Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person

Apr. 3rd, 2025 05:06 pm
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.13: First Person 
 
 
Key points: First person. What does it do well? Direct address to the reader, the aside. Subjective unreliable point of view. Intimacy. What is first person not effective at? Clarity, complex scenes. Multi POV ensemble cast! Mirror moments, what does the character look like? Tools for first person? Avoid navelgazing by adding a activity. Multiple senses! Cadence. Why use first person? Proximity, emotion. Genres of the body, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Tapping into emotional subjective experience. Plot reveals! Character change. Coming of age stories. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? When character's goals shift. What is the lie that the character believes? 
 
[Season 20, Episode 13]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 13]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] First person.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We are beginning today a small cycle of episodes in which we're going to talk about the lens of proximity, how close you are to a character and how much you get to know about that character's reactions and motivations and so on and so on. We're going to begin today by talking about first person. First person feels as if it might be the most natural way to tell a story, because that's the way we talk about ourselves. Though obviously, the other persons that we will discuss in future episodes are also and equally useful, just useful in different situations. So I want to start by asking what is first-person good at? What kinds of situations do we love first-person? What does first-person do well?
[Mary Robinette] I think the direct address to the reader, the aside, where it's like, this is what I'm thinking. This is how I'm feeling in the moment. It's not just about the internal thoughts. It's one… It's a… The thing that I've found that first-person can do that kind of nothing else gets to is hang on, let me just explain this one thing to you. So that kind of direct address of here's some exposition. I think one of the things that it has is that it immediately connects it to why it is important to the character and that is it's sometimes harder to surface things.
[DongWon] One of the things I love about first-person is it's a thing that you can do in text, in prose, in a way that's incredibly difficult or artificial to do in other media. You can have first-person asides, like the aside in theater, being… Or a soliloquy, and you can sort of fake it in films through voiceovers and things like that. But in a novel, you can have it in direct access into the interiority of a character in a way that you can't in almost any other medium. So there's something really special about the ability for prose writers to use that first-person perspective to say explicitly here's what the character's thinking, here's what the character is perceiving. And when you want to root someone very much in a subjective unreliable point of view, first-person is the go to in your toolkit.
[Dan] Well, that unreliability is so fun to play with, too. Talking about this direct aside to the reader… You could do that in third person. But in first-person, it feels like there is no artifice there. It feels like you're getting it much more directly. But… Of course there's artifice there. Because you are telling this through some other person that you've invented. It's the first person. It's not actually me, it's John Cleaver or whoever I'm writing about. So there's still a lot of artifice, there's still a lot of kind of artificiality about it, but it feels truer, it feels more direct, and that allows you to be unreliable and shaky and shenaniganry.
[Erin] I also think it creates a feeling of intimacy, or it can create a feeling of intimacy between the character and the reader. Because it's like… Like the direct aside, it's like somebody has sat down and said, okay, I'm going to tell you something. I'm just going to tell you, the reader, this thing. And nobody else in the story will understand how I feel about this at the core, nobody else will know my internal thoughts except for you. One of the reasons I love writing in first person is because you can really lean into the voice in a way that I think third person can do, especially third person where it's very close, but it doesn't have that quite the same feel as, like, a friend sat down. And part of what I'm trying to do as a writer is to capture that friend's voice and how they would tell the story in a way that nobody else could.
 
[DongWon] There's something really, really interesting about first person, because it is both our oldest form of storytelling, because just the way that we tell a story is I was walking down the street the other day. I was going to the store. The dog jumped out in the street, and I chased after it. Right? Like, that is just how we tell stories, and the way people have told stories as long as they were telling stories. But as a literary convention, as a part of the novel, it's one of the newest forms. At least in a dominant way. Like, there are examples that go back. But in terms of being so dominant in terms of how it exists in the contemporary novel, it is very much a thing that arose in, like, modern days, in like early mid twentieth century. Right? So one thing that I see people struggle with, when people push back against first-person, which I still see kind of a shocking amount. But when I see that pushback, it's… There's like an artificiality to first-person that can be a tough hurdle for some readers to get past. Because you're reading a text, but the text is being told to you as if a person is narrating it. So who is narrating it to you in that moment becomes a question in certain reader's minds. So there's like a… There is both an incredible immediacy, intimacy, and familiarity to first-person, and a layer of artificiality that requires one extra jump for the reader.
[Howard] And… That's weird, because I will accept that there is magic and spaceships and vampires, but I'm really struggling with the fact that there is a book.
[Mary Robinette] I think it's not so much that it's… Like, I can think of a bajillion examples of first-person. Because the novel would often start… When you're looking at the trajectory of the novel as a travelogue. Then you're looking at Poe, who often used first-person.
[DongWon] It's like where does epistolary end…
[Mary Robinette] Right. Exactly.
[DongWon] And first-person begin is a we… The distinction that you and I are drawing here. But [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. But… But I think the thing is that one of the reasons it fell out of fashion is that people started to get hung up on the… But really did they have time to write this while they were being dragged away by eldritch horrors?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Yes. Always yes.
[Dan] Yeah. At what point in the story is this account being given? Well, I like you mentioned the kind of newness of it. It is… First person is going through a huge Renaissance right now in certain corners of the market. A lot of book tubers, books to grammars, book talkers… There's a big trend going around. I see where they will just flat out refuse to read something unless it's in first-person.
[DongWon] Huh.
 
[Dan] That's obviously not everybody, and it's not the whole market. But it's kind of having a heyday right now, which I think is really interesting. I want to ask the question what is first-person bad at? As long as we're talking about it, what can you not do very effectively with it?
[DongWon] Clarity.
[Howard] Avoid the capital I.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I think first-person… It can be harder to truly communicate to the reader what's happening in a complex scene. Because you're anchored to one perspective and one understanding of what's happening in a particular moment. So there's an immediacy to that. But when you think about your subjective experience of a large event, you're not getting the full picture because you're only seeing a little piece of it. Right? So I think we think of first-hand experience as the most true, but in a lot of ways, the way we consume information about what happened is somebody explaining from multiple perspectives. So when you're limiting yourself to one POV in a story, you are removing access to a lot of tools that you have that you would have in cinema, for example. You think cinematically, all the things the camera sees are just what the character's actually seeing, what the character's seeing is very different. Right? So you're much more constrained. So if you want real true like grounded clarity about feelings, emotions, what happened in a complex scene, first-person's pretty tough to make that happen.
[Howard] Your multi POV ensemble cast…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] In a heist thing… Yeah, that's difficult to pull off in first-person.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's also, I think, first-person… You can cheat when we get to third person, you can cheat to show us what a character looks like even when you're in tight third person, but when you're in first-person, unless they step up and have a mirror moment, which… I was walking down the hall and I stopped to regard myself in the mirror.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I had curly red hair, bright green eyes, and was extremely buxom.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I think that everyone thinks about themselves [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Exactly.
[Erin] Just in that tone. Well, I agree with it. Like, clarity is part of it, and also just knowledge. Like the characters… A lot of times, you have, like, but the reader knows and what the character knows. In first-person, they get… They are the same. Because… Unless… Now there are ways to cheat out of this, but in general, you only know what the character knows about the world, about the situation, about the experience. So if there's something that you really need, like description, self-description, the reader to know, but there's no reason for the character to know that, you're going to have to figure out a workaround. Even in unreliable… Like, one of the things I really like doing in pieces with unreliable narrators is setting up a reliable outsider that is… That can be established, like, because they hold a position of authority or you see them being reliable in several scenes, and can point out through dialogue or through their own actions what's happening outside of the first-person, that character's first-person experience.
[DongWon] They can also…
[Erin] They can then misinterpret what that reliable person does, but the reader… It's clear enough to the reader, like, what happens. I think about a scene I wrote in my story Wolfy Things where the mom is crying and the sun misinterprets it that he's like…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] She's trying to salt the food with her tears. Like… Because no one's going to do that.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, you, as a reader, know that seems unlikely. Probably she's just crying over the soup.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] But he cannot accept that. But because it's something clear enough to the reader, it comes through. But it requires a lot of work to do that. Where is in a third person, you could probably just say, like, she's crying and then you would know.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] You could cheat that also with chapter bumps. You insert in universe material that appears at the top of the chapter, and then the first-person account either accounts for that or doesn't account for that. That can argue with the character just fine.
[Dan] All right. Let's take a moment here to pause, and when we come back, we'll discuss this further.
 
