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Writing Excuses 19.47: Final Thoughts on Our Close Reading Series
 
 
Key points: Reading for an aspect is exciting. It's nice to have something concrete to tie concepts to. You don't read authors because of what they do poorly, you read them because of what they do well. In your own writing, celebrate what you do well. Try compliment sandwiches. Start with what works, what you like about the book, then go into the critical part, then back up and point out what works, what shouldn't be changed. Try cheerleading critiques, highlight the awesome parts! Analysis! First find the healthiest part, then lift everything else up to that. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 47]
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, there. If you missed out on the very cool special edition of one of our close read books for this season... I'm talking about the Orbit Golden Edition of the Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. This is so beautiful, and we've arranged for you to still get 20% off. Listen. The set includes an exclusive box illustrated by Justin Cherry/Nephelomancer, a signed copy of The Fifth Season, fabric-bound hard cover editions of the trilogy, gilded silver edges, color end paper art which I love, brand-new foil stamped covers, a ribbon bookmark, and an exclusive bonus scene from The Fifth Season. You need to read this scene. All you have to do is visit orbitgoldeditions.com to order and use the code Excuses for 20% off. And to let them know we sent you.
 
[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 47]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Our Final Thoughts on Our Close Reading Series.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we need to read more.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I still need to read more. I'm Howard.
[Chuckles]
 
[Dongwon] Yeah. So this is… We've come to the end of this season of Writing Excuses, where we took you all through very detailed readings of five different works that we love, through five different aspects of the craft of writing. We're just going to chat a little bit about how we felt about it. Things that we thought were highlights. Any low lights that came up. But, for me, I had the best time in the world doing this. For each of these books, they're books that I know well, by and large, and in each case, there was a thing that they were doing that I was always so impressed by that I wanted to understand better. So, this was such an opportunity to get some of my favorite people together and force them to talk to me about it. That's, I think, what all these podcasts should be.
[Mary Robinette] We… I mean, we could completely change the format of the podcast forever, and keep doing this. I was also extremely excited because… I don't know if our listeners can tell, but we like each other and enjoy talking to each other.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But, in fact, we do. What was fun for me was that some of the stories I had previously read, and some of them I was coming into for the first time. So it was interesting… Like, the ones that I had already read, This is How You Lose a Time War, I had read some of the C. L. Clark stories, and I had read The Fifth Season. But reading them this way, going back and seeing things, knowing how the story was going to end… Like, I was still emotionally tense through those stories, but I was also… My writer brain was able to dial in, because I was reading them very consciously for specific things. Whereas the two that I hadn't read, going in and reading Ring Shout and thinking, okay, I am reading this and I am specifically looking at how tension is being handled. It didn't break the story for me at all, like, the rest of the story, I was still moved by it. But it caused me to pay more attention to things than I normally do, and that was exciting for me.
[Erin] I have to say, I'm getting, like, a little nostalgia moment…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because I'm remembering when we were sitting, all on the cruise, actually, like, having I think some sort of meal…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
 
[Erin] And, like, now we've actually gone through and done it. I think what I loved about it is that I love talking about random abstract things, but I think sometimes it's nice to have something concrete. So that when you talk about a concept or you're mentioning something, it doesn't just feel like it's floating in the air, it feels like it's attached to a work. So, even if you like these works, you hated the works, at least it's something where you can say, "Oh, I get that is a specific example." It also stopped us from using Star Wars as examples all the time…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Erin] Which was… It is a personal love of mine.
[Dongwon] I love Star Wars. But it's not that useful as an example, actually, is what I've found over the years of teaching.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And it is a movie.
[Dongwon] Yeah. So, getting to talk about actual books that were complex in specific ways, and let us really dive into what is voice, what is worldbuilding, how do you use it? We kind of touched on this, but each of these books could probably, or each of these works could probably have been used to teach any of the subjects. Right? We could… Absolutely could have used Ring Shout to teach character. We could have used the C. L. Clark to teach structure. By God, the structure in his stories…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness.
[Dongwon] Right? We could have used Time War to teach worldbuilding. Right? Like, we could have swap them around. So, the puzzle for us as we were planning this series was often, like, where do we put these books?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dongwon] It was a very fun puzzle to solve. I feel really good about how that kind of worked out. But, I'm curious, was there one where you found yourself restricted from talking about an aspect of the book because we were focused on one aspect and you wished we could focus on a different thing?
[Mary Robinette] I really wanted to be able to talk about character when we were in Fifth Season.
[Dongwon] Yeah. That is absolutely true. Yeah.
[Erin] I don't know. I think I liked the mismatch. In fact, I was just thinking that it'd be, like, a fun game to, like, take all of these aspects, think of them as, like, you have, like, a regular D6 six-sided die and then, like, next time I read a book, or in my rereading something, roll and be like, I'm going to pay attention to its use of character this time, or this time I'm going to pay attention to worldbuilding.
[Dongwon] Well, that's a great way to introduce the concept for next season Writing Excuses where we're going to do the same five books… No, I'm kidding [garbled]
[laughter]
[Howard] For… Gosh, 16 years? Writing Excuses started in February of 2008. For many, many years, the conversations that we would have about books were… That we had all read… Were restricted to kind of a narrow overlap of things that everybody had read. We didn't do deep dives on them at all. But, off mic, we would often have really deep conversations, one or two of us, about a book we'd just picked up. Then a third one of us would come into the room and say, "Why aren't we mic-ing this? Why aren't we having this conversation?" The answer is because it's going to take another eight years for us to be clever enough to figure out…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Howard] That if we just give ourselves homework to all read a book, we can do this thing.
[Dongwon] Well… [Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] It's not so much giving us homework, it's giving you…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Our dear listeners…
[Howard] Well, yes. We gave our listeners homework. But you gave me homework.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay. I had to read… I hadn't read… I'd read Time Wars. I think that may have been the only one of these.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, wow.
[Howard] That I had already… That I already read. From one standpoint, I was like, oh, gosh. They're giving me homework. Never used to have homework.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Used to be I could just talk about Star Wars.
[Laughter]
[Howard] But from another standpoint, to use the rotate the object and see how the shadow changes, from another angle, what this looked like for me is, wait a minute, I get to have these fun conversations that we had off-mic on mic. With friends who love reading and love writing and understand craft in ways that I do and in ways that are way better than I do. I still love being the you're not that smart part of the tagline, because that's still my job. So this close reading series… It's been magical for me.
[Dongwon] Yeah. I think that that hits on a really important point for me, which is I'm still relatively new to the podcast as a full-time host, and I have never felt so connected to our audience than I did through this series. Because we ask you guys to read along with us. Right? Knowing that, knowing that we could have these really in-depth conversations because you guys showed up, you did the work, you read the works, and we didn't have to worry about spoilers. It really felt like we were having a conversation with you all in the room with us. Right?
[Mary Robinette] It's one of the things that I've been enjoying on our Patreon…
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Going into the Discord that's attached to it. Because watching… That's one of the places that we can really see the listeners having a conversation and we can engage in it too. That has been a lot of fun watching people… Especially when we did Ti… Well, I guess, as we are recording this, not all of the episodes have released yet. So… But I recall this whole conversation about Time War where people were going, oh, my goodness, I understand what's happening now. My mind is blown. I'm like, yes. This is why we picked this episode.
[Dongwon] Exactly. So, making this, which is largely us talking in a room that you guys get to hear, feel more participatory, feel more open to the audience as well… I don't know. It's been really nice.
[Erin] Yeah. I was thinking about during our last book, we talked about what's in conversation. What books are in conversation with… And it just occurred to me that a podcast is us in conversation with each other, but because we all read the books, and you've read the books, like, we are in true conversation with you. I think of that as like, really beautiful, and I think one of the things I'd love to chat about more… I'm sure we have to go to a break soon, but… Is how do you create that kind of conversation now that you're going forward?
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Erin] If we're not doing this, if we're doing something different, how do you keep that up so that you can have that kind of conversation outside of our podcast?
[Dongwon] One of the best ways to do that is to go to patreon.com/writingexcuses and join our Discord… No.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] Yeah. I would love to talk about that more in depth, but let's take a quick break first, then we'll come back on that.
 
[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.
 
[Erin] My thing of the week this week is an article, making you do the work of reading essays that I really love. I have recommended the essay Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency to, like, everyone I've ever met, and so now I'm going to recommend it to you. It is a great look at how do we make the characters, in a game in this case, but in your writing as well, how do you make them feel like they live when the focus isn't on them from the narrator, the focus isn't on them from the main player? How do you make your NPCs, how do you make your secondary characters feel like they exist? This writer, Meghna Jayanth, she talks about it from the perspective of writing the game 80 Days, but it really works from anything that you're doing, thinking about how do you not center your protagonist to the point that it feels like all of the other characters are just paper dolls waiting to be played with by them, and instead, make them feel like real living people that your protagonist gets a chance to hang around with. So, check out the essay Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency. It has lots of pictures in it. So, it's fun, it's cool, and you should learn from it.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, the thing that you were talking about, Erin, is actually homework that I assign to my short story cohorts sometimes. I will give them a short story to read. Sometimes it is as simple as saying why don't you all subscribe to Sunday Morning Transport or to Uncanny? So that you get reminders, so that your all reading the same story at the same time. But you can do this with just a group of friends. Yes, does this sound like a book club? Yes. Secretly.
[Dongwon] Was book club the thing we keep accidentally calling this series internally? Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But, the difference is that, as you will hear about later in the season, when we have a conversation with Gabriella from DIY MFA, one of the things that you can do is to do this kind of deep read and read specifically for anything. So if you have a group of friends and you're like, hey, let's read a book, but let's read specifically for how they're handling voice. Or maybe even assigned, if you want to assign each other homework, you can be like I'm going to read for voice, and someone else can be like I'm going to read for tension. And just go in and read intentionally. But still reading for fun.
[Dongwon] Yeah. That's such a cool idea. Like, I could see each of us having done that with this. A different way to structure it is each of us have taken an aspect and recorded an episode per book on each aspect. But… Not to rebuild this season as were wrapping it up…
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] That would have been a fun way to do it.
 
[Howard] I just realized that one of the things that Sandra and I love most doing together is TV time where we're just watching anything together, but we're both very writerly, very artsy, in the way we approach things. One or the other of us will often grab the remote and say, nope. Stop. I gotta rewind this because this thing… Just look at what they did with the light, or the color, or the dialogue, or the whatever. We deconstruct it on the fly, and you can't do that in the movie theater, and you can't do that with friends who don't get why you're doing it. You only get to do it with your friends who love taking art apart in order to be able to make their own art better.
[Mary Robinette] When we talk about taking art apart, frequently what we're talking about is nitpicking and being like, oh. They did this. I'm so annoyed about that. Why are all of these women in the Regency wearing spandex gloves? But I was talking to… Spandex doesn't exist yet, Erin.
[Laughter]
[Erin] I looked at my hands like what is wrong with them?
[Mary Robinette] But I was… I took this class by Tobias [Bechel?] called Finding Your Spark. One of the things that he said in it, which so resonated with me, and is what we were doing with this whole series. He said you don't read authors because of what they do poorly.
[Dongwon] Yeah
[Mary Robinette] You read them because of what they do well. So, example that I have of this, it's something that most of you have read, maybe, or at least are aware of. Nobody reads Isaac Asimov for his characterization…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Or his portrayal of women. Like, that is not why you read him. At all. But you do still read him. And you, as a writer, there's… Well, some of you still read him.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] His career seems fine.
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Let's put it that way. When you do read him, it is not for those things, is for the ideas, it is for other things. And with your own writing, we tend to discount the things that we do well because those are easy for us, and we think easy is not valuable. And it's not that you shouldn't push, but when you're reading something, when you're doing one of these deep reads, when you're watching something in… A fun way to look at it is to celebrate, like, what are they doing really well. I'll do that even when I'm going to something that is really terrible. I try to find at least one thing… This is some live theater that I'm thinking of very specifically…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But at least one thing that they've done well.
[Dongwon] It's… I think more of my job than people realize is sitting authors down and telling them what they're doing well. Right? I think it's hard to see when you're in it sometimes. So I view a lot of my job as being like, hey. You're really good at this part of this. You are doing this really well. Yes, do we need to work on X, Y, and Z? Sure. But there's all this other stuff. Right? There's a form of critique feedback called the compliment sandwich…
[Mary Robinette] I call… Yeah, go on.
[Dongwon] What do you call it?
[Mary Robinette] I just realized, the moment I heard sandwich, I realized we're talking about two different things. So…
[Dongwon] We are talking about two slightly different things, but go ahead.
[Mary Robinette] No. Talk about yours first, and then…
[Dongwon] Okay. Okay.
[Mary Robinette] Do you want a segue into that more neatly, or…
[Howard] This is fun. Our listeners love this stuff.
[Laughter]
[Howard] This is compliment sandwich Dongwon.
[Mary Robinette] Carry on.
 
[Dongwon] The compliment sandwich. um… The compliment sandwich is very, very important. And that… Whenever I see somebody skip the bun as it were, which is you start talking about what works about the book, what you liked about the book, then you go into the critical part, and then you come back out and you explain again. Yes. Also remember these are the things that work, don't change these things. Make sure that that stays. Is what people don't understand about why that structure's really important. I think a lot of people are, like, yeah, yeah, compliments. Let me get to the hard stuff, the work that needs to be done. I think both editors can feel that way and authors can feel that way. But from my perspective, the compliment part is an alignment exercise. It gets me making sure that I understand the vision of what you're trying to accomplish. There are many times where I've done the compliment sandwich, and the author's like, wait, wait. Nope. You've misunderstood. This is what I'm trying to do. Right? Like, or you haven't read this part yet, because I only sent you the first 10,000 words. Here's what's happens in acts two, three, and four. Right? So that exercise of understanding how the parts of this work is really important both for me as an editor, but also for you as a writer. I encourage you to as much as possible when you're reading… Engaging with art that you're interested in, think about what does work about it as much as you think about what doesn't. That will give you some of the tools to look at your own work and be like, damn, that was a good sentence. I like this character arc. Sure, do I need to fix the villain? Absolutely. But this part is working, let's preserve that and [garbled]
 
[Mary Robinette] So, the type of thing that I was talking about is very similar, but it's a critique that's called a cheerleading critique. You… I had this idea that when you're critiquing, and we're talking about critiquing as opposed to…
[Howard] As opposed to critical reading.
[Mary Robinette] As opposed to critical reading. But in… I ask usually people to tell me about things that are awesome, boring, confused, or disbelief. But with a cheerleading one…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I only want them to tell me awesome. And that is so important for writers to know. Frequently, they do not know what they are doing well. We had a… I ran into one of the authors and I won't betray which one, but one of the authors that we've been talking about this season. Ran into them at a convention, and one of the things that they said was, thank you. I've never had anyone talk about my work this way.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I was like, oh, no. But they just… It was so meaningful to them…
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] To hear someone get really critical, really like in the how is this working? Why is this doing? They'd never heard anyone discuss their work in that way before. That's something that you can set up for yourselves with a critique group, or the type of reading that you're doing.
[Howard] I would say analytical instead of critical, even though the word critical is the right word.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Because analysis is less value laden.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Howard] I love analysis. We took form and analysis classes for music in college, and I came out of some of those classes wishing that I could hang out with this group of people once a week and dissect a piece of music together again. And I just now remembered that wish as I'm realizing, oh. I'm kind of getting to do that with a new group of friends and a completely new medium, and it doesn't have music in it…
[Laughter]
[Howard] But I'm okay, because I love words too.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I think there's something really nice about figuring out, also, like, how sometimes the things that you maybe need to work on are themselves complements of things that you've done well.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] In the way that it is not maybe until you are listening to a particularly amazing piece of music that you realize that your speaker system could be better.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Erin] You see what I mean? But until then, you're like, whatever.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] But then you're like, oh, wow. Like, so sometimes it's like I love the characters so much that, like, I really wanted them to experience more tension, because I just wanted to see how they would deal with that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And really, celebrating that, like a lot of times, there is some gem that is shining so brightly that it's just that we want the rest of it to shine as brightly as that.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Erin] As opposed to… The other parts are not holding it down it's just that we just want to make the entire thing shiny and bright.
 
[Mary Robinette] Have I told you about my re-wilding of the landscapers experience?
[Dongwon] A little bit, but go on. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So, it has… Is changing the way I'm approaching revision. Because we've got this property, it's got a lot of invasive species on it, so we are re-wilding it. We're pulling out the invasive species, replanting it with native species or species that are at least are not poisonous. And so one of the things that I expected was that they would start in the section that was filled with privet hedge and English ivy. The landscapers said no. We want to start in the healthiest part of the landscape, because that tells you what the rest of the landscape is supposed to look like. I found that when I'm… Now, when I'm looking at my manuscripts, that I look at, okay, what is the healthiest part of it, what am I trying to support, what am I trying to nurture? When I'm reading other people's, I'm like, what is the healthiest part of this? What is this doing really, really well? Let's lean into that, let's play to those strengths. How can we lift everything else up so that it's doing this too? How can we get that better sound system? How can we pull up the English ivy?
[Dongwon] Yeah. What I love about this is you need to learn what the good version of this thing is. The thing that you're trying to accomplish, need to have a sense of what the healthy version is, what the accomplished version is. The only way to do that is by encountering it in other people's books.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Dongwon] That's where you start. You start by reading. If you want to write, you have to read, and you have to love reading, and you have to be excited about the category that you're in. Because, again, it's a conversation. If you want to participate in the conversation, you need to know where it came from. Now I'm not saying you need to have read the entire canon. You don't need to read X, Y, Z work. But what you need to do is understand why you're excited to write this thing. Why do you want to write it? What's the conversation you're trying to start, to participate in, to evolve?
[Howard] You're using the word conversation… If you want to participate in a conversation, you have to spend a lot of time listening.
[Dongwon] Yes.
[Howard] If all you do is talk, it's not a conversation, you're lecturing a group of people who already know more about what you're trying to say then you do.
 
[Dongwon] On that note, I have a little bit of homework for you that's going to help you start this conversation, participate in it, and be an active participant in the work that you're trying to create. So, what I want you to do… This may not be surprising, given the conversation that we had, but what I want you to do is get a group of friends together and pick a book you love to discuss and unpack what makes the book tick. Then I want you to find us on Instagram and tell us what book you picked and how that conversation went.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go read.
 
[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.
 
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.41: A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season
 
 
Key Points: Structure and The Fifth Season. Spoilers galore! Structurally audacious. Structure. Start with divisions, what are the parts? POVs. Inversion. Parallelism. Sequence or order. Perspective. Tradition and innovation. Structure is usually pacing, order of information, scene and sequel. POV character is the one in the most pain. POV character is the one who can best tell the joke. Second person. Structure as tension, voice, who's narrating. Character as structure. "And you would not exist." Surprising, yet inevitable. Table of contents and chapter titles. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 41]
 
[Mary Robinette] Hi, friends. I want to tell you about this very cool special edition of one of our close read books for this season. It's the Orbit Gold Edition of The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemison. This is so beautiful. The set includes, get this, an exclusive box illustrated by Justin Cherry nephelomancer, a signed copy of The Fifth Season, fabric bound hardcover editions of the trilogy, gilded silver edges, color endpaper art, oh, my God. Brand-new foil stamped covers, a ribbon bookmark, and an exclusive bonus scene from The Fifth Season. The bonus scene… I wants it. Just preorder before November nineteenth to get 20 percent off and you can lock in your signed copy, again, I say, your signed copy of The Fifth Season. Visit orbitgoldeditions.com to order.
 
[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 41]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Structure: An Overview and Why Fifth Season.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] We are going to be reading and talking about The Fifth Season. I need to let you know that we are going to be spoiling this up and down and sideways. You need to have read this book before you go into it, unless you're okay with spoilers, in which case, fair game. Have fun. But this is your warning. All of the spoilers, all of the time, as we go through.
[DongWon] Yeah. Because it's structure, we really can't talk about this book without getting into a lot of the nitty-gritty of how things unfold.
[Howard] To be quite honest, to be quite frank about this, if you haven't read this book, the discussions that we are having about structure are not going to be as meaningful for you, and you are not going to learn the things that we believe you, as a writer, really want to learn.
[Mary Robinette] But, having said that, we also know that sometimes you can't wait to listen to something without having read the book. Hopefully, you'll still be able to get stuff from the larger conversation. But if you have plans on reading the book, just do it before you continue listening.
[DongWon] I will also encourage you to look up content warnings for this book. Because there is some pretty intense and dark stuff in there.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, why did we pick this book? One of the reasons is that it is structurally audacious. When I finished reading this… I'm friends with the author, N. K. Jemison, and the first time I saw Nora after seeing this, I walked up and I said, "Nora. Just finished Fifth Season. So good. F U."
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] "You have some nerve. Because now the rest of us have to live with this book being out in the world." So we wanted to talk about it, because it is breaking so many of the conventions, and it is structurally so solid, but it's not using an existing recipe.
[DongWon] Exactly. On top of that, it really is one of my favorite fantasies I've read in decades. I think, as an epic fantasy novel, it does such a good job of fulfilling so many things that we look for when we go to epic fantasy, in terms of big worlds, politics, multi perspectives, and exciting magic systems. Right? It's sort of really checks a lot of those boxes, but does something that feels very fresh and innovative with it to me.
[Erin] This is a great book.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] [garbled] [laughter] We were like, let's figure it out. Because I think it's… One of the things that I really love about having conversations on this podcast and teaching in general is that sometimes you do want to figure out why did something work.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] The best way to do that is to dig into it. Because it's easy to put it away and be like, oh, that was so much fun. But, like, having a really good meal that you want to be able to replicate in some way, we want to figure out, what's the salt, fat, acid, heat, of this book.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, along those lines, that's a great segue. I was going to ask you, when you think about structure, what are the things that you think about? Like, what are some of the things that we are going to be thinking about as we're talking about this book?
[Howard] I start with divisions, really. Where are the… What are the three parts? Or what are the five parts? That is… When I'm creating a thing, that's where I begin. Because that informs all of the decisions I make about the things that will be building those parts. This… For me, this book felt like it was built out of points of view. But, structurally, you could argue it's built out of time. Or it is built out of punctuated catastrophes. Or… There's any number of ways to think about carving it up.
[DongWon] Yeah. I… As a reader, and as an editor, I don't actually think about structure that often. It's a little bit of a thing that… I just don't pay that much attention to it. It's not something I'm particularly interested in poking at. Obviously, we do structural edits and move things around, but when I'm doing that, it's more about character arc, it's more about tension, it's more about all the other things we've talked about so far. So, I think Fifth Season really jumps out at me because it is one of the times when I'm actively thinking about structure, because it is not being applied in a passive way. It is being applied as an active engagement with the reader of how structure works in this book. The three different POVs, the reveal around what is going on with those POVs, the inversion from the beginning to the end, all the narrative rhyming and parallelism that happens throughout the book. We're going to dig into all these topics in detail. But, for me, it's hard for me not to think about Fifth Season and think about the structure of the work almost as its own character. Almost as… It is the device through which we are understanding this world in a way that feels so radical compared to what we see in most fiction of A to B to C to D.
[Howard] You might think that you don't think about structure when you read or when you watch or whatever else. But I always come back to that moment when my 10-year-old and I were watching a movie, I think it was ParaNorman. I turned to him and said, "Do you think this plan's going to work?" He looked at me, he rolled his eyes, and looked at me. "Dad, if it works, we don't have a whole movie."
[Laughter]
[Howard] 10 years old.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Howard] Already understood the meta. I think we all have that happening subconsciously.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] For me, and this is not some… This has nothing to do with this book. But to answer your question. I actually think that games and working on games has started to, like, really rewire the way that I think about story and structure as being sort of very divided from each other. Because the way that a lot of games work, you don't have as much control as you do in a book about the way that people take in story information. So you always have to be thinking, like, how do all of these different pieces of information, how do all of these different pieces of narrative, actually create forward motion. Even if people pick them up at different times, and in different ways. It's started to affect the way that I write stories, where I'm like, I want to write stories where you can read things out of order. That is where it does come back to this book, which is, I think a really great way of saying, you can play around with structure.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] You can play around with order, and you can be really upfront with it. I think you said audacious, someone said audacious earlier. I think there's something really great about that. Because it gets you to challenge the way that we have been told that stories have to exist. In a world where… It's not just me, gaming and movies and television impact a lot of the way that we take in narrative. It's nice to see books playing with that as well. Just because it's in print, doesn't mean we can't have fun with the form.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think one of the things you said about the… Being able to… Writing in things that you were reading out of sequence. That that's one of the things that's interesting about Fifth Season, is that the timeline is not sequential. Structurally, the things that she's using that for… That controlling that order of information, that control of time, to play with things that we'll be talking about later with parallelism and inversion, but even on a very, hello, I'm an early career writer, thinking about the order of information that you portray to the reader, that is one of the basic elements of story structure that she plays with all the way through this.
[DongWon] It's interesting because time is one of the first clues of what's happening in the meta-narrative.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] The timeline is one of the first… Howard, you and I were talking about this off mic, but realizing that the world is not ending in these other storylines, that humans still exist in these other storylines, is the thing that starts to clue us into, wait, something else exciting is happening here.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of timelines, I believe that it is time for us to take a small break.
 
[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. Head to acorn.com/wx or download the Acorn app to start saving and investing in your future today. [Lots garbled]
 
[Dan] This week, our thing of the week is a role-playing game called Rest in Pieces, which is a short game about being roommates with the Grim Reaper. It uses, instead of dice, a Jengo tower which you'll see in other games like Dread, but in this case, half of the blocks are painted black and half of them are painted white. So, as you go through the game, you have to do something, you will pull a block, and if the tower falls, something terrible happens. But in this case, whether you're going to act in a selfish way or a selfish way determines what color block you have to pull. That is a very compelling dynamic that changes the way that you play the game, the decisions that you make. It's a really wonderful idea. The game is a lot of fun, and has a lot of cute art in it as well. Once again, that game is called Rest in Pieces.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, as we come back into this, one of the other things that I am interested in hearing you all talk about is some of… To foreshadow, some of the things that we'll be talking about later. We're going to be touching on things like… Topics that we'll be hitting are whose perspective is it anyway, parallelism and inversion, and tradition and innovation. So, I just want to give our readers a prologue…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Of why we think it's important to talk about these things. Because these are not structural elements that most people talk about.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Most of the time, when people talk about structure, they're talking about pacing. They're talking about the order of information that I brought up before. They're talking about scene and sequel. We're not going to be talking about any of that. So why is it important to be thinking about the things that we're going to be talking about with structure? What can… Like, give us a little [garbled taste]
[Howard] You want teasers?
[Mary Robinette] I want teasers.
[DongWon] I think, for me… I mean, this connects to what Erin was saying earlier, and the idea that the structure of this book is audacious. This might just come from my perspective of reading so many books and seeing so many things at various stages of their drafting, but any time… I want people to be more playful with structure. But I would love these people to understand that you can play with time, you can play with perspective, you can play with the sequencing of things to get across your core thematic elements more than you are getting across your plot beats. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[DongWon] So much of structure as it's currently taught, whether that's like Save the Cat or something like that, is… Or Hero's Journey, is so much about how do you get across clearly the A to B to C to D. To me, that can sometimes feel very flat or not in service of the actual goal of your story. Right? So if you step back a moment and think about what story am I trying to tell here, and what the best way is to tell that, because this is what I'm writing about, this is why this story's important to me. We're going to be talking to N. K. Jemison at the end of this cycle, and one of the things I'm so excited to hear from her is that she write this out of order or did she write this in order and reassemble it into the form that we see now. I suspect she wrote it out of order, but I'm kind of curious at what point in the process it occurred to her to use this structure.
[Erin] Also, for perspective, I think it's a little bit about challenging some of the assumptions of structure. So I think a lot of times, we think of perspective, POV, as like a decision that you make at the beginning, and you go, okay, I'm going to do this POV, and now I'm going to write the story, and, like, it's a thing that, like, it cannot change. But, like, you made the decision. It's like… I'm like I must stay in this perspective because I told myself I have to. Or because that's the way I think books are written, or it's the way that the books that I've read have been. What I like about this is it shows that even the things we think of as assumptions or as early decisions can be tools that we decide to wield intentionally…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] In the story in ways that are not the ways that necessarily the books we're used to have wielded them. Plus, I feel like this it is, to be honest, a story where if you don't speak about perspective on some level…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] You're doing a disservice to, like, one of the major tools that is used within the book.
 
[Howard] Way back in Writing Excuses Season One, I figured out… And just so we're clear, Writing Excuses Season One is the story of Howard figuring out what it is he's actually doing…
[Snort laughter]
[Howard] Up until that time, I did not know what POV meant. I did not… Yeah, I did not know that I was writing social sat… I did not know anything. I was so much more not that smart than I am now. The point though is that I did know that the story was being told based on a principle that is sometimes articulated as your POV character should be the one who is in the most pain. Mine was the POV character or the camera angle should be who is in the best position to tell a joke about what's going on right now. Okay. That principle right there, that POV principle right there, for me, dictated mountains of structure. Because I had to move things around in order for it to make sense of the camera to be pointed at this person so I can tell… So I can deliver this joke. So when we talk about perspective as a structural tool, it's absolutely a structural tool because if the perspective is important, it is going to be dictating all of the structural elements that go into justifying it.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that… Beginning our spoilers now. One of the things that happens in this, is that Nora breaks one of the rules, which is that second person is not the done thing. As you get through the story, you realize that it's not actually second person we're getting. That's a very structural decision about when to… Why to use that and when to use it. For me, one of the things that is interesting about it, and why I like using this book to talk about structure, is that the reason to not use second person is that it can be distancing. That is exactly what that character is going through is that distancing. There's also a transformation that happens through the book. So there are all of these different small structural tools that she's kind of taking and blowing up.
[DongWon] Yeah. We could have used this book to teach any of the segments…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] That we've done this year. Right? What I found fascinating is that she somehow turns each of those elements into structure. The structure of the book is where the tension lies, the voice is tied to structure, in the ways that you're talking about, about the switches to second person, who's narrating it. Character is structure, because the parallels of the three versions of the same character across this book. It's just endlessly fascinating to me to see the ways in which structure is such the centerpiece that holds up all the other parts of this book in a way that is more visible and more active than we see in other fiction.
[Mary Robinette] I think that's one of the things that you as a listener can think about with your own book, if you been thinking about, oh, I have to use the Save the Cat structure. Why? That particular one. I often think about story structure as a recipe. That you can have a recipe, and you can make a really good recipe. But if you say, okay, according to this, every recipe needs to have leavening, which is great if you're doing a cake…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But not so good for soup. And it's irrelevant for soup. Leavening is completely irrelevant. So what's fun for me with this one is that I feel like I'm watching an improvisational cook go into the kitchen. Or, I feel like I'm watching someone doing molecular gastronomy, where there like, okay, this looks like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but actually…
[DongWon] It is ham and cheese. [Garbled]
 
[Howard] I… There is a line in… I think it's the prologue, I'm going to go ahead and read this real quick.
 
"The woman I mentioned, the one whose son is dead. She was not in Yumenes, thankfully, or this would be a very short tale. And you would not exist."
 
[Howard] That last bit, and you would not exist. Wait. Me, the reader? In my tied into this? Then we get to those chapters where the point of view is second person and you… Oh. Oh, that means… And then the you point of view would not exist, because… I still haven't decoded at this point in my reading, I still have not decoded what this means, but that is not a throwaway line. That is a hook upon which a whole bunch of structure is going to hang, and I love it.
[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you brought that one up, because I… In the reread of this, I hit that line, like, oh!
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I need to call Nora and yell at her again.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Because she tells you upfront what she's doing.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] And I'm like, oh…
[Howard] And you would not exist. Really?
[DongWon] That was my reaction. In my head, so many of the reveals come so late, or, like… In my head, like, the second person was used so sparingly, and it's right there, in the prologue.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It's there from the jump. It is all throughout. And it's almost… The reveal is that she wasn't hiding anything from us.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It just took us a long time to understand.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] It's the surprising yet inevitable. Where you look at it and say, "Well, obviously it was inevitable, but now I'm angry that you surprised me that way."
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the other things that… Just when we're talking about it, one of the other tools that she uses is actually the titles of the chapters. When you look at the table of contents, the prologue, you are here. Chapter 1, you, at the end. Chapter 2, Damaya, in winters past. It's like, I'm telling you straight up front what's happening. Three, you're on your way. It is fascinating to me that this is also, because of the two interludes, arguably a classic three act structure, but it is profoundly not a three act structure.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Because there are so many moving pieces that are happening simultaneously.
[DongWon] Again, she's using so many classic things like the chapter titles that we don't see anymore. It's a call back, it's a throwback to an older mode of storytelling, and yet it… The end result feels so contemporary and fresh.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, with that, let's go ahead and give you some homework. I actually want you to look at the table of contents… And for those of you who have read the book, this is specifically for you. Look at the table of contents, and without opening the book again, write down the one important thing you remember from that chapter. Then, through the course of the next several episodes, as we talk through things, refer back to that list and see what you need to add to it that is also important that you missed on the first reading.
 
