wetranscripts | Entries tagged with tone

Writing Excuses 20.49: Using Tone and Mood

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-49-using-tone-and-mood

Key points: Plot tells us what happened, structure tells us how it happened, and tone and mood shape the emotional experience of the reader. Tone is the narrator's view of the world, mood is the character's view of the world. Tone is imagery, word choices, sentence structure. Mood is the characters' physical responses, internal reactions, actions they take, and what they pay attention to. Aligned or in conflict? Juxtaposition and contrast! Mood as landscape, and tone is the personal walking there? Control tone through imagery, word choices, and sentence structures.

[Season 20, Episode 49]

[Erin] Hey, everybody. This is Erin, and I've got a question for you. What have you learned from Writing Excuses that you use for your own writing? Now, we talk a lot about tools, not rules. Which means there are things that we're going to say that you're going to be like, yes, that is for me. That's the tool I'm going to use in my next project. And there are others that you're going to be like, uh, I'm going to leave that to the side. And what we want to know is which of the things that we're saying have really worked for you? What's the acronym you're always repeating? What's the plot structure you keep coming back to? What's a piece of advice that has carried you forward, when you've been stuck in your work? Or that you've been able to pass on to another writer who's needed advice or help? However you've used something that you've learned from us, we want to know about it, and we want to share it with the broader community. Every month, we're going to put one of your tips or tricks or tools in the newsletter, so that the rest of the community can hear how you have actually taken something that we've talked about and made it work for you. And I'm personally just really excited to learn about those, because a lot of times, y'all take the things that we say and use them in such ingenious and interesting ways to do such amazing writing that I'm just like chomping at the bit to get in these tools and tips and share them with everybody else. So if you're interested, please go to our show notes, and fill out the form there, and be part of this project and just share with us what you're doing, what you've learned, and how are you using it so that we can share with everybody else. Really excited, again, to get all this in because, honestly, what we say is made real and important and meaningful by what y'all do with it. With that, you're out of excuses. Now go tell us what works for you.

[unknown] If the Lenovo gaming computer's on your holiday list, don't shop around. Just go directly to the source lenovo.com. You'll find exclusive deals on the gaming PCs and tablets you want. Like the powerful Legion 7i Gen 10 laptop and the versatile Legion tab. So avoid all that shopping chaos and price comparisons, and just go directly to the source lenovo.com, where you can unlock exclusive savings. That's lenovo.com. [singing Lenovo, Lenovo]

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

[Season 20, Episode 49]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Using tone and mood.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And I have brought this topic to the table because it's a class that I taught for my Patreon because I started thinking about what tone and mood did. And that they are one of the most powerful storytelling tools. But we always talk about structure or character arc or things like that. Here is why I think it's important, and then we're going to... We're going to tell it... We're going to... I will let other people talk at some point.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Yay!

[Mary Robinette] Basically, I think plot tells us what happened, structure tells us how it happened, and tone and mood shape the emotional experience of the reader. And my example of this, I've got two of them for you, is that Wizard of Oz is structurally a heist. So, you have the catalyst, which is the tornado, you have scouting the territory, Welcome to Oz, you have gathering the team, meet the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and The Wizard, you have practice and prep for the heist, which is the Merry Old Land of Oz song, you have committed to the heist, the wizard sends them to get the broom, they're forced to alter the plan, there's flying monkeys. Then the plan comes together, the team rescues Dorothy, everything goes wrong, they get chased by guards and the witch through the castle, they're at an apparent total loss where they're caught, and the scarecrow catches on fire, and then the actual win, which is the witch is melted and we have the true plan revealed, which is that that was the wizard's goal all along. So...

[Howard] More heist movies need flying monkeys.

[Mary Robinette] Right?

[Howard] Wow!

[Mary Robinette] But it doesn't feel like a heist, because tonally, it is a wonder tale and it's a coming-of-age story. And then Pride and Prejudice? Actually, secretly a mystery. You've got the crime, Mr Darcy is an asshole, the investigation, Lizzy investigates and continues to find proof that he's an asshole, and you have the twist, Wickham runs away with Lydia, and the breakthrough, like, what, Darcy saved Lydia from ruin? And then the conclusion, that he's not an asshole and that they're in love. And then you have marriage. So... But, again, it... Tonally, it's a... It's not that. So...

[DongWon] This connects to fundamental genres in certain ways. Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly. This gets into Elemental genres. But I think that tone and mood are things that we can play with. So what I want to do is talk about tone in this first half of the episode, and mood in the second. And my thinking is that tone is about the narrator's view of the world, and that mood is about the character's view of the world. So, I am curious what... Having just spewed at you, here's my thinking, I'm very excited about that idea...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What do you think about that? And, like, I think there's a number of different ways that we control tone, and so I'm curious what you think, now that I've been like, hello, here's a thing.

[Howard] I am... One, I'm reluctant to disagree because this is very well thought out, and I love it. But, two, I think that tone might be... Yeah, might be the structure and so on and so forth, and mood might be a more readerly thing that comes into the narrative because, in the context of what I bring to sitting down to watch Wizard of Oz, Wizard of Oz doesn't feel like a heist, it feels like a wonder tale. But if I'd never seen, if I didn't have that context, Wizard of Oz might feel like... Might feel more like a heist. And so mood might be more related to the conversation... We talked about this earlier this year... The conversation that your piece is having with other pieces that are similar in the mood that you're shooting for.

[Mary Robinette] I see what you're saying. I think the question is, if we're thinking about this as being an intentional thing that we can control...

[Howard] Yes. And that's why... That's the other reason I'm reluctant to do this. How would I control that? I don't know.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and I think the reason you can... The way you control that is through how the character feels. Like, Dorothy, when she walks into Oz, when she steps out into Oz, her reaction to being in Oz tells us how we should feel about it.

[DongWon] So, that's the mood.

[Mary Robinette] That's the mood.

[DongWon] And the tone is the heist structure of it. The...

[Mary Robinette] No, the tone... The structure is this thing that's happening. The tone is... So, the tone is the narrator's view of the world, it's the imagery that we use.

[DongWon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So it's... In fiction, it's the word choices, it's the sentence structure. And in Wizard of Oz, it's the color palette and things like that.

[Erin] I was going to... Actually say what you would say for mood, and then... I have a theoretical analogy.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, okay. so, for mood, the tools that I think we're using to control things are the characters' physical responses, their internal reactions, the actions that they take and the things they pay attention to.

[DongWon] I see. Okay.

[Erin] The way that I'm thinking about this, of course, is with karaoke.

[Mary Robinette] I love it.

[Erin] So, I'm thinking, like, so the tone... Because to me what you're saying is the tone is the way that... it's how the teller tells the tale. And so when you sing a song, like, you can decide... Like, if you... It could be the weirdest song ever, that's like, who knows, could be the most emo [trumo] song, and if instead of screaming it, you decide to sing it in a sultry jazz voice, like, you have changed the tone of the song. That song's trying to do what it's doing, but you have put your foot down and said, this is the way that I'm going to do it. I say everything is a sultry jazz number, and I don't care what it is. And that's the part of the experience that you're going to have. And then the mood, to me, is more like the crowd. Like, the mood is like I'm telling the tale this way, and the mood is like looking around and seeing, like, is everyone polka-ing? That's going to give a different mood.

[DongWon] Yeah. Right.

[Erin] Then no matter what. So... And then those two things intersect. And one of the things I think is interesting, number one, is to see does that even work for you as an analogy, and number two, then, like, what happens if the tone and the mood... Like, do they always have to line up? Or can they be in conflict with each other?

