Writing Excuses 19.48: Beginning With A Thrill

Dec. 4th, 2024 03:03 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.48: Beginning With A Thrill
 
 
Key Points: Beginning with a thrill. A bang! A big, flashy question. Cold open, somebody is murdered, so who did it, why did they do it, how did they do it? Howcatchem. Start with small question, answer, to build reader trust and curiosity. Thrill or long slow burn? Little things going wrong. Let the character notice that something is wrong. Language and choice of details. Not always a burst of action or violence. Something unexpected or shocking. Mysterious stranger in the shire. Disrupt the normal. Meet cute or meat cube? Don't introduce tension through worldbuilding. Foreground action, not back story. What would startle your characters, and how would they deal with that? Give your characters stakes early on. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 48]
 
[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 48]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Beginning With A Thrill.
[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] I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] Today, we are going to talk about beginning with a thrill. But first, we want to tell you a little bit about what we're going to be doing all month. And this is Erin.
[Erin] Yes. This is Erin.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] 15 minutes… No, I'm…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] [garbled] inspired by an earlier episode that we recorded with Marshall where we were talking about how different genres can help you understand writing in different ways, we're going to be focusing on a genre that does something really cool that you can take into your own work for the rest of the month.
[Howard] I am excited to be a part of these discussions…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because I literally have no idea what's coming.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Well, that is also what all the people who die at the beginning of a thriller say.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Do you like that segue? So, the reason we're starting with thrillers is because thrillers in mysteries, as a genre, tend to start with a bang. You need to ask a big enough, flashy enough, question that will pull the reader through the rest of the story, and you need to do it right off the bat. Kind of establish, this is the kind of story you're in. Where we see this most bluntly is in, like, a detective show on TV, where the cold open is some random person we've never seen being murdered, and then the rest of the show is trying to figure out who did it, or why they did it, or how they did it, or whatever it is.
[Howard] Sandra and I will play a game when we're watching those shows. The game is the moment we see someone on TV, we decide whether they discover a body or become a body.
[Laughter]
[Howard] One of those two things.
[Mary Robinette] Is about to happen. Well, this is one of the things that I love, is that that discovery of the body or becoming the body doesn't actually have to be the very first thing that happens in the novel. But usually when you're watching those cold open scenes, there's something small that goes wrong first. So, what I like looking for is something that goes wrong that kind of sets the tone that is going to lead directly to the big problem, but is not necessarily the big problem. I've… Have a… I've learned that dropping the body in the first chapter is not always the best thing to do. As tempting as it is.
 
[Dan] Yeah. There's… One of my favorite mystery genres is called the howcatchem, which is related to whodunit, where the main question is who killed this person. A howcatchem story is we know who did it, but we are watching the detective to see if they're going to be able to figure out who did it and stop them. The way this often starts is we will see the killer first. They're not going to discover or become a body, they're going to produce a body.
[Squeak]
[Dan] And often the way this goes is we get to watch all the things that are wrong in their life, the person who bugs them, or the aspect of their life that needles at them and we can tell that sooner or later this person's going to explode. That is the kind of tension you can draw out for a while, because it's just ominous enough and it's tense enough that it does ask that big flashy question, what is this person going to do to get out of this situation they hate?
[DongWon] This is usually, at least in terms of bookstore genre, one of the distinctions between thriller and mystery. When you know who the killer is upfront, and then the tension is more about will the hero figure that out, and then as you have that sort of cat and mouse kind of perspective, that's how you ratchet up the tension, rather than the mystery being what pulls you forward into who actually did this thing. Right? So it's kind of two distinct hooks that define these two genres.
 
[Howard] There's a secondary principal at work here, which is that when you present that big question, you want the reader to already trust you that you are eventually going to provide an answer. The way to build that trust is that somewhere in the first page, somewhere in the first 10 pages, or the first chapter, you want to be asking smaller questions and providing answers. Small questions, provide answers. Small question, delay the gratification for the answer, get another question, and then, oh, here's the answer. You set this pattern up for the reader, where they realize, oh, yes, I am curious, and then, I am sated. Then, I am curious, and I am sated. Then I am desperately curious… And that's the page turn for the next chapter.
 
[Erin] So, I have a question. So, I'm thinking about a book where I'm reading about someone going through their life, and things are bad, and I'm wondering, I know that I bought a thriller. Like, I bought it from the thriller section of the bookstore, so I'm probably anticipating that, like, this bad thing will end in a body one way or the other. But how much of that… Let's assume that I didn't know that it was a thriller, I bought it with, like, no knowledge of the book at all. What is it that you're doing in order to make this feel like it's tense, like something's about to go wrong in this person's life in a murder-type way and not just like a day in the life of a guy whose life sucks?
[Laughter]
[Dan] Yeah. That is a very good question to ask. That's where I was going to try to go next. Because this is called starting with a thrill, not starting with a long slow burn. Although those often can be the same if you're very good at it. We talked earlier in the year about the establishing shot, and when you are writing a book or a short story, the very first thing that you show us is kind of telling us what kind of story this will be. If you start your mystery novel off with a fight scene, then you're telling us this is going to be an action movie or maybe a thriller. If that's not actually what it is, the death has to be more abrupt or less of a back-and-forth. There needs to be less interaction in the way this person dies. But, if you were doing, for example, an episode of TV or a movie, you could get away with a lot of that tension you're talking about with musical cues and stuff. Weird shots, weird POV shots that make us feel like this person is being watched or followed, spooky music, to let us say, oh, no, this person's going to die. The way you can create that… I should say, one of the ways you can re-create that in a novel, where you don't have music and things like that, is to just draw things out. Focus on details that don't seem as if they should be important. Because that makes readers nervous. Why is it taking two paragraphs to find her keys before she can get into her house? Things like that. Which is… The purpose here is not to bore the reader. This has to be tense and interesting. You're giving us little micro tensions of, oh, no, something is wrong. Oh, okay, they got out of it. Oh, no, this other thing is going wrong. Oh, they got out of it. Why is he describing so much about this type of whatever? It's to put readers on edge. Take them out of comfortable territory.
[Mary Robinette] Another tool that you can use along those lines is having the character notice that something is wrong. So, the character who is approaching their house and is like, "That's weird. I don't remember leaving a light on." And having the character… Using POV to signal to the reader, hum, things are about to be not okay.
[Dan] Yeah. Speaking of character, you can absolutely in prose do the freaky POV shot that you would get in a TV show. If the whole first scene is a couple just came home from a date, and they're flirting with each other as they walk through their house, and they talk about their bank accounts while taking their clothes off, but we're seeing the entire thing from some third perspective. Someone is listening to them. Even if that listener is never identified, and you drop hints about how they can't see what they're wearing yet or whatever it is, but it's obvious that this very private intimate conversation is being eavesdropped on, even without any direct mention of danger or threat, that's invasive and puts us on edge.
[Mary Robinette] That really is invasive and does put me on edge.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Let's come back to what it feels like to be on edge after this break.
 
[DongWon] One thing I've really loved recently is Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite, which was released in 2018. It's a brilliant historical satire about a rivalry between two of Queen Anne's ladies, played by Emma Stone and Kate Winslet [Rachel Weisz?]. The Queen herself is played by Olivia Colman, in a brilliant, hilarious, and tragic performance. It's sort of like All about Eve, but with an even more biting edge and a lot to say about class, privilege, and power, all wrapped up in a strange, almost surrealist aesthetic. It's a really wonderful movie, and I highly recommend it.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of my other favorite tools to use to make things tense is language. So, the word choice that I pick… If I'm describing a rose, and I want it to be a romance, then I'm going to talk about all of the beautiful, perfect things about the rose. But if I'm setting up for a thriller or a mystery or horror, then I'm going to be talking about, like, the diseased leaf on the rose. And even the words that I'm going to use are going to be much more visceral, I'm going to reach for the ones that are darker. Those are some fun things that you can do to set tone in the same way that a film would be able to set tone.
[Howard] When you put things in a scene and shine lights on them, you can make us comfortable, you can make us uncomfortable. The easiest example I can think of is someone striking a match or lighting up a lighter, and we see a cigarette, and we see the end of a fuse. Those are two very, very different things. Knowing what your stand-in will be for the fuse or for the cigarette or for the stove that requires a lighter… I don't know. Knowing what your stand in is, that's your job, not mine.
[Chuckles]
 