[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.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.40: An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark
 
 
Key Points: Multiple influences. Make it a people story. Food is an unsung hero of worldbuilding. People live in color. Relax with a meal, then a monster comes. Fight scenes in places that shouldn't have fights, like schools, hospitals, playground, kitchens. Clues and seeds in the beginning, then bring them out later. Tell a story that sings to people and can change them. Write something for yourself. Absurdity, trauma, and horror. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 40]
 
[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 40]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] An Interview on Tension with P. Djèlí Clark
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] Today, we are joined by our special guest, P. Djèlí Clark. We hope that you've been reading along and listening as we've been talking about this phenomenal book, Ring Shout. We've brought him on to talk to us about the ways in which he tortured us through the tension. Phenderson, do you want to introduce yourself to our audience?
[Phenderson] Sure thing. Thanks for having me here. I'm Phenderson Djèlí Clark, people probably know me as P. Djèlí Clark. I write stuff. Mostly science fiction when I can. Apart from my day job, where I'm an academic historian. So, this is how I attempt to let off steam. Thanks for having me.
 
[Mary Robinette] Thank you so much. So this was… I've talked about this with the listeners before, that this was a really difficult read for me, because you do crank up the tension quite a bit. There's a number of scenes that we will… We will discuss. But one of the things that I'm wondering about, when you sat down to work on this, were you thinking about, like, the historical era, or were you thinking about how can I make people super uncomfortable? Like, what kind of…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] What drove you?
[Phenderson] Yeah, that's a great question. I think perhaps a little bit of both, one subconsciously, one consciously. Certainly, I was thinking about the historical era. As I said, I'm an academic historian, and one of the classes I teach is Slavery in Film. So I've gotten to know Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith, the 1915 film where the Klan are heroes, quite well. I was trying to figure out a way to bring that story to people in the genre I love. So, Ring Shout came about from that central focus, as well as, as we can talk about, a lot of other little interesting ideas from ex-slave narratives that I've read, from stories that I've liked when I was younger, people may catch some Miss Whoozits, Miss Whatzits, what have you, from A Wrinkle in Time, down to the aesthetics of Beyonce's Formation Review.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Phenderson] There were multiple inspirations that I threw into this big pot of gumbo and hoped that it would work.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Erin] Absolutely. I love that. Like… I will say, I did not catch all of that, or most of it, probably. But I remember when I… The Birth of a Nation comes really early, and I was like, "Oh. Oh, I see what he's doing. He did this thing, he did this other thing, it's and he puts them together into this thing." It really made me feel good. It made me feel like, okay, like, all the time that I've spent, like, watching like, sad narrative slavery [garbled twenties] and all those eyes on the pride where my parents were saying, like, it's all [garbled] like, paying off, which I thought it was a really, really fun thing. But I have to wonder, like, does that… I mean, does it ever feel like too much? Do you ever feel like I'm trying to juggle all these influences and not get overwhelmed by them?
[Phenderson] it's Well, yeah. When I was… To answer your question, when I was doing this, when I finished it, I was, like, well, this is a mess. I was like, this is just way too much going on here. I want to just throw some space aliens in here while I'm at it. Right? There's just so much going on. I didn't know if this thing would work. I always say, as writers, sometimes you create something that… I didn't have a full genre for it. I was like, this is all over the place. I didn't know how it would be received. I was pleasantly surprised. Shocked, even, at times, that you guys liked this. Okay. Great. So, it's one of these things where you take scotch tape and you put together this giant thing, you don't know if it's going to work, and it did. I don't even know if I could re-create it again. Because it was such a in the moment type of creation.
[Howard] Say, you're looking at your editor, you're like, "Wait. You took a heat gun to the scotch tape? No, are we supposed to fix that?"
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] So, I have to ask this question, did you still feel like it was a mess when it went to print?
[Phenderson] Again, luckily, so many people had read it and given it all these great… I was like, "Oh. It worked. Pshew." I guess what I was going for worked. I was so surprised, I still am surprised, at how many people like it. How much it's liked. All the countries that people have read it. When it was something that I wrote kind of as a stopgap. For my first novel. [Garbled] remember, hey, this guy's a writer.
[Howard] Okay. I'm here to tell you that whatever that gap was…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] You stopped it.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] It is well and truly stopped.
[Phenderson] So it worked. I'm happy. Right? I… Certainly, anything, I think, of any writer, you certainly have these deeper meetings. But I didn't know if anybody would get them. Like, Erin was saying. I didn't know if people would be able to latch onto those things. People really did. I'm just grateful.
 
[Mary Robinette] That was one of the things that we talked about when we were… Earlier, when we were discussing the idea of the narrative versus contextual tension. That there's the tension that happens on the page in the story, and then there's the tension that the reader brings to it, the contextual tension, that the reader brings to it by what they know about history…
[Phenderson] Right.
[Mary Robinette] And what they know about the larger world. You do a really good job, I think, of making sure that there is narrative tension there even for people who do not have a deep understanding of the contextual tension. I think that's why it works when you go to another country that is not as familiar with the history of American slavery and oppression. Were you thinking about that? Like… When you were structuring scenes, that you were like, oh, I need to make sure that there's something here for people who are a little clueless?
[Phenderson] I wish I was doing that consciously.
[Laughter]
[Phenderson] I mean… I could hold forth and have a very long discussion, like Max Gladstone on how things work. I wish that I had, like… That I had that ability. But really so much of my writing is from the fact that I love reading, I love listening to storytellers, I come… My mother was an excellent storyteller. My mother could give you directions and it was riveting.
[Chuckles]
[Phenderson] Right? She would build up tension… You're like, oh, man, I got it, which Lane I'm supposed to switch into. That's amazing. So I think I've brought some of that to this. It's just… I mean, I want to tell the largest story. Like you said, about ideas of oppression, about being in slavery and everything else, but I also want to make it a people story. I wanted the characters to shine. I wanted it to have their own lived experiences and how I would imagine people dealing with everyday life. Having a love life. Not getting along with the people in your little monster fighting group. How you would butt heads with people that you have to work with. I wanted to bring all of that to the story as well. In some ways, to make it more human, so people could relate to it. Also, to show that in the midst of this oppression, people still go to a juke joint. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] People still talk about sex and all these other things in life. That it's not just fighting the oppression, it's people living their lives. I wanted to make sure I got that across as well.
[Erin] Oh, my God. I…
[Howard] There was a lot of joy in that book for me.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] I… Gosh, I can't remember which scene it was. I remember which scene it wasn't. It wasn't the scene in the butcher shop.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, my God [garbled]
[Howard] But there was a scene where I literally had to go make some jambalaya. Because you made me hungry for…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] The food of my people.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] For some of that deep South cooking.
[Phenderson] Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think food is one of the unsung heroes of worldbuilding.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] There's a way that I think food can evoke things. I've been in moods before where people like show a plate and I can hear people behind me going, "Mmm. Mmm."
[Chuckles]
[Phenderson] I heard someone's stomach growl once in a film. I think it was in the movie Soul Food. Somebody's stomach growled in reaction. You know what I'm talking about, Erin, when they show that one plate…
[Erin] Yes.
[Phenderson] And I'm like… They're like, "Mmm. Mmm." I always thought it was ironic, though, the very plot of this movie is that food kills. Anyway.
[Laughter]
[Phenderson] People do love their food. So I think there's a way that… I'm glad you said that, that… I know that… I think I know the scene you're talking about, like, when they're sitting down to eat. Because I just wanted to show that that communal experience of eating and enjoying these things after having a hard-fought battle… What's better than sitting down… Like, in the first Avengers movie. You go and you have some [garbled]. Right? There's something about that that is just very real. I… So, yeah. I think food is the unsung hero. I tell that to writers all the time. Don't neglect your food.
[Erin] If the food is bad, that tells you something too.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] You get out there, with [garbled vibration] plate after [garbled]
[laughter]
[Erin] It's not a good thing.
[Phenderson] Exactly.
 
[Erin] [garbled] When you were talking about oppression versus the real life, it may be think of one of my favorite things to do is to look at old black-and-white photos where they actually colorize it. Because I think people forget, like, people were living in color. You know what I mean? Like, well, instead they like put them on the wall, like they're not…
[Phenderson] Yes.
[Erin] Real. When you see them, like, I just think I saw one the other day, I think it was like Martin Luther King looking…
[Phenderson] Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott?
[Erin] Yes!
[Phenderson] They've re-announced it. People are like, "Whoo, they was fly." [Garbled]
[Erin] It was…
[Phenderson] Did you think they dressed in black and white? I think that's so true, is a historian, how people think of the past. It's hard sometimes for people to think of the past as these were people. Right? All of these events were happening, but they were still people, living their lives, bickering, getting along, joking. They were just people, and yes, they dressed in color. They matched the things. [Garbled] it was just, I guess, my gray drab suit. My other drab suit, now. No. It was… But there is something about that, how it brings it to life. I'm so glad you brought that up. I saw that effect in this. [Garbled] I understand that. It's still… It's something human about seeing those colors that makes you understand, like, yeah, these are people.
 
[Howard] When you… Coming back to tension for a moment, being able to sit down to a meal. That's a relief. That is a…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] Relaxing thing. If you let your leader… Your leader? Your reader relax…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] Into some food that they are imagining and you're describing it and they're getting the smells and the tastes…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] And the sounds and all that. And then you spring a monster on them later. It's going to be even sharper. It's going to work even better.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] I loved that. I don't know if you were doing it deliberately, but as I had gone upstairs eating the jambalaya, I was thinking, I may have walked into a trap here.
[Chuckles]
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] I may have walked right into a trap. I'm letting my guard down. Something terrible's going to happen very next.
[Phenderson] Yeah. I think that's good points you're making. I don't even know if I do it deliberately, but I think, like, I'll tell you, there's some stories I read and there's so much action and, like, do people stop and go to the bathroom? Right, you gotta stop someplace. Give me a pause. Right? I'm really big into if I'm reading a story, I want to pause. I want people to [garbled] I want people to stop. I think… It's okay if they don't have a big scene, I want a pause. Nothing like that communal, like you said, this way that people let their guard down when they're eating, especially if they feel they're in a safe place here for people. Then there's also still a time… That was my time to let people… For Sadie and Maurice to still have their little bickering bit. All right? But also to show that they're closer than people know. Right? Also, the juke joint, right? I could have easily made this a weird mean girls thing where they just don't get along, but I wanted to show that, no, underneath all that, they absolutely love each other. Right? That Sadie will tear down this world for Maurice even if they also bicker. I think there were those scenes that allowed me to do that. I really liked it… Like I… When I started the story, for instance, starting there, that conversation. I didn't worry, because you know we're taught, like, oh, the story should start. Don't have them… Don't have people in conversation. I was like, no, I want this conversation. I want this convo in the very beginning to start the story off. I thought there I could build a little tension between this group, and then the tension explodes, and, oh, there's a monster.
[Laughter]
[Phenderson] Right. Shows up. Yes!
[Erin] I also think in real life, I think we talked about this on the episode, like, we all are much more, like, going to have tension in our conversations than because monsters attack us. Like, that's a kind of tension we understand. Like… I don't know what you all do in your spare time…
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Erin] But, in general, so it's like it feels so real, and then you're like and it goes to 11. It's sort of… I was thinking about, Howard, what you said about the food. When you read a food scene, it's like your nose opens up. Like you suddenly think about how things smell. Then, if the next thing you smell is like monster, like, you are… You're taking that in with a soul whiff, you know. Because you're in that moment.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Erin] You're ready for it, and all your senses are already being engaged, versus, like, sometimes when you know tension is happening. As a reader, like, you'll tense up. Your hands will curl, you won't take in full breaths because you're in the moment. So I kind of like the idea that there's enough slowdown, that we're just chillin', laying back, and then [crunch].
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I… It's one of my favorite things also that… The… Making the reader feel like, oh, no, you're safe now. Everything's all fine. All fine… Then very not. Very, very not. I actually… Since we were talking about that first scene, I had a question as well. That kind of… I been thinking about it while I was reading it, but then when Howard said, oh, no, this is a trap… There are potential narrative traps as a writer in some of this… In some of the things… Any time we're writing. One of the things that I was… When I was reading it, I was waiting for the parade to turn on them. Because that's something that I would have seen in cinema or…
[Phenderson] Right.
[Mary Robinette] In the hands of another writer. You take us a very different place.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] With, hello monsters, and then going into the warehouse, which, like, is full and should not be full, and, like… So you keep ratcheting up the tension, but you avoid the obvious one. Did you avoid that because you were just not interested in writing it, because it was a little bit of a trap, or… I realize that's asking someone to tell us… Tell us what you were thinking when you were writing this however many years it is after you wrote the book is like monumentally unfair, and yet I'm still asking.
[Phenderson] Well, you know, as a writer, it's also like a ret con. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] Like, people are always asking you to figure out why you did the thing you did. I end up coming up with an answer, and I'm like, "Is that true? Or am I…"
[Laughter]
[Phenderson] Just [garbled] like, am I imagining that was what I was thinking at the time? So, I know that's interesting that you say that, that you thought the crowd was going to turn on them. Right? Because they're in this dangerous place, that certainly was a Klan march. Right? So I don't think I ever thought of the crowd turning on them. I knew that they were going to be doing something away from what most people could see, only because what they have to do is so wild that everyone can't see this. Right? It has to be like this is the secret underground world. Like Blade. Like, nobody knows I'm fighting vampires. Right? This is what I do. This is the… What does he say in the movie? There's the candy coated world, and there's the one underneath. Right? I wanted to get that idea of, like, there's this underneath world that most people are simply unaware of. For that, to me, it had to happen away from the main crowd. It had to happen away from the main block of people for them to be able to have this open warfare. So, yeah. The warehouse came to me, I mean, this is where I literally had a… I've been to Macon, Georgia, but I had a map and I had a warehouse that was actually there. That's from an actual warehouse. It was… I have photos of it. It was actually used to house cotton. So it gave me the… It gave me something from the landscape to look down upon. Then I would be, like, I want a fight in a warehouse. That's a great thought. All right. So I like having fights in places that you just shouldn't be having fights in, right? Like in schools, hospitals, warehouses. It's just like that's not what this is for. But this is what we're going to going to turn it into. [Garbled] So, yeah. That's how that came about.
[Mary Robinette] That's fantastic. Now I'm sitting here going what is for having battles in…?
[Erin] I was just like… I was like playgrounds, playgrounds are really…
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Erin] That's a top place.
[Phenderson] Some of the best fight scenes, right?
[Howard] There really isn't a good place to have [garbled] battles
[Phenderson] If you like Star Wars, like, they're constantly having fight scenes in industrial centers. Hey, we're working here. [Garbled] with light sabers running around. They're just trying to get this work done.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] [garbled] around, causing problems.
[Howard] We are on a space station. If you break that, everyone dies.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] Does ownership know what you guys are doing right now?
[Mary Robinette] Right. Every time there's a battle, a fight scene, that runs through a kitchen and the cooks just keep on cooking while they're going through…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I'm like, what? How does that…
[Phenderson] Yeah. Yeah.
[Erin] Table 17 needs…
[Chuckles]
[garbled]
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] They're more scared of the chefs than they are… 
[Phenderson] Yeah, they are.
[Howard] [garbled]
[Phenderson] Basically.
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of interrupting things when fights come running through, we're going to interrupt right here and be back in just a minute to talk a little bit more about tension.
 
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[Phenderson] My thing of the week is… I am always late on TV shows. I say this to everybody. We live in a golden era of television. There's more fantastic TV that has ever existed in my lifetime. I no longer have to choose between the A-Team, Knight Rider, and Auto Man. That was like a weird show about a guy who turned into a car. Very ridiculous. In the eighties, eighties was a wild time. But now there's so much TV. But I'm always late. So what I've decided to watch this week is something that came out in 2019. It's a series, a short series, called The Terror. It is on Netflix. It's about these two British ships, the Erebus and I think it's the Terror, trying to find a way to the Northwest passage, and, whoo boy, these strange things begin to happen. I've long wanted to watch this film, then it went away. Now, thanks to the magic of Netflix, it's returned. I'm able to watch it. When this is over, I'm going to enjoy another episode. As I do constantly. So, yeah. That's my thing. Some of you have seen it. If you haven't, The Terror. Watch it at night.
[Erin] No.
[Mary Robinette] Making mental notes, do not take Phenderson's advice.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Here we are, back on the other side. The heroes have fought their way through our kitchen, and we have to talk about some more ingredients of tension. So, I was so pleased with myself for that metaphor, it's not really great.
[Phenderson] We love it. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you. I appreciate you. Some of the other things that we talked about were things like anticipation and resolution. There's a bunch of stuff that you set up early on that then has a nice payoff later. For instance, talking about the film that's going to be on Stone Mountain. You talk about that right at the beginning of the book, and then it comes back and plays… It continues to play a larger and larger role as we move through the book. Did you always have, like, and we're gonna go to Stone Mountain?
[Phenderson] Yeah. I always knew we were going to Stone Mountain. We were always going to Stone Mountain, because part of the origin of this entire thing is the fact that in real life, the second Klan has its origins on Stone Mountain. Right? And literally is created after D. W. Griffith releases Birth of a Nation in 1915, which is where the Klan arose. By this time, the first Klan is mostly died out, because they got what they wanted. They've taken over… They've instituted Jim Crow. The second Klan comes about really based on the film. The film so inspires this guy, Al Simmons, in Georgia that he decides to create the second Klan. The second Klan now has… It's still hates black people, but it has a larger enemies list. Now it doesn't like Catholics, it doesn't like German immigrants. It really doesn't like Jews. In fact is the killing of Leo Frank, the murder of Leo Frank is very much tied up with the second Klan being born in Georgia. He goes to Stone Mountain and they do a ritual. The ritual is based heavily on the film, the Birth of a Nation.
[Mary Robinette] Wow.
[Phenderson]'s It would almost… I mean, the group is not a terror group. It would almost be funny to call the movie Klan. Because the way they do many of the rituals they do are based more on the film Birth of a Nation than the first Klan that comes about. Right? This second Klan, of course, is much more massive. Where is the first Klan was maybe tens of thousands, this Klan rises to some four and a half million. Where is the first Klan was mostly in the South, and also in California where they're harassing the Chinese, the second Klan is everywhere. It swallows up the Midwest. It's in Maine, it's in Connecticut. It's everywhere. They're running people for office. They're not even wearing masks, because everyone can be a member of the Klan. Right? So I always knew I was going to Stone Mountain. Because Stone Mountain was that symbol. To this day, Stone Mountain is still a place where Klan and white supremacists meet. It has these giant reliefs on their, actually, of Confederate generals like Lee and others. Right? So it's still this place, this tension. So I always knew I wanted to go there, and, yeah, I definitely seeded it in the beginning. Because I'm a believer that if you give somebody something late in the story, I want to see it later on, but don't just put it there. I like people… I like to give people clues so that they can know that it's coming. Like, when I first saw M. Night Shyamalan… What's the movie with Bruce Willis? In the…
[Howard] Sixth Sense.
[Phenderson] Sixth Sense. I love the fact that when we figure it out, we're like, oh, the clues were always there. Right? We just saw it differently. So I like to make certain that I've seeded things so that when they do happen, people aren't like, whoa, what are you doing on Stone Mountain? I want them to get these little hints before, and then take them back now. See, I gotta do it, I'm an academic historian, so if you ask me things, I have to plug the history.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] I was right there with you. I spent a lot of time in Atlanta, and as you were talking, I was thinking about a friend of mine who was… Went to Atlanta for a job and was picked up by his boss at the airport. His boss took him, the first stop they made on the way from the airport to the job was at Stone Mountain.
[Phenderson] Okay. It's good that people go. It's beautiful scenery.
[Mary Robinette] Well, yeah. Contextually, a little more challenging when the person who's showing up for the job is a young black man and it's an older white guy who takes him there.
[Phenderson] It's not the best place. Especially if you know the history of, like… Why are we here?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, those are questions that are still being asked.
 
[Howard] So, one of the things that I love the most about Ring Shout… I'm a middle-aged white dude who grew up in Florida. I have zero childhood knowledge of the history that you're talking about. That was all completely obscured from me. I… It's just been the last 10 years that I've been looking back and realizing, oh, wow. I know nothing. Well. Less than 50 percent of what was happening in that time. In that area. The way you wrote the novel, I was able just contextually to tell immediately, okay, this is P. Djèlí Clark creating fiction and this is P. Djèlí Clark telling me history.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Howard] That dance that you did between the fantastic that you wove through your story in order to create a mythos that was brilliant and wonderful and horrific and full of scary meat versus…
[Mary Robinette] Still mad about that.
[Howard] Versus the history which is… I am ashamed for not knowing it sooner. But that dance you did was wonderful. I loved the book for that.
[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Unfortunately, in Florida, they're trying to make it so that people will not know about these things.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] I just think that there is this way that I think you're hitting on the head, there are these aspects of American history that just aren't spoken of. I think about when HBO re-did Watchmen and they decided to do it from a perspective of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa, Oklahoma is something that I've known about since I was a kid, because in black spaces, it's just talked about. Even if people don't know everything, they've heard of black Wall Street. They know what happened there. People just bring it up. My parents are from the Caribbean. So they didn't come here and tell like the late sixties, early seventies. They knew about it. I heard about it in a barbershop somewhere. This is just something I knew. But most people, even the show runner for that show. He was a 40 something-year-old black male. He had never heard of it. Right? Until, like a few years before. It fascinated him. He went to look for it. Therefore he knew he had to put this into the film. That night that it premiered, I think Google almost broke because people were googling what is Tulsa Oklahoma? What happened there? Now it's just become something that everyone knows, but there is this way that there are a lot of things that the national narrative doesn't like to talk about. That doesn't make us feel good. So these kind of things become knowledge to like a few people where it's just known in the black community, like this thing happened, but in the larger community, it's just completely unheard of. So, yeah, I wrote… Part of what I was doing as the historian in me, I'm trying to bring these things out by using fiction. Right? What inspired me, for a lot of this, what inspired the story, were actually the ex-slave narratives taken from the last generation of enslaved people who were living in the 1920s continuing into the 1930s, during the depression, the WPA narratives. They talk about this first Klan. They described them as monsters. When I first… I was like, whoa. That's amazing. Now they know they're not monsters. But they're using this notion of describing the Klan as haints, saying that they have horns, that they could drink tons of water, do these supernatural acts, that they have chains, and they would blacken their faces I always had this idea that the using this idea of storytelling to talk about the trauma that they were faced with. Right? Turning these people… Who they knew who they were. They're like, yeah, that's Judge so and so. I know who he is. He owned me, or I worked for him. But he dresses up and he comes and he terrorizes us. What better way to talk about your trauma then using horror? Which is what the scholar Kinitra Brooks, she always says this is what horror is. Right? It's about us trying to find a way to talk about trauma. So, all this to say, I took my cue from these former slaves using folklore to talk about this history, and saying, what if I did that as well. It was just me trying to… Constantly trying to make it not get to historical, so that people like, oh, no, it's history, I'm running away. But yet, imbuing it with the fiction enough to keep people there in the story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think you just did a great job of walking that line. I also enjoy writing historical fiction.
[Phenderson] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] The tension…
[Phenderson] Very well.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you. The tension that you can put on things by inviting the reader into…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I feel like when you use real history, you are making space for the reader, because your engaging their curiosity.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] In a way that is harder, I think with some other forms of fiction. One of the things…
[Erin] Oh, sorry.
[Mary Robinette] That you did…
 
[Howard] This might be a little on the nose, but I feel like our listeners at this point really need to be able to draw a line between the way Birth of a Nation as a medium, as a story, was so incredibly destructive… I mean, it was very influential on culture, but it was very, very destructive. And the stories that we tell now that attempt to correct that can be so corrective. Writing is important, and getting it right is important. Telling a story that will sing to people and can change them is important. This is a good work that you did, that we want to do. It is a good work.
[Phenderson] Thank you. Thank you. That's great to hear. I mean, so much of… Yeah, I can't say I didn't write this in a sense of this is a corrective or for my own catharsis. You know? People hunting Klan members? Yeah, it's cathartic. So, thank you, that's great to hear. I… Like I said, when I say I wrote this with the idea that a few people might like it, I still had this idea this is what I want people to get from it, and that people come away with this notion of it's a corrective, but also this… Giving them this inspiration to go, I want to find out more. As a historian. Of course, I want you to find out more, I want you to be able to look and say, oh, wow. This was a real part of history. This is a fictional part, like you said, these things actually happened. So, thank you very much. That's… You make me want to go write.
[Erin] Please do.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Please do write more. One of the things that I just wanted to draw a line under that Phenderson is talking about that Howard has mentioned is that Phenderson wrote this for himself. We talked about the idea of writing for… Of having a story that's written for an in group, a group that has a shared common experience. Then, knowing that people who are outgroup are also going to read it and engage with it. I want you to understand… I want you to bear in mind that this is something that he wrote for himself, and it is… When you are sitting down to write something, the thing that you can do to make it most true and most interesting is to write something for yourself.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Erin] I think not be apologetic about it. You know what I mean? I think that there are… The world will tell you, like, oh, you need to approach this really carefully and you need to… It's not to say that you can just do whatever you want, but, especially when you're talking about things that are about what you know, what you grew up with, and things that your family talked about, things that are part of your history. I think it's what I really liked about this book is that it's bold. You know what I mean? It's not shirking from engaging the past. It's going all the way in. This is going to… I'm going to take a complete 90 degrees turn here for no reason other than I can.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Don't try to stop me! Which is that I also think tone is so interesting and important, because one of the things I always… I was about to say one of the things I always loved about the Klan, not an actual thing, but…
[Laughter]
[Erin] My favorite part is that one of the things that undercut them was when comic books started mocking them, that actually it was these are ridiculous people who took hate in the weird movie and decided to like cosplay evil. When that was being made fun of by like old-school comics, they were like, oh, we can't recruit as much because it turns out that our stuff… Like, we aren't able to get the recruitment. It's not scary anymore.
[Phenderson] Right.
[Erin] It just feels silly. So I think there's so many different tones, and I'm curious, like, what made you decide to go, like, all the way on horror? Because there's something ridiculous about it, but also something horrifying.
[Phenderson] Yeah. I thought that's a great… That's interesting. Thinking about recent happenings in politics, the notion that when you can make hatemongers and fascists, you make them feel weird and simply laugh at them, how much power does that rob from them? Right? The fact that you can do that. So that's an interesting point that you're making their. In this case, again, I was taking my cue so much from those ex-slave… To a great… You're… I mean, I should point this out, that I first read those narratives when I was doing a Masters degree. 10 years before I would sit down to write Ring Shout. Those ideas, I was introduced to those ideas there, I was introduced to the night doctor in those narratives. I kind of sat… I know, like I said, I want to do something with this. I didn't know what. So, it took me 10 years before I was, like, okay, I'm ready to actually approach this. So I want to say that I was really trying to honor… The fact that they gave me these wonderful ideas and trying to be truthful to it. Yeah, like, so much of it was I wanted to show the horror of it. Some of it's also absurd. Right? Like Butcher Clyde is absurd. But he's also terrible. I wanted to have that bridge between absurdities, but also it's frightening. Right? I just wanted to get that down. The notion that, you know, there's a point where Nana Jean says, like, "The Klan members we haven't turned yet," and she calls them, like fools. Right? I wanted to get this idea that they're dressing up and they're clowns. They're fools…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] Right? But if they let that hate consume them, they can become this monstrous danger, that can destroy others. But she says of the ones who aren't, she just says, they're fools. Right? She said… She makes this distinction between the fools are the ones who turned. But I wanted to get that across. Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Again, you just… I think you walked those lines really nicely. On the subject of the narratives, the slave narratives, you've got a bunch of the sections that are transliterated from the Gullah.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And… I loved… Like, I got… They're just so juicy, and I love them all. But I'm looking at notation 25 in particular, the shout Eve and Adam tell about them to that wicked snake and the fruit from the forbidden tree. That one, it's interesting to me the way it is talking about the shout and how you wind up using the shout later. So I'm curious again, like, having… There's so many decisions that go into making these kinds of interludes. There is the where you place it. There's the content. There's the tone of it. There is the… Like… How many of these are you jumping straight off of something that you had read, how many of them are you are completely riffing on your own? Tell us… I don't have a question there, I just want you to talk about them.
[Phenderson] Well, thank you. Because I don't get asked about [garbled] those parts are so important to me, because I thought they set the tone for each chapter, they set… They were able to say so much in their… In between interludes. I actually pulled a lot of that from, first of all, I looked at actual shouts. I wanted to know what the shouts were about. So each one is pulled from an actual different shout. I thought the shouts were so fascinating because I said this is philosophy. People are giving phil… And I even have something in their where somebody says how many intellectual philosophers were lost to the droning work of slavery, and so forth. How many did you lose? How many minds that could have thought up these fascinating things? I thought when I was… So I… There were the shouts themselves, and I read people who were interpreting the shouts. Some of these were Lomax and others who were first doing interviews. Later there are books that talk about shouts where people say, well, this is what the shout is about. As I'm listening to people, I'm like, this is philosophical. They're talking about how humans think about themselves and their place in the universe and how… It was all of that. Right? It's as deep as Kant and anybody else. That's what I wanted to get across here in these shouts by… So some of it comes from quotes that I've read, and I'm also adding my own take to it, and my own riffing of it, and trying to give an interpretation, but trying to let their voices come through there. I have this transliterated because if anybody noticed that supposed to be [garbled] not memory for name… Our favorite Jewish radical who's a member of the monster fighting crew. If anybody knows, those are her initials, she is the one who supposedly a hero throughout this. So I'm putting a little bit in there. I kind of have her as a Lomax or something, like, using that the way that they would write about what they saw. So it's a bit of that. But, yeah, each one was important, each one was supposed to be kind of linked to the chapter that was coming. And you should know that I also had little quotes that I wanted from the slave narratives themselves, direct quotes. They ended up having to go, because I think, like you said, if people were like, okay. You have the interludes, then you have the little narrative parts…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Phenderson] Of the chapter, it's too much. So it was one of those things, okay, it hurt, but I had to cut them all out. But I kept one. That is in the very… In my acknowledgments. The one about Oma. It was like the Klan came into her house and she whooped them one at a time. That's an actual quote. I love that. Because here she's talking about her mama's like… I mean, just fantastical that her mother's just… It's so Paul Bunyan, John Henry. Klan members came in, I'm home with the baby, I'm just beating each Klan member one at a time. I said, that's… I have to have… I have to keep this quote in here. So there were a lot of quotes like that, I wanted to get these voices of these ex-slaves. But I definitely kept that one about Ma. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Awesome.
[Erin] I love the way you were thinking about… As you were talking about the shouts in the stories and the narratives, because so much of the way I took some of this actual story is that it's about the stories we tell ourselves.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] It's about the stories we allow ourselves to tell, the ones that we hold back, the ones we are afraid of, the ones we should fear. So, so much of it being rooted in you wanting to tell people's stories.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Erin] I think is just really cool and deep and like an extra level, knowing that that was part of what went into it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When you said that the shouts were philosophy and about thinking about their place in the universe, I'm like, that is what this entire book is, Maurice trying to figure out her place in the universe.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So, well done.
 
[Howard] This episode is titled discussing tension, and the real tension I'm seeing here is your tension that is relieved by writing this book.
[Phenderson] In some ways, yeah.
[Howard] So, this was done and it was out and you told that story.
[Phenderson] I wrote this book in a few weeks because it was one of those things you know, as writers, you have this idea. I pitched the idea months before. It was due, like, in August. I hadn't written a thing. This is when I had the idea in my head. I'd been percolating this story for several years. But I just hadn't let it flow out. When it flowed out, like, I think it was like two or three weeks, I just wrote it. Let's get it all out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, this is where one writer says to another in a friendly collegial way, "You ass hole."
[Phenderson] Thank you.
[Laughter]
[Phenderson] There's something, again…
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] wrote this award-winning book in just a couple of weeks.
[Phenderson] [garbled] The idea for it, like I'd taken this stuff like a decade before. It was sometime around… I would say around 2015 or so, I really started thinking about it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] I was on a fellowship. My last fellowship. I was working on my dissertation in Indiana, Pennsylvania, literally nowhere Pennsylvania. My wife came to visit me one time there, when she was living in DC. She's like, "I'm not going back again." I saw tractor pulls and people chasing greased pigs at a fair.
[Chuckles]
[Phenderson] Okay, at a fair. So I would drive almost every weekend back to DC, several hour drive. I'd be driving through this misty mountain, I don't know if anybody listens to Old Gods of Appalachia, but it was that. Right? I was… So, while I'm driving, I'm listening to some shouts. I'm listening to these songs sometimes I'm just imagining. So there was a way where some of my built-up tension, I had so much of it in me, that when it came out, it just all poured out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Phenderson] Because it was something I'd been spinning with for so long that when I finally came to write it, I could just write it.
[Howard] So what I'm hearing is if you want to write a book in three weeks, think the book for a decade.
[Erin] Oh, yeah, that works.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.
[Erin] I find that reassuring. There are several things I've been thinking about for a decade, so, like, I feel like any day now…
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I have… I've had things that I've had to sit on for a while. That's a question that we get a lot from listeners or early career writers who are like, "I have this idea, but I don't know if I'll be able to do it justice." I'm like, it's okay to sit on it.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] It's okay to sit on it and think about it and noodle on it until…
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And write other things while you're leveling up.
[Phenderson] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of leveling up, and writing other things, I think it's time for us to give some homework. Phenderson, I think you have homework for us?
 
