18.31: Getting Personal: Mining Your Life for Themes
In our final episode diving into how and why Dan wrote “Dark One: Forgotten,” talk about how you can take something personal and mine it for fiction. We also tackle the complicated question—Why should you be the one to tell your story? We think about the personal touches that you can add to your writing, and how people can hear when your story is personal.
Homework:
2 things!
1. Have you watched Criminal Minds? If you haven’t, you should! Next week, we have a special guest—Kirsten Vangsness who plays Penelope Garcia! Explore her other stuff (like her web series and podcast), and get ready for an INCREDIBLE conversation with her.
2. What’s the thing in your real life that you keep thinking about when you aren’t writing? Can you give that feeling or theme to a character? ALSO, prepare for our next Deep Dive, by reading through Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary. And feel free to re-listen to our interview with Howard earlier this year,
Thing of the Week:
Everything Everywhere all at Once
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key points: How do you take personal stuff and mine it for fiction and storytelling? Sometimes it’s just things you love day-to-day. The things we carry! Sometimes it’s small details. Try putting the polar opposite, or at least different approaches, into your story. Turn it up to 11, and then back it down and play with it. Take care of yourself, too. Give yourself time and space for tough stories. Life is more than just trauma, you can mine happy stuff and good memories, too. Make sure the reader knows what is going on, too. Give them the signposts, breadcrumbs, context to make sense of the inside joke, the emotional tug.
[Season 18, Episode 31]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Getting Personal: Mining Your Life for Themes.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And I have opinions… That don’t always make it into my stuff.
[Dan] Keep them to yourself.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] No, this is an opinion episode. So, this is our last episode where we’re kind of digging into Dark One: Forgotten and how and why it was written. One thing that is very personal for me is the concept of memory. I, when I was first married, spent eight months living with my grandfather who has Alzheimer’s. This is one of my favorite people in the world, he practically raised me for a huge chunk of my childhood. Then I… The situation was reversed, and I became his caretaker and helped kind of guide him through this disease that eventually killed him a few years later. I had not realized how much un-dealt with trauma there was until I wrote a John Cleaver novella called Next of Kin, which is specifically about a monster who consumes other people’s memories and then relives them. All of this stuff just came gushing out. I have since written several books that deal very closely with memory and what it is to have or lose memories. Dark One: Forgotten is one of them. That becomes a major part of the story, especially at the end when all of the supernatural stuff is revealed. So, I thought it would be really interesting to talk about this specifically. Not memory, but the broader category of how do you take something that is so personal, that means so much to you, and then mine it for fiction and storytelling?
[DongWon] I get the question all the time of, like, “What are you looking for in a project? What makes something stand out to you? What makes you pluck something from the unsolicited submission pile?” Not every book has to be this way. Obviously, there’s lots of reasons to write, there’s lots of fiction that works. But, for me, the thing that I’m looking for is always where do I see the author in this story? When I read a pitch, when I read a piece of fiction, I want to know that a person who is in a place in a situation felt that they had to tell me this story. Why were they the only person who could do this? That comes from really personal places. That comes from stories that are rooted in people’s childhoods and their experiences and their hopes and dreams and fears. I think that, for me, is always the thing that makes me really just like sit up and pay attention and get so excited to work on a story.
[Howard] Sometimes it’s as simple as the things that you love day-to-day. Like… I mean, the foods that you eat, the things that you listen to. As somebody who studied music and sound recording technology, I listen a lot. So, describing sounds in the things that I write is fun for me. I like to do that. That’s… Now, it has to be the right character in order to be noticing something. Some character will say, “Well, what’s that booming noise?” Another might say, “There’s a 30 Hz rumble and it’s increasing…” Whatever. But the foods that I love to eat and the smells associated with those foods, these are things that bring characters to life. That absolutely make the page into something that lives for us. Because the things that we love, the things that we sense, the things that we are passionate about, we infuse into our characters in small ways. It doesn’t need to be a book about food, or a book about pipe organs, or whatever, it can just be a book about people who experience things the way you experience them.
