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

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

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

[Season 19, Episode 38]

[Mary Robinette] This 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 38]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

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

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

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

[DongWon] The Candyman.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Sometimes a whiskey is just a whiskey.

[Chuckles] [laughter]

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Erin] No…

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

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

[Erin] We're stumped.

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Ooo...

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think having that…

[Mary Robinette] Yah...

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

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.

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

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

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Erin] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Right.

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Like, oh, this is neat.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[DongWon] Yes.

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

[DongWon] Yes.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Howard] That sounds like it might be homework.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.50: The Unreliable Narrator

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-50-the-unreliable-narrator

Key Points: Unreliable Narrators! Some know they are unreliable, others are fooling themselves. Reveal or revelation? If the character doesn't know they are unreliable, signpost it to the reader. Hang a lantern on it. Let another character question it. What is the scope of the unreliability, just one specific secret, or a broader range? Building trust with the reader for a character with a secret. Have the character reveal one secret, while holding others. Or save the cat. Don't overdo twist reveals! Consider intentional versus unintentional, and broad versus specific unreliability.

[Season 18, Episode 50]

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[Season 18, Episode 50]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, The Unreliable Narrator.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And you can't trust us.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm someone.

[DongWon] I'm someone else.

[Erin] I'm a third person.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But are you?

[DongWon] The most unreliable answer.

[Laughter]

[Erin] We are going to be talking today about the unreliable narrator. This is one of my favorite techniques. I… Well, I actually believe that all narrators are unreliable in their own way, because it's always, whenever you're telling a story, even in life, you're telling it from your perspective. But when we talk about unreliable narrators, these are when you're actually trying on purpose to have your narrator either believe or represent something different than the actual facts of what's happening on the page. I have this whole construct/theory of unreliable narrators that I'm going to pitch you all…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] In sections. So, the first part I'm wondering about is do you think it matters? If the narrator knows that they are unreliable versus if they are fooling themselves and therefore fooling the reader?

[DongWon] I think it's incredibly important because it changes the relationship to the audience. So if your audience is reading a book that has an unreliable narrator who does not realize that that's what they're doing, then they… We are going through that journey with them. They're experiencing their slow realization that they are being unreliable or we are watching them descend further and further into a break from reality. Right? So there's us walking with somebody. If the narrator is being deliberately unreliable and lying to us, then… There's a different kind of experience where we are sort of… The audience is almost antagonistic to the narrator in a certain way. This doesn't mean that the narrator can't be sympathetic and fun and all of those things, and almost has to be to balance that out. But it requires a different care that you're taking of the audience to make sure that when the reveal comes, that they have been lied to, but they don't feel betrayed and angry at you, the author.

[Howard] I played How to Host a Murder once, and I was the killer. But the first 2 pages of my booklet were stuck together. I did not know I was the killer. I didn't know. So I was the most convincing liar of anybody, because I was utterly innocent in my own mind…

[Choked giggling]

[Howard] Of this killing. We went to the end, yeah, I totally got away with it. It was like, "Okay, who was the murderer? Who has the…" "I don't know." Everybody looked at the… We passed around our books. Somebody said, "Howard!" They peeled it apart and were like, "You did it!"

[Laughter]

[Howard] I was like, "Oh. I did?" Yeah. To me, that's the big distinction. The unreliable narrator who knows they're lying can be tripped up in their lie. Can be dishonest… They're dishonest with an agenda. Whereas the unreliable narrator who just doesn't know the truth is going to be utterly honest about what they know, and is, to my mind, more convincing.

[Mary Robinette] As we're talking about this, I'm thinking about something that I did in Relentless Moon, which is that my main character has 2 secrets. One of them she is keeping secret for societal reasons. She has anorexia. The other she's keeping secret for spoiler reasons. Which is… She's keeping those both secret from the reader. But then she also has a secret that she is keeping from the other characters. So one of the things that I was… But that she's sharing with the readers. So one of the things that I was playing with in that was having her lies be in the same patterns. So that when the reveal happened, that you recognized that you had been lied to in the same way that the other characters had been lied to about this different packet of information.

[Erin] Oo, that's cool.

[DongWon] That is really cool.

[Erin] I was thinking about the word reveal. So what I think is really interesting is that secrets are meant to be revealed. So part of the difference between these 2 unreliable narrators is what the story is building towards.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, in… If you're hiding a piece of information, your narrator is on purpose, at some point, there is a general sense that that will be revealed in a specific moment, or, like, it will come to light. Whereas if the person is fooling themselves… I think of it more of a revelation. A slow revelation, but the reader that something is happening that they shouldn't trust. But it doesn't have to happen… There's not necessarily a moment. There can be. But it doesn't have to go, like, one, like, "And then…"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] "You'll never guess what really happened!" But more, as you're getting more and more details about the world, you're like, "There seems to be something that's askew." That kind of brings me to one craft technique that I learned about in creating unreliable narrators, which is that if they don't know that they're being unreliable, you have to give some sort of signpost to the reader that they are. Usually by bringing in something that the audience can make a very clear judgment about, and be like, "Well, that isn't the way I would interpret it, and they're interpreting it very differently, so something is off." In Wolfy Things, there's a moment where he sees his mother crying and he's like, "She still trying to, like, salt the food."

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] You know, with her tears. Just because like… Like, that's so off, she's obviously upset about, like, the appearance of this wolf and what's going on there, but he misinterprets it so wrong, like so badly…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That you're thinking, "Okay. There's like something… He's not seeing the world the way that other people see the world."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] How do you make sure in that moment that the reader isn't just like, "Oh, you, the author, missed something," or like, "That doesn't make sense to me, this book is bad." Right, like? Because I think when I see that done poorly, that is the result. The result can be like… Oh, I'm just not connecting with this. I don't understand this character. They're acting ideologically in some way. But when it's done really well, for me, that's like the most exciting thing. Right? Like, I loved that moment of realizing, like, "Oh, man, this mom at a way different experience than what this kid can see." It makes sense, because he's a kid. Right? Like… So…

[Howard] I hang a lantern on it. It creates conflict. Another character in the scene… I use it a lot with worldbuilding. I especially use it with worldbuilding when I realize, "Man. I built this earlier, and I have characters talk about it, and I don't like it. I don't think it works that way. I need them to have been wrong." So another character comes in and says, "Hey, guys. I think you're talking about this all wrong. Let's have an argument." There's comedy and there's argument and the reader now sees, "Oh. Oh. Yeah, I had some questions about that too. But now that a character is asking questions about it, I'm fine." They don't actually need to resolve it. They just need to question what was happening. Now the reader no longer blames you, the writer, because there like, "Oh, yes. My concern has now been raised in the text. I'm fine, I'm on board with whatever continues."

[DongWon] Yeah. Parallax can be really useful if you're in a longer text. Right? So if you're in a novel, your multi POV, you can have sort of 2 characters looking at the same thing from slightly different angles and you can sort of see the difference between them. In a really tight constrained text…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] With a single voice, like, how do you make that clear?

[Erin] I think one way is by bringing in…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] An outside influence. One of the reasons… One of the roles that the Conjureman plays in Snake Season is to present a point of view in the narrative that is not the point of view of the character.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] To see her interact with something that I could give you, like, here are the actual facts of what's happening in this interaction and here's the way she's seeing this interaction. Sort of show how those 2 things are diverging from each other as a way for you to be like, "okay. Something is a little different here." Then, at the very end, there's the husband's point of view and what he says in dialogue is another way of saying, like, this is where he's just describing exactly what he's seeing and what he understands. That's also a way to show an even greater contrast. As the contrast between the character's perspective and these other characters that the interact with becomes greater and greater, it gives a sense that there's more and more unreliability. I think the other thing that's really important is to give your character an absolutely genuine belief and reason for believing what they do. I think if you're like, "Oh, I'm just going to have them misunderstand this as a technique," it doesn't feel true to the character. Like, Nikki really believes that that's what's going on with his mom. He's really wrong. But what his belief is seems like it's really genuine, it's coming from a place of heart. I think if when people are sympathetic to your characters, then they care about them, and they want to understand why there seeing the world way that they are. That really brings them into the "Oh, this is what the character is about" mode versus "this is what the author is doing" mode. You basically keep them tightly in the head of the narrator, so they don't have time to think about what else is going on.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But I think the… Just to draw a line under the thing that you said, which is, in that sign posting that Howard was talking about, that you present the reader with something that is clearly recognizable to the reader as a… Like, his mother is looking out the window and giggling. It's like, okay, she's not afraid of this wolf. Then, having that obvious misinterpretation then sets them up before you get to all of the other misinterpretations, sets the reader up to know… To look for that.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] One of the other pieces along those lines which is, I think, something that you're also doing with Nikki is what I call the doth protest too much. That they spend a lot of energy trying to justify their belief. That they think about it and talk about it…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Way more than it would… Otherwise, it would be like, oh, mom's upset again, and you move on. But it's like, moms upset because of this, or, actually, it's because of this. Like, that they doth protest too much.

[Erin] Exactly. All right. I love this. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, I have another question to pose for you in my grand unified unreliable narrator theory.

[DongWon] Or will we?

[Gasp]

[Erin] This week, I have a short story collection for you. It is Lost Places by Sarah Pinsker. Sarah Pinsker is an amazing short story writer. You gotta love that there are 2 Hugo and nebula winning short stories in this collection. 2 Truths and a Lie and Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather. But there's just… It's story after story after story. One of the things I find really interesting is that she does… She thinks about the world in such a fascinating way. I feel like there are the stories that she's really well known for, but some of the quieter pieces that are in here… Like I Frequently Hear Music in the Very Heart of Noise are just really beautiful love letters I think to the form and just expertly crafted short story experiences. So, that's Lost Places by Sarah Pinsker.

[Erin] We're back. We weren't lying about it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So, for the 2nd question that I have for you all about the unreliable narrator is the scope of the unreliability. So, the way I think about this is that you can have someone, like you were talking about your character having a secret. So that's like a very specific thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] The way that say, the rest of the world, everything is accurate, but this one thing is something that they're hiding. Then, I think about somebody like Marie in Snake Season whose entire worldview is a little off. Like…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] It's not like she's hiding something specific, she's just misinterpreting everything around her.