[Erin] Okay. I have another question.
[Dan] Okay.
[Erin] This one is, let's say I woke up and I decided not to choose violence.
[Laughter]
[Erin] I was like no murders here, but I still want to use these techniques in my story to draw the reader in. What should I be doing?
[Dan] You're getting to all my points right before I get to them. That's… We're on the same wavelength here. Because I would wager that a vast majority of our listeners right now are not writing thrillers. They're probably writing fantasy or science fiction, which can include thriller or mystery elements. But we focus so much on tension, whereas what we really are talking about is starting with a thrill, starting with a bang. That doesn't have to mean a burst of action or violence. What it really means for me is something that is unexpected and/or shocking that hooks us into the book. Maybe that is the person we thought the main character dies, and, okay, now I'm in for the rest of the book. I want to see who did this. Maybe that is something like you present to us an idyllic shire full of wonderful hobbits, and then a mysterious stranger shows up that nobody trusts. Then, even if you haven't introduced our main conflict, you've introduced a conflict. We know that there's the potential for danger, that things could go wrong. What about the rest of you? What answers do you have?
[DongWon] One thing I like to think about when thinking about writing in these different genres is that a genre's really made up of a whole bunch of tropes. Right? It's a whole bunch of individual patterns that we recognize of, like, oh, this has spaceships. Oh, this farmboy found a sword. Oh, this, that, or the other. That tell us we're in science fiction, that tell us we're in fantasy. But there's a thing that I think of as like micro-tropes or micro-patterns, where you can pick and choose from other genres and pull them into the main genre that you're working on. So, this is exactly what Dan was talking about, in terms of having a beat early on that's in maybe a thriller beat and have that moment or somebody's trying to find their keys or key card or whatever it is. That can increase that… Just to have that little hint of the thriller tension in there. Then you don't have to have bodies hitting the floor at that point. You can go into a different scene. You can go into a board room. You can go into the bridge of a starship. Whatever it happens to be. But you can use those little micro-tropes, those little micro-beats to really goose it in the way that you want. Right? So don't be afraid to steal from other genres and to do a little bit of mix and match, while still hitting the big beats that you want to say this is science fiction, this is fantasy.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I find that one of those small beats is just a disruption of the normal.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Like, what is… What breaks their normal. And you don't have to have normal established very long before it breaks, and I think that one of the things for me with the thriller pacing is that that break in normal comes very early. It's not three chapters in, it's something that happens usually on the first or second page.
[Howard] If you throw a meet cute into the first couple of pages, you can absolutely start with a thrill and just take us at a run into a romance.
[Mary Robinette] So, just in case people have never heard this phrase before, that is meet as in meet each other, not meat as in meat cube, which is what I first heard you say.
[Howard?] Did you all think meat cube…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because every last one of you looked at me…
[Garbled bodies. Really thought that's where we were going.]
[Dan] You guys don't put meat cubes into the first chapters of your books? That's super weird.
[DongWon] I love to start a romance with a meat cube…
[Howard] Yeah. When the two meat cubes meet, it's… I'm so sorry.
[Mary Robinette] I did read a book once that said that… That had come here, you big hunk of love [garbled]
[cool]
[Dan] Oh, man. That is not what I would name my meat cube.
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] I say. As if I don't already have one. So, one way that I see this done wrong very frequently by aspiring writers is that they are trying to present their world, establish who the characters are, and where the story takes place, and the way that they try to introduce tension in those early chapters is through worldbuilding. By saying, yes, we're in an idyllic shire, but we never leave here because there's monsters in the woods. Or because there is evil travelers on this road sometimes, or because there's a dark Lord that every seven years will come and eat one of us. I mean, yes, you're adding some darkness to the world, but you're not adding darkness to the story. This needs to be some kind of action. Those mysterious strangers on the road need to show up. Or something has to, as was said, disrupt normal in some way. There has to be an immediate danger, not just the back story of danger.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because for people who… Dark Lord shows up every seven years, terrible people on the road… That is their normal, and so they continue to go about their day-to-day life. What is it that breaks their day-to-day life that is the foretelling of… The foreshadowing of the bigger thing that's coming?
[Erin] Yeah. I also think that there's a… There's something that can happen where you… Like, one of the things that… Sorry. One of the things that I love about thrillers and mysteries is that the thing that goes wrong is something that we instinctively know is bad. Like people dying, we're not a fan. Like, in general. So, when you're trying to create that for another genre, it's what is the thing that is, like, wrong in your world? What is the thing that, like, would throw things off? If the dragon shows up on year six instead of year seven, that's going to feel very, very wrong in a way that is very unique to the world that you've created. So, a lot of times, just think about what are the things that would startle the people that are in your world, and then what would… How would they deal with that?
[DongWon] Well, this is why giving your character stakes early on are so important. Right? This is why you have to start page 1 really with something your character cares about. Ideally another person, but it could be some goal that they have. Right? That's their normal. Their normal is trying to get to school to give the girl the note that you've been thinking about giving her all week. And then something happens on the way to school. Right? You need to have the thing to be disrupted, not just to be a normal everyday day, but something that somebody cares about their day. Right? Somebody is… Has to give a big presentation, then when they can't get their key card, and they can't get into the room, now you have a cascade series of events where things are going wrong. But… To make those scary things that are coming into the world feel threatening, you have to give the characters something they care about, so that I care about the character and what they care about.
[Dan] Yeah. One of the… One of my favorite examples of this, believe it or not, is the first Toy Story movie. Which we don't think of as a thriller. But that movie starts with a kid playing with his toys, and then we get the little premise of, oop, the toys are awake when he goes out of the room. Then we don't get the actual, like, inciting incident main plot conflict for a while. But what we do get right off the bat is the birthday party, and the toys lose their minds over that. Because this, to them, disrupts their normal. They know that it has the potential to change everything. So we haven't gotten to Buzz, we haven't gotten to the whole Woody's not the favorite anymore, none of that has arrived yet, but we do have a conflict that, through their eyes, we can understand is very meaningful to them, and there's a lot of action, there's emotion, there's a lot of thrilled to it. Then, four or five scenes later, we get the full, actual, oh, this… The real plot has arrived now. We have basically run out of time now. We want to give you plenty of time to write. So we are going to end with homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] That homework is what breaks normal for your character right now? The next thing you write, how does normal break for them?
 
[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 16.32: First Page Fundamentals – THE KILLING FLOOR, by Lee Childs

Aug. 11th, 2021 04:50 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 16.32: First Page Fundamentals – THE KILLING FLOOR, by Lee Childs
 
 
Key points: A thriller introducing an iconic character. Incomplete sentences, pop, pop. Foreshadowing. A very brief cold open, and flashback. Layers of questions about what's going on and what's going to happen. Short, blunt, simple sentences, with rich visual imagery.
 
[Season 16, Episode 32]
 
[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, First Page Fundamentals – THE KILLING FLOOR, by Lee Childs.
[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. So, this week we're doing the last of our three deep dives. We're going to do a close reading of the opening page of one of my favorite thrillers that introduces the character of Jack Reacher, who will be the protagonist of this series for however many books there are, 10, 11 books. I think he's an incredibly iconic character in the field of thrillers. Yeah, so we're going to have a quick reading of the first couple paragraphs of most of the first page here.
 
[Mary Robinette]
 
I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. I was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain. All the way from the highway to the edge of town.
 
The diner was small, but bright and clean. Brand-new, built to resemble a converted railroad car. Narrow, with a long lunch counter on one side and a kitchen bumped out back. Booths lining the opposite wall. A doorway where the center booth would be.
 
I was in a booth, at a window, reading somebody’s abandoned newspaper about the campaign for a president I didn’t vote for last time and wasn’t going to vote for this time. Outside, the rain had stopped but the glass was still pebbled with bright drops. I saw the police cruisers pull into the gravel lot. They were moving fast and crunched to a stop. Light bars flashing and popping. Red and blue light in the raindrops on my window. Doors burst open, policemen jumped out. Two from each car, weapons ready. Two revolvers, two shotguns. This was heavy stuff. One revolver and one shotgun ran to the back. One of each rushed the door.
 
[Dongwon] So, the two examples we've done so far have been very high-minded, very beautiful language, very high prose. I mean, we're talking two master stylists of the American canon here. In fact, a lot of times, when I'm on Twitter, I will see somebody start to make fun of Lee Childs' writing. They'll flag it as quote unquote bad writing. I could not disagree with them more. I think this is some of the most effective writing for the genre that we are talking about, the character that we're talking about. I think there is a rhythm and a beauty and a poetry to it all on its own. It is not trying to paint an incredibly moving, chilling Gothic picture, it is not painting the rich interiority of a depressed person, it is instead engaging with how a particular person sees the world and how that makes them good at two things, investigating and extreme violence.
[Howard] Calling back to the discussion of asking questions and then answering them. "I was arrested in Eno's diner." Well, I have a lot of questions already. "At 12 o'clock." You know, the time at which you were arrested was not one of the questions I had.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But thank you for the additional information. "I was eating eggs and drinking coffee." Okay, that's also not one of the answers I needed, but thank you for completing the picture. Then, "A late breakfast, not lunch." Oh, wait. Eggs, coffee, 12 o'clock. Maybe I should have been asking that question. But, no, again, that's not the question I had, but thank you for completing the picture. I love the way it works, because with each reveal quote unquote, we're being given information that isn't what we asked for, but which completes a picture, and the tone of it says, "Hey, that first question you had about me getting arrested? Pfft. That doesn't actually matter. We'll get to what matters later. Let me tell you about my eggs."
[Dongwon] Well, the thing that's implicit in that is his superiority as an investigator, right? It's not in the Sherlock Holmes, I'm like I'm going to prove I'm so much smarter than you. But there is an element to this, it's like, "Hey, dummy. You didn't ask important questions, which is what was happening. Why was I here?" All of those things that led up to this moment. You start to get a sense of how does Reacher's brain work. How does he see the world? How does he, like, put all of these things together? I love the inferences that they can pull from this. A thing that we will later learn about Reacher is that he is fundamentally homeless, he doesn't have a home. He's itinerant. So he doesn't have a car either. So that whole wet and tired after a long walk in the heavy rain from the highway to the edge of town… Why was he doing that? Why was he walking through the rain to get to this diner to have this late breakfast? Also, just so many bad things have happened to him already by the end of this paragraph, like, that's not a fun way to be, he's getting arrested, and yet, we don't get rage, we don't get anger, we don't get depression. We just get, "Eh. It's a Tuesday."
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other thing that I notice about this is the way… Again, I always tend to look at punctuation, because of the audiobook narrator background. There's so many incomplete sentences in this. When he's describing things, it's these quick pops of things. Brand-new, built to resemble a converted railroad car. Like, that's not… That is… That's the entirety of it. There is no verb there. Well, built, I guess. But it's just… These incomplete sentences that just give you these pops of his notice. It's like… For me, what it mimics is kind of the way his eyes are darting around and looking at things. It's like, "I noticed this, I noticed that, I noticed this." I don't linger on anything, because I can't afford to linger on things. I have to keep moving forward.
[Dongwon] My guy doesn't have time for verbs, what are you talking about?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dongwon] Who needs subjects to sentences? Objects? Forget about it.
[Mary Robinette] These are ridiculous things. Grammar? I don't have time for grammar. I'm wet and tired. I gave you a subject verb right there. I was wet and tired. What more do you want from me?
[Dan] Yeah. I…
[Howard] Had this been written by Melville or MacLaine, there would be semicolons.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Right!
[Dongwon] Exactly.
[Howard] There would be a truck fun of semicolons.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] [garbled]
[Howard] In order to capture that voice.
[Dongwon] But you said MacLaine when you meant Jackson. I think you meant Shirley MacLaine instead of Shirley Jackson.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Very different people.
[Howard] You're right. I did mean Shirley Jackson.
[Dan] I would read either a horror novel or a thriller novel written by Shirley MacLaine.
[Dongwon] Absolutely.
[Dan] That sounds wonderful. So, I find it really delightful that people kind of mock this language. In large part, because, that is, I think, fundamentally, a bit of genre bias. That this can't be good writing because it is airport bestseller thriller. But who this language reminds me most strongly of is Cormac McCarthy who is considered to be one of our best living writers. It's because this is not considered literary fiction that the exact same writing style that leaves out verbs and has short, punchy, very descriptive painterly sentences suddenly doesn't count anymore because of the genre that it's in. But if you look at this, the first sentence of that third paragraph is enormous. It is 2 to 3 times longer than any other sentence in here. That always jumps out at me. Like, why does this merit so much extra time and attention? The sentence is, "I was in a booth at a window, reading someone's abandoned newspaper about the campaign for a president I didn't vote for last time and wasn't going to vote for this time." There's so much in their. There's… It's such a… Not just long, but a complicated sentence. Which forces your brain to kind of look at that and say, "Well, why does this deserve more than the others?" Not having read the book… I'm three for three now, on not having read Dongwon's big examples. I don't know why that one gets more attention than the others. But it's…
[Dongwon] But it's…
[Dan] Go ahead.
[Dongwon] I think it's a little bit of the person slipping through the detective. Right? You just get this digression where he can't contain his irritation with the world. He can't contain the reasons why he's chosen to exit society and live this itinerant life. Right? He's an outsider, an outsider by choice, because he can't even be bothered to care about who's President, because to him, it doesn't matter and it won't matter because whoever it is, it sucks. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Well, structurally, what he's doing, like, every time he's got a longer sentence, it is actually a sentence about him. "At 12 o'clock, I was eating eggs and drinking coffee," is longer. "I was wet and tired after a long walk and heavy rains." "I was in a booth at a window, reading somebody's abandoned newspaper." It's… When we get even a hint of interiority that we linger on things. But the other thing I think is that part of the reason that he stretches that out is because the character's a little bit bored. This is… It's not en… It's not so much that we get bored, too. It's just enough for us to say, "Oh, he was there for a little while reading this. Then stuff started going down."
[Dongwon] Which he's still not interested in.
[Mary Robinette] He's still not interested. Exactly. Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] I do bef… I do need to pause us for the book of the week, and then we'll come back and talk about some more things. The book of the week this time is one that I want to talk about that Dan wrote.
[Dan] Yay.
[Mary Robinette] So, Ghost Station by Dan Wells is also a… It's a Cold War spy thriller. I listened to the audiobook, which is fantastic. It's beautifully narrated. It is not science fiction or fantasy, so those of you who know Dan that way, this is straight up historical fiction. It's right… Right like a week or so after the [inaudible]
[Howard] Berlin airlift.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's right after the Berlin wall goes up. It is twisty, it is tightly paced, you're deeply in the main character's head, who's a cryptographer. What he notices and doesn't notice is so important to the entirety of the book. This is… It's a great book. One of the things were going to be talking about when we come af… Come back from me raving about how much I love this book, and I loved it a lot, is we're going to be talking about foreshadowing. Listening to this book and listening to it twice, it is, in and of itself, a master class and how to handle foreshadowing.
[Dan] Well, thank you.
 
