Writing Excuses 20.23: The Lens of the Senses

Jun. 12th, 2025 04:53 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.23: The Lens of the Senses
 
 
Key points: Sensory details. What do you use automatically? Sound, sight... What do you remind yourself to include? Cues to memory or emotion. Use analogy to describe. Tie it to an emotional moment. The unexpected squirt in the dark. Leave space for the reader. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 23]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 23]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] The Lens of the Senses
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm stinky.
[DongWon] And we all have a regret.
[Laughter]
 
[DongWon] So we've been talking about the various lenses you can use to approach how you're doing worldbuilding, how you're building your fiction, how you're just constructing your story in general. Right? We've been talking about context and time. But I wanted to bring us back down into the body a little bit today. And what is the most rooting thing you can do in a scene often is to remind your readers of the sensory details of the scene. What do they see, what do they hear, what do they taste, what do they smell? What do they feel? Those are the five senses. I believe I hit all of them. And so... 
[Mary Robinette] What do they taste?
[DongWon] What do they taste? Did I miss that one? Anyways. As we're going through these, or as we're talking about how to make your world feel really lived-in, what are the sensory details that you guys reach for in a scene automatically, or what are the ones that you find otherwise you have to remind yourself to include?
[Howard] I reach for acoustics. Very, very quickly. Because, as an audio engineer, one of the first things that I would do walking into a space is stop, close my eyes, and listen to the room. Not just listening for things that are making noise in the room, but then I also snapped my fingers or clicked my tongue and listen for the T 60, the time in which an echo will drop by 60 decibels. How long does it take for the echo to die away completely? And I realized fairly early on that with my eyes closed, I could tell, without making any noise, if I was in a little room or a big room or a giant room or outdoors. And it's such a fun exercise to do.
[Mary Robinette] I… It's interesting that you say this, because my husband is also an audio engineer. Film and television, he did location sounds. In college, I was an art major. I am very visually oriented, and tactile orientation. So we walk into the same space, and he will be absolutely driven bonkers by a buzzing sound that I don't even know exists until he points it out. And I will talk about the pattern in a carpet that's just, like, why would anyone do this, it gives people vertigo, and he is like, there's carpet in the room?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And this is… I think one of the reasons that it is such a powerful tool, because it's telling you not only about the world, but also about the character. So I tend to default to visual. And I think a lot of writers do. As a result of that, I will sometimes make a conscious decision that one of my character's other… It's primary sense is something other than sight. So… To differentiate them. I try to link it to… Usually something about the career that they've wound up in. Not because the career shapes it so much, but because I think that you get drawn to a career based on what is important to you. But I can reverse engineer that to create some character distinction.
[Erin] What's interesting hearing that is that I… I have aphantasia, so I cannot make mental images at all, and I have a horrible sense of smell. And those are my two favorite senses to use when I'm writing.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Actually…
[Mary Robinette] Interesting.
[Erin] I don't know if it's because I am try… Like with visual, I actually am trying to make it happen. So, something that I will do is I will actually pull up images of the place or something like the place I'm writing about so that I can actually look for what are the visual things that, like, would be happening. And I just love smell because I feel like it's so visceral, even though I don't experience it as much as other people maybe. I just love what it says about the way you experience something. I feel like it's the thing that's the hardest to get away from. Like, if something smells bad…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It also will have, like, a taste effect on you. And so I think it's an interesting one because it kind of has, like, an interesting secondary effect. But I think part of the reason is because they aren't things that I'm experiencing as much, I'm able to think about the way that the character experiences them in a completely different way, and it doesn't… I'm not distracted by my own senses in coming up with the character's sensory experiences.
 
[DongWon] Interesting. It lets you put yourself in the fictional space more because they're things that aren't [garbled] connected to you… A you experienced world. But it's also really interesting about this is each of the senses are tied to memory and experience in different ways. What we see versus what we smell versus what we hear, I think, are all different cues for different people into memory. I… There's a lot of research that scent is the most strongly connected to memory for a lot of people. Maybe less so for you, Erin. But that the scent memory of something… I know, for myself, that sometimes I'll smell a particular smell and I'll suddenly just be back in when I was 13 years old in this particular space, in this particular summer, or whatever it was. And so I think… Are there things that you guys not only are connecting in terms of what's interesting for the character, but if you're trying to evoke certain emotions, do you lean towards different sensory details or do you find that it's more just what tool fits what character?
[Mary Robinette] I often, when I'm trying to evoke a specific emotion, the one that I lean towards is touch. Because I lean into what the body is feeling, where the character is feeling their tension. If they're too hot, if they're too cold. Those are the things for me, when I'm trying to create emotion, that I tend to lean towards. Which is linked to, but somewhat different than trying to create a sense of place.
[DongWon] Right.
[Howard] I do feel like scent, the sense of smell… It's almost like when we remember things, smell ends up as the index tabs. Whereas other things, sounds and colors, don't. And… But I don't do that to try and… I don't include smell to try and make the reader smell something or… I'm not trying to flip through their index tabs. What I'm trying to do is let them look into the character's brain by giving a scent and have the character immediately smell…Ah. It smells like grandma's place. What? Oh, mothballs. I'm smelling mothballs. And if anybody's had that experience, and I think most of us have, where you smell the thing and immediately been in a place or had a thought, that is normalizing, that is… That draws us into the character and gives us, the reader, a sense that we experienced the same thing the character's experiencing.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I will hear people talk about sometimes is that they… Yes, they agree with that, but that they don't use smell as much as they would use sight because there's not as much language for it. However, after my husband went through the audio engineering, he went and became a winemaker. Which, sometimes I have to help him with his research, and that's very difficult.
[Erin] Oh, no.
[DongWon] What a struggle.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] sadness. But it means that I wind up going to these winemaking events, and they have so many ways to talk about scent. One of the things that I was struck by was that actually it's the same toolbox that we have for talking about sight, we're just not used to using it. When you talk about a color being creamy, that's an… That's analogy. Right?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And that's the same thing that happens when you're talking about scent. It smells chocolatey. It doesn't smell like chocolate, but there's that richness of flavor. And this… You can build a sense of something that is not a flavor or scent that occurs in the real world by linking it to things. Like, I just wrote a story where there was something called a basil willie, because people are actually really crap at naming things. We just name it by what we… But then I was sitting there, trying to describe basil. I just had a recent experience where I have a friend who has the unfortunate gene where cilantro tastes like soap, and she's like, what does it taste like to you? And attempting to link it to things that I know that she has smelled and tasted. It's like, oh, yeah, this is all analogy. One of the things that my husband says when people are learning to approach wine is if it smells like that to you, you're correct. If the way you need to describe it is it reminds me of grandma, then someone else can be turned and say, oh, knowing me, oh, your grandmother's southern and you're picking up these bacon notes and these vegetable tones. Grandma's baked green beans are amazing. Now I'm hungry.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Now I want bacon wine.
[Mary Robinette] I can introduce you.
[DongWon] I really want to talk more about the language that we used to describe sensory details. But before that, let's take a quick break.
 