[Erin] When I think about sort of personal issues and the personal things, I think about the things we carry. Which is, a lot of times, the way that I think about like the issues that we’re going through in our lives and the things that we’re processing. There are some things that we carry for a long time that may show up in all of our fiction. Memory may always be a component of what you’re talking about, Dan. I’m also fascinated with memory for different reasons, because I don’t have a very good one. So I’m very fascinated with how much memory makes up who we are. But then there are things that you pick up along the way. Some of them are things like foods, smaller things that bring you joy. Some of them are issues that you’re working through for a specific period of time in your life, and then set down. What I think is really exciting is that fiction gives you an opportunity to, number one, find out what things you’re carrying. Like, you didn’t realize, Dan, like, how much that was a part of you until you put it on the page. So, sometimes when you’re writing, you can go back and find out, “This is something I’ve been carrying, and I been carrying it so long that little bits of it are like sprinkling out on the pages that I’m writing in the things that I’m doing.” But what can be kind of difficult is that over time, the things that you carry change. One thing that I found really interesting, I think I’ve talked about it before on the podcast, is during the early pandemic, like, so much of what we were carrying was changing. As writers, you’re trying to catch up to the issues in your life that are changing, and it’s changing the way that you do fiction, and it’s changing the stories that you’re trying to tell. There’s something really amazing and beautiful in that. But I think it also can be difficult to know how to catch up to the issues that are now the things that you’re carrying.
[Dan] Yeah. I love that metaphor for what you’re carrying, because so much of carrying something comes down to how you’re carrying it. Carrying a rock might be very easy, or very hard, depending on the size of it. But also, if I’m carrying it in a backpack versus carrying it in my shoe, that is going to totally change the way that I am interacting with it and the kind of the amount of pain that something relatively small might cause. If it’s just something that I’m not aware of or that I’m not dealing with. That can spill out sometimes problematically into fiction. With that first draft of Next of Kin, I had to tone it back and say, “Okay, wait a minute. This needs to be a story about John Cleaver, not a journaling entry about Dan Wells.”
[Mary Robinette] I think that that… To get to some more practical nuts and bolts of how to do this, that when you’re looking at stuff from your life, when you’re mining it, you don’t have to say this is a thing that is happening in my life and then put it in as a major plot point in the book that you’re writing. It can just be something that you’re holding in your head and it will inflect it. Or it can be showing up in small details. Like, one of the things that I talk about all the time is that I will gift my characters with the things from the real… From my real world that are just nagging at me. Like, when you look at Lady Astronaut of Mars, there’s a scene in which Nathaniel cannot make it to the toilet in time. I had spent time with my grandmother who at the time was 105 years old, and we had that moment together. She has no relationship to him. Like, I didn’t write a story about my grandmother. I didn’t write a story about that. But I explored the feelings and the moments and the viscerality of that, and transplanted it into another time and place and with another character. You can do that with large thematic things or you can do that with just small pieces of it.
[Dan] Doing that can add so much flavor and emotion to a story. Because it is something, like DongWon said at the beginning, that is intrinsic to you. We can read that scene and go, “Oh, this author has gone through this. This author knows what they’re talking about and has helped put me into a position to experience some of those same emotions.” Which, for me, is a huge part of why I read in the first place.
[Howard] One of the most challenging, and I would argue, the most likely to make your story robust, techniques is to take whatever this is and find the polar opposite and be able to put both in the story. If you have a particular hobbyhorse… I mean, it might be a sensory thing, like foods or music, it might be a political stance. If you can take the polar opposite and represent that well, then not only will you succeed as a human in more deeply exploring that thing you’re passionate about, you will also make your story more robust, and it won’t feel like… It won’t feel didactic. It won’t feel like you’re just preaching to us.
