Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-38-an-interview-with-charlie-jane-anders

 

Key points: A sequel? Backburner. Multiple POV and omniscient POV. Hidden narrators. The book grows up with the characters. Whimsy! Humor. Silly, noir, goofy! Pair humor with other stuff. Scientists and witches, lasers and spell books. One zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000... overload and boring. Add emotion and relationship. Fill the silence with active listening. Beat-by-beat plot? Many iterations. Little bits of information...

 

[Season 20, Episode 38]

 

[unknown] I swear, Detective, I was nowhere near the Polo Lounge on the night my poor darling husband Charles was murdered. I was on a Who Dun It mystery cruise with my assistant, Dudley, a darling boy. You, too, can join us on our next deadly cruise, February 6, 2026, seven nights out of Los Angeles on the Navigator of the Seas. Call now, if you dare, 317-457-6150 or go to whodunitcruises.com.

 

[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 38]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] And I'm DongWon.

 

[Mary Robinette] And we're very excited to have a special guest, Charlie Jane Anders, joining us today.

[Charlie Jane] Hi.

[Mary Robinette] So, for those of you who've been listening along, we've been doing a deep dive into Charlie Jane's book, All the Birds in the Sky. And we're excited to have her here with us to talk about process, and to talk about tone, and some of the other really cool narrative tricks that she was using when we're…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When playing with this book. And I think it… It turns out this is fairly timely, since you're working on a sequel right now.

[Charlie Jane] I mean, it's kind of on the back burner at the moment, but I wrote about 30,000 words of a sequel, and people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster… By the time you listen to this, they will have gotten a PDF with the sequel plus some deleted stuff from All the Birds. But it's… I wrote about 30,000 words, and I kind of… I have to kind of stop and think about it. So, that's on the back burner. I have other projects I'm probably going to work on first. But that's… I've written a chunk of a sequel.

[Mary Robinette] Amazing. [Garbled]

[DongWon] Interesting. I mean… We're such huge fans of the first book, and it's been such a delight talking about it in the past few weeks here.

[Charlie Jane] That's awesome.

[DongWon] So, I'm very excited for any news about a sequel when it comes around.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Eventually.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] At some point, there will be a sequel.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is… I feel like this kind of conversation is probably actually really reassuring to new writers, who are like, oh. Oh, I'm not the only one who does 30,000 words of a novel and then has to sit there and go huh.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I promised… Like, I decided to promise people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster this thing as a preorder reward. And so I always kind of knew I was going to, like… Just because I was having fun playing around with writing a sequel. And so I was like I know I have enough of an idea of what I'm doing to get that much done. I mean, originally, it was going to be 10,000, and it just kind of ballooned to 30,000. Because, that was just the section I was writing got to be that long. But… Yeah. I mean, it's going to be… I think the rest of that book is going to be a lot of work, and I'm going to have to… I'll wait until I'm at the point where I like feel like I've got some breathing room and can really slow down.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, do you want to talk about the… Some of the work that you did with the first novel?

[Charlie Jane] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Because… There were a bunch of things that we were very excited about. When we picked it, one of the reasons I was particularly excited about it was because you were using more than one POV…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And because you were tipping into omniscient POV. It's something that we don't see used a lot. But I felt that you were using it very effectively to kind of move the reader around the story that takes place over decades.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean… It's interesting. Like, I kind of felt like I was being a little rebellious, kind of dipping into omniscient POV with that book. Like… And I didn't do it that much. I did it here and there, like, there are versions of it where it gets much more omniscient, and, like, I go much deeper into that omniscient thing. Like I'm just much more leaning into that. But I… I feel like it worked. Really, I thought it worked pretty well sparingly. Like, I thought doing it, like, once in a while, was really like fun, and if I tried to push it, it might have gotten… I don't know. I was aware that a lot of people have issues with omniscient POV. I think for reasons that are kind of misguided.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] But I think they think that omniscient narrator is going to just like literally be omniscient and, like, just tell you everything that's going on. Which I don't think has ever been the case with omniscient narrators.

[DongWon] Right.

