Writing Excuses 18.38: How Do You Write A Series With Books That Stand Alone?

Sep. 21st, 2023 06:19 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.38: How Do You Write A Series With Books That Stand Alone?
 
 
Key Points: Deep Dive into A Function of Firepower. The title comes from a maxim, "Sometimes rank is a function of firepower." AI, Oafans, Petey, all these guns versus "The pen is mightier than the sword." I.e., an academic conference. Mutual assured destruction. Fermi's Paradox. Comedy depends a lot on subversion. Petey is an antagonist, but not villainous. Being a villain and being sympathetic are not necessarily separate. Sympathetic and monstrous at the same time. Sometimes you need a new tool. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 38]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive, A Function of Firepower.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[Howard] And I'm in charge for this episode, and I have been for some of the other ones. Kind of in charge. Mostly, the questions from my friends here are going to steer what happens…
[Laughter]
[Howard] The title of this book, A Function of Firepower, title comes from one of the 70 maxims. The maxim is "Sometimes rank is a function of firepower." Which obviously means sometimes who is in charge is not a question of who was elected to be in charge, who is most qualified to be in charge, it is who is the best armed. Which is, as I think we can all agree, a terrible way to decide who gets to run things. The story here begins with a crazy AI who has lots and lots of big guns and who is bound and determined to blow up anything that could cause the sort of mess that she's upset about. Then we have the return of the Oafan race, who own a whole bunch of spaceships that our heroes took because they didn't think the Oafans were still alive. But, hey, surprise, they are. Now we want our stuff back. Now, instantly, they are the largest armed force in the galaxy. Then, of course, throughout Schlock Mercenary, there's been Petey, where I always imagined as the sci-fi equivalent of an enlightened desperate. A benign god-king. Who is not as powerful as he used to be. Then I balanced those questions, all of those guns against the old saw… I say the old saw. It's Shakespeare, isn't it? The pen is mightier than the sword? That's Shakespeare?
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to say yes. I don't actually know.
[Howard] It's probably Shakespeare.
[DongWon] Odds are high, let's say.
[Laughter]
[Howard] [garbled ballad] is Shakespeare. So, yeah. The pen is mightier than the sword. I wanted to drive some of the actual solutions from an academic conference where people are trying to answer the question, where did all of the civilizations go that came before this galactic civilization? Are we doomed to wipe ourselves out? Is there a great filter? What is it that's going on? I really enjoyed writing it, but it was a challenge, because I knew it had to be more than just a thing that keeps the conclusion from sitting right next to the beginning. It needed to be more than a spacer.
[DongWon] You managed to create in the way that middle volumes are kind of a really dark chapter of this story. Right? I mean, the thematics as you just laid them out, tapping into Cold War era of mutual assured destruction. There's, like, overtones of almost, like, indigenous reparations. Then, answering this big question about like Fermi's Paradox in certain ways. Right? I'm… I know you grew up sort of child of the Cold War in some ways. How much was that weapons of mass destruction, mutual assured destruction, finding other answers to that and asking that question in a slightly different way… How much was that [garbled driving]
[Howard] That's been… I mean… Sigh. People use the word DNA wrong in this way all the time. That's been part of my DNA my whole life. I grew up… Yes, child of the Cold War. Parents telling me how incredibly scary the Cuban missile crisis was. And I think it was Korean Airlines flight something or other… Seven… KLA… I want to say 007, but it couldn't have been that because nobody would name their plane, their flight, 007. Korean Airlines flight shot down by the Russians in the early 80's.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I remember that.
[Howard] I remember everybody at school thinking this is it. This is the thing that sets it all off. So, yeah, there… That's in my blood, that's the thing that my brain grew up with and grew out of… Not in the same way that you grow out of a pair of clothes, but in the way that a tree grows out of a given patch of dirt. So, yeah, I had to explore those themes. Also, those themes are… When you look at the various solution sets for Fermi's Paradox, one of them is the set that says intelligence always gets greedy and destroys itself in a way that leaves no traces. Which is a horribly negative thought to have, but it's fun to ask the question.
[DongWon] I think, because you've kind of created inverted war games here in certain ways. Right? Like, Chinook has decided that the long guns are bad, we need to get rid of the long guns, and she's going to do everything in her power to make that happen. Unfortunately, that also means the Cold War is now a shooting war.
[Howard] Yep.
[DongWon] And a lot of people are going to die as a result. Also, the actual problem is completely external to whatever is happening here. This is a misinterpretation of the data. But I guess I'm kind of curious, like, how did you get to that iteration of this? It seems like you took the basis… The base narrative that we see a lot, of the AI goes amok, decides humanity is the problem, but pushed it one step further in this way that she really is trying to save civilization in a certain way. Right? She believes she's doing the right thing. In a way that I found to be very relatable and kind of fascinating, watching her kind of go off the rails, even as she's editing herself and coming to some erroneous conclusions. But what was… I don't exactly know what I'm asking, but there's something very interesting in how your thinking about mutually assured destruction that I don't feel like I've ever quite seen in this way before.
[Howard] I'm so glad you noticed.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because at some level, everything Schlock Mercenary is, is derivative of things that I've consumed. I named a book Big Dumb Objects because there's this whole sci-fi trope about big dumb objects. Better authors than I have gotten to many of these questions long before I did. So when I addressed them, I wanted to subvert or distort… Because comedy depends a lot on subversion, and maybe that's just… Maybe that accidentally resulted in something that from a philosophical standpoint is interesting rather than comedic. I'm so glad you noticed.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean, like… Circling back to Chinook when we're talking about the goals. Like, there's the authorial goal of these are the things, the questions that I need her to take. Then there's the character goals of this is why she's doing that. When you were mapping it out, when you were doing that outline, how aware of her internal motivations were you, and how much of that did you discover in the process of writing it?
[Howard] Ah. I knew pretty much all of what was driving her from the word go. There were the overt motives which is that her creator, her jailer, and her savior were all killed at the same time. It was very emotional for her. She suddenly had no way to process it. But also, the event triggered or set off a trigger like a timebomb in the system that she was now inhabiting, because the intelligence that had all of the Oafans trapped was so unhappy with themselves for what they'd done that they built this thing that would let them rewrite themselves so they could forget having committed the crime so that they could continue to keep the Oafans trapped. Well, now Chinook was there, the AI that used to live there moved out because they were ready for a new life, and she has this horrible emotional event and trips a system that begins rewriting her psyche in ways that she doesn't know she's doing. I got… I mean, when I first described that to myself in the outline, I got chills. I was like, "Oh, my goodness. Oh, what a landmine you've created for this character."
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Howard] "This is going to be fun." Then, everything after that…
[DongWon] Well, the core metaphor…
[Howard] Everything after that was just exploring the outgrowths of it.
[DongWon] I love the core metaphor of for these cycles of violence to perpetuate, for us to continue these wars, to continue these oppressions and genocides, we have to erase our own memory of what happened and rewrite our memory so we don't remember what we did a generation ago.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And then we will repeat the same error, which keeps people oppressed, which keeps people in these positions, which perpetuates this long Cold War and all of that.
[Howard] Yeah, that when I did do on purpose. But… And I can't remember when, but I recall at one point deciding, "Oo. You know what? I don't want to say that part out loud. I want to just leave that at that level as a discovery exercise for the reader." Speaking of discovery exercises, we're going to go discover something and come right back after the break.
 
[Howard] Hey, everybody. It's Howard. If you go to kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler spelled T.A.Y.L.E.R. all one word, you will find that we are getting ready to put Mandatory Failure, Schlock Mercenary book 18 into print, and you can get a copy for your very own self. We are super excited about this. I've done a bonus story for it that [Ethan Kozak] is illustrating. The book is glorious and wonderful. It's one of my very favorites. It's one of Sandra's very favorites. I'm sure that the moment we're able to put it into your hands, it will be one of your very favorites. Kickstarter.com/profile/howardtayler all one word except not with the all one word part, I didn't need to tell you that, you knew that. Just spell it with the ER and you'll be fine. Thanks.
 
