Writing Excuses 19.37: A Close Reading on Tension: Movement and Resolution

Sep. 18th, 2024 02:55 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.37: A Close Reading on Tension: Movement and Resolution
 
 
Key points: The law of the half step, a little movement creates tension. Solutions to problems that create a whole new problem. Yes-but, no-and! Repetitions that have changed just a little bit. Don't play coy with the reader, withholding secrets. Make sure your reveal give us new information, moves the story forward. EDM beat drops! Use mini-drops, small revelations, to assure your reader that we are moving towards a resolution. Use multiple threads, multiple pieces of tension, at any given time. Resolve something that the reader doesn't know needs resolution. Make sure the movement and resolution is story driven. Reframe have to do as get to do. Reframe have to hold this back from the reader as at this point, I get to reveal this amazing thing, and I am going to build to that reveal. Make your goal to be cursed by readers who didn't want to feel the thing that you just made them feel.
 
[Season 19, Episode 37]
 
[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.
 
[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Season 19, Episode 37]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Movement and Resolution.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Howard] I want to talk about music for a moment. Way back when I was studying music composition, one of my instructors talked about what he called the law of the half step. Which was that when there's a note that is a half step off from being the tonic or the dominant or whatever, from being in resolution, you have a chord that has created tension, has created a need for movement. The whole principle behind this was that as you are composing, you want to build chords where there are these half step movements just waiting to happen. You don't want to move a whole step, you don't want to have a note jump, especially if you're writing for choir. You don't want to have somebody jump a third or a fourth or a fifth in order to resolve the chord. You want the little movements that make things resolve. In teaching us about this, he said, "Now let's listen to some Wagner," because he was a cruel, cruel man. What we learned in listening to Wagner is Wagner was always resolving in one direction, while shifting something else out...
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Of place. He knew what he was doing. How does this tie into close reading tension with regard to Ring Shout, where the tension depends on something that is just a little bit out of place? Something… It doesn't need to move far, but it needs to move. It really needs to move. The longer it doesn't move, the tenser we get.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about this is it's a different way of describing something that I often use when I'm trying to create tension, which is the solution to whatever problem your character is dealing with creates a new problem.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Which… One of the things that I specifically think about in Ring Shout is the butcher shop scene. She needs to find the butcher shop. She needs to go and confront this guy. Doing so unlocks… It's like she does it. She has the confrontation. That unlocks this whole other enormous problem that… The dream that she had had was not actually just a dream. Ugh. I still have problems with that scene.
 
[DongWon] I mean, we see that again, over and over, he's doing that in terms of creating these moments that are the yes-but, no-and. Right? Like things… Even when things don't work out for them, it opens a door to further progressing the story. When things do work out for them, it works out in an unexpected way. Right? So, I think the night doctors is another great example of that…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] When she goes into the tree, there's a [garbled] name for the tree that I'm forgetting in the moment, but…
[Mary Robinette] The Angel Tree.
[DongWon] Yeah. The Dead Angel Tree. Sort of that whole sequence, which is this deeply upsetting thing, which is a solution to a problem. But it raises so many more questions in doing so. Right?
 
[Erin] What I love about both the girl from the dream and also the sort of brother's voice that comes out, is that it's one of those things where it's like every time we come back to it, it's moved a little bit. So like there's a little bit of tension in that. Because you know that there's some revelation coming. There's no reason this would be occurring over and over again in the story, and then be like, "Oh, well. That happened." Like, it seems like it's building towards something. But in between, there's all these immediate, like, present tensions. Like, I gotta go into this butcher shop.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I have to like run into a place on fire. But then it will be like, "Oh, this little voice." And the voices saying something a little different. Oh, this little girl. But she looks a little different. It's almost like those movies where something small on a shelf moves out of the corner of your eye…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And all of a sudden, you're like, "Oh, my God, this moved such a long way."
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That is a great way…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] To build tension in this story.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. Well, to return to the music metaphor, it's that scale is building in the background. Right? It's each note is progressing up the scale, and at some point we know that's going to resolve. We know that's going to have to go somewhere.
[Howard] The… Going back to the music again, and the law of the halfstep. When you have a repeated theme in music, but something is changing, the accompaniment has changed, the tempo has changed. We've all heard it done when you play a familiar melody in a minor key. One of my favorite examples of that was Katrina and the Waves played in a minor key as part of a tribute during a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser. It was emotionally superpowerful, but you make little changes and it tells the reader, tells the listener, we're going somewhere. We're not just waiting for this piece to end. There is a resolution coming, and the modification of the thing that you're familiar with is leading toward that resolution.
 
[Mary Robinette] This is one of the things that P. Djèlí Clark does that I see early career writers not get where they have a character who has a secret, who has some past traumatic event, and they play coy with the reader. The reason that it does not work is, when it's handled badly is, that there isn't that movement, there isn't that giving us new information, there isn't anything to be gained by the withholding. In this, is the withholding and then the resolution of that. When she finally goes and has to relive that memory fully, that is a… That is a major plot point. It is one of the things that the story is building towards. As we are going through it, there are these tiny movements, we get these small resolutions every time we come back to it. With the things that Erin was talking about, with those, every time we come back to the voice, it's a little bit different. It's a… It is these small resolutions that then open up a different question.
[Howard] There's a common trope in all kinds of fiction where there is a secret and someone asks about the secret and the answer is you don't want to know the answer. Oh, you're not ready for me to tell you that yet. It's often so ham-fisted that we just think of it as a trope and we hate it. But in Ring Shout, there are secrets that she is not ready for the answer to. When you talk about the butcher shop, in particular, and we get an answer and the answer is a reveal where there is a whole scary horrible mess that you were just not ready to know about earlier.
[DongWon] Yeah. To modernize the metaphor a little bit, from Wagner… Sorry. But you can think about it in terms of like in EDM beat drop. Right? Like, you're building this slow thing, and then the beat drops, and now you're in a different rhythm and things are going faster. What you want is that sense of release when you get there. When you get to that beat drop, things should be popping off, being a little chaotic. Then you'll find a different rhythm, you'll find a different pace as you settle in past that moment. But the butcher shop is such a good example of that because it's a thrilling scene. Right? It is… The things that are happening in it are like absolutely buck wild. Even compared to the kind of horror we'd seen up until that point, this is reaching a different crescendo of that. Right? Which is part of the mix. That sequence is so memorable and is going to set the pace and tone for the back half of this story.
[Howard] We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about moving toward that resolution.
 
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[Erin] The movie Clueless is great.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] I'll just say it. So my recommendation is watch the movie Clueless, the nineties Valley girl retelling of the Jane Austen book, Emma. It's got classic clues, it's got amazing actors, it's got Paul Rudd at whatever age he was claiming to be at that moment. But the thing that I really love paying attention to is the way they take something from a completely different era, the Regency era, and move it into nineties valley girl voice. If you're thinking about voice in your own work, think about how did they do that? How do they make it seem like Clueless is a movie of the time and place that it's from while still keeping the plot and all of the things that come with being a retelling of an Austen classic? One thing I like to think about that you may do as you watch this work is how would you make that same story happen in the world that you're building? Enjoy that, while you watch Clueless.
 
[Howard] So you might have in front of you an outline for your work in progress where you've got a pretty clear picture of where things are going. Many of us will look at you and laugh a little bit, because your characters have not yet run away with the story. Others of us will look at you very jealously and say, "Wow, I wish my outlines work that way." The thing to remember is that this is your plan. You have an idea of how to move and how to resolve. The reader isn't in on it. Part of what makes Ring Shout, for me, so satisfying is that at every stage I could tell that we were moving toward a resolution. I knew that, but I had no idea what it was. How do you set about creating that for your readers?
[Erin] I would say that one of the things that I loved that I was talking about before with ring shout That is the mini-drops, the small answers that let you know that questions will be answered. So, looking at the sort of dream figure of the little girl… It's a little girl, who is this? Who is this girl? Wait, this girl is me? Wait, this girl wasn't a girl. And there's a barn. Like, there's all these pieces of information…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Come out. Like, we don't learn about the barn, really, until about three or four…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And then, once you hear about it, like, you may or may not contextually put together your own beliefs about what the barn is… It was exactly what I thought it was…
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] But, it's each thing tells you, okay, this small question was answered, so I know the next question will be answered. That leads you towards the overall resolution of why is this important. Each single bit of information also tells you a little bit more of the reason that the girl is a girl in her mind's eye, even though… When the event happens, she wasn't young because it's easier for her. You're like, "Oh. That gives me both an emotional resolution and some more information about what's happening here." I think it is those smaller bits that really help to give the reader confidence that you are driving towards something.
 
[Mary Robinette] It's also that more than one thread is active at any given time, more than one story thread, more than one piece of tension, active at any given time. And each scene is moving those, like… In… Ah, it's so good. I'm thinking about, there's the girl, but also the Ring Shout scene. That in that scene, you're learning about how Ring Shout works. You're also learning about violence that's been happening other places. You are learning about how the Ku Klux's work. All of those things move just a little bit. And then the weather begins to shift. Each time, it's like… It's all of these little tiny half steps that resolve something while shifting something else out of alignment. It's something that you can do with your own work, is to look at scenes and see do you have only one thread that you're moving and resolving tension for in a given scene? That's for short fiction or longform.
[DongWon] It's why overlapping sounds and overlapping rhythms and melodies create greater amplitude. Right? They're not countering each other out. I mean, you want to make sure that they're not canceling each other out, which is a thing that can happen. So if you have different kinds of tension and they're running counter to each other, this can cause a drop in excitement and tension in the book. But if you're doing what he's doing here, which is adding all these different layers of here's the most visceral immediate layer of like they're fighting Ku Klux's in the street after trying to blow them up with this trap to the memories every time she draws her sword. We know we're going to get another beat on that particular layer. Then the Ring Shouts, the sort of epistolary pieces that start off each section…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Each of those is adding another note to the sort of stack of melodies that we're getting that is building over the course of the book. It makes the whole book feel like one of its own Ring Shouts. Right? It's one of these owned stories that has this impact and potential and is saying something very specific and powerful.
 
[Erin] I also love that sometimes it's building and creating emotion, even when you don't think it is. So, for example, all the people, the voices that… The images basically that she's getting when she draws the sword happen basically the same way every time that we see them the first few times. So it feels like this is just a thing. When you draw your sword, you get some random pretty tragic things that happened. But then those voices come into play at the end…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Of the novella… Spoiler alert, but you were supposed to read the book. Like, those all come into play feels like such a great res… Like a resolution I wasn't even expecting.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I think that sometimes that is also something that we could do, which is to resolve a thing that you didn't know needed resolution, that it feels so emotionally satisfying to get it.
[DongWon] You keep us moving so much that we forget that, oh, her best friend died, which means that she could be one of the spirits of the sword now. You know what I mean? So that moment when she comes is such a resolution to that whole arc, the arc of friendship, the arc of the tragedy of her death, and the ark of the sword, all coming together in a single moment that leads to such a big emotional catharsis for these two characters and this relationship.
 
[Howard] One of the things that makes this kind of movement and resolution satisfying is when it is always story driven, rather than driven by the necessity of the meta-, the beat chart. I want the reader to not know this yet. I want the reader… Now I want them to know this. Okay, that's fine. Having a beat chart at the beginning that says the reader is in the dark about a whole bunch of things and this is my list of reveals. But every one of these reveals not only needs to be justified, but the reader needs to feel like there was a really good reason why nobody in whose POV I was had that information until just now. One of my favorite parts of the book is the realization that the trope of oh, I had this sword because I am the chosen one of these women who gave me the sword, and then, after the butcher shop scene, you're like, "Wait a minute. I'm not their chosen one. I'm someone else's chosen one." I… Oh, and that's the point at which, for me, I no longer knew… I had no clue where this was going to resolve. I was now genuinely frightened because there… We had this discussion years ago on the podcast. There's so many worse things that can happen to a character than death.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Having them make the decision that you as the reader hate is so much worse. I was afraid of that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Erin] [garbled] About the relationship between writer and reader, you were talking about the meta-beat, and I think that one of the things… A life thing that I have been thinking about recently is the difference between have to and get to. So, trying to reframe things that you have to do in your life as, like, I get to do that. It doesn't always work…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] But…
[Mary Robinette] I may try it at home…
[Erin] But I do think that, like, sometimes instead of it's "I have to hold this back from the reader," it's "at this point, I get to reveal this amazing thing to the reader and I'm going to build to that amazing moment of reveal." So I think it's about like wanting to share your story versus wanting to hold back your story.
[DongWon] This came up in one of my D&D games in a conversation with one of my players. We settled on this thing of the difference between holding a secret from you versus holding a secret for you.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's great.
[DongWon] So… If you think of yourself as a writer holding the secret for your audience, you're… It's going to be more exciting, more fun, better resolution if they don't know this thing yet versus like I'm keeping this thing from you and you don't get to have it. Right? I think that subtle shift in the mind set… It's as delicate as the get to, want to or get to, have to, or whatever it was. It's as subtle as that distinction, but I think it's a really important one, and that can be really helpful in getting to the most exciting kind of release at the end of the movement.
 