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[Dan] All right. So we've talked about things that first-person does well and does less well. Let's talk now about how. How can we use first-person effectively? What are some good tools for using first person as a perspective?
[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to talk about one of the traps of first-person is a way of bringing us around to an effective tool. One of the traps of first-person is navelgazing. So it is, I think, one of the things that it does really well is that you can get into the character's interiority, but you can, like, have a character just sit in a room and think about themselves and never move on. So, for me, one of the tools that I often try to use when I'm doing that to combat the navelgazing is that if I have a scene where my character needs to think about something for whatever reason, I try to pair it with an activity that is somehow plot related. So, like, if there's this is a conspiracy, I think a conspiracy thing is happening, I will have them trying to repair a rover. Then, as they're repairing the rover, and having conversations, different things will then trigger for them. It's like hum, I think this is… You just said something very fishy, and what's going on with your face right now? But it is… Having that interaction with the outside world keeps… For me, keeps my navelgazing to a minimum.
[Howard] Yeah. It's the multi sensory approach. Only saying what the character is thinking about is just the navelgazing. But, I'm thinking about this. I'm seeing that. I smell this. I heard that. I'm touching this. My heart is pounding or I have a headache. I have… There's a whole huge spectrum of senses that you can tap into with first-person. If you don't use at least three of them, I feel like you're leaving too much unsaid.
[Erin] A tool that I really like that… To play around with with first-person is cadence. What the rhythm of that person's thoughts are as they're driving things. Because it tells you about the emotions. One thing that's really… You can have a very self-aware first-person character, but a lot of times they're not sure what's going on, exactly. They're afraid, but they may not say, like, I am afraid right now. They may just be experiencing fear. But what you can do is go with a faster Kayden. All of a sudden, like breathing heavy, like the heartbeat racing, when you're afraid. They're noticing things that are fearful, but also, the entire cadence of the piece as that sort of taut feeling to it, and then when they're safety, the cadence slows down. It gives a completely different feeling without you needing to signal it from the outside.
[Mary Robinette] Also, that is something that is extremely apparent when I'm doing audiobooks. When I'm narrating and the author is thinking about that, it shows up on the page and you can really hear it. It is much easier to [garbled]
[Howard] [garbled] makes your job easier.
[Mary Robinette] So much easier. I actually think that that's one of the reasons we're seeing the surgeon audio, in first-person narratives, is because they do better in audiobook. But there are times when I have to narrate something and the writer has not paid attention to the Kayden, and attempting to get the emotion into that scene is significantly harder, even though you have the added layer of I do cool things with my voice. It is undercut by the cadence.
[Howard] One of the reasons, Mary Robinette, that your first half of the episode mirrors scene was so humorous is that it breaks the true cadence of that person. That is not the pattern that you would use, that is not the cadence of… At least not of my inner voice. When I look in the mirror…
[Mary Robinette] No.
[Howard] My inner voice… Well, I'm not saying mirrors scenes are bad. I will look in the mirror and the cadence for my mirror scene is, Howard, you gonna go outside looking like that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Yep. Then I'm off. Now the reader has an insight into how I feel about how I look and how much I care. That's all we need.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, most of my mirror scenes would actually be…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] How did you sleep on your hair to get [garbled]
[laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like that.
 
[Dan] So, if we are using first person as a lens… Let me rephrase. If are using proximity as a lens, this is how we want to look at our work and we… What are some of the reasons we might choose first-person then? What is going to guide us? What… I guess this kind of comes back to the question we asked in the beginning of what does first-person do that the others can't. But what are some situations where we will say you know what this really needs? First-person.
[DongWon] It's so intimate. Right? We're talking about proximity. Right? First-person is… You're right up on that perspective, you're in their head with them. So when you need anything that is raw emotion. Right? That's why it works so well in YA, why we see it there so much. That's why you see it a ton in what I think of as genres of the body. Right? So, humor, romance, erotica, and horror. Right? Like, horror in particular, first-person is just so valuable there because as a person is experiencing disruption, fear, sensations in their body, all of those things, are stuff that you can get to so quickly and so closely as first-person that can take extra work when you're having to do the work of third person limited or omniscient of describing a broader scene. Right?
[Dan] Yeah.
[DongWon] So I think whenever you want to tap into someone's like emotional subjective experience, first person does so well for that. I think that's why it's doing so well on things like book talk right now.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] When you've got a plot reveal that that moment, first-person can do that so well. Because we are right there. The Revelation of whatever it is, the plot twist, the monster, the whatever, the reader is getting that reveal at the same time the character is getting that reveal at the end. Yeah. Immediacy and proximity. And, as a writer, that lens of proximity… You may choose to look at your reveal's pacifically at the reveal you have in mind and say, you know what? This is going to work better in first-person than anything else I can do. So maybe that's the way I need to shape the rest of the story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Yeah. I think that a lot of times, I think of first-person stories as stories of perspective. Because you've chosen to use this particular… That character is the lens into the story more than anything else. Because you are filtering everything through the way that character experiences things. So, choosing it when you're going to have a reveal that shifts that character's perspective, where they understand something they didn't understand before, that they couldn't understand before, is where something… Where it really appeals to me. Where there is a reason in which that person as a filter is the best filter for the story.
[Mary Robinette] That ties into one of my absolute favorite things that you can do with first-person that you cannot do with any of the others. It's the proximity thing. That you can have the character change by the act of telling the story. Like, some of my favorite stories are ones… It's one of the reasons I love the John Cleaver books so much is that John is not the same person at the beginning is at the end, and the way John is relating to the reader has changed. That is so… I think that's so interesting. It works really… I think, really, really well in coming-of-age stories. I think that's one of the reasons we often see first-person paired with younger protagonists, because you more commonly have a coming-of-age story with them. But it is something that is just so delicious, so intimate.
[Dan] Yeah. I know that we are kind of running up against the end of time here…
[Erin] The end of time!
[Dan] The end of all… Not necessarily all time, but the end of our time for this. I do want to get back to…
[Mary Robinette] As I was sitting on the couch, Dan told me that I was running up against the end of time. I paused to look in the mirror…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Are you really going outside like that?
[Dan] This is part of the lens of where and when.
[Erin] Exactly. At least I'll look good during my final [garbled]
 
