wetranscripts | Entries tagged with trope fishing

Writing Excuses 21.05: The Same, But Different

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-05-the-same-but-different

Key Points: How do you write something that feels original, but still meets readers' expectations? Genre or sequel? Sequels, structure or cast? Change one. Don't change too many things, one difference can be enough. Grounding questions may carry over. Window dressing genre or elemental genre? Keep the window dressing the same, but play with the elemental genre elements. Aesthetic driven or structure driven genres? What are the questions underlying your stories? Writing as hospitality. How do you avoid repeating your tropes? Do it consciously. Honor the fact that you are not the same person. Ask what if about your writing!

[Season 21, Episode 05]

[Mary Robinette] This episode...

[unknown] Kimi no game system... [advertisement in Japanese] [Singing Lenovo, Lenovo]

[Mary Robinette] ... 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 21, Episode 05]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The same, but different.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Mary Robinette] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] And this week we're going to talk about one of... A topic that I'm deeply fascinated by, and, I think, one of the trickier things to figure out when you're talking about genre writing, when you're talking about series writing in particular. But I think it's really true of the entire publishing process. Right? And that is how do you write something that feels original, but still accomplishes meeting the reader's expectations? And that can be down to meeting the same genre expectations, that can be down to writing a sequel, that feels in conversation with the original but is its own thing and is unique. Right? I mean, again, we are creatures of pattern recognition. Right? We want certain beats, we want a certain feeling from our romance or fantasy or science fiction or mystery or thrillers. Right? Like, there's this idea of fiction being trope-y or formulaic. But those tropes and formulas are the building blocks of genre storytelling. So, how do you look at differentiating the story that you're writing from the things that came before it?

[Mary Robinette] So, I think that there's two ways to think about this. One is with sequels and one is with genre. I'm going to start with sequels first.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, when I wrote Shades of Milk and Honey, it's basically Jane Austen with magic, it is more or less a straight up Regency romance. In romance, the structure is that you write the first book, and there's a very specific romantic structure. And then when you write the second book, the structure is the same, but the difference comes from a different cast. So it's the sister of the heroine and the boyfriend's BFF. Now follow form. I didn't want to do that. So what I did for my same but different was I changed my structure, but I kept my cast. And what I see when I see people moving into sequels is that a lot of times they are keeping the same ca... The sequels that feel flat is that a lot of times it's the same cast and they are facing the same kind of problem. So it's the same and the same. And they aren't bringing anything new to it. So I think one of the things that you can think about when you are moving into a sequel is keeping the same as this is the heart and the core of this story. Those are the things that you keep the same. Because I also see that the other problem which is that someone moves into a sequel and then go the different and the different.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] And it's so far away from the original that people... People go back to that sequel because they want a specific thing. And so if you remove that piece of the same, and you then... Then there's no reason for them to go back to it. So I think looking at kind of what is your intention, keep those things the same. And then, what are the places you want to kind of surprise or bring something new?

[Erin] I was thinking about, because I haven't written novel sequels, like, where I've encountered this. And I kept thinking about my time when I was writing for Zombies Run. It's interesting, because it's the same cast of people, and it's the same action. There are zombies and you are running from them. Every single time.

[DongWon] You've got one verb.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It is a game with one action. Run. And so, something that we would find is early on the instinct would be to throw a lot of new things, to try to make each thing different. Like, there's more zombies, and they're on fire. And you're in space. No, not really. But, like, and they're all happening. And it turns out that a lot of times one difference makes a huge difference because people are like, oh, I understood how they got through everything, like, they really figured out how to run from the zombies. But now the zombies are on fire. Which is bad. And so, like, this one difference accelerates the tension, in part because you're like, they can't repeat what has already happened, so how are they going to get out of this situation this time? And so, you don't have to change everything, and, like, throw all the toys into the bin, you can just have this one thing that they can focus on, and that actually adds a lot.