[Charlie Jane] Like, they don't… Like, there's always a degree of, like, selectiveness  in what the omniscient narrator tells you and how intrusive it is. Like, even going back to when it was more ubiquitous. But, yeah, I mean… There's a scene in All the Birds in the Sky which I'm sure you all have already talked about, where Lawrence and Patricia are sitting under the escalator at the mall…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Charlie Jane] And they're looking at the shoes of the people who go by and they're trying to guess who these people are based on their shoes, and then the narrator comes in and says that the last person that they guessed, they actually guessed right and he is an assassin. He's actually… Wants to kill them. And, like, that was, like, I was like, oh, this is going to be the part where everybody's going to throw the book across the room and quit reading. And instead, I don't know how many people have come up to me at this point and said that's their favorite moment in the book or that's when they got hooked. Which is so funny. Because I was like… I almost cut it out, I was like, oh, my God, this is gonna make people stop reading the book. It's gonna like… It's gonna destroy the book. So, for me, to just like throw that in. And I just… I felt like it was a fun playful thing. And I think the playfulness was an important thing with the omniscient narrator in general. And I did feel like there's a lot of choices I made in that book where I was kind of giving a middle finger…

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] To people on the Internet who were saying you can't do X, Y, and Z, and I was just like I'm going to do all those things because [garbled]

[laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think there's, like, a very, very vocal and very small minority of readers who get very fixated on POV and get very rigid about what the rules of POV are and how they can be deployed and I think you're exactly right, that there is such a sense of play to the way you use the POV here that makes it such a delightful reading experience. I can totally see why people… I mean, that moment jumped out at me too. It's such a great little moment, and so deftly sliding from one perspective to another, and then opening up more of the world. And I want to go back to something that you were saying about having an omniscient narrator not really being quote unquote omniscient. They're not a character in the book, but the narrator still has a perspective. How do you think about POV when you're not grounded in a particular character then?

 

[Charlie Jane] I mean, I think that like I said, most of the time we are grounded in a particular character, and I think if you do omniscient narration, it does kinda become a character in the book at some point. And, like… I've read, like, three or four novels published in the past year, and I'm… I think of the title of one of them off the top of my head, but I don't know… It's kind of a spoiler, so I don't even know if I should say the one that I think of the title of. But I've read, like, a few books in the past year where the narrator appears to be omniscient, and then at a certain point, like, halfway through the book, you find out it's actually a character who just knows a lot of stuff and is narrating all this stuff from there vantage point of like… And, like, that's a trick that I see people do lately, of, like, oh, you think it's an omniscient narrator, but it's actually Fred. Who, Fred, knows a lot of stuff and just hasn't introduced themself yet. Just kind of like hiding who they are from you until a certain point in the book. And, obviously, I feel like it's been out for long enough that, like, The Scent of Bright Doors. You don't find out who the narrator is until almost the end of the book.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Like, I feel like that's a trend right now, the hidden narrator. The narrator who is actually… He's a specific viewpoint, but we don't know until we get to almost the end [garbled]

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Charlie Jane] Sorry.

[DongWon] Every single time, I find that really delightful and enjoyable. So… Maybe I'm part of the trend here.

[Charlie Jane] I've always [garbled] Yeah. Like, I feel like it could get overdone at some point. Maybe we'll be like, okay, enough of the hidden narrator. Like… I definitely… I think, yeah. I really like that. But I also think that's a sneaky way to do an omniscient narrator without doing an omniscient narrator. Like, have a narrator who just by virtue of being some kind of supernatural entity or a person who just is in a privileged position has a degree of what appears to be omniscient, and then is like, ha ha ha. And there's probably a version of All the Birds where it turns out that it's narrated by Peregrine, the AI, and like… I made various attempts to adapt the book for screen a few years ago, and one of the things I toyed with was, like, maybe for me to have a narrator speak up occasionally. It could be Peregrine, the AI, as narrator [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Because Peregrine does have this privileged viewpoint. But I actually like having an omniscient narrator that's just an omniscient narrator. But I think… Like, I very much came up… Like, one of the traditions that kind of influences me is the tradition of, like, loosely, like, Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut, who at least when I was young, they were compared a lot. In fact, how I got into Kurt Vonnegut is people kept comparing Douglas Adams to him, and they're obviously [garbled] in some ways, but they do have that kind of… They do have a narrator who is chatty and over shares and kind of like… Often will kind of intrude on the story in various ways. And I love that. I think it's really fun and funny, and I think we've lost something by not… Like, I think it's… There… It's not just that there's a minority of readers who don't like omniscient narration, there also are just busybodies who give writing advice with a little perspective where there like, these are the things you must never do, and, like… And those people… They're… I'm sure they're lovely people, but they should shut the hell up.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] Or learn to be less prescriptive, really. But, yeah, I like the playfulness, I like the… I think when you're writing… But to return to your question, DongWon, because I didn't really answer it. When you have… When you're not in a particular character's POV, I think it really helps if the narrator has, like, maybe not opinions necessarily, but, like, they are telling you information that is relevant to the story in a way that is kind of like commenting on the story from a particular, like… They're giving you perspective and often it's perspective that the characters are not aware of or that is not quite like within the confines of what people in the scene know. And so the narrators sneakily giving you little extra pieces of information. And so I like a mischievous narrator, I guess.

