wetranscripts | Entries tagged with word choice

Writing Excuses 20.49: Using Tone and Mood

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-49-using-tone-and-mood

Key points: Plot tells us what happened, structure tells us how it happened, and tone and mood shape the emotional experience of the reader. Tone is the narrator's view of the world, mood is the character's view of the world. Tone is imagery, word choices, sentence structure. Mood is the characters' physical responses, internal reactions, actions they take, and what they pay attention to. Aligned or in conflict? Juxtaposition and contrast! Mood as landscape, and tone is the personal walking there? Control tone through imagery, word choices, and sentence structures.

[Season 20, Episode 49]

[Erin] Hey, everybody. This is Erin, and I've got a question for you. What have you learned from Writing Excuses that you use for your own writing? Now, we talk a lot about tools, not rules. Which means there are things that we're going to say that you're going to be like, yes, that is for me. That's the tool I'm going to use in my next project. And there are others that you're going to be like, uh, I'm going to leave that to the side. And what we want to know is which of the things that we're saying have really worked for you? What's the acronym you're always repeating? What's the plot structure you keep coming back to? What's a piece of advice that has carried you forward, when you've been stuck in your work? Or that you've been able to pass on to another writer who's needed advice or help? However you've used something that you've learned from us, we want to know about it, and we want to share it with the broader community. Every month, we're going to put one of your tips or tricks or tools in the newsletter, so that the rest of the community can hear how you have actually taken something that we've talked about and made it work for you. And I'm personally just really excited to learn about those, because a lot of times, y'all take the things that we say and use them in such ingenious and interesting ways to do such amazing writing that I'm just like chomping at the bit to get in these tools and tips and share them with everybody else. So if you're interested, please go to our show notes, and fill out the form there, and be part of this project and just share with us what you're doing, what you've learned, and how are you using it so that we can share with everybody else. Really excited, again, to get all this in because, honestly, what we say is made real and important and meaningful by what y'all do with it. With that, you're out of excuses. Now go tell us what works for you.

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

[Season 20, Episode 49]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Using tone and mood.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And I have brought this topic to the table because it's a class that I taught for my Patreon because I started thinking about what tone and mood did. And that they are one of the most powerful storytelling tools. But we always talk about structure or character arc or things like that. Here is why I think it's important, and then we're going to... We're going to tell it... We're going to... I will let other people talk at some point.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Yay!

[Mary Robinette] Basically, I think plot tells us what happened, structure tells us how it happened, and tone and mood shape the emotional experience of the reader. And my example of this, I've got two of them for you, is that Wizard of Oz is structurally a heist. So, you have the catalyst, which is the tornado, you have scouting the territory, Welcome to Oz, you have gathering the team, meet the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and The Wizard, you have practice and prep for the heist, which is the Merry Old Land of Oz song, you have committed to the heist, the wizard sends them to get the broom, they're forced to alter the plan, there's flying monkeys. Then the plan comes together, the team rescues Dorothy, everything goes wrong, they get chased by guards and the witch through the castle, they're at an apparent total loss where they're caught, and the scarecrow catches on fire, and then the actual win, which is the witch is melted and we have the true plan revealed, which is that that was the wizard's goal all along. So...

[Howard] More heist movies need flying monkeys.

[Mary Robinette] Right?

[Howard] Wow!

[Mary Robinette] But it doesn't feel like a heist, because tonally, it is a wonder tale and it's a coming-of-age story. And then Pride and Prejudice? Actually, secretly a mystery. You've got the crime, Mr Darcy is an asshole, the investigation, Lizzy investigates and continues to find proof that he's an asshole, and you have the twist, Wickham runs away with Lydia, and the breakthrough, like, what, Darcy saved Lydia from ruin? And then the conclusion, that he's not an asshole and that they're in love. And then you have marriage. So... But, again, it... Tonally, it's a... It's not that. So...

[DongWon] This connects to fundamental genres in certain ways. Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly. This gets into Elemental genres. But I think that tone and mood are things that we can play with. So what I want to do is talk about tone in this first half of the episode, and mood in the second. And my thinking is that tone is about the narrator's view of the world, and that mood is about the character's view of the world. So, I am curious what... Having just spewed at you, here's my thinking, I'm very excited about that idea...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What do you think about that? And, like, I think there's a number of different ways that we control tone, and so I'm curious what you think, now that I've been like, hello, here's a thing.

[Howard] I am... One, I'm reluctant to disagree because this is very well thought out, and I love it. But, two, I think that tone might be... Yeah, might be the structure and so on and so forth, and mood might be a more readerly thing that comes into the narrative because, in the context of what I bring to sitting down to watch Wizard of Oz, Wizard of Oz doesn't feel like a heist, it feels like a wonder tale. But if I'd never seen, if I didn't have that context, Wizard of Oz might feel like... Might feel more like a heist. And so mood might be more related to the conversation... We talked about this earlier this year... The conversation that your piece is having with other pieces that are similar in the mood that you're shooting for.

[Mary Robinette] I see what you're saying. I think the question is, if we're thinking about this as being an intentional thing that we can control...

[Howard] Yes. And that's why... That's the other reason I'm reluctant to do this. How would I control that? I don't know.

[Mary Robinette] Well, and I think the reason you can... The way you control that is through how the character feels. Like, Dorothy, when she walks into Oz, when she steps out into Oz, her reaction to being in Oz tells us how we should feel about it.

[DongWon] So, that's the mood.

[Mary Robinette] That's the mood.

[DongWon] And the tone is the heist structure of it. The...

[Mary Robinette] No, the tone... The structure is this thing that's happening. The tone is... So, the tone is the narrator's view of the world, it's the imagery that we use.

[DongWon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So it's... In fiction, it's the word choices, it's the sentence structure. And in Wizard of Oz, it's the color palette and things like that.

[Erin] I was going to... Actually say what you would say for mood, and then... I have a theoretical analogy.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, okay. so, for mood, the tools that I think we're using to control things are the characters' physical responses, their internal reactions, the actions that they take and the things they pay attention to.

[DongWon] I see. Okay.

[Erin] The way that I'm thinking about this, of course, is with karaoke.

[Mary Robinette] I love it.

[Erin] So, I'm thinking, like, so the tone... Because to me what you're saying is the tone is the way that... it's how the teller tells the tale. And so when you sing a song, like, you can decide... Like, if you... It could be the weirdest song ever, that's like, who knows, could be the most emo [trumo] song, and if instead of screaming it, you decide to sing it in a sultry jazz voice, like, you have changed the tone of the song. That song's trying to do what it's doing, but you have put your foot down and said, this is the way that I'm going to do it. I say everything is a sultry jazz number, and I don't care what it is. And that's the part of the experience that you're going to have. And then the mood, to me, is more like the crowd. Like, the mood is like I'm telling the tale this way, and the mood is like looking around and seeing, like, is everyone polka-ing? That's going to give a different mood.

[DongWon] Yeah. Right.

[Erin] Then no matter what. So... And then those two things intersect. And one of the things I think is interesting, number one, is to see does that even work for you as an analogy, and number two, then, like, what happens if the tone and the mood... Like, do they always have to line up? Or can they be in conflict with each other?

[Mary Robinette] They don't [garbled]

[DongWon] I have a great example, I think, of where they diverge. What's fun about this episode is you brought up this idea and we didn't talk about it much offline. So this is sort of a little bit of a class situation...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] For us, and a little bit of, like, let's interrogate the instructor and find out what this means.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] For me, this is let's kick the tires on that. Yes. No, I love it. Okay. So. Mike Flanagan, who's a horror director, made a adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story called The Fall of the House of Usher. The tone of this is this big dark family drama horror story of a man being haunted by the deaths of his children that are happening over the course of weeks, where all of his children die in increasingly horror... Or not increasingly, but all equally horrible ways. The tone of this story is told in this, like, bombastic way, this. like. big grand family drama. And then the experience of watching this show is almost horror comedy. It's campy, it's over the top, and I think a lot of people reacted badly to the show because of this. But it's a deeply unserious show with a serious core message. But it's a deeply unserious show... You watch these characters die in increasingly ludicrous ways. In ways that feel very Edgar Allan Poe, in terms of being wildly over the top, of watching a guy go insane because he thinks there's a cat in the wall. Right? Like... and it's... To me, it was an utterly delightful experience. We were like howling and cackling through the whole thing. But it strikes me that there is a real difference between the tone and the mood, where the tone is like reading Edgar Allan Poe poems, like, verbatim as narration, with, like, this somber music behind it, and then you're watching someone run around with a sledgehammer trying to find a cat. And it's, like, fantastic, but there's such a difference between those two experiences. And the... I think the dissonance between them led to so much of the space for Flanagan to say the serious things he wanted to say, while also entertaining the hell out of us watching a bunch of awful, incredibly wealthy people get got in ways that they deserved.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, to Erin's point about can these two... Can these things work in opposition to each other, can you create a juxtaposition and contrast? Yes. Absolutely. One of the things that I was thinking about is that in This is How You Lose the Time War, the tea shop scene, the tone of that is like, look at how lovely Britain is, and how beautiful this is, and the mood of the characters is quite different from that. While the character is there to enjoy that, the character is inhabiting it as a this is quaint, this is... And I'm also having all these big feels about this person that I'm having these battles with. This is a battleground. That's the mood that's going on. One of my other favorite examples is Jane Austen. You do not have to read the entire novel. But if you take a look at Northanger Abbey, chapter 21 and 22, in 20... It's basically the character arrives, and she's in this room, and she's like, oh, no, this room is so Gothic and terrible and it's really frightening and there's mysteries in it. And the author, the tone of it is that Jane Austen, the author's voice, is gently mocking the character, while the character is having genuine feels. And in chapter 22, she wakes up in the morning and discovers that the terrible scratching at the window was actually a beautiful rose bush and that the wardrobe that she thought was locked was actually unlocked, and that she had locked it, and that that was why it was hard to get open. So the tone remains quite consistent, I'm gently mocking you, while the character's mood switches, and so it causes you to experience the same room in two very, very different ways.

[Erin] The thought I'm having is that it seems like mood, in some ways in terms of tools and how you work with it, that mood is a more primal... It seems like it's more of a lizard brain thing. And by that, I mean, things are scary. There are certain things, like when things..., a scary mood plays on things that we are afraid of. It is dark, there is a strange sound. There are a lot of ways to bring different tones, because we can do a lot more [garbled] control over the way our narrator thinks about it and talks about it. But things like hitting a wall with sledgehammers looking for a cat... Like, if you frame that well, like, there's something that we will just think that's funny because there's something funny in the visual that puts us on that kind of level. And so I'm kind of curious, like, how you... Speaking for myself, how to set up that kind of, like, this is the landscape, in some ways? Like, mood is the landscape, and tone is the person walking through the landscape? And so we can control how they see it and what they say about it, if they make fun of it or whatever. But in some ways, the landscape is still there. And if you want to change the mood, you're making broader changes to the landscape [garbled].