[Howard] And we're back. What are we going to discover next?
[Mary Robinette] So, let's talk a little bit about Petey and what Petey is going through here.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Again, like, by this point, we really like these characters. You're doing stuff to them that I have feelings about. Why? Why?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] For a long time, when I created the character of Petey, the trope that everyone expected and they been waiting for this shoe to drop for a decade or more, was, "Oh, yeah, he runs a galaxy. He's going to turn out to be awful. We're going to have to kill him, we're going to have to fight him. He's going to be a bad guy." I needed to set things up so that that didn't happen. The easiest way to do that was to put pressure on him where he has to do violent and unpleasant things, and he always manages to do it in as nonintrusive a way as possible, and actually to back away from the options that a true tyrant would have taken.
[DongWon] Do you consider Petey a villain?
[Howard] I don't, but I consider him frightening.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, he definitely serves an antagonist purpose, but…
[DongWon] Yeah, he fits the antagonist role, especially in volume 3, which will talk about in [garbled episode]
[Howard] He's an antagonist, but I don't see him as villainous. Does that make sense?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Which is, I think, why I'm like these are characters that I wind up caring about because it's not just the… It's like all of them.
[DongWon] I mean, Chinook is like the primary villain of this book. Right? I also find her probably to be the most sympathetic character in this book as well. Right? Those things aren't necessarily separate. There are ways in which I really like Petey. Also, I find Petey to be the scariest thing in these books. I consider the arc of all of this is… Or the fundamental arc really is as much what do we do about Petey as it is what do we do about these dark matter intelligences that are determined to destroy the universe.
[Howard] Well, the fact that… There's that… The UNS, they're having some High Admirality meeting and somebody mentions Petey and somebody else says, "What are you doing? You might as well just invite him in." Then he shows up and says, "I don't actually need to be invited."
[DongWon] I was already here.
[Howard] "I've been here the whole time." One, that's a fun joke to tell. Two, that's yet another cementing of, guys, when something is super intelligent and superpowerful whether or not it is super benign, it's scary.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly.
[Howard] That's actually echoed by something that happened very early in Schlock Mercenary, which is my discovery that from any perspective other than Schlock's, Schlock is a monster. So, placing a character we like in a way that you don't have to turn the book very much to one side or the other to realize, "Oh. You're really scary." That was very fun for me.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Well, I mean, you do such a good job of that, of so many of your heroes are also quite monstrous in certain ways and capable of truly mind-boggling acts of violence. Right? Like, even your human scale protagonists are often capable of truly astonishing acts of violence. Right? Whether that's pulling the arms off the enemy ship's captain or…
[Mary Robinette] I was thinking that that…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] When you were talking, it was like…
[DongWon] Or one person in power armor just destroying an armada.
 
[Erin] It seems like it's really on cue with the theme… Like, getting back to that kind of mutual assured destruction, like, I think there's something really… Wholesome is not the right word, but in realizing that monster… Like, everyone is… People are both sympathetic and monstrous at the same time, and that's what makes the whole situation so terrifying.
[Howard] Yeah. The… Again, coming back to the question of Fermi's Paradox, the idea that as civilizations developed technologically, their ability to destroy themselves permanently… Not just a portion of themselves, but to just wipe themselves out of existence, increases. That's an important theme here, and I wanted to illustrate it in a way that lets us explore a possible alternative. Which is what that whole scholarly convention was, and is… Elizabeth, who ends up running the scholarly convention, she was roped into traveling with the Toughs because her boyfriend was one of the mercenaries and she just followed him onto the ship and suddenly realized she was cooking for a group of professional sociopaths and wasn't sure she fit in. In this book, I wanted to put her in a position to steer things, to guide things away from all of the violence and disaster.
[DongWon] Well, she's really the antidote to the title. Right? Like, rank is a function of firepower, but also, we see her get promoted out of being a cook, just for being smart and competent and willing to say the thing that no one else is willing to say. Right? It's almost like your… In creating this hero organization of these mercenaries, the antidote to just taking power at the end of a long gun really is recognizing and rewarding competence and forthrightness. It's in a world where not only rank is a function of power, firepower, but ethics is a function of firepower, to have an antidote to that, I think, really essential to making this book work.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, along the lines of making this book work, it also had to function as setting up in the launchpad for the final book. So when you were… So let's talk about, since this is a deep dive and we're full of spoilers, let's talk about the ending.
[Howard] In the end of the previous book, the end of Mandatory Failure, the Pa'anuri, the bad guys, blow up one of Petey's cities. It was during this book that someone figures out, "Oh, I think I know how the Pa'anuri long gun works. They don't have a targeting mechanism… Their targeting mechanism… They can see certain kinds of power sources, and they are walking their shots. What are they aiming at? They're aiming at Petey. They're trying to destroy his core power generator, which, by the time we get to the end of the book, we realize that's the tool that he needs in order to fight back. They blow a piece of it up. I knew that was… That was part of the original outline, is that we blow up something that creates a puzzle in book 18, we blow up something that creates a disaster in book 19. Cueing that up was a lot of fun. Honestly, one of the things that was the most fun about it was… And this is going to sound silly, I'm sure. Using brush pens and circle templates to create some of the energy effect shapes that I wanted to create, and then sending them to the colorist and saying, "Look. There is no actual astronomical or physics analog for the colors that these things should be. Just make it look scary and dangerous and loud and hot and big and whatever." Travis ran with it.
[DongWon] Yeah. I was going to say, we… We're a writing podcast, so obviously we're talking about the narrative structure and the writing, but on the art front, you really pushed yourself to a different level it feels like here. You got on… I don't know, you kind of got on your Jack Kirby bull shit in the best way.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] It was really fun to see some of these bigger scope, bigger scale intergalactic war things happening. You really start pulling out these big guns, no pun intended, by the end of this one.
[Howard] I leveled up the writing earlier in my career than I leveled up the art. That might be because I joined the Writing Excuses podcast…
[Laughter]
[Howard] In 08, and have never been part of an art podcast. Never. But I remember, it was a convention, it was at GenCon, I was talking to Lar deSouza and complaining about how much my hand hurt using this one pan trying to create lines. He looked at what I was doing and said, "Here. Take this." A [fidona suke] polymer nib short brush pen. I grabbed it and was like, "Oh, my gosh. A light touch makes a skinny line, and a hard touch makes a fat line, but it doesn't splay like a brush. Oh, this is amazing. This is so cool." Took it back to my booth. He gave it to me because he's a hero. Took it back to my booth, and drew a book cover with it. I think that was 2015. Just started to learn to use those tools and that piece of the toolbox was critically important for the finale, because now I could render some of these pictures that I just didn't have the skill set for earlier. Weird to talk about that on a writing podcast.
[Mary Robinette] But it's I think it's very much to the point, that there are… There is a tool that you don't know that you need to add to your toolbox. Like, that's… We talk about it as a metaphor all the time, and you're talking about it is a very literal real thing.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It's like, "Oh, here's a new tool. Physical tool." I think that that's something that everyone can take away. It's like you… Just getting the tool is not enough, it's learning how to use the tool that's really where the magic is.
[Howard] I think one of the things that Lar said was "When the student is ready, the master will appear." I had tried to use brush pens before and just couldn't. I tried several. Simply could not make them work. Then I sat down with him, and in 30 seconds, the lines were coming off my hand the way they needed to. I was like, "This pen is magical. I never…" Then he said, "When the student is ready, the master will appear. You are now ready for this tool. Congratulations." We are just about out of time. The conclusion of this book needed to set up the final story. That involved what I call like character arc blocking. Where I had to put chunks of the cast in different places. I had to scatter them because I knew that the final act, the next book, was going to come together with them in the very end coming together. I know that sounds shallow and silly and obvious, but shallow and silly and obvious… I've made the Schlock Mercenary joke already. Which of those words suggested that I would not do this? But sometimes those simple tools are the best. We work with those forms, and then, as you drill down on them and make them your own, they actually work. Hey, work. Homework. Who's got that?
 
[Erin] Yeah. I do. Speaking of tools you can make your own,what we're going to ask you to do for the homework this time is to work three words into your work in progress. They are expeditious, sock, and dragonfly. The best words. So, enjoy those and set them right into your work.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[DongWon] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, to ask any questions that are on your mind.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces

Jun. 3rd, 2021 05:43 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces
 
 
Key Points: Scenes and set pieces? Start with setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development. Setting? Wow factor and tactical implications. Environments let players get creative. Challenge? Variety, and catering to different players. Sneak, battle, talk? Unique elements. Make your challenges hinge on character abilities, not player abilities. Adversaries. Introduce bad guys early, and make things personal. Give them distinct abilities. What's their motivation? In prose, we often challenge characters outside their area of expertise, but in games, we usually challenge players in their skill sets. Rewards, or consequences, and story development. Rewards, gear, show the reader they are making progress. Story development. Make sure characters have incentives to do the encounters, and that there are stakes. Think about how a scene pushes things forward. What are the ramification, what are the potential callbacks?
 
[Season 16, Episode 22]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Cassandra] Scenes and Set Pieces.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[James] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[James] I'm James.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We are talking about scenes and set pieces today. We've got a lot to cover, so were just going to jump right into it. James? Get us started.
[James] Yeah. So when I'm designing an encounter or a scene or whatever you want to call it, I like to break it up into several different categories. So I like to think about the setting, the challenge, the adversaries, the rewards, and also story development. So we're going to hit each of those in turn. I just want to start off with, so, for setting, Cass… Oh, Mary Robinette?
[Mary Robinette] I just want to say… I just want to jump in real fast and say all of the prose writers have been riding along with this because they're interested and curious about it. This episode in particular has stuff that directly applies to what you do. Because every point that we're about to hit is something that you should be thinking about in your prose scenes as well.
 