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, going to sort of MICE quotient, right, you have all these different components that make up a story, from milieu to the characters. And I think choosing one or two of these, I mean, you can do a thing where you're keeping most of these the same, and if you're doing, like, romance, you're really keeping a lot of things very similar. Or if you're doing, like, procedural mystery, then a lot of it is staying using the very popular phrase these days, standalone mysteries with series potential, you're going to want to be able to carry things through. But if you wrote the first book as a true standalone, now it's like, okay, how do I do book two? Right? And so figuring out what you want to carry over from book one, whether that is purely the setting, have new characters or pick up side characters, or you have the same cast and you're putting them in a different situation. I think those are the things that you need to start thinking about, of, like, wait, what are the things that I want to be fixed points as I'm looking forward to telling this new story?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like with the Lady Astronaut books, I've got Elma has anxiety, and so... But we go into space and all of that. And so in book one, we don't fix her anxiety, but she has come to a place where she accepts the choices that she's making and... But in the second book, the thing that I change isn't, oh, now she has a new problem. It's, she still has anxiety, but it's a different trigger this time. Which is often the way that things happen in real life. You're like, ah, now I have a handle on this. Oh, wait, circumstances are different. So a lot of times, just changing the context, whether it's setting your zombies on fire or sending someone to Mars, is enough to shake things for the character.

[Erin] And if you think about... Like, a lot of science fiction that, like, at least I grew up on Star Trek, it's very procedural. Like, it is...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] The same but different, like, episode after episode after after episode in the series, where it is the same cast and theoretically the same... Like, they're still part of the Federation, they're still trying to, like, seek out new worlds, but it's what's on this world? What does this alien do that we didn't expect? How are our expectations of how we can handle this shifted? And I think we, like, see a lot of that and have experienced a lot of that as watchers, as people who are engaged in science fiction. But then sometimes when it's written, it like freaks people out. It's like, nah, you cannot have... If people really love your characters, like, fanfiction will tell you, if people love your characters, they will watch them open an alternate universe coffee shop together...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because they just really want to be in a place with these people.

[DongWon] Well, and sometimes it's important to realize that you can wander pretty far afield.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? I mean, I'm thinking about two classic examples of 80's science fiction movies, which is Terminator and Terminator 2. Right? Which is just a complete inversion of the first story. Right? They're the same structure, in a lot of ways. Same beats in a lot of ways. But instead of the Terminator being the villain in one, now he's the hero in two. Right? Instead of Linda Hamilton's character being the victim in the first movie, she becomes this incredible badass action hero in two. So it's like, oh, what if we just flipped everything on its head, but told the same story, How does that change? Right? Which makes it a really fun, easy to grasp thought experiment as you're looking at it and being like, oh, I get what this is right away. Also, this feels like a Terminator movie, has the same tone, and it has the same body. And another example is the jump from Alien to Aliens, which is a complete genre shift. It goes from horror science fiction to action science fiction. Right? The second movie, wildly different tone, wildly different vibe, same aesthetics though. Right? It's using the same visual elements and it's still quite scary. There are still, like, horror elements to it. But the difference between there is one alien and it is picking us off one by one to oh, hey, God, there are thousands of them and... But we have a whole military unit with us. Completely different tone, but, again, same but different.

[Mary Robinette] I think... Talking about the tone also brings up a thing that you can do when you're looking at a sequel, and I'm thinking of the Gideon the 9th and...

[DongWon] Harrow...

[Mary Robinette] Harrow. That there's a big tone shift when you go from one book to the other. Because we shift POV characters...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because of a bunch of other things. But there are also so many grounding questions that are carried over...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] From the first book that you are still engaged with it, even though there's a lot of difference...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] In that one. But the big kind of question of sort of who am I and how do I define myself...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And pushing against systems that want to keep me in a specific place, like, that's very consistent from book to book.

[DongWon] Or, again, A Memory Called Empire jumping to A Desolation Called Peace. Right? We read A Memory Called Empire a little while ago on this podcast, but the second book takes the same characters or many of the same characters, the ones who make it through the first book, and then they put them on the bridge of a starship trying to figure out how to communicate with some very different aliens. It's a really different problem and setting. I mean, one... In the first one, we are in an epic fantasy succession sort of story, and then in the second one, we're in this Star Trek how to meet the aliens story. But, because of the same characters and the tone and the questions are the same, they are still questions about connection and communication and language in a way that the first one is, it feels of a piece, even though they are radically different from each other. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, I want to talk about some... Zooming out a little bit in sort of a more macro scale, How do I keep this feeling the same, while not just doing a direct sequel.

[DongWon] Okay. DongWon here. I wanted to remind you that in September, our last annual cruise will set sail from Alaska. And on February 15th, ticket prices will increase. The hosts are teaching classes on the business of publishing, world building, conversational storytelling, and game writing. You can sign up and learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats. Hope to see you there.

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[DongWon] Okay. Welcome back. We're going to keep talking about the same but slightly different now.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Do we get to talk about genre now?