[DongWon] The slow build to realizing how wide the scope is of her unreliability…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Is so much the deliciousness of that story.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] There… I've used this. I've used this? I've referenced this before. The lore master for the Elder Scrolls online… One of his first challenges was the fact that the Elder Scrolls games were terribly inconsistent in the way the history of that universe played out. Their solution was unreliable narrators. Anytime we describe something, we want to describe it in the narrative from the point of view of a character. Because a character can be wrong. But if we describe it without quotes around it, then people are going to take it as gospel truth. What was funny to me, and what I just now realized with regard to scope, is that in that article, the lore master never use the term unreliable narrator. It was exactly what he was talking about, but he never used that term. On the one hand, I thought, "You can't possibly not know the literary technique you're using," and just today I realized, "Oh, wait. You're writing game software. You don't want to put the word unreliable in the text…"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "In front of the gamers…"

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because you will communicate a whole new level of unreliability to them.

[DongWon] Well, this kind of goes to one of the earlier points that Erin was making, which is any time you have a character proclaiming their worldview, there's something always unreliable about that. Because we… Our subjectivity inherently influences how we see the world. This is going to be a minor spoiler for N. K. Jemison's The 5th Season…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] But there's a moment in the book where you realize that the narration is 2nd person, that you are being told the story by somebody. That, for me, was such a moment of like, "Oh, no. Everything is now unreliable." Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That subjectivity has been influencing the story this whole time… For me, that was just like a thrilling moment because it just inherent… By shifting me into a character's perspective, suddenly the scope of the unreliability was infinite.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It was this entire story, this entire world…

[Mary Robinette] That was such a gut punch. I was actually thinking about the broadness that you're talking about with Ghosts, because Ghosts has 2 things going on. One is that she has been made unreliable narrator by someone removing her memories. But she also… Like, when she… When she takes… When they take Princess to the…

[DongWon] Memories

[Mary Robinette] To the memory…

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] The 2nd time, none of her plan is in that narration. Even though it's kind of clear to the audience, but your… It's… She's justifying why she's making these choices. It's such a broad, like, there's so much broadness there, I think.

[DongWon] Yeah. She shifts from accidental to deliberate…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Unreliable narrator in a way that is very fun, and it is such a heel turn in the best ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] So…

[Erin] It's funny, too, that I think of… Thinking about her looking at Princess's memories, I think it was interesting, there's a little bit of a… Her questioning of Princess as to whether or not Princess is actually a reliable narrator of her own relationship with her father and what was happening before. So that, I think, is also one of the reasons I love playing with memory is that like memory is one of the least reliable narrators.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] That we have, and yet it is the way that we experience the world and kind of go through things.

[DongWon] Yeah. The fact that Princess was a reliable narrator was the unforgivable crime. Right? The realization that someone was… Dared to tell the truth was unbearable.

[Mary Robinette] Dared to tell the truth and also all of the things that princess may not have understood about her…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Own situation.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… There are so many layers of unreliability in that story. And revelation.

[Erin] I have a question, speaking of sort of reveals, about characters with secrets. Which is something I do less of. I tend to do like unreliable on a broad scale. How do you make sure that a character holding a secret doesn't feel like they can no longer be trusted in any way versus just in this one way?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things for me… One of my pet peeves is holding the secret to long from the reader. So, with the… One of the ways that I build trust with my readers is that I will raise a question then answer a question, raise a question, answer a question, then raise a question and not answer the question. So, with this one, because I knew that she had two secrets, I went ahead and gave the answer to the first one within… The anorexia, within the first couple of chapters. I feed it to you a little bit slowly, and then I give the answer so that the… So at that point, you're like, "Oh, now I can trust the character because they have let me in on this one secret." But then all of the other secrets that she's holding, the other secrets, you're like, "Well, she must be being forthcoming with me now, because she was honest about this other thing."

[Erin] That's awesome.

[Howard] I would do the… You're familiar with the term save the cat. Early in a story, you have a character save the, and now we know, "Oh, this is a good person." All right. That trick works after you have revealed that someone was keeping a secret. You have them do the save the cat, and we're like, "Oh. This person is actually okay. They've done a good thing." Now, you may be mistrusting whether that cat was actually worth saving. Maybe it was a feral, rabid cat, and they're saving it in order to kill us all. I don't know. But you get the point here. You're trying to… You adjust that likability slider strongly. Crank that all the way up so that we're willing to trust them again.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah. I may be jumping a little bit too far ahead, and also maybe too much of this is a personal taste thing, but I always want to caution writers about over-relying on the twist type reveal.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? So, two movies that are incredibly popular, so this may undermine my point, but The Sixth Sense and Old Boy, the Park Chan-wook movie, both rely on last-minute reveals. They completely recontextualize all the action that has happened up until that point. I, as an audience member, in both of those cases, even though there's other aspects of those movies that I could really admire and really like, felt almost betrayed by the narrator. Right? The narrator in this case wasn't a character, but it was the authorial voice of those movies. So I got mad at M. Night Shyamalan, the person, which was unfair. I don't hold a grudge against the man. He's fine. He makes good movies. But, like, there was an aspect of that that…

[Mary Robinette] Thou doth protest too much.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I'm trying to be nice.

[Howard] It's okay to be mad at him for the Avatar movies.

[DongWon] Sure. But… I mean… There's a way in which that twist can really undermine your audience's relationship to the text. Now, that can be done very, very well. Sometimes that twist will have that backward ripple effect. One example I think of is Neon Genesis Evangelion, which I re-watched recently. There's a late reveal of Asuka's character that makes you recontextualize why she is the way she is in a way that I think is beautifully done and makes a character that I find very annoying suddenly, for me, one of the most sympathetic characters in the show. So, anyways, I'm not getting into the spoilers of that. But there are ways to do it really, really well, and there are ways that… I think sometimes if you don't have enough time after to really settle back into the story, it can just leave you with the feeling of being uncomfortable and unsettled in a way that is unpleasant to me narratively.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have this personal theory that one of the reasons that that particular thing happens to early career writers is that they are themselves unreliable, in that they didn't know the answer to something. So they were just like, well, now it's a big secret that I'll reveal later. Then they keep going until he hit a point where they have to reveal it, and they are justifying themselves… To it, justifying that choice to themselves all along as, well, I'm doing it this way because I'm going to build tension and will have this big twist. Really, it's that they just don't know the answer and don't want to write those scenes.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] I don't think…

[Howard] You've read the first 3 years of Schlock Mercenary.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm not pointing fingers.

[Howard] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] Doth protest too much.

[Erin] I will say that I think a lot of it's also trusting yourself.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As a writer. That without a gimmick, people will still want to read your stories.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] One of the things that I struggled with a lot in trying to write Wolfy Things is that… I tried to make some a of the, like, the relationship between him and the wolf, like, a lot more like a lot less clear. In the original version. Like, where it was a big twist at the end. I would give it to people and they're like, "That's fine. But, like, I really didn't need to be surprised by that." In some ways, not being s… Like, being able to have your own revelation as a reader earlier and then see that you understood the truth of things and it's still going to go horribly wrong was actually more fun then the feeling of like, "You got me," that happened that the end of the story.

[DongWon] This is a thing I've learned as a GM is that it has been way more fun just to tell my players stuff, just to be like, "Here's what's going on." Then they're like, "Oh, no. That's bad." Then they have to figure out what to do with that information. Then you can have more twists and reveals, but it's grounded in them knowing what's going on versus me trying to, like, surprise them with a big gotcha moment. I think that can be disorienting and unsatisfying for me as a storyteller and for them as the audience.

[Howard] We're recording in Utah. One of my favorite hikes here in Utah is to a place that we call First Falls up above Sundance. From the starting point of the hike, you can look up the hill into the cirque, up the mountain into the cirque you know that that's the ending, you know that that's your destination. As you walk, the scenery is beautiful. The plants, the bees, the bugs, the whatever else. There is this experience on the hike that is just wonderful. But the whole time you're hiking, the waterfall is now no longer visible. Then you come around the corner to it, and it's bigger and it's loud and it's wonderful. The whole voyage has been rewarding. It was not that last turn that made it worthwhile.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] That last turn…

[DongWon] It's a payoff, but [garbled]

[Howard] It is a payoff, but it was not the whole reason…

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] You took the trip.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I think, for me, the key is what emotion do you want the reader to have. Is it… Is that emotion, "Oh, that author is clever," or is the emotion, "Oh, the crippling dread…"?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, what emotion are you trying to have the reader…

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] All right. Now, we have already been slightly unreliable about our 15 minutes long…

[Laughter]

[Erin] So, I am going to bring this together into my grand unified theory for 2 seconds, and then we will go to the homework. Which is to kind of think about how these 2 things intersect. I'll… We'll put a lovely graphic in the show notes so you can check it out. But thinking about what you want to do, I often think about how these 2 things come together. How intentional the narrator is in their unreliability or the author is in their unreliability, and how broad it is. So you've got your M. Night Shyamalan twist. That's when you're being broad. The entire nature of what you thought about this thing is wrong, and I'm going to tell you at the end intentionally. You've got something that's a secret. That's intentional and specific. I'm not going to tell you about this one aspect of me, but everything else is the way you think it is. There's what I call the memory hole, which is unintentional and specific. That's the I've repressed the memory of this time I killed that guy. You know?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The pages of my How to Host a Murder book are stuck together.

[Erin] Exactly. But everything else you did was actually accurate to the character, it was just those stuck pages. Then, lastly, the false belief, which is my favorite…

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] Which is when you're basically wrong about everything around you.

[DongWon] I have to say when Erin first showed me this chart, I then spent the next 10 minutes in a fugue state just categorizing everything I've ever read…

[Pain]

[DongWon] Into these categories. It is one of the most useful infographics I've seen about this topic.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[DongWon] Erin, you're very good at this.

[Erin] Thank you. With that, we will go to the homework.

[Howard] All right. Take an event that you are familiar with. Which probably means it has to be something that personally happened to you, and write about it as truthfully as possible. Then, write about it from the point of view of someone who knows the basics, but not the whole truth. Sort of the memory hole. For bonus points, tell the story a third time from the point of view of a lying liar with an agenda.

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

[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you've applied the stuff that we've been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.18: How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/05/01/17-18-how-to-be-funny-with-jody-lynn-nye/

Key points: Take expectations and twist them. Be the anodyne for the evening news. Exaggeration. Tweak the standard tropes. Break the rule of three. Move the boundary between violation and the benign. Tragedy plus time or distance. Puns. Juxtaposing the modern with the ancient or the fantastic. Absurdities and anachronisms.

[Season 17, Episode 18]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye.

[Jody] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Jody] I'm Jody.

[and there was no Howard there!]

[Dan] We are so excited... Jody, we have known you for so long, and we're kind of shocked to realize we've never had you on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

[Jody] Well, I write science fiction and fantasy, most of it with a humorous bent. I have been writing since I was a small child. But I started getting read by other people in the late 70s, early 80s. I played Dungeons & Dragons long enough ago that I'm playing now with the grandchildren of some of the people I used to play with.