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[Mary Robinette] The thing of the week is an experience that I think is actually going to be hard for you to find. It's called Darkfield. It is a train show and you go… They have containers that they have turned into a theater, and you go into a container and are in a completely dark space. This is actually something that is not commonly experienced, because most of the time, there's a little bit of an LED, there's the exit light. Completely dark space, and they tell you a story through sound and motion. It is wild. There's… They have a couple of different experiences. Flight, séance, and comma. As a storyteller, thinking about how you can tell a story with only a few senses and removing others highlights exactly where we get our information. It's very compelling. It's a little disturbing, and it is a touring show so it may be hard for you to find. But if you can, I recommend seeing Darkfield.
 
[DongWon] I started this episode by talking about how sensory details can be the most grounding. But, Mary Robinette, before the break, you were talking about ways in which actually that sensory experience is so subjective. What I experience is very different from what you experience, very different from what Erin experiences, and Howard experiences. Right? What tastes one way to us, even if we all like the same thing. My experience in eating cilantro is different from yours, because I'm a different person. I mean, my physics, biology, all these things. So when you're trying to use language to make an experience feel universal, make someone feel in the body of this character, you don't know what kind of body your reader has. What are the tricks that we can use to make sensory experience feel universal or feel connected or feel specific in different ways?
[Erin] So, it's funny, because hearing y'all talk earlier about, like, scent being the core of memory, I think, because of a lack of both sent and visuals, like, I actually have a quite poor memory. And I… The only way that I remember things is by feeling like there's a story about it, almost as if somebody was singing a song and suddenly you remember the chorus. And so, like, that's how my whole… My whole life is stories. But one of the things that I do, then, because I'm trying like to convey scents to… Or something to a reader that I don't have is I often make up what a scent is by trying to create an emotional moment and then telling you there's a scent to it. So I would say this smells like a combination of… And a lot of times I'll use a very sensory thing and a fake thing. Sort of. So I'll be like, this smells like rotten meat and sidewalk chalk the day after a rain.
[Howard] Yeah. And as a humorist, I am always, always playing with the words around smell. Because it's so much fun. This smells like something died and then went to gym class without taking a shower. That's a ridiculous metaphor. But… And what we know is that the character has passed judgment on… Maybe it's body odor, maybe it's putrescence, maybe it's both. But we are having, hopefully, a humorous emotional response to what the character is experiencing.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that Erin was saying, just taking that and tying back in, you make me think about the way perfumiers describe perfume, that they're trying to create an experience that takes you through something. So, even though you're saying an imaginary thing, it's like, yeah, it's imaginary, but there's a whole layer of scents that are associated with each of those things that builds this whole in a way that a list would not. It smells like petrichor, sidewalk chalk, and exhaust from streets… But, like, that's a very different thing than the smell of sidewalk chalk after a rain.
[Erin] And the thing is if you say, like… I can think of a lot of reasons why I think, like, that scent makes sense, like, things like rain do have their own scent, a sidewalk after the rain has a certain scent, and chalk has a scent. But I also think that it's very possible that if we had, like, smell-o-vision or, like, I could suddenly smell what you might think of when you thought of that, that we would all have different smells.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But I've rooted it to the same emotions.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] So that if I reference it again, or if I'm using it to describe a character, it's sort of doesn't matter that the scents are different because the emotional thing…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That I'm trying to get you to realize through using that sensory detail is the same.
[DongWon] I think that's the thing that we were all talking about, is that really, when we get to these sensory details, so often it's about emotion. How is the character feeling? We're describing sensory details to give us a sense of what their experience is, not just in a physical way, but how that connects to the emotional truth of it. Right? So, in describing… The way you're combining positive and negative imagery when it comes to the scent of something, that gives us a more well-rounded experience of, like, oh, this smells bad, but also a little nostalgic. And what does that mean that this character associates writing me with something a little nostalgic?
[Howard] The mediums that we're using… We have to pay attention to these. Because if you are writing and someone is going to read it, then you are using principally the sense of vision to create a data stream that is giving us… But if the audiobook is read… If someone reads the book to you, you're listening to an audiobook, the information stream is now going through your ears. And there are audiobooks that are not just read, they're dramatized. And so some of the sounds you might put in the text end up performed as sounds. I remember being in a planetarium for a concert, and they said if you see something you like, that's us. If you hear something you like, that's us. If you feel something you like, don't look at us. And then, during the show, they were in the back with a squirt gun.
[Laughter]