[Phenderson] Yes. If anyone is really interested in building tension and storytelling over a short amount of time, I have something that you can go watch. If you seen it already, go to Netflix, I want you to find somebody else's Netflix if you need to, and I want you to watch Midnight Mass. I want you to watch a show that builds so many different areas of tension that by the time it all hits, you will have realized I haven't slept in 12 hours watching this show. And you are a balled up knot of tension watching and trying to figure out what's going to happen next. It's an amazing show. Midnight Mass if you haven't seen it yet. By Howard's face, Howard has seen it.
[Howard] That's awesome homework.
 
[Howard] You're out of excuses. Now go turn into a balled up knot.
[chuckles]
 
[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.
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.37: A Close Reading on Tension: Movement and Resolution
 
 
Key points: The law of the half step, a little movement creates tension. Solutions to problems that create a whole new problem. Yes-but, no-and! Repetitions that have changed just a little bit. Don't play coy with the reader, withholding secrets. Make sure your reveal give us new information, moves the story forward. EDM beat drops! Use mini-drops, small revelations, to assure your reader that we are moving towards a resolution. Use multiple threads, multiple pieces of tension, at any given time. Resolve something that the reader doesn't know needs resolution. Make sure the movement and resolution is story driven. Reframe have to do as get to do. Reframe have to hold this back from the reader as at this point, I get to reveal this amazing thing, and I am going to build to that reveal. Make your goal to be cursed by readers who didn't want to feel the thing that you just made them feel.
 
[Season 19, Episode 37]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 19, Episode 37]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Movement and Resolution.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Howard] I want to talk about music for a moment. Way back when I was studying music composition, one of my instructors talked about what he called the law of the half step. Which was that when there's a note that is a half step off from being the tonic or the dominant or whatever, from being in resolution, you have a chord that has created tension, has created a need for movement. The whole principle behind this was that as you are composing, you want to build chords where there are these half step movements just waiting to happen. You don't want to move a whole step, you don't want to have a note jump, especially if you're writing for choir. You don't want to have somebody jump a third or a fourth or a fifth in order to resolve the chord. You want the little movements that make things resolve. In teaching us about this, he said, "Now let's listen to some Wagner," because he was a cruel, cruel man. What we learned in listening to Wagner is Wagner was always resolving in one direction, while shifting something else out...
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Of place. He knew what he was doing. How does this tie into close reading tension with regard to Ring Shout, where the tension depends on something that is just a little bit out of place? Something… It doesn't need to move far, but it needs to move. It really needs to move. The longer it doesn't move, the tenser we get.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about this is it's a different way of describing something that I often use when I'm trying to create tension, which is the solution to whatever problem your character is dealing with creates a new problem.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Which… One of the things that I specifically think about in Ring Shout is the butcher shop scene. She needs to find the butcher shop. She needs to go and confront this guy. Doing so unlocks… It's like she does it. She has the confrontation. That unlocks this whole other enormous problem that… The dream that she had had was not actually just a dream. Ugh. I still have problems with that scene.
 
[DongWon] I mean, we see that again, over and over, he's doing that in terms of creating these moments that are the yes-but, no-and. Right? Like things… Even when things don't work out for them, it opens a door to further progressing the story. When things do work out for them, it works out in an unexpected way. Right? So, I think the night doctors is another great example of that…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] When she goes into the tree, there's a [garbled] name for the tree that I'm forgetting in the moment, but…
[Mary Robinette] The Angel Tree.
[DongWon] Yeah. The Dead Angel Tree. Sort of that whole sequence, which is this deeply upsetting thing, which is a solution to a problem. But it raises so many more questions in doing so. Right?
 
[Erin] What I love about both the girl from the dream and also the sort of brother's voice that comes out, is that it's one of those things where it's like every time we come back to it, it's moved a little bit. So like there's a little bit of tension in that. Because you know that there's some revelation coming. There's no reason this would be occurring over and over again in the story, and then be like, "Oh, well. That happened." Like, it seems like it's building towards something. But in between, there's all these immediate, like, present tensions. Like, I gotta go into this butcher shop.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I have to like run into a place on fire. But then it will be like, "Oh, this little voice." And the voices saying something a little different. Oh, this little girl. But she looks a little different. It's almost like those movies where something small on a shelf moves out of the corner of your eye…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh, my God, this moved such a long way."
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That is a great way…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] To build tension in this story.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. Well, to return to the music metaphor, it's that scale is building in the background. Right? It's each note is progressing up the scale, and at some point we know that's going to resolve. We know that's going to have to go somewhere.
[Howard] The… Going back to the music again, and the law of the halfstep. When you have a repeated theme in music, but something is changing, the accompaniment has changed, the tempo has changed. We've all heard it done when you play a familiar melody in a minor key. One of my favorite examples of that was Katrina and the Waves played in a minor key as part of a tribute during a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser. It was emotionally superpowerful, but you make little changes and it tells the reader, tells the listener, we're going somewhere. We're not just waiting for this piece to end. There is a resolution coming, and the modification of the thing that you're familiar with is leading toward that resolution.
 
[Mary Robinette] This is one of the things that P. Djèlí Clark does that I see early career writers not get where they have a character who has a secret, who has some past traumatic event, and they play coy with the reader. The reason that it does not work is, when it's handled badly is, that there isn't that movement, there isn't that giving us new information, there isn't anything to be gained by the withholding. In this, is the withholding and then the resolution of that. When she finally goes and has to relive that memory fully, that is a… That is a major plot point. It is one of the things that the story is building towards. As we are going through it, there are these tiny movements, we get these small resolutions every time we come back to it. With the things that Erin was talking about, with those, every time we come back to the voice, it's a little bit different. It's a… It is these small resolutions that then open up a different question.
[Howard] There's a common trope in all kinds of fiction where there is a secret and someone asks about the secret and the answer is you don't want to know the answer. Oh, you're not ready for me to tell you that yet. It's often so ham-fisted that we just think of it as a trope and we hate it. But in Ring Shout, there are secrets that she is not ready for the answer to. When you talk about the butcher shop, in particular, and we get an answer and the answer is a reveal where there is a whole scary horrible mess that you were just not ready to know about earlier.
[DongWon] Yeah. To modernize the metaphor a little bit, from Wagner… Sorry. But you can think about it in terms of like in EDM beat drop. Right? Like, you're building this slow thing, and then the beat drops, and now you're in a different rhythm and things are going faster. What you want is that sense of release when you get there. When you get to that beat drop, things should be popping off, being a little chaotic. Then you'll find a different rhythm, you'll find a different pace as you settle in past that moment. But the butcher shop is such a good example of that because it's a thrilling scene. Right? It is… The things that are happening in it are like absolutely buck wild. Even compared to the kind of horror we'd seen up until that point, this is reaching a different crescendo of that. Right? Which is part of the mix. That sequence is so memorable and is going to set the pace and tone for the back half of this story.
[Howard] We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about moving toward that resolution.
 
[Shawn] Hey, it's Shawn Nelson, founder and CEO of Love Sack and host of the Let Me Save You 25 Years podcast. Want to avoid common pitfalls and get straight to the insights that drive success? Join me and recognize names like John Mackey of Whole Foods and Joe Vicente of Sparstar as we unpack the hard-earned lessons from their journeys. Ready to streamline your path to success? Listen to Let Me Save You 25 Years on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That's Let Me Save You 25 Years with Shawn Nelson. Listen now.
 
[Erin] The movie Clueless is great.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I'll just say it. So my recommendation is watch the movie Clueless, the nineties Valley girl retelling of the Jane Austen book, Emma. It's got classic clues, it's got amazing actors, it's got Paul Rudd at whatever age he was claiming to be at that moment. But the thing that I really love paying attention to is the way they take something from a completely different era, the Regency era, and move it into nineties valley girl voice. If you're thinking about voice in your own work, think about how did they do that? How do they make it seem like Clueless is a movie of the time and place that it's from while still keeping the plot and all of the things that come with being a retelling of an Austen classic? One thing I like to think about that you may do as you watch this work is how would you make that same story happen in the world that you're building? Enjoy that, while you watch Clueless.
 
[Howard] So you might have in front of you an outline for your work in progress where you've got a pretty clear picture of where things are going. Many of us will look at you and laugh a little bit, because your characters have not yet run away with the story. Others of us will look at you very jealously and say, "Wow, I wish my outlines work that way." The thing to remember is that this is your plan. You have an idea of how to move and how to resolve. The reader isn't in on it. Part of what makes Ring Shout, for me, so satisfying is that at every stage I could tell that we were moving toward a resolution. I knew that, but I had no idea what it was. How do you set about creating that for your readers?
[Erin] I would say that one of the things that I loved that I was talking about before with ring shout That is the mini-drops, the small answers that let you know that questions will be answered. So, looking at the sort of dream figure of the little girl… It's a little girl, who is this? Who is this girl? Wait, this girl is me? Wait, this girl wasn't a girl. And there's a barn. Like, there's all these pieces of information…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Come out. Like, we don't learn about the barn, really, until about three or four…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And then, once you hear about it, like, you may or may not contextually put together your own beliefs about what the barn is… It was exactly what I thought it was…
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But, it's each thing tells you, okay, this small question was answered, so I know the next question will be answered. That leads you towards the overall resolution of why is this important. Each single bit of information also tells you a little bit more of the reason that the girl is a girl in her mind's eye, even though… When the event happens, she wasn't young because it's easier for her. You're like, "Oh. That gives me both an emotional resolution and some more information about what's happening here." I think it is those smaller bits that really help to give the reader confidence that you are driving towards something.
 
[Mary Robinette] It's also that more than one thread is active at any given time, more than one story thread, more than one piece of tension, active at any given time. And each scene is moving those, like… In… Ah, it's so good. I'm thinking about, there's the girl, but also the Ring Shout scene. That in that scene, you're learning about how Ring Shout works. You're also learning about violence that's been happening other places. You are learning about how the Ku Klux's work. All of those things move just a little bit. And then the weather begins to shift. Each time, it's like… It's all of these little tiny half steps that resolve something while shifting something else out of alignment. It's something that you can do with your own work, is to look at scenes and see do you have only one thread that you're moving and resolving tension for in a given scene? That's for short fiction or longform.
[DongWon] It's why overlapping sounds and overlapping rhythms and melodies create greater amplitude. Right? They're not countering each other out. I mean, you want to make sure that they're not canceling each other out, which is a thing that can happen. So if you have different kinds of tension and they're running counter to each other, this can cause a drop in excitement and tension in the book. But if you're doing what he's doing here, which is adding all these different layers of here's the most visceral immediate layer of like they're fighting Ku Klux's in the street after trying to blow them up with this trap to the memories every time she draws her sword. We know we're going to get another beat on that particular layer. Then the Ring Shouts, the sort of epistolary pieces that start off each section…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Each of those is adding another note to the sort of stack of melodies that we're getting that is building over the course of the book. It makes the whole book feel like one of its own Ring Shouts. Right? It's one of these owned stories that has this impact and potential and is saying something very specific and powerful.
 
[Erin] I also love that sometimes it's building and creating emotion, even when you don't think it is. So, for example, all the people, the voices that… The images basically that she's getting when she draws the sword happen basically the same way every time that we see them the first few times. So it feels like this is just a thing. When you draw your sword, you get some random pretty tragic things that happened. But then those voices come into play at the end…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Of the novella… Spoiler alert, but you were supposed to read the book. Like, those all come into play feels like such a great res… Like a resolution I wasn't even expecting.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I think that sometimes that is also something that we could do, which is to resolve a thing that you didn't know needed resolution, that it feels so emotionally satisfying to get it.
[DongWon] You keep us moving so much that we forget that, oh, her best friend died, which means that she could be one of the spirits of the sword now. You know what I mean? So that moment when she comes is such a resolution to that whole arc, the arc of friendship, the arc of the tragedy of her death, and the ark of the sword, all coming together in a single moment that leads to such a big emotional catharsis for these two characters and this relationship.
 
[Howard] One of the things that makes this kind of movement and resolution satisfying is when it is always story driven, rather than driven by the necessity of the meta-, the beat chart. I want the reader to not know this yet. I want the reader… Now I want them to know this. Okay, that's fine. Having a beat chart at the beginning that says the reader is in the dark about a whole bunch of things and this is my list of reveals. But every one of these reveals not only needs to be justified, but the reader needs to feel like there was a really good reason why nobody in whose POV I was had that information until just now. One of my favorite parts of the book is the realization that the trope of oh, I had this sword because I am the chosen one of these women who gave me the sword, and then, after the butcher shop scene, you're like, "Wait a minute. I'm not their chosen one. I'm someone else's chosen one." I… Oh, and that's the point at which, for me, I no longer knew… I had no clue where this was going to resolve. I was now genuinely frightened because there… We had this discussion years ago on the podcast. There's so many worse things that can happen to a character than death.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Having them make the decision that you as the reader hate is so much worse. I was afraid of that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Erin] [garbled] About the relationship between writer and reader, you were talking about the meta-beat, and I think that one of the things… A life thing that I have been thinking about recently is the difference between have to and get to. So, trying to reframe things that you have to do in your life as, like, I get to do that. It doesn't always work…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] But…
[Mary Robinette] I may try it at home…
[Erin] But I do think that, like, sometimes instead of it's "I have to hold this back from the reader," it's "at this point, I get to reveal this amazing thing to the reader and I'm going to build to that amazing moment of reveal." So I think it's about like wanting to share your story versus wanting to hold back your story.
[DongWon] This came up in one of my D&D games in a conversation with one of my players. We settled on this thing of the difference between holding a secret from you versus holding a secret for you.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's great.
[DongWon] So… If you think of yourself as a writer holding the secret for your audience, you're… It's going to be more exciting, more fun, better resolution if they don't know this thing yet versus like I'm keeping this thing from you and you don't get to have it. Right? I think that subtle shift in the mind set… It's as delicate as the get to, want to or get to, have to, or whatever it was. It's as subtle as that distinction, but I think it's a really important one, and that can be really helpful in getting to the most exciting kind of release at the end of the movement.
 
[Mary Robinette] I think that also gets to something that I often end up telling writers which is, like, "Okay. So what emotion do you want the writer to have? Because, gosh, that writer is clever is not…"
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] "Sustainable." That is the I am holding the secret from you.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] The, "Oh, no," is I am holding the secret for you.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. [Garbled]
[Howard] My goal as a writer, as an early writer, would be… Yeah, I would like to be seen as clever. Now, I've reached the point where my goal is I want to be cursed by people who didn't want to feel the thing that I just made them feel. That's… For me, that's the high bar. Do I curse P. Djèlí Clark?
[Mary Robinette] I do.
[Howard] Maybe a little bit.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Maybe a little, but I enjoyed that ride quite a bit.
[Mary Robinette] I appreciated that ride.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I'm not going to say that this was an enjoyable ride.
[Howard] Hey, we've got one or two more episodes to talk about this? Two more. All right. Let's go ahead and wrap this up.
 
[Howard] In the musical vein, I have a fun homework for you. Write a scene three times. Same scene, and write it from scratch three times. But listen to different music each time. If you need help varying things, try all instrumental. Try something that's got lots and lots of vocals. Try something that you are completely unfamiliar with, you've never listened to before. For… See how that changes what you put down on the page.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.36: A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual
 
 
Key points: Narrative tension is tension happening in the story, on the page. Contextual tension is what the reader brings to the story. How much do you assume your readers are bringing context with them? Language and dialect. Narrative structure, tension, all that is a pitcher, and the writer puts whatever they want in that. The audience brings you their glass, and you don't know what kind of glass they will bring. It may not match the drink, but they can still enjoy it. There's always context. Use the characters having memories to bring context onto the page. Characters always carry their context with them.
 
[Season 19, Episode 36]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 19, Episode 36]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] I'm obsessed with the topic that we're going to be talking about today...
[Laughter]
[Erin] Which is narrative and contextual tension. So, just to give a this is what I mean when I say that, to me, narrative tension is the tension that's actually happening in the story. It is when your characters are tense, when your... the setting is tense, anything that's actually happening on the page. Contextual tension is what the reader is bringing to the table. The example that I always use is if you write a story called Last Dinner in Pompeii, and it's just a normal story of people having dinner, we all know that Pompeii will be buried by ash the next day, so we will bring plenty of tension to the table, even if they're just talking about how next week they're going to go shopping. We're like, "Oh, you won't."
[Laughter]
[Erin] That brings [garbled]. That's contextual, but not narrative at all. I think this, Ring Shout, is a work that obviously lives in a place of contextual tension…
[DongWon] The context that I'm bringing to this is I've been so excited for this episode because I think three years ago on the Writing Excuses Cruise at like one in the morning, you explained this idea to me after a day of hanging out, and my jaw was on the floor. Because I'd never thought about it this way. It's such an important concept, and it is so useful. So, getting to finally talk about it on mic for the podcast is a resolution of the kind of tension for me. So.
[Erin] Love it.
[Mary Robinette] That's also one of the reasons that some works don't translate, because they bring a lot of contextual tension from their home locations that the audience in the new location doesn't have. It was one of the things that happen to me when I was reading Three Body Problem, that there was a lot of context that I was just missing. With Ring Shout, I had, because I am from the American South, there was a lot of contextual tension for me that was layered onto the book where I was anticipating things. I think that P. Djèlí Clark was using that very intentionally throughout the book.
 
[Erin] It's an interesting question, though, which is how much do you want to assume that your audience is bringing that context with them? I also… My family… I have family from the American South, family from slavery, family who experienced racism in the South. So, for me, I'm like, "Oh, this feels very tense on a lot of levels." But if you're from another country or you've never heard of the Klan, do you think that the story still works? Or do you think that there's something that is required in the context in order to make the tension happen?
[DongWon] I remember around the launch of the TV show Lovecraft Country, there was a lot of conversation. Because the opening scene of that show is an actual historical massacre of Black Americans in the American South. It's referenced also in Ring Shout. It's mentioned. I had never heard of this event. I didn't know about it. I also grew up part of it in the South. Racial politics is a personal interest, of things that I've read about and studied. But I just didn't know this particular event. So a lot of the press coverage was about what an incredible work it is, both that it's bringing in all this contextual elements, but also educating such a broad audience about it. Right? So I think it can do sort of both and it's one of the challenges of leaning on that contextual tension is you need to work with your audiences to some extent, but it's also not your responsibility to educate them about it in the moment. But if you sort of give them enough of the context clues to understand what kind of thing we're talking about and then they can go into doing the research about it on their own.
[Howard] It's worth pointing out here that the narrative versus contextual dichotomy is enormous. Absolutely enormous. I'm sure you've all had that experience where you're talking about a film with somebody and halfway through your like, "It's like we watched two different movies." It's because, yeah, about 80 percent of what you get out of a thing has to do with what you brought into the thing.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I mean, there are things that I'll watch where the lead actor or one of the actors whose prominently featured is someone I just no longer like because of a me too or whatever, and that is a new context that didn't exist when it was created, but it's a real thing. Planning for it is fantastically difficult. My counsel to writers is don't assume that everybody has the same context that you do. But on your first draft, trust your context and write the story that you want to write. Then you're going to have to work with your beta readers, with your editor, to see if those narrative…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Versus contextual bits are fighting.
[DongWon] Well, one of the things I like most about this was the confidence with which P. Djèlí Clark…
[Howard] Oh, my goodness, yes.
[DongWon] Approaches the historical context.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] We're dropped into a situation, we're dropped into a scene. Nothing's explained to us, other than the fantastical elements. Those are explained to us. But the political historical context, we are assumed to either know it or pick it up from atmospheric clues around what's being discussed. I found that to be very powerful and very useful.
[Erin] I think that one of the reasons that that works so well is in that opening scene, you're dropped into that sort of primal life versus death tension. You get a group of people who obviously know each other, and are… We sympathize with, who are immediately trying to kill some horrific monster. So it tells you, okay, I understand what the stakes are. I understand who I'm rooting for, and who I'm not. Now, as I get more context, I can use that to build out the world. But I think it grabs you so immediately that you're not worried about the context, because you're like, oh, if there's a giant monster in front of you, you should probably hack it to death. I totally get that. Now that I'm in, now you can tell me about why it's important and what's going on around it.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that that particular scene… That was the first scene where I had that layer of… That extra layer of tension. Because I was… What I was fully anticipating was going to happen is that they would defeat that monster, and then they would get… Have a bunch of angry white people running after them. That's not what happens in the book. What happens is worse and different. Maybe not worse. It's different. That's one of the things that I… When I say that I think that P. Djèlí Clark is doing it very intentionally. That a lot of what he's doing is setting up, here's this… Here's the context. Here's a thing that can go wrong. But I'm not going to do that one. I'm going to do a different one. That's… That, again, is that thing for me when you're playing with… When you're using historical work and you're playing with someone's knowledge of that time, where you can put some additional tension on the story by putting those two things in opposition, by moving directions you weren't necessarily expecting. But also, if you don't know that's a possibility, it still plays… Like, you don't need the contextual tension for it to be really terrifying.
[Howard] In the… In the previous episode, we talked about how this book uses a lot of horror techniques. But it's kind of a fantasy action adventure historical. That particular tool of setting up… Having our characters be aware of what could go wrong and prepare themselves as best they can for this worst-case scenario that they're imagining, and then discovering that the worst case scenario is actually 25 degrees to the left and is way worse. That's straight out of the horror playbook. So you are not wrong in feeling like this is a horror novel, because that's done so expertly and so often.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting, and one of the reasons this is such a great example of this is the contextual tension remains contextual. It doesn't really… It never fully finds its way into the narrative and into the in text tension. He kind of makes an agreement with us in that opening scene…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And kind of sticks to that boundary in a way that I think is very savvy, but still leverages the awfulness of the actual history to increase… To add extra weight to a lot of the character [garbled], to a lot of the characters decisions and to the emotional intensity that we feel throughout.
[Erin] Yeah. I will now pause because of the context that we are on a podcast and we need to take a break.
 
[Howard] I write best when I got music to isolate me and my personal acoustic space from the rest of the world. Music with no words in it works best for me, and one of my very favorite playlists is Random Friday, the 2011 album from Solar Fields. It's through composed, each track flowing both thematically and seamlessly into the next. So I never get distracted by a gap telling me I might need to restart the music. Solar Fields really leaned into this, because there's an eleventh track which is a 78 minute continuous mix of the first 10 tracks. Just in case your player of choice doesn't do gap lists gaplessly. But what does it sound like? Well, it's upbeat ambience and electronic and I listened to it while I wrote this.
 
[Erin] And we're back. I want to take this moment to talk a little bit about in detail, because we love to get into the text in these close readings, and talk about the use of language in this. Because I think that some of that what do you have from context and what do you have on the page is really evident in the way that the text uses Gullah. Now Gullah is a real language, and it's used here occasionally, mostly in the Nana Jean character uses it, and that's the way that she speaks, and if you have the context to be able to understand Gullah, you'll understand what she's saying more readily. But what I love is that she actually, in text, warns, very drastically, that bad things are coming. So it's an important narrative tension moment, but it still lives within the context of being in Gullah. If you give up and sort of don't read that part or skim past it, you could, theoretically, miss that moment of tension. What I think that Clark does so well here is that it's repeated. So she says, "Bad weather's coming," essentially, and then it comes in at the end of the chapter in italics. So it's like, did you miss all of this? Because the context held you back? I'm going to bring it back on the page in a narrative way so that there's no way you can miss that bad things are coming. The word bad is there, even if you don't understand anything else. I just really love that. So I wanted to throw it out…
[Mary Robinette] It is one of the things that I enjoyed so much about this book, and why I wanted to listen to it in audio, because in audio, you get all… Because that's not the only language that's showing up in there, that's not the only dialect. So you… Getting all of that interplay is so much fun. The other thing that it does, besides that is that it brings in the contextual thing about different class perceptions that people have. That frequently when people hear someone… People will think Gullah is a dialect as opposed to a language. They will hear it and think that the person in modern day is like low class, uneducated. Whereas Nana Jean is a very powerful woman. I love the fact that he is using that, he is subverting some of the expectations that we often have from modern day, some of the contextual expectations. He's subverting those in the narrative tension that he's using. I think it's so much fun.
[Howard] Even without the Gullah, the narrator speaks and often omits definite or indefinite articles or conjunctions of to be. We up on the tower. Or no… Yeah. We up on the tower, rather than we are up on the tower. It took me five or six pages to realize, oop, no, this is just the voice of my POV character, and I'm all in. Had I… I'm not sure if there was a context that was expected of me or if the narrative taught me that. But it was definitely there, and it was a little while before I stopped noticing it is a linguistic thing in the book.
[DongWon] Well, I think the language does a really good job, I mean, both in the use of Gullah, and the use of [garbled] dialect things, and then overall, the general use of a particular voice of the narrator. I think this is such an important thing when it comes to a lot of fiction of communicating who this book is for. Right? It's being written for a specific audience, while still being accessible to everybody. Right? Like most of us here are not of the culture that this was written in the perspective of, but I got a ton out of it. I had a great time reading it, and I learned a lot reading it and all of that. But the idea of it is written for an in community reader, that is still accessible from a broader perspective, I think is really powerful.
 
[Mary Robinette] There's an analogy that I use sometimes when I'm talking about this, which is that you can think of narrative structure, tension, all of this, you can think of it as a pitcher. You can put anything you want to in that. Then, your audience comes to you with their glass. You don't know what glass they're coming to you with. So if I am… Say, if I've got a fine Pinot Noir in a beautiful crystal whatever, and I pour it into a Riedel glass, a Riedel wineglass which is the glass that it's intended for, it's like,, this is a perfect match. But if you come to me with a red Solo cup, you're still going to enjoy the wine, just maybe not the way I intended it. On the other hand, if that pitcher is filled with hot apple cider and you come to me with a wineglass, it's going to shatter. So, one of the things that… When you're talking about this in audience, writing it for a specific audience, you're writing it knowing some of the context they're going to bring to it, knowing that that's who you want to write it for, and that… Everybody else can enjoy it, but that's not the intended audience.
[Erin] Yet, sometimes…
[Howard] If I'm pouring whiskey and you're coming to me with a sippy cup…
[Mary Robinette] If you're pouring whiskey, I'm…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] You're coming to me with a sippy cup and a baby bottle? No! Stop that right now!
[Mary Robinette] No. That was when my parents actually dealt with…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Colds with me. But anyway…
[Laughter]
[Erin] I was going to say, also, sometimes you gotta shatter people's glasses.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.
[Erin] Sometimes, that's okay. I think that's one of the things that I love about what publishing I think is doing these days, though probably not as much as it could be, is letting people tell a story…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Where they don't have to have the right context.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Because the narrative tension is strong enough in this piece that if you have no idea what's going on, it is still a story of people killing monsters that are horrible and have…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Mouth eyes and just things that are not going to work for you. Like, no one's going to be like, oh, yeah, love those mouth eyes.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So even if you don't understand what is happening and the context, you'll still get a great read out of it. I think that what has happened in the past is that sometimes people will see the context and shy away from it, and not see what's going on in the narrative beneath it, or how the two intersect. So that if you have both, I think you get the perfect glass...
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] For the perfect drink. But, if not, you still enjoy it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. With me, I was like, oh, okay, I'm going to go need to get an insulated thermos...
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] When I'm reading this right now.
 
[DongWon] To slip into the publishing conversation a little bit, one of my very favorite reads in the last several years is Torrey Peters Detransition Baby which is a novel about the trans experience. A very complicated aspect of the trans experience. But when Torrey Peters had that book published, she was very insistent to her publishers that it not be pitched and marketed as a quote unquote trans book or even a queer book, but as an upmarket women's fiction book. At every point, she was very insistent that, nope, you market this how you would market any book for the broadest female audience you would normally publish for in terms of, like, contemporary fiction. I think that was an incredibly effective way to get a book that was very much written for a specific in community audience… So much of that book was for me and other folks like me who live in New York and are trans and are queer and all of that, and that was a very powerful, but it was read and was so accessible to such a broad audience that I think it really reached hundreds of thousands of people.
[Mary Robinette] I think the same thing is very clearly true with Ring Shout when you look at the fact that in the year that it came out, it was nominated for all the big awards. It won the British Fantasy, it won the Locus Award, it won the Nebula Award. So this is a book that was written for a specific audience, but clearly resonates…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Because of its use of all sorts of narrative devices with a much larger audience. So…
[DongWon] I think we did a great job of packaging it to make it clear what the book is, but then it didn't feel tracked in a particular subcategory or only for a certain readership, which [garbled]
[Howard] Now when we talk about narrative versus contextual as a source of tension, there's a part of me that can't help but think that the greatest experience of that tension is on the part of the publisher, who's like, "Boy. I hope we split the difference between the narrative and the contextual correctly in how we positioned this book, because what shelf does it go on? Does it go in sci-fi/fantasy, does it go in horror, does it… Where does it go?" Maybe that's a little too meta-. But…
[DongWon] No. It's…
[Howard] I can't not think that.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] I will say that I think for our listeners, who are like, "I'm not planning to write in a fraught historical era." There are still things to take away from it, even… Because there's always context.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Readers always bring context, even if it is the smallest. Even if it is I'm reading a romance, and I expect the characters to end up together, even though it hasn't happened on the page yet, this is the type of experience that I'm bringing to the table. If it's the pattern recognition that you, DongWon, that you were talking about in a previous episode, where it's like, okay, things are happening and I know this tends to end this creepy way, so that's what I think is going to happen next. So, thinking a lot about what is your audience bringing to the table at that moment, both in terms of their life experiences and their belief about narrative, what are they used to, what are the patterns that you think they've walked through, so you can figure out how do I want to either stay with that and reinforce it, or how do I want to subvert it? When do I want to use it for good or ill? But if you're not thinking about it at all, then you can't be intentional about it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I think it's something that we often forget, because we bring our own context as writers, and we sometimes forget that readers will come from a completely different place.
[DongWon] I think this taps into Mary Robinette's metaphor in a certain way of you don't know what cup your audience is bringing to this particular fountain. Right? It… You can't control your reader. You have to make space for them in certain ways, but also be really true and honest to the story that you're trying to tell and what you're trying to accomplish with it. One thing that is very interesting about this book is it is in part about arts in the audience and reception of that art and the impact that art can have on how people think and behave in the world. Right? Because Birth of a Nation is such an important piece of how this story is told, and it's about how you can use art as propaganda to manipulate people in really extreme ways. So, I think it's really interesting that as we are talking about the contextual history of this story and the way that creates tension, it is itself engaging… I said earlier it doesn't really engage with like the contextual tension. It does in this one specific way, which is what was the role of that film in American history, what were the consequences of it, and it… Go ahead.
[Mary Robinette] To that point, because that's so important, not only is that a contextual thing, that's something that is brought into the narrative of the tension. In order to make sure that the audience has the right context to understand this, we get a lot of information about Birth of a Nation and how it's being used, both for the magical purposes of the book, but also the historical context of it. There is a… That's, I think, an important thing for you to understand and also that if you are… If you want the book that you are writing to survive outside of the context, even just to survive down history, two… Then you have to… You have to make sure that it's on the page.
[Erin] A great example of this is… I don't know exactly where it is in the text, but I think there is a reference where it says, "1919 was a bad year…"
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] "For all of us." For me, I know that that was in the red summer era of Klan rides and horrible numbers of lynchings in the South. But the fact that they all agreed, and then I think everybody had like a slight him bit of memory about why it was bad or what had happened brought it on the page in a way that.. I brought a lot more context to it probably as somebody who knows a lot about that era, but there was enough there that you understood that they all had this common experience in a little bit about what it was. It was on the page, but also, I was able to bring what was off the page onto it.
[Mary Robinette] I will also say that if you're writing secondary world fantasy, this is a tool that you can use, because your characters will have context that the readers will never have because they're living in a fantasy world. So this kind of tool is something that you can use to give context to something without having to have like, "And now, I shall tell you about the battle of the five red armies…"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] "I'm going to pause this tavern brawl so that we all…" It's like you don't have to do that.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] You can just have these moments where the characters are all living memories and bringing it onto the page that way.
[DongWon] I think that's also why there is so many prologues in secondary world fantasy and epic fantasy in particular is they're trying to give you context so that you can have some of that contextual tension as you roll into the thing itself, but also, again, think about genre expectations. We read Lord of the Rings, so somebody's going on a journey. We're going to have some context and some expectations about what that means.
[Erin] I also think, and then we will give you homework and wrap up for the week. But I think it's also important that characters carry their context with them.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] I think that when you do historical, it's easier to see how that has happened, because we understand how it happened in history. But one thing that I do not like is when you have a prologue that will give you all the context, but it doesn't feel like it actually like it's being carried. If there was a war of the five red armies, and, like, everyone involved was part of it, how does that war shape them? How does it change the way they see things? When do they recognize somebody from one of the other armies and it changes the way that they deal with that character? So, thinking of the context that your own characters are bringing with them is a great way to add more tension to the page.
 