[Mary Robinette] I think that also gets to something that I often end up telling writers which is, like, "Okay. So what emotion do you want the writer to have? Because, gosh, that writer is clever is not…"
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] "Sustainable." That is the I am holding the secret from you.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] The, "Oh, no," is I am holding the secret for you.
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. [Garbled]
[Howard] My goal as a writer, as an early writer, would be… Yeah, I would like to be seen as clever. Now, I've reached the point where my goal is I want to be cursed by people who didn't want to feel the thing that I just made them feel. That's… For me, that's the high bar. Do I curse P. Djèlí Clark?
[Mary Robinette] I do.
[Howard] Maybe a little bit.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Maybe a little, but I enjoyed that ride quite a bit.
[Mary Robinette] I appreciated that ride.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I'm not going to say that this was an enjoyable ride.
[Howard] Hey, we've got one or two more episodes to talk about this? Two more. All right. Let's go ahead and wrap this up.
 
[Howard] In the musical vein, I have a fun homework for you. Write a scene three times. Same scene, and write it from scratch three times. But listen to different music each time. If you need help varying things, try all instrumental. Try something that's got lots and lots of vocals. Try something that you are completely unfamiliar with, you've never listened to before. For… See how that changes what you put down on the page.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.47: NaNoWriMo Week 4 - Climaxes, or OH MY GOD NO

Nov. 22nd, 2023 07:08 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.47: NaNoWriMo Week 4 - Climaxes, or OH MY GOD NO
 
 
Key Points: Making the turn from opening to closing. Beware the three-quarters mark! Switching modes, from opening questions, introducing new problems, etc. to solving problems and wrapping things up. Treat yourself with candy bar scenes! Switch from yes-but to yes-and. Keep track of the questions and promises from the beginning. Use the MICE Quotient! What's the impossible choice the character faces here? Concentric circles of nested problems! Write yourself notes. Leave notes in square brackets. Ask your writing group what you forgot. Ask yourself what new goals your character has.
 
[Season 18, Episode 47]
 
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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 18, Episode 47]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 4. The three-quarter mark. Making the turn from opening to closing.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Erin] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
 
[Erin] Today, we're going to talk about, as we move from the opening part, the gallop away of writing through NaNoWriMo, to the end. Which is near. But my question for you all is what is the difference between the way that you write when you're starting something in the way that you write when you're ending something? Because we're going to be transitioning between these two. What are we transitioning between?
[Mary Robinette] So, this is a thing that it took me forever to figure out. Why I always bogged down at the three-quarter mark. I think it's because you're switching modes. So, for me, what I find is at the beginning, I am opening questions, I'm throwing out possibilities, I'm making things worse. I'm introducing new problems. At the end, I have to start solving problems and wrapping things up. It's like the difference between when you arrive on vacation and you've got a bag and you just open it and you pull your stuff out, and then when it's time to go home and you have to somehow get everything back into the suitcase. It never goes back into the suitcase the way you think it's going to. But also, you don't want to. Because you just want to keep pulling things out. So, for me, it's the difference between asking questions, in a general sense, and answering them.
[Erin] That makes sense, but it almost sounds like it's the anticipation of that ending part. So, like, it's not the last… You're not throwing the things in the suitcase yet, but you're figuring out what you're going to wear the day before the last day, and you're like, "Oh, gosh. There's stuff all over this hotel room."
[Chuckles]
[Erin] All over this cruise cabin, and at some point, I'm going to have to do it. It can almost make you not enjoy the thing that you're doing right now, as you're like thinking ahead to what's coming.
 
[Dan] One of my favorite stories about writing is an interview Neil Gaiman gave when he was writing… I think it was Coraline, it might have been The Graveyard Book… He said that he hit this point in the book where he just hated everything, the book was not working, the characters didn't work, the story was terrible. He called his agent and he said, "I'm sorry, I don't think I can write this. It's awful." She laughed and said, "Oh, you're at the three-quarter's mark aren't you?"
[Chuckles]
[Dan] "You call me every single time and give me the same thing. Keep going, you'll be fine." A lot of it is just our tendency to get inside of our own heads and to think I'm almost to the end of the tight rope. Of course, I'm going to fall off these last few feet. No you're not. You're doing great. We have to… Like Mary Robinette said, start answering questions instead of asking them. Asking questions is so easy because we can ask anything we want. That's a problem for future Dan...
[gasp]
[Dan] But then…
[DongWon] Now you're future Dan.
[Dan] Now I'm future Dan, and some jerk asked a bunch of questions. I have to find not only answers, but good answers that make sense and pull all the threads together that I've been carefully laying out and make them into this beautiful, beautiful perfect ending. It can be incredibly overwhelming even if it isn't actually difficult. It's just it looks like it's going to be so hard.
[DongWon] I can't tell you how many times I've had that exact same phone call…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Where I told my writers, "It's okay. You're most of the way through a book. You're two thirds, you're three quarters. It just feels not great sometimes when you're there." I do think it's really interesting to hear from your perspective why that is, that making this turn from rising action, where you get to be introducing things, and now you start having to answer the questions that you've asked. Right? So, I guess my question for you guys is how do you start answering those? Right? Like, how do you start bringing people moving away from each other and having to have them re-intersect, having your villains and your heroes, your antagonists, romantic interests, whatever it is, start actually reaching the point that they're on their collision paths and start colliding?
 
[Erin] I think that's a great question. But, actually even before that, just to kill this metaphor of the vacation, is that there's something nice about like you've got the outfit that you feel really great in for that particular day, and it's that you want to find something that you can treat yourself with in this part of the book. Like, there's something at the three quarters mark that you get to do, which is that the big huge explosions, whatever those are, whether they're literal explosions or emotional explosions, like those get to happen at this moment. There's a person that I know calls them candy bar scenes. The scenes that you're sort of waiting for that are rewarding yourself. So, if you think, yes, I do have to bring everything back together, but also, this is the part where I get to open and eat this candy, it's a way to keep yourself excited while you answer that question of how you're going to pull everything back together.
 
[Mary Robinette] I think that's a great idea. I've talked before about how there's scenes that I've been waiting to get to. Like, just eager to write. One of the tricks that I use is that I shift the way that I'm handling try-fail cycles. So, up to about this point, I've been doing the yes, they succeed, but something goes wrong. So if you think about yes as a progress towards a goal, and no as progress away from a goal. Reversals. But you think about and as a continuation of motion, and but as a reversal. So, I switch from going yes-but to yes-and. So I start giving my characters bonus actions. Like, we're trying to break into this safe. Does it work? Yes. And there's also this other piece of secret information in the safe that we weren't expecting to find. So I'll give them bonus actions. With the no, it's like are we able… If, instead I'd been like, are we able to get into the safe? No. But in the process of doing that, we accidentally set off the alarms, which is now preventing the cops from getting to us. So we have extra time. So, like that, giving them that tiny bonus action, I start sprinkling those in. So when I'm starting to move to the end and I can sort of feel story bloat happening, I will look at it and be like, "Okay. How can you give them success and a little bit of a bonus action?" If  I want to keep the tension going, then I give them no and then a little bit of a bonus action.
[DongWon] I love this idea of candy bar scenes. This plays really well into what you're saying in terms of switching from one model to the yes-and. Because there should be joy as you're heading into the climax. There should be emotional resolution. Right? I was thinking about the Spider-Man into the Spiderverse. Right? Where before you get to the big climactic battle, there are all of these like incredibly heartfelt emotional scenes that lead to this... one of the most triumphant scenes I've ever seen in cinema, when Miles like finally owns his own power and does an incredible jump off the building. That's such an iconic shot. It's like you have these incredible emotional highs in that that come from getting to have… The candy bars of his dad telling him that he loves him and he's proud of him and all these things. Of him believing in himself. Like, we've been going through it with him for so long and so hungry for that, that by the time we get that treat, it's a whole feast. It's such a powerful moment. So, I think when you're thinking about how to go into… We started by talking about why this is also hard. This doesn't make it easy necessarily, but I love this idea of framing it as a treat for you, the writer, a treat for the character, and a treat for the audience. This is the reward we've been hanging out for this entire time.
[Dan] It always helps me to remember that so many writers are also bad at this.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Right? We talk so much about movies. How many action movies have you seen that have two acts, an hour and a half, whatever, of brilliant dialogue and funny stuff, and then Act III is just a gunfight or a chase scene and then it ends? Right? Like, most of the Marvel movies are this way. Incredibly interesting questions in Winter Soldier about the… Where's the line between safety and security? How far can we push this? What are we going to do? What's the answer to this question? At the end, the movie doesn't answer that question, it just has a big fight scene. But then, one of the ones where they did it really well was in Endgame. Where, yes, the 3rd act is a giant fight scene, but it is filled with these candy bar scenes, these character moments. That's when we get on your left, and all the people show up. That's when we get Avengers Assemble that we've been waiting 23 movies for. That's when we get all these little heroic stand up and cheer moments. So it's not just a fight scene, it's more than that.
[Erin] And, at this moment, we're going to take a break. When we come back, more candy.
 
[Mary Robinette] NaNoWriMo is just around the corner and it's time to start planning. If you're aiming for 1600 words a day, it's easy to de-prioritize eating, but you need to keep the brain fueled. During Nano, I turn to meal kits. Hello Fresh makes whipping up a home-cooked meal a nice break from writing with quick and easy options, including their 15 minute meals. With everything pre-proportioned and delivered right to your door every week, it takes way less time than it takes to get a delivery. I find that stepping away from the keyboard to cook gives my brain time to rest. I love that with Hello Fresh, I can plan my meals for the month before NaNoWriMo begins, and then, I can save all my decision-making for the stories. With so many in season ingredients, you'll taste all the freshness of fall in every bite of Hello Fresh's chef crafted recipes. Produce travels from the farm to your door for peak ripeness you can taste. Go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use the code 50WX for 50% off plus free shipping. Yeah, that's right. 50WX. 50 for 50% off and WX for Writing eXcuses. We are terrible with puns. Just visit hellofresh.com/50WX and try America's number one meal kit.
 
[DongWon] Hey, writers. You're doing a hard and difficult thing. I'm sure at this point it feels like you've been doing it forever, and will be doing it forever. That said, I'm not going to tell you it gets better. I'm here to tell you that you can survive this. Doing hard things is hard. That's okay. Making art should be hard. Especially in the middle of it when you're past the initial rush of starting and you can't yet see the finish line. It's like walking a very long way. When you're doing something like that, I think a lot about the mile markers. For me, they're a blessing and a curse. They remind me of how far I've come, and how far I have to go. For me, surviving any kind of endurance activity requires focusing on the present moment. Thinking about the next step that's in front of me and putting out of my mind how far away the end is. So, sometimes I try to ignore the mile markers. To refuse to acknowledge how long I've been walking and how long I will be walking. But the problem with that is it means I forget to have joy in the process. I forget the mile marker means I've accomplished something great, I walked another mile. I took another step. If the answer is to be truly present in the moment, that also means honoring what it means to have made it this far. So, I'm asking you now to stay in the moment. I want you to celebrate today's word count. Don't focus on the total. Focus on the accomplishment. Focus on what you've done. I know it's hard. I know it's long. But you've come this far, and I'm so proud of you for doing so. You've got this. Keep taking that next step. Keep putting the next word down and keep going. I'll see you at the end.
 