[Mary Robinette] That sounds like a great thing for us to talk about when we come back from the break.

[DongWon] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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[unknown] If a Lenovo computer's on your holiday list, don't shop around. Just go directly to the source Lenovo.com. You'll find exclusive deals on the gaming PCs and tablets you want. Like the powerful Legion 7i gen 10 laptop and the versatile Legion tab. So avoid all that shopping chaos and price comparisons, and just go directly to the source Lenovo.com, where you can unlock exclusive savings. That's lenovo.com. [singing Lenovo, Lenovo]

[Mary Robinette] So I love this idea of thinking about it as a landscape, and I think the reason that I have been thinking about mood is that... As a thing that is very character centered, is because different people react differently to the same landscape. And so the narrator has set for me, it's like, okay, here's your landscape. I'm going to... maybe I'll set up some fog, and some scary lighting, and this is amazing. And the character is like, I love fog and scary lighting. And then another character's like, no, this is much worse. And that's the... For me, a lot of the... What a character does when we are in tight third person or first person is that they are my viewpoint into the story. They're my way of imagining how I would feel in that, and it does activate my lizard brain. So I think that that's... It's an interesting way to think about it.

[Howard] You bring that up... I went through a haunted house once a couple of decades ago, and the mood that I brought with me was I have heard that they have spent a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of effort and they've got really good... They got a really good team working on this, and it's being hosted at what used to be the actual mental hospital up on the hillside in Utah. And I was giggling, generally joyful, happy the whole time. And somebody does a thing where they pull down a lever and crush a dummy. And something squirted on my face. And I squealed with laughter. And one of the cast members stepped up to me, just right in my ear, like, dude, what's wrong with you?

[laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled we need to?] hire you.

[Howard] Would you like to work here? Because you're frightening all of us. And so, yeah, for me, the tone and the mood are dependent a lot on what I bring into that landscape.

[DongWon] I'd love to turn at this point to talking a little bit about how we can use this as a tool.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? I think understanding... We've gotten to a little point where we kind of understand the terms here. How do you deploy this in your fiction, or how should we think about this as an active use?

[Mary Robinette] Let me actually use an example from an early, early piece of my own writing. This is one of the pieces that made me understand that tone was something that I should be consciously manipulating. So, there's a short story called Cerbo in Vitra ujo, which was the first horror story that I sold. And I'm like, this is... I'm not very deep into my career. I have... I don't have novels out at this point. And... So I'm going to read you the first paragraph or so. For 3 sentences ish. And then I'm going to read you the revision of it after I talked to Ellen Datlow who gave me some lessons about horror. So...

Behind the steady drone of the garden's humidifiers, Greta caught the whoosh snick as the airlock door opened. She kept pruning her Sunset Glory rose bush to give Kai a chance to sneak up on her. He barreled around Noholen's Emperor artichoke without a hint of stealth. Something was wrong. Greta's breath quickened to match his. Kai's dark skin seemed covered by a layer of ash.

So, this is what Ellen said when she read that, was that there was nothing visceral about it. There was nothing about the language... The tone of my language. Right now, I'm setting up something that could just be a meet cute kind of thing. He could be about, like, oh, my goodness, I'm about to propose marriage. Like, anything could be happening right now. So when I revised it, all of the actions are exactly the same. But I've switched my language.

Greta snipped a diseased branch off her Sunset Glory rose bush, like she was a body harvester looking for the perfect part.

So you can see... I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of it. But you can see immediately that the tone switch that that makes. So, for me, when I'm thinking about tone, I'm thinking about the imagery that I use, and that was one of the things that Ellen said, was that I needed... That there needed to be something diseased or something like... Why was there a perfect rose bush? So imagery, the word choices, like body harvester, choosing that, sentence structures, whether you're doing something that's flowing and languid or, like, choppy and breathy.

[Howard] And I think that's where, to my original attempt to argue with you, I think that's where we have control over what the reader brings to the experience. Because when you say body harvester, that's the sort of phrase that is going to resonate with people, whether or not they had experience in sci-fi or horror...

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Howard] Really well.

[Mary Robinette] What I'm going to point out is that my character does not know that she's in a horror story, and that's why I think mood is a separate thing.

[DongWon] Yeah. So, if mood is the landscape, as Erin sort of described, I'm seeing tone as the score. Like the movie score that's running underneath it. Right? Like, you have a scene of a group of characters laughing with upbeatness behind it, you are in a comedy, you put a discordant ambient sound underneath it, it is a horror movie now.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? Howard showed me a YouTube video the other day of the trailer for Mad Max, remixed to the Yakety Yak song. And it changed the tone, let's say. While the mood of the characters remained the same because the landscape is the same.

[Erin] This is not important to writing, but this is why I have always wanted... If I were going to have a superpower, for it to be to be able to hear the orchestration of my own life.

[laughter]

[Erin] So that I would know when to be afraid, when to be happy, when I'm like meeting a romance. Because it would come through and let me know that, like, while I may be in this place, something completely different is happening all together.

[DongWon] You know what, Erin, I think you're empowered to choose the music that is behind your own life.

[Erin] I love it. But I would say the other thing that's not to do with my own life is I think we, a lot of times, play around with this with contrast. I asked that question about the contrast and the example that I thought of was, like, your old school Law and Order episodes where, like, someone has been killed in some horrific way, and then Lenny Bristol is like, guess he's not making it home for dinner.

[laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean? [garbled] like, it cuts because you're like, oh, no, like... And it is a... But it brings you to, like, this is a show that's about procedure and we're kind of having a fun time. It's not a horror.

[yeah]

[Erin] Law and Order is not a horror show.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] But that would be interesting. And it teaches you a little bit, but also, it makes you laugh. because the mood sets up one expectation, and the tone comes in contrast to that, and contrast, I've learned from Howard, is one of the tools, I think, that you can use to make humor happen.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. And that's... It's also one of the things that you can use to make tension happen, too, which we've been talking about in a lot of other places. That placing two things in contrast to each other. That's why you so often see the, hello, it's a giant battle scene, the [garbled]... Like, the classic one is, it's... What a Wonderful World, and Good Morning, Vietnam. And that's the thing that I think is fun to play with on a conscious level. I think a lot of us do it unconsciously, but I think it is as important to think about as plot.

[DongWon] Yeah, I totally agree.

[Howard] The tools that I find myself using are white space and sentence length. Where, when I want to make a shift, and I think about that in terms of it, Erin, as you suggested, the score. because the song of, the music of, the poetry of, the prose on the page is so dependent on where the breaths land, that by adding white space, by shortening sentences, I can change the breath of what's happening, and govern the mood in the same way that an orchestral score might.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I think when you're looking at it, that you kind of have two choices. You can either... When you're combining tone and mood, that you can either have them match, or you can have them in juxtaposition. And when they match, you get what Edgar Allan Poe called unity of affect, where you are reinforcing an underlining this is... Things are really bad or things are good. And in juxtaposition, when they don't match, you can create tension by a contrast between the narration and the character. If the narration is like, oh, there is... Bad stuff is going down, and the character is like, I love this place. You're like, uh-huh, things are... No. It creates that anticipation.

[DongWon] It's funny that you mention that because the Fall of the House of Usher show that I was talking about, there's one moment towards the end when the tone and the mood match, and it is a devastating brutal beat in a show that has been mostly about yucks up until that point, where he just kicks you in the heart. And it's when those align.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That's the trick he pulls. It suddenly aligns, and then we slip out of that again for the finale, but it's interesting to point that out. I'm like, oh, that is a good trick to pull.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have got some homework for you. Your homework is that I just want you to take a mystery structure, and a mystery structure is five parts. You have a crime, an investigation, a twist, a breakthrough, and then the conclusion. I want you to take that structure, and I want you to write something that is not obviously a mystery.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.15: A Close Reading on Voice - Tying It All Together

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-15-a-close-reading-on-voice-tying-it-all-together

Key points: Voice can be an active part of developing plots and character arcs. As the character changes, their voice changes. Characters learn. Allow yourself to love to write. When you can't write with joy, reach for craft. Use the tools in revision. Use pacing, punctuation, word choice, accent, sentence structure to make the character more them. Allow yourself to be yourself as you write, use the personal voice! Use the smiley face! When something is good in what you are reviewing or critiquing, put a smiley face by it. Look for the key phrase, the sentence or paragraph that really sounds like the character, and use that to ground yourself as you revise or write more. Take big swings! Push yourself, and aim at the home run. Watch for falling into the same rhythm, sentences, and repetition by accident. Try reading it aloud to catch this! Check the musicality of your text. Deconstruct what you're doing, just step back and look at what you are trying to accomplish and how you are doing it.

[Season 19, Episode 15]

[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com

[Season 19, Episode 15]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice – Tying It All Together.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So, this episode, we are reaching the end of our first sort of module, talking about This Is How You Lose the Time War. We want to focus a little bit on both recapping some of the stuff we've talked about, but also making sure it feels actionable for you, the audience, about how you can start to apply this to your own fiction. So one of the things I really wanted to focus on, I think we've hit a number of times over the past few episodes, is we can sometimes think about voice as a very passive element of your story. You decide the voice at the beginning, and then once you sort of finish your opening section, you're like, "That's the voice for my book." I hope you can see from the past few episodes as we looked at Red and Blue and the letters individually, how voice is an active participant in developing the plots, in developing the characters, and really carrying the reader through in a way, with much more clarity than if the voice hadn't evolved.

[Mary Robinette] This is something that is a factor that you will find in most fiction that you're going to be reading or writing, that… If you have a character arc, I should say. If you have a character arc, your character at the end is not the same person they were at the beginning. So it is natural that the voice of the character would evolve over the course of the story. But we often don't think about it. We just let it go for a ride. So, thinking about some of the tools that we've used here, the big one that I would say for adjusting things is the experiential nature of the character. Like, that they are seeing things differently at the end than they are at the beginning. So you're going to be using different language to highlight things, as one example.