[Mary Robinette] They don't [garbled]

[DongWon] I have a great example, I think, of where they diverge. What's fun about this episode is you brought up this idea and we didn't talk about it much offline. So this is sort of a little bit of a class situation...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] For us, and a little bit of, like, let's interrogate the instructor and find out what this means.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] For me, this is let's kick the tires on that. Yes. No, I love it. Okay. So. Mike Flanagan, who's a horror director, made a adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story called The Fall of the House of Usher. The tone of this is this big dark family drama horror story of a man being haunted by the deaths of his children that are happening over the course of weeks, where all of his children die in increasingly horror... Or not increasingly, but all equally horrible ways. The tone of this story is told in this, like, bombastic way, this. like. big grand family drama. And then the experience of watching this show is almost horror comedy. It's campy, it's over the top, and I think a lot of people reacted badly to the show because of this. But it's a deeply unserious show with a serious core message. But it's a deeply unserious show... You watch these characters die in increasingly ludicrous ways. In ways that feel very Edgar Allan Poe, in terms of being wildly over the top, of watching a guy go insane because he thinks there's a cat in the wall. Right? Like... and it's... To me, it was an utterly delightful experience. We were like howling and cackling through the whole thing. But it strikes me that there is a real difference between the tone and the mood, where the tone is like reading Edgar Allan Poe poems, like, verbatim as narration, with, like, this somber music behind it, and then you're watching someone run around with a sledgehammer trying to find a cat. And it's, like, fantastic, but there's such a difference between those two experiences. And the... I think the dissonance between them led to so much of the space for Flanagan to say the serious things he wanted to say, while also entertaining the hell out of us watching a bunch of awful, incredibly wealthy people get got in ways that they deserved.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, to Erin's point about can these two... Can these things work in opposition to each other, can you create a juxtaposition and contrast? Yes. Absolutely. One of the things that I was thinking about is that in This is How You Lose the Time War, the tea shop scene, the tone of that is like, look at how lovely Britain is, and how beautiful this is, and the mood of the characters is quite different from that. While the character is there to enjoy that, the character is inhabiting it as a this is quaint, this is... And I'm also having all these big feels about this person that I'm having these battles with. This is a battleground. That's the mood that's going on. One of my other favorite examples is Jane Austen. You do not have to read the entire novel. But if you take a look at Northanger Abbey, chapter 21 and 22, in 20... It's basically the character arrives, and she's in this room, and she's like, oh, no, this room is so Gothic and terrible and it's really frightening and there's mysteries in it. And the author, the tone of it is that Jane Austen, the author's voice, is gently mocking the character, while the character is having genuine feels. And in chapter 22, she wakes up in the morning and discovers that the terrible scratching at the window was actually a beautiful rose bush and that the wardrobe that she thought was locked was actually unlocked, and that she had locked it, and that that was why it was hard to get open. So the tone remains quite consistent, I'm gently mocking you, while the character's mood switches, and so it causes you to experience the same room in two very, very different ways.

[Erin] The thought I'm having is that it seems like mood, in some ways in terms of tools and how you work with it, that mood is a more primal... It seems like it's more of a lizard brain thing. And by that, I mean, things are scary. There are certain things, like when things..., a scary mood plays on things that we are afraid of. It is dark, there is a strange sound. There are a lot of ways to bring different tones, because we can do a lot more [garbled] control over the way our narrator thinks about it and talks about it. But things like hitting a wall with sledgehammers looking for a cat... Like, if you frame that well, like, there's something that we will just think that's funny because there's something funny in the visual that puts us on that kind of level. And so I'm kind of curious, like, how you... Speaking for myself, how to set up that kind of, like, this is the landscape, in some ways? Like, mood is the landscape, and tone is the person walking through the landscape? And so we can control how they see it and what they say about it, if they make fun of it or whatever. But in some ways, the landscape is still there. And if you want to change the mood, you're making broader changes to the landscape [garbled].

[Mary Robinette] That sounds like a great thing for us to talk about when we come back from the break.

[DongWon] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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[unknown] If a Lenovo computer's on your holiday list, don't shop around. Just go directly to the source Lenovo.com. You'll find exclusive deals on the gaming PCs and tablets you want. Like the powerful Legion 7i gen 10 laptop and the versatile Legion tab. So avoid all that shopping chaos and price comparisons, and just go directly to the source Lenovo.com, where you can unlock exclusive savings. That's lenovo.com. [singing Lenovo, Lenovo]

[Mary Robinette] So I love this idea of thinking about it as a landscape, and I think the reason that I have been thinking about mood is that... As a thing that is very character centered, is because different people react differently to the same landscape. And so the narrator has set for me, it's like, okay, here's your landscape. I'm going to... maybe I'll set up some fog, and some scary lighting, and this is amazing. And the character is like, I love fog and scary lighting. And then another character's like, no, this is much worse. And that's the... For me, a lot of the... What a character does when we are in tight third person or first person is that they are my viewpoint into the story. They're my way of imagining how I would feel in that, and it does activate my lizard brain. So I think that that's... It's an interesting way to think about it.

[Howard] You bring that up... I went through a haunted house once a couple of decades ago, and the mood that I brought with me was I have heard that they have spent a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of effort and they've got really good... They got a really good team working on this, and it's being hosted at what used to be the actual mental hospital up on the hillside in Utah. And I was giggling, generally joyful, happy the whole time. And somebody does a thing where they pull down a lever and crush a dummy. And something squirted on my face. And I squealed with laughter. And one of the cast members stepped up to me, just right in my ear, like, dude, what's wrong with you?

[laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled we need to?] hire you.

[Howard] Would you like to work here? Because you're frightening all of us. And so, yeah, for me, the tone and the mood are dependent a lot on what I bring into that landscape.

[DongWon] I'd love to turn at this point to talking a little bit about how we can use this as a tool.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? I think understanding... We've gotten to a little point where we kind of understand the terms here. How do you deploy this in your fiction, or how should we think about this as an active use?

[Mary Robinette] Let me actually use an example from an early, early piece of my own writing. This is one of the pieces that made me understand that tone was something that I should be consciously manipulating. So, there's a short story called Cerbo in Vitra ujo, which was the first horror story that I sold. And I'm like, this is... I'm not very deep into my career. I have... I don't have novels out at this point. And... So I'm going to read you the first paragraph or so. For 3 sentences ish. And then I'm going to read you the revision of it after I talked to Ellen Datlow who gave me some lessons about horror. So...

Behind the steady drone of the garden's humidifiers, Greta caught the whoosh snick as the airlock door opened. She kept pruning her Sunset Glory rose bush to give Kai a chance to sneak up on her. He barreled around Noholen's Emperor artichoke without a hint of stealth. Something was wrong. Greta's breath quickened to match his. Kai's dark skin seemed covered by a layer of ash.

So, this is what Ellen said when she read that, was that there was nothing visceral about it. There was nothing about the language... The tone of my language. Right now, I'm setting up something that could just be a meet cute kind of thing. He could be about, like, oh, my goodness, I'm about to propose marriage. Like, anything could be happening right now. So when I revised it, all of the actions are exactly the same. But I've switched my language.

Greta snipped a diseased branch off her Sunset Glory rose bush, like she was a body harvester looking for the perfect part.

So you can see... I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of it. But you can see immediately that the tone switch that that makes. So, for me, when I'm thinking about tone, I'm thinking about the imagery that I use, and that was one of the things that Ellen said, was that I needed... That there needed to be something diseased or something like... Why was there a perfect rose bush? So imagery, the word choices, like body harvester, choosing that, sentence structures, whether you're doing something that's flowing and languid or, like, choppy and breathy.

[Howard] And I think that's where, to my original attempt to argue with you, I think that's where we have control over what the reader brings to the experience. Because when you say body harvester, that's the sort of phrase that is going to resonate with people, whether or not they had experience in sci-fi or horror...

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Howard] Really well.

[Mary Robinette] What I'm going to point out is that my character does not know that she's in a horror story, and that's why I think mood is a separate thing.

[DongWon] Yeah. So, if mood is the landscape, as Erin sort of described, I'm seeing tone as the score. Like the movie score that's running underneath it. Right? Like, you have a scene of a group of characters laughing with upbeatness behind it, you are in a comedy, you put a discordant ambient sound underneath it, it is a horror movie now.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? Howard showed me a YouTube video the other day of the trailer for Mad Max, remixed to the Yakety Yak song. And it changed the tone, let's say. While the mood of the characters remained the same because the landscape is the same.

[Erin] This is not important to writing, but this is why I have always wanted... If I were going to have a superpower, for it to be to be able to hear the orchestration of my own life.

[laughter]

[Erin] So that I would know when to be afraid, when to be happy, when I'm like meeting a romance. Because it would come through and let me know that, like, while I may be in this place, something completely different is happening all together.

