wetranscripts | Entries tagged with try-fail cycle

Writing Excuses 19.39: A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-39-a-close-reading-on-tension-tying-it-all-together

Key points: anticipation, subversion, movement, resolution, narrative, context. How do you decide what to use when? Think about one thing and do that the best you can. Then go back and fix the others. Do little bits of lots of things. Ask yourself questions at the end of a try-fail cycle. Use an inverted pyramid, to do the least rewriting. A mille-feuille of elements! Multiple threads of tension. Bake your structure as you go! Add tension in rewriting. Tension is not just conflict. Don't just add more explosions. Tension comes from caring, stakes too. That needs relationships. Relatable moments. Focus! Variation and change.

[Season 19, Episode 39]

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

[Season 19, Episode 39]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] I'm excited that... Well, I'm sad that we're winding up our whole piece on Ring Shout. But I'm excited to talk about all the things that we've been talking about over the last few weeks and figuring out how do you put it all together. We've been talking about anticipation, subversion, movement, resolution, narrative, context. If you're writing, trying to write something as tense as Ring Shout, how do you decide which tools you're going to be using at which moment to make it work?

[choking sound]

[Howard] I'm laughing because there are so many disciplines… That as a web cartoonist I had to learn so many different disciplines and in every last one of them, I found that I knew more things than I could track at once when I was trying to do a thing. So, for me, the answer is think about one thing. Do it as best you can. Then come back and figure out where you made the mistakes in all of the other things and now try to do them.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is been such a fun module because we were able to cover some many different techniques, so many different types of things. I think P. Djèlí Clark is really virtuoso-ly demonstrating a lot of these techniques at once. So one of the things to kind of take away from it is what you want to be doing is doing little bits of lots of different things. Right? I think this kind of goes back to what we were talking about last episode in terms of how to keep something from feeling super trope-y is having that variation. You want to subvert a little bit here, you want to like deny someone a resolution here, and then you want to complete the pattern here so that we're in the rhythm of the story and your drawing us forward. Right? This really ties to a lot of the stuff we've said before, we're just framing it slightly differently in terms of try-fail cycles, yes-but/no-and, like all of these kind of things that help move someone through the story which we usually talk about in terms of plot, really are tension techniques. Because tension is the thing that makes a reader excited to continue reading. That's when you get that page turning effect. That's how you get the more like quote unquote transparent prose effect where it makes something more quote unquote commercial. Right? I'm going to just keep saying quote unquote around…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] All these publishing terms. But tension is so much of what like drives the story, because you can get to the emotional core of the characters, you can get to the core of the relationships, and you can set stakes in really efficient ways.

[Erin] I love what you said about try-fail cycles, because one thing I've been thinking about for myself is, like, how to incorporate all of this. Because it's one thing to read it in somebody else's work, like you were saying, Howard. It's another thing to try to put it all in yours. I was thinking if I broke my work down… A work I was still doing, into a try-fail cycle, maybe these are all questions I could be asking myself at the end of that cycle. So it's like, okay, I'm trying, like… What am I… What are the characters anticipating in this try-fail cycle? What have I resolved at the last try-fail cycle? Where am I moving towards? Instead of look for some of these moments of tension, because, sort of as you were saying, though the try and fail is a lot about the… Like, the action. But not necessarily the tension. So, thinking about what's the tension that moves that action forward, or that makes that action important, might be a cool thing for me to think about, like, when I'm trying to figure out an outline or if I've written something and I'm like, "That doesn't seem very tense. How can I add more to it?"

[Howard] I love the try-fail cycle aspect of it, because try-fail cycles are one of those things structurally that you kind of want to know early on. Because if you get them wrong, you have to do a whole lot of rewriting. I think about… Tying it all together, all of the techniques, I think about which do I need to do first in order to do the least amount of rewriting. It's kind of an inverted pyramid. Worldbuilding. For me, is the very first, especially with a historical alt history piece like this. You get something wrong, oh my goodness, the amount of rewriting that has to go on. But the amount of history that your readers are actually seeing on the page is very small compared to things like dialect, dialogue, all of those other tension techniques we've been talking about. So, for me, tying it all together is an inverted pyramid. Start with the structural things that will make the biggest mass if I get them wrong, and finish with the structural things that are like the fine grit sandpaper.

[DongWon] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. One way to think about how to apply what you're talking about and sort of what we were talking about earlier in terms of all these techniques is I often think of a novel as a layer cake is the metaphor I use a lot. Right? Not like a three layer birthday cake, but like of mille-feuille with all these different elements. One thing I want people to think about in terms of how to keep tension rolling forward, how to keep that momentum up, is if you're resolving one thread of tension, if you're coming to the end of a pattern, make sure you have another one set up that's going to carry them forward. Right? So as you're resolving one, so… Say it's resolving her arc of understanding what happened in the barn, then underneath that you have the second arc of the broken sword. So that's going to carry you forward. As one ends, there's already rolling forward tension and momentum on another plot line. Ideally, like two or three others. Right? This is partially why what we were talking about in one of our earlier episodes about contextual tension can be so useful. Because the contextual tension is this ambient tension that pulls us through the whole book as were trying to understand how does this tie into the real world history, how does this tie into the actual plan, into the history of quote unquote the nation and all of those things.

[Erin] I also think I will say, like, as a very messy writer, I am not a great structural like planner. So I think it's also maybe, maybe not, a way to like bake your structure as you go. So I'm thinking about that opening scene where they're fighting… Let's say I was just like I want to write a scene where the clan are monsters and somebody is fighting them, and I'm going to figure out the rest once I get there. So it's like the scene has ended. Okay. They fought them. Then it's like what is left unresolved on the stage. Like, what is left? What's actually left is the next thing they do, which is the pieces. So I'm thinking, like, okay, now they've killed these things, they've got to, I assume, get out of wherever they are. Okay. That needs to be resolved. They need to, like, take the bits of monster somewhere and do something with them.

[Howard] Oh, and they gotta steal some whiskey.

[Erin] And they gotta steal some… There's always time to steal some whiskey. One of my life mottos. Not really. But then, like, by thinking about that, then it's like, okay, maybe that gets me to the next scene. Then I can figure out, okay, now I've figured out where they take the pieces. Oh, I thought up a new character, maybe that character provide some new tension. Will it be a lot jankier, and you're going to have to go… It's like a cake… You ever make those cakes where it didn't quite work out?

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I mean, not frosting the heck out of it?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You're like, no, no.

[DongWon] [garbled] Flat and round. Right?

[Erin] Exactly. That's all you need. So you may have to fix it in post. But I think sometimes, for me, like, I will often get stuck when I'm writing at transitions. I think a lot of times it's because I haven't figured out where the tension is going.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So it feels like you just ended a sentence with a really, like, heavy period. That sounds very odd. You just ended a sentence with a very definite ending.

[DongWon] You want to keep the flow going.

[Howard] You know what, let's keep that. And speaking of flow, should we take a break for things of the week?

[Erin] Sure, while I get myself together.

[DongWon] This episode of Writing Excuses is sponsored in part by Acorn. Money can be a difficult topic for writers and creative professionals. It's not like earning a regular paycheck that comes in at reliable intervals. It requires more careful planning to make sure that that advance covers you not just this year, but set you up for the future as well. Learning to invest and be smart with your money takes time and research, and it's easy to put that off in favor of short-term goals. I encourage all the writers I work with to read up on the options out there and do their homework to figure out what makes sense for them. Acorn makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing in your future. You don't need a lot of money or expertise to invest with Acorn. In fact, you can get started with just your spare change. Acorn recommends an expert-built portfolio that fits you and your money goals. Then automatically invests your money for you. What to acorn.com/wx or download the Acorn app to start saving and investing in your future today. [Lots garbled]

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about a novella that I translated from Icelandic. Yeah, I know. Icelandic. It's a whole other story. The thing I want to talk to you about is this novella. The author, Hildur Knutsdottir, is an award-winning writer in her home country, and we met at Ice Con in 2021. I fell in love with her writing, but it wasn't available in English. The Night Guest is a creepy horror novella which starts out with a totally relatable situation. The main character goes to the doctor because she keeps waking up tired and with mystery bruises. That's not the relatable part. The relatable part is that her concerns are dismissed because she's being quote hysterical. But each night, the injuries get worse. Hildur has this beautiful spare language that manages to create dread in the seemingly most innocuous moment. I loved this book enough to translate it. Check out The Night Guest by Hildur Knutsdottir.

[DongWon] Howard, I love what you're saying about thinking about how to write efficiently. How to figure out how to do the least rewriting. The one thing I do want to say on that, though, is I think tension is the thing that needs rewriting the most often. You know what, as an editor, the thing that I see the most, the feedback I give the most is, characters are great, worldbuilding is great, the plot is great, it just doesn't have enough momentum. It needs somebody to… The line I always say is it didn't pull me through the story in the way I need it to. Right? So that's always a tension critique when I give that. So what you're saying, Erin, makes a lot of sense to me too, in terms of like when you do it, you have these individual scenes, is getting the momentum and sliding from one scene to the next. Tension is how you create that elision, moving from one beat to the next beat. So figuring out how to layer that in sometimes will not be too obvious for you in the planning stages, and maybe something you find as you go. So if you're struggling with that, I don't want you to, like, worry too much about things in the outlining and planning stages. Obviously, have an eye on it, think about it. I think it can be really helpful. But it's okay if you feel like this needs a lot of rewriting to get the kind of tension in there that you want.

[Howard] You know what, I want to be clear here. When I say the least amount of work, I'm not talking about no work.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There is so much rewriting that needs to be done. But I don't want to have to take this magnificent set of layers and instead of doing some trimming, I turn a dobos torte into a dobos tortilla. There's... Okay, I only have one layer I can use. Now I gotta rebuild the whole thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] For a tension rewrite, what I prefer is to be able to say, "Oh, this chapter isn't working the way it needs to work. I will rewrite this chapter." Rather than, "Oh, this chapter doesn't even fit in this book. I have to restructure it and everything that comes after it." That's the work that I want to avoid.

[Erin] I think that one of the reasons… I agree with everything. But I think that one of the reasons that tension often happens in the rewriting is because tension is different than conflict. I think sometimes when we get stuck in writing, or maybe it's just me, like, the instinct might be to, like, Michael Bay it and…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Just be like more explosions! More things! More enemies! Like, and just like build it out bigger and bigger and bigger. But that doesn't necessarily make it any more tense.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it's like if you're up against 50 people trying to kill you or 60 people trying to kill you, it's pretty bad either way. It's not more tense, you're pretty dead. So you have to think about a lot of times, it's small things…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] That create tension. It's emotional things, it's personal things. I think that's what I love about Ring Shout is that things that we talked about in tension, the girl, the sword, they're important, but they're not the big set pieces.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] They're not the huge battles in a lot of ways. They're the smaller moments that pull you from one big set piece to the next. I think they can be harder to find until the rewrite, because you don't know what small details you put in chapter 3 until you write it out. Then you go, oh, I mentioned a cloak. Maybe that's a source of tension that I can bring through…

[DongWon] I think the lesser version of the opening of this book is one that starts with the trap blowing up. Right? But he doesn't do that. He starts with a conversation. Starts with a long conversation between the key characters of the story. I think that leads to the kind of tension that's interesting. Because now we have a sense of who these people are, we're starting to care about them. Then, for me, the fight scene in the warehouse is fine until she draws the sword. Then it's like, oh, damn. This is interesting now. Right? Because that, for me… I… We talk about this a lot, but death isn't very interesting stakes. Right? Like, if the character dies, I'm sort of like, okay, characters dead, let's move on. It's how the other characters feel about the character's death that makes it hit hard. It's the sense of, like, oh, they had something to accomplish that they didn't accomplish. Because we, as people, care about other people. Right? We don't necessarily care about one thing in isolation, we care about communities and relationships. So when I say that this needs stakes, I almost always mean that this needs a relationship of some sort. To another person, to a group, even to like themselves in a certain way. An aspiration for themselves. That's the thing we're going to feel emotions about. So, that's why starting in an action scene is something that, like, I always recommend against. When you think about action scenes in general, as Erin was saying, it's not about the explosions, it's not about the cool fight scenes, it's about the intensity of emotion, it's about caring about the relationship, it's about what's the consequence of losing this fight. That consequence is in the regard of their community and their family, whatever it is.

[Howard] The community and family. There's a scene about… I want to say a third of the way into the book, where the community is coming together for shared meals, and we talk about the food and we talk about the music and what's happening. When a scene like that is done well, I want to eat. I am now connected. If you do something that like removes their ability to get crayfish anymore, I'm tense. Because I… Food. That's important.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] So these sorts of celebratory moments a third of the way into the book… Granted, my meta-reader is saying, "Oh, Howard, don't learn to love this food or these people or whatever else. P. Djèlí Clark is just setting you up to care about things that could be taken away." Yeah, set my meta-reader aside and just enjoy it. Because it's a lovely scene that connects me and allows the author to create stakes that matter.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Rather than, oh, no, somebody's gonna die. Oh, no, this community might fracture.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It's so grounding. Like… You said food, it made me think, many of us may have been in life or death situations against multiples of people, but many have not. But we've all eaten. I would assume. Oh, boy…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So I think that a lot of times in… It makes me think about one of the challenges of fantasy and science fiction, which is that sometimes you're talking about things that we have no frame of reference for. Like, I have never been tense about a ship exploding, because I'm not on a spaceship. But I am tense about letting the people on my crew down. Or, like, disappointment is something that we understand. So I think a lot of times where I can sometimes get lost in fiction is when so much of the tension is focused on the thing that I can't ground myself into, and not enough, like you're talking about, in the relationships.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But I think when people hear "add more stakes," sometimes they think…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Add bigger things blowing up.

[DongWon] One other thing I want to add to my layer cake metaphor here…

[Erin] Yes.

[DongWon] And sort of what we're talking about in general is I think one of the problems with adding more explosions is you lose focus. Right? So I'm saying have lots of layers, but have one of those tensions be the focus of your scene. Right? Then as you resolve that, you shift the focus to something else. When you're just adding more noise, you lose sight of the tension, so the tension drops, actually. Right? So thing to remember is that, like, if you think about the juke joint fight scene, right, she's running around looking for her lover through all that, and the tension is coming from that, primarily. There's other elements there. Right? There's the relationship with Sadie, there's whatever's going on outside with the butcher, there's… Again, the stuff with the sword, her memories, those are all present in the scene, but the dominant note, going back to our music metaphor, the dominant theme in that is her relationship with this guy as she's coming to terms with how much she cares about him.

[Howard] You mentioned don't raise stakes like Michael Bay by blowing more things up. Funny story. I think it's the third Transformers film where they were shooting in 3D, and it was the most enjoyable and comprehensible for me. It turns out it's because the 3D tech people went to Michael Bay and said, "That thing you keep doing with the cameras? Stop it. We can't do 3D if you jiggle around a lot." So they, for technical reasons, they forced him to, as you were saying, focus our attention on something.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Which let me care about it. Which made things comprehensible.