[DongWon] We get to talk about genre now.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[DongWon] I want to talk about genre now, but I also want to talk about your career planning. How to still feel like you as a writer. But let's talk about genre first. So, in terms of genre, I think a lot... Many, many years ago, Writing Excuses, before I joined the podcast, did a season that I think about all the time, that I find so useful, which is the idea of elemental genres. You sort of have your window dressing genre, which is sort of are there ray guns and spaceships or are there dragons and swords in this? And then you have your elemental genres, which is is this fundamentally a mystery? Is this fundamentally romance? Is this a story about wonder and discovery? Right? And so when I think about the same but different, I think the things that need to feel the same are the window dressing things, kind of carry through, but then the things that you get to play with more are the elemental genre things. Right? You can set a mystery inside your cyberpunk setting. But the cyberpunk setting needs to hit certain aesthetic beats and hit certain elements to feel of the same.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I talk about a lot and think about is that there's, I think, aesthetically driven genres and structure driven genres. So aesthetic ones are things like science fiction, fantasy, historical, Western, that there's a look and a feel and a vibe. Set dressing.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Costumes. Ray guns. And then structure driven ones are things like romance, mystery, heist, thriller... That there's certain beats that you have to hit in order to do that. And the nice thing is that you can often get your same but different by layering those things.

[Erin] I'm curious though. That all makes sense to me, but how do you know what readers, or should you care what readers are responding to? Let's say you have a cyberpunk mystery that everyone's like, wow, cyberpunks cool, but I was really into this cyberpunk detective and, like, the actual unraveling of the mystery. And therefore if you make your next book cyberpunk romance, this... People might be like, oh, yeah, that was fine, but, like, I was really hoping for more on the mystery side, less on the cyberpunk side.

[DongWon] Well, I think one thing that's really important is we're talking about aesthetic versus structural genres. I do want to flag, though, that even though it is aesthetic and we're talking about it as set dressing, the aesthetic often has a question embedded in it that's really important. Right? So talking about cyberpunk specifically, it is about a certain set of questions and issues, and I think when cyberpunk doesn't feel like cyberpunk, it is just like hackers and flashy stuff. But there's no question about like what is individual... How do we operate within an oppressively capitalistic society? Right? I think, like, one of the primary elements of cyberpunk is the punk part of it. Right? How do we DIY ourselves under corporate oligarchy? Right? I think that's a really important thing. So I think if you carry through that question from one to the other, it'll feel connected. Right? I mean, this is Blade Runner versus Blade Runner 2049. are interested in really different or have incredibly different story structures. One is sort of like... The first one being more of a detective mystery and the second one being more of this, like, more sprawling story about tevolution and inheritance. Right? But they both feel like Blade Runner stories because, not just the aesthetics carry through, the question carries through of what makes a person a person.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that that is absolutely true. And also, I think that in... You're thinking about the question, but then there's also the thing you're asking is that that may be the thing that the creator is interested in is this question. But the readers may come for something else. And so for me, this goes to a metaphor that I've talked about before, which is the idea of decorating the house. Amal el Mohtar talks about writing is an act of hospitality. So I think that when you're thinking about this same but different, which pieces do you keep, you're thinking about when you move from one house to another, there's some things you keep and there's some things you don't keep. but it's ultimately still your house. So when I did Shades of Milk and Honey, and did the next book, which was secretly a military war novel disguised as a Regency romance, I did lose readers. Because there were readers who wanted... The same that they wanted was the structure. And I lost readers. But that was a ch... And I knew I would. It was a choice I made on purpose because I... As much as I love romance, I didn't want to be trapped in writing Regency romances. So I think that you can do that, but you just have to be conscious of it and decide why you're making the change and who you want to invite into the house. And what house do you want to live in?

[DongWon] Yeah. And I think this goes into sort of the second half of the question I had, which is, as a writer, when you're thinking about your career, when you're planning out what book is next, if you're not writing a series or even necessarily writing in the same genre, how do you make sure your next book still feels like a project from you? Right? What is an Erin Roberts story, and then what also feels like one, when you're thinking about what your next story is? Right? Like, is that something you two think about actively in planning that out?

[Mary Robinette] I think about it with novels.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I do not think about it with short fiction. With short fiction, that is the place where I am deliberately and joyfully playing all over the map.