 

[DongWon] Do you see that as your perspective or do you see that as something external again, like, is it another layer in between you and the text?

[Charlie Jane] It's a little bit of both, I guess. I mean, it's not me me…

[DongWon] Right.

[Charlie Jane] It's not like me being, like, hi, is Charlie Jane, I'm going to tell you stuff. But it is kind of… It is my kind of… Obviously, everything in the story come from me in the end, of course, as always is the case. I think it's a viewpoint that is kind of closer to authorial than that of any other characters, I guess, is what I would say. But it's still not the authorial viewpoint, necessarily. And, like, you can have a narrator who is wrong about stuff. Or you can have a narrator who provides misleading information or… I feel like a part of why people don't like omniscient narrators is because they think it's just going to, like, spoil the story, or, like, tell you too much, and, like, omniscient narrators can actually mess with you in various ways and give you… Like, give you more perspective, but also maybe tell you stuff that's actually going to lead you astray. Or whatever. Or… I don't know. Um.. Yyeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I liked about the way you were using the omniscient narrator, for me, specifically, was the way you were using it to shape tone. Because in the first part of the book, when they are little, it takes on this kind of swami British, like, children's fantasy novel. Or children's… And then as we move, the omniscient narrator… There's a continuity of tone, but also, the narration style ages up very subtly each time we go. So that when we get to them as adults, we get very few intrusions of the omniscient narrator. They just appear at just, I think, very key points, because the rest of the time, it is stylistically more like an quote adult novel. Which is either… Which tends to be, in science fiction and fantasy, tight third person. Were you doing conscious decisions about that sort of pushing or pulling or was it just sort of happening in revisions?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I like the idea that the book kind of grows up with the characters. That was something I thought a lot about, for sure, and I thought… I mean, I dialed it way back, like, in the earlier drafts, like, the first couple chapters, like, the opening Patricia chapter was written in a much more fairytale style. Like, almost, Once upon a time, there were two sisters. It wasn't quite that, but it was pretty close to that. And people were like this is too hard. Like… It's too jarring. That transition from, like, straight up fairytale, like, kind of to something more grown-up. I also, like, when I had the more fairytale stuff in the beginning, the omniscient narrator was going to be much more front and center, because I was going to start out with, like, two girls in the woods, and, like, it's very fairytale and… But Roberta was going to grow up to be a serial killer. And, like, just kind of throw in pieces of information that would just let you know on page 1 that this is not that story. And in the end, I cut that, because I ended up not going quite that far into fairytale land and it felt intrusive to just start throwing spoilers at you on page 1. But… And actually, Roberta is not really a serial killer in the final draft. She's just… She has killed someone, but there was extenuating circumstances. He kind of deserved it. But, yeah. I mean… But the tone kind of evolving was something that I really struggled with. And, in general, the level of whimsy was something that I really struggled with. Like, I didn't want it to go too far into whimsy and in fact in my subsequent works, I really kind of moved away from whimsy a little bit, because I felt like I… It… That can kind of take over and it can become, like, the exclusion of, like, character and emotion and stuff. Like, I feel like I had to pare back the whimsy a lot in order to make the characters feel fully… Like, fully realized and emotional and make their relationship feel as real as it needed to and… So there was a lot more kind of… For lack of a better word, twee kind of whimsical cuteness in the first draft, and I really dialed it way back, and, like, only kept the stuff that felt like it really belonged.

[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we go ahead and take our break, and when we come back, let's talk about how we make decisions about humor and whimsy.