[Erin] With that, I have your homework, which is to take a scene that you're working on, one that has tension or could use more of it, and put a piece of information at the start that is only meant for the reader. Some piece of context. Could be historical, could be that you know that this is going to end in the death of a character. Anything that is extra context. Then think about revising the scene, believing that the reader has that information. How does it change the way that you actually write the scene and deliver the tension within that context?
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.35: A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout
 
 
Key points: Tension: how do you create, build, and release it? Various forms, contextual, in text, anticipation and denial, movement and resolution. Lizard brain or primal tension, intellectual tension, emotional tension. Discordance. Historical fantasy pits what the audience knows about history against the tension of the story and how you have changed the world. Tension as potential energy, the rock on the top of the hill. It's going to roll! Tension can be horror or suspense, released by the jump scare or awful revelation, but it can also be released through a joke or comedic drop. Sometimes we braid physical, emotional, and intellectual tension. Tension: someone walking towards an open manhole. Tension plays with pattern recognition, tapping into narrative inevitability, patterns and expected resolutions.
 
[Season 19, Episode 35]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 19, Episode 35]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[DongWon] So, this week, we are continuing our close reading series by looking at Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark. We wanted to talk about this book in particular because as we're looking into the segment on tension, and how do we talk about how you create, sort of build, and then release tension over the course of a story, we realized that shorter works can be really useful in examining how these techniques work in the best ways to go about doing that. So we wanted to pick a novella, and this is a very tense, very dark novella that we want to talk about in a little more detail.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I particularly found compelling about it is that it uses tension in more than one way. We'll be talking about a bunch of these throughout the next couple of episodes, contextual versus in text, anticipation and denial, movement and resolution, but you're also seeing it in terms of the speed with which the tension is deployed, and many of the tools that he's using from the character to the situation. It's got a lot of good examples for us to use.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] I also think it's just really cool as a… To compare with our other novella from earlier in the year. Because This Is How You Lose the Time War is about fantastical, imaginative landscapes and this is a very grounded, very sort of feels like it's got a foot in the real world, but still fantastical story. So I think it's really important to think about how do our tools work, both when you're creating something completely new and when we're drawing from something that we know maybe a lot better.
[Howard] I loved reading this so much that I read it all in one afternoon. Maybe that's because the tools were just used so well to keep me tense that I couldn't put it down until I was done with it.
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to say, for those of you who are a little bit jumpy, I was listening to this audiobook, and I had to stop because I needed to be able to skim over the parts that were too much for me. I can't do horror. While this book is not actually horror, it's a straight up monster book. It's monster hunting, and it's basically an adventure novel. There are parts of it that are using tools from horror to create tension, and I couldn't listen to it in audiobook.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It was really good, and I was like, I have to stop. This is not okay.
[DongWon] As the cover might indicate, it is also dealing with a lot of real-world trauma and tension. A lot of this is pulled from actual history or begins in actual historical events, and then adds a fantasy layer on top of it. So, just a heads up to all of our audience, that we're going to be getting into some pretty heavy topical topics and conversation here.
[Erin] Be ready for it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Or as ready as you can be. So, but it is good to note, especially if you're just starting to read the book now, so that you're not… So that you have some preparation for what is to come. But who can really prepare for tension in truth?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] No. No. That was… That's actually one of the things… We'll talk about this deeper into the episodes, but one of the things that I particularly appreciated and why it was so hard is that I would see the tension and I would brace myself for one kind of problem, and then it would be something else that was sig… I was not prepared for.
[DongWon] The bait and switch is such a useful technique.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] One place I'd love to start, actually, as we're diving into this conversation, is actually to not start with the writing itself, but to start from a publishing angle, because I just touched on it briefly, but I think the cover of this book is absolutely brilliant, and does such a fantastic job of signaling the kind of story that we're going to be engaging in, and already increasing the tension there. It really hits on the thing that you were just saying, Mary Robinette, of you have this figure of the white hood, which is very iconic and symbolic and menacing. But then when you look closer, Erin, you and I were talking about this right before we started, you can see the teeth eyes… The teeth in the eyeholes, which again, I think is for you, like, expecting one thing and then realizing, oh, there's another layer here that's upsetting and difficult.
[Howard] Okay. I didn't even look at the cover. I was… Admission, I read this on assignment. I had not picked it up before I knew we were going to record it. But then I picked it up and immediately just opened it up and started reading. Sat down and started reading. The first time I stopped and set it down and looked at the cover, I looked at it and went, "Ewww."
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because they… Because now I knew what might be there and, whew, boy, it was fun. It's very stylized. It's not like…
[DongWon] The cover. Yeah.
[Howard] You're looking at something graphic. It's just… That's just cool.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have to admit that I was reading it in the airport and I had the thought of this book does not look like the book that I'm reading to someone who does not know what this book is.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That creates another additional tension. That I think is very intentional tension.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's a book designed to make you uncomfortable in a number of ways. Some of that is the contextual elements in terms of the packaging and the design and how it was published and some of that is the content itself.
[Erin] Yeah. I just keep thinking about the teeth eyes.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] Sorry, I'm like…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The teeth eyes… I have a… Uhn Uh.
[Chuckles]
 
[Erin] I love that. I always think… This is a slight tangent, but I think there's something about putting things together that just don't feel like they could ever belong together that creates like a visceral lizard brain tension.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because I think that we can have tension, like, in the front of our brains, where it's like this is an intellectual tension. Why is it like this? But then there's like the part of us that's like, "No. Eyeholes with teeth? Bad!"
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Erin] Like the parts of you that would have been afraid of, like, a wolf back in the day is activated. I love when stories are working both on that primal tension level…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And the intellectual. And the emotional tension level. I think this one does all three, which is so cool.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. For me, one of the big things for me is like a kind of discordance. Right? So if I'm watching supernatural horror, I could ride with lots of gore, lots of violence, doesn't throw me at all. But you put me in a real-world context, like a home invasion story, or somebody using something that's not meant to be a weapon as a weapon, I'm deeply unsettled and very uncomfortable, and often have to bail. There's a memorable scene in a movie called [Taten?] Involving a knitting needle that if anybody's seen it, I was like, I'm done. I gotta bail on this movie. I very rarely bail on movies. But sometimes that discordance, being able to lean into a kind of tension where you're making people uncomfortable by creating things that shouldn't go together can be so powerful and disruptive.
[Mary Robinette] It is one of the best tools to use when you're writing anything that's set like any sort of historical fantasy. Because there is the tension of what the audience knows about the history that is in conversation with the tension of the story that is also in conversation with the tension of the way you have changed the world. These three things can cause the story to become wildly unpredictable to the audience, and for them to also bring their own… Like, the places where they're putting their own pressure on the story from the outside, from a… Which this does great things with.
 
[Howard] I sometimes think of tension in terms of potential energy, the rock at the top of the hill. I know that there isn't much keeping this from rolling, from heading down the hill, and I think I know which way it's going to roll. It doesn't have to be frightening. It doesn't even necessarily have to be uncomfortable. It just has to be this awareness that this state of things cannot hold. Something is going to move. I don't know what's going to move, but it has to move, because this can't keep up. That's every other page for me on the way through Ring Shout.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Love it!
[DongWon] Well, this is something you talk about a lot, Howard, is that tension can be multiple things. Right? We're talking about tension in a horror context, or, like, a suspense context, because of this particular book. But tension also can be released through a joke. Right? You can use a comedic drop instead of the jump scare, or the reveal of something awful. That's still tension building the same way. I think about the movie director Jordan Peel, being such a brilliant horror filmmaker, because he's a brilliant comedian, too. Right? So many of the skills that go into one can go into the other. There's a moment in the Candyman reboot that they did a few years ago where a woman opens the door down the basement stairs, and it's like these long stairs descending into darkness. This is like this incredibly tense moment. It just feels awful. Then she just goes, "Nope," and closes the door.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] The theater I was in just burst out laughing completely. It was like a perfect use of tension and release in that moment, although, even though in a horror movie, not for a horrific purpose. In a way that, as we're talking about this, I want you to think about all the different ways in which tension can be deployed as a narrative tool, even though, because of this, we're going to be focused on the dark side of it.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I think we often like braid the different types of tension, and just… Like you're saying, call them all tension. But, thinking back to kind of the, like, physical, emotional, and intellectual tension, I was thinking about it again when you are talking about the rock at the top of the hill, because I'm thinking, if you're watching a snowball go down a mountain and you're at the bottom, like, intellectually, you know it will gather speed and eventually crush you. Eventually, it will come close enough that you will really know that it's about to crush you…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Also… I don't know, your mom's standing there. So you have to save her from the avalanche that is about to come up on you. But, different people will react in different ways. Like, some people can see the most terrific physical, like a slasher movie, forever…
[DongWon Yep.
[Erin] And it will have no impact. They will not feel any tension. They're like, I don't care about physical danger, but emotional danger gets me.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] Like, somebody being embarrassed to me is harder to watch than somebody being hacked into bits.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] So, if you're thinking about all the time where are you deploying each of those types of tension, then you'll get the widest audience possible feeling tense.
[DongWon] Yep. Speaking of keeping balls rolling and moving things along, we're going to take a break for a moment and we will be right back.
 
[DongWon] Late last fall, Netflix released a new animated show called Blue Eye Samurai. I was initially skeptical, but was completely won over by the stunning animation style and impeccable action choreography. Frankly, I expected a simplistic good time, kind of like a John Wick thing, but was surprised by how thoughtful the show is about race and Empire and violence. It's one of those hyper kinetic action shows, but one that knows when to slow down and ask questions about its hero and the world she inhabits.
 
[Howard] Mel Brooks famously said that comedy is you falling into a manhole and dying. Tragedy is me with a hangnail.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] When I think of tension in terms of this, you see someone walking and you see an open manhole and there is tension, but you don't yet know if the resolution is going to be comedy or tragedy, because you don't know what's in that hole. That's part of… That unexpected aspect of it. I mean, there's the tension of the potential energy of something is going to fall, but there's the unexpected, the darkness of that manhole. It might have a very silly octopus in it. It might have a very ferocious octopus in it. I don't know.
[DongWon] I talk a lot about pattern recognition when it comes to fiction. Right? I think tension is a thing that is very consciously playing on pattern recognition. It taps into something I think of as narrative inevitability. Once you start setting up a certain pattern, people will expect that to conclude in a certain way. They'll expect a resolution of that. Right? The example I was talking about earlier of heroine opens the door to a dark basement, you're like, "Oh, she's going to go down there and something bad's going to happen." You expect that resolution. That's where the tension, that's where the dread, that's where the energy in that scene is coming from. As you're talking about, Howard, it was a release in comedy instead of in horror by her closing the door in a very funny way. But it was the refusal to resolve that tension as opposed to giving into it, I think, is a thing to think about as you're building it. So, how do you actively use the patterns of storytelling to manipulate your audience's emotional state?
[Mary Robinette]. It's something that we talked about in a previous episode… Previous season, when we did a dive into tension. We talked about anticipation and the patterns that the listener… Or the reader, recognizes. As we're talking about Ring Shout, one of the things that I want to point out is that you'll hear us using different terms than we used previously. That's because the terms of art for tension, there are so many different ways to apply it, that all of the things that we're talking about are basically us attempting to apply a lens or some sort of words to "this makes me feel some feels."
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah. Tension's about emotion is the main thing to think about here.
[Erin] I'm feeling some kind of way [garbled]
[chuckles]
[Erin] Expressions. I also think it just occurred to me that, like, thinking about the manhole. There was a recent question put out in the writing world, of whether or not twists make sense. Because the theory is if the twist is actually completely unexpected, it actually feels like a trick. Like, if you could not anticipate it at all, it feels like the author being clever at your expense. But I think one way you can actually get around that, if you want to have the truly surprising twist, is by making the emotions carry through even if the facts don't. So if you're walking down the street and there's a manhole cover, the, like, open hole in front of you. But you step on it, it turns out it's an optical illusion. It was just a sidewalk artist doing it. So the audience is, like, "Aha. You fooled me." Then the person takes another step and gets hit by a truck.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] The hitting by a truck makes no sense, maybe, but you were still in that moment of tension, right at the moment that something happened. So it feels more earned.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Even though the truck came out of nowhere.
[DongWon] Yeah. The example I always think of is the red writing from the Game of Thrones. Right? It's like this moment that is such a famously twist moment, of, like, "Oh, my God, nobody anticipated that," but it made so much logical sense and emotional sense where the characters were at, that you could see how it was inevitable in retrospect. Right? So tension can also be… I'm talking about narrative patterns, and you know something is going to happen, but it's fun to hold that back, of understanding exactly what the event will be that will release the tension. Right? So it's another way to think about that.
[Howard] One of the things that I want to point out before we wrap up is that as part of the close reading series, we want you to read the book before you listen to the episodes. When you are doing this… Read the book. Do a close reading of the book. Think about why the book is making you tense. Think about choice of language, the choice of point of view, what decisions are being made. By all means, enjoy the book. But read it closely and try to learn from it. That's… At the beginning of the episode, why did we pick Ring Shout. Because we can learn from it. We can learn a lot from it.
 
[DongWon] That dovetails very beautifully with my homework. Which is, I basically want you to do what Howard described to a book that you love or a movie that you love. Take a suspenseful story that you really enjoyed, that you feel the kind of feelings that were talking about. Either anticipation or dread or that kind of emotional tension. What I want you to do is write an outline for that work. Create that outline. Note where that tension was coming in for you and how it was resolved. Right? From that, you'll have a little bit of a map and a little bit of a key to begin to understand some of the stuff we're going to talk about in the coming episodes.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.10: Introducing Our Close Reading Series
 
 
Key Points: Close reading, so you have concrete examples of how these techniques work. There will be spoilers! Voice, worldbuilding, character, tension, and structure (see the liner notes for the novels, novellas, and short stories). Close reading gives us a shared language and shared examples to talk about craft. Close reading? Open the book with a question in mind. Read it for fun, then go back and look for examples of a specific technique, and look at the context. Reconnect with the joy of writing, reading, and great fiction. Find your own examples, too!
 
[Season 19, Episode 10]
 
[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 10]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Introducing our close reading series.
[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.
 
[Erin] I have a confession. Which is that we are actually recording the introduction to our close reading series after we've recorded most of the close reading series…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because, honestly, we wanted to get a sense of what this was going to be like. It's our first time doing this, and, I'll be honest, even as a teacher, when I hear the words close reading sometimes I think boring class, it's going to feel like going to a bad college class all over again. But I think it's been really fun.
[Mary Robinette] This is been some of the most fun that I've had doing episodes. One of the things that people talk about in our previous episodes when we been trying to give examples of things is that we often reach for film and television because we feel like there's a higher likelihood that you will have seen the thing and that you'll have read a particular work. With this, because what we've done is we've picked 5 books… Actually, 2 books, 2 novellas, and a collect… A bunch of short stories, so that you can read along with it. But we're doing all the heavy lifting. We've done the close reading and we're using these to tell you kind of how these techniques work, with very concrete examples.
[Howard] We're also leaning all the way into this and reading directly from the text during the episodes. Which is, to my mind, critical for helping you understand what it is that we love and what we see in the words that we read.
 
[DongWon] Because, as Howard said, we're going to be quoting from the text, you don't necessarily have to have read all of it before hopping in with us, but do be aware that we are not holding back on spoilers. Because we want to talk about the structure, we want to talk about how certain things unfold, so we will be referencing elements of the plot and the story from throughout the entire book. So if you hate spoilers, then read along with us. If you don't have time, don't stress about it, we're going to walk you through it.
[Dan] Well, also, not for nothing, we picked really great works that we love. You're going to want to read these anyway. So if you can, definitely read at least part of them. I think you should read all of them. You'll get a lot out of it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That thing where people will say, "Okay, spoiler alert," and you know to plug your ears or whatever stuff… We didn't even bother with that. We just sort of… The spoilers are scattered, like.
[Dan] It's all spoilers all the time.
[DongWon] We tend to focus on the first half of the book just naturally and how we're talking about it. But, yeah, absolutely, be prepared.
 
[Erin] Okay, so we should probably talk a little bit about how we got here in the first place. It started with, I think, DongWon, it was you and I and maybe even Mary Robinette, we were all scheming on the cruise…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] We had nothing to do during a lunch, and we said, "Let's start scheming and plotting, and figure out how we can bring like these really interesting close readings in a really cool way to the listeners." Is that… Do you remember it that way?
[DongWon] I remember it being not so much nothing to do during lunch, rather than season 19 curriculum meeting…
[Laughter] [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] It was a nice lunch, too.
[Dan] It was a great lunch. Halfway through the curriculum meeting, you remembered that it was supposed to be a curriculum meeting.
[DongWon] Yeah. You were eavesdropping on us, clearly.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] But the thing that really is like so often when I'm talking about a technique, it would be easier if I had a sentence that I could show it to you with and we've got those. What we wanted to do was not just pick books, but pick topics that were going to be useful to you. So, we've got the season broken down into 5 topics, each of which has a representative work that is tied to it. So we're going to be starting the season with voice…
[DongWon] Starting with voice, yes.
[Erin] That makes sense for a podcast.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] We recorded these out of sequence, which is part of why I was like, it was voice, right? Voice, interestingly enough, was How to Lose the Time War, which is just ironic, considering the out of sequence nature of our recording schedule.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] I think we're winning the time war.
[Dan] That's true. We organized the time war joke that we made.
[Mary Robinette] There we go.
[Dan] We set this up in advance where, like, someone's going to make a time war joke. That was it, folks.
[Mary Robinette] There we go. That's the only time war joke you're going to get.
[Dan] That's all you get.
[Mary Robinette] We will have done this several times.
[Laughter]
 
[DongWon] So, we're starting with voice, and then we're going into worldbuilding after that, reading Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Then we're going to do character, using C. L. Clark's short stories. There'll be a list of these in the liner notes. Then we are going to do tension with P. Djeli Clark's Ring Shout. Then, finally, we're going to talk about structure using N. K. Jemison's The Fifth Season.
[Mary Robinette] We've tried to set this up so that you've got novellas, you have plenty of time to read it, because it's a shorter thing. Then we go to a novel, so you've got a little more time. Then you get a breather, because we do some short stories. Then novella, and you have a lot of time before you have to read N. K. Jemison's Fifth Season. So we're thinking about 2 things. One is your actual reading time. The other thing that we're thinking about is a little bit of the arc of how you think about a story. Thinking about a story as driven by voice versus thinking about a story as driven by structure. You can start either place, but often the structure is something that you refine at the end during the editing process. So we're hoping that you'll be able to use these tools all the way through the year on the works that you're writing yourself.
[Howard] Just to be perfectly clear, Arkady Martine's Memory Called Empire does a bazillion things well, including worldbuilding. We're focusing on the worldbuilding. Don't go thinking that it doesn't have amazing voice, or amazing characterization, or brilliantly executed tension. All of the stories that we picked could have served as examples for any of the topics that we covered. We just picked the ones that we did because, to us, that's what seems to fit.
[DongWon] Trying to pick titles that fit the topics was incredibly difficult.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Right? Like…
[Erin] I was going to say, one of my favorite things was our little [tetra see] trying to figure out…
[DongWon] Oh, my God.
[Erin] Well, this could be this, but also that.
[DongWon] Yeah. Howard's exactly right, some of these move from category to category. Right? Where we were, like, okay. Maybe we should do Fifth Season for voice or tension or all these different things, and ended up settling on structure and sort of why we picked one versus another is maybe slightly arbitrary. There are certain focuses. Time War is a very voice-y book, so it felt like it fit really well there, even though the structure of it is also really fascinating, the character work is fascinating. So, don't take any of these as being completely silo, but it was what have we really loved, what's in the genre that's exciting right now, that does at least address in a core way one of these topics.
[Dan] So, it's worth pointing out as well that these kind of close reading series are very specific. Talking about worldbuilding with A Memory Called Empire, it is not a broad and generic talk about worldbuilding in general, it is how did Arkady Martine use worldbuilding in this book for this purpose. The same thing with voice in Time War, and all of the other series that we're doing. I think that that actually ended up, at least for me, being a lot more interesting than trying to cover all of worldbuilding in 6 episodes.
[DongWon] One thing I really loved about this project was… You heard us do deep dives before. We've gone in depth on projects, but those have always been our own projects. Those tend to be from a holistic angle of talking about one of Mary Robinette's books, or, all last year, you heard us go through Erin's short stories, Howard's last couple volumes, all these different things. So, being able to focus in a really laserlike way on a single topic on a single book, using a handful of lines or quotes from passages, really let us dig into the topic in a really mechanical way that, for me, at least, was one of the most fun I've ever had on this show.
[Howard] You say dig. 30 years ago… The math gets fuzzy… When I was studying music history and form and analysis, one of the things that are professor said was, "Imagine yourself as a… You want to find out what's under the ground. Do you want to dig a thousand one foot holes or one thousand foot hole?" Then he said, "For our purposes in this class, we're going to dig only ten 10 foot holes and then one 900 foot hole. We're going to do a little survey work, and then we're going to drill way down on one thing. In the past here with Writing Excuses, a lot of times, we've taken the… A 100 ten foot hole approach. Now we're going mining.
[Erin] Actually, I think this is… We're about to go to a break. When we come back, I want to talk about how do you do close reading well. Because we've been talking about it, I want to make sure that you're prepped for what you need to do or what you might want to do when we start this series.
 
[Dan] Hi. This week, our thing of the week is a role-playing game called Shinobigami. This is a role-playing game written and published in Japan, translated into English. One of the reasons I love it and the reason I'm recommending it is because it is so interesting to see a role-playing game from a completely different culture. One of the things that stands out as different, in Western role-playing games, we tend to avoid any kind of player versus player conflict or combat. This game is entirely about player versus player combat. As the name implies, Shinobigami, everyone is a ninja of some kind in modern Japan, and you are fighting each other. Trying to accomplish secret quests or secret missions at the expense of the other players. It's a lot of fun, it's way different from what you may have ever played before. It's great. Check it out. That again is called Shinobigami.
 
[Erin] So, how do you close read? What does this mean?
[DongWon] I wanted to toss this one to you, actually, because…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] You're the one who, among all of us, is the one who's actively teaching in a classroom environment. Right? You're teaching writing to students. Do you use these techniques? Do you do close reading examples in class, or… How does that structure work for you?
[Erin] Just when I thought I'd gotten away with it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] So, I do use… A lot of what we do, what I do when I teach is to give the students let's all read this story, let's all read this book. So that we all have a common thing we're talking about. I find it to be very helpful because when you want to give an example later, when you're reading somebody else's story and you're like, "Oh. Oh. I really like the way you built tension like…" And you reach for an example, if everyone is speaking the same language and everyone has read the same story, we can make those references really quickly. It basically creates a little environment, a little community for the classroom, which we're going to kind of replicate here where everyone's speaking the same language, everyone knows what we're talking about, and therefore it makes it just so much easier to reference things and talk about craft.
[Dan] Well, not just easier. But it allows us to go, as Howard's metaphor was saying, much deeper than we normally would because we don't have to cover a lot of the basic stuff. We don't have to start each sentence by saying, "Well. In How to Lose the Time War, we…" Because that's understood. We have more time to get into the real meat of each of the stories.
[Howard] For me, the secret to close reading was opening the book with the question already in mind for me. The question might have been when do… When does the… It's a very specific, very detailed very 400 level question. When does the likability slider for characters move in this book? I would just ask myself that question before I started reading. I would find phrases and it would resonate with me and I'd realize, "Oh, that's where that thing happens."
[Mary Robinette] So, the way I often approach it, because I will often do close readings when I'm trying to learn a new technique. So I brought some of that to this, when we were working on this project, that I will… I'll go ahead and just read it for funsies. With a question in mind. But then I go back and I kind of open it a little at random or 2 things that I remember, but I think, "Okay. I want to go through and I want to look for…" Say, with Time War. I want to go through it and look for places where they're using cadence, where they're using the rhythm of the language. So I'll skim through the book, looking for an example of that. Then, this part is for me really important, I will read the whole page, I will look at the context of how that thing is being used. Because none of these examples, you're going to hear us read an isolated sentence, but none of these sentences exist in isolation and the connective tissue is the part that's really, really fun. So it's quite possible for you to just read the book for funsies. Then, you'll hear us say a sentence, and you go find that sentence in the book, and just read the stuff around it. It's also possible for you to not read the book, wait for us to say something, and just go read it and be like, "Well, I don't have anything else, but I can see how even on this page, this technique is working." It'll be techniques like pitch… No, not pitch. It'll be techniques like cadence, or something like sentence structure, word choice…
[DongWon] Punctuation.
[Mary Robinette] Punctuation. Or, when we get into talking about character, we're talking about things like ability or role and really unpacking those that you can look at in context, to see how they work, and how they work over a span of pages.
 
[DongWon] One thing for me, there's a hazard of my job where I spend so much time reading manuscripts. Right? Reading client work, going over drafts, editing, that sometimes it can get a little mechanical for me. Where I end up so in the weeds, and kind of like, "Oh, I've got to get through X number of manuscripts by the end of this month, to stay on top of things." So, being able to do this, where we got to dig into these books and dig into certain passages in a very specific way, kind of really reminded me how much I love writing. Like, there was such a joyful conversation to be like, "Oh, it is so cool that in this paragraph they did this. Look how they did this thing, and how that's going to have consequences later," and, I hope that that also works for some of our audience, too, that sometimes when you're writing, it can be easy to lose sight of what matters. This is a way to sort of reconnect with the joy of writing and reading and experiencing great fiction.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We didn't want to call this book club, but in some ways…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It's kind of like…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Being in a book club with the entire Writing Excuses audience. In fact, this is also a good time to let you know that our Patreon has a Discord attached to it. If you want to come in, the Discord is brand-new. But, if you want to come in and yell about these books with people who have also read them, we have a space for you to do that.
[Howard] I'd just like to put a pin in the fact that coming up with the term close reading…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] As opposed to book club was way more painful for me than picking the books.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Picking the books is easy. But coming up with a 2 word name, that's misery.
 
[Erin] Yes. I would say, going back to the idea of the joy of the reading, like, I love the idea of like reading with a question in mind or really being very intentional about it. But I'll be honest, like when I give my students things to read, I'm not asking them to do much other than read it. Then, when we come back in class, we ask questions that get to why it's working. So, something I like to do sometimes when I'm reading a book is read it, and then think, what are the 3 things I would tell someone about this book that I either loved or hated. Because, look, you may be like these are the worst 5 books that we have… I have ever read. I hate them all. I hope not, because we enjoy them. But you learn something either way. You learn something… It's like you learn something from the people you dislike, just like you learn something from the people you like.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Erin] About the way you relate.
[DongWon] More from a book that you hate then you will from a book that you love. Because you can sort of see in contrast the things that they are doing that you don't like, but you can start to understand the techniques as a result.
[Erin] Exactly. You can ask yourself why. So, if it's the 3 things you love or hate, it's, well, I hated the character. Well, why did I hate that character? Usually, it's like something they did, or something that happened in the text. Then you can say, "When did I know that happened?" Like, if I hated them because of the fact that they stabbed 6 kittens, when did that happen? What was it about that kitten stabbing that like, really made it horrible. Sorry, kittens.
[Dan] Made it so different from my other kitten stabbings that I loved in the past?
[Mary Robinette] A John Cleaver book.
[Howard] Being able to ask yourself and come up with an answer why you don't like something is… That's an exciting ride. I well remember the movie Legion which a lot of other people thought I would love. But the loser guy who gets everybody killed is named Howard…
[Laughter]
[Howard] And his wife is named Sandra. That's a dumb movie, I hate it.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Another really valuable thing on this topic is if you hate one of these books, this gives you the opportunity to see what other people saw in it that you didn't. It's okay to hate books. I hate so many books. But, as an author, especially as a working author who wants to make this a career, it's important to understand what the market likes, what people who are not me are looking for in a book.
[Erin] It's also great to see the variety of opinions. Because some people will love it, some people hate it, some people will be in different. I think sometimes as writers we think there's some objective measure that this book is good and everyone loves it and this book is bad and everybody hates it. But any book, like the book that you love the most, is somebody else's least favorite. The book that your least favorite is somebody's most loved book. I think seeing that variety of opinion helps you realize that, like, in your own work, you don't have to meet some mythical standard. You just have to try to use these techniques that were talking about as best you can, and put it out there, and find the audience of people who will love your work.
[DongWon] All that said, we hope you love these books. Because we love these books.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] It's okay if you don't. We get it.
[Dan] I doubt they hate them.
[Laughter]
 
[DongWon] But one of the reasons we hope you love it is we're going to also be talking to some of the creators behind these books and doing interview episodes at the end of each series where we get to interrogate them. Hey, how did you do this thing? How did you think about these things? I am so looking forward to those conversations, because I think it's going to be really fun to pick the brains of some of the most talented people in this space and talk about these big ideas.
[Howard] These authors will be more excited about those episodes if we use the word interview instead of interrogate.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] No. Interrogate the writers.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] What I'm looking forward to with those is where we say, "Oh, I really love it when you did XYZ," and they're like, "Hmm, I'm glad you noticed that."
[Laughter]
[Howard] I am so happy that work for you.
[Erin] Why did you… Why do you think I did…
[DongWon] I think it's something you might have been on the other end of once or twice.
 
[Mary Robinette] One thing that I'm going to say, this is not your homework, but just something I want you to think about as you are listening to these episodes all year is that we're going to be citing examples. But the examples that we cite are not the only examples of each technique in the book. So, one of the ways that you can enhance your own understanding is go and find your own examples. Then, find someone to share that example with. Because that's going to really help you cement the techniques that we're talking about in your own brain. Then you can take it to your work and see if you can use it there. Which is what we're really hoping. That's the reason we're doing these close reads is we're hoping it will help you level up your own writing.
[Erin] That sounded like the homework. But it wasn't!
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It was not. I know. That's why I said this is not the homework, but…
[Erin] That was great. I wish I'd come up with that.
 
[Erin] This homework is, like, super complicated, too. So… One thing, we talked about these 5 things that we're going to be thinking about. Voice, worldbuilding, character, tension, and structure. So, I want you to take a scene from a work that you love or from your own work and create… Pick a different crayon color or colored pencil for each of those things and underline where you think it's happening within the scene. So, underline all the cool voice places, underline all the different worldbuilding in a different color, and just take a look at the pallette that you've created for yourself. Because we're going to be talking about all of these things, and they can be found in all of these works. It's a good way to remind yourself of all the ways that these techniques come together on the page.
[DongWon] I love that so much.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go read.
 
[Howard] Hey, podcast lovers. Do you know that you can upgrade your experience here with our ad-free tier on Patreon? Head over to patreon.com/writingexcuses to enjoy an ad-free oasis as well as access to our virtual Discord community where you can talk to your fellow writers.
 
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.15: Building a Mystery, Now With More Tools
 
 
Key points: Using a toolbox of ways to build tension in mysteries? Anticipation! Unanswered questions. A foundation of character tension, relationships and stakes. Handles or business ends of the tools? It's not just information, there's also emotion, revelation, and consequences.
 