[Erin] I think... Yes and no. Like, I think it's just like part of the story is a reflection of who you are. And so, when you think about the same but different, we are ourselves are often...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The same...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And always different. And I think one of the struggles when the world is moving at a pace, we'll say, and things are happening is you're changing a lot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And you're trying to figure out who you are and what's going on. That also changes your writing. And I think, for me, feeling beholden to a past version of myself feels like trapping myself in a relationship...

[DongWon] 100%.

[Erin] I didn't want to or locking myself in a house and refusing to move.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Even though the neighborhood's on fire. and so I think it is... Even though who knows what the consequences of that may be.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's better to do something that I feel is a reflection of the thing I'm trying to say and maybe I'm the only one who likes it than writing something that I think other people will want, but I'm not happy with and I feel uncomfortable in the space. I'm not being hospitable to myself.

[DongWon] One thing I look at when considering taking on a client is what is their project. Right? Is the way I think about it. And when I say project, I mean not just what is this book, but what is the big question they're tackling. Right? Are they writing about liberty and authority? Are they writing about family inheritance? Right? Are they writing about morality? There's all... Or are they interrogating capitalism? Right? Like... And I say that in a way that sounds very highfalutin, but sometimes, like, I have this question about Chuck Tingle, too. Right? Chuck Tingle is writing about how to be queer in a world, how to find joy in a world, where things are really difficult. And these are big thematic questions told in a way that is often very light-hearted and accessible. But everyone I think is interrogating a question in their fiction in one way or another. Right? Whether they know it or not, and whether they're aware of it or not. And it's not a question I ask them and that I need them to answer, but this is a question for me of can I see it and can I figure out how to support that question. Right? And... So I think to some extent that connectivity is really important from one book to the next book of being able to feel like they're still talking about the same stuff.

[DongWon] But I've also noticed something, and I'm new to doing creative works on my own. Right? I've worked a long time supporting writers, but I've been doing a thing recently in preparation for an upcoming project where I've iterated on a bunch of games really quickly. Original settings, different groups, different themes. But I keep finding myself tripping over... Like, oh, crap, I did the same thing again. Right? Oh, I put doppelgangers in this story again. I put twins in the story again. Or whatever it is. Right? Like, there's a few repeated tropes I have. How do you spot the things and resist the things that are too same-y, same-y from story to story, and keep it feeling fresh? Or do you not worry about it at all?

[Mary Robinette] I don't worry about it often when I'm drafting. And there's some things like... There's some things I do on purpose. Like, with my books, one of the things that you know is that you're going to get committed family people. Whether it's a couple or friends, that there's a strong relationship that's not threatened. You will usually know that you're going to get some pretty costumes. The thing that I notice is that I have a... And I think this is a... I have a really strong tendency to injure my characters' hands and arms.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And I suspect that that is because as a puppeteer, that is the thing I'm most afraid of. And so that's the part of the body that I'm most likely to damage. And so I will catch myself doing that sometimes and pull it back. And other times, I'm just like, no, that's actually the appropriate part of their body to injure...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And we're just going to...

[DongWon] We're just going to do that.

[Mary Robinette] We're just going to do it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, like, it's when I look at it, I think, okay, why do I need to change this, and do I need to change it? Like, the number of times that someone actually is going to binge all of my material back to back and then write a thesis going, ah, she has broken five arms... It's unlikely to happen.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] A lot of times, the patterns that we see in our own work are because we are living with our own work, not because other people see it. And then other people will see patterns that we have no idea are there.

[DongWon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Like, someone just pointed out that I've got three different books, one of which isn't out yet, that are essentially about... That have this through line of the cost of celebrity.

[DongWon] Interesting.

[Mary Robinette] And I'm like, oh, yeah. Elma doesn't want it, has it forced on her. Tesla in Spare Man, that was a conscious theme of that book. And then the new one, I'm like, oh, yeah. No, look, I've done that again accidentally. Huh.