[DongWon] Yeah. I saw an interview with George Miller the other day where he was talking about the most important thing that he learned to do, and he learned it from making Happy Feet 2…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Which he made immediately before Mad Max Fury Road, which is very funny to me. But once you spot it, you can see why it makes Mad Max so good, is he learned that you communicate who the protagonist is by what the camera is looking at. Right? So all throughout Fury Road, you will notice these scenes… You talk about, like, Michael Bay level action, a million things are happening at once, but you're always focused on a character, what that character's experiencing, thinking, and you can tell what that character feels about the other characters in the scene. Right? You can see the growing trust and affection between Max and Furiosa simply by watching how they move, how they respond to each other. Then when they start fighting in tandem, it's this beautiful moment of two people coming together for survival. So, I know we've wandered off of Ring Shout…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But think about that focus when you're thinking about how to create and maintain tension.

[Erin] Yeah. I also want to, just before we wrap up this episode, you were talking about music earlier also made me think about something that I've seen that happens a lot at karaoke. Which is that if you have somebody who has the most beautiful voice in the world and they start singing at the same volume and, no matter how beautiful it is, after about 30 seconds, people will stop. The thing they do where they start listening, they're like, "Wow, you can really sing," and then go back to their conversations. Because it is the change that actually makes…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] People pay attention. Our human brains are really good at taking things that there use to and screening them out. It's actually… Whole nother podcast on why that actually is unfortunate, because if you're happy, sometimes you could get really accustomed to it and start thinking you're not happy anymore, because that's what the human brain does. But it does the same thing when you're reading. So when you were talking about the one scene in her looking for her lover, that's the note of that scene. But it's not the note of the entire book.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Erin] Because if you hit the same note over and over and over again, nothing wrong with explosions, I think the reason Michael Bay gets a lot of heat is because when you go to the same well over and over, it's like that singer holding the same note, same pitch, same timber, for 10 minutes. Eventually, you're just like, oh, got that. Now I need something new.

[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Erin] Speaking of something new, we have new homework for you.

[DongWon] Yeah. I've got your homework for you this week. What I want you to do to tie this all together is to take a look at your own outline. Move one of the major conflict points in that outline into a different act. Move it forward. So, say you have the resolution of Act I. See if you can stretch that into what happens if you move that to the end of Act II. If you have something in Act IV, what happens if you move that to Act III? See how that changes the pacing, see how it changes the tension, see if moving things forward or back increases or decreases the speed of reading the book and the momentum of your story.

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.46: NaNoWriMo Week 3 - Raising the Stakes

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-46-nanowrimo-week-3-raising-the-stakes

Key Points: Raising the stakes! Consequences! Try-fail cycles. Plan A, but... Multi threads! Ground increasing the stakes in what your character would do. Layer failures! How could this be "blank"er? Bigger, or deeper emotional reaction? What is already on the table, and how can I threaten that? Physical reactions! Establish the conflict first, then introduce emotional stakes. Dramatic irony! Be mean to your characters. Put them in difficult situations. Use the kind of stakes you have in your own life. Add try-fail cycles.

[Season 18, Episode 46]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 3 - Raising the Stakes.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

[DongWon] So this week, as we're entering into the third week of NaNoWriMo, we're going to talk about sort of the next step in developing your story, and developing the book that you're working on. Which is, raising the stakes. So, now that you've had your inciting incident, now that you've introduced your characters and your setting, we're going to talk about starting to introduce some consequences for your characters. So, yeah, I'm just going to turn it over to the group. How do you guys think about the next phase here? How do you start revving the engine, as it were?

[Dan] Well, we talk about try-fail cycles a lot. I think one of the great ways to raise the stakes is to have a plan A, and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't, but either way, it's going to go horribly wrong. Right? This is the yes-but, no-and. I keep talking about Star Wars. I'm going to keep talking about Star Wars. In the inciting incident gets them off the planet and their plan is to fly to Alderon, and that's plan A. Do they succeed? Yes, they fly to Alderon. Does that help? No, Alderon's been exploded, and then they get captured by the Death Star. Like, it is a completion of their first goal, sort of, kind of, but it's also this drastic failure that ruins everything. On the other hand, look at Toy Story. What would he wants to do is be the favorite toy. He's decided that his… That's his super objective. Being the favorite toy. His objective is I need to get rid of Buzz. Does he succeed in doing that? Yes, he does. He gets exactly what he wants. But it just goes horribly wrong. He kicks Buzz out of the window, and he feels like it's his fault. He tries to rescue him and that spins off the whole rest of the story.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I enjoy playing with with raising the stakes and the idea of consequences is that I… Stories are not like just one track. There's multiple things going on all at the same time. So I enjoy interrupting the progress towards one goal with another goal. Where it's like, "Am I able to do this thing? No, because…" So I think of this as… Because I often think in terms of MICE Quotient, as single thread versus multi thread. So in single thread, the consequences of one action, like, are continuing straight in that line. So using… Continuing our Star Wars…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When we've got the rest doing the princess thing, it's a milieu. We get in, we have to rescue the princess, we have to get back out. So are they able to rescue her? Like, they're being chased by Storm Troopers. What's the smartest thing they can do? They can try to shoot out this vent and get into a chute. Does it work? Yes, but they wind up in a trash compactor. Or a garbage chute, actually, they don't know it's a trash compactor yet. What's the smartest thing they can do? Well, not actually the smartest, but very… The Luke-ist thing they can do…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Is try to shoot…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Their way out. Does that work? No, and they wake up something under the water. But the entire time, they're still dealing with environment. It's all milieu until finally they get a yes resolution which is R2 letting them out. Multi thread does a different thing, though.

[Erin] Oh. I… You know what, keep on going.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. So…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] In multi thread, the consequences of one action affect another goal. You most commonly see this with event threads, where you have to give up something that is precious and personal in your character thread in order to make the event move forward. It's like do I… My going to be able to unlock this? Yes, but only by sacrificing my grandfather's pocket watch. So it's one of these things where you can interrupt one. It's also very useful in mysteries, where you're trying to ask someone a question, and then something goes wrong with the environment that causes you to not be able to finish asking that question.

[Erin] Yeah. I got so excited…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And interrupted your thread.

[Laughter]

[This is multi thread]

[Erin] but what I got excited… When you said it was the Luke-ist thing they could do, because it really reminded me that the increasing of stakes works the best when it's really grounded in what your character would do. Like, there are things that can be done that will make the stakes worse, but feel like they're out of nowhere. I feel like if you think like what's the worst decision that your character could make at this moment, and then be like let's convince them to make it, like, that often raises the stakes, but it also reinforces what it is that your reader really likes about the character.

[DongWon] Yeah. One thing I think about on that front as well is so much of, for me, of what does raise the stakes, what makes me so invested in character, is their relationship to each other. Right? How they feel about each other, or how a character feels about themselves. Right? We think of, like, life-and-death situations as great stakes, but I actually find that those can be really flat. What's interesting about Alderon getting destroyed isn't the fact that all those people died, it's about we're seeing it through the eyes of someone who watches their home destroyed. That raises the stakes for the entire galaxy. What's interesting about the trash compactor isn't necessarily are they going to survive this or not, but we see 3 different approaches to solving a problem as these characters are in conflict, of Leia making fun of Han, of Han just shooting things for no reason, and then Luke being the one who is, kind of the [garbled], they need to keep rescuing throughout this whole sequence. So we start to see the dynamic that is going to form the core of these movies for the whole trilogy, of these 3 characters interacting and their feelings about each other starting and deepening in these moments. Now we have stakes. Now we care about how Leia sees Luke. Now we care how Han sees Leia. All of these different parts of the triangle, some of them become very important, and now I'm emotionally invested in this movie at a whole different level than I was when it was just Luke being sad about his parents.

[Mary Robinette] This is a great point. One of the things that there are 2 things that are happening in the trash compactor scene. One is they have to get out of it. But the other is Luke is trying to impress Leia.

[Yeah. Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So when you can have… One of the ways that you can raise the stakes is not by making the individual failure point, but by layering two failure points onto a single action.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's one of the things that you can do, is, like, hang more on it. Which is, I find, a lot of fun.

[Dan] Yeah. Another thing I love about that… Sorry, this is turning into the compactor scene episode…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Luke's entire character arc in that movie is that he has to learn to rely on something that is larger than himself. What is his solution to get out of the trash compactor? It's he calls for help, he relies on R2-D2. Which is a really nice little nod toward he's not trying to do it all on his own, he's trying to rely on outside help. That is setting him up to be able to make the choice he makes at the end of the movie.

[Erin] I really feel like I should have seen Star Wars more than one time in my life…

[Laughter]

[Erin] In order to participate in this conversation. So, I'm going to take it, sorry, turn away, as I don't know nothing about no trash compactor.

[Wait! Star Wars podcast! Garbled]

[Erin] To talk a little bit about zombies. Something that you said, DongWon, maybe think about it, because when we were doing Zombies Run, we were always like, "What can the zombies… How can the zombies become…" They chase you all the time, every single episode. So you kind of get like, "Oh, zombies again." But are they closer, are they scarier, are they bigger, are there more of them? But instead of thinking of these as life or death space, I like taking them and moving them into whatever situation you're in. So, the fact that like there's a normal-sized zombie, and then a giant zombie, that's bigger. But something can also be bigger in terms of, like, it just has more impact. It will do more damage if it catches up to you. So, giving a speech in front of a lot of people is one thing. Giving a speech in front of a lot of people that include your crush, who, I guess is Leia… Are there other speeches in Star Wars? Like, is bigger. Like, the impact is larger. So one way to raise the stakes is by being, like, could this be blanker, and just take any word of your choice, that's a… Any word of your choice. I'm not going to hold you back.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Think, can this be blanker? Then figure out how do you do that. That's one way to also to raise the stakes.

[DongWon] On that note, as we think about how to make things more blanker…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Let's take a break, and we will start digging into what exactly that means when we are back.

[Mary Robinette] NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and it's time to start planning. If you're aiming for 1600 words a day, it's easy to de-prioritize eating. But you need to keep the brain fueled. During Nano, I turned to meal kits. Hello Fresh makes whipping up a home-cooked meal a nice break from writing with quick and easy options, including their 15 minute meals. With everything pre-proportioned and delivered right to your door every week, it takes way less time than it takes to get a delivery. I find that stepping away from the keyboard to cook gives my brain time to rest. I love that with Hello Fresh I can plan my meals for the month before NaNoWriMo begins, and then I can save all my decision-making for the stories. With so many in season ingredients, you'll taste all the freshness of fall in every bite of Hello Fresh's chef crafted recipes. Produce travels from the farm to your door for peak ripeness you can taste. Go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use the code 50WX for 50% off plus free shipping. Yeah, that's right. 50WX, 50 for 50% off and WX for Writing eXcuses. We are terrible with puns. Just visit hellofresh.com/50WX and try America's number one meal kit.

[Dan] Hi, everybody. It is week 3 of NaNoWriMo. You're halfway through. You've been writing this thing, and you have, at this point, pretty good sense of your pace. How far are you into it, how much longer is it going to take. More than anything, at this point, you're probably thinking, this is the worst thing anyone has ever written. That's okay. What I want to do today is give you permission to write an imperfect book. I give you permission to write a bad book if you need to. I wrote 5 books that were terrible before I finally wrote one that was good. This is good. This is a good thing. Is more important for you to learn how to finish a bad book then how to endlessly spin your wheels perfecting a book that is never going to be perfect. Perfect is out of our reach. So, I give you permission to write a bad book. Finish this. Leave some scenes unfinished. Leave some dialogue clunky. It's okay. What you are doing right now is learning how to write the next book. That is going to be best if you turn off that internal editor and just crank through it and learn how it feels to finish a book. I believe in you.

[DongWon] Okay. So. As we're coming back from the break, we've been talking about how to make things bigger, and we've also been talking about how to make things more, deeper in terms of the emotional reaction. So, one of the ways that I love to do that, is to really start to draw out the personal connections. I kind of touched on this a little bit before, but going back to your zombie example, the way that the zombies always become so upsetting and so threatening is, one, the visual or them approaching en mass, but there's always that moment where the character you cared about gets bit. Now you have to deal with the awful consequences of the slowness of them starting to turn. Right? So, for me, I think that's such a perfect example of how to make the stakes almost unbearable by adding this emotional quotient that relies on the personal connections that you have between the characters. How do you guys build to that? What are the things that you can introduce that, like, start establishing those stakes so that you can pull that trigger when you need to.

[Mary Robinette] Well, one of the things that I will do, especially during NaNoWriMo, is that I will look at the things that I've already put on the table. So, in an ideal world, I am laying down groundwork and I thought ahead and… But, in reality, especially during nano, I'm often at the point where I'm like, "Okay. I have to make this work. What have I already established that they care about? And how can I threaten that thing?" So most of the work that you have to do is actually before you get to the point where you raise the stake. It's establishing some relationship, something that will make the person feel like it's a failure, so that when you get to this, you can threaten it. Like, one of the things that I think about sometimes is, like, someone's house being robbed is bad. Okay? But someone's house being robbed and their grandfather's pocket watch being taken, that's worse because it's a specific personal thing. But if it's… I always, like, "How can I make this worse for the person?" If they weren't supposed to have it out of the house, and they had taken it with the intention of getting it repaired, and then it's stolen… That's worse. Because now there's multiple layers of failure that are accompanying that. So, for me, it's not so much that I have to make it bigger or flashier, but, looking at the character's connections. One of the other tools that I'll use for that is their physical reaction to it. Like, just the… All of the… Like, thinking about all of the visceral reactions that happen to your body when you're in failure mode can really make a character like…

[DongWon] I love this idea of making stakes felt in the body. Because, I think when you can make your reader feel the things that your character is feeling in a physical way, that's, I think, like a huge success.

[Dan] Another way to do this is to approach it backwards. Rather than establish emotional stakes first and then introduce a conflict into it… I'm thinking, for example, of the movie RRR which establishes the conflict first. Two people on opposite sides of a revolution are trying to find each other, trying to capture each other. Then they meet in disguise, they don't know who the other one is, and they become best friends. So, suddenly you have raised the stakes, not by adding that conflict, but by adding the dramatic irony of, "Oh, no, inevitably they will find out who the other one is, and this beautiful friendship will be destroyed."

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a really great point. That a lot of times when we're talking about stakes, that we think in terms of direct conflict, and that it doesn't have to be that, it can be a layer of tension that you give to the audience, where they are waiting for… Everyone is waiting, when they're watching that film, for the moment when the two of them realize who the other person is.

[Dan] There's multiple near misses. It's just excruciating every time.