[Dan] I do want to circle back to unreliability. Because not only… That was something we mentioned not only as a strength of first-person, but it's one of the things that is… One of the downsides of first-person. Not necessarily a downside, is that it's really hard to not be unreliable with it. What is the value of an unreliable narrator? This isn't really an unreliable narration episode, but it's so closely linked to first-person. You were talking about the John Cleaver books. That's leaning so heavily on that, the idea that what he is telling you is what he thinks is true, not what is actually true. That dramatic irony of being able to listen to him talk about himself and know, oh, dude, you are wrong about so many things. What is the value of unreliability and why might a reader, an author, I mean, choose to put that into their story?
[DongWon] I mean, going back several episodes to goals and motivations. Right? A character's goals often involve them lying to themselves a little bit because they think they want X, but what they really need is Y. Right? So the movement from understanding what your original goal was to what your new goals are is one of that unreliability coming to the fore so you realize that, like, oh, my understanding of the world is shifting. The reason why first-person is sort of inherently unreliable, because character growth necessarily changes what is quote unquote real for the audience experience. Right? So you're shifting… Which is both what makes first-person fun and so challenging is that it's always already moving around you at all times.
[Mary Robinette] There's the idea that we talk about periodically, what is the lie the character believes? There's a bunch of different forms that that takes, but I think one of the things that you can really play with in first-person is that you can reveal character by what the character is lying to themselves about and how they are lying to themselves and the lengths that they will go to to preserve those lies. That's something that's, I think, much easier to do in first-person because of the navelgazing. But because they can do a soliloquy in ways that a third person really can't. Then, that in itself, can become a form of conflict as they are struggling with the fact that all of their reasons are breaking down.
[DongWon] I call that narrative parallax because the slight shift in perspective lets you reveal more.
[Erin] Something that just occurs to me as you asked this question is that the reason because I love unreliable narration. It's like my favorite thing ever. I think it's because I like characters that don't necessarily change or grow. Which means that the forward momentum in the story has to be the reader realization of the truth of who that character is. So, like, if they're not, like, because if they were doing… They externally sort of do the same things, but you… They understand more about the world, you understand more about them. It grows in context, as opposed to in action. Sometimes I think unreliability works well because it feels like you're moving forward as they continue to misinterpret the world, even though they don't do anything different. It still gives it a sense of a forward lean in the reader's mind.
[Howard] I think two of my favorite examples of unreliable narrators are in first-person our books where you don't realize until the very end that this is a single POV that has been telling you a story in multiple POVs. The Fifth Season and Player of Games by Iain Banks. Fifth Season by N K Jemison. You discover late in the stories, oh, this story has a first-person narrator who is part of the action, and they been lying to me about their involvement the whole time, until the very end. That's not really a first-person narrative, and maybe that's a segue into how we mess with proximity later.
 
[Dan] Well, now we finally have arrived at the end of times…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] So, it's homework time. What I would like you to do is go pick up a book that you love, something that you enjoy. Find a scene that you think is really great that is not in first-person, and take a crack at rewriting it in first-person from the point of view of one of the characters in it. Pay attention to what types of changes this requires you to make, how information comes across differently.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.50: The Unreliable Narrator

Dec. 14th, 2023 07:07 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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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[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 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.52: The WXR 2022 Q&A

Dec. 30th, 2022 04:03 pm
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Writing Excuses 17.52: The WXR 2022 Q&A
 
 
Q&A Points:
Q: What strategies can you use to make the reader aware of the complexities of your world without infodumping?
A: Drop bits of reference into the dialogue without details. Pick themes that your characters are passionate about. Add stuff that is not vital to the plot. Let the character interact with them.
Q: How do you balance a sense of progress with an unreliable narrator?
A: With a goal that they are aiming for. Why are you using an unreliable narrator? Knowing that, and being deliberate about it, allows you to mix it with progress. Progress is asking questions and answering them, which is not necessarily connected to whatever the narrator may be lying about. 
Q: How can I make two magic systems work in the same setting when one is very underpowered compared to the other, and the protagonist uses the weaker magic?
A: That's the best way to do it! Because it has conflict. Show that they are the underdog, but they use their skills better. This builds sympathy and rooting interest. 
Q: Have you ever based a character on yourself or someone that you know? If so, did you find that more or less difficult to write?
A: Yes, every character is a reflection of me, in some way. No, not actively base on myself, that I consider to be me. Basing a character on someone you know? Strip out the details, keep the patterns of mannerisms. Base on a struggle or a conflict. Tuckerizations!
Q: So, on book adaptations, Dan, as someone who has had a book adapted, can you talk a little bit about what the process looks like and things to keep in mind when working on adaptations?
A: New and innovative is better than faithful. Script form, on screen, is not the same as novel form. 
Q: Do you have any recommendations for conventions or other writing events an aspiring author should attend for networking purposes?
A: Surrey International Writers Conference. Nebula conference. Check your local conventions.
World Fantasy. World Con. Story Makers and Pikes Peak. 
Q: Do you use any particular methods to calibrate how detailed your scientific or technical terms are for each series or audience or genre?
A: Consider a cheese sandwich. If all it does is feed the character, you don't say much about it. If the character is a chef, you may say more. Technical jargon is the same. Think about the structural purpose they serve in your story.
Q: How do you cultivate an audience, specifically how do you interact with fans responsibly, especially starting out when they may number less than 10 and are essentially your peers?
A: Try to add value to every group, every conversation you have. Marketing is a minus value, so add value to the group before you try to market to them. Make a contribution, be interesting, make sure people enjoy spending time with you first. Consider a street team! 
 
[Season 17, Episode 52]
 
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on the Writing Excuses Cruise 2022.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] And you guys are going to ask us questions, despite our not-smartness.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Go ahead. First question.
[Julie] Hey, can you hear me?
[Dan] Yup.
[Julie] I'm Julie. What strategies can you use to make the reader aware of the complexities of your world without infodumping?
[Howard] What strategy… I love this question, and James Sutter gave us a great answer to that a couple seasons ago. Just by dropping little lines of dialogue, "the screaming hills" or "The monks of whatever" as little bits of reference without any additional details. These are just things that exist, that the characters know about, and that gets sprinkled into the dialogue, and then off they go with the plot.
[Brandon] I would pick a few themes for your book. In specific, things that you are going to… That your characters are passionate about. Right? Everybody… Kind of because Tolkien did Tolkien's thing wants to pick the ones that Tolkien did, which is not a bad idea. But your character might be a calligrapher, and they might be interested in the history of fonts on your world. They can talk about the history of fonts, and drop those hints in, not at length, not infodumps, but mentions here and there. Which will give the same sense of depth in history to your world, and be relevant to your character and their passions, rather than that same character talking about the history of that fort over there, which might be something that Tolkien would have done. Pick the ones that your characters are passionate about.
[Dan] I think so much of what provides depth to a story is stuff that is not vital to the plot. If we… If the only information we ever get is the information we require in order to understand the current story taking place, then the world is only as big as the current story taking place. Whereas, if we have other things, other history, other cultural details that have nothing to do with the current story, then that makes the world very large.
[Mary Robinette] I pick them based on whether or not my character is interacting with them. So if the character is interacting with the food, then I can describe that food. If they aren't interacting with the food, then I do not describe the national dish of whatever fiction fantasy world I have.
 
[Brandon] All right. Question number two, by the person in the excellent T-shirt. One of mine.
[Todd] Ah, yes. I'm Todd, and I'm currently wearing the same shirt as Brandon, but… For my question, I'm wondering how do you balance a sense of progress with an unreliable narrator?
[Brandon] Uh…
[Mary Robinette] Ah…
[Brandon] How do you balance… Oh, that's… I don't have to repeat them because…
[Mary Robinette] Um… So, your character can still have a goal that they're aiming for. Frequently, that unreliability is about some aspect of self. So, you don't… You can still be honest to the reader by having the character react in ways that are consistent with whatever that secret is. Which allows you to make that forward progress and then kind of drop clues before you do the big reveal about what the unreliability is.
[Brandon] Yup. I would agree. Unreliable narrators should always be a feature, not a bug. Right? Like, if you're using it, you should be using it for a reason. What is your goal in using the unreliable narrator? What are you achieving? Well, that will then tell you how you can intermix that with progress. Because you can cheat and really fun ways with an unreliable narrator. There can be several… I mean, a character that I wrote who lost several years of time in their memory, or parts of the time in their memory, becomes unreliable not because of them hiding from the reader, but they legit don't know. This then becomes a cool reveal. So highlighting those things… The thing that I would say you most want the reader to pick up on is that you as an author are doing this on purpose. The character is unreliable on purpose, not on accident. They will give you all kinds of accommodation if they know it's on purpose. As soon as they suspect it's on accident, you start to lose them.
[Howard] I think that the sense of progress and the narrator might be a false concomitance here, that those are not necessarily related. For me, the sense of progress comes from a question being asked and then later being answered. Every time I get an answer to a question I had, to a question posed by the story, I feel like we've made progress. That, for me, is completely disconnected from who the narrator may or may not be lying about.
[Mary Robinette] I just realized part of why I think they may have asked this question. That if you're writing something like a heist where…
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] The narrator has a secret goal.
[Brandon] Right, right. In a lot of heists, they do. That's a very good point to bring out. A lot of times, your character will have a secret goal. Again, I still think it comes back to make sure the reader knows that it was done on purpose. So they can start to suspect and put things together. I always feel like if you're heisting the reader, the clues should have been there all along. Now, there are really brilliant ones were you're not supposed to notice anything is wrong until the last minute before it happens. But in that case, you need to have created a narrative that has payoffs all along, otherwise it's suspicious.
 