[DongWon] You know what, Erin, I think you're empowered to choose the music that is behind your own life.

[Erin] I love it. But I would say the other thing that's not to do with my own life is I think we, a lot of times, play around with this with contrast. I asked that question about the contrast and the example that I thought of was, like, your old school Law and Order episodes where, like, someone has been killed in some horrific way, and then Lenny Bristol is like, guess he's not making it home for dinner.

[laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? [garbled] like, it cuts because you're like, oh, no, like... And it is a... But it brings you to, like, this is a show that's about procedure and we're kind of having a fun time. It's not a horror.

[yeah]

[Erin] Law and Order is not a horror show.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] But that would be interesting. And it teaches you a little bit, but also, it makes you laugh. because the mood sets up one expectation, and the tone comes in contrast to that, and contrast, I've learned from Howard, is one of the tools, I think, that you can use to make humor happen.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. And that's... It's also one of the things that you can use to make tension happen, too, which we've been talking about in a lot of other places. That placing two things in contrast to each other. That's why you so often see the, hello, it's a giant battle scene, the [garbled]... Like, the classic one is, it's... What a Wonderful World, and Good Morning, Vietnam. And that's the thing that I think is fun to play with on a conscious level. I think a lot of us do it unconsciously, but I think it is as important to think about as plot.

[DongWon] Yeah, I totally agree.

[Howard] The tools that I find myself using are white space and sentence length. Where, when I want to make a shift, and I think about that in terms of it, Erin, as you suggested, the score. because the song of, the music of, the poetry of, the prose on the page is so dependent on where the breaths land, that by adding white space, by shortening sentences, I can change the breath of what's happening, and govern the mood in the same way that an orchestral score might.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I think when you're looking at it, that you kind of have two choices. You can either... When you're combining tone and mood, that you can either have them match, or you can have them in juxtaposition. And when they match, you get what Edgar Allan Poe called unity of affect, where you are reinforcing an underlining this is... Things are really bad or things are good. And in juxtaposition, when they don't match, you can create tension by a contrast between the narration and the character. If the narration is like, oh, there is... Bad stuff is going down, and the character is like, I love this place. You're like, uh-huh, things are... No. It creates that anticipation.

[DongWon] It's funny that you mention that because the Fall of the House of Usher show that I was talking about, there's one moment towards the end when the tone and the mood match, and it is a devastating brutal beat in a show that has been mostly about yucks up until that point, where he just kicks you in the heart. And it's when those align.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's the trick he pulls. It suddenly aligns, and then we slip out of that again for the finale, but it's interesting to point that out. I'm like, oh, that is a good trick to pull.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have got some homework for you. Your homework is that I just want you to take a mystery structure, and a mystery structure is five parts. You have a crime, an investigation, a twist, a breakthrough, and then the conclusion. I want you to take that structure, and I want you to write something that is not obviously a mystery.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.07: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Intention

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-07-nanowrimo-revision-with-ali-fisher-intention

Key points: Editing for intention, focusing to make the book more of the book that you want it to be. What effect do you want to have on the reader with the book? Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose. You read your favorite author because of what they do well. So lean into what you do well, and what you enjoy. Don't kill your darlings. Why is this here? Do consider where and how you are planning to publish. Don't write to the market, but you can edit to the market. Having someone tell you what they think the book is about can help. Focus on the question the novel is asking. What is the tone of the book? The vibe? What is your lodestone, your guiding light?

[Season 19, Episode 07]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A mini-series on revision with Ali Fisher, editing for intention.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Ali] And I'm Ali.

[Mary Robinette] We are delighted to have Ali Fisher back with us for this episode, where we are going to be talking about intention. This is, like, how you're approaching the editing when you're not thinking about the length, but thinking about really focusing to make the book more of the book that you want it to be. There's a thing that Edgar Allan Poe said that I referenced in our last episode about writing and editing for unity of effect. That is, in his view, what is the emotion that you want to leave the reader with. That's a… Something that I share as well, and I think I've certainly heard both of you talk about that quite a bit. Like, thinking about what effect you want to have on the reader with the book. So, what are some of the questions that you ask your authors when you're trying to get them to focus their book?

[DongWon] Absolutely. When I'm approaching a manuscript, so much of what I'm doing in the initial pass is trying to make sure I understand very clearly what the author was intending to accomplish. Right? What was the unity of effect that they were going for? Since everyone else has a quote on this topic, I also have one…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Which is a Dolly Parton quote…

[Yes]

[DongWon] which is, "Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose." So much, I think, of writing a book is a process of figuring out what is this book, who is this book, why did you write it? I think sometimes you'll have an idea going into it, and sometimes that idea isn't clear until you've finished it. Or, what you originally thought it was about turns out not to be what the book is about. Right? So, I think the process of writing it is often, no matter how much planning you do, discovery of what your intentions were, and are, and what you want them to be going forward. Right? So, that's so much of the thing that's going to be informing your editing process and your revision process as you dive back into it.

[Mary Robinette] I love that so much. That Dolly Parton quote makes me so happy. It also ties into something that... I just took a class with Tobias [Buckell?]. He was talking about finding your spark, but one of the things that he said just set off all sorts of fireworks and sparks in my head, was that you read your favorite author because of what they do well, not because of what they don't do well.

[Ali] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] So, like when you're reading Asimov, it's not because of his characterization.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, that's not why you read Asimov.

[Ali, DongWon chorus] Nope.

[DongWon] Truly not.

[Ali] She likes jewelry. End of character.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. That's all you need. Really. It goes with the diamonds. But, for me, it was like thinking about… Like, really leaning into what you do well, and the things that you enjoy as a representative audience member yourself, as a writer.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] That's, for me, I think just an exciting way to think about it. It's, like, what do I love about this and how can I make it more of what I love.

[Ali] It's such a good reframe. Author Jo Walton had a series of posts. I don't know if they were critiques or love letters, but they got all published in a book by tour that was called What Makes This Book so Great. That was what the series was called. I just thought that was such a wonderful way to approach, like, the reading experience. But also a very helpful way to approach the revision period which is when you're expected and most likely will be extremely hard on yourself. We're not talking about the fallout trial process in this episode, but stay tuned until next week or 2 weeks from now…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Next week.

[Ali] Stay tuned. But I will say one of the things that, when talking about revision and intention, I always do my best to try to remember to flag the things that, like, what's so awesome here, like, this made me cry, don't touch it. I want it, I want to get hurt. Let's talk about how to hurt me more. Or, like, what… This is so great. So, what else is like that? Or, like, what else can we do to sort of… Putting those flags down I think is just really helpful. Because it can be… It's a really hard time, it's a really hard time to be with the story and just remembering what all these good things is really helpful.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think 2nd only to show, don't tell, which is something I complained about last episode, one of the most common repeated refrains of writing advice that just drives me bonkers is kill your darlings.

[Mary Robinette] Ugh. Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? There's this idea that… There are times when you do have to cut something you love. Right? We talked about this a little bit less time, about cutting a character or cutting a scene or an element that isn't tying… That is slowing your pacing down or isn't supporting the main action of the story or the main intention of the story. But that's different from this idea, that's like, oh, if you love this thing, then it shouldn't be in the book. You wrote this book, the reason we are here is because we like the things that you're doing well. I mean, this is exactly… Going back to Tobias's quote, I don't remember the exact wording, but it's this idea of, like, we're reading this for a reason, and that reason is probably the thing that you're most excited about. Because your energy and enthusiasm and interests are going to come through. Right? Now, don't overindulge in that. Right? Don't, like, luxuriate in that at the expense of all the other elements that a book has to have. But, don't kill your darlings. Love them. Find ways to support them and give them an environment that they can be best observed, appreciated, and so they can flourish for the reader.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. For me, it's that you have to be willing to kill them if they are pulling the book out of alignment. That's… Sometimes, if you've got a book that's got this really clean, spare, austere sense of language, and then you've got one sentence that has a lot of flourishes in it that you love, that sentence stands out, not because it's a bad sentence, not because you love it, but because it is in contrast to everything else that's happening in the book. It is not part of that unity of effect. There are times when you want to contrast, but you want to make sure that it's a contrast that is applied deliberately and for an effect itself.