 

[Mary Robinette] And as part of our break, Charlie Jane, I think you're going to tell us about your newest book?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Thank you. So, my newest book, which came out on August nineteenth, is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's got a lot of that sort of quirky whimsical tone as well. It does get a little darker and sadder in places. It is about a young trans woman who is a PhD student in English literature, but more importantly, she's a witch. And her mother, Serena, has been depressed and kind of hiding from the world for several years since some really bad stuff happened. And Serena [Janie?] decides the way to bring her mother back to the world and kind of help her mother kind of embrace life is to teach her mother how to do magic. Which, magic being magic, has some unpredictable results, and magic is kind of a mirror for, like, your desires and your sense of self in this book. And so, not surprisingly, Janie's mother comes to use it very differently than Janie does, and that leads to a lot of interesting mother-daughter conflict. But there's also, just, like, a lot of cozy queer vibes and occasional upsetting stuff, mixed with a lot of cozy queer vibes and, like, queer activism of the 1990s and the 1730s as, like, we get flashbacks about Janie's mom when she was a young woman, and also Janie is researching queers of the eighteenth century. Which turns out there was a lot of them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] So, yeah, it's about kind of queer survival and queer joy and healing and forgiveness and learning to understand your mother as a human being rather than as just, like, this icon from your childhood.

[Mary Robinette] It sounds so good. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on that.

[Charlie Jane] Yay.

[DongWon] [garbled] That sounds really amazing, and just what we need.

[Charlie Jane] Well, thank you.

[Mary Robinette] Let me remind you, that is Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.

 

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[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we are going to talk about how to make decisions about whimsy and humor, and where to place it, and how much to dial it up or down, and it's a fun, but complicated, subject sometimes. When you were working on All the Birds in the Sky, did you know going in that you wanted it to have that sort of whimsical tone or was that a discovery as you were writing it?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I mean, I think from the jump, it was a very whimsical novel. And, like, I was writing a different novel… Like, what happened is, backing up slightly. I had an urban fantasy novel that was a kind of noir like paranormal detective… Not quite detective, but paranormal investigator type novel, in the kind of vein of, like, Jim Butcher or Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels, or the Octave… The October Daye novels. Like, that kind of stuff. And it was like… We're talking 2011. I was working on this urban fantasy noir book, and I was walking in the park, and this idea about a witch and a mad scientist just kind of bonked me on the head. And I had to go write down a bunch of stuff about it. And so I feel like every project I write, I kind of approached differently. The urban fantasy novel also is very silly in places. It had a lot of very silly stuff, but it also had that more noir tone. So I always knew that this was going to be more whimsical. And I always knew that this was going to be more of a fun, kind of almost goofy, novel. And, like I said earlier drafts were much goofier. And I feel like, as a writer, I am someone… At least I have been someone to whom goofy humor comes really naturally. Like, my first attempts at writing science fiction and fantasy were just pure zany comedy with, like, ridiculous premises and, like,… Just like the silliest stuff  I could come up with, and they weren't very good. They didn't have… The characters are one-dimensional. Often, they just ended, like they would just, like, oh…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And that's the… Story's over now. Go home, folks. Nothing to see here. Oh, you wanted resolution. Oh, well, too bad.

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] But, yeah. No, I was really good at goofy, zany humor, and it… Basically, I would say that the course of, like mo… The first, like, I don't know how many years of my career, from, like, when I started writing fiction seriously to All the Birds in the Sky, I was learning to kind of… Learning to pair humor with other stuff. And eventually kind of dial back the humor, because I got the feeling… And I got feedback from people that the humor was… That I was like sacrificing character and emotion for the sake of humor and that… And so now, I think, I am… When I use humor, it's something that I… Is an intentional thing that I put in intentionally. But originally, it was just like the automatic thing that I always did. And then I would add character and story and plot and stuff on top of that [garbled] or under that or whatever. And I think that… I mean, there's a version of All the Birds… Like, in my very, very first crack at All the Birds in the Sky, it was going to be just like complete, like, campy comedy of like scientists and witches battling it out with, like, lasers versus, like, spell books versus, like wizar… Like, ghosts and goblins and vampires and aliens and everybody's just like… There's like every silly trope from both genres, just like bursting out all over the place. And that would have been actually very boring. Because one zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000 zany tropes is just like…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] It just becomes… It just… Yeah. It just becomes, like, overload and it's boring and… Functionally, they all start to feel the same. Like, an elf and an alien are not that different, unless you put a lot of effort in making them different.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Charlie Jane] And so, yeah, and so I realized that I really wanted this to be… And I had just written Six Months, Three Days, my short story that [garbled] attention, which was very focused on the relationship and was more emotional. And so I was like, I want to bring that energy to it. And so it was really like challenging myself to have that kind of whimsical humor, but also that emotion and that kind of feeling of, like, being… Especially the main part of the novel, when they're growing up, being in their twenties, and just, like, getting what you always wanted, but it's still kind of sucks.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And, like, you're finally in the city and getting to like have an awesome life, kind of, but life still kind of sucks.

