urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker aka here I scribble mbarker 2009-12-28T23:47:39Z urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:130491 2009-12-28T23:47:39Z 2009-12-28T23:47:39Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 31: Tragedy<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/27/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-31-tragedy/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/27/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-31-tragedy/</a><br /><br />Key points: Tragedy is powerful because of the catharsis or emotional release. Even if you don't want to make your whole story a tragedy, you may want to sprinkle tragic arcs in it for extra texture. Tragic flaws can make your characters rounder. <br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Howard] 15 minutes long because you're in a hurry.<br />[Dan] And everybody dies.<br />[Brandon] I'm Brandon.<br />[Dan] I'm Dan.<br />[Howard] I'm dead.<br /><br />[Brandon] We better be more peppy, before they turn us off. Hi, we're going to talk about tragedy today and we're going to make it fun. A couple of weeks ago, we did a podcast about antiheroes where we realized we had never really talked about the concept of tragedy in writing, which is kind of odd, since it is one of the great classical archetypes for writing. So were going to do a podcast talking about how to write tragedies. This is particularly interesting for me, because I just experienced a really great tragic story, but I don't know if I want to... well, right now if you... ah, I'm just going to spoil it for you. Guess what, Dr. Horrible ends sad.&nbsp; The Wikipedia article lists it as a tragic comedy. It was genius. I had just experienced this and thought, wow, why is that so compelling even though it's a tragedy?<br />[Howard] Probably because Dr. Horrible is an antihero.<br />[Brandon] Yeah. He's not actually an antihero because he's sympathetic. Tragedy. Why do we write tragedies? What's good about it? Why do people enjoy it, or...<br />[Dan] For me...<br />[Howard] Classically... sorry...<br />[Dan] Go ahead, Howard.<br />[Howard] Classically, I think that the Greek philosophers loved tragedy because of the catharsis.<br />[Dan] Yes. That's what I was going to say.<br />[Brandon] That was their big thing. Let's talk about catharsis.<br />[Howard] They wanted us to have an emotional response because apparently crying is good for Greek people.<br />[Dan] Crying is good for everybody.<br />[Howard] I don't like it much.<br />[Dan] This catharsis, this emotional response, emotional reaction... or I believe that it's strictly called an emotional release... is very powerful. When I look at the movies that I love, so many of them have that, and they have those elements of tragedy. I just watched last night 3:10 to Yuma -- the new one with whoever in it...<br />[Brandon] I love whoever. He's great.<br />[Dan] Whoever has got another one coming out soon.<br />[Howard] He's been in a lot of good films.<br />[Dan] Anyway. Whoever dies. Spoiler warning. It's really, really awesome. It's sad and it's terrible and because of that catharsis, it's very uplifting at the same time.<br /><br />[Brandon] Why do you think it is that our society... is it just because we're steeped in this Greek tradition... values tragedy so much more than comedy? Let's get back to defining tragedy and comedy in their classical ways. A comedy being something that ends well -- you don't necessarily laugh the whole time. And a tragedy being something that ends sad. It ends tragically. You may laugh along the way. It's really kind of focused on the concepts of the endings. So why?<br />[Dan] I would actually say that a lot of our modern culture, movies especially, but it has kind of bled into everywhere, is kind of in the middle of those. Because we have dramatic non-comedic stories that still end well. Hollywood does not like sad endings.<br />[Brandon] Don't they? Well, you look at the best picture nominations...<br />[Dan] You'll see them every now and then. But... what won last year? Slum Dog Millionaire? Super happy ending.<br />[Howard] I think that the guilds of writers and directors and actors place a high value on tragedy, probably because many of them have been classically trained. But the box office values a happy ending.<br />[Brandon] That's kind of interesting that you would say that, because I used to think that was true. Yet I have seen several times where people have talked about Hollywood endings versus not-Hollywood endings and it's not always happy or sad. It's heroic happy or unheroic sad. If you die heroically at the end of your film, they still like that. It seems like the box office likes that. It does pretty well.<br />[Howard] But Oedipus did not die heroically.<br />[Brandon] No, he did not die heroically. He did not die well. And that's kind of the classical concept of tragedy. But... I guess... I may have spoken falsely, because if we look at the nominees, I bet we'll find a large number of tragedies. But if we look at the winners, we'll probably end up seeing the people who... the winners were the ones that were happy.<br />[Howard] When you talk about what viewers value, so many people complain about what gets nominated for the Oscars that...<br />[Brandon] Yeah, we probably ought to just throw that whole conversation out. Let's dig into it then...<br />[Howard] But Jordo can keep it. We'll make everybody listen to it.<br />[Dan] Pay no attention to that conversation we just had.<br />[Brandon] Because it's important and poignant.<br />[Howard] And tragic.<br /><br />[Brandon] Why do we like tragedy? What are other reasons... why are we writing this? Is it because it's unexpected? I think that might be part of it.<br />[Howard] I've got a great example of tragedies that we love. The first five minutes of CSI. Those are little mini stories that set up what happens next. Yes, there's a mystery to them, but they are little tragedies.<br />[Brandon] Something terrible happens to somebody.<br />[Howard] Something horrible happens. Even if it's just somebody finding a body. Their day got ruined. I think I love watching that because I know that's not me.<br />[Brandon] What's that Mel Brooks' book?<br />[Howard] The circumstances these people are in are not circumstances I place myself in. So I can wag my finger at them and say shame on you and it validates my lifestyle.<br />[Dan] [garbled]<br />[Brandon] [garbled] morality plays.<br />[Howard] Yeah. It's a little mini morality play.<br />[Dan] Brandon, you said that maybe one of the reasons people like tragedy is because it is unexpected. I would actually say the opposite. Going back to the idea of the tragic flaw, for example...<br />[Brandon] There is the tragic flaw. I'm talking about something else, though. For instance, when you get to the end of a... well, look at Frodo. You don't expect the story to be Frodo fails at the end. When you read Frodo fails, it punches you in the face and makes you sit up and say wow. It's still inevitable, it's surprising but inevitable. It's a great twist. The same sort of thing happens at the end of Dr. Horrible. Not to give away too much. But I'm laughing the whole time, it's genius, it's funny, it's... oh, my goodness. Oh, that's terrible. Oh, that was inevitable.<br />[Dan] I heard this described very aptly once when someone was talking about the difference between books and video games. They said that the main difference is that in a book, you can do something to a reader they would never do to themselves. If you were playing the Lord of the Rings videogame, you would not have Frodo do that at the end. You would keep going back and reloading your game until you got it right.<br />[Howard] Or you get to that point in the game and the game designers switch you to play Gollum -- you have to steal the ring from Frodo in time to fall to your death.<br />[Dan] I'm not saying this to denigrate video games. I'm just saying that in books, we can do that, we can force the reader into an uncomfortable situation, and that's where the catharsis comes from.<br /><br />[Brandon] I'm still going to rely on my old unexpected concept. Although I'm going to say unexpected yet expected. You're hoping it won't happen, you're watching it happen, there is a fascination. It's the whole car wreck concept. You're watching the car wreck, it's terrible, your eyes are glued to it though because you have to know. You have to know. My mother, when she watched the Lord of the Rings movies, she got to the end... the first one, we forced her to watch, she didn't really want to watch it. My mother doesn't like this type of film, we made her because this was an important experience for her, darn it. She got to the end and said, "Oh, I hope Aragorn and that nice elf girl get together." That was her reaction to it. We had her watch the second one. This is how I know Peter Jackson got the second one down right, is she got to the end and she said, "Please tell me that little Smeagol turns out all right? Please tell me that everything goes well with little Smeagol?" She had to watch the third movie. She actually wanted to. Because she wanted to know what happened with little Smeagol. When Gollum made the wrong choice at the end, it was tragic and terrible for my mother, it was emotional, it was powerful. She no longer was focused on the nice elf woman and Aragorn that... she was into this character and loving this character. That is something that tragedy can do.<br />[Dan] While we're on the subject of Lord of the Rings, this is something I think that writers can use, is Lord of the Rings is not necessarily a tragedy, but many of its arcs are.<br />[Howard] Lots of tragic arcs in it.<br />[Dan] Boromir's story is a horrible tragedy, that's why he's my favorite character of that book. Smeagol is a horrible tragedy. He sprinkles those in with all those other non-tragic heroes, and it gives a lot of extra texture to the book.<br />[Brandon] Let's break for an advertisement. We are going to have...<br /><br />[Howard] I got this one. Stephen King writes a whole lot of what I would actually call tragedies because things end badly and we get emotional responses. They are also horror. I'm not going to tell you whether or not Stationary Bike is a tragedy. Stationary Bike is short, it's only about what 90 minutes long?<br />[Brandon] Hour and a half.<br />[Howard] Hour and a half long. I loved this book because it inspired me to exercise and warned me away from buying possessed exercise equipment.<br />[Dan] Always helpful.<br />[Brandon] That's a very important lesson.<br />[Howard] Indeed it is.<br />[Brandon] All right. audiblepodcast.com/excuses. You can download it for free and give a listen to the story that Howard loved. We won't tell you if it's a tragedy or not.<br />[Brandon and Dan] Dum, dum, dum.<br />[Howard] Peddle, peddle, peddle.<br /><br />[Brandon] For the last third of the podcast, I want to do my standard thing and force us to dig in and speak directly to writers and say how can you use this? What tools can you put in your toolbox related to writing tragedies and how can you make them work?<br />[Dan] First one, I think, is the tragic flaw. My example for that is going to be... sorry, we keep talking about movies all the time... the original Night of the Living Dead by George Romero. It's a bunch of people trapped in a house. Every single one of them has a tragic flaw. Every single one of them is undone by their flaw by the end of it. It's fascinating to watch and see oh, that guy who has this one thing, yep, that's what does him in in the end. It's really, really well done.<br />[Howard] I like what you said earlier about whether or not you're planning on writing a tragedy, employing tragic arcs is critical. In fact, it ups the ante a lot. If somebody...<br />[Brandon] Knowing that it could end... yeah.<br />[Howard] Not just knowing that it can end not well for a character. If it can not only not end well, but end not heroically. If a character ends like Oedipus, failing abjectly. I think that's a great way to handle some of your characters. I was going to say something else, but I forgot what it was.<br />[Brandon] Willy Wonka works very well in a similar way... a more obvious way with the tragic flaws leading to people's downfalls. Even kind of almost with Charlie himself.<br />[Dan] Those tragic flaws are helpful because first of all they round out a character quite a bit. The typical character that you start writing when you first sit down to write your fantasy story or whatever tends to be a little flat, a little too heroic. Giving them a tragic flaw not only creates some tension like Howard said because then you start to think oh, well, maybe his excessive pride or drinking or whatever is going to do him in. But it also just makes that character a lot rounder and a lot rougher.<br />[Brandon] It also allows you to seed a whole bunch of these in a bunch of different characters and drive your plot by the readers wondering which of them is going to succumb to their flaws and which of them are going to overcome their flaws. I would say that the tragedy used in a toolbox is very important to the concept of the three act format or the three book format. There is a reason why the middle volume often ends in tragedy. Look at the original Star Wars trilogy and you'll have an example of heroic end, tragic end, heroic end used for their proper beats which allows you to have a little bit of each one, but also it allows the third movie to have an extra punch because of the lows with which you are starting. I think it's a wonderful tool to have in your toolbox, so to speak.<br />[Howard] I can't remember who it was who described the three act format as act one, chase the characters up a tree, act two, throw rocks at them, act three, cut down the tree. Tragedy is at some point during act two, one of the characters pulls out a saw and actually begins cutting off the branch that one of the characters that we like is sitting on, as a result of his flaw.<br />[Dan] They cut down their own tree.<br />[Brandon] Right. It can be wonderfully compelling. It can allow you... but it also means that you don't have to end on that note. You can use it as part of a story arc. What other tools can tragedy help you with?<br />[Howard] I think the catharsis. Coming back to that original point, if you don't have that emotional release, then the tension that you've built up in your story may end up insufficiently fulfilled. If you build up tension and the releases just all joyous, I don't think it's complete. I think you have to have some of that release be of the cathartic unhappy kind.<br />[Brandon] We've talked about before that some people say... and I won't say whether I believe this or not... but some people say a story is about putting characters through an unimaginable torture and pain for the course of the story. If none of that torture and pain and failing end up in a tragic situation, then what you've done is you've not given payoff to your promises. Someone who is brilliant at this is George R. Martin. He uses the tragic flaw, he uses a lot of concepts of tragedy in his books. It makes them brutal, it makes them almost... I can't take them, because they are so well done that they are so brutal. But if you want to learn how to write some tragic flaws, and some tragic characters, you can look at those books -- or even tragic ends to heroic characters. <br /><br />[Brandon] Let's go ahead and give our writing prompt to Dan. Dan, what'cha gonna give us?<br />[Howard] I am sure glad he picked you.<br />[Brandon] You love it when I do that, don't you?<br />[Dan] Yes I do you're going to write a delightful story about happy, cheerful woodland creatures who are all horribly killed.<br />[Howard] You just described Happy Tree Friends.<br />[Dan] Okay, they are happy, aquatic creatures.<br />[Brandon] Happy aquatic creatures that all die horribly?<br />[Dan] Yeah. Okay, I just described The Little Mermaid. You're going to write a tragedy that hasn't already been done before.<br />[Howard] An anthropomorphic tragedy?<br />[Brandon] It's already tragic.<br />[Dan] You're going to write furry fanfic.<br />[Howard] My fur suit, the zipper is stuck.<br />[Brandon] Before we go any further, we're going to end. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses and so are we. Go write. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:130248 2009-12-23T08:44:50Z 2009-12-23T08:44:50Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 29: Antiheroes<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/20/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-29-antiheroes/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/20/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-29-antiheroes/</a><br /><br />Key Points: Antiheroes come in many flavors, including Frodo, Punisher, and the Talented Mister Ripley. Frodos are heroes, except they fail. Punishers do evil for good purposes. Talented Mister Ripley's are unsympathetic, unheroic, horrible. Sympathetic villains are not antiheroes, nor are heroes with a steep character arc. Heroes are like Christmas Day, and you wish it could last all year. Classical antiheroes are like olde Halloween, you never ever want to be like that, but it's stilll fascinating. Punisher antiheroes are more like modern Halloween, with cool costumes and candy from the neighbors. If you plan to write an antihero story, think about which kind you are writing and what will keep people turning pages.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 29... stop making faces at me, Howard.<br />[Howard] 15 minutes long because you're in a hurry...<br />[Dan] And we're not that smart.<br />[Brandon] I'm Brandon.<br />[Dan] I'm Dan.<br />[Howard] And I'm still making faces at Brandon.<br /><br />[Brandon] Yes, but that's not the title of the podcast. It's actually antiheroes, of which you are not. We want to do an antihero podcast because there are lots of definitions flying around of what an antihero is. I was trained one way in college which is not the way that people normally use the word. Dan, what is an antihero?<br />[Dan] To my thinking, there are three definitions of antihero that you see a lot of. I call them the Frodo, the Punisher, and the Talented Mister Ripley. We start with Frodo. Frodo is the type of antihero that is a reflection of the hero. Follows all of the heroic convention and then at the end, instead of overcoming his problems, he is overcome by them.<br />[Howard] When you say reflection of the hero, he's not a reflection of the hero in the book, he's a reflection of the hero archetype?<br />[Dan] A reflection of the hero archetype. Exactly.<br />[Brandon] He does everything right except the end. He is the hero who then becomes a villain at the end.<br />[Dan] Yeah. Like if Luke succumbs to the Dark Side at the end of Return of the Jedi, that would be a Frodo hero.<br />[Brandon] Frodo antihero, which is not really an antihero, but we'll accept it. We're going to say...<br />[Howard] does that mean that Anakin is an antihero in the third Star Wars film or should we just let that go?<br />[Brandon] No, he is. He was always intended to be an antihero. He's actually...<br />[Dan] He was definitely an antihero.<br />[Brandon] Yes, this type of antihero.<br />[Dan] He's definitely a Frodo antihero in my opinion. All right.<br />[Howard] I contributed.<br />[Brandon] Yea, Howard.<br /><br />[Dan] Number two is the most common one today, by today's definition. That's the Punisher. Which is basically the bad dude who... chews bubblegum and...<br />[Brandon] He's doing evil in order to achieve good purposes.<br />[Howard] Chews bubblegum?<br />[Dan] Got lost.<br />[Brandon] He's doing terrible things, but it's all to bad people.<br />[Dan] Exactly. He kills people, but they were all bad. Wolverine and Punisher, there's a lot of gritty comics stuff.<br />[Brandon] The Crow.<br />[Dan] You see it a lot. A ton of movies.<br />[Brandon] This has kind of overcome the definition of antihero and taken it into itself. Which is really actually kind of bad in my opinion because this is the one that annoys me when we call these antihero because they really aren't. There's nothing really anti about them. It's...<br />[Howard] Well, and they're shallow.<br />[Brandon] They don't have to be shallow.<br />[Dan] They don't have to be, but they often are because people think that this is enough to hang a whole character on.<br />[Brandon] We'll delve more into each of these three. But give us the last one.<br /><br />[Dan] The third one, the one that Brandon accepts as canonical, is what I call the Talented Mister Ripley hero. Which is the main character of your story, the protagonist of your story, who is completely unsympathetic and unheroic in every way and yet you are compelled to follow their story. My favorite example of this, even though I didn't name the archetype after it, was Perfume by Patrick Susskind which is about a serial killer in medieval France, who is horrible and awful and the entire story focuses on him and you hate him the whole time, but it's just fascinating to watch what he does.<br />[Brandon] Let's throw two things in here that are not under the scope of this podcast. Number one is sympathetic villain. A sympathetic villain is different from an antihero. If you have a villain that we like, that's a bad dude doing bad stuff and we like them, go listen to our sympathetic villain...<br />[Howard] So Anakin Skywalker is a Frodo antihero, but Darth Vader is a sympathetic villain?<br />[Brandon] I don't know how sympathetic Darth Vader is... until maybe the third movie.<br />[Howard] He ends up as a sympathetic villain...<br />[Dan] More of a redeemed villain than a sympathetic villain.<br />[Brandon] Something else that gets tossed out here is the person who's unsympathetic at the beginning so they can have a growth arc so you'll like them at the end. That's not an antihero. That's just someone with a very steep character arc. Antihero. That's not someone with a very steep character arc. Antiheroes... it's interesting... we want to talk about it because as writers who are listening to this podcast, you may have heard this term thrown around a lot and you may be thinking I want to write an antihero book. Each of these different types, even though Brandon doesn't accept them as canonical as has been stated, do different things and can be very successful types of stories. I just want you as listeners to be able to understand what actually makes an antihero and why it works. Frodo antihero. Let's spend some time talking about them. Why do they work? How do you do them well?<br /><br />[Howard] Frodo antiheroes work well because when you get to that point at the end of the story where the hero has fallen and has failed, you've managed to turn attention past the breaking point. You've managed to do something that... when Frodo fails, that's... at least the first time you read it... it is pretty darn amazing. The fact that all ends up saving the day, the book still gets a happy ending, which was awesome.<br />[Brandon] The thing about this is... what we're talking about are actually what would generally be called the classical tragedy archetype. We should do a different podcast on that, but that is the classical archetypal tragedy, a heroic person who does not succeed in the end. The difference between tragedy and comedy classically was the hero would succeed in a comedy. Not necessarily that you laughed at one and you didn't add another, it was a person who failed. If you look at Oedipus, Oedipus was actually a very sympathetic hero, did a lot of things right, and then failed in the end almost because the gods just decided he had to.<br />[Howard] Well, the gods decided he had to from the beginning.<br />[Brandon] Right. Though he did have a heroic flaw. Generally, there will be a heroic flaw.<br />[Dan] You should save that, I guess, for the tragedy one so I won't say anymore about that.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let's move on and talk about these other two, because these are the main antihero types. Let's see. Let's talk about the Punisher antihero. <br />&nbsp;[Dan] The Punisher. The Punisher, like I said, I think that's the one that everyone thinks of these days... or most people think of when they hear the term. It's because it's become such a common thing to see, I guess, as we grittify our media.<br />[Brandon] I would say that movies and comic books have had a lot to do with this. Turning the Dark Knight into a quote unquote Punisher-style antihero in some of his stories. Batman, and this sort of stuff.<br />[Howard] You get a little bit of that from Batman, but not to the extent that you get it from the Punisher...<br />[Brandon] The Punisher or Lobo or...<br />[Howard] Batman is breaking the law by virtue of being a vigilante. Punisher is breaking the law by virtue of murdering people.<br />[Brandon] Right. But why are these stories compelling? Why are they so successful? Howard called them shallow?<br />[Howard] Because I think that... and... this is... ah, I'm going to get chewed to bits, I'm sure. The problem I have with them a) is that I love them. Because we love to see justice done at the expense of propriety. In a very real sense, I think that undermines part of what makes civilization work. But there's a part of us that says, boy, I really want to see justice served.<br />[Brandon] And this person's going to do it for us.<br />[Howard] And this person's going to do it for us because due process is getting in the way and democracy...<br />[Brandon] It's a very American sort of thing.<br />[Dan] In some ways, I think it is. I think a lot of that modern definition comes out of the noir, the film noir kind of idea.<br />[Brandon] [inaudible]<br />[Howard] When you say it's very American, I don't think it's American. I think it's cowboys.<br />[Dan] Well, and noir comes from France, I guess, so I shouldn't say that.<br />[Brandon] That's what I was saying, cowboys. It's the concept of you've got to take matters in your own hands. The whole idea of superheroes kind of feeds out of this whole culture of ours that sometimes the system doesn't work... and we love that for some reason. Maybe it's because going back to our roots where America said it's not working, we're going to revolt.<br />[Dan] We're just going to do it ourselves.<br />[Howard] That's true. If you look at the Punisher as an antihero, you have to say, well, gosh, Batman is also an antihero. And so is Spiderman because he's a vigilante.<br />[Dan] Breaking the law and hiding from people.<br />[Brandon] Here's the thing about all of these characters. The reason that I don't think they fit the classical definition is because they are wildly sympathetic. If you go back to our podcast about making sympathetic characters, what are they doing? These characters are extremely capable. That alone isn't enough to not make them an antihero, but they are very capable. We like that. They're also generally shown as having a lot of sympathetic qualities. They'll love their dog. They'll be funny. They'll be doing good works even if they're going off...<br />[Dan] There's a lot of wish fulfillment in it. There's a lot of that. Because how many movies do you watch or stories do you read where you just say, come on hero, just punch him in the face right now? Even though a good guy hero is never going to do that, we love to read this story about the bad guy hero that will.<br />[Howard] Jack Bauer.<br /><br />[Brandon] Right. We're going to break for an advertisement right now for audible.com. We thought a lot about what we could do as a good antihero book. We really didn't come up with anything. Because...<br />[Dan] Unfortunately, Perfume is not on audible.<br />[Brandon] We disagreed a lot on what was... would make a good one. I ended up choosing Good Omens. Which is not really an antihero book, but it does deal a lot with a lot of cool concepts of good and evil, who is a hero and who is not. If you haven't read the story, it's by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It's hilarious and philosophical and awesome. It's about what would happen if an angel and the devil decide to try and stop the Apocalypse by kidnapping the antichrist and having him raised by a good suburban family. It's awesome, you should give it a listen. If you do, go through our promo so that audible knows that people are clicking through. It's audible.com...<br />[Howard] slash excuse<br />[Jordo] audiblepodcast.com<br />[Dan] And you could potentially get the book for free.<br />[Brandon] Is it audiblepodcast or is it audiblecast?<br />[Howard] audiblepodcast.com/excuse<br />[Brandon] If you do listen to this, please go through our link at audiblepodcast/excuse to let them know that you are listening and that you appreciate them and you can get it for free.<br />[Howard] Because we appreciate them.<br />[Brandon] Yes we do.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let's continue on with antiheroes. Let's talk about the final classical definition of an antihero. I first learned about this in an English program. I got into class and they said we're going to read one antihero novel this semester. I thought oh, good, it's going to be something like The Punisher. I was smacked in the face when they gave me Madame Bovary. Which is a boring book that I didn't like at all. That was apparently the point. Dan, can you talk more about why these books exist? What's going on here?<br />[Dan] They exist because some people find them fascinating, even though you've found Madame Bovary boring. I think there's actually a lot of cultural stuff involved there, because at the time it came out, it was fascinating. Because it was the kind of thing no one had ever seen before. Another one is The Stranger by Albert Camus. It was popular in large part because no one had ever read a story about an unsympathetic jerk before. It was really fascinating. This allows us to tell stories about serial killers, about Hitler, about people that would otherwise not be able to be the protagonist of the story if we didn't have this kind of device to treat them.<br /><br />[Howard] I think I just found a metaphor that works. This time of year it's actually especially appropriate. The hero is like Christmas Day. That's the person you want to be all year long. The antihero... the true antihero is like Halloween when you dress up like somebody you should never ever be. But we still celebrate Halloween.<br />[Brandon] The thing about that metaphor is Halloween does wish fulfillment. In a lot of antihero books, you don't want to be this person. You would never want to be this person. Their life history, they are miserable for most of their life, or they are just pure evil. There is no sort of desire... but sometimes it is fascinating to read about.<br />[Howard] You just haven't dressed up as the right person for Halloween.<br />[Dan] Is metaphor still works if we look at the history of Halloween. The old Halloween, where you would burn children in wicker cages, that's the original definition of the antihero. The modern Halloween, where you dress up like Spiderman and you get candy from your neighbor, that's the Punisher antihero.<br />[Brandon] Okay. Wow, Dan, way to rescue that metaphor. We sound brilliant now. Well, you do.<br />[Dan] And I owe it all to Howard.<br />[Brandon] I say that everyday.<br /><br />[Brandon] Our listeners, they think they're going to write an antihero story. Let's give them some advice for the last part of the podcast. What should they do?<br />[Howard] Don't try to sell it.<br />[Dan] No, that's not true. First of all, figure out what you really want out of an antihero story.<br />[Brandon] Yeah, why are you doing this?<br />[Dan] If you say to yourself, I want to do an antihero... what kind of antihero are you really thinking about? Do you want to do the Talented Mister Ripley who murders a guy and takes his place just because he can or do you want to do Wolverine who kicks butts and slices people in half?<br />[Howard] Or do you want to do the one that isn't really an antihero? That's just the guy who starts out despicable and ends the story being wonderful. A hero with a really steep character arc.<br />[Brandon] I think most people who are wanting to write antihero stories, they're kind of getting either Punisher or that one. If you really do want to write a classical antihero, you've got to remember what is going to pull people through these stories. You always want to be asking yourself that. Why are they going to turn the page? Come up with what it's going to do. Is it... is the question what is he going to do next? What terrible thing is he going to do next? Or is it going to be how is he going to fail? How is he going to be caught? Is it plotting, is it character? What is driving people to read? If you're not going to have a sympathetic protagonist, that's going to be really tough and you're going to have to be very careful about it.<br />[Dan] I also think that if you set out to write an antihero, you're going to have to know ahead of time how you are going to work the ending. We're going to talk about this more with tragedies, when we do that episode, but most antiheroes do not have happy endings. Any of those three kinds is not going to have a happy ending. It's either a good hero who fails, or it's a jerk hero who can't end happy because Punisher is never happy, or it's a serial killer who even if he is happy, the reader is not going to be happy, because why would I be sympathizing with this serial killer? You need to know how you are going to end it without disappointing your readers.<br />[Brandon] I guess it builds upon the promises you make. That's one of the things we keep bringing up.<br />[Howard] I am so glad I haven't read any true classical antihero books, because they just don't sound fun to me.<br /><br />[Brandon] Your writing prompt is going to be to write a true classical antihero and make it fun for Howard.<br />[Howard] I don't actually have to read what they write, do I?<br />[Dan] Yes, you do. And you have to grade them.<br />[Brandon] And you have to eat dinner at their house.<br />[Dan] And you have to dress up as a clown for their first date.<br />[Howard] All right. Schlock mercenary at gmail dot com. Go ahead and send me...<br />[Brandon] I want you guys to do this.<br />[Howard] Oh, dear.<br />[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.<br />[Howard] Something awful.<br />[Brandon] [laughter and then choking...] urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:129961 2009-12-21T05:55:16Z 2009-12-21T05:55:16Z There is a numeric keypad on the door to our lab, and I was intrigued to watch one of the students operate it this afternoon. It's the type of keypad where you press it once, and it displays the numbers randomly arranged. Press the right four keys, hit the enter # sign, and it flashes okay and let's you in. The thing is... he operated it with both thumbs hitting spots. Me, I do the old-fashioned one-finger dance.<br /><br />I realized that he was operating it the same way that they operate their cell phones for text messages. Both thumbs working away.<br /><br />Then I got to thinking about the parallel to the older touchtyping versus two-finger (or one-finger) typists. Hunt-and-peck. Or my friend who uses a Dvorak keyboard layout, and says the QWERTY is old-fashioned.<br /><br />Back when I was doing a fair amount of phone calling, I learned to use three-finger dialing on the touchtone pad. And I've seen clerks playing tunes on their adding machines, while reading the figures from the spreadsheet.<br /><br />It's kind of intriguing considering the ways that we adjust to our mechanical interfaces. But in the meantime, I'm just going to continue working the keypad with one finger. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:129751 2009-12-17T05:09:02Z 2009-12-17T05:09:02Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 30: Unreliable Narrators<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/13/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-30-unreliable-narrators/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/13/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-30-unreliable-narrators/</a><br /><br />Key Points: Unreliable narrator, third person limited, depends on how wrong the character's perceptions are. Unreliable narrator, first-person, often just lies to the reader. Unreliable narrator can add a subtext, another layer of meaning that the reader deduces. Another use of unreliable narrator is to let us see the character's viewpoint more clearly, since we experience their flawed view of the world. Yet another use is as a plot device to hide a twist. Epistolary stories, told through letters and journals, often are unreliable because people hide things in their writing. You can also have epigraphs that are clearly mistaken. Using third person limited unreliable narrators who are competing can introduce tension and characterize because the reader sees both sides, even though the characters don't individually know enough. Some books have a character who misleads by paying attention to red herrings and discarding real clues as meaningless. Seeing the uncertainty -- experiencing the confusion of the unreliable narrator -- also builds sympathy. Just don't withhold too much, have good reasons for what you withhold and why.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Brandon] I'm Brandon.<br />[Dan] I'm Dan.<br />[Howard] I might be Howard.<br />[Dan] I demand that I am [Bruce Vondel] [Note: I am not sure...]<br /><br />[Brandon] Let's define unreliable narrator before we go completely off-topic here. Unreliable narrator... we're talking about a couple of things. It works differently in third person than in first person. But generally what we're having is either in a third person narrative... the viewpoint when you're writing... how unreliable that viewpoint is... meaning are you inside their heads so much that you are seeing things as they perceive the world. Therefore the narrative is wrong as often as that character is wrong. First person narrator... you can have an unreliable narrator who flat out lies to the readers. We're going to talk about tools for using unreliable narrator and that sort of thing. Dan, you use it a lot in the Serial Killer books. You're writing first-person narratives. How are you using an unreliable narrator?<br />[Dan] I am using an unreliable narrator the same way that it was initially introduced to me. One of my favorite poems ever is My Last Duchess by Robert Browning which is kind of the classic example of unreliable narrator. It's a first-person account of a Duke walking someone through his house and describing to him all of his artwork. One of them of course is a portrait of his last Duchess was unfortunately unfaithful and died of some tragic accident. The unspoken subtext that the poet just makes ingeniously clear as you read it is that the Duke was insanely jealous of his beautiful wife, thought she was unfaithful, and had her killed. He tells that story without actually telling it. So there's two stories going on at the same time. It blew my mind. I thought, "This is why I want to be a writer." It was like a logic puzzle hidden inside this wonderful story. That's what I tried to do with Serial Killer is... I have this character, John, who... the way he perceives the world is not the way the world actually is. You get a lot of things where people will read through and he'll be talking about something and then the reader will go, "Wait, I know that's not right. I know that he is seeing that wrong." That adds this extra dimension to the whole story.<br /><br />[My Last Duchess can be read at <a href="http://www.poetry-online.org/browning_robert_my_last_duchess.htm">http://www.poetry-online.org/browning_robert_my_last_duchess.htm</a> ]<br /><br />[Brandon] There are a lot of ways to do this. I'm not sure if we can cover unreliable narrator in the scope of a 15 minute podcast because there are so many different directions to take it. But there a couple of different generally used concepts. One of the concepts is to add a subtext like My Last Duchess. You're adding another layer of what's going on by having the narrator... the way that they talk indicating to the reader... in that case, one of your goals is going to be to get across to the reader that the narrator is unreliable. If they don't know...<br />[Howard] Yeah, you have to drop cues that say, "We're not getting the whole story here."<br /><br />[Brandon] Exactly. One of the other ways we use unreliable narrator is simply to make our viewpoints more connected to the reader, to make them more real. Robert Jordan does this very well. It's one of the things I've always been impressed by his writing about. When you're reading his third person narratives, no one is lying, no one is intentionally misleading you. It's not that...<br />[Howard] But as a reader, you can tell, "You're wrong."<br />[Brandon] You can tell that this world is colored by the way that Nineve sees it in these viewpoints. When you're in Matt's head, he thinks, "Oh, Rand and Perrin are so good with women." When you're in Perrin's head, he thinks Rand and Matt are good with women. These sorts of things where you see... and sometimes that's just stated as a narrative. Robert Jordan indicates very early on at you are seeing things directly as these characters see them, so therefore he can obscure things. It gives him... the narrator is no longer this omnipotent voice that explains things to you, the reader. Instead the narrator becomes the flawed manifestation of the character's own soul. Which makes you very, very close to them. It's why I like those books and it's why I don't like omniscient narrator quite as well.<br /><br />[Howard] Stephen... no, Iain Banks, Player of Games. It's a story about a guy who is the best strategy gamer in the culture... universe... and as a result sent as an ambassador someplace else to play their game in order to get close to their king and close a deal. The whole story is told, if I remember this correctly, is told from what sounds like kind of a third person omniscient narrator. You get to the end and realize the story is being told to you by somebody who was actually there the whole time and has been keeping secrets from you about who he was and how he was able to be there the whole time.<br />[Brandon] That is actually the next thing I wanted to say, because you can use unreliable narrator as a plot device to embed something and have a pow twist ending with your unreliable narrator. It works very well that way, if you do it right.<br />[Howard] Iain Banks is deep, deep writing for sci-fi. It's... when I'm reading sci-fi, I think that's probably... he's probably the hardest guy I read. Just in terms of the prose and the layers of meaning and... Player of Games was great fun.<br /><br />[Brandon] You can do an unreliable narrator with omniscient. The Lemony Snicket books are another great example. If you want to contrast this, read The Hobbit sometime, which has an omniscient narrator who is not unreliable. When the narrator is speaking, whatever the narrator says is a fact. The narrator will say this is what Frodo...er, Bilbo was feeling at this time. This is what was going on. You can accept that as a true statement and build your story upon it.<br />[Dan] He will never lie to you. The big modern example of the surprise twist unreliable narrator is the movie Unusual Suspects. Which the entire movie is about the writer and director playing with the idea that you believe what you see on the screen.<br />[Brandon] If we want to use a book example, The Prestige. Which if you saw the movie, it loses the unreliable narrator. It has to, in order to translate. It's a great film, but one of the concepts of the book is the concept of the unreliable narrator, because it's an epistolary story, a lot of it. It's told through letters and journal entries, and in these journal entries, the various magicians, the two guys are representing themselves in a certain way through their writing, specifically in order to sometimes mislead you or sometimes reveal how they are misleading themselves. That's a wonderful way to approach it.<br /><br />[Howard] What do you call the little chapter headings that you see so often in fantasy and sci-fi? The little blocks?<br />[Dan] Epigraphs.<br />[Brandon] Well, I've started calling them epigraphs, but an epigraph is really actually the beginning of a book. I don't know what they're called. I sometimes call them chapter bumps. Those things.<br />[Dan] The Dune things.<br />[Howard] I have seen unreliable narrator type things done with those where you are... the Encyclopedia Galactica or whatever example that is we all like to use... has information in it about the events you are about to read and the Encyclopedia is wrong. Those are fun.<br />[Brandon] If you want to find some fun unreliable narrator told through epigraphs epistolarily, read Mistborn. With that, let's stop for an advertisement. Let's have Dan do the one this week.<br /><br />[Dan] This is once again an audible.com audio book. The one I'm going to recommend is a tragedy, so get ready for next week's tragedy episode. It's No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Which is also antihero, so it's very thematic for our recent string of podcasts. It is a fantastic book. It kind of has three characters, none of whom are especially heroic, all of whom are kind of tragic. It's just beautifully written. If you've never read a Cormac McCarthy book, he is in my mind the best word for word writer working today. It is not genre fiction, but he's absolutely fabulous. No Country for Old Men, audible podcast.com/excuse. If you sign up through our deal, you can get it for free.<br />[Brandon] Yep. And you support Writing Excuses by doing, every time you click through. We thank you very much, listeners.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let's get back to unreliable narrator. [Garbled] second half... yeah, go ahead.<br />[Dan] I wanted to say something when we were talking about ways to use unreliable narrator writing. One thing that I've seen a lot... the example that comes to mind is Bernard Cornwell in the Sharpe's Rifle series. He's got Richard Sharpe, who is his main character, but a lot of the books will deal with Obadiah Hickswell who is his nemesis. They narrate the book from this third person limited point of view entirely based on their own knowledge which is inevitably flawed. You will see them maneuvering against each other, trying to do things. One of them will start moving toward a certain city with his troop of guys and the other one wants to cut him off but doesn't know where he is. It seeds a lot of tension into the story because you know what they're trying to do and you can see both stories but they can't see each other, and so there's a lot of unreliability there.<br />[Brandon] Let's put you on the spot then. Second half of the podcast I want to talk about how our readers can use this. How can they use that? What is that story gaining from? How is it doing it, these sorts of things. Directly to our listeners.<br />[Dan] How are they doing it? First of all, this is a great way of using multiple viewpoints. If you have multiple and especially opposing viewpoints... if you have... you see that hero and then you see a different hero or a villain that they're working against each other, you can use this unreliability to show how little they know about each other and then to build a lot of tension. I think that's the biggest thing you gain.<br />[Brandon] So you're building tension and you're characterizing.<br />[Dan] Yes.<br /><br />[Howard] Simple trick, if you're looking to put a really cool plot twist in your book and you have figured out the exact sequence of clues that need to be put in place for you to figure things out. You've also obviously put some red herrings out there. The unreliability is the character who is following the red herrings and pointing those out while looking at the real clues and discarding them as meaningless. I feel like it's kind of a cheap trick if not done well, but it's really effective.<br />[Brandon] You can use unreliable narrator to do that... to mislead. We've talked before that writing a good story is often times you're playing the part of a stage magician. You are distracting people with the big flashy thing in one hand while you're slipping something with the other hand into an unexpected place so that you can pop it out and say, "Look what I just did." An unreliable narrator is an excellent tool for this because if a character becomes fixated on something and believes something very strong, the reader is going to believe it as well. Now if you come on too strong, they're going to see it's an obvious red herring, probably, unless you handle it delicately. I would say that on this one, more than anything else, I would say practice.<br />[Howard] A soft touch and practice.<br />[Brandon] Yeah, and use a soft touch. Because these sorts of things can be wonderful if you use them right. If you use them wrong, it's going to be like pounding someone in the face. It's just not going to work.<br />[Dan] That same trick can work very well for satire... can work brilliantly for satire. Because you are able to use questions of ethics or morality or whatever you are trying to satirize, just with that kind of dramatic irony, that the audience knows something is true that the characters don't believe or specifically disagree with. You are setting up that to be paid off later on.<br /><br />[Brandon] Yeah. So, what else? Why do we do this? Why not just use a narrator who's omniscient who gets everything cleared up and so that there aren't these confusions? Sometimes it is confusing. If you can't trust the characters, then who can you trust?<br />[Dan] One of the reasons that I chose to use it with the Serial Killer books was that it built a lot of sympathy with John. Because if it's just about a serial killer and we're seeing everything from this omniscient viewpoint -- black and white and cut and dried -- then we know who is good and who is evil. But we introduce that element of uncertainty, where the main character himself is not entirely certain what is going on, what he believes, and what other people are doing, then we're able to see his point of view much more easily.<br />[Howard] That whole theme of uncertainty is established in the title of the first book, "I Am Not a Serial Killer."<br />[Brandon] It raises the question, doesn't it?<br />[Dan] That's suspiciously specific.<br />[Howard] Why did you even need to tell me that?<br />[Brandon] Right. I think we downplay... downplay is the wrong word... we sometimes don't acknowledge the importance of uncertainty in writing. It's one of the reasons that omniscient fell out of favor is because if you can't hide things and if you can't obscure things, then often times the story doesn't have that compelling drive, you've got to find the answer.<br /><br />[Howard] I actually think... this is... we haven't popped can-of-worms in a while. That's probably worth popping can-of-worms on. I think that as readers, as consumers of entertainment, in the last 40 years we've become a lot more sophisticated. We want not to be told what is happening, and not even so much want to be shown what is happening, we want to experience it. If there is uncertainty, we want to experience being uncertain.<br />[Brandon] Right. What the characters are feeling...<br />[Howard] We don't want to be told that the character's not sure...<br />[Brandon] We want to be unsure.<br />[Howard] We want to be unsure. And...<br />[Dan] That's like The Last Duchess that I mentioned earlier. That kind of... the joy of figuring out the story behind the story was what made that poem so good for me. I think a lot of people today want that because they are more sophisticated. They have read this story, and if you want to tell them that same story, then there needs to be more, there needs to be that second layer or the kind of uncertainty so that they get to feel really excited and really good about themselves when they figure it all out.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let's end with me throwing out a warning. One thing you can do wrong and this is very tricky, is withholding too much from the reader.<br />[Dan] Absolutely.<br />[Brandon] Dan called me on this in our writing group last week. You've got to be very careful what you're withholding and how you're withholding it and giving good reasons for the characters being unreliable. If they simply don't know it, then that's great, you've got a good excuse. But if they know something and they are deliberately withholding information from the reader, you're going to have a frustrated reader unless there's a legitimate excuse or a legitimate explanation...<br />[Dan] Or unless you're Dan Brown who does it all the time.<br />[Howard] John saw a clue on the floor and picked it up and put it in his pocket...<br />[Brandon] Just tell us what the clue was.<br />[Howard] And the author is not telling you what the clue was... that's... hiding too much.<br />[Dan] That's hard to not do. That's very hard to not do.<br />[Brandon] Right. It is. There are tricks to get around it. Maybe we should can-of-worms that. How to deal with these sorts of concepts. It is very difficult. You can't reveal everything because it would make for a boring story, yet you can't withhold too much, otherwise the reader is going to think you're just doing it to make them annoyed.<br />[Dan] You are just jerking them around.<br /><br />[Brandon] I'm going to go ahead and give our writing prompt this time. I would like you to do... to have one event occur, and then have five different perspectives of that event which are... none of which are completely true. Just people's own views of what happened. They did this once in the X-Files, it was a wonderful episode. [Note: probably X-Files Jose Chung's "From Outer Space"] The movie Hero accomplished this, different narratives explaining the same event.<br />[Howard] There's an episode of CSI that did the same thing.<br />[Dan] Rashomon by Kurosawa.<br />[Brandon] Give this a try yourself. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.<br />[Howard] Five times.<br />[Dan] You're out of five excuses. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:129341 2009-12-08T02:54:35Z 2009-12-08T02:54:35Z [Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 28: World Building Political Correctness. [Note: later in the podcast, they changed the name]<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/06/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-28-world-building-gender-roles/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/06/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-28-world-building-gender-roles/</a><br /><br />Key points: Writing gender issues is hugely challenging. Be wary of 21st-century sociological conventions in anachronistic settings, but be aware that readers may have trouble empathizing with very different thinking and sensibilities. Subtle changes are more easily believable than huge changes. World building -- is it important to the plot or characters? If not, don't overdo it. Recognize that you may have a blind spot regarding gender issues -- write your story your way, then listen to your alpha readers, and address their concerns.&nbsp; <br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Brandon] I'm Brandon.<br />[Dan] I'm Dan.<br />[Howard] And we're in trouble.<br />[Brandon] I'm going to start off by saying this was not my title. You guys decided on this, so you can blame Howard for this. What in the heck do you mean by world building political correctness?<br />[Howard] When you write... let's say medieval fantasy, when you write women in medieval fantasy and the women are strong willed and their husbands don't...<br />[Brandon] OK. You are already in trouble. Because you're implying that women aren't strong willed?<br />[Howard] No, no... when the women are strong willed and their husbands don't immediately beat them for it? You may have...<br />[Brandon] I don't think that... that's a completely different thing. But... how about this? Women who are looking to advance women's liberation issues in a medieval fantasy.<br />[Howard] Yeah.<br /><br />[Dan] Let's basically say using 21st-century sociological conventions in an anachronistic way...<br />[Brandon] Either in fantasy or even in far future science fiction. How do you do this? Do you actually do it? I'm a poster child for this. I've said it from the beginning when people have asked me. I'm generally not interested in writing about people who think like someone would during the 11th century.<br />[Howard] Neither am I.<br />[Brandon] I'm not interested in reading about it... well, I'll say, when an author does it really well, like in Doomsday book, I'm interested in reading about it, but it's hard for me to connect with those characters. So I do not write books like that. I always say, different worlds, different things advance in different ways. I have never written a book that has been set in medieval times. But even my books that are set in early modern times, I have people... their sensibilities are more like modern people. I just say, look, they developed differently on this world. Some people don't like this. Dan, you were saying your brother...<br />[Dan] Yeah, my brother... Hi, Rob!... he has this complaint very frequently about your books and about other fantasies that he's read. It has actually to some degree turned him off to a lot of fantasy because he hates to read something that is not modern and yet people have very modern senses of personal freedom, and women's rights, and all of these things that we have now -- so we assume they are natural, but they have not existed forever, and might not exist 5000 years in the future.<br />[Brandon] I think that really what we're saying here... this might be a short podcast... well, they're all short... what we're saying here is that you have to decide. Make a decision on this.<br /><br />[Dan] Let me ask the question to you, then. Do you write these kind of civic issues the way they do because that's what you want to read about or... with Mistborn, did you go back into it and say this is how they developed? Did you actually do some hard-core world building then?<br />[Brandon] Oh, yeah. Generally I do that. But it's usually with me saying, look, I don't want to write someone who thinks that way. I don't want to write a society where everyone is extremely chauvinistic. It's not interesting to me. I have trouble empathizing with those characters. Some other people have done it very well, and done a very good job of it. I don't want to go there.<br />[Dan] So what did you do then when building this society? Did you think to yourself I need a specific event to have happened a 100 years ago that means there were...<br />[Brandon] One of the things I do... for Elantris, one of the things I did is I allowed instantaneous communication, which I think... personally, communication -- the development of communication had a large change on the world...<br />[Howard] Oh, yeah.<br />[Brandon] Liberating people and allowing people to be informed. The printing press and instantaneous communications gives... in Elantris, in a Renaissance level technology, but with the early 20th century or late 19th century sort of sensibilities in this way. It's because they have the printing press and they have instantaneous communication. It wasn't as big an issue in the Mistborn books because I was setting it in my head technologically in the mid-1800s without gunpowder because the Lord Ruler simply suppressed that technology -- took it away and killed anybody who knew about it. In that case, we do have a social evolution where people have gone through all of these revolutions and change and we've got sort of a revolutionary culture and the concepts of personal freedom are very important to people because you've got so many people who are approaching the sort of concept of American revolution era or French revolution era. This is what people's mindsets are. So it worked very easily in that. But in other books, I've simply said, "You know what? They just developed differently."<br />[Dan] OK.<br /><br />[Howard] In Schlock Mercenary, I initially imagined a crew that was almost all male. I can imagine that 2 to 300 years from now, we will have militaries that are fully integrated.<br />[Brandon] Power armor really kind of changes things.<br />[Howard] But it's entirely possible that 800 years from now, for whatever reason, we have militaries that are completely non-integrated. I see these things as being inherently cyclical. In Schlock Mercenary, I'm able to address some of these inequities. I can have a captain who is not comfortable being in the chain of command of a woman. Yet we have a woman as a High Admiral in the UNS right now. Tagon never questions that she is there, he just doesn't want to be in her chain of command.<br />[Brandon] Lois Bujold approaches these things very well in a lot of her books, particularly science fiction. What she will do is she will ram different planet's cultures into each other, and say this one has developed this way and this one has developed this way, and allows you this sort of friction to deal with these concepts.<br />[Howard] And it builds conflict for her stories, which is wonderful. The way I'm doing it, it builds conflict for the characters in such a way that I'm able to tell jokes. Because of the cultural context of the reader of Schlock Mercenary, they are jokes that the reader is going to get in is going to appreciate because some of these issues are issues that we are still dealing with.<br />[Brandon] One of the things I will mention here, just for aspiring writers. I've read a lot of books where the female character fighting against a chauvinist society and trying... doing all of that. It's been done a lot. It's been done well, it's been done poorly, but a lot of new writers seem to fall into this trap, that the first thing they latch onto if I've got a female character in a medieval society -- she's going to be the oddball. Everyone else acts like you would expect them, but she's going to be oddball, and she's going to want to fight for women's lib. Which you can make a convincing argument for saying one person can think differently than a society... someone else might make the argument that that doesn't really happen that often, but you could make that argument. But it's been done so many times. Even in Elantris, where I have Sarene doing that a little bit, people come to me and say, "You know what? I'm kind of tired of this trope. Just so you know. You did it just a little too much." So... I don't know. Have you guys seen that? What is your response to that?<br />[Dan] One example I think did this pretty well was actually a movie about Marie Antoinette that had I think Kristen Dunst as Marie Antoinette. It was a very feminist movie in that it was depicting this woman oppressed by her status and by her gender and at times and place she lived in, but she herself was not in any way a feminist. She was certainly a product and creature of the period she lived in, but the movie, because of the way it presented her, got all of those points across without having her act anachronistically.<br /><br />[Brandon] OK. I'm going to rename this podcast World Building Gender Roles. We're going to talk some more about this when we come back from the advertisement which we're going to do for the gathering storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson.<br />[Dan] Oow. I hear it's pretty good.<br />[Brandon] I've heard that that's pretty good. They have an audio book, you know, and it's read by Michael Kramer and Kate Redding. Little fun factoid -- the reason there are two readers for the Wheel of Time audio books is because Robert Jordan himself asked if we could have a man read the male viewpoints and a woman read the female viewpoints. That was him.<br />[Howard] I've listened to the first five or six -- all the way through the first five, halfway through the sixth Wheel of Time audio book. I have to confess, listening to the first book, when Kate Redding first starts reading, it was very jarring because there's a good three or four hours or more of just male viewpoints. But now, it's very refreshing.<br />[Brandon] Some people think that they are among the best readers of audio books in the business. I think they do a fantastic job. I hear there's an interview with that Brandon Sanderson guy on the audio book somewhere... I think at the end or something like that.<br />[Dan] Ooh. Sign me up.<br />[Howard] If you're not tired of listening to Brandon on Writing Excuses.<br />[Brandon] Number One New York Times bestseller. There you go. Is that...<br />[Dan] Self-serving enough for us? Yes.<br />[Howard] I'm glad we gave up the pimp music thing back in season one because that would've been a lot of humming.<br />[Dan] I know. We wouldn't even have been able to hear Brandon.<br /><br />[Brandon] OK. Gender roles.<br />[Howard] World building gender roles.<br />[Brandon] Gender roles. How do you approach doing gender roles in your fiction? I've already said that the woman fighting against a chauvinistic society is kind of a cliche. But we'll add the caveat that anything done really well, it doesn't matter if it's a cliche, it can be done really well. I actually wanted to promo The Gathering Storm partially because I think Robert Jordan has a very fascinating way of looking at gender roles in his books. Because he actually takes a few steps forward and says... takes a concept and takes a few steps... world builds it really the way that you should. Meaning in his world, women have access to magic, and men if they use the magic go insane and kill everyone that they love. That changes the way that the genders interact.<br />[Howard] Changes things very significantly. David Brin wrote a book... and I'm struggling to find the title of the book and I can't... we'll get it in the liner notes... in which men and women have been genetically reengineered so that the time of year during which they... the women become pregnant determines what kind of child is born. What's fascinating is that the gender roles are largely reversed in that book. Women hold most of the places of power. Men are looked down upon as being weak and very emotional. And the way in which they are looked down upon, we look at it as readers, and we think, "Oh, well, yeah, men kind of do that. How come we don't get accused of being weak and emotional in 20th century -- 21st century Planet Earth?" There was one scene where there is a man who is from Earth who has none of these biases and he's riding a horse. The women are all shocked. How can men possibly ride horses without crushing their equipment?<br />[Dan] There was an episode of Sliders which is not known for its brilliant writing in the first place. But they had an episode where they went to the obligatory parallel world where women ran everything.<br />[Howard] Oh, that was the toilet seat episode.<br />[Dan] It presented it terribly. Because the way it got its point across was to have, anytime they wanted to raise this issue, they did it with awful maid and butler dialogue, where they are like, "Well, as you know, our emotional cycles are hormonally whatever..." It just really ruined everything. You have to be careful about the way you get these differences across. You can't be too overt about it when you're shaking it up.<br />[Howard] I think I saw three minutes of that episode walking into a friend's house. It was the part of the episode where... yes, we know you're hiding men in this house because somebody left the toilet seat up.<br />[Dan] That was the only clever part of the episode. Arguably, of the series.<br /><br />[Brandon] Subtle changes, I think tend to be... getting us back on track... tend to be more useful than huge overarching changes. You've got to remember that human beings are generally going to be biologically... they're going to act in certain ways. There are certain things hardcoded into us. What is hardcoded and what is not is an area of discussion that's very interesting in science fiction and fantasy. But I would say to readers be very careful of the matriarchal societies because again, it's very easy to fall into cliches rather than doing very interesting things. The really great books I've read that do this take a step and say OK, they're different from us, but the same concepts are still there treated in different ways. Subtle changes instead of huge changes. What else... what other advice can we give people when they are world building gender roles?<br /><br />[Dan] Let me ask this question, because earlier we talked very briefly about the future of an integrated military and you mentioned power armor. A complaint that I hear a lot, often from current military people, is that they just don't believe that future integrated military because of the way women are built biologically. Do you have to get into that and explain, well, it works because of power armor, or it works because of this, or do you just ignore that aspect of your readership?<br />[Howard] The way I explained it in the Schlock book where I actually focused on those characters was that the tanks that the guys were using... the many tanks that were designed for the Obenn, the koala sized guy -- well, not sized -- built for soldiers who were around 5 feet tall. There were a couple of women in the company who were just the right size for that. One way to approach this is to say, "You know what? In space, space... physical space is very, very valuable." In a spacecraft, in a robot suit, smaller is better. You don't necessarily want to be a big person.<br />[Brandon] I've seen that done with fighter pilots. Saying... making female fighter pilots makes more sense because of the weight... it can... having smaller people, less weight on your fighter, therefore more maneuverable, these sorts of things. I don't know. I do think you want to be addressing these things. But there's so much discussion, so much argument, so many different opinions. I've heard people say the reason they don't believe in an integrated military is not because of the way women act, but because of the way men act. If you throw a woman onto the field, the men will ignore their orders in order to protect the women against what is best for the company, or for themselves, or for the woman or for anyone...<br />[Dan] Yeah, to protect or to hit on or whatever...<br />[Brandon] Because of the psychology of the men. I do think these are things that you need to deal with. OK, need to... I'm going to say that this is one aspect of world building. Again, remember, whenever we world build something, you can't do everything. In some cases, you have to say this is not important to the plot. This is not important to any of the major characters. Therefore, this is something that I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about.<br /><br />[Howard] I think for beginning writers, the best advice is to listen to this podcast and recognize that you probably have a huge blind spot with regard to gender issues. Write what you're going to write anyway, and listen to your readers. Listen to your writing group, listen to your alpha readers. Listen to them as they talk about this and see if there are ways for you to address it. Writing gender issues is hugely challenging.<br />[Brandon] It is. But I find it one of the most fascinating parts of science fiction and fantasy is one thing to approach. The Left Hand of Darkness, the Wheel of Time books, all of these where they change things subtly and the gender roles become different. It's something we can approach in our genres that you can't approach in a lot of other genres.<br />[Howard] David Brin's Uplift series did away with the him and her pronouns. It's a fascinating read because halfway through the book you realize, oh, wow, my language really is male centric. Mister Brin has gone and fixed it.<br /><br />[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and give a writing prompt. I'll make myself... oh, you're pointing at Dan. Howard chose you. Dan, you're going to have to do it.<br />[Howard] Dan is scowling at me.<br />[Dan] OK then. All right. You are writing a future society, a future military, where the only people allowed in the military are homosexual and you need a good explanation of why.