[Season 18, Episode 15]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Building a Mystery, Now With More Tools.
[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] We're going to talk about mysteries again, but now you have this whole toolbox of different ways to build tension, and you see why we were so excited about it. So. Let's start  talking about mysteries. So we've been talking about mysteries and anticipation. Okay. So how do you apply anticipation to mysteries? What are some of the classic ways we've seen it done or ways that you're like, "This! This is a really meaty juicy way to do it?" I can talk about... I was like, "I'm just going to riff until one of you has an answer…"
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I was anticipating something and then it fell through for me. Seriously, though, one of the things that I did a lot in the Spare Man was that I was using anticipation. I was using the anticipation of waiting for that body drop is one of the things in the first scene… Or second scene. In the second scene, I set up a fight. So that is building for the reader the anticipation that something is going to happen with one of these three characters. That then allows me to have… To keep you moving along. Then we get into the second scene… Or I guess it's the third scene, actually. The next scene where we have a scream. That builds an anticipation of oh, something has gone wrong. Which I then ramp up further by giving you an unanswered question of who is the screamer? So what I find a lot of times you can do with these is that you can take one of the tools that we've used and then use it as a… One of the tools we've mentioned and then use it as a handoff or a funnel point…
[Howard] A page turner.
[Mary Robinette] Page turner. Use it as a way to keep you going, and then give you another. Another piece of tension.
 
[DongWon] I'll say that those are the mechanics of a plot structure that you have there. Those are the beats that you used to move us along. What works really well, and the reason all all that engine goes, is you've established underneath that the character tension. Right? You've established the relationship and the stakes for these individuals of like her trying to figure out how do I relate to this other person, what is marriage going to be like for me, and also like dealing with her own trauma, her own history. Like those are all questions you've introduced fairly quickly. I cannot remember exactly when each piece of that comes in, but by the end of the first few chapters, I have a lot of questions about the future of this character, the future of her relationship, the future of her sense of self, that are pulling me through all of this as your giving me the plot details and the unanswered questions that layer on top of that.
 
[Howard] Coming back to the toolbox metaphor for a moment, as we talked about these as tools, we're kind of talking about the business end of the tool. The way the blade of the screwdriver fits into the head of the screw. The way the hammer slams the head of the nail. We haven't talked a lot about the handles of the tools. For my own part, I don't start with anticipation or juxtaposition or conflict. I start with what is the answer to the original unanswered question of who committed the murder. Then I start making notes about where I want readers to feel the different things. This is where I want them to be excited. This is where I want some sense of wonder. This is where I don't know what's going on or what's going to happen, but I've got to get them to turn the page, so here's a question mark. Then as I sit down with the manuscript, that's when I open up the toolbox and start looking at, "Oh. Oh. This is where I'll throw in micro tension, because the characters are talking about things that don't really matter, but I need to explore them. I need to explore the characters so I need them to be passionate about what they're talking about and to be perhaps a little bit in conflict during the discussion." So my approach to the use of the tools is… Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So, I will say that with Spare Man, I actually started with not who committed the murder, but how the murder was committed. Because for me, the thing that is interesting in a mystery is the puzzle. That puzzle is around the murder. So I figured out what is a really interesting way to murder someone. Then who do I have that can commit that murder. That was actually the way that I built that particular thing. Which… What I'm hoping that you're noticing, dear listeners, a thing that we keep talking about is that there is no one right way to do things. Each of these is a correct way, it's just whatever is feeding you as a writer.
[DongWon] Yeah. I don't want people to come away from this feeling like with all of these different tools, you have to have some kind of master plan. Right? That you need to know, "oh, I'm going to deploy a red herring here, I'm going to deploy tension here, I'm going to deploy this that and the other there." Because I think a lot about the apocryphal thing about Agatha Christie, about her not knowing who the murderer was until Poirot said it on the page or something along those lines. Right? You can approach it from… I mean, yes, you do need to know which end of the tool's the business end, and which is the handle, but you can deploy these tools as you go and sort of see where that leads you and sort of build up to something that feels really consistent. A lot of making a mystery feel right is a thing that happens in editing process as you go back through it and say, "Hum. I was giving a little too much information here. I need to withhold that there." Or, "This is really confusing because I knew what was going on, but I didn't set that up properly two scenes ago." Right? So, mysteries. Think of them more as magic tricks rather than like perfectly executed plans. Right? You get to go back through it and adjust and tweak and make sure everything's set up right for your audience to get there when they get there.
[Dan] So, as we've been going through these last few episodes, which really stood out to me talking about all these different forms of tension and how to use them are overlaps between them and ways to solve multiple problems with a single tool. So, for example, we've talked a lot about how we need to care about the characters in order to be invested in them. That is a perfect match with the concept of micro tension, because if you give your character enough texture that they have a hobby or a job or something that they love outside of the plot, then suddenly you've given them something that they can be working on in the background of a scene or these other kinds of little micro tension problems they can be dealing with while trying to solve or trying to ignore the much larger mystery and problem that they are faced with. That solves a lot of things all at once.
[Mary Robinette] That's a great example… Sorry, I'm going to use… A great point, and I'm going to use the character of Fantine in Spare Man as an example of that. So, there's two things, two micro… Two points of micro tension for her. One, she's doing crochet for much of the thing. At one point, she is so distracted she makes a mistake, and in yelling, she's mad, not just about all of the other things that are happening, but about the fact that she had to rip out 20 rows. It's like having to rip out 20 rows has no bearing on the overall mystery at all. But it is… It's a piece of character detail and it adds just a little bit of micro tension. Then the other piece for her is her weird pattern of cursing. Because she had made a deal with her priest that she wouldn't use swearwords. So she curses by a combination of Shakespeare and Catholic martyrs. Again, she hits a point where she's so upset that she accidentally does swear. Again, it's just this tiny bit… Little bit more tension that I'm applying to that seen, and texture to the character, which is a lot of fun.
[Dan] Fantine ends up as a lot of people's favorite character, or one of their favorite characters. Because of all these things that you've done.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. Hashtag team fantine or team gimlet, apparently.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] Why don't we take a moment and pause? We'll come back and talk about some of our other tools and how to apply them to mysteries.
[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Mark Oshiro's new young adult novel Into the Light. It is a very twisty thriller that's told in a nonlinear way. It focuses on a young teen named Manny who was first pulled into a cult called Reconciliation and then subsequently kicked out of said cult. We sort of meet up with him while he's on the road after all of that. His sister stayed behind, and so he's trying to reconnect with her. Then sees on the news that a dead body has been found in the hills near where Reconciliation is based. There's multiple timelines, there's different POVs, as we try to get to the heart of what exactly happened at Reconciliation. What is his trauma around his experience with this cult, and what is it like to navigate the world as a queer adoptee who's been sort of neglected by the system. It's a really fantastic pointed sharp funny weird novel. I think people are going to be very excited to find the spoiler at the core of what makes this novel tick. It's a real thrill.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, when we're talking about mysteries and tension, there are a number of other tools that we have not even gotten to yet. One of them which… One of my favorites and one of the core things is the unanswered question. So we talked about that a little bit in the first one. We've got a whole episode on unanswered questions. But when we're applying them specifically to mysteries, one of the things I want to look at is not just the ways to do it, like misunderstanding the question, but also some of the dangers in that. Like, what are some of the pros and cons of delaying an answer in a mystery?
[Dan] Okay, so I've got a pretty good example of this one. One of the things of the week that we promoted earlier was my new book, Dark One Forgotten. Which is a mystery and it is a prequel to a Brandon Sanderson fantasy novel. What that means is that even though it is structured as if you are listening to a true crime podcast, you go into it knowing that there will be a supernatural angle. You know that eventually… It's got Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson on the cover, there's going to be magic or some kind of speculative element to it. Especially if you've read the novel it's based on, you know exactly how the mystery gets solved. So the problem that I ran into in writing it, and that I had to send multiple drafts over and over through my writing group to figure out is, it is obvious to the reader what's going on. We know that the reason no one can remember the killer or the victims is because there is some kind of magic effect. So, how long can I drag out that anticipation for the reader for the characters to finally catch on without making them seem stupid or without frustrating the audience? It's difficult. It was very hard to write a story that kind of fundamentally ignores one of its core premises for the first half or so of the story. So there is that unanswered question like who's the mystery, but the fact that it's… Or who's the killer. The fact that it's a prequel means that I needed to start… And here's the solution. Here's why I'm saying all this. What I eventually had to do was to just give you as much information as possible. It was essentially a story about tying off every possible loose end before they finally conceded that maybe magic was real. Because it takes place in our world. They aren't predisposed to believe it, even though the audience is predisposed to expect it. So, three episodes of them exhausting every possible other explanation made it interesting enough to get through that. So the anticipation and the unanswered question was very difficult to deal with.
[Erin] I think this gets to something that we've talked about before. Which is that sometimes you can give the answer to the reader or to the listener. I think it's what's really cool about that example is the question, it seems like to me, becomes less is there magic involved with this, because everyone knows the answer is yes, but more how will people deal with the revelation that magic exists in the world? So that's a different unanswered question. So sometimes shifting from the informational question… I think one of the dangers sometimes in mystery is you think everything has to be about information and plot. But, sometimes some of the most interesting unanswered questions are the ones about emotion, revelation, and consequence, as opposed to the ones about who did what to whom at what point.
[Howard] Touching on something that Dan said toward the beginning of this episode, and something that Erin just said, we've talked about how it's like setting up a magic trick. In the second edition of Xtreme Dungeon Mastery, Tracy and Curtis Hickman point out that magicians entertain purely by deception. When they explain how the trick is done, it just kind of makes us feel dumb for not having seen it. Which is why they typically don't do it. Storytellers entertain by setting up deception, and then with revelation. Erin, you use that word twice. So when I think of unanswered questions as a tool, I'm always thinking of the revelation that is going to come at the end. The reveal of this is the answer to the question, this is how it was done. The magician typically won't show us that they were using a trick knife with a collapsible blade, but in Knives Out, famously, we are told about a trick knife in the first act, and we are shown the trick knife at the very end of the show.
[Mary Robinette] Interesting that you say that, because I have some friends who are magicians and we talk about the overlap between magic and story all the time. Because one of the things that a magician must do is that they must tell the rea… Tell the viewer what they're about to do is impossible. Because you go into a magic trick knowing that they're going to do something. I think that that is also one of the things that you have to do, in different ways, but it's still a narrative thing, that you using a lot of these tension tools in a mystery to signal to the reader that this is actually hard to solve. A lot of the conflict things that you're using are ways to say this is… There are reasons that this is hard to solve. Much like what Dan was talking about with, well, why don't they just think it's magic. There have to be… It has… You have to present the impossibility to them in order to get the payoff of, "Ah, here's the solution and the answer." So a lot of the tools that we've been talking about are tools that you can use for that.
[DongWon] I think one thing that's important to remember in all of this is that there's a way in which mysteries and the structure of a mystery is a fantasy. You are selling people on the idea that there are easy answers to complex problems. That there is a trick behind the whole thing. I think when we think about unanswered questions, sometimes it is almost more interesting to not answer every single unanswered question you put out there. Right? Like, sometimes you have a Darrell who's still wandering around the island and nobody knows why he's there. That adds this extra layer to what you're doing and you can sell the fantasy of, "Wait. We do know who the killer is. We do know what happened. We do know what exactly was done to pull this magic trick off." But things are hidden from the audience in that. Right? There are answers that we won't see, and that's okay. I think that can add a really interesting layer to how your presenting your mystery, how your presenting your answers, and what questions are you really asking in the story that you're telling.
[Mary Robinette] I think these are all great points. I'm hoping that our listeners have some new tools for when they're going back into their mystery and can apply all these different forms of tension to the mystery.
 
[Mary Robinette] We also need to set you up for success for the next episode. We are going to be doing a deep dive on The Dark One. Dan, do you want to tell us a little bit about what people should do?
[Dan] Okay. So, as we explained several episodes ago, our next little series that were going to do, we'll start with a deep dive on Dark One Forgotten, an audiobook by Brandon Sanderson and me. Then we'll have some other episodes spinning off of that. So, in preparation for that, you've had several weeks, you have one more week left to listen to Dark One Forgotten. This is audio only because it is a fake podcast. You can get it pretty much anywhere that has audiobooks. Audible and LibroFM and Google Playbooks and Barnes & Noble and all these other places. So it's about six hours long, a little more. Listen to that. Then get ready for next week, when we are going to dive deep into everything about its structure and its… The process of creating it and why I love it so much.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the reasons that we're doing these deep dives, and then building episodes off of them, is so that you can see the tools that we use and hopefully start to build a toolbox of your own. Which brings us to our homework assignment.
[Howard] Okay. So. Yeah, part of your homework is if you haven't listened to Dark Ones yet, go listen to Dark Ones. But the other part of your homework is make a list of the tools which you regularly return to when you're writing. That might be MICE Quotient, three act structure, Hero's Journey, whatever. Just make a list of the tools that you already use regularly. Then make a separate list of the tools you know about, perhaps tools like tension via micro tension, conflict, anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions. Make a list of the tools you know about but don't think you're using yet. Then, try to move one tools from the second list to the first one.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go build a toolbox.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.14: Heavy Lifting with Microtension
 
 
Key points: Microtension is smaller versions of the tension tools, adding conflicts between goals. It adds depth. Form is what you can touch, essence is how it makes you feel. Microtension is the form of the larger essence conflict. Put the labels on your toolbox that work for you.
 
[Season 18, Episode 14]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Heavy Lifting with Microtension.
[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 don't lift heavy things anymore.
[chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] That's why we're going to use microtension. So, microtension is this idea that you can take all of the tools that we've previously talked about and just use smaller versions of them. So that you 're kind of adding conflicts between goals, or small elements that don't belong. This is an opportunity for often, I think, some fun tension within a novel or story or whatever it is that you're working on. Can you all think of examples of micro-tension that are particularly delicious? Dan.
[Dan] So, what of my favorites is a recent one that I saw in a TV show called The Offer. Which is like a behind the scenes about the creation of the movie the Godfather. He gets… Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, the director and the writer together, and he's trying to get them to create this movie. They fight and bicker constantly. There's one really simple, really little scene where the two of them are in the kitchen, because they're sharing a house during this process. There in the kitchen trying to make spaghetti and arguing, heatedly, about the script. But, at the same time, arguing about how you make spaghetti, because they're both from Italian families, they cannot agree on my family's method or your family's method. Then the scene ends with one of them going, "[gasp] we should put this in the movie! This is what it's like to be in an Italian family. We need to have this kind of simple slice of life stuff." So the tension turns into something else. The microtension in the scene actually becomes the solution to the other part of the scene. But it's just a really simple wonderful way of adding a lot of depth to what's going on.
[DongWon] One of my favorite ones, and we mentioned Glass Onion many times over the course of this series, but… And Glass Onion is chock-full of these. Of tiny little character beats that add up to more and more tension over the course of the movie. My favorite one is, there's a device in the movie that if there's a sound that slightly too loud or if there's fire in the room, a very loud shutter slams shut to protect a valuable object. Over the entire middle act of the movie is this long-running scene in one room that this thing is in, and it is constantly slamming shut over the course of this scene, over and over again. Every single time, I jumped, and then I would laugh. It added more and more tension, just like this chaotic thing happening in the background. It was this constant release of tension, and kept me so on the edge of my seat as characters were mostly just talking to each other in a room. That's all that's really happening over the course of this scene. But because he introduced this element of this randomly slamming shut noise throughout the thing. It is this master Chekhov's gun just sitting over there, and just adding this element of pure chaos in what could otherwise be a boring talking scene.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I enjoy about that, and why I think it's a particularly good example… When I first started hearing about microtension, I heard about it from Donald Maass. He thinks about it as like kind of the moment by moment tension… I think he says moment by moment tension that keeps the reader in a constant state of suspense over what will happen next, not within the story, but in the next few seconds. So I think one of the things that kept happening with that particular shutter was wondering if this was the time when its closing was going to be plot relevant. Because you knew it was going to be at some point. That constant little tug on the reader… It's like, "Is this important? Is this? Is this going to matter later? Do you have to…" That's a fun thing that you can play with as a way to ramp the tension up.
[DongWon] It's almost like you're giving them like a narrative loop, but in a tiny moment. Right? So it's a way to remind them of the overall structure of what's happening. It's like, the overall structure of Glass Onion, these recursive loops. So by giving us the beats within this scene, of keeping us on our toes and questioning, "Is this the thing? No, that's not the thing, that's a red herring. And this one's a red herring. And this one's a red herring. Oh, now it's real." Right? Like, the pure joy of that when you're in the hands of somebody who is good at delivering at the end of the day can be incredibly satisfying.
[Howard] In one of our very first episodes of Writing Excuses, we talked about the principle of explaining something small in great detail, then not even bothering to explain something huge. Because the audience, once you've explained something small in huge detail and gotten it right, they're like, "Oh, I totally trust you." If two people are having an argument about what constitutes pizza, okay, I realize that might not be macro tension, that's actually holy war…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Between Chicago and New York and possibly a bunch of other places. But if they're having this argument and the argument is well articulated and everybody responds in a way that makes sense for their characters and makes sense to the reader, then when they are having an argument about whether or not to use nanotube contained antimatter in their drive, the audience will trust you to get the argument right.
[Erin] Part of that is because, I think, there's an underlying resonance there. DongWon literally took the words out of my mouth that I was going to say about the small loop being part of the big loop. But I think that's true of argument as well. Part of it's that the emotional need that is kind of driving your conflict, if you have two characters with different emotional needs, those will show up just as much in your pizza argument or your making of spaghetti as they will about the bigger things. So it feels resonant especially if you've… Like, the fact that I love, from a previous episode example, I love to do things through performance and I'm really invested in my public persona, and someone else is really about math, because they really feel like a kinship with logic, and that's how they've always solved things. Then we try to make spaghetti together, and I'm throwing it around and they're measuring. Those are both very resonant with what we understand about the character. That's what makes the microtension kind of work, and also makes it work later when we see those same traits on a much bigger stage.
 
[Mary Robinette] When we come back from our break, remind me that I want to talk about the difference between form and essence, spinning off of what Erin just talked about. Now, we're going to take a brief break.
[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Chlorine by Jade Song. It's a debut novel. It is a dark horror novel. It tells the story of a young woman, a teenager, who is on her school swim team and under an enormous amount of pressure. She's the child of Chinese-American immigrants, is under pressure at school, is under pressure from her coach. She becomes convinced that the way that she needs… What she needs to do to become the best swimmer that she can be is to become a mermaid. It is this very dark, twisted story of her trying to become her best self through any means possible. It is full of body horror, it's full of the challenges that young women face in today's society. It's an absolutely brilliant lyrical strange story. I cannot be more excited about people to read this and lose their minds in the way that I lost my mind the first time I read this. That's out March 28, so it should have just come out when you're hearing this. I implore you to rush to the store and pick it up. Check content warnings when you do, this book has a lot. But I cannot recommend it highly enough.
 
[Mary Robinette] So, something that Erin said just made me go, "Oh!" There's this idea of form versus essence which I use a lot when I'm talking to people about how to go after a goal or achieve something. It suddenly occurred to me it applies when we're talking about that microtension. So the idea is that there's… That form is something you can touch and feel, and essence is something… Is about how… Sorry. Form is something you can touch or buy, in essence is about how it makes you feel. I learned about it from a happiness coach, which sounds very woo. However, the example that was given to me was a friend was talking about how she wanted… She and her mom were baking cookies. For my friend, the essence of this was connection. For her mom, the essence of it was productivity. So when things started going wrong, my friend was like, "Oh. This is fine. I'm still getting to connect with my mom. Why are you getting so uptight?" Her mom was like, "We are not checking things off our to do list. Why are you being so flippant about it?" Where it ties into this idea of microtension is that microtension is the form of this larger… There is a larger essence conflict that is going through the entire story. That large loop, the recursive thing, the story loop that DongWon was talking about. The form is in this moment, this is how it is expressing itself, in this tiny micro conflict that is happening right now. But it is still part of this larger essence.
[DongWon] Yeah, it's that sort of Renaissance idea of as above, so below. Right? We can show what the greater pattern is by showing us the small version of it here. I think that could be such an instructive… I think of it as a roadmap, right? You're showing them a little bit of a roadmap of how to read the rest of it. If you have that tiny moment that has that conflict in it, that has those different ways of seeing things, then that can give us such insight into the overall development of what's happening with these characters over the course of their entire arc. Going back to sort of earlier topics, too, that could be a way to mislead people. Right? You can give them a microtension and make them think this is the real conflict, when really it's something else entirely. So it's a way to sort of like manipulate our reader a little bit, set up red herrings, set up a little bit of false information that's true to the characters, you're not lying to them, but those patterns that you're using can be sometimes manipulated in interesting ways.
 
[Dan] So, here's a… Spinning this in kind of a different direction, now, I really love a TV show called Tehran. This is an espionage show made in Israel about an Israeli spy, a woman, who is… Goes into Iran to do something, and gets stuck there. She can't get out. So most of the series is about her trying to cross the border, trying to get back out of Iran. While she is there, of course, she has to wear a scarf on her head. This is really only one time over the course of the entire first series does this become a major issue. But it is always a micro issue behind every scene. In what situations is it socially acceptable for her to take this off? When does she have to have it on? Who can she trust, who can she not trust? When and how she wears this scarf on her head, despite being just this minor thing in the background, is this huge metaphor for everything that's going on. How comfortable she is in a certain situation, who she will allow herself to trust or not trust. Kind of like this visual signal of the wall she puts up when she needs to deceive somebody or lie to them. It's really fascinating to watch. Then, like I said, there's one scene where it becomes suddenly and abruptly incredibly important. Anyway, it's a really wonderful way of bringing out all the underlying themes and tensions of the spy story with this small detail that adds to the character, builds up the worldbuilding and the culture, and does all these other cool things at the same time.
[Mary Robinette] I think this is a great example, also, to just draw a line under what Dan said. When we started this, we talked about that all of the different forms of tension that we were talking about could be used on a small scale. So this is a great example of how it's being used on a small scale and continuing to ramp up the tension up by building this anticipation, because you know that it's probably going to become significant at some point. Similarly, you can use juxtaposition as a form of microtension by putting a character into a scene and having them think about something that no one else in the scene is thinking about. So it's only affecting them. For instance, that class that I mentioned when we started talking, where I was literally teaching a class on tension and I was the only one at the beginning of the class who knew that there was a medical emergency back at home. That thing was constantly happening in the back of my head. Had I been a character in a scene, on a page, that would have kept popping up as this little piece of microtension that would've kept the scene tight and active while really all that was happening in that scene was a class was being taught. So, sometimes, just an internal juxtaposition is enough, you don't need to have like sweeping music coming through the scene.
 
[Howard] For the taxonomy nerds in the crowd, in putting together this set of episodes, we talked quite a bit about where the lines were between these things and whether some of these were actually separate things or whether they were the same things. That is part of what makes these tools so powerful. Microtension can also be a tool for juxtaposition and anticipation. Conflict can be created in microtension. All of this is very much in flux. If you, fair listener, are in conflict with us about the terminology we're using… Awesome! Because that means you have strong opinions about how the taxonomy will work best for your toolbox. That's going to serve you better than the stuff that we're talking about.
[Mary Robinette] That's right. Frequently what we are doing on this podcast is just trying to give you words that you can use to describe the thing that you're doing. But the thing that you're doing is probably something that comes naturally to you. The toolbox is for those moments when it is not coming naturally to you. But none of this is the right way to do something. They're just tools to think about.
 
[Mary Robinette] So let's give you another tool. Why don't we give you a homework assignment?
[Howard] I've got your homework. Take a scene you've already written. Raise the tension in it by adding microtension of some sort alongside the big plot tension. Doesn't have to be making spaghetti or arguing about pizza or even related to food at all. Just a microtension that ramps up the tension of the scene that you've already written.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.11: Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition
 
 
Key points: Juxtaposition adds tension from the contrast between two things. Good news, bad news framing. Hallelujah moments in movies, with something horrible happening and beautiful music playing. Juxtaposition works with mood and emotion, instead of conflict. Horror often juxtaposes monsters and pastoral settings. Juxtaposition can add depth and context. It can add tension to a character. You can use it to show the reader how the character doesn't fit, or that this person has hidden depths. Cozies juxtapose cozy elements with murder.
 
[Season 18, Episode 11]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Turning Up the Contrast With Juxtaposition.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[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] We are going to be talking about juxtaposition this week, and how to use it. I'm actually going to tell a personal story to kick us off, because the first time I taught this as a topic, I was at a conference and my phone rings and it is my husband. I'm like, "What's going on?" He's like, "Well, there's been a family medical thing at home." I'm like, "Oh. Okay." He's just updating me. Everything does turn out fine. It does have a happy ending. But I then had to go back into the room and teach. The thing is that this added a certain amount of tension to this thing. Because there was nothing that I could solve. I was in a different country. There was nothing that anyone in the room could solve, because they didn't even know about it. But there was this juxtaposition between hello, I have to teach this class, and there's this thing that's going on at home. They're two unrelated things. The tension comes from the contrast between those two things.
[Howard] A common example of this is the good news, bad news framing of things. Again, a real-life story. Sandra and I were at Gen Con, and we get a call from one of the kids who's holding down the house. He says, "So, good news and bad news. Good news is I learned how to defrost the freezer."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] "The bad news is I didn't do it on purpose."
[Laughter]
[Howard] That juxtaposition right there has told us an entire story that we're going to have fun unraveling. So I often think of juxtaposition first in terms of the good news, bad news. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the juxtaposition of the Steward of Gondor eating while the soldiers are going to war is completely different. That's just bad news, bad news.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I often think of the hallelujah moment, which is where something horrible is happening and a cover of Hallelujah plays in a movie.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Erin] If you ever hear Hallelujah playing, run. You know what I mean? Something bad is happening. But it's something about the beauty of that song, or any sort of piece of music that is very beautiful, with something horrible happening underneath that's [garbled]
[Howard] Ave Maria in Hitman.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The first time I saw that was in Good Morning Vietnam with It's a Wonderful World… Or It's a Beautiful World… Trees of green and like bombings are happening in the background. It can be overplayed. Because in… They tried to do that in Downtown Abbey, where it's like, "Oh, look, the new baby…" This beautiful music is playing, and someone is having a car crash in the background. It fundamentally didn't work because it was so clear that that was what they were trying to do.
[Dan] Yeah. Music is such a great way to do this. One of my very favorites is actually the finale of the first act of the Steven Sondheim musical Gypsy in which everything has gone wrong. The little sister has run away, and now the family isn't going to travel around anymore. The older sister, she's the main character, she thinks, "Oh, great. This is perfect. This is exactly what I want. Now I get to have a normal life with a normal mom and a normal dad." Then the mom sings Everything's Coming up Roses which is this huge triumphant don't worry, we're going to make this work, I'm going to make you a star. Which is 100% not what the main character wants out of her life. It is a triumphant and wonderful song juxtaposed against the absolute world crushing tragedy of what it means for this girl. It's horrible and delicious and I love it when a story is able to do that.
 
[Mary Robinette] I think… You just reminded me of something that Erin had talked about previously, which is that the tension is coming from the emotion. I think that one of the things about juxtaposition is that it is so much about mood and emotion. Very specifically those things, rather than the conflict. An example that Howard gave previously was the eating of the food during the… Juxtaposed with the battle. That those two things spoke to each other, but that they were a contrast as well.
[Howard] When I teach my humor class, I talk about juxtaposition, but the sort… The kind that I use is what I call forced congruence. Which is when you juxtapose two things in such a way as to force them into congruence one with another. The example I use is from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "the Vogon ships hovered in the air in much the same way that bricks don't." Which is hilarious and it forces bricks hovering to be the same as the Vogon ships. Paints a very clear picture, and, for me, manages to be hilarious.
 
[DongWon] You also see this used to extremely great effect in horror. Again, I think horror and comedy are sort of two sides of the same coin. I'm really thinking about Bong Joon-ho's movie The Host, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. The first time we see the monster is running along the banks of the Han River through this park area where people are picnicking, having a lovely time, it's a lovely day. The grass is green. Then this monster comes bursting out of the Han River, causing chaos and mayhem. It's a very visceral terrifying scene with this intruding thing into this very pastoral imaging. Throughout the entire thing, the visual thing that drives all of that is the juxtaposition of horror and this family pastoral thing, which ties into the theme of the whole movie as it is very much a family drama of a family trying to figure out how to come together in the face of tragedy in the middle of this apocalyptic thing happening in this major metropolitan area. He uses just… Bong Joon-ho, in particular, is so masterful at using juxtaposition to drive narrative throughout all of his movies.
 
[Erin] I think one of the things… Because sort of a lot of our examples are movies and our visual media because they have… There's so many great tools of juxtaposition in terms of showing two images together or using music. I was thinking about what is a good textual… Another textual example. I recently reread The Ones Who Walked Away from Omalas. It starts with like the equivalent of a beautiful musical piece in describing this utopia in such lyrical… In such a lyrical way that it almost feels like you're listening to music, which makes the juxtaposition with the reality of Omalas hit so hard. So it's something you can do, like with text, as well as in a visual and sort of a medium that has sound besides.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Mary Robinette] I used it in Spare Man in what I will call the singing toilet scene. In which I have a conflict, straight up conflict, but it is happening in a bathroom that has singing toilets. It is one of my favorite things that I've ever written.
[DongWon] Well, I would argue that one of the driving impulses of the… Or one of the driving things about the book in general is that juxtaposition of the humorous surreality that is a cruise ship or a space liner in this one against this serious drama and murder and interpersonal drama. It… That tension between those two things, the discordance between the ridiculousness that is a cruise ship that all of us know very well versus a very serious thing happening, which… That is so much this like generative engine in the book. It's like… It almost feels like a gear slipping, but you're doing it on purpose. So we keep like running into it, and having to be like, "Wait. How does this work? Why is this like this? Oh, that is so weird that this murder is happening here, but also it's so weird that this service person is talking to them in this way right now."
 
[Howard] It calls back to anticipation, because if you are juxtaposing, especially if you are juxtaposing where there is a forced congruence happening. If one of the elements is one with which we're familiar and we know how it unfolds, the juxtaposition forces us to anticipate what is going to happen with the second element. I don't have a good example off the top of my head, but if you think of Beethoven's… Is it the ninth that ends with the da da da da da da dat dah dah? And then the cannons?
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Howard] I think that's… Is it the ninth or is that the third?
[Dan] The beginning, the 1812 overture.
[Howard] 1812 overture! It's the overture. Okay. Thank you. Gah. Music major. They can have their degree back. Find.
[Mary Robinette] Juxtaposition is…
[Howard] [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Happening in your brain right now.
[Howard] When you hear that ba ba ba... The next thing that's going to happen is an explosion. If you're watching a movie, something's about to blow up. Because the forced congruence and the anticipation has told us what's coming next.
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, what's coming next right now is our thing of the week. Our thing of the week is When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins. I loved this book a lot. It is set immediately or shortly after the end of World War II. It's in the 1950s. Franny is a young Jewish woman and she wants to do stand up comedy. If you think that's Marvelous Mrs. Mazel, this is not Marvelous Mrs. Mazel with magic. That's not what this is. The only thing it has in common are the words that I have said thus far. It is a story about intergenerational trauma. It is a story about the search for comedy. It is also with… Has this wonderful magical element. It's at the juxtaposition between stand up comedy and the very real PTSD that Franny's brother is dealing with, that she herself is dealing with. Those two things play off each other so beautifully. It's funny and it's moving. I highly recommend When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins.
 
[Dan] So can I talk about another example of juxtaposition? We have in our notes beautiful music playing over a fight scene. One of the ones that I love is in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. The opening stunt, the opening fight scene, they have the music Ain't That a Kick in the Head, which I believe is a Dean Martin song. It's very funny, ha ha, fight scene with this, but you realize very quickly that that music is diegetic, that music is happening inside of the story and all of the characters can hear it. It's being broadcast over the PA during a prison break. So there is the juxtaposition of tone, but also we realize that the characters are using it as a countdown. So it becomes this form of creating tension in the story. What's going to happen when we get to the end of that song? So it's kind of adding two or three things at once, and doing them very effectively.
[Howard] The fourth thing that it's doing is finally doing right what Hudson Hawk tried to do for the entire movie where the two of them are singing the same song in order to try and time their heist. But it was never as cool as it was in Mission Impossible 4.
 