[Howard] And it was hilarious, because we were getting information through a stream that we were told we wouldn't be getting.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Howard] Anyway, I'm just fascinated by this.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that I love about this is that we're in the module where we're talking about where and when, but we're talking about character, and this is, I think, an important thing is most of the time when your reader is experiencing the place, they are experiencing it through the lens of a character. When we're using these sensory details. How is the character experiencing it? And even if the character isn't there, the reader is interpreting it through their own lens of self and their own awareness of how their body would experience those things. Like, if I see someone who is describing stepping out into the humidity of a southern day, and they are describing the way I described it, which is, it's like stepping into a sauna and being hit in the face with a hot wet towel. I know that, and I have… I bring my own memory to it. This is part of a thing that we talk about a lot, that your reader is building the story with you. And so, invoking those sensory details, even if you're doing it in omniscient, even if you're doing it where there's not a character on the page, you are evoking them for the reader.
[DongWon] I mean, that's what I like so much about this topic is, whether we like it or not, we all have bodies. Right? Whether we like it or not, we all have… We're all in our Gundams made of ham. Right? We're experiencing the world filtered through the sensory organs that we have. And so are your characters. Right? So when you get this opportunity to remind your reader that your character has a body… They don't. They're fictional. You made them up. They literally don't have a body. But the reader does. Right? And so if you can connect those two dots, you will increase the verisimilitude of the reading experience exponentially.
[Erin] And what I like about that in setting is that you can use things that are very visceral and sensory to connect things that are very speculative, very out there…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] To something that we can feel. I was at an immersive theater show at the Edinborough Fringe Festival where we were in the dark. Full black dark, in front of, like, an arcade machine, and you could, like, choose things, and it was all audio. We're just standing there. But at one point, there is… Like, somebody is killed by some really weird out there gun of some sort, and the arcade machine squirted a tiny bit of water. It was the most disturbing thing ever…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because, like, I don't know what that machine does, I don't know what happened to the person exactly, but death plus liquid in your face…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Is making you feel like so many things. And I connected really strongly. I don't remember much about that experience other than that moment, because it was so visceral and because it was so sensory and I didn't need to know the specifics of how the thing works because I understand how the thing feels.
[DongWon] I mean… I think this is why… I talked about genres of the body. Right? Because horror is such a classic one, because you can take the most outlandish thing in the world and you bring it down to blood and bone and the smell of somebody dying and now it's so real for your reader no matter how bonkers made up the monster was or the situation was with a haunting was. You made it felt in the body, and then your reader's with you in that moment.
[Howard] I… I love the senses, and I love the idea that when you feel a thing… Feel, smell, hear, see… That seems out of place, it can be absolutely horrifying. A little bit of wetness when there's been a splotchy death noise. A little bit of open fresh air when you've opened a door you expect to lead to another room, and you realize that this door opened into… Don't take a step or you're going to fall to your death. There's all kinds of ways to play with this, where the unexpected sense is part of a reveal that can be humorous or horrific or intellectually stimulating or whatever it is you want to evoke in the reader. You do it with more than one sense, and it's harder.
[DongWon] And it's a place where sometimes doing less can be more. Right? I think if you're really trying to overwhelm your audience with the sensory aspect, it can be hard to parse what's happening. One of the… Going back to horror, I'm thinking about the famous rain room scene in Alien, part of why that is one of the most iconic effective scenes in all of horror history is because it's very quiet. He's there, you can hear the drips of water, you can feel how cool it is on his face, you're so grounded in his body, in that moment of, like, this moment of relief of, like, oh, there's water on my face, the chains are clinking, there's a little bit of a breeze, and there's all these tiny little sensory details that are making that scene pop, right before awful things happen. Right? And it's the quietness in that moment that lets you absorb the sensory reality of it, which then heightens your dread, because you know what's coming.
 
[Mary Robinette] I think along those lines, sometimes, the thing that you can do is to leave space for the reader.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] There's this thing that has stuck with me for a long time from Steven King where he says, you can describe the pain in great detail, going into all of the… The nerve endings lighting up and all of this stuff, or you can say, they ripped his fingernail off. And, like… For our listeners, DongWon, sitting beside me, just winced and turned away.
[DongWon] Yup.
[Mary Robinette] And that's an example of leaving space for the reader. That sometimes you describe the thing that is happening to someone and you don't deliver the sensory details, you let the reader experience them. It's something that you use sparingly. But it's also the thing that relies on the reader having a common experience.
[Erin] I'm just thinking… It makes me think that part of the way that we experience sense is also distance. Like, how far away is the sound, how close is the smell? You know what I mean? And I think that there's like… That is something to think about. And that actually I like to play with more, which is, like, what happens when a sense… Something that you sensed as far away is suddenly closer. Or something that you sense as close… If you're smelling your grandmother's baking bread and then that becomes further away through time or further away through distance. Like, that actually can convey emotion in the exact same scent, but a different context for it.
[DongWon] Absolutely. I really love that. And that's combining the differences that we have in terms of context, in terms of time and distance, and all these things, and how you experience that in your body. So, while we think about how to make space for the audience, Mary Robinette, I believe you have some homework for us?
 