[Erin] Something that I think is really exciting to do is to use the way you write as a way to push yourself. So, something that I find in... At some point, I actually did have two stories where I was like, wow, these stories are very different, different settings, but I was like seems like I'm writing a lot of stories about a person who realizes their place in the world is worse than they thought it was and lashes out as a result. Against something or someone or in some way, and so I was like, well, that's cool. But what happens after you lash out? Like, what happens, like... It's a short story, so, like it ends there, and there's, like, a lot of implication about what that might mean. But I'm like what happens after an act of, like, violence or anger? Like, what does the community... What are we left with and how do we deal with the aftermath? And a lot of the work that I'm working on now is about what do we give to each other and what do we do as... In the aftermath of, like, an act that is not a good one, but is still one that you have to live with? And I'm like, who knows? Maybe at some point I'll get sick of those and be like then what happens, like, when you want to do restorative justice?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled] Like and so it actually becomes, like, this larger story of, like, how do we deal with life? As I have different things that I am interested in. And part of the reason that I push myself was, I was like, oh, I'm sick of writing the same story, but also, it was partly like maybe I do need to interrogate a little bit a harder thing for me to write. But it's something that I'm still interested in writing.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's exactly the key to writing the same but different, is to honor the fact that you are not the same person.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And to always be like, well, what is it... I mean, science fiction and fantasy in particular is really the story about, like, what if.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That's one of the main things that drives us. So I think doing that with your own work... It's like, well, what if I try something different? What if I push this? Even if it's not a theme or a question... What if I push this area of craft? Like, all of these things are ways to have the same but different. Because you are the same person writing it.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. Okay. I think we're going to leave it there. Thank you guys so much for talking this through with me. I have a little bit of homework for the audience. This one is less of a writing exercise and more of a critical one.

[DongWon] What I would love you to do is to take two works from the same franchise, either a direct sequel or just two things in a series. Could be a TV show, could be a movie, could be a book. And then I want you to take note of did you like the ways in which they handled the sequelness? Did it feel the same but different? And then I want you to do a detailed analysis of that. Really write down, component by component, what carried over, what didn't carry over? Did it feel good to you that this thing changed, did it feel good to you that this thing stayed? Did it feel really static, did it feel dynamic, did it ask new questions? And take note of that and think about it as you plan out your next work.

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

mbarker

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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-38-a-close-reading-on-tension-anticipation-and-subversion

Key points: Anticipation and subversion. Set something up for the reader, then send it off in a completely different direction than they expect. You don't have to go the exact opposite. Lateral! Lean into it! Support your subversion with something else in the text. First show you know what you're doing, then start subverting. Mini-subversions and Chekhov's whiskey bottle. Humor and horror. Mix it up, sometimes follow the trope, sometimes subvert it. Widening the lens can be a subversion. Use in text subversion. Use the POV character's attitude.

[Season 19, Episode 38]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion.

[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite forms of tension is the thing where you set something up for the reader, and then you send it off in a completely different direction than they expect. It's something that P. Djèlí Clark does again and again in Ring Shout. An example from a different property... It's one that DongWon mentioned earlier in this series when they were talking about the... in The Candyman...

[DongWon] The Candyman.

[Mary Robinette] The Candyman remake with the opening the door, the long set of stairs, looking down it, and going, "Nope!"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, we are anticipating that, and that just subverts it. It's like, nope. We're going to do the exact opposite. We're going to go in a completely different way than you expected. So, when we're playing with anticipation and subversion, is it necessary to always go in the exact opposite direction when you're subverting or are there other options?

[DongWon] Yeah. I think there's so many ways to subvert. Right? There's the complete inversion. Right? But then you can also just sort of sometimes make a lateral move. Right? Like, the nope example is the complete subversion, but to stay on the Jordan Peel tip for a second, the movie Nope make sort of a right turn instead of a complete inversion. What originally feels like an alien invasion story is still about aliens, but it has morphed into a monster movie instead. So he is very carefully subverting our expectations over and over and over again throughout that movie. In general, he's a complete master at this. But the turn into the more adventure and monster tone that that movie goes into, I think is such a great example of how to be very playful with your audience while still honoring the core experience that people showed up to your movie for.

[Howard] Another really great example of that is the hotel desk scenes in the original Beverly Hills Cop and in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F where Eddie Murphy pretends to be someone he's not in order to get a free hotel room. In the second movie, he starts into it, and then stops, and says, "Oh, I'm too tired. Do you have any open rooms?" The woman says, "I do." "I would like a room, please." Yeah, complete subversion. Then she quotes the price, and he gives us the same deadpan I'm going to accept this price that he gave us in the first movie. So it's a… It's almost like it's a double subversion.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I think is fun is that you can subvert something by moving away from it, but you can also subvert something by leaning into it more. I'm going to go back to that butcher shop scene. Because we get… We get this… She has this really horrific nightmare, where she sees this butcher and he's this redheaded man and he's got mouths all over him, and then she wakes up and it's horrifying. You're like, "Well, that's a really bad dream." Then she goes to the butcher shop and what I'm expecting to happen is for that dream to have been a metaphor for something else. It turns out, no. In fact, he is a redheaded butcher who is covered in mouths, and then we lean into it even further because each of those mouths is a separate individual creature. That is all composing this one horrific person. So it is… It's not the thing that I thought it was going to be. It is setting it up and then it's going I'm just going to take it further than you thought it could go. That's another way that I think you can subvert something.