[Setting]
[James] Yeah. I mean, I definitely think, Cass and I both write fiction as well and I'm sure we probably bring everything we've said in this class to those as well. But, so I want to just right now with Cass, when you're designing the setting for a scene or an encounter, what do you think about?
[Cassandra] Well, there are two things, primarily. The wow factor and the tactical implications of your environment. The wow factor can be a whole bunch of things. With video games, in particular, it's all about the visuals, it is all about the audio, and it's also about cinematography. You can have the best graphics in the world, you can have the best music, but if it's a very static kind of thing, or it's just a character walking in, it's not going to work out for everyone. It's also about individual imaginative [garbled]. In prose, for example, it could be things like how things smell, how things taste, texture. But in games, it can also be about emotional beats. My favorite example of that is Persona 5. When you start the game, you are midway through a heist. There are people with shadow faces leading you on through it. You're running through it. It's great and everything, but it's not terribly impactful because it's weird. However, at the climax of the game, after you have everything explained to you, you actually revisit that first place with the exact same parameters. It's suddenly so much more powerful, because you just had 40 hours of context drilled into your head. Well, we've come to the tactical side, since most of my design goes through actual designers. I'm curious about how you develop them into the RPGs, James?
[James] Yeah. So, in a game like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons or Starfinder that's all about more or less killing things and taking their stuff, or occasionally other variations on that, environments can be really important to the design of scenes, especially combats, because it allows the characters to get really creative. It allows… And it makes, frankly, things seem more interesting than just fighting skeletons in a blank room over and over again. When you add an environment, suddenly the players have a lot more things they can work with. So, for instance, you get the players coming up with all these interesting ideas where they'll go, "Okay, if I tie the badminton net to the goat, and then I scare the goat with the airhorn, then they'll run up the end." Like, players are really creative. You want to give them props to do stuff  with. So that's where I feel like the environment can really be handy. Which… Oh, Dan, did you want to jump in?
[Dan] Yeah, I was just going to say that this is a lesson that I learned watching Star Wars movies, actually. Because the first time I played a tabletop wargame about spaceships, I very quickly realized that it's super boring. Because there's no terrain in space. So there isn't really an environment to interact with. It's the absolute epitome of an empty room. Then you watch the Star Wars movies and realize, "Oh, this space battle, they're running through a trench. This one, they're dodging asteroids. This one, they're flying through debris. This one, there's the big giant shield and it's all about which side of the shield are you on, and is it going to be brought down in time." There's always some kind of dynamic interactive element to make those encounters more interesting.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things about the setting that I just wanted to get in here for prose writers, is that the same thing is true. Like, when you're thinking about the setting, how is your character going to use that setting? How is it going to play into the overall arc of the story?
 
[Challenge]
[James] That brings us right into the second one, which is talking about the type of challenge. I really like variety, like you were saying. I really want to mixup the enemy types with the types of challenges. So it just doesn't become wave after wave. Thinking about challenges that cater to the different character types and player types. Because some people are going to want to sneak, some people are going to want to battle their way through. Mary Robinette's probably going to want to make friends with them if they're giant apple trolls, like from last episode.
[Laughter]
[James] So, you want to make sure that there's sort of something for everybody. But, Cass, what do you think about?
[Cassandra] Well, the balance is definitely one of the most necessary things. But I think it's also important to focus on the elements that make your game unique. If your game is all about a character with an energy whip, create challenges that explore every possible use of that whip. Let her swing across chasms, electrocuting things, retrieving objects… I remember Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I picked up this weird Taser-like ability, and my favorite thing to do would be to knock out people and just very gently, like, fill the water full of electricity to watch them very gently buzz to death.
[Laughter]
[Cassandra] In an RPG, you should always…
[Mary Robinette] Very gentle.
[Cassandra] Be sure that your challenges hinge on character abilities and not just player abilities. The players who spent points building a detective should have an easier time solving mysteries. Even if the player playing the barbarian is naturally better at puzzles.
[James] That's so important. I feel like I've absolutely been in that game where I'm the wizard with the 18 intelligence, but I'm naturally just terrible at most puzzles compared to the people I play with. So it'll be the barbarian being like, "No, it's this and this and this."
[Chuckles]
[James] I'm like, "Dude. You shouldn't know that, and I should."
[Dan] Yeah. The first time that I wrote, it was actually an adventure for Starfinder, typically the game writing that I have done has been in much more narrative systems. Starfinder is much more of a crunchy numbers-based thing. So, the main comment that the editor sent back after I submitted the first draft was, "Dan. Players like to roll dice."
[Yeah. Laughter]
[Dan] I realized that I had not really given them any skill checks. It was all based on just kind of interaction. You can ask these questions and learn this information and then you know where to go. He's like, "No. There's like 20 skills in this game. You haven't used any of them. They put points into those skills and they like to roll dice. Give them a chance to do what they're good at."
[Cassandra] That sort of reminds me, I think, of my favorite tabletop RPG story that is in [garbled]. There was a comment going around a few years ago, of this group of Avengers trying to fight, I think, this Orc Lord. Everyone was kind of dropping over dead and it was just terrible and they were all going to lose. There was this one dude left. He was like, "Okay. What? Screw it. My character has like really high charm. I am going to try to seduce the Orc Lord." He rolled a natural 20.
[Chuckles]
[Cassandra] There was just this long pause. He was like, "You know what, I am going to go for it. I am going to declare my love and just stop the war." He kept rolling natural 20s. By the end of the game, his character was leading this Orc Warlord home and going like, "Mom, this is my new husband."
[James] See, that's what I love about tabletop role-playing games. Because in a videogame, maybe you spend the resources to build out that possibility, even though it's a very, very faint possibility. But in a tabletop role-playing game, you can just change on the fly and go with that. I think that's really one of the things that has kept games like Dungeons & Dragons alive in the era of video games.
[Mary Robinette]. If you been listening to all of these things, the variety of challenges that your character faces in prose is as important as it is in a game. You don't want a character who's constantly just fighting things. You want a character who's having to solve the things in different ways. Often in ways that do not play to their skill sets. That's what often will make an interesting challenge in prose.
 
[Adversaries]
[James] Actually, that's a great segue into talking about adversaries. So, I think it's really important when you're thinking about the adversaries in your encounter, you want to introduce any big bad guys early and give players a reason to care. You want to make things personal. So, yeah, what do you folks do in terms of trying to establish a good adversary?
[Cassandra] You want to give them a few distinct abilities that strongly point towards who they are and what they are, and possibly, at least for me, have at least one encounter that completely cements their personality. I think a good example of this is Borderlands and Handsome Jack. Very early on, you meet him and you kind of get a sense of exactly who he is and why you should absolutely hate him. These things need to be done quickly. I think if you're designing a tabletop role-playing game, these parameters have to be set very clearly as well. Because players have the whole game to learn how to use a complex character effectively. A game master who is looking at your notes, he only has minutes. I'm curious about what people have done in regards to that [garbled]
[Howard] Yeah.
[Cassandra] Adversaries.
[Howard] For my own part, the word adversary is hugely informative here. If you run across something, somebody, some animal, whatever, and it just wants to kill you, that's not an adversary. That's just obstacle, it's an enemy. An adversary that I'm going to care about? Well, look, the party and I, we are trying to build a bridge across the street. But the Otter King has decided that there shall be no bridge across the stream, and he takes issue with our entire project, sabotaging us at every turn. But if we don't build the bridge, our eventual plan to unify the clans on both sides of… You see where I'm going?
[James] I romance the Otter King.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Yes. Please. Romance the Otter King, because everybody loves otters. Ultimately, if… For the adversary to feel real, and for us to feel invested, they have to be working logically and passionately and investedly in something that runs counter to what we're trying to do.
[James] I just want to throw out that in my current Starfinder game, I have a player who is literally playing an otter marriage counselor. That's her whole deal. She's incredibly effective. It's… We've talked our way through half the encounters.
[Mary Robinette] So, the thing with adversaries, we been talking about and around, comes back to a thing that I bring from theater for you prose writers. What's my motivation? The Otter King? Like, sure, the Otter King wants to stop you from building the bridge, but why do they want to stop you from building the bridge? That why can make your adversary often significantly more interesting. So think about what that motivation is.
[James] One other thing I want to throw out before we go to our game of the week is that something Cass had said about keeping abilities narrow. This is especially important in tabletop role-playing games, and which I always tell people who are designing new monsters or new adversaries is that really, you're only… If you're not going to use an ability in the first couple rounds of combat, that's often all that an enemy is on stage for. So you don't want to build an enemy with a dozen different abilities if they're only ever going to use three of them. Because that just makes it harder for the game master to process quickly. So pick a couple of things and that'll both let the GM know how to run them and let the PCs know how to fight them.
 
[James] But, let's pause for our book of the week.
[Mary Robinette] So, book of the week, or game of the week, is Shadow Point Observatory. Which is a game for Oculus Quest 2. It's a puzzle game. But I picked it up because it's beautiful. It's about observatories, which are totally my jam. You're trying to solve this thing where this young girl has been ripped out of time. It's the character that you're going in and you're trying to figure out how to restore her to her time. But because she's been ripped out of time, every time you encounter her, each layer of the puzzle, she gets older and older. It takes decades in her… For her for you to figure this out. There's this one point… It's a spoiler, but this is also like… The kind of excruciating thing that they're doing. Because you're in this beautiful environment, and she begs you not to leave. You're like, "But I have to go, because I have to finish solving these puzzles in order to bring you back." It's so painful to walk away from her. It's just… It's really nicely done. I liked it a lot. My dad likes it too. So. Shadow Point Observatory. Highly recommended.
 