[Chuckles]

[Jody] I… Let's see. I do calligraphy, I do baking of fancy cakes, I like to travel, I like photography, and of course many people know that I love my cats, and most things are all about the cats, and everything goes to feed them.

[Dan] Just so that the audience understands like the sheer level of genre godmother that you are, you helped edit some of the initial Dungeons & Dragons books. Correct?

[Jody] Not exactly. My first job in publishing was typing the players guide monster manual in DMG for Gary Gygax from his original notes. Correcting spelling and bits of grammar and things like that, that, my boyfriend at the time who was one of the founders of TSR said, "No, no. Don't change anything." I realized then that they weren't going to be able to tell.

[Laughter]

[Jody] So I made it a little easier on the final editor.

[Dan] Awesome. You also helped start Dragon Con, correct?

[Jody] I was there early.

[Dan] You were there early. Okay.

[Jody] I was… I think I have been to all of them.

[Dan] Nice.

[Jody] So, Dragon Con is a wonderful convention to attend. It is the largest fan run convention in the world. It is a… Let's… A small place, but still cozy in its own way. It has as many as 50 tracks of programming, something for everybody. There are skeptics tracks, science tracks, many kinds of writing tracks. There's even a puppetry track.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Jody] Anyone can find anything to participate in.

[Brandon] It's a giant fun party.

[Dan] Yeah, it is.

[Jody] It is Mardi Gras for nerds.

[Dan] Mardi Gras for nerds.

[Jody] That's its nickname.

[Brandon] The last convention I did before the pandemic was being Writing Guest of Honor at Dragon Con. So…

[Jody] You and I were on a panel together. That was fun.

[Dan] Now, we are here, live, at a much smaller convention. LTUE.

[Cheers]

[Dan] We're so excited to be here.

[Dan] Howard is not here with us, and yet, Jody, you have pitched to us how to be funny as an episode topic.

[Brandon] It's always more funny when Howard isn't here.

[Dan] I know.

[Brandon] See, Howard always gets on the panels whenever we're going to discuss funny and says, "Nothing is more boring than talking about humor." That just really sets the stage.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] For being funny. So, we're doing this without his knowledge, because we… We're the kids playing when the master of humor is away. We're going to be funny, darn it!

[Dan] I don't know if we're going to be funny, but we're going to talk about how to write funny stuff. Jody, you've written a lot of very funny books, a lot of humorous books. Let's start with the question of when and why do you decide, well, this book I'm going to make sure that it's not just a fantasy or not just a science fiction, but it's going to be a funny one.

[Jody] I like to take expectations and twist them. I like to go for something that people have probably seen a lot too much of, and go with it. I have written now, with Robert Asprin, many, many books with him and in a couple of his series since then. The MythAdventures of Aahz and Skeeve.

[Brandon] No relation.

[Jody] No relation whatsoever. They don't even look alike. In spite of the green stuff.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Jody] Right. I always wanted to be the anodyne for the evening news. I wanted to give something to cheer people up when they were devastated at having turned on the news, realize that 800,000 gallons of oil has just poured down Main Street, and you're going to be stuck in traffic for eight hours. When you get home, pick up one of my books. It'll make you feel better. So that was my sort of reckoning, my idea. I like humor. I was brought up on the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello, Saturday morning cartoons, comic books. All sorts of things alongside real books. There weren't enough funny ones. So…

[Brandon] Yeah, you say that.

[Jody] I am filling that gap.

[Brandon] Real books… I've… I'm on record…

[Jody] Yes.

[Brandon] Talking about Pratchett, saying that I think humor is a higher art form than other forms of literature. Because it adds another aspect that you have to do. Really good books, like Pratchett or the MythAdventures still have… They're going to have character arcs. They're going to have narrative, they're going to have plot, they're going to have literary styling. You have to do all that, and be funny. It just makes it harder. When it works, it is just that much better.

[Jody] Oh, yes. Pratchett is amazing. I thought that… I think that he was our Shakespeare, because he understood everything about human nature in the same way that Shakespeare did, and liked us anyway.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yup. Yup. You always feel like… That's a good thing to bring up. There's like… There's all kinds of humor. It's all valid. It doesn't… Whatever you find funny. But Pratchett, I always felt like his arm's around my shoulder, pointing at things that we all do. But he's not laughing at me, he's encouraging me to laugh with him at me. Which is different. We always say, "He's laughing with us, not at us." He is laughing at us. But he's got his arm around your shoulder, and you don't feel bad. When I read his books, and he's making fun of something that I do, I feel better about myself after having laughed. I just love that aspect of his humor.

[Jody] I have seen… I have known people that he poked fun at, that he's put into the stories, such as, I know two of the three witches, the originals. That when he talks about Magrat, for example, who became Queen, that she was shaped rather like two peas on a shovel, well, the lady upon whom Magrat is based is a plump lady who is by no means just two peas on a shovel. She's tremendous fun. Gisa North who is Gytha Ogg, Nanny Ogg, is in fact, personality wise, quite a bit like her literary counterpart, but a complete opposite bodily. Of course, when he decided to create Lady Sybil who was one Anne McCaffrey crossed with Barbara Woodhouse clone, Anne McCaffrey absolutely adored it. She loved being sent up in that way, because he got her. But it was also quite a bit of Barbara Woodhouse, who is famous for… She was a dog trainer. She would command dogs, "Sit!" in this huge stentorian voice. Not unlike Anne who was trained for opera and also had a huge voice and could make people sit down, too.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Now, I do want to point out that not all humor has to be gentle or kind or loving. A nice counterpoint to this story, I had the chance on a book tour to go through Roald Dahl's hometown in England. The librarian there told me, just giggling through her hands the whole time, that when he wrote the witches, everybody in town knew exactly which ladies he was making fun of. They all hated it, and everyone else thought it was hilarious.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Let's pause here, and give you a chance to pitch one of your books to us. What do you have out that's recent or that you would really like people to go look up and read?

[Jody] I am…

[Dan] And buy, which is key.

[Jody] All right. I am very fond of my latest series, which is the Lord Thomas Kinago books, which are humorous space opera, which are essentially P. G. Wodehouse in space. They are the feckless young lordling and the sensible, self-effacing gentleman who more or less keeps him out of trouble. The names of each of the novels… Lord Thomas is far too wealthy to have hobbies. He has enthusiasms. So, his enthusiasm of the moment is connected to the title of the book. So, View from the Imperium is about photography and image capture. Fortunes of the Imperium is about superstitions. It's not that he actually believes in any of them, but he loves the trappings. He's got a fortuneteller's tent and a crystal ball and a phrenology chart. Rhythm of the Imperium, naturally, is about interpretive dance.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Of course. That's perfect. All right. So, let's talk about how to be funny. Making people laugh at dinner is very different than writing a book that is funny. So, when you set out to do it, how do you add humor to something? How do you be funny on command?

[Jody] There are so, so many facets to humor, but in Lord Thomas's case, exaggeration is one of the ones that I like to use the most. He is very, very wealthy, so he can do what he likes. He is very, very overprivileged, and so are all of his relatives who, pretty much, except for a couple of his cousins, are odious people. But they are exaggerated in the same way that P. G. Wodehouse pictured a lot of the aristocrats that Bertie Wooster palled around with. In fact, Lord Thomas has aunts in the same way that Bertie Wooster had aunts. Some of them he could stand, some of them he could hide behind when the others were raging at him, and some of them were just terrible people altogether. But that's half the fun of it, is the exaggeration. There's a lot about the standard space opera that, with just a tweak, could be extremely funny. I played with a lot of those tropes. But at the same time, they're… It's a fairly serious story because he has a lot of elements of him that he's very sensitive about, that a great deal of the bravado is to hide the sensitive person inside. So I had to tell a good story at the same time writing a science fiction story that also had humorous elements to it.

[Brandon] Something you said earlier that I would like to emphasize here is playing with expectations. Right? A lot of our humor comes from there's a thing you expect, and then it is broken in a way that makes us laugh. The most obvious of this is probably the rule of three, right? You'll see this all the time in humor. In normal narrative structure, you often want to use the rule of three to emphasize in some way. So you will list three things, instead of two, and the third one is the most powerful of them. Even if you're just listing reasons that someone wants to go to dinner and it's not supposed to be funny. But you can use that third one as a twist when they're expecting growth. That's one of the ways to be honey… Funny. It's like, oh, these first two are building on each other and getting increasingly more relevant, and then the third one is completely irrelevant, and it makes you laugh. But you can also use that to say something about the character, which is always a lot of fun.

[Jody] Sort of faith, hope, and nattily.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I love that. So, Howard is not here, but he has a whole class on humor that he has taught on our Writing Excuses retreat before, that talks about how humor is like the intersection between something that is benign and something that is a violation. Often, the process of telling a joke or setting up a punchline is moving one of those circles in order to create overlap. That this would normally be far too violating or horrific to joke about, but I have nudged it just far enough that a corner of it has dipped into the benign circle on our Venn diagram. Then, all of a sudden, I can say it in a way that makes you laugh instead of makes you shocked or horrified.

[Jody] Such as… There's a saying that comedy equals tragedy plus time. You're in an awful situation, and quite a lot of situational humor… And I'm not talking about sitcoms which have become not very funny things that have laugh tracks…

[Laughter]

[Jody] That say you should be laughing here even though you don't want to. But it can also be comedy equals tragedy plus distance. Something that is happening far away could be a lot funnier, especially keeping the nasty bits out of the view of the audience, so that you can laugh at the circumstances around them.

[Dan] I do love Mel Brooks version of that, where he says tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall in a sewer and die.

[Jody] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Jody] I was going to use that very same…

[Brandon] That's playing with expectations right there.

[Dan] Yeah, it's playing with your expectations, because we think we know what it's going to be. It's adding distance, because it's not funny when it happens to me, but it is funny when it happens to you. It's also… If I just said it would be really funny if this guy in the front row fell in a sewer and died. Like, that would not be funny.

[Brandon] Oh, I think that's hilarious.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Well. Telling jokes to sociopaths is an entirely different process.

[Laughter]

[Jody] They think everything's funny.

[Dan] When you set it up properly, and say it in that form, then it moves that violation far enough that the benign can take over and it can be funny.

[Brandon] I've got a question for you, Jody. When I'm working on humor in my books, and I don't generally write humorous books, I write books with humorous elements occasionally. One of the things I've found is that sometimes the things I think funny just do not land with certain members of the audience. The way I mitigate this is by trying to have different kinds of humor. So that nobody will find everything funny, but somebody will find something funny. Do you have any advice on different kinds of humor that work well in books?