[DongWon] One more thing I want to bring up in terms of juxtaposition is it is incredibly useful as a technique to add depth and context to a scene. I often talk about fiction and particularly novels as a layer cake. You want to add as many layers as you can to make sure that the reader's getting the most amount of information as possible in a given moment. Right? So, going back to examples Erin used last time in terms of making sure there is tension rather than conflict, a way to add tension into opening with a fight scene, opening with an action scene, is you're giving us flashbacks, you're giving us different POVs, to tell us about the character and what they care about. If you start with a gun fight, and halfway through, you do a flashback to realizing that the main… The protagonist's sister has been kidnapped and that's what they're trying to do, then that adds tension in a way that wouldn't be there initially. So, using juxtaposition can add so much more meaning or depth. Also, like the Aldhani… Climactic Aldhani scenes in Andor is a great example because they're cutting between this religious ceremony that's happening by these colonized people and this heist for the revolution that is going to eventually free them. The tension between those two images is adding all this thematic and narrative depth that elevates what's happening on the screen to a different level versus what we would have seen if it was just a heist happening in a vault.
[Dan] Well, if I add to that… I know, Erin, you want to say something. But, just before we leave Andor, one of the things I loved about the tension created in that juxtaposition at the end is that we know that all of the fallout and all of the consequences of this heist are going to fall on those indigenous people and not on our main characters. They're the ones that the Empire is going to crack down on, they're the ones that are going to have horrible consequences. So it adds this extra layer of really bitter tension to what's going on. It drains all of the joy that we normally expect from a heist, and all of the triumph is completely gone, because we know that those people are going to suffer for it.
[Mary Robinette] Erin, what were you going to say?
[DongWon] But we also know that… Oh, sorry.
[Erin] No, no. Keep going. That's fine.
[DongWon] But we also know though that this is the thing that is going to lead to their eventual liberation. This single act leads directly in a chain of events to the destruction of the Death Star and the fall of the Empire. Which is anticipation coming… Juxtaposition, anticipation, all these things are layered in there in this beautiful example. Anyways, we'll stop talking about Andor now because we would do that for six hours.
[Chuckles]
 
[Erin] I was just going to say that in addition to adding tension to a scene, that juxtaposition can also add tension to a character. It's a great way of signaling an unreliable narrator or a character that makes you feel weird in a bad way.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Which is that, if someone, for example… If something really horrible is happening, but a character… Their interior thoughts about it are way off from what we think… They're like, "Kicking puppies? Eh, fine." That juxtaposition of our… What we believe would be the normal, or, like, within a set of reactions to a situation and what the character is experiencing, it can show things that are bad, things that are good, but I think it really adds some tension, because the next time you see this character, you're not sure how they're going to react to something, because they didn't react in the way that you were anticipating that they might.
[DongWon] This is Javier Bardon calling people friendo in No Country for Old Men. Terrifying.
[Chuckles]
 
[Howard] The episode that kind of kicked all this off, we were talking about building a mystery, and then we're talking about the tools of tension. Using juxtaposition late in a mystery where a small thing has the same shape as the solution to the puzzle. You juxtapose those things and the detective looks at the small thing and suddenly realizes, "[gasp] Aha! That's the last piece that I need." Even if those pieces aren't related. That is a very common use of juxtaposition in mysteries.
[Dan] So, one way that I have used this, for example, in the John Cleaver books. In the first one, I Am Not a Serial Killer, I used this as a way of showing you how messed up John Cleaver is. This is a lot of what Erin was talking about, is, if we're seeing somebody's reactions are off. I went out of my way to include a lot of slice of life kind of moments. We get to see this kid on the first day of school. We get to see him at Halloween. We get to see him at Christmas. Every time, he is not reacting the way that we expect, and the kind of excitement that we would want to feel at those different moments. The cool high school dance that he gets to go to is this kind of nightmare for him. The Christmas party is just absolutely, kind of unbearably sad, because of the way that no one in the family gets along with each other. So providing those moments of resonance where we recognize what the character is going through, and it should feel one way, but it feels a different way, adds a lot of tension to a character.
[Mary Robinette] You can have that also in the positive, as well. If there's a character who is slightly terrifying, but you actually want the reader to feel sympathy for them or to enjoy… To ultimately think of them as a good guy. Giving them something that they care about, like a Yorky or a teacup poodle, is a way to humanize them by providing that juxtaposition. It remind you that people are not mono-dimensional. The other thing that has occurred to me as we been talking is that this tool of juxtaposition is a key tool in cozy mysteries. That that's one of the reasons that cozies work is because they are juxtaposing a British beautiful little country house with murder. Or baking with murder. That juxtaposition is, in fact, a key element of the cozies.
 
[Mary Robinette] Now, I'm afraid, we're going to juxtapose your homework.
[Erin] Homework.
[Howard] They've been anticipating it.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] All right. For the homework this week, look at your work in progress and find a scene where you may want to add more tension, and add an element of juxtaposition to do that. Any sort of… Any of the ones that we've been talking about, but add some juxtaposition into your work in progress and ramp up that tension.
[Mary Robinette] You are out of excuses. Now go write.
[Behind you!]
[Murder!]
[Laughter]
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.09: Unpacking the Tension
 
 
Key Points: What drives a story? Tension! So what kinds of tension are there? Anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and micro-tension. Tension is emotional, it requires engagement. Narrative tension is what the characters feel, contextual tension is what the readers feel, and they don't have to be the same. Anticipation, expectations about how we think things are going to go. Juxtaposition, contrasting expectations and actually how things go. Unanswered questions, mystery, but also other levels. Cold start horrible situation, then back off to earlier, making us wonder what happened. Mystery box storytelling, what's in the box, what's the solution to the puzzle. Do a question and answer quickly to build trust with the audience. Anticipation is expecting an outcome, while unanswered questions, where you, the reader, don't know the answer. Micro-tension is smaller tensions, often lower stakes. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 9]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Unpacking the Tension.
[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] We are going to be spending the next several weeks talking about tension. I'm going to go ahead and frame this a little bit, because as we were trying to set the season, we each brought something that we have been struggling with a little bit or a new toolbox that we've been noodling with. Erin and I happen to have simultaneously just taught a class on tension. So she's going to be chiming in here in a moment. But I want to start explaining what's going through my head with this. So, we are often taught that a story must have conflict. I think that actually what drives a story is tension, but that conflict is the easiest form of tension to teach. I started thinking about this while I was reading Japanese literature, which often does not have any visible conflict, but there's a ton of tension. It really solidified for me while I was watching Ted Lasso. Slight spoilers here, but when you look at… Watch the Christmas episode of Ted Lasso, there's no villain. Everyone is being kind. There's no conflict. All of the conflict comes from this anticipation of something that you think is going to go wrong. For instance, at the beginning of the Christmas episode, he's watching It's a Wonderful Life and he's drinking, so, obviously, the next thing that's going to happen is he's going to go on a bender, and he's going to have a dream sequence. None of that is what happens. But they so clearly signpost it that it builds this tension, and then you get this release… So, what I want to talk about is looking at some different types of tension. So we're going to kind of give you an overview, and then for the rest of the episodes, we'll be digging into each type of tension. So. I'm going to break them down, and then let other people talk. The types of tension that I am identifying as I am attempting to build this toolbox are anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and then micro-tension. Erin, on the other hand, is building… Is constructing a tension toolbox in a different way.
[Erin] Yeah. I will say that one of the things I love about tension, just to start, is that tension is emotional. Just the word tension feels more emotional than conflict. I think it's an amazing reminder that you need some sort of engagement with the thing in order to be tense. If you don't care, you won't be tense. I think sometimes because we think a lot about conflict, people will open a story or a novel or a movie with a conflict that we haven't bought into. So we're not feeling the tension. We just see the conflict. Like when you have a little… Your two dinosaurs, as a kid, and you have them fight. The two dinosaurs are fighting with each other, but why? Does anyone care? So, to me, tension is a lot about building in and thinking about the emotion. The other thing that I really love about just tension versus conflict is that conflict is something that is felt on the page. Your characters are in conflict with each other. Perhaps. Or with nature, or what have you. But your reader is not in conflict. They are observing the conflict. The tension is the thing that both the readers and the characters can share.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Dan] I love this description of tension as requiring an emotional investment. For me, the way I have always thought about it, tension is a combination of anticipation and hope. You anticipate something bad is going to happen, you hope it doesn't. But without that hope, without that one outcome I like and one outcome I don't like, there isn't really any tension. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens.
[Mary Robinette] I think the outcome of tension and hope is where a lot of romance comes from. It's like, oh, you know that they're going to get together. So that's the thing that you're hoping for the entire time, but you keep seeing all of the reasons that they aren't going to get together, which is what builds that tension. That's a… I really like that framing, Dan.
[Howard] Yeah. I've… Without going into detail, one of the things that for me makes a good action scene is if I care about what's happening. If the action scene… Fight scenes are often inherently conflict, because they're fighting, but if I'm not feeling tension, if I'm not emotionally invested, all the great fight choreography is just eye candy. I don't care. So tension is key. It's critical.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think that brings up a really interesting point, because for me, tension is almost always about relationships, because stakes aren't necessarily about survival, stakes are about consequence and how you see yourself or how you see other people in connection to other characters. Because that's how we think about it, and that's how we feel it, so just for a quick example going to what you're saying, Howard, like the lobby scene out of the Matrix is them fighting a bunch of goons. The tension in that scene doesn't come from are they going to shoot these security guards. It comes from is Neo starting to realize who he is? Is he in tension with himself? What matters to him? So we're excited by that scene because we see, as Morpheus says, "He's starting to believe." We see that relationship starting to change. So the tension comes from an internal journey that the character is on, not the conflict of there are 10 random goons that need to get out of their way at this point.
 
[Erin] I think you can also, like, you're thinking, "Oh, I'm just starting my story. Nobody yet cares about my characters. How am I going to create this tension?"
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] One way to do that, also, is to tap into kind of primal tensions I think that we feel. So if you're on a spaceship and the spaceship is breaking, that's bad. But it's also this person's first day on the job, like, there's a certain primal, "oh, crap, I just got this job, and now everything is breaking." Or I have to give a speech. The things that people freak out about in their dreams. Like, that kind of thing, if you put it on the page, it's a way to tap into tensions that people might be feeling in their own lives. Then use that to kind of move the action forward while you build up the character engagement.
[DongWon] Yeah. The thing that you said about conflict being something the character sees, but tension is something the audience sees. Conflict for the character is am I going to survive this. I, as a reader, at the beginning of a book, I don't really care yet. I don't know you. Sure, if you fall out into space and die, that's not particularly interesting to me. But what is interesting to me is are you going to feel bad about it being your fault that you fall out into space and die. Right? I think that's the difference between tension and that conflict in that way of stakes matter… Survival matters to the character, but you have to give me a reason to care. That's where tension comes in.
[Howard] Circling back to Mary Robinette's five things here, can I talk about juxtaposition for just a moment?
[Mary Robinette] I think you can, after the break. That is going to create tension for our readers, our listeners…
[Gasp]
[Mary Robinette] As they wait to find out what Howard is going to say about juxtaposition.
 
[Dan] All right. So our thing of the week this week is Dark One: Forgotten. The first official collaboration between Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson. This is the prequel to a story that has been out in graphic novel form for a while, called Dark One. It's a portal fantasy. This is presented… The prequel is presented as a… As if it were a six episode podcast. Someone is making an amateur true crime podcast about a mysterious murder that has remained unsolved for 30 years. Over the course of the series, discovers many more mysteries and a much larger thing going on. This is a lot of fun, because of that nature of a… As a faux podcast, it is only in audio. It's available pretty much everywhere audiobooks are available. Take special note of this thing of the week, because several episodes from now, we're going to do a deep dive on this one. When we finish our whole tension class that we're doing, we are going to do a deep dive into Dark One: Forgotten and talk about the process of writing it and producing it and everything at length. So, it's a little over six hours, and it's a lot of fun. They did an amazing job on the recording, the cast is wonderful. So, Dark One: Forgotten by Dan Wells and Brandon Sanderson.
 
[Mary Robinette] All right, Howard.
[Howard] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] All right, Howard. Tell me. Tell me about juxtaposition. [Garbled]
[Howard] Okay. Return of the King, the Peter Jackson, we have the scene where the Steward of Gondor has sent troops into Osgiliath to try and take it back. While those troops are in Osgiliath, the Steward is eating and making… I can't remember if it's Merry or Pippin… Making them sing…
[Dan] It's Pippin.
[Howard] It's Pippin. We are watching… Is it John Noble? Is that the name of the actor?
[Dan] Yes.
[Howard] I think it's John Noble. We are watching him crush food in his mouth and dribble on his face and tear meat from bone as we watch these soldiers drive into Osgiliath. It is brilliant and beautiful as juxtaposition and also serves as a way to give us X-rated levels of gory horrible violence without actually doing that. Our… Your brain does all the work because of the juxtaposition. It makes you terribly tense because the soldiers on the horses have not yet been turned into grapes in John Noble's mouth yet and you don't know if they will be.
[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Something that it makes me think of that I've been thinking about a lot is how much of storytelling is a collaboration between the author and the reader. We talk about this in puppetry that the difference between playing with dolls and a puppet show is that one of them has an audience, and that the puppet exists in this liminal space between us. It is also true for writing, that I can write something, but the moment you start consuming it, you're going to bring your own lens to it, your own experience, and you're going to combined things in your own head in ways that I can't anticipate.
 
[Erin] That makes me think a lot of something that I find really fascinating about tension. It is that difference between what readers are doing and what the characters are doing is narrative tension versus what I call contextual tension. So, narrative tension is the tension that characters feel, and contextual tension is the tension that readers feel. They don't actually have to be the same. If the characters are blithely walking into an ambush, but you signal to the reader that there's an ambush coming, there's a difference there. Versus where both folks, both are feeling tense. So there's a lot of really, really fun things that you can do there, in separating those two, and playing with where your character's feeling tension, and where do you want your reader to be.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think of this really as genre expectations. Right? So if you're in romance, you're in horror, you're in mystery, in the ways that we've talked about it in the past, the audience has certain expectations. This is why, when I talk about storytelling, I always talk about pattern recognition. Right? We have read and absorbed thousands upon thousands of stories over the course of our life. So, we have ideas about how these things are supposed to go. You can use those expectations for a lot of these techniques which [we mention?] here, in particular, anticipation and juxtaposition. Anticipation being sort of like we think we know how it's going to go. Then, juxtaposition is the contrast of we thought it was going to go this way, but now it's going that way. I think you can use that tension between the audience expectation and what's happening in the text to kind of create a discordant note that automatically creates a sense of tension that the audience is so hungry for it to be resolved. Waiting for that resolution, waiting for that next cord to progress, so that we know where we're going, is one of the most effective ways to create tension between the book and the audience.
 
[Dan] So one of the elements on Mary Robinette's list that we haven't talked much about yet is unanswered questions. Which, at one level, that's just what a mystery is, right? Somebody is dead, we want to know who killed them and how. So we have that question. But there's a lot of other ways to use this type of tension. The example that comes to mind is the old TV show Alias, which kind of leaned a little too heavily on this particular trope, but many, many… I would go so far as to say, most of those episodes started with the main character in a horrible situation, and then we would cut away and say, "72 hours earlier…" Then, that leaves us with this unanswered question of "Oh, no. I know she's going to be in a horrible peril at some point. How does that happen? How is that situation created? What is going to go massively wrong?" That creates the tension that draws us through the episode to get the answer to that question.
[DongWon] This is also what's commonly referred to as mystery box storytelling. This is this J. J. Abrams idea of asking what's in the box, what's in the puzzle, can be a driving force for your entire narrative. So, Lost is probably the most famous example of this. Sometimes they can be unsatisfying if it's clear they never knew what's in the box in the first place, but you can really connect with an audience who also wants to know what is the core of this mystery, what is the core thing that's happening. A more recent example is Severance. It's a good example of like, "What the hell is he actually doing down there?" It's something that really drives the story forward.
[Erin] Speaking of boxes, literally, since we've done Glass Onion as thing of the week, maybe you've all seen this, but it starts with a box being opened. I think that why this is so important is because in order to have your audience trust that you will answer the unanswered questions, it helps to pose a question and answer it early on. So that you're like, "I am capable of answering questions." How will they open this box? They do. You saw it. So then you're actually willing to give them more space. Each time you answer a question for an audience member or for a reader, I think what happens is you lengthen the amount of time that you can put between question and answer as they trust you that much more.
[Howard] Dan's example, from Alias, 72 hours earlier, is the in media res, and we're familiar with that structure. One of my favorite reversals of that can be found in the first paintball episode of Community. I think it's episode 23 of season one, where Jeff leaves the room. We've been told, "Oh, there's going to be a game of Paintball Assassin," whatever. Jeff leaves the room and says, "I'll see you losers later. I'm going to go take a nap in my car." Then we see, kaching, one hour later. Jeff wakes up in his car, steps out of the car, and the campus is a wasteland, with sort of zombie wasteland music playing. For a couple of minutes there, you're wondering, "Okay. What happened?" I now have a lot of questions about what could have gone this wrong in an hour. Now, obviously, it's a community… It's a community? It's Community, so it's a comedy. So there is exaggeration. But the tool is still there for you. Running the clock forward a little bit and things have changed, and how did it get this bad this quickly?
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to briefly cut into say that one of the reasons that we separated unanswered questions from anticipation is that… We went back and forth on whether or not they should be lumped together… Is that with anticipation is something that you know is going to happen. Like, you know that when they walked down the basement steps, that a bad thing is going to happen, and tension comes from that. It's anticipating an outcome. Versus unanswered questions, where you don't know the answer. So in one… You can be… With anticipation, you can be wrong about the answer. Like, often you build tension by having them go down the stairs, and then something jumps out at them. But it's just the cat. So you can build anticipation and tension and let the reader be wrong about what they're anticipating, but that is different than the reader does not know what is going to happen.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, so, like in Severance, I'm actually expecting not to get answers to many of the questions I have. It's sort of a genre expectation, that I would almost be unsatisfied if they did answer all those questions, but finding out more so I can start piecing together the puzzle is one of the narrative things that's pulling me through this story that I'm loving.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The last piece of it that we need to define, and then we'll go to our homework, is micro-tension. I'll try to keep this short. Micro-tension are smaller tensions that happen within a larger scene. So if your character is attempting to deal with a murder, but then they also have to make spaghetti dinner and the water boils over. That's a micro-tension. They're small tensions that pop up often from mundane sources, but not always.
[Howard] They can be related to the plot. I need to get the autopsy report, and in order to get the autopsy report, I have to apologize to the coroner. Now, macro-tension would be I'm going to steal the report.
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
 
[Howard] Hey, should I do the homework?
[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a great idea, Howard.
[Howard] I should do homework. Okay. In this episode, we covered five types of tension. Anticipation, juxtaposition, unanswered questions, conflict, and micro-tension. Look at your current work in progress or something that you're reading… Last week, we invited you to read a mystery… And try to identify examples of each of these. That's it.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Imagine working with horses as a way to explore and enhance your creative process, all while enjoying the beautiful surroundings of Bear Lake, Utah. Led by me and Dan, this four-day workshop is suitable for writers and riders of all levels and experience. Come make new connections, receive valuable feedback, and set your writing goals in motion. Visit writingexcuses.com for more information about Riding Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go ride.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.33: Building Tension 
 
 
Key points: Tension supercharges dialogue. A simple breakfast order, with a bomb under the table, becomes tense, loaded with expectations. What are the stakes? Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Break stability, lose control, and then build and stretch. Every line can be a cusp/decision/choice point.
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialogue Masterclass Episode Six, Building Tension.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And… Dun, dun, dun, dun…
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
[Howard] I thought that joke would play better than it did.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Thank you, Howard.
[Dan] I'm just going to pretend like it was an introduction to me, and you were actually saying, "Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan."
[Chuckles]
 
[Dan] Okay. So, we talked about conflict last time. Let's talk about tension this time. Dialogue in tension. Maurice, why do we want tension in our dialogue?
[Maurice] Well, tension is that thing… It both holds it together and then charges it to push it forward. So, tension in a lot of ways just sort of supercharges dialogue. One of the things I think about is there's a scene… I'm about to date myself. Alfred Hitchcock movie. I think it was called Saboteur where you have these two people having a mundane conversation. They're just sitting around in a café, and they're ordering breakfast. It's just a really mundane conversation, trying to figure out their coffee order and everything. But then the camera pans down and there's a bomb underneath the table. The bomb's on a timer. It is getting close to detonation. Then the camera pans back up. So you have these two characters that are still just trying to figure out what they're going to order for breakfast. But now suddenly this moment has been supercharged with tension and expectations and wanting to see what's happening next.
[Dan] Yeah. That's one of my favorite principles of writing. It is so important when you're doing this that you make sure to establish what those stakes are. Because prior to seeing the bomb, that was just a boring conversation about breakfast. After seeing the bomb, everything changes. I have a horror class that I teach, how to scare people, how to build suspense. I show clips of movies. I showed a clip from the beach scene from Jaws where the kids are out playing in the water, and there's like a hundred misdirections where you think there's a shark, but it's not actually a shark. I showed this to a group of kids at a teen writers conference, and I forgot to set it up. They'd never seen Jaws, they didn't know what this was about. So they didn't know there was a shark. They didn't know that everything they were watching were misdirections about why is this person screaming? Why can't they find the dog? All of these little things. So they were bored to tears watching this scene. Because they didn't have any context, they didn't know what the stakes were. So if you want to build that tension, you have to tell the reader what could go wrong. Then don't let it go wrong for a while.
[Howard] Yeah. The… It's difficult to describe what tension is. In music, one of my instructors described it as what he called the law of the halfstep. Which was when you have a chord that is… Where one note is a halfstep off from resolving into the major key, the tonic of the piece. Everybody can hear that and everybody's like, "Okay. It's about to resolve. Go ahead and resolve." It's a musical tension. He went on to describe the works of Richard Wagner and saying he keeps using this law of the halfstep, but every time we resolve the halfstep, we introduce a new note that is a halfstep off from a new resolution. So Wagner is tiring to listen to for some people, because the tension is unrelating... er, unrelenting. It never resolves. Dean Koontz wrote a book called Intensity, which functions that way for me. There were these little resolutions at every step, but with each resolution, there was a new twist that maintains the tension. Very difficult. Very difficult to read. So, circling back around, what is tension? In fiction? What is tension in our writing? I think it's best described in terms of like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for a thing to resolve so that I can let out this breath.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, it's about an expectation that… As you say, waiting for the other shoe to drop. When we talk about what's at stake, the reason that that's important is because it creates one end of that tension. If you think about it as something that you are stretching a line… An elastic line between two things, you need one end of it to be the thing that's at stake, like a literal stake. You could maybe think of it that way. Then the other thing is all of the things that are drawing that out, that are pulling it away from that thing that's at stake.
 
[Dan] So, as this relates to dialogue, specifically. We know why tension's important. How do we draw out that thing, how do we draw it out, how do we stretch it when it's dialogue without it just being dull?
[Howard] Aa...
[Maurice] So…
[Howard] Oh, go ahead, Maurice.
[Maurice] Oh… Uh… Let me give you a link to this article. We'll put it in the liner notes. But it's called Toward a general psychological model of tension and suspense, which is as amazing a read as you imagine it will be. But in that… So I found that a really useful article for me personally because, so, for one, it defines tension as "a diffuse general state of anticipation." So there's that whole idea of like waiting for the shoe to drop. Then suspense as the specific anticipation between clearly opposed outcomes. Like, whether or not this bomb is going to explode. Right? So the whole article breaks down this whole idea of what does it mean to hold tension, what does it mean to hold suspense. It's sort of like lays out this process of, one, stability gets broken. Two, there's this loss of control. Then, three, which is the key thing you were just talking about, Dan, is the whole build and stretch. I think we've actually already touched upon the first two items there, the whole stability gets broken. Stability is just us setting the scene, and then it gets broken by you have these characters in collision with opposing agendas and what for. Then there's this whole idea of loss of control. That's the idea of, all right, let's show you the bomb, let's show you what's at stake. So now we have that loss of control. But the build and stretch… When I think about build and stretch, I think about the movie Inglorious Bastards. It's a Quentin Tarantino movie. There's a scene in there which I always refer back to. It's sort of like a master class on tension. A master class on that build and stretch idea. Right? Because you have your hero… It takes place in World War II and our heroes are in a German… I think a canteen. But anyway, they're surrounded by all…
[Howard] They're in like a downstairs tavern. That's the scene you're talking about, right?
[Maurice] Yeah, yeah. That's the one. So you have this German officer who is aware that there is a spy among them. He's trying to ferret out which one is the spy. So this whole scene is everybody trying to retain their cover, act like they belong, knowing that one slip up… And this whole scene ends bloodily, we'll say.
[Chuckles]
[Maurice] Spoilers. It ends bloodily. But the scene goes on for almost 20 minutes. Almost 20 minutes. By minute 12, you almost feel tension as a character sitting next to you. Right? Because he's done a pretty masterful job of just using dialogue, question after question, or comment after comment… Because it doesn't have to be questions, it's just… Literally each line of dialogue is a potential trap. Everybody understands one slip up and we're dead.
[Mary Robinette] So the potential trap… I want to drill into that and talk about cusp points. Because every line of dialogue can be a cusp point. For instance, we can continue talking about that now, or we could pause for the book of the week.
 
[Dan] That's a good idea. It's your book of the week this week.
[Mary Robinette] That's right. So the book of the week for me this week is Meru by S. B. Divya. This is a far future science fiction novel. It's set in a point at which humans have really borked the Earth, and the next evolution of humanity, called alloys, are kind of keeping things going and preserving original humans as an important species. In much the same way they are preserving elephants. What's… What it's… Interesting is that… I mean, it's really quite compelling. But one of the things that's interesting for me about it is that the… There's parent-child conflict in it that is also not just parent and child but the parents of this child are alloys and they're raising a human child. So it's both the parental feeling, but there's also these other aspects of it, of… Where it touches on colonialization, it touches on what it means to be a dominant species, and how, in many ways, like touches on some animal rights things. But never, like, being explicitly about that, because it's also just this really fun and now we're going to go explore a new planet. So it's got so much intriguing world building, good interesting conversations, and… I'm just… I'm enjoying the heck out of it. So this is Meru by S. B. Divya.
[Dan] Cool. That sounds great.
 
[Mary Robinette] So. Okay, back to my cusp points.
[Dan] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that we're talking about when we're talking about these… This tension, and the scene that Maurice was describing, is that when you're in a dialogue, when you're in conversation with someone, in many ways, every line that is spoken represents a cusp point, a decision point, a choice point. When we talk about knowing your character's agenda, people come into things with more than one agenda and often a conversation can expose and open up a whole new agenda. You've had these conversations where someone says something and like five different possible responses collide in your head at once. The reason they collide is each of them could spin the conversation in a different way. So one of the things that you can do with the… To ramp that tension up is to make us aware of… The thing that's happening with the scene that Maurice describes is that each one of those innocuous questions could be the question that spins the conversation into danger. You can… That's something that you can play with as a deliberate tool is to look at what cusp points are represented by each line of dialogue. Like, what is the other thing that your character could have said that would have made things worse, and what is the thing that they could say that would make things better. What is the thing that will just change the conversation, change the topic, the tenor? These are things that can add tension if you kind of make the reader aware that this exists.
[Dan] That's really cool. I don't have a follow-up, sorry. I'm just [garbled]
[laughter]
[Dan] Wow. That's actually really fascinating.
 
[Howard] Well, one of the things that's… A common trope, we see it a lot. When the tension can be resolved by one person telling the other person the thing that they're planning to tell them, and the two people are together, and instead of telling them, they say, "We don't have time for that right now. Follow me!" Eee, no! You actually could have just said, "I committed the murder. Sorry. My bad."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] "Now, follow me, we're running from the cops." Or whatever. The artificial maintenance of tension really bugs me. If you need to do something like that, if you've reached a point where the energy state of the conversation is just going to collapse now. It's just going to happen. You either need to backup and write these characters apart so they're not having the conversation yet, or you need to interrupt them with something that neither of them get a say in in order to prevent the conversation from continuing.
[Dan] I would caution you as a rider on that principle that if you find yourself doing this type of thing frequently, mix it up. Don't have someone kick down the door and interrupt the conversation every single time. Use different methods of delaying that resolution and of drawing out the tension. Because otherwise it just becomes a parody of itself.
[Howard] Well, the master class version of this is the person who has the information needs to not be motivated to share it yet for a really good reason.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. That can't just be the authorial intention of I need them to not share this yet.
[Howard] Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] Frequently, when characters do share information, it can lead to much more interesting conversations that are still filled with tension. Like one of the things that I'm super enjoying right now is on TicTac… Tiktok, Natalie Hernandez… Natalie Hernandez author is the Tiktok handle, has been doing romance tropes in real life. Where the… She does both sides of a dialogue in which one side is like, "Stay calm. Don't…" "You just kidnapped me." "No no no no no. But stay calm." Why would… Like, shatters every piece of the way these conversations normally go. Because one side is trying to have the standard romance trope conversation, and the other is like, no, this is the kind of communication that you would have if you were a healthy adult, and I will absolutely not have anything to do with you because you are not a healthy adult. And you…
[Dan] So…
[Mary Robinette] I just… I love it because part of the… And the reason it… I think it… I brought it up here is because part of the tension describes from the thwarted expectations.
 
[Dan] Yes. Let's take this to our homework for the week, which is kind of a version of this. I want you to write a difficult conversation. Someone, as Howard said, has information they are motivated not to share. An example could be that they have made an incredibly questionable choice, some kind of deep moral compromise, and they don't want to tell what they've done. But I want you to write for versions of this. They have this conversation with a child. They have this conversation with one of their own parents. They have this conversation with a police officer. And they have this conversation with an old, good friend. See how that changes the tension and the ways that you build that tension in the scene. This is Writing Excuses, you are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.3: Chekov's Surprising Yet Inevitable Inverted Gun
 
 
Key points: Chekhov said if there's a gun on the mantle in Act I, it must be fired in Act III. Which means if you want something surprising yet inevitable later in the book, you need to set it up, make the promise, earlier! Structure, genre, audience, medium all shape the way you put the gun on the mantle. Look at your story holistically, especially during revisions. Do critical analysis of the media you consume, especially when the big reveal fails. Use expectations to create good anticipation and tension.  
 
[Season 17, Episode 3]
 
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Chekov's Surprising Yet Inevitable Inverted Gun.
[Kaela] 15 minutes long.
[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.
[Megan] And we're not that smart.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Kaela] I'm Kaela.
[Sandra] I'm Sandra.
[Megan] And I'm Meg.
 
[Transcriptionist's note: According to the sources I checked in Google, Chekhov is spelled with an h. So... I'll spell it that way in the remainder of the transcript.]
 
[Howard] This episode is about creating the thread which makes surprise inevitable. The title of the episode is an acknowledgement of the fact that most people use Chekhov's gun backwards. Chekhov was saying if there's a gun on the mantle in Act I, it must be fired in Act III. I suspect that Chekhov, who was a playwright, was basically conserving budget for the props master. It's like, "No, we're not going to spend any money putting a gun on the mantle unless the script calls for a gun to be fired in Act III." The way we use Chekhov's gun is the inversion. If a gun must be fired in Act III, it has to be on the mantle in Act I. We want it to be surprising, yet inevitable. That gun on the mantle makes a promise, but the only promise is that the gun matters. Maybe it's a distraction, maybe it's not loaded, maybe it'll misfire, maybe it'll get used as a club, maybe it's in front of a secret safe on the wall. What do we do, as writers, to put a gun on the mantle in order to correctly foreshadow, in order to correctly make a promise of something really cool that's going to happen later in the book?
[Sandra] This is one of the places where… This is like where the rubber hits the road. This is where you have to look at the expectations you're setting up with the very structure you picked, and the genre that you've picked, and the audience that you're aiming for, and the medium that you've chosen… All of those things play into the decision on how do I put a gun on the mantle. Because the answer is very different for an animated show versus a cozy mystery novel versus a picture book. To hail back to the example of a picture book, The Monster at the End of This Book, which we talked about a couple of episodes ago, you have Grover and you have the title… The title, right there, that's the thing on the mantle. The title promises you at the end of this book, there will be a monster. That has to be delivered upon. That is the perfect way to deliver the promise for a picture book, because your audience is 3 to 5. You really just have to put it right there in front of them and say, "Hey, look. I've promised you this." Then we're all going to spend the whole book talking about it. Whereas a much more subtle thing, for example, Dan's I Am Not a Serial Killer series, had a huge telegraphing problem because in I Am Not a Serial Killer, the first book, he had supernatural elements that don't really come into play in the story until a third or halfway through the book. So he had to figure out how to hang supernatural elements on the mantle right there at the front of the book so that when they showed up later, no one felt betrayed about it.
[Howard] There were places where the bookstores had shelved it with thrillers…
[Yes]
[Howard] Instead of with something that's in context, "Oh, this is probably supernatural as well." Yeah, there were folks disappointed at that. What are some other good examples of foreshadowing? Kaela, and then Meg.
[Kaela] So, I love knight books. Knight books for this does such a good job, like, there's an amazing twist… Spoilers, I'm warning you there's about to be spoilers. Plug your ears if you're really invested. But knight books, they have this whole tension and it's weaved into tension and satisfaction overall. That's what this is about, satisfaction. But the… You find out, you find these bits and pieces, these clues about the last girl who tried to escape this witch's house or apartment in this case. The boy is piecing it together, he finds out that she had a plan and he finds what her plan was and then he doesn't find any more information about it. So he's like, "Oh, she must have escaped." There's like all these little unicorn emblems about it, right? My favorite part is realizing that it seems like a logical solution, she must have escaped because she didn't write more. But when he runs away, when he does the plan, he runs out and he sees a wild unicorn where he thought… What he thought was the exit, a wild unicorn, and he's like, "Oh, my goodness." Then he finds out the witch that has captured him was the girl and that she took the place of the old witch. You're like, "Oh, my goodness." It doesn't… It's surprising, yet it completely makes sense with the way they had framed things. You're like, "Oh, my goodness. That was satisfying payoff without feeling like you had tricked me." I had… It was totally a possibility, I just hadn't considered it because in the way it was framed by the characters. Very logical reasoning where they're like, "Oh, it must be that. She escaped." You're like, "Oh, yeah, I buy that. That made sense to me."
[Howard] Meg.
[Megan] One of my favorite examples is the comedy film Hot Fuzz. Because I think it has the greatest number of setups and payoffs in any movie that I've ever seen.
[Howard] It is so tight.
[Megan] Yeah. Pretty much any line of dialogue or any prop that you see in the first half plays into the big final fight of the movie. It's about this big cop from London with all of these skills who has to move to a tiny town where really no crime ever happens. It's this fish out of water story, and just the writing and the editing of the film itself, like how the shots are used and cut together, is so fresh and intriguing that it's one of my all-time favorites.
[Howard] It is a masterpiece. My own high bar for foreshadowing is the BBC America 2016 Dirk Gently. In the first episode, we get touchstones for… There's a missing girl, there's a dog wandering around, there was a terrible murder in this apartment… In fact, we open on this murder scene that just doesn't make sense, and then a kitten walks across and traces little red footprints in the carpet and then a hand reaches down and scoops up the kitten. For the first half of the episode, we cut and intercut and nothing connects. Except Dirk Gently keeps saying, "I am a holistic detective, I function on this way in which everything is connected." At the end of that episode, Dirk Gently unzips his bag and pulls out the kitten, and we see in the bag a gorilla mask that we saw on a monitor, and we realize, "Oh, wait. Oh, wait. What's going on?" Then we roll credits on episode one and we head into episode two. It does this so well. I watched it numerous times and it's like Hot Fuzz, there is nothing wasted. Everything that is thrown down shows up later and it is connected to other things. For me, it functions kind of like a master class. Because I want to be able to do that. I want to be able to foreshadow by writing things that… Where every word matters and every word is telegraphing or foreshadowing something that is coming. Kaela.
 