<br />[Brandon] That's an excellent writing prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:129158 2009-12-02T13:13:51Z 2009-12-02T23:58:09Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 27: Mixing Humor with Drama and Horror<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-27-mixing-humor-with-drama-and-horror/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/12/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-27-mixing-humor-with-drama-and-horror/</a><br /><br />Key points: To blend humor and drama, start with the drama, identify the key points, then add humor. Humor is good while reading, but drama and character make readers come back. When the humor detracts, excise! Be careful about humor that pushes readers out of the story. Make humor fit the character -- don't break characters for a joke. <br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Brandon] I'm Brandon. I'm back.<br />[Chorus] Yeah.<br />[Brandon] What day is this? Where am I? Anyway, I'm Brandon.<br />[Dan] I'm Dan.<br />[Howard] I'm Howard.<br />[Brandon] Mixing humor with drama and horror. We actually...<br />[Dan] We didn't do the tagline.<br />[Brandon] Oh, we didn't?<br />[Howard] I did the tagline.<br />[Brandon] Yeah, we did the tagline. We've been out of practice.<br />[Dan] I didn't say that we're not that smart. Did you say that we did it 15 minutes long?<br /><br />[Brandon] Back in Season One, we can-of-worms'ed this topic, mixing humor with horror. We threw in drama with it because the concept with this is it is sometimes very hard to blend. When people will try to be dramatic, and they've been writing humorously, suddenly all the humor will go away for a while and it will be boring. Or sometimes when people try to mix in a little bit of humor with their drama, they fall completely on their faces and the drama comes off as feeling just shtick-y or whatever. So how do you mix these together? Our resident expert is Howard.<br />[Howard] I'm the resident expert?<br />[Brandon] Yes, you are.<br />[Howard] Awesome.<br />[Dan] Congratulations.<br />[Howard] I start with the drama and I try and figure out what the salient things are... the salient points that need to be conveyed that are inherently dramatic. Whether they are character moments or plot moments or whatever. I figure out what those points are and what needs to be communicated. Then I take a couple of steps back... because remember what I'm doing is delivering a punch line every day. I take a couple of steps back and I think, "Okay, how do I piggyback a punch line in there?" Sometimes the punch line and the dramatic moment can go hand-in-hand, without the punch line undermining the dramatic moment. Most times, I have to put the drama in the middle of a Sunday strip so that I have enough time...<br />[Brandon] To be funny again.<br />[Howard] To be funny again without undermining it.<br />[Brandon] That's actually fascinating. Because you say... you have told me before, punchline every day. I am going to be funny. So your guiding light is I am funny.<br />[Howard] There will be a punchline.<br />[Brandon] Yet you build the drama first, and then make it funny. Which is interesting.<br />[Howard] Because if the story... if I'm just moving from joke to joke, I get bored. I want to tell a fun story. If that story has big dramatic moments and big reveals, I don't want to spoil those big reveals by slapping a punchline on them and turning them into a pun.<br /><br />[Brandon] I've said many times before... I'm not sure if I've said it on the podcast or not... but for me, humor will make me enjoy my experience when I'm reading a given comic or book or whatever, but when I put it down, the drama and the character are what is going to make me pick it back up again. This is the problem I've had with many of the humorists who are outrageously funny when I read their books. As much as I like... Douglas Adams is an example. I never want to pick up a Douglas Adams book. When I'm reading it, I'm always enjoying it. I think that's a problem with the drama and the character.<br />[Dan] I agree. That's something that I will be able to notice in my own work. The infamous vampire bunny thing that we talk about all the time on this podcast... the early drafts of that, the reason I could tell they weren't working is because if somebody read it straight through, they loved it. Whereas if something came up and they had to stop, they would never go back to it. Because the character was not strong enough and the drama was not strong enough to bring them back, exactly like you were saying. That's always a sign for me, oh, will someone pick this up again, because that's what draws them back into it.<br /><br />[Brandon] Now, Dan, you are writing horror. Horror is infamous for mixing lots of humor in. Why, how, and how do you do it?<br />[Dan] I think one of the reasons for that... at least for me is that... the reason horror works... when it works, the reason it works is because the characters are strong. Because you cannot feel scared reading about someone unless you really identify with them. The characters are what make it work. That's also, for a large part, what makes a lot of humor work. So combining them goes very naturally together. That happens to work out well because you can then use humor to deflate tension when you need to. Because... that's why a lot of horror movies will have it...<br />[Brandon] So you are using it to deflate tension? [Garbled]<br />[Dan] Occasionally. You can't overuse it because then you're not scary. I use it because I think it's interesting and because I want to be funny, but there are times when I know that it's wrong. In the book that I just finished, I had a conversation going with several characters in the car, and it was really funny. I thought at the end, this just doesn't work. Because this can't be funny. It's nice, but it's releasing too much tension. It's supposed to be tense, and it's supposed to be scary. By the end of the scene, we've been laughing the whole time. It just didn't work. I had to go back and excise a lot of that humor from it.<br />[Brandon] That's a balance issue, which I suppose is part of this, is knowing where to put the balancing factor and how much of each. One thing I've noticed in thinking about this topic is when we say humor... one of the problems with this is humor is so widely diverse. What is humor, and what types of humor? I've written the Alcatraz books, which are... one of the main focuses of them is to be funny. But there is also humor in my epic fantasies, and it is a very different type of humor. I think the difference in... I got in a big discussion with my editor once about this regarding the book Warbreaker in which I really wanted to work on the humor. I wanted to have a very humorous story, which was dramatic... very dramatic.<br />[Howard] You had a character in that story who was jokey. He refused to take things seriously and was... he was almost a prankster.<br />[Brandon] I was trying to channel Oscar Wilde and stuff him into that character. The argument with my editor that I had was that he felt that the humor in places was pulling readers... had the potential to pull readers out of the story. When he got that across, and I realized what he was saying... in a book like this, I can't break the fourth wall, certainly. I'm never going to break the fourth wall. But there are like nudging against the fourth wall. The fourth wall is, of course, addressing the reader. But if I made a character make a joke that the reader had to stop and think, "Would they actually be able to make that joke in this world?" An excellent example is in the Mistborn books. There is a time Elend is talking about all the people that Vin has killed. He names off three of them and says that's kind of like a homicidal hat trick. This term...<br />[Howard] Hat trick.<br />[Brandon] I researched and found out it was an ancient term. It has been around for years and years and years. It was long before hockey, it was used. But it has pulled so many readers out because they say, "That's a hockey term. That just pushed me out of the story." I can't do that. In the Alcatraz books, I can. Howard, you can?<br />[Howard] I can get away with that and I do get away with that all the time. Now I am careful... there are times when I am crafting a metaphor and I've got a metaphor that makes me laugh. Metaphors... I use those all the time as punch lines or as setups for punch lines. But then I will go back and look at it again and say, "Okay, let's really look at this. Would that term -- straight from the horse's mouth -- I don't know that I've used that -- but what they really say horses 1000 years from now? What would they use instead of horses?"<br />[Brandon] And you can draw humor from that.<br />[Howard] And I can draw humor from extending the metaphor into the future. That is one of the reasons why... people will write to me and say I love how your stuff is hard science fiction. That's not hard science fiction, it's just I made a joke that felt real in the context of our future.<br />[Dan] One of the things you do that I really enjoy is whenever something shows up that feels like a pop-culture reference, I always know there is going to be a footnote down below explaining how that fits seamlessly into the world after however many thousands of years of development.<br /><br />[Brandon] We're going to break for an advertisement. We're actually going to do something interesting this time. We're doing another audible advertisement, who has been wonderful sponsoring the podcasts. This week, we want to choose the book Hero With A Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell. It's a foundational book dealing with archetypes. A lot of fantasy writers like to use this book kind of as a guidebook almost for writing the hero's journey. It was very influential in Lucas doing the Star Wars films. I have a lot of stuff to say on it because I'm not sure how it should be used or if people use it the right way. But it is a very useful book to read. We are actually going to do a podcast in about six weeks or so in which we deal with Hero With A Thousand Faces. The advertisement this time is for the audio version of Hero With A Thousand Faces. Go give it a download, listen to it, use audible's free promo to get a free copy. Then in six weeks, we will talk about it and do a podcast focused on it as writers how it can help you. <br />[Howard] I've got to tell you, I listened to that book and it blew my mind. It absolutely blew my mind.<br />[Brandon] Hero With A Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell.<br /><br />[Brandon] All right. Back into it. Let's get to the balance issue. How do you know... I think this is one of the things people ask a lot about is... how do you know when to put in the humor and when it's too much?<br />[Howard] I... when it doesn't work. When it's...<br />[Brandon] That's real helpful. Thanks, Howard.<br />[Howard] I know. I read it and I realize this... the drama... I sucked all the wind out of the sails. It's not sailing. I think of... a good example and a bad example in media that we might all be familiar with. Good example, season two, season three of Buffy the Vampire Slayer were wonderful blends of humor and drama.<br />[Brandon] Yeah. Joss Whedon is very good at that.<br />[Howard] Bad example, season seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer which was too dramatic and was a real downer. Another good example, Frighteners by Peter Jackson. I loved the Frighteners because 30 minutes into the film, I thought, oh, this is kind of like a realistic sort of Ghostbusters. It's neat, it's kind of campy, it's fun. Then about 90 minutes into the film, I remember turning to Sandra and saying, "All the funny went away. I'm scared." But I was still very happy to be in the theater. The setups were perfect and the humor backed away in time for us to be terrified. There were some laughs there at the end.<br /><br />[Brandon] What was the difference? How do our listeners actually do this?<br />[Dan] I think... I've talked about character before, but really, hit character really hard. The example I'm going to use here is actually a song, Neil Gaiman's I Google You. You can go out and find it on YouTube, sung by Amanda Palmer in various different settings. It is a brilliant combination of humor and drama. The first half of it is very funny. Just the title itself is already funny. It's about a person who looks up the object of his or her affections online to see what you can find about them. Then halfway through, the song -- because it is staying true to the character, you realize that this is actually a really sad kind of pathetic thing to do with your time. He just follows that character and stays true to it past the point where it kind of stops being funny and start being really sad. It works really well because he stays very true to the character.<br />[Brandon] The idea is to not use your humor to undermine character.<br />[Howard] Never undermine your characters.<br />[Brandon] But that's a really big temptation, I think, for writers because it's an easy joke. It's an easy way to... to slap down or make a character break out of their character for a moment to get the joke across. I think these are things... don't break character just to get a joke.<br />[Dan] The scene from my book...<br />[Howard] If you've got a really good joke to tell, play on words or whatever that you just think is really funny and you want to have one of your characters say it... figure out which character it fits with, and make sure that that character has a reason to be in the scene and to say it. Don't just give it to the next character who needs a line. Because your readers... if you've been good at characterization to this point, your readers will see through that and it will knock them out of the story.<br />[Brandon] Don't use humor, also, to undermine a character objective. If they're... a good example of this, I watched Doctor Horrible for the first time last week. It was fantastic. It is a tragic comedy. Through the entire thing, I identified very much with the character and he never broke out of his character despite breaking into song and singing ridiculous, silly things. What he was doing was... none of the jokes were actually undermining the character's motivations and objectives. I guess that's the same thing as not breaking out of character. But I think...<br />[Howard] He never broke out of character, and they never broke the rules of the form. One of the rules for musical theater is that you don't ask the question, "Why are we all singing?"<br />[Brandon] Right. There you go.<br />[Howard] The one time I've seen that rule broken was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the musical episode, in which asking that question was the plot. So it was okay.<br /><br />[Brandon] I would say the other big thing to keep in mind is to understand the different types of humor. Having characters laugh wryly about their situation because they're all about to die is very different from having characters laugh at their situation and try to make a silly joke at the wrong moment. Different types of humor can be appropriate in different times and can work. Some work better with your drama, some work better with your horror.<br />[Howard] I find that if a character is joking about something, and you as the writer look at it and realize, "You know that's the sort of joke that would make everybody uncomfortable, I don't know that I should tell it." If it was in character for that character to tell that joke, let them tell it and have somebody else call them on it.<br />[Dan] Oh, I got to do that several times in the three John Cleaver books. He is such a dark person, he has such a dark sense of humor, that he would frequently say things that the other characters just didn't think were funny at all. Even though the reader usually would laugh, then go "Oh, yeah, that other guy is right. I shouldn't have laughed at that." That's a great reaction to get an actually helped advance the humor and the horror aspect of the books.<br />[Howard] I laughed twice. Because you made me laugh, and then you made me scowl at me for laughing, and then I laughed again because you made me scowl.<br />[Dan] Well, perfect.<br /><br />[Brandon] All right. Howard, we're going to make you do the writing prompt because you're the expert on this.<br />[Howard] Okay. Take the most intense character tragedy you can imagine for a character that you've already got and find humor in it for another character to point out. Whether or not it's appropriate, find humor in that tragedy.<br />[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. [The podcast cut off at this point. We can only assume that Brandon provided the tag line "You're out of excuses, now go write."] urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:129022 2009-11-24T01:04:41Z 2009-11-24T01:04:41Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 26: Nanowrimo<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/22/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-26-nanowrimo/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/22/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-26-nanowrimo/</a><br /><br />Key points: Nanowrimo, National Novel Writing Month, is an opportunity to write 50,000 words in November along with 160,000 other people worldwide. See <a href="http://www.nanowrimo.org/">http://www.nanowrimo.org/</a> Nanowrimo forces you to write quickly, turn off your internal editor, shut up and write. <br /><br />What do you do when characters act dumb? If it's in character, fine. If it's not, what information are they missing, what emotions cloud their judgment? Forging ahead is one of the best ways to find an alternate solution. What do you do when main characters digress? Keep writing, and expect to throw away words. Save the good stuff for another book, because there will be other Novembers. What do you do when the pacing changes? If you're comfortable, keep going. You discover aspects of your style by writing. It's possible to have character development in action -- fight scenes can reveal and develop characters. Getting ideas on paper lets you see them and develop them, plus it gives you good practice. Nanowrimo -- keep writing.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Howard] I'm Howard.<br />[Dan] And I'm Dan.<br />[Howard] And there's only two of us.<br />[Dan] Because Brandon is a loser.<br />[Howard] On tour, in airplanes.<br />[Dan] Yes.<br />[Howard] But enough of that. We are here... it's actually not just the two of us, there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine plus two plus producer Jordo. We're here at Dragon's Keep on a Tuesday night with the nanowrimo crew. Everybody shout hello.<br />[Chorus] Hello.<br />[Howard] Almost like a live studio audience. Dan, what are we doing here?<br /><br />[Dan] We are talking about nanowrimo, as we have said. Nanowrimo is National Novel Writing Month. It is every November. Howard, tell us a little bit more about what it is and why it's cool.<br />[Howard] Nanowrimo is cool because it is an opportunity to share the experience of trying to write 50,000 words with 160,000 other people worldwide via the nanowrimo website and via... I'm going to call it a study group, although it's different than a study... what do you call your group?<br />[Unknown] A writing group.<br />[Howard] A writing group. I should have known that...<br />[Dan] A writing group. There we go.<br />[Howard] It's a writing group. We did a whole podcast on writing groups and I couldn't come up with that word. During the course of the month, you attempt to write 50,000 words that are contiguous and consecutive and sensible and novelistic...<br />[Dan] Well, ideally, but they don't have to be.<br />[Howard] Dan's writing a poem. [laughter]<br />[Dan] I've cheated a couple of times on nanowrimo, but that's okay. The main benefit in my mind of nanowrimo for those who want to become published authors is that it forces you to write quickly. It forces you to turn off your internal editor. It forces you to stop looking forward to the book you eventually are going to write and just shut up and write it. I have found that... I have done nanowrimo three times. It's been fantastically valuable to me as a writer.<br /><br />[Howard] Awesome. We are here with this group of nanowrimo writers and we've got questions for them. Jeff, let's start with your question. You had a fantastic question. I'm going to reach over here with my microphone so that people can hear you.<br />[Jeff] What do you do when your character has to do something dumb or your characters just do do something dumb?<br />[Dan] Characters who make dumb decisions. What do you do with that? Howard, what do you do with characters who make dumb decisions?<br />[Howard] It depends on the dumb decision. If it's a dumb decision coming from a dumb character, then test it, it didn't character, we move forward, we call it character driven, and I'm happy. If it's a decision that had to be made in this way because that's what moves the plot forward, but the character should be smarter than this, then we're being plot driven instead of character driven.<br />[Dan] Well, plot driven in a bad way. This is something that we call the idiot plot. You'll see it a lot... it shows up especially in low rent romantic comedies. You'll see all the time there.<br />[Howard] You just said that Jeff is writing a low-rent idiot plot.<br />[Dan] No, I didn't. It's a nanowrimo book. No, I didn't say that at all. What I said is that used improperly, that that's what it can be. It's called the idiot plot. It's a plot that can only happen the way it happens because one of the characters is a moron. But as you said, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If the character would make a dumb decision, awesome. In fact, I think that that's great. One of the reasons that I thought the new Battle Star Galactica was so successful is because every character was flawed and every character made stupid decisions every now and then. That made them seem much more real and much more human -- even the ones that weren't human.<br />[Howard] Let me approach it from a different angle. You're asking the question because it sounds like you are not comfortable with the decision the character is making. You don't want to make the character be dumb when the character isn't dumb area I would go back into... well, for nanowrimo I wouldn't do a rewrite. I would just forge ahead, let him make the decision or let her make the decision as is. But consider on your rewrite, withholding key information from that character so that the decision they make, makes perfect sense given the facts that they had.<br />[Dan] That's a very wise choice to make. Also, if you want the character to go ahead and make a decision that the reader can consider poor, give that character reasons to make a decision like that. It might be a bad decision, but they are very angry at the time or they have some kind of emotional reason clouding their judgment. A bad decision could work perfectly.<br />[Howard] Accidentally took two too many diphenhydramine and...<br />[Dan] I see you know Jeff, then. Now, the other direction to approach this from is changing what that decision is. You have to look very carefully at your plot and say, "Well, I thought it was going to be solved in this way or I thought it was going to head in this direction, but that involves a stupid decision and I don't want to do that." Then you take a good hard look at it and say, "Well, is there a different way that this problem could be solved that would allow this character to make a different decision?"<br />[Howard] You know what I'm going to say? I'm going to say that for nanowrimo, turn off your internal editor and just keep writing. Go fix it in post. Just keep going. Unless you feel so bad about it that you absolutely can't proceed. In which case, nanowrimo is here to teach you to proceed anyway.<br />[Dan] Exactly. Forging ahead, honestly, is one of the best ways to find an alternate solution. Just go ahead and have the character make a smart decision and see where it takes you. It doesn't work for everybody, but it might work for you.<br /><br />[Howard] Did I recall, we had another question from...<br />[Dan] Heather.<br />[Howard] Over here. Heather, go ahead and ask your question for us.<br />[Heather] What would you recommend -- for specifically nano novelers who are trying to get this crazy amount of words done -- when what their main character is doing doesn't really fit with their main character and they end up having to erase about 2000 words.<br />[Dan] I've run into that problem many times. I've actually talked about this specific scene before where I had two characters talking on a bridge and it was a wonderful conversation that did not progress the story and ended up taking the characters in a place they shouldn't have gone. I had to axe it. But this being Nanowrimo, you don't necessarily have to throw it all away. Howard, what do you suggest?<br />[Howard] Two pieces of advice. One, yeah, by all means, keep writing. Just keep... anything you can do to keep momentum, keep momentum. Second, expect to have to throw away words. Expect that once you've written 50,000 words and your story has a beginning and a middle and an end, you're going to go back and you're going to edit it. It's going to end up being 35,000 words long because you did all the pruning that needed to be done. Those 2000... that discussion, Dan, that your characters had on the bridge? Did you actually delete those words or did you take that chapter and just push it off to the side?<br />[Dan] I totally saved it and reused it later.<br />[Howard] Okay. So those 2000 words you've got? If it's fun dialogue, if it was interesting action, save it. Use it in a different book. Because November doesn't come once a century, it comes once a year. There will be other Novembers.<br />[Dan] There we go.<br />[Howard] I almost said because November doesn't just come once a year... wait a minute.<br />[Dan] Howard follows a very different calendar. One of the important things to remember about Nanowrimo is that, in truth, the goal is not to complete a novel, it is to complete a first draft. Your first draft does not have to be perfect. In fact, if you're pounding it out at this rate, it is not going to be perfect. If you just accept that, then you're happy. So you can keep that, knowing that later on you're going to have to justify events differently or you're going to have to cut that scene out. But for the purposes of Nanowrimo, yeah, you got 2000 words, good for you. Don't throw that away. It's great. Keep going. I think it is time.<br />[Howard] I was going to say, speaking of cutting and then keeping going, let's cut for a commercial and then we can keep going.<br /><br />[Howard] This week's episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by Audible.<br />[Howard] Joining us as part of a Nanowrimo group is Nathan Hale who illustrated Shannon and Dean Hale's Rapunzel's Revenge which was nominated for an Eisner. Nathan, you've been listening to some audio books lately. What have you liked?<br />[Nathan] I just listened to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five narrated by washed up 80s actor Ethan Hawke.<br />[Howard] Oh, wow.<br />[Nathan] Yeah, it was really good. You got to hear all the pronunciations of the religion in the book about Granfalloons and uh... what's the planet that they're on? I should know this, I just listened to it. Anyway, it was great.<br />[Howard] Fantastic. Visit audiblepodcast.com/excuse for free trial membership.<br /><br />[Howard] And we're back.<br />[Dan] We're back. We have a question from Stephen.<br />[Howard] We do. I'm going to slip off my microphone and hold it in front of Stephen here. Go ahead, Stephen, you're close enough.<br />[Stephen] I'm writing the second book of a trilogy right now. In my first book, I was able to introduce my characters and throw in a lot of character development. But it seems like in my second book, I'm just going straight from action scene to action scene to action scene without a lot of down time. Is this a problem for the second book in a trilogy?<br />[Howard] What do you think, Dan?<br />[Dan] What do I think? I think that being the second book of a trilogy is in some ways irrelevant to the point. Any book can have too much or too little action regardless of where it falls in a series. In this case... I guess the best answer is to say that if it works, it works. If you feel like there's too much action, it's likely that your readers will feel the same thing. If you feel like there are things being left out, then your readers are probably going to feel the same thing. If on the other hand you are thinking, "This is so awesome. I can't stop typing because this is a really exciting, really thrilling book." then ideally your readers will feel that as well. Howard, what about you?<br />[Howard] I'm going to ask you a follow-up question, Stephen. The first book in the trilogy... was this your first book that you'd written?<br />[Stephen] No, it was my second one.<br />[Howard] Your second. What we're seeing here is an increase in 33% of your experience in writing. That may be what has affected your pacing. It is entirely possible that the book you wrote first wasn't written as interestingly as the one that is being written now. I for one love reading a book that goes from action to action to action without all that boring character development. I'm just... I'm throwing this out because as a new writer, you're going to discover aspects of your style while you write that... the only way to discover them is to keep writing. You've written... what, at this point, 150,000 words? How many words have you written, total? Do you know? Between your first two books and this one?<br />[Stephen] Approximately 130,000 words right now.<br />[Howard] OK, 130,000 words. You're 10% of the way to your first real word according to what's his name...<br />[Dan] Whoever said that.<br />[Howard] Who said you have to write a million words. Jerk. The point is, this is fantastic. You've written 130,000 words. I think that discovering that you're writing something that's more quickly paced than what you wrote first is going to be good for you. Finish it this way and move on. Way too many... in my estimation, anyway... way too many second installments and trilogies are just a placeholder to get me to the third book. What is it, second book syndrome? Second movie syndrome?<br />[Dan] The second one always tends to slow down a little. If yours is speeding up, that could be a great sign. There's also to consider that it's entirely possible to have all of that character development in the action. A great example of this is Joe Abercrombie. His books are not nonstop action, they do have several slow scenes in them. Or, I won't say slow scenes, but slower paced than the fight scenes. But every one of his fight scenes is an opportunity to reveal and develop character. In fact, that's where the characters tend to grow, is when they're halfway through cutting some barbarian's head off. So use this fast pace and throw in all that character development. It's entirely possible to do both at the same time.<br /><br />[Howard] Awesome. Let's see, can we come up with another question before the end of the cast?<br />[Dan] Do we have any more questions from the audience?<br />[Howard] I think we've got room for one more.<br />[Dan] We have a question right there from a young man named...<br />[unknown] Nathan Hale.<br />[Nathan] Hi. This is Nathan Hale. I just want to know what you did, Dan, with your nanowrimo books that you finished.<br />[Dan] My nanowrimo books that I finished? I have them on my computer, and every now and then I look at them and go, "Wow. I should really get back to that someday." Let's see. The first one I did for nanowrimo was The Saga of Crag, and it was about a barbarian.<br />[Howard] It sounds like Krod Mandoon and the...<br />[Dan] Yeah, it was really ridiculous. It was a really cool idea that I don't think I would have done if it had not been nanowrimo because it was very silly and very weird. I would like to go back to it someday. I am glad, however, that I used that idea and actually saw it through. A lot of writers have a tendency... especially ones who have never written at all before... to think, "Oh, I want to save this idea for when I am a better writer and use it then." I personally don't agree with that philosophy. I think that getting that idea out on paper allowed me to see it more fully, to see it in a different way. It made everything I have written since much better because I had more practice. Now I know, next time I go back to revise that or more likely to just rewrite it from the beginning, it will be a much better book because of that. That has been my experience with nanowrimo, is it's a great way to get these ideas out, look at them, do a first draft of an idea that you aren't sure is going to work any other way. That is my answer to that question.<br /><br />[Howard] Well, we're out of time, so you're out of excuses...<br />[Dan] Wait, we have a writing prompt.<br />[Howard] Oh, we need a writing prompt. You're right, we need a writing prompt.<br />[Dan] A writing prompt? OK...<br />[Howard] Should we ask the crowd for a writing prompt? Anybody want to throw a writing prompt at our listeners?<br />[Katherine] Have you done the traveling shovel yet?<br />[Howard] I have not heard about the traveling shovel. What's your name, please?<br />[Katherine] Katherine.<br /><br />[Howard] Katherine, give us a writing prompt that involves a traveling shovel.<br />[Katherine] On the nano forums, I don't know if any of you all have been there but there's this sort of motif about the traveling shovel of death. One of your characters gets killed with a shovel somehow. You just have to work it into your story.<br />[Dan] Awesome.<br />[Howard] There's your writing prompt. Kill somebody with a shovel. No, wait a minute. Write about killing somebody with a shovel. You're out of excuses, now...<br />[Dan] Kill somebody with a shovel.<br />[Howard] Go write. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:128571 2009-11-18T00:39:53Z 2009-11-18T00:39:53Z What's the opposite of no commercial interruptions?<br /><br />Even the announcers had trouble figuring out just what to say about this one. They started out saying that it was an event about modern culture, then explained that in this case the culture is CM, or commercials. Advertisements. The organizer apparently is French, and he has collected 500 ads from around the world. All for a somewhat lengthy show that he apparently brings to various cities. And this time, it's coming to Osaka!<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />They showed some of the ads. One was from New Zealand, with a nude man getting out of bed, along with his pink-furred bedmate (clearly male face, although the body, arms, and hands were covered in pink fur). He gets ready for the day, with his pink friend wrapped around him at every opportunity. Then as he walks out the door, his pink friend finally leaves him at the door. WIth a pleading look. And he looks cold and withdrawn. He steps into the sidewalk, meeting another man who is also doing the body language of defeat -- and looking at another pink furred critter in a doorway. And we see people in their houses with pink companions. Finally we find out that Pink Batts keep you warm. Insulation, apparently.<br /><br />Another one was from a few years back, from Africa. It starts with the hero in shorts, open vest, and mask telling his lion to wait and watch, then he sneaks up to a house. He pops three big batteries off his belt and into his old-style portable radiophone, calling his beautiful female sidekick in her car. He tells her that the poachers are in the house, and that he is going in. She tells him to be careful, and don't forget his Wonder batteries. Then we see him pop more batteries into his flashlight and tape recorder. He pushes the tape recorder into the room along the floor. Suddenly one of the poachers hears something, and goes to investigate. As he turns the corner, the hero hits him light from his flashlight, and he jumps back. Then the hero charges into the room and kicks one, knocking the table into the other. The first poacher tries to escape, and the hero calls Wonder -- and our favorite lion blocks the door. Pan to focus on the hero, then closeup to the lion medallion on his chest for the tagline. Buy Wonder batteries, with the full power of the lion in each battery.