[Brandon] Question?
[Unknown] How can I make two magic systems work in the same setting when one is very underpowered compared to the other, and the protagonist uses the weaker magic?
[Brandon] Ooo. That's the better way to do it, usually.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Why?
[Brandon] Because conflict. Stories are about conflict and what you can and can't do. I'm glad you're asking this question, but the answer is actually pretty simple in that you don't have to really worry about power level in books, particularly if your character is the weaker party. The answer is how do you do this is you make it very clear that they're the weaker party, they're the underdog, and you show them using their skills better than those who are overpowered. Right? The whole idea of I am not as strong, so therefore I must be very tactical in how I apply the strength I do have, builds enormous amounts of sympathy and rooting interest for a character. If you have a character that's superstrong, it's actually much harder because building that rooting interest when they are from a position of power means that the conflict has to be approached differently. So I would say present these kind of magic systems in an interesting way that reinforces what you're doing. Right? If the powerful magic system is in the control of the elite, and the week magic system… I mean, this is the most obvious one, but it's a good example… Is in the hands of the underdogs, both socially and narratively, then you will… It'll be… It'll flow from there.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The plucky hero is a common trope, but one of the things that you often see in superhero movies is that the super villain is ridiculously overpowered compared to the superhero. Those are essentially two different magic systems.
[Dan] Yeah. Well, also, when you start to think about what counts as a magic system in the kind of grand metaphor of just character power, look at something like the Star Wars series. The original trilogy has one Jedi, but that doesn't make the other characters not interesting. Right? Han Solo's magic system is that he can attack people from range and he can fly through space. He does that with other things. It's not as powerful as being a Jedi, but it's not on interesting and it still is vital to the story and to the society that they live in.
 
[Brandon] All right. Next question.
[Lisha] Hi. I'm Lisha Bickard. Have you ever based a character on yourself or someone that you know? If so, did you find that more or less difficult to write?
[Brandon] Okay. Let's split that into two questions. First, have you based a character on yourself?
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Howard] Yup.
[Dan] No.
[Brandon] I would say every character I write as a piece of me. Some aspect of my personality comes out. It's inevitable.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Yeah. That's… Same here. I've given up on trying to say, "Oh, this character is nothing like me." Because I am alive to write what they say, so, at some level, they're at least a little bit like me.
[Dan] But I feel like that's a very different question from have you actively based one on yourself versus do elements of yourself bleed through.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Dan] I don't think I've ever written a character who I consider to be me.
[Brandon] I would agree that I have not done that, either. There's no… I mean, I don't know if you're talking about self inserts, but, like the Dirk Pitt books, Clive Cussler always shows up in them as a character. I've never done that.
[Mary Robinette] No, I haven't done that either. But I have given my character… Like Ellena, I've talked very openly about in Calculating Stars, that while I don't have an experience personally with anxiety, my experience with depression is her experience with anxiety. That I mapped that. Also, there's several other things that I'm just like, and that's… The other thing I talk about is her experience with Parker is based exactly on someone that I used to work with. So I have done that.
 
[Brandon] Let's take the second half of this one. Basing a character on someone you know? Have you done this? Pitfalls? How did you approach it? These sorts of things.
[Mary Robinette] Again, so, Parker is based on somebody that I know. I strip out the identifying details, and what you're left with is the patterns of mannerisms. In Glamorous Histories, I've often talked about the fact that Mr. Vincent is heavily based on my husband, who I frequently describe as the love child of Mr. Darcy and Eeyore. Mr. Vincent and Rob do not have the same back story in any way, shape, or form. But they have the same mannerisms. They have many of the same interests and attitudes.
[Brandon] It's kind of uncanny.
[Mary Robinette] It really… Yeah.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Howard] There was this one time where, as a favor to a friend, I wrote a character into a story, and then had him kill his own dang self. Really stupidly, and… That was a lot of fun both for me and for my friend.
[Brandon] I don't generally base on… Well, I do and I don't. I base on a conflict often. If I have a friend who has a struggle or a conflict, I will put that in. The only characters that are based on friends more overtly than that are Tuckerizations, where they get to say they make an appearance in the books.
[Dan] Yeah. I often auction off for service auctions and charities and things the ability to be brutally murdered in a Dan Wells book. That's not so much copying the mannerisms as just, "Hey, look. You can show all your friends that…
[Mary Robinette] Your name.
[Dan] A monster killed you."
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Your name is in this book. Frequently, with Tuckerizations, they are not anything like the person, they just have a name in common.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] One of the pitfalls is that if you have not cleared it with them ahead of time, that it can be… Like, my husband knows that I put his mannerisms into books. I have a friend who was a Tuckerization, and then I was like, "Oh, I'm very sorry, but your Tuckerization is actually going to be a villain in the next book. Is that okay?"
[Brandon] Yeah. The Tuckerizations I do of friends stay in the background almost exclusively. If it's an unflattering Tuckerization of someone I know, I always change the name and the description, and it's then just kind of the concept becomes on inspiration.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is what happens when you write something that you think is a standalone and they ask you for a sequel.
[Dan] And then they ask for more. I had a character, there was a teacher, a schoolteacher in the John Cleaver books, that was named after a friend of mine who is a schoolteacher. Before that went to print, I realized, oh, wait. In the next book I'm going to turn this guy into a pedophile. So I'm going to change that name really quick and make sure that that does not come back to bite him in any way.
 
[Brandon] So, let's stop for our book of the week. Our book of the week is my book.
[Yay!]
[Brandon] So, 15 years ago plus, I started writing a little series called Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians as a way to take a break between the Mistborn books. It's as different from Mistborn as I could possibly get inside my brain. About kids who have weird magical talents that sound like drawbacks until they use them. Like being late for things or being bad at dancing or things like that. Now, long-awaited last book, last secret book of the series. I actually pitched this book to my editor. I said, "I want to do five books, and then end on a horrible, horrible cliffhanger. Because there kind of comedic, and that's what the character's been warning them. Then pretend there's going to be no sixth book because the main character refuses to write the book. Then I want to have a sixth book which is finally coming out written by another character in the series to give the actual ending because the main character was a dweeb and would not write the ending of his series, where he actually kind of proves to be a little bit more heroic than he's been telling people all along. So we have Bastille versus The Evil Librarians, written with my good friend Janci Patterson, who's been on the podcast a number of times. Who helped me get the voice right, because I was struggling with it, which is part of what took so long. It is finally out and you can get it. The series is now finished.
[Mary Robinette] Yay!
[Dan] Hooray!
[Howard] Huzzah!
 
[Brandon] All right. So, let's go to the next question.
[Unknown] Awesome. So, on book adaptations, Dan, as someone who has had a book adapted, can you talk a little bit about what the process looks like and things to keep in mind when working on adaptations?
[Dan] Yeah. So, my general theory of adaptations is that I am far more interested in something that is new and innovative rather than endlessly faithful. That is an assertion that gets sorely tested when it is your own little baby…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Being adapted. I did not have creative control over the Serial Killer movie, but I did get the chance to read all the drafts of the script and be involved with casting and things like that. The initial drafts of the script, and even the final shooting script, included some changes that I disagreed with pretty wildly. Fortunately, I had, over the process, become good friends with the director to the point that he was able to just say, "Hey, trust me. This is an art form that I am familiar with and you are not. Give me the benefit of the doubt here." I did, and ultimately realized, oh, the changes he was making would not have worked in the book. They would not have been effective in novel form. But the changes I was suggesting he make to his script would not have worked in script form. They would not have worked on the screen. So I was right and he was right, and he was smart enough to know that that's why I was arguing with him, is because it was simply an art form that I didn't know as well. The final product, he made the right calls on those adaptive changes, and I made the right call in that I stopped making a stink about it.
 