[Ali] Right. Do you want that attention, because you're grabbing it. Is this the subject or the topic or the moment that needs that spotlight because it's got it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, for me, when I'm thinking about this editing for intention, the thing that I'm coming back to is always like why is this scene here, why is this moment here? If I'm trying to fix something, sometimes I'm looking at it like I can't get this sentence to work. Then realize it's because it does… It just… It doesn't fit. There's some part of me that knows that it doesn't belong there. If I query, like, what is my intention with this and what function is it serving in this scene, then I can usually either swap it out for something different that serves better or recognize that it doesn't have one and cut it. But it is always coming to the why is my starting point.

[Ali] Yeah. We've talked about sort of philosophical and essentially political, but, like the effect that the book is having and that intention. Do we also want to talk a little bit about the intention of like how to publish it and, like, whether or not you're planning on going to a major publisher or publishing yourself or making it into a zine, like printing your own booklet? I think knowing the expectation, or like excitement of the reader in different spaces, or, like, what is more exciting to people right now, like, they're [garbled]. We were talking about the [Oops La] battle novel in…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right.

[Ali] In our last episode. I feel like there are certain areas that that could potentially hit stronger. I think maybe knowing where you're going with the story or where you're hoping to take the story out is a good thing to keep in mind, because there will be expectations based on whatever that publishing process looks like.

[Mary Robinette] That's a really great point. There is the reason that you write is not the same reason that you publish.

[DongWon] I always really strongly encourage writers not to think about the market when their drafting or coming up with a book. Right? Like, don't write to the market. But what you can do is edit to the market. A little bit. Right? You don't want to overdo it. But there's ways in which once you have a drafted thing, and now you're sitting there figuring out, like, okay, here's the book I wrote. I love it. How do I get this in front of as many readers as I can? That's the point at which you can now start to consider, okay, what categories does this fit in? Is this for adults? Is this for teens? Is this for a middle grade audience? Is it genre? Is it literary? These are so where you can start to edit and start tweaking things to push it in one direction or another. Sometimes, it can be hard to completely do a 180 in terms of your direction once you have the draft, but you can move it 10° this way, 10° that way, and I think start to hit a really specific audience and a specific reader that you're aiming for.

[Ali] I mean, even within like traditional publishing and within my work, I've had a situation where cover art comes in before the book is finished and, like, we realize, like, oh, there's… Like, there's an expectation here, like, an even cozier… Even, like, whatever expectation… Let's put in more food, more delicious like moments, like more textures. Then, the sequel, like, oh, what if it's snowing, and there's a little cozy fire. Like, there are things that can be really surprising that can have an effect. This is obviously very down the line. But you might be surprised at some of the things that affect the revision by the end of the process.

[DongWon] Yeah. I've had situations where we wrote up the copy to pitch it to publishers, and in writing the copy, we both went, like, wait a minute. There's something that's not working. There's a huge piece of this that needs changed, because it just wasn't hitting, it wasn't… That intention wasn't coming through, both in terms of what the author was trying to get across, but also how we were trying to publish it and who we were trying to publish it for. So we really, like, took it back, broke it down, and like added a whole other… We added like 20,000 words, added a whole new character arc, and a new POV, based on trying to write the pitch for the book. Like, we were ready to go out with it, and then suddenly, like, 6 months later, we're like, okay, now we're ready to go out with it. Sometimes it really is that much of a process of figuring out how do we target it for who we're trying to get it to.

[Ali] I've absolutely been in the same situation, where I've been like…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] But, wait, I'm like working on addressing some copy and been like, I actually don't know what the stakes are, but I don't care. So what does that mean? You know, like… During the read, it didn't bother me, but now, like, is there space for that? Is it needed? That kind of thing.

[DongWon] Yep

[Mary Robinette] So, when we come back from our break, we're going to talk a little bit more about intentions and how to figure out what your intention is when you've finished a book, but actually don't know what it's about.

[Ali] So, DongWon assures me that they've already pitched you Scavengers Reign, an animated show, I assume you're all now watching. It is gorgeous, vivid, kind of psychedelic dark science fiction. A while back, I got to work with the cocreator of that show, Joe Bennett, on illustrating 2 books with us. One that he also cowrote with Dera White called I Will Not Die Alone about learning the end is nigh and basically just playing D&D with your friends. He also illustrated a book by comedian Joe Pera called A Bathroom Book for People Not Pooping or Peeing, But Using the Bathroom to Escape. Both are now available from Tor books, and you should check them out.

[Mary Robinette] So, we've been talking about different types of intention, but one of the things that I will hear early career writers say, and indeed have experienced myself, is I don't know what this book is about.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Nancy Kress, who is a phenomenal writer, said this thing to me that just… Like, I shivered in my very bones. That she writes a draft, and that that is what tells her what the book is about. Then she throws that draft away completely, and start writing again from scratch now that she knows what the book is about. I'm like, I cannot. Uh-uh. But I've also heard other people and myself say this, and then someone will say, like, one chance thing, and I'm like, "Oh! That's what my book is about." So, how do you help your writers understand what their book is about? Like, what are some of the questions that you ask? I'm hoping for pearls of wisdom that will help me.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Oh, great. How do we… No, I mean [garbled]

[Ali] One of the things that I do is I tell them what I think it's about. Then get to watch their face and find out if they're like, "Oh, no," or like, "Oh, yay," or "I hadn't seen that," or whatever. It's… I love to go in there with a very like, I'm often wrong, here's what I think attitude and just sort of see what that surfaces for somebody. But in terms of actually identifying it?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is… I think people ask a lot… I have an undergraduate degree in English literature, and I think people ask a lot, if, like that's useful in what I do, and in most ways, it isn't. Right? It's not like I learned grammar from that or how to compose prose from that. But one thing it did give me was critical reading skills. Right? And how to think critically about the stuff that I am reading. Thematically, what there is in it. It's not even so much the formal instruction that helped me do that, it's just reading a ton of books. Right? I think this is one of the reasons why I so strongly encourage, if you want to be a writer, if you want to work in publishing, you have to like books, first and foremost, and you have to read books, first and foremost, and try and stay current with what's happening out there. Because when you're consuming enough media, when you're consuming those things, you start to understand why you like something, what it is about it that… Even if you don't know how to articulate it. When we say that we want you to understand what your book is about, I don't need you to be able to sum it up in a sentence. I don't need you to be able to tell me. In part, you wrote the book because you don't have a simpler way of explaining whatever it is that you were trying to get to with writing the book. Right? That's okay. That's great, actually. That's my job to figure out how to frame it up in a pithy few sentences so they can go on the back of a book or go to an editor or whatever it is. So, I think, for me, it really is putting those critical skills into place as I'm reading to figure out, okay, what is this project? What are they trying to accomplish here? What are the thematics of it? What are the things that are really jumping out at me that seem to resonate with the person behind this book? Now, that's me as a third party coming in, and again, what Ali was saying, I think is so true of sometimes it's about presenting that idea and watching it bounce off the person you talk to, and hopefully you're close…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And sometimes it's like, oh, wow, I'm way off here. Then we can approach the edit with that sort of refocus on the intention.

[Mary Robinette] When you don't have access to an editor or an agent to do this for you, because I have absolutely had that happen… On the Spare Man, Claire looked at the book and said, "This is a story about a woman of privilege who wants to get her hands dirty." I was like, "Oh. Yeah." The… For me, the thing about that is that that is a declarative's statement. But when I go into the book, the thing that I have found most useful is to figure out what question I'm asking. This is a… I'm reframing something that Elizabeth Bear said, like, you know how you're having a casual dinner conversation and someone just says something brilliant? You're like, "Well, that is going to save everything I write from now on." She said that the difference between a story and a polemic is that a story asks questions and a polemic answers them. The thing for me about a novel, in particular, is that a novel can show so many different answers, so many different possible ways, and leave room for the reader to decide what their own answer to that question is. So, for me, one of the things that helps when I'm trying to focus a story is to think about what is the big question I'm asking. In… It's… It varies. Sometimes it's something like how do you handle it when your spouse is depressed. Sometimes it's a very straightforward one like that. Sometimes it's a big societal one, like how do you create community? Like, what does community mean to you? Like, what are the different ways that community expresses? Then, when I'm writing, I can evaluate against that question. It's like does this scene explore that question? If it doesn't, is there a way that I can add that? If there's not, what is this scene doing? Why is this scene in here? It's not that every scene has to be providing an exact answer to this. But it's… Even if it's just one moment in the scene where that is explored, it still helps me. It helped me with focusing and making decisions about what to include in that.