[Jody] Well, puns, depending on the book, puns work well. Puns are a very intellectual form of humor. No matter what some people might say. Because you have to understand the context in which they appear. Juxtaposing the modern upon the ancient or the modern upon the fantastic can be a lot of fun. For example, take Shakespeare in Love, where you had Shakespeare going through all the rituals of writing that quite a lot of us have little rituals that get us in the mood to write, and also the fact that he was seeing an analyst, which was completely modern. Certainly there would have been nothing like Anthony Sher doctor in real life in Elizabethan times. But it worked so well. There was a beauty to it, that they were able to present that kind of absurdities and still make it seem as if it was a historical kind of story. So, that kind of anachronism is often funny.

[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, we talked about Pratchett. Like, a good third of the humor in those books is that exact joke, just done again and again in different and interesting ways.

[Jody] Yeah. He was tremendously good at that. It is very hard to do slapstick in a book. But we can also play with timing, so that we can, using punctuation, capital letters, italics, spacing, and making sure that you have to turn the page before you get to the punchline. Ellipses are your friend. So are m-dashes.

[Chuckles]

[Jody] You can place… You can make the audience breathe so that you can get your punchline in there. Then, the line that follows it should be benign enough, just sort of carrying things on, so that they laugh at the joke and they don't actually miss anything important. So it is setting up a joke as if you were telling it out loud.

[Dan] Well, that's great. Thank you so much for being on our show today, Jody. We love you, we think you're so smart and wonderful.

[Dan] What is our homework?

[Jody] Your homework, since we were talking about humor, is to take something that you have written before. Take one of the scenes and make it funny. Draw out what it is you can exaggerate, make absurd, minimize. Give these incredibly important stakes to something that would otherwise seem trivial, and have fun with it.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.17: Writing in the Public Domain

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/04/24/17-17-writing-in-the-public-domain/

Key Points: So, what's in the public domain that you can use? Make sure what you are using is in the original work, not created by the media. What's public domain? Anything older than 96 years. You get to use an established universe, and you can bring out lesser-known aspects and characters. Retelling is fine! Remember, writing builds on shared understanding. Twists play off audience expectations.

[Season 17, Episode 17]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing in the Public Domain.

[Brandon] 15 minutes long.

[Gama] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Gama] And I'm Gama.

[Dan] We are here at LTUE…

[Cheers]

[Dan] Very excited to be here, recording live in front of our home court science fiction fantasy conference. We have Gama Martinez with us. Gama, you've been a friend of ours forever. We're so excited to have you on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

[Gama] I am a writer, obviously. A runner, a diver, I dive with sharks all the time…

[Dan] What?

[Gama] Yeah, I volunteer at the aquarium. I dive with tickling shark tanks.

[Dan] Okay. I thought you just like broke into the aquarium.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] This is the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium?

[Gama] Yeah.

[Brandon] Cool. I didn't know that that was you.

[Dan] Yeah, I didn't know… Well, we're not going to talk about the other thing. We'll just talk about sharks.

[Laughter]

[Dan] No. You pitched this, and I think it's a fascinating idea. Because the public domain at this point does include a lot of really cool stories, fiction, characters, all of this cultural background that we might be very familiar with that is actually totally legal to just tell your own stories about. You are publishing a book about…

[Gama] It is called God of Neverland. It's set 20 years after Peter Pan, where Michael Darling asked to return to Neverland to help save Peter Pan.

[Dan] That's cool.

[Brandon] It's very cool. I have read it. I got an early copy. It is… You're even kind of… The worldbuilding's really cool. Because it's, like, Peter Pan, you find out very early in the book, is, like, this ancient God, a trickster God, that Peter Pan is just one of his incarnations.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It delves into mythology and things. It's really cool.

[Gama] So, yeah, in Celtic mythology there is a God called Maponos who is an eternal child, and is a personification of youth. So I'm like, "Oh, that's perfect."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yeah. I thought that connection was just awesome. It propelled me through the whole book, just that single idea, landed so well for me. The book is great, too. It's not just that idea.

[Dan] So, Peter Pan and Celtic mythology are both public domain.

[Gama] Yes.

[Dan] If somebody wants to write with public domain characters, such as Peter Pan, what are some considerations that they need to take?

[Gama] The big thing to be careful of is that what you are using is part of the original work, and not something created by Disney or another movie company. The third book in this series, for instance, is going to be based in Oz. But what a lot of people don't realize is that the ruby slippers were not in the original book. They were silver. They were put… They were made ruby in the movie because they were just doing color movies and red popped out more. So, I can't use ruby slippers because that's not public domain, even though the Wizard of Oz is.

[Brandon] Yeah, it's really odd was Sherlock Holmes, right? Because the estate of Sherlock Holmes has somewhat successfully proven that certain elements from Sherlock Holmes are not in the public domain, even though early stories of Sherlock Holmes are in the public domain. So, they'll like sue if the friendship between Sherlock and Watson is as it's represented later in the books instead of as it is early in the books. Which is really an interesting distinction that is a little intimidating, I think.

[Gama] Yeah.

[Dan] So, is there an easy way of learning this stuff, or is it just do your research?

[Gama] Anything before 96 years from now is public domain. There's some gray area between…

[Dan] Before 96 years from now?

[Gama] Well, 96 years…

[Dan] Anything older than 96 years?

[Gama] Yeah, that's exactly it.

[Dan] Okay. So, for example, what are some Peter Pan things that I'd probably assume are original, but are actually Disney creations?

[Gama] The crocodile's name is Tick-Tock.

[Dan] Okay.

[Gama] That is not in the book. The crocodile is not named in the original. Obviously, a lot of the songs.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I assume all of the song.

[Laughter]

[Dan] None of them were original in Barrie. What about, like, aspects of the lost boys? They all… Did they all dress up like squirrels and stuff in the original?

[Gama] No, they didn't. Now that you mention it, no, they didn't.

[Dan] Oh, okay.

[Gama] They were just boys who had… In the book, they had fallen out of their cribs. The reason they were only boys is that girls were too smart for that.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Oh! Okay. As the father of three of each, I agree.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's absolutely correct.

[Brandon] This topic's going to grow increasingly relevant in the coming years. Because so far the Sonny Bono act, which extended copyright, has not been re-extended. I don't know if it's actually called the Sonny Bono act…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But that act that was… That extended copyright protections in the 90s. Everyone is expecting Disney to fight to re-extend it. So far, they haven't. They were a big motivator behind it happening in the 90s. So, for instance, Batman and Superman are going to be entering the public domain within the next 10 years or so. If this doesn't… If something doesn't happen. Right now, the people who are watching this are saying if Disney's not going to join this fight, then it's going to happen. Which means that you will be able to write Superman stories if you want. But this can only be the issues of Superman containing elements from the ones that were the first year that Superman was out, and then, the next year, the next set of issues will enter the public domain and certain other things will enter. So it's going to get real interesting about 10 years from now when there are unlicensed Batman and Superman movies that start getting released.

[Gama] Right. Originally, Superman couldn't fly.

[Brandon] Uh-huh.

[Gama] He could leap tall buildings in a single bound.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yeah. No, that's legit. A lot of the villains, the iconic villains, will not enter because originally Superman was not fighting Lex Luther, he was fighting generic 20's mobsters. So it's going to be a real interesting thing when that starts happening.

[Dan] Yeah. I can't recall the specific outlets right now. We'll try to find this for the liner notes. But there are… I have seen announcements come through almost every year of, "Hey. These are all the things that are going to enter public domain this year." 96 years ago is not very long ago in terms of our cultural history and our pop culture. I mean, was 96 years ago? 20 something… 20… Bleah, I can't do math, I'm a writer.

[Brandon] Yeah. It would be the 20s.

[Dan] 28? Yeah, the 1920s. So we're going to start getting all kinds of… Like, it's only another decade or so before we get Captain America.

[Brandon] Entering this year is Winnie the Pooh. A. A. Milne.

[Dan] Winnie the Pooh. Everyone get out there. Be first on the Winnie the Pooh train.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's the big one. But there is an Agatha Christie novel entering the public domain. There is some Faulkner and some Hemingway entering the public domain. Not as big franchises there as perhaps Winnie the Pooh, but…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But kind of interesting to see these things now that that expansion has run its course.

[Dan] People have been waiting for William Faulkner to enter the public domain…

[Brandon] Yeah, my William Faulkner…

[Dan] With bated breath.

[Brandon] As I Lay Dying cinematic universe…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Is up and ready to go. Just various people in their caskets, monologing about their deaths.

[Dan] Okay. So you were just reading us a list you were scrolling through your phone. Where did you look that up, so our listeners can look it up?

[Brandon] I googled "entering the public domain in 2022" and took the first hit.

[Dan] Oh. Well, there you go. That's…

[Gama] So that means it's actually already in it, because all the stuff goes in when the year starts. So Winnie the Pooh is public domain now.

[Dan] Winnie the Pooh is already out. Jump on it.

[Brandon] Don't quote us on that. Go get a second source, because it was a five second Google for me.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So if you write it and then you get sued because you're a year early because this list said it will enter next year and I just didn't read that, you can't blame me.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Well, you can, but I will dispute that.

[Dan] Yeah. The audio evidence that he has told you this is there.

[Dan] Gama. You're our book of the week. So, once again, tell us not only about your Peter Pan book, but where people can find it.

[Gama] God of Neverland would be in all book stores. It's being released by Harper. Like I said, it's 20 years after the original Peter Pan. The audiobook is by Simon Vance, which I am really excited about.

[Brandon] It… If you're looking for [tones], again, I read it and really liked it. It has about a mystery thriller feel to it. It's like lots of interesting sort of detective-ish things. Detective adjacent, would you say, Gama? It's not really a detective story.

[Gama] Right. Yeah.

[Brandon] But thriller-esque.

[Gama] Yeah, definitely.

[Brandon] Sort of feel. Very fast-paced, very seat of your… On the edge of your seats sort of stuff.

[Dan] Cool. All right. So, let me ask another question then. What is the value of… Maybe this is super obvious. What is the value of using a public domain character or setting rather than just making everything up on your own?

[Gama] You have a whole established universe to play with, and then you can find the lesser-known aspects of the story and bring those out. Unlike writing media tie-ins, you don't have to get permission for that. So, like I said, you have this really big expanded universe. There is one thing that's like in the epigraph of Peter Pan, it talks about a little old lady with a crooked nose and a house. She becomes a major character. You can expand on little-known parts of stories that everyone knows about.