[Brandon] All right. Next question.
[Unknown] Hi. Do you have any recommendations for conventions or other writing events an aspiring author should attend for networking purposes?
[Brandon] Oh. Specifically for networking purposes.
[Mary Robinette] There are two major ones that I would recommend. Surrey International Writers Conference in Surrey, B. C., Which is my favorite writers conference besides the… Including the ones that I run, actually. The one that were currently on, Writing Excuses, we constantly tell our students that the best thing they get out of this is the interactions, but you know that because you're here. Then, the Nebula conference is designed specifically to be a thing for developing and professional authors.
[Brandon] I met my agent at the Nebula conference 20 years ago. And he's still my agent.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So those are the big things for me. But I would also look at your local conventions. Because you don't have to travel places. And also, you don't have to go to conventions to network. You can network online. Also, you don't have to network to be successful. There are plenty of authors who are successful who are complete recluses. There are a number of things that it helps with. But you can also have a career without doing that, if it is something that you're not comfortable with.
[Brandon] indeed, I'd say it's the least important it's ever been before breaking into the business. Not to say it can't still be useful, but as in the publishing is happening… Happened, as publishing has started to spread out and move out of New York a little bit more, and things like that, the need to network has decreased a little.
[Dan] Let me ask a question. One con we always used to recommend as a really fantastic networking con was World Fantasy. It is my perception that that is no longer as helpful of a networking con as it used to be. Is that… Would you agree with that, or am I wrong?
[Mary Robinette] You are correct. Yeah, you're correct. The… That was David Hartwell's home convention. He always asked his fellow editors and his author stable to attend the convention. With his passing, while networking still happens, there is not quite the same presence...
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] There since that. They also had some other issues that often happen when you move a convention from place to place. World Con is another one of those which depending on where World Con is… And this is also true with World Fantasy. Depending on which group of volunteers are running it, they can be more helpful than others. But you have to be pretty deep into the community already to know which one is going to be a good one. So when they're close to you, absolutely go to them. But I wouldn't always recommend making the trip for it.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Brandon] If you are in the inner mountain West, the Story Makers Conference tends to be our best conference in the Salt Lake area.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, Pikes Peak in Colorado is very good as well.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] The one piece of counsel I'd offer when thinking about networking is that if you are slightly impatient, and what you are looking for is someone a few rungs up to help you really launch the career, that's challenging, and that's a hard relationship to build. If you're willing to be patient, if you're willing to network and make friends with people who are at your level in career launching or in book writing or whatever, and you begin to grow with those people, in many cases these are the relationships which five years or even 10 years down the road, these are the relationships that will redefine your career when somebody comes to you and says, "Oh, hey, by the way, I just got a show green lit, and I need a script doctor, and I know you can do it." It's… I love to see people just willing to make friends. Those friendships that you make are going to be more genuine and I think they're going to be more helpful to you.
 
[Brandon] All right. Go ahead.
[Unknown] Do you use any particular methods to calibrate how detailed your scientific or technical terms are for each series or audience or genre?
[Mary Robinette] My cheese sandwich analogy. So, if you've got a cheese sandwich and it is in a scene where everyone knows what a cheese sandwich is in the cheese sandwich serves only the function of feeding the character, you don't need to describe it deeply. If your character is a chef and they are doing something exquisite with the cheese sandwich, you need to describe it more deeply, because the character is going to have a different relationship with it. It's the same with the technical jargon that you throw out. If you've got an alien that is… Has never experienced a cheese sandwich before, what often happens to a reader, to an early career writer, is that they want to say, "All right. So a cheese sandwich is made out of cheese and bread." The alien is like, "But, okay, what is bread?" You're like, "Bread comes from wheat, which is grown in…" Like, none of that is actually useful. What you want to say is a cheese sandwich is something that you hold in your hands and you eat it and it's tasty. So when you're thinking about the jargon, you're thinking about the structural purpose… The mechanical research details… You're thinking about the structural purpose that they serve in the story. I often just put in a bracket that says technical detail goes here. Or jargon goes here. Because frequently the only reason it's there is to demonstrate competence porn.
 
[Brandon] All right. This is going to be our last question for this episode. So, hit us.
[Qwamai] Hello. My name is Qwamai Simmons. How do you cultivate an audience, specifically how do you interact with fans responsibly, especially starting out when they may number less than 10 and are essentially your peers?
[Brandon] Mmm. That's an excellent question. So, interacting with an audience. There's a couple tips that I would be… If they are your peers, in particular, but… You always want to be value adding to any group that you're part of. Marketing generally value negatives, so keep in mind that it's like your value to a group is going to earn you chances to occasionally network. The sorts of things that I don't like seeing our social media feeds that are just… Network is the wrong term. That was from before.
[Dan] Market.
[Brandon] Market. Are just marketing, are just big marketing. You'll see this sometimes on Internet forums or things. People pop in and be like, "Hey, I just sold my first book. Here it is." And it's the first time you've even seen them. If you're not value adding, don't be doing that. Try to be adding something to every group you're part of and every conversation you're part of.
[Dan] Yeah. Think of your community of readers as a group of friends that you interact with. Not necessarily close friends that you invite to your house all the time, but people that you want to hang out with and that you want to pay attention to you. If you and your friend group, all you ever say is, "Hey, I have a lot of shirts for sale on my website," you won't get invited to parties anymore. Whereas, if you are contributing things, if you are interesting, if people enjoy spending time with you, then, suddenly, you are a valuable friend that people love to hang out with.
[Howard] This comes back to what I said earlier about patience. We're all inherently impatient to some degree, we want to launch ourselves from zero readers to 20,000 readers. I don't have a magic bullet for that. I don't have a magic trick for that. The thing that I have found is that it is… Doing marketing where I am asking the marketing under something, that's exhausting. I just allow myself to be myself with my audience and be silly. Then, every so often, I let them know that I'm doing a thing. Is that effective? I don't know if it's effective, I don't know if I'm actually good at this. But I know that I'm way more comfortable with that than I am with the other approaches.
[Mary Robinette] The last thing that I would say about this is that it's very easy to sound very calculating when you're thinking about this. I've heard people talk about it as a social bank. You have to put things into the social bank in order to have a withdrawal later. That is true. Also, being a good person, which is what we're talking about, being a value add, is not transactional. It's like when you are a good, contributing member of the community, you're not doing it because, well, then they're going to be nice to me.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That is the wrong way to approach it. The way you approach it is by being genuinely interested in other people. Finding the community that you want to be part of. That's the piece that you're doing. The people that you want to be part of, that you're genuinely interested in, they don't owe you friendship in return. Right? They don't owe you anything. You're doing that because it is something that you find satisfying. You kind of have to approach it that way. Otherwise, you are going to be angry and bitter, because you've entered a transactional relationship that no one else agreed to.
[Dan] Yeah. I do want to point out that there's kind of a community building thing that I have seen a lot of authors use. This has become pretty common over the last two or three years, at least in some of the circles that I move in, called the street team. I'm sure that there are other authors that have different names for it. This is something that is kind of overtly transactional in a way that avoids the problems Mary Robinette is talking about. Saying… Assembling a group of people and saying, "Hey, I will give you an advance manuscript or I will give you these other things because you're a super fan and I would love to have you help me spread the word about my books." That's something that I see… Maybe it's mostly in YA. I don't know if this is something the rest of you have run across. But it is a system that if you handle it correctly works well to build a community that way. Like, you're part of my club now. Here's all the benefits of the club. Then, also, you're going to help.
[Howard] I was standing at my booth at World Con and a super fan had bought a book from me and someone else came up to the booth and was kind of like, "What's this?" Super fan launched into a fantastic pitch for my stuff. I very calculatedly, very carefully, did zero things to stop them.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Are you overselling me? I don't care. You dearly love this, and you love this in a way that I would love for other people to love this. So go. Run. Do the thing.
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to put in a quick plug for my Lady Astronaut club. Which is, basically, I have built a community. You can send away a self-addressed stamped envelope, you can be a member of my Patreon, someone can vouch for you in the community. We call it the kindest corner of the Internet. It is a place where I get to interact, but also, it is, at times, a street team. Like, if I come in and say, "Hello, I really need help with X." But I never approach it with the expectation that they will do these things for me.
 