[Mary Robinette] You also have to be an adult.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Charlie Jane] Like, yeah. Being an adult is just… Yeah. Anyway. And so, yeah, and I feel like I really tried to have more of the humor come out of character, and I'll give a very specific example that I think I've probably touched on before. There's a moment in the book where Lawrence is starting to, like… His relationship with his girlfriend Serafina is unraveling, like, they are just… Things are not working out between them. And there is a moment where the narrator… Like, they just run out of things to say to each other, and Lawrence is trying so hard to be, like, a good boyfriend, and it's actually self sabotaging as he's just over… He's trying too hard. And there's a moment in an earlier draft, where the narrator said… Says, Lawrence tried to fill the silence with active listening.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] Which I thought was a [garbled] line, because, like, you can't do active listening if, like, nobody's talking. Right? And then I was like, you know what? That's the narrator coming in and telling us that Lawrence is a chump. What if it is Lawrence reflecting to himself, I wish I could fill the silence with active listening. Or I am… Or just realizing, in his own mind, that he is trying to do this thing that's impossible. Then it's got pathos as well as humor…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Because it's Lawrence realizing, oh, I'm screwing up. This is like… This thing I'm trying to do is not working.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And by changing… Just changing, like, three words, from, like, the narrator, like, standing above and, like, looking at Lawrence and laughing at him to Lawrence kind of realizing ruefully, kind of laughing at himself, but also realizing that he is… He's messing up, and that this is not working. That just made it… It was still funny, I think, but it was funny in a different way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And so that was a lightbulb moment for me, of just, like, oh, the humor can actually come from within the characters, and the characters can be part… They can be in on the joke to some extent, or if we are going to make fun of them, we can at least respect their perspective in some way. Kind of. I don't know.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I really love hearing you talk about that, because I can see now that you've pointed it out all the ways in which you've implemented that throughout the book. Right? I mean, there's about six different tones in the book. Because you have the fantasy side, the science fiction side, and then you have the three different age categories. Right? And I can sort of see that… You talk about the early version as being very whimsical, and there's certain whimsy in play in the book, but I don't think of that as my primary reaction to it in a lot of ways. Right? Like, that original concept you had of, like, laser guns versus spell books, big explosive battle. That kind of makes it into the book, but when it does, it's quite scary and really upsetting, actually.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, like, we watch a witch die, pretty horribly, like on screen someone who's been really interesting and compelling. God, I love the way her magic works in the book, too.

[Charlie Jane] Oh.

[DongWon] But then I can sort of see where you start with this idea of, like, oh, here's the fun big concept, but then adding that character depth to it. You don't lose the crazy energy of it, because it's still a bunch of witches fighting a bunch of scientists with guns, and there's something about that that's so delightful and exciting and strange. But then it's like grounded in this very deep way that lets you get out the core issues of how to be a person, how to be in community, how to be a partner to somebody. Right? All of those things that, to me, were so resonant with my experiences of growing up in a city, of trying to figure out how to be in a community with people, and all of that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Likewise, I feel like this book has so much heart to it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it really is about people just trying to connect and to be the best version of themselves, while they are… Have been influenced by someone…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Else's idea of what the best version of themself looks like. And I love watching them unpack the layers, but using the humor as this kind of scalpel to sort of… It's like, aha! That's funny, but now I'm going to make you hurt just a little bit more.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It's not just a spoonful of sugar. Right? But there is a little bit of that, like, that candy coating that gets us into the meat of the story a little bit. And it's interesting, because you can… I think both are failure states in terms of only being whimsy and only being lightness, and then only being darkness and grittiness. Right? Like, I think I've seen both cases where you lose the core message of what the author's trying to get at, if it's just, like, overwhelming violence and horror and upset versus overwhelming just charm and whimsy and… Both are hard to dig your sort of, like, teeth into. Right? To continue with food metaphors here. It's hard to get into the body of it sometimes.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because, like, if you look at this book on a beat-by-beat plot basis, it's very dark and grim.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I guess so.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like two different kids who were… Who dealt with very different forms of abuse from neglect.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean…

[Mary Robinette] And then the… And increasing, like, escalating bullying, escape to places in which they experience different kinds of bullying. They have a brief… They both get a brief heyday of everything seems to be going well. But then they're both in relationships that are not the right relationships. And then the world ends.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's pretty…

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Bleak. But it doesn't feel bleak while you're reading it. I mean, a couple of places that it does, but it is [garbled]

[DongWon] Only in moments that feel very, very intentional that we feel…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That, as we feel that heaviness before heading into the next sort of emotional beat. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, like the whole sequence with the hot pepper sauce.