[Dongwon] One other thing I want to point out, which is a very small note here. But we've been talking a lot about how saying your book should be for somebody, not for everybody. But he does something that is so canny in this newspaper line where he talks about a campaign for a President that I didn't vote for last time and wasn't going to vote for this time. I don't care where you are on the political spectrum, you feel that, right? You could be left, you could be right, you could be a libertarian, you could be a communist. Anybody is going to read that line and be like, "Yeah. That President. I know which one you're talking about." They're all… Everyone has a different person in mind. It's so smart that he doesn't alienate anybody, but still talks about politics, because that's how we all feel about politics, right? So it's just this tiny little moment where sometimes withholding specificity can open the door to identification. Even though most of the time the more specific you are, the more you're going to find that connection.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The reason he can get away with it here is because he does not care about it.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So he's being nonspecific about a thing he doesn't care about.
[Dongwon] Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] But I want to talk about the foreshadowing which is that he… He opens with, "I was arrested at…" And then he… Essentially, what he does is everything that follows that is a flashback. Until the arrest happens. So he's saying, "Bear with me. Bear with me, I'm going to get to the good stuff." So that's… We can call that foreshadowing, although it's… Or we can call it a very brief cold open, and then flashback. But he also does some other interesting foreshadowing in here that I'm going to have Dongwon talk about.
[Dongwon] Yeah. So I think the other foreshadowing that's going on here is… The thing that makes all of this remarkable is his complete disinterest in his complete lack of fear about getting arrested. That tells us so much about who he is as a person. One thing is that he's white, he's a man, he has all these elements that don't make him afraid. But also, he's police. He was formerly a military police, which is a thing that will learn later. So he has a connection to these people. He's not afraid of them, he knows how they operate. Then the thing that comes immediately after where we stopped the reading is that this operation was for me. He knows they're coming for him, not the cooks, not the waitress. He's the target here because he knows he's a dangerous person, or capable of great danger. What this is all setting up is that the police are interested in him, that they're not interested in him because he committed a crime. They're interested in him for some other reason. That's adding this layer of foreshadowing, adding these layers of questions as to what is going on, what's going to happen. Now, what's going to happen is he's going to be forced into working for the police to help them find the killer, right? There's such an expectation across the structure of so many of these thrillers, but again, he's blasé about men with shotguns and handguns charging at him is indicative of both his control of the situation and that foreshadowing, that foreshadowing that he knows that he can be useful to them and that that's why they want him at the end of the day, not because he is a criminal.
[Dan] Yeah. Now, one of the kind of key principles of a character introduction is that we need to know not only who this person is but why do we like them. This extreme competence and lack of fear that you're talking about is a big part of why we start to like this guy. But I'm reading ahead a little bit, and in the next paragraph, he has this huge thing where he talks about reason after reason that he knows they're coming for him and for nobody else. So what does he do? He finishes his eggs, and then he puts a five dollar bill under his plate. Because he knows he's about to get arrested, he knows he's not going to have time to pay, but he wants to make sure that this diner doesn't get shafted out of the money he owes them. That says an incredible amount about the character.
 
[Dongwon] One last thing I want to bring up is this language isn't beautiful. It's short sentences, it's blunt sentences, it's very simple. But actually, the imagery is quite beautiful. He pauses in the middle of this scene to say, "Outside the rain had stopped, but the glass was still pebbled with bright drops." Then he like kind of jumps forward to "light bars flashing and popping, red and blue light on the raindrops on my window." He's pausing for these rich visual images. I know exactly what this diner looks like. I can see it in my mind. I can feel the vinyl of those booths. I can smell it. You know what I mean? He's so evocative with his imagery. We get caught up in the staccato pacing of it, his observations, that sort of like military mind looking for the threats and dangers. But the writer behind that is showing us a rich and textured world. So, just because you're being blunt, doesn't mean you can't have beauty in what you're doing. That you can't have aesthetics really coming forward in a powerful way. One of the things that makes this work so well for me is it's operating on like all these different layers at once. It's just firing on every cylinder, character, plot, setting, writing, all those things are really coming into play here in a way that I find incredibly exciting and absolutely makes me want to turn to the next page and find out, okay, what happens when the cops get in the door? Okay, what happens when he gets to the station? Okay, what happens at the next step of the investigation? Everything is just pulling me forward like a freight train. For me, I find it irresistible.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I would also argue, having… Since we just did the master classes with Amal about poetry, that this is actually beautiful language, and that if you took this and did a paragraph break where most of these periods are, that… And presented a chunk of this as free verse poetry to someone, that they would believe you and would talk about the capture of individual elements.
[Dan] Yeah. Well, this has a lot of that density of kind of meaning that we talked about with Amal. Sentences like here "I saw the police cruisers pull into the gravel lot." That's a visual detail, but that's also an audible detail. Because we can hear instantly what tires on gravel sounds like. We know that, and it's very familiar. There's a lot of different sensory information all packed into very small spaces.
[Howard] Yeah. I noticed, scanning back over it, that he doesn't use comparison to describe things. There are places where he uses words that might more commonly be used to describe other things. "They were moving fast and crunched to a stop," gives us a sound effect as they are stopping. But it's very straightforward description. He doesn't compare the red and blue lights on the raindrops to something else to help us see red and blue flashing through the raindrops. He just calls it like it is. It's very direct.
[Mary Robinette] That is consistent with the character.
 
[Mary Robinette] Which brings us to our homework. Dongwon, I think you have that this week.
[Dongwon] So, I think our homework is to sort of take what's been done here, and take a lesson from that. Write an introduction to your story that focuses on entirely the character's view of the world. Maybe, again, take that scene that you worked on for the past couple homeworks, and rewrite it again. Not necessarily the character reflecting on their interiority, but how does the character interact with the world? How do they see the world, both in mechanical and philosophical ways? How is what is happening in the world around them filtered through their point of view? When we say point of view, this is what we're talking about.
[Mary Robinette] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters

Feb. 19th, 2020 11:25 am
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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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Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

Jan. 22nd, 2020 12:32 pm
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Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing
 
 
Key points: There's money in self publishing! But it takes marketing to get it. Try Kindle Unlimited and get your page reads up! Pay attention to visibility. Your craft needs to hold people's attention, and keep them reading. Romance has a lot of voracious readers, but there are niches for horror, fantasy, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, all kinds of stories. Look at what readers want to read! Take advice from people who know what they are doing. Interact with your readers. Make sure that when readers start to read your book, they keep reading it! You can write to the market, and still write from your heart and write well. Have fun! 
 
[Transcriptionist note: I tried to sort out who is talking, but I may have mislabeled some parts. Apologies in advance for any mistakes in attribution.]
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Three.
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Self Publishing.
[Nandi] 15 minutes long.
[Victorine] Because you're in a hurry.
[Tamie] And we're not that smart.
[Bridget] But we are all self published.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Nandi] I'm Nandi. [Nandi Taylor]
[Victorine] I'm Victorine. [Victorine Lieske]
[Tamie] I'm Tamie. [Tamie Dearen]
[Bridget] And I'm Bridget. [Bridget E. Baker]
[Howard] We are all, in point of fact, self published. We are also all on stage at WXR 19 on Liberty of the Seas in the Gulf of Mexico. Give it up for us, live audience.
[Whoo! Applause!]
 
[Howard] Thank you so much. This is been great fun for me, and it's been a huge learning experience for me. As longtime listeners of Writing Excuses are probably aware, I make my living by giving away the comic strip for free online, and then selling books, selling ad space, doing Patreon subscriptions, whatever else. Yes, that is a full-time living. When I say I make a living, that's… Sandra making it into money. I just hide in the studio and draw pictures and write. It's a joint project. It is not independent, it is very codependent. It is a very two-person project. It is a model which I'm very familiar with. But a couple of days ago, in the Olive or Twist Lounge up on deck 15 in the rear, I was talking to Bridget about Kindle Unlimited and self-publishing. As part of this episode, we're going to drop some numbers. Bridget, drop some numbers on us. How are you doing with self-publishing?
[Bridget] So I published my first book last September, right before the Writing Excuses cruise that I went on. So I started, put my book out, and shortly after that, came on this cruise and had very few numbers to share. In one year, I put out seven other books, so I have a total of eight books out. I only made about $5,000 in the first four months. Then I've made about 89,000 since then. So, slow start, but as you start to get your books out and you learn marketing and you understand how to make the book that you had more visible, then you can earn a significantly higher amount of money.
[Howard] 89 plus 5 is… 94.
[Bridget] Yeah, 94 grand. That's my total author income so far.
[Howard] That's a solid number.
[Bridget] For my first year.
[Howard] That's a very solid number for a first year. Victorine, how are you doing?
[Victorine] Well, I hit the jackpot with my first book. Because it hit the New York Times bestseller list. I would say the first probably three years of self-publishing, I made about $40,000 a year. Just with one or two books. Then I took a little time off, so I made some less money for a couple of years. Then I started really studying the market, and publishing books directly to a certain market. So, since then, I've been able to make about $50-$80,000 a year. I'm really close to hitting that over six-figure thing now. So, I'm hoping to do that soon.
[Howard] Tamie?
[Tamie] I've been publishing since 2013. But it was really just a lark when I started. Actually, my kids published my book for me as a surprise for Christmas. So I really wasn't serious about it, other than I just kept publishing them. Wasn't really writing to market until I actually encountered Victorine and the Writing Gals. Got some good advice. Since I've been following that, I went from… I was probably making 30, $35,000 a year, and I just had my first $10,000 net month. So I'm pretty excited about that.
[Howard] That is amazing. Nandi? How are things going for you? Because I… Think you… When we talked a little bit in the preshow, you're counting things a little differently?
 