[DongWon] But if your book isn't feeling like it has a clear purpose, that it has a clear direction, then I think that's a great way to go about it, is asking these questions of is this particular scene supporting the central question that I'm asking? If the answer is no, then does this scene need to be here and does this scene need to shift in its purpose to better support whatever that central thing is. Right? So, I think being able to have some clarity about what that question is, and also what your personal connection to that question is… I see a lot of times someone will come into a book and they'll be asking a big question about society or about how a certain relationship would work, but I can't feel why that question is important to the person in particular. Sometimes digging until you get that personal connection, where you can feel the author in the story, is the thing that really makes a book pop for me. That's when I get very excited, when I can suddenly be like, oh, I see you. You're here. This matters to you because X, Y, or Z. Sometimes it's something as simple as a shared identity, and sometimes it's very nuanced and complex in a way that could not be explained without 30 hours of conversation about the author's like life. But whatever that is, you should feel a connection to the questions that are being asked by your book and find a way to really focus on that and make sure you're really highlighting that in all the major pieces of your story.

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. One of the other things that I've found along these lines is, again, that personal connection is thinking about the tone that I want the book to have. Because I'm measuring against a bunch of different things. In an ideal world, I'm just writing it and I'm feeling it and it's there. But when I'm revising it, and I'm having to make decisions, like, my first series, Jane Austen with magic, it's like how does this feel like Jane Austen with magic right now? Spare Man, Thin Man in Space. Does this feel… Does it have that feel? No. Okay. Fine. There needs to be more cocktails, obviously. Like, who's… Where is the small dog right now? So, I think that that's another question that you can ask yourself, is, like, what is the tone that I want? What's my vibe? Is this supporting it or is it a deliberate juxtaposition?

[Ali] Yeah. That's so helpful because I do feel like purpose can start to feel sort of like academic. It can feel a little like intellectualized in a way that I think rightfully a lot of people would bristle against. But it can be really basic. It can be like I want to give people a laugh. Or, like, I want… I want to show how cool explosions are. Like [garbled] probably.

[DongWon] [garbled] by the fire. Right?

[Ali] Yes. There probably is more there, if you wrote a whole novel, like, there's more there. But, also, like that is a very legitimate and exciting and cool sort of jumpoff point that needs to be honored in a very similar way, I think. Especially…

[DongWon] Again, it's not something you need to necessarily be even able to articulate. You just need to have like a feeling of what the vibe is. If you lock into that vibe, that's all you need. You just need a tone, or like an image, a thought, a question, any of these things can be your guiding light. I just encourage you to try and figure out what that sort of lodestone is for you that is going to pull you through it, and keep you consistent when you're asking questions about should this stay, should this change, whatever it happens to be.

[Ali] Find your vibe.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a great… Yeah. I think that's a great segue to take us to our homework for the week. Ali, I think you have that.

[Ali] I do. Thank you for asking. Or telling or saying. Okay. Yes, I do. Your homework this week. Write down what you like best about your book. Find a spot in your book where you can incorporate that element where it isn't now. Godspeed.

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.31: First Page Fundamentals – MOBY DICK

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/08/01/16-31-first-page-fundamentals-moby-dick/

Key Points: Mental illness. Suicidal ideation. Dark humor, and a lot of tone. Authority, a command to the audience. Plus character. Specifics, visceral and relatable. Contradictions and questions. An audience surrogate? What kind of ride, what kind of story is this? Stakes. Ripples and echoes that shape everything to come. The mythic tone of oral history. Alliteration and front rhyme.

[Season 16, Episode 31]

[Dongwon] This is Writing Excuses, First Page Fundamentals – MOBY DICK by Herman Melville.

[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] So we're going to do…

[Dan] None of us said, "You can call me…" and then our name. I think that's… I admire our restraint.

[Dongwon] [garbled] restraint.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] So we're going to do another deep dive into an opening page. In this case, we're going to do Moby Dick. It probably has one of the most famous first lines that Dan just referenced right there. So, I'm going to hand it off to Mary Robinette again to introduce us to this little sample here.

[Mary Robinette] Just a brief content warning. Much like when you make promises to a reader at the beginning of the book, we want to make sure that you have the opportunity to nope out of things that you don't want to read or listen to. Moby Dick deals with a couple of things. It deals with mental illness and suicidal ideation. Those are both present in the paragraph that you're about to hear.

Moby Dick. Loomings.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

[Dongwon] This is another example of an opening that I absolutely adore. I think it captures so much of the spirit of this book in just a tiny little microcosm. It's darkly humorous. Not to make light of the very serious issues on display here, but the tone of it, I think, really establishes so much of the book. Given the grimness of a lot of things that lay before us, he's approaching it in such a specific lens that I think sets us up to meet Ishmael, sets us up to meet Queequeg, sets us up to spend time on this ship with all these people who all have their own reasons to be at sea, but, fundamentally, are all because they are escaping something. They're escaping the burdens of everyday life. You have that last note that ends on "all men in their degree, cherish very nearly the same feelings for the ocean with me." That choice to go to sea rather than submit to the other things that are plaguing Ishmael in this scene I think is really the core spirit of this whole book.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We tend to think of Moby Dick as the pursuit of the great white whale. While that is happening, it really is about escaping. It is about the internal conflict. The great white whale, what that represents is that's the avatar of the escape. It's… It is the not-self. But this book… It's been, I will grant, a very, very long time since I read it. But for those of you who cannot see the…

[Suppressed Snickers]

[Mary Robinette] Video feed, Elsie has just joined us by jumping up the back of my chair and across my face. Okay. So, hello. Elsie, would you like to purr for these nice people? No. Okay. Good job. So, what were we talking about? Use of flashbacks?

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I think the thing… Even putting aside, because we are focused on how first pages work. So we can put aside sort of the bulk of Moby Dick, and really focus on what draws people in in this case. Again, I like it because it is that microcosm. But in terms of the mechanics, what pulls people in, you have a few things. Going back again to the idea of authority, it literally starts with an authoritative statement, which is, "Call me Ishmael," right? It's a command to the audience. But also, there's so much character built into that, in that sense of unreliability. You get the sense immediately, Ishmael is not this guy's name. He's asking you to call him that for some reason. The slipperiness that's injected into it immediately set so much of the tone for what's pulling us into this paragraph, what's pulling… Introducing that breadcrumb. Breadcrumb one. The authority of the command and the doubt about who this person is. Then we're sliding immediately into this portrayal of someone who is suffering some kind of mental illness, some kind of condition here, whether that's depression, whether that's suicidality, all these things are really coming to play in this scene. That's driving him, in a very real way, to make this choice, which is to go to sea.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that he does, again, in that things are going to be somewhat squishy is "some years ago, never mind how long precisely." Again, it's that command to the reader. But then he gets… He gets very specific about all of the different kinds of symptoms that he spots in himself. So I think one of the things, for me, again, in terms of the ways that this pulls me in is it's like, "Look, don't worry about this thing. Don't worry about that thing. Here are the things I want you to think about." It's it's like this examination of self, the… Bringing up the end of a funeral procession, the moment when you think maybe I should just step into the street. These things are specific, they're visceral, they are inherently things that a listener or a reader can relate to in some ways, and disturbingly so.

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] And also funny.

[Dongwon] My favorite bit of this is the methodically knocking people's hats off, right? It creates this very specific image of this guy just losing it and the way he's going to lose it is walk in the street and knock everyone's hats off because he so frustrated with something. Right? Voice is a huge component of what makes this paragraph work. But the other aspect is character. All the things about Ishmael that raises all these questions and all these story promises of finding out what's going on with this guy. Why is he like this? How is he going to address this stuff that he's struggling with in this paragraph? Just the specificity of the image, the specificity of the way in which his frustration is manifesting itself in knocking people's hats off, I think opens huge doors into this story, into the character, and is that just absolute trail of breadcrumbs that pulls me into the book to find out what's happening next.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, that word methodically changes everything about the sentence. This is not him losing control. This is not him becoming so frustrated that he has to go out and knock a hat off. That's not what's going on. He's trying to pick a fight. He's trying to get himself in a fist fight so that he can feel something, so that maybe someone will beat him up or kill him, just in order to start something. I love that line. That was absolutely the part that stood out the most to me.