<br /><br />Anyway, some very odd ads. And there will be 500 plus ads, showing from 10:30 PM to 5:30 AM, along with all you can drink for one cover charge. And seven hours of advertisements. Nonstop. I think they should provide story breaks, to provide some kind of continuing background thread to help you fight off the flicker, flicker, flicker of unbridled consumerism.<br /><br />So what is the opposite of no commercial interruptions? No non-commercial continuity? urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:128491 2009-11-17T00:57:32Z 2009-11-17T00:57:32Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 25: The Business of Writing Comics<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/15/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-25-the-business-of-writing-comics/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/15/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-25-the-business-of-writing-comics/<br /></a><br />Key points: Professional relationships and keep plugging. Don't be afraid to try other things, you need a portfolio more than a specialty. Make your deadlines and be easy to work with. And work hard -- it takes passion and love to break into the comics industry.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Dan] We are back again with Jake Black, author of The Authorized Ender's Companion and many and varied comic books. This week we are going to be talking about the business of writing comics. Let's start with the burning question that everyone has had all week long. How did you get into this business and what advice can you give them to do the same?<br />[Jake] I'm glad that you asked it, "How did I get into this business?" rather than how would someone get into this business, because the short answer is you can't.<br />[Dan] And that's our episode...<br />[Howard] I've heard Jake tell this before. I love this explanation.<br /><br />[Jake] A couple of... well, almost 10 years ago now, I started as an intern on the TV show Smallville. It was heavily overseen by DC Comics. Obviously, it's a Superman property and they are very specific in watching over the intellectual property. I started as an intern. I was a writer's intern. They had me working on online projects... they had... Smallville was the first show to do viral marketing for the show or the movie or whatever. Actually won a lot of awards. One of the things that I did is I wrote in character for the Smallville newspaper -- quote unquote newspaper. I wrote as the characters on the show writing for the newspaper. After the show was on the air for about a year, DC Comics decided to do comics based on the show. Because I was still really good friends with the people that worked on it, I asked if I could be brought on to do one of these comics. I cowrote a story with one of the head writers on the show. It was published by DC Comics. That meant that my first comic book that I wrote was published by DC Comics. That's very unusual in the industry. I had really no credibility and I wouldn't have been able to do that if I wanted to just jump in and write comics.<br />[Dan] If you didn't have the TV show background helping you out. That's actually more common than I think people think, is getting in from other media. You can see that with Joss Whedon and Scott Card and all these people.<br />[Howard] It's not just getting in from other media, it's getting in from who you know. The fact that you worked there as an intern, knew the names of these people, and had a good working relationship with them.<br /><br />[Jake] That... we talked about this in last week's show, like fan fiction. I don't think this was part of the actual podcast, but we made the joke that I get paid to write fan fiction, basically. I think that this professional working relationship is the thing that sets apart a professional from a fan fiction community. A lot of times, the fans don't have the best reputation on working on something like this. You don't want to bash your audience, so I'm really trying to be careful here. Because I want to make clear that fan fiction is a fantastic thing. In fact, I wrote fan fiction when I was in high school. When I was working on Smallville, they asked me what my writing experience was and I said that I would just write... Lois and Clark stories was the example that I used. I would write Lois and Clark stories because I wanted to read them. I didn't even... this was before the Internet was really a common thing, so I didn't really have anyone to share these stories with. I just wrote them because I wanted to read them. The writers that I told this to... one of them was Mark Verheiden who went on to be an executive producer on Battlestar Galactica. He wrote the movie The Mask and Timecop. He's a producer on Heroes now. And Michael Green who went on to work on Jack and Bobbie and... what's that show that shot in Utah that was on WB? I can't remember what it's called.<br />[Howard] Touched by an Angel?<br />[Jake] Everwood. That was it. No, not Touched by an Angel.<br />[Dan] Keep going.<br />[Jake] Then he created the show Kings that aired for a couple of episodes on NBC. But they were really supportive of the idea that I had written fan fiction because I cut my teeth. Combining that with the professional... I don't know if it's demeanor or what's the right thing to call it... but the working relationship that I established with the staff at Smallville. They felt comfortable and confident going to DC Comics and saying...<br />[Dan] And recommending you.<br />[Jake] And recommending me. Right.<br /><br />[Dan] It sounds like what you're saying is what we say when people ask how do you get your first novel published is you have to put in the work beforehand. You have to... you can't go in cold. You need to work it before, you need to do a lot of stuff that will never see the light of day, a lot of stuff that gets rejected. Then eventually, you break in. And Hooray. Now that you're in, what do you do to find work? You started doing a comic or two for DC, now you're doing all these things, you're on Ninja Turtle titles, you're on a lot of other titles. How did you get those... how do you find new work as a comic writer?<br />[Jake] It's constant. You mentioned a lot of rejection. I still get a lot of rejection. So much of what I pitch just never works or is successful. It's maintaining the relationships, though, that so key. I think that's the same in prose writing. You have to have a good relationship with the editor. Because editors have all the power in the publishing world, whether it's prose, whether it's comics, whatever it is. I've done a lot of animation work, too, and I've done it again through relationships. It's really cool to see... kind of trace the path I guess for how these relationships happened. After my first comic was published by DC, I thought that meant I would be able to work... I had my pick of the titles at DC and Marvel. Because I had done one comic at DC Comics, I was going to be like Jeff Jones or Neil Gaiman.<br />[Howard] So there is a reality check waiting for you.<br />[Jake] Yeah, there was a reality check waiting for me. I think that I... I think every copy of that first Smallville comic that I wrote has passed my hands at some point because I kept buying them on eBay and sending them out to every editor that I could find. It wasn't just at DC and Marvel, but it was at independent publishers and everywhere. That's what got me on Ninja Turtles, was the fact that I had done this DC thing.<br />[Dan] Who is the publisher for the Ninja Turtles?<br />[Jake] It is Mirage currently, but only for about three more months. Mirage is Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman who created the Ninja Turtles, they established Mirage Studios 25 years ago. They called it that because it wasn't really a studio, it was just them, and they needed to have a corporate identity, so it was a mirage. But Mirage just sold the IP rights to Viacom like two weeks ago. They're publishing Turtle comics through May, but then that's it. They hold the rights so Peter can do more Ninja Turtle comics if he wants to, but he's so burned out on 25 years of Ninja Turtles that...<br />[Howard] You said something interesting. You said that you got that job because you had the Smallville credit. I'm going to take issue with that. You got that job because you were able to put a Smallville comic that had your name on it in front of them. And you beat the streets for months doing that, putting that Smallville comic in front of people, and you've got one bite.<br />[Jake] Right.<br />[Howard] Okay. That's... a lesson for our listeners. Should we let them chew on that lesson while we break for a commercial?<br />[Dan] I believe we should.<br /><br />[Howard] With Brandon out of town signing Wheel of Time books, it's appropriate for me to plug Wheel of Time books from audible. I've been listening to the first five Wheel of Time titles recorded by Kate Reading and Michael Kramer. Fantastic audio books. They've been very, very engrossing. They are also very, very long which is why I've only read... or had five books read to me. When I'm sure everybody else is all caught up and can pick up The Gathering Storm right now. Grab yourself some Wheel of Time audio books. Good stuff. Visit audiblepodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership.<br /><br />[Howard] And we're back.<br />[Dan] And we are back. We were talking about the importance of putting in the work. As soon as you have something, you have one credit in comics, then you can't just rest on that, you have to put in a lot more work. In many ways it sounds like getting your second shot at a comic was possibly more difficult than getting your first shot at a comic.<br />[Jake] It was. It for sure was. I think every story is unique in the comic industry. Nobody has the same way that they got in. Though my story is shockingly similar to Jeff Jones. I'm not Jeff Jones, by any means. He's far more successful than writing comics than I will ever be.<br />[Dan] Not yet.<br />[Jake] No. I can tell you for actual full-on fact that he is far more successful than I will ever be. I was an intern on a comic book related TV show. I was working in the comics industry that way. It transitioned into the actual format of a comic book. So many other ways, you know?<br /><br />[Dan] Let me anticipate some of the fan questions, because I know that there's going to be a lot of people asking these. The first is a question I get all the time and I'm sure that people are going to wonder. As a comics artist, is there livable money in that? Do you make a living at that?<br />[Jake] I don't write just comics. It is possible to make a living as a comics creator, Howard can tell you that. But it's not exclusively what I do. I wouldn't make enough money if I just did comics.<br />[Dan] Which is why you do other things like animation. But you do make a living as a creative writer?<br />[Howard] Yeah. You're making a living as a writer and that's...<br />[Dan] That's the dream, so...<br />[Howard] Comics is a great thing to add to your stable of writing, especially if you're interested in writing things like screenplays or animation because the formats are almost interchangeable. They're not fully interchangeable but...<br />[Jake] There's a lot of crossover industry wise, too. The people that run the animation industry are... like the story editors on a show is the same as the editor in comics, and a lot of the story editors in the animation industry are the top names in comics. People like Christopher Yost and Dwayne McDuffie and people like that. They're doing the same thing that I'm doing, they're making a living as a writer...<br />[Howard] Follow the money. Disney owns Marvel, and Warner owns DC, and the marriage...<br />[Jake] Viacom owns the Ninja Turtles.<br />[Howard] The marriage of full motion media and comics is complete [evil laugh]<br /><br />[Dan] Here's another anticipatory question. To what extent can producing your own comic, whether it's online or just something self produced... to what extent can that get you into a real job at an actual comics studio?<br />[Jake] That's a real common way that people break in. The challenge now though... and I think this is in part because of the economy, in part because of just the way the industry has evolved over the last few years, is it's really hard to get your self creator owned comic book series out there. The industry is controlled, maybe even monopolized, by the distributor Diamond who sends out to the comic book stores. They sell to comic book stores. Comic book stores order their merchandise from Diamond comic distributors. Diamond has to make a profit. They have recently, just in the last six months or so, raised the minimum on numbers of issues that you have to sell for them to carry or distribute your title. That's not to say that there are no other distribution options, but it's a much more uphill battle to get out that way. Having said that, if you're doing creator owned title to make money, you're in the wrong business. Because you're not going to make money, for the most part. You might be fortunate like Howard and hit a chord and have thousands of fans...<br />[Dan] Hundreds of thousands.<br />[Jake] But for the most part, when people go into a comic book store, comic books are four bucks an issue now. They're going to go with the ones...<br />[Howard] They're going to go with the stuff they know. The other thing is that if you're trying to create a creator owned property, you lack the infrastructure to get into Diamond, to get into these comic book stores. You can get into the local stores. Yeah, you can shop that around, maybe you can use that as a resume piece, and say, "Hey, look, I wrote a comic. Will you let me write a comic for you?"<br />[Jake] I think that's a more successful route to take.<br /><br />[Howard] That is a more successful route. What I would tell people is that if you really want to do a creator owned comic, do it as a web comic. Because the moment you start trying to burden yourself with print, the whole infrastructure of print distribution, you're going to kill the creative fire. Spend some time just writing stories and putting them online. If you get lucky and strike a chord like I did... there's about 100 similar stories to mine out there were guys are making a full-time living out of it... then that'll work. I would not... I strongly discourage people from self-publishing comic books. What a horrible idea that is.<br />[Jake] There's competition. I think... Image has one, Top Cow I know has one. DC runs kind of a web comic, but it's not really a web comic. I don't think...<br />[Howard] You're talking about Zuda. Yeah, there is Zuda, and there is the Amazon... the top comic contest on Amazon that they are recently doing...<br />[Jake] Top Cow does Pilot Season, but even Pilot Season is tough. So there's options or opportunities for you to get your creator owned stuff out there to be picked up by a bigger company but again...<br /><br />[Dan] More likely, you're just going to catch somebody's attention and then they'll say, "Here, write my thing for me." We talked about some contests, we talked about how you were interning with DC. If somebody is out there and wants to get into this business, what other routes are there for them to get their work in front of the right people? Do you recommend that they go to certain conventions? What kind of stuff can they do?<br />[Jake] Yeah. They should go to conventions, but smaller conventions. Not San Diego. Don't try to get work from San Diego because it's so massive that the editors don't really even look at what they're given there anymore. But there's one in Phoenix that I think the publishers go to or at least some editors. There's one in Seattle called Emerald City which is a fantastic convention.<br />[Howard] Emerald City Comic Con is a delightful event.<br />[Jake] Even the New York Comic Con is better than San Diego. It's a huge convention, but again...<br />[Dan] More likely to have an opportunity...<br />[Jake] Face time...<br />[Dan] to pitch an editor or to show someone your work. Well, very good. We are essentially out of time. Do you have any final words on the business of comics?<br /><br />[Jake] I know that Howard wants me to say this part because he loves it so much.<br />[Dan] Oh, now I'm excited.<br />[Jordo] This would not be luxury.<br />[Jake] I have a friend and mentor in the industry who is named Mark Wade. He's written over 1000 comic books in his 25 year career. He learned from someone, and I can't remember who it was, I meant to look it up today before I came, but... He used to say that you need two of three things to be successful in comics. You need to be the most brilliant writer that ever lived, you need to absolutely make your deadlines, and you need to be the editor's favorite person to work with. If you have two of these three things, you'll make it. I tend to think that I meet my deadlines and people like working with me more than my stuff is brilliant. I don't really think my stuff is necessarily brilliant. Having said that, he changed his mind recently and said really, you just have to be good now. The industry is moving in such a way that if you're not good now, the companies don't have time to wait for you to get good. You may only have one shot to break in. That can be defeatist, but I think it's pretty realist as well. Also, the other thing that he likes -- that Howard likes is, this is another Mark Wade quote, is it's kind of like breaking into a military-industrial complex. Everyone has their own way of getting in, but once they find the hole that you tore in the fence to get in, they patch that and make sure no one else can get in that way. So every experience is unique, every story is unique, and you just... if you work hard enough, you can do it. If you're talented enough, you can do it. But it is a really, really hard industry to break into.<br />[Howard] You've really got to love the industry in order to even start that. It's... if you want to write comics, you've got to be doing it because that's where your passion lies. Because if you're not passionate about writing comics, then your first setback is going to send you into writing technical articles for Wired.<br />[Dan] And on that depressing note...<br />[Howard] I am so sorry.<br />[Dan] No. The note we will end on is, it is possible, we are sitting in the presence of a man who has done it and who makes it his living. So go out and do it.<br /><br />[Howard] I have a writing prompt.<br />[Dan] Writing prompt? Let's hear it.<br />[Howard] Our superhero gained his superpowers by writing technical articles for Wired.<br />[Dan] Excellent. You're out of excuses, now go write. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:128243 2009-11-16T12:14:28Z 2009-11-16T12:14:28Z On NHK (Japan Public TV) there was a transition just now to a short piece about an artist's eco residence... and during the intro, the background music had a few recognizable phrases, and I found myself humming along...<br /><br />...he shaved his legs... take a walk on the wild side...<br /><br />I have to admit, I laughed long and hard. Then I went and found the words, just to check my memory. Right, Quincy Jones, Walk on the Wild Side... and... oh, yeah, those lyrics... I'll bet they didn't translate all of those into Japanese. They used the English lyrics, just a couple of clips almost inaudible behind the announcer, but... I heard it.<br /><br />It does sound nice, though. And for those who recognize the tune or words, it is kind of a nice break to hear that kind of a song on public TV. We are the people our parents warned us about, I guess... urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:127771 2009-11-12T00:19:59Z 2009-11-12T00:19:59Z The human interest piece in yesterday's noon public TV was about oyster farming. I have to admit, I've never thought much about it. Turns out that oyster farmers worry about water quality, much as dirt farmers get concerned about the soil. And then there are those oysters smoking...<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />Yesterday's Furosato (hometown) piece at lunch on TV was interesting. Basically, we went to visit an oyster farm. The farmer stood on a square grid of wooden beams maybe 2 feet apart -- with 8 to 10 beams across, in the middle of the bay. The TV team was in a boat pulled up to the raft. <br /><br />The beams had ropes on them, but before we got to that, he took a cup of water from the surface of the water between his feet and asked the visiting star -- a comedian -- to taste it. The comedian tried it, somewhat gingerly, and looked surprised. It was fairly fresh, even though they were well out in a saltwater bay. The farmer explained that they had had rain, so the top water was fresh -- and that it would kill the oysters. So they lower the oysters.<br /><br />Next he showed us his "water tester." It was a beer bottle sitting on a good-sized stone, wired together so that the beer bottle stood upright. The wire mesh also held a rope, and there was a wooden plug tied to the rope above the bottle. The farmer pushed that plug into the mouth of the beer bottle. Then he lowered the stone and bottle and rope into the water, showing us the red marks on the rope that let him know how deep it is. At 1.8 m -- roughly 70 inches, or 5'10" -- he stopped lowering. Then he jerked the rope. He pointed out the bubbles that came floating up, waited a minute, then pulled the whole rig up quickly. He poured some of the water in the beer bottle into the cup and let the star taste this. The comedian made a face and pronounced it salty. I got the impression that the farmer could have been much more specific.<br /><br />The farmer explained that the oysters like the minerals that the rains bring, but they will die if they are left in the fresh water. So there's a balance. He said when there's a typhoon, he has lowered them to 4 m to keep them safe.<br /><br />Of course, he pulled up a line and showed us the oysters. There were several clusters on a rope. He said that raft had about 170 lines, and that he has about 4000 lines altogether. He also explained that the oysters he was showing us -- he took one off and opened it -- these were two-year-old oysters. He thinks this is a good size. He said that lots of people will sell you one-year-old oysters, but he doesn't think they're very good.<br /><br />One other part of the short segment was interesting to me. They had an underwater camera that showed us the oysters hanging on their ropes in clusters. While we were watching, one of the oysters smoked. It blew out a cloud of white specks that floated out and up. Then a moment or two later, another one blew a similar cloud of smoke. I have to admit, if they explained what this was, I missed it, but I found the image of the oysters hanging in their watery clusters, blowing smoke, quite charming.<br /><br />So -- that was our 10 minute or so introduction to oyster farming. Frankly, I hadn't realized that they have to raise and lower the oysters to keep them in the best water. Or that they smoke while they are growing up! urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:127496 2009-11-10T00:27:37Z 2009-11-10T00:27:37Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 24: Writing Comics with Jake Black<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/08/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-24-writing-comics-with-jake-black/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/08/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-24-writing-comics-with-jake-black/</a><br /><br />Key Points: Comic scripts need to be clear enough in stage directions and dialogue for the rest of the creative team to figure out what's going on. Be prepared to adjust and tweak. Comic characters don't talk a lot -- 20 or fewer words in a balloon. It's a visual medium, and dialogue and captions eat up art space.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Howard] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by audible. Visit audiblepodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership.<br /><br />[Jake] And I'm Jake.<br />[Dan] Jake Black is filling in with us this week for New York Times best-selling author Brandon Sanderson. Jake, you are the author of the Authorized Ender's Companion. You also write for Ninja Turtle Comics. Tell us more about yourself, you are a very accomplished man.<br />[Jake] I appreciate that. I don't know that I've accomplished that much, but... I wrote the Authorized Ender's Companion. It's the encyclopedia of the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card in stores November 10. I've also written a bunch of comic books. I've written various projects for the TV show, Smallville, written animation for the Chaotic based on the collectible card game, also Ben 10 Alien Force, Batman Brave and Bold, a bunch of comic books, Ender's Game comics, Ninja Turtle Comics... I'm doing some stuff for DC comics, Marvel...<br />[Dan] That's awesome.<br />[Howard] After hearing you say that, I know that a zillion people are already wondering how you get into that line of work and we're going to tell them. We'll answer that question...<br />[Dan] Next week. Mwaa-ha-ha. We are going to do this as two parts. This week is the creative side of writing comics. Next week is the business side of writing comics. All those questions, save them for next week or...<br />[Howard] You can post them in the forum, but we are recording two episodes tonight. This is non-interactive.<br /><br />[Dan] Let's go ahead and start with the nuts and bolts of the writing, then, Jake and Howard. You both write comics. What is the format of a comic script? How do you do that? Let's toss this at Jake first.<br />[Jake] One of the interesting things about comics is there is no real set format that everyone uses. Every writer uses their own format and style. There's a lot of books that will show scripts that different comic writers use, their style. I settled on a style that I like. But really what it comes down to is, as long as your stage directions and your dialogue are clear enough for the rest of the creative team to figure out what is going on on a page, that's really what matters.<br />[Howard] So what's your style like?<br />[Jake] I'm pretty... I don't want to say lax, maybe it's lax, maybe I'm lazy. I don't know. But my panel descriptions are not real detailed. I guess relatively detailed, but not down to every square inch of the room or the scene. I'll start with... it'll say page 1, panel one... actually, no. I'll say page 1. Then I'll do a description of the layout of the page. Three tiers of panels, with... the top tier has two panels, the second tier has one wide shot, the bottom tier has three panels.<br />[Howard] So you are envisioning the layout as you're scripting.<br />[Jake] A lot of comics writers will do thumbnail sketches of what the layout is on the page. I don't do that. I don't... I'm not... I don't know if I'm not committed enough that way. But I also... I think it more comes down to the fact that I really trust my artists and my editors. If they have a problem with the described layout of the page, I trust that they will make it better.<br /><br />[Dan] They'll find a good solution. Now this is something that unless people are already in comics or have studied it, I don't know if they're going to understand. First of all, you say there's other people you work with. In comics, that's an inker, an illustrator, and a letterer and all of that sort of thing.<br />[Jake] Right.<br />[Dan] You're talking about stage directions. For most of our audience who are prose writers, describe what stage directions are and how you do them.<br />[Jake] Wow. Describe what stage directions are. I guess it's just describing the look of each panel. In each panel... I guess we'll define panel, too. A panel is the square box on the page that you're looking at. If you have a page that's just one picture, that's called a splash page. You describe what each panel, what each box looks like. Then you have your dialogue. It's scripted like a play or TV or radio or dramatic podcast.<br /><br />[Howard] Keep going. I've got a stack of Jake's recent work here. One of them is the Halloween... the DC Universe Halloween Special 2009. Which opens with a splash page of Bizarro...<br />[Jake] He's got the Bizarro World superheroes bound and gagged and he's warning the audience... warning the reader that the stories in this anthology issue -- it's an anthology issue -- are very happy. Bizarro speaks backwards speak so it's supposed to mean that they're scary or sad or whatever. Turn the page, there's credits. Under the table of contents, it lists all of the stories in the anthology. Under each one, it has a huge list of the creative collaborators. It says Jake Black writer, artist is Abraham Robertson, color done by Giovanni Kososki... I don't know, I don't know that person.<br />[Dan] Now if we can... look at... let's consider this splash page. I know that you guys in radio land can't see this, but it's basically like you said, it's a full-page illustration. We're looking over Bizarro's shoulder, there's some faces in the periphery of the page. How much of that did you script? Did you tell the artists or did you just say, "Bizarro's got some people tied up" and then they went with it?<br />[Jake] What I did on this one... it's a pretty good-sized paragraph as I recall. I wrote it several months ago because there's a lot of lead time in comics. This came out about two weeks ago, I think, two or three weeks ago. I described it as we are outside the Bizarro Fortress of Solitude so it's made of solid rock instead of crystal. He is surrounded by Bizarro versions of the DC Universe and he is reading the comic book that this is.<br />[Howard] Reading the book you're holding.<br />[Dan] Very cool.<br /><br />[Jake] This page actually was a late addition to the script. DC decided after I had submitted it that they wanted it to be what they call the bookend story to the anthology. So there are four pages at the front and then four pages at the back. Then other people did a bunch of stories in between.<br />[Howard] That really confused me when I picked it up the week before Halloween. I knew that you had a story there and I thought, "Oh, I want to read the Jake story." So I picked the book up and read the four pages and said, "I do not understand this ending at all. I really don't understand this ending."<br />[Jake] Originally, it was just seven pages but when they decided to make it the eight page bookend, the editor -- a guy named Eddie Berganza, who works at DC Comics obviously -- said that it was going to be the bookend story so they were giving me another page to work with and they wanted it to be a splash page introduction to the book. They said if it could be based on the cover, that would really... that's what they wanted. I had seen the cover image which also has Bizarro reading a Halloween comic and the heroes of the DC Universe.<br />[Dan] Awesome.<br />[Jake] So I adjusted the script.<br />[Howard and Dan] Let's break for an ad.<br /><br />[Howard] With Brandon out of town signing Wheel of Time books, it's appropriate for me to plug Wheel of Time books from audible. I've been listening to the first five Wheel of Time titles recorded by Kate Reading and Michael Kramer. Fantastic audio books. They've been very, very engrossing. They are also very, very long which is why I've only read... or had five books read to me. When I'm sure everybody else is all caught up and can pick up The Gathering Storm right now. Grab yourself some Wheel of Time audio books. Good stuff. Visit audiblepodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership.<br /><br />[Dan] And we're back. Now, in discussing that comic that we were looking at, you said a lot of things like, "This is Bizarro's Fortress of Solitude so it is made out of rock instead of crystal." You are working with somebody else's IP. How much research do you have to do and what fear do you have that there's going to be a bunch of fans out there that know more about it than you do?<br />[Jake] I don't go to message boards anymore. I really don't. They make me so angry, because fans are so angry and they can't just enjoy the product. But I'll probably visit the forum on Writing Excuses after this.<br />[Dan] Well, obviously, yes.<br />[Howard] Jake, if it makes you feel any better, sometimes I can't visit my own forums for the same reason.<br />[Jake] Yeah. I went on a rant couple of weeks ago on JakeBlack.com about fan mentality -- negative fan mentality. I also want to be very clear, and I was very clear in this rant, that there are really good fans, really supportive fans, really positive fans. It depends on the property that I'm working on -- the level of research that I have to do. I hadn't ever read Ender's Game before I started working with Orson Scott Card.<br />[Dan] Dangerous thing to admit.<br />[Jake] It is a dangerous thing to admit. I've read it more times now than any human probably should as I was doing the research for the Ender's Companion.<br />[Howard] Coming into it cold gives you a really solid advantage over a lot of fans. Fans will read a book and then they will tell themselves the story that comes next... or they will tell themselves the story that comes first. That's usually where we upset our fans, is when we go and we write the story that comes first or that comes next and it's not what they told themselves. They feel like they've been proven wrong and nobody likes that. But coming into it cold, you were able to look at Scott's canon of work, the whole body of work, go through the whole thing, and treat it as a research project. Lift out the salient points and see things that I think the hard-core fans are likely to miss.<br /><br />[Dan] Now... how different was the experience, writing that book, to writing the typical comic script?<br />[Jake] Well, it took me about two years to write the book. Actually, I guess that's not totally true. It took me about six months to write the book the first time. But then he kept adding books to the series. Like War of Gifts came out, and he did a bunch of short stories for his online magazine. Then Ender in Exile came out. So I was having to adjust the manuscript. Also, I was the resource, his continuity resource as he was working on these other books to make sure that he wasn't going to earn the ire of the fans as we discussed a minute ago.<br />[Howard] How did you get into that position?<br />[Jake] Actually, it was through comics. About five years ago, I published a couple of comics. One of them was a Smallville one and again there was another intellectual property. But I had a little bit more of an advantage on Smallville -- we'll talk about that in a second for a second -- but he was writing Ironman for Marvel -- Scott Card was -- and I wanted to get my name out there, I wanted to get my portfolio out there little bit more, so I tracked his e-mail down and contacted him asking if he had any contacts or anything that... or if I could co-write a comic with him? I said that I had worked on a couple of other projects before. He was like no, but I just licensed my novel Wyrms to be adapted into comics. Here's the editor of that project, send him your stuff. If they say it's okay, then you can do that. I did this adaptation, this comic adaptation of his novel Wyrms. He really liked it. It was actually a train wreck of an experience, but that's another story for another time. Maybe when we talk about the business. He trusted me from that. Also, my degree is in history, and he trusted me from that. And he offered me the Ender Encyclopedia.<br />[Dan] That's very cool. I have another question. We don't have a lot of time left, but I want to make sure that we get some...