[DongWon] This is where dramatic irony can be such a useful tool in raising stakes. Right? To return to Star Wars, I'm a big fan of the Clone Wars era of Star Wars. Which is so wonderful, because you know what's going to happen at the end of this, because we've seen the movies. We know things don't work out for these people, and that most of these people were interacting with over the course of the show are either going to be dead or gone in some way by the end of it. So it creates incredible stakes over and over again as we're in this sort of prequel mode of thinking, because we know where things are going to end up. So you can use really heavy foreshadowing in your story, as in this RRR case, and rely on your reader's knowledge of just how stories go sometimes, what genre you're in, what beats are coming in this story. Returning to the zombie example as well, we know someone's going to get bit. Right? There is no zombie movie that ends with the whole cast surviving. Right?

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] If it is, that's a very low stakes zombie movie. I'm not sure I want to watch it. Right? So you can rely on your audience's awareness of category, of story, and of the stakes that you're setting up to sort of increase that tension. You can be very playful with that as a creator. That can be really fun.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Did anyone else just feel the moment when someone out there said, "That's it. No one in my book is getting bitten!"

[Laughter]

[Erin] It happened in my brain. Out there? In here!

[DongWon] To use Erin's recommendation, you want to make sure you're going with more biterer.

[Laughter]

[Erin] That really works for any word, but…

[Dan] More bite-ier?

[Erin, Mary Robinette] Bite-ier.

[Dan] Well, it's… This is may be a good time to mention that you, as the author, you have created these characters, you love these characters. You have to be mean to them. I used to describe my job is that I was just mean to John Cleaver for a living. Because that's how all of these books are constructed. There has to be conflict, there has to be something horrible happening to the characters. Sure, maybe they recover from it, and that's great. Maybe they don't and someone else moves on and recovers. But you have to be willing to pull the rug out from under your characters and put them through the wringer.

[DongWon] Even if you're telling a cozy story or a romance or something like that. There are still… I mean, you might change the settings so it's not going to 11, you're going to 7…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] But you're still… You're putting them in difficult situations. Right? Even if you're doing a coffee shop hey you kind of thing, somebody's going to get their order wrong or somebody's going to be… You're going to run out of milk. I don't know, whatever it is. But your stakes can change in terms of scale, but the technique is still the same. The core principle is still the same. Your story will need stakes of some sort. [Garbled]

[Dan] Well, it goes back to what you were saying about that emotional core. I would argue that in a romance, raising the stakes can often be to an 11. I'm going to be alone forever because the person I am in love with doesn't love me back. That's an 11.

[DongWon] Oh, absolutely.

[Dan] To that person.

[Erin] Yeah. Something to remember is that in our own lives, while… Not to speak for any of you, most of us are dealing with stakes that are those kind of stakes, the romance stakes, the coffee shop getting our order wrong stakes, and our lives often feel very dramatic to us.

[DongWon] Oh, dear me, it's always an 11.

[Laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? I think sometimes we feel like in fiction we have to, like, add all this outside force, and you can. But sometimes you can think about the ways in which your individual life feels like it has stakes, and go with those types of stakes within your fiction.

[Mary Robinette] Along those lines, one of the things that happens in your real life, the things that make it feel worse, is when you have more try-fail cycles. Like, I just want to make a cup of coffee, and… Or I just want to record a podcast, and first, they're using grinders outside, and then they're pounding on metal, and then there's a drill, and you're like, every time, it's like, "Really? Are we gonna finish this ever?"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So sometimes you can make it worse for your character just by adding in a try-fail cycle. Making it harder for them to solve a problem that you've already set up.

[DongWon] I think, on that note, you are entering into week 3 of NaNoWriMo, and it's time for you to raise the stakes and get to that word count.

[Mary Robinette] And we have some homework for you. I know that this part of NaNoWriMo is often a little challenging, so our homework this time is just designed to help you move forward with your work in progress. Pick an aspect of craft that you feel weak on, and choose to focus on it during your next writing session. So instead of trying to think of everything all at once, just pick one thing. Just say, "You know what, I'm going to really nail dialogue this time." Or, "This time, it's all going to be about description." Will you have to go back and correct and balance some things later? Yeah. Probably. But it allows you to move forward and feel like you're making progress in making your craft better without having to worry about getting the scene exactly perfect.

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

[Howard] We are now offering an interactive tier on our Patreon found at patreon.com/writingexcuses called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.42: Creating Magic Outside of a System

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-42-creating-magic-outside-of-a-system

Key points: Does magic need rules to work? You don't need to build a magic system ahead of time. Just dive in and let things happen. But... Humans are pattern-seeking creatures, and we will make a magic system out of everything. Does magic have to have a personal cost? Is magic consistent, in terms of costs and consequences? Some technology might as well be magic. Fantasy stories tend to personalize cost. Technology stories tend to make the cost less personal. It's less about the cost of magic, and more about consequences. Folk magic, magic beyond our understanding and control, is a force on the story, not something exerted by the protagonist. Use SMART as scales to think about magic (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based). Build a try-fail cycle around ordinary things, which magic as the danger in the pit. When you make the choice of a SMART magic system or not, how do you decide? If it feels technological, put rules around it. What is the premise of the story? You don't always need to understand the rules, just roll the thunderstorm in. Science, learning, civilization can coexist with magical thinking, understanding, and folk logic. Instead of X or Y, what is the Z in between?

[Season 18, Episode 42]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Creating Magic Outside of a System.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] I am so excited to talk about magic outside of magic systems. Which is one of my favorite things to play with as a writer. Two of the stories that I had y'all read were… Had magical elements in them. I mean, wolfmen are not real that I know of. Conjuremen actually are real, but that's a type of folk magic that's very different than the way we think about magic a lot of times, where it's like you say, "Alakazam," and something happens. What I really enjoy about these is that I think sometimes we think we have to come up with rules in order for magic to work. But I would say that we really don't. I have a theory as to how we can determine the type of magic that we're using in our worlds. But before I do that, you, Mary Robinette, I keep thinking about you because you actually have worked in a magic that has more of a system. I'm curious, like, do you like it, do you not like it, how do you feel about it?

[Mary Robinette] Um, so I… Hmmm, this is hard, because I don't agree with your central premise, and I agree with your central premise, simultaneously.

[Erin] Love it.

[Mary Robinette] So, I don't think you need to do any building ahead of time on a magic system. I think you can just dive in and let things happen. Which is actually the way I did that with the Glamorous Histories. I dove in, I let things happen, and then I was like, "Well, you better not let that happen because now you've accidentally invented telephones. Let's roll that back." So I found the magic system as I went. But then I also made some very deliberate decisions about it. I've also written stories that are much more in the fairytale mode of magic system where it's just like magic things happened, and there's not… But, here's where I disagree with it. Humans are pattern seeking creatures, and we will make a magic system out of everything. Which is why, like, what is the one magic spell that works perfectly for hiding something in the real world. You put it anyplace safe. What is the counter spell for that? You buy a duplicate. Everybody knows this spell. Right? We make systems. If you walk away from the bus stop, the bus is going to come. If you say that Wolfy Things doesn't have a magic system, but it 100% has a magic system. The wolfsbane is a magic system. It's just not the kind of thing where you sit down and you turn it into… I think when people think about magic system, they think about something that you can turn into basically an RPG.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that's exactly it. When I think magic systems, I think things with rules that can be codified easily and always work the same way. One of the reasons that I often push back… There are 2 rules that I was taught about writing magic, neither of which I like for my own writing. One is that magic always has to have a cost. A personal cost. It is often the way that it's described.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I mean, I guess I understand where it comes from, because magic can't just be unlimited. But like…

[DongWon] The desire to work magic into the logic of capitalism, though…

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's a desire to work magic into an imperialist possessive extractive mode of thinking that I think is sometimes very fun. I love playing Dungeons & Dragons which is absolutely in that mode. But also there are other ways to think about the numinous and the magical that I think can be rule-based and consistency-based, but aren't necessarily highly systematized in a hierarchical way.

[Mary Robinette] Again, Nikki pays a cost for gathering the wolfsbane. He talks in the beginning about the prickles and the stings of gathering it. Like, there is a cost there, whether or not it's a monetary or economic cost. It's not… I agree that it doesn't necessarily have to be there. But there is… If we think of it as an effort, that there is something that is… Something happens. There is some sort of exchange.

[DongWon] One of the things… Where I'm going to push back on consistency.

[Mary Robinette] Consistency?

[DongWon] Yes, there can be a cost. But what one character pays in one moment versus one another character pays in another moment doesn't always have to be the same. Right? Think about this in terms of Studio Ghibli movies. Right? So there is consequence and cost. If you eat the food, then you end up turning into a giant pig. Right? There's a certain logic to that, a certain cost to that. But what one character experiences won't always be the same as what the next character experiences. Even though there's an underlying logic to it. Right?

[Mary Robinette] That is…

[DongWon] So I think when we're talking about systems, for me, at least, that's kind of like where I start to push back on the idea of like this has to be systematized in a concrete way. But I also understand what you're saying, that there's an underlying logic to how these things work.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, I mean, in the real world, when you're looking at systems, people do not pay the same costs under any…

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So that's why I'm like I understand, but I think that whether or not you intend it, the reader is going to find a system and the characters will find a system. That systemizing will happen.

[DongWon] I'm going to push back a little bit. I'm sorry to keep pushing on this…

[Mary Robinette] No, no, this is…

[DongWon] But I do think that…

[Howard] Erin and I are having a great [garbled time?]

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I do think a Western reader will want a kind of rigor and system to it that is different from what readers from other cultures might [garbled think]. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Sure.

[DongWon] I think… I just want to be cautious about generalizing too much. I think the experience of an American reader or a European reader tends to be slightly different from the experience of a reader who is coming from a different culture, and has different expectations of what the logic and implied costs and consequences of magic could be in that world.

[Erin] Well, I think that…

[Howard] If I could address the technological…

[Erin] Sure.

[Howard] Elephant in the room. Erin, you began by saying to of these stories have magic in them, and one of them doesn't. I'm sorry, the technology to remove… Transfer… Manipulate… Bank, not bank memories might as well be magic. It is a technology, and you may have technological rules and costs associated with it, but the story does nothing to explore that beyond the most superficial level. It could just as easily have been a wizard did it.

[Erin] What I… This actually gets to one of the things about costs that I find really interesting, which is a slight pivot from what we've been talking about. But I think a lot of times, fantasy stories tend to personalize cost. It is your finger, your soul, your whatever, your blood. Technology stories tend to make the cost more like the way we think of cost. Electricity has a cost. But it's a bill, not like my soul. You know what I mean? Like, ultimately, that cost changes, and there are some people who can't pay their electric bill and have to deal with the consequences of that. But I think some of the desire to make fantasy really individual… A lot of times bloodline oriented in a weird way, like inherited, makes the cost really like about the actual person wielding it and not the systemic cost. Because, like, there's something going on… The memory tech is very magical, but it is something that is run by a company outside of, like, individual people, and the choices they're making are how to use that system, not that they have to create it themselves or sacrifice part of themselves other than their morals in order to do something with it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I completely agree with all of that. I think, as we're talking, something that is clarifying in my mind is that part of the reason we say magic… I suspect that part of the reason the magic must have a cost arose as a rule is because what we're really saying is for your protagonist to succeed, they must exert effort, and that frequently people were doing things where… It's like, "And now we do magic."

[DongWon] I think it's less about the magic having a cost, and more about the characters choices having consequences.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? So when Nikki's picking the berries, he is feeling a cost, but that cost is his choice to engage in this act of hunting, in this act of violence. He's giving blood to do that. I think that's a part that's so interesting to me. More than necessarily like magic works in a certain way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things, going back to what your thing about electricity is, I will often tell people like electricity is a spell that will does one thing, and we figured out how to do a lot of really interesting things with this one spell.

[Erin] I love that. I also think a lot about folk magic. I thought a lot, because I did a lot of research into folk magic in working on Snake Season and, like, the conjureman has all of these different potions and things and… Do they work? Do they not work?

[DongWon] I love the conjure bag. Yeah.

[Erin] It's not clear. I think that's true of a lot of folk magic. I was talking with someone the other day who said, like, "Does it work to paint your house [garbled] blue, so that the spirits don't come in?" It's like, well, who's going to not paint their house that? Like, you don't want to be the one person that paints your house green and now the spirit's in you. So we believe, and sometimes a belief in something is its own magic. It doesn't actually have to work. If you paint your house blue and a ghost gets in anyway, you just figure you did something wrong with that. But you don't have to codify it. It's not like I didn't mix the paint correctly and do the right spell. It's more like, "Oh, well. I guess something happened, and, oh, well, they got in another way. Like, I'll have to deal with those consequences." I think that's where you see cultural differences. The idea that like ghosts are real, that there is just kind of magic around us that is beyond our understanding, beyond our control, is something that I find really interesting, because then it just becomes a force on the story as opposed to something that is being exerted by the protagonist within the story.

[DongWon] Well, it lets you draw on a cultural component in a really interesting way. Right? So, the fact that everyone paints the roof of their porch a specific shade of blue is a regional cultural thing. It is also superstition, it is also part of maybe a magic system of sorts. But it's also… It's a people saying this is who we are. We are people who paint our porches this color. Right? I think that is where folk magic intersects with narrative in ways that I find really rich and exciting and fun.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] We're going to take a break, and when we come back, I have a daft theory to propose, and I want to see what you think of it.

[DongWon] Hey, writers. I love to cook. It's one of my main ways of winding down from a hectic week, and it's a I show care for my favorite people. But a busy fall schedule doesn't always leave me with a lot of time to spare. With Hello Fresh, I can actually get a wholesome meal together even when I haven't had time to run to the store or figure out a menu. With their quick and easy recipes and 15 minute meals, you can get a tasty dinner on the table in less time than it takes to get takeout or delivery. And Hello Fresh is more than just dinners. You can also stock your fridge with easy breakfasts, quick lunches, and fresh snacks. Just shop Hello Fresh Market and add any of these tasty time-saving solutions to your weekly box. To start enjoying America's number one meal kit, you can go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use code 50WX for 50% off plus 15% off for the next 2 months.

[Mary Robinette] I recently read a short story collection called The World Wasn't Ready for You by Justin C. Key. I was blown away by this. It's his debut collection. It… Like, from the very first page, I was like, "Oh, this guy knows how to tell a story." Each story feels different. Also, warning, they are horror. Like, this is heavy stuff. The way the publisher described it was Black Mirror meets Get Out. So you're dealing with science fiction and horror and fantasy to examine issues of race and class and prejudice. It's fantastic. I highly recommend this. The World Wasn't Ready for You by Justin C. Key.

[Erin] Okay, I promised a theory, and here it is.

[Howard] You promised a daft theory.

[Erin] A daft theory.

[Howard] I'm here for the daft.

[Erin] I was thinking about how do we think… Like, if you're creating magic, if you want to make a more systemic or otherwise, how do you describe how magic works within your world? I started thinking about the acronym SMART that people always tell you to use for goalsetting. That your goal should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based. I decided that each of these could be a scale to think about magic.