[Dan] Super cool. Before we move on to the next thing, I cannot get this thing out of my head that Mary Robinette said earlier, when we were talking about challenges. She said that for prose, it is often, and I would say usually, really important to challenge the character in something that is not their area of expertise. Which is the exact opposite of what we were saying about game writing. Where often you want to let people do what they are good at. I think that that's a really key thing to bring out, that in games, the players want to excel. They want to have a chance to use their powers. They want to show how awesome they are. In fiction, we often kind of… We want to let our characters demonstrate their awesomeness, but we also want to force them to be weak and to overcome those weaknesses. Which, I think, is a really interesting dichotomy.
[James] Well, it's important to remember that when you're doing a game, you're designing for a range of characters, often in a role-playing game. You don't necessarily know which one you're getting. So you want to make sure that the challenge you design is hard enough to challenge the person who specializes in that particular type of challenge, so that it's a satisfying thing, but they can succeed. But it still needs to be beatable by characters who aren't specialized in that. So you want to make sure that you are accommodating for all of the above.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Even… In both cases, I think, the thing that will happen is the thing that happens in real life, which is that whatever tools you bring to the table, whether it's your characters bringing it to the table in prose or in games, they're going to solve it with the tools that they have on hand. So, just because the challenges and set up for them to be like this is the… The character who in prose who walks into the room and is like, "Oh, there's a lot of people here that I'm supposed to shoot at and I can't… I don't actually know how to use a gun. But I'm very good at sneaking." So they do this… They use the skills, even though the challenge in front of them is set up for them to fail.
[Howard] I want to do a quick call back to something Cassandra said two or three episodes ago about choices yielding consequences. The reward being consequences. I don't mind failing a challenge in a role-playing game, provided the failure isn't, "Oop. Wawawawawa. Game over. Start again." If the challenge going back to the Otter King… I failed to talk to the Otter King, now we have to fight the entire otter tribe. Well, that's a sad failure, because I don't want to fight the otters, I want to befriend the otters. If you build the challenges in such a way that the failures alter the choices we can make, then failure isn't catastrophic. I feel like in role-playing games, failure should be fun.
[James] Yeah.
 
[Rewards]
[Mary Robinette] I feel like that is a natural segue to talking about rewards as part of the consequences.
[James] Yeah. Absolutely. Rewards, and even putting rewards and story development together. Because in many ways, like you were just saying, there kinds of the same thing. The rewards, the consequences, and the development, all fall into the same category. So how do you all handle that?
[Cassandra] Very carefully. Because I feel like…
[Chuckles]
[Cassandra] The entire feel of a player's experience can be ruined, honestly, if they end up with, let's say equipment that is meant for them in the end dungeon. Now, for some players, again, I am a power player, I am happiest when I can just bulldoze through things. It makes me laugh. But for other players, it just takes away the enjoyment, because all the challenges are gone. The environment, the varieties you build in the consequences, they no longer matter if one strike of the sword is enough to stop an adversary cold. So you do not want to end up with a character that is overpowered. Similarly, it's important to track the rewards, because an underpowered character is just going to be miserable. The grind isn't fun when you're dedicating a few hours of your life to fun.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that I think about in prose is that the rewards are part of the way of letting the reader know that you're making progress. It's not just about the gear that you pick up, but that yes, this slog is worth it. Because it's really easy in prose, we talk a lot about yes-but, no-and, and making things worse for the character, and it's really easy to forget the importance of the yes, which is the reward. Even if there is a consequence for that reward. It's still that forward momentum, that forward progress, is still important to think about.
[Howard] One of the mechanics we built into Planet Mercenary, if players embrace in character their failures, they get role-play points. You can spend the role-play points to boost die rolls, to reroll dies, to reroll dice, to… There's all kinds of uses for them we didn't put limitations per game around on how you spent these. One of the players in one of the play tests I ran, to my great joy, figured this out, so that when we got to the point where it's time to defuse the nuclear weapon, he has accrued all of his role played failures and plays this stuff and Bam! The weapon is defused. Nothing about that felt steamroll-y. Everything felt earned. Because he had done such a good job of owning all of the earlier failures.
[Dan] That's great. One thing about rewards, when we're talking about gear, I keep talking about Star Wars and I apologize for that. I don't know why that's the example that leaps to my mind. But when you're talking about giving overpowered gear to a character too early, Luke Skywalker gets his lightsaber like 20 minutes into the first movie. That's the best weapon in the game, so to speak. But what's fascinating about it is that he… The reward is not the gear. It's his own skill with it. We have to get into the middle section of the second movie before he really learns how to use it. It's not until the end of the third movie that he gets it into a full-blown lightsaber battle where he gets to show off all his skills. So sometimes rewards are… It can be really valuable to give someone the crazy equipment early on, and then just let them learn how to use it.
 
[Story Development]
[Cassandra] Last of all, one you really do need to consider is how story development ties in with encounters they are creating. Make sure that your characters are incentivized to actually do the encounters. Make sure there are stakes. They don't need to be big stakes, however. Assassin's Creed Valhalla had this one [cat] that you could find and [stick, take] to your boat. It was a completely separate, quiet quest. Mechanically, it did nothing. It's just a decorative item. But, good Lord, it's also a kitty that you can have on your Viking boat for the rest of the game. James, do you have anything to add on that point before we run away [garbled]?
[James] Yeah. You want to think about how does a given scene push things forward. What are the ramifications? What elements do you want to tag for future reference, so that, as we said before, you can call back to something? What can the outcomes of this scene lead to later so that when, three scenes down the road, somebody calls back to a thing you just did, you've laid the groundwork for that?
 
[Mary Robinette] You all had homework for us, I think?
[Cassandra] We did. We would like you to design an encounter for a game that you've enjoyed, getting all of the factors that we mentioned. Setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development.
[Dan] Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. This is been a long, but I think, really fantastic episode. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.28: Small Evils

Jul. 15th, 2020 10:57 am
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Writing Excuses 15.28: Small Evils
 
 
Key points: Small evils are easy to relate to, we all have felt them. Small antagonisms turn into small evils, which make nuanced villains. Motivation separates the antagonist and protagonist. Contrasting philosophies. Villains are interesting because they can move upward, while heroes can only fall from grace. Redemptive villains can become heroes. Team sports stories often have small evils villains. We like villains with small evils because they let us see someone who feels things we have felt, and acts out on them. We see ourselves in the negatives of a character, rarely in the positives. We like to watch people be bad. We, the writer, chooses who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist. Consider what would happen if you flip the narrative, shift the perspective. It's important to know why the villain, the antagonist, feels the way they do about the protagonist. When you shrug off external costs, you become a evil. Use escalation, and remember the process that takes a person from human to villain or vice-versa. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 28.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Small Evils.
[Victoria] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Victoria] I'm Victoria.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm trying to be bigger.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Victoria, you pitched this idea to us. Will you explain what you mean by small evils?
[Victoria] I do. I will, I will. I am fascinated by villainy and antagonism. It's one of the guiding principles in all of my stories. The thing that I'm really interested in is the idea of, as I said, small evils as compared to big ones. The way… The example I always give is it's Voldemort compared to Umbridge. Dolores Umbridge, one of the prime villains in chapter 5 of the Harry Potter series. The reason is that world domination is not a very grounded concept. It's not something that the vast majority of people can relate to. But almost all of us, I'm pretty sure, have felt a small evil inside of us. We've either been jealous or covetous, we've felt slighted, we've felt as though somebody hasn't given us the attention or the spotlight. I am fascinated by the way in which these small antagonisms can become small evils, that can make very grounded nuanced villains.
[Dan] I love the way that you told us about this earlier, that none of us have met a Voldemort, but we've all met an Umbridge. Right? Some domineering or tyrannical person that we've had to deal with at school or at work or in our own home. So we can relate to that, instinctively.
[Victoria] Yeah. I love it. I was writing a series I called the villain series, Vicious and Vengeful, which genuinely explored this on the most grounded level possible. I wanted to see if I could write a book without heroes and still make you root for one of them. So it became an exploration of small evils, it became an exploration not of the things that people do, but of the things that motivate them to do those things. It becomes about the relatability of the motive. I have a character who basically had a God complex. That was not relatable. So people had a very easy time casting him in the role of the villain. I had another character do the exact same evils in terms of the what, but his why was very different. The why was simply that he wanted revenge on this other character because of the massive falling out that they had. What I found was that people could absolutely relate to the sociopathic character who was bitter about his falling out, and nobody could relate to the sociopathic character who had a God complex. So it became an exploration of motive, and of really cre… Motive turning antagonists into protagonists.
[Brandon] We've often talked about how a lot of times the stories with the strongest villains tend to be the best stories. Strength of the protagonist is directly related to how difficult it is to overcome the villain and how interesting that villain is. It's not all one-to-one, but…
[Victoria] It's not, but… So I'm very anti the concept, like, when you're talking about love stories, that two halves make a whole. When we're talking about hero and villain, or protagonist and antagonist, I absolutely believe that two halves make a whole. That our hero and our villain, our protagonist and our antagonist, for a less dramatic turn of phrase, are in constant conversation. Really. One of the examples I always give of this is Batman and the Joker. Because if you look at what kind of character Joker is, he is formed directly to fit all of Batman's fears. Like, Batman is a complete control freak who wants to have power over his environment, control over his city, who wants to set things right. Joker is an avatar of anarchy. An avatar of chaos, and of everything that Batman fears and can't control. I absolutely believe in writing your heroes and villains not only with the same amount of thought in the same amount of humanity, but also of thinking about them as things which are foils, in constant conversation with each other.
[Brandon] Right. The best hero villain pairs are the ones that espouse contrasting philosophies about life, or have the same goal but very different philosophies getting there. Magneto tends to be my favorite…
[Victoria] Yeah. Mine too.
[Brandon] Villain from comic books. Because they have, over the years, built this contrasting philosophies between him and Prof. X that you can see they both are aligned on trying to achieve the same thing and approach it in very different methods.
[Victoria] Yeah. Talk about a philosophical divide. But one of my favorite things that I heard recently from another writer was that the thing that makes villains so much more interesting is that they don't have a fall from grace that can happen, they can move upward. So they tend to actually protect certain people, or have caveats to their villainy. Whereas the hero can justify almost anything they do for the right cause. So there's a fascinating space between the hero and the villain where one has the ability to rise and the other one has the constant tension of falling.
[Brandon] So, some of my best… My favorite moments in books are when the villain has a chance to… You see, and you bring it, and you're like, "Wow." They could, at this point, make the decision to go… Good… Good is kind of difficult to talk… They could make the decision we want them to make and they don't and we totally see why they don't, and it breaks your heart. Right?
[Victoria] Exactly.
[Brandon] Like, a villain breaking my heart is one of the things that I just… I love when a story is able to do that.
 