[Nandi] Yes. The way I self publish is a little bit different. I'm actually published on Wattpad, which is a story sharing website. So the jury's kind of out on how much money I'm going to make through this. Right now, it's a nice goose egg, but that is going to change. Because my story did pretty well on Wattpad, and it was actually picked by Wattpad books. So while it was on there, it gained me about a million reads and 25,000 followers. So it's being published through Wattpad books in January of 2020. It'll also go… The Wattpad version will go behind a paywall once the story is published.
[Howard] The distinction there between reads and follows seems like it might be an important one. Because one of those numbers is way larger than the other one.
[Nandi] Yes.
[Howard] Make sure I understand this right. Reads is the number of times the book was accessed and read?
[Nandi] Yes.
[Howard] Follows is the people who have… What? Subscribed to you?
[Nandi] Exactly. Yes. Wattpad works a lot like a social media site. I almost like to call it like a YouTube for books.
 
[Howard] Cool. Is there a similar sort of metric for Amazon, for what you're doing? Victorine? Tamie?
[Victorine] When you're published on Amazon, you sign up for their Kindle Select, which means you agree to only publish on Amazon platform, they put your book in what's called Kindle Unlimited. Then, people can read your book… It's kind of like Netflix for books. They can sign up for this program and they can read it for free, if they pay the program the monthly fee. So we get paid per page read through that program. So if you have a lot of pages read, it can really add up to quite a bit of money.
[Howard] Bridget, I think you were doing the same thing, weren't you?
[Bridget] Yeah, I did the same thing. What happened is when I first started, all my friends that I had met had told me, "Oh, we make most of our money off of page reads." I think the only people who bought my first book were like my friends. So I had a lot of sales, but no page reads, because I didn't have visibility. So I had to start learning techniques for gaining visibility. Then, my page reads went up dramatically. Now, I probably get about two thirds of my revenue is from page reads. The thing I think that's interesting about page reads is that you can slap up a book that's lousy, and you will get no page reads. Because people can check it out, read the first couple of pages, say, "Oh, this book is junk," and check it back in. So your book needs to be in there, but it also needs to be good enough that it holds people's attention and that they want to read your other books. Then, depending on the length of the book, you can make $0.20 you can make 2.50. If it's really long, you'll get paid more because they're reading more pages.
[Howard] Victorine? Oh, sorry. Tamie. I'm… [vuogh] so many people at this table that it's terrifying me.
[Tamie] Yeah. One difference with me is because I have… Some of my books are not exclusive to Amazon. So they are not in the Kindle Unlimited program. So I have one series that is five books, and the first book is actually Permafree, which means that I have made it free on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and those platforms. Then Amazon has price matched as free. Because you cannot set your price free on Amazon. So Amazon has price matched it as free. So that one is out there. Anyone can read it. Usually stays… I think right now it's in the 700s in free books on Amazon. It usually stays up above 1000. Then, people hopefully will buy the rest of the books in the series and read them. If they actually read the book. A lot of people just download free books and don't even read them. But you get a certain percentage of readthrough on there. Then the rest of my… Probably most of my money still comes from page reads.
 
[Howard] Okay. A couple of terms that I want to make sure we're understanding. Wide means?
[Tamie] Means published in other places besides Amazon.
[Howard] Okay.
[Tamie] So, wide means that I'm published on those other channels. By the way, if… When Victorine made the New York Times bestseller list, her books were wide. You can't make a bestseller list without publishing on all those channels
 
[Howard] Let's pause for a moment for the book of the week. Somebody was going to pitch a book to us.
[Tamie] Okay. Yes. I'll just recommend the last good book that I read by an indie author named Emma St. Claire. It's called The Billionaire's Secret Heir. It's a really fun book. I don't know if you like billionaire romance stories, but this one is a clean, or what we call a sweet romance, meaning that there isn't any sex in it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have any heat. It's a… They really are attracted to each other, but it's a book that people who object to reading sex and their books would enjoy this book. It's a cute idea, but the man and his wife were unable to have children and had used a surrogate mother to have a child. Then, many years later, I think his wife had passed away and the child is like seven years old, and he ends up meeting the girl who was the surrogate mother. She becomes the nanny, and you can just guess what happens. But it's a really sweet book.
 
[Howard] I want to address the potential… Elephant in the room might not be the right term. I get the feeling that there's a lot of romance in the genres that you guys are working within.
[Victorine] Yep. Yup.
[Bridget] I think in part that's because you're dealing… The three of us are all, at least to some extent, in Kindle Unlimited, and…
[Howard] When you say three of us…
[Bridget] I'm sorry, I'm…
[Howard] Bridget, Victorine, and Tamie.
[Bridget] Correct. That's right. So, Kindle Unlimited specifically has a lot of people who subscribe who like romance. I think in part that's because a lot of people who read romance tend to be voracious readers. So, paying 10 or $12 a book, if you're reading two books a day, gets cost prohibitive. Cost prohibitive in a hurry. So they tend to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. That means that you get a lot of immediate audience who are interested in reading your books if you're in that genre. So I write about half romance and half young adult. My romance is a much easier sell on Kindle Unlimited. I mean, obviously, it's not technically a sale, because they're just downloading it and reading it. But those get way more page reads for way lower ads spent. Whereas I get a lot more sales in paperback and in e-book on my young adult than on my romances. I almost sell no paperbacks in romance, but I sell a lot in YA.
[Nandi] I'll piggyback on that. The trend is the same on Wattpad as well. You will see a lot of romance. You'll see a lot of books titled things like The Bad Boy and the Nerd, or The Billionaire, or the Gangster's Girlfriend and things like that. They tend to do really well. Kind of for the same reason, voracious readers like to read things at low cost. In this case, free. But, that said, I would encourage anyone who is looking for feedback or who wants to share their story to post on Wattpad regardless of what you write because, as long as you put it up there, there are niches for horror, fantasy, things like this. If you look, you can find them.
 
[Howard] I want to pose that question to all of you for our listeners. If they want to make a living on Kindle Unlimited or if they want to make a living e-books going wide, does it have to be a romance? Do you have to write seven books a year?
[Bridget] No, definitely not. I know authors who are writing in many different genres. They probably need to be genre fiction rather than literary fiction or middle grade. Those are the two that really struggle with self-publishing. But I know authors who write mysteries, who write thrillers, who write science fiction, who write fantasy. All of them six-figure plus authors. Doing really, really well in that field. My suggestion would be to go on Amazon and look at the top selling indie books in whatever genre you write in and you're passionate in. Pick up those books. Pick up five of them, and read them. Look at the commonalities between… This is what the reader wants to read. So, if you can look at what readers want to read and you can write in that space, you can do very well as an indie author.
 
[Howard] We often caution our listeners against writing to the market. But with Kindle Unlimited, I have this sense that the market changes daily. A new book can come out and spike the list and you can pick it up and read it and understand what the market is consuming right now. Which is… You could be pretty agile in your production. Bridget, you said that you did some research about marketing and positioning your books and things like that. We don't have a whole lot of time. Do you have some secrets you can share with us?
[Bridget] So, I don't know if this is a secret per se, but my number one advice is even when it's hard to take, take advice from the people who know what they're doing. So, Victorine is sitting right here with me, and I'll tell you that when I put out my very first romance, I said, "I don't care what everybody's telling me, I just follow my heart." I got a photo shoot of a normal-looking couple because I said, "All these romances have models on the cover. I want normal-looking people on mine." I put it out, and nobody bought it. I had like 10 friends reach out and say, "Your cover's horrible." I'm like, "What do you know? People want regular people." It turns out they don't.
[Chuckles]
[Bridget] So I had to change my cover, which meant I paid for a cover twice, and I paid for a photographer that I didn't need, because I ended up using stock photos. So that's just one example. But there are people in the indie community who, if you go find some groups, they are very willing to help you. Victorine is one of them, who is like, "Bridget, this cover's not good. I know, because I'm a cover designer, and also I make a lot of money on my books. You need to change it." It wasn't until I listened to that advice that I did not want to listen to that I started to get progress and traction with the marketing end. You've got to have your book branded right. You've got to have something that hits the market, because even though it's always changing, there are things that you can look at and say, "Oo, this is working," or "this isn't." The great thing about indie is you can change it. So I had that cover that did crappy for a month, and I changed it. My book went whoosh! Straight up! After I got a better cover on it. So there is… The neat thing about indie is you don't just put it out there and your publisher bought 50,000 copies. Too bad. You can put it out there and say, "Ho, this didn't work. Let's try changing my title." If you own the ISBN, you go change your title, you give it to Amazon, Bam. You've got a new title, a new cover, it's rebranded, and all of a sudden it can do dramatically better. So listen to the advice, even if you think you're smart, you're probably not at the beginning.
[Victorine] Find a group of authors that know what they're doing, right? I'm part of a Facebook group called The Writing Gals. We give tons of advice. Just… When people ask questions, we tell them what to do in order to be successful. Because we want to give back, because we have been very successful at doing this.
[Howard] I'm looking right at Nandi. What've you got for us?
[Nandi] Well, in terms of… I'd like to give kind of advice on not necessarily secrets or tips, but one thing that was really useful to me on Wattpad specifically is that you can interact with your readers directly. I will do things like actually ask them questions, chapter by chapter. Whose side are you on? What do you think about this? I actually took that information and incorporated it into my edits. So it's kind of a unique and amazing thing, is that I'm literally in my readers' heads as I'm writing. It can be a benefit and a downfall. I mean, you don't want to tailor your book too much to what readers think, but it can be a really cool thing that most readers don't have access to.
 