[Dan] That's very cool. This would also, I assume, include retelling, right?

[Gama] Oh, absolutely.

[Dan] That you could do "This is Peter Pan, but it's cyberpunk in the future, and it's all gritty, and everyone dies."

[Brandon] It's interesting for you to ask this question, because narrative… When we are writing stories, we are always building on a shared understanding. Even if it's just a shared understanding of story structure and things like this. A lot of what we do as writers to make things feel fresh and original is we are in some ways twisting that structure. We are playing off of audience expectations. You can't have a twist in a book if the audience isn't expecting something else to happen. That's the definition of a twist. Because of that, anytime you have something shared in a narrative with the reader that you can expect they will understand, you can play with it. Gama does an excellent job with this in his book. It's one of the reasons we like… Like, when someone gives you a pitch, "It's this, but 20 years later and with this twist," you're building on that shared narrative. That is just really fun. That's the way that we make interesting twists and interesting takes. Like, even when I will pitch Mistborn, I'll say, "Oh, Mistborn is a cross between My Fair Lady and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's the pitch I used to give when people knew Crouching Tiger a little bit better, right? Because it was new. It's a ninja story. My Fair Lady, the ninja story. That works because you know My Fair Lady. You're like, "Oh. My Fair Lady, but with magical ninjas." That is just a cool twist. It's a cool take. It lets you give these really efficient pitches.

[Dan] That's awesome. Cool. Well, Gama, we have really loved having you on the show.

[Gama] I was glad to be here.

[Dan] We've been so organized the last several years that we haven't had the opportunity to do what I'm about to do. Which is, with no warning whatsoever, say, "Gama, what's our homework this week?"

[Gama] Your homework is to find something entering the public domain and write a story about it.

[Dan] There we go. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, as is Winnie the Pooh. Now go write.

[Laughter]

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.12: Structuring a Story Within a Story

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/03/20/17-12-structuring-a-story-within-a-story/

Key points: The story within a story structure can give a mythical or mystical feeling. It also engages the reader in discovering the link between the two. Often it adds essential information or explanations. You can also use story within a story to illuminate the theme. Smaller narratives can make the story feel richer. It's especially useful for twists and reveals. Is it one frame around a single story in the middle, or is it a photo collage frame with lots of little stories inside? Frames can add verisimilitude. They can also help control pacing. Sometimes they can help the writer figure out what kind of story they want to tell.

[Season 17, Episode 12]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring a Story within a Story.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] And I'll be relating Howard's tale.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Very good. So, this is another structural element we… I don't think we've ever talked about on the show before. Story within a story. Peng, what do we want… Where do we want to start talking about this?

[Paying] Story within a story is such a beautiful and really delicate type of structure, I think. I think it works really well for stories that you want to have a kind of mythical or mystical feel to them. There's always this element of like discovery that you want to uncover the link between the two. So, I think, I mean we could start by just talking about some stories that do this really well, or ways that you can kind of back into this structure.

[Dan] Yeah. Give us an example so people know what we're talking about.

[Peng] Sure. So, I think a really great example, well, everybody knows Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, but a more recent example might be the 10,000 Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. In that book, it's about a girl who… She's got magical powers that she doesn't fully understand where she can open portals to other worlds. Early on in the novel, she finds a journal hidden away in the attic of this house that she lives in. As she starts reading the journal, you realize that it has a much stronger connection to her story then you might at first realize. It turns out that she… Oh, should I spoil it? I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't. Um…

[Mary Robinette] You realize things.

[Peng] Yes. Which is… I'm sorry. It's just such a great book. I just realized that I was about to spoil it. But it's a great example of how you can have an artifact… Not an artifact, you can have a story within the greater story that you're telling, and it ends up adding like essential information that you might need to understand the present narrative or explains magic or something like that.

[Howard] A couple of examples that are not recent. There's the Canterbury Tales which I was alluding to, obviously. I will be relating Howard's tale.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] He's not the knight, he's not the baker, he's the cartoonist. Also, not going to Canterbury. And One Thousand and One Nights, which is a compilation of Middle Eastern folktales, compiled during the Islamic Golden age. The editors who put this together created multiple layers of framing stories connecting this material. It's one of the most outstanding examples of story within a story because of how many layers there are and the way it's structured.

[Dan] Yeah. The kind of modern… One of the modern takes on Canterbury Tales is The Hyperion Cantos, which updates it into this big kind of sweeping space opera story. The way they use story in a story, there is a much larger thing going on, this kind of sweeping across the whole galaxy, and by the end of the second book, you know they have fundamentally altered everything about this vast space faring civilization. So they use the story within a story element to kind of illuminate different aspects of that society that they're about to… That they're eventually going to change. So we get to see what the different… Some of the different cultures are like. We get to see some of the different religious beliefs. We get this very widespread vision of the world as we are doing this much larger story that will change it all.

[Peng] I think one of the other… One of the best ways that you can employ this technique, this structure, is, I think, often when you've got a story within a story, you're able to illuminate your theme a lot more directly in a way that isn't going to hit people over the head with it or come off as soapbox-y because you're doing it within the story that is within the story. So you have a little bit more room there to, like, explore something like the theme that you're trying to get at or the lesson, if you have a lesson.

[Mary Robinette] One of the… One of my favorite examples of this is The Neverending Story, which is…

[Peng] Oh, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I don't… Most people know the film. The book, the physical artifact of the book, is just also a beautiful thing. One of the things that happens in it is that as the… As we go between the embedded story within the book, we are also… And then come back out to the hero's main… Real life and then back in, the lessons that he is learning in both places affect the way he moves through the world. It's really, really lovely. The other thing that I kind of want to say about this idea of story within a story is that while you can use it for big overarching structure, you can also illuminate a story or have the idea of story within a story affect something on a smaller scale or a microcosm. Honestly, the thing that comes to mind most is a Star Trek episode, the Darmok episode, in which there's the Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. It's this culture that entirely speaks in embedded metaphors. At a certain point, the only way to communicate is when Picard tells them another story. The thing for me about this is that these smaller stories, even if it doesn't become a huge structural element, embedding smaller narratives into your work can make it feel richer. Because it gives you these views into the culture and again contrasts, I think.

[Dan] Yeah. I agree. That's one of the strongest… That's actually my favorite Star Trek episode out of any of the series. Part of the reason is it provides this kind of mythic backdrop to it. I mean, Patrick Stewart reciting Gilgamesh would be powerful in almost any context. But once they have established the importance of story as a cultural element, then him sitting down and relating the story of Gilgamesh by a campfire just gives it this absolutely epic tone that is absent in a lot of other Star Trek.

[Dan] We are definitely far enough into this. We're well over half. Let's have our book of the week, which is also Mary Robinette.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's right. So I'm going to briefly pause to embed another story in the episode. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a fantastic novel. I listened to it in audiobook. The narrator was Chiwetei Ejiofor. He's just so good. But one of the things that… the whole novel is him writing journal entries. As the story unfolds, he comes across a trove of additional material. I'm going to say it that way to avoid some spoilers. That unlocks a bunch of things and makes you realize that what is happening in the story is not at all what you thought was happening. It's a really, really clever use of the story within a story.

[Dan] Cool. That is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] Excellent. Now we've talked a lot about ways that story within a story can kind of recontextualize what's going on in the larger story, the frame that the other story's within. It seems like this is very useful for twists or reveals. Is that the best use? Is that the only use? Are there other things we can be doing with the story within a story?

[Peng] Well, that… Yes. I think so. But I would say that that's one of the… At least one of the best uses. Because often times when you have a story within a story, it'll start with the character who finds the story within the story in whatever form it is, a book or an almanac or something. They, when they find it, are usually not clear on exactly what it is or how it will relate to their life or their journey. So, I think it just creates this kind of an automatic desire in the reader to solve the question and figure out in what way does this story relate to the present narrative, or is it real or is it not. Because that's also usually one of the first questions that comes up when you encounter the story within a story, you're wondering if it's purely some kind of a fable or if it's a second reality that is also happening or has just happened.

[Howard] Yeah. I've found that the… Up until now, I typically just called this structure the framing story structure. Where there is a frame that is its own story, and there's a story on the inside. The realization that I've had recently is that with things like The Canterbury Tales and the One Thousand and One Nights, the frame is framing multiple stories. One of the first structural questions that I'd ask is are we going to build it like, for instance, I think it was Name of the Wind. There is an outer framing story, and then there's the meat of the story which is just one thing in the middle. Or are we building a single frame… A frame like those photo collage frames…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You'll get at the big box store, where you have lots of little stories stuck inside. The big framing story I think is… It's a fun way to make a thing feel epic, but the photo collage approach is a great way to build a very complicated puzzle which resolves itself as you make your way through the various stories.

[Dan] So let me ask a question of you all, because I'm curious. Now that we're talking about frames, Frankenstein, for example, is famously a frame story. There… It is the story of somebody telling the story to someone else. But, also rather famously, most adaptations of Frankenstein, the movies that have been based on it and things like that, do away with the frame. What do we get by adding… What is the value of adding a frame to a story, of doing a story within a story, instead of just telling us the tale of Frankenstein without the frame around it?

[Mary Robinette] So, historically, one of the reasons that you would have a frame story was to lend a sense of verisimilitude, that this is obviously a true thing that is being shared with you because there is a narrator here in the here and now that you can relate to and that will guide you through the story. So one thing that a frame story can do is to do that and give that sense of trust. But, the other thing that a frame story can do is that it can serve as, in much the same way that a frame would for a painting, that you may have a painting that needs a very narrow, thin band just to set it off from the things that are around it, but that helps you focus in on the important things. Or you may have like a miniature that needs quite a large frame around it in order to give you time to get into the meat of that tiny, tiny little thing in the center. So I think that those are things that that frame can do. I also think that frequently it is a tool that authors will reach for because they don't trust themselves to tell the center story.

[Mmmm]

[Mary Robinette] So as a modern writer, we're no longer having to deal with some of… Like, you used to have to do a frame story because that was the only way you could tell fiction.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So you have a lot more leeway now to do that. So you have to figure out whether or not it's serving the story, the emotional experience that you want the reader to have. The other piece of that, I would say, is whether or not your frame story is only around the outside or whether or not it has interjections and interludes within. Those can be a way to control pacing. Those are often useful in that way.

[Dan] Peng, let me get your opinion on this. If an author is looking at their work, the story they want to tell, what are some signs that they might want to wrap another story around the outside or insert another story into the middle?