[Erin] All right. So we are back from our break. I actually want us to answer… Sort of answer a little more the question, DongWon, that you asked earlier before we got distracted. Which was how do you actually start bringing things back in. So you're treating yourself, but you can't treat yourself so much that you forget the story that you're telling. I think one way, actually, is to be more explicit about the questions that you're asking. Because I think what happens in those action movies, Dan, that you were talking about is that sometimes the story gets so excited by the treats that it forgets the questions that it's set up in the first half and actually doesn't think to answer them because there's so much like, "Oh, I've gotta do this," or, "I've gotta get to the ending." But you forget that you left out the questions about safety and security, or these bigger thematic issues. So, I'm curious, how do you keep track of like the promises that you made at the beginning and sort of how to make sure that you're keeping track of them as you move towards the end?
[Mary Robinette] I mean, this is why I lean on the M.I.C.E. Quotient so much. Because it… Usually, there's a fairly clear question-y kind of thing at the beginning and… So, like… I often describe this area of the book is one of the places where the character has to face an impossible choice between their goal and a failure state, or between which goal they're willing to sacrifice in order to obtain the other. So, like, if they're afraid of heights, they're absolutely going to have to go out on a ledge right now. So, I will often look back at what I have at the front of the book. Part of my mechanical process, which is harder doing Nano, but I will often pause at the three quarters point and read through what I've already written. Then keep going with the pieces I'm excited about, knowing that some of the stuff I've written I'm going to discard because it's less exciting to me. So it's less candy. But, for me, those are some things. The other thing, for me, mechanically, is something that Dan taught me, which is the 7 point plot structure. This is the point where I'm going to look at Dan meaningfully…
[Dan] Oh.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I was excited for you to just talk about how smart I am for a while.
[Mary Robinette] so, yeah, the 7 point plot structure is specifically… There's the point where, right around in here, the hero finally has all of the tools that they need in order to solve the problem. So, recognizing… It's like, "Oh. This is something that I can do on purpose. I can look for what does my main character need? What are the problems? What is the goal and the failure state?" They're going to have to make that impossible choice. Then, like, what tools… we're coming up on that impossible choice. What tools do I need to have in their hand so that when they get to that choice, they can make it?
[Dan] Yeah. I love to think of these choices specifically as like kind of concentric circles of nested problems. The example that leaps to mind is The Nice Guys. That's probably my favorite detective movie ever. So we start with this kind of outside problem. Here's a weird mystery, we need to solve it. Then, we introduce, here's this detective who's an absolute mess and his daughter doesn't respect him. Then we introduce here's this other detective who the daughter thinks is probably a bad guy. Then we're going to resolve those in opposite order. In the final fight scene, we get Mr.… Is it Haley or Holly, whatever his name is… If you kill that man, I will never speak to you again. Of course, at this point in the movie, that means something coming from this 12-year-old girl. We love her. She's the best character in the story. So he leaves the person alive, and we get… We've tied off that inner circle. He has proved himself a good person to this girl. Then we tie off the next one. Ryan Ghosling succeeds, he saves the day, he doesn't screw up for the first time in his life, and his daughter smiles at him. Okay. We've got that respect. Then, at the very end, we tie off the whole thing, we've solved the mystery, we know what's going on. So if you think about it in those terms, of there's not just one conflict, there's several, you can nest them like that and then solve them in reverse order. That gives your ending a lot of structure that you might not have known was already there.
[DongWon] This really ties into one of the things we were talking about last week when we were discussing raising the stakes, which is introducing multiple threads of stakes. Right? This gives you the opportunity to build to your… Keep increasing the tension and ratcheting things up, even though you're closing things off, because if you do have those nested stakes, if you do have that multiple thread, your heroes can defeat a mini bot, have an emotional resolution. The big conflict is still coming, the last sort of act of this is still playing out, but you have these beats to give you those candy scenes, to give you those points of resolution. The more you have those little things closing off, that is a signal to your audience that, okay, we are in the denoue… Not denouement, but we're making the turn here. Right? We're in the three quarters mark, we're moving towards the big climax here. So giving people those little signals can be a great way to build tension as well.
 
[Erin] This can be difficult, definitely, all of this during Nano because you're just… You're moving at a pace. You're going really quickly. But one thing that I like doing during a Nano project is actually writing myself notes about what threads might be or what the concentric circles might be as I'm going. So, like, at the end of the day, I might write, like, one note of, like, the coolest thing that I randomly wrote that day. Like, I'll be like, "He [garbled smashed?] the spider."
[Laughter garbled comments]
[Erin] Maybe that doesn't come up again because I forget about it but then when I get to that three quarters mark, I can't do the thing Mary Robinette was talking about, where you read the whole book, but I can read back a page of very slightly incoherent notes, and be like, "Oh, yes, that is a spider…"
[Chuckles]
[Erin] "This is a chance for me to like make that kind of come back."
[DongWon] Erin, I'm not sure about this Spider-Man reboot. I know it's like any other one, but this one might be a little tough for me.
[Dan] I'm hoping this is part of the "the house is full of bees" universe.
[Laughter]
[Erin] It is.
[Mary Robinette] That's why it's so traumatic for him. I do a very similar thing during Nano because, as you say, I do not have time to read through the whole thing at this point. But I… All through the process, I am leaving notes for myself in square brackets. So I will, at this point, just look for any note that I have left for myself to see, like, what great idea I had earlier that I'd totally forgotten about by the time I get to this. Because you've probably left something to yourself, a note someplace. It doesn't make any sense. That's okay. You can still, like, try to fold it in here.
 
[Erin] Yeah. Even if you haven't left a note to yourself, a lot of times people work collaboratively during Nano so if you have any friends that you're working with in your writing group, you can ask them, "Is there something I was mentioning like 2 weeks ago maybe…"
[Laughter]
[Erin] "That you haven't heard me say anything about recently?" They'll be like, "Yes. There was a spider dead." You're like, "Yes. The time is now."
[DongWon] That's what it was.
[Erin] Spider dead and the bees.
[Laughter]
[Dan] That's one of the reasons I find writing group so useful, is because if there's something you forgotten about, they haven't. Because you have asked this intriguing question and they really want to know the answer to it. They'll be like, "Why haven't we ever gotten back to his dad being a spider?" Like, "Oh! Yes! Don't worry, I have some really cool plans."
[DongWon] Again, all of the things we're talking about our big structural tools. Right? These are stuff that will be as useful to you in editing and in drafting when maybe you are trying to hit this insane deadline every week of getting certain words out. But, hopefully, all of this is at least giving you some framework and some ways to think about, "Okay. How am I approaching this week of work?" Right? Now that we're in week 4, how am I thinking about the words I'm going to get down on the page?
[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that you can do, particularly as a Nano thing and if you're discovery writing, remember way back when we were talking about objective and super objective, one of the things that will happen to the character is that their goals will shift as they change. So you can look at it now and say what new goal does my character have based on their new understanding of who they are. Because… Like, it still needs to be tied to that super objective and to those initial opening questions, but, like, what is their new solution? That will often help you get towards the final final climactic battle because the new solution is an easier thing to solve. Or their new… Like, oh, this is what I can do. Their new goal is an easier thing to solve then whatever thing they have been continually failing at.
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] This sounds like a great point to get some homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, this is a trick that I picked up from Dan. Which is, read through what you wrote the session before. Not the day, not everything, but just the session. So if you wrote for 10 minutes, that's all you get to reread. You can make minor edits if you're adding words. But you can't cut anything because it's Nano and every word counts. Use brackets to make notes to yourself about stuff you want to go back and plant earlier, things that you are going to need for your character to solve what's coming up, but you don't have to actually go back and do that right now. You're just going to use this as a launching pad to move on.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We're now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.36: The Soggy Middle Pays the Rent (or "Stand Alone With Series Potential")

Sep. 7th, 2023 01:43 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 18.36: The Soggy Middle Pays the Rent (or "Stand Alone With Series Potential")
 
From https://writingexcuses.com/18-36-the-soggy-middle-pays-the-rent
 
Key points: The soggy middle is actually where the bulk of the story happens, but writers often feel it is a slog. The final chunk often grows. Shifting modes from setting up to closing can be hard! Like mile 19 in a marathon. Watch for the three-quarter effect. Don't think about how much is left to do, focus on what you can do now. At the three-quarter mark, change yes-but, no-and to yes-and, no-but. Don't open parentheses in Act 3! Middles need their own sentence. Structure each book as a standalone, even within a long arc. Consider building explicit on-ramps. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 36]
 
[1:30 minutes of largely inaudible advertising -- Hello Fresh?]
[About 1:51]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, The Soggy Middle Pays the Rent.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And we're stuck in the soggy middle of our day. Apparently.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] I'm grateful for an audio engineer who has made all of this sounds seamless for you instead of so goofy for us. We're a little punchy. This is our fourth episode recording in a row.
 
[Howard] We're talking about the middles of things.
[Mary Robinette] I want to actually jump in because we just have a really good metaphor here. One of the reasons that I think… I have issues always with the term soggy middle. My issue is that what that is referring to is the writer's experience…
[Howard] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Of the middle. Because the writer is tired, they're… They want to be done, but also, they feel like there are certain things that they have to do with the characters in order to get to this really cool set piece. Most of the time, like, the bulk of the story is actually spent in the middle. The bulk of the story is not soggy. The bulk of it is the middle. So I think that if we stop thinking about it is this thing that we have to slog through, and if we start thinking about it as the place where all of the cool stuff really happens, that it is a more useful framework for us as we are proceeding into it.
[Howard] You're absolutely right. When I wrote the title to the episode, I was tongue very firmly in cheek. Because there is no soggy middle in something that is successfully presented to the reader. When it is successfully presented to the reader, every page, every screen minute, every whatever is justifying itself and was worth doing. With Schlock Mercenary, as I mentioned in the first episode of this series, on around book 10, I figured I could finish by book 15. Spoiler alert, I went all the way to book 20. Does that mean that I waffled and rambled and lost my way for five books before wrapping things up? The answer is no. No, I found fun interesting things that I wanted to explore. The more of those things I explored, the more I realized there were characters I cared about who hadn't yet had their moment in the sun, and as I wrote them further into the story, I began to see where that sunshine would be coming in, and I knew that they needed, because of the way I was structuring the books, they were going to need their own book in which they are introduced in the first section and they get their big moments in the resolution of the story.
[Mary Robinette] So, along those lines, one of the things that I joke about when I'm writing, and it happens to, I think, most of the writers that I know, is that I'll hit a point where I'm like six chapters from the end and I will be in the six chapters from the end for six chapters. Which means I'm actually 12 chapters…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] From the end. Because there are all of these things that I'm realizing that I need to actually unpack and fold up. This happens to me in short form, but it's less noticeable in short form. So I… When we're talking about the soggy part, I think that it's not the middle which implies that you're halfway. I think that it's actually the two thirds, three-quarter mark. Because… I think the reason it happens is because you are shifting modes from setting things up to closing things. You've been so much in the mode of "And then it escalates, and then it escalates more," that you don't know how to switch to the "And now, I have to start solving things." That's when it will drag on a little bit too long sometimes.
 
[DongWon] I cannot tell you the number of times I've been on the phone with a writer who is just in complete despair. "The project is terrible, I don't know how to write, my career is over," like, all these things. I will have to stop and be like, "You're 70,000 words out of 100,000 words. You're three quarters of the way through this. This happens every time. Every book you've written, we've had this conversation." Every author I know, I've had this conversation. It's such a natural part to be trying to make that pivot, you been working on this for months, it's… You're in the middle of that marathon, it's mile 19, then you just have that last bit to go. It feels eternal. It feels forever. You're… I think you're exactly right, pinpointing that it's at two thirds mark where you have to shift from building, building, building, to starting to close parentheses and the idea of like figuring out how to start to tie things off, how to shift your momentum from expansion to contraction is really difficult. Because now you have to solve all the problems you've created for your characters. I think that can feel really overwhelming. But, the thing to remember, going back to the core of this, is that the reader's experience is a very different thing. Where they have been feasting, this entire time, you've been giving them delicious things to chew on, to work through, to think about. Now, you're going to start giving them the satisfying conclusions to all the things you set up before.
[Erin] I love that you use… I was just thinking about marathon as an example, and then you said it. I've run a marathon before and it… They always say people hit the wall around mile 20. Part of the reason is that you feel like you're close, but not close enough. It's like, I just have to… I've already run all this way, but it's still…  my leg hurts. Like, I'm so out of breath, and I still have to go up this big hill. One of the things that I found is to anticipate that feeling and set yourself up some fun things at that moment. So in… When you're running a marathon, one of the things I did was I picked one of the songs that I felt would be most epic, and I was like the minute I start to feel like I'm so far, even though I've come all this way, and I just want to stop, I will put on this most epic of songs and this will somehow get my lizard brain to push through. I think that it sometimes what's a really fun thing that you can be writing, whether it's within the story you're doing, maybe this is the time to write a quick flash fiction piece of some fun thing in your world, that will just get your excitement back.
[DongWon] I love that.
[Erin] Make you feel the way that you did right at the beginning at that moment, because a lot of it is in your head, but you still have to be… It's your head. You still have to push through it by making yourself excited again. Or telling somebody about the story. This can be a good time, even if you're complaining to your agent about how bad it is, as you're talking through it, they might get excited about something that you've now discounted because you're used to it, but for them, it's still something exciting. That can help you push on.
[DongWon] Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] There's actually a term for this. It's called the three-quarter effect. It affects people in every discipline. The way I learned about it was from a researcher who was researching people who did mime simulations. That about three quarters of the way in, they're like, "I can't possibly finish this." This would happen to people on tour with puppet theater, when you're doing the run of a show. If it is a nine-month run, then about month six, you're like, "I cannot finish this." But it also, if it's a two week run, you're like, day 10, you're like, "How can we possibly continue doing this show?" Part of what happens with this three-quarter effect is that your brain looks at the amount of effort that you have put in to get to that point and assumes you have to put in that much effort to get to the end.
[DongWon] I haven't written a novel, but I've also run a marathon. The thing that I do, and trust me when I balked, it was one of the darkest moments of my life's. It was on the lower level of a very cold bridge from Queens back into the Bronx, and I was like, "I'm going to die on this bridge. I'm never getting across it." But, going back to what you're saying about the three quarters mark, the thing that I've learned to do when I'm on runs is I forbid myself from looking at my watch, once I hit that three quarters mark, I will no longer look at how much left I have to go because it then becomes this, like, asymptotic Zeno's finish line thing where every time I get another point one mile, my brain says you cannot do the rest. Because it was that hard to do this point one mile. It's going to be so much harder to do that last bit. So what I worked very hard to do is to stay incredibly present in the moment. So, a lot of times what I remind my clients when they're having that similar feeling is focus on… Don't think about how much you have left to right, don't think about 30,000 words, think about what you can do today, what plot bit that you want to solve next, and see where that takes you. Yeah, sometimes that means that the five volumes you have left turn into 10 volumes you have left. Sometimes it means that things double and grow in size. But that's not necessarily bad. The story's going to be what it wants to be. I think giving yourself permission to be in the very specific moment that you're in and keep taking that next step is the thing that will get you to that finish line when you're feeling that sogginess.
[Howard] Are we halfway through this episode? Can we subdivide it with Zeno's Paradox…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Via blank blank. All the way down a million times, so that I have no idea. We'll find out after the break.
 