[Howard] At risk of plugging the Writing Excuses retreat again, this morning… Was it this morning? I can't even remember what day it is. Dongwon taught a class on the first two pages and the hooks. How important is that kind of thing for you in this market?
[Bridget] Fantastically important. You have to be as good or better than any other choices they have out there. On Amazon, there's billions of books they can choose from, so your craft has to be on point. Definitely, people will look… Pick up a book and look at the first couple of pages. They have to be excellent.
[Victorine] In fact, I good friend who told me straight up when I asked her to join my street team that she doesn't have time to read. So I said, "That's fine, no problem." A couple of days later, she contacted me and said, "I saw your book on Amazon, and I just read the sample pages," that they let you read for free. I had already offered her a free book, guys. "I just read the sample pages and I could not put them down. So can I have that free book?" Then she plugged me on her group, which is like a deals page. I sold like 580 copies of my book that day. It was just because my sample pages were good enough that they drew her in, and she wanted to read it. Someone who doesn't read. If your sample pages… If your first two pages are crap, you're not going to sell your book. You're not going to get page reads.
[Tamie] I want to say something about writing to market. I think when Victorine first was talking about it, I was a little bit put off by the idea, because I'm an author and I have things in my heart and I don't want to compromise myself for money. Right? But you can write from your heart and write well. You don't have to put down your standards, you can still get your message out there. Like, I have a billionaire romance series, which, you think is pretty corny, but my particular series is based on a group of men who met when they were teenagers at a camp for kids with disabilities. So each one of my heroes, even though they are billionaires and they do happen to have six packs and are really good looking, they also happen to have disabilities. Which I felt like was just underrepresented in romance books. So you can still do that and still make money and reach out to people while writing to market.
[Nandi] Absolutely. I would cosign that. My book deals with a character who is… Has a similar background to mine, which is Caribbean and kind of West African culture. I wasn't sure how it would do on Wattpad. To my surprise and delight, it's done really well. A lot of people have connected with my character. I think self-publishing and online publishing are great ways to kind of prove certain conceptions about what sells wrong and get your story out there.
 
[Howard] Last question. We've talked a lot about business, we've talked a lot about agility and market and whatever else. Are you all still having fun?
[Nandi?] Absolutely.
[Howard] They're nodding. For those of you lacking the video feed, everybody's nodding.
[Victorine] When I first decided to go indie, there was a lady named Elaina Johnson, who sat down and spent her entire lunch talking to me because I had an agent and was insistent that I needed to go traditional. She basically said, "Why haven't you ever considered indie? You've been pursuing traditional for a long time, through a variety of frustrating obstacles." I said, "Well, I write YA and people that are indie don't do well with YA." She's like, "Well, they may not do quite as well as romance, but why don't you try both? You might actually like writing romance." I said, "Phtp. Like writing romance?" Well, all of my YA has a romantic subplot, so I don't know why I was so obtrusive that I didn't see that, but I now write both. I do a YA series during the course of the year and a romance series. So I put out several of each. I like the romance as much as I like the YA. So I am still having a lot of… I mean, I'm writing what I want to write, and I don't have to argue with my agent about whether or not it's something that someone will buy. Because I can put it up, and then people buy it. So…
[Nandi] I'm having a blast. I'm on a writing cruise, and I get to write the whole thing off.
[Garble]
[Tamie] I would say, on my day job… I'm a dentist. I've said before, but honestly, if I just wanted to make money, I would just work a lot of hours at the office and make money. So, I write because I love to write. If it wasn't fun, I'd quit.
[Nandi] Yep. Absolutely. Actually, I started listening to this podcast in 2014, and I told myself, "Okay. One day I'm going to be on this podcast."
[Cheers]
[Nandi] Thank you. Thanks to the… Taking the chance of putting myself up online, now here I am today plugging my first debut book on the Writing Excuses podcast in this, the year of our Lord 2019. So…
[Howard] Nandi, you're doing a great job, and I promise you right now, I'm actually more nervous than you are.
 
[Howard] Who's got our homework?
[Bridget] That's me. That's Bridget. So, Tamie just explained that she's a dentist. I'm actually a lawyer as my day job, I guess. Although I'm not doing as much. But I did a couple of podcasts for the Writing Gals, you can look them up on author taxes. Your homework is this, no matter where you are in your writing journey, you need to start thinking about how to be smart about the business of writing. That involves teaching yourself through the podcasts that I did that are way too long and way too detailed, or go out and do the research yourself. Talk to a CPA and start finding out what things you can deduct. There are two main ways you can deduct them, but I think that is beyond the scope of this. Start keeping track of those expenses. Whether you're going to deduct them annually or whether you're going to roll them altogether as startup costs when you first start making money, either way, you need to start getting your ducks in a row, so that when it becomes money for you, like $94,000 in a year, you know how to get it down so that you don't pay the IRS a third of that.
[Howard] Okay. Before I say that we're out of excuses, I would like to acknowledge the presence of the Writing Excuses cruise audience.
[Whoo! Applause.]
[Howard] We've had a great time out here. I haven't done very much writing. But I know that some of us have written like 40,000 words while on a ship. We're not going to name drop anybody. I'm just going to say, fair listener, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue

Jun. 19th, 2019 10:08 am
mbarker: (Burp)
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Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue
 
Key points: Political intrigue? The fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust. Shifting the dynamics or balance of power. Am I looking for the answer (aka mystery) or am I trying to find out why this is happening (aka thriller)? A heist of information! Why are people doing things, what are their motivations? Who has informational advantage? Beware of boredom! Give us a reason to care, make sure we understand the stakes. Scheming leads to actions, and actions lead to complications and ramifications. There must be change, not just scheming. Build rooting interest and sympathy for a character before you dive into political string pulling. The machinations of your villain should be smart, not just insanely convoluted. Secrets and informational advantage are the keys to political intrigue.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 24.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Political Intrigue.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] Or are you? [Dum, duh, dummmm!]
[Margaret] Last I checked. I hope so.
 
[Brandon] Let's talk about political intrigue. So, can we define this? What do we mean by this? I'll give you a little starter, primer. When I was pitching books, back when I had no idea how to pitch books, right?
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I was just wondering around the World Fantasy convention, trying to pitch my book to anybody who was standing by looking bored.
[This potted plant…]
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I pitched to somebody, I think it was an editor at Delray or something. I pitched my book as a political book about such and such. They listened and like, "Oh. You mean political intrigue. Not political book. Make sure you add that word intrigue on when you do this pitch in the future…"
[Howard] To somebody else. To somebody who is not me.
[Laughter]
[Margaret] But solid advice for a free sound rejection.
[Brandon] Yeah. I always thought, oh, I was presenting… Because what I really did mean was a political intrigue book. I was not writing a book about politics, it was about the fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think… I mean, the word intrigue, it is intriguing, it is engaging, the curiosity of it, the quest for answers. I sometimes joke that… And it's not really a joke… That the third book in the Glamorous Histories, Without a Summer, is a political intrigue disguised as a Regency romance. It is all about the way things are shaped in court, and although my characters wind up being somewhat peripheral to it, it is all about shifting those dynamics.
[Brandon] I can…
[Howard] It's worth pointing out that in Season 11, when we talked about the Elemental Genres, we drew a distinction between mystery and thriller. Re-listening to those episodes as we talk about political intrigue might be useful, because in some cases, the mystery is I want to answer the question. In thrillers, often it's I already kind of know what the answer to the question is, but I don't know why this is happening. There's looking for the answer, and then there's looking for a way out.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I sometimes think about political intrigues as a heist of information.
[Brandon] Yeah. I think that that's a…
[Howard] Info heist.
[Brandon] That's a great way to put it. When I'm looking at this, it's often you don't know other people's motivations. The main character is trying to figure out where does this person lie, where do their allegiances lie? What are their actual goals? And these sorts of things. As I was thinking about political intrigue, I realized a lot of what I write is political intrigue. Because, if you want to have fast-paced intense fantasy, one way is people always fighting, but that kind of gets boring to me very quickly. So the next step for that is trying to figure out people's motivations, and the plots they're pulling, and things like that.
[Mary Robinette] It is ultimately about trying… There is a character who's trying to shift a balance of power.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That is a key element to a political intrigue, is that shift of power.
[Margaret] I think… Because sometimes the political intrigue can definitely be the informational heist of trying to obtain information. But that doesn't mean that necessarily it's a quest for something, like that is a part of the guise of I am trying to accomplish my goal of X, and it is made difficult by the fact of the shifting sands that are all around me.
[Howard] It's worth looking at a couple of terms here. The term political. It's easy to get bogged down in current politics, or current events. Really, what's meant here is balances of power. Who has power over who else? How are these powers related? How is this power expressed? This group has power because they control the military. This group has power because they control the making of laws. Understanding that when you're thinking of the word political is critically important. As is just politics at like the university level or the family level. On the intrigue side of things, the term that I fall back on is informational advantage. Which is something that comes up all the time in sociology. The idea that one group has informational advantages over somebody else, and that gives them power that cannot be disrupted until, coming back to Mary's heist of information, until the information has flowed the other way and the advantage doesn't exist anymore.
 