<br />[Howard] We can run to 18.<br /><br />[Dan] We can run over. Be prepared, listeners, we'll run over. I want to ask about characterization. I think this will be a valuable thing for people who intend to write comics or scripts or even fan fiction. When you are working on somebody else's property, what do you do to really get into those characters and to show who those characters are? Especially with something like Bizarro who's been around for decades.<br />[Jake] Bizarro is easy because he's dumb as paint and just does everything backwards. But... in the case... probably the hardest thing I did is I did an Ender's Game comic where I was working with Peter and Valentine. Nobody has spent more time in that universe in the last two years than I have. Even then, I was having some issues picking up on the nuances of their characters. It took a lot of conversation with the editor and Scott Card to sort those things out.<br />[Dan] Are there any tricks that you have when writing dialogue or when scripting a scene?<br />[Jake] I don't know. I don't really think that I'm the best at characterization. That's probably the biggest note that I get all the time, is you need to tweak this dialogue here to make it more in character. When I get that note, I can do it. If I can figure out how to do it the first time...<br />[Howard] If you can figure out how to do it preemptively...<br />[Jake] That would be really, really fantastic for me.<br /><br />[Dan] That's why editors are so awesome. This is where Howard says luxury. Of course, you have Sandra and you have other people that fill that same collaborative role, at least in part, isn't that right?<br />[Howard] In part. I... obviously, I'm working with my own IP. So when a character is changing as a result of dialogue, it's likely because I think the character needs to change and I am adjusting the course of that character. The thing that's different between what Jake does what I do is that I'm also doing the principal illustration. I'm doing all the line work. I've now hired out the coloring, but I'm doing all the line work. So I do my scripts right in the panels. I just sort of imagine the pictures. The scripts for me... the dialogue... dialogue tags, whatever... they serve as placeholders so that when I sit down to pencil, I'm like, "Oh, he's saying that. What was he doing what he was saying that? Oh, I remember what I thought he was going to be doing. Well, I'll go ahead and pencil that." I'll start penciling and I'll realize, "Well, that was stupid. I'm going to pencil something else." So I'll pencil something else.<br />[Dan] Do you, Howard, then tend to do most of that visualization by memory or do you keep little notes for yourself?<br />[Howard] Oh, it's mostly by memory.<br /><br />[Jake] That's a really good point though, that you bring up. When you're writing comics, your characters can't really talk a lot. If they say more than 20 words in a balloon, it gets really problematic. That may be the biggest difference between like prose writing where you can fill up pages and pages of dialogue and comics where it's a visual medium and you have to let your artist make the visual medium. The balloons, the captions, all of that take up art space, and the bigger they are, the less space there is for the art. It ends up not succeeding. I did an Ender's Game comic a couple of years ago. It was one of the first comics that I'd done. I wasn't really conscious of that rule. I have balloons where there's 50 words of dialogue, so it's this really dense balloon and a head in the panel.<br />[Howard] I just picked up a Conan comic where there were narrative tags and dialogue tags and they had broken up because they only wanted 20 to 30 words per bubble tops. But there's a whole lot of frontloading on that story and it's the front page. It's where the splash page would go, and it's not a splash page. I still haven't read that comic, because I get to that page and my brain has to put on the brakes because it's covered with dialogue. In that regard, it fails as a comic.<br />[Jake] That's the same with the panels, too. You don't want to overload your page with too many panels. I try to have a maximum of five panels per page, occasionally six, very rarely seven. Someone like Alan Moore who wrote Watchmen has 9 to 12 panels on each page. It's a sure sign of an inexperienced, and I would say almost amateur, comics writer who scripts like that. Alan Moore can get away with it because he's Alan Moore. But a new writer -- you need to keep the pages freer and more open, keep the dialogue...<br />[Howard] One of the reasons that he got away with it with Watchmen was because he was deliberately harkening back to earlier days of comics when a lot of that syntax hadn't been established.<br />[Dan] It's the old adage that you can break the rules once you know them and you are breaking them on purpose, but when you are breaking in, you need to follow them.<br />[Howard] The other place where I think you can break that panel rule is when you are not doing multiple panels for dialogue, you are doing multiple panels because there is a key piece of action that needs to be described and you will describe it as Superman swoops in, picks up the gun, kicks that, pulls blindfold off of that guy, and stops to take a picture -- okay, now it's Spiderman. To have all that happen is going to be... it's almost like animation, and you might do 10 or 12 panels on page illustrating that.<br /><br />[Dan] We are running far over time, so we are going to cut this. Please tune in next week when we will talk about how to get into the business of writing comics, and how to succeed and stay in the business of writing comics. Your writing prompt for today is to write a story -- you can do this as prose or you can do it as a comic script -- in which Superman swoops into a room, kicks something undefined, and then turns into Spiderman. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:127276 2009-11-05T11:03:26Z 2009-11-05T11:03:26Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 23: How to Write without Twists<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-23-how-to-write-without-twists/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/01/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-23-how-to-write-without-twists/</a><br /><br />Key points: Simple surprises and obstacles are not plot twists. Watching engaging characters overcome real problems is satisfying. Watching characters make progress is satisfying. Stories without twists often have strong setups with very clear conflicts and high stakes. Even stories with major plot twists often have straight-forward subplots.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Brandon] This podcast is going to involve a lot of contention between us, I have a feeling already, because as we were discussing it ahead of time, we were kind of disagreeing even on our own definitions of the thing. What I want to do is, I want to have a podcast where we talk about writing stories that fulfill people's expectations and still are satisfying. Meaning, this is kind of the anti-Shyamalan podcast. The podcast where we are not talking about stories where some big revelation or twist happens near the end of the story that redefines the story or surprises you. I'm talking about writing stories that you promised something in the beginning, you get it by the end. There might be obstacles to overcome, but everyone's expecting those to be overcome, and lo and behold, we do.<br />[Howard] In terms of genre, this is going to work really well in romance. It's going to work reasonably well in certain flavors of fantasy and science fiction. It's going to fall on its face completely if you're trying to write suspense or murder mysteries or...<br />[Brandon] No, no, no. See, I'm going to disagree already because I knew exactly what was going to happen at every single point of the way along Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and it was still a compelling book. At least for the first half. I knew... maybe that's... I felt that everything... there was nothing in that, that was surprising. The same thing... a better example is going to be the Dirk Pitt novels. I'm never surprised by anything that happens in the Dirk Pitt novel or a James Bond story...<br />[Howard] They are so formulaic.<br />[Brandon] They are so formulaic. But I really enjoyed the Dirk Pitt books that I have read. I had problems with the Da Vinci Code, but the Dirk Pitt books... they are fun, happy action movies of a book and I read along and I get to the ending and yep, Dirk defeated everybody and got the girl and everything we expected to happen, happened. That is somehow satisfying. Why? Why is that satisfying? I should hate myself for enjoying that book. Dan? Why did I enjoy it?<br />[Dan] I don't know... I think it's a weird attitude that a lot of us have, that we demand to be surprised by our literature and by our media. Because as we said at the beginning, you make a promise and you fulfill it. That's in large part the purpose of a story. It's kind of weird of us to demand that a story jump out of nowhere and grab us with something out of left field.<br />[Brandon] I really love stories that do that, and I like to write stories that do that. But that's not what this podcast is talking about. This podcast is exploring why it's effective and how we can use that in our writing. The romance genre has been brought up. I want to say that it happens in every genre, it's not just the romance genre. Every genre... if you want to look at a quest fantasy. There are a lot of quest fantasies out there that are very satisfying which say introduce your protagonist, they go on a quest, we get what we expect.<br />[Howard] I think some of this may hinge on the maturity... maturity is probably the wrong word, the reading experience of the readers, because... Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code? For a lot of us, we look at the Da Vinci Code and yeah, we knew exactly what was coming. For a lot of other people, they looked at the Da Vinci Code and the big reveal was earth shattering and was a massive twist. The fact that it didn't work that way for me didn't make it any less enjoyable, it just meant that it didn't feel like a Shyamalan to me.<br /><br />[Dan] I think were running up against differing definitions of what a twist is. If you look at a mystery story... every mystery story depends on the revelation of a surprise. You don't know who the killer is until a certain point. Does that count as a twist?<br />[Brandon] I say that counts as a twist. Because the mystery author...<br />[Howard] I agree. That counts as a twist. I think a fair definition of twist... let's see if you guys shoot this down... a fair definition of a plot twist is the surprising, yet inevitable, where if the reader is really paying attention and really trying to puzzle this out, they stand a decent chance of guessing this one right.<br />[Brandon] Yeah I'll go with you on that one.<br />[Howard] Whereas there's straight surprise, which is the story is moving along in the diner and all of a sudden the diner explodes. There was no way of knowing that was coming. It wasn't telegraphed. But it moved the story forward because something happened. Those sorts of stories... I think the Dirk Pitt novels do that a lot. Something just blew up.<br />[Brandon] Dirk Pitt does that a lot. But let's look at an example Dan brought up earlier before we started the podcast. He brought up Apollo 13.<br /><br />[Dan] Apollo 13 seems like the kind of story that you're talking about. Where there is a problem and we solve it. There's obstacles on the way, but there's no really big twist, there's no red herrings that lead us off in a different direction. Now, I suppose you could look at it and say, well, the shuttle blowing up half way through their trip counts as a twist. But not really, because they were forecasting that from the opening scene.<br />[Brandon] Let's take it a step further and say when I saw that movie, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I was familiar with the history of it. Yet it was a compelling movie. The question is why. It's a great example because... Dan Brown's a bad example because I don't think it's a particularly good book. But I think Apollo 13 is a particularly good movie and it works and yet... Dune does this too. Let's look at Dune. Dune...<br />[Howard] If you look at Apollo 13, Apollo 13 wasn't about plot. Apollo 13 was about characters in conflict with their environment. Characters in conflict... in smaller conflict with each other. If they don't find ways to resolve these conflicts, the characters, whom we care about, die. The book succeeds... or the movie succeeds because we are made to like the characters. They are believable. We can see pieces of ourselves in them. We can see pieces of our families in their families. We look at the conflict and we say, "I would have no idea how to solve that problem. It doesn't look like he has any... how do you solve this problem?" It's not a reveal, there's not red herrings, it's just grinding away at the problem until you've fixed it.<br /><br />[Dan] That's very satisfying. Like we said, you make a promise and then you fulfill it. That's a satisfying thing to happen. To watch people who are good at something be very good at it. That's a satisfying thing. We are social creatures. Mankind is a very social thing. When we see a person and a problem, we have an innate desire for them to solve that problem. When we see someone succeed, we have an innate sense of satisfaction in watching that.<br />[Brandon] I think it comes down little bit to progress as well. The concept of following progress. Do any of you, when one of those little bars comes up when something is loading, get transfixed with that? Because it's loading, and it's getting closer and closer to the ending, and it's going to achieve that ending. It's meaningless, but adding one of those little progress bars to something that's loading saves...<br />[Howard] You're right. The progress bar... you pay attention to the progress bar. My least favorite progress bars are the one that have just a patterned gradient in them...<br />[Brandon] Or a little spin...<br />[Howard] And they just kind of move to the right, but you never know... it's not a progress bar, it's just I am working. It might as well be an hourglass.<br />[Brandon] Exactly. This progress bar... in some ways, Apollo 11... 13? Which one is it?<br />[Dan and Howard chorus] Apollo 13.<br />[Brandon] Is a progress bar. We have a goal to achieve, to get these guys back home safe, and we know they are going to get home safe because you know history -- at least I do, but we are going to watch the progress bar step by step by step.<br /><br />[Dan] I'm going to say that the reason a story like that works is because even though it doesn't have twists, it still has major obstacles. Apollo 13 is an example that has a ton of major obstacles. Here's this problem. All of a sudden there's too many people in the lander, therefore the air filters aren't working and were going to suffocate. Okay, we have to solve that. Then we have to solve this other thing. Then we have to solve this other thing. There's a constant stream of obstacles that need to be overcome even though none of them are necessarily a surprise.<br />[Brandon] What I'm seeing as we're talking about this is it seems to me... and this just could be completely off base... but it seems to me the stories that don't depend on the twist spent a lot more time in setup with very delineated clear conflicts, whereas a lot of the movies and books I'm thinking of that depend on the twist, you're not really as sure where it's going at the beginning. You start to get your feet underneath you and then they yank it away. If we look at the Sixth Sense, I don't really know when I begin Sixth Sense really what's going on in this movie. You've got a sense of conflict. There is this kid who can see ghosts and there is the psychologist trying to help him. But it's not the same sort of thing as oh my goodness our shuttle is exploding and there's no way we're going to get home to be saved. Huge setup. Battlefield Earth does this as well. It's another example of this. That was an extremely compelling book. Not a very good movie. But extremely compelling book for all of the same dumb reasons that the Dirk Pitt books are compelling. Yet I really enjoy them. Set up an extremely difficult problem, let's fix it.<br /><br />[Dan] Diehard is another example. There's ostensibly a twist because oh they're not terrorists, they're just thieves. I don't know if that counts because it didn't really matter. The more important thing is here's a character we really like and identify with, like Howard was saying, and then he overcomes these incredible problems.<br />[Howard] Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho.<br /><br />[Brandon] How do we do this? How do we use this? As writers wanting to be able to achieve this sort of story, what can we do... can it help our stories where we write with twists? Can we combine them? I've actually...<br />[Howard] I think it can help. If you're writing a story with a plot twist in it, okay, fantastic. You have a major plot twist. You're probably going to have subplots. The subplots can be boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl in the end. They can be Apollo 13-esque in which we have a series of technical problems which we need to solve or we all die. Those things can be happening in parallel to the big reveal. The way I would map those is that when you have your big reveal that is... you might have multiple big reveals... but when you have the big reveal that is the triumphant one in which the main plot there is now going to be some sort of resolution. At the same time that is happening or sort of simultaneous, you have fulfilled promises to the readers in the other subplots. Romantic fulfillment here, technical problems solved here, so that it's all crashing in happy at once.<br /><br />[Dan] I'm going to recommend if you want to have this kind of story, I think you need to start with a much bigger conflict than you would in a twist-based story. Because you can't make things horrible out of nowhere, halfway through the story, you need to start off with something awful. You need to start with we are all going to die on this shuttle.<br />[Brandon] Or at least big stakes.<br />[Dan] Yes. The stakes have to be very high, because your opportunities to raise them aren't going to be as big.<br /><br />[Howard] You're probably also writing a shorter book. Probably.<br />[Brandon] That's possible. Most of the books I've read that have tried to do this and have kept it going too long have fallen on their face when they did so. I've felt that many... like for instance, Da Vinci Code is a great example. If it would have ended halfway through, I would've loved that book. It was the trying to keep me going... Battlefield Earth has the same problem. A lot of these... getting that sweet spot of length down, where something is going wrong repeatedly. It happens in romance novels too. You've got to have all of these things going wrong, but people are not going to just keep forever waiting. They want their fulfillment. You promised us they are going to get together, and if you're just stringing me along too long, I'm going to put the book down. You can't stay at an elevated state as long as a lot of these books try to do. One thing I would say is that Diehard as an example succeeded more than its clones I think in part because of the compelling character but also in part because of the clever reveal. I think it did have a twist. I think that actually jumped that movie up from bonehead action movie yeah to wow they surprised me. I think that you can use these things hand in hand to trying to pretend you're being one and then pow people in the face at the next moment.<br />[Dan] I could see that.<br />[Howard] So it's a meta plot twist.<br />[Dan] Let's look then at Diehard as the no plot version that I proposed. One of the reasons that it worked is that it was very clever. There weren't any twists thrown by the plot. I think you could look at it as the main character came up with a lot of twists in that he solved this endless string of problems in pretty clever ways.<br />[Brandon] I was talking about the reveal that they're not terrorists. That was a kind of movie redefining moment for me. I think we're coming...<br />[Howard] The other thing that worked well in Diehard was just the dialogue was clever. That kept pulling me forward. I really enjoyed the performances of both the villain and the hero.<br /><br />[Brandon] In a really good romance novel... if we lump something like Jane Austen in with that, which I believe it does, you're going to have that dialogue carrying you along as part of it.<br />[Howard] Jane Austen 3: Jane Austen Earth.<br />[Garbled] Jane Austen with vengeance<br />[Dan] I like what Brandon said about... and now we talked about Jane Austen and I lost it... I liked what he said about something<br />[Brandon] that something... dumped for Jane Austen...<br />[Dan] It was really cool. Oh, it was about a set up, about having a good solid setup. You can see this in both Diehard and Pride and Prejudice. They will establish five or six conflicts right off the bat. In Diehard, it's estranged from his wife. It's the terrorists show up in the building. There's also the kind of greasy little salesman guy who you know is going to cause problems. There is all of these things on the kettle that makes the audience a little nervous to see which one boils over first. You can see that in Pride and Prejudice as well.<br />[Brandon] The oily little... never mind.<br />[Dan] The terrorists and the salesman guy. That was my favorite part of Pride and Prejudice.<br />[Howard] I liked the zombies.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let's do a writing prompt before this spirals completely into insanity.<br />[Jordo] Is it going to be Jane Austen and Diehard?<br />[Brandon] No.<br />[Dan] No?<br />[Howard] It can't be Pride and Prejudice and zombies, either, because that's been done.<br />[Dan] It's going to be Sense and Sensibility and terrorists.<br />[Brandon] You have lots of excuses why you are not going to write, but we're going to pretend you don't. Thanks for listening. This has been Writing Excuses. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:127176 2009-11-02T01:56:25Z 2009-11-02T01:56:25Z I don't understand why people object to two people deciding to get married.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />Oh, yes, I recognize that these are two men or two women, instead of the heterosexual marriages of yore. So what?<br /><br />Someone is going to say "civil union." Can you say separate, but not equal? We've tried various ways of discriminating in the past, and it never works out very well. Matter of fact, if you try to establish "separate but equal" facilities on most any other basis, people will just laugh at you as they drag your sorry butt into court. But apparently for same-sex couples, we're going to try separate but equal out one more time?<br /><br />Or maybe someone wants to talk about challenging the sanctity of marriage? Nice words. But let's think about it. We've got two people here who want to participate in marriage. Sounds to me like they are confirming the sanctity of marriage. In fact, forcing people to relationships outside the rituals and sanctions of marriage seems like it breaks the sanctity of marriage. Not allowing people to take part in something doesn't seem like a very good way to support it?<br /><br />Let's face it, marriage consists of at least three layers. One is the relationship and agreements between two people. And frankly, none of us can stop that. Any two people, same sex or different sex, can decide to establish a relationship. And can make commitments to that relationship, to that other person. <br /><br />The second layer is the social one. This is the one where we as a society take notice of what two people are doing. This is the one that I think most people are talking about when they trot out the sanctity of marriage argument, because they think somehow that all the social recognition should be for one and only one type of relationship. Of course, that's not true. We've already gone from parental or clan decided marriages to the pair of lovers style. And there doesn't really seem to be any reason why society shouldn't recognize that two men, two women, or a cross-gender pair can fall in love.<br /><br />What about the third one? Oh that's the civil contract. It really seems to be the simplest, since we allow contracts for almost anything and everything. Admittedly, we like to use standardized ones for standardized kinds of interactions, but I don't think the marriage contract would require much if any change.<br /><br />So if we admit that any two people have the right to develop a relationship, and to celebrate it with our society, and even to register it with the mechanisms of government -- what's the fuss?<br /><br />Don't tell me you're worried about two men or two women being forced into marriage by pregnancy?<br /><br />Children, divorce, all the other fun and games that often goes with marriage? Of course, I'm sure that just because two people share a gender doesn't mean they can't get into fights and struggle with their relationship just as much as a cross-gender pair. But does the fact that they may have to work to make their marriage good make them any different? And does it give us the right to keep them from trying it out?<br /><br />Nope. I just don't understand it. Let's admit that any two people can get married, clean up the laws and wording, and move on. Figuring out how to help people build healthy marriages that last, and that support both parties and the children in being the best people they can be -- now that's a challenge. And it won't happen if you just bar some couples from trying. It'll only happen when we work together to make every marriage a success, no matter what ages, colors, religions, or sexes are involved.<br /><br />Let no man put asunder... it has a ring to it, doesn't it? urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:126805 2009-10-28T11:48:55Z 2009-10-28T11:48:55Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 22: Idea to Story<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/25/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-22-idea-to-story/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/25/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-22-idea-to-story/</a><br /><br />Key Points: To turn an idea into a story: Look for the points of conflict. Look for the boundaries -- what kind of story is this? Consider plot, setting, characters. What is the ending? How will you resolve the story? Look for characters who are in pain. Check old ideas that didn't get used yet. Brainstorm interesting ideas -- set pieces, events, twists, interesting stuff. <br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Howard] This episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by audible.com, a leading provider of spoken audio information and entertainment. Listen to audio books whenever and wherever you want. Go to audiblepodcast.com/excuse<br /><br />[Brandon] The origin of this podcast came from a comment someone made on one of our threads on our website where they said, "How do you take an idea and turn it into a story?" We thought, well, let's give it a try. What we're going to do is, I have come up with an idea... it's not a particularly good idea, but it is an idea. Howard and Dan have no idea... I'm saying that word too often.<br />[Dan] We have no idea about your idea.<br />[Brandon] What my idea is. I'm going to throw it at them. We're going to watch and see how we turn this into a story. The idea is insects have suddenly become resilient to all forms of pesticide and it is making them so that they are actually poisonous to their predators and we're having lots of trouble suddenly with growing food. All right. Dan. Where do you go from there?<br />[Dan] When I start looking at an idea to turn it into a story, I look for points of conflict. Where do the story elements kind of come against each other to create interesting stories? In an idea like this, you look at, like you said, it is very difficult for us to grow and produce food. So starvation becomes a conflict. Farmers that cannot sell anything, they now become destitute and homeless, that could be an interesting conflict. It could be an interesting character to go with. The scientists who are trying to solve this problem now have a conflict. There's interesting little bits like that, that instantly let you say, ah, that's a jumping off point.<br />[Howard] I would look... I like points of conflict, but the other thing that I would do is look at the driving force behind this technology or whatever it is... behind this scientific principle.<br />[Brandon] The why.<br />[Howard] The why. I'd ask myself, how far does it extend? Because right now, most of the poisons we use against insects are designed to destroy insect metabolisms without hurting human metabolisms, but some of them do. But if you pour hydrochloric acid on an insect, it still dies. Now the question is, in this environment, does that still work or doesn't it? That's...<br />[Brandon] You have complete freedom to decide that.<br />[Howard] Exactly. What I'm suggesting is, if the hydrochloric acid still works, we're telling a science fiction tale with molecular biology at its core. If the hydrochloric acid has stopped working, we are telling an urban fantasy in which the insects have developed magic.<br />[Brandon] [laughter]<br />[Dan] OK. No, you're right.<br />[Howard] That's where we take the idea and crank it up a notch.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let me define this for our listeners. Dan is going to the conflict. You're going to the boundaries. You're saying, what are the boundaries of the story, what type of story am I telling? If you step backward, where this idea originated from was me reading an article online where they were... scientists were afraid that a certain type of insect was becoming immune to a certain type of pesticide. Which I'm sure you've read and heard about these things before...<br />[Howard] Oh, yeah. Very common.<br />[Brandon] People are worried about superbugs and this sort of thing. That was just one of those little ideas that lodged in my brain. Now we go through it. My first step would be to start a book guide. If I assume I'm going to write a novel out of this, which is what I do with pretty much everything... I would open up a book guide, where I would say, OK I've got... this feels like a setting idea for me. Maybe it's a little bit of a plot idea because the conflict was already set in there. To balance out my book guide, I've got plot, setting, character. I would immediately start looking for characters.<br />[Howard] You need characters.<br />[Brandon] I would need to decide... this is a little bit partially boundaries like you've talked about and a little bit conflict like you've talked about, because for my characters, I'll need to know, am I telling a deeply personal story about a couple of people caught up in this? The scientists that were mentioned or the farmers that were mentioned? Or is this a more sweeping thing, or is it a Michael Crichton style story where we're going to have a team of specialists who are going to be working on this? Is it adventure fiction or is it more literary? What kind of story is it? I guess the boundaries are important.<br /><br />[Dan] I think it's also important to look at the end. I've learned that in my own writing, I have to start looking at the ending very early so that I can write toward it. At this point, I would look at it and say, well, where do I want this to end? Do I want someone to solve this problem by reversing it? Or do I want this to be... is the problem solved by humanity finding an alternative food source? Or is the problem solved in a completely different way? Let's figure out what the resolution is going to be, and then work backwards from there.<br />[Brandon] Or you have to learn dark, black bug magic [inaudible] killing the bug wizards. I like that idea. That's got to be our writing prompt, bugs discover magic.<br />[Howard] I like it. One of the reasons I like it is that the idea that you've described is very similar to Frank Herbert's The Green Brain in which we have a few countries where pesticides aren't working and everywhere else or a lot of other places, the only bugs are bugs that are completely controlled by people... the populations and everything [clatter] That was Jordo dropping his zune. The crops in those places have failed. The big reveal in Frank Herbert's The Green Brain... I'm sorry, the statute of limitations has passed, it was written in the 80s... the big reveal there is that the bugs have a hive intelligence that extends beyond their species and they are actually trying to save the planet because we keep killing them and we don't understand the ecosystem as well as they do.<br />[Brandon] I think this gets us back to what type of story do we want to tell. Our end, our goal, is going to have a lot to influence that.<br />[Howard] For me, then, it's... well, I read The Green Brain. I don't want to...<br />[Brandon] Do the Green Brain.<br />[Howard] I don't want to do that again. Because that was Frank Herbert. I'm not Frank Herbert and I'm not Kevin J. Anderson. So bugs and magic is where I... <br />[Dan] Let's take that and move on.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let's all take that and roll with it. We've got bugs have discovered magic which makes them immune to pesticides. What is our next step? Where do you go from there? You've decided you're writing an urban fantasy sort of thing. We're going to assume it's set on this world, our time, but bugs have discovered magic. Now what? Dan?<br />[Dan] For me, the thing is, let's take this even further. If bugs have discovered this kind of defensive magic, how long before they discover some kind of offensive magic? What... how much further will this idea progress by the time the story is done? I start looking at interesting ideas. Well, what would a bug do with offensive magic? Would they just make it easier for them to eat plants? Would they suddenly become much more hostile to humans than they are? If we're talking about locusts, they are hostile primarily because they eat all our food, not because they come and kill us in our sleep. Figuring out where this is going to go next is what I would do.<br />[Howard] Orc army ants. With little tiny swords... <br />[Dan] Is this the Zurg?<br />[Howard] and little white handprints on their noggins.<br />[Dan] Nice.<br />[Brandon] My first inclination at this point would be to start saying what has been done before and how can I make it something new? That's very important to me when writing science fiction and fantasy. You bringing up the Zurg makes me worry about this. Also the concept of the bug aliens as a whole genre... I don't want to go there.<br />[Howard] I don't want to go there either. Those are all big bugs.<br />[Brandon] Right. I want to remain little bugs. I don't think we want bugs that are sentient. I think that we've got bugs who have simply evolved to the point that they are tapping on some sort of magical source and it's just they are still bugs, but somehow they are managing to use this magic. Howard, where are you... how are you... let's get to the nuts and bolts. How are you actually developing this now?<br /><br />[Howard] Developing the magic system or the plot or... because at this point, I need a character who is in pain.<br />[Brandon] You need a character who's in pain. That's because... like we said, we're unbalanced. We have a lot of conflict, we've got a lot of plot, we don't have a lot of character.<br />[Howard] I think taking the plucky farmer's daughter who doesn't want to be on the farm anymore and is moving to the city. This happens, and the cityfolk she's hanging out with, maybe at school or whatever, just completely don't understand. Don't see how serious this is. But she's plugged in and does understand how serious this is, but she doesn't want to go back on the farm. She's not studying agriculture, she's studying... I don't know...