[Mary Robinette] I do. This is an exercise that I learned from C. L. Polk. We're going to link in the liner notes to the original essay. And it is an exercise that they use to create an immediate sense of place, that they got from an anxiety stopping exercise. Five, four, three, two, one. You list five things your character can see, for things your character can hear, three things your character can touch, two things your character can smell, and one thing your character can taste. So that your exercise, is to do the five, four, three, two, one. I'm going to put in a slight twist for you, which is, if your character's primary sense is something other than sight, make that the one that's the five.,
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.16: Your Setting is a Telegraph

Apr. 23rd, 2019 04:42 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.16: Your Setting is a Telegraph
 
 
Key points: Setting can be used to quickly telegraph the kind of story they are reading, the tone and mood. E.g., a prologue can establish the tone of the entire story. Specific, concrete details can help. Don't forget the Stooges' Law, a coconut cream pie on the mantle in the first act means by the end of the third act, someone will get hit in the face with it. Screenwriting has the opening shot, with a visual setting. Where a meeting is happening, what they're doing, where the events are happening can do a lot to indicate the type of story. If you have a tonal shift, before telegraphing it, consider whether the surprise of the unexpected shift is part of your point or not. When you finish a book, you may need to revise the first chapter and fine-tune the setting to get the tone right. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 16.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Your Setting is a Telegraph.
[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] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] Howard, when we were preparing this, you gave us the title. So why don't you explain what you mean by Your Setting is a Telegraph.
[Howard] it comes from the term telegraphing the punch, telegraphing the punchline, telegraphing the joke, whatever. Which is often used negatively. But here we mean your setting is going to telegraph to the reader very, very quickly… You're going to communicate to the reader very, very quickly what kind of a story they're reading. Are they reading a comedy, are they reading military sci-fi, are they reading a puzzle story about alien archaeology, all of those sorts of mood things can be established by your setting, and can actually be established very, very quickly when you introduce them to your setting.
[Brandon] Yeah. You can always, of course, establish these other ways, as well. Through word choice, through what your character is doing, through situation, but this… We're talking about world building this year, and we want to really talk about how to use your descriptions, your settings, or where people are, or things like this to give an immediate and powerful indication of the tone of your story. A lot of times, one of the big questions I get from students is, "Should I use a prologue or should I not?" Which is one of those loaded questions, which is… What kind of juice do you want? Right?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Should I have a drink of juice or not? Do you like juice? Is it breakfast? Do you want a prologue? Well, one of the reasons you might want a prologue is if you are having trouble with your first chapter establishing the tone of the entire story, then you can use your prologue to do this. Now that's of course dangerous because maybe you need to look at that first chapter and learn how to maybe make that one, but it is one of the things you can do, is… I often use the Wheel of Time as an example of this. In the beginning of the Wheel of Time, in chapter 1, the first few pages take place with the young man on a farm with his father. It's a little bit creepy because he keeps seeing shadows, but that's not a real indication of tone. If you were taking those opening scenes as a promise, it might be, "Oh, this is going to be a pastoral, perhaps horror." So Robert Jordan has a prologue where a madman is wandering through a burning castle, screaming for his dead wife and children, who are at his feet and he can't see them. Things are on fire, and there's been a big war, and it's like, "All right. We're in the middle of a giant war drama with some psychological elements." So that early introduction of tone is very important to set the tone for the entire series. How can we do this? What suggestions do you have to our listeners?
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that if you are specific and concrete with your choices in the beginning, that this does a lot. So, like if I am writing military SF, then having a hand cannon says we're going to be shooting some things. If I'm doing a comedy, then in very broad terms, if there's a coconut cream pie there, we know that at some point… It's the Stooges' law, that if there is a coconut cream pie on the mantle, then by the end of the third act, someone is going to get hit in the face with it. These are the things that happen that can communicate tone to the reader, because we latch onto these concrete details.
[Howard] Well, it's important to recognize that the version of Chekhov's law that Chekhov actually said, which is if you want to fire a gun in act three, you need to show it on the mantle in act one. If you want to hit somebody with a coconut cream pie, you have to show us a coconut cream pie on the mantle in act one, so that we know that this is a story in which there can be a pie fight.
 
[Margaret] I think it's interesting in the difference between fiction and what I'm thinking in terms of screenwriting, because it's your opening shot. Right? It's very hard to avoid establishing setting, because the visual is right there. In screenplay format, the first thing you say is this an interior or an exterior? What is our setting? Is it day or is it night? That's the first thing somebody reading after fade in is going to encounter in a script. In fiction, you have a little more freedom in there. Like, if you're starting with a character, but it's remembering to put the character in a place, because you can get so much lifting done, as you say, in terms of tone by where you're meeting somebody, what they're doing, where these events are happening. A conversation that happens in a diner is different than a conversation that happens in a car that's speeding towards a cliff or in a prison visiting area. All of those start you on three very different types of stories.
[Howard] If I have a science fiction… An opening science-fiction shot that is in the science-fiction equivalent of a mausoleum with data-encoded corpsicles or whatever, and that is what I am describing, the reader has a pretty clear indication that life and the ending thereof is going to be one of the thematic focuses of this story.
[Brandon] One of my favorite episodes of Firefly is the one that starts with Mal in the desert naked. Opening shot.
[Mary Robinette] That's one of my favorites, too.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] That shot indicates wacky hijinks are going to occur. Not just him, desert, naked, but his pose, the way he's talking. He's not, like, lying there, dying of thirst, crawling through the desert. He's like, "Huh." Just one shot. He says something, but you wouldn't even need to. You know that you are going to chuckle and wacky hijinks ensue. I really like this.
[Margaret] Things have gone rapidly out of his control over the course of this episode.
[Brandon] I love when stories can do that.
[Mary Robinette] I think, actually, one of the things about that is that you've got the specific concrete detail, but you also have the character's relationship to that detail. So, one of the examples that I think of is the difference between Star Wars and Space Balls. Both of them say this is science-fiction and they both have the same opening shot, which is ginormous ships scrolling through. But Space Balls, it goes on so long that it becomes comical. That tells you, "Oh, no no no. This…"
[Brandon] You're going to laugh.
[Mary Robinette] You're going to laugh all the way through this.
[Howard] Then there's a bumper sticker on…
[Mary Robinette] There's a bumper sticker.
[Howard] On the back of the spaceship.
[Mary Robinette] Just in case you missed how long it was going on.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Terminal Alliance.
[Howard] Yes. Terminal Alliance by Jim Hines. My family, we bought this book twice. I was on my way back from Cedar City, with Kellianna and I put on the audiobook of Terminal Alliance so we could listen to it. We got home and she said, "Are you going to listen to this in your office while you draw?" I said, "Maybe. But I'm not working yet." She said, "Well, I want to keep going, and the reader is too slow. So do we have a copy of this book in print?" So we bought it in print. No regrets. No regrets. It's a comedy about space janitors and zombie apocalypse. You know, that's kind of all you need to know. If I say space janitors and zombie apocalypse, you have enough setting that I've telegraphed to you the tone of this thing from my friend Jim that you're really going to enjoy.
[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to second that I enjoyed the heck out of this book, too.
[Howard] I think the cover was a Dan Dos Santos. I'm not sure. I love the cover. I love the cover.
 