[Kaela] Yes. I would agree with that. I think that one of the keys to getting this done is looking at your story holistically. Which, of course, the time for that is really revisions. I know I've mentioned that already, but it's because it's so important, like revisions is the time when you are tracing threads throughout your story, and making sure that they're evident, that they're there, and they have their payoff. If they're not there, how do you add them there, how do you build to this kind of full moment where it feels satisfying? Because if you don't have it running consistently through, it is not satisfying. It's just like, "Oh. Okay. Deus ex machina."
[Howard] Yup. Meg.
[Megan] I have a YouTube video to recommend from a YouTuber called Folding Ideas. He did, back in 2016, he did a half-hour dive into the film editing of the 2016 Suicide Squad film. Talking about how their visuals didn't set up what the story was actually trying to tell. There is one very specific instance that he brings up. There's one of the characters who has a pink unicorn stuffed animal. That's just something he has. In his opening title card, where you learn about this character, he has a thing for unicorns. Then, later on, you see him get… This is maybe 20, 30 minutes into the movie, you see him get thrown down in a scene, and the unicorn falls out of his jacket. He picks it up and he puts it back in his jacket. Then, in the final fight, there's a moment where I think someone throws a knife at him, and he catches it, right in the chest. But then he reaches and he pulls the knife out of his jacket, and it's in a wad of cash. The unicorn never shows up again. So they did a set up for it, they did a reminder with it, and then the unicorn vanished for the rest of the movie. So…
[Howard] Was the cash supposed to be like stuffed in the unicorn, and the stuffing came out and… We have no way to know that.
[Megan] No. It's just a big stack of dollar bills in the exact place where he tucked the unicorn in his jacket. This was a film that underwent a lot of re-shoots and a lot of re-editing. So it's possible it's a through line that either ended up on the cutting room floor or maybe the cash was supposed to be a joke. It's just… It's not quite clear. So this is an example of something that would be done in revisions, where you have your alpha or your beta reader being like, "What? What happened to the unicorn?" You can be like, "Oh, right. Right." Because [garbled] thousands of words and hundreds of pages, you may not remember everything you've already put in your story.
 
[Howard] Right. Let's pause for the book of the week. I've got this one. It is Deadbeat by Jim Butcher. This is the seventh of the Dresden Files novels. It's… It is a novel that puts necromancy out in front. The title is three layers of pun. I won't explain it. But the premise of necromancy as a power in which the older something is, the harder it is to bring back but the more powerful it is when it arrives. The way these things are foreshadowed delivers in a final sequence that is just so delightful. So very, very delightful. Deadbeat by Jim Butcher. I don't think you need to read the other six Dresden Files novels in order to pick this one up and enjoy it. So you should pick it up and enjoy it.
 
[Howard] Let's dive back in now. What are some tools for us for foreshadowing well, for correctly creating the thread that makes the surprise inevitable. How do we create that inevitability?
[Sandra] I think that one of the best tools that a writer could use is critical analysis of the media that you consume. Look at the ways that the show you're watching or the book you're reading, how it fails. If you are frustrated by the big reveal, then dig into why that is. Kaela and I were having a little conversation about Frozen. I want her to tell us…
[Howard] Oh, oh, oh. Let's talk about Frozen. Yup.
[Sandra] Frozen. Yes.
[Kaela] Okay. So, Frozen. What I… Now, Frozen does a lot of good things, so I'm not ragging on the movie here. But my least favorite part of it, and yet also my favorite part too, at that, is the Hans twist subplot, where he is like, "Oh, Anna, if only someone loved you." Then tries to kill her and take over her country all of a sudden. Now, the reason that gave me whiplash, other than the fact that I had, at the beginning, when I was going to watch the movie, joked, "\Huh. What if he was the bad guy?" Because I always joke about what things that would be bad twists.
[Chuckles]
[Kaela] And I was right about my joke bad twist. But one of the things that… Like, this is not necessarily a bad idea, it could have leaned into the scenes really well, it could have been a satisfying through line, except that it was almost intentionally deceptive. Which does not create a satisfying, a surprising yet inevitable. It is, "I cheated. Ha ha." in a story structure. So I think the big moment that I can pin it down to in that movie is when, after Hans and Anna meet, and she walks away, and he looks after her. It's just the audience watching Hans, Hans by himself in the water. He has no reason to be deceptive. He has no reason to be trying to put on a face. He goes, "Ahh," all dreamily and smiles after her. We know… We're supposed to believe that that means, "She's the perfect person for me to murder later. Ahh." It's not at all tonally consistent. It doesn't match. All those things later… Yup. Megan, yeah.
[Megan] I was just going to hundred percent agree with you on that. Not only that, but there's a music cue that also indicates this moment is romantic. Because in books, we can be in our character's head, but in movies, it's the lighting, music, and sound design that indicate what our character is thinking beyond just what the actor is doing with their face. Every single element of that scene is stacking up to tell us that this is a romantic man with good intentions.
[Kaela] Yeah. He's a gooey boy. Like a… It shows that evidence. Then… Now, everything in the middle of Frozen could be interpreted that he could be secretly plotting things. But his whole set up, there is no evidence to give us any belief that he is a plotter.
[Howard] So, categorization of this. The apologist might argue that what's been done here is like a red herring, but what I'm getting from you and what I personally believe is that it wasn't a red herring, this was the animators, this was the studio, deciding that we need to help Hans keep his secret by lying to the audience. That is not how you make a surprise inevitable, that is how you make a surprise annoying.
[Yeah. Chuckles.]
[Megan] Because you feel cheated.
[Howard] Yeah. Meg.
[Megan] We have very intelligent audiences, as well, that… Especially if you have someone who really likes to consume everything in their genre. It can be very hard to hide your gun on the mantle. I went to a theater production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame at the Hale Center Theatre Orem with my family a while ago. There's a bit where Quasimodo is showing Esmeralda around the bell tower. This is a small theater with a circular stage and people sitting around it. There's not a lot of space for set. But there's a point where he points up into the rafters and was like, "And that's where I keep the hot lead where I repair the bells." I just leaned over to my sister and I'm like, "So that's Chekhov's cauldron of hot lead, right?"
[Laughter]
[Megan] We had a little bit of a giggle in the theater waiting for it to come back in Act II.
[Kaela] Yeah, but the interesting thing is like I think that people try to subvert… Like, you see people try to subvert expectations because they know that these tricks are in quotation marks tricks of the trade. But in fact that can create… You can use them to create good anticipation instead. Like, when you're like, "That's where I keep the hot lead," and I'm like, "Ooo, I hope the bad guy gets melted with lead." It actually makes you invested if you're doing it right. When you're like, "Hey, I'm not telegraphing the fact that oh, maybe it almost fell on the guy this one time before it officially becomes a thing." But that it can be… You can use it for tension, you can use it for anticipation. If you're looking at it right.
[Howard] That's why I describe the possibility that the gun on the wall has a safe behind it. So that we have this inevitable moment, somebody goes to lift the gun off the mantelpiece. But instead of lifting it, they pull down on it and the panel slides to one side and they open a safe.
[Megan] I think one thing… We want surprise and inevitable. But if you can only hit one, hit inevitable rather than surprising.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Megan] Because that is going to deliver a more satisfying experience for your reader, even if they guessed this once.
[Howard] We'll talk about red herrings in our next episode. Predictability is better than abject disappointment.
[Chuckles. Right.]
[Howard] To my mind. I could be wrong. I could be wrong. We've got…
[It's time for homework]
[Howard] I just love talking about this stuff, and we could just keep going, but we're almost 20 minutes in again.
 
[Howard] Homework. I think this is…[Megan] Meg.
[Megan] I got this. In your current work in progress, pin down a person, a place, or a thing you threw in for flavor at the beginning of your story, but didn't plan to use again. Write a scene for them to come back in the final act of your story in an unexpected way.
[Yes. Satisfaction.]
[Howard] I love it. I love it. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.40: Nesting Threads in the M.I.C.E. Quotient
 
 
Key points: Nesting threads, or first in, last out. Symmetry! When you close a thread, there is a tension drop. You need two or more threads to give most stories an interesting dynamic. You don't have to use them all, and pay attention to how much weight you give each one. Pairing M.I.C.E. thread types can work well. Be careful about braiding too many, though.
 
[Season 16, Episode 40]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, talking about the M.I.C.E. Quotient, Nesting Threads.
[C.L.] 15 minutes long.
[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[C.L.] I'm C. L.
[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.
[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette, with Elsie, who is purring very loudly.
[Dan] Hello, Elsie.
 
[Dan] I am very excited for this episode. We have been circling the concept of nesting threads for five episodes now. Here we are in episode six. We get to dig into it in detail. So, what do we need to know that we haven't already talked about with nesting threads?
[Mary Robinette] All right. So, nesting threads is basically first in, last out. It works because of the length of time that we have to invest emotional energy into a problem. So, there's a couple of things to know about the way people are wired. I am going to say that this is specifically Western storytelling style. There's many different traditions, but the way we are trained is that when a quest… When we ask a question, we want an answer to it. Right? We also want symmetry. Humans tend… And babies tend to respond really well to symmetry. We like recognizing patterns. So it is helpful to have this kind of mirroring thing happen in your story, by having, like, if you begin milieu and then you open an inquiry, to close the inquiry and then you close the milieu. People recognize patterns. The other piece, and this is the more important piece, I think, is the amount of emotional energy that you've invested into something. So going back to my idea of elastics, the longer you stretch an elastic, the more tension it's going to be on it. So if you got something that you start to stretch on page 1 and you don't release it until page 597 if you're Brandon, then that's going to have… There's going to be a lot of tension remaining on that. Whereas if you have another thread that you start on page 100, you have 100 fewer pages to spread that over the span. So knowing that, what happens is if you release the tension on the one… That longest thread before… So, let's say my longest one is milieu, and I release that before I release the one on inquiry, what happens is that there's a tension drop. So when I get my… When I get that other answer, I haven't had as much time to invest in it. Thinking about Wizard of Oz, which you have all watched now, hopefully, when you get to the end, we close things out in sequence. That Dorothy exits Oz… She gets the answer, ruby slippers will carry you home, she exits Oz, she gets back to Kansas, everything is fine, she didn't have to live in a… Kansas farms are all yay and happy. If you remember in the witch's castle when Dorothy is looking at the hourglass, and we see Aunt Em sitting on the porch… Or looking around frantically going, "Dorothy? Dorothy?" That exists to remind you that the status quo is still disrupted. If instead in that hourglass what we see is Aunt Em sitting on the porch, everything about the farm has been restored, status quo is reestablished, that closes that event thread early. So when Dorothy gets out of Oz and goes back to Kansas, it's no big deal. You get a dramatic tension drop because the status quo… We already know that the status quo is restored. There's no… There's no doubt about that in the reader's mind. So that's why nesting threads are very… And thinking about this first in, last out concept is very useful for maintaining that tension through the story. I'm talking about the frame of the story, not the stuff that's happening in the middle.
[Dan] Yeah. Let me use another example. I'm going to talk about my book, Ghost Station, again. So it begins with this… It's about spies in Berlin in 1961. It begins with the message that comes in from a double agent that is gibberish nonsense. So the main thrust of the novel is figuring out what is actually going on. Why was this message weird? What does that mean? Etc. Then it hits a point where the main character and another one he's working with cross over the wall into East Berlin. Then it becomes a milieu section, inside of the larger inquiry section. They are trying to survive in East Berlin and then escape back out again. While inside… Big spoilers for this book… The person that he is working with attacks him. It has this event of, "Oh, no. The person I thought I could trust, I no longer can trust." There's this event that takes place inside of there. Then we tie them off in reverse order. He learns that, "Oh, yes, that person actually I can trust. There were very good reasons for that attack." Then he escapes out of East Berlin. Then he solves the overall problem of what's going on and what this message means. Using what you were just saying, Mary Robinette, if we had resolved those in reverse order. If he had, for example, solved the entire problem of the message and gotten that taken care of while he was still in East Berlin, then it would feel very unsatisfying. Like, well, yes, you've solved this problem, you dope, but now you're stuck on the wrong side. It would be this kind of dragged out ending of, well, the real story is over but he's still in a pickle and he's gotta get himself home and we have a few more obnoxious chapters of that. I had not thought of it in those terms, until you described it that way. But that makes perfect sense as to why you need to close the brackets in the same order you opened them.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We've… You've all seen films or things where you're like, "Ah, it's over. No, no, still going." Usually that's because they're closing things out in the wrong order.
[Dan] Yeah. That is really interesting.
 
[C.L.] I was just going to say that there is something that I have been trying very hard to hold back while you've been going through the previous episodes. It's this. I'm thinking maybe that calling a particular story simply a milieu story or an inquiry story, etc., can't really accurately describe a story because you do need a second ingredient to give the story kind of like… An interesting dynamic?
[Mary Robinette] So, yes, C. It is exactly that. That you have all of these things going on all the time. With like my book, Ghost Talkers, which is coincidentally our book of the week, that has multiple things going on in it. It is an inquiry story. It's a murder mystery, whodunit. But it's also an event story. Because it's a wartime novel. There's constant status quo disruptions. And it is a character story, because the character is learning to… Learning things about themselves and how they move through the world. But it's primarily event inquiry. Those are the major drivers. This helps me… The M.I.C.E. Quotient helps me understand what things, what elements to bring into that story and which ones to focus on. It helps me understand how to end it in a way that was going to be satisfying. While, at the same time, trying to do things that were fulfilling these promises, but hopefully in unexpected ways.
 
[Mary Robinette] But, Ghost Talkers, for people… Since it is book of the week. It is probably actually my favorite of my novels, and it is the one that the fewest people have read.
[Dan] It is actually my favorite of your novels.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you. It…
[C.L.] I love Ghost Talkers.
[Mary Robinette] I went on book tour… My book tour started on election day in 2016, and weirdly… Weirdly!
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] There was just not a lot of interest in books at that point. I don't know what was going on them. But it is a World War I spy novel in which mediums work as advertised. The soldiers are trained, conditioned, that when they die, they have to report in as ghosts. So you have the Spirit Corp. Then things go wrong. Someone gets killed, and they aren't supposed to. Not that anyone is necessarily supposed to get killed, but… You know what I mean. But it kicks off this murder mystery. Then it's a look for who the betrayal… The person who… That's the spy and the saboteur is. So World War I spy novel with ghosts is basically it. Ghost Talkers. 
 
[Mary Robinette] But when you listen to it or read it, one of the things that I think you'll notice is that I could have weighted it differently. Because all of those elements are there, and I could have made different choices about where I was putting the emphasis in the story. That would have shifted dramatically the direction of the story and the way the ending plays out.
[Charlotte] That's great. I mean, what I'm hearing is that you can have as many M.I.C.E. threads as you want, and actually maybe it's a good idea to have more than one for a little bit of spice, a little bit of texture as C was talking about. I remember, when I was plotting my novel, I was like I'm going to… It starts with character, then it leads into event, and then it goes into milieu, and then it goes into inquiry. I remember talking it through with you, Mary Robinette, and you were like, "You don't have to have them all." I was like, "Oh. I don't?" So maybe it's a question of how many and also what weight you put on each quotient?
[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes, exactly. It's… It is how heavily you weight them. Because you can… Like, all of these things will exist in the story. It's just how much of them are you letting drive? That's… That is the thing that is tricky to figure out. So what I have found when you're doing this is that one of the things that works well is to pair disparate M.I.C.E. thread types. So one of the things that will happen, particularly in multiple POV books, you've got one major plot and then the other one feels extraneous. You're annoyed every time you have to switch over to the B plot. What I find is that frequently when that is happening, it is because they are the same M.I.C.E. thread. So that they are… Or the same M.I.C.E. type. That they are, say, both events. But one of the events is lower stakes than the other. So it is difficult to care as much. So it always feels like a tension drop. Whereas, if you have one event and one character one, they can intersect each other in different ways. But the other thing that they can do is that they can have comparable stake levels. So that when you move from one to the other, you don't have that same tension drop.
 
[Dan] Would you also suggest or recommend that when you are nesting them, not so much multiple POV's, but nested inside of each other, that they be different types of elements as well? If you've got a milieu inside of a different milieu, it can start to feel repetitive. We have to escape from this place, and now we have to escape from this other place, with no variation in tone.
[Mary Robinette] So, the… Yes and no. Mostly what happens when you do that is that it just reads as an extension of the original problem. So in Star Wars, the rescuing the princess, they have to get in, they have to get the princess, they have to get back out. While they're in there, Storm Troopers… Surprise! So they have to escape by jumping into a garbage… A chute. Does that work? Yes, it does. But it is a garbage chute. So now they have another milieu within the larger milieu that they have to escape. So that… That's just a long series of obstacles… Consequences, obstacles, that's just an extension of that original one.
[Dan] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] So that's… Actually, blowing up the Death Star itself is, we have to get in, drop this package off… Which is this bomb, and then get back out without being killed. I mean, it's still, that's… It's… There's just a lot of milieu driving that. But that is not, I would say, the major driver. What are you thinking, C?
[C.L.] I was just thinking about like the idea of having like the two milieu stories in one. Because I was thinking about like the Lord of the Rings where it's like basically they're going on a journey to reverse heist a ring into a volcano. But, like, the first part of the story is about them leaving Hobbiton. It's just like the segments of, like, we're in a place, we're going to leave a place. We're traveling across a place in order to get to a place. I think it works. Generally. What I was thinking about was you want the variety of story type things going on in order to have some variety, but at the same time, I always try to think of my different plot threads as they have to be braidable. Like, they have to… Like, if I have an inquiry thread and I have a character thread, then each one has to affect the other one.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[C.L.] So it's just like two strands twisted together, like a rope. But if I add a third one, then it has to… Then things get a little bit more complicated, because each one has to affect the other two. Then, if you add a fourth one…
[Chuckles]
[C.L.] Like, lots of people know how to do three strand braids, but not a lot of people know how to do four strand braids.
[Mary Robinette] Yup. Exactly. That's a great analogy. We're going to be talking about that when we get to the next one, which is the middles and conflicts. We're going to be talking about how to braid the stuff in the middle. The nesting stuff is mostly like where do you start the thing and where do you end it. But, yeah, you're exactly right, the more you layer in there, the harder it is to juggle all of those things.
 
[Mary Robinette] So. This brings us to our homework. Take your fairytale. What I want you to do is I want you to look at two M.I.C.E. threads. You're going to… Now you get to do it with two of them. Okay? So maybe you decide that you're going to do character and event, or you might decide that you're going to do milieu and inquiry, or milieu and character. Whatever. So I want you to figure that out and nest it neatly, so that you begin with character, then… So, Goldilocks is tired of being treated like a child, then she enters the Bears' house, does some investigating, and decides that actually maybe she should go home, so she goes home and then she's like, "I am actually happy being a child and my home is much nicer than the place I explored." So we have this very nice little nested thing. So you're going to do a two strand thing like that. Then the thing that I want you to do is I want you to take those tags and I want you to invert them. So, in mine, Goldilocks would enter the Bears' house, and while she's in the Bears' house, she would make a discovery about herself because of her exploration that would then cause her to go home. As opposed to the other way around. So, your job is to do a two strand version of whatever your fairytale is. Then, after you've written that out… You don't have to write the entire story, you can just bullet point it. Flip that, flip the tags, and do it the other way. See what that does to where the conflicts land and how the beginning and end feel.
[Dan] And you are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.28: Common First-Page Mistakes
 
 
Key Points: Don't start with a character waking up. These little moments of life don't really tell us what the book is about, or even much about the character. Your opening should ground the reader and orient them. Don't start with dialogue. We don't know who the person is or where they are. Be aware, readers take your beginning literally, so avoid wild metaphors. Keep our readers going forward as fast as possible. Make your opening a trail of breadcrumbs. What kind of questions do you want the reader asking? Don't start with a fight. We don't know what the stakes are, or what's going on. We don't care about the character yet. Action is only exciting if there is real tension to it, a real threat to it. 
 
[Season 16, Episode 28]
 
[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, Common First-Page Mistakes.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dongwon] Okay. This week, we are talking about some of the most common mistakes that we all see in first pages of books. So, there's a few things that are sort of talked about a lot in workshops, among agents, among a lot of the writing advisors. But we wanted to break down a little bit why these are… Why these don't work as places to start your book, even though they are sort of natural places that you think might be a good way to open. So, I think the first one is a really classic comment that you hear a lot, which is, "Don't start your story with a character waking up." We see this a lot of a character coming out of sleep, waking up in bed, and again, it's this thing of starting the story at the beginning because you think, "Oh. My character's going to have a big, exciting day. I should start where the day starts." Which is them getting out of bed, seeing themselves in the mirror, so that they can describe themselves, get a cup of coffee, drive to work. These are all natural things, because it's what we think about as a person's life. Because a lot of a person's life is these little moments. The problem is, as a reader, you don't know anything about what the story is. By the time you're done with that scene, you have no information about the book. You may know a little bit about the character. But these also aren't moments that are really defining who a character is and what they care about under pressure.
[Mary Robinette] Right. Because one of the things that you're dealing with in the morning is that you're disoriented. Right? Part of your goal in that opening is to ground your reader and to help them feel oriented. But a character's natural state… I mean, your natural state in the morning is disoriented. The things that you're thinking about are not the things that are most important to you through the day. They're just like, "Where are my pants?"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's not… I mean, I'm sure that there is out there somewhere someone who will write a really compelling story about where are my pants…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But that's…
[Dan] But it's not you.
[Mary Robinette] It's not…
[Dan] I mean, I do so many chapter critiques, and I teach so many classes, I am astonished at the sheer number of people who will tell me to my face, "Yes, I know that we're not supposed to do this. But I'm doing it differently." No, you're not. Like, that's why we tell people not to do this. The odds of you, on your very first novel, being the one who cracks the code and is able to do this cliché in a brilliant and innovative way… It's just safer to stay away from these kinds of things.
[Dongwon] Of course, the problem with any kind of writing advice is there is someone out there…
[Dan] Yes.
[Dongwon] Who did do it and it's great.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] Odds are, it's not you. Maybe it is. You can try. But then don't be frustrated when it doesn't work.
[Mary Robinette] So, like, for instance, there's a book that's just come out, which is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. His character literally… It starts with his character waking up in a literal white room. But he has reasons for doing that. Like, this is one of the things, it's like when you do something like that, you are buying a thing. He's buying something very specific with that. He is buying a character who has been in a medically induced coma in spaceflight. Most of the fun of the book is figuring out… Like, all of the book, really, the fun of it is him figuring out what's going on. So, he's buying a specific thing. However, I'm also pretty darned convinced that if that manuscript landed on an average agent's desk, that they would bounce off of that. You have to buy trust from the reader in some way. Starting with something that… Something like that on your first go round is just not safe. Like, Andy Weir has bought trust because he's Andy Weir. Not because of the actual writing on the page. Which is not fair, but it's true.
[Howard] The first lines, the first page of The Martian were outstanding. They grabbed me straight out of the gate. The book convinced me that I am… I am willing to pick up more Andy Weir books and read well beyond the first page before making decisions.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] That is a luxury that debut authors simply don't have.
[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is that he's using all of the other tool. He's using voice and he's created an unusual setting that the character is waking up in. 
 
[Mary Robinette] But there are other mistakes, too. It's not just waking up. There's starting with dialogue. This is another example of a thing that I see a lot of people do. You can do it. Like, the book that I started… I mentioned last week starts with a line of dialogue. The problem with starting with a line of dialogue is that we do not hear a voice without attaching things to it in the real world. It's incredibly rare to hear a voice and have no sense of who the person is. But when you start with a line of unattributed dialogue, you have no sense of who that person is, you don't know where you are. So…
[Dongwon] The thing that I… Oh, I'm sorry.
[Mary Robinette] Go on. Oh. What I was going to say was that the reason that it works in The Last Watch and then also Ender's Game begins with just straight dialogue. No dialogue tags at all. Very, very short. But what it is telling you is that these characters are not important. The subject of the conversation is the thing that is important. In J. S. Dewes's, the subject of the conversation was the main character. In Ender's Game, the subject of the conversation was Ender. It's very, very fast and it gets you on and it launches you. What were you going to say, Dongwon?
[Dongwon] Oh, the thing that I notice most of the time is that when it does start with that line of dialogue, I immediately forget what that line was. It's almost invisible to me. Nine times out of 10, because I have… There's nothing for me to attach it to. Right? The important thing to remember is you have spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours thinking about those characters, this world, your plot, all these elements. I, as reader, coming to your story for the first time, know exactly zero things about the book that you're giving me. I have nothing to attach anything to. So anything you present to me, A, I'm going to take it very literally, so be careful of wild metaphors in your first paragraph, because I will take them as real actual things that you are saying. Like, if you say this person is a duck, I'm going to think that person is a dock, even if what you meant was metaphorically, this person walks and talks like a duck. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. For instance, Gregor Samsa? Not actually a cockroach.
[Dongwon] Debatable.
[Chuckles, laughter]
[Dongwon] But, yeah, so starting with a line of dialogue with nothing to attach it to in terms of character or setting or story… It just vanishes. It disappears into some recess of my brain, never to be seen again. So I have to go back to that later to get context for wait, why are they talking about this? Oh, right. Somebody said something before. The last thing you ever want your reader doing on the first page is having to go back to the top again.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Dongwon] You want them going forward as fast as you can make them.
[Dan] Let me give an example of this. Sometimes… So, like in the example that Mary Robinette gave last time, I think the first line of dialogue was "Spread your legs and bend over." Right? Which by itself is very eye-catching, it is very compelling, because it's shocking. That kind of gives it a pass and makes it work, because it makes it more memorable. But… So, consider one of my very favorite first lines of all time, which is Paradise by Toni Morrison. It's narration. The narrator says, "They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." It's incredibly shocking. It's compelling. But because it's narration, it's easy to understand. If you take that exact same line, they shoot the white girl first, and you put it in quotation marks, what you're doing is adding a bunch of extra layers on top of it that the reader doesn't understand. We don't know who's saying it. We don't know why they're saying it. We don't know who they're saying it to or in what situation. Which means we understand it far less then if it was just the exact same words, but as narration.
 
[Mary Robinette] That is a great example. Speaking of first lines, let me use this to segue to our book of the week, which is something I'm going to talk about. This is a literary magazine that I think you all should pick up a copy of. This is the place that I made my first couple of sales. It is called, literally, The First-Line. thefirstline.com The premise of the magazine, it's a quarterly. They… Each issue of the magazine, every story in that issue has the exact same first-line. Because their premise is that if you hand call me Ishmael to Mark Twain, you do not get Moby Dick. You get something totally, totally different. So it's a really good example of what a first-line… Like, how important a first-line is, but also how much the rest of the story comes from the specific author. Like, the first-line is incredibly important, and also, not important at all.
 
[Mary Robinette] To segue us out of that, I'm going to talk about a literary horror story, which is that my second novel, Glamour in Glass, when it came out, they accidentally omitted the opening line of the novel.
[Ooo]
[Mary Robinette] So, this is a thing that we… I had done all of the things. I had gone back… I labored. I am not kidding. There is a handwritten page that is just me rewriting that first-line over and over again to get exactly all of the beats that I wanted. They left it out. For reasons, not on purpose, it was a… For reasons. We'll just leave it at that.
[Dan] Where did you bury the bodies?
[Mary Robinette] You know, we have 12 acres.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] And there's a gully. So…
[Dongwon] I feel that story in my bones every time I hear it. Goof.
[Mary Robinette] But the thing is, if you don't know that first line is missing, the book actually plays just fine. It breaks me inside, because I labored over it, and also because my closing line is an intentional mirror of the opening line. But one of the things that I did as kind of part of that how do we deal with this was that I posted a thing on my website of the second line to books and asked people to guess which book this came from. People were able to guess. So the thing to understand, I think, about openings is that it is a series of breadcrumbs. The mistake that a lot of authors will make is that that first thing that they put down on the page isn't a breadcrumb leading to the next thing. There's no logical causal progression. They're just trying for I'm going to try to catch… I'm going to hook the reader with the shocking thing, and then we don't go on from there.
[Dongwon] I think that's really the argument with dialogue is it doesn't give you a base to build off of. It will connect at some point, but in the example were talking about, in terms of The Last Watch, it connects so cleanly to the next line that you do get that breadcrumb effect. The way I think about it is you have a first-line that leads to the first paragraph which leads to the first page which leads to the first scene. If you can get them past that threshold, you have them, at least for the first chunk of your book. You've got them into your book at that point. So if you think about that progression as sort of a clean step up into where you want to get to, I think that can be really helpful.
 
[Howard] I also like thinking about it in terms of the kinds of questions I want the reader to be asking themselves. Even if they're not consciously articulating those questions. And how swiftly and satisfactorily I can answer those questions. If the first line of the book is dialogue, the reader's question to my mind should be something along the lines of, "Why would someone say that?" Then I immediately am told why that is being said, and it is an answer that raises another question. "Oh, that makes perfect sense. But what's going to happen to…" And now I'm hooked. So the first line of dialogue can work that way. But, yeah, if the first line of dialogue, if the question I'm asking is "Uh. Who is talking? What's even going on?" That is way too broad a question. I want that first line to ask me a narrower question, ask the reader a narrower question, so that I can answer it specifically.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I'm going to talk about, just to segue us a little bit away from verbal dialogue, is also physical dialogue. Wesley Chu talks about combat as being nonverbal dialogue, that it is a conversation. So when you start with a fight scene without telling us why we are in the fight scene, it's like coming in on two people having a conversation without understanding what any of the stakes are. So another very common mistake that you will see is, again, you want to start… You want to start with the action, so you start with people having a fight. The reason that James Bond films can start with a cold open of Bond doing the things is because we know that we're in a James Bond film. Bond is already an established character.
[Howard] And the cold open is the… dun dada dun dun... dun dun dun... The music that tells us why we are here. It's…
[Mary Robinette] Yes…
[Howard] That opening romp isn't quite that cold.
[Dongwon] I think one of the challenges of starting with a fight scene… People think, "Oh, I need to start in media res, and that's going to be exciting." But we don't know the character yet, we don't care about the character yet, so if this character dies, I genuinely don't care. Or if they get shot, I'm like, "Okay. Cool. What's this book about?" Right? So, I think you need to give us something that we really care about in some way to attach to the character and really pull us into the story that way. So I think people think action is a great way to start because it's exciting, but action's only exciting if there's real tension to it, if there's real threat to it. There's no threat if there is no character that we know yet. So I think it can be a really tricky place to do it I think with all three of these examples, as we're talking about it, it's sort of become clear as we talk about it and when we get in-depth with it, is that these aren't fatal errors, but they are starting a book on hard [mode]. Right? It is possible to do these things, but you've set yourself a very high threshold that you need to clear in terms of your need to communicate to the reader knowingly… You kind of need that wink, wink, nudge, nudge, in those opening pages of I know I'm not supposed to do this, but I'm doing it anyways, and you're going to trust me, because I'm so competent at doing this thing. So it's all about building that trust in the reader in that opening scene.
[Mary Robinette]
[Dongwon] Go ahead.
[Mary Robinette] In fact, building trust is what we're going to be talking about next week. So, before we… Because I can feel myself wanting to talk about how to do that, right now. But why don't we give them homework, which is a very simple assignment this time.
 