[Dan] Well, connected to that, I love redemptive villains. I love that moment where you get there and then they do the thing and you're like, "Wait. You've been the antagonist for two whole books. Now in the third one…" Zuko does this in the Avatar series. He becomes one of the heroes by the end. It's handled so well.
[Howard] In terms of genre, in terms of story type, I think that the small evils villain sees a lot of play in the team sports stories. Because ultimately the triumph of these stories is team comes together and wins. It's not team comes together and overthrows the Dark Lord. That story can work just fine if there is no villain at all. But they really become grounded for us when we have minor antagonists who may be on the same team. People were not getting along with who are preventing us from coming together, or a rival on the other team who is doing things they shouldn't be doing in order to undermine us. But that's still not super villainy. It's small and we can relate.
 
[Victoria] I'm going to make an argument for why we love villains with small evils as compared to large evils. It is the slight, almost like virtual, sadism of the reader, a little bit, but basically they allow us to look at avatars of people who feel the things that we have felt in our lives, and who act out on those things in ways that we cannot. I think there's an immense satisfaction in reading like a villain lowercase V or a villain with small evils because we do see ourselves in them. We always see ourselves in the negatives of a character, very rarely in the positives. Very rarely do we go in the adventure, and be like, "I can relate to that hero, I feel just as brave." Usually, it's like, "I can relate to that antagonist, I have felt this way before." So I think… I don't know, when I write my villain series, I get a lot of messages from people who are like, "This woman got to act out in a way that I obviously can't because society dictates that I don't go burn my ex-husband into ash, but it was very satisfying to read."
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] I think we get some satisfaction from getting to watch people be bad. It's sometimes why we enjoy watching a hero have a fall and descend. I remember growing up on Smallville and loving when Clark Kent got his hands on red kryptonite, because we got to see that let loose. That letting loose, which is the thing that villains do so much more readily than heroes, is a very enjoyable reading process.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is a book called King of Liars by the author Nick Martel. This is an arc that I was given by my agent for a new epic fantasy. I honestly don't know if it will be out yet, by the time this episode goes live. It should be around this time. I really enjoyed this. Debut authors are always fun to read. I like to see what the new writers are doing. Often, they make me try to level up my own writing, because I'm like, "Man, if the kids are doing stuff like this these days, I gotta get better." This story is very fun, because it's about a family, they're called the Kingmen, not the King's Men…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] The Kingmen. This family, whose job was to kind of help protect the throne. The protagonist's father, instead betrayed the throne. He lives under the shadow of his father having been the Kingmen who went against the rules they have. They have a very stratified society. It's got all sorts of interesting politics and things to it. It's got a very cool worldbuilding, with a shattered moon that is constantly dropping debris on the planet, which is a very science-fiction concept taken into fantasy, which is the sort of stuff I like. It's kind of about his story of deciding is he a villain, is his father… Was his father a villain, what is… Where is the evil? And there are small evils all over this story. It's less about superpowered characters fighting other superpowered characters and more about the sticky messiness that comes from family expectations and societal expectations, in an epic fantasy package. So. Kingdom of Liars by Nick Martel.
 
[Victoria] Also, you hit on something in that pitch that I want to talk about.
[Brandon] Yeah, let's go for it.
[Victoria] [It's about] perspective. It's about… We obviously… It's a very trite phrase, like, that the villain tends to be the hero of their own journey. But we really didn't think about the fact that we choose when we're writing who is our protagonist and who is our antagonist. It's fascinating to analyze a little bit why we choose these things, understanding that if we flip the narrative or we shifted the narrative, one scene to the left, or one person over, we could end up with a completely different dynamic here. So I often challenge myself when I'm writing protagonist and antagonist to make sure that I write the antagonist as someone who doesn't necessarily feel like they're right, but could, through a different lens… I would say it's the… Like the Gryffindors and the Slytherins. There's like the Gryffindors are written as the heroes in that story from a perspectival sense. So they get centered in the narrative. But I'm always interested in what happens when you shift the narrative one over. There's a book for younger readers out right now called Nevermore that essentially follows like a girl who is kind of set up to become like a super-villain, like a Voldemort, magic villain, and it's about like what happens if she didn't choose this, but the world is so afraid of the kind of power that she has that they have essentially vilified her in advance. I'm fascinated by the idea that we choose the perspective, and in so choosing, we do choose who our heroes are.
[Dan] One of the… One of my favorite villain kind of series to look at is actually the Oceans series, Oceans 11 through 13. Partly because they do what you're talking about. Like, there is this small evil. The first movie is this big heist and it's all very stylized and all very cute. But, at the core of it, is you ruined my life and you stole my wife. So now I'm going to steal her back. Which, not only is it that very relatable thing and a very small evil, but you could totally flip the story around, like you're talking. If the casino owner was the protagonist, here's this old ex-con who's coming to wreck my home and steal my wife from me. I think that that's amazing.
[Victoria] Yeah, it's the comprehension of both sides. You don't have to root for both sides equally, but it's really important that you understand why the villain or the antagonist feels the way they do about the protagonist.
[Dan] To follow that on, you look at Oceans 12, which is the least loved and least successful of the series. It does not have a strong villain at all. The villain that it has, has no personal connection to the characters. So that's why when they got to the third in the series, they're like, "Nope. We have to bring this back to basics. We have to have a villain that there's a reason to dislike them." Because the hole that not having a strong villain leaves ruins every other part of the movie.
[Brandon] That movie in particular, that series… Like, there are series you can get away with your villain being a little bit weak. It works for certain situations. But in that series, you have to root for the bad guys.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Brandon] To do that, that series puts you against someone worse. That's the whole framing device of why you can root for these people doing pretty terrible things. Those movies absolutely need a strong villain for that reason.
[Victoria] I… Oh.
 
[Howard] I want to bring up a principle here. The principle of external costs. The idea that you profit on something because there is a cost that you didn't need to pay, but that someone else did. For me, one of the easiest definitions of evil is once you know about the external costs, you shrug it off and say, "Eh. Somebody else will pay it." A horrifying example of this which doesn't actually end in horror, this morning as we were picking grapes to bring to the craft services table, Sandra found actual ripe deadly nightshade in and among the grape plants. Okay? A handful of these berries will kill a child. The neighbor child, the toddler, loves wandering over to our yard and eating grapes off the vine. Deciding not to weed when we don't know about the deadly nightshade is just deciding not to weed and there's a tragedy. But once you've seen that plant, deciding not to immediately drop everything and rip them all up and tell the neighbor… Well, now I've become evil. It's just a little thing. Maybe nothing will happen. But that's evil.
[Dan] You should get to that at some point, Howard.
[Chuckles]
[Victoria] Yeah. This has to be the last point that I want to…
[Howard] I made my son do it. By which I mean, I asked Sandra to make my son do it. Then I checked before I left.
 
[Victoria] This has to be the last point that I want to make, which is one of escalation. One of my favorite examples to give from recent pop-culture is Vulture, in Spiderman Homecoming. Michael Keaton's character. What's so amazing about that character is it starts from such a grounded place. It is an escalation of minute choices. It is an escalation of a man trying to care for his family, who ends up having his job taken away from him, who then decides he'll just have to sell the products that he has on the black market. Who then escalates into a much larger business, who then escalates into obviously a villain and murderer and terrifying human. I think that is probably my favorite thing is to remember whether you're rewinding from villain back into human or fast forwarding from human, like your standard human character, into villain, that there is a process that happens there. Nobody just starts out and is like, "I'm going to take over the world." There is something that happens to displace them or set them at odds with the norms of society or with the good guys, whoever's on the other side, that makes them feel not only self-othering but as though they belong in the place that they're in.
 