[Brandon] So, kind of riffing off that, Howard, how do you indicate that there are comedic elements in your stories, and how do you indicate sometimes… Sometimes, Schlock Mercenary gets very serious. I feel like you use setting to distinguish these two quite well.
[Howard] There's… Well, first of all, I need to establish that if you're reading Schlock Mercenary and have been reading it for a while, if there isn't a punchline or if things happen and there are no repercussions, there is no serious side of it, you'll feel like I've broken some rules. That's… We've talked in previous episodes about budget. So I have this currency that I have spent to get you to this point. That said, I try to begin every book with some sort of establishing shot, that will tell us this is science-fiction. I'm going to end the strip with a punchline, which, because of the beat, beat, punchline format of things will tell you very quickly we're going to tell a lot of jokes. But I like to establish the scope of the story. In the most recent… I say most recent. When book 19 launched, I did a joke about prologues. We had a prologue in which an alien spaceship is flying and they're saying, "There's a star system ahead, do we need to change course?" "No, we're going to fly through their cloud… Comet cloud, we should be fine." "But anything…" "We're big. Anything we nudge, those inner planets are going to have to deal with." "Sure, they're going to have to deal with it, but it just means millions of years." 8 million years later, we have a little velociraptor with a telescope who looks kind of like Leonardo da Vinci, if he were a feathered velociraptor talking to another velociraptor who also has a similar sort of da Vinci-ish look who is building something. He's saying, "Huh. How soon can your flying machine be ready?" That has told us this is going to be a tragic story about the ends of civilization, but you're going to laugh.
[Brandon] Excellent.
[Howard] That was a very long-winded…
[Brandon] No, that's great.
[Howard] Approach to it, but... I also made so much fun of prologues, and I was thinking of you the whole time.
[Brandon] Thank you very much. I'll have you know that… 
[Margaret] I wanted to giggle at your description, but I didn't want to mess up the audio.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I've restrained myself, and most of my books only have two now.
[Wha!]
[Brandon] Way of Kings has four prologues.
[Mary Robinette] I know. I know. I'm just… I'm amazed at your restraint.
 
[Brandon] Yes. All right. So. Building off of that, let's say you want to shift tones in your story, you know you're going to do it. You're going to be writing a comedic story that is going to get serious, or you're going at it the other way, you're going to write a serious story but you know you're going to have some comedic elements. How do you indicate that from the beginning? Do you need to indicate that from the beginning?
[Howard] I think the second part of that question is the more important bit. If the surprise that people experience with a tonal shift that they weren't expecting is your point, then you don't need to telegraph it. If, however, you don't want to alienate them… You know there's a tonal shift, and you don't want to alienate them, then you do need to telegraph it.
[Brandon] Okay. I would absolutely agree with that. Though, we're talking specifically about using setting. Right? The methods of using setting. So, let's in our last few minutes here, let's give a few tips. What are things you've done using your setting to indicate your tone?
[Mary Robinette] So, I did this in Calculating Stars. Calculating Stars opens with a couple in the Poconos, and they're having sexy fun times. Then I slam a meteor into the earth.
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] So… What I did with that, and I made very, very deliberate choices in that first page. The opening line is "Do you remember where you were when the meteor struck?" That tells you this is going to be a disaster story. Then, the
is "I was in the mountains with Nathaniel, and we were stargazing, by which I mean sex."
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] Which gets a laugh. It tells you… Having those two things back to back tells you about the setting that we're in… And, granted, I'm doing this in narration. It is a first-person character. But I'm using the setting there to tell you what this is going to be about. That you can expect a story in which we're dealing with relationships, we're dealing with disaster, and that there's going to be some comedy. It's not going to be disaster all the way down.
 