[Margaret] What you were saying reminded me of the idea that power can take many different forms. One of the classes that I teach fairly frequently is one in adaptation. Where we ask students to take a piece of literature in the public domain and change it somehow. I had one student, he was adapting Macbeth. But he adapt… He set it in a junior high school classroom.
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] So you had all of the political machinations of Macbeth, but it was all revolving around, it's not the crown of Scotland, it's who's got social and political capital inside this group of tween's. So it doesn't necessarily have to deal with kings or presidents or government, if you're talking about political intrigue.
[Brandon] Absolutely. I mean, the number of times that a Shakespearean political intrigue story has been re-done as a teen high school drama… I think you would be shocked to see how many times they've done that and how well it translates.
[Margaret] Or as a motorcycle gang.
[Yeah. Yeah.]
[Mary Robinette] The thing is that… That's important about this is that when we're talking about this shift of power and capital, we're not talking about the shift of physical power. Which is why Avengers: Civil War is not a political intrigue at all. Even though it is very much about a shift of power.
[Brandon] Right. Whereas…
[Mary Robinette] Winter Soldier kind of is, though.
[Brandon] Winter Soldier kind of is. Yes. Exactly. That's a very good way to put it. So my question to you is, and this is coming from the professor mind where… I get a lot of students who obviously are trying to do this, and it is b o r i n g…
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] So boring. How do you keep this from being boring, and highlight what makes it interesting?
[Mary Robinette] The same way you do it with everything. Stakes. And giving us a reason to care. What happens if the character fails to accomplish this thing? Why do we care that they're going after this information? If we don't care, we're not… It doesn't matter how compelling you make breaking into some place, it doesn't matter, any of that, if we don't care. That means telling us about their motivations, that means telling us about the physical visceral sensations that they have when they're trying to hack into a database, or use their mystical powers, whatever it is. If we aren't getting those things, it doesn't matter what set piece you've got, it's going to be dull.
[Margaret] To me, it's that machinations have to result in actions, and actions have to result in complications and ramifications. Things that change… The shifting status quo has to actually be shifting. You don't want a bunch of people sitting around scheming, but nobody ever actually does anything.
[Brandon] I think that's part of the problem my students run into. I think part of the other problem is that they assume just like action, that political intrigue is naturally interesting. So you get these chapters where they forget they need to establish rooting interest and sympathy for a character, and then just immediately dump the political situation on us. They start, this is a young prince at court, and here's the politics of what this person's behind the throne and all that. You're like, I don't care yet. So since I don't care yet, I don't want to know who's trying to secretly pull the strings. I want to see this character and see the impact on their immediate life, and make sure that I'm interested, and then start layering this on.
[Howard] If I need to know who is motivated to kill the CEO, then it's useful for me to know a little bit about the lines of succession to being the CEO or what happens if there is no CEO. But relaying that information to me organically through the story versus narrating to me the constitution of the corporation of the book that you are writing…
[Mary Robinette] I'm getting bored…
[Howard] Are two completely different things.
[Mary Robinette] Just listening to you.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Yes…
[Margaret] I think there's an assumption sometimes that in order to understand or be interested in a chess game, you have to see the entire board.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Margaret] In terms… For chess, yes, that is literally true. But for metaphorical chess, often you want to, as you say, reveal things more organically. Stick to your point of view and let this get discovered…
[Howard] Position the camera right over the bishop's shoulder at what the bishop is aiming at diagonally, and suddenly we're invested in the direction that the bishop can go.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I'm going to make the argument that you have to see the entire board to play chess. You don't have to see it to watch chess.
[Margaret] Oooo!
[Brandon] Well, I also would make the point that playing chess when somebody else can see the entire board but you can't is part of what a lot of political intrigue stories are about.
[Mary Robinette] That's true.
[Margaret] Oh, yeah.
[Brandon] Right. Somebody is moving all these pieces, but you can only move this little one.
[Margaret] Well, how long of a driver in Game of Thrones is it that… The Starks arrive in King's Landing and all of this stuff is going on, and it's Ned blundering around in the dark trying to figure out what's actually happening.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. I'm going to pitch at you The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki. This is a fantastic book. I love this book. You probably don't need me to tell you that. I mean, it was a finalist for the Locus Award and various other major awards. It is a really cool political intrigue story that starts in the political intrigue of a secondary fantastical world based on Indian history and mythologies, where the main character is part of a harem. She's grown up in the harem. She's the daughter of the king. We start to inch into political intrigue, until it turns about-face and turns into political intrigue in the world of Faerie from Indian mythology. That happens very naturally, but also very surprisingly in a very cool way very early in the story. From then on, you're like, "Oh. She was having to play 2D chess where she didn't know all the pieces, and now she's playing 7D chess and she doesn't even know what kinds of creatures are playing on the playing field with her." It is written beautifully. The language is beautiful. The intrigue is interesting. The mythology is fascinating. It is just a really well done book. So that is The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki.
 
[Brandon] So let me bring it back to you guys. One of the questions that I have is when you're doing political intrigue, and when you're reading it, often times you will eventually find out the machinations of the villain, who was behind the scenes, and it is the most convoluted…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] They were… Their method of winning this chess game was to have like 17 different things that don't mean anything, and at the end, they're like, "Ha Ha! I've won this." It just… It really bothers me when the brilliant machinations come to fruition and they're kind of dumb.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of problems with that, where you're like, "There are really a lot easier ways to accomplish that. Why didn't you…"
[Howard] One of my favorite lines… It's from one of the Lois McMaster Bujold Miles Vorkosigan books is, from somebody who's doing this political chicanery, and she says, "I don't plan a path to victory. I plan so that all paths lead to victory."
[Mary Robinette] Interesting.
[Howard] As you unravel what this character is doing, you see, yes, it was convoluted, but it was convoluted because depending on the things other people do, you put me on a different path that leads to me winning. That's super interesting. But when it's super convoluted because all of these things need to work exactly right for me to cross the finish line, suspension of disbelief fails.
[Margaret] I will say for… I was going to comment, on the flipside, so I don't know if you want to duck in first?
[Howard] Go.
[Margaret] The first television show I ever worked on was called The Middleman, and the catchphrase of all of the villains on that show was, "My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity." The plan was never simple. Ever. I believe if we had had Season Two, it would have become, "My plan is sheer elegance in its draconian complexity."
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] You can use that to great comic effect. Phineas and Ferb does this really well. Dr. Doofenschmirtz has a very simple problem with a very simple solution, which he decides to solve in arcane ways that don't work.
[Howard] It's Pinky and the Brain.
[Margaret] Exactly.
[Howard] The Brain… Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So a lot of times these plots are in fact a Rube Goldberg machine. The way I handle it is that I actually plot my villain like a hero story, so that they pick the simplest solution possible. All of the plot complications are them compensating for things going wrong.
[Howard] Well, when we come back to the idea of intrigue, and the term informational advantage, the complexities for political intrigue plots are often I have a very straightforward path and it remains straightforward if I have kept secrets from the following people. If I have informational advantage at all of these stages, then I will win. Now, once you as a writer have plotted that out, you switch sides to your heroes, and you now have a big list of obstacles that they need to clear in order to succeed, and they don't even know what the obstacles are.
[Mary Robinette] I think, again, highlighting the fact that secrets are really important in political intrigue.
 
[Brandon] All right. Well, let's go ahead and go to our homework.
[Margaret] Yes. The homework this week is to take a classic fairytale, something like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Little Mermaid, whatever floats your particular boat. Take that story. Now assume the story we know is only a cover. What was actually going on? Incorporate as many details from the original story as you would like. If baby bear had the smallest serving of porridge, why wasn't it the coldest? Why did they leave their breakfast on the table when they went out walking, anyway? Come up with the undercurrents that explains what we see on the surface.
[Howard] Goldilocks and Three Russian Bears.
[Margaret] Da.
[Brandon] This is my favorite one we've come up with, so I'm really looking forward to what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 

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Writing Excuses 13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are

Nov. 1st, 2018 11:01 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are
 
 
Key points: To write a character who is super clever, amazingly smart… Gift the character with your indecision. Show the character going through the process of thinking, then show the character making logical jumps. Clean the brain vomit off the screen, but keep the key portions. Give the reader enough clues to understand the problem and try to solve it themselves, so they participate in the intelligence of the character. Brainstorming, pacing, and cleaning it up. Letting the reader arrive at a conclusion before the character does is satisfying, but don't overdo it. Make sure the key clues are all out there for the reader. In mysteries, the reader is one step behind the detective, but in thrillers, the reader is one step ahead. It may take the writer some time to figure out a clever answer, but if the character does it in seconds, the reader is amazed at how smart they are! Similarly, if all the other characters react as if this character is very smart, the reader will accept it, too. If the character knows they're smart and displays that confidence on the page, the reader sees it. Also, borrow expert knowledge from other people. Sometimes, for instance in a heist novel, later revelation of how something gets done works best. But when you reveal the monster, make sure it's horrifying! Lastly, consider Dave and the fizz buzz test.
 
( Bits and pieces... )
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Amal] And we're not… That… Smart? Are we smart?
[Howard] We… Okay.
[Amal] We're pretty smart.
[Howard] We are rejoined for this episode by Amal El-Mohtar, who I personally believe is very much that smart.
[Hah!]
[Howard] But even at that level, if she takes time… Yes?
[Mary] We should actually introduce all of ourselves.
[Howard] Oh, damn.
[Dan] He's just demonstrating how not smart we are.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm just… 
[Laughter]
[Howard] I was so excited to be able to do something right.
[Laughter]
[Howard] And then Mary told me I didn't.
[Dan] You know, at some point, the opportunity might arise again.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm thinking 2020…
[Mary] What's er name?
[Howard] Amal El-Mohtar.
[Mary] What's your name?
[Howard] My name? Or her name?
[Mary] Your name.
[Howard] My name. I couldn't hear you. I said, "What's her name?" I was missing like a little piece of the syllable.
[Mary] He's Howard. I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan. 
[Howard] I was going to start again.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Hey, you know what, we're keeping it.
[Amal] We're keeping this?
[Howard] We're keeping it. I was going to pre-roll over the whole beginning again. Amal, thank you for joining us. I'm so sorry for how not smart we are. It's so nice to have you back.
[Dan] Because you are.
[Amal] It's a pleasure to be here.
 
[Howard] Thank you. One of the trickiest things to do in any of our writing is to write a character who comes up with a solution that is super clever, amazingly smart, in just seconds, and we try to write that in the same amount of time, or even in 10 times that amount of time. We try and write characters who are far cleverer than we are. What are the tricks that you use to make that happen?
[Mary] One of the things that I often use is actually gifting the character with my indecision. Because what I find is that there are two things that will make a character seem smart. One is watching them go through the process, and the other is watching the logical jump. Strangely, I often find that watching them go through the process, especially early in the piece, will make the character… Make the reader think, "Oh, this character's smart," because they can see all of the logical chains. So when I'm struggling, like how would you solve this problem? Having a character who is thinking, "Okay, I'm stuck in a room. How do I get out of the room? Do I try that door? No, that door has killer bees outside.
[Hah!]
[Mary] Do I try this door? There's someone with a drill outside it.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Whatever it… Okay. So, I know, I will open this third door, and there's a balcony, and I can hang glide from it. Whatever that process is, that gifting… Basically what's happening there is I am brainstorming on the page in the voice of my character. What the reader is receiving is a character is thinking logically through the problem. Then, later in the story, I don't have to do that. I can brainstorm off the page, and just have the character jump to that, and the reader will then assume the character has exhibited all of those smarts, because I've laid the groundwork earlier.
 
[Dan] Yeah. When you write that kind of brainstorming scene, and I do it a lot as well, I find that I almost always need to go back and clean it up a little bit, because you don't want to have the full brain vomit all over your screen. But keeping the key portions of it, do… They set it up so your audience trusts you that the character is figuring out all the rest of the things that you don't have to show.
[Amal] I think that… What you're describing there too is sort of a pacing issue more than anything else. There's a difference in demonstrating an intelligent character's intelligence in film and television which I think we're really used to seeing at this point with… Especially in genre with Dr. Who and with Sherlock and with all the iterations thereof, we're used to this kind of fast-paced banter stuffed with things that you the audience can't keep up with how smart the characters are. But on the page, I think that for that effect to be achieved, there's a certain degree of working the readers through the situation. So what you were describing, both of you there, is that giving the reader enough cues to understand the problem and get to solving it themselves as they're reading it is, I think, a big part of sharing in the intelligence of the character. I think part of the question here is not only how do we make our smart characters smarter than us, but how do we make our smart characters have smartness that the reader participates in in a degree that is enjoyable, and to what degree we want that joy to come in. There are… Like I think of… There are narrative level joys there where you have a kind of meta-experience of it, and there are character level joys where you're tense and nervous and wondering how you're going to get out of that locked room as well with this character, and a big part of that is seeing how impossible it is to do that. So it feels like… Like it's… The pacing of it is kind of the middle of the Venn diagram between the brainstorming it in the first place and then the cleaning up of it afterwards that you just described.
 