[DongWon] Well, the subversion can lean into the thematic core…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Of the things as well. Right? Because thematically, it's not one evil person. It's not one dude doing this. It is the host, it is the collection of all the different perspectives, all the different people that that represents, all the different intelligences that make up the butcher. Just the sheer horror of realizing you're not dealing with one guy, you're dealing with a system of people, a way of being.

[Erin] I think when subversion works really well, it's when it is supported by something else in the text.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] So it doesn't feel like you've just gone out completely on a limb. But it's a limb to a tree that is being supported by your story. In this case, it is that her sword is also a multitude of voices.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So you've got the multitude of voices that are good, or not good, but that are in support and the multitude of voices that are apart. That becomes more and more apparent over the course of the story until it eventually, like, in the climax, that becomes, like, the song versus anti-song, becomes like a huge part of the climax. So, leaning into it and subverting it also is the story that's being told here on purpose.

[DongWon] Also, it's very important to think about patterns here, too, because when you want to subvert, you kind of have to show that you know what you're doing first. If the first move you make is a subversion, then it sometimes will just feel like you don't know what you're doing. Right? But if you look at Ring Shout, that opening fight is a sequence of promises that are delivered on. Maybe not delivered exactly how you expected. Like, he knows how to draw the beat out, draw the tension out. Right? It's not the bomb that kills them. Because the way that scene unfolds, where the explosion is the start of the fight, which then resolves inside the warehouse. Right? So, what he's doing, over the course of that scene, is setting up all these beats, all these reveals, by making us promises, and delivering on them. Right? Setting up the anticipation, and then saying, here's the thing. So that when later he wants to start messing with us and providing that subversion, which is adding extra layers to it, which is pushing the book in different thematic directions, where it's like, "Oh, this isn't just a we're going to have sword fights with monsters book, there's more going on here," we're open to it because we have the competence, he's proven to us that he knows what he's doing.

[Erin] I also think there's some interesting mini-subversions in that scene. Like, for example, there is a whole, like, we're in a cotton warehouse, like, in a story about the South…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But it's not important. Like, it's just that's just what's there. And they find the whiskey, and I was like, "Ah, this will be key to everything, this whiskey." It's not. It is just…

[DongWon] No, they're just mad because they're competitors.

[Laughter]

[Erin] They're just like, "No." It does actually matter in the course of the story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But it isn't like, oh, this is going to be the key to figuring it all out. What I like about that is it says, "Oh, like I need to pay attention. I can't just check out and be like, oh, this is going to check these boxes…"

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's going to follow the steps. I don't need to worry about it, and I can kind of half pay attention. It's like, no, the things that you think may be key are not. The things you're maybe not paying attention… As much attention to are in fact important. I love that because it makes you lean into the text.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It looks like it's going to be Chekhov's whiskey bottle, but… Like that is a thing that you expect. It's like you set it up in Act I, it's going to go off in Act III. And Chekhov's whiskey bottle does not, in fact, have to be consumed.

[DongWon] Sometimes a whiskey is just a whiskey.

[Chuckles] [laughter]

[Howard] Okay. So we're laughing… We're laughing at this. I want to point out that the whole principle of anticipation and subversion is one that horror and humor rely on incredibly. I'm going to put a stake in the ground here and say if you want to write good humor, become a student of horror. If you want to write good horror, become a student of humor. Because learning how people use these tools for things other than what you plan to use them for is how you'll get better at using them.

[DongWon] Horror writers are some of the funniest people I know. Like, their ability to dig into on the one hand, very dark material, but also that gives them so much of the toolset to deliver a great punchline, tell a great story, and things like that. So…

[Mary Robinette] Which reminds me of this really important point. But we're going to take a break right now.

[Laughter]

[Erin] No…

[DongWon] No one writes a story like Kelly Link. There's such an odd pacing to them, and I find in that to be endlessly enchanting. Her worldbuilding, character work, and deep interest in what makes people people keeps her at the top of my list of writers of short fiction. She has a new collection called White Cat, Black Dog. This shows that she remains at the peak of her abilities. Rife with creepy encounters, fairytale retellings, and even just strange creatures, this is a unique and rewarding read that I cannot recommend highly enough.