[Brandon] So, we're out of time for this episode. Let's go to our homework, which you are very excited about.
[Victoria] I am, because it's a direct extrapolation of the thing that I was just talking about. So, often you'll be told, if you were the hero of the story, what would it look like? But I essentially want the listener to become the villains of the story. I want them to take their own petty grievances, I want them to take their own perceived weaknesses, their own cracks in their armor of life, the things that they know get to them. I want you to start asking yourself what steps stand between you as you are now and you as a villain in a narrative. What would it take, and what would it look like? I think this is important, because it is that reminder that all villains started normal at some point. So, like, just start extrapolating it out and see what kind of villain you would be.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go create some evil.
[Howard] And do the weeding. Please.
[Chuckles]
 
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Writing Excuses 14.52: Game Mastering and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence

Dec. 31st, 2019 07:49 pm
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Writing Excuses 14.52: Game Mastering and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence


From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/29/14-52-game-mastering-and-collaborative-storytelling-with-natasha-ence/


Key points: How do you design a story knowing that your audience is going to have direct control over what happens? Like a landscape architect, set up little areas with lots of seeds. Go in knowing the beginning story, the big arc, where you want to end up, and the big markers on the way. Then let the players add characters. How do you keep the story going? Remember your story seeds, and your notes on what they liked before. Collaborative storytelling let’s you come up with things that you wouldn't have thought of yourself. Take what someone else throws out there and roll with it. As GM, steer the story by asking them to make choices, then telling them what they find on that fork of the road. Good GMs make sure everyone has a fun experience. You have to let go, and let the other people tell their own story. Beware the recurring villain who cannot be caught. Also beware the main characters always succeeding! Make sure that every player gets to be special in their own way.


[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 52.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, GMing and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.


[Brandon] We are live at LTUE again.

[Cheering. Applause.]

[Brandon] We are super excited to have Natasha Ence on the podcast with us. Tell us just a little bit about yourself.

[Natasha] All right. So I'm actually a professional game master, which means I have the amazing opportunity of learning an amazing life where every day I get to wake up and play tabletop RPGs with really cool people who have hired me to create stories through them.

[Brandon] All right. I know the first question everyone is going to ask when they hear this is how in the world did you end up being a professional GM and how can they do it?

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] I decided that pretty much any time you have to spend time doing something that takes in the amount of talent, creativity, and skill, there is a market for it. So you can sell that.

[Brandon] All right, so I'm… I'm going to… Howard's like, "Wait… What?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's very wise.


[Brandon] Yeah. Very wise. So I just want to throw the first question out. How do you design a story knowing that your audience is going to have direct control over what happens? Right? I'm… As a novelist, I… My characters never surprise me. Some novelists talk about this, right? Oh, I didn't expect my character to go do this. No. I know what my character's going to do, and if they aren't doing what I want them to, I either rebuild the outline for them or I force them. I find a way to make it work. But you can't really do either of those things. So how do you tell a story, not knowing where it's going to go?

[Natasha] So, my background is… My background and education is in creative writing. I like to consider myself like a landscape architect. I go in and I set up my little plots, my little areas where I plant my seeds. Then I let them grow. But I have to go in and trim that back every once in a while. I go in with my beginning story in mind and a plot that's big arc. I know where the beginning is, I know kind of where I want it to end up. Along that way, I can plot the big markers. Then I get the characters, right? I don't get to pick those characters. I get someone else who comes in and says, "Hey, I really want to play this half-orc barbarian with a crush on cats."

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] Or "I really want to play a bard puppeteer who is a fallen angel."

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] No. This is legit. This is legit with multiple personalities.

[Laughter]

[Natasha] It's amazing. It's amazing. I love it, though. Okay. Then I get to sit down and plot out, okay, what are these persons' flaws that they have given me? What are the good things about them? What is this person's arc going to look like? Very basically.

[Dan] I love that metaphor of being a gardener and planting all of those seeds. Because when you're doing collaborative storytelling like this, it really is kind of a matter of planting as many seeds as you can, and then seeing which one the audience… The players or the readers or whoever it is… Grabs hold of. There are certain story seeds that they're going to love. They're going to be fascinated by that one character, they want to go back and talk to her all the time, or that one kind of magic or that one weird monster. As long as you got lots of those, and a lot of them tied into who the characters are in what kind of person they are, then no matter what direction the players or the readers want to go, you're ready because you've planted enough seats.

[Howard] My friends and I used to joke that our definition of the problem player was when the GM says, "Okay, we're going to be playing a 16th-century age of sail game, no magic. Let's talk about our characters." He's the guy who says, "I wanna play a ninja."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Reflecting on that now, I think, "Hum, you know what, the GM's job is to now roll a ninja into a 16th-century, age of sail game. That's going to make a story that none of us have ever heard before."

[Natasha] Very much so.

[Howard] Or hadn't heard before Pirates of the Caribbean.

[Laughter]


[Brandon] So, you're designing a story, you're coming up with these sort of prompts, these hooks and things like this. When you're designing this story, do you design everything, every place they could go? I'm going to assume not. So when you're doing it in the moment, any tips, tricks, suggestions on keeping the story going when it goes a direction you're not expecting?

[Natasha] So we just talked about story seeds, right? You fall back on those. You keep your notes of things. Okay, they really like this, like two towns back, or three sessions ago, or however many… However long ago that was. Right? You say, "Oh, they ran into Hogar, the bartender, who has a three-year-old who's kind of sick and need some medicine, and this one character really connected with that." So maybe I'll riff off of that and how they run into a medicine woman. Right? You can tie that back in and allow them to take off with those tiny plot hooks when they have nothing else to do.

[Brandon] Dan, I know a lot of the role-playing games you're a part of kind of go off the rails a little bit. Because I've been in many of them.

[Laughter]


[Brandon] What do you do? You really like collaborative storytelling. Like I've played some card games with you that are collaborative storytelling card games that really are about just building a story. What draws you to this? Because this always scares me. I don't want to be out of control as an author. But you obviously really enjoy it. What can writers learn from collaborative storytelling?

[Dan] Yes, Brandon and I have been in a lot of role-playing groups together for about 20 years now. One of the things we learned very early on is that one of us had to be the GM.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Because if both of us were players at the same time, the game would go so far into the weeds that it was unrecoverable. I know Natasha's thinking, "I could've fixed it," and she probably could have.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I love collaborative storytelling because of your ability to come up, like Howard was just saying, with things that you wouldn't have thought of yourself. I know I've talked about this on the show before, that if I create a scenario that is exactly what I need to be, it runs the risk of feeling very artificial. If I didn't know that that story was going to have a ninja in it, or a shepherdess, or a whatever it is, then it runs that risk of feeling flat. So I am drawn towards role-playing games, collaborative storytelling, in general, because taking what somebody else throws out there and rolling with it, saying, "Oh, I was not expecting that twist, but I've got such a great follow-up to it." It ends up being much more than the sum of its parts.

[Mary Robinette] So, much of my background was in improv, which seems like it has a lot of parallels to what you're doing. One of the things that my coach told me very early on, because I was coming in from being a writer… He's like, "Don't let the narrative brain come into this." Because as soon as you let the narrative brain come in, what it does is that you're making decisions for the other actors in the thing. We would always talk about this idea of yes-and, that you would say whatever… Like, ninja on the sailing ship? Yes, and… You also have… That you would fold it in. But you are actually… You are the narrator. So I'm curious kind of when you're doing this, how much… How much do you steer them? Like… Okay. Apparently this question was not as well formed as I thought it was…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Going to be. Because now I want to talk about puppet theater.

[Natasha] Keep going.

[Mary Robinette] Because one of the things that we brought from puppet theater was when we're doing an interactive story thing with the audience, where they are participating, is that there are ways to actually steer the choices that the audience made. That's kind of the thing that I'm curious about, if you can do that in this interactive storytelling?

[Natasha] Oh, absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] You're nodding.

[Natasha] Oh, absolutely. Because you don't… So, when you put a fork in the road, you don't have to tell them which fork castle that you want them to go to is that. You just have to say, "Which fork would you like to go down?" Then they pick one, or they pick to go down the middle and go into the field that is between the two forks. But the castle is in there, too.

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] So it doesn't really matter, they're still making the same decision because ultimately you know where that castle is going to be.


[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which is not a book. It's actually a Patreon. Tasha, tell us about your Patreon.

[Natasha] So, I just launched a Patreon, which is actually encounters that you can plop right into your tabletop games. I wanted to do this because so many times in games, we see repeats of themes. So the first one that I put out was a gamblers' alley. We've seen this in shows like The Road to El Dorado. It's one of the opening scenes where there playing that dice game behind whatever place, right? You see this multiple times, over and over and over again. It gives characters the chance to be characters. Whereas in so many games, with random encounters, it's often a fight. I wanted to have some story in there.

[Brandon] Awesome. So, everyone can check it out, just patreon.com/

[Natasha] Natasha Ence.

[Brandon] That's slash Natasha Ence.


[Brandon] So one of the things I've noticed, a big dividing line between good GMs and bad GMs, and I've been in groups with both, and I've been both in my life… Is that the good GM focuses on making sure the experience is fun for everyone. It's that sense of fun you're looking for. That collaboration, but you make sure that every player is satisfied and enjoys what they're doing. So I guess my question for the whole panel is how do you… What is not fun? What are the pitfalls? What are the things that you've done, that you've done in a role-playing session, or you maybe even found you wrote it in your books, and you thought everyone was going to enjoy this. Then they ran into it, and people just did not have any fun at all.

[Howard] When we were developing the Planet Mercenary role-playing game, I was… We ran some tests, some play tests, and people wanted to play with me as the GM. That is my very definition of not fun. At first, I thought it would be awesome. But then I realized… I actually realized this very quickly, I'm carrying that whole universe in my head, and I have a firm set of rules for what a story needs to be and needs to not be. The product we were creating needed to not being that. I needed to let those people tell their stories. So what was fun for me was when we did a GenCon playtest, and I was one of the players. People kept turning to me… I was the medic. They kept turning to me, like, "What do we do now?" I'm like, "I'm counting Band-Aids."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Then they ran with the story. That was wonderful for me, because I let go.