[Dongwon] Then it's paired with this… With the philosophical flourish Cato throws himself on his sword, I quietly take to the ship. Right? There's this high-minded intellectualism that suddenly slips in here. Here's this guy. We know he's broke. We know he's sort of at the end of his rope. But he's still going to talk about Cato. He's still going to talk about philosophy and history. But then contrasting that with him quietly heading to his destiny. Here is again this disjunction, this pairing of contradictions, in this character that raises all these questions about who he is.

[Dan] Yeah. Now, I have to admit, they're going to take my English degree away for this, but I've never actually read Moby Dick. So, coming to this completely cold, what stands out to me more than anything is what you've already talked about, that this is entirely character focused. Moby Dick has such a reputation as being this very plot heavy and/or metaphor heavy kind of slog of a book that is incredibly detailed about the process of whaling and about all of these other things. Nothing that I have heard about the book prepares me for this paragraph being so intimately based on one person's mind and mindset. It… This suggests to me that it's much more character driven than I think the clichés about the book have led me to believe.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Why don't we take a moment to pause for the book of the week, actually, which is a preparation for next week's episode?

[Dongwon] Yeah. Next week we're going to do our third and final deep dive. We're going to be reading Lee Child's The Killing Floor. These are the Jack Reacher series of books which are very well known, very successful series. Killing Floor is the first Reacher book. It's Lee Child's first novel. I think it's an absolute master class in how to write a thriller. These are some of my favorite thrillers ever. I think it will be an incredibly instructive example. It's also a fun read that will take you about 30 seconds from start to finish. You won't want to put it down. So, yeah, our book of the week is The Killing Floor by Lee Child.

[Howard] A couple of fun trivia bits about Moby Dick. Herman Melville wrote this across a span of about 18 months. Which is a year longer than he planned to spend. About halfway through the writing of it, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is supposed by many that this meeting inspired Melville to go back revise and expand and make the project a bit bigger. Because Moby Dick is actually dedicated to Herman Melville… Err, dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. In token of my admiration for his genius. I think that… I don't know what his writing process was like. I doubt that the first line came first for him. I suspect that part of that expanding and revising was the recognition that Ishmael's voice was a poem, if you will, that was going to get stretched through the book in ways that perhaps it hadn't.

[Dongwon] In fiction, sometimes, we talk about audience surrogates, right? So, this is Kitty Pride in the X-Men. That character that the audience can relate to to get them into the story. I think Ishmael's operating for us in some of those ways. Right? He's going to be our lands into understanding Ahab as we understand what's going on with Ishmael. Right? Ishmael being the sort of larval stage of Ahab as he descends into his obsession, into his madness, and all of that. So, I think again this is the author telling us from the very first line what we're in for, what kind of story this is. This is going to be a story about men struggling with their internal selves. Dan's right, so much of the way we talk about this book is this metaphorical, like, man against nature and all these things. But really, at the end of the day, this is a group of people who are characters divided against… Minds divided against themselves. Trying to overcome their own limitations, their own obsessions to literally survive the experience. Although the stakes are there. Survival is on the page. Dealing with mental illness is on the page. Figuring out a solution to what kind of life do I want to lead. All those things are immediately in this first paragraph. I think the echoes from that will ripple throughout the book. Right? This is the first stone thrown in the pond, and then that's going to shape everything that comes after it.

[Howard] One of the… The book… There's sort of a parenthetical aspect between the beginning and the end of the book. In the editions that we have today, there's an epilogue, in which we learn that Ishmael survives the final events of the book. The first UK edition in 1851 didn't have the epilogue. That forces me to imagine the experience of the British reader of 1851 who… First, like, call me Ishmael. Some years ago, never mind how long… And then gets to the end of the book and it doesn't look like he lives. How does that even work?

[Mary Robinette] So I want to… Because we're talking about opening lines and the importance of setting things. There's another book that is related to Moby Dick that… It's called Two Years before the Mast. We were talking about what inspired Herman Melville to write it. He, in multiple places, cites this book, Two Years before the Mast, which is a memoir. It's a real book about a British fellow who went to sea. This is the opening of that. I want you to notice the difference of it and the difference in the promises it makes. Even though the subject matter of the book, which is being at sea, is, on the surface, exactly the same. Or I should say being at sea and a lot of details about being at sea.

2 years before the mast

The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim on her voyage from Boston round Cape Horn to the western coast of North America. As she was to get under weigh early in the afternoon, I made my appearance on board at twelve o’clock, in full sea-rig, and with my chest, containing an outfit for a two or three years’ voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books and study, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my pursuits, and which no medical aid seemed likely to cure.

So, both of these are men that are going to see to fix something, right? But the promise that is made in that opening paragraph about the ride you're going to be on is entirely different. They're both told authoritatively. They're both internal and about the character's sense, but one of them's much more focused on the surroundings and we're going to get on this ship and this is going to come to an end when I get off of this ship. The other is my mind is a mess.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And I'm going to sea because my mind is a mess.

[Howard] I went sailing because I need glasses.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Yeah. The other genre thing I want to flag here is this opening firmly places this book in a tradition of oral history, of oral storytelling and folklore. Which is a totally different ride from what Mary Robinette was just talking about in Before the Mast. I think framing it that way gives it this mythic tone immediately. It calls to mind Percy Bysshe Shelley's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It calls, like, the Odyssey. He's referencing this grand history of oral epics and I think framing it that way again gives us such a sense of where this story is going. So when he spends the next three chapters talking about huddling in bed with another man while they smoke pipes because it's cold and then goes into four chapters describing the biology of whales, we had in our heads still that this is going to be this epic storyline. This is going to be this long framework of an adventure even though we're taking all these digressions. I think that tone carries us through these digressions and lets us gather the joy of those moments which are very funny, very strange, very weird moments and then loop back into this bigger narrative, this bigger understanding of we're going on the Odyssey here, right? We're going on this grand journey and people will contend with the elemental forces by the end of this.

[Dan] I want to point out, just really quick, a word choice trick that he's doing here to grant it some more of that epic oral history vibe. Which is alliteration. In a lot of Western, especially Nordic, languages, Beowulf for example, has front rhyme rather than end rhyme. That the letters all… The words all start with the same sounds. That was a form of rhyme in this really strong epic oral tradition. So when you get down here and he says, "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul," he is echoing that type of oral epic storytelling very deliberately.

[Howard] There's two sets of rhymes in that one line. Growing grim about the mouth. That is a beautiful phrase.

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Well, we are going to leave you with a slightly longer episode, which is appropriate for Moby Dick. We're going to give you a little bit of homework. That is to write an introduction that is purely internal to the character's mental state. So, much like this begins with him ruminating on where he is internally, that's where we want you to do with this homework episode… With this homework. Now, if you're in a mood to try something really fun, take the one that you wrote last week and rewrite it so that it is focused on the character rather than the description of the outside that you were doing last week. This week, focus on the character's interiority, that question of who am I at the beginning of this book.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.16: Your Setting is a Telegraph

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/21/14-16-your-setting-is-a-telegraph/

Key points: Setting can be used to quickly telegraph the kind of story they are reading, the tone and mood. E.g., a prologue can establish the tone of the entire story. Specific, concrete details can help. Don't forget the Stooges' Law, a coconut cream pie on the mantle in the first act means by the end of the third act, someone will get hit in the face with it. Screenwriting has the opening shot, with a visual setting. Where a meeting is happening, what they're doing, where the events are happening can do a lot to indicate the type of story. If you have a tonal shift, before telegraphing it, consider whether the surprise of the unexpected shift is part of your point or not. When you finish a book, you may need to revise the first chapter and fine-tune the setting to get the tone right.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 16.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Your Setting is a Telegraph.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] Howard, when we were preparing this, you gave us the title. So why don't you explain what you mean by Your Setting is a Telegraph.