[Peng] Well, it's a really interesting thing that you just said right before this, Mary Robinette, because what I was going to say was I often find that this technique can be really great to use if you're stuck. So it's interesting that you said sometimes you feel that writers might use it if they're lacking confidence in the thing that they're writing. But I would wonder if a lot of stories that end up having a story within a story ended up that way or rather started that way because the writer was stuck and they were having trouble figuring out exactly the kind of story they want to tell. So, if you're stuck, and this will kind of relate to our homework, but it can be really useful in some cases to try to go deeper and to write a story within the story you're trying to tell, because you're working with this really encapsulated smaller version of the thing where you just trying to explore the purpose and figure out exactly what you're trying to say. Then, once you have that thing as a guide, you can build the larger story around it, or it can help you move the larger story forward. So it's sort of like a guide in reverse, because it's a smaller thing, but it's a lot more straightforward in some ways.

[Dan] Your description actually calls to mind the Greenbone Saga by Fonda Lee. Which, each of those books includes little interludes that are basically small in world stories or legends or history pieces that are only a couple pages long, but that she definitely is using to kind of help explain what's going on in the present. To give you cultural context for something or just to let you know who this important historical figure is that someone's about to reference a few chapters from now. Yeah. Anyway.

[Mary Robinette] They also serve as pacing. Because, if I'm remembering correctly, there is usual… They often, as kind of an [entre act?], A thing where there's going to be a jump in time. So helping give that also emotional distance from the stuff that happened in the chapter prior.

[Dan] That's true.

[Mary Robinette] Which is a… I know that we are close to the end. We are over time. But I did just want to mention The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars by Steven Brust. That has a story within a story which is… The basic set up is there is a painter, modern day. He's trying to… Well, it was modern day when I read it in the 80s. But he needs to do a painting. The book follows him from beginning to end. One of the things that he does, there's a Hungarian folk story that is cut up and interspersed through the novel. There's no explanation for why you're getting it. Until, at a certain point, you realize that it is a story that he is telling to his studio mates every evening. Because he doesn't tell you where it's coming from, as a reader, you try to draw parallels yourself. That is another thing that I think that this structure can do, is that it can engage the reader by giving them another vessel in which to put themselves and draw their own parallels, so that each reader can wind up having a… Their own intimate relationship to this work.

[Dan] All right. Peng, you have our homework this week.

[Peng] I do. Your homework is to take or create some kind of an artifact within your current project. Like, a letter or a diary entry or an in world almanac or a spell book you've got magicians. Flesh it out for a passage or a scene or a chapter. See what that adds to your story. If it enhances the world building or if it lends depth to a certain part of the plot or reveal something about your characters that you otherwise weren't getting at.

[Dan] Sounds like fun. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.4: The Gun on the Mantel is Actually a Fish

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/01/23/17-4-the-gun-on-the-mantel-is-actually-a-fish/

Key Points: Red herrings help make the inevitable surprising. Aim for inevitable first, build surprise second. Deconstruct shows and books that have deliberate twists to them. Drop fish into your foreshadowing to keep us distracted. Use the tricks of a stage magician, give us other things to watch. Make the red herring story significant, while the actual foreshadowing is just a small thing on the side. Include clues to support multiple endings. Beware the sudden change, and unintentional storytelling without knowing where you are going. Ambiguity can be useful! Use your context to highlight the wrong thing. Use the character that everyone likes to point the reader in the wrong direction. Synonyms, homonyms, and other misdirection. Make sure you deliver in an enticing, wonderful way.

[Season 17, Episode 4]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, The Gun on the Mantel is Actually a Fish.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[pause]

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

[chuckles]

[Howard] I was late with my line about who I am. Okay, last episode, we talked about foreshadowing. I described it as creating a thread which makes a surprise inevitable. This episode, we're talking about red herrings. This is where we create the thread which makes the inevitable surprising. As we said last week, aim for inevitable first, and then build the surprise second. Because if you fail at inevitable, you've got a deus ex machina and we're disappointed and bewildered and we feel llike we've been lied to. If you fail at surprise, we're like, "Oh, I saw that coming."

[Which, depending on...]

[Howard] I would much rather have the reader feel like they're smarter than me than feel like they're better than me.

[Laughter. Very true. Very, very true.]

[Howard] So. Red herrings. Let's talk… Some good examples of 'em? Where have you seen them done really well?

[Fish market. [Whisper] I'm kidding.]

[Laughter]

[Howard] Mmm. So tasty.

[Kaela] You just really went for that one, Meg.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Straight in.

[I was going to give a serious answer.]

[Sandra] I think it's useful to look at shows or books that have a deliberate twist to them. Where… A frequently used example of this is the Sixth Sense. Where you have this twist that I can see… The kid sees dead people. Oh, our protagonist is dead is the big twist at the end, and the surprise. And yet it is the surprise that makes you want to go back and rewatch the whole movie and see how absolutely clearly inevitable it was. It was absolutely there. So much there that there are many people who saw it coming from scene one. Some people were not surprised. So you go into the movie and you deconstruct and say where… How did they mislead the majority of the audience into believing that Bruce Willis was alive and interacting with the world? They put him in scene after scene after scene where there's another human in the scene who our brains fill in the blanks, because they are sitting opposite each other in chairs. We assume that there was a part where Bruce Willis knocked on the door and came in and was welcomed and invited to sit down. We don't see any of that. So the show uses the medium and the automatic back and fill that the medium asks of the audience to get us to back and fill something that absolutely wasn't there. So the show actually is getting the audience to create their own red herrings. Which is kind of a cool and interesting thing that that particular show does. So that's one of my examples and it's fascinating to go through and figure out where was I misled.

[Howard] Kaela.

[Kaela] Yeah. I think that's a really good example, particularly leaning into the strengths of your medium to accomplish that. I think one for books was Harry Potter, the first one. I think that was one of the best, like, at least… I mean, admittedly, I was young when I read it, but I still think it holds up really well. The way that they make you think that Snape is the one who's trying to steal the Sorcerer's Stone. Because, by all means, it seems completely reasonable. Snape was the one that was muttering a curse when Harry's broom bucks around and he nearly falls off. Snape seems to hate Harry for absolutely no reason. So you're like, "Yup, I believe he's a bad guy." And, like… There's the cut on his leg after everybody runs through the troll in the dungeon. So we have pieces of evidence that imply that it is him. But when we find out that it's Quirrell, we also suddenly remember that Quirrell was in all of the scenes, that Snape was muttering the counter curse, Quirrell got knocked over by Hermoine's fire stuff, and that broke his concentration for the curse. That Quirrell had run through the dungeon, Snape headed him off, and, like, they were there with Fluffy. Like, they… We forgot Quirrell was there because we were wrapped up with a very good and reasonable explanation of Snape.

[Yeah. And…]

[Howard] The… Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, what you've described here is a pattern that has a tool built right into it. Which is, any time you are laying a piece of foreshadowing, grab a fish and drop a fish next to it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay? You want to have a red herring in there with your foreshadowing, so that the audience can be misled.

[Sandra] Right. We can also take a… Learn things from stage magicians. Where there's the patter and the hands that are waving because he is moving something from the table in front of him into his pocket. He does this big gesture with his opposite hand and tells a joke because he knows that the audience can only pay attention to a limited number of things at a time. Then there's also that video with the passing the basketballs and the gorilla that dances through the middle of it. Nobody sees the gorilla because we're so busy paying attention to the balls. You can do the same things in what you are creating. You can teach them, and teacher audience, okay, pay attention to the ball. Your job is to count how many times the ball is passed. When, truthfully, you're hiding the gorilla in plain sight. Meg?

[Megan] Yeah. So the idea is to give your red herring story significance while making the actual foreshadowing something that's just happening to the side or… Like, a small joke in the conversation, where we're talking about the big important thing. A show that I think does this very well is The Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin. It has some of my favorite examples of long set up and payoffs for a joke in an episode. I'm going to tell you one that just happened now. The payoff won't be as good because I'm telling you the beginning and the ending right after.

[Howard] Go ahead.

[Megan] You need to imagine there's 40 minutes in between. But there's a news anchor, and he's complaining to his wardrobe assistant that, "Is there something wrong with the pants you give me? Because I keep trying to put them on, and both my legs end up in one side." The assistant's like, "You can't put your pants on, and you think there's something wrong with the pants?"

[Giggles]

[Megan] The A story of this episode is someone is here to do a hatchet job news article about the news agency. He used to date the main producer of the show before she dated the main character, the news anchor. So the reporter and the producer are having a huge argument. She is standing up for the news anchor. She's like, "You don't understand. He is a great man. I mean, he struggles with things, but he's a great man." As she says struggles with things, we see him hop into the scene, trying to put on his pants.

[Laughter]

[Megan] Then he falls over in the background. It's been a half hour since we mentioned the pants, but it just comes back at like the best moment. So… Check out The Newsroom by Aaron Sorkin.

[Howard] Yeah. That's the… As a professional humorist, that sort of thing is something that I use a lot. Sandra mentioned stage magic. In the second edition of X-treme Dungeon Mastery, we call attention to the way in which surprise, for a magician… The deception with a magician there should never be a reveal. They have red herrings, but they are never going to tell you how they perform the trick. Whereas as storytellers, the deception needs to be gentler. It can't be, as we mentioned last week, can't be animating Hans having a loving, kind, totally genuine expression of love while the music cues and the lighting all say this is a good boy for her to be interested in, when in fact, he's just making a play for the kingdom. That's deceptive. We want our reveal, for storytellers, the big payoff is in the reveal. For audiences of magicians, the big payoff is I was deceived and I don't know how. I use the example… We illustrated the example in the book of the trick knife. If the magician says, "Aha, see, this is where I switched out the actual knife for a knife with a collapsing blade. You didn't see it, though, did you? But, yeah, the knife just has collapsing blades. Stab, stab, stab." Big deal. In the movie Knives Out, we are told that there is a knife that has a collapsing blade, and in the very last scene, someone attempts to commit a murder with it, and we find out that they've grabbed the wrong knife, and it is delightful. Because we get to see the trick knife.

[Kaela] Knives Out is a master.

[Howard] I just realized… Oh. Go ahead.

[Kaela] I say, Knives Out is a master class in red herrings and guns on the walls and like, seriously, like, pick it apart.

[Howard] So, very, very many. On the subject of red herrings, I have the book of the week. It is And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. I picked this one because it is arguably the place in which red herring cemented itself in the colloquial… The jargon for a distraction. The character Vera scolds everybody for being distracted, because in the verse that applies to one of the previous character's deaths, a red herring swallowed one, and then there were three. She's saying, "A red herring's swallowed one, that clearly means Armstrong was not dead. There was a distraction here." And Then There Were None is a fine book to read. It's short and it's very tightly woven.