[Mary Robinette] We've been talking about long-running series. I am the narrator for Seanan McGuire's October Daye series. As we are recording this, I am also separately in the middle of narrating book 17 in this series. So if you're looking for an example of something that has an extremely long arc, I know for a fact that Seanan is proceeding towards an ending. I know that because as her narrator, I have to get spoilers so that I don't voice characters wrong. These books… I enjoy them so much. October is a private detective who is half fairy, half mortal. She's a changeling in San Francisco. So she then has to go and solve mysteries at the beginning. As we get deeper into the books, she's doing a lot more of solving major problems within the world of fairy. They're interesting. Each book reinvents themselves. There are books and novellas that are not part of… That are not October's POV. Just to let you know how much I like these, I go read them. Even though I'm not getting paid to narrate them. So… I also don't earn extra money, by the way, for books that I have narrated when you go listen to them. So when I tell you that you should go listen to the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire, it is a series that I think is worth the 17 book investment.
 
[Mary Robinette] Okay. As we are coming back, DongWon, you started talking about some tools that writers can use to get themselves out of this. So I want to talk about the tools that I figured out, and why it was happening to me. Because it does happen to me. Every time, it's like, "Oh, this book is terrible and it's going to be a disaster, I'm going to have to completely rewrite it." What I realized was that… Long time listeners will have heard me talk about something called yes-but, no-and. Which is the idea that when your character is aiming for a goal, are they going to succeed? Yes, that means a step towards the goal, but means a reversal. Means you move away from the goal. Or, actually, but means a reversal. No means that you took a step away from the goal. And is a continuation. So at that two third, three-quarter mark, when I have something go wrong, when I'm writing by instinct and a theme, I will often have the instinct, because I've been doing it for 70,000 word, to have something go wrong for the character, and then to have it get worse. So what I've begun doing is looking at it and saying, yes-and. So that it's a continuation in the direction that they're going. It's like they get some success, and they get a bonus action. Or, I'll give them a no, they move away from that, but they get a bonus action. So I start to look for places where I can give them little bits of success if I'm heading towards a happy ending, or, if I'm heading towards an unhappy ending, where I can start like really doubling down on those failure points. But realizing that I need to look at my momentum towards the end and break the rhythm of what I've been doing to that point has made a huge difference in my ability to move past that.
 
[Howard] There were… That is one of the pieces that I used with books 18, 19, and 20. I consciously told myself for little plot things for that book, yes-but, no-and. To about the two thirds mark, and then yes-and, no-but. But for the whole book, I cannot have a yes-but. I cannot have a no-and. Because the series is now 18 books old, 19 books old. I am now coming up on a big finish. So I can't have giant resets… That's not to say that there are not giant disasters in books 18 and 19 and 20. But I can't have any that are so big that they introduce something new. That was the second piece. DongWon, when you talked about parentheses, my rule is I'm not allowed to open parentheses in Act III. I'm just not allowed to. So… That was one of the reasons for me that I ran five books longer than I originally thought I needed to. Because I kept finding places where I wanted to open parentheses, and the moment I opened one, I was like, "Nope. I have to close that. I need to give that time to bake before I can close it." Big major plot level parentheses. So those two tools. The one that Mary Robinette mentioned, yes-but, no-and turns into yes-and, no-but, and no open parentheses in the third act. Those are my go-to's.
 
[Erin] Well, I don't write long things. I read them. I will say that one of the things that… Thinking about the parentheses, it's like when middles don't work for me… So, maybe the middle book of a series, for example, is when it feels like the entire thing is happening within nested parentheses. Like, it's like there's too much context required. Like, all the cool stuff happened in book 1, and it will be resolved in a cool way in book 3, but book 2 is just like giving me all the details that make that work. So, I love when middles have their own sentence that they're trying to start and finish. That, in itself, is really interesting. One of my favorite middle things of all time, which is not a book, is Mass Effect 2, which is an amazing middle game that I think is probably the most well-regarded of the Mass Effect series. One of the great things is that it's basically a heist at the end. So there's this long like set up for a big set piece that tells you a lot about the world and sets up things for later, but because that's its own sentence, it manages to keep really good momentum. That part of it is something that I can pay attention to even if I've forgotten what happened in game one or may never pick up game three because it's three years away.
 
[DongWon] One of my favorite structures… I know we're talking about long series, but I'm going to shift to something slightly shorter. One of my favorite structures is what we call the standalone with series potential. Right? You hear that all the time in current publishing. There are very strong business reasons to that, I'm not going to touch on right now. But I also really like it as a narrative structure. Because it lets you tell a complete story as book 1 that has all the cool stuff that you can think of in it, and then what you're kind of doing is then telling a duology for books 2 and three. Book 2 will often have more of a cliffhanger ending that leads into book 3. Going back to Star Wars. This is how that's structured. Star Wars is a standalone story, has a beginning, middle, and end. Empire Strikes Back has an open ended cliffhanger leading into the third movie. We just saw this happen with the second Spiderverse movie, it has a very cliffhanger ending. I'm not going to spoil anything about it, but it's very much the middle movie of a trilogy, and it does what Erin's talking about, where it introduces new verbs, introduces new sentences, introduces new ideas. So that is building towards this big satisfying conclusion that's going to be movie three… Hopefully satisfying, fingers crossed. I have ultimate confidence in that team. But letting yourself tell a complete story, and then using the tools of that, using the reader's satisfaction from that, let you have the trust now to tell something slightly more open-ended, to open a lot of questions that you're going to end in that third book. It's a way to think about middles. You have an arc, and then the rhythm of it is now you get to tell a bigger arc. So that middle is you getting to set up a ton of stuff, and then figure out how to start closing those things off in your third story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think the failure mode of that is where people are doing there's this really cool thing and I have to save it…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So I will find myself doing this in my work where I'm waiting, like, because I feel like my characters have to earn it. I'm like just montage your way through that or move it forward. Find a different way to escalate it. It's the… That sense of… I think that people will have this false sense of what that arc looks like. One of the other tools that I've realized is that whatever problem… There's two. One is that whatever problem that they solved in the first one, that they're just going to have to solve a different iteration of it. So if they're like, "Oh, I don't have the confidence to do that," it's like, "Well, okay. Congratulations, you are an orphan farmboy, now you're the king of the kingdom." It's like, "Oh, but now I'm a fraud, and everyone will know because I was an orphan farmboy." It's like, well, you're still dealing with imposter syndrome. It's just a very different form of it. You're not hitting exactly the same hurdles, but you're still dealing with the same character-based thing.
[DongWon] We see this failing a lot in superhero movies where it feels like we already solved that character beat, why are we repeating it again? Right? Iron Man is a good example of this, where that arc was very much closed out, and then it just got reopened again all of a sudden when they decided, no, Iron Man three can't be the end of this, we need more Iron Man, and therefore he's going to continue to do the same thing, even though we had a character arc conclude in that mood.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There are ways to have people move forward while still dealing with the same basic core thing, but if you're hitting the same beats, that's where it's like, no, this is a little bit dull. The other piece is something that Howard had mentioned in a previous episode where… That he realized that each season needed to work as a standalone. That's something that I do is not just that first book which is a standalone with series potential, but that I try to structure each of them as a standalone. So that you have beginning, middle, end, while there is this very long arc that is happening.
[Howard] Well, when there's… When it is part of a series, but you are crafting it so it will function as a standalone, what you are saying is standalone with potential for you, fair reader, to get so excited about it you want to pick up the whole series. That… I mean, that mindset for crafting a thing will always be useful.
[DongWon] From a publishing perspective, one really strongly recommend if you're doing a very long series, it's good to have them operate as standalones, but sometimes you can build an explicit on-ramp book. Right? So, we're in the middle right now of closing out Max Gladstone's Craft sequence, which is, when we're done, going to be a 10 book series. Speaking of things expanding. We originally planned it, the ending of the Craft sequence, to be a duology. It is now four books, because that's what happens when you dig into something. But we designed the first book of what's now called the Craft Wars, which is the ending of the series, to be an explicit on-ramp. It's like, okay, you've read these six books, but we're starting you fresh. A character that you know from the previous series, but reintroducing her, giving her new problems, giving her new situations. That is a way for us to bring on a whole new readership as we publish these books that are going to close out the series in a much more serialized way than he's done up until this point. So, thinking about moments where you can strategically bring on new readers as you continue to build your series can be really helpful and keep you out of a situation where you're only getting a subset of the previous readers of the previous books as you continue to publish.
[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to mention one other thing that Howard had said in the first episode in this… In our series. I'm sure you were foreshadowing this…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But you were talking about how something… So that whatever solution that they had come up with would propagate to a disaster. That's one thing that you can do when you're looking for ways to keep that soggy middle from being soggy is that whatever solution your characters have just come up with is the catalyst for the next problem.
[DongWon] This is the yes-but on a macro scale. You can use the yes-but, no-and on the meta-scale of your series in addition to at a micro scale of a character solving an individual scene.
[Erin] Yes. Like, instead of it being yes comma but, it's like YES! The end. Then next book, But…
[Mary Robinette, DongWon chorus] [But…]
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] If it's a cliffhanger, then it's Yes! But… Then you're like, "Well, now I have to have the next book." Speaking of cliffhangers, we're going to move on to our homework.
[Howard] Actually, before we move on to the homework, I want to make one final point. Because the next three episodes are going to be the actual drill down into those last three books. 18, 19, 20. I wanted to mention that the titles of Schlock Mercenary books often came from some quote or something that happened in the middle of the book and I realized, "Oh, that's so cool, I have to use it." At one point, somebody says, "Gosh, with the spare parts there, I could turn that into the longshoreman of the apocalypse." I realized, "Oh. That's a book title. Longshoreman of the Apocalypse." For the last three books, I decided not only could I not afford to do that, but the titles had to come from the 70 maxims. I needed to have those written in advance. Mandatory Failure comes from maxim 70. Failure is not an option, it's mandatory. The option is whether or not you let failure be the last thing you do. The second one was A Function of Firepower. The quote was, "Rank is a function of firepower." The third and final one was Sergeant in Motion. Which, as I've alluded to before, I wanted to call all the way back to Schlock's arc, Schlock needed to be part of the solution. There's a maxim that says, "A sergeant in motion outranks a lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on." By tying these to the maxims, I was doing that thing where I'm not opening any more parentheses. This book title is itself a closing paren, on a piece of information you've already been given. On that note, I think we're ready to hand out homework.
 
[Mary Robinette] Great. So I have a homework assignment for you. I want you to look at your work in progress and see where things are soggy because you're waiting for the big set piece. Look at places where you are escalating when you could actually provide a solution. Look at places where you should be escalating instead of just having them in a holding pattern. Look at why your character isn't doing the next cool thing and see if you can move them to that just a tiny bit faster.
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] To stay up-to-date with new releases, upcoming in person events like our annual writing retreat, and Patreon live streams, follow us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Or subscribe to our newsletter.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions

Mar. 23rd, 2023 05:34 pm
mbarker: (Burp)
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Writing Excuses 18.12: The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions
 
 
Key Points: How do you postpone answering questions? First, we haven't gotten there yet. More specifically, you have to gather evidence first. Or you have an answer, but it's the wrong one. Or you have an answer, but there's more to uncover. Try-fail cycles! Yes-but, no-and! Plan your information arc, where are they gathering information, where is it revealed. Hide the real question! Cell phones and Google -- I don't know who to call, or I don't know how to ask the right question puts a speedbump in the way. Let the familiar become strange. Go ahead and tell us, and see what happens then. Give us some information that is satisfying and compelling, and build the trust that you will tell us about the other stuff later. Let another character ask the questions the reader wants to know. Use red herrings, things that seem connected but really aren't. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 12]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] The Long Shadow of Unanswered Questions.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] 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.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] There are questions that we have that are unanswered. In our continuing exploration of tension, one of the favorite tricks for tension is questions that are unanswered. This can take a number of different forms. You classically see them in mysteries, but you also see them in romance, like, "Will they get together?" So, let's talk about some ways to avoid answering questions without it being super gimmicky.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I have mentioned before my use of my small dog, or of my character's small dog to interrupt questions as… For people not on the video feed…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Erin's cat is also providing a running commentary.
[DongWon] Which has completely prevented us from answering questions about unanswered questions.
[Erin] Her main unanswered question is, "Why no treats? I don't understand."
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] I think it's worth pointing out that when you write a book, when you're reading a book, fundamentally, information is being hidden from you because you haven't gotten to the end of the book yet. Just the ordering of the material is such that I'm not hiding the answer, I'm getting to it. We're getting there, we're just not there yet. You don't have to… The moment someone in the story or on the screen or on the page has the answer to the unanswered question, that is not necessarily the moment at which that answer would be revealed to anybody. Because the story unfolds at a pace at which that hasn't happened yet. So, I mean, that's the easiest tool.
[Dan] So, to be a little more granular about that, some specific things you can do to kind of stall that answer is you have to gather evidence first. Or you have an answer that turns out to be the wrong one. Or you come up with an answer that doesn't actually solve the mystery, it doesn't answer the main question, it just spends you off in a new direction, and then suddenly you have together more evidence and answer different questions.
[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, I think for a mystery type story, this is really the heart of the try-fail cycle. Right? The thing you are trying to do is gain more information. The way you as the author withhold that is you have your characters fail at that or get misleading information or only a piece of it. Right? I mean, this is, going back to another of Mary Robinette's favorite tools, the yes-but, no-and, you can apply that to yes, you now know this one piece of information, but there's a complication because that leads you down to a dead end. Right? So you can think about it in terms of… I think we often give try-fail cycles around action in terms of trying to rescue someone or trying to fix something. But you can apply that to information gathering, because when you're in a mystery, fundamentally, your main tool is the information that's in front of you right now.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I think the… One of the things I like to think about a lot when I'm writing is information arc as an additional type of arc in a story. Like, you have your character arc, maybe your plot arc, but where is information being gathered, it's where is it being revealed to the reader, and then maybe separately to the characters, really planning that out. Because I think where unanswered questions become annoying to readers is when it feels like you just didn't… You forgot you raised the question, or you just didn't bother getting around to answering it, versus that it was something intentional that you're doing about the way you give out information.
[Dan] Another great thing that I've seen done before is just kind of hiding what the real question actually is. We've used romance several times, which is another great source of tension. The first season of Bridgerton does this brilliantly. In a romance, we often expect the main question to be will these characters fall in love? Yes, clearly, by like episode three, that's answered. But there's more going on. Will they get married? Yeah, like by episode five, I think, they're married. But there's more going on. Ultimately, we realize the actual question that that season is asking is, will they be happy together? Will they resolve their other issues and have a happy life together? Which is just taking it much further than what we initially thought we were asking.
 