[Howard] it comes from the term telegraphing the punch, telegraphing the punchline, telegraphing the joke, whatever. Which is often used negatively. But here we mean your setting is going to telegraph to the reader very, very quickly… You're going to communicate to the reader very, very quickly what kind of a story they're reading. Are they reading a comedy, are they reading military sci-fi, are they reading a puzzle story about alien archaeology, all of those sorts of mood things can be established by your setting, and can actually be established very, very quickly when you introduce them to your setting.

[Brandon] Yeah. You can always, of course, establish these other ways, as well. Through word choice, through what your character is doing, through situation, but this… We're talking about world building this year, and we want to really talk about how to use your descriptions, your settings, or where people are, or things like this to give an immediate and powerful indication of the tone of your story. A lot of times, one of the big questions I get from students is, "Should I use a prologue or should I not?" Which is one of those loaded questions, which is… What kind of juice do you want? Right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Should I have a drink of juice or not? Do you like juice? Is it breakfast? Do you want a prologue? Well, one of the reasons you might want a prologue is if you are having trouble with your first chapter establishing the tone of the entire story, then you can use your prologue to do this. Now that's of course dangerous because maybe you need to look at that first chapter and learn how to maybe make that one, but it is one of the things you can do, is… I often use the Wheel of Time as an example of this. In the beginning of the Wheel of Time, in chapter 1, the first few pages take place with the young man on a farm with his father. It's a little bit creepy because he keeps seeing shadows, but that's not a real indication of tone. If you were taking those opening scenes as a promise, it might be, "Oh, this is going to be a pastoral, perhaps horror." So Robert Jordan has a prologue where a madman is wandering through a burning castle, screaming for his dead wife and children, who are at his feet and he can't see them. Things are on fire, and there's been a big war, and it's like, "All right. We're in the middle of a giant war drama with some psychological elements." So that early introduction of tone is very important to set the tone for the entire series. How can we do this? What suggestions do you have to our listeners?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that if you are specific and concrete with your choices in the beginning, that this does a lot. So, like if I am writing military SF, then having a hand cannon says we're going to be shooting some things. If I'm doing a comedy, then in very broad terms, if there's a coconut cream pie there, we know that at some point… It's the Stooges' law, that if there is a coconut cream pie on the mantle, then by the end of the third act, someone is going to get hit in the face with it. These are the things that happen that can communicate tone to the reader, because we latch onto these concrete details.

[Howard] Well, it's important to recognize that the version of Chekhov's law that Chekhov actually said, which is if you want to fire a gun in act three, you need to show it on the mantle in act one. If you want to hit somebody with a coconut cream pie, you have to show us a coconut cream pie on the mantle in act one, so that we know that this is a story in which there can be a pie fight.

[Margaret] I think it's interesting in the difference between fiction and what I'm thinking in terms of screenwriting, because it's your opening shot. Right? It's very hard to avoid establishing setting, because the visual is right there. In screenplay format, the first thing you say is this an interior or an exterior? What is our setting? Is it day or is it night? That's the first thing somebody reading after fade in is going to encounter in a script. In fiction, you have a little more freedom in there. Like, if you're starting with a character, but it's remembering to put the character in a place, because you can get so much lifting done, as you say, in terms of tone by where you're meeting somebody, what they're doing, where these events are happening. A conversation that happens in a diner is different than a conversation that happens in a car that's speeding towards a cliff or in a prison visiting area. All of those start you on three very different types of stories.

[Howard] If I have a science fiction… An opening science-fiction shot that is in the science-fiction equivalent of a mausoleum with data-encoded corpsicles or whatever, and that is what I am describing, the reader has a pretty clear indication that life and the ending thereof is going to be one of the thematic focuses of this story.

[Brandon] One of my favorite episodes of Firefly is the one that starts with Mal in the desert naked. Opening shot.

[Mary Robinette] That's one of my favorites, too.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That shot indicates wacky hijinks are going to occur. Not just him, desert, naked, but his pose, the way he's talking. He's not, like, lying there, dying of thirst, crawling through the desert. He's like, "Huh." Just one shot. He says something, but you wouldn't even need to. You know that you are going to chuckle and wacky hijinks ensue. I really like this.

[Margaret] Things have gone rapidly out of his control over the course of this episode.

[Brandon] I love when stories can do that.

[Mary Robinette] I think, actually, one of the things about that is that you've got the specific concrete detail, but you also have the character's relationship to that detail. So, one of the examples that I think of is the difference between Star Wars and Space Balls. Both of them say this is science-fiction and they both have the same opening shot, which is ginormous ships scrolling through. But Space Balls, it goes on so long that it becomes comical. That tells you, "Oh, no no no. This…"

[Brandon] You're going to laugh.

[Mary Robinette] You're going to laugh all the way through this.

[Howard] Then there's a bumper sticker on…

[Mary Robinette] There's a bumper sticker.

[Howard] On the back of the spaceship.

[Mary Robinette] Just in case you missed how long it was going on.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Terminal Alliance.

[Howard] Yes. Terminal Alliance by Jim Hines. My family, we bought this book twice. I was on my way back from Cedar City, with Kellianna and I put on the audiobook of Terminal Alliance so we could listen to it. We got home and she said, "Are you going to listen to this in your office while you draw?" I said, "Maybe. But I'm not working yet." She said, "Well, I want to keep going, and the reader is too slow. So do we have a copy of this book in print?" So we bought it in print. No regrets. No regrets. It's a comedy about space janitors and zombie apocalypse. You know, that's kind of all you need to know. If I say space janitors and zombie apocalypse, you have enough setting that I've telegraphed to you the tone of this thing from my friend Jim that you're really going to enjoy.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to second that I enjoyed the heck out of this book, too.

[Howard] I think the cover was a Dan Dos Santos. I'm not sure. I love the cover. I love the cover.

[Brandon] So, kind of riffing off that, Howard, how do you indicate that there are comedic elements in your stories, and how do you indicate sometimes… Sometimes, Schlock Mercenary gets very serious. I feel like you use setting to distinguish these two quite well.

[Howard] There's… Well, first of all, I need to establish that if you're reading Schlock Mercenary and have been reading it for a while, if there isn't a punchline or if things happen and there are no repercussions, there is no serious side of it, you'll feel like I've broken some rules. That's… We've talked in previous episodes about budget. So I have this currency that I have spent to get you to this point. That said, I try to begin every book with some sort of establishing shot, that will tell us this is science-fiction. I'm going to end the strip with a punchline, which, because of the beat, beat, punchline format of things will tell you very quickly we're going to tell a lot of jokes. But I like to establish the scope of the story. In the most recent… I say most recent. When book 19 launched, I did a joke about prologues. We had a prologue in which an alien spaceship is flying and they're saying, "There's a star system ahead, do we need to change course?" "No, we're going to fly through their cloud… Comet cloud, we should be fine." "But anything…" "We're big. Anything we nudge, those inner planets are going to have to deal with." "Sure, they're going to have to deal with it, but it just means millions of years." 8 million years later, we have a little velociraptor with a telescope who looks kind of like Leonardo da Vinci, if he were a feathered velociraptor talking to another velociraptor who also has a similar sort of da Vinci-ish look who is building something. He's saying, "Huh. How soon can your flying machine be ready?" That has told us this is going to be a tragic story about the ends of civilization, but you're going to laugh.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Howard] That was a very long-winded…

[Brandon] No, that's great.

[Howard] Approach to it, but... I also made so much fun of prologues, and I was thinking of you the whole time.

[Brandon] Thank you very much. I'll have you know that…

[Margaret] I wanted to giggle at your description, but I didn't want to mess up the audio.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I've restrained myself, and most of my books only have two now.

[Wha!]

[Brandon] Way of Kings has four prologues.

[Mary Robinette] I know. I know. I'm just… I'm amazed at your restraint.

[Brandon] Yes. All right. So. Building off of that, let's say you want to shift tones in your story, you know you're going to do it. You're going to be writing a comedic story that is going to get serious, or you're going at it the other way, you're going to write a serious story but you know you're going to have some comedic elements. How do you indicate that from the beginning? Do you need to indicate that from the beginning?