[Megan] In my eighth grade English class, I disagreed with the ending. I remember meeting with my teacher afterwards, because she was talking about, like, it was inevitable. This is the only way it could end. I'm like, challenge accepted.

[Laughter]

[Megan] I wrote a different ending as to who the murderer was and what they were doing. I pointed out it could have happened this way. She's like, "Okay, Megan. It's not that deep. But good job."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Here's the thing. This is… I can't remember where I got this. I could be speaking out of class. But I have heard said that Agatha Christie often wrote these things three quarters of the way through without knowing who the murderer was herself, and then went back and made sure that the foreshadows in the red herrings all aligned and she had a proper ending in place. Which means if you… Depending on how much of the book you let yourself rewrite, yeah.

[Sandra] Yeah. Well, it's fascinating, the movie Clue, I don't know what year it was, but it's the Tim Curry movie Clue, which did an experiment that they actually filmed three different endings with three different murderers. Then they sent different endings to different theaters.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] So, theoretically, you could go see the movie in multiple different theaters and get to see the three endings. Now, in the age of streaming, they just play all three endings one after each other.

[Howard] Yeah, they've concatenated the endings and they've given the third one, they're saying, "But this is what really happened."

[Sandra] Right. But the whole thing is written so that there are clues to support every single ending. Which is valuable as a writer to deconstruct, because the vital clue for one ending is a red herring for a different ending, and so you can pull that apart.

[Megan] So, the writers' strike of 2002 hit a lot of shows very hard. One of the shows it hit quite hard was the procedural Bones…

[Yes]

[Megan] Which is one of my favorite shows of all time. There is a recurring murderer in the third season. Which is rare for this show. Normally, we get our guy every time they show up. But there is a recurring murderer that is a cannibalistic cultist that eats people's faces. Like the Sith, there's always a master and an apprentice. At the very end of the season, it is revealed that someone on our team is the apprentice of the murder. Even though throughout about 90% of the season, this person has been making discovery after discovery, helping us track down the murderer. So you try and rewatch that season, and there is no clear moment when this character betrays us until you can see in the writers' room that… Well, or lack of a writers' room, I'm not entirely sure how the writers' strike wrapped up the season. But…

[Chuckles]

[Megan] They had to cut the season early, and about two episodes from the end, this character starts actively working against us. But it's clear to see that that was a decision made much later on in the season, and it doesn't logically follow. So what we have earlier aren't red herring, it's just unintentional storytelling before we knew where we were going. Because you can't go back… [Garbled]

[Howard] It was the writers' phone booth, not room, because…

[Yeah]

[Howard] Phoning it in. Because… That joke would have played better if I told it sooner. What other tools do we have for creating satisfying red herrings in order to make the inevitable surprising?

[Kaela] I think one of the things that… You have to use this carefully, but ambiguity is a very helpful tool when depicting things. Because ambiguity is the… Or almost an objectivity. Like, this is what happened. These are the facts of what happened. But a lot of storytelling is contextualizing what has happened. So, if you can show what happened and either just leave it there as if it's not important or touch on the… Like, use your context to put only one part of it in focus, without obscuring the view of the rest of what happened, you can use that ambiguity to your advantage to get people to look at the wrong thing or to pay attention to the wrong thing. That still makes sense, but you haven't hidden anything from them. You're just leaving it ambiguous or uncommented on.

[Howard] One of the things that I try to do is take the character who is the most charismatic, the character that everybody likes the most, and have that person look at the wrong thing. The right thing is someplace else, but the person we like is looking at the wrong thing. Now, obviously, you can't do this all the time, or you're just like, "Okay. Check everything in the room that he didn't look at. That's a possible clue. That list of things will thread to the answer." But, yeah, the audience is going to follow… They're going to follow the funny, they're going to follow the cool turns of phrase, the… When I write, I try and put the funny around the wrong thing enough of the time that people mislead themselves.

[Kaela] The power of misdirection. Like you were talking about with the magician's stuff, where you're shoving the context over here. That doesn't mean that you turn out the lights on everything else and you are deceiving them, but you're like, "Hey, look at this cool thing." I love using a trusted, likable character to do that. Where you're like, "Oh, I love this character. I appreciate this character." Or even "I trust this character, they're really smart." Then, you're like, "Oh, but they didn't have all of the picture either. They didn't tell me that this thing was the answer, but I thought it was."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sandra. Sorry.

[Sandra] A quick set of tools depending on what medium you're working in. If you're in a prose medium, you can use synonyms and homonyms carefully. That's a potential tool depending on what you're writing. Auditory, then you want things that sound the same but mean different things. Then visual mediums, you can do visual misdirection again. So it's all… Just another set of tools to think about. Meg?

[Megan] I want to kind of wrap this up by saying it's okay if the audience guesses what's coming, if you can deliver on it in a very enticing way. That's Chekhov's cauldron of hot lead is coming back. Because I had just assumed they were going to put on some red and orange lights when it's time to spill it, because we're in a small theater, we're inside. They set off fireworks inside the building.

[Gasp]

[Megan] There was just a fountain of real live sparks and fire on the stage. So I knew the scene was coming, and just didn't care. Then they delivered with an actual explosion. I was like, "Oh. I was wrong. Oh, my gosh." So, that was great. That was wonderful.

[Howard] The 1812 overture…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Done by the high school, in which the sheriff is backstage firing his shotgun into a bucket.

[Laughter. Yeah.]

[Howard] Sandra, I think you got this week's homework. We could keep talking and talking and talking about this. We need to get people homework.

[Sandra] Yeah. The homework is, this is a paired episode with last week's episode. So, do the reverse of last week's homework. Instead of finding a thing in the beginning and writing a scene at the end, find something that is important at the end and find a place early where you can rewrite the scene to put that on the mantle in some way. Then, maybe, take some of the tricks and tools to magician misdirect so that it's there, but it is not the focus of attention. So…

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/28/14-17-its-like-car-talk-meets-welcome-to-nightvale/

Key points: Comp titles, or comparative titles, are titles that a book reminds you of. Who is this book for? E.g., a pitch like X in space. Or traditionally two books, with your book in the overlap. Not the sum or combination, but the intersection. Comp titles early in the writing process can help you refine your book. Comp titles can define genre and category. Think about the elemental genres. Comp titles can help identify your audience and target a market. Consider the set dressing and structure when picking your comp titles. Comp titles is not just A meets B, you can say which elements you are referring to. You can also throw in a wrench with a third element to give it a twist. Be aware that readers may not understand the shorthand of comp titles. Use comp titles as the base of longer explanations. Comp titles are a clarifying exercise, to help identify the core elements of your story. Beware the comp titles that have been overused, like Harry Potter.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 17.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale."

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] We are talking about comp-titles. Those things that you cite when you are trying to describe the thing that you've created in terms of other people's stuff. Dongwon is back with us this week. Dongwon, in your line of work, agenting, you use comp-titles kind of a lot.

[Dongwon] Comp titles is how we think about the universe. So, comp titles are, just for clarification, it means comparative title. So any time you're talking about any given book, what you're usually doing in the back of your head, if you're a publishing professional, is automatically coming up with the one to two to three titles that this book reminds you of. Part of the reason you're doing that is, in publishing, one of the main questions is who is this book for. The way we talk about that is we use other books as a proxy. So if your book is like Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, then that tells you something about who this book is for and, hopefully, how many copies it's going to sell.

[Dan] Yeah. I just sold... at time of recording, I have just sold a middle grade to Audible, based almost entirely on the pitch, Home Alone in Space.

[Dongwon] Hell, yes.

[Dan] That is working everywhere. The editor's taking that around the company and says, "Hey, can I get some resources?" "For what?" "Home Alone in Space." "Yes. Here's all the money that you need." So a really good comp title can have incredible value.

[Mary Robinette] That is basically how I sold my first novel. It was Jane Austen with magic. Then I also have Thin Man in Space.

[Dan] Which I've wanted to read for so long.

[Dongwon] I will point out that every example of a comp title that we've given so far has been one book with an extra element. That is one way to do a comp title. But most traditionally, what you really want to do is have two different books. In the Venn diagram, the overlap between book A and book B is where your book lives. Right? So, the ones that we've been giving so far can be really useful just to give a feel for what the book's going to read like, but it's not telling enough yet about who this book is for in terms of the audience. That's sort of an interesting gradation that you'll see [garbled]

[Howard] The first time I ever had to come up with a comp title for my work, I was making a pitch to a media guy who, of course, never got back to me because that's the way a lot of these things work at Comic Cons. I described Schlock Mercenary as it's like Babylon 5 meets Bloom County. Babylon 5, science fiction that pays attention to story, science fiction that remains consistent. Bloom County, comic strip with short serial elements.

[Mary Robinette] So in that, is Schlock Bill the cat?

[Laughter]

[Howard] If you pay close attention, both Schlock and Bill the cat have mismatched eyeball sizes.

[Ooo!]

[Howard] So the answer to your question is not no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] My work is not just highly derivative...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It is markedly and easily identifiably derivative.

[Dongwon] We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of the things that I think is interesting about comp titles is that... I find that when I come up with the comp titles early in my process that it also helps me sort of refine what it is that I'm working on. That sometimes it's like, "Oh, yeah. This is an element out of that Venn diagram." So as we're going through this, I kind of want to talk about what we mean by the Venn diagram of where the two books overlap. You're the one who introduced me to this idea, Dongwon, so I'm going to put you on the spot and make you explain it.

[Dongwon] So the Venn diagram is really useful. I think the way people think a lot about A plus B is they tend to think that it's the combination, it's the full territory defined by book A plus book B. That's the wrong way to think about it. What you're doing is, you're looking at the narrow overlap between those two books. One of the reasons this is really useful in pitching, for example, is it does a lot of the work to define genre and what category your book is before you start telling people the details of your book. So if you start saying that it's Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, then you already know that this is for someone who likes dinosaurs and laser swords, right? It's not... The combination of those two things, it's you're putting the laser swords into a park full of dinosaurs or something to that effect.

[Howard] It's also worth calling back to our... Oh, was it Season 11, Elemental Genres? Calling back to the Elemental Genres. Let's talk about Star Wars and Jurassic Park. It will not always reverse engineer this way, but if you are talking about Jurassic Park because there are cool monsters and it is a horror story in which there is a sense of wonder, and you're talking about Star Wars because Campbellian monomyth and swords. Then, if those are the elements in your story, Star Wars meets Jurassic Park is a great way to say which elemental genres you are using. But it could also be dogfighting spaceships meets biological technology that hasn't actually gone wrong...