[Erin] The polar opposite may not be like the obvious like political difference. The reason I say this is one of the things I was working through in my own writing is a lot of my published short stories are about somebody who is facing a culture that is the enemy. Like, the antagonist of the story is the cultural norms that don’t support this person’s life, and figuring out a way to kind of get past that. Often by lashing out at that culture. I felt like a lot of what I was exploring in retrospect was the idea, like, the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house. But during Covid and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, part of what I started thinking is, well, what am I saying does dismantle the master’s house? Am I saying that it gets to remain standing? That isn’t what I necessarily want to be saying. I want to be looking at different ways around this issue that are separate. So, some of the stories that I’m working on now are more about people having differing opinions about how to accomplish the same goal. They all agree that the master’s house should be dismantled, but some people want to blow it up, some people want to burn it down, some people want to use the tools. Figuring that out has made the stories richer because I’m experiencing this issue on a deeper level and therefore so are my characters.
[DongWon] One of the things I love about that is sometimes that can be really direct in terms of like the metaphor and… When I say I want to be able to see the author in the piece, sometimes that is very obvious in terms of like I have a book that will have come out just this last spring called Chlorine that’s by a young woman who is a child of immigrants, used to be a high school swimmer, and the book is about a child of immigrants who is a high school swimmer. Right. There’s like a very much one-to-one, like, I can see, oh, yeah, you are in this story. But other times, it’s like layered through many, many filters of metaphor. Right? So I think about N. K. Jemison’s Broken Earth books, which are just a searing portrait about… Of marginalization, of oppression, of colonialism and all these things, that feels like she wrote a book about living in America. But there’s nothing in that book that I can one-to-one map to this is that ethnic group, this is that cultural group, this is that… She is writing a book about magic schools and wizards and magic rocks. But still managed to make something that felt very politically trenchant to me as a reader in 2020 or whenever I was reading that. 2019. It was very transformative for me of understanding how an author’s experience can completely inform a text without it necessarily being legible about what specific thing maps to what.
[Howard] After the break, I’m going to talk about turning the knob to 11 first. But we’re going to take a break.
[DongWon] So, the thing of the week this week is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. As we are talking about how stories can be very personal for us, sometimes the audience’s relationship to that is also very personal. Right? So, this is a movie. It just swept the Oscars a little while ago. It’s made by a directing pair named the Daniels who wrote and directed it. So it is very much a story of Asian immigrants to the United States and their children’s relationship to them. For me, as a queer Asian American child of immigrants, it hit very, very close to home for me. There’s so many different aspects of that story that I identify with, and there’s so many things that feel so specifically grounded in someone’s experience and their perspective and then, the specific experiences of the actors themselves and what they brought to those roles, that it, I think, really resonated with the audiences because it did have a very deep personal connection. It felt like everyone was bringing their own selves to that set, to that production. That is so touchable and it’s so tangible and legible in the end product in a way that meant… Means it was hugely impactful for me when I saw it, and for a lot of my peers and for a lot of people in the world generally. So, if you haven’t seen it yet, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a magnificent movie. I love it almost on every level. It is absurdist, it is strange, it is charming and romantic and funny and exciting. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
[Howard] So, in This Is Spinal Tap, there’s this joke about how the guitar amp has a knob that goes to 11. Well, how does that make it louder? This one goes to 11. Ha ha, very funny. As a sound engineer, there’s this technique that I learned that works great in audio engineering, it works great in applying filters in Photoshop. It is terrible to try and work with in cooking. The principle is this. Start by turning the knob to 11. Somebody [garbled] “Does this need more bass?” I don’t know. Let’s see what more bass sounds like. All the way to 11, and then pull it back. When I said earlier, find the polar opposite, I didn’t mean start with 11 and keep it there. I met start with 11, and then… And then nuance it and play with it. Because until you know how loud it goes, you might not really feel the shape of it. The same thing in Photoshop. You’re applying a filter, throw the filter all the way down, crank it all the way up. Then pull it back and start to massage it. This doesn’t work well in cooking, when you’re, say, trying to see how much cummin is enough and you begin with the whole jar. That’s hard to undo. But I love this principle. This is kind of a multilayered sort of approach to the approach, because audio engineering and visual stuff and cooking are things that I’ve already talked about, and they colored, not just what I write about, but how I talk about what I write.