[Howard] There's also a piece that if you're… I'm going to go back to the escaping the room. Where you have something that many savvy readers will already know. A character says… Grabs one doorknob, "Oh, that doorknob's really hot. I'm going to need a towel. No, wait. Doorknob's really hot, I shouldn't open it, there might be a fire on the other side.
[Right]
[Howard] Because the reader might already know that thing, and the reader arriving at the conclusion before the character does is very satisfying for the reader. This is the… That's a quick thing that you can give them. You might not want to give them that for the whole book, because then, oh, they totally saw it coming.
[Amal] Exactly. Oh, the doorknob's really hot, I'm going to use it to burn the ropes that are holding my hands together before I do anything else, and so on.
 
[Dan] I love what Amal said about characters… Or the reader participating in the character's intelligence. That, I think, is really important. You can look at mysteries, which I think are a fantastic example of this. Because there's always… For me, the very disappointing mysteries are the ones where the key clues that solve it are stuff we hadn't heard before. Or something that the amazingly brilliant detective has pulled out of the air. We're like, "Well, I didn't know about that offshore account. I couldn't have solve this mystery." Conan Doyle does this really well with Sherlock. One of the reasons that Sherlock Holmes has become such an iconic character is because, for the most part, he does give us all the clues. We can look back and go, "Oh, it was all there, and I could have done this." One of my favorites is in The Redheaded League, where he has an entire interrogation of the character, and we think that that's important, and then, at the very end, as they're walking away, Watson says, "Well, what did you learn?" He says, "Oh, it doesn't matter what I learned. I was just there to look at his knees. They're dirty." We don't know why that's important, but we start to think about it… 
[Wow]
[Dan] And we realize his knees are dirty. He was kneeling in dirt. He was digging through into the next building.
[Laughter]
[Dan] That's so cool. That makes us feel smart. Which makes us think the character is smart.
[Amal] Right.
[Mary] One of the things… I'm glad you brought up mysteries, because one of the things that I often go back to is that there is a difference between the thriller and mystery, which is that in mystery, you're one step behind the detective, in thrillers, you're one step ahead of the character. So when you're looking at whether or not you're making the character smart, part of that participatory aspect is whether you let the reader figure it out before the character, or if they figure it out after. I think if you want the reader to feel like this character is supersmart, you let them figure it out one step after the character. It doesn't have to be like pages and pages later, but if you let them figure it out just a little bit later. One of the tricks that I will do sometimes with that, I will gift them with my uncertainty, but with what Dan was talking about, about cleaning up afterwards, I'll sometimes pull steps out. Because that allows my character to figure it out a moment before my reader does.
 
[Howard] Let's pause for our book of the week. Dan?
[Dan] Yes. Our book of the week is a really fantastic nonfiction, called What If by Randall Munroe. This is the guy that does XKCD, which is a really cool science-based web comic. He did a book that I believe is subtitled Ridiculous Answers to Serious Scientific Questions. He will take… People will ask him things like, "What would happen if you had a mole of moles?" Then he will go through into exhaustive detail all of the actual science behind if you had literally millions of moles, the animal, just floating in space in a giant ball, and how would gravity affect them, and what would happen to them? And things like what would happen if a submarine went into outer space? All of these things. In the process of answering these questions, you learn so much about the science and you learn it in a very engaging way. It's something that I have continued to go back to as I write my fiction, because there's really good science in there, presented in a really intelligible, accessible way.
[Howard] There's good science in it. It's quite funny.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] What would happen if the pitcher threw the ball at the speed of light?
[Hah!]
[Howard] He begins by telling you, "Okay. Bad things are going to happen once we're moving at this speed. So, let's assume that a moment after he releases the ball, it accelerates to the speed of light. Because that way, the bad things are going to happen in a more interesting way."
[Laughter]
[Dan] He's got one where somebody asked if the planet in The Little Prince could actually exist, and have its own gravity, and people could live on it. In the process of exploring what would happen to a planet like that, what would it have to be like, how dense would it be, what would the gravity be like, I have gone back to that exclamation over and over as I write my outer space science fiction because of the way he explains gravity. So, What If, by Randall Munroe, is a really great resource. We recommend you look it up.
 
[Howard] Okay. Coming back around to our tricks for writing characters who come up with solutions that are bit more brilliant than we've come up with. Have there been moments where you've been stuck and the solution you've arrived at is one that you're particularly proud of and would like to share with the class?
[Dan] I do have one. In the first Mirador book, Bluescreen, I've got the characters caught in the middle of a drive-by gang war. Two rival gangs are shooting at each other, the main character needs to stop them, but she does not have combat powers. She is a gamer and a hacker, and I wanted to make sure to solve that problem with intelligence, rather than her just picking up a gun and going Rambo on everybody. I had to stop and think about it for a couple of days before I figured out, "Oh, okay. I think some of those seeds that I've earlier put in about how pop up… Everyone has a computer in their head, and pop up ads will come and kind of intrusively come into your vision." So she was able to use that advertising system to blind all of the gang members essentially, so they weren't able to attack each other. It took me a few days to figure that out. She does it in seconds. I'm very proud of it.
[Howard] DDoSed with pop-up ads.
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] That's horrifying. While you guys… While you all are thinking about the answer to the question, I want to clarify something. This episode actually airs just three and a half weeks from us recording it, because it's a replacement episode. So, Amal, you're not appearing a season later than you appeared before, you're appearing right in the middle of the season in which we're already enjoying episodes with you. The thing that feels weird is that Dan and I have not had the opportunity to record with you.
[Amal] This is true. This is a delight. I have now recorded… Well, when we are done recording, I will have recorded with all the core cast of Writing Excuses.
[Dan] Hooray!
[Amal] Which is really awesome.
 
[Howard] Any other boasting you'd like to do?
[Mary] So, with Calculating Stars, one of the challenges… And Fated Sky… One of the challenges that I had is that I have someone who can do math, who's a mathematician, and I am… I have dyscalcula. I like legit cannot do math. Not in the math is hard, but like I… Geometry? Fine. Absolutely. My spatial awareness, wonderful. Arithmetic and I are, wow, we are really not friends. We have not been on speaking terms for decades…
[Laughter]
[Mary] At this point. I have this character who is a computer, who is a calculator. What she does is she does math. So my problem was I don't. I'm not actually that interested in it. So what I did was I treated it like a magic system. Rather than having her do all of the math that I need her to do in these books, I laid the groundwork ready early that Elma can do math. Then I decided that Elma can do math in her head and that she visualized it. Which is the same thing that they do in the television Sherlock Holmes films, series, that the BBC series. Where you get to see… Things whipping around him, that's the visualization. Because that way, rather than having to explain the logical leaps, it's like, "Oh. Magic system happens. Math is magic."
[Hah!]
[Mary] So I am particularly proud of that, because it allows me to get around my own weakness in this area. While at the same time, because early on, I have every other character treating her as if she can do amazing calculations. Actually, through the entire book, everyone is like, "Oh, yeah. No one is faster at math than Elma. She can do amazing math in her head." Everyone reacts to her as if this is a truth in the world. Which means that I can just put the conclusions on the page. I don't, in that case, have to step through the process to get there.
 
[Amal] Similarly, so I have this novella, which… I've talked about it… No, I haven't talked about it yet. Oh, no. Sorry.
[Howard] You will have talked about it…
[Amal] I will have talked about it.
[Howard] In an episode previously recorded.
[Amal] That's exactly it. That's exactly it.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] I wish I could… I wish I were smart enough to make that seem like something that I just know from understanding times…
[Howard] It's happened to us enough times, that I already have all those parts of speech.
[Mary] They are used to our time travel.
[Chuckles]
 
[Amal] So, Max Gladstone and I have co-written a novella that is coming out in probably… I think it's… Probably, I think it's July 2019. It's a book of two dueling time traveling super spies. One written by Max and one written by me. I have a number of insecurities in this regard because, first of all, I mean, they're time traveling super spies, they have all of time and space at their disposal, they are the best there… They are the best there are at what they do. But Wolverine quote, "And what they do is not very nice." Etc. So, they're brilliant, and they're constantly outsmarting each other and one upping each other. I am not a time traveling superspy.
[Howard] Probably.
[Mary] What!
[Amal] Probably not. But… The thing was, the insecurity I had around this, is I also haven't read a time of spy fiction. Like, there are, I think, a lot of protocols around this genre, that I only feel glancingly familiar with. So what I started to do, I realized, was writing this character… And especially because Max has a lot more of those protocols than I do. He is far more savvy with all of the kind of… Especially Cold War era stuff. He's literally writing a serial for Bookburners… Not for Bookburners. A serial for Serial Box, which is not Bookburners. Which is the spy… The witch that came in from the cold. Anyway, it's literally Soviet era spy stuff. So what I found myself doing was kind of the opposite of what you described at first, Mary Robinette, of the… Of giving… Gifting the character the uncertainty. I had my character strike constant confident poses. That confidence, like that maintaining of I know I'm a brilliant superspy. I know that I can outsmart you. And stuff. And to just kind of dwell in the affect of knowing that she is that brilliant helps to overcome those hurdles. So I feel like it was like a sustained thing across the whole project, to just find the confidence to display that confidence on the page was the [fall] for me in that situation.
 
[Mary] One of the other things, like that confidence and the I don't know this thing, that I also find that I use is expert knowledge from other people.
[Uhum.]  
[Amal] Ah. Yes.
[Mary] Which I have talked about in other places. That I am totally comfortable with going to someone and just leaving blanks in my manuscript, and going to someone who actually is an expert in this field, and then having them fill in my blanks, so that my character is literally smarter than I am, because they're talking about things that I know nothing about.
[Amal] Right.
[Mary] Whether or not that's one of my astronaut friends.
[Laughter]
[Amal] Wait, wait. Do you have astronaut friends, Mary?
[Mary] I do. I know, I know, it's shocking to everyone.
[Howard] You want to know something funny?
[What?]
[Howard] This episode airs immediately after Writing Excuses interviews an astronaut.
[Laughter]
[Amal] That's so great.
[Howard] We couldn't will have timed this better.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Well, that was exactly why we did this. Will have done this.
 