[Brandon] All right. We are out of time. Thank you all for the excellent questions here at the Writing Excuses Cruise.
[Applause]
[Brandon] Your homework is to write out a few questions. To think about it, think about what are the things you need help most on in your writing career right now. Now, we are unavailable to answer your questions because we are off somewhere else. But I find that formulating these things, sitting and thinking what do I need, really helps you kind of put a point on what you need to do, where you need to learn, where you need to grow. That's going to help you get those answers. So, ask yourself the question, what is holding me back the most in my writing career, and what question would I have for the team if I were able to ask it. Maybe you will eventually be able to do so. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.45: Next Level Narration

Nov. 14th, 2018 10:52 am
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.45: Next Level Narration
 
 
Key points: Leveling UP your narrative. Get the standard narrator, a character much like yourself, with similar experiences, solid first. Then try things like unreliable narrators. Study writers who have done something similar before you experiment with narration and form. Try breaking the fourth wall, making your reader aware that they are reading something, suspicious of the person who is talking. With unreliable narrators, at some point, the story reveals that they are unreliable. Figure out how the character sees the world, what their defaults are, and how that affects what they tell the reader. Try multiple witnesses, narrators who have their own angle on what is happening. Older, younger, different life experience. Brains wired differently. Try to understand and represent their reactions. Make them rounded, with one aspect that is different. Use forums, YouTube, listening to people to help you. Be cautious of carrying defaults from one work to the next. 
 
( There are more words? )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Next Level Narration.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.
[Maurice] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Amal] I'm Amal.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
 
[Brandon] We are getting near the end of this year on character, and we wanted to spend… Oh, you're giving me the pouty lip…
[Amal] Sad face. I'm so sad.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] I am. It's been so fun.
[Brandon] But we want to talk about kind of leveling up your narrative. When we were talking about this earlier, Mary said, "One of the things we want to focus on is you want to get really good at telling maybe a more standard narrative first." Standard's probably the wrong phrase for that.
[Mary] So, when you're writing as a narrator, one of the things we've talked about multiple seasons is that there is a lot of different techniques and skills. A lot of times, what you want to do is, you want to start and solidify a technique on kind of the easy setting. Which is, by writing a narrator who is very much like yourself, who's lived very similar experiences. Then there is the stuff that's harder. Some of those things are things like unreliable narrators. This is much harder to write than a narrator who is reliable.
[Brandon] Yeah. Let's talk about that. I want to point out before we do that, when we say on easy setting, that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make a worse book. We talk about this a lot. Taking the thing that is in some ways… particularly with a writing technique, natural for you and comfortable for you. Starting with a first person or a third person limited, the kind of standard viewpoints, is a good place to begin before you try something with a really strange omniscient viewpoint. It's not that your book's going to be worse, it's just mastering a skill before you level it up. One of these things that you can try is, as Mary said, an unreliable narrator. Have any of you guys written an unreliable narrator before?
[Mary] Yes.
[Amal] Yes.
[Brandon] Let's talk about it. What did you do, how did you do it, what pitfalls were there, and what advantages were there?
[Maurice] Well. This next level writing is hard.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Really?
[Maurice] So, what happened? How did this come about? So, I love writing short stories. One of the main reasons I love writing short stories is I get to experiment with different forms. So I get… It's like failing in the privacy of your own home. So recently I've tried this unreliable narrator. I've only tried this… like within the last couple months has been me trying this. So the story's about this woman who's experienced some trauma, and it's kind of fractured her psyche. So she is trying to progress through her current day… I mean, trying to push through her day, while both simultaneously reliving the trauma and healing from it at the same time. So the story plays with time and how she's perceiving it and just events. So, like the events are happening out of order, but the order is happening in which she's experiencing her healing. So she's experiencing the story in the terms she needs to in order to be healed. It's… It was a tricky thing… And it's one of those things… I'd gone over… I'd been studying Kelly Link. I read like a lot of Kelly Link stories. Just to sort of… All right, it's time to level up, who do I need to read? So she was one of the people I was studying at the time to experiment with narration, experiment with form. That's why I just dove into it that way.
[Brandon] And it worked out?
[Maurice] So far, so good. I… My writers' group were a little mixed on it. Because they were just… One lady said, "This story is on the verge of making sense."
[Laughter]
[Maurice] Which has been my favorite criticism ever. But I know I'm one draft away from having something I think might be really special.
 
[Amal] I love that. So, the ways in which I've tended to write unreliable narrators is absolutely informed by the fact that I've been in academia for way too long. So I try to approach them from this idea of… Almost like breaking the fourth wall in theater, where you make your reader aware of the fact that they're reading something as opposed to… So that it rises to their minds like, "Where is this information coming from?" You want to make… Like I want them to eventually become suspicious of the person who's talking to them. In a couple of cases, I've… In which I've done it… in one of them, I wrote a story called The Lonely Sea in the Sky, which is about a planetary geologist who's been working on Triton, specifically looking at the diamond ocean, which, for real, exists on Neptune. There's like an ocean of diamond on Neptune. It's like diamond in a liquid state.
[Mary] I am totally googling this when we're out of the studio.
[Amal] It is so cool. It is so cool. Articles about this started coming out in 2000… Anyway, so I won't go there. Point is, so she has succumbed to this illness that is being… That is still being figured out. It's just being called Meisner Syndrome for want of… They don't know whether it's… Like, what the nature of this is. It's a set of symptoms that some people… A very, very, very small percentage of the population succumbs to, and it seems to have to do with interacting with the diamond ocean on Neptune material. She is being encouraged to write a journal about her experiences. But she is… She's arguing that she's not succumbing to this, when she clearly is succumbing to this. So you're having her… You're experiencing her stuff. My… The line that I was trying to walk here was that I want you to be sympathetic with this character… I want you to sympathize rather with this character. I want you to believe everything that she says, but I also want you to see how that is changing over time, and to walk that line of not distrusting her necessarily, but understanding that she is impaired where her own reality is concerned.
 