[DongWon] That kind of brings me to what I think is the greatest failure state of how information is released to the audience in a novel. One of the those things is when it's not connected to character. Right? I think one of the best ways to sort of appease an audience when you give them bad information or if they're not getting the answer that they wanted is making sure you're getting more information about who the character is and you're tying that process of trying to get more information into something revealing about who the character is. I'm thinking of like the game Hades, which is a fantastic game. It's a [rogue?] Like, so you're just… It's designed so that you will fail and die. Every time you die, you're rewarded with a little bit more story, as you get to interact with all the characters of this world. So the loop is, we're punishing you for the fact that you've failed, which you're supposed to do, and rewarding you by giving you character. So if you think about like how satisfying the loop in Hades is, think about that in terms of your reader going through the try-fail cycles of your book. Make sure that your rewarding them with something, even as the characters themselves are failing.
[Mary Robinette] That brings me to a great point that when we're talking about these questions, the unanswered questions, there are unanswered questions that the character has and there are also unanswered questions that the reader has. If you want to… I find that when you're trying to emotionally link the reader and the character, but if you give them both the same unanswered questions that that puts the character… The reader on the character's path. But sometimes you'll have a situation where the character knows an answer… This is my traumatic piece of back story… And the reader doesn't know the answer. So that… The reader tension is what is the character's traumatic back story? The character obviously knows it. So that's like… That's a way that you can ratchet the tension up by withholding something from the reader as long as the reader doesn't feel overtly manipulated. The I'll think about that later. That you have to have a reason for them to not think about it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of reasons to not think about the rest of that and how are we going to do it, I'm going to pose a question, which is, how are we going to keep people from feeling like they're overtly manipulated when they didn't get the answer that they want, and we're going to answer that after our break. Our thing of the week is Ted Lasso. It is currently a two season series. There is supposed to be a third season. I am eagerly awaiting it. It… On the surface, this is nothing that I would like. It is a show about soccer. I love this show so deeply, because it is a show about what happens when you make the kinder choice, ultimately. Because of that, and because of the way they are handling tension and tropes. It's as if they said, "What's a common TV trope? We're going to set that up, then we're going to subvert it by having the character make the kind and understanding response to it." It is funny. It is heartwarming. I care about soccer in ways that I have never cared about them. It has some of the best secondary and tertiary characters of anything that I've ever seen. Highly recommended. Ted Lasso. All of the seasons. If you're only going to watch one thing, that one thing should be Ted Lasso. Except DongWon will arm wrestle me about some other things. But…
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So I posed a question before we went to break. That question was how do you interrupt a question… How do you withhold the question from the reader…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And make them feel not overtly manipulated? That moment when someone's like…
[Howard] Yup.
[Mary Robinette] Here's a thing that everyone in the room knows, but the reader is not allowed to know it.
[Howard] 15 years ago or so, there was this up ending of the whole industry of writing and plotting things, because suddenly viewers, readers, listeners, whoever recognized that just about everybody had the sum of all human knowledge in the palms of their hands and could call just about anybody. So if there was a question that couldn't be answered by the people in the room, but they knew someone else had the answer, they would just call them. Screenwriters and writers of fiction and writers of everything had to find new ways to say, "Well, why wouldn't they just call them?" The first answer was terrible, and that's, "Oh, I've got no bars. I've got no signal." There are 10 minute YouTube videos of people in movies holding up their phones and having no signal, because the audience needed to be manipulated, because we needed to not have the answer right now. The right way to do it is illustrated in what happens when someone else's Google Fu is better than mine. I don't know how to ask the right question to get the answer from my phone. I don't know what the right question is. I don't know how to phrase this so I can find the answer. I don't know who to talk to who will have the answer, but maybe if I talk to somebody else, they can help me. That starts putting speedbumps in the… In between me and the answer to the question.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That was one of the things that I had to do in the Spare Man was… It is set in 2075 or 2074, I can't remember. Anyway. My own book. Whatever. Point being, everybody is constantly interconnected. So I had to come up with a reason to turn that off. It was fun, in some ways, because I made it a punitive thing that was being withheld from them. Because they were being falsely accused of a crime, so they were not allowed to connect to the Internet. But that also then allowed me to make it a strong character thing, because it then became a thing that had to be fixed. Also, the frustrations that go with I'm used to being able to just send a ping to my husband, and now I can't. Like, one of the things that I enjoyed was her constantly trying to contact him and not being able to. The reflex of it.
[Erin] I also think that communication devices, just that specific thing, as like the reason you can't get the answer, can also be a way to ratchet up that tension in kind of a similar way that if you're used to something, something is familiar and it goes to becoming unfamiliar, that's always I think a great source of tension in horror. The familiar becomes strange. So if you pick up your phone to Google something and instead your phone is doing something very odd, or you get a picture of a dead body, or something else that's both distracting… So, like, throw something shiny the reader's way. To distract them, for one thing, but also with something you thought was going to happen. You had an anticipation of getting the answer, then that was yanked away from you. That can provide new information and new questions that then the reader will fixate on instead of the one that you didn't answer in that moment.
 
[DongWon] I'm going to come out with a little bit of a chaotic answer to this, which is if you are really struggling how to figure out the key… How to keep your audience from feeling manipulated by withholding information, try just telling them the thing. Right? I think so often I see writers going through these back loops and just like contorting themselves to withhold information where I'm like, "No no no no. Just tell us what's going on!" It'll be more interesting if we, or even if your characters, know exactly what's happening and they still have to solve this problem. Right? I think one of the week parts of a mystery is sometimes knowing what happened doesn't actually change anything. To spoil Glass Onion a little bit, it has an aspect of this, where, like, the resolution of the mystery still leaves a really big unanswered question of like, "Well, what do we do about this?" In a way that is truly fascinating. Right? So I think sometimes if you find yourself stuck, and your like grinding on this question, try writing it from the perspective of just give them the information. Let their phone connect to the Internet. Let that person call person C and be like, "Hey, the killer is so-and-so." Then what does person C do? It doesn't mean they're going to survive. Right? It could make a much more interesting scenario for you and kick your book in an exciting new direction.
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to second that, that often I find that when I just let my character tell the other person the thing, that what actually happens is it just… It opens new questions and they're significantly more interesting questions.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Which allows me to keep ramping that tension up.
[DongWon] If you're stuck, you might be asking the wrong questions, is really what I'm saying.
 
[Dan] So I see this a lot with doing chapter critiques and stuff at conferences and classes. We will be sitting around in like a writing group environment. We've read chapter one of seven different people's things. Especially with fantasy and science fiction, a lot of the questions are, "Well, I don't understand this. I don't understand X or Y thing about your story." I have to remind them, you usually don't in chapter one. There's worldbuilding, you have to give us time to settle into it. But what I find fascinating is that I usually don't get that question when the chapter is providing us a ton of other fascinating information. If you are giving us something that is satisfying and compelling and makes us… It's scratching that itch to know stuff, then those other kind of unanswered questions don't seem as pressing. Because part of that is the distraction that Erin talked about, you throw some shiny at us, but a lot of it is just you're building trust with your reader. You're giving them information, so then I know that you're going to give me this other information if I am patient and wait for it.
[Howard] It's super useful to anticipate the question that a reader might have and to give that question to another one of the characters. If one of the characters does a thing, and you know the readers are going to be like, "Wow, why did they do that thing?" Let another character ask that question. "Why did you do that?" The person who did it said, "You know what? That's a long painful story and we're not going to have that conversation right now. Right now we're busy running." Now I have acknowledged to the reader that there is information you don't have yet, you know who has the information, you know who isn't giving you the information, and everybody in the story to this point is behaving in character.
[Mary Robinette] I will flag though that you do need to make sure though that it is actually a long painful complicated story.
[Howard] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Because the number of times I have seen someone say, "I'm not going to tell you that right now. We don't have time." And really, all they needed to say was like a five word sentence.
[Chuckles]
[yes]
[Mary Robinette] It's… Make sure that there is a legit reason. There was one other thing that I was going to say. What was that?
[Pause]
[DongWon] I guess we'll never know.
[Mary Robinette] Well, I guess I'm going to have to…
[Howard] I have to say none of us know and all of our cell phones work.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] Oh, I know what… There was actually a thing. Red… I do want to just briefly touch on how to construct a good red herring. Because red herrings are one of the ways that you can… Are linked to the unanswered question, because they are the question… The line of questioning that pulls your detective down the wrong dark alley. In Glass Onion, it's one of the most blatant red herrings in the history of ever is wandering around in a bathrobe for much of the film. But what you're looking for is something that appears related to the story, that you feel like everyone else should be able to draw connections to whatever it is, and ultimately ends up not being connected. I have a red herring going on in Spare Man. The way I constructed that one… And I will attempt to discuss it without spoilers for the people who haven't read the book yet… Is basically, I did it was that I gave one of the characters a secret so they were clearly hiding something, which is obviously to the reader going to be related to the murder. But it had… That secret had nothing to do with the murder. So that's a real simple way to give… To insert a red herring is to give someone a secret, that's just not the right secret. Which then leads to more unanswered questions.
 
[Mary Robinette] And… Your unanswered question right now is what is our homework assignment?
[Dan] Well, as tempting as it is to just never answer that question, I will tell you. I will spoil the homework. What we want you to do is take a look at whatever you're working on right now, your work in progress, something that you're writing or creating, and figure out what questions you are asking to the reader. Sometimes that might be an overt mystery question, how does this thing work, where did this body come from, who did the thing? Sometimes it's worldbuilding questions. You've proposed some kinds of things about the way a technology or a magic or a society works. Figure out what those questions are. Write them down. So that you can decide later when and how or if to answer them.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.05: An Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal

Feb. 1st, 2023 04:31 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 18.05: An Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal 
 
 
Key points: Puppetry and teaching a cat to talk with buttons? Before that? Art education with a minor in theater and speech. Art director. Puppets. Technique, and something to say. Curiosity and surprise. Challenge! Toolboxes. MICE Quotient. Axes of power. The go-to? Yes-but, no-and. What is the character trying to accomplish, what is their motivation? Next? How do we deal with tension without conflict. Subverted expectations? 
 