[Erin] I think another thing is, building on that different language, is also that characters learn things. You know what I mean? There are things we always carry with us, like, if you were the child of fisherfolk, maybe you always use fish metaphors throughout the rest of your life. But if you suddenly learn magic, or you learn how to become an engineer, or you go to space, the type of language that you use will change. I think a lot of times, again, we will sometimes think, "Oh, I've set up the knowledge that my character has at the beginning of the story," and then that knowledge changes. But has the language changed with it? So you can sort of look at a paragraph from the beginning of something you're writing and something at the end and say, "Do these seem the same?" If they do, is that a choice that I've made, or is that something I've defaulted into?

[DongWon] Well, one great example of that is in the letters, they start referencing this thing that's like Mrs. Levitt's Guide, which is some kind of…

[Mary Robinette] Etiquette.

[DongWon] Etiquette manual. Thank you. That teaches them how to write letters. Red is using this actively, and we see Red discover postscripts and all kinds of different aspects of letter writing. But it's also a cue for the audience as well of showing how literally Red and Blue are teaching each other how to speak to each other. Right? We'll see poetry start to appear in Red's letters. We see this back-and-forth about different elements of letter writing, about postscripts and things like that. I think it's really reflecting what Erin is talking about, of how you can actively and deliberately have your characters learn how to speak and how to write in a way that shows their ongoing entanglement in the way that language changes.

[Howard] The tool that I would first recommend that you, fair listener, take from this whole close read. Allow yourself to love to write.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Let yourself love it. Lose yourself in it. In our previous episode, I used the word luxuriate, Erin used the word indulgence. Embrace those. Please. Luxuriate in it, indulge yourself in writing. And that joy will begin to lock in some of these tools for you. Because I'm watching Mary Robinette work from notes as she talks to us and lists these things that we can do deliberately, and I think I will never be able to do all of that deliberately. That's fine. I'm just going to have fun with it, and then remember those rules and rewrite deliberately.

[Mary Robinette] Well, so frequently the tools that I list are things that I used to punch up my fiction, that it's… Sometimes it's stuff that I do unconsciously, because I come out of theater. So, getting into a character voice and rhythm is something that I was trained to do and have internalized. But other times when I'm writing with depression, I cannot write with… Through the joy. I lean… I reach for the craft, and I'll let myself get something down that's messy, knowing that I can come back and I will look at it and say, "Okay. Pacing wise, where does this character pause? Is this a character that speaks in long fluid sentences? Or is this a character that speaks in short punctuated sentences?" I will go through and I will adjust my punctuation, I will think about the word choice, I frequently go back in even with something that I have written from a place of joy, will go back in and look at how I can dial up a character's particular accent. Like, what are the word choices and sentence structure that makes this character more specifically them? How do I remove the ambiguity, so none of the other characters on the page could have said that sentence?

[Erin] I think we do a lot of this subconsciously all the time. I think about being in a meeting, or even listening to this podcast. You'll be like, "Oh, yeah. That's such a so-and-so thing to say."

[Laughter]

[Erin] Or, like when somebody says to me, they're going to use a long metaphor and talk about their cat, because that's what they always do…

[Mary Robinette] Have I told you about Elsie recently?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Who is Elsie?

[Mary Robinette] Elsie is my cat, who uses buttons to talk. It's very much… Carry on.

[Laughter]

[Erin] That was absolutely… The cat who has no shame. I've been looking at pictures of my own cat all day. But I think that… Think about the things that you do. How do you recognize somebody else's voice? Then, what is it about it? Is it the lens… Is it the things that they reference? Is it a specific word that they always use? That is a thing that they always come back to? Then think about how can you create characters that have that same depth and richness?

[Mary Robinette] Also, think about who your character is addressing, because that is one of the things, again, that we do naturally that Erin was just talking about. So when your character is speaking to someone else, do they have the same rhythm every time? Or do they change it based on who they're talking to?

[DongWon] Yeah. I think one thing that comes through clearly in this is kind of going also to what Erin's saying that allow yourself to be yourself as you write. This is the 3rd part of voice that we didn't talk about, which I'm forgetting the exact term you used for it, but…

[Mary Robinette] Personal voice.

[DongWon] Personal voice. Right. Red and Blue sound very distinct because there written by different people. I get the distinct pleasure of being friends with these people, so I know how they talk. These are such heightened versions of how Max speaks and how Amal speaks. But their natural rhythms and their natural proclivities in how they talk, how they construct a metaphor, are coming through and they let that happen. Right? There was no hiding who they were. They were in fact amping that up, I think, to make that distinction very clearly felt the different sections. So, I think one other lesson you can take here in addition to let yourself have fun, write from a place of joy when you can, is also just because we're giving you all these tools to manipulate voice, to use it in different ways that are very deliberate, don't feel like what we're also saying is you have to hide who you are. The way you talk, the way you think, the way you speak. Sometimes, the most distinctive fiction is the one that feels like you are talking to the person who wrote it.

[Mary Robinette] The way I often describe this is you've spent your entire life honing your tastes as a reader, and you've got good taste. So trust your taste when you're writing.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I would say as both a reader and a listener. Because I think there are ways of writing, ways of speaking, that actually don't make it into fiction as often. So if you love the way that your auntie tells a story, you know, maybe there's a way to take that and put that on a page in a way that nobody else could because nobody else has your auntie. Well, except your relatives.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So, just get that and put that on the page. Because it comes from you and your experience, it will feel real and it will feel valuable to the reader…

[Howard] Depending on the relatives, it might be a sister or a daughter.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] You are still right. None of them have your version of her.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's the personal voice. So, the thing about this is that what we're trying to do here is to teach you the mechanical and the aesthetic voice and how to manipulate them. What we hope is that you can learn to inhabit your own personal voice. Because mechanical and aesthetic can be learned. Personal is all about just learning to trust yourself.

[Howard] I have a smiley face for you. After our break.

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[Erin] This week I want to talk to you about Princess Weekes. She has some of my favorite YouTube video essays on the Internet right now. She has this way of bringing excellent story, culture, and media analysis that has helped me immensely in crafting my own work. She looks at popular or unpopular works of media, asks the right kinds of questions to get you thinking, and explains why it did or didn't have the impact it was looking for. Specifically, her video on why The Last Duel failed was an excellent critique of how you can look at a movement like Me, Too or see the problems in representation of women, and then try, but fail, at addressing the true reasons the movement happened. But you should really go watch all of her things. That's Princess Weekes on YouTube.

[Howard] One of my biggest fears when I pick up the long lists of tools and techniques is that it will suck the joy out of whatever it is that I've written, that it will become mechanical, that it will become cookie-cutter or recipe or whatever. My solution for this is the smiley face. In red pen, when I am reviewing my manuscript or when I'm critiquing someone else's, if there is something that sings to me, makes me laugh, it was a wonderful metaphor, whatever, I put a smiley face next to it. That means there may be other things you need to change in this document, but don't break this bit. Don't break this bit. I gotta tell you, the smiley face has been the most valuable critique mark that I write to myself, because it stands as a reminder.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Howard] Because when I go back over the text, I don't always remember how much I loved that the first time I wrote it or the first time I reread it.

[DongWon] It's such a huge mistake I see early career editors make. Right? When they're starting out and doing their first books that they're working on, they'll give feedback and the author will be like, "I thought I wrote a good book. What happened?" I'm like, "You did write a good book. This person just forgot to write down all the parts where they liked this." Right? They forgot to do what I think of as an alignment exercise of, like, first you tell the writer here's what I loved about this book, here's why it's important, here's why all these things are working. Now let's get on to some of the stuff that isn't working that will further highlight what does work. Right? So I think when it comes to voice, when you go through your manuscript, I think this is great advice from Howard, of learn to recognize what things do sound like you and you like that fact. Right? Lean into that going forward.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's a more of this, please. This is something… I love calling it an alignment exercise. This is, again, trusting your own taste, trusting that personal voice. You… Books that you love, you're not the only person that loves that book. When you read it, you have an emotional response to it every time you read it. So when you're reading your own book and you have emotional responses, trust those emotional responses. Those are genuine things that you experience as a reader. If you like it, lean into it. It's like, "Oh, okay. I did that well." And when you're learning, you can use these tools to say, "Okay, what did I do well here? How can I do that intentionally, and heighten it later in other parts of the book, so that this thing that I love, I continue to be good at?"

[Erin] I also think with voice specifically, because it can be hard to really capture the voice of a character, at least it is for me, is sometimes I'll go through and find a sentence or a paragraph where I feel like, "This is the person." Like, I really got it here. Sometimes I'll have to write my way into it. Like, I'll start writing the story, it's not quite there, it's not quite there, and then I'm like, "This is the phrasing that this character would absolutely use 100% of the time." I will highlight that, and then when I go to either revise or write more, I will start by grounding myself in that sentence or paragraph and say, "Okay. This is what I'm trying to get to, this is the feeling. Now, can I carry it forward?"

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] As someone who has built PCs, I love the word grounding myself…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because if I forget to ground myself, I'll destroy a $1500 video card…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Absentmindedly.

[Mary Robinette] Well, this… In audiobook narration, we call this thing that you're talking about, we have a word for it, it's called a key phrase. It's used to get yourself into the rhythms of the character, so that you remember what is your pacing for this, what is the accent of this character, what attitude do I have? I think that that's the thing that you're looking for when you're looking for this phrase, it's like… It embodies all of those things in a single moment.

[DongWon] Yeah. Kind of building off of this, the one thing that I also want people to remember when experimenting with voice, in addition to the other elements we've talked about, is don't be afraid to take a big swing. Don't be afraid to push yourself and reach for the tonality, the voice, the emotion that you're looking for, whether that is the blunt muscular brutalism of Red or the deep poetic organicness of Blue. These are huge swings in terms of voice. Right? There really aiming for the fences with how far they're pushing this, and I think that's part of the joy of the book and that's part of the playfulness of the book, is this sort of high wire formalist act that they're pulling off here. Then we see that again in the letters, the way they become so profoundly hugely romantic. That's… That is not a thing you see very often in text. I think one of the reasons people responded to it so well is both the humor, but also the "Oh, my God, these characters are so in love with each other," and feeling that in your body as you read it is really wonderful.

[Howard] Sports ball has the best metaphor here. You miss 100% of the pitches you don't swing at.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] You take that big swing, and, speaking as someone who is at this moment remembering very vividly some of my young writer mistakes and fears, you will miss some of those pitches you swing at. The good news is that as a writer, you get to go back…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And rewrite. You get to put the novel in a trunk, or the story in a trunk, and come back to it 10 years later and say, "Oh. Now I have the skill set to finish this thing that I wanted to do," or, you come back 10 years later as Dr. Frankenstein, and this is more liked my approach, and say, "Oh, that corpse is only good for parts."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But I know which parts!