[Brandon] I often have trouble with first chapters. Not starting them. I've talked about this before in the podcast, though, that when I get done with the book, I feel like my first chapter no longer belongs with the book that I ended up writing. This is coming from someone who architects and outlines a ton. That first chapter, getting that tone right, can be a big deal for just kind of establishing how the whole story's going to play out. I had to do this just with my most recent book, that will have just come out at this point about six months ago. Skyward. Where I wrote the first chapter, I even did readings from it. At the end, it was just not right. Even though when I rewrote it, it was basically the same events happening. I needed to make… They live in a cavern system underground, I needed to make the caverns a little more claustrophobic. I needed to make the stepping on the surface for the first time more full of wonder, because the idea of we as a people are escaping the caverns and getting into the skies, that's the point of the story. It just… I find finishing my book and then going back and saying, "What was my book's tone really about?" And "How can I hit this metaphorically in the first chapter?"
[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a really good point, that… For me, a lot of times, it's about going back in and finessing the specific physical details of the space. I have a story called Cerbo in Vitra ujo which is one of the true horror stories that I've written. When I wrote it initially, it read like it was going to be a teen drama. What I had to go back in and do was bring out… Even though I didn't move the location, I shifted the… They're in a conservatory on a space station, so there's all of these plants around. But I made sure that there is like a broken rose, that there is a diseased rose. That there are elements there that are unsettling in order to indicate that that's where we were going. It was about going back and adjusting the setting to match the tone.
 
[Brandon] So, our homework plays right into this idea. Which you have for us, Mary?
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is I want you to write an opening. It can be taking an opening of something that you're already working on or just starting from scratch. But I want you to write the first half page. In that first half page, I want you to hit three specific concrete details. I'm picking three as an arbitrary number, because I want you to actually really dig into this. But I watch to pick three specific concrete details that telegraph setting… That telegraph the tone. That telegraph what the mood is. These details are obviously your setting. So I want you to do that. Then I want you to write it again and telegraph a different mood.
[Brandon] Use, maybe, even the same dialogue, but use the setting to indicate a different tone. All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.10: Magic Systems

Mar. 12th, 2019 02:53 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.10: Magic Systems
 
 
Key points: How do you go about designing magic for a book or story? With younger readers, you can get away with a softer magic system. I drew on Indian mythology, but then change or craft it to fit. Hard = rules, crunchy. Soft = more free-form, less description. Take something from mythology or folklore, and turn it into a system. Think about what the readers are looking for -- wish fulfillment, fun, aspirational geewhiz. They want escapism, a world of new experiences, but where they can still identify with the problems and conflicts. Don't forget the flipside, the speculative what if and social exploration. Why do we like favorite magic systems? Essentially giant puzzles. A visual component to the magic. The immediate combination of "it would be cool to do this" and "Oh, wow, the implications are really frightening." Surprising, yet inevitable fulfilling of promises. Collecting plot coupons! Knowing what it would be like to experience or confront the magic.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 10.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Magic Systems.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard. Why are you laughing?
[Mahtab] And I'm Mahtab.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I'm laughing because she copied our vocal intonation.
[Laughter]
[Dan] It was really funny.
[Howard] Okay. You know what I do when I'm traveling in a foreign country? I start to sound like them. We are aliens and… Welcome, Mahtab.
[Laughter]
[Dan] [garbled cool aliens house]
[laughter]
 
[Howard] One of my alien powers is to invent magic systems.
[Dan] Ooo… Talk about that.
[Howard] Did that bring us back on topic, Brandon?
[Brandon] Yes, it did. Before we started this, Howard looked at me and said, "Brandon, you're not going to just talk this whole time, are you?"
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Because you could.
[Brandon] We decided together…
[Dan] Probably what the listeners want. Tough.
[Brandon] No, it's… We… I have written a bunch of essays on magic systems. We're not going to touch on the things in those essays. Because we've covered them in episodes of Writing Excuses, I've talked about them at length. Instead, we're going to kind of talk to the side of them. So if you want to read those essays, Sanderson's Laws, you can go find them. You can read them. Instead, I want to ask… I'm going to start with Mahtab. How did you go about designing the magic in The Third Eye or in any of the stories you've worked on?
[Mahtab] Well, first of all, because I'm writing for middle grade, I do not need to have too many hard facts or go at extreme length in terms of describing the system. I think you can… With younger readers, you can get away with doing a softer magic system, where… So one of the influences that I had was the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That was one of my absolute favorite novels that I read. Things are not really explained. When Aslan sacrifices himself to save Edmund, and then he dies, and he's on this Stone Table which breaks, and that is some deep magic related to Christianity and sacrifice. I didn't know all of that. I totally didn't understand. But, I mean, I felt that wonder when he came back alive, and the kids went back with him. So, as far as mine, when I was writing The Third Eye, I drew a lot on Indian mythology. So one of the… Well, the main character's Tara, who is a young child, but the mean villain is Zarku, who is an evil character and he hypnotizes people with his third eye, which I borrowed directly from the god Shiva, who has a third eye. Except that Shiva uses it to burn evil things, whereas I actually gave that quality to my evil protagonist, who could hypnotize people and make them do things. I had a couple of really gruesome scenes which kids kind of love and the parents hated. Which is fine by me, as long as they picked up the book to read.
[Howard] But, you know what, that's the mark of a really good book for kids.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Kids love it, and their parents hate it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] You've done society a great service.
[Mahtab] Thank you. That's actually the one book that won the Silver Birch, which is a reading program in Ontario, and it kind of kick started my career. I was really happy about that. So I drew a lot on Indian mythology. Even when Tara has to solve problems, she prays to Lord Ganesh and she has… Lord Ganesh is supposed to have a helper in the form of a little mouse. That is what comes to save her. So, my magic system was soft, but it was based a lot on drawing from Indian mythology, and then kind of changing or crafting it to suit the story.
 