[Dongwon] Your homework is make sure you haven't done these. Go back to your first page and consider where you're opening. Go back to that first scene and consider am I doing these mistakes. Maybe not necessarily one of these specific things. But think about the principles we started to talk about here in terms of making sure we have a character we can attach to. Making sure we have context, and that we're not coming into the story disoriented and confused. Really examine that first page and see am I making these mistakes. If not, then how do I make sure that we're moving forward from here?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It really is my character… Have I given the audience something to orient? Have I given them a breadcrumb about what the future story is going to be like? We'll talk next week about how to build trust with your reader. But right now… You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.21: Writing about Children with Shannon and Dean Hale
 
 
Key Points: Writing about children can be difficult, and you may stray into caricature. How do you avoid making fun of them? First, don't just transcribe what kids actually say. Try to give the sense of being children without hitting the reader over the head, especially in dialogue. Children focus on different things than adults. If you add grammatical issues, be sparing. Kids are sometimes overly precise, applying a rule everywhere. Why are you writing about a child, focus on the bits that enrich the story. Looking at the world as a child does can let you portray the fresh wonder of the world. The life experience, and stakes, are very different for children. When the protagonist is a child, or a teen, the stakes rise, and the tension, too. Consider kids as foreign visitors, trying to avoid faux pas. Teenagers are spies in adult country! Teens are not little adults, they are trying to figure out the transition from child to adult. Don't minimize their feelings. To write about kids or teens, you need to respect them. Pay attention to what is important for the story, and the relationships, how other characters react to what the children say and do. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 21.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing about Children.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Shannon] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Brandon] And we have special guests, Shannon and Dean Hale.
[Shannon] Hello!
[Dean] Hi. I'm Dean.
[Shannon] And I'm Shannon.
[Brandon] Thanks, you guys, for coming on the podcast with us.
[Shannon] Yeah, it's great.
[Dean] Thank you.
 
[Brandon] You're going to tell us how to write about children.
[Shannon] Okay, let's do it.
[Dean] Awesome.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So, this has been surprisingly hard when I've done it. I'm never sure if I'm going too far and it's straying into caricature. Like, I can usually tell for an adult when I've gone too far in a vernacular or a voice or things like this. When you're approaching writing about children, how do you keep away from making it… It almost seems silly to me. Does that make sense? Like, I'm making fun of them rather than actually writing like them.
[Shannon] It's actually… I've written… Where I've taken direct transcrip… Directly transcribed what my children have said, and tried to put it into a story. Our editors are always like, "That's too extreme."
[Dean] Nobody would be like that.
[Shannon] "No one talks like that. Come on!"
[Dean] What are these, monsters?
[Shannon] So you can't actually… Actually, I did write what I thought was a humorous slice of life story about our four-year-old twins. The editor legitimately thought it was a horror story.
[Laughter]
[Shannon] I was very… The notes were very confused. I was like, "Why is she saying… Why is she reacting…" Then, finally, she referred to it as a house of hell. I was like, "Oh, she thought it was a horror story. That's just our everyday."
[Chuckles]
[Shannon] But it is… You can't do exactly what kids do. Just like… But it's true with any characters. Dialogue would be really boring if we just transcribed what people actually say. So you have to get the sense that they're a child without hitting the reader over the head. Particularly in dialogue.
 
[Mary Robinette] What are some of the markers in dialogue that you find for believable child language? Is it a difference in vocabulary, sentence structure, con…
[Shannon] You know… First of all, I would say children are very observant about things that adults don't care about. So for… Just what they talk about is going to be different. That can be so much fun. What does this kid… What are they interested in, what would they notice? So there are these non sequiturs that just kind of pop up. It's a great thing for humor. I would say also, just as with any character, if you want to have like grammatical issues for the kid, pick like one or two and stick with those. Don't hit the reader over the head with, like, weird grammar things constantly. Just have that consistency be for that character. Just like you would for an adult character who might have a certain quirk with the way they speak. You don't… You wouldn't do it every single sentence because it gets to be too much.
[Mary Robinette] When I was doing the puppet theater, we were often… I mean, the protagonist was always a child. One of the things that I found was that… Also, going into schools a lot, was that kids tended to be overly precise sometimes. That they would have learned a rule and they wouldn't actually have any nuance about how the rule was applied.
[Brandon] I've noticed this in my children. This is absolutely true for almost all kids I've met. That they… You tell them something. They want that to be the way the world works. They now understand the world. Then, when you immediately violate it, because of the wiggle room we give ourselves, they call you on it. I remember when my… He was only like three or four. We had talked about certain words that we don't say. Then we went to a Disney movie and they said like one word that was like this. Then, later on, that kid was describing the movie to my father… His grandpa… And said, "Don't go see that movie, grandpa. It is filthy."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] It's like a Pixar movie, right? I'm like, "Oh. Okay. Yeah."
[Shannon] I actually wrote a chapter book that was based on our twins, and really tried to be true to what it felt like to be that age. My… I sent it to someone who didn't know it was about these twins. My response was that the character was unlikable and nobody would be interested in this child.
[Laughter]
[Dean] Your children are unlikable and no one is interested in them.
[Mary Robinette] She's also living in a hell house.
[Dean] Right.
[Shannon] But it can be too much. You don't… Like, too much reality, nobody wants. So what do… Why a child? Why are you writing about a child, first of all? What are they bringing to it? So you focus on those little quirks, those little bits that can just enrich a story.
[Dean] The best part for me about writing from… As a child, because that's kind of where I go, is get into that headspace, is just looking at the world in a different way. It makes the story somehow more interesting. It's like that quote from… Was it GK Chesterton? That's about the dragon and the… I can't remember how it goes, but the idea that…
[Shannon] That… The quote you're talking about is GK Chesterton says that fantasy doesn't tell you if dragons exist. Fantasy shows you that dragons can be defeated. I think you're thinking of a different quote.
[Dean] No, I am… I'm thinking of the door one. That there's a…
[Shannon] Oh… Yes. So… Like a kid of 10…
[Dean] Go, quote.
[Shannon] Is interested in reading a story that says, "Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon." A kid of four is interested to read a story that says, "Tommy opened a door."
[Dean] It's finding…
[Shannon] Everything is still so new.
[Dean] Finding the wonder in those things that are sort of rote and old is… For… As a writer, is awesome. I mean, you can be able to kind of get that reinvigorated look at something from the other side.
[Dan] Yeah, that's what I did with Zero G, which was the middle grade that I put out. The plot is… I always pitch it as Home Alone in Space, but really, it's Die Hard in space with a 12-year-old. It's Die Hard if John McClane were super interested in how fun it was to jump around in antigravity, right? Like, that's his focus. He's always either trying to have fun or he's hiding from bad guys. Because those are the cool things that a kid is going to care about in that situation.
[Shannon] Yes.
 
[Brandon] So, when we were talking about this ahead of time, you mentioned the stakes are really different for children in life, which really struck me. Can you expand upon that? How are stakes different for children? How does that influence writing about them?
[Shannon] Children don't have the same… Well, life experience. But, just, they don't have as much in their toolbox. They don't understand how things work, they don't have the confidence, they don't have experience, they don't have a credit card, you know, they don't have… So when they're put in a situation, it's going to be totally different than if an adult were in it. You can get so much tension by having the protagonist be a kid. And a teen as well. Also, even if the main character isn't a child, if you insert a child into a situation, the stakes go through the roof. Immediately. Oh, we've got to save these people. Yeah, let's do that. Oh, and there's a three-year-old about to fall off the bridge. [OOOOH!] I mean, it just…
[Dean] We did that with Squirrel Girl. Like, we were like, "We need more tension here."
[Shannon] Let's add a baby.
[Dean] Yes.
[Laughter]
[Dean] That's exactly what we did.
[Shannon] She's not just saving the day, she's saving a specific baby. Suddenly, it's like, "Yes, we need to do this immediately." I was… We were just watching Adventures in Babysitting last night with our kids. I was trying to explain to them, because I'm a nerdy writer mom that's explaining story to my children in the middle of a movie…
[Dean] Mom, we're watching.
[Shannon] I know. But, I'm like, "Do you understand why…"
[Dean] Pause.
[Shannon] If this was about adults, it wouldn't matter, because…
[Dean] Can we watch it now, Mom?
[Shannon] They've got a credit card, they can just get a new tire. But, added to the fact that all these things are happening, is the fact that they can't let their parents know. They can't make the most logical easiest way… Choice to get out of this situation because they can't let their parents know. An adult wouldn't have that same situation. So, the stakes are higher, the tension's higher, and then [you opt] for fun.
 
[Mary Robinette] Sorry, it just occurred to me… One of the things that I often say, like, when I'm talking about kids is that… What you said, that they just lack experience. But I think of them as foreign visitors. Like, when you come… When you go to a foreign country, what you want is someone to explain what the rules are so that you don't make any social faux pas. So, like, when I go into… When we would go into schools doing school visits with the puppets, the mob mentality was the thing you kind of had to fight. Because they would… Like, if one kid did it, everyone would assume that that was the thing you should do. But it occurs to me that teenagers are actually like spies who have come into adult country and don't want anyone to know…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That they're from the outside or child land. So they're desperately trying to not get caught is still being children.
[Shannon] Yes. Oh, teens are… I love writing about teens. I think a mistake a lot of writers make is they don't want… First of all, they don't want to be annoying. They don't want their character to be annoying. So they just make them into adults. They say they're 16, but they really just behave like adults. They're missing so much great story matter there. What matters to a teenager? What are they going through in their lives? But in addition to the science fiction adventure or whatever you're writing, you've also got that element of this is a person trying to figure out… Navigate that transition from child to adult. That's really interesting.
[Dean] I think one of the things that we do as adults, or at least that I do, is tend to believe or to minimize the feelings of the kids, or minimize the experience.
[Right]
[Dean] To believe here they are going through this thing that… [Adolescence?] Oh, that's ridiculous. How is that difficult? But if I go into writing it that way, it rings weird. But the kids are feeling with the same intensity or more than we would if we were put in… If we were plucked out of our familiar environment and put into an environment where we don't know what the rules are.
[Mary Robinette] It's stressful.
[Shannon] That's a good point, that you have to absolute… When you're writing about kids or teens, you absolutely have to respect children and teenagers. You can't…
[Dean] It can be hard.
[Shannon] It will come off as false if you go in thinking and judging them and being like annoyed with them and wanting to just make them older. Come in respecting their point of view or it will be false.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dean, you're going to tell us about The Princess In Black.
[Dean] The Princess In Black is a phenomenal…
[Shannon] Phenomenal.
[Laughter]
[Dean] Yes, it's a… Let me see if I think of another word that you can say. No, it… What's the type of book that we are calling it? It's like transitional chapter book about a g… Princess Magnolia who is a princess and loves being a princess and walks around in pretty dresses. But when the monster alarm rings, she becomes the princess in black, and puts on a black costume and goes out and fights evil. As a superhero would. There are many books in the series, some of them…
[Shannon] There are seven so far. Yes.
[Dean] Oh, and if… Wait…
[Shannon] [Gorgeously?] illustrated by LeUyen Pham.
[Dean] How close are we to Easter? We're past Easter. Because I was going to recommend, there's a hungry bunny horde book if you're celebrating Lagomorph Liberation or some other kind of…
[Chuckles]
[Dean] Day.
[Shannon] [A bunny horde book] belongs in every Easter basket.
[Dean] That's true. That's true. So, The Princess In Black by Shannon and Dean Hale. Illustrated by…
[Shannon and Dean] LeUyen Pham.
[Dean] Something…
[Brandon] We love these books in our household. My sons just went straight through the whole series eagerly, so… They're fantastic.
[Shannon] Yay. Thank you.
[Dean] More coming.
[Dan] I purposely did not tell my children that I was hanging out with you guys today because they would have just blown a gasket. So.
 
[Shannon] I have to tell a quick story. One time I… My son borrowed a bunch of books from a friend. Several of them were Sanderson books. We were going out to dinner with the Sanderson's, so I brought my son's friend's books with us and he signed them to this guy. When I returned them, I was like, "Hey, just FYI, I saw Brandon Sanderson, so we just had him sign your books to you." He said, "Hold on a second." He ran upstairs, he ran back down, with all seven Harry Potter books and said, "Would you like to borrow these?"
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I'll sign them.
[Shannon] That's not going to happen. But only because… Also, talking about Princess in Black in terms of writing about children, these kinds of books… There's lots of different ways to write about children. In some of them, we like get inside a kid's head and show the world how they're seeing it. In other ones, like Princess in Black, it's purely wish fulfillment fun. There are no adults in this world. So we're not showing children by comparison to what they're not. We are just having kids in adventures. So the way they talk and the way they experience things is a very different style than in some of our other books.
 
[Brandon] I want to circle back to this what you said before about respecting children as you're writing about them. Because I find this is a hard line to walk sometimes, because some of the things my children do, as we've talked about, you just can't put on the page. Like my children, I think all children, are basically sociopaths for a large part of their…
[Narcissistic sociopaths. Yup.]
[Brandon] Getting that across, getting across… Like, I love my 10-year-old. He's awesome. But he will not accept that the world is not the way he wants it to be. If we say, "You have to do this." He says, "No." We say, "But if you don't, your teacher said this." "No, she didn't."
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Right? I'm like, "No, we have a piece of paper here." He's like, "She didn't say that. It doesn't say that." He won't accept it, it's right there. Like, evidence means nothing to my 10-year-old, right?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Because he says it's not. So, how do you do things like this in a story about children, but also respect them and not act like they're… There's this fine line between talking down or treating down and also presenting how they are. That line can be really tough for me sometimes.
[Shannon] Yeah. It is a really fine line. Honestly, if we really wrote children exactly as they are in movies and books, nobody would like those characters at all.
[Dean] They just really aren't likable.
[Shannon] But we love them in real life.
[Dean] Yes.
[Shannon] But you just can't show that.
[Dean] [garbled… The paranoids aren't there… The paranoia…]
[Chuckles]
[Shannon] It's insane. So you have to show the bits… We're always asking ourselves, what's most important for this story? So, what matters about this story? Then characters in service of this story. Also, I mean, I think the… I'm sure you guys have talked about this many times. The heart, the foundation of every single story, no matter the genre, is relationships.
[Dean] Relationships. Oh, yeah.
[Shannon] Relationships between characters is all that matters, ultimately. Everything else is set dressing. So how the other characters react to the children is equally important to what the children say and do.
[Brandon] That's a really good point, thinking about it. Like, that's another dynamic that changes your perspective. Asking what the stakes are, asking what are the relationships, how does the child view the relationships with those around them? Which is going to be very different, but still very intense and important than the way I view the relationships.
[Dan] Well, those relationships… I love what you said about that being the most important thing. To talk about my own middle grade series again, the second one, Dragon Planet, I had this fantastic plot built, of how he was going to go out and explore this brand-new planet and there were dragons on it and all this stuff. I'm like, "This is still so boring."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] "Why is this Dragon book so boring?" Then just added in the little character arc was that the little boy is trying to get his dad to think of him as a scientist. All of a sudden, all of the stakes were there because that relationship was in place.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I think of examples of stories where… That do not have relationships. But all of the ones that I get really excited about, like, the ones that I read for… Certainly, I think if you have characters on the page, that if they are not having relationships, there is a problem.
[Shannon] I mean any relationship, not just romantic, but any kind of connection…
[Mary Robinette] No no.
[Shannon] Between other characters.
[Mary Robinette] I just… There's… This is a total digression, but there's a story that I love that has no characters on the page at all. So…
[Brandon] Once in a while.
[Mary Robinette] Once in a while. Once in a while, you can do it.
[Shannon] Any rule can be broken.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. But one of the things that I was thinking about with the honoring of the children is that… What I've found is that when I try to remember like specific incidents from my own childhood, rather than looking at the outside of the children… From an outside observer point of view, that it is often a lot easier for me to have them move through the world in a way that makes emotional sense.
[Shannon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] There was something that someone said when they were… It was at an assembly. Like an art exhibit opening, and someone had brought their infant, and the infant cried. You could hear a couple people in the audience make a dismissive sound. But the speaker said, "I am so glad that you brought your child, because we've all been that child. We have all cried." It was just like, "Yes, yes. We have all cried." It's a good reminder that everyone can enjoy art.
[Shannon] Some of us have been the mom who desperately needs to get out of the house. But I can't leave without the baby.
[Brandon] Didn't you take the twins on tour with you?
[Shannon] I took my kids everywhere. Yeah. The twins, specifically, came when we shot the movie Austenland in England. So they were there for seven weeks with me.
[Brandon] On set?
[Shannon] Well, you know.
[Dean] When they let you on the set.
[Shannon] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] All right. We're out of time on this episode. It's been awesome. Shannon, you're going to give us some homework.
[Shannon] Yes. So we talked about how the stakes change when you've got a young protagonist. So find a storybook or a movie that is about adults, and conceive of it as instead to be about a teenager or a child. Just write a paragraph about how that plot would change. What would… How would the heart of the story change if everything that happened in the book still happens, but it happens with and to a child?
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters
 
 
Key Points: How do you make chapters? Feeling! Some people create them, others chop things into chapters. Chapters have a beginning, middle, and an end, like a short story. Chapters have a miniature arc of action. Chapters are like episodes, climbing towards a finale. Chapters interlock, forming a part of a book. Take your outline, which describes scenes, and think about what scenes can be combined into a single chapter, thematically or emotionally. Pay attention to the page turn! The chapter break forces a new beginning. How do you begin and end chapters? Do you do cliffhangers or not? Chapter titles, first lines, first paragraphs may signal what a chapter is going to be about. The beginning of a chapter is like the first line of a book, a place to grab the reader and pull them into reading more. Use cliffhangers sparingly. Try to use cliffhangers with a promise of what you are going to get, rather than just question marks. Pay attention to genre, thrillers need tension. Make your chapters rewarding, but keep your readers wanting more, too.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Seven.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Creating Chapters.
[Victoria] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Victoria] I'm Victoria.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] We are, again, taking questions that we have been given and creating episodes around them. This one is a common question we get asked, which is, how do you make chapters? How do you decide where to break your stories up, and how to divide them up? I get this a lot, like in Q&A sessions that I'll do and things like that. It's always kind of hard to answer, because it's not a thing I studied. It's not a thing I ever looked at in anyone else's books. It's just a thing that I just started doing, and it just felt natural. I talk to a lot of writers, and that's how it goes. Right?
[Victoria] Yeah, it's hard to sit here and think about what are the mechanics or what are the rules. I feel like we're going to be able to talk about a lot of our personal guiding principles, but not necessarily any codified guidelines for something like this.
[Dan] Yeah. Although the good news is, based on what we're saying, listeners, you can take away that, at the very least, this isn't something that matters is much as you think it does. Right? You can kind of fake your way through it until you get a feel for it, and it will turn out better than you expect it to.
[Howard] We had a difficult time naming this episode. I think… I just realized the disconnect for me is that I don't create chapters, I chop things into chapters. I had a thing that is… I have a thing that exists, and I am deciding where the breakpoints are. Rather than saying, "Wow, I need a chapter here." As we prepared for the recording sessions today, we have a craft services table with food for us. I got to unwrap a block of cheese. That block of cheese is probably way less interesting than the novel, but it needed to be cut into chapters, it needed to be cut into pieces so that Howard didn't just walk away with a fistful of cheese. That's the way I think about it. These are…
[Dan] I mean, he still did, but…
[Howard] Well, that's because cranberry wensleydale is crack.
[Brandon] See, it's interesting because I do create chapters. I'm not taking the whole and just chopping it up. When I'm creating an outline, one of the things I'm doing is I'm… I'm just getting it all on there. But when I sit down for the day's work, I say, "All right, what do I need to achieve today? How can I form a chapter out of that? How can I have a rising action, how can I have questions be answered, how can I actually create something that feels like it has a beginning, middle, and an end?" Basically, I'm going to create a short story set in the world that is a continuation of other short stories.
[Howard] So, your chapters take shape after the initial outlines. I don't want to suggest that I do chapters when the final prose is done. Yeah, I'm the same way. In that I outline, but I don't outline to the chapters. They take shape later.
[Victoria] I think I'm in Brandon's camp here in that I don't like thinking about how hard it is to write a book.
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] A book is a very long, very daunting thing. What my plots do is essentially function like a series of escalating episodes. I treat each chapter as a short story, as a short story of kind of interlocking stories. Almost like a season of television than a movie. So when I'm approaching a chapter, whether it's a short chapter for middle grade or a longer chapter for a fantasy, I make sure that I have a miniature arc of action happening within that chapter. I want to fulfill certain promises. I want to not only move my characters from A to B physically and emotionally, but I almost wanted to feel like an exciting little episode that does something in the interest of climbing the steps toward my finale.
 
[Brandon] Yeah, the great thing about this also is once you learn this with chapters, like… I don't want to imply this isn't important to learn. That's not what I was meaning at the beginning, because I think it is. But it's something you can pick up on your own. The great thing is, once you start to learn it… People ask, "How do you create a thousand page fantasy novel? How do you create…" I've got Stormlight Archive which is two arcs of five in a 10 book series, and each… It gets, like, that is way easier than learning to create chapters, which you do over time, practicing, at least I did. Once I got able to interlock these scenes, basically episodes, I could be like, all right, these 10 episodes make a part of the book. Three of those make an entire novel. Three of those make a super arc through a series. Then you start to do this, and the chapter is where that all begins for me.
[Victoria] I do the same thing, I think. Shades of Magic is broken into something like 10 parts, each part has maybe 5 to 6 chapters in it. Each part is functioning as almost a season arc. The entire book is like a TV show. Each chapter within the arc is like an episode of the season. I know that I want to create a certain pace. But also, I do this from a complete self-preservation standpoint of I would get completely overwhelmed if I couldn't break it down into a substantial… Like substantially a smaller piece. On top of that, I like the satisfaction of a chapter that feels like we go through all of the emotional beats that I want you to. I wanted to feel… I have books where I have had a one-page chapter. I'm not saying you can't do that, to a different effect. But in something like… The longer the format, the more daunting it is, the more I recommend that writers begin to think of them as many, many bricks in a wall.
[Dan] When I started, my chapters were basically just how much can I write in one day. Which is why in Serial Killer, every chapter is about 2500 words. Because that's what I was doing back then. That's still my most successful book, so maybe that's a good way to do it. But, like, by the time I got to Makeover, which was like my 16th published book, I had… I'd become much more of an outliner. So when I create an outline, it's this big massive thing that tells me scene by scene everything that's going to happen. Then I will look at that and go, okay, which of these scenes need to be combined into a single chapter? Which is a little different than what you're talking about, at least narratively. Because there's not a single thread of storyline that goes from the beginning of this chapter to the end, because it will have two or three different scenes and possibly different viewpoints in it. But I try to do that in a way where they're all thematically linked together, or where there is an emotional through-line through it. So we're going to talk about this aspect of the story or the world or the technology or the magic. We're going to see one character deal with it, and then a different character deal with it in a different way. They will inform each other. That will form a chapter.
 
[Howard] Chapters and prose really are the one place where prose and comics share a structure, and that is the guarantee to page turn. With comics, you're always writing to the page turn. Because there is a visual reveal that is huge when you turn the page. With prose, you never think about that because you don't know where the pagination is going to be yet. With electronic publishing, you know even less. Except for the chapter break. You are… I have yet to read an e-book where I was forced to see the beginning of the next chapter while I could still see the end of the previous chapter. For me, that's huge. Because it means there is this psychological shift tween that thing I just read and not being able to read anything… I'm making the gesture, turning the page with my hands… And now there is all new information all at once. That is… I think that's important to think about, because even if they're just pushing a button to do it, you, the writer, now have a moment of physical puppetry control over the reader. You know they're doing anything. What can you do with words in order to make that more effective? I probably just made it a lot more difficult for everybody, didn't I?
[Dan] No. That's actually brilliant. I've never thought of it in those terms, but I can look back… Even that first one, at Serial Killer, and see places where I did that. Where, hey, you need to be… "I'll see you in the morning." Then the chapter break is, "By the time I got there, they were already dead." You can do tricks like that. That's… Now I'm going to have to think about that and try and do it on purpose.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.
[Victoria] Yeah. So, the book of the week is Docile by K. M. Sparza. It's a debut novel, coming out in April. It's a really, really fascinating examination of consent under capitalism. It is a slight near future alternate history in which our debt crisis has reached a point in which people are selling themselves into kind of an indentured servitude for a variety of functions. In order to forget this part of their lives when they do choose to sell it… In order to erase their family's debt, they take a drug called Dociline. It's about two young men in the story. One who has decided to sell his family's debt off, and with it, himself, and has decided to refuse Dociline because of what it did to his mother. The other one is the one who buys his contract and is the heir to the Dociline Empire. It is about an examination of consent, of really, really interesting gender and sexuality, a lot of fascinating themes, and also, just a delightful read.
[Brandon] Excellent. Docile by K. M. Sparza.
]Transcriptionist note; Google Books says Content warning: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.]
 
[Brandon] Coming back to this, let's talk about… One of the other questions asks about how we begin chapters. I want to talk both about beginnings and endings. Because, thinking about it, where I break a chapter is often based on where I began a chapter. Because chapters work very well for me if I have some sort of note I can hit again near the end to signal, hey, we've completed this arc, or a character's looking for something, the character finds something. It's this MICE quotient thing Mary Robinette likes to talk about, I'm using very instinctively in creating chapters. So, how do you begin and end chapters, and then, kind of a question of this, if you want to talk about… Sometimes you want to end a chapter on a cliffhanger, sometimes you don't. What's the difference there?
[Victoria] Um… Go ahead.
[Dan] So, when I wrote Zero G and started my middle grade series, I wanted to give chapter titles. Because that's kind of a very good middle grade thing, I always loved chapter titles when I was a kid. That enabled me to set things up… This chapter is about X. Like, you know that right off the bat because there's a title that tells you. I realized, in the process of doing that, that that's kind of what I had previously been using first lines or first paragraphs to do. As a way of signaling a little more subtly this chapter is going to be about this character trying to do X. Some way of setting up, here's what you're in for, this is my promise, this is my establishing shot.
[Howard] Chapters, for me, are… The first line of a chapter is an opportunity for me to revisit the experience of the first line of the book, because often the first line of the book gets so much attention that, for me, anyway, the pros ins up far more refined. Not purple necessarily, but every word is exactly in place. I try to give that consideration to the beginnings of chapters because I see those as decision points for the reader. The… A lot of times, when I'm reading a book, I will turn the page to a chapter and realize, "Oh. Oh, this character. I'm not all this interested in this point of view." But, if there is some turn of phrase or some something right there at the beginning, to reward me for having turned the page… I'll muscle through it. But I'm a bad reader.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Don't write for me.
[Victoria] Yeah, because I write my chapters like short stories, I do put the same amount of emphasis into the beginning and end of each chapter as I would the beginning and end of the novel. I also really… I love it, like I come out of a poetry background, I love the challenge of trying to distill, not necessarily a premonition of what that chapter's going to be, but I write multiple perspectives. For me, that opening line of each chapter is a way to instantly ground you in the voice. Because I don't mark it. I don't start the chapter by telling you whose perspective it's in. So I'm relying on the moment of perception. I write it from third person, so it's just a close third. But the moment of perception at the beginning of the chapter can tell you so much about the person that you're following, about the things that they notice, not only what they're going to be going through in kind of a hinting way, but just where their emotions are at, where their mind is that, all those things. Then, yes, like Brandon, I am somebody who because I write them like short stories, and one of my favorite things in short stories is the full circle moment, I love finding a way to echo by the end of the chapter where we are at. Then, every now and then, I try really hard not to overuse the cliffhanger ending because I think it gets tired. I think you have to use it sparingly. I think there's a difference between having enough tension to make you turn the page and having a dum dum dum moment.
[Brandon] Right. I've… We've talked about this before on the podcast. I've… The further I've come in my career, the more I've disliked the cliffhanger that says, "And he went to open the door and…" dum dum dum. I've liked the cliffhanger that says, "And he opened the door and his ex-wife was there." Right? Like, the cliffhanger that promises you something rather what you're going to get rather than promising you a question mark. When you can make those work, I like them. I do like to use chapters occasionally to force the page turn. I think you do have to use those, particularly in epic fantasy, you have to use it wisely. The longer your book, the fewer of these, I think, you can actually use. Which is counterintuitive. But if it's a short book, it's… You feel less guilty making them read it all in one or two sittings. If it's a long book, that will get exhausting.
[Dan] Well, that's what I was going to say, too, is, in addition to book length, consider the book genre. Writing in thrillers, you want every chapter to end on something tense. Maybe a cliffhanger, maybe not, but if you ever get to a point of rest where your reader can say, "Oh, okay, everything's cool. No one's in danger right now, I can go to sleep." You're writing your thriller weirdly.
[Victoria] Yeah. So, I have a big fantasy series that I feel like behaves more in these epic ways, where you have to use them sparingly, where every chapter really functions like an episode. Then, I have a series wherein I wanted to feel like a comic book without pictures. In that case, it is the chop, chop, chop of the turn. It is treating every chapter like a moment. In that case, there is more grouping of chapters into a smaller arc. But it's about… You can use brevity to the same effect that you can use length. You can use any element, like we're obviously talking a lot about the opening line and the ending line, but every aspect of a chapter is the utility that you have, from the voice to the length to the paragraph formatting, everything that you choose to do. To how many scenes you want, whether you want to have scene breaks within the chapter or not. I think it's about setting rules and expectations for your reader. It's really weird if every chapter of your book is like 30 pages long, except for two, unless those two moments are affecting something that is extremely dramatic.
 
[Howard] Episode five of season two of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, one of my favorite episodes, and it structures for me, it outlines what I kind of feel like a perfect chapter is, because, all of the threads come together in this moment of triumph, and then we get a POV and realize, oh, wait, that wasn't all the threads. Oh, a bad thing happened. End of episode. Page turn. So it's enormously rewarding, and then there's this piece at the end. It's not that it's super short, there's this piece at the end which absolutely draws me further in. Yeah, my philosophy on chapters is that I want every one of them to be rewarding. I want people to be excited that they read that, but I want to leave them wanting more, so that the next chapter is something they'll turn to.
[Victoria] Well, I just want to say, I think rewarding is a key word here, because rewarding is different from dramatic. Right? Like, I think there's a cheat code sense that if you want the chapter to be the most exciting version of itself, for the most rewarding version of itself, you have to end in this like dum dum dum, whether implied dum dum dum or actual dum dum dum. Sometimes, the most rewarding thing that a chapter can do is give you the equivalent of a full meal, and then the promise of something new. I think it's about also… It's about balance. It's about varying it between those things.
[Dan] So, just last week, I read Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which is part of the Tiffany Aching series, one of my favorite ones. There was a chapter in there with a funeral. It ends with the funeral. There's no cliffhanger whatsoever. There's absolutely nothing to drive you forward. It is completely final. But. The way that the ending was written was so beautiful. It was this perfect capstone to the dead person's life, to the survivors moving on and still going forward, that I couldn't wait to read the next chapter. Because I'm like, "This is so beautiful. How can I not be reading this?"
[Brandon] Curiously, the Terry Pratchett young adult novels use chapters and his adult novels don't. There's no chapters, they just are scene, scene, scene, no numbers. I've always found that very interesting. Why he chose to do one way or another, I'm sure he answered at some point.
 
[Brandon] We are out of time for this episode. Although I have some homework for you. I would like you to take something you've written, and try moving the chapter breaks around. See how it feels to you to force yourself to end in the middle of what you thought was a scene. How to add more onto your chapter and end there. I bet you will find that you're doing this pretty naturally, that you're already creating these arcs. But maybe you'll learn something interesting about your writing and be a little more intentional about it. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 

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