[Mary Robinette] Ooo…

[Erin] So, is your magic specific, as in, like, it does one thing, or is it general? Is it measurable, like you can actually, and sort of controllable in that way, or is it more kind of broad? Is it attainable by certain people, or by everyone, or can only certain people wheeled it? Is it realistic or does it just do gonzo…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Wild stuff that you wouldn't expect? Is it time-based or is it always available to you? So this was my random theory. I'm curious, does any of that make sense for you guys?

[DongWon] Oh, my God, I love it so much.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I'm so excited by that. I'm like…

[DongWon] My love for you is melting.

[Howard] It makes sense, and I'm going to need… Let's see, what was the T for? Time-based?

[Mary Robinette] Time. Yeah.

[Howard] I'm going to need a big time-based spell in order to unpack it. One of the thoughts that I had about the magic… In Wolfy in particular, we talk about the wolfsbane as something that will work for killing a wolf.

[Mary Robinette] Very specific.

[Howard] Yeah, it was specific. But the effort that needs to be put in by the protagonist in order to kill the wolf that way has nothing to do with the wolfsbane, and everything to do with coaxing, using things that are real to all of us, the wolf up to the edge of the pit, and then pushing, using tools that are available to all of us, the wolf into the pit, and then let the magic do its thing. That aspect, when you've got a magic where the try-fail cycle is not focused on the magic, because you don't want to have to build all those rules, you have the try-fail cycle around can I get the wolf up to the edge of the pit and push it in, and then let the magic do the rest. It's a very simple… It seems very simple to me, anyway, a very simple toolbox for taking non-rule-based, non-systemic, non-gamified magic and working it into the familiar and useful structure of a try-fail cycle.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, Howard, I was going back to the SMART. I'm like, Yep, specific, it does this thing. Measurable? Yep. The wolf is dead. Accessible? Anyone can grab it. Then I was like, "What was R? What was R?"

[Erin] Realistic.

[DongWon] Realistic.

[Erin] Is it realistic? That's what gives space for like gonzo magic. Right?

[DongWon] Totally. Totally.

[Erin] So, is it like the wolf falls in and turns into like [a blues?]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, there is like that sort of surrealistic way of approaching magic where it never does…

[DongWon] The big dream logic.

[Erin] Yeah. Exactly. It doesn't do what you think. It does something, but it doesn't do what you would expect it to do. It probably isn't very repeatable, which is another thing that R sometimes stands for.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah yeah yeah.

[Erin] In that because the next time you do it, it might lead to a completely different effect. Which makes it harder for you to like wield it as a tool. Because every time, you're sort of taking a chance that it would do the thing you wish it would.

[Howard] That was in Iain Banks Against a Dark Background. The MacGuffin is a weapon called the lazy gun. All we know about the lazy gun is whatever you're pointing it at, when you pull the trigger, it's going to die. For small targets, it might be a tele-portal opens above it and jaws come down and chomp them. Totally gonzo. For large… The larger the target tends to be, is, the more likely it is that you're just going to get a boring explosion. I loved that magic system, and the whole story, once they get their hands on the gun, has nothing to do with how the gun works, and everything to do with hanging onto it long enough to point it at something.

[DongWon] So I guess my question for you is, Sour Milk Girls has a very specific, let's call it a magic system quote unquote, that is systematized, that has hierarchy, has all these consequences. Right? It fits most of the categories of SMART in those ways. Then, Snake Season definitely does not. Like, for you, when you're making those choices of what kind of magic system you want in this story, when do you want something hierarchical and rigorous, and when do you want something that's more fluid and numinous?

[Erin] Well, that's interesting. I think that I… The more it feels technological, for me, the more I want to put rules around it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because that's just I assume that technology has rules in a way that I'd never assume that magic does. So, the more… The closer it comes to tech, the more I think about it that way. I think it also comes down to, like, what is the premise of the story. So, in many ways, when I came up with Snake Season, the premise was, what if this… What if there's a woman living on the Bayou whose kids are messed up? Like, you know what I mean? Which has nothing to do with magic. But then the Bayou in that culture has so much magic infused into it that it like kind of leaks into the story. Like, even if I didn't mean for it to be there, it did. It was. Something I find… This is a complete aside… Very interesting about folk magic of sort of the Bayou New Orleans all of that area is that it actually mixes like traditional folk magic with Catholicism in a really interesting way. Catholicism is very rulebound, and folk magic is very not. I found something really interesting in that. Maybe a parallel to the ways in which Marie's trying to figure out like where she fits within the rules of something she doesn't fully understand.

[Mary Robinette] So I think the thing that… Sorry, my brain is exploding over here.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. Same.

[Mary Robinette] I think that… Circling back… Taking that, and then circling back to what you said, the more it feels like tech, the more it feels like a system, I think what you're actually getting at is the more mainstream it is. The more it has been monetized and become a technological system then something that is… Where it is all self-taught. So in the self teaching of it, the non-rulebound, that's where it's like, "Well, yeah, I do it this way." In the same way that when you're looking at art, it's like, well, you have to have perspective, and you have to have this. Then you see folk artists, you see outsider artists who are not doing it that way at all, who are exploring totally different things.

[DongWon] You see this around like tarot and arcana. Right? Like the massive industry that surrounds that at this point in terms of specific interpretations, specific things like that.

[Howard] If you look at our understanding of weather, climate, and ecology in, like, the 12th century. There are cycles of the moon, there are ann… Our passage around the sun, there are tides, there are seasons. But they don't always align and it's difficult to tell why. Moss grows on the north sides of trees. What is it about the windward and leeward sides of mountains? We didn't have an understanding of the water cycle, of where rain comes from, and we obviously didn't have satellites to predict thunderstorms. But we had this magnificent experience of a thunderstorm rolling in from nowhere and doing things that, in the context of the 12th century whoever is a huge force that… Did it come from the moon, did it come from the things we did, what did it have to do with the trees and the mountains and whatever else? So I look at that, and I map that onto how would I build a magic system where maybe it has rules, but I don't need to understand them. I just need to roll the storm in.

[Erin] In truth, I think we take comfort in the idea that we can understand it all in a way that is not true. I keep thinking about like… I can't think of a very specific example right now, but there are cases where there will be a village that relies on folk magic. They're like, "We are eating this thing or doing this thing, and it has this effect." People will come in and be like, "That makes no sense. It doesn't fit in. We can't codify it. We can't understand it. Stop doing that." Then there will be some tragic consequence. Then, later, they'll be like, "Oh, it turns out that actually you eating that mushroom did inoculate you against the thing we didn't realize was happening around you." Because there's this idea that we have to be able to put something in a box in order for it to make sense to us. I think part of that is the pattern seeking nature of humanity, but I think the fact that those patterns have to be kind of in written form or really measurable form in order for them to work for us is kind of the capitalism impulse.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] It's why, for me, the more technological something is, the more systemic it feels like it needs to be. Like, the more systematized it feels like it needs to be, because I associate it with needing… With capitalism, and I think capitalism, like, abhors a vacuum and uncertainty, because you can't monetize uncertainty.

[DongWon] I think this conversation's been so wonderful because it's unlocking a certain thing in my brain about how I think about this. I think one thing I realized about why I find this dichotomy to be a little bit of a frustrating one, between like highly systematized and folk magic in certain ways, and kind of even going to how Howard was sort of explaining people trying to understand natural phenomena, is it sets up science and learning and kind of civilization almost as opposed to magical thinking and understanding and folk logic. When, in fact, I think they coexist beautifully. Right? I mean, also, science is becoming more and more a magical thing. Like, you can spend 30 seconds thinking about quantum mechanics and you are in magic land at that point as far as I'm concerned. But…

[Howard] I think the GPS.

[DongWon] Exactly. But I think folk or magical thinking, dream logic, can exist in a way that doesn't negate that this is how the storm works, this is why the moss grows here. It can both be there are magical reasons for that, there are spiritual reasons for that, that are important to us as a community, as a culture, and also, water flows this way, storms work this way for reasons. Right? So I think when you have that in a story and when you're making your magic highly rigorous and systematized in a very Dungeons & Dragons way, you're telling a story that is more science fictional about systems, about abstraction, about society in a certain perspective, and when it's more dream logic, folk logic, more numinous in that way, it is more about the character growth and development and personal experience. Right? It's sort of the scale of the lens… I'm making a very broad generalization.

[Can we push back…]

[DongWon] Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. I am a… Obviously, I'm down for that. But, like, I think there's a reason why I think we tend to want the magic system in one type of story, very broadly speaking, and a little bit more of a certain kind of logic and character growth in a different kind of story.

[Mary Robinette] So, the reason I'm like, yeah, yeah. The Glamorous Histories are totally about exploitation. I mean, I'm like… I write… Like, Glamorous Histories are highly systematized, and you're telling me they're not about character?

[DongWon] No, I'm not saying they're not about character. What I'm saying is the Glamorous Histories are also very concerned with societal questions of how society is structured and oriented in the way the Jane Austen books are. Right? Her books are as much a critique of money and power and social dynamics as they are personal character driven romance stories. I'm not saying these are mutually exclusive categories. I'm saying scale of lens comes into play. I do think the glamorous histories That books have a lot to say about the world in a very broad lens way.

[Mary Robinette] But one of the things… Like… One of the things that I actually do use the magic system… Specifically use the magic system for is that… In book 5, is that James and Vincent have grown up with this very systematized, very European, and then they are encountering people who use Glamour but have been trained… Who've grown up Evo and come at it from a different way, and they been told, "Oh, that doesn't work that way. That's not how Glamour works." They've been like… They have been treated as if the way they use magic is folk… Is not real. Even though they're using exactly the same tools. But it's just the language that they use to talk about it has been pooh-poohed.

[DongWon] One thing I love about this conversation and one thing that… You can tell we keep wandering into like slightly prickly corners of this conversation, is because so many different valences have been attached to these currents. Right? So even me talking about a more systematized versus character driven way sounds like I was making a value judgment between commercial and literary in some way, or something along those lines. I wasn't doing that, but it comes off that way. You know what I mean? We talk about, like, Western versus non-Western, like hierarchical versus non-hier… There's all these like cultural judgments that get caught up in this. I think that is part of what makes this conversation so energetic and fascinating. Being live to those assumptions about what is better writing, what is better fiction, how should magic work, should it be SMART or not? Right? Like you… There's a valence in that, too. Right? I don't know, I love it. This is a super fun conversation for me.

[Erin] I actually… One of the reasons I had fun with SMART, other than, this is what I do when I sit in my house…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Is that… My cat's used to it… Is that, like, thinking about ways in which you can separate letters that seem like they would go well together… So, specific and measurable feel like, okay, that's your systematized versus your sort of generalized, like, uncontrollable. But what happens if you have something that's both specific, but uncontrollable? Or highly measurable, but very general? Like, what happens when we play with… Get rid of the idea that were actually talking about it either has to be X or Y, and figure out what's the Z that lives between…

[Mary Robinette] I love this.

[Erin] And has elements of both.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I really love this.

[DongWon] What a great system.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Just thinking about that as a set of sliders that you can push back and forth… It's very yummy.

[DongWon] It makes me want to, like, map every piece of fiction I love to that right now.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.

[Howard] The readerly can of worms here is when someone reads one of these speculative fiction pieces, however the magic was, however the characters were, what is the piece that they come away from and tell you, "Oh, I have got to tell you about this book. It's so cool because the magic does…" and then they tell you all about the magic, versus them saying, "Oh, I love this because these characters do…" For me as a writer, whatever it is that gets me excited about it, is… That is the important piece. I hope that's what the reader comes away with. But as often as not, I'm just wrong.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Well, this has been such a fun conversation. But to think about SMART in a different way, now we have some homework for you.

[DongWon] So, your homework is to write a thing that brings… Write a scene that brings an element of magic into a mundane place that you know well. The grocery store, a bank, whatever. Try to make it impactful without explaining how it all works.

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

[Mary Robinette] Do you like stars? I do. Maybe you'd like to put up a constellation of stars by rating us on Apple Podcasts. Well, yes, we're talking about ratings, not astronomy. But a 5 star review can help us by creating a navigational beacon for new writers like you to find their way to Writing Excuses. So, rate us on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.13: Finding the Core Conflict

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-13-finding-the-core-conflict/

Key points: Conflict, fights, disagreements, or other struggles, are often easy to teach. They are usually external, with beats. Set up, try-fail cycles, consequences, resolution. But, how do you make them interesting, and ramp up the tension? Make sure the reader is invested in the characters. Sometimes the conflict is because they have different plans to get the same thing. Action scenes, fights, wars, car chases, can be boring because we know who is going to win. So, show us something that we've never seen before, use the action to explore character, or make sure there's some real uncertainty. Don't forget that conflict can be fun! To make it satisfying, add something new and exciting. Consider the emotional need of the character, the superobjective or tragic character flaw. Watch for the underlying rules or agreement behind the conflict about how to solve things. Or for the gaps in that agreement. Consider having your characters question their motives before, during, or after a fight. You may make the world better.

[Season 18, Episode 13]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Finding the Core Conflict.

[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] No, you're not!

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about conflict.

[Howard] I was about to try to quote the argument sketch from Monty Python…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And I just didn't have the piece I needed, so…

[DongWon] See, my mind went to I demand that he may or may not be Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That is correct.

[Erin] I was just going to say World Star, but…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, when we're talking about conflict, it can come in a bunch of different ways, but it is the form that most people think about. It can be fights or disagreements or struggles. These are all easy to teach because they're usually external and you have a clear set of beats. You've got the setting up of the conflict, you've got the try-fail cycles, you have the consequences. Then you have the resolution, where the character gets or does not get the thing that they're looking for. But when we're thinking about that, like, how are the ways that we can build conflicts that are more interesting, that are doing a good job of ramping tension up and as… To quote Erin from much earlier… That readers… Or to paraphrase Erin… That readers experience tension and only characters experience conflict, so how do we get the readers to feel tense about the characters' conflict?

[Dan] So, I want to start by reiterating something we touched on early on, which is that tension, and in our case now conflict, only really matters to you if you're invested in the characters who are a part of it. This is why a solid 60 to 70% of every horror novel is just slice of life of this person and what they're doing and what they care about and what's important to them. Because if we don't have that grounding we don't love them and we're not invested in their survival, then whatever conflicts they experience won't mean anything to us.

[Howard] As a tension tool, conflict… If we can see the conflict coming before they can… The old math problems about a train leaves Chicago at this time, a train leaves Nashville at this time, going this speed, where will they meet? Oh, by the way, both trains are on the same track and can't stop. Well, now suddenly, the math problem has tension in it because we want to find out how to stop trains, or what's going to happen when they collide. We have these two conflicting… Irresistible force versus immovable object, and they're going to meet.