[Howard] It's worth pointing out that next week we're going to talk about magic without rules. So…
[Dan] That's kind of what we mean by hard and soft.
[Brandon] Right.
[Dan] She was throwing those terms around. If it has a lot of rules and is very crunchy, that's a hard. If it's more free-form…
[Brandon] Yeah. There is sometimes this sense, like, when I start talking about these, people assume that I don't like soft magic systems. You'll be disabused of that next week.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I really like a good soft magic system. I like magic in all its different varieties, and what it does in stories.
 
[Brandon] So let's talk about building… You said you reached into Indian mythology to get a lot of your ideas. I do this too. A lot of my ideas for magic systems will come from something from mythology, or something that… Like, I love the idea of spontaneous genesis, right? That things get… They used to believe that frogs were born out of mud, because you always find frogs around mud. That idea is so cool…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] And so interesting. A lot of my magic systems are born out of me looking back at some sort of folklore or myth, and then saying, "Well, can I make that into a system?"
 
[Dan] One of the things that I have started to value more and more, every time I try to write magic, is the idea of wish fulfillment. That what readers are really looking for, even though they don't always admit this, especially adults, is magic that is fun, that they would want to use. I think that's one of the major reasons that Harry Potter has been so successful, is because everybody wants to go to Hogwarts, everybody wants to be using those cool spells. So while there's certainly a place for magic that requires sacrifice or that causes pain or something like that, I think there's a lot of aspirational geewhiz in fantasy, where the reader wants to be able to go, "Oh, I want to write a dragon. I want to use all these metals and then fly through the sky. I want to be able to do that. That looks awesome."
[Brandon] That comes into something I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is the draw of fantasy. What is it? How is that maybe different from some other genres? I hadn't even really put this together, but if you look at like movies, some of the big ones, what is the difference between the superhero movies and Star Wars? Star Wars is a lot more fantasy, right? Even though it's got science-fiction trappings. You see with Star Wars, people… They don't necessarily just dress up as the characters in the movies. They go get their own Storm Troopers costume and become a Storm Trooper and things like this. I saw this a lot in The Wheel of Time fandom, that people didn't necessarily when they would do costumes, not necessarily want to be one of the characters. Sometimes they would, but often they would want to put themselves into the setting, and dress themselves like a character and come up with a persona from that world. That's a very kind of distinctive thing, I think, for fantasy.
[Dan] It really is.
[Mahtab] It's a lot to do with escapism. I mean, most people who read fantasy, they're just so bored with… Well, bored or whatever. They just want to go into a whole new world, be the characters, live with them, experience totally new things that they wouldn't, and then they kind of come back to their lives. For me, science fiction and fantasy is exactly that. Just getting out into a different world, yet being able to identify with the problems, with the conflicts that the characters face, so that there is something that I can feel, I mean, it should be something that I feel is relatable to me. But it's still… It's a whole new world.
 
[Howard] Well, there's a flipside to that, which is the speculative fiction aspect of fantasy and science fiction. At risk of calling the elephant in the room an elephant, Brandon's Steelheart takes the social concept of absolute power corrupts absolutely and wraps that… Or maps that onto a superhero universe, and asks us the question, and it's a socially important question, what happens if there are superpowers and absolute power corrupts absolutely? That question, whether or not there's escapism involved, it's a fascinating read for the social reasons. I think that's kind of the other half of magic systems. We talk about wish fulfillment, we talk about escapism, but we also talk about how the ability to obey a different set of rules, a set of rules that are not the laws of physics as we understand them, but are themselves rules, how will that change us as people? If it doesn't change us as people, how will it change our relationships with other people? That's… So that was really deep and maybe way to crunchy, but…
[Dan] No, that's something that a lot of urban fantasies in particular get into. The TV show called Lost Girl, The Dresden Files series, they both get very heavily into that idea. The Magicians, as well. If you have all of this power, and can get away with stuff, you're going to start getting away with stuff, which I think adds another really cool dimension to the magic system, is there are people who use it well and there are people who don't. People who use it for evil.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop, and our book of the week is actually The Third Eye. So, will you tell us about it?
[Mahtab] Absolutely. This is actually the very first novel that I wrote. I think I sweated blood and tears over it. It's about a young girl, Tara, who slowly… I mean, she is living in this village with her father and her stepmother, and slowly, as the story progresses… There's a new healer in town who has got three eyes and just about everyone's enamored with him, but she's the only one who can see behind that façade of his and realize that he's evil. The story is about her journey in trying to find her grandfather, who's the only other person who's kind of strong… You could call him a Dumbledore kind of thing. Who is strong enough to fight Zarku and defeat him. But throughout the journey, what I try and do is take away the entire support system, so that eventually, Tara is just relying on herself, and a little bit off the soft magic system based on Hindu mythology that I talked about earlier, to try and defeat Zarku.
[Brandon] It's a delightful book.
[Mahtab] Thank you.
[Brandon] I'm really enjoying it, although I will tell you, I did not expect it to be as much of a horror book as it is.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] That's not where I thought I was going.
[Howard] Brandon loves it, his parents do not.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] It is genuinely creepy in a lot of places in a really delightful way.
[Mahtab] It's a different horror. I was just telling Dan on the way here, saying I'm delving back into horror, but, yeah, there are some very graphic, gruesome scenes which I really enjoyed writing. I often get teachers saying, "What were you thinking?" But then, it's like, the kids like it, and there isn't anything else that shouldn't be in there, so let them enjoy it.
 