<br />[Brandon] Music.<br />[Dan] Marine biology.<br />[Brandon] Marine biology. No... yeah, that's good.<br />[Dan] And music. She sings with whales.<br />[Brandon] I'm going to go ahead and add to this as we are shaping this out. I feel that we need something in the past that will work with us, so I'm going to nudge toward magic realism. I'm going to say there is among whichever nationality her parents were -- they're immigrants -- there is an understanding of a folk magic that involves this sort of thing. At this point, I would start digging into folk magic. I'd start doing the research and I'd say OK, which culture do I want to use, what country do I want to go to? How am I going to use that to relate to this magic? Something that's... I'd probably go look at Asian, East Asian... say, let's look at some of these magics that involve nature and how we can actually apply this. But the point here is not to show you how good or how lame we are at coming up with stories off the cuff. The point here is to actually dig into it and say this is how we do it.<br />[Howard] We want to look at the process.<br />[Brandon] We want to look at the process. We're going to pause right now for a break and when we come back, we will dig into process.<br />[Howard] Can we break for a pause instead?<br /><br />[Howard] This week's episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by audible.com. They've given me the opportunity to pitch an audio book that I really like. I'm here to pitch Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. If you think that Aragon was ripping off Star Wars, if you think that Star Wars was ripping off Lord of the Rings, you need to read or have read to you Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Because he goes through what he calls the monomyth, and dissects it and explains it and talks about how mythology infuses all of our literature and all of our religion and all kinds of... all of our things. It's just... it's mind blowing. I really, really enjoyed this book and it was the first audio book I ever listened to. There you go. Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell. Available at audible.com.<br /><br />[Howard] And we're back.<br />[Brandon] And we're back. Let's try and look at process. Let's not extrapolate any further on this story because that's just going to get us into trouble. Let's look at what we actually would do. With me, I'm using the book guide. This is the process I use...<br />[Howard] When you say the book guide?<br />[Brandon] I've talked about it before on the podcast. But what it is, it's the file... that is split up... I use the Microsoft Word document map feature which allows me to build an outline. I put down plot, setting, character. Usually, it's actually reversed, it's character, setting, plot. I will start throwing ideas brainstorming wise under these three headings. Just lists and lists of ideas that apply to this, often in bullet points. Some of those will spawn other ideas that start making bigger ideas. My brainstorming session will eventually turn into the plot structure and the character... people call them dossiers. And all of these things will grow out of my brainstorming session, the actual file. As I'm discarding ideas, I actually throw them in a place at the bottom called the trash pit where all these ideas just get tossed. Some of those will eventually get pulled out and stuck into another file of just random good ideas. Some of them will... are just too bad to even consider.<br />[Howard] I call that area the boneyard. Because that way when I bring them back from the boneyard, they are like zombies, and if I decide to get rid of them, I'm just burying them. But I don't have to call any of my ideas trash.<br /><br />[Brandon] The next process I would use would actually be to get out that file of old ideas that were cool but didn't fit into another story. I will look at them point by point and say do any of these apply to this story? What's going on here is something we've talked about on the podcast before, which is where I think that a novel particularly, any story needs more than one good idea.<br />[Howard] It needs more than one good idea. I go back and I look for characters that I've discarded. Character concepts where I thought... it would be fun to do a character who is a martial artist but will not... is religiously opposed to using weapons, and then put them in an environment where everybody else is using weapons. Just because that's silly. That hasn't shown up in Schlock yet because I haven't found the right place for it. But every time I bring up a new story, that character rears his or her head, and I look and I say this is not where you fit. I've got a set of those dossiers that keep coming up.<br />[Brandon] Those are all in my... it's actually called cool stuff that needs to be used sometime file. That's the entire name of it. Dan?<br /><br />[Dan] I have a process similar to Brandon's, but I do a specific thing that I don't know if he does. I've talked about this before. I will start a file and fill it with ideas of cool set pieces. I think I got this, like most of my story idea processes, from a role-playing game. I would just take the idea that I'm working on and say what would be cool? What would be a cool set piece, what would be a cool event, what would be a cool twist, what would be really interesting? Then just brainstorm as many of those as I can.<br />[Brandon] What haven't I seen before and what fits with this idea?<br />[Dan] Exactly.<br /><br />[Brandon] Another thing that I'm doing at this point is I'm getting very goal driven. Let's assume I've done all this brainstorming, I've looked at my other file, this is the point where really the goals need to happen because I cannot build the character and I cannot build the plot until I know where I'm going. With the setting, just lots of cool ideas can get thrown in there and stacked in there. Sure I want them to interweave and those sorts of things. I'll start to say OK, this character is going to be part of this cultural idea, this character is going to be intersecting this way, but I need those goals. I need an ending. Not everyone needs that. It sounds like everyone here at this podcast kind of does that. But, Howard, you sometimes just start writing?<br />[Howard] I start writing and noodling along, but as I'm doing that, I'm thinking OK, this character has some sort of purpose in mind. Hopefully, two or three strips from now, I'll have figured that out. When I do, I write that down so that I can call back to it in two weeks or a month or two months, and it looks like I've been planning it the whole time.<br />[Dan] When we were at Worldcon, Brandon and I were on a panel with Jay Lake where we talked about writing. We talked about our process and how Brandon and I both start with the ending and figure out how to get there. Jay absolutely disagreed. He said that would bore me to tears to write that way. He said that he just starts at the beginning, he goes from there, and the ending will be broadcast in the beginning. If it is a coherent story, there will be predictions and ominous warnings or whatever right from the... right off the bat of how it's going to end. He works that way. It's a similar idea to what we do, he just starts at the other end.<br />[Howard] He just does it in a straight line. That's very similar to what I'm doing in that as I write things, I look at them and say or ask myself, have I just made a promise to the reader? Have I promised... by saying this, that something dire is going to happen along these lines or something wonderful is going to happen along these lines or in some way closure has to happen with regard to this little punch line that I threw out three strips into the story? Those are the things that I muse on, and hopefully I fulfill all those promises when I get to the end.<br />[Brandon] What you're doing... because of the way you're having to do it... you are like a juggler who's tossing the balls really high up into the air as you're juggling the other ones, and you're just hoping that a hand will be free to grab that ball when it comes back down. You're really good at juggling, so most of the time you do.<br />[Howard] When I drop balls, I wink at the audience and say, "I meant to drop that one."<br /><br />[Brandon] We're out of time. But let's go ahead and give you the writing prompt which is the same idea that we used at the beginning.<br />[Howard] Insects have in some way evolved defenses against all of the poisons that we use to kill them and many of the chemicals that would work to just kill anything because they have somehow developed magic.<br />[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:126639 2009-10-27T06:44:12Z 2009-10-27T06:44:12Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 21: Pitfalls of Self-Publishing<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/18/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-21-pitfalls-of-self-publishing-with-larry-correia/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/18/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-21-pitfalls-of-self-publishing-with-larry-correia/</a><br /><br />Key points: Self-publishing is not easy. You still need all the stuff that a publishing house does, and you have to do it yourself. You have to avoid the con artists. You have to be a businessperson, marketeer, and accountant. You need a business plan! <br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Brandon] I'm Brandon.<br />[Dan] I'm Dan.<br />[Howard] I'm Howard.<br />[Larry] And I'm Larry Correia.<br />[Brandon] We once again have Larry Correia with us. We wanted to do this podcast with Larry because Larry is a success story. As I understand it, Larry, you self published Monster Hunter International and then gained Baen Books attention, which is a big national publisher in science fiction and fantasy, who picked up the book.<br />[Larry] Yeah, that's correct, Brandon. I'm that guy who did everything wrong and still got published.<br />[Brandon] You're the exception that proves the rule, I suppose. I don't even know what that phrase means, but I'm going to pretend I do.<br />[Larry] Let me just say that first off, as someone who broke into traditional publishing through self-publishing, if you can get published in the traditional manner, do it. I don't recommend self-publishing unless -- as far as traditional novels -- unless you're pretty insane...<br />[Brandon] Or Howard.<br />[Larry] Or Howard. Because he's made a real good career out of it.<br />[Howard] See, and I don't recommend it either.<br />[Dan] Well, he said traditional novels.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let me ask why. You made that blanket statement. You've done both routes. You've been in both camps. You've been self-publishing, you've been in traditional publishing. Why do you say that?<br />[Larry] Here's the thing. I tried to go the traditional route first. I had rejection... I'm sure a lot of people listening to this podcast have been through the rejection roller coaster and have the boxes of rejection slips. I refused to give up and I decided to self publish. Now, the thing about self-publishing though is when you do that, the assumption is it's crap. If people see a self published novel, their first inclination is the only reason this is self published is it's not good. Otherwise, it would go through a regular publisher. So you already have a huge mountain that you've got to climb there to convince people that it's good. You really have got to be a master marketer and you've got to get it out in front of your audience and convince these people to spend the money on you who they are going to assume isn't that good.<br /><br />[Howard] Larry, when you started publishing, did you have an existing audience that was coming to your website or something?<br />[Larry] Now what I did to be successful at self-publishing is... I had done a pretty large online fiction serial and I had a pretty good online following to begin with, so when I released my self published novel, I already had a pretty large group of people to jump in on that.<br />[Howard] You keep saying your audience was fairly good or large or whatever. How many people were coming to the website on a weekly basis?<br />[Larry] I used a web forum... it's actually a gun nut forum, but we'll get into that in another podcast. I used an online forum called thehighroad.org, and I posted an online fiction serial there in conjunction with another fellow. We did it over about a six-month period where every other day one of us would post something.<br />[Brandon] Wow.<br />[Larry] Yeah, it was pretty intense. A 1000 words at a pop to 2000 words at a pop. By the time we got done, we had 120,000 hits.<br />[Brandon] OK. A day?<br />[Larry] Oh, no, no, no. That was in total. Oh, man, I wish it was 120,000.<br />[Howard] So 120,000 views of that forum thread?<br />[Larry] Those are not individual visitors. Individual visitors were probably about 10,000 people.<br />[Howard] That's a fantastic audience.<br />[Larry] So when I released the self published version of my first novel, right off the bat, I sold about 2000 copies in about six or seven weeks.<br />[Brandon] And that's why you did it. In fact, I've actually heard that number told to me by editors before. If they find a self published book that did 2000 copies, that's an indication that that's something to look at. Curious that you said that.<br />[Howard] My first book Under New Management we sold 1830 copies via pre-order in 30 days. Yeah. There's that sweet spot. If you can sell 2000 books...<br />[Brandon] People will pay attention.<br />[Larry] I got lucky in one particular respect. I had a large bookstore in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Uncle Hugo's. Don Blyly is the proprietor there, and Don... one of his former employees passed it on to him before it was ever even published. He got the word document. He started reading it and wound up printing it off on his printer. He sold the heck out of this self published novel. Don Blyly is actually the person who got me in contact with Toni Weisskopf at Baen and went from there.<br />[Brandon] OK. I want to add a blanket thing here. Larry has said the general assumption is, if it is self published, that it is crap. That is obviously not true. There are spectacular examples of self published novels that go very high places. The reason that a lot of people assume this is one of the pitfalls of self-publishing. I would say pitfall number one of self-publishing is the assumption that you don't need anyone else.<br />[Howard] Oh, yeah. If you as an author think you don't need anyone else, then you're in big trouble. You're just in trouble.<br />[Brandon] The big theme in self-publishing right now is... they're calling them indy books, independent books. Which... people who have this sort of independent mentality are thinking down with the big publishers, we'll get rid of all those editors that are only picking up books by celebrities and don't want to publish great fiction and we will bring to the masses the books that they want to have. The problem there is what a publishing house does is very important to your book. If you're going to self publish, the pitfall is assuming that you don't need any of that stuff. Meaning art direction, meaning copy editing, meaning editing, meaning proofreading, and a lot of these things. Because people don't do this, it brings a lot of these problems.<br /><br />[Howard] This episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by Scenting the Dark, a collection of short stories by Mary Robinette Kowal. You may remember Mary Robinette's puppetry podcast with us. She is brilliant and wonderful and we love her. If you thought she was awesome, wait until you read her stuff. Scenting the Dark, available November 30.<br /><br />[Brandon] Pitfall number two in my opinion is that you have to beware of disreputable people.<br />[Larry] Ah, yeah. There's...<br />[Howard] [maniacal laughter]<br />[Larry] Howard? He seems pretty nice.<br />[Dan] Isn't that a pitfall for everything?<br />[Larry] There's actually a lot of vanity presses out there where they're basically looking to con money out of gullible wannabe authors. They will take your money and they're going to make you a major bestseller, they're going to make you a superstar and... they just take your money.<br />[Howard] Let me approach this from a different angle. We assume that self published novels are crap because they haven't passed through the traditional gatekeepers. We talk about that in the comics world all the time, that the syndicates are the gatekeepers.<br />[Larry] The syndicates. That sound so ominous.<br />[Howard] We look at them as the gatekeepers to the audience, and the audience looks at them as...<br />[Brandon] Quality-control.<br />[Howard] Yeah, as quality-control. What these vanity presses do is they say, "You know what? It's not really about quality or anything like that. It's really about whether or not you have enough money to get past the gatekeeper. We will serve as the gatekeepers, we will get you in front of this audience, all you need to do is pay us the printing costs plus X. thousand dollars for this. Those people are dishonest.<br />[Brandon] I'm really... for the pitfall here, I'm worried about the dishonest people. There are plenty of publishers that are vanity presses or print on demand's that are not disreputable. That will take your money to print your book, but that's what their job is and they will be up front with it.<br />[Howard] Those are not publishers, those are printers.<br />[Brandon] Printers... well, Lulu is a good example. They sometimes walk the line and tried to pretend that they are a publisher but if... they're pretty upfront with all the stuff they do. It's a good place to go. There are other ones. Who did you use?<br />[Larry] I used Infinity, which is similar to Lulu in that... they will kind of portray themselves... it's like, "Oh, yeah, you can be really successful doing this." Yes, you can be really successful, but you need to be not just an author, but you also need to be a businessman or an entrepreneur.<br />[Brandon] We'll talk about that. That's pitfall number three. But I want to go back to number two and just tell you, beware. There a lot of disreputable agents.<br />[Howard] What's the site called? Is it author beware or writer beware?<br />[Brandon] Writer beware. Read writer beware. Go to preditors and editors. Hang out on the forums at absolute write. You can find a lot of these places that will tell you about it. But there a lot of people who want your money and who don't really want to give you the service that they should. If you're going to actually pony up the money, you should be getting good service. OK. Pitfall number three, being a businessperson.<br /><br />[Larry] You've got to be a businessperson. You have to be a marketeer, you have to know how to reach your audience, you have to be an accountant -- which is easy for me, being an accountant. If you come into it and you think, "Well, I'm just going to spend the money and all have this book out there and people would just come and magically buy it," you are smoking crack. You need to know how you're going to reach the people, you really need to have a business plan if you want to have success as a self published author. It was a very... I'm not a fan, but one of the most successful self published novels ever was Aragon, the dragon. What happened there was they had a very good business plan in that they went around from school to school selling copies of this book. I had a built-in audience of a couple thousand gun nuts to reach out to that already knew me from the other things that I do. On the accounting end of things, there is two ways you can go about this. Print on demand or you can print a bunch up front and then sell them. Now print on demand, the downside is that the books are going to be a lot more expensive per copy which makes them more difficult to sell.<br />[Howard] The profit margin is lower.<br />[Larry] The profit margin is much, much slimmer. However, you don't have the upfront costs of having to cough up several thousand books to print a bunch of books.<br />[Brandon] Which did you do?<br />[Larry] I actually did print on demand, because at the time, I was in business for myself, I was an entrepreneur, and I was tapped.<br />[Brandon] For most people, I would suggest print on demand just because people I know who self publish a lot of times... I've known a couple of them... they say, oh, this is going to do great. If I buy 5000 instead of 3000, the price goes way down per copy. They end up buying way more copies than they can... than they are ever going to sell. Realizing that a lot of the most successful self published books only sell 1000 or 2000 copies, and they're buying 10,000.<br /><br />[Howard] this I would say that if you're going to self publish -- if you who are listening to this podcast right now are planning to self publish, then your business plan should be to find a way to sell 2000 books. Don't plan on making much money off those 2000 books. Plan on making money on the publishing deal you are able to sign for your next book when the publishers see that there is actually an audience, that you have an audience. That means print on demand.<br />[Brandon] In that case, pitfall number three is to remember you're going to have to do a lot of this stuff yourself. Everyone that I know who has been successful at self-publishing has been successful because they have a really good business sense. Which is not something that intersects with artistic writers very often. The really big ones... if you look at something like The Christmas Box, or if you look at Aragon, or if you look at you, these are people who were business people, who said, OK, I've got this book as a product. Now that half of me that is a businessperson will take this book and sell it and I know how to do that. If you don't know how to do that already, you shouldn't be even considering this. Really. Don't consider self-publishing unless you already have a business plan.<br />[Larry] Yeah. You're going to just basically be wasting your time and your money at that point.<br />[Howard] If you are a creative type who thinks I really don't want to have to interact with all of those businessy types because I hate them and I don't think I need them. You know what, just write books. Just keep writing. Just keep writing and have fun writing. Maybe some day you'll wake up and decide to hand your stuff to one of those business people. Please don't spend money.<br />[Brandon] In 99% of the cases, I would advise my listeners to not self publish. But I wanted to bring Larry in because you actually did it. You are the person that proves, you know what, Brandon, I'm the one percent. Getting published is like a long shot anyway. So there are many different roads...<br />[Howard] He's the perfect success story because he self published and then went on to traditional publishing. So you could see where you cleared those initial pitfalls but then you moved on to a model where those pitfalls aren't present and you can spend more time focusing on the writing.<br />[Larry] I only know of one successful author who is entirely self published traditional novels. His name is Matt Bracken. But he only writes for a very specific audience that he knows very well. But he sells about... if I recall correctly... I don't know the actual numbers... but he sells a pretty large sum of self published novels every year. But he knows his audience. He is a very successful writer in that audience and he is a rarity. Now me personally, I was so glad to break into traditional publishing and get signed up with Baen, so I could get out of that and concentrate on actually writing books. Which is much much nicer. I've sold two more books since then which has been very nice.<br />[Brandon] All to Baen?<br />[Larry] Yes.<br />[Howard] And you didn't have to self publish those.<br />[Larry] Oh, yes. It was very nice not to self publish those.<br /><br />[Brandon] All right. Any last words for them, Howard, on your end? Because you're a successful self publisher...<br />[Howard] I'm a successful self publisher who remains self published. I remain self published because I have yet to be offered a publishing deal that continues to pay the bills.<br />[Brandon] I think you are in a medium where a nontraditional publisher in many ways is overtaking or at least coming up and tying with traditional publishers.<br />[Howard] We've talked about how important it is to have an audience. What I've found is that I have an audience, I have a large, loyal following. The only reason for me to go with a publisher is if the publisher is not looking at my audience covetously and saying I want a piece of that audience. I want the publisher to be looking at my content and saying I have an existing... the publisher already has an existing audience of millions of people and wants to put my content in front of them. That's the deal I'm willing to sign. But a deal where somebody makes it easier for me to submit stuff to my own audience? That's a sucker deal, and I'm not going to take it.<br />[Larry] One of the things for Howard is, he's kind of a pioneer on a relatively new medium. One of the keys for you is, you can sell... your people are primarily on the Internet ready to go. For traditional novelists, we've got to get into stores. We've got to get into Barnes &amp; Noble, we've got to get into Borders.<br />[Brandon] People still don't read fiction consistently online. We've had lots of trouble with very good publishers trying to get this to work and it just isn't working. But we need to wrap this up.<br /><br />[Brandon] I've got a writing prompt for everyone. Story about someone who self publishes a book which for one reason or another becomes a threat that will end the world. So someone self publishes the Necronomicon.<br />[Larry] So you read my book?<br />[Brandon] Thank you to Larry. The book is Monster Hunter International. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:126439 2009-10-26T02:56:42Z 2009-10-26T02:56:42Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 20: The Difference between Character Driven and Plot Driven Stories<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/11/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-20-plot-vs-character-driven-fiction/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/11/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-20-plot-vs-character-driven-fiction/</a><br /><br />Key Points: What is driving the story -- who the characters are or what events are they involved with? What draws the reader in -- how does this end or who is Sally? Both kind create tension in readers, and require conflict. Is the climax a confluence of events or a character decision/change? When the characters' internal moments and the plot's external moments all line up, that's thrilling. Does the plot revolve around a discovery, a decision, or an action? Strong characters make plots interesting. Make your characters strong enough to carry the story.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Howard] This week's episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by Audible. They have a special offer for Writing Excuses fans. Go to audible.podcast.com/excuse and have a look. And now, our show.<br />[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses. Season Three, Episode 20, the difference between character driven and plot driven stories.<br />[Howard] 15 minutes long because you're in a hurry...<br />[Dan] and we are not that smart.<br />[Brandon] I'm Brandon.<br />[Dan] I'm Dan.<br />[Howard] I'm Howard.<br />[Larry] I'm Larry.<br /><br />[Brandon] We have a special guest star, Larry Correia. Larry, tell us about your book and who you are.<br />[Larry] I am an author for Baen Books. My first novel, Monster Hunter International, came out this year. It's doing really well.<br />[Brandon] Enjoyable book. I've read it.<br />[Larry] Thanks. I know Howard's partially through it.<br />[Howard] Three quarters of the way through it. Very anxious to get back to it. But I don't get to do that tonight.<br /><br />[Brandon] We'll be talking with Larry some more later about areas of his expertise. But we want to do a podcast on... a lot of people talk about this. Character driven stories or plot driven stories. It's a big hullabaloo that people like to discuss in English lit programs. What is the difference? Dan! You went through an English lit program. What is the difference between a character driven story and a plot driven story?<br />[Dan] You think they discuss that in English lit programs?<br />[Brandon] They did in mine.<br />[Dan] Not in mine, apparently. The difference for me is what the focus is, what is driving the story forward. Are the characters doing what they are doing because of who they are or because of what they're involved with? Because of what is happening to them?<br />[Brandon] So I guess it's... is it Man versus self, man versus man, man versus... it kind of comes down to that. I think I should add a caveat here. A lot of times when people say character driven versus plot driven, they're actually talking about literary fiction versus popular fiction. That's not how we are talking about it, but a lot of people do that. They'll say, you write plot driven fiction. Plot driven fiction to them is anything with a plot.<br />[Dan] I think that defining them that way hurts the conversation, because then it becomes a discussion of genre rather than a discussion of actual writing.<br /><br />[Howard] When I think of character driven versus plot driven stuff, I think in terms of process as a writer. How am I forcing the story to unfold and am I forcing it or is it a little more organic? But it's possible that people who are criticizing stories for having plot are looking at what is drawing the reader into the story. Is it the characters that are drawing the reader in, or is it the plot? I want to know how this ends versus I want to know what happens to Sally?<br />[Brandon] Right. I think that's a great way of encapsulating it. It's very easy to break down to what Dan said, genre discussions. Because you can look at thrillers and say OK, thrillers are going to be plot driven fiction. But I think that does a disservice to the discussion because I think you can drive every story both with plot and with character. Larry? Do you consider your stories plot driven or character driven or both or is there a weight toward one or the other?<br /><br />[Larry] I think I started out plot driven and my first novel is probably more plot driven. I've done both now though. I have some more coming that I would say are more character driven. Luckily for me, I never took any English classes though. I was an accounting major. I'd say my first novel definitely was... it started as an idea, which turned into a plot. It really was primarily a plot novel. Though as I went along as a writer, it became more of a character thing, but I would characterize it as...<br />[Howard] As somebody who is reading it, I definitely want to know what happens next. I'm not to the end yet, I want to know how things get resolved. But there are characters that I'm interested in and I want to know how they turn out.<br />[Larry] You definitely have to have both aspects. I don't think it's an A or B. It's not a mutually exclusive kind of thing here.<br />[Brandon] Yeah. Although a lot of people want to make it an exclusive sort of thing. I do think, looking at it, we have to really dig out and say what is the main reason people are going to keep turning pages in your book. I think it's important for a reader to consider these things. I don't think... it's less what's going to happen to John or Sally. I think it's... character driven is who are Sally and John going to be at the end of this story.<br />[Howard] That's a better way to say it.<br /><br />[Dan] I think my book actually is a pretty good example of this. Because you can look at Serial Killer. It is very character driven. It has a plot in it, but it would be a very different book if that plot took over. If the plot was in the forefront, it would become a thriller, it would move a little further away from where it is now.<br />[Brandon] I think people who complain, "Oh, I have trouble with endings. I don't know what to do with my endings." I think maybe they are focusing on trying to make a plot driven story when they naturally want to write something character driven. But that's not to say that you can be lazy about it. You can't sit down and say, "Oh, I've got a character driven story so I'm just going to spend time with the characters. You've got to remember you have to create tension in the reader. With a character driven story, you're creating that tension by saying who are they going to be. Is this person going to turn out to be good or bad? Which choices is he going to make? Will he decide to go with the girl that I know he should or will he choose the woman that I know will be bad for him? These sorts of things are character driven conflicts, and there has to be conflict. You were going to say something, Larry?<br />[Larry] I was just going to say that I think the two kind of are interchangeable in one respect, that your characters... you have where you want them to go. As your characters grow and become more realistic, more vital people, the plot will evolve based on the characters and the characters' actions.<br /><br />[Dan] I think in a lot of ways you can look at this question by looking at the climaxes of the story. I've been looking at narrative arcs recently and kind of studying it. I was looking at The Matrix. I won't necessarily say that that is character or plot driven, but the climax that comes is very much a character climax at the end of that movie because it hinges very strongly around what Neo decides and what Neo believes. Whereas a different story, that climax would be a plot climax. It would be a confluence of events rather than a character decision or a character change.<br />[Brandon] I think that one of the reasons I like to write epic fantasy, just armchairing it here, is because it gives me the page length to do a lot of both. You don't always have that luxury. There are a lot of stories I've written that I have to really choose to focus on one or the other. I think this would be a good point to break for an advertisement.<br /><br />[Brandon] We're trying something new this week. We've picked up audible.com as an advertiser. One of the reasons I wanted to use audible and go with them... they have an interesting program where we can pick as pod casters a book that we want to prom each week. Rather than them giving us a book and saying, "Hey, do an advertisement for this," we can pick one that we've actually read, that we actually like, and can talk about it. Then send you people to maybe download it and listen to it. Audible also has a special program with our podcast where if you go to audible.podcast.com/excuse -- we'll link that in the liner notes -- they have a thing where you can sign up and get a 14 day free trial and get a free book. If you're thinking of joining audible, you can do it through our links this way and support the podcast and you can also get a free book. The book we want to talk about this week is Stephen King's On Writing. If you are an aspiring writer and you haven't read this book, I would highly recommend it. Dan and I have both read it.<br />[Dan] It's excellent.<br />[Brandon] It is fantastic. It's a mix between Stephen King talking about his process and his life, but getting into some nuts and bolts of writing, and also just talking about the experience of writing. The cool thing is the audio book is read by Stephen King himself. You don't often get that, the author reading it. He's also a very good public speaker. This is a fantastic book, highly recommended by the Writing Excuses team to help you be a better writer.<br />[Dan] Indeed.