[DongWon] This is what drives a ton of westerns. Right? You know at some point that the gunslinger and the sheriff are going to drawdown. Right? The question is when's that happening? When… How are we going to get to that point? So, knowing that that conflict is there and building up the terms of why are they going to fight, what is at stake here, is so much… What drives a great Western is knowing all the back story, all the trauma, all the history between these characters that is going to lead to the standoff. I mean, samurai films, same structure. Yeah.

[Erin] I also think that having like an emotional weight and some depth to the conflict is really important. What are the reasons that this particular person wants this thing? It's not just that it's a thing and it's cool, but maybe they have some emotional tie to it, or it fills some need that they don't even realize that they have. It's another reason that I really like it when two opposing parties are in conflict not because they just want to oppose each other, but because they want the same thing for different legitimate emotional reasons. That's what really drives their conflict. So it doesn't feel like conflict for conflict's sake, it feels like you're invested in their emotional journey, and therefore you're invested in what they want out of it.

[Mary Robinette] Or, taking out another way, is when they both want the same thing, but have totally different plans for how to get there. Right? That sometimes is driven by their own emotional state. Sometimes it's just that. Like, I tend to solve things by saying, "Let's turn it into a show. Can we theater our way out of this?" Someone else is going to look at it and say, "Well, that's silly. Let's math our way out of it."

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, this is like Black Panther and Killmonger. Right? They both want the same thing for the future, but they have such different visions of how to get there. So it becomes a question of methodology, it becomes a question of how you execute those things, your ethics there, also, hashtag Killmonger was right. But, it is…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Like, interesting questions. Sometimes that leads to the most interesting conflicts. Not do we think this obviously moral things should happen, it's how do we actually do that? How do we get there? Right? How do we get from this future or this present to that future? Those are the conflicts that I, on a bigger scale, not necessarily on a personal emotional scale, get much more interested in intellectually and emotionally.

[Dan] So, this conversation is much wider than just action scenes. But I want to talk a little bit about action scenes, whether it's a fight or a war or a car chase or whatever. Because most of the time, I find those to be incredibly boring. The reason is because I know who's going to win. It's rare that a fight scene will justify itself as more than just a display of people punching or shooting at each other. Because the outcome is rarely ever actually in question. So, if you're going to do some kind of action scene, I find it really useful to do a) show me something that I've never seen before. This is why, like a Jackie Chan or a Tony Jaa fight scene is so much more compelling than a lot of the other ones. Because they are doing something I've never seen in a way I've never seen. Or b) use that action scene as a way to explore character. To demonstrate something intrinsic about these people that I wouldn't be able to see in any other way. Or b) just make sure that there's some actual uncertainty. That maybe the characters involved might actually die even though they're on the poster. Or however you do it so that there's still some tension, some uncertainty, and some investment in what is otherwise a fairly wrote exercise.

[Mary Robinette] Wes Chu, when we had him on, talked about fight scenes as being a conversation. That the conversation is basically, "I want this thing. You want a different thing. How do we work that out? Which of us is going to get the thing?" I've always felt like that was a really… A useful way to think about it structurally, because conversations have an arc, and fight scenes can have an arc, the really well constructed ones have an arc, and that conflict is… That… Is that exchange between them.

[Mary Robinette] So, let's take a moment and pause for our thing of the week.

[Howard] The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This is nonfiction and huge and brilliant. I'm going to go ahead and read the blurb that one of my other favorite nonfiction authors wrote about it, Nassim Taleb.

"This is not a book. It is an intellectual feast. There's not a single chapter that does not playfully disrupt well seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read. This is… It begins with a deconstruction of the 19th or 18th century question, what are the origins of societal inequality. It takes that question and says, why were they even asking that? A better question is what is the origin of the question what are the origins of societal inequality. What they arrived at, in a nutshell, is 18th-century, 17 through 19th century Europe, colored our perceptions of human history in such a way that we've been misinterpreting pre-human history, pre-history of humans badly. Most of the book is devoted to looking at the new research and telling new stories about primitive peoples in ways that make way more sense than the ones that Rousseau and the others were looking at."

[Howard] I know that sounds kind of heavy and heady and maybe not fun, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb is right. It is pleasurable, it is glorious, it is humorous, it is eye-opening, it is fun. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to talk about as we're talking about conflict that I don't want to lose sight of. I generally agree with everybody that character development, all those things are incredibly important, and that's what generally you need around conflict, but I also don't want to lose sight of the fact that conflict itself can be really fun. Right? A scene involving conflict is often the meat of certain types of stories. Right? I really love action movies. I love kung fu movies, things like that, and executing an action scene incredibly well should be revealing of character. You should learn stuff about the world. There should be advancement of story. But also, just executing on the thing itself is its own joy. Seeing a good argument unfold on screen between two characters… One example I think of is Hereditary. The most thrilling scene in that very upsetting movie, to me, is just Toni Collette at the dinner table yelling at her family. It's this moment of just pure like terror and excitement as she finally lets loose. It is this conflict that's happening in this moment. But it's just hearing, seeing her face and hearing her language. Or, I think a very effect… Like, all the John Wick movies. Right? The conflict in those… The tension in those movies is incredibly basic, which is, will John Wick get revenge on the people who killed his dog? I'm not spoiling anything, that's the plot of the whole first movie.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And sort of the plot for three more movies. Right? The joy of those movies is watching this guy beautifully, athletically, murder a billion people over the course of several hours. So, do you guys have thoughts in terms of how to make sure your conflict, whether it's a physical conflict or argument, whatever it is, is satisfying in its own right, beat for beat, style for style?

[Howard] I do, and I think we're going to talk about it in the next episode where we talk about micro-tension.

[DongWon] Yeah, it does overlap with that. I can live with that.

[Howard] Because you've got that whole big conflict, and there can be smaller conflicts that are being explored, resolved, as we are going forward with the big obvious one.

[Dan] A short answer I can give right now is kind of what I said earlier. What you're talking about is my point about showing me something I've never seen. I've seen a million car chases. But until Fast and Furious Five, I think, I don't think I'd ever seen a car chase where they were dragging a bank vault behind them on the street. There's always ways to add something new and dynamic that really takes it to another level.

[Mary Robinette] For me it gets to… Goes back to that emotional thing or… I say that it gets… As if there's a single answer. There's multiple of them. But a lot of times, what I find myself reverting to is the idea of objective and super objective. That there's this big deep character want or need that's in the middle of them, and that the conflicts that they're going through are a series of objectives, each of which is targeted to try and solve… To try and fill that super objective in them. So a super objective is a very large thing, like safety, security, love. Revenge. Then the objective is the specific action that you're going after. Sometimes I will see conflicts and they don't seem to emotionally link back to whatever gaping hole the character has… Sometimes we call this the tragic character flaw. But I find that if I can link it back to that… Can draw a link between the objective/super objective, that allows me to have a series of conflicts that are also linked and also escalating in a way that is interesting.

[Erin] This is not going to answer that question at all… Not to cause conflict on our conflict discussion…

[Laughter]

[Erin] It's something that I just find really fascinating about conflict, is the inherent agreement in it. So think back to what Killmonger and Black Panther, they may disagree about a lot of things, but they definitely agree that single hand-to-hand combat is the way that one should determine who gets to rule your kingdom. Like, they… There's a certain baseline in a lot of conflict, like this is something we should solve by violence, or these are, like, a well-placed bon motte is the way to get under the skin of your opponent, like, maybe more of a Jane Austen type novel. What I think is really interesting is thinking about where do the people involved in the conflict agree at least on the ground rules, and what that conflict should be composed of. Then either leaning into that, so showing it at its most extreme, Fast and Furious level, or, that can also be a way of keeping it interesting if they kind of disagree on what the ground rules are. If somebody gets the rug pulled out from under them because the way the conflict was happening turns in a way that they weren't expecting.

[Mary Robinette] You just made me think of a thing, Erin, which is something we talk about so frequently in other episodes, which is the consequences of something. So if it's the… If you've got someone who's coming in and they believe that it's… That the way to deal with something is with the crushing bon motte, but they are facing someone who believes that the way you deal with it is by pulling out a rapier, that that's a consequence. Then, me and the M.I.C.E. quotient, frequently, conflicts are built around events, it's a disruption of status quo. So, often if you can have… If you can have the conclusion of conflict A be creating the problem, creating the status quo disruption that becomes the problem that conflict B must solve, that you again have that linking. I think an interesting way to do it would be to bring to people who do not agree on the rules of engagement together. It's not the only way, but I'm like, "Oh, that's an interesting thing to play with."

[Howard] When we prepared for this episode, Erin asked the question, "What are the emotional needs that are underlying a person's investment in the conflict?" I keep coming back to that, because… Just in my own life, when I'm feeling a thing, when I'm angry or conflicted about a thing, the first step I take… Okay. I'm 54. I've been living inside this skull, this meat frame, for quite a while. Maybe this is 400 level stuff. But the first thing I do is ask myself, what am I really angry about? What is the underlying emotional state here? Am I reacting nonlinearly? Am I going ballistic over something that should be perhaps a little less hyperbolic in nature? The characters in our stories… It's probably not super interesting if they all do that before getting in a fight, because then maybe there wouldn't be a fight at all. But then again, if they have those discussions with themselves after the fight, if they have those discussions with themselves during the fight, so that we are exploring those emotional states, exploring the changes to those states, exploring how the consequences of the fight might alter those states, now we're invested. Because that's the thing… I mean, I've said this before. Fiction is a tool by which we can make the world better. If your action scene accidentally teaches people to question their motives before getting in a fight, I think you performed a public service.

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of performing, it is time to perform some homework. So, for our homework assignment…

[Howard] I think Erin's got this one.

[Mary Robinette] Erin's got this one.

[Erin] Oh, look at that. I do have this one. In this one, it is… It's a perfect segue from what Howard was just talking about, which is to write a conflict twice. Each time, change the POV character's underlying emotional need. So, have them need one thing in the first version of the scene, and something completely different, emotionally, in the second version. See how that scene changes for you.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-12-the-long-shadow-of-unanswered-questions/

Key Points: How do you postpone answering questions? First, we haven't gotten there yet. More specifically, you have to gather evidence first. Or you have an answer, but it's the wrong one. Or you have an answer, but there's more to uncover. Try-fail cycles! Yes-but, no-and! Plan your information arc, where are they gathering information, where is it revealed. Hide the real question! Cell phones and Google -- I don't know who to call, or I don't know how to ask the right question puts a speedbump in the way. Let the familiar become strange. Go ahead and tell us, and see what happens then. Give us some information that is satisfying and compelling, and build the trust that you will tell us about the other stuff later. Let another character ask the questions the reader wants to know. Use red herrings, things that seem connected but really aren't.

[Season 18, Episode 12]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions.

[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] There are questions that we have that are unanswered. In our continuing exploration of tension, one of the favorite tricks for tension is questions that are unanswered. This can take a number of different forms. You classically see them in mysteries, but you also see them in romance, like, "Will they get together?" So, let's talk about some ways to avoid answering questions without it being super gimmicky.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have mentioned before my use of my small dog, or of my character's small dog to interrupt questions as… For people not on the video feed…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Erin's cat is also providing a running commentary.

[DongWon] Which has completely prevented us from answering questions about unanswered questions.

[Erin] Her main unanswered question is, "Why no treats? I don't understand."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I think it's worth pointing out that when you write a book, when you're reading a book, fundamentally, information is being hidden from you because you haven't gotten to the end of the book yet. Just the ordering of the material is such that I'm not hiding the answer, I'm getting to it. We're getting there, we're just not there yet. You don't have to… The moment someone in the story or on the screen or on the page has the answer to the unanswered question, that is not necessarily the moment at which that answer would be revealed to anybody. Because the story unfolds at a pace at which that hasn't happened yet. So, I mean, that's the easiest tool.

[Dan] So, to be a little more granular about that, some specific things you can do to kind of stall that answer is you have to gather evidence first. Or you have an answer that turns out to be the wrong one. Or you come up with an answer that doesn't actually solve the mystery, it doesn't answer the main question, it just spends you off in a new direction, and then suddenly you have together more evidence and answer different questions.

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, I think for a mystery type story, this is really the heart of the try-fail cycle. Right? The thing you are trying to do is gain more information. The way you as the author withhold that is you have your characters fail at that or get misleading information or only a piece of it. Right? I mean, this is, going back to another of Mary Robinette's favorite tools, the yes-but, no-and, you can apply that to yes, you now know this one piece of information, but there's a complication because that leads you down to a dead end. Right? So you can think about it in terms of… I think we often give try-fail cycles around action in terms of trying to rescue someone or trying to fix something. But you can apply that to information gathering, because when you're in a mystery, fundamentally, your main tool is the information that's in front of you right now.

[Erin] Yeah. I think the… One of the things I like to think about a lot when I'm writing is information arc as an additional type of arc in a story. Like, you have your character arc, maybe your plot arc, but where is information being gathered, it's where is it being revealed to the reader, and then maybe separately to the characters, really planning that out. Because I think where unanswered questions become annoying to readers is when it feels like you just didn't… You forgot you raised the question, or you just didn't bother getting around to answering it, versus that it was something intentional that you're doing about the way you give out information.

[Dan] Another great thing that I've seen done before is just kind of hiding what the real question actually is. We've used romance several times, which is another great source of tension. The first season of Bridgerton does this brilliantly. In a romance, we often expect the main question to be will these characters fall in love? Yes, clearly, by like episode three, that's answered. But there's more going on. Will they get married? Yeah, like by episode five, I think, they're married. But there's more going on. Ultimately, we realize the actual question that that season is asking is, will they be happy together? Will they resolve their other issues and have a happy life together? Which is just taking it much further than what we initially thought we were asking.

[DongWon] That kind of brings me to what I think is the greatest failure state of how information is released to the audience in a novel. One of the those things is when it's not connected to character. Right? I think one of the best ways to sort of appease an audience when you give them bad information or if they're not getting the answer that they wanted is making sure you're getting more information about who the character is and you're tying that process of trying to get more information into something revealing about who the character is. I'm thinking of like the game Hades, which is a fantastic game. It's a [rogue?] Like, so you're just… It's designed so that you will fail and die. Every time you die, you're rewarded with a little bit more story, as you get to interact with all the characters of this world. So the loop is, we're punishing you for the fact that you've failed, which you're supposed to do, and rewarding you by giving you character. So if you think about like how satisfying the loop in Hades is, think about that in terms of your reader going through the try-fail cycles of your book. Make sure that your rewarding them with something, even as the characters themselves are failing.