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah. Not to stress everyone out, but from a publishing perspective, we're in an era where base hits aren't good enough. Right? You've gotta be swinging for the fences. It can be okay if you get on base, but that shouldn't be your target. Your target should be the home run. So I encourage you to do all these things that we're talking about in terms of finding a way to get to that joyful place that you're writing from, but also to make sure you're pushing yourself and reaching for the thing that is really distinctive, is really going to stand out, is really personal.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] As we're talking about this, I want to flag a thing that I see happen with early career writers with voice, that is an… Asking for a mistake, and I see it happen a lot, which is this idea we've been talking about pacing and finding the rhythm of the voice, is that you will have a character or the… Just the language of the text itself, where everything has the same rhythm, where all the sentences are the same length, and you have this accidental repetition that, again, can flatten something. All your paragraphs are the same length. In the real world, you have this variety of rhythm. Something that you can really see when you look at This Is How You Lose the Time War is how intentionally they're using when the character speaks in long sentences versus short sentences, when the switch happens, when the variety takes place. So look at your own work and think about if you've been thinking my prose falls flat, and your urge is to add more adjectives, take a look at it instead and see if it's something that you can fix with your punctuation. Fix by just breaking up how the sentences are structured.

[Howard] I am almost shocked and amazed, Mary Robinette, that you didn't tell us to try reading it out loud. Because often that is how I identify it, when I realize just in the pattern of my breathing, in the pattern of my nodding, of my body movements, I'm like, "Oh. This is all written to the beat of the song I was listening to…"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "When I wrote it."

[DongWon] That's what I was going to say is…

[Howard] Oh, my.

[DongWon] I encourage people to think about the musicality of the text. Right? Think about the rhythm, the sound, all of those things. One way to switch stuff is to change the music you're listening to. If you write to music, whether it's wordless or with lyrics, find something with a different BPM. Find something with a different tonality. That can help you shift out of one rhythm. Or, even if you're not using that specifically, just think about it as a piece of music, of when do you want to change your time signature, when are you heading into the bridge, when are you heading into the verse. Right? Those are all things that will help you unlock those tools of rhythm, of sound and poetics, and of repetition, which is also a very common thing in music, of when are you coming back to the same beat, the same note.

[Erin] I also think it's just fun to sometimes deconstruct what you're doing. There's this song that I love called Title of the Song in which each ver… It's like declaration of my feelings for you, elaboration on those feelings. The ver… The actual versus are telling you what the song would be doing. Sometimes, when something feels off to me, I'll actually say like, "A long ass sentence that appears to be explaining the world. A really short quip." Like, I'll actually look…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] At what my thing is… What my sentences are attempting to accomplish. If it's the same thing 8 times in a row, then it doesn't quite work.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because, to think about musicality and karaoke, one of my favorite things, even the most amazing singer, if they just come out and belt, with no variety, they never make their voice softer, no matter how good the tone is, people will start to tune out, about 2 like sentences in. Because they'll be like, "Oh. Okay. That's what's happening here. Back to my conversation." The way you keep people in a song is the way you keep people in writing, by using variety so that not quite sure what's coming next and they feel like you're taking them on a journey that they want to go on with you.

[Howard] The song between the servants, This Is As Good As It Gets, in season 2 of Gallivant, the actress is trained as a Broadway singer, and they don't let her off the leash until the last 2 verses of that song, and she belts… I get chills every time I hear it, because I realize that was the message of this song. She is breaking free from a life of servitude and accepting that she is good enough to not have to eat olives off the floor. They communicate that with that note of… Just a couple notes. Oh, I get chills just thinking about it. So, yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Changing the rhythms. It's something that we're hardwired… We're hardwired to pay attention to repetition and then to also tune it out. The reasons are that if there's something that's a sameness, that's… If you think of us as humans as animals, that's not important information. You know what it is, you've identified it. So you're listening for the threat or the opportunity. The threat of the rhythm of someone stalking you. Or the drip drip of water that is a food source… A water source. So, again, like when you're placing those repetitions in your text, you want to be placing them in points where it's carrying information that the reader needs as opposed to just accidental repetition that the reader tunes out as unimportant. It's like, "Oh, yeah, it's all green. It's true, it's leaves."

[DongWon] Yeah. If you want an example of how pacing and repetition can really enhance your experience, I love Tina Turner's rendition of Proud Mary, which starts very slow and then gets incredibly fast and intense by the end of it. I think that sense of… That increasing excitement and thrill and danger, all those things are communicated in that song as it changes very differently tonally from the beginning to the end. So, I want all of you to sort of think about the musicality and think about that tonality. Think about rhythm and repetition, as I'm demonstrating right now. As you're like really digging into how to keep building the voice of your work.

[Mary Robinette] I think that brings us to our homework.

[DongWon] Our homework for this week is I want you to write a short outline of your work in progress. This would be a new outline. I want you to instead of focusing on what are the plot beats for your characters or… You could even do this for a single character arc if you don't want to do it for the whole book. But instead of writing down what happens to the character, make notes about how the voice of that character will change with these events. Make a little bit of an outline so you have a sense of the arc as the character changes how they see the world, how they're going to talk about the world, and experience it.

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

[DongWon] Please rate and review us 5 stars on Apple podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Your ratings help other writers discover us for the first time.

[Mary Robinette] Support for today's show comes from the Inner Loop Radio. If you listen to us because you're a writer, then you'll also want to listen to Rachel and Courtney talk about how to stay inspired, how to stay focused, and how to stay sane. Subscribe now to the Inner Loop Radio on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or any other podcasting site. Get inspired, get focused, and get lit on the Inner Loop Radio.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.50: Worldbuilding Finale: Making Deliberate Choices

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/12/12/16-50-worldbuilding-finale-making-deliberate-choices/

Key points: Making thoughtful, deliberate choices in worldbuilding, along with cool and fun stuff. Think about how your speculative elements reinforce plot, character, and theme. Don't just fall back on the familiar, make sure you have a good reason for including it. Pick your time and cultural analogues. Interrogate your defaults. Be aware that the defaults, the cliches, the trope elements carry a kitchen sink full of implications. Balance what you are borrowing from real world analogues with what you are building from the ground up. Make sure you keep the kernel of cool in your writing, even while you make all these deliberate choices. Look for your armored bears!

[Season 16, Episode 50]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Finale: Making Deliberate Choices.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We have been talking about worldbuilding for seven weeks now. Now, here in the eighth episode, we're very excited to kind of tie this all up with what we hope is a very intelligent bow. What do we mean, Fonda, by making deliberate choices?

[Fonda] So, what I hope I've done over the course of the eight weeks that we've been talking about worldbuilding is encourage listeners to really examine why we worldbuild and how we worldbuild and how it serves the story in ways that are not just it's cool and fun to worldbuild, but are actually really thoughtful and deliberate. I have often taught writing classes, workshops, at different conventions and venues, and sometimes early career writers will submit work, and very frequently I see them fall back on worlds and speculative elements that are familiar and that are default. Because we've seen and absorbed them so much before. Like medieval European analog, or a magic school. Fantasy races like elves and orcs and so on. Those are all perfectly fine magic worlds, but what I really would like to encourage writers to do is to ask yourselves well, why am I making worldbuilding choices, and what are those speculative elements that I'm including because they really reinforce plot and character and theme? Why am I choosing something as opposed to I'm just falling back on something that I feel comfortable with or that I've seen other people use before.

[Dan] This is something that I talk about a lot, the idea that a cliché is not bad because it's familiar, it's bad because it's thoughtless. All of these elements that we see so often repeated like elves and orcs and magic schools and things like that, they're not flawed things you should never put in your story. You just need to be sure you're putting them in for the right reasons. That you have… You're not just using them because they're familiar and you don't want to think about it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's that… The metric of "Write what feels good. See how it moves you." is useless because… Not completely useless. But it's a… It's very wiggly wobbly, because frequently something feels good because it's familiar. When we're talking about right reasons, it's again, that's a wiggly wobbly thing, because different stories have different reasons and different this is right. So there's not… It's not as… It's not an easy metric to go by. So what you want to make sure you're doing is that you're doing it deliberately and with intention. It's the intentionality that we've been talking about for the past several weeks.

[Fonda] Yeah. I especially want to encourage people to think about what time, and what cultural analogues they're choosing to use and why. I, earlier on in the master class, in the previous week, I talked about my aesthetic reasons for wanting to write the Green Bone saga in a latter half of the 20th century analog. There's also a thematic reason why I did that, because one of the big themes in that series is the tension between a very old culture and tradition with all the forces of modernity and globalization and the conflicts that are inherent there. So I chose a time period that is uncommon in epic fantasy, because it reinforced a theme that I wanted to be at the front and center of the whole trilogy. So, just think about, like, what is it that you're trying to do with that story, that you want to leave with the reader, and bring that into your worldbuilding choices.

[Mary Robinette] There's a thing that we talk about a lot when were talking about a default character. We've talked about this in previous episodes, the unspoken default, and that in modern-day America at this time that we are recording, that's a 30-year-old white man. People will say, "But, why have your character be… Be… I don't know… Be a woman? Why can't you just…?" The question that I find myself asking is, like, I'll go ahead and put down whatever my defaults are. Then I'll go back and interrogate them. That also includes where I'm setting it. So why am I setting it here? What does that buy me? Because I'm going to be spending a lot to build this place, spending a lot of words. So what am I buying with that? Is there a reason that I'm doing it here? Sometimes that reason is this is a place that I'm comfortable, and I'm going to be doing something more challenging in some other part of the novel. That's not a ridiculous reason to set something someplace that you're familiar. Especially if you don't enjoy research. But it is a deliberate choice at that point. You're making it on purpose instead of just falling into it by accident.

[Howard] Now, one of the things to be aware of as well with the defaults… The defaults, the clichés, the trope-tastic elements, whatever those may be, is that… Its kitchen sink effect. They don't all fit. If you put all of the things that you love from various Western themed fantasy stories into one story, and then begin exploring the implications of any of them, actually being thoughtful about them, they will crowd some of the other ones out. They… It doesn't all work together. It's one of the reasons why highly derivative stuff feels so flat, because it feels like, "Oh, you just painted a Disney version of Tolkien as a backdrop for characters to act against. The dragons would be eating the sheep. This doesn't make sense."