[Dan] One thing that I find that can be done well, but that is very often done wrong, is the recurring villain in a role-playing game. That sounds like such an easy thing to do, because everyone loves recurring villains. The person we love to hate. Oh, good, it's them again, I can't wait to punch them in the face after the insult they gave me last time, whatever it is. But the way that often plays out in practice is this person gets away no matter what you do. Because I need them to come back again in the future. So… That's not fun. The characters have spent the whole adventure, maybe several sessions in a row, trying to catch this person or trying to stop this person. Then they get away because the GM has thus decreed that they shall be a recurring villain and will come back later. That really kind of deflates a lot of the energy.

[Natasha] On the other side of that is always succeeding. You also want the main characters to fail, so getting bye-bye the skin of their team sometimes is what they need to feel successful, or so that in future battles or in future scenes, they can still feel successful.

[Mary Robinette] So, I very much enjoy the ones there were doing problem-solving. Like, puzzles, escape stuff, that's super fun for me. I find it so frustrating when I'm playing with someone like Sam Sykes who just enjoys breaking the rules.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's his fun spot. So, for me, when I'm in a situation like playing with Sam Sykes [cough]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] What I…

[Dan] Don't worry, he doesn't listen to our show.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm sure that none of our listeners are tweeting at him right now saying how annoyed I am with him.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Sam.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So what I have to do then is very much what Howard was talking about, it's like I just kind of have to let go and go okay, this is not one where I'm going to get to solve things, unless it is the thing that I solve is drugging Sam's character and strapping him to the back of a horse, which I may or may not have done.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] This plays into kind of my answer to my question, that one of my big moments is a GM, where I feel like I made great strides in being better is when I realized I could… My job was to construct a story where every player got to be special in the way that they wanted to be. This was a struggle because early on, I would be very, "no, you can't have this special thing. It breaks the rules, and everyone will get jealous of you." Because we were all focused on who had the best stats. As we matured as people and as players, we started to realize what Gordo wanted was just to have a secret past. He didn't… It didn't have to actually… He didn't have to have special powers related to it, he just had to have this secret past. What Earl wanted was Earl just wanted to be unkillable. Because it was stressful for him if his character could die. If he just knew that his character could never die… This is a thing that I didn't want to give him, because I'm like, "Well, if you can never die, there's no stress and tension." He did not want stress and tension.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] He wanted to enjoy the story. The moment where we realized we could make Earl indestructible and that was a feature… That the rest of the party could throw him into a room of traps, and it would like… They would all go off, he would start on fire, get chopped to pieces, and then come back to life. They could get through… They could use his superpower to problem solve. The whole team loved this. We had a much better experience than when we had been trying to be like, "Who has the best stats? Who's going to die, who's not going to die?"

[Dan] We accomplished that, by the way, by making Earl a half-dragon troll, who was therefore fireproof in addition to everything else. I think acid was the only thing that could harm him. Which was, in itself, this beautiful little holy Grail thing that could show up as a MacGuffin in the middle of a story. There'd be the one drop of acid on the floor, and Earl's like, "I'm out."

[Laughter]

[Dan] "I'm not in there, I'm not going anywhere near this dungeon." It's like you said, everybody loved it.


[Brandon] We are out of time. This has been a very different episode. I'm glad we got to do this. Thank you so much, Natasha for making this possible.

[Natasha] Thank you.

[Brandon] Thank you to our live audience.

[Cheers. Applause.]

[Brandon] Natasha, I'm going to ask you, do you have a writing prompt you can give us?

[Natasha] I do. All right. Since we just talked about games going a little badly, I'd like you guys to write about a game that's gone badly. We've seen this in the past, like The Hunger Games. Or, let's see… We've seen this in Ready Player One and some other things.

[Brandon] Excellent. Make that game go poorly. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.


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Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue

Jun. 19th, 2019 10:08 am
mbarker: (Burp)
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Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue
 
Key points: Political intrigue? The fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust. Shifting the dynamics or balance of power. Am I looking for the answer (aka mystery) or am I trying to find out why this is happening (aka thriller)? A heist of information! Why are people doing things, what are their motivations? Who has informational advantage? Beware of boredom! Give us a reason to care, make sure we understand the stakes. Scheming leads to actions, and actions lead to complications and ramifications. There must be change, not just scheming. Build rooting interest and sympathy for a character before you dive into political string pulling. The machinations of your villain should be smart, not just insanely convoluted. Secrets and informational advantage are the keys to political intrigue.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 24.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Political Intrigue.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] Or are you? [Dum, duh, dummmm!]
[Margaret] Last I checked. I hope so.
 
[Brandon] Let's talk about political intrigue. So, can we define this? What do we mean by this? I'll give you a little starter, primer. When I was pitching books, back when I had no idea how to pitch books, right?
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I was just wondering around the World Fantasy convention, trying to pitch my book to anybody who was standing by looking bored.
[This potted plant…]
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I pitched to somebody, I think it was an editor at Delray or something. I pitched my book as a political book about such and such. They listened and like, "Oh. You mean political intrigue. Not political book. Make sure you add that word intrigue on when you do this pitch in the future…"
[Howard] To somebody else. To somebody who is not me.
[Laughter]
[Margaret] But solid advice for a free sound rejection.
[Brandon] Yeah. I always thought, oh, I was presenting… Because what I really did mean was a political intrigue book. I was not writing a book about politics, it was about the fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think… I mean, the word intrigue, it is intriguing, it is engaging, the curiosity of it, the quest for answers. I sometimes joke that… And it's not really a joke… That the third book in the Glamorous Histories, Without a Summer, is a political intrigue disguised as a Regency romance. It is all about the way things are shaped in court, and although my characters wind up being somewhat peripheral to it, it is all about shifting those dynamics.
[Brandon] I can…
[Howard] It's worth pointing out that in Season 11, when we talked about the Elemental Genres, we drew a distinction between mystery and thriller. Re-listening to those episodes as we talk about political intrigue might be useful, because in some cases, the mystery is I want to answer the question. In thrillers, often it's I already kind of know what the answer to the question is, but I don't know why this is happening. There's looking for the answer, and then there's looking for a way out.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I sometimes think about political intrigues as a heist of information.
[Brandon] Yeah. I think that that's a…
[Howard] Info heist.
[Brandon] That's a great way to put it. When I'm looking at this, it's often you don't know other people's motivations. The main character is trying to figure out where does this person lie, where do their allegiances lie? What are their actual goals? And these sorts of things. As I was thinking about political intrigue, I realized a lot of what I write is political intrigue. Because, if you want to have fast-paced intense fantasy, one way is people always fighting, but that kind of gets boring to me very quickly. So the next step for that is trying to figure out people's motivations, and the plots they're pulling, and things like that.
[Mary Robinette] It is ultimately about trying… There is a character who's trying to shift a balance of power.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That is a key element to a political intrigue, is that shift of power.
[Margaret] I think… Because sometimes the political intrigue can definitely be the informational heist of trying to obtain information. But that doesn't mean that necessarily it's a quest for something, like that is a part of the guise of I am trying to accomplish my goal of X, and it is made difficult by the fact of the shifting sands that are all around me.
[Howard] It's worth looking at a couple of terms here. The term political. It's easy to get bogged down in current politics, or current events. Really, what's meant here is balances of power. Who has power over who else? How are these powers related? How is this power expressed? This group has power because they control the military. This group has power because they control the making of laws. Understanding that when you're thinking of the word political is critically important. As is just politics at like the university level or the family level. On the intrigue side of things, the term that I fall back on is informational advantage. Which is something that comes up all the time in sociology. The idea that one group has informational advantages over somebody else, and that gives them power that cannot be disrupted until, coming back to Mary's heist of information, until the information has flowed the other way and the advantage doesn't exist anymore.
 