[Season 18, Episode 5]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] An Interview with Mary Robinette Kowal.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] 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.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
 
[Howard] And I'm driving. My name's Howard Tayler, and I get to lead this interview of my friend, Mary Robinette Kowal.
[Mary Robinette] Hi.
[Howard] Mary Robinette, I remember meeting you at World Con in… Gosh, was it Montréal?
[Mary Robinette] It was World Fantasy, but, yes.
[Howard] Was it World Fantasy?
[Mary Robinette] No, I think…
[Dan] World Fantasy. I'm pretty sure it was World Fantasy.
[Mary Robinette] It was World something.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm pretty sure it was World Con, because that was the year that I got to be in the People Versus George Lucas movie.
[Dan] Okay.
[Howard] But we podcasted, and episode 3.14 was Mary schools Brandon, Dan, and Howard about using puppets to teach us how to write. That was when I met you. But that is not when you started. You have done a bazillion things. I know that one of them is puppetry, and another is teaching your cat to talk with buttons. Where did you come from?
[Laughter]
[Howard] Where did you even…?
[Mary Robinette] Were did I even? So, I was actually an art major in college. Art education with a minor in theater and speech, because being one of those kids who wanted to do everything, that was the closest I could get to doing all the things I wanted to do.
[Howard] The everything major!
[Mary Robinette] Yes. The everything major. I was firmly convinced… So, before that, I was firmly convinced that I was going to be a veterinarian specializing in cats. Then I looked at my math grades, and… Actually, just looked at my grades in general. I was like, "Oh, hey." It turns out I'm good at art. Went to college to do that. I… Like, I can render. I have good technical chops that I have used outside of school. I've been an art director. I've even illustrated some things. But I looked at the stuff that my friends were doing and realized that I had technique, but I didn't actually have anything to say. With puppets, I had both. I had the technique, and I had things I wanted to say. I had a voice that was specific to me. I fell in love with that, and chased it, and did that for 20+ years. Somewhere along the way, also started writing again. Because I had stopped. Again, had that moment of, "Oh. Not only is this fun for me, but there are things I want to say." It's very much the storyteller with any tool you will give me. But some of them I have more things to say than others.
[Howard] That is fascinating to me, because I feel like… Well, you and I are clearly very different people. Because I feel like if I got something to say, and I have technique, then I got something to say using that technique. I've seen your art and was… You drew a picture on a tablet at one point when we were in Chicago. I remember looking at it and thinking why are you not just doing this. You've got so many wonderful things to say, and clearly you've got mad art chops, why don't you say them that way? So that… I don't understand that. I'm not denying that it's a thing, but I just don't understand it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It doesn't make sense to me either. Honestly. I don't know…
[Meow]
[Mary Robinette] Elsie however does have things to say.
[Chuckles]
 
[Dan] Well, let me ask you a question, Mary Robinette. Was there a specific moment or project or story that helped crystallize for you either visual art is not for me or puppetry is for me? Because of that, I have something I want to say. Is there anything specific attached or is it more broad than that?
[Mary Robinette] It's broader. Some of it is the difference in where I am in my life, I guess. But with the… I mean, with the writing, I very clearly remember that I was… When I came back to it, my niece and nephew had moved to China with my brother. Skype was not yet reliable thing. So I started writing this story for them. If you go back pretty far into episodes, you can find a thing where we do a deep dive on an outline for… I think I was calling it Two Ordinary Children or Journey to the East, I can't remember which. But it's the novel that brought me back to writing. I remember that I was starting to write this thing as a serial for my niece and nephew. I thought, well, you know, I'll just write an episode and all kind of choose your own adventure my way through it. And that I was… I was starting to think about what happened next and starting to wonder where the story was going and that I wanted to know what happened next. That was this moment of going, "Oh, I think I have something here." That curiosity, that wonder, that is the next thing, what's the surprise. For whatever reason, when I draw, when I paint, I love it. I really en… It's very satisfying. But it is not surprising for me. There's no curiosity about what's the next thing around the corner for me.
[DongWon] I think that is such a wonderful way to think about it, and I'm so glad that you expressed it that way. I… One thing that I always encourage people against is this idea of comparison. That moment you had when you looked at the stuff that your friends were creating and what I thought you were going to say is, "And I could see they were so much better than me." That's not what you said. That's a really important difference. What you said is that you found your voice and your excitement in a different style of art. So I don't want people out there to just get discouraged and stop doing one thing. But the way you did it instead is you got very encouraged by something new and exciting and followed that passion. Which is such a better way of making that decision.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Like I… As I said, I use those skills. It has framed the way I approach things. I still take enormous satisfaction from it. It's just I get more satisfaction from other things. I have stories to tell that I… The tools for me are better with puppets than with fiction.
 
[DongWon] You're exploring all these different media, you're exploring all these techniques. To sort of refill your creative tank? To sort of get back to the writing side, or is it all kind of orthogonal, incidental to each other?
[Mary Robinette] It's… It depends. There's… A lot of this is a new understanding of it. If you had asked me this at the beginning of… When I joined Writing Excuses, I'm sure I would have answered it differently, but I don't know how I would have answered it. Because at the time, I didn't understand that I had ADHD. One of the things that helps is the new. Like, I'm drawn to the new. In hindsight, it's like, "Oh, that's why I had a very successful career in theater," because theater is… Everything is… It's constantly moving to a new show. You do that show and you get really good at it. Then the season is over and you go to a new show. Or you're doing a television show and it's a different… Each episode is different, and you have to learn this technique and that for this particular thing. So it was constantly… New was constantly happening. With the writing, I think that's one of the reasons that I keep moving genre is because that's some of where that newness comes for me. But I also… One of the other things for me that is a driver, and again, it's like, "Oh, in hindsight," is the challenge. So the refilling of the well, it's less about going to something else to refill the well, and more about finding something new to challenge me. So sometimes that's the "I'm going to take my friend's advice and try to write this book without an outline."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Sometimes it's "I'm going to learn to make a Regency gown that is entirely handsewn."
[Oh, wow.]
 
[Howard] Okay. On that terror inducing note, let's take a quick break for a thing of the week, and then were going to come back and… I've got some cool questions queued up.
[Mary Robinette] I want to talk about The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope. So I met Leslye through a friend of a friend and was told this person is great. Then I was like, "You know, I'd like to…" Correct, Leslye is fantastic and extremely talented and smart. Then I was like, "Let me read this person's fiction." So I listened to The Monsters We Defy. It is such a good audiobook. So it is prohibition black Washington heist novel with ghosts. It is so good. The heist is so beautifully structured. Like, I spent a lot of time looking at how to construct a heist, and this one is so just exquisitely handled. There is the assembling of the team beats, and I love all of the teams. There's the… There's… Every heist, there's a twist, and the twist is… It's just so cleverly handled and moving in the way that it's handled. It's… I can't tell you about it, but you need to listen to this book. It's also really well narrated. It is smart, it is moving, it's funny. It's dealing with generational trauma. It's dealing with fashion. It's dealing with magic and ghosts and I love it a lot. I keep talking about it on kind of everything I go on. So, this is The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope.
 
[Howard] I have a question about the toolbox. Because, Mary Robinette, you have thrown so many tools at us during the last decade or so. The MICE Quotient, obviously, we come back to a lot. The axes of power that you've talked about a little more recently. Discussions of creation of tension. Discussions of the way learning to read things aloud changes the way you write. Do you have a go to favorite when you're stuck? When you fall back on craft, what's the first tool you reach for?
[Mary Robinette] Yes-but, no-and. Because almost always, when I am stuck…
[Howard] Sorry. I thought you were yes-but no-anding my question. And I'm like, "It wasn't enough?"
[Laughter]
[DongWon] The worst improv tool ever.
[Laughter]
[Dan] That's going to be my new response when I get interviewed in like someone else's podcast. Just…
[Laughter]
[Howard] It sounds like a game. Yes-but, no-and.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Mary Robinette, please continue.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. But…
[Howard] No.
[Mary Robinette] Okay. So, the reason that I said, "Yes-but, no-and," is that almost always when I'm stuck, it's because of the "Okay, but what is the next thing that supposed to happen next?" It's usually I have a general idea of the scene and I'm in the scene and I'm like, "Oh. This is okay. But where's? What's the…?" So I look at what my character is trying to accomplish. So I guess in many ways the actual answer is that I go back to my theater roots and I'm like, "But what's my motivation?" Then, once I got the motivation, it's the question of does she succeed at this thing? It's going to be yes, she succeeds, but there is a negative consequence. Or, no, she doesn't succeed, and there's a negative consequence. Then, more recently, when I'm in the latter part of the book, realizing that the but and the and represent directions of progress. So, yes is closer to the goal. But is a reversal. And is continued motion. So yes-and gets me closer to the goal. So it's yes, and a bonus action. That has helped me so many times when I'm kind of trying to inch forward towards the ending. It's reaching for that has been very useful in a scene. Especially if it's like something is coming too easily for the character, or it's coming… It's too hard. I can, like, "Okay, you can adjust direction of action."
 
[Howard] Okay. 
[Erin] I'm curious…
[Howard]  Who else has questions? Erin?
[Erin] I'm curious, yes, what the… So, you have all these amazing tools. I'm curious if there's anything you wish you had a tool for, but you haven't yet figured out. Something that you're working towards figuring.
[Mary Robinette] Um… Hah… Yeah. That's a great question. So… I'm sitting here… What… For the people who don't have the video feed, I'm staring into the middle distance as I think about the novel that I am writing right now. I wish that… So. Huh. A thing that I have been thinking about a lot recently, which I will talk about later in the season, is the difference between conflict and tension. I wish I had a set of tools for talking about tension that is not conflict based and how to manipulate it. I'm starting to kind of be able to identify it and some of the tools to manipulate it. But it is still such a new concept to me because so much of my training as a writer has been story must have conflict. I've been coming to realize that a story must have tension and that conflict is the easiest way to teach that. But that I don't think that it has to have conflict. So, like, one of the things that I'm actually trying to do in this book is have people… Is have the conflict come from the cooperation. Or have the tension come from the cooperation. It's… It is such… Like, it is working, but I don't have a toolbox for it. I'm definitely feeling myself… My way through it and am looking forward to being at a point where I can reverse engineer it, and can reverse engineer what other people are doing. Like, I can tell that other people… It's like, "Okay. This is a subverted expectation." What are the dials for setting up that expectation? What's the point at which you subvert it? Does it matter which direction that you do the subvers… Like, when you veer off of the expectation, does it matter which direction you go? How do you control that? Like, I really… I am… That's, for me, the toolbox that I'm excited to get my hands on next.
[DongWon] That's so cool.
[Howard] Let me know when you've got that one labeled.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I love watching your process, Mary Robinette. Because… This reminds me of, like, there's a thing that the physicist Richard Feynman said at some point about you don't truly understand the concept until you can teach it to a freshman seminar.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] I see you over and over again tackle these new ideas, these new techniques, these new things. Like, watching you sort of figure out how to internalize it, how to do it, and then how to explain it to other people, seems to be the cycle that I see you go through. It's always really exciting just to watch that and participate in it, and end up getting to reap the benefits of the results at the end there.
[Mary Robinette] My dad says that actually what I is an engineer, really. He's sad that I didn't go into programming.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] The rest of the world is happy that I did not.
[Howard] There is a computer somewhere that is very sorry that it's not running a Mary Robinette Kowal program. But it's not running one, so it's unable to speak to us, so… Meh. Oh, well.
 
[Howard] Hey, do you have some homework for us?
[Mary Robinette] I do. What I want you to think about is, I want you to think about the skills that your non-writing life has given you. I talk a lot about the stuff that I've brought from puppetry. Dan has talked about the stuff that he's brought from doing audio. Which is, granted, still writing, but it is the non-writing aspect. Howard talks about the stuff that he gets from drawing. DongWon and Erin are going to be talking about these things as well as we go through the season. So think about your own life. What is a lens that you have that gives you a toolset that is exciting to play with in your writing?
[Howard] Thank you very much, Mary Robinette. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.6: Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back

Feb. 8th, 2022 09:41 pm
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Writing Excuses 17.6: Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back
 
 
Key points: How do you reset expectations, break old promises and make new ones, without breaking the trust of the audience? Deliver something different and amazing! Yes-and, keep the old promises and make new ones. No-but, break the old ones, but give them a different wonderful experience. Oh, crap. I broke it, and I don't know how to fix it. Dash through the red paint and hope no one notices. Telegraph the change as much as you can, and accept that you may lose some audience. Long-running shows often do a reset during season breaks. Give them a big moment of character change instead of the big climax they expected. And a Big Can of Worms for resetting your career... 
 
[Season 17, Episode 6]
 
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Hitting Reset Without Getting Hit Back.
[Kaela] 15 minutes long.
[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.
[Megan] And we're not that smart.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Kaela] I'm Kaela.
[Sandra] I'm Sandra.
[Megan] And I'm Meg.
 
[Howard] We are talking about resetting expectations. We are talking about breaking promises and then making new ones without actually betraying the trust of the audience. I'm trying to think of a good example of this. It's possible that the good example may be Million-Dollar Baby…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Which breaks a promise to the audience, this is a sports movie, by giving us 1/3 act that shows that it's actually a drama about euthanasia, about… It's very dramatic and it's not very sports movie. As we pointed out when we mentioned it earlier, it's got a 90% fresh rating from critics and audiences over at Rotten Tomatoes. Maybe part of this is because it's 15 years old. But it won a lot of awards and it did great grossing in theaters. It was something which broke promises that audiences felt had been made to them, and then delivered something different, but delivered it so well that the majority of the audiences put up with it, they accepted it. They loved it, they came out of the theater… I don't want to say happy, but having experienced something amazing, which is what the filmmaker set out to do. So let's talk about that. What are some examples of things where you feel like the expectations have had to be reset and they did it well?
 