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to pause us here…

[Dan] Let's pause here…

[Mary Robinette] To talk about the book of the week. Because it's actually right on point for this. It's Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. It's inspired by pre-Columbian Americas. It is, at its heart, an epic fantasy full of the kind of political machinations and prophecies that you get from other epic fantasies. But she's made deliberate choices to pull from a different mold, from a different palette than most of the epic fantasies that you read. Because of that, she's got access to all of these different areas, different intersections of politics and culture that's rich and thematicly give these additional layers that… So she's buying a lot. It's not just, "Oh, cool. This is a different setting. That's neat." Thematically, narratively, there's so much richness to this world. She's able to… She's doing one of the things that we talked about in a previous episode by having her POV characters come from very different worlds and different cultures. Some of them are outsider characters. I think, actually, all of her POV characters are outsider characters in one way or another. Your able to get this really broad, rich, just gloriously textured landscape that the characters are moving across. It's a beautiful book. It's one of the Hugo finalists this year. As we record this, it's still just a finalist. But who… It's so good I would not be at all surprised to see this one walk home with the rocketship.

[Dan] Cool. That is Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse.

[Dan] Now, Fonda, let's get back to something that you mentioned earlier. You talked about making deliberate choices about what kinds of real-world cultural analogues to… That may or may not show up in your story and in your worldbuilding. So let's talk about that a little bit. Without getting into a massive discussion of appropriation. Let's just set a baseline, do your research and be respectful. Talk about this idea of real-world cultural analogues.

[Fonda] Yeah. One of the choices that I want all writers to consider is how much, when you're creating your world, how much are you importing from the real world versus building from the ground up? Maybe I can illustrate this best with the example of this term Asian fantasy. So my books, the Green Bone saga often get described as Asian fantasy. Which is a term that I can understand the usefulness of this term from a marketing perspective, but I am not fond of it. Because it is used as an umbrella term to encompass a lot of things that are potentially very different, completely different types of stories. As an example, let me contrast a few books. There's a new novel, She Who Became The Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. It is a story set in ancient China, and it is based on a real historical figure, the founder of the Ming Dynasty. It obviously changes some things about our real history by re-imaging the identity of this very real person. So that is borrowing a lot from our real world, and then telling a story within it. Then you have The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K. S. Villoso which is set in a secondary world that is very reminiscent of the Philippines. K is from the Philippines and the story is a secondary world that is like if the Philippines had not been colonized. So you have very strong cultural cues, including what the characters eat, the way they dress, that say that this is inspired by the Philippines. On the other hand, you have my series, the Green Bone saga, which is in a secondary world that is not based on any one specific Asian nation, because I wanted the story to be in a place where there was this magic element, and it was this isolated culture that was on an island. So the fact that there is magic Jade would have influenced their entire development. It could not simply be Japan or Taiwan with the serial numbers rubbed off. Like, it had to be its own thing. So that influenced my worldbuilding choices, and I made really deliberate decisions when I was writing the story not to use words that tied it to specific places. I never use adobo or sushi or dim sum. Like, I never use words that would make you think that this is based on a specific place. So that's an example of three books that fall, from a marketing standpoint, under the same term, but have made very different worldbuilding choices in service of different narratives.

[Dan] And are going to appeal to very different audiences.

[Howard] When I think of worldbuilding, I'm often… And the clichés, I often force myself to question the boundary states that I've created around given terms, like… The example I'll use here, what does it mean when a place is crowded? My house has, I think, 2500 square feet, and there's five people living in it. There are people who would say that that's crowded. But I spent some time reading up on and looking at pictures of Kowleen free city, which was in the… In this area between two political entities. It was essentially 60,000 people or 40,000 people living in a space the size of a… The footprint of a football stadium. That… Was crowded. It was literally one of the most crowded places on earth. I looked at that and realized, okay, the boundaries that I've got in my mind for crowded are light years away from that, whatever that is. I perform these interrogations anytime I'm creating something to make sure that I haven't used the word like crowded to mean something that it doesn't really mean.

[Dan] Now, as we talk about making these deliberate choices, whether they are for narrative or aesthetic or thematic reasons, we don't want to lose the idea that your worldbuilding should still be cool. That there should still be awesome stuff that makes us want to love that book or wish we could live there. So, how can we do that? Fonda, give us some homework along these lines.

[Fonda] Yeah. I… To your point, I want to kind of bring the whole master class back around to, like, why do worldbuilding? We've talked this entire time around how it should support your narrative, your plot, your characters. It all should work together seamlessly and be this perfectly balanced three-legged stool. But I want to come back to the fact that many of us worldbuild because it's really fun. When you are a novelist, and you're going to devote years to a project, and spend so much time in this world, you need… There needs to be something about it that is so compelling to you that you'd rather spend time in this fictional world in front of your computer than out in the real one. So I often ask writing students, "What are your armored bears?" I'm… I point them to Philip Pullman's Dark Materials series. Right? That is a series that has really meaty themes. I mean, it is interrogating organized religion and oppression and some pretty meaty stuff. But what do we… What is on the cover of the book? What is on the movie poster? It's the armored bear. Because armored bears are just really freaking cool.

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] So that is my cool theory of literature, that you've got all this awesome worldbuilding that ideally just support your narrative and does so much heavy lifting and is meaty and rich and nuanced and full of texture. But there has to be that kernel of cool that just draws your reader in, draws you in, and keeps you there.

[Fonda] So, my homework for the week, and to close out this master class, is I want you to consider for your own work, what is your armored bear? What element of the story your writing right now makes you most excited to worldbuild and why?

[Dan] Sounds good. We would… At least I would love to hear what some of you come up with. This is a really great way to end this. So, thank you, Fonda, so much. This has been an absolutely wonderful master class. I've learned a lot. I hope the listeners have as well. So, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.06: Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/09/15-06-prose-and-cons-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: Delicious, tasty writing with flavorful words? Good word do! How do you write beautiful prose? Go over it again and again, tweak and tweak and tweak, like tumbling a rock in a tumbler. Watch for repetitions and ambiguities. Beware lazy writing. Focus on the sound of language. Listen to good word doers. Read good word do! Read your own work before writing more. How do you add density to your sentences without going purple? Don't add things to it, take out the unnecessary parts. Trim, and trim, and trim again. Ask yourself, what is the emotional output of this paragraph supposed to be, and what order of information is most effective in getting there? Words go through the brain, but sounds can strike you in the heart. Lyricism can put your hand around somebody's heart in a way that the best analogy in the world never could.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Six.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pat] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Pat] And I'm Pat.

[Dan] We have Patrick Rothfuss with us again. We're going to talk about prose. This is specifically about writing itself. Word for word, how do you make your prose delicious? How do you make your writing as wonderful as it can be?

[Howard] Tasty, tasty sentences with flavorful words and syllables and… And…

[Mary Robinette] Things.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You know, it's a lot easier to do when I write it.

[Pat] We all good word do. We make you do word good too.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Now I'm super excited to have Pat on for this episode. This is… You have such a reputation for fantastic word-for-word writing in your work.

[Pat] Do I actually?

[Mary Robinette] Yes, you do.

[Pat] Really?

[Dan] You absolutely do. That's always…

[Mary Robinette] You didn't know that?

[Pat] I mean, I know I work on it, but… Usually, that's not what people s… I mean, it's rarely what people say when they come up to me.

[Mary Robinette] Huh. That's what people talk about all the… I'm…

[Howard] It's what we say behind your back.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan] But I know that people do ask you how do you get… How do you write beautiful prose? What do you say when people ask you that?

[Pat] What I said just today was, "Boy, I don't know how I would teach that." Because it comes very intuitively to me. So for it to get better and better, I just sort of go over it again and again. Each time, I tweak and I tweak and I tweak. It's like tumbling a rock in a tumbler. It gets smoother and smoother and smoother until it's done. But that's not advice that can be followed.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I have found, because it's… I come at it from theater, and similarly, I run into this issue when people ask me about dialogue.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, how do you do dialogue, which is… Dialogue is one of those places where the words are… Like, the words… You're telling a story, so the words are always important, but dialogue specifically, because it's often carrying even more, you have to be very concise with it. But similarly, it came super easy to me. It took me forever to figure out how to teach it. I wound up having to reverse engineer what I do as a narrator. Because my job as a narrator is to take the words that are on the page and make them into sounds. Writing developed to convey the spoken language. Right? So what I'm looking for with that, what it taught me, are the things that sound good, the things that play smoothly, the… It's a lot about repetitions. What I find is that if you use repetition with intention, it will draw attention to something and it will point it at the thing you want people to look at. But when you don't use it with intention, when it's an accidental repetition, the repetition is always going to catch the reader's attention, and it will drag them in the wrong direction. That's the thing where you… It's not quite having a piece of déjà vu with the thing, but it'll pop you out of the story just a little bit. Sometimes that repetition is a word, and those are easy to spot. Sometimes it's a collection of sounds. Sometimes it's a concept. But often that's the thing that I'm looking for. Making sure that those repetitions are where I want them to be. One of the other things that I look for our ambiguities. Words or phrases or concepts that could go either way and aren't doing so on purpose. Like, one of the examples that I use sometimes when I'm talking to people about it is this thing… There's a compilation video of… In movies, people saying, "You just don't get it, do you?"

[Pat] [snort] Oh, that.

[Mary Robinette] I know. There's a compilation video of person after person after person in completely different films saying, "You just don't get it, do you?" That's lazy writing. It's ambiguous, because what don't you get? Why don't you get it? But then you look at Blade Runner and Rutger Hauer's famous speech, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe." That is "You just don't get it, do you?" But it's getting… It's making it specific, it's removing the ambiguity, and the repetitions there are all very deliberate. This beautiful rhythmic flow.

[Pat] That's really interesting, because you're coming at this from a conceptual… As soon this topic got brought up, I immediately thought of the sound of language. Because I focus that way a lot. But what you're talking about is something that I also do. I love the term lazy writing. That's something that I find increasingly galling as I watch more TV. I actually hear it reflected in my son's speech, now that he gets to watch more TV, is he is emulating the lazy writing that he has heard.

[Dan] That is depressing.

[Pat] Oh, it's super depressing, which is one of the reasons I've tried to keep him away from bad media, is it homogenizes his beautifully original speech. That's what it does to everyone. So, I first off say, if you want to do good word do, then listen to good word doers. Like, absorb it in a meaningful way that like it sticks to you. Sometimes, that's just like… For me, I read Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Like… Or I read Shakespeare. Like, ooh, some Shakespeare. The problem is, I am so sticky, I'm such a mimic, that if I read a Shakespeare play, I will have to fight to not write and speak in iambic pentameter. Especially if I get a couple of drinks in me.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] So good word do sticks to you.

[Laughter]

[Pat] Sometimes, yes. So, like, that is a trick that I would recommend, is, like, if you read enough of something, it kind of gets in you.