[Charlie Jane] Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] That was so… I mean that… I think I went into Roald Dahl mode a little bit, like Roald Dahl…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] Books was like stories that I read when I was a kid, of, like, people being really kind of tortured…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] By adults, or by each other, and, like… I don't know. I… Yeah, I didn't realize how intense some of those childhood scenes were until people told me, dude, that was like… That was really a lot. And this is the thing, I… With every book I write, like, I don't know… Like I just… I don't know until I… Until it's out in the world or until beta readers read it. There's some parts where there like oh, this is funny, and other people are like, that's really horrifying…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] And I'm like, oh. Okay. Like I just… I don't know if that's because I'm a terrible person or if it's just because it's really hard to tell sometimes when you're inside a story.

[Mary Robinette] It's hard to tell.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. God.

[DongWon] When you're inside it… And then… I think it's also sometimes what community you're in. You know what I mean?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[DongWon] And if you're surrounded by a lot of people who've been through a lot, then what is baseline funny in those circles can sometimes not travel well and certain other communities.

[Charlie Jane] That's very true. Yeah. And like… Yeah… I mean, I think this book was just me throwing everything out there and just being like I'm just going to do all of it and see what I can get away with, kind of.

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] Can I ask you… You said there's one version where it's like this, and there's one version where it's like that. Do you know how many versions or drafts you went through to find this book?

[Charlie Jane] I mean…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] For that… For… When… I'm going to send people… When, I'm hopefully by the time you hear this, we'll have sent people the PDF of bonus material. I had to… Like, one of the things that I did was grab deleted scenes that were like… Scenes that almost made it into the book, like, they got very close, but they were cut for link reasons. But also, there's a whole… Like, I'm calling it an alternate ending. It's like I feel a little bit bigger than that. It's like a whole other, like, version of the climax with a lot of stuff leading up to it that was different. And I… So the other day, I was looking back through the draft folder and I have things labeled, like, sixth draft, seventh draft, but it's very arbitrary.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] What you consider a draft, what you consider… What's just another pass. But it definitely went through, even before I got an agent and made changes for the agent and then made changes… Went through editing with Tor. It had already gone through a bunch of different versions before that, for sure. Like it had already gone through multiple iterations. And, like, there were versions that were very different. Like people who get that PDF are going to be like, whoa. This book was going to be much weirder. Like, I had forgotten quite how weird it was going to be. Like the… There was a very different version where, like, the climax is very different. And the plot is much more elaborate. Like, I think I dealt… I pared back the plot a lot to try to reach something that was more kind of… Yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well. Speaking of paring things back, okay, it is probably time for us to pare back to our homework. Did you have some homework for our fair listeners?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, since we've been talking about tone and like having a narrator that kind of like pokes… Like, intrudes into the scene a little bit with, like, little touches of omniscient, I thought… Think it would be fun is take a scene that you've already written and, just like add, like, five or six narrative asides that are providing information that the characters couldn't possibly know in the scene. Just like little bits of information. It doesn't have to be, like, major reveals, it could just be, like, oh, and by the way, this guy ran over someone's dog and nobody knew, and he got away with it, or something like… Just little bits of information that there's no way that anybody… Any of the characters, other than maybe the character we're revealing a secret of, could have known. Or, unbeknownst to these characters, three blocks away, this was happening. I don't know. But make it at least relevant to the scene, not just like… Not… Not just like complete like random information, but stuff that's, like, relevant to the scene and hopefully adds, like, a little bit of humor, but also, just kind of a different perspective, a different way of thinking about what's happening in the scene.

[DongWon] I love that.

[Charlie Jane] And just see how that looks, see if… What it does to that scene.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's great homework.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 18, Episode 10]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

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

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

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

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

[Mary Robinette] That actually…

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

 

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Thank you for noticing that.

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Two episodes ago. Previously.

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

[Chuckles]

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Noise]

[Mary Robinette] The other… Go on.

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

 

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

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

 

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

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