[Mary Robinette] That brings me to a great point that when we're talking about these questions, the unanswered questions, there are unanswered questions that the character has and there are also unanswered questions that the reader has. If you want to… I find that when you're trying to emotionally link the reader and the character, but if you give them both the same unanswered questions that that puts the character… The reader on the character's path. But sometimes you'll have a situation where the character knows an answer… This is my traumatic piece of back story… And the reader doesn't know the answer. So that… The reader tension is what is the character's traumatic back story? The character obviously knows it. So that's like… That's a way that you can ratchet the tension up by withholding something from the reader as long as the reader doesn't feel overtly manipulated. The I'll think about that later. That you have to have a reason for them to not think about it.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of reasons to not think about the rest of that and how are we going to do it, I'm going to pose a question, which is, how are we going to keep people from feeling like they're overtly manipulated when they didn't get the answer that they want, and we're going to answer that after our break. Our thing of the week is Ted Lasso. It is currently a two season series. There is supposed to be a third season. I am eagerly awaiting it. It… On the surface, this is nothing that I would like. It is a show about soccer. I love this show so deeply, because it is a show about what happens when you make the kinder choice, ultimately. Because of that, and because of the way they are handling tension and tropes. It's as if they said, "What's a common TV trope? We're going to set that up, then we're going to subvert it by having the character make the kind and understanding response to it." It is funny. It is heartwarming. I care about soccer in ways that I have never cared about them. It has some of the best secondary and tertiary characters of anything that I've ever seen. Highly recommended. Ted Lasso. All of the seasons. If you're only going to watch one thing, that one thing should be Ted Lasso. Except DongWon will arm wrestle me about some other things. But…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] All right. So I posed a question before we went to break. That question was how do you interrupt a question… How do you withhold the question from the reader…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And make them feel not overtly manipulated? That moment when someone's like…

[Howard] Yup.

[Mary Robinette] Here's a thing that everyone in the room knows, but the reader is not allowed to know it.

[Howard] 15 years ago or so, there was this up ending of the whole industry of writing and plotting things, because suddenly viewers, readers, listeners, whoever recognized that just about everybody had the sum of all human knowledge in the palms of their hands and could call just about anybody. So if there was a question that couldn't be answered by the people in the room, but they knew someone else had the answer, they would just call them. Screenwriters and writers of fiction and writers of everything had to find new ways to say, "Well, why wouldn't they just call them?" The first answer was terrible, and that's, "Oh, I've got no bars. I've got no signal." There are 10 minute YouTube videos of people in movies holding up their phones and having no signal, because the audience needed to be manipulated, because we needed to not have the answer right now. The right way to do it is illustrated in what happens when someone else's Google Fu is better than mine. I don't know how to ask the right question to get the answer from my phone. I don't know what the right question is. I don't know how to phrase this so I can find the answer. I don't know who to talk to who will have the answer, but maybe if I talk to somebody else, they can help me. That starts putting speedbumps in the… In between me and the answer to the question.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That was one of the things that I had to do in the Spare Man was… It is set in 2075 or 2074, I can't remember. Anyway. My own book. Whatever. Point being, everybody is constantly interconnected. So I had to come up with a reason to turn that off. It was fun, in some ways, because I made it a punitive thing that was being withheld from them. Because they were being falsely accused of a crime, so they were not allowed to connect to the Internet. But that also then allowed me to make it a strong character thing, because it then became a thing that had to be fixed. Also, the frustrations that go with I'm used to being able to just send a ping to my husband, and now I can't. Like, one of the things that I enjoyed was her constantly trying to contact him and not being able to. The reflex of it.

[Erin] I also think that communication devices, just that specific thing, as like the reason you can't get the answer, can also be a way to ratchet up that tension in kind of a similar way that if you're used to something, something is familiar and it goes to becoming unfamiliar, that's always I think a great source of tension in horror. The familiar becomes strange. So if you pick up your phone to Google something and instead your phone is doing something very odd, or you get a picture of a dead body, or something else that's both distracting… So, like, throw something shiny the reader's way. To distract them, for one thing, but also with something you thought was going to happen. You had an anticipation of getting the answer, then that was yanked away from you. That can provide new information and new questions that then the reader will fixate on instead of the one that you didn't answer in that moment.

[DongWon] I'm going to come out with a little bit of a chaotic answer to this, which is if you are really struggling how to figure out the key… How to keep your audience from feeling manipulated by withholding information, try just telling them the thing. Right? I think so often I see writers going through these back loops and just like contorting themselves to withhold information where I'm like, "No no no no. Just tell us what's going on!" It'll be more interesting if we, or even if your characters, know exactly what's happening and they still have to solve this problem. Right? I think one of the week parts of a mystery is sometimes knowing what happened doesn't actually change anything. To spoil Glass Onion a little bit, it has an aspect of this, where, like, the resolution of the mystery still leaves a really big unanswered question of like, "Well, what do we do about this?" In a way that is truly fascinating. Right? So I think sometimes if you find yourself stuck, and your like grinding on this question, try writing it from the perspective of just give them the information. Let their phone connect to the Internet. Let that person call person C and be like, "Hey, the killer is so-and-so." Then what does person C do? It doesn't mean they're going to survive. Right? It could make a much more interesting scenario for you and kick your book in an exciting new direction.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to second that, that often I find that when I just let my character tell the other person the thing, that what actually happens is it just… It opens new questions and they're significantly more interesting questions.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Which allows me to keep ramping that tension up.

[DongWon] If you're stuck, you might be asking the wrong questions, is really what I'm saying.

[Dan] So I see this a lot with doing chapter critiques and stuff at conferences and classes. We will be sitting around in like a writing group environment. We've read chapter one of seven different people's things. Especially with fantasy and science fiction, a lot of the questions are, "Well, I don't understand this. I don't understand X or Y thing about your story." I have to remind them, you usually don't in chapter one. There's worldbuilding, you have to give us time to settle into it. But what I find fascinating is that I usually don't get that question when the chapter is providing us a ton of other fascinating information. If you are giving us something that is satisfying and compelling and makes us… It's scratching that itch to know stuff, then those other kind of unanswered questions don't seem as pressing. Because part of that is the distraction that Erin talked about, you throw some shiny at us, but a lot of it is just you're building trust with your reader. You're giving them information, so then I know that you're going to give me this other information if I am patient and wait for it.

[Howard] It's super useful to anticipate the question that a reader might have and to give that question to another one of the characters. If one of the characters does a thing, and you know the readers are going to be like, "Wow, why did they do that thing?" Let another character ask that question. "Why did you do that?" The person who did it said, "You know what? That's a long painful story and we're not going to have that conversation right now. Right now we're busy running." Now I have acknowledged to the reader that there is information you don't have yet, you know who has the information, you know who isn't giving you the information, and everybody in the story to this point is behaving in character.

[Mary Robinette] I will flag though that you do need to make sure though that it is actually a long painful complicated story.

[Howard] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Because the number of times I have seen someone say, "I'm not going to tell you that right now. We don't have time." And really, all they needed to say was like a five word sentence.

[Chuckles]

[yes]

[Mary Robinette] It's… Make sure that there is a legit reason. There was one other thing that I was going to say. What was that?

[Pause]

[DongWon] I guess we'll never know.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I guess I'm going to have to…

[Howard] I have to say none of us know and all of our cell phones work.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, I know what… There was actually a thing. Red… I do want to just briefly touch on how to construct a good red herring. Because red herrings are one of the ways that you can… Are linked to the unanswered question, because they are the question… The line of questioning that pulls your detective down the wrong dark alley. In Glass Onion, it's one of the most blatant red herrings in the history of ever is wandering around in a bathrobe for much of the film. But what you're looking for is something that appears related to the story, that you feel like everyone else should be able to draw connections to whatever it is, and ultimately ends up not being connected. I have a red herring going on in Spare Man. The way I constructed that one… And I will attempt to discuss it without spoilers for the people who haven't read the book yet… Is basically, I did it was that I gave one of the characters a secret so they were clearly hiding something, which is obviously to the reader going to be related to the murder. But it had… That secret had nothing to do with the murder. So that's a real simple way to give… To insert a red herring is to give someone a secret, that's just not the right secret. Which then leads to more unanswered questions.

[Mary Robinette] And… Your unanswered question right now is what is our homework assignment?

[Dan] Well, as tempting as it is to just never answer that question, I will tell you. I will spoil the homework. What we want you to do is take a look at whatever you're working on right now, your work in progress, something that you're writing or creating, and figure out what questions you are asking to the reader. Sometimes that might be an overt mystery question, how does this thing work, where did this body come from, who did the thing? Sometimes it's worldbuilding questions. You've proposed some kinds of things about the way a technology or a magic or a society works. Figure out what those questions are. Write them down. So that you can decide later when and how or if to answer them.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.08: Building a Mystery

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-08-building-a-mystery/

Key Points: Types of mysteries? Cozy! Solving mysteries in your spare time? Straight up detective. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot. With a final gathering, explanation, and fingering the murderer. Police procedural. The system, and how it works. Supernatural mysteries. Weird happenings, and puzzles. Noir! Voice and character make it. In the dark streets, in the rain... Mystery structure? Crime, investigation, twist, breakthrough, and conclusion. Also, red herrings. Act 2 try-fail cycles. Final clues are often out-of-left-field, accidentally revealed. Playing fair, so the reader and the detective have the same information.

[Season 18, Episode 8]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Building a Mystery.

[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 the Act 2 corpse.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So we're going to be talking about mysteries today. One of the things we promised you is that we were going to use the... Our deep dives as a way to look at different things. Over the course of the next couple of episodes, we're going to be talking about tension. But we're going to start by looking very specifically at mysteries. For the first half of this episode, we're going to talk about the different types of mysteries. Then, after our break, we're going to talk about some of the common tools. So. What are some of the different types of mysteries?

[pause]

[Mary Robinette] Great. Good answer.

[laughter]

[Dan] Yeah. We're all deer in the headlights. The first one that comes to my mind is the cozy mystery. Which is the... Kind of the Murder She Wrote ish genre of often an older lady who is solving a mystery in her spare time while doing something kind of charming or adorable. That's one of my favorites.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I feel like they tend to be lower stakes, a little bit, like easier on the violence. I mean, people still will end up dead in these, but it's not like as hard hitting as like a Jack Reacher or something like that.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Oh... There's a whole rule set for cozies, where if the detective... If our POV person, who I'll call the detective, if they are ever actually threatened, then you've stepped out of the cozy. If they actually perform violence, get in a fight, then it stops being cozy and starts moving into something else. Yeah, Jack Reacher, I'm not sure what style that is. It's not quite... I think of it as the anti-cozy. Because we have... we are following one person who didn't set out to be a detective under these circumstances, but they are doing all of the cozy mystery-esque stumbling into things, but they're stumbling into it with elbows and fists and sharp edges.

[DongWon] It's like the reluctant detective kind of thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. One of the other things I love about cozies is that they can really be in any like area of interest. It's like are you interested in this hobby? Then there's probably like a cozy mystery for you. Be it bridge, gardening, mountain climbing. So I love that it gives people an opportunity to put the things that they love, their passions, into this really comfortable form and just work it all in there.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I remember as a kid I read this whole series of cozy mysteries told from the POV of cats. This is still ongoing. One of my dear friends continues to edit these books. But the cat cozy mysteries is just one of these truly delightful weird corners of publishing.

[Mary Robinette] I have been contemplating having Elsie solve mysteries, but it feels like it's already been done.

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So another type that you'll see is the straight up detective novel. Which is where the main character is a detective. Like Sherlock Holmes, Poirot. Where they're using their expertise to solve the mysteries. With Spare Man, I was actually splitting the difference, a little bit, because I have a detective, but I sideline him very fast. So my main character is using different expertise, but she is not a detective. So we are landing somewhere in between those two.

[DongWon] For me, the defining feature of these is the moment where the detective gathers everyone in a room and explains what happened and points a finger at the actual murderer. Right? I feel like this is just that really classic Poirot scene of like you have to use the little grey cells and he's going to tell you exactly what happened. That, to me, is just one of the most delightful sort of resolutions to a mystery in this very clean way. Yeah, it's just like the thing that makes them stand out in my head is this iconic figure standing in the front of the room telling you what happened.

[Dan] Yeah. Really great modern example of this is Knives Out which was leaning really hard into all of those tropes of detective, and, I think, very telling that when they got a sequel, it is about the detective rather than the other giant cast of really interesting people. He wasn't even necessarily the main character. But he got that big scene at the end, where he walks everybody through and then he points the finger. It's right back in the tradition of Agatha Christie and that sort of thing.

[Erin] I think something that Knives Out plays with a little bit of... is that I love that the detective is there like 50% of the time before, in this case it's after, but before a murder occurs. Which is hilarious to me because it's very like anticipatory a lot of the time. Like, I think I'm going to be killed tonight...

[chuckles]

[Erin] So instead of preventing that, I'm just going to invite a detective, so at least my murder is solved. It's such an interesting, like, very comfortable trope in a lot of ways. It makes the death feel less tense, I guess, because the person kind of knew it was coming and at least they prepped for it. Which is an interesting feeling that I enjoy in sort of a classic detective story.

[DongWon] That's great.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of my other favorite classic detective mysteries is a series called Foyle's War. It's set during World War 2, he's a detective for the British government, or the British police force, and he has to go out and solve murders. So that actually trends us over into another style, which is called police procedural. Which is usually a large group of people working within the system, and they're using the system to solve the mystery. So, Foyle's War kind of sits between these, because he gets some help, but it is frequently him doing his detective thing because they are significantly understaffed because of World War 2.

[DongWon] I mean, Law and Order being the classic example of this. You can turn on daytime TV at any point and watch a procedural episode of somebody committed a crime, usually you'll see it in a cold open, somebody solves it, and you go through the whole arc of following. It's very fixated on process. It's very fixated on the machinations of how a police department functions. All the Michael Connelly novels kind of fall into this. Police procedural's like a very classic... Probably the most popular version of this through the 90s and early 2000s.

[Dan] Definitely.

[Howard] It's why I identified myself... Instead of saying I'm Howard, saying I'm the Act 2 corpse. Because in those police procedurals, it is very, very common with the structure that in Act 1, you've got 2 or 3 suspects, and one of them is looking really good. Then that really good suspect ends up as your corpse at the beginning of Act 2, or in the middle of Act 2, somewhere in there. To the point that when my family sits down and watches a new police procedural or something, someone will point at the screen and say, "Didn't do it. That's going to be our Act 2 corpse." It's like we're putting money down. It's fun.

[DongWon] Called shots.

[Dan] Yeah. Another genre that I think is important to mention, this is kind of two for one, supernatural mysteries. I think the kind of main example I want to throw out is Dr. Who. Dr. Who is often not even a murder mystery. This is not about solving a crime necessarily so much as solving a puzzle. The mystery is weird thing is happening. In Dr. Who's case, it could be supernatural or science fictional. But mysteries don't have to be about murder.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. Especially when you're talking about something like YA, where it's so often dealing with... Or middle grade, where you're often dealing with a theft. The Encyclopedia Brown books. Nancy Drew. All of those are dealing with a classic mystery structure, but there's no corpse. So, even for adults, it does not have to have a corpse.