[Brandon] Right. I think that this is kind of vital to the idea behind an unreliable narrator, is that at some point, it's going to be a part of the story that they are unreliable. Though, in another way of talking about it, it feels like every character is going to be slightly unreliable. This is one of the reasons why we put things in a character voice is they're going to describe things in a specific way. You need to be able to get across to the reader that this is the way the character sees the world. That's going to make them attached to the character. That's what they're going to like about the character. In some cases, like when I've done it, I've been very kind of almost ham-fisted with the this character is funny because they just describe things the opposite of what you would expect this description to be. They will sometimes break the fourth wall and just be like, "Yeah, I'm not going to tell you about that story yet." And these sorts of things. Sometimes you do it very subtly, which is the character who over time, as you're writing the scenes, the reader starts to realize, "Oh, they see the world in a certain way, and there are just certain things they don't see as I would."
[Mary] That's one of the things when we were talking previously in an earlier episode about defaults, that your characters are going to have their own default settings. If you can figure out what these are... the thing about an unreliable narrator that can be frustrating for a reader is when the narrator is inconsistent in ways that break kind of that character's world. So when you can figure out what their defaults are, that's going to tell you the places that they're going to lie, the reasons that they're going to lie, the ways those lies are going to take shape. They're not even necessarily lies. They are ways that the character is reporting things that may be honest and true to them, but that are not representing the way another person would experience that.
[Maurice] So, a story I had a huge amount of fun writing. It was called At the Village Vanguard. It was for Mothership Zeta. It was the first of my Afro-future stories. So it was about this place nicknamed Blacktopia. Cause I'm subtle like that.
[Laughter]
[Mary] So they… Do they dare say, "By my blackness?"
[Laughter]
[Maurice] I missed out on that opportunity.
[Laughter]
[Mary] I just want you to add that to something in the future, please?
[Maurice] It's done. But the way I chose to tell the story, because it's kind of an origin story, but the way I chose the story… The way I chose to tell it was as an oral history. So I actually have… I believe I have seven narrators of this story. It's kind of…
[Wow]
[Maurice] Like… One of those… The reliability of eyewitness testimony, we have seven eyewitnesses who roughly tell… Can tell the same story. But they're all telling their version of the story. Determined by what they saw, or actually buy their own personal biases about what this story now means to them. So that was another way for me to just experiment with form and the whole unreliability of each individual storyteller. You have several witnesses, all who have different angles on it trying to tell one story.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Because didn't you just have a book come out?
[Maurice] I did. I did. It's The Usual Suspects. It's my first foray into middle grade detective novels. It's all about these middle school students who, whenever anything goes wrong in the middle school, they round up this group of middle school students and like, "We know one of y'all did it." That was actually the first… My first time… Speaking of interesting narrators, was using narrators who are much younger than I am. So, it is all told first person through the eyes and mentality of who is essentially on unreliable middle grader. That's almost redundant, but…
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Let's ask about that. How do you write from someone who's much younger or much older, has much more life experience than you have?
[Maurice] Well, in this case, at the time, I had two middle grade students. So, this is going to sound a little weird, but actually I record a lot. So, like, there's times when I will just randomly record like my kids' conversations, and… With the caveat that anything I hear, you can't be punished for. So there's always that that I throw out there. But I literally… I'm studying how they speak to one another, how they speak to their friends. So, like, I can like just really get into their headspace. Being a middle school teacher helps, because I just hear students speak all the time to one another and how they interact and everything like that. So I'm… That has helped me a lot in terms of staying in their heads and sticking with their mentalities and the way they see the world. But on the flipside though, like I said, this is a narrator who as I… I didn't even realize this when I was plotting out the character, but part of him being so intelligent, he has like a streak of paranoia to him. So now… So he's still making observations about the world, but you realize, "You know, this student's a little paranoid." Little things like that.
 
[Brandon] Well, that brings us into another topic I want to talk about. Writing people whose brains are wired differently than your own.
[Mary] Yeah. So, I just wound up doing that in the Lady Astronaut books. Elma is… Has anxiety. She specifically has social anxiety disorder. So she gets really… Like being the center of attention in a large group makes her really uncomfortable. I am clearly not wired that way. I love being in front of a large group. Hi, podcast listeners.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] But I do know what it is like to be anxious about something. I have had anxiety and panic attacks. The ones that I was having were because I had been sexually harassed by my boss for three years. So it's a totally different circumstance. But the physical symptoms are very similar. So what you… What I wound up doing was extrapolating from what I knew. I did a lot of reading about what the disorder was like, and then the symptoms that people were listing, I thought about the times that I had had those physical symptoms. Also, then, I had to think about ways in which… I had to make sure that I was being cognizant of the fact that her default setting about the way she would react to a crowd was different than mine. I would have to go and adjust that. But I also… I know what it is like to mask when you're afraid or upset about something. So again, that's one of the things that often goes with that disorder, is that often people will seem very calm. Really, super calm and chill, because they are masking so hard. So making sure that I was also representing that. That a lot of people around her didn't know that she suffered from this.
[Amal] I wrote a story called The Singing Fish for the… It's called The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. It was a story that I was solicited for at very, very short notice. It was one of those. It was a huge break for me. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer invited me to this, and I think I had something like two weeks in which to turn around a story. This was an ekphrastic collection, like they had a piece of art that they wanted me to write a story for that was appearing in this book. It was literally of like a fish standing on its tail and singing while a very puzzled man looks at it and stuff. So I ended up writing a story that was about critics and art. But… I can't remember now how this even came about. The… One of the characters in this story… It's basically a story that's a bit of a biography of a woman I made up who is an artist who drew this painting… Drew this painting? Drew this pencil and ink sketch.
[Mary] You do underdrawing before you paint.
[Amal] There you go. Yes. So I wanted to make a story about the artist who did this. I genuinely cannot remember… It was just… I fell down a wiki hole. Must've been what it was. I gave her Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Which is a thing where… I think people are not quite sure why it happens. I think there's… I think it might be a physiological thing that comes from having pressure on the brain, but your perceptions get fundamentally altered so that the shapes and sizes of things relative to each other shift drastically. So things that are… Things might seem very, very, very small or very, very, very big. All I had to go on was the Wikipedia description, because I was in a huge time crunch and I wanted to just turn this story in. I felt really uncomfortable about the fact that I was doing this. But for whatever reason that I cannot now remember, it still seemed like a good idea. Partly because I was fascinated by the fact that this existed. I'd never heard of it before. So I just… I tried very hard to imagine what it would be like, and ended up writing it into the story. But wrote it also from… What I tried to do to make up for the fact that I didn't actually know what this was like was to have it ironically be in first person… Be like have her write diary sections where it was her voice. So that I could at least have a whole rounded character who had a voice and this was just something that happened to her sometimes, that she experienced. To try and compensate for that lack of knowledge. As it turns out, one of my closest friends has Alice in Wonderland syndrome.
[Mary] Oh.
[Amal] Which I only learned years after having written this story. I like knuckle bitingly asked, "So what is it like, and what about this story?" Because he totally read the story. He was like, "No, no, you totally got it right. That's what it's like." Like, I can't recommend this…
[Mary] Whew.
[Laughter]
[Amal] As a method. But I think that it was partly just treating that difference as just one facet of the character that I imagined everything else about. Because I'd gotten the rest of that tissue there, it made it that much easier to imagine well, what would it be like if this were happening to me, given this description.
 
[Brandon] One of the tools I love is just going to forums. The Internet is wonderful for this, and see forums where people collectively together and gripe about their life. Those forums are like gold for a writer, because if people are sharing their gripes, you learn so much. Just being a fly on the wall and listening. How… What do you get frustrated when you are… You have this certain way of seeing the world and everybody else sees it differently from you, and they compl… You complain about what they don't see. Those things… When you guys are doing that on forums, know that you are helping us out as writers.
[Maurice] Well, there's another thing. Because when I was writing Buffalo Soldier, one of the early edit notes that I got back was, "Well, you have this child, he's neuro- atypical, but we'd like to hear more from that character." I was a little nervous because I was just like, "Well, how am I going to do that?" I'm obsessive about dialogue. So I was like, "Well, how am I going to get this dialogue right?" YouTube is an un… I mean, YouTube is like the writer's best friend. It gets underutilized as far as I'm concerned. Because I googled… Just randomly "conversation with autistic children." There are tons of videos of mothers who just upload conversations with their autistic children so they can show other mothers. Because everyone thinks that they're isolated and alone. This is a good way for people to just go, "Hey, you know what, we're all in the same boat. Here's what we're going through. What are you going through?" It was a good way to just observe conversations and study those conversations, so I could very much just get the conversations right.
 
[Mary] I'm going to throw in one cautionary thing, which is that once you figured out how a character is going to behave, it's very easy to take those characteristics and carry them forward to your next work as a default. So don't… Like if you got a character who has anxiety, say… I did. She was a mathematician. One of the ways she calm herself down was counting things. Specifically, she would do primes and she would do the numbers of pi. I was working on another story and my character was on the autism spectrum and also had problems with crowds, but very different reasons. Right? One of them is all about sensory input, the other is about attention. It's two different things. I looked at the story after I'd finished, and I'm like, "I have her counting things! This character would not do that." I have made that my default for how a character with anxiety behaves. So you do have to be aware of the defaults that you can… When you're going to this next level narration. It's like, "Oh, a character who lies behaves like this." Be aware of the defaults that you are carrying forward from your own stuff, in addition to the things that you've absorbed around you.
 