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly the way I wrote The Glamorous Histories is that I would read a chapter of Jane Austen, and then I would write a chapter.

[Pat] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] Because that… Because I was using it as a conscious upload of her language.

[Pat] Actually, that's a trick that I use in my own stuff if I've been away a while, or even just to maintain consistency, is I read the previous chapter before I start writing or drafting a new chapter.

[Mary Robinette] You do that, don't you, Dan?

[Dan] Yes. I will always start each day's work by reading what I wrote yesterday to kind of get myself up to speed before I step out of the moving car, so I can…

[Chuckles]

[Pat] By the time you get to the end, I'm usually already tweaking and fiddling, so I'm already writing by the time I hit the end.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Pat] Then I've got momentum.

[Dan] That also makes the first draft a little cleaner, because it's kind of been cleaned up as you go.

[Pat] Exactly. And the tone is easier to match, because you've kind of… Or at least I tend to have my head in it.

[Dan] I would like to pause here if we can for our thing of the week. It is not a book this time. It is a podcast. What are you going to recommend for us?

[Pat] I would really love to recommend to you the One-Shot Podcast Network. Now, it's a group of podcasts, and they all deal with gaming in some way. But what I have really come to love over the last year is listening to a lot of comedians and actors and game players get together. Effectively, what they're doing is collaborative improvisational storytelling. They have an ongoing series called Campaign. There was 100 episodes of like a Star Trek theme podcast. The current one that they're doing, where I think they're about 30 episodes in, is unoriginal world called Sky Jacks that is inspired by the Decemberists' music. Oh, it's so good, guys, it's so good. But also, the One-Shop Podcast Network itself, they do a bunch of one-shot games. Like, I came in and I played a game called Kids on Bikes.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's…

[Dan] That's a good game.

[Pat] Oh, it's amazing. It's based off like the 80s, like ET and Goonies and The System. James D'Amato runs it, and he runs a lot of these games. You can go in and see like what they're doing. This year is especially interesting, because they… James has decided to feature only games designed by not-white dudes. He is an amazing guy, an incredible storyteller. I've learned a lot about gaming and narrative just by listening to the podcast.

[Dan] Cool. That is called One-Shot?

[Pat] The One-Shot Podcast Network. Which contains many shows, including Neo-Scum, One-Shot, Campaign, and some others that I'm embarrassed that I can't remember off the top of my head.

[Dan] Awesome. So go listen to that. We will link to it in the liner notes as well.

[Dan] Now, I've got a great listener question that I'm going to throw out, and then immediately provide my own answer for.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Because I've got a really good answer to this one. Someone asks, "How do you add density to your sentences without going purple?" Purple prose is something that we want to avoid that… If you've ever read an AP English essay, you've se… They're just trying to cram so much brilliance into their… My solution to this is actually you add density to something not by adding things to it, but by taking out the unnecessary things. Think of this as you are cooking your writing on low heat so that it reduces down, and what you're left with has just as much flavor as possible. Earlier, Pat was telling a story about how he revises by trimming something and then leaving it and coming back and then trimming it down until… What was it you said, that one day you'll be left with just 12 words that are so intense they can kill a person.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] What I loved about that story is that that's exactly what the poet, Ezra Pound, did. He had an experience where he was… He went into the Metro in Paris, and, just for whatever reason, had this profound experience looking at faces in there. He wrote this giant thing, it was this multipage essay, trying to re-create that emotion that he had. He was like, "No, this is too much." He kept cutting it down. He ended up with a poem called Faces in the Metro, which I'm going to tell you right now.

"The apparition of these faces in a crowd,

Petals on a wet, black bough."

[Pat] I remember that. [You said that before]

[Dan] Cutting out the extraneous stuff until he's left with just this one powerful emotion adds so much density to it because you don't have any filler.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that… I have a similar kind of a relationship with Ray Bradbury's writing. Because it's… What I love are his short stories, and the way he plays with language. There's a piece that I use when I'm teaching narration, which was again one of those things where I'm like, "I know this works. Why does this work?" So I'm just going to read a little bit to you. This is from The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl.

"William Acton rose to his feet. The clock on the mantel ticked midnight. He looked at his fingers and he looked at the large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor. William Acton, whose fingers had stroked typewriter keys and made love and fried ham and eggs for early breakfasts, had now accomplished a murder with the same ten whorled fingers."

It's like… It's just… It's so beautiful. But the thing about it, and we'll put this in the liner notes so you can look at it, there's… That repetition that I'm talking about. He uses "He looked at his fingers, he looked at the large room around him, and he looked at the man lying on the floor." It's like this is a normal thing, this is a normal thing, this is not a normal thing. One of the things that he's doing there, when you look at it, is he's adding modifiers, but he's adding modifiers just to the things he wants you to pay attention to. The… First, it's "he looks at his fingers," and he doesn't give you any modifiers, he doesn't give you any modifiers to feet, to the mantel, none of that. "He looked at his fingers, then he looked at the large room." Gives you a little bit more emphasis. "Then he looked at the man lying on the floor." Like, lying on the floor, it's not purple prose. It's just… Just adding that little bit and it's making it more specific and it's pointing you at it, just by lingering on it. Then he comes back to the fingers again. Because those actually… It's like these… This, I… These are the things that did that. Everything in that sentence, about stroking the typewriter keys and the ham… It's all about these were normal, and I've done this other thing with them. I think it's just beautiful, but it is… It's that layering and that deliberate choice about what things am I going to emphasize. It's not about let me add more adjectives, but it's about pointing.

[Pat] It's also… Bradbury is so good about this. He's extraordinarily lean.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Pat] It's just so clean. Robert Bly once said, he's an American poet, he was on stage, I saw a recording of it, and he said, "I think a person could be an amazing poet, even if they…" He goes, "You don't need more words. You don't need fancy words." He goes, "If you knew 25 words perfectly, you could be a poet." That was really interesting to me. It's the sort of… In some ways, this is kind of a wankery statement. But, I think, he's pointing towards a truth. That is, like, you don't need to get fancy. Now, I think there's a space for fancy. Sometimes a perfect word is perfect. But a lot of times, the perfect word is the less perfect word that everyone knows.

[Howard] My approach to this is… The Bradbury piece. What is the reader to be left with? Well, the reader is supposed to be left with the horror of having committed a murder and staring down at one's own hands and realizing that you are the murder weapon. Or at least that's what I got out of it. Other readers may get other things, but that's what I got. You can get that, sort of, by telling the reader exactly what they are supposed to feel. "He stared down at his hands, and was horrified that these were now murder weapons." Okay? That is really, really lean. But I've been very literal and told you exactly what to feel. Purple prose is when you have words in there that are not working towards giving us that emotion. They are working towards demonstrating to us that you…

[Dan] Own a thesaurus.

[Howard] Have memorized the thesaurus.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] So, a great many times, I will sit back and look at a paragraph and ask myself, what is the emotional output of this paragraph supposed to be? How do I get there? How do I get there fastest? Well, I get there fastest by being very literal, and that's actually not the most effective. How do I get there in an order in which it's the most effective? What are the pieces of information that I want to give? That's where I think the Bradbury piece becomes a tutorial.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Howard] Where we're looking at… We're identifying the murder weapons, but not yet. We're just looking at them. Then we're describing that there has been a murder. Then we are con… We are recontextualizing the hands. By describing it in that way, it suddenly sounds very non-poetic and very mechanical and very soup can. But when you sit down to do this, when you sit down with this recipe if you will. I'm headed for this emotion, and these are the beats I want to hit, that's the point at which, at least for me, I can no longer teach it, I can no longer describe it, because I have to have done it 200 times in order to have any sense of how this is going to work.

[Pat] It's a muscle memory thing, and I think… For some people, it's easier, for some people, it's harder. The same with plot and character and dialogue. I always come back to sound, as… Because, like, I love the plain… Rather, the simplicity of the concepts that Bradbury's talking about there are great. Because, like, who knows ham? Everybody knows ham. I can… It's good. Like, this isn't fancy, it's not elaborate. These are simple, solid, real things. He could get florid, he could get fancy, but… Honestly, I see that in a lot of like first-time books. Where they're describing the breakfast somebody sits down to. But authors like Bradbury, it's almost like everything he puts on the page is an icon with roots down to the heart of the world. Like, there's just nobody like Bradbury. Nobody did what he does, or does what he did. But, like Robert Frost, not to bring up another white guy, but Frost, like… Seuss doesn't get credit for his mastery of language. Because what most people know about Seuss is his kind of thumpy, heavy-handed, singsong-y kids' books. Which, by the way, are extremely hard to pull off, and you could not do it even though you feel like you could. But he wrote a book called The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough. Which, it's hard to understand how brilliant that title is, until you look at it in print, because all the words look the same, and they're all pronounced differently. Dude was like deep in the paint in his understanding of how words do. But, like, same thing with Frost. Frost wrote consistent beautiful iambic language and you would never know. He would do it in dialogue. Some of his longer unknown… Like, never cited, never read poems are pages and pages long of people having a conversation. You don't realize your reading iambic anything. It's because it's perfectly natural and perfectly flawless. Which means he sweat blood into it. I think Frost also wrote

"The old dog barks backwards without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup."

It's amazing because what he's doing is playing with metrical feet. "The old dog barks backwards" is a series of words that you must say in stochee, in single metrical feet, because of just how… You can't make those flip trippingly off your tongue. Then, I think, the second line are all dactyls. They go dada dah, dada dah. One two three, one two three. "And I can remember when he was a pup." They're frolicking. They sound like a ferret running. It's things like that that I think of, and that I have a particular fondness for, because the words always have to go through the brain, but sounds will start… Will strike you straight in the heart. I get… I can get… If I can get past your brain to your heart, then I've won as a writer. It's like way easier to short cut around the brain because our brains are really messy and complicated.

[Mary Robinette] And often not very bright.

[Pat] Right! So, like, poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who would write things so beautiful that I could not understand them. Like

"I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon..." [The Windhover https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover]

You're like, "What are you even doing? What are you talking…" That is beautiful. I don't know what you just said.

[Laughter]

[Pat] See, that's… I don't know if that's purple? It's close to purple, but, like, if you can figure out how he did that and do a piece of it… You get 15% of that in your prose, and you can have a lyricism that will put your hand around somebody's heart in a way that the best analogy in the world never could.