<br />[Brandon] That's audible.com, and we appreciate audible sponsoring our podcast.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let's get back into it, and dig into process on this. Once again, the podcast theme, we always want to try and tell you guys how to do it. Now, if you are a writer and you want to be deciding how to balance plot driven versus character driven stories in your book, how do you approach it? Howard?<br />[Howard] I draw arcs for the plot and for the characters. I look at... I will actually draw the narrative curve on a piece of paper and write little landmarks on it. I want this character to have a discovery moment -- you know, sort of an internal discovery -- I want them to have some sort of an external triumph. Then I will map these various character arcs onto what I see as the overall plot arc and see if it fits. Sometimes halfway through the story as I'm writing these things, I will make a discovery about the character. I will realize, you know what, this character's internal discovery is different than I thought it was. That's going to change what their external moment needs to be, and that's going to change the overall plot. I will go back and I'll re-shape those curves. But when it hits on all of those, when I get to my climaxes and I realize that the characters are having their external moments and their internal moments, and the plot is unfolding perfectly, that's just thrilling.<br /><br />[Brandon] Cool. Larry, how do you approach this? How do you balance it?<br />[Larry] Well, personally, how I do it is... I have a lot of really weird friends that make great characters. But I usually start with an idea, and that idea turns into a plot. What I do as I create the plot is I think who are going to be really interesting people to go through and fulfill this plot? Who are people going to be able to really hate or really root for or just love and be interested? I try to come up with characters that people can relate to. I try to give them traits and mannerisms and things that make them into real people. The more you care about the characters, the more you care about the plot, so I find that the two are really intertwined that way.<br /><br />[Brandon] OK. Dan, we've talked about how you are focusing on character...<br />[Dan] That is correct.<br />[Brandon] How do you keep that balance? How do you keep it from turning just into a thriller? How do you keep the focus on the character?<br />[Dan] I have a process similar to what Howard was talking about. I don't draw the arcs, but the end result is kind of the same thing. It's kind of what I was talking about before with climaxes. I look at... you take all those various arcs that you've drawn, and your plots and your subplots, and you look at the resolutions of each one. This is what I do. Is the resolution of this going to be about the plot? Is it going to be external, is it going to be internal? Is it going to be a character? That will help me know what I need to be driving toward. In my mind, the way I keep the focus on character, because that was very important for the John Cleaver books, is everything that happens has to be seen through him. It has to be filtered through him, through that lens of his perception, and how it affects him. There's a plot going on, but we only see the parts that really change him and that really affect him.<br />[Howard] We've talked about that before. Sometimes when you're writing the middle of the book and you're stuck because the middle is boring, it's because you're not looking at the character who's experiencing the most pain or experiencing the most change. I do that a lot. If I'm looking at things and realizing, "Wow. This strip is funny, but it's boring. It's not moving the story forward. What am I doing wrong? Oh, wrong perspective character." I need to switch to somebody else, I need to do something mean to them, and I need to push them along their story as well as moving the overall story forward.<br />[Larry] That's something... I'm sure that Dan could probably agree with me on this, if you write in the first person, that makes it an especial challenge because everything is going through that same character. If you get to that boring spot, you've got to be really careful on how you're going to wade through that.<br /><br />[Brandon] That's its own set of problems with this. With me, I do it a lot like Howard did. Though I'm building my plots... I'm looking at it and I'm saying what's going to cause the major revolution in this plot. It's usually one of three things. Either it's a discovery, it's a decision, or it's an action. Meaning somebody achieved something, they learn something, or they decided to kick their personality, who they are, and go in a different direction. The decisions are going to be character moments. For me to build the tension, therefore, I build a plot framework that drives you to wonder where is this character going to go, what's going to happen with them. That becomes a character driven substory for me. Whereas a discovery story is generally... that's actually plot driven because what's going to happen? What are we going to learn? Actions, again, are going to be plot driven as well. Are they going to achieve this great contest or not? A lot of times, what happens for me is I find that I use a decision to launch a new plot arc for a discovery or an action. That's part of that intertwining that you talked about.<br /><br />[Dan] I think that Larry made a very good point when he was talking about how strong characters will make people more interested in the plot at the same time they are more interested in the characters. It's important to note, like we said in the beginning, that this is not an either or question. You don't have to choose plot or character and then just stick with that, because you need to have both be strong. Strong characters tend to be the way to make that work because when people are invested in those characters, that's when you're going to be triggering all their emotions. A love plot will work if the reader loves your character.<br />[Howard] Brandon and I had a conversation a couple of months back in which I was concerned that a particular character couldn't carry a story... I didn't think that this character could carry a story. I've given that principle a lot of thought since then. I think that it's a useful technique for any writer, is to look at a character and ask yourself, "How much story can that person carry? Why or why not? If they can't carry the story, what's missing? What is it about them that isn't interesting enough?" Then reach into their life and make them interesting.<br /><br />[Brandon] I think that's a great note to end on. Larry, we want you to give us a writing prompt. Just off the top of your head. I'm putting you on the spot. This is what happens. A writing prompt for our listeners.<br />[Larry] Come up with a plot driven story and try to make it good with boring characters.<br />[Dan] Ignore all the advice we've just given you.<br />[Howard] We've just made them run laps for no reason.<br />[Brandon] Someone's already done that. His name is Dan Brown.<br />[Larry] Oh. Burn. Snap.<br />[Howard] You can get Dan Brown's stuff on audible.com.<br />[Brandon] Yes, you can. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:126004 2009-10-08T01:19:48Z 2009-10-08T01:19:48Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 19: Emotion in Fiction with John Brown<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/04/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-19-emotion-in-fiction-with-john-brown/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/10/04/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-19-emotion-in-fiction-with-john-brown/</a><br /><br />Key points: fiction is all about guiding an emotional response in a reader. Writing takes time to think about writing plus time to write. Make time for both. Emotions come from reaction and thoughts, but when we think distorted thoughts, we cause our own emotional reactions. Cognitive therapy tool: stop, write down the feeling and the thought that went with it. Then examine the thought to see if it is realistic. Don't just compare what someone else does well with what you are weak at -- pay attention to the things you do well, too.&nbsp; Good writing guides the reader into experiencing emotions, so think about what evokes a response in you, then put that in your story. Character identification, believability, clarity, focusing on triggering details are all part of evoking emotions. The question you have to ask yourself is, what would evoke that response. Then put that in the story.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Brandon] We once again have John Brown with us. We're going to be pitching a lot of questions at him this time because this is kind of his topic. Just as a reminder, John Brown writes epic fantasy. His first book is coming out in mid-October.<br />[John] October 13th.<br />[Brandon] I was only a couple of days off.<br />[John] You were only one day off.<br /><br />[Brandon] Emotion in fiction. Why did you want to talk about this topic, John?<br />[John] This one is incredibly important to me for two reasons. The first is, as an author, this was one of the two things that added 10 years to me breaking in. It was how I dealt with rejection and hopes and fears. I had to dance with the Dark Lady of depression for about 10 years until I figured out that I was dealing with that. When I did, the insights from that into writing fiction were incredible. Because fiction is all about guiding an emotional response in a reader.<br />[Brandon] I think what we'll do then is break this podcast into two parts. The first part will talk about you during that time trying to break in, because a lot of our listeners are trying to break in, and how you dealt with all of these emotions. The second part will be what you learned and how you learned to apply that to your writing. First part, what was generating all this? These 10 years, what was fueling it and turning you in... what caused the depression? That's a terrible question to ask. What specifically about the writing process fueled your depression?<br />[John] I think the cause of the depression is good, because it talks about the emotion. So let me just... there were two things that were killing me with writing. The first was I did not spend enough time at it. My mind is like a furnace, if I don't have enough time, I'm always just getting up to speed and then never really getting anywhere. Or I'm able to write and six months later I come back and have to junk it. That in and of itself is a problem, you have to just overcome it. But depression or emotions, they depend on a couple of things. There are three nodes. There's... you have the sensory input or thought. There are two paths to emotion. There's a very quick one that goes to your... technically, amygdala and then your thalmus and boom, you've got a physical response. There's another pathway that goes at the same time, you get the same input, and it goes up to your cortex and you think about it. You go outside and step on this slithery thing. Boom, that's the quick way of the emotion, you jump back and you think it's a snake. But you don't really... it's kind of a fuzzy way that you're thinking, but it's quick. Then the next one, you see that slither's a little bit too long, oh, that's the hose. Here's the deal, here's how this ties in. That cognitive thing... when I was trying to break into writing, I think most writers or a lot of writers have this... you write something and there is a cognitive thought that comes through your mind, "This is junk." Or you go out and you read somebody's stuff and you realize I will never be able to compete with this guy. I just read Orson Card. Holy schnitzel. There's no way. Why am I even trying to compete with Stephen King? You have these thoughts that come through your mind. You get a bad review, or somebody doesn't say something about your's that they said about somebody else's. If you're not careful... at least in my case, if you're not careful, these have an immediate effect. Because these thoughts are input... they have an immediate effect on your emotions and then on your writing. Am I answering the question?<br />[Howard] That's perfect.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let's dig into it a little bit. How specifically did you deal with it when you are comparing yourself to other writers?<br />[John] This is great. If you look at depression, about 60% of people can be treated with cognitive therapy. What cognitive therapy does... you have these three nodes again, you've got this very quick emotion, you've got the physical response, and then you have your cognitions, your thoughts. What cognitive therapy does, the whole basis of that is, the reason why you are sad or depressed is because you are thinking certain things that are causing that, that are distortions of reality. This is where this falls into place. Here I am, I read... I can't remember who I read just recently... it was that same thing, it was holy crap, what am I doing? There's no way that I am going to be able to compete. Immediately then, I used my cognitive therapy tool, which is I need to write that feeling down and write the thought that went with it. Then I examine the thought and say, "Is that really realistic?" Oh, this guy actually has 20 years of writing experience. Well, no wonder his book is so good. What was his first book like? It was pretty good, but it wasn't that good. That's the process. There are a number of these things that I notice with other writers that they do all the time.<br /><br />[Brandon] Something that I do, is I look at... I take a step back and say, "Okay, the things I'm noticing that they're doing are what they shine at." Oftentimes, it'll be I'll notice what someone else shines at that happens to be a particular weakness of mine. Then compare the books that way. As unfavorably as humanly possible, looking at their bright point and my dim point. If you reassess, you can look and say, "There are some things I do really well that they're not even trying." That's one of those mental gymnastics that helps me. You guys got anything? Dan?<br />[Dan] No.<br />[Howard] Dan has nothing. I was going to say that...<br />[John] They're all even keel.<br />[Dan] I'm far too arrogant to have problems like this.<br />[Howard] No, no, no. I struggle with the same sort of emotions. There are days when I look at myself and say, "Boy, I am really depressed. Something's got me down." I have to throw everything I'm doing through the cognitive filter and think about it. I'm not allowed to have a visceral reaction without thinking about it... at least trying to think about it. When I'm done, often I'll identify, "Oh. This is because I read that one e-mail from that one person and it got me thinking about this and that's not a happy thought. That's really kind of irrelevant. That has nothing to do with what I'm trying to accomplish today. So I can be happy. Sometimes that thought works and sometimes it doesn't. I think the difference between clinically depressed people who have to be medicated and people who can get by is whether or not that particular strategy works.<br /><br />[Brandon] Although, I do want to say, this isn't an episode about depression. It's an episode about being a writer and dealing with these things. We did do an entire podcast on dealing with criticism. Perhaps we could point back to that. Let's focus it on the new writers. One of the things you mentioned that you had a problem with was that mental energy, finding time for writing. What did you specifically do to overcome that?<br />[John] That's a good question. I was in a very transformational workshop. It was Orson Card's boot camp. I write about it on my blog. But that was the climax of my writing. Because if I didn't perform there, I was going to be done. That was it. The manuscripts were going in the garbage. The books were going to be sold, and I was done. One of the insights there is that they talked about finding time and making time. Here's Mary Higgins Clark, a single mother, getting up at 5:30 in the morning to get an hour and a half to write. Here was another guy in the Bootcamp, this guy named Paul Bishop, who writes these police novels. He's very, very busy. He heads up LA's... half of LA's sex crimes unit or something like that. Incredibly busy, making time to write. I just had to say, that's it. If I want to do this, I've got to make time to write.<br />[Brandon] If they can do it, then...<br />[John] If they can do it, I can do it. So I got up early. During breaks, I would walk around and think about it. My lunch, I would write. That broke that dam for me. Suddenly the ideas started flowing. But I still had to deal with these other writerly messages that are just distortions that I think a lot of writers run into.<br />[Brandon] One thing you said there that I think is very important is... and a lot of writers, new writers, don't realize this... the mental time you spend, not necessarily writing, is as important as the time you spend writing. Finding a couple of hours at night to write most of the time isn't enough, because we need to focus on something. I've got a friend who is a schoolteacher. He has so much trouble writing, not because he can't find time to write, because he can't find time to spend thinking about his writing because he is always focusing on his students. Which is great, it's important for him. But find mental energy.<br />[Howard] That's why, when I lie down to take a nap, I am working. The voices are playing in my head.<br />[Brandon] You need to find time for that.<br />[Howard] You need to find time for that.<br />[Brandon] New writers have to be able to say, "OK, now is not the time to think about work, now is the time to think about writing. That can be very hard to do."<br /><br />[Brandon] Second half of the podcast. Let's dig into how do you use this, John. How do you take all this experience, this turmoil, this depression, this wrangling with yourself and apply it to your fiction?<br />[John] This was the fascinating thing. There is a book... if anybody out there is dealing with this, the book you have to get is Feeling Good by David Burns. End of story. It will change your life if you're dealing with it. But as I was reading that, as a writer, all of a sudden, all these lights started to go on for me. Because writing is the process... you're guiding... a good book guides the reader into an arc of emotions. What I found was that I needed to make sure that they had the thoughts... in the text... I had to make sure that we put in the thoughts that would lead to suspense, that would lead to mirth, that would lead to whatever the effect was that I was yearning after. Once I identified that... then the other thing... this goes back to Adam... I had read this before, but not put together. This is Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiment. That is, I'm not going to have that emotion by having somebody tell me about it. I'm going to have it by seeing the raw inputs. Don't tell me to be scared. Show me something that is going to scare the crap out of me. Don't tell me to be creepy. You have to show me something, you have to give me these things that would elicit, evoke that response in me if I were out on the street.<br />[Howard] Show, don't tell.<br />[Brandon] Now you're making us sound stupid again, because you said that about 10 times as well as we ever have. So stop it.<br />[Dan] John, John, John.<br />[Howard] I just figured it out -- he is the same guy.<br />[Dan] He is that guy.<br />[Brandon] He is that guy who posts that stuff on the forum that makes us look dumb.<br />[Howard] Get out of here.<br />[Dan] You'll have your turn, in prose.<br />[Brandon] Our stupidity aside...<br /><br />[Dan] I actually have a point on this. At the Stoker conference that I went to, F. Paul Wilson was giving a talk about engaging emotions in the reader. He said that it's especially in that genre, in horror, that character was vitally important. Because you wouldn't be scared unless you were scared for the character. That means that you had to be attached to that character. That means that you had to love that character, which means the character has to be incredibly strong. For me, really strong characters that the reader identifies with are the surest route to evoking these emotions.<br />[John] Something else that goes along with that... you will not... in the cognitive research that they've done, you will not have an emotion if you do not believe there's a threat or there's an opportunity. That's why it's so incredibly important that it's believable. You will not have an emotion if it's not clear. This is why it's so important to be clear. The other thing is... we talk about the rule of three, three of this, and three details, and three whatever? But the reason this is so important is because our working memory only has so many slots. If I go, and I'm trying to be clear, and I'm trying to be believable... this kind of is what Mary was talking about, with focusing attention. I have to make sure, because of the working memory, I have to make sure I am focusing them on these critical salient details that will trigger... that evoke that situation for them. That's why you don't want to load it down. That's why you want to have characters that have a dominant impression. Because they can't remember it. They've got that working memory thing and you have to focus them in on it.<br /><br />[Brandon] It comes back to the whole stage magician aspect which I talk about a lot. How do you use and focus somebody so that you can punch them in the side of the head with a surprise? But a lot of times that focus itself is really important because that's what's going to be in their memory.<br />[Howard] I've been going to the wrong magic shows. You can go to a magic show and be punched in the head?<br />[Brandon] Yeah, by William Shatner, it only costs 200 bucks. [Laughs] Sorry, inside joke that... if you had listened to the episodes in between episodes, you would get.<br />[Dan] The un-episodes.<br /><br />[Brandon] So, John, I want to ask a very hard question of you. How? How, specifically, are you doing this? Can you give our readers something that they can try, that they can practice, that will make the emotions spring out at their readers better?<br />[John] The first thing is what everybody has already talked about. That is, think about what is going to elicit... when I am writing, I am yearning for an effect. Sometimes I am very explicit about that. I know I want to have a great beginning. I don't know exactly, but I want... or sometimes it's a very emotional thing, and I'm yearning for the affect. The question I always ask myself is... what do I need... what would elicit that affect in me in real life, and I've got to put that in there. It just depends on what I'm trying to do. This is like what you're talking about with twists and turns and surprises. I've always got to say to myself, what would evoke that? Then go back and do it. I don't know if that's what you're looking for, but that's the question that I have to ask myself.<br />[Howard] That's fairly concrete. Because if you kick that... if the writer in question is somebody who has been struggling with emotions and has actually kicked things through that cognitive loop and been thinking about their emotions. That is a tool that they can then apply to their writing because you take the character and you push them through that cognitive loop, only you give them the information that you had in your head. Then force them out of the cognitive loop so they are having the visceral reaction instead of the thinky one.<br />[John] Let me just go on this... there were two things... for example, I wanted to write a romance. I also wanted to write about villainous heroes. I said to myself, "OK, having the working memory issue, having all these others, how can we write villainous heroes and have them actually work? What is it that is being presented to the mind that makes me still cheer for these people?" When I asked that question, I came up with a number of surprising insights. Same thing with romance. What is it that I have to have to be able to start feeling romance or attraction? Oh, I've got to have this, this, and this. When I ask that question, I usually get some good insights into the emotion. Then I can say, "OK, I've got to put that in the book somewhere." He's got to be a noble character. He's got to be attractive in some way. He's got to do something. That's how I approach it.<br /><br />[Brandon] OK. Let's go ahead and do a writing prompt. I think that might be a good one right there. A story about villainous heroes that has a romantic element that inspires terror in your reader. That's going to be your goal. All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:125699 2009-10-07T09:49:13Z 2009-10-07T09:49:13Z Oh, that's wicked. This guy is a gourmet foods buyer -- so he's going to visit farms and such, then to restaurants and other users of the products he buys, and of course, everyone feeds him. So he is definitely plump.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />The bit that started the show, though, was him visiting a pig farm that he had heard sold wine pork. They happily showed him -- they feed the pigs partly fermented grapes. They had him feed some of the pigs, and they certainly seemed to enjoy the grapes. Then they took him outside and grilled some of their pork for him to try. He had a slice and admitted that the taste was really good. He said the fat was sweeter than usual. I wonder who came up with the notion of feeding the pigs a special diet, and does it really make them worth enough more?<br /><br />Weird and wonderful. I didn't even know there were gourmet food buyers, nor would I have known what his job was. Run around trying out gourmet foods? It actually sounds like a rough job, because even though the perks of the job are tasty, trying to outguess the gourmet foods market must be difficult. And if you buy a half-ton of wine pork and no one wants it because they're dieting this week -- food spoils. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:125564 2009-10-05T01:51:00Z 2009-10-05T01:51:00Z One of the TV shows here in Japan had what I thought was a fascinating experiment with monkeys the other day. These were the wild monkeys that are somewhat common here in Japan -- a large pack of them, clearly familiar with the area and rather bold.<br /><br />The first part of this was showing us what happens when someone walks into their area carrying a banana. First they showed us a woman walking in. She was carrying the banana at about waist level. Within about two steps, they surrounded her, grabbed her skirt, and one of them jumped up and tore the banana out of her hand. Next they showed us a man, about the same height and build. He was carrying a banana in the same way that the woman had. He stepped into the area, and walked across it and back. They cleared his path. One monkey did a half-hearted jump towards the banana, but didn't even really try.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />According to the narrator, this is common behavior for the pack of monkeys. They swarm a woman with food, but leave a man alone.<br /><br />The second part was the fun one. They asked the panel to guess what would happen with the following four people trying the same walk with a banana. First, they dressed the man in a woman's dress. Blond wig, false breasts... as someone on the panel said, he looked like a woman. And the question was, what would happen now when he tried to walk through the monkey pack carrying a banana? Second was a new half -- one who prefers leather, I guess. So this was a man who habitually cross-dresses, but wearing tight jeans, black leather jacket -- somewhat as if a woman were dressing as a man. Long hair, and makeup like a woman. Third... was a female judo wrestler who is built like a sumo wrestler. She wore her judo outfit. They also did a demonstration for the monkey pack before her walk -- they set up a small set of mats, and she threw a smaller man over her hip and down a couple of times. The monkeys surrounded the mats, and seemed fascinated with the demonstration. The fourth was our original man, but this time in a monkey costume. A large brown monkey head, with the pullover suit to make him a very large monkey.<br /><br />Each one then walked across the area, holding a banana. And what do you think happened?<br /><br />The man dressed as a woman got stopped, his dress pulled, and the monkeys jumped up and grabbed his banana. Clothes (and a wig and makeup) do make the woman!<br /><br />The new half also lost his banana. Apparently tight jeans and leather jacket don't make the man?<br /><br />The reaction to the female judo wrestler was amazing. When she stepped out, the monkeys moved back. They gave her more room than they had the original man. They were clearly not going to argue with her.<br /><br />And the big monkey? The pack ran. They turned tail and ran.<br /><br />I'm not sure that this means anything -- I would want to do a lot more trials and combinations if you were really trying to figure out what the monkeys are using to decide who's banana they can safely steal. But it seems pretty clear that there's some kind of monkey business going on.<br /><br />Incidentally, they rewarded the monkeys with a whole box of bananas after they finished the various walks. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:125210 2009-10-03T00:36:06Z 2009-10-03T00:36:06Z One of the news shows recently had a segment covering the "Pink Ribbon" campaign somewhere here in Japan. Apparently an exhibit and so forth focusing on breast cancer. And they made a point of showing us one of the displays.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />Basically, it was two pairs of breasts, side by side. Fairly natural skin tones. Very weird, because it looked as if someone had cut the front off a pair of twins and pasted it on the wall. And the people at the exhibit were fondling the breasts!<br /><br />The newscaster then explained that these are plastic, and they are constructed so that one pair feels like normal breasts, while the other pair has the nodules that one should be looking for in a self-examination. So this is an educational simulation, intended to help women, in particular, know by experience what they should be looking for in self-examinations. <br /><br />Frankly, I think it's a brilliant concept. I mean, how do you know what kind of lump should make you concerned? Well, with these plastic training breasts, you can find out what it feels like.<br /><br />Of course, that doesn't really explain why that was the focus of the short segment on the news... but it's still a good idea. Made me wonder what other learning experiences would be simplified with a little tactile simulation. Maybe instead of show and tell, we need to urge students to touch and feel? urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:125015 2009-10-02T02:02:19Z 2009-10-02T02:02:19Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 18: How to not repeat yourself<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/09/27/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-18-how-to-not-repeat-yourself/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/09/27/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-18-how-to-not-repeat-yourself/</a><br /><br />Key points: Balance continuity and similarities with new stuff. Watch for reuse on small details and for reuse of themes and storylines. Try different takes, outcomes, characters, directions. Hang a lantern on reuse -- let the reader know that you know you are doing it. Try recombination of disharmonious elements and random jumbles to make yourself stretch.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses Season Three, Episode 18: how to not repeat yourself.<br />[Howard] 15 minutes long because you're in a hurry.<br />[Dan] And we're not that smart.<br />[Brandon] I'm Brandon.<br />[Dan] I'm Dan.<br />[Howard] I'm Howard.<br />[Brandon] This is Season Three Episode 18: how to not repeat yourself.<br />[Howard] 15 minutes long because you're in a hurry.<br />[Dan] And we're not that smart.<br />[Brandon] I'm Brandon.<br />[Dan] I'm Dan.<br />[Howard, hesitantly] I'm Howard.<br />[Dan] And this is season three...<br />[Brandon] All right. How to not repeat yourself. Last, no, it was two episodes ago now, because we...<br />[Howard] It was two episodes ago now.<br />[Brandon] How to not repeat yourself. Okay, this is getting terrible.<br /><br />[Brandon] We... As a writer, I often run into this problem. I will sit down and start writing a book and realize the themes that were important to me in a book I'd written before are still surprisingly important to me. So I start writing a book covering those same themes. Or the type of character that made a certain... the type of attributes that made a certain character fascinating to me in a book are still fascinating to me, and so, lo and behold, that same character pops out again. How do you avoid this? Help? John.<br />[Dan] John.<br />[John] Hi, I'm John and I do not repeat myself.<br />[Brandon] By the way, we have John Brown again. Yay.<br />[Dan] Didn't we have him on before? This seems a little repetitive.<br />[Brandon] Buy his book, Servant of a Dark God, coming out from Tor in October sometime.<br />[John] Thank you. I'll talk about it from a problem perspective. I know I used to go out and look for new authors. I would read... I would see this exact same thing. I would read three or four books. Then I would say I'm reading the same thing over and over again. On the other hand, if you look at something like Burn Notice or Lost, you're experiencing a lot of times the same thing over and over again. I think there's some continuity that's going to be there. I'm going to be honest. I looked at Brandon's books... I just went through them very quickly again and I noticed a lot of similarities. But when I was reading them, I didn't mind because he had introduced enough new stuff. I think for me, that's what I try to do, is I try to stuff... if I see something, I'm going to cut it, and try something new. But I'll also just try to stuff new things in, if I'm really just loving that theme that I already wrote about.<br /><br />[Howard] This is a huge risk for me because if I start to repeat myself, it's because I'm telling the same joke. There's 3300 days of Schlock Mercenary. 3300 punchlines and I need to not repeat them.<br />[Brandon] But it gets bigger than that, though, because... number one... well, part of it, the way you're doing it as you're going, I could see running into a lot of danger where you realize, "Hey, wait a minute, I did this exact same character arc with this exact same character three years ago." How do you avoid that? Can you avoid that? What do you do?<br />[Howard] The way I start is I try and think, "all right, for this story, what haven't I done?" If I'm going to re-tread some ground... if I'm going to go back and do something that I know I've done before... I want to have another take on it, I want to have a different outcome. I want to have different characters involved in. The danger that I find myself falling into is reuse of words, punchlines. It's happened to me three times in the last week. Where I've been writing something, and I thought that seems really familiar. I will then Google my own website and found out, "oh, yes, that's familiar because I wrote that punchline for that strip." What I did in that case, is I said, oh... it was actually the punchline that just aired, putting all your eggs in one basket, you might as well use an exploding basket. I thought that's a powerful metaphor. This character would have remembered somebody having used that metaphor and would refer to it. Rather than joking about the exploding basket, he's taking it a step further. But catching myself... that was a job for Google.<br /><br />[Brandon] Let me point out something Howard said here which I think is important, and then we'll get into other aspects of it. You are suggesting hang a lantern on it. I don't think we've used this term before on Writing Excuses.