[Brandon] Now, you had also some homework for us?
[Mary] I do. So we're going to harken back to some homework that you have already done, which is in April, when in character voice, we had you do three different points of view. 80 years old, 12, and from a different country. At the time, we were having you think about character. So this time, you're going to do next level narration. Which is that each of these characters are experiencing the same scene differently. So this is the Rashomon effect, that some of them are telling you information that the others are not telling you because they're lying. So at this point, you're dealing with two different aspects of narration. One is that these characters are different from each other, so we need to be able to tell that. The other is with their default settings and what is important to them, some of them are lying. Figure out which pieces they're lying about and why.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.9: Q&A on Viewpoint

Mar. 1st, 2017 10:24 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.9: Q&A on Viewpoint

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/02/26/12-9-qa-on-viewpoint/

Q&A Summary:
Q: Third person omniscient is generally the norm in most fantasy/sci-fi. Do you have any ideas, tips, tricks to make this voice more interesting or unusual?
A: Give the narrator a personality, characterization.
Q: How can you make [third person] limited more interesting?
A: Make the character sing. It's not the viewpoint, it's the character.
Q: It usually takes me a few drafts/revisions to really nail down a character's voice. Is this normal for most writers? Any tips on how to discover it in other ways?
A: If it's working for you, don't break it! Try writing a quick scene that is pivotal and important to your character. Sample scenes, monologues, conversation, job interviews. Don't be afraid to throwaway writing. Let the character talk so you can figure out who they are.
Q: What is the most effective way to portray an unreliable third limited viewpoint in which the reader can still know what is actually happening?
A: Why do you have an unreliable narrator? To fool the audience? Dramatic irony, where we know something the character does not? Establish that this is the character's personality, they think one thing, even though something else is really happening.
Q: How does one thoroughly immerse themselves in a setting/person? I know it's very subjective, but what are the most effective methods you have found in feeling, for example, when a pregnant woman, a pious man, or a lost child might feel? It's so far eludes me.
A: Meditation, guided imagery. Primary sources! Find forums where people are sharing trials and experiences, and get the things people gripe about right. Method acting for writers – feel it yourself, then write.
Q: How do you choose between first and third person? What's your process? When you're preparing a story, how do you make that final decision?
A: Is the story about plot or character? If it's about character, do it first person. Check your genre – adult romance usually is third, YA first person. How can you best express the characters? Try a writing sample, a quick scene or paragraph, to see which works best.
Q: How do you pick the right character for a viewpoint in a scene? How do you choose whose eyes you're going to see through?
A: Who is in the most pain? Who's most interesting? Who has the highest stakes, the most emotional response? Who's going to be doing the most, whose protagging the most? What do you like to write?
Q: I'm writing my first novel. How do I choose to do first person, third person, it's overwhelming. I could do omniscient, I could do non-omniscient, how do I make this decision?
A: Which POV makes the words flow for you? First novel, just write it. Spot check along the way, "Is this still working for me?" If so, keep going. If not, try a test scene in another perspective and see if that works better. What do you want to accomplish? Grand in scope, lots of different characters, third might work better. But first and foremost, finish the book.
Q: I have a problem with transitioning between voices. A.k.a. How do you know when to cut, how do you smoothly transition from one viewpoint character to another, how do you do a chapter break, do you sometimes not do a chapter break, how do you decide this?
A: End on a phrase that resonates with the reader, that's impactful, and makes them want to keep reading. Look at the first line of the next scene, make sure the reader knows whose head they're in as quickly as possible. Beware the garden path sentence, where the reader doesn't know whose head they are in until they turn the corner. End on a zinger, something awesome to say goodbye to that character for a while. Answer a question, raise a new question, resolve a package. Give emotional closure.
Q: My characters start to sound less distinct the further in my story I get. How do you keep this from happening?
A: Give each character a high concept that's evolving out of the consequences of previous acts, along with a dialogue tic that's a result of the consequences. Check prepositional phrases and three syllable words to see if your characters are all using the same ones. Visual and verbal tics work because they remind you, the writer, who the character is. Remember the character's passion.

( Wow, back and forth... )

[Brandon] I'm going to call it here. We have so many questions. I'm sorry we didn't get to them all. But, Piper has some homework for us.
[Piper] Oh, I do. My brain just died. I'm so sorry. So, my homework for you is to take dialogue, not narrative, dialogue, and take the characters who were involved in the dialogue… Probably works better with two or three, just a limited number of people in the dialogue, and swap them. So character A might say one thing, character B might say another. Now swap them, and how would character B say that first line, and how would character A respond?
[Brandon] Excellent. I really like that writing exercise. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 11.41: The Editor's Wishlist, with Navah Wolfe

Oct. 13th, 2016 10:00 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.41: The Editor's Wishlist, with Navah Wolfe

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/10/09/11-41-the-editors-wish-list-with-navah-wolfe/

Key points: On Navah's wishlist, we find character first. A good character, with a distinct, unique voice. Are the characters interesting? The characters must feel real. A trick: if your main character was a side character in someone else's story, would they still be interesting? What's the best pitch? This-meets-that, IF that captures the heart, the emotion, and not just the set dressing. Lady bromance, or friendships. Ensemble stories. Dislikable characters that you fall in love with. Aka lady bro heist with Jaime Lanister. Unreliable narrators with a good payoff. Closed room spaceship mysteries. Heists. Epic fantasy with a lady protagonist. Remember, editors and agents are people -- talk with them first. Then mention your lady bro heist from a closed room spaceship with an unreliable narrator.

( Go right to the source... )

[Brandon] All right. To bring us out, Mary's going to give us some homework.
[Mary] All right. So, Navah talked about the this-meets-that and looking for the emotional heart of those things. So I want you to write two different pitches for your work in progress. Whether that's short story or novel. One of which is basic this-meets-that. So think about the emotional heart of your piece and pick a film or book or some other touchstone that has that same emotional heart. Not the set dressing, but the heart. Then I want you to do a second pitch, but this time I want you to think about the set dressing. So, Orphan Black, people who have the same face, that is set dressing. The emotional heart is about sisters. So think about those two things. Look at those two pitches. Then see which one fits your story best, and whether or not, in fact, what you need is a third pitch which is a combination of those two.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 30: Unreliable Narrators

Feb. 20th, 2011 05:49 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 30: Unreliable Narrators

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/13/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-30-unreliable-narrators/

Key Points: Unreliable narrator, third person limited, depends on how wrong the character's perceptions are. Unreliable narrator, first-person, often just lies to the reader. Unreliable narrator can add a subtext, another layer of meaning that the reader deduces. Another use of unreliable narrator is to let us see the character's viewpoint more clearly, since we experience their flawed view of the world. Yet another use is as a plot device to hide a twist. Epistolary stories, told through letters and journals, often are unreliable because people hide things in their writing. You can also have epigraphs that are clearly mistaken. Using third person limited unreliable narrators who are competing can introduce tension and characterize because the reader sees both sides, even though the characters don't individually know enough. Some books have a character who misleads by paying attention to red herrings and discarding real clues as meaningless. Seeing the uncertainty -- experiencing the confusion of the unreliable narrator -- also builds sympathy. Just don't withhold too much, have good reasons for what you withhold and why.
( behind the curtain... )
[Brandon] I'm going to go ahead and give our writing prompt this time. I would like you to do... to have one event occur, and then have five different perspectives of that event which are... none of which are completely true. Just people's own views of what happened. They did this once in the X-Files, it was a wonderful episode. [Note: probably X-Files Jose Chung's "From Outer Space"] The movie Hero accomplished this, different narratives explaining the same event.
[Howard] There's an episode of CSI that did the same thing.
[Dan] Rashomon by Kurosawa.
[Brandon] Give this a try yourself. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
[Howard] Five times.
[Dan] You're out of five excuses.
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