[Dan] This is… Has been a wonderful discussion. I'm glad we ended on poetry, because that is our homework for you, is just to go out and read poetry. We've been reciting some of our favorites. We will put some of our recommendations in the liner notes, but go out and fi… Not just one poem, but multiples by several different people, and people of different backgrounds. Just read a lot of poetry, and see what they're doing, and how you can put that kind of fluidity and grace…

[Howard] Read it until your mouth starts trying to poet…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Actually, no, one of the things I'm going to suggest is that if you are having difficulty getting poetry, because it is a different language, it's a different form, if you've been reading prose your entire life and you're trying poetry. One of the things to try with it is to try to read it out loud as part of your homework assignment. Also, to listen to people. So I'm going to add a… We're going to put some poems in the liner notes that we have mentioned or that we're fond of. I'm going to give you one to start with. That is Gwendolyn Brooks We Real Cool.

[Pat] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] It's so good.

[Pat] Read her off the page, but then… I'm sorry, go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Because there is audio of her reading it. So, read it on the page, and then you can find the audio to listen to it. Then, also, if you're still like this is difficult for me, there is a video by Manual Cinema which is, strangely, is a public company that I am very fond of.

[Dan] Imagine.

[Mary Robinette] But they were commissioned by the Poetry Foundation to create a poem… A visual poem to go with and support the recording of Gwendolyn Brooks reading We Real Cool. It's a great way to kind of get a sense of oh, this is what it can do, if it is new to you as a form.

[Pat] I heard her do it live.

[Mary Robinette] [gasp] I'm a little bit jealous of you.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm a lot jealous of you.

[Dan] All right. So, go read some poetry. Read it to yourself, read it out loud. Just kind of see what you can do with it. That's your homework. You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.36: Languages and Naming

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/08/14-36-languages-and-naming/

Key points: How do you name things? How do you come up with names? Baby name websites! Sanskrit or foreign languages. Read the credits on movies. Internally consistent, and different. Borrow names from other countries. How do you approach constructed languages, dialect, or jargon in stories? A few words go a long way. Read it out loud. Make sure readers can tell your names apart! Consider using the language as a source of conflicts, either because people don't speak the same language, or because of the way their language makes them see the world. Misunderstandings and cultural expectations can lead to conflicts. What does this do in your story? What's the role it plays in the plot? Can you use dialect or wording to help with setting?

[Transcriber's note: Apologies to the Ursumari, Hindi, and Korean for any mistakes in the transcription of names and words in those languages.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 13, Episode 36.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Languages and Naming.

[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] [pause] I'm… Okay, I'll tell you my name. I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] She won't make you work for it. Like Howard does.

[Brandon] Languages and naming. So. I would say the number one question I get, usually from younger writers who come through my line is, "How do you name things?" So, I'm going to actually point this at you first, Mahtab, because I think they've probably heard us answer this question. How do you come up with names for your stories?

[Mahtab] Well, I consult a lot of websites. Especially, I start with baby names. But Sanskrit is also a really good source, because… Really, I mean, writing for a North American audience… And since most of my books are published in English, even if I threw in a few Hindi words, it would seem, like, exotic. But, for example, in The Third Eye, I used the word Zarku, which is… It means, in Sanskrit, it means evil. Which is… So I would do Google translate and take keywords off… Which personify the character that I'm naming and try and find the right word. Play around with it. Just, as I said, Google some interesting names and see… And and say it out loud to see what sounds good.

[Howard] Reading… For starters, you should all be staying through the end of the credits of all of the movies you see. But reading the names on the credits is a great way to read a bunch of names that you're probably unfamiliar with. It's also a great way to realize that wow, portions of this film were produced or managed in, I think that's Southeast Asia, or I see a lot of Indian names. I like that. I like seeing that in the films, but seeing that variety opens me up to naming things, because… I mean, just the way we name other human people is hugely diverse.

[Brandon] Now, you were talking about one of the naming conventions you came up with for one of the races in Schlock Mercenary.

[Howard] Yeah, I… The role-playing book, the Planet Mercenary role-playing book, one of the things that we realized is that if people are going to role-play, they're going to want to be able to name their characters. What are the naming conventions for these different species of alien? The first thing that I did was panic, because, how am I going to come up with seven different naming conventions? The second thing I did was, well, I'm going to start subtractively. So I looked at my own language and said, all right, they will never have some of these sounds in their names. I used a different set of subtractions for each of them. One of the groups, one of the races, all names are 10 syllables long. They are all 10 syllables long, and this is how the construction works, and this is where the accenting works, and this is where the pieces of the names come from. It was still familial, which is something we're all familiar with, but it created these names that just looked incredibly alien. But after I knew how to build them, I could suddenly rattle off 10 syllable names very quickly. It made them start to seem real. I think that's, for me, the most important aspect of naming and language stuff in worldbuilding, is that once you have some of the words that your aliens are your monsters or your whatevers use, they become different than you, and they begin to develop their own voice.

[Dan] I think a key part of that, that a lot of as you said especially young writers are overwhelmed by, is making a lot of those decisions. They can be meaningless or random at the point where you're establishing those rules, as long as you come up with something that is con… Internally consistent and that is different, it's going to feel cool. The readers don't necessarily need to know, oh, he just pulled those letters out of the alphabet at random and disallowed them, or however it is that you're building these. You don't need to overthink that initial process. There doesn't need to be some kind of divine foundation for where these names come from, as long as you come up with consistent rules that sound cool and unique.

[Howard] The uplifted polar bears in Planet Mercenary. What I said was the first two generations of uplifted polar bears, it was very common to give them Inuit names, Siberian names, those were very common. Then the polar bears realized you're just naming us after the humans who live near us. That's awful. So for two generations, all of their names are a little more blended. The whole reason for that was so that I could tell the joke of oh, some common Ursumari names are Jones, [Ketchikan, Ggrrnnkk!]

[Laughter)

[Howard] But as I was writing it, I realized that's probably exactly how the bears would do it.

[Mahtab] It's also a very good idea to borrow names from other countries. To point out an example, Avatar. It still sounds weird in my mouth, because it is basically avataar in Hindi, which is just a version of… Most gods and goddesses in the Indian… Hindu mythology have various forms are various versions which are avataars. So when I say avatar, it's like, that is not the correct pronunciation.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] The other thing that I also remembered was tsehelyu [sa-hey-loo?] which is the bonding of the horse and the person. It's… I thought it was spelled differently, but I looked it up, it spelled t-s-e-h-e-l-y-u. But it sounds so close to [sahelee?] which is friend in Hindi. It's just a friend bonding. So you can use existing words. Change the spelling, change the pronunciation, and you have a totally different word.

[Brandon] [garbled] This is how language works. It really does. Like my son was assigned… They're doing a Christmas thing at school, and they said all the kids are going to say Merry Christmas in different languages. He came to me and said, "I chose Korean. How do you say Merry Christmas in Korean?" I'm like, "Merry Christmas. That's what they say."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Now I… There is actually a way to say it in Korean, but I had to go look it up, because when Christmas time was around, everyone just said Merry Christmas because even though it's not in Korean…

[Howard] It's Western…

[Brandon] It's a Western holiday. They just use the English words.

[Dan] We borrow stuff from each other all the time. I will say, following from what Mahtab said about kind of borrowing words and names from other cultures, use a really wide variety of them. I made a world map for a fantasy series that I wanted to put together. I realized, after I had kind of named 15 or so nations on this map, that most of them were kind of the obvious this is based on German or Welsh or maybe some Russian if I was feeling saucy. Why did I not have some more Southeast Asian? Some Chinese? A lot of these other completely different sounds that are not as European and not as obvious that we tend to skip over?

[Brandon] One of my favorite things… We're on a side tangent here, but with making maps, is to think about who's making the map. Because if you make the map, that country's names for all the countries in the world, are going to be that country-ized, that country-ize. Like, we call Korea Korea, right? In Korea, it's Hangug. It's… The Koryo dynasty was years and years ago, but that's the name that stuck for us. All countries do this, right? They don't call us America, they call us migug. That's just how… When whoever's making the map is going to use their biases to create all of the names for all the countries. That is a lot of fun for me, for worldbuilding aspects.

[Dan] Because a lot of those names will come from the first person that they encountered from that region, or, like with Korea, whoever was in charge at the time we decided to codify the name.

[Howard] It is important to be careful with this. The apocryphal possibly story of a games workshop sending their materials to be translated in German, and the Germans coming back and saying, "Okay. We need to work on naming with you, because you've literally named the villain villain.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You've named the hero hero. You've just…

[Dan] Yes.

[Howard] Taking these words from German and naming them as your characters in English, because you think it sounds exotic, is not going to work well because it spoils the surprise for everybody here…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Who can read German.

[Dan] Yeah, which is why I liked, again, what Mahtab said about changing the spelling, changing the pronunciation. Use it as a base and then make it your own.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Mahtab] Yes. I would love to recommend Binti by Nnedi Okorofor. I hope I'm not butchering her name. But it's a novella. An excellent mix of African culture and science fiction. It centers around Binti, who is from the Himsa [Himba?] tribe. She has been offered this place in this university. It's called the Oomza University. Which is a place of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept this, she has to leave her people. So when she does, and against everyone's wishes, against the family's wishes, she decides to go. But the one thing that she takes with her as something to remind her of home is this earth, which the Himsa people tend to apply on their hair and their skin. It turns out that this is something that helps her when there is a war that the University is with, with the Meduse people which is an alien race. I'm not going to, again, give away the ending. It's a short novella, but it's beautifully written. It's, as I said, a very good mix of an African culture, science-fiction, and a must read.

[Brandon] It won the Hugo and the Nebula. It's free to read on Tor.com, I believe. Maybe it's not free.

[Mahtab] I don't think so.

[Brandon] Yeah, it's actually one of the Tor.com novella programs. But it is a novella that you can get very cheaply online, and well worth a read.

[Mahtab] Excellent. Excellent book.

[Brandon] Let's stray a little bit from naming towards language conventions. So let's talk about conlangs, which is kind of the word for constructed languages that you use in your books, or your own kind of feel on how to use dialect or jargon in your stories to kind of enhance the authenticity or the worldbuilding of your story. So how do you approach coming up with languages and things like this?

[Dan] Let's start by saying that we did an entire episode on conlangs with a linguistic professor last year. So, for a much more full discussion, look that up.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Dan] But now I got nothing.

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] I can start, because I was very taken up with Dothraki, which was invented by David J. Peterson. I was listening to a TED talk of his in terms of how he came up with it. So what he said is he used the text George R. R. Martin wrote and he used certain words. He kind of broke them apart. So words like cow and ruck and hudge, cuss, which is consonant vowel consonant. He kind of used that as a base and then he developed a language. Of course, there is a lot between using those words and what he came up with. But just writing for younger readers, I think one has to be very careful because large paragraphs or large texts in a very weird language could actually pull the reader out. Which is why I appreciated just a few words of parsel tongue in the Harry Potter movies, or just a couple of words here and there, because you do not want to trip up young readers. If you do come up with interesting words or made-up words, I would read it out loud. Just to see if you're tripping up, which is what would happen with the… With your readers.