[Howard] I think the second part of that question is the more important bit. If the surprise that people experience with a tonal shift that they weren't expecting is your point, then you don't need to telegraph it. If, however, you don't want to alienate them… You know there's a tonal shift, and you don't want to alienate them, then you do need to telegraph it.

[Brandon] Okay. I would absolutely agree with that. Though, we're talking specifically about using setting. Right? The methods of using setting. So, let's in our last few minutes here, let's give a few tips. What are things you've done using your setting to indicate your tone?

[Mary Robinette] So, I did this in Calculating Stars. Calculating Stars opens with a couple in the Poconos, and they're having sexy fun times. Then I slam a meteor into the earth.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So… What I did with that, and I made very, very deliberate choices in that first page. The opening line is "Do you remember where you were when the meteor struck?" That tells you this is going to be a disaster story. Then, the

is "I was in the mountains with Nathaniel, and we were stargazing, by which I mean sex."

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Which gets a laugh. It tells you… Having those two things back to back tells you about the setting that we're in… And, granted, I'm doing this in narration. It is a first-person character. But I'm using the setting there to tell you what this is going to be about. That you can expect a story in which we're dealing with relationships, we're dealing with disaster, and that there's going to be some comedy. It's not going to be disaster all the way down.

[Brandon] I often have trouble with first chapters. Not starting them. I've talked about this before in the podcast, though, that when I get done with the book, I feel like my first chapter no longer belongs with the book that I ended up writing. This is coming from someone who architects and outlines a ton. That first chapter, getting that tone right, can be a big deal for just kind of establishing how the whole story's going to play out. I had to do this just with my most recent book, that will have just come out at this point about six months ago. Skyward. Where I wrote the first chapter, I even did readings from it. At the end, it was just not right. Even though when I rewrote it, it was basically the same events happening. I needed to make… They live in a cavern system underground, I needed to make the caverns a little more claustrophobic. I needed to make the stepping on the surface for the first time more full of wonder, because the idea of we as a people are escaping the caverns and getting into the skies, that's the point of the story. It just… I find finishing my book and then going back and saying, "What was my book's tone really about?" And "How can I hit this metaphorically in the first chapter?"

[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a really good point, that… For me, a lot of times, it's about going back in and finessing the specific physical details of the space. I have a story called Cerbo in Vitra ujo which is one of the true horror stories that I've written. When I wrote it initially, it read like it was going to be a teen drama. What I had to go back in and do was bring out… Even though I didn't move the location, I shifted the… They're in a conservatory on a space station, so there's all of these plants around. But I made sure that there is like a broken rose, that there is a diseased rose. That there are elements there that are unsettling in order to indicate that that's where we were going. It was about going back and adjusting the setting to match the tone.

[Brandon] So, our homework plays right into this idea. Which you have for us, Mary?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is I want you to write an opening. It can be taking an opening of something that you're already working on or just starting from scratch. But I want you to write the first half page. In that first half page, I want you to hit three specific concrete details. I'm picking three as an arbitrary number, because I want you to actually really dig into this. But I watch to pick three specific concrete details that telegraph setting… That telegraph the tone. That telegraph what the mood is. These details are obviously your setting. So I want you to do that. Then I want you to write it again and telegraph a different mood.

[Brandon] Use, maybe, even the same dialogue, but use the setting to indicate a different tone. All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.49: Beginnings Revisited

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/12/02/writing-excuses-7-49-beginnings-revisited/

Key points: "In late, out early" tells you the right place to begin. Also, you need to establish tone, setting, and character. Remember that beginnings are where you make promises to the reader. Prologues may work, but they are often overused. Orient the reader, don't disorient them. Your first scene needs motion, conflict, change. Make something happen. Establish a question and spark curiosity. Use something fascinating, interesting, geewhiz to pull the reader in. If it is not this world, quickly establish that it is another world. But remember learning curve. You don't have to try to tell us everything at once, just suggest and promise to come back later.
( The curtain rises... )
[Brandon] All right. Well. We are out of time. Thank you all for listening. Our writing prompt this week is going to be... starting a new story. I want you to do each of these things. I want you to give us character, place. I want you to give us a sense of tone from the first sentence. All right. Do all of it in the first sentence. Character, place, sense of tone.
[Mary] I want you to do it in 13 lines, which is how many lines someone will see on your first page.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

[Brandon] Hi, all. This is Brandon. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I just wanted to give you a special reminder. Audible has my novella, Legion, up for free in audiobook. So since they're a sponsor of the podcast, I thought I'd give an extra shout out. They actually have, if you go to www.audible.com/sanderson, they have Legion up there. You... there's no trial, there's no strings attached, you just get it for free. So I hope you guys go give it a listen if you haven't already. You can go to audible.com/sanderson to download it and give it a try.

Current Mood: twiddle
Current Music: Dancing Cowboys

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 7.15: Editing Mary's Outline

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/04/08/writing-excuses-7-15-editing-marys-outline/

Key Points: Inciting incident and tone need to be clear from the start. Make sure to include emotional cues. Don't forget the characterization! What defines the character? Make sure the reader knows the starting state (establishing shot!). Decision Point! What is the problem for the book, and decide to overcome it. Readers should be able to pronounce names and tell them apart. Visual cues can help. If characters change their minds, make sure something leads them to it. Escalate! Don't let the Monkey King take over. Make sure characters have conflicts, problems, skills, and flaws that show us who they are. Make sure your outline highlights the plot elements, the progression, the problems being worked through, and the conflicts -- not eating fruit. Consider giving the readers the map (ala Dora the Explorer).
( A silhouette by any other name? )
[Mary] All right. I have a writing prompt for you. This started off as a retelling of a Chinese folktale. So, what I want you to do is I want you to take a folktale and retell it in the Dora the Explorer formula. So make it a quest story, and just go ahead and outline it for right now.
[Brandon] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: slipping

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.12: Revising Howard's Story

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/08/21/writing-excuses-6-12-revising-for-description/

Key points: Word choice can identify genre. Inherent conflict builds interest. Be careful with names. Concrete is better. Make sure the reader knows what's going on. Tell us what the character feels. Be careful about details that feel natural to the character but may be disorienting to the reader. Use word choice to bring out tone. Use contrasts to build interest. Consider letting the reader understand the character, quirks, interests, motivation. Instead of reporting sensations, let them happen.
( One day on Jupiter... )
[Brandon] We should really let you post this whole thing for people in the liner notes.
[Howard] Oh, that would just be awful.
[Brandon] Then our writing prompt can be, start with his concept and write your own story.
[Dan] Nice.
[Howard] Very good.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: gas diving

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Episode 35: Voice, Tone, and Style

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/10/06/writing-excuses-episode-35-voice-tone-and-style/

Key points: how do you write so that it is distinctive to you? This is NOT something that a starting writer should worry about too much -- they need to focus on characters, plot, and setting. One stylistic thing for starting writers is to pay attention to using said and asked instead of said-bookisms. Another point (lost in the transcription) was to watch for overuse of very, adjectives, and favorite words. And the main suggestion for developing a style - practice, practice, practice. Find what you're good at and emphasize that, avoid what you're not good at.
( hiding details to save friend's pages )
[Brandon] Writing prompt: take a scene -- just a quick scene -- then write it as Dan would write it, then write it as Brandon would write it, and then write it as Howard would write it.
[Dan] should we give them a scene? Maybe the "Luke, I'm your father" scene from Star Wars?
[Howard] no, make it the romantic confession scene from Star Wars Episode Two

Current Mood: belated
Current Music: Life is a Highway, Rascal Flatts

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with tone

Writing Excuses 20.49: Using Tone and Mood

Writing Excuses 19.07: NaNoWriMo Revision with Ali Fisher: Intention

Writing Excuses 16.31: First Page Fundamentals – MOBY DICK

Writing Excuses 14.16: Your Setting is a Telegraph

Writing Excuses 7.49: Beginnings Revisited

Writing Excuses 7.15: Editing Mary's Outline

Writing Excuses 6.12: Revising Howard's Story

Writing Excuses Episode 35: Voice, Tone, and Style

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