[DongWon] One more category I wanted to hit is a classic one, which is the noir. This is taking elements of mystery, but really punching it up with voice and character right up front. This is Dashiell Hammett, this is Maltese Falcon, Chinatown. A mystery is core to what's going on, usually someone's dead or money's been stolen or an object's gone missing, but this is very much focused on a very moody, very dark tone. A very specific voice and pastiche. Noir is truly one of my favorite categories. It's a thing I delight in. I think Dashiell Hammett is one of the great writers of the 20th century. It's a real delight.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That, interestingly, was one of the challenges that I had working with Spare Man, because the novel, The Thin Man, which I was riffing on the Thin Man, the novel is noir but the films, which is the part that I was riffing on, are not. They're a different style, which is called a mystery comedy. So one of the challenges that I had was getting some of the trappings of noir, but keeping the tone light.

[DongWon] Which is great because the Spare Man feels... You can feel the noir roots in it, but you can also see how pushing the voice a little bit takes it out of the category and makes it something else. It just shows like how much it is about a particular way of saying things and a particular way of voicing a character and a perspective.

[Dan] At the risk...

[Mary Robinette] Well, that's...

[Dan] At the risk of leaning really heavily on Ryan Johnson, and this is going to lead us into our thing of the week, one of his first movies was called Brick.

[DongWon] What a [garbled]

[Dan] Which is a modern film noir. Watching that, and comparing Knives Out to Brick, you can see how important that tone is. The tone of it, the style, that kind of atmospheric focus really changes the flavor of the whole thing.

[Mary Robinette] Well, let's go ahead and take a pause. Then, when we come back, we're going to talk about the structural elements that all of these different forms of mystery have in common.

[DongWon] Our thing of the week this week is Ryan Johnson's newest movie, The Glass Onion, which is a sequel to Knives Out. It just came out last December on Netflix, and was truly one of my favorite things that I saw over the holidays. It is following on the world from Knives Out, it's the same detective, Benoit Blanc, returns, but tonally, it is doing something very different from Knives Out. Where Knives Out was riffing on sort of classic mystery structure at a remote house, at a remote manor, this is a much brighter, sort of pulpier, more contemporary story about a tech billionaire who invites his friend to an island for a murder mystery game, which then devolves into something far more dark and chaotic from there. It is, as... He does such interesting things with narrative structure and is very playful with the audience expectations. It is somebody who understands the mechanics of how to put together a mystery at the deepest levels. Watching him assemble this beautiful puzzle box is, for me, as somebody who likes to think about story and craft, just incredibly delicious and incredibly exciting. I can't recommend Glass Onion highly enough.

[Mary Robinette] So, now we're going to talk about structure. There are a lot of overlaps in the different genres of mystery. You'll see things that are both a cozy and a detective. All of these things. But they have two main things in common. There's the overall structure, there's a... Mystery has a specific structure. Then they all contain a puzzle. I'm going to talk about the structure that I was working with when I was working on The Spare Man. Then we can also talk about some of the additional tropes, because I'm not hitting all of the tropes when I talk about the structure. So, you have the crime. Then you have the investigation. Then there's a twist. Then you have a break through. Then you have the conclusion. These are the basic beats that you have to have in a mystery. There are some other beats that will commonly occur. You'll see red herrings. The crime is often preceded by the establishing of normal, but sometimes you begin with a cold open of a crime. So what are some of the things that you all think about when you are thinking about mystery and the structure of mystery?

[Howard] I look at the structure of... When I think of 3 acts, I think of Act 2 as driven largely by this iterative looping of try-fail cycles. For mystery writing, for me anyway, the try-fail cycle is the detective having a theory and proving it wrong, having a theory and proving it wrong, having a theory and it proves disastrously wrong. The Act 2 corpse. With each iteration, information is being dropped on the reader so that the reader has the opportunity to catch up with and maybe, if they're super clever and I want them to be right, they will be able to get the answer before the detective drops it in Act 3. But that whole try-fail cycle of iterative looping through theories is a key structure for me.

[Mary Robinette] When... Surprising no one, I'm going to mention the MICE Quotient... mysteries are classic inquiry stories. This iterative looping that Howard is talking about... In a mystery or an inquiry thread, you begin with a question, and it ends when the question is answered. So all of the road blocks in the middle are keeping you from answering those questions. That's that try-fail cycle, the iterative looping which is also where red herrings come from, because it draws the detective and the reader down the wrong path.

[Erin] One thing I think is really interesting in thinking about the differences between the types of mysteries is where that information is coming from, and how much of it is access to authority. So, in a cozy, there is usually no real authority figure. It is just a person acting on their own. Detective stories tend to bring in... like, I've done a few try-fail cycles on my own, but now I really need to get that autopsy report, other thing that like an authority brings. That is why the detectives tie to the police, even if it's tenuous, it's helpful in their moving things forward. In a police procedural, they have all of the access and sort of the authority of the state that they can use as they're making these try-fail cycles happen. So I think the structure is the same, but how these try-fail cycles happen is a lot different, depending on who's actually doing the investigating.

[Mary Robinette] That's a really interesting point about the authority of the detective. I am making notes. That's very smart.

[chuckles]

[Howard] Well, I often use that as part of the structure. Is that I'm... one of the fails in the try-fail cycle is not being able to do a thing because you're not the authority.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. A lot of what we're talking about, it strikes me, are basically impediments to success. Right? Why does the detective not solve this mystery in the first scene? Because there are impediments to their success. Sometimes that is access to authority or to key information. The detective requests the autopsy report or the bank account records or whatever very early on, but they don't get them until the end. A lot of that middle part is just treading water in an entertaining way, until we finally get that information. Sometimes it is the try-fail cycles like Howard was talking about of this theory doesn't pan out and this theory doesn't pan out and so on and so on. One thing that I see often is that the final clue that helps us solve the whole thing is discovered accidentally. The detective earns it by their dogged determination to never stop looking. But in the process of trying something else, something pops up and they say, "Oh, wait. Now I know exactly what's going on." It's because of this out-of-left-field clue... If the audience is paying attention, they can possibly put it together as well.

[Mary Robinette] A lot of times that out-of-left-field clue recontextualizes a piece of information that the detective had recieved earlier. Frequently, it's one that they had misunderstood, that is pointing them at the wrong person, or that had seemed otherwise irrelevant. This is... This gets into an area called playing fair. Which is that in a mystery, the detective and the reader are trying to solve it at the same time. So to play fair, the reader has to recieve all of the same information that the detective does. Often, you will have some things, like with Sherlock Holmes, which aren't actually playing fair in many ways, because Holmes has this encyclopedia of knowledge in his brain and will often, because he's not the POV character, will have noticed something that Watson does not. Like, "The shade of mud on his left cuff...

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Indicated that he was bicycling through tarpits. Obviously. Elementary."

[DongWon] A little bit of a magic trick. Right? Because you're trying to make the audience feel like you've played fair with them. But you, as the author, obviously have way more information than the reader does. So how you reveal things and when you reveal it is sort of the prestige of the trick. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Like, how are you revealing the information. One thing that I think about a lot in terms of the structure of this is you actually want the audience to solve the mystery before the detective does. You want them to do it as close as you can to the reveal, but immediately before it. There's a famous saying in film making that's like, "If you let the audience realize that one plus one equals two, they will love you forever." Right? Letting them feel slightly smarter than the thing that they are reading is going to really hook them. Now, if they figure it out like on page 10, it's way too early. So being able to time what information you reveal that let's them figure out who it is right before they come to the in-text revelation is a thing that is so satisfying to the reader as they're engaging with your mystery.

[Howard] I want to point out that that's not the same thing as sitting down to a familiar, but you haven't seen this episode, murder mystery show, and in the first ten minutes, realizing that person's the killer. I don't know why, I don't have enough clue... There's no way for me to know why other than the fact that these screenwriters, these directors, these actors consistently do certain things that are their own identifying tells for who the killer is. I don't know how I'm identifying that, but sometimes I'm right. That makes that delightful for me. Then, as the episode unfolds, and I see the clues, I'm even happier. That's my goal, is to make people happy when they read a thing.

[Mary Robinette] So we have so much more to talk about with mystery, however, we are doing a second mystery episode. In between, we're going to be talking to you about the tools of tension. So even though I can see everyone wanting, including me, to tell you more things about mystery, we're going to go ahead and wrap up here, and then move on to our homework assignment. In a couple... In seven more episodes, we're going to come back to talking about mystery with your new tool set.

[Mary Robinette] So, Dan, do you want to give us the homework assignment?

[Dan] Yeah. So, this is a pretty fun, pretty simple homework assignment. We want you to consume a mystery. Whether that is reading a book or watching a movie or TV show or something. Maybe seek one out that you haven't seen or read. Or try one of the genres we talked about in the beginning that you're not familiar with. We're going to be talking about mysteries for quite a while. So give yourself some ammunition to work with.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/08/16/15-33-the-long-dark-second-act-of-the-soul/

Key Points: How do you make the second act interesting? When you're stuck, make something happen. Also, admit that it is going to be rewritten. Think about the second act as the fun part, where trailer scenes come from. Play with things, build fun scenes. Connect the dots! Know what you have to do, and find the most exciting ways to do it. Treat your chapters and scenes like episodes, with plenty of escalating miniature arcs. Act one, introduce things, Act three, blow them up. Act two, make trailer moments, show us a new context. Fill the second act with try-fail cycles. Foreshadowing moments, little lessons and pieces of information building towards the resolution. Use the inherent tension of how. Make the problem larger, involve more characters, expand the scope. Try-fail cycles can give the reader some awesome, too! It's not just a hamster wheel, more of a winding path towards the climax. Character change. Don't worry too much about this during writing, but use it for outlining, revision, and when you get stuck. Get your Muppet chest buster.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 33.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] Howard named this episode, if you couldn't tell.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Second acts. Let's talk about second acts. We got a lot of questions about how to make middles of your story interesting. One question is, "I'm pantsing my SF book and started with a vague wouldn't it be a cool idea to begin with and went from there. I quite like how the character's progressing, but I'm basically stuck in the second act."

[Howard] The best advice that I've got for pantsers. It's in two parts. The first part is, when you are stuck like this, make something happen. Blow something up, burn something down, a couple of people get in a fight, just make something happen. The second is admit to yourself that this is going to need to be rewritten. That you may need to chop off the front, you may need to rewrite the ending, you may need to prune bits out of the middle. But, for me, when I pantsed, getting unstuck was way more important than sitting down and outlining the end. On several occasions, that exercise of getting unstuck… I'm going to make something really exciting happened… Reinvigorated me and I realized, "Oh. Oh, that's right. Oh, that's what I wanted to do." And off I go. The thing, in about half the cases, didn't end up exploding. It did something else.

[Dan] So, one of the things that made me change the way I think about second acts was I was reading a screenwriting book. It was talking about the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. In talking about the second act, it said, "This is the fun part where most of the scenes in the trailer come from." I thought I've never thought of it that way. This is the part where the characters have entered a new situation or they've gained some new powers, they're doing something new and they're playing with all of those new things. So now I try to put that into my second acts, and say, this isn't just the part you slog through to get to the end. This is where you get to play with all your fun toys and build the fun scenes that are going to end up in the trailer.

[Victoria] I mean, the hard part is, right… The first act, you get to introduce all your toys. The third act, you get to make them blow up. You get to put them where they're going to land. In the second act, somehow, you have to get between those two points. I mean, I fully admit, I am not a pantser. But, even before my extreme outlining days, where I am now like finding so much joy in execution, I would try and give myself what I used to call the connect-the-dots theory. Which I would try and make between 3 to 6 points in my story. Even if I didn't know where the story was going or how I was going to get between those two points, even having three meant that I had something I was moving towards. I could say, "Okay, here I am in the story, and I have this one spot, one thing I know I want to have happen before the end, and I am moving toward it. What's something that could happen between here and there?" And I figure out another dot. Now I've got half the distance between. I go, "What's something that could happen?" You're essentially playing a choose your own adventure game. I had a friend who used to say, "How do you make it worse?" Basically, like, she wrote a zombie novel, and the zombies chased these two kids up the tree. There up the tree and it seems like it's pretty bad. The question is how do you make it worse. She set the tree on fire. Right? Like, it's that moment. Sometimes it's just finding ways to play, but I do think this is the hard part. It can't just be play, because you also need to progress the story. Nothing is more frustrating than when you get to a really interesting book that has an amazing first act, you get to the second act, and all of a sudden, they're in the fire swamp, right? They're just like wandering through it, without any real purpose except to kill time.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] And maybe gain assets and like toys and things that they're going to need to fight the final battles.

[Dan] So, let's look at Star Wars. I'm old enough that when I say Star Wars, I mean Episode IV. Okay? Act Two Is the Death Star. The things that have to happen narratively are we need to rescue the princess and we need to lose our mentor. Both of those are opportunities for big set pieces. We lose the mentor, and it's not just well, we're going to… They die in the fire swamp. It's a lightsaber battle. That's the only lightsaber battle we get in that movie. Rescuing the princess… There's this whole gun chase, and then they get thrown into a pit with a monster that tries to eat them, and then they drown and all these things. So, knowing what you have to do, and then finding the most exciting way of accomplishing that is kind of what the second act is for.

[Brandon] I think readers/viewers are really sensitive to the second act thing, without knowing it.

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Brandon] This is one of these things that, just by consuming media, you pick up on. I've noticed that a lot of the movies that people love and the sequels that people love are all ones that are surprisingly good in the second act. Right? Star Wars is a great example. But even when people say, what are the best sequels of all time? It's always the second movie that you expect to be bad because the first one was good, and we've been trained that the middle's the weakest. Yet, the best Star Wars movie, a lot of people say it's the second one. The best Godfather movie, The second one. The best Toy Story's movie is the second one. I think this is partially because people are expecting it to be bad, and it's good. Those expectations are then subverted. If you can do a good second act in your story, I think that that will just make the readers unconsciously say, "Wow, this is fantastic. I don't expect this to be the most exciting part, and it is."

[Victoria] I mean, this is one of the reasons we discussed in a previous episode that I was on where we disc… I discussed treating my chapters and scenes like episodes. I think it's in part to help me avoid the lull of the second act by creating miniature arcs within the story that bring their own satisfaction, and then stitch together into something. To me, a part of it, and we can talk about this more later, is I pretend there is no second act. I don't break it into three. I find that very, very stressful. I work forward from the beginning and backwards from the end, and I populate it with escalating arcs, because I think we put so much pressure on the second act that it becomes a place of dread. The middle of a book is already a place of dread because it's when you're most likely to quit writing it. It's when the shiny new idea sweeps in, it's when you're full of distraction, and you're beginning to get bored because everything's becoming familiar and you have to begin delivering on promises that you made in the first act. It's a very treacherous place to be. So I do think maybe also like take some of the pressure away of thinking of it as the 2A and 2B, of thinking of it as this central part of your narrative which has to hold the whole roof up. Start to look at those exciting episodes like in Star Wars where there are things that need to be accomplished and there's a very exciting way to do those things.