[Howard] Or if phonetically you're saying something you don't want to say.

[Mahtab] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] One of the tricks that I look at is… Primarily for naming things, but if you're making up a language, English readers… I don't know if this is a problem in other languages, but I know it's a problem in English. English readers will tend to conflate foreign looking words that all begin with the same letter for each other. You have three six letter names that all begin with F. They're all going to be kind of read as the same person. So you may want to find a set of rules for your language that allows you to have different first letters. That's a… It's a silly sort of constraint, because you may have a language where all of the first letters are the same. Every word begins with F.

[Brandon] Orson Scott Card has a really great essay on his website about naming, where he talks about this sort of concept. Varying the length of the names, varying the… Some of them being… Sounding like a word, like calling someone Bean as opposed to calling someone Ender which will… Ways that different names stick in people's heads. It is well worth reading.

[Howard] But with regard to language, specifically, if you are going to be dropping snippets of your alien foreign whatever made-up language in your book, having the words… Let us be able to tell the difference between the words. So that if one of those words shows up later, in a chapter heading, maybe we'll recognize it as a word we've seen before. Maybe that's a plot point. Maybe it's a significant touchstone for us as readers. There needs to be a reason for you to have gone to all this trouble to construct your own language.

[Brandon] I, when I'm building books, I'll use a couple of different styles. It's going to depend, for me, on how much time I want to spend with the language being a source of conflicts. Last month we talked about this idea of cultural setting as conflict. In some of my books, the fact that people don't speak the same language, or the ways that their linguistics work informs the way they see the world becomes a conflict in the story or at least a way that characters are not quite understanding each other or the cultural expectations are being expressed. In those worlds, I spend a lot more time on my worldbuilding and my language. I am not a linguist. Fortunately, my editorial director, Peter, is a linguist. I've taken enough classes that I can be dangerous in this field, so to speak. But you don't need to be a linguist to be able to do this. I really do approach it results-oriented. Why am I doing this? Like Howard said, what is the function of this in my story? Why am I having this happen? In the Stormlight Archive, I have one character who uses a lot of words in a different language. It is to reinforce that his culture is really important to him, and the way that he sees the world involves giving people nicknames from his language. Which really changes the way that the reader and the other characters interact with this character, and has been wonderful for using those linguistics. But the actual linguistics don't matter as much to me as what the role… The role they're taking in the plot.

[Mahtab] Dialect or using certain words can also help you… Help give you a setting, a time. Like, for example, Feed by M. T. Anderson. They use words like unit, which is wow. Or "This is really meg." Words like this. Which was… Although the book was written in 2002, it was an indication that this is a society in the future. I was just reading To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the lines that Miss Maudie says is, "Mockingbirds don't do one thing except make music for us to enjoy." People don't normally speak that way. So if you use a dialect, or if you use a certain way of putting words, and the order in which you put them could also help you describe whether it's southern US that you're talking about or even India. There are so many dialects. By using it, you can say so much more without saying it. Because that's the way the people in that area talk.

[Brandon] Excellent. We are out of time on this episode. Howard, you have our homework.

[Howard] Yes. You are probably familiar, fair listener, with the way human beings name each other. We name each other after our progenitors. We have first names, we have last names. They all sort of run in families. Come up with a naming convention for aliens or fantasy races, whatever. Come up with a naming convention that has nothing to do with family and is completely, completely different.

[Brandon] Completely removed from the way that we do our naming.

[Howard] Completely removed from the way that we name each other.

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

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Writing Excuses 12.12: Words as Words, with Linda Addison

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/03/19/12-12-words-as-words-with-linda-addison/

Key Points: Picking the exact right word, for the shape, sound, visual space, as an object unto itself, independent of meaning. Taste your words, feel them, find the rhythm, the breaks. "Poetry is to be read like a fine meal or a fine wine, one sip at a time." Journals! Write down anything and everything, then go back and pull out words and ideas and feelings. Write stories and turn them into poems. Write poems and create stories out of them. Take words out. Change words. Read them out loud. Create a startling image. Change hard and soft words, or sibilants and bebop. Take out the most important word, and let the reader put their own ideas, their own breath, their own emotion in there. Play with the rhythms of poetry, to learn them. Make them an unconscious rhythm that you can draw on. Poetry, like music, is organic and normal. It's the cadence of storytelling around the fire. Whether you want to write poetry or something else, pay attention to word choice, the music of words, and to words as words.

( Iambic pentameter and blank poetry? )

[Dan] So, you said that you had a little writing prompt to throw at us at the end?
[Linda] Always. I mean, it may be something I end up building my life poem on today, because I haven't done it yet, but it's four words. I would suggest playing with something that starts "Driving through the tears."
[Dan] I like it. All right. So there's your writing prompt, dear listeners. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: beat

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Writing Excuses 12.11: Diction

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/03/12/12-11-diction/

Key points: Diction, word choice, how do you pick the right word? Don't try too hard while you are writing. Fix it in revision. What does this sentence mean, why is it here? Make it more specific. Don't go overboard! Make sure you use the word with the right meaning. Keep a list. Watch for terminology. Think about simplicity versus more specificity. What's important for the character? Don't let the experts bury you. Lyrical, easy to say out loud. Watch emphasis! Unintentional alliteration and rhymes can make it hard to read. Is your style transparent, windowpane prose, or something more stylized? [Bracket] overused words to help with revision. Limit your favorite phrases. Use text-to-speech to listen to your prose.

( Watch those darling words... )

[Brandon] Now I will say that we're doing an entire podcast coming up later this month on how to write beautiful prose. So I'm going to cap this session here. I'm going to let Mary give us some homework on diction.
[Mary] Right. So, what we've been talking about is how to choose the right word, and the area of intention, and all of these things. So what I'm going to ask you to do is to take something that you have recently written and go through… We're just going to look at dialogue on this one, just to make it easy on you. I say easy. Mwahaha. As an exercise, what I want you to do is, I want you to replace all of the dialogue, and you're not allowed to use any of the existing words in those sentences. This is to force you to think about what these sentences actually mean. I will grant you that you are allowed to use the articles and the prepositions, but no verbs, no nouns. The only ones that I'm going to allow you are like names or a MacGuffin that is very specific to that world. Otherwise, I want you to replace every single word and get deep into why you are picking that word.
[Mary Anne] Can I just add one more quick exercise?
[Brandon] Yes. Go for it.
[Mary Anne] My students love this one. It's so frustrating. You write a scene in sentences that are all seven words or less. Then you write the same scene in one long sentence. It's really good for making you think about sentence structure. It's super frustrating trying to write in seven words or less sentences. Which is good for you.
[Brandon] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: headachy

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Writing Excuses 6.12: Revising Howard's Story

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/08/21/writing-excuses-6-12-revising-for-description/

Key points: Word choice can identify genre. Inherent conflict builds interest. Be careful with names. Concrete is better. Make sure the reader knows what's going on. Tell us what the character feels. Be careful about details that feel natural to the character but may be disorienting to the reader. Use word choice to bring out tone. Use contrasts to build interest. Consider letting the reader understand the character, quirks, interests, motivation. Instead of reporting sensations, let them happen.
( One day on Jupiter... )
[Brandon] We should really let you post this whole thing for people in the liner notes.
[Howard] Oh, that would just be awful.
[Brandon] Then our writing prompt can be, start with his concept and write your own story.
[Dan] Nice.
[Howard] Very good.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: gas diving

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Writing Excuses 6.11: Making Your Descriptions Do More Than One Thing

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/08/14/writing-excuses-6-11-making-your-descriptions-do-more-than-one-thing/

Key points: Make your descriptions release information about character or plot, too. Mood, emotion, characterization. Pay attention to word choice. Be economical with words. Watch for unintentional gaffes and gorilla in the phone booth phrases. Don't be purple! Evoke character. What does this description do to advance the story? Use description to imply the setting, not hit your reader over the head with it.
( Red velvet curtains... )
[Brandon] Okay. Let's do a story prompt. As much as I liked Mary Robinette as a koala, let's go ahead and pick something else that has to do with description. I think we'll just go ahead and pick...
[Mary] Can I actually offer one?
[Brandon] Yeah. Go for it.
[Mary] Because this is a writing exercise...
[Dan] Nobody ever volunteers writing prompts!
[Mary] I know. But this actually is a really good one, for description. Which is to focus just on the description. Take yourself someplace and for 30 minutes, describe the environment that you are in. Don't describe the people. Just describe the space. Try to use all five senses. What's going to happen to your brain is that you'll hit a point where you're like, "I cannot possibly describe anything else." That's when you start noticing the little details. The little details are the things that make a story.
[Brandon] All right. Wonderful advice, wonderful writing prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: wordy

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 13: Dialects and In-World Jargon

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/08/23/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-13-dialects-and-in-world-jargon/

Key Points: Accents and dialects are attempts to emulate the ways people speak. Changing the spelling can be hard to read, makes the prose obvious, and can irritate the reader. Word choice and word order also can be used to suggest dialect. Fake swear words and in-world jargon also can help. "Do whatever is honest for the character."
( words )
[Brandon] Did you have a writing prompt for us, Dan? Didn't we talk about this? No, you had one last time. I should come up with one.
[Haggis] It's your turn.
[Armando] It is time for you to give us a writing prompt.
[Brandon] Armando and Haggis are together...
[Armando] As we often are.
[Brandon] Trapped in a room...
[Armando] With many beautiful women.
[Brandon] With many beautiful women, running away from them...
[Haggis] And I've got a kilt.
[Brandon] Why are they trapped in this room? This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: plain
Current Music: Friends in Low Places, Garth Brooks

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with word choice

Writing Excuses 20.49: Using Tone and Mood

Writing Excuses 19.15: A Close Reading on Voice - Tying It All Together

Writing Excuses 16.50: Worldbuilding Finale: Making Deliberate Choices

Writing Excuses 15.06: Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss

Writing Excuses 14.36: Languages and Naming

Writing Excuses 12.12: Words as Words, with Linda Addison

Writing Excuses 12.11: Diction

Writing Excuses 6.12: Revising Howard's Story

Writing Excuses 6.11: Making Your Descriptions Do More Than One Thing

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 13: Dialects and In-World Jargon

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