[Amal] There is one quick thing I wanted to say, too, just about things that we've been discussing. It occurs to me that some of the things that we've touched on are kind of generic distinctions between… In ways to talk about… To convey the smartness of characters who are smarter than we are. Because I think of… So we've talked about mystery, we've talked about other stuff, but I… If you're writing a heist novel, for instance. I have to assume that part of the way you display the smartness of the character is by revealing afterwards how a thing was done. What you're doing, instead of showing how smart they are, is showing how impeded they are throughout, in order to then kind of just reveal at the end the way that those things fell together. It feels like writing kind of backwards the things that we were initially talking about.
[Mary] I think that gets into that thing we were talking about earlier, about whether or not you want the reader to be ahead of or behind the character. You were going to say something, Dan?
 
[Dan] Yeah. The more that Amal is talking about this, I'm kind of coming to this epiphany, that a lot of this intelligence that we see in characters follows the same principles of a horror movie when you finally reveal the monster.
[Oooo]
[Dan] Right. It's the monster…
[Mary] I'm shocked that you refer to this as…
[Dan] I know. Isn't that weird that I would go there?
[Laughter]
[Dan] If you've been building up the monster as something horrible, and then you finally show it and it doesn't live up to our expectations, then it feels very disappointing. It feels so much worse than if we'd never seen the monster at all. If you're doing this, if you're building up your character's confidence or intelligence or capability, and then we finally get to the point where we see them, for example, do some math and it's like super simple math…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Then that's not going to impress us, and we're going to be like, "Really? That's the math that Elma's so good at?" So that's one of the things I thought, for example, that Elma did really well, that you did well with Elma, was when we finally saw the monster, so to speak, when we finally revealed that capability that we'd been hearing so much about, it lived up to, if not superseded, our expectations.
[Mary] And because… The reason it did that was because I was using someone else's math. The one scene in the novel where I actually have her talking at length about a formula is when she is at the Congressional hearing, and there is a formula, and she is explaining it to the Congressman. That formula comes out of Wernher von Braun's Mars, A Technical Project. Wernher von Braun was the father of modern rocketry.
[Dan] Modern rocketry.
[Mary] So… And that formula, by the way, is ridonkulous.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] It is so long. So she explains the first maybe 16th of the formula. It is that… Again, it's like I don't give the reader everything. But I give them… It is competence porn, is basically what we're dealing with.
[Dan] Well, one of the reasons, again, that that particular scene works well is that she is presenting it to a group of very smart, very capable, very competent people, and they can't follow it. So we're seeing not only her own intelligence, but her comparative intelligence.
 
[Howard] There is a… A test, a quiz, that's often administered to people who are hiring for programming jobs. It's called the fizz buzz test, which is write a program that prints the numbers one through 100, that if it's a multiple of three, you substitute the number with fizz, if it's a multiple of five, it's buzz, and if it's a multiple of both three and five, do fizz and buzz. Write a computer program that will do that. Elegant is good, writing it quickly is good, writing it so it is tight is good. Solve this problem for me, let me see what kind of a problem solver you are. My friend Dave had an interview in which the guy asked this question. Dave said, "Well, first thing I'd do is I'd write a program that says call FizzBuzz.lib from whatever this hub is because somebody else has already solved it."
[Laughter]
[Howard] The guy laughed and laughed and laughed. Then Dave provided his solution. Then, that night, Dave went home, wrote a very elegant, over the course of about four hours, fizz buzz program that he uploaded to the library, so that when his boss to be came in the next morning to look it up, he found it and saw who wrote it.
[Laughter]
[Mary] That is…
[Laughter]
[Mary] That is smart.
[Howard] That is brilliant and beautiful and kind of hilarious.
 
[Howard] On that note, I would like to offer our listeners some homework.
[Mary] Yes, please.
[Howard] Time. Is. Your. Friend. Your character might not have a lot of time, but you do. Write a solution, off of the top of your head, to a character problem that you are currently facing. First thing you can think of. Now, over the next couple of days, it might be two days, it might be a week, it might be longer, spend time researching on the Internet, in books, from friends, anything even tangentially related to that problem. Maybe it's math, maybe it's science, maybe it's climate, maybe it's geography, maybe it's pop up ads. Research these things and as you are doing the research, write down the solutions that come to you. Then, after you've done all this, order these solutions in a list of what you think is dumbest to smartest, and see how much smarter you are able to get with time. You are out of excuses. Now go write. Because this is Writing Excuses. And I got those out of order. I'm terrible at this.
[Laughter]
 
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Writing Excuses 11.30: Elemental Thriller Q&A

Jul. 26th, 2016 07:53 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.30: Elemental Thriller Q&A

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/07/24/11-30-elemental-thriller-qa/

Q&A Summary
Q: How do I build tension consistently through my story? As opposed to having little batches of it here and there?
A: Shorten sequel time, or overlap it with another piece of action. Raise stakes consistently. Set the stakes in the beginning, then just remind us of them.
Q: What are some disadvantages of thriller pacing?
A: Fatigue. May have ramped up the tension so high that character moments are difficult. Beware not having a payoff for the level of tension you've created.
Q: What are advantages of a thriller? Why would you write on, or inject it?
A: Keep the reader reading! Draw the reader deeper into the story.
Q: How do you keep tension in dialogue and beats, movement beats, instead of just having things explode all the time?
A: Keep your dialogue snappy. Raise the stakes behind the dialogue.
Q: When don't you use a cliffhanger?
A: When you don't have a good payoff. There are different kinds of cliffhangers, surprise and wonder, or what's coming next.
Q: When you write a scene from a thriller, do you ever imagine how it would play out in a movie?
A: Yes.
Q: How much thriller is too much before it changes your genre?
A: Which part is set dressing, and which is elemental genre (emotion)? What promises do you want to make to your reader? What excites you? If the thrill overpowers the other emotion you were trying to evoke, then you've used too much.
Q: What do you do when the tension in your story has peaked too early? How do I escape from the thrill I have inadvertently created?
A: Revision. Take your stakes, spread them out. Do a beat chart and see what you need to do. Consider adding a subplot.
( What if you had one more question? )

[Howard] Yep. We are about halfway through our year of elemental genre. So what we want to do is start putting these things together, using thriller as well, in this case, kind of as a pacing element. I talked about a beat chart earlier. Sit down with your manuscript or with your outline, and in the margins, write at each point what the emotion is that you are trying to evoke from the reader. Are you trying to evoke anxiety? Are you trying to evoke joy? Are you trying to evoke laughter? Is it action, is it wonder? Make these visible notes, underlined. Then sit back and look at the manuscript and see where the spaces are. See where things are really close together. The conclusion here is you're going to learn something about your manuscript. I don't know what it is.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] But it should be exciting and thrilling. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.29: Elemental Thriller As Subgenre

Jul. 19th, 2016 04:31 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.29: Elemental Thriller As Subgenre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/07/17/11-29-elemental-thriller-as-a-subgenre/

Key Points: Thriller, adrenaline, pumped! To make a thriller, make sure your character is in danger, and stays in danger. Take away the people the protagonist can trust. Keep the pot boiling -- four things at once, not just one. Try-fail cycles with yes-but/no-and and plenty of unintended consequences. Timebomb after timebomb. But don't lose what makes the main genre work, just add to it. Make it personal. Why does it matter to this character?
( When you turn the page, the bomb goes off? )

[Brandon] So, I'm going to stop us here and give you some homework. I'm going to suggest that you practice your cliffhangers. A lot of people ask me, students asked me this, I get a ton of questions over twitter about "How do you decide how long a chapter should be?" Well, one of the number one things you can learn from thrillers is practicing how to end a chapter in a way that pulls someone to the next one. What I want to avoid are the cheap tricks. So I want you to look at chapters you've written or write new ones or something monumental, something really cool happens at the end and it is so cool that the person wants to turn the page and read what happens next rather than hinting that something cool is going to happen in the next page. Practice doing this a few times. Practice chopping your chapters in different places from what you've already written. See what kind of effects you can create through varying chapter length and varying where you end them. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.27: the Elemental Thriller

Jul. 6th, 2016 03:49 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.27: the Elemental Thriller

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/07/03/11-27-the-elemental-thriller/

Key Points: Thriller! In danger, being chased, someone is trying to kill you, if you don't stop the bomb from exploding, millions will die. Anxiety! If horror is fear of the unknown, thriller is fear of what is coming. Tension! Short chapters, with cliffhangers. Races and chases! Timebomb! Adrenaline. To write one -- use chapter breaks, in cusp points. Minimize resting places. Scene, scene, little sequel. Keep the momentum going! If your protagonist is doing the chasing, make sure there is a timebomb, that they don't have time to prep and plan. Pursuit thriller, where we are chasing, often has high stakes. Pursued thriller, where we are being chased, often has personal stakes.

( What happened then? )

[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and break and give you guys some homework. Mary is going to make you do something.
[Mary] All right. So we're going to talk about having you actually ramp up your current work and get a little bit more thriller action in there. There's a very useful plotting tool called "yes-but, no-and" which is the idea that every question… Every action that your character takes is essentially a question. The question is, "Does this succeed?" Your answers are "Yes, but things get worse," or "No, and things get worse." So what I want you to do is to look at what you've got going on and find something that you currently have them succeed at, and then you have a nice resting spot, and then they go on to another thing. Take out the nice resting spot and make that success a little less triumphant. So essentially what I'm asking you to do is have scene, scene. If you really need the sequel, if there's content in there, see if you can roll that into the next action scene. But what we want you to do is tighten it up so we've got a lot more breathlessness going forward.
[Brandon] All right. That's excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.1: Introduction to Elemental Genre

Jan. 6th, 2016 01:14 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.1: Introduction to Elemental Genre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/01/03/writing-excuses-11-1-introduction-to-elemental-genre/

Key Points: Season 11 is going to be different! Elemental genres. Each month, expect the first week to be an elemental drill down, second week to be a wild card, third week to be using the elemental genre in subplots, and the fourth week will be Q&A. Elemental genres are the things that make you read, the emotional resonance that drives a story. Not bookshelf genres, but elemental genres. The 11 elemental genres planned are wonder, idea, adventure, horror, mystery, thriller, humor, relationship, drama, issue, and ensemble. This is a framework for talking about what makes readers turn the page and have emotional responses, not a hard-and-fast set of categories or rules. Elemental genres let you mix-and-match underneath the veneer of the bookshelf categories.
( Underneath the veneer, they found elemental genres! )
[Brandon] But I am going to give you some homework today. Your homework is actually to take some of the films and books that you love, and I want you to try and drill down to... You don't have to really define the elemental genre, because we haven't defined all of these for you yet. But what I really want you to do is start looking at what the emotional impact of that story is. What the people who made the story are doing to you. How they're hacking your brain. Try to relate... Try to strip away the veneer and dig down at it for yourself. Pick three of those, books and films that you love, and see if you can do it. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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