[Howard] Something you said earlier, Victoria, about the first act is where we're introducing all the things, and that's fine and that shiny. The last act is where we're blowing them up, or there blowing each other up. For me, if I don't break things into three acts, I will continue to introduce things through Act Two, and that breaks the story. Because it just… It bloats in bad ways. So it's useful for me to think about it as if we're describing the items in a room during Act One. Act Two, we change the lighting in the room, and now everything looks different. It's the same thing, we're just now seeing them all in a different light and were tripping over them. It's now whatever. Then, Act Three, the house is on fire. I don't know. It's a dumb metaphor.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The idea here is that the point at which you stop introducing things structurally kind of defines the second act. So that's a point for you to create these trailer moments, like Dan was saying.

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Howard] By changing the lighting, by changing the environment, by changing the context. That'll make it a lot more exciting, I think, than just a fire swamp.

[Dan] One of the reasons I think people get intimidated by Act II is because Act I sets stuff up, Act 3 resolves it. What do I do… I'm treading water for half my book. So one of the things that I try to do is make sure the second act is filled with try-fail cycles. It's not that my characters know they have to wait to a certain point before they can end the story. They spend all of second act trying to end the story.

[Brandon] It should always be upping the stakes and escalating. Your sense of progress for that middle is that things are getting worse or the stakes are getting bigger and bigger.

[Victoria] I think of… So, obviously, we referenced the fire swamp. The Princess bride is one of my favorite examples of an archetypal narrative that follows this very, very well. You meet your players by the end of Act One, then spend Act Two with Wesley and the Princess trying to flee, being continuously failed, being abductive, being separated, trying to reassemble. We reassemble the teams by the end of Act Two, and then in Act Three, we have the fight in the war and the conclusion. It's a beautifully simple story. But it's a very satisfying story across all three acts. It starts… One of the other things that Act Two gets to do is introduce the foreshadowing moments, the little lessons and pieces of information that we're going to need in that resolution. So in a… I always say it's like it's getting all of your weapons together, it's gathering all of your forces. These are beautiful moments in Act Two, through that try-fail cycle, to achieve the motifs and the little things which are going to come back around in Act Three.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. You actually, Dan, have a book you were talking about how great the second act is.

[Dan] Yeah. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which I talked about a while ago. Tiffany Aching is my favorite Terry Pratchett series by a mile. Wintersmith is an interesting one to bring up in a structural episode, because it has a very weird structure. But its second act is its strongest one by far. Its second act is basically Tiffany Aching is apprenticed to an older witch named Miss Treason. Miss Treason is very weird and she's very dark and she's very spooky. It's very slice of life-y. We know from the prologue that there's going to be this big evil problem with the Wintersmith. The third act, we deal with the Wintersmith. In the middle, it's just Tiffany learning how to be a witch. She will go through kind of the daily life and she will learn various lessons. It's so powerfully done because it is framed with her arriving there and it ends with Miss Treason… Spoiler warning… She dies. We get her funeral. We know she dies chapters before she does, because she's a witch, so she knows everything. But the way that it is built, I think really is a fantastic example of how to do a powerful second act.

[Brandon] So, let me ask about this. Along those second act ideas. I feel like it can get frustrating for a reader in that second act because it feels like you're going nowhere, as we've mentioned, but also the heroes, the protagonists, are often failing over and over again. How do you keep a sense of momentum when you're failing over and over again? The reader knows, in the back of their head, because they have the page count, that they can't succeed here. So, how do you work with that as authors?

[Victoria] I like to break it up. I like to break up the literal team. I often write ensemble casts. That's one of my favorite times, where they get separated and they're finding their way not only toward the goal but back towards each other. I like to put them in peril. I like it because you know, with so much of the book left, that they're going to find a way through that, that there's going to be things that happen. Then, the question becomes how. I think that there is an inherent tension in the how of something, in the understanding that there's a lot of book left, what feels like it might be a climactic moment is almost like a tease. Then it becomes a lot like, "How are they going to pull this off? How are they going to achieve this goal?" I think we can sometimes underestimate the inherent tension of how.

[Dan] One of… So the book and movie Crazy Rich Asians does something very cool in its second act. I think one of the ways to do what you're talking about is to expand the scope, use the second act to expand the scope of what we're looking. The problem itself gets larger or it starts to involve more characters. Crazy Rich Asians does this with the cousin Astrid. A lot of the plot focuses around the main character trying to fit in better with the very Asian sensibilities of the fiancé's family. She doesn't have any allies. So, second act throws Astrid at her, the cousin who A) becomes a powerful ally, but B) is rejecting a lot of the very Asian attitudes. Becomes much more independent and much more Western in the way that she views her own family. So it's exploring the same themes from a different direction and including more characters, but all in a way that eventually is going to give the main character the tools she needs in the third act.

[Howard] I think that the try-fail cycle model, Dan, that… Or… Yeah, Dan, it was you that had described the try-fail cycle, coupled with the idea of scenes from the trailers. Yes, the viewer… I remember my son, we were watching a movie and I asked him… I just turned to him and said, "You think their plan's going to work?" He was 10. He says, "If their plan works, we don't have a whole movie."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I was so proud. I was so proud. I wept in that moment. It had nothing to do with the film. But the reader knows that the plan isn't going to succeed, because they can tell how far through the book we are. They can tell through the page count. So, the try-fail cycle has to give us… Has to give us one of these trailer moments. Has to give us some awesome. We should come out of it not with a sense of, "Oh, that didn't work," but with a sense of, "Hah! That went terribly, but now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho."

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Then we're cheering during the second act.

[Brandon] Well, I always also like the structure that in the second act, you try something, you succeed, and then you realize…

[Howard] You've made it worse.

[Brandon] You've made it worse. This happens in the story structure… What is it, the seven points, the nine points?

[Dan] Seven point.

[Brandon] The seven point, that Dan really likes. When I was reading about that once, there's this broadening of goals during the second act, where you realize the thing that you wanted, even if you achieve it, is not the thing you wanted all along. Suddenly, you realize, "Oh, by achieving this thing, we are in much bigger trouble." To reference Diehard again, "Oh, the FBI's here, everything's okay. Oh, crap, that was part of the plan." Those sorts of moments are really great.

[Victoria] Yeah. I agree. I think that it's also… When we talk about try-fail cycle, I think there's an erroneous visual that happens, of like a hamster wheel. That's not what it is at all, because when you get forward and you realize something's wrong, and when you fall backwards, you gain some advantage. There's always something happening, which is giving you kind of a winding path towards your climax.

[Dan] Well, I'm glad that you brought up the kind of the character change that can happen in the second act. Because sometimes that is I'm about to get what I want and realize that'll make everything worse. But just as often, it can be… The second act is where they change their attitude. They realize the goal they been pursuing is actually bad, and they decide to pursue a different one. That is going to change the focus of the rest of the story.

[Victoria] Can I say one last thing before we run out of time? I also just… I'm going to be the devil's advocate here of I don't think about these things when I'm writing.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Like we're articulating things in a way that I do not sit down and think, "Oh, I'm here in the second act, I better think about the way that my character is going to evolve." I think part of that is like, and we've talked about this in previous episodes, there is an intuitive level here. I think it can be really overwhelming when it becomes a codified level. Like, yes, these are things which you should be able to analyze, perhaps in the revision cycle or if you get stuck, but I think it's also okay if you're operating on a draft level in an intuitive way, and you don't feel like you're stopping and checking your map for these kinds of things every step.

[Brandon] That's really great to bring up. It can't be reinforced too much. The idea that a lot of what we do, we're doing by instinct. The more I've written, the more I am conscious of these things during outlining and revision. I still, when I'm actually writing, am not focused on this nearly as much as it might sound that we are. But when I wrote my early books, I wasn't focused on it at all. I was just learning how to write a story. Some of those books got published, and people loved them. Even though I wasn't as conscious about it. It's talking about it, it's teaching it really that forces you to analyze these things and look at what you're doing.

[Victoria] I just refer to it as developing an internal story monster, which is like a tiny Jim Henson-esque monster that lives in your chest and feeds on narrative. The more that you watch and the more that you read and the more that you write, the more you teach that internal demon figure what works and what doesn't, and the more…

[Howard] You've given me a Muppet chest buster.

[Victoria] Exactly. Exactly.

[Howard] Thank you. Thank you for that visual. Thank you.

[Brandon] All right. We are out of time. Howard, you have some homework for us.

[Howard] I do. I just turn the page from it, which was a very silly… Ah, there it is. Pick your favorite book or movie, or favorite entertainment of whatever kind. Identify where the second act begins, where the second act ends. Then, with a notebook in hand, make a list of the things that you love about that second act. Now, if your favorite thing, the second act is your least favorite part about it, make a list of the things that allowed you to muscle through the second part in order to get to the ending that you love. But, this is homework that involves writing. Because you're going to take that list of the things that you love, and you're going to try to map that onto the second acts where you are stuck.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/08/06/12-32-structuring-a-short-piece/

Key Points: Flash fiction and short stories. Short fiction is usually just two MACE elements. Flash fiction is usually a single MACE element, often one problem to solve. Introduce the problem, a couple try-fail cycles, and solution. Often MACE elements get nested, or form frames. Also, changing POV often changes MACE elements, because they are all about affecting the primary character. MACE is often useful for pruning -- focus on what you really want to tell, and remove extra threads. Sometimes flash fiction, short fiction, implies questions or endings for the reader, instead of explicitly describing them. This is good for issue stories (elemental genre).

MACE: Milieu, Ask/Answer, Character, Event.
Milieu: starts when a character enters a place and ends when they exit (often returning home); main conflict is getting out, returning, stopping the main character from getting out of the milieu; journey, quest, man against nature.
Ask/Answer: the character asks a question, ends when they find an answer; main conflict is stopping the character from getting the answer: mystery, puzzle, trying to solve or find an answer. Sometimes getting the answer introduces a bigger question.
Character: internal conflict, starting with dissatisfaction with self, end with new self-definition or acceptance of self; conflicts block the character from finding satisfying self-definition; love, romance, coming-of-age.
Event: external conflict, status quo has been disrupted, ends with new status quo or resolution of some kind; conflicts block character from achieving new status quo.; action, adventures. Often event story introduces character story, as the disrupted status quo causes the character to question their self-definition.
(For more details, see the liner notes!)

( Swing that MACE, hit them in the gut... )

[Brandon] We're out of time. Mary, you're going to give us some homework to help us practice the MACE quotient?
[Mary] Yes. Now, ironically, this is probably the longest description…
[Laughter]
[Mary] For a homework assignment. What I want you to do is, I want you to take either a new idea or something that you're working on that you'd like to be a short story. I want you to write… Pick one of the MACE elements. Whichever one you want to pick. Whichever one you feel like is your major driver. I want you to describe that in three sentences. So the first sentence is where the story opens. The second sentences what your major conflicts are. What your major conflict is, or the type of conflict. Your third sentence is where that winds up. All three of those things should match. Then, I want you to pick a second MACE element and do the same thing. So you've got two things. Say you've got one that's character and one that is ask/answer. So that's part one and part two of your homework. Part three of your homework is to nest them. So that you start with the ask, then you introduce the character, then you close out your character tag, and then you close out your ask tag, so it's nested. Part four of your homework is to flip it, so that the character is on the outside… It doesn't have to be character, whichever of these you picked. Character is on the outside, ask/answer is on the inside. I have this written out in full detail, you'll be happy to know. It is in the liner notes. So that you don't have to remember all of the things that I've just told you. And all of the description of the MACE elements is also in this.
[Brandon] You get a worksheet this time!
[Mary] You get a worksheet.
[Whoohoo!]
[Mary] This is the benefit of the fact that I teach classes sometimes.
[Brandon] Excellent. That actually sounds like a lot of fun. You guys should all totally do that. But for right now… This has been Writing Excuses, and you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.40: Elemental Drama

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/10/02/11-40-elemental-drama/

Key Points: Drama as an elemental genre focuses on a character's journey and transformation, and how this affects everyone around them. Character transformation is elemental drama. Coming-of-age stories, descent into madness, whenever a character learns something and changes. That is the driving force that keeps you reading, how is this character changing. Drama often starts with a downward slope, but it does not have to have a tragic ending. Drama often has a catharsis, a release of tension as we experience the change. As writers, use progress, the try-fail cycle, to keep the reader engaged. Also, make the characters interesting! Many dramas have other elemental genres supporting it. The downward slope is often where the character is broken down to allow rebuilding. What are the beats in a drama? Tearing down or showing what's broken. Also showing what is not broken. Showing the moment of decision that starts the descent. Something that shows they can succeed, that there is a capacity and a spark. Often there is a character who shows what the main character needs to succeed. Often there is also a foreshadowing or example of what happens if they fail.

( One man deciding what to do... )

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and give some homework. Mary, you're going to give us some homework?
[Mary] Yeah. So we've been talking about the foreshadowing of failure state, and frequently in dramas, you have a character who represents that failure state. We talked about the fool, we talked about the dropout druggie kid in the coming-of-age stories. So I want you to do is I want you to look at something that you have recently written, and go back and insert a character. Make them integral. Insert a character who represents the failure state for your protagonist.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: headache

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Eight: The Three Act Structure

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/12/01/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-8-the-three-act-structure-with-bob-defendi/

Key points: The Three Act Structure: Act I, hero encounters problem; Act II, hero discovers problem is bigger than first thought; Act III, he triumphs anyway. Act I needs to establish the characters and the initial conflict. Act I ends when the main character enters a new world, when the battle is transformed into a war. Act II: try-fail cycles are your friend. Don't forget the twist, and a character hits rock bottom. Kick down the door: any time things are slowing down, it's time for another disaster (a.k.a. mini-climaxes). Act III: monkeys are allergic to cheese, or hidden learning lets the hero win.
( the transcript, more or less )
[Dan] This is more of an outlining prompt. So your outlining prompt for this time is to sit down and plot out a very basic Three Act structure either for what you're already working on if it doesn't have one or for an entirely new idea.
[Bob] All right.

Current Mood: try-fail
Current Music: Lookin' for a Good Time, Lady Antebellum

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with try-fail cycle

Writing Excuses 19.39: A Close Reading on Tension: Tying It All Together

Writing Excuses 18.46: NaNoWriMo Week 3 - Raising the Stakes

Writing Excuses 18.42: Creating Magic Outside of a System

Writing Excuses 18.13: Finding the Core Conflict

Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions

Writing Excuses 18.08: Building a Mystery

Writing Excuses 15.33: The Long, Dark Second Act of the Soul

Writing Excuses 12.32: Structuring a Short Piece

Writing Excuses 11.40: Elemental Drama

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Eight: The Three Act Structure

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