[DongWon] One thing I wanted to bring up is that… It occurred to me while you were talking about this in terms of turning it to 11, is also remember as a writer that you are also a person. I would encourage you to take care of yourself first and foremost, and to be gentle with yourself. A lot of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about mining your own life for themes is digging into your own traumas, into some of the worst things that happened to you, into oppressions that you experienced on a daily basis. I once made a joke to my own therapist that [garbled] Of my job is sticking a crowbar into a writer’s trauma and then pulling until a novel pops out…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I don’t actually do that to my writers. I don’t actually mine their traumas in that way and don’t try to re-traumatize them.
[Mary Robinette] The writers say other things.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] I’m sure that they do. I do want to encourage people though to remember that this is dealing with very difficult material and that you should be taking care of yourself first. You should be paying attention to what your limits are, and I would encourage you, if you’re doing this work, to make sure that you are working with people who can support you in that, whether that’s professional mental health or a support network, whatever it is. Make sure that you are checking in and seeing how you’re doing as you’re going through this process.
[Erin] That also may mean giving yourself more time and space for stories that hew closer to your heart, closer to the bone. So, whereas you might be, like, “I finished the story and I’m going to send it to my critique group the next day,” if this is something that is very personal for you, you may come more personally… More of yourself may be exposed when you’re getting feedback, when you’re talking about it. So it’s wise to give yourself a break and make sure that you’re sort of ready for that experience so that you’re not sort of out there, like raw, and then people are trying to give you feedback and it’s hard for you to take it, because it feels like it’s feedback to who you are and not what you wrote.
[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] But also bear in mind that when we talk about mining your… Getting personal and mining your own life, your own life is made up of more than trauma.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Mary Robinette] You can mine the happy stuff. You can mine the good memories. You can mine those good sensory details, the good relationships. Like, every romantic relationship that I write is in some aspect based on my relationship with my husband. My picture book, Molly on the Moon,… Actually, I guess this is a trauma, but it is based on a real life thing that happened with me and my brother, where he took my stuffed lamb and I was like five. But it’s also based on this other happy memory of me making a toy for him. You can look for those, those are gems. There’s a thing that I think we do when we discount our own life and experiences as being like normal. But there only normal for, like, you. They’re not an experience that anyone else has had.
[DongWon] This goes back to what Howard was saying of put sounds, put foods, put tastes, put sensory things that you experience in there. You’re mining more than just like the big heavy dark stuff. I completely agree that I would also encourage you to find the joyful things in your life and put those in your text. Find the friendships, the relationships, the experiences. Plenty of people have great relationships with their parents and their family. It is just as important to see good parents in the young adult section as it is to see neglectful parents. Right? So I think finding that balance is so important to building a really important, well-rounded presence in your book.
[Dan] I loved what you said about kind of being careful, making sure that when you get feedback on this type of very personal storytelling, that you’re in the right place to receive it. I also… I want to add to that, that I find the need for revision to be even stronger when I’m dealing with something that I care about this deeply. Because often the first thing I’ve put down does not work for the story. There’s a thing I say all the time, which is that your first draft is for what you want to say, and your final draft is for how you want to say it. When it’s dealing with something that relates specifically to a pain or a trauma that I am processing, the first draft isn’t even what I want to say yet. It’s just this kind of blurp of feelings that come out. Then I need to go back and work it into a form and say, “Yes, the story does want this emotion here, and it does want this rawness, but maybe not… Maybe it needs to be shaped a little better. Maybe I need to turn this more into what the character is going to do rather than just me.”
[Erin] I think that’s true for joyful fun things as well. I mean, think about when you have a shared joke with someone and somebody else walks in and you’re trying to like explain it. There’s 18 amazing like things about