[Mary Robinette] Now, the pattern from Writing Excuses over the years is that coming back from the break, I'm going to tell you what that important point is. But I have another question for you. When we are looking at Ring Shout… I'm certain that someone out there is like, "No, she's making this up." No. When we're looking at Ring Shout, and one of the other things that we had talked about with that, that anticipation and subversion is the thing with the girl. That we keep anticipating that this is going to be important, and where it finally is revealed, it is in a different way than we expect, and also exactly the same way. Do you think that there are ways that he could have subverted that more than he did, or do you think it's important that he follows the pattern there?

[Erin] We're stumped.

[Howard] That's a difficult question, because I was so enamored of the beauty of the resolution of that scene that I'm reluctant to suggest any possible change.

[Mary Robinette] So, this is one of the things that I wanted us to be thinking about for our listeners is that when we're talking about this anticipation and subversion, that a lot of times someone can see a tool and be like I want to use that all the time, and that actually the reason it works is because there are patterns that are set up and followed through.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So you don't know which ones are going to be subverted and which ones are going to be like oh, that's kind of the payoff I was expecting. Which means that everything then becomes tenuous and tense.

[DongWon] Exactly. It's how you keep it from feeling quote unquote trope-y. Right? Like, I get a little frustrated when people say that a book is trope-y as a criticism. In part, because, again, returning to my whole patterns thing, books are made up of tropes we've seen before. They're all just combined and recombined in different ways. But those little subversions, having the little subversion of, like, the girl isn't the age that she was when that event happened reveals itself to mean something else in that moment. But those little moments helped disrupt the sense of oh, I've seen this pattern before, even though we absolutely have. Right? I think including small moments like that, not fulfilling every single pattern you set up, having some make a right turn, having some of them invert, I think adds the kind of texture and nuance that people are looking for from a book that make it feel like it's not just paint by numbers.

[Erin] I think in that particular example, like, the subversion is in the widening of the lens. So, sometimes the way that you subvert things is that you create a pattern, and then you're like it's a much broader, a wider pattern then you even realize. One of the things that I love is that I had the same thought twice during that sequence of the girl. There's the one where she is a little girl, like, I think, like hiding under the floorboards. And she feels guilty, and I think, "Of course she couldn't do anything." Then you realize she's 18 and I thought, "Of course she couldn't do anything."

[Mary Robinette] Ooo...

[Erin] Like, that difference in context, nothing has changed in my understanding, really, but the broader context just made it like hit me so much more.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think having that…

[Mary Robinette] Yah...

[Erin] Earlier moment of sympathy made that sympathy carry through, and made it so much more tragic when I understood.

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That is a really good example of that kind of widening of the lens, of different ways of subverting. What are some other ways that we can… That we saw this being subverted?

[Erin] I have one other one which is I love that there is an in text subversion. So I like when subversion is happening, it's happening in our minds, it's happening in context, but the belief that what she would be offered was to have her family live again…

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Is a belief that I also considered as one that the story would do. But I love that she considers it on page and is told her beliefs and her anticipation is subverted in the text. Because it is an interesting way, like, it's subverted for me as well, but then I also get to see the emotions play out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] How do I feel about that? How does she feel about that, is an even better question may be to be asking. By subverting it on the page, I get a chance to experience it, both from my reader perspective, and also from, like, the parts of me that is identifying with her as a POV character.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, the fact that as we go into that scene, we are not told what her decision would be. For that… That she thinks she's already made the decision. I'm like, "Oh. Are you going to turn that down?" Then, when she gets the actual decision, and is… Like, the actual offer, and the temptation that she has… I'm also, like, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the temptation that you're having right now.

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think the core inversion of the question of what does it mean to be a hero in that circumstance. Right? The question of is the sword good or is it a curse? Right?

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] Is really core to it. And her relationship to the haints and things like that… Like, we are so conditioned as the reader to be like, "Oh. You're the chosen one. You're getting all these cool magical powers. You have the magic sword. You're the hero of this." But we can see how corrupting that is on her. Then, when the offer itself is subverted, that leads to us recontextualizing and questioning all of her choices about the story and what future she represents for this community, for herself, for all of these… All of the people that she holds and represents in a very literal way.

[Howard] There's also a subversion of the overall meta-, which is… This looks like a story about good versus evil, and when we get to our resolution, it's… Well, there's good and there's evil, and there's something else. All of these things are on the table and in play. That was the point where I got chills…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Like, oh, this is neat.