[Margaret] What you were saying reminded me of the idea that power can take many different forms. One of the classes that I teach fairly frequently is one in adaptation. Where we ask students to take a piece of literature in the public domain and change it somehow. I had one student, he was adapting Macbeth. But he adapt… He set it in a junior high school classroom.
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] So you had all of the political machinations of Macbeth, but it was all revolving around, it's not the crown of Scotland, it's who's got social and political capital inside this group of tween's. So it doesn't necessarily have to deal with kings or presidents or government, if you're talking about political intrigue.
[Brandon] Absolutely. I mean, the number of times that a Shakespearean political intrigue story has been re-done as a teen high school drama… I think you would be shocked to see how many times they've done that and how well it translates.
[Margaret] Or as a motorcycle gang.
[Yeah. Yeah.]
[Mary Robinette] The thing is that… That's important about this is that when we're talking about this shift of power and capital, we're not talking about the shift of physical power. Which is why Avengers: Civil War is not a political intrigue at all. Even though it is very much about a shift of power.
[Brandon] Right. Whereas…
[Mary Robinette] Winter Soldier kind of is, though.
[Brandon] Winter Soldier kind of is. Yes. Exactly. That's a very good way to put it. So my question to you is, and this is coming from the professor mind where… I get a lot of students who obviously are trying to do this, and it is b o r i n g…
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] So boring. How do you keep this from being boring, and highlight what makes it interesting?
[Mary Robinette] The same way you do it with everything. Stakes. And giving us a reason to care. What happens if the character fails to accomplish this thing? Why do we care that they're going after this information? If we don't care, we're not… It doesn't matter how compelling you make breaking into some place, it doesn't matter, any of that, if we don't care. That means telling us about their motivations, that means telling us about the physical visceral sensations that they have when they're trying to hack into a database, or use their mystical powers, whatever it is. If we aren't getting those things, it doesn't matter what set piece you've got, it's going to be dull.
[Margaret] To me, it's that machinations have to result in actions, and actions have to result in complications and ramifications. Things that change… The shifting status quo has to actually be shifting. You don't want a bunch of people sitting around scheming, but nobody ever actually does anything.
[Brandon] I think that's part of the problem my students run into. I think part of the other problem is that they assume just like action, that political intrigue is naturally interesting. So you get these chapters where they forget they need to establish rooting interest and sympathy for a character, and then just immediately dump the political situation on us. They start, this is a young prince at court, and here's the politics of what this person's behind the throne and all that. You're like, I don't care yet. So since I don't care yet, I don't want to know who's trying to secretly pull the strings. I want to see this character and see the impact on their immediate life, and make sure that I'm interested, and then start layering this on.
[Howard] If I need to know who is motivated to kill the CEO, then it's useful for me to know a little bit about the lines of succession to being the CEO or what happens if there is no CEO. But relaying that information to me organically through the story versus narrating to me the constitution of the corporation of the book that you are writing…
[Mary Robinette] I'm getting bored…
[Howard] Are two completely different things.
[Mary Robinette] Just listening to you.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Yes…
[Margaret] I think there's an assumption sometimes that in order to understand or be interested in a chess game, you have to see the entire board.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Margaret] In terms… For chess, yes, that is literally true. But for metaphorical chess, often you want to, as you say, reveal things more organically. Stick to your point of view and let this get discovered…
[Howard] Position the camera right over the bishop's shoulder at what the bishop is aiming at diagonally, and suddenly we're invested in the direction that the bishop can go.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I'm going to make the argument that you have to see the entire board to play chess. You don't have to see it to watch chess.
[Margaret] Oooo!
[Brandon] Well, I also would make the point that playing chess when somebody else can see the entire board but you can't is part of what a lot of political intrigue stories are about.
[Mary Robinette] That's true.
[Margaret] Oh, yeah.
[Brandon] Right. Somebody is moving all these pieces, but you can only move this little one.
[Margaret] Well, how long of a driver in Game of Thrones is it that… The Starks arrive in King's Landing and all of this stuff is going on, and it's Ned blundering around in the dark trying to figure out what's actually happening.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. I'm going to pitch at you The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki. This is a fantastic book. I love this book. You probably don't need me to tell you that. I mean, it was a finalist for the Locus Award and various other major awards. It is a really cool political intrigue story that starts in the political intrigue of a secondary fantastical world based on Indian history and mythologies, where the main character is part of a harem. She's grown up in the harem. She's the daughter of the king. We start to inch into political intrigue, until it turns about-face and turns into political intrigue in the world of Faerie from Indian mythology. That happens very naturally, but also very surprisingly in a very cool way very early in the story. From then on, you're like, "Oh. She was having to play 2D chess where she didn't know all the pieces, and now she's playing 7D chess and she doesn't even know what kinds of creatures are playing on the playing field with her." It is written beautifully. The language is beautiful. The intrigue is interesting. The mythology is fascinating. It is just a really well done book. So that is The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki.
 
[Brandon] So let me bring it back to you guys. One of the questions that I have is when you're doing political intrigue, and when you're reading it, often times you will eventually find out the machinations of the villain, who was behind the scenes, and it is the most convoluted…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] They were… Their method of winning this chess game was to have like 17 different things that don't mean anything, and at the end, they're like, "Ha Ha! I've won this." It just… It really bothers me when the brilliant machinations come to fruition and they're kind of dumb.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of problems with that, where you're like, "There are really a lot easier ways to accomplish that. Why didn't you…"
[Howard] One of my favorite lines… It's from one of the Lois McMaster Bujold Miles Vorkosigan books is, from somebody who's doing this political chicanery, and she says, "I don't plan a path to victory. I plan so that all paths lead to victory."
[Mary Robinette] Interesting.
[Howard] As you unravel what this character is doing, you see, yes, it was convoluted, but it was convoluted because depending on the things other people do, you put me on a different path that leads to me winning. That's super interesting. But when it's super convoluted because all of these things need to work exactly right for me to cross the finish line, suspension of disbelief fails.
[Margaret] I will say for… I was going to comment, on the flipside, so I don't know if you want to duck in first?
[Howard] Go.
[Margaret] The first television show I ever worked on was called The Middleman, and the catchphrase of all of the villains on that show was, "My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity." The plan was never simple. Ever. I believe if we had had Season Two, it would have become, "My plan is sheer elegance in its draconian complexity."
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] You can use that to great comic effect. Phineas and Ferb does this really well. Dr. Doofenschmirtz has a very simple problem with a very simple solution, which he decides to solve in arcane ways that don't work.
[Howard] It's Pinky and the Brain.
[Margaret] Exactly.
[Howard] The Brain… Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So a lot of times these plots are in fact a Rube Goldberg machine. The way I handle it is that I actually plot my villain like a hero story, so that they pick the simplest solution possible. All of the plot complications are them compensating for things going wrong.
[Howard] Well, when we come back to the idea of intrigue, and the term informational advantage, the complexities for political intrigue plots are often I have a very straightforward path and it remains straightforward if I have kept secrets from the following people. If I have informational advantage at all of these stages, then I will win. Now, once you as a writer have plotted that out, you switch sides to your heroes, and you now have a big list of obstacles that they need to clear in order to succeed, and they don't even know what the obstacles are.
[Mary Robinette] I think, again, highlighting the fact that secrets are really important in political intrigue.
 
[Brandon] All right. Well, let's go ahead and go to our homework.
[Margaret] Yes. The homework this week is to take a classic fairytale, something like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Little Mermaid, whatever floats your particular boat. Take that story. Now assume the story we know is only a cover. What was actually going on? Incorporate as many details from the original story as you would like. If baby bear had the smallest serving of porridge, why wasn't it the coldest? Why did they leave their breakfast on the table when they went out walking, anyway? Come up with the undercurrents that explains what we see on the surface.
[Howard] Goldilocks and Three Russian Bears.
[Margaret] Da.
[Brandon] This is my favorite one we've come up with, so I'm really looking forward to what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 

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Writing Excuses 13.5: Villain, Antagonist, Obstacle

Feb. 7th, 2018 02:19 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
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Writing Excuses 13.5: Villain, Antagonist, Obstacle

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/02/04/13-5-villain-antagonist-obstacle/

Key points: Holding up a mirror to hero, protagonist, main character, we have villain, antagonist, obstacle. Something or someone in the way is an obstacle. Someone intentionally working against the protagonist achieving goals is an antagonist. Evil makes a villain! Villains, antagonists and obstructions are key to good stories. Conflicts make the story change, while obstacles are just in the way. You may decide which one to use based on where you want the story to focus -- obstacles make protagonists more proactive, while antagonists and villains often make them more reactive. Consider scale. Superpowers and minor issues don't play well together. Antagonists can allow you to explore different viewpoints around an issue, topic, or theme.

( Thesis, antithesis... )

[Brandon] Mary, you had some homework for us.
[Mary] Yes. So. Last month, when we were talking about hero, protagonist, main character, we had you tell a story where you broke the hero, the protagonist and the main character apart and told it from different viewpoints. What we want you to do this time is to only have one main character, but they're facing three different types of problems. Same scene. One time, you're going to write it where they're just facing an obstacle or an obstruction. The next time you write it, reset everything to zero, and now they're facing an antagonist. Then you do it again, and they're facing a villain.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 7.19: Q & A at UVU

May. 8th, 2012 02:32 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.19: Q & A at UVU

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/05/06/writing-excuses-7-19-qa-at-uvu/

Key Points:
Q: Why do books in a series become different as they go along?
A: Characters, stories, and stakes change. The writer grows.
Q: How do you approach the paragraph?
A: Each paragraph has a mini-arc, beginning, middle, end. Use topic sentences.
Q: When do you start thinking about a prequel?
A: When the backstory deserves it. But beginning writers should stick to in-late, out-early.
Q: How do you plot?
A: [James] Premise, brainstorming major events, major plot twists, and then I get so excited that I start writing. [Brandon] I write a little bit. Something sparks, is exciting, and I write that scene. Then I look at where do I go from this, what is a great ending, what's exciting about it, and work backwards to the start.
Q: How do you craft endings that are highly satisfying and leave the reader wanting more?
A: Answer all the questions set up in the beginning, then raise a new question. People live before and after the story -- point to that.
Q: How do you keep a really compelling and convincing villain from taking over the book?
A: Make the hero more proactive. Make sure the hero has a great scheme to achieve something awesome, so they are doing things, not just waiting to respond to the villain.
( The details... )
[James] Okay. One day, you have a bunch of crazy people come to your house and kidnap you, and put you at a place called... It's an asylum for the criminally sane. [Laughter]
( cutting out )
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