<br />[Dan] We have not defined it.<br />[Brandon] Hang a lantern -- it's a screenwriting term. Which is one way to deal with a potential problem in a script. If there is a continuity problem or readers or listeners or viewers are going to say, "Wow, that really stands out." One way to deal with it is to point out that you know that that stands out by doing what they call hang a lantern on it. Have one of the characters mention it, in other words. Or I've used this joke before, have the characters mention remember that joke... suddenly you can use the joke again because readers will allow you to do it. I do this. In fact, when I was approaching how I wanted to do my writing, I realized that there were some things I wanted to look at again and again. I thought there's no way I can publish all these books dealing with the same concepts from different sides. Then I thought for a while and said, well, yes I can if I make it a theme. If I say I am going to do... for me, it's the city of the gods. If you follow all the back stories, the behind the scenes of Brandon's books, you will find that there is a reason why this theme keeps popping up in my books. It is something that the characters are approaching from different directions. It becomes intentional. Because I sat down and said I want to do this, let's see if I can make it all work out connected together. Then it becomes something cool instead of something accidental.<br />[Dan] One of the other things that you do, and John already mentioned this, is just adding in lots of extra stuff. You talk about gods and deification is a major theme... I don't think I've read a book from you that doesn't have a character turning into a god by the end. But that is an aspect of it. There's so much other stuff. There's no way I can look at your books and say these are all just different versions of the same story because they're totally not. There's plenty of other things going on. There's other ideas in there. That's just a recurring theme, not a "oh this again."<br />[Brandon] Right. Hopefully.<br />[Dan] I agree.<br /><br />[Hang a Lantern is called Lampshade Hanging at TVTropes <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging">http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging</a>]<br /><br />[John] I do too. If you look at it on the big scale, there are people that say there are only two stories: a guy came to town and somebody died. Or there are nine stories. Or there are so many themes. There's romance that gets written over and over again. I think the time that we get into problems is when it small... it's the smaller details. I have the same description... I remember reading T. Coraghessan Boyle. He always had a description of a guy going into a creek and... I don't know if I want to... the way the water affected his unmentionables. It was the same thing in every book after every book. It was that kind of a detail that was startling... like Howard's jokes. Howard could probably... after how many years and how many panels... you look at Calvin and Hobbes as well, you've always got dinosaurs and you've got Calvin being the same type of guy. But it's those small details I think are the ones that need to be worried about.<br />[Dan] I agree wholeheartedly. When I noticed this as a problem, it's always because it's a small detail rather than an overarching storyline.<br /><br />[Brandon] I have it on large things. David Eddings is an example. I loved David Eddings books as a youth. I would read through the books. His first series was fantastic. His second series was even better, except there's a voice in my head saying, "This is the same story again." I said, "Yeah, but it's really well done." Then I hit the third series and I'm like...<br />[Howard] This really is the same story, isn't it?<br />[Brandon] This really is the same story. I couldn't read the fourth series. Now, granted, I've already read 20 books by this author, and maybe there is no way that an author can go that many books without you saying that.<br />[Howard] He sold you 20 books. He did okay.<br />[Brandon] He sold me 20 books, so it's kind of... it's hard to... but at the same time, it made me say, "Okay, I'm done." I did the same thing with Clive Cussler on the second or third book.<br />[Howard] Those are all the same book.<br />[Brandon] That gets into reader expectations. Which maybe once we come back from the break we will talk about.<br /><br />[Howard] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by John Brown's Servant of a Dark God available from Tor... when? Now?<br />[Brandon] Sometime. October. October... mid October. October 14.<br />[Howard] This book has a launch date, but the podcast is not brought to you by the launch date, it's brought to you by the book.<br />[Dan] This podcast brought to you by John Brown, The Servant of A Dark God.<br /><br />[Brandon] And we're back. Reader expectation. You wanted to say something, Howard?<br />[Howard] I was going to say... reader expectation. If you look at the Clive Cussler novels, if you look at romance novels, if you look at things in that genre, people want escapist fantasy in which this, this, and this happens, but don't tell me exactly which characters going to do what. Make me guess. That's okay in those genres. In what we're writing, I don't think you can get away with it for very long.<br />[John] I think part of this is... I don't know, I can't speak for the Eddings thing... but I think part of it has to do with how critical surprise is in the reading experience. If you look at somebody who is reading... it doesn't matter if it is romances or it's epic fantasy or whatever... they are reading the same type of book over and over again. They want -- they crave that same experience, but they can't get it unless there is something surprising about what's going on. I think maybe there's something there... I don't know...<br />[Brandon] I think there is something there. It comes down to understanding your genre in part, understanding your readers. Oftentimes fiction -- I've said this before -- I think is a balance between the original and the familiar. That balance is different for every genre. But if we're really looking at it and saying we want to push ourselves as authors -- this is important for nonpublished authors, too, you guys. Those out there are thinking, "Oh, this isn't an issue until you have 15 books out." I was having this trouble when I was an unpublished author writing. When I sat down to write a new book. There are several times where I said I can't write this book. I stopped part way through.<br />[Howard] But you were an unpublished writer writing your dozenth book.<br />[Brandon] It was... but there are people listening who have... I started having this pretty early on where I said I can't write this book because I've already written this book. It ruined the process for me.<br />[Dan] Most people are going to write several books before they get one published. They're going to have to deal with this.<br /><br />[Brandon] So how do you deal with that? As a writer...<br />[Howard] Thematically, I don't have a tool. In terms of phraseology and punchlines, I use Google and I search the stuff that's on my website. All of my script files for my comics are in Microsoft format in a single folder. I can go into that folder and I can do simple word searches. Sometimes it takes three or four minutes to grind through 3500 some odd files, but it will show me where the matches are. I can use that for other things. When you said hang a lantern on it, if I find out I've used a punchline before...<br />[Brandon] You hang a lantern on it.<br />[Howard] I'll use it again. Only this time I won't use it as the punchline. I would use it as the setup for the real punchline.<br /><br />[Brandon] But I think this can be an issue for writers in that it can stop them... stop the creative process... you can freeze yourself, be unable to expand further. This podcast is themed at people who are aspiring writers mostly. If they are running into this and saying I'm writing the same book over and over again. How do they stop? How do they break out of it?<br />[Dan] One thing I'm going to suggest here... and this is kind of what you did when you were talking about the gods thing... is take a back... when you start to realize that all of your books are very similar or everything that you write follows the same lines, take a step back and really analyze it. Get down to the very bottom core of what that idea is that you keep repeating. Whether that is... in my case, it's monsters. And the relationship between monsters and heroes. And how can a hero become a monster? That's not necessarily an overt theme, but it's in the back of my mind and it's something that interests me. Once you take it back to that very basic point, I think at that stage, you can look at yourself and say, "Wow, I'm really interested in this." There's a lot of different ways... there's hundreds of different ways I could approach this idea without repeating the exact same story every time."<br />[John] I think... You know the old "don't think of pink elephants" thing? That to me is what we're talking about here. When we say don't do this thing. Instead of saying don't do this thing... it's like what Dan said, it's think of... yes I want to be aware of the problem and if I'm doing this, my alpha reader, please tell me that or I'll notice it. But then the thing is to think forward and say yes, it's okay to write three seasons of Burn Notice and have the same type of thing going on. Because what I'm going to do that is, there are so many variations, there's something new, something surprising, that I want to do with this. I look at your books, Brandon, that's what I see. I see you taking this idea and you do something... you add so many wacky new incredible things. So it's fresh even though are still talking about gods. Even though the first three, first four books was this sooty, gray ash city -- I didn't care. Because there were so many other things that you were doing with it.<br />[Brandon] I've seen it with myself what I do. Just trying to analyze myself. I react against myself. I've tried to start using this rather than just letting it happen. I write a book and say okay, I just finished this Mistborn series. I've done these certain things. How can I write a book which takes... goes a different direction? Because of that, it actually connects my books in a way that may be good, maybe bad, I don't know, but it's how I have to do it. Because they are stepping up on each other. If one is finishing, the other is saying, OK, here's where you left off the conversation. Let's take the branch that you didn't take and approach it that direction. I found myself doing this in the early years too. How did that keep it fresh? It was really tough for me at certain points. It was something I had to come to grips with. To do it, I would often reach back and... do what Dan said, dig it down but then try and throw in something completely unexpected. Something that I'd never intended, and forcing it to work. Forcing yourself to be creative by putting disharmonious elements together.<br />[Dan] We've talked a lot about recombination as a source of creativity on this podcast. That is a great way to do this. If you say, this story that I'm writing now is very similar to the one I just finished, approach it from a different angle. Say, well, I'm going to tell that same story but I'm going to focus very heavily on character rather than plot. Or I'm going to...<br />[Brandon] And throw in a few disharmonious things. This is going to be a wacky metaphor, but Dan and I both began role-playing by playing a certain role-playing game. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.<br />[Dan] Oh, baby.<br />[Brandon] Separately. It's a great game. Anyway, one of the things I think attracted us to this is the random generation of a character at the beginning. You didn't know what you are going to begin with because the game encouraged you to roll a bunch of dice and come out with a wacky thing. This type of animal has this type of path, it has this type of skills, that you didn't choose it, it all came at you randomly. That forced you to combine these all and come up with a character. Maybe that's what you need to do, readers, is take a few of these elements that are things you like and then a few things you would never contemplate putting in a book, role the dice, randomly jumble them together, and say, "Wow, how can I turn this into a book?" It's got some of the themes I like, it's got things I have to stretch for, let's see where it goes.<br />[Howard] Tracy Hickman built a tool for that in the XDM book that I illustrated. It's called the story thing generator. Where he said, "a blank is trying to blank a blank using a blank."<br />[Laughter]<br />[Dan] That's foul, Howard.<br /><br />[Howard] No, no. But you pick several... you pick among one of these several sentences and then you roll the dice for nouns and adjectives and whatever. It's like MadLibs, only when you're done, you realize, "A Princess is trying to eat a pie and the magic frog doesn't want her to." You come up with story seeds, from which you could go...<br />[Brandon] Well, we have a writing prompt.<br />[Howard] Okay. Writing prompt. A princess is trying to eat a pie and someone is trying to stop her.<br />[Brandon] And the fate of the world depends on it.<br />[Dan] [musical interlude -- dun, de dun dun...]<br />[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:124926 2009-09-30T12:13:33Z 2009-09-30T12:13:33Z Here's an oddity. The one-year drama on public TV here recently came to an end. This is a daily serial, with 15 minute segments six days of the week. Each segment is shown about 3 times in the morning, once at lunch, and then again in the evening. Saturday they run through the whole week, just in case you missed something. I haven't really been watching this one, although Mitsuko watches it daily.<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />The week before the very last week we reached the climax -- the community radio station where the 20-year-old protagonist was working was being evicted from the old movie theater that they were using. The evil woman who was the landlord had been shown to be behind most of their troubles over the last year -- she evicted the family from their longtime candy factory/home at the very beginning of the show, and now she was evicting the community radio station -- so that she could tear down both buildings and put up her dream -- a shopping center. So they were holding a final broadcast and community celebration, saying goodbye to the old movie theater.<br /><br />And the villainess, dragged into the celebration, changed her mind. She gave them back the old movie theater as a place for the community radio station, and even gave the protagonist's family back their old home and candy factory. Naturally, everyone on the show seems happy that they got it all back.<br /><br />I found it oddly disappointing. They had made a new home, and were running their candy factory and shop in a new place. They had done the goodbye broadcast, and brought in all the old characters to celebrate leaving the moviehouse. I really thought moving on was the right next step. Having the villainess suddenly turn soft at the climax -- it fell flat for me.<br /><br />This was a sort of coming of age story -- with the 20-year-old protagonist facing a number of challenges to her life. Her mother who had left when she was 10 years old to chase being an actress, suddenly came back home. They were evicted from their home. She helped find a place for the community radio station and then built it into an important part of the community. Lots of other odds and ends, culminating with the radio station being evicted, too. Admittedly, they would've had a only a week to hint at everyone moving on to new places and new lives. Still, I think it would've been more realistic, and a bit more fulfilling, then the sudden change of mind of the evil landlady.<br /><br />They filled in the final week with various reconciliations. Clearly they were trying to wrap up all the loose ends. For this kind of a portrayal of life, though, I think it's sometimes better to leave the loose ends -- "and they went on," rather than "everything was wonderful." urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:124358 2009-09-27T02:49:21Z 2009-09-27T02:49:21Z Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 17: More Q&amp;A at WorldCon<br /><br />From <a href="http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/09/20/writing-excuses-episode-3-season-17-characters-worldbuilding-qa-with-mary-robinette-kowal/">http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/09/20/writing-excuses-episode-3-season-17-characters-worldbuilding-qa-with-mary-robinette-kowal/</a><br /><br />Key points: What do you do when characters revolt? Check -- is this the right character? Are you bored with the story? Are you forcing yourself to follow an outline, and you are a discovery writer? Or go ahead and write it out, then decide whether or not it is better. What's surprisingly hard about writing? Starting something new, doing revisions, doing all the parts -- beginnings, middles, ends. How do you build a world and history for your story? Study history. Reuse fiddly bits. Plan and take advantage of serendipitous happenstance. For new magic or technology, consider -- how does it affect the poorest class, the richest class, and how can it be abused?<br /><a name="cutid1"></a><br />[Brandon] And once again Mary Robinette Kowal joins us. Hugo nominee... we'll be calling for you in two days... oh, and you, too, Howard.<br />[Howard] Thanks. And I'm Howard.<br />[Brandon] You're up against Joss Whedon. I just don't know... can someone beat Joss Whedon in a fair... I don't think it's...<br />[Howard] If anybody can, Phil Folio can.<br />[Dan] Joss Whedon turns up dead.<br /><br />[Brandon] We have three more questions from our audience that we are going to keep answering here. Who was the next one? It was...<br />[Dan] [inaudible]<br />[Mary] That was me.<br />[Brandon] No, no, your's is the next one. Come on up. I think...<br />[Dan] Get up here and speak at the book.<br />[Brandon] Here is the book. The sacred book.<br /><br />[Audience] What is your standard plan of response if the characters revolt and start taking over the story?<br />[Brandon] This is something that writers often ask about... aspiring writers... you hear talked about... what to do when you're writing along and your characters... people will describe to me, "Oh, my characters decided that they wanted to go this direction instead of this direction" or "my characters decided that they wanted to do this." How do you respond to that? Mary, what do you do?<br />[Mary] My feeling is that if the character is doing something that's not good for the story, then I've cast the wrong character. Therefore I need to go back and reconsider it. I don't think that I'm only going to ever come up with only one brilliant character, so I can just save them for another story that's appropriate.<br />[Brandon] I've noticed... and I've asked this of professional writers a lot. A lot of them... the pros don't ask this question as often. They actually back up a few steps and say, "Okay, why is this character trying to deviate?" That means there's a problem. Either the wrong character is cast, which you've mentioned, or you've gotten bored with the story. You haven't built a story that's exciting enough, so you're trying to throw spice into it. You want to say...<br />[Mary] I just had this happen. I was using historical characters, which I will never do again. I was like I've got the wrong historical characters on stage. I need to go research and find a different one. I came back after doing the research and sat down and looked at it and said, "Nope, this scene is just dull."<br />[Brandon] It's a deeper problem a lot of times. Another problem could be that you're not an outline writer and you're trying to force yourself to outline write. Some authors don't use outlines and they don't work for them. Stephen King, as we've mentioned before, never outlines. If you are trying to force yourself to use one, then maybe you shouldn't. You should try it different ways, maybe you should free write. For me, my characters don't do this. Either I've come up with something really interesting that I want to fit into the story and I say, "Oh, this would be better" and so I just move from my outline. But I'm always in control, personally. Dan?<br />[Dan] When this happens to me, it is usually a dialogue problem. I like to write dialogue very organically and make it flow. When it starts flowing the wrong direction, I can immediately tell. I think, this scene is not going to end the way I wanted it to because now the characters are talking about something else. However, it is still interesting. The thing I do is just ride it out. I will write that scene I now see where the characters want to go, if they eventually get back on topic, if where they are going is more interesting. By the end, I can tell, "Okay, I need to kill this, I need to go back and I need to tweak the beginning so that this conversation will go in the right direction" or sometimes I'll think this turned out better than I expected because it went in a different way. Sometimes you just keep going and keep going and the problem might fix itself or suggest its own resolution.<br />[Mary] You just said something that made me think that one of the things that I often find is that when I'm having a problem, it's not with the section that I'm in, it's with the section two or three back or way back. That it's some earlier groundwork that I've done.<br />[Brandon] This also might go back to the concept of killing your darlings sometimes. We did a whole podcast on that, you can listen to it. I've been in writing groups with Dan for a long time. Sometimes Dan has sections that are pure genius that don't belong in the book.<br />[Dan] He's always very quick to point those out to me, too.<br />[Brandon] They'll be brilliant and he'll be writing along and it's going completely the wrong direction. That's what happened. Dan is very good with dialogue, very good with language, he gets on a roll and the scene turns out brilliant. But you can have a brilliant scene that's wrong for the book. Sometimes you have to write those out and just cut them. Use them later.<br />[Dan] Sometimes you have to wait for the writing group to tell you to cut it out.<br />[Howard] That sure would be nice. Once I've started penciling and inking the page, I'm not going to throw it away. Good night. That's work that I'm not going to do twice. I'll rewrite something if it doesn't have art associated with it, but once I've started arting...<br />[Brandon] So what do you do? You just follow the characters if they go off somewhere?<br />[Howard] If the characters start going somewhere, I can usually tell while I'm scripting that, "Oh, that's going to change the story, now isn't it?" I'll evaluate. Is it changing the story because this is what the characters would really do? Is it changing the story because the story is boring and I want to do something else? Or is it changing the story because the story that I had outlined is not nearly so interesting is this horrible, horrible thing that's going to happen if the characters decide to actually do this? Obviously, I usually lean towards making things worse.<br />[Brandon] We've talked about before... you have sometimes a different motivation... you want to be funny every day. That trumps everything else.<br />[Howard] That is a trap that I cannot prevent myself from putting my foot in. Sometimes, in order to make a joke, a character who is on the screen has to reveal something about himself or herself that is going to change the story. I will look at that joke long and hard. If the joke is funny enough, that's it. We have a new piece of information that just changed the whole shooting match.<br /><br />[Brandon] Next question was actually Mary's. Do you want me to remind you what it is?<br />[Mary] It was...<br />[Howard] Let Mary...<br />[Brandon] What things surprised you... difficulty [partially inaudible]<br />[Mary] You just asked it.<br />[Brandon] When you became a writer... first started writing, what things surprised you in their difficulty? I'm curious about this too. We're going to make Dan answer first. Ha ha.<br />[Dan] This is too easy for me. Nothing has been difficult.<br />[Howard] Finding food in Ben's fridge?<br />[Dan] Yeah. The guy whose house I use as an office never stocks his food with fridge... food with fridge? The most difficult part for me is speaking clearly. The most difficult part for me of writing has been moving on. I know this is not a question that our aspiring writers are going... not necessarily going to speak to them. I sold a book that turned into a trilogy and everyone wanted it. I wrote books 2 and three knowing that they had already been sold and that those characters and the world had already been accepted. Moving onto a new project terrified me. It was the hardest thing I think I've ever done since I started writing. Because I was writing something new that I didn't know if they were going to like me anymore.<br />[Brandon] That is surprisingly hard. I'll say that that surprised me. Even though it didn't... it wasn't as hard for me, because I like moving on to new projects. Every time I release a book, it surprises me how anxious I get about, "Oh, now they're going to hate this one." I guess that's the artist's temperament. I would say though that the thing that surprised me most was revision. I was not anticipating revision being the hardest part of writing a book. It's easier for me to plan a book and write a book than it is for me to revise a book. I would much rather write a completely new one than revise the one I'm working on. Particularly once the 17th draft rattles around. We did, on the Wheel of Time books, 17 drafts. Normally I do eight or nine. Even by...<br />[Howard] That's only twice as much.<br />[Brandon] Only twice as many. I hate it. I hate revising. Hate, hate, hate. But it makes the books much better.<br />[Mary] Wow. Yes. Eight or nine...eh. 17? Nah. Mine was... the thing that was hard for me was I could write good beginnings and I could write good endings. The middles? It was like I would write a good beginning and I would have a really great ending... from two different stories that just happened to be in the same Word document.<br />[Howard] There's this skinny bridge between the two of them with angry wizard standing there saying you shall not pass?<br />[Mary] Yes. And asking me about sparrows.<br />[Brandon] I would agree. Middles are the hardest part. That didn't surprise me so much as the other things. But they are really tough.<br />[Dan] For me, I actually think it's been reversed. I've never been super good at endings, beginnings are difficult, but the middle? I can write the middle of the book forever.<br />[Howard] I know.<br />[Brandon] All right, Howard. What surprised you?<br />[Howard] Coming up with the punch line every day. I actually thought it would be harder than it was. Sometimes I look back and I wonder how am I doing it? Because the moment I start thinking about it, I'm like the bumblebee who is studying aerodynamics and can't fly anymore. Because it just stops working. It's one of those things where I have to remind myself when I start writing, "Oh, yeah, there's something I got to do at the end of this strip, but that's not what I'm thinking about right now. What I'm thinking about right now is just moving the story forward, writing some dialogue, and panel four... oh my gosh, there's a punchline. Whoohoo, it happened."<br />[Brandon] I wrote... I actually posted this on my twitter just a while ago... I tweeted it, I guess. I was trying to write... there is a character who's very witty in the book I'm working on right now. I realized writing the witty parts took twice as long. It took twice as much effort per word as writing the dramatic parts. I don't know if that means I'm naturally more dramatic or if it just... I don't know, but it was really rough.<br />[Howard] It takes practice. What I've found is that when I come up with the punchline or when I come up with the joke that I want to tell, I will then look back over the strip and say, "Okay, now let's deliver this properly." And I will rewrite the dialogue so that the phrasing of the words... comedy is like poetry, in that the words have shape, the sentences have shape. There are things that you can do to make... for instance, the word monkey is a funny word. You can make the word monkey funnier by setting up with other words. Setting up with the word predestined is not as funny as setting up with the word poo or banana.<br />[Dan] The Predestined Monkey is a great band, by the way.<br />[Brandon] actually, that's going to be our writing prompt.<br />[Howard] I am so sorry.<br />[Brandon] We'll do that at the end, though.<br />[Mary] I'm a big fan of monkeys, you know.<br />[Brandon] Predestined monkeys?<br />[Mary] Evil robotic monkeys...<br /><br />[Brandon] One last question and then we'll wrap up.<br />[Audience] My question is, one of the most important things in each book is the world it's set in and the history that keeps popping up throughout the book. You learn bits and pieces. How do you build that world and the history?<br />[Brandon] How do you build the history for your books or your stories? This applies even when you're writing non-science fiction and fantasy, when you're writing mainstream, the characters are going to have history. The setting is going to have history. How do you devise that? How do you make it real? Mary? Why don't you go ahead?<br />[Mary] Boy, that's a... the thing that I do is I cheat and I look at existing structures. I look... if I'm trying to create a truly unique and original world, one of the things that I've done is that I did a survey of different cultures across the world to see what common things exist because that gives me a basic building block. It's like I can believably interpret that someone is going to have developed glass because it arose in several different cultures. Then I start looking at how things connect together. If I have got glass, then I also have to have quarries, and if I have quarries, then stone building is also going to be important. I try to build out from that, and look for... look at the lenses that people will view the world through. If a baker walks into a room... into a kitchen, the first thing they're going to notice is if the counters are clean. If an artist walks into the same kitchen, they are going to notice the color the walls are and if the paintings are crooked. It's the same thing in the world. If I've got a Temple that's got a goddess of swords, those people are going to view things through the metaphors of swords and blades and things like that. I could have actually made this much easier. When I teach puppetry and we're doing adaptation the thing I talk about is if you change one thing, it changes everything. Everything is connected.<br />[Brandon] Howard, let's let you answer next, because you're always last. I don't want you to feel last. You're more like next to last in my book.<br />[Howard] Penultimate. The technologies and the histories and stuff that I build in the Schlock Mercenary universe grow out of silly commentary I want to make in footnotes. Then I look back at the jokes I've made and say, "Hum. How could that have happened to the French?" Then I write horrible things happening to the French. I'm sorry, I had a medical experience in Nice that was not very niece. But a lot of what I do is just taking elements that I know have worked and reusing them. Someone came up to me last night during the party and said, "What are those little antenna that stick off of everything? What piece of technology is that?" He was talking about the little... I call them obligatory fiddly bits... little stick with a yellow ball on the end. I attach them to everything. He said, "What do they do?" I don't know, but it identifies things as Schlock Mercenary technology and my readers get that. I don't need to know what they do, I just know that it makes them high tech. That sort of principle is probably all the way through my sloppily written histories.<br />[Brandon] I use the grand old writerly tradition of stealing like a thief, particularly from history. History books work wonders for coming up and developing your histories. I use them extensively -- honestly, that's the best thing I do. But it's also goal driven for me. I will decide okay, what's important to this story? In some stories, the religion is going to be very important, so I'll world build and build the history of the religion a lot. But the language is going to be less important, so I won't develop how the languages happen. I talk about this a lot in the podcasts, but I decide what are my goals and how can I flesh out those goals and make the history like another character.<br />[Dan] My use of history in my books, because I write in the modern world, tends to focus on character history. That's a combination of preplanning and serendipitous happenstance. A great sample is in Serial Killer. I was developing his relationship -- the main character -- that meant he needed a mother and I wanted him to have an absent father. That told me a lot about the mother. I also wanted that mother to have a twin sister. The first time the twin sister walks on-screen in the first chapter, I wanted to compare her. I wanted to describe her. I thought, well, I'll compare her to the mother. She's always seemed... she was indistinguishable from the mother, except she seemed happier. I wrote the line, that's probably because she'd never been married. I wrote that because it was snarky, but then I thought maybe she hasn't been married. Then that started telling me all kinds of other things about those characters and what their relationship was. I built that into the story and it ended up working really well. So combination of planning and grabbing those nice hooks when they show their face.<br />[Howard] Serendipitous snark.<br />[Brandon] And working backwards.<br />[Mary] I remembered three things, and I can't remember who mentions them, but three things that have been really fabulous tools for me when dealing with new magic or new technology in a world. That I should look at how that magic or technology affects the poorest class, how it affects the richest class, and how it can be abused?<br /><br />[Brandon] That's very good advice. All right. We'll go ahead and end with the writing prompt which is you're going to write about a band called the Predestined Monkeys...<br />[Howard] I thought you'd just make them write about a predestined monkey...<br />[Dan and Brandon] [garbled]<br />[Howard] It can be a band of predestined monkeys.<br />[Brandon] Something like that is your writing prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. Special thanks to Mary for sitting in on three of these. Thank you all, audience, for giving us questions. Keep on listening.<br />[Dan] You have no more excuses, now go write. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:mbarker:123918 2009-09-26T08:44:05Z 2009-09-26T08:44:05Z I've been trying to come up with a name for them, and I think that's pretty good. It's harvest time in this area in Japan, so the rice fields are ripe for the crows and such to get into. And most of the farmers put up bouncing dervishes to try to reduce the pilferage.<br /><br />What's a bouncing dervish? Start with two long limber bamboo poles -- say 20 feet long or so? Stand them up about that far apart, with a long string on each of them. In the middle, hanging on the string, there's a hoop -- maybe 3 feet across? -- covered with... I guess it's plastic, or maybe paper. White, anyway. With huge eyes and a mouth, or some similar pattern on it. Most of them have a bright tail on the bottom to help stabilize it. But every passing breeze makes it flip and jump, with a lot of up and down because the poles are very limber.<br /><br />I think they really make the rice fields decorative at this time of year. Bouncing dervishes everywhere!