[Erin] Yeah. I think it's also, just like the subversion of good versus evil. One thing that I… Not my favorite thing is that you will have like forces that like all evil forces line up together and they all agree on…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I guess the evil of it all. But what I like here is that each set of folks, like each group here, has their own perspective on each other.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Like, the haints are like, "I don't know about this, like, lady."

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] And the woman is like, "I don't know about going to the night doctors." They're all sort of, and in some ways, she needs them all. I think in a story that's ultimately about communities…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Communities for good, communities for ill. The fact that there is a community of people working together, none of whom are quite good or evil, but each have their own perspectives and needs that can align for this moment is something that's really power subversion of the overarching trope.

[DongWon] Like her going to the night doctors is such a hero's journey in a certain way. Where we're expecting her to, like, go on this quest, rebuild the sword, like, she's literally like reforging whatever Aragorn's sword's name was, I forgot it all of a sudden. But, like, whatever. She's off to the quest of re-forge the magic sword, all of these things we're expecting in this regard. That just takes such a hard right turn into something completely different. The night doctors scene was probably my favorite in the book, just because it is… It just feels almost like it's from a different story. But still is so in conversation with the thematic's, with the characters, with the world, that it felt like it's from a different story, but in a good way. Not, I mean, parentheses complementary. Right? Being able to subvert expectations that way, of just like making the hard 90 degree turn into something else for a second, I think made the world feel so much more expansive and rich and nuanced than if we just stayed with the haints and the butcher.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As you were saying that, it made me realize that there are two places, two different worlds that she portals into.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] The contrast between those two is really interesting and fun to play with. Something else that I was also thinking about in terms of subversion is that one of the ways you can subvert something is with the hero's attitude towards what they get. So that sometimes your hero achieves the goal that they were going for and they're unhappy about it. That's a way to subvert a victory. Sometimes they lose something, and they're like, "Oh, thank heavens I lost that thing," and they're happy about it. That's… The attitude of your POV character is one of the ways that you can subvert things.

[Howard] That sounds like it might be homework.

[Mary Robinette] Ah, it's pretty close to homework. So, this is a time in Writing Excuses when we normally offer you homework. This has been Writing Excuses…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The homework that I have for you is I want you to take a trope and I want you to write for different outcomes for it. One of it doesn't deliver the trope outcome. Just like the nope. Just doesn't deliver it. One of it inverts the trope. It goes in the opposite direction of what you're expecting. One of them has an unexpected kindness. And one of them has an unexpected cruelty. And now…

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

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. Private instructions here includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait

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.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 5.35: Brainstorming an Urban Fantasy

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/05/01/writing-excuses-5-35-brainstorming-urban-fantasy/

Key points: Brainstorming isn't all serious. Sometimes it's jokes, roleplaying, and silliness. Focus on the key parts: setting, characters, plot, premises. Don't be afraid to go trope fishing, and pick ones you like -- but put your own spin on them. Main characters need a life and goals that go beyond the plot of the book. Don't forget that everyone is the hero of their own story -- so what do the other people want? Where will it end, what's the big problem? And don't forget to wear a banana slug in your hair.
( Are you going to write urban fantasy? )
[Brandon] Yes. It Happens at Sundance. That would be awesome. I do think... why don't we just say this? Your writing prompt this week is to take what we've done here...
[Dan [Come up with an ending.
[Brandon] You need to come up with a big problem. Come up with an ending. What's the big problem? What's the story really about? We know who it's happening to, you have your first two chapters, and you have where it's occurring. Now give us a real story.
[Howard] Alternative writing prompt. Go through the list of films shown at Sundance. Pick six. Determine why these six are all related to a fay plot.
[Brandon] Wow. That could work, too.
[Dan] Alternative alternative writing prompt. Were banana slug! Because the classics will never get old.
[Brandon] Wear them? Like across your body? Like clothing? Out of [garbled]
[Dan] Yes.
[Howard] We're done.
[Brandon] We're done. This has been Writing Excuses. Thanks, folks. Goodnight.

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 21.05: The Same, But Different
mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.35: Brainstorming an Urban Fantasy

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 21.05: The Same, But Different

Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders

Writing Excuses 19.38: A Close Reading on Tension: Anticipation and Subversion

Writing Excuses 18.10: Anticipation is More Than Just Making Us Wait

Writing Excuses 5.35: Brainstorming an Urban Fantasy

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