[Dongwon] I'm now picturing raptors learning how to use X-wings. It's a really delightful image.

[Mary Robinette] I would totally agree the heck out of that.

[Dongwon] There you go.

[Dan] Now Mary mentioned, Mary Robinette mentioned earlier the... That it's often a very good idea to come up with this comp title, this comparison early in your process. One of the reasons that that can help is it can help you identify your audience and it can help you target your market a little better. I sold my YA cyberpunk to the editor, to the publisher, using "This is Veronica Mars meets Bladerunner." Which is great, but he's my age. It very quickly became obvious as we started figuring out how to market this in the YA market that when we sold this six years ago, there were no good well-known cyberpunk properties for teenagers. We tried everything we could think of. Today it would be easy. Because we have... There's a new Bladerunner movie that's been very recent, there's all these other cyberpunk things that are popping up. We've... I use it now, I usually pitch it as Overwatch. But six years ago, if I'd taken the time to think about it, I could have identified maybe... Maybe there isn't a slot in the market for this. Which is what turned out to be. It was a very poor seller because the market... I was maybe two or three years before the market was ready.

[Dongwon] And yet… Sorry.

[Howard] I just… I wanted to pause for a moment for a book of the week, because that sounded like a nice point to transition. Except Dongwon had a thought and I didn't want to step on it.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I'll say my thought really quick. Dan has stumbled on, I think, one of the reasons why publishing can be a very conservative business sometimes. It's one of the flaws in the system. It's how we think about things, but it's one of the issues is if there isn't a prior example that's been successful, it's very hard to do something that is very new and very different from what has come before. Now there will be breakout moments when that thing happens, and you get to do this big new thing. But often times, there are a number of books that preceded it that didn't get traction. Often, when somebody says, "Oh, this is a brand-new genre," that's not actually true. That work has been happening, it just hasn't been selling particularly well.

[Howard] Well, that's kind of a down note to talk about a book that we want to [inaudible]

[laughter, yeah]

[Dan] A positive spin on that particular thought is that my kind of tepid reaction to cyberpunk actually paved the way for the new Blade Runner movie to be a big success.

[Chuckles exactly]

[Dan] That's where I'm going to go with this.

[Dongwon] You provided a lovely steppingstone.

[Howard] Who's talking about Arkady Martine's book?

[Dongwon] I believe that is me. So, our book of the week is Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. It's a brand-new space opera that's just out from Tor Books. The comp titles that I'm using for this book would be that it is John McQuarrrie meets Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It is a political murder mystery set in the heart of a future massive galaxy-spanning empire. A young diplomat is sent to the heart of this empire because her predecessor, she discovers, has been murdered. She needs to prevent her tiny nation from being annexed by this empire. It's a really wonderful fraught political thriller full of massive world building and a very sort of complex view of how people interact and how empires work which is where the Ann Leckie part comes in. It's a wonderful read, and I hope you all enjoy it very much.

[Howard] Outstanding. That was A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine?

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Howard] Available now?

[Dongwon] It should be available now.

[Howard] Should be. Because we record these things in advance…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And our listeners never get tired of us talking about this weird time travel thing that we do.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, according to some of our listeners, they really do get tired of it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Will cut all this out.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It is absolutely available now.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So one thing that I wanted to kind of circle back to about when we're talking about the comp titles and how to pick one is that there's kind of two things that you're looking at. One is the set dressing of the thing. The other is the structure of the thing. So the set dressing are things like Jurassic Park, if we think of Jurassic Park and the set dressing of that, we think of dinosaurs, we think of a park. But the structure of Jurassic Park is thriller and horror. So when you're picking your comp titles, I think it's imp… I think that it's worthwhile making sure that you're trying to find a comp title that has both axes in alignment with what you're picking. Otherwise, if you're like, it's like Jurassic Park, but it's all gentle and soft. Unless your other comp title brings the gentle and soft into it, you're going to wind up sending a false message [garbled]

[Howard] It's like Jurassic Park meets Gummi Bears.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Then I think people… But see…

[Dan] Ooo, yeah.

[Dongwon] Then your raptors are just bouncing around the park. That's [unsettling, upsetting]

[Dan] I'm digging that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but that…

[Howard] That sounds just delicious.

[Mary Robinette] That could be like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man version of…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] rampaging Gummi bears.

[Dongwon] One thing to point out when talking about comp titles is you don't have to just say it's like A Meets B, right? You can say different things about it, right? So you can say it's the voice of A and the world building of B. Or you can say it's the plot of this meets this set dressing element. An example I just gave for the Arkady Martine, John McQuarrie is providing the elemental genre, it's a thriller, it's a political thriller. Then Ancillary Justice is providing voice and setting, more than anything else. One I talk about a lot is Marina Lostetter's Noumenon, which is… I talk about it as an Arthur C. Clarke big idea story as told by Octavia Butler. So it gives you this is old school big idea science-fiction, but told with this contemporary voice that has a cultural focus.

[Dan] Yeah. Another thing you can do is add a third element to throw in a twist. My Partials series, we marketed that as this is The Stand meets Battlestar Galactica, starring Hermione Granger. That third element can kind of be the wrench that helps the other two twist around.

[Dongwon] Dan is very good at this game. I'll point that out.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'd like to take a moment and leash this just a little bit. Because in my experience, I'm excited to hear if it's at all universal, the comp title tool does not work well with large bodies of readers. If I go to the customer and tell them this is like Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, they do not have necessarily the vocabulary, the syntax, to know that I'm not saying the nostalgia you have from Star Wars and the nostalgia you have from Jurassic Park, you're going to get both of those in this book. When I've seen people try and pitch their books in that way, often hand selling, it feels fraught. Whereas if you're having a conversation with an agent or a publisher or an editor or a bookseller, they speak that language and they know exactly what you're doing.

[Mary Robinette] I think that you're right that if you do a shorthand, if you just toss it out just as those two comp titles to the average reader, they don't have the insider shorthand. But I also think that if you use those as the basis of a longer sentence, that it is very, very useful. It's one of the things that… With the… The way I talk about Calculating Stars to readers is I say, "So, it's 1952. Slam an asteroid into the Earth, kicking off the space race very early when women are still computers. So it's kind of like Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact." They're like, "Oh! Oh, sign me up for that."

[Howard] See, that is a… For me, that is a perfect pitch. Except not… Perfect pitch has a different…

[Laughter]

[Howard] It is an outstanding elevator pitch for a book because it goes very, very quickly, and at the end, you have planted a hook. That, for me, is one of the most important parts about these comp titles is that it's supposed to give you a bunch of information, but also invite you to ask a question. Which is, Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact, how bad does it get?

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is that I'm also focusing… Using that initial sentence, I am telling the reader which parts of the comp titles to focus on. So I do… It's like you have to decide what is important and why you picked that comp title, and then set it up when you're talking to a reader.

[Dongwon] Also, the comp titles are really a clarifying exercise. It helps you to focus on what are the core elements of your story that you want to be telling to other people about the book that you've written. So, once you have your comp titles in mind, all of your copy, your longer pitch, that can descend from that. So even if you don't end up using the actual comparative titles when you're talking to a reader, if you meet them on the street or in a bookshop or whatever it is, you still have in your head the target audience in mind that is shaped by those overlapping properties.

[Howard] Dongwon, I think that's a great place to phase into our homework, except Dan's telling me he wants to say something.

[Dan] There's one important thing I want to point out before we leave comp titles.

[Howard] Go.

[Dan] Which is in line with thinking about your audience. Especially when you are pitching this, when you are presenting this to an agent or an editor, keep in mind that they have already heard four bazillion of these. So don't use the really obvious ones. Don't use Star Wars, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones. Because they've seen those so many times.

[Dongwon] Well, the thing I want to add to that, just a little bit of clarification about why those are bad, is because the comp title's a proxy for the audience. So if you say Harry Potter, what you're saying is my book is for every human who's ever existed on the planet.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] That's not useful information. It made plot wise be correct or it may have elements that are correct. So you can cherry pick an element, you can say starring Hermoine Granger just because that's good shorthand for a character. But you can't use Harry Potter as a comp because it doesn't tell me anything useful. You're only… Your Venn diagram is a circle of the human population.

[Howard] I think that that's probably the places in which I've seen the hand selling fail. Because if you tell me it's Harry Potter meets Jurassic Park, I don't believe you.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's not the result that you wanted.

[Howard] We have homework.

[Mary Robinette] Your homework is to come up with six comp titles. Now, what I'm going to recommend is that you take some work in progress and you come up with three comp titles that are from works in progress, and that you come up with three additional ones that are for work that you have not written but you just think would be a cool combination. Literally, the Thin Man in Space, which we have just sold to Tor at the time of this recording, that began as a comp title. I had the comp title before I had anything else. So, six comp titles. Three for existing works to help you clarify what you're working on, and three as an initial brainstorming for something that you might want to write.

[Howard] Once you've got those three that you might want to write… [Garbled may be planted]

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Howard] It may be time to write it.

[Mary Robinette] In fact, you may be out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.27: Fantasy Setting Yard Sale

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/12/04/writing-excuses-6-27-fantasy-setting-yard-sale/

Key Points: Building a setting based around a magic system? How can someone obtain magical powers in a non-traditional way? Think of options, then explore those. Push them. What kind of unusual power could they gain? Think of the expected ones, then go on. Consider how this affects the society, history, interactions. What limits does it have? Time, resources, geographic? Consider different variations. Make sure people are proactively involved! What has changed?

What's an odd way to set up a government? Religion? Why are people chosen? What drives this? What are the problems? What are the taboos and the accepted things? What's different? What are the different classes? Are there rebels, and why? How do they act? Are there minorities, and what sets them apart?
( Today only! Get 'em while they're hot! )
[Howard] This whole episode's been like a big writing prompt, hasn't it?
[Brandon] So we don't have to...
[Howard] Does that mean we're all off the hook?
[Brandon] I think we're off the hook for the writing prompt.
[Mary] Go write.
[Brandon] This has been great. You guys are totally out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: fingertalk

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 twist

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

Writing Excuses 18.50: The Unreliable Narrator

Writing Excuses 17.18: How to be Funny, with Jody Lynn Nye

Writing Excuses 17.17: Writing in the Public Domain

Writing Excuses 17.12: Structuring a Story Within a Story

Writing Excuses 17.4: The Gun on the Mantel is Actually a Fish

Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

Writing Excuses 6.27: Fantasy Setting Yard Sale

Writing Excuses Season Two Episode Eight: The Three Act Structure

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