[Brandon] All right. Let's ask you guys, favorite magic systems in books or films that you've experienced, and kind of why? What made this magic system work? What made you enjoy the story?
[Dan] Well, at the risk of over inflating Brandon's ego…
[Howard] It's now an inflatable elephant in the room.
[Laughter]
[Dan] The… I love the Mistborn magic system, but for two very specific reasons. First of all, they're essentially giant puzzle games. Where, here's all of the pieces. You know how these work. How are they going to solve the problem at the end of the book? For me, reading any of the Mistborn novels is essentially just a cool puzzle to solve. Okay, this guy can do… Here's, in the Alloy of Law series, here's the girl who only has the one weird power that she doesn't think is of any use, she likes slows time down or something. How is that going to be valuable, because you know it is? I love ciphering those puzzles.
[Brandon] They are slightly Asimov Laws of Robotics books, stories.
[Dan] Exactly.
[Brandon] Where you set up several laws, and then you show they're not working or that there's a hole in them somewhere, what are we not understanding? Then you kind of put it together at the end.
 
[Dan] That's not what every magic system has to do, and shouldn't. There needs to be variety. But I like those for that reason. One of the others, though, and this is another one of the rules that I've kind of set for myself as I develop my own, is that magic should have a visual component to it. I always used to try to make magic very mental, very cerebral. I think a lot of aspiring fantasy writers do the same. But adding that visual element… So again, back to Mistborn, you've got things as simple as being able to pull or push on metal, and you don't need a visual component, but you added the blue lines. The blue lines bear so much weight in these stories, and they serve such a powerful function, even though it's a very simple thing. Because that gives us a sense of what it looks like, and what it would feel like to do it, and it helps us understand what's going on. Just because of these dumb little blue lines.
 
[Brandon] I love magic systems where, when you start reading it, you both see why it would be so cool to have this magic and also, are instantly worried and frightened about the implications of it. Right?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] A great example of that is our former professor, Dave Wolverton's Runelords series, in which you can take someone's strength and brand it onto yourself with a branding iron, and that person loses their strength and you have it. You're twice as strong. But now, you have this person that you need to take care of, because if someone can get to them and kill them, you lose your magic strength. The social implications of that are just staggering. The moment you read it, you realize, "Oh, man. This changes society in some really dark ways." He goes there.
[Dan] Yeah. He follows through on the ramifications. Like, every evil thing that you think as you're contemplating that, he comes… He deals with at some point or another. It's a really great example of how to show the effects of magic, and how to show a society shaped by magic.
[Brandon] How fantasy can, as Mahtab was saying, can take some our world element and in some ways by exaggerating it really kind of bore down into that issue. Like with the Runelords, the fact that the strong become stronger and the weak become more and more subject to the strong, is really well exemplified in that story, to ways that make, I think, you start to realize this is kind of how our society works, and that's an ugly underbelly to it.
[Howard] Deadbeat by Jim Butcher. The… I suppose I'll just spoil it, because…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Do it.
[Howard] That's what we're here for and it's an old book. The name of the book is both a reference to our detective, our wizard, Harry Dresden, who is kind of a deadbeat, and this idea that necromancy works best when you have a rhythm to which all of the dead are marching. I don't remember the exact details, but the older the bones are, the more powerful a thing you can raise. We end up with a guy dressed like a one-man band drummer riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton through town. It is surprising, yet inevitable. It fulfills all of the promises of necromancy as he set it forth. It was a lot of fun. I mean… Undead dinosaur, you can't go wrong with that.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Any other favorites?
[Mahtab] I have one which is… I read it a few years ago. But, The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. Where Will Stanton, on his 12th birthday, realizes he's one of the Old Ones, and he has to collect these six symbols of… I think they're called the Champions of Light, which is… Is to circles made of wood and bronze and iron, fire, water. Then that… He has to collect it, it makes a powerful object, then he repels the Dark with it. But it's just so beautifully written. It's kind of a coming-of-age, a fantasy, there's wild magic, high magic, but it's really, really good. The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper.
[Dan] I also wanted to mention, just to have like a really soft magic system in here, the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. I love the magic as he presents it there. Because there's maybe one or two rules, and I don't know anyone who could name them off the top of their heads, but it has a distinct flavor to it. Like, there's no… We don't know what the rules are governing it, but we absolutely know what it feels like. We absolutely know what it would be like to experience or confront the magic that we find in those books. I loved the way he pulled that off.
 
[Brandon] All right. So, I've also got our homework for this week. Now, next week we're going to be talking about soft magic systems. What I would like you to do is kind of… Make you take some sort of soft magic system that you've read about or you've loved. The example we came up with was… Is Gandalf. Gandalf's very soft. We never know what Gandalf can do, specifically, we just know he's awesome. Well, I want you to take a soft magic system, and apply rules to it. Give Gandalf rules. Take a soft magic system you have written and give it rules. Flip it on its head, and see how the magic works differently if you explain exactly how it works and have it work according to those rules. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 24: Writing Comics with Jake Black

Feb. 19th, 2011 01:39 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 24: Writing Comics with Jake Black

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/08/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-24-writing-comics-with-jake-black/

Key Points: Comic scripts need to be clear enough in stage directions and dialogue for the rest of the creative team to figure out what's going on. Be prepared to adjust and tweak. Comic characters don't talk a lot -- 20 or fewer words in a balloon. It's a visual medium, and dialogue and captions eat up art space.
( Inside the Fortress of Solitude )
[Dan] We are running far over time, so we are going to cut this. Please tune in next week when we will talk about how to get into the business of writing comics, and how to succeed and stay in the business of writing comics. Your writing prompt for today is to write a story -- you can do this as prose or you can do it as a comic script -- in which Superman swoops into a room, kicks something undefined, and then turns into Spiderman.
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