[Kaela] Well, I think that, personally, for me, there are two main movies that come to mind for this. One is Kung Fu Panda Two, which is one of my favorite movies ever, and How to Train Your Dragon, for different reasons, but both of them playing with expectations. I think Kung Fu Panda Two does multiple things with your expectations. For one, it kind of gives you an origin story again, except it's deeper, it's bigger, it's… You're like, "Whoa, I didn't think I was going to get this from a Kung Fu Panda franchise."
[Laughter]
[Kaela] So I think that's the other thing is, tonally, it's a lot harder, it's a lot… It's more explorative of pain, of destruction, of trauma, of working out issues like… Heavier themes than the first one. Like, the first one had a good heart still, but the second one just really dives in there in a way that you wouldn't have expected. But at the same time, I was not like, "Why is my fun movie sad?" when I watched it. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, they do a great job of acclimatizing you." They start out fun and everything too, but they do a good job of acclimatizing you to this is going to be a bit heavier of a movie. It's still going to be an amazing adventure, but it's going to be more emotionally in-depth than the first one without losing you. I don't know anybody who was lost with Kung Fu Panda Two. I think… I know most people just sat there stunned and in awe instead. Not disappointed.
[Howard] Yeah. I was kind of slack-jawed. I was, "Wait. How did they do that?" Usually, the origin story has to come first, and the two movie is a raising of stakes and a new adventure. But you managed to raise the stakes and give me a new adventure and give me an origin story and it's… Wow. It seems to defy… It seemed to defy the number two.
[Kaela] Yeah.
[Howard] Which was pretty cool. Meg?
 
[Megan] I actually have an example of something that did it badly, that raised my expectations and then turned it on its head.
[Howard] Okay.
[Megan] It's the anime Attack on Titan. Which is about humanity fighting to survive when they are constantly attacked by huge giants who are referred to as Titans. We have are very strong protagonist character who's going to get revenge on all the Titans and he's going to save the world. They kill him off, seven episodes in. I was like, "Amazing. I love this. Now his meek sidekick character is going to have to step into his shoes and become the new protagonist and…" No. Protagonist came back, magically, and with magic powers.
[Chuckles]
[Megan] And is so magical now. I was like, "Man. I mean, that's cooler now, but… I wish he'd died."
[Laughter]
[You want a ghost?]
[Howard] Why couldn't you stay dead?
 
[Howard] As I categorized these in our outline, I talk about yes-and, which is a raising of expectations, making new promises while keeping old ones. I feel like yes-and is the easiest expectation reset. Because really, all you're doing is raising the bar. It's not like you've broken promises. No-but is the next one, and that's the actual reset where you had to make promises by breaking earlier ones. Yes, I know I promised you a sports movie, but I'm going to give you an amazing cinematic experience that's going to touch your soul and you wouldn't have come out to the theater to watch this anyway, but it's important and, thank you, everybody, and I'll take my Oscar now. I may be projecting a little bit. The third category is what I call oh, crap. It's the one where I felt like I most often lived in Schlock Mercenary, which is the discovery that you've broken a promise but only after it's too late to fix things. I foreshadowed something and got the technology wrong. Oh, crap. Oh, I can't actually make that work, what do I do instead? So in these three categories, what are our strategies?
[Sandra] I remember watching… Oh, it was decades ago, the making of Indiana Jones. A documentary. So it was like one hour long, the making of show. Listening to Steven Spielberg talk about how when they're writing the scripts, they would actually literally paint themselves into a corner. The opening sequence, Indiana Jones has just run from the boulder, tumbled out, and now he is standing trapped, facing a circle of spears, and there is literally no way to get out. Spielberg basically says, "Well, what you do when you've painted yourself into a corner is quickly duck and dash your way through the red paint and hope that nobody notices the footprints."
[Laughter]
[Sandra] Which is pretty much what that movie does. There may be better tools for this, but honestly, I think of like the Pirates of the Caribbean, I think it's 5, that begins with we're dragging an entire building through the middle of town using a horse-drawn cart.
[Howard] Yes.
[Sandra] It is absolutely completely and totally ridiculous, but basically what it's saying is, "This is the movie you're getting. If you're not on board, just go ahead and leave the theater now." So if you have to reset, any time you have to reset expectations, you're going to lose some audience, you're going to shed some audience who don't make the turn with you. That's just normal and expected. If you need to make the turn, make the turn anyway. Telegraph it is much as you can, so that people are ready for that moment. Okay, we all need to lean to the right. Lean to the right so we can make this turn, and… Now the wheels are back on the ground and we can keep going.
[Howard] There were a lot of turns in that scene where they were dragging the…
[Sandra] The whole building.
[Howard] The bank through the village, and, as I recall, they lost all of the money.
[Sandra] They lost the entire building.
[Howard] In the course of doing that. Yeah. Nice. Good choice of scenes. Nice metaphor. Well played. Bravo.
 
[Megan] There's something, especially in long-running television series, where, in between seasons, they will reset. So it's always sad sometimes when they come back into a season and these characters are now gone, and, oh, no, the set where they spent all their time, that's different now, they're going to spend all their time here instead. Sometimes writers rooms will literally just reset the world and which characters we have and we just never mention it.
[Laughter]
[Sandra] Yeah. That becomes part of the expectation of watching a long-running show. You just kind of know that there's going to be a reset. A…
[Howard] Sorry. Let me interrupt you there. That's the experience of someone who has watched lots of long-running shows.
[Sandra] Right.
[Howard] There are plenty of people who watch a long-running show for the first time and as those things happen, they're like, "No!"
[Yeah]
[Howard] No. Because they feel like they've been betrayed.
[Sandra] An excellent reset to examine is the movie Serenity versus the TV show Firefly. Because you have this TV show that only ran for a very short time and then was canceled. Then you have this gap of time. Then they make a movie. In order to… Which is actually a jump in media. It's… A movie is a different medium than a TV show. Which meant that there are different expectations, different language you can use, and in order to make that shift, they had to do some reset. The one that I… That jarred me the most, was that by the end of the run of the show, the doctor character had kind of become reconciled with the captain character as we're a family. When they start the movie, there's a lot more friction between them and it's more like the beginning of the show than the end of the show. They had to do that reset in order to give the proper arcs to the movie, because the movie had to be able to stand alone as well. So, it jarred me, as a watcher of the show, but once I was like, "Eh," it was not so jarring that I was knocked out and walked away. I was like, "Eh, I don't like that, but… Okay. Take me along for this ride." So…
 
[Megan] As an example for the no-but resetting expectations, Avatar the Last Airbender did that to me in, like, the third season. Like, the day of black sun. Because they really built up to it. I was watching this is a kid at the time, about 13-ish. I was like, "It's finally happening." We've had seasons building up to this day, they really built up to it in those moments, too, where they're like, "We're really… This is the day we lay siege on the Fire Nation." It's the eclipse that we risked all our lives to find information about in the previous seasons. This is it. It's a two-parter, and everything, so I was like, "Oh, this is finally going down. We're going to take down the Fire Nation." And it doesn't. It does not pan out. They fail the invasion. Because they already knew and were already ready and just gone. They're shocked and terrified, and I was too. I was like, "What?" But what they did was a great job in that, because otherwise it could of felt like really deflative, where you're like, "Well, great. Okay, but what did we spend all this time for, then?" But what they give you is a bunch of other things that you really wanted and needed, like, most particularly, the Zuko storyline carries out the days of black sun two parts. Having Zuko come in and that's the moment where he decides to defect from the Fire Nation and healthy avatars make his new plan to take down his dad. Like, that ends up making the story worthwhile. So, no, I didn't get like the big climax that I was really prepared for, but I got Zuko's storyline intersecting finally and his big moment of character change.
[Howard] You can argue that we set out to defeat the Fire Nation, and we got the victory we didn't expect, which was turning Zuko.
[Megan] Yeah.
[Howard] So, you can make the argument that you actually fulfilled the promise. I think that's part of how you make no-but work is that you take the new thing that you hand them and say, "By the way, this actually fulfills all of your other expectations." Trust… I'm just going to paint it red so that it looks like what you were…
[Giggles]
[Howard] Yeah. [Garbled a neat] trick.
 
[Howard] We need to have a book of the week. Or a thing of the week. I think Meg's got it.
[Megan] I have a thing of the week that also ties up a lot of the things that we've been talking about in all of the other episodes. This is a Korean drama that I originally watched on WB's drama streaming service, which no longer exists. But you can purchase the show on DVD which I have. The show is called Circle: The Two Worlds or Circle: the Connected Worlds depending on your translation. But every episode is two completely different stories. The first half of the episode takes place in 2017, the other half takes place in the far future. The 2017 story is about these twin brothers who are going to university and there's some strange things going on and they're investigating it. It's a smaller story about brothers investigating a mystery. The future story is high sci-fi, and there's this town where you can only live if there's a chip implanted in your brain that regulates your emotions and there's no pain and no fear and there's no crime. It's about a police detective who is trying to investigate an alleged murder that's happened inside the perfect city. But the guards won't let him in. But it turns out he has a second motive to get in there. He believes there's evidence about two twin brothers who disappeared back in 2017. It's these two completely different stories, completely different genres, and you've got expectations set up for how these kinds of stories work. It's slowly about how these two storylines tie back into each other and influence each other. Circle: the Connected Worlds.
[Sounds cool]
[Howard] That sounds really cool, and I wish I had it on a streaming service right now.
[Megan] Howard, I have my DVDs here in Utah. They could end up at your house on accident or purpose at some point in time.
[Whew!]
[Howard] Well, see now you're making all of our listeners terribly, terribly jealous…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Which just doesn't seem like a fair thing to do.
 
[Howard] Early on in Schlock Mercenary, I was writing… I mean, the design principles for Schlock Mercenary were I am not making fun of science fiction in my science fiction comic, the comedy will come from other things. But it was very newspaper humor, dad joke type stuff. Would have fit right in in the age of people collecting newspapers. But this was a web comic. About two years in, the Teraport wars begin, and the stories begin getting bigger. Brandon Sanderson wrote the introduction for book 2, The Teraport Wars, and said, "This is the book where Schlock Mercenary figures out what it wants to be when it grows up."
[Accurate]
[Howard] It very much… This was not a thing that I did consciously. It certainly wasn't a thing I did expertly. But it was a thing I did. I had an existing audience, an existing brand, and I decided to take them from a quick episodic fast beats sort of story to a much larger form story. I got lucky in that I guess the audience was so small to begin with that when it grew, we didn't notice that we lost anybody. But this was definitely a case of something which at the time I began creating it was one thing, and at the time I finished it was very much something else. Even though you still have this blob character and mercenaries running through the core of it.
[Sandra] You had an assist from the fact that web comics are expected to evolve. So there is a genre expectation that there will be evolution which totally assisted in the redirect, which [garbled can be…]
[Howard] Yeah. That is the… That is what we called the low expectations of audiences watching amateurs.
[There's that. Anyway…]
[Howard] Good times. Wow. Are we really already 19 minutes in? What else can we say? I had a… We just need to can of worms this part. The whole career level can of worms of how do you rebrand yourself after spending 20 years as a cartoonist. Whatever I go do next, how do I keep the promises of my old brand…
[That's]
[Howard] Or break them in such a way…
[Another can of worms]
[Howard] I don't know.
[I think we just need to…]
[Howard] That's an old can of worms.
[Garbled]
[slap a lid on that, and say, whoops, can't cover it.]
[Howard] Whoops. Sorry. That's another eight part thing.
 
[Howard] Okay. We ready for homework?
[Homework. You are giving us the homework this time.]
[Howard] Okay, I am. In the first episode, I talked about how this intensive was expectations and promises, and how I didn't call it Eight Expectations because that would have forced me to drill down and to configure the content in such a way that there were eight discrete elements covered across seven episodes plus a… It was a headache. Your homework is to fulfill the promise that I decided not to make because I would have broken it. Call this intensive, call this discussion we've had over these last eight episodes, Eight Expectations. For you, for your toolbox, write down eight different categories in which promises and expectations can be used as structural elements, as troubleshooting elements, as critical elements, as career elements. Laying over all of the other tools that you use, that we all use, when we write, when we create. So there's your homework. Write the thing that I was either not smart enough or into much of a hurry to write, the course outline for Eight Expectations. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.52: Game Mastering and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence

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


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


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


[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 52.

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.


[Brandon] We are live at LTUE again.

[Cheering. Applause.]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's very wise.


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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Natasha] Very much so.

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

[Laughter]


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

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

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

[Laughter]


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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Natasha] Keep going.

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

[Natasha] Oh, absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] You're nodding.

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

[Chuckles]

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


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

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

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

[Natasha] Natasha Ence.

[Brandon] That's slash Natasha Ence.


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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] What I…

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

[Laughter]

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

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Sam.

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

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


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

[Natasha] Thank you.

[Brandon] Thank you to our live audience.

[Cheers. Applause.]

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

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

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


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Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications

Apr. 2nd, 2019 10:49 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications
 
From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/31/wx-14-13-obstacles-vs-complications/
 
Key points: obstacles versus complications. People, things, or circumstances that impede the progress of the character or the story. Obstacles can simply be overcome, but complications cause ramifications that make the story take a turn. In terms of MICE threads, obstacles keep you on the same path, but complications take you to another thread. Obstacles are linear, complications change the direction or goals. Obstacles often are within scenes, while complications strengthen act breaks and make the audience come back. A story that is all complications may be too twisty, while a story that is just obstacles may be too linear and frustratingly slow. Try mixing yes-but, no-and with complications and obstacles. A couple of major complications may be plenty.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 13.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Obstacles vs. Complications.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] I'm in the way.
[Chuckles, laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So, I wanted to do this because a couple of times on Writing Excuses, you've heard me say, talking about obstacles versus complications and how I learned about it from Margaret Dunlap, and it occurred to me that we actually have Margaret here, so instead of having to listen to my fumbling attempt to distill this theory that she has come up with, we could just have her explain it to you. So, Margaret, tell us, please, about obstacles versus complications.
[Margaret] Okay. So, obstacles versus complications is, I think… I was trying to think back to the origin of this. For me, it goes back to learning how to write to act breaks. Because you… Classically, you write to the act break, you're going to stop, have commercials, and you want something that's going to drive the audience to come back. The problem of writing television today is the television audiences have watched hundreds of hours of television, and they kind of know how television works. So if you put in a classic kind of cliffhanger of like, "Oh, no. Is Mulder going to die?" on the X-Files, well, probably not. Most of your audience is pretty well aware that at the end of act one, it's likely Mulder's probably still going to be with us for the rest of this episode. So, TV writers had to get better at making stories twistier. So, obstacles versus complications, both of these are people, things, or circumstances that are somehow impeding the progress of the character or the story. The difference is, while an obstacle is something that your character can overcome and then keep moving, a complication is something that they have to deal with and then causes ramifications that causes the story to take a turn.
[Mary Robinette] If I can jump in here, one of the… Because we spent a delightful period of time talking about this, and for me, one of… It clarified something that I've talked to my students about, which is when I talk about the MICE quotient and talk about how you can have multiple threads and they can be braided together, I intellectually like… Not intellectually. I had an intuitive sense of what it meant, but I had a difficult time articulating it. So an obstacle keep you on the same path. It's like a straightahead thing. If you're on a milieu line, you stay on a milieu line. Whereas, a complication will kick you off over into a character line.
[Brandon] That is really fascinating.
[Mary Robinette] Isn't it!
[Brandon] Yeah. That's really helpful.
[Howard] Obstacle is the speedbump, complication is the detour sign which you're not actually sure which side road it's pointing to.
[Margaret] Right. Or the detour sign that someone has taken away, or… I have an example of if I am a renowned thief and I am trying to break into Mary's home, the locked door is an obstacle. The fact that Mary is home, and I thought that she wasn't, that is a complication. Potentially. If I knock her out because I am awesome, because I'm an internationally renowned thief, then she is effectively an obstacle. But if she provides information that the thing I have come to steal, I'm not stealing it back, I'm just stealing it, that creates a complication.
[Brandon] Yeah, this is really interesting, because a lot of plot formats, particularly some of the ones rooted in screenwriting, talk about this idea of at some point during the story, you're… The characters are going to realize their goals are larger or different than they wanted them to be. Knowing the difference between obstacle versus that complication that can open their eyes to a greater plot could be really helpful.
 
[Margaret] Yeah. It's also a way to take a story that has a very linear progression, and think about… Because often we know where we want a story to end. It's like, "All right. Well, the character starts and they had that way." If you think in terms of complications, maybe they start out going in this direction… Yeah, as you can tell from watching me moving my hands on the podcast…
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] They start moving to the right. A series of complications might bend them around 180° and get… Or, more likely, 90°, speaking narratively. We rarely have a character start out seeking the exact opposite of what they wind up getting. But those are the complications that can create those twists that aren't… A shocking twist that you'll never see coming. But just those little shifts in the narrative.
[Howard] There is a classic twist in the… Elementary, CBS's Sherlock Holmes thing, that I've described to my kids as the act two corpse. Which is the point at which we are moving along, and then someone is dead who we are not expecting to be dead. Maybe it's an obstacle, because we can no longer ask that person questions. But we discovered that it's more complex. What's fun is that even though my kids will now watch TV with me and lean forward and say, "Act two corpse? Is it… Yay! Act two corpse!" The episode still works, because we don't know what the complication is going… We don't know what's going to happen. We just know there's been a complication, and we are on board for where our heroes take it.
[Margaret] It's the murder mystery where your prime suspect is the second victim.
[Brandon] I've done that before. It's very handy.
[Margaret] And classic for a reason.
 
[Brandon] Let's break here for our book of the week.
[Mary Robinette] Great. So our book of the week is Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse. This is a fantastic book. On one level, you can read it as just monster hunters going after monsters. But it's so much more than that. So this is after the world has basically drowned under the big water. It's set on what used to be a Navajo reservation. It has been reborn as Dinetah. All of the gods and heroes of the land are kind of there again. So, like, there's Coyote. It's wonderful. It's relevant to this because it has a great series of obstacles in complications. There are obstacles that are just getting in the way of her tracking down the monster, and then there are complications which are completely affecting the way… A relationship with herself, her relationship with other people. It's wonderful, wonderful storytelling.
[Brandon] So tell us one more time.
[Mary Robinette] It is the Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse.
[Brandon] Excellent.
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Since we are talking about obstacles in complications, one of the things that I wanted to also talk to our listeners about, we've talked a little bit about how to use them. I also want to talk about the dangers of them. Like the dangers of a story that is only complications.
[Margaret] Only complications. The danger of a story that is just piling complication on top of complication on top of complication is that it can be easy to lose track of the stakes. If we are constantly shifting what's going on, what are we after, how is it happening, it's tough for the audience to… It can be difficult for the audience to remain invested. Because it's who's on first. They're losing track of what is our ultimate goal, what are we actually pushing towards, are we making progress towards it, or do we keep just getting derailed into detours? It is possible to make a story too twisty.
[Mary Robinette] Is it possible to go the other direction, and just have just obstacles?
[Margaret] Yeah. I think the danger of a story that is only obstacles is that, one, it can feel like your character isn't getting anywhere because anytime they're building up a head of steam, they're hitting another wall. The other risk that we sort of talked about earlier is that the story can feel very linear. It's like I am headed to grandma's house. The road goes out. So I've got to get a boat. The boat blows over. It just keeps going. One thing to another thing to another thing, but we never shift years. You can do it. But there is a risk that it just feels like a straight shot down a hallway, and why is it taking you so long to walk?
[Brandon] I've worried about both of those things, with the yes-but, no-and methodology that we've talked about, that Mary introduced me to, which is great. I use it in my class for those discovery writers who don't know how to outline, and don't really want to outline. I say, here's a method. But I worry about if they do this the wrong way, you're going to end up with only complications, because it's so easy to say, yes, they do accomplish this, but weird wacky things happens that sends us off in another direction.
 
[Mary Robinette] So that brings up the question of progress in pacing. One of the things that I talk about sometimes with the yes-but, no-in is, since in Western storytelling, we have the rule of three. Which is three times are funny, third times a charm, three times are unlucky. We just… We're geared to think in terms of threes. That you can use that in hack with it. If you want something to feel easy, then you have it happen with less than three trial error cycles. If you want it to feel hard, then you do more than three try-fail cycles. So with a yes-but, it's like yes, but complication. Then with no-and, it's like no, and obstacle. To a certain degree. So you can… I feel like you can control pacing to a certain degree that way. How do you con… Do you use these as tools to control pacing?
[Margaret] Um…
[Mary Robinette] I mean, it's hard… It feels like it when you're talking about act breaks.
[Margaret] Yeah. I mean, it is a way to control pacing. I think when writing in television format, it's such a set structure. Even now, as we're seeing more TV being written without commercial breaks. If you're writing for a Netflix or one of the other premium services, you don't necessarily have commercials that are coming in between, but I like to try to write on that 4 to 5 act structure anyway, just because it ensures that things are happening. That you're not getting the episode that feels like, "Okay, this is just an installment, but nothing's really happening. It's a lot of kind of dithering around and nothing is really changing, nothing's really progressing." Having those sorts of stops along the wheel of setting up the problem of the week, making our first attempt at it, a big turn at the midpoint that shifts things around, having to recover and prepare for that, and our final confrontation act five, having that is a kind of baseline structure sets up that… One, the idea that we're accomplishing something in a single episode, even if it's a piece of a much larger story. But also, again with a television audience that watched a lot of television, there are certain rhythms that you get use to. You can shift those rhythms. I watched a lot of Law & Order in high school and college. Then I started watching Homicide: Life on the Streets. I realized that I would start getting really antsy around the half-hour point in Homicide, because subliminally I was waiting for the cops to hand it over to the lawyers to handle the second half of the show.
[Mary Robinette] [Ooooo]
[Margaret] But Homicide is all cops. It took a while to get used to the different pacing and the different rhythm. But having that television falling into those… Saying familiar patterns feels like it's cliché, but just that sort of the storytelling rhythms that at a certain level feel comfortable that you can use or shift up in order to really unsettle your audience.
[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, I realized that when I earlier said yes, but complication, no, and obstacle, that made it sound like those are the pairings that you have to do. Which is not actually true at all. Yes his progress towards the goal, no is progress away from the goal. Then, complications and obstacles are additional tools that you can use in terms of shifting. I find that I am more likely to use obstacles as a… Within a, roughly put, within a scene, and then use the complications kind of as I approach a scene end.
[Margaret] I think, complications, you do have to be judicious with them, at least in terms of major complications. If you look at… If you look at the Leverage pilot, which I'm guessing many listeners and people here on this podcast are familiar with, you get a couple of really big complications in that, but only a couple. We've been hired to steal airplane plans. It turns out those airplane plans, we didn't steal them back from the person who stole them. We just stole them from the people that created them. Then they have obstacles in trying to get revenge from the person who set them up. With… There are some additional complications buried in there, but they aren't all necessarily… A complication doesn't have to be earthshaking. It can be you have to take your little sister with you on this heist job, and how are we going to handle that?
[Howard] The nice thing about the Leverage show format with regard to complications is that when the heist is one in which we are going to be shown, after the fact, that there was a piece they were actually prepared for this. The final complication looks to us like the nail in the coffin that, nope, they're not going to survive this twist. Oh, wait, this is the one they were ready for. That bit of formulaic TV writing… Yes, if formulaic, and yes, if you watch an entire… You binge watch Leverage, you can start to see the seams, but… It's beautiful. I love the way it's done.
[Margaret] I would just like to say, John, Howard said it was formulaic, I didn't.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] All right. Let's… This has been really fascinating. It's really helped kind of frame this in my head. Something that… Like Mary said, I've always kind of known, but never been able to put words to.
 
[Brandon] You also have a piece of homework for us, right, Margaret?
[Margaret] What I'd like you to try to do is take a story, either something you've written or another story, and either find or insert an obstacle into it. Then, brainstorm what might happen if that obstacle were actually a complication. It's something that forces the narrative to take a turn. See what happens.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.41: Raising the Stakes

Oct. 11th, 2017 10:17 am
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
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Writing Excuses 12.41: Raising the Stakes

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/10/08/12-41-raising-the-stakes/

Key Points: Raising the stakes over the long haul? How do you keep it interesting? Lots of smaller plots, smaller scenes that raise the stakes in different ways. Subplots! Make the failure worse, and worse. Mounting consequences! Put yourself into it. Find the personal issues for the character. More specific, and more personal. Use try-fail cycles, yes-but/no-and, and build new problems out of old solutions. Rest points can accent the pedal-to-the-metal moments, if they are real. Build a stairway, always up and progressing, but there are plateaus as well as risers. The question raised at the beginning must matter, it must be gripping, then the stakes will carry you. Don't raise the stakes too fast and too high! Save your great finish for the end, don't give it away too early. Also, delayed consequences, or solutions that postpone the problem without solving it may work for you.
( Raise the stakes? Bet on it! )

[Brandon] This has been a great discussion. I'm going to have to call it here. But I do have some homework for you guys. I want you to try a few of the things that we've talked about in this episode. Specifically, raising the stakes, number one, by making… Try taking a side character from a story you're working on, and raise the stakes for what's going on for them. I want you to try by making it more personal first, but I'm not going to let you use the crutch that a lot of us use, that they have lost someone in their past or that it's personal because this is the person that killed their mentor or something like that. It can't be related to the loss of a loved one.
[Mary] No fridging!
[Brandon] Yes. Just make that one not on the table, and just see what you can do with that then. And then make it more specific. Try to make it a little less epic, but more specific to the person. Try that. Try that instead. See if this raises the stakes for you in interesting ways for your story. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 11.29: Elemental Thriller As Subgenre

Jul. 19th, 2016 04:31 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.29: Elemental Thriller As Subgenre

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/07/17/11-29-elemental-thriller-as-a-subgenre/

Key Points: Thriller, adrenaline, pumped! To make a thriller, make sure your character is in danger, and stays in danger. Take away the people the protagonist can trust. Keep the pot boiling -- four things at once, not just one. Try-fail cycles with yes-but/no-and and plenty of unintended consequences. Timebomb after timebomb. But don't lose what makes the main genre work, just add to it. Make it personal. Why does it matter to this character?
( When you turn the page, the bomb goes off? )

[Brandon] So, I'm going to stop us here and give you some homework. I'm going to suggest that you practice your cliffhangers. A lot of people ask me, students asked me this, I get a ton of questions over twitter about "How do you decide how long a chapter should be?" Well, one of the number one things you can learn from thrillers is practicing how to end a chapter in a way that pulls someone to the next one. What I want to avoid are the cheap tricks. So I want you to look at chapters you've written or write new ones or something monumental, something really cool happens at the end and it is so cool that the person wants to turn the page and read what happens next rather than hinting that something cool is going to happen in the next page. Practice doing this a few times. Practice chopping your chapters in different places from what you've already written. See what kind of effects you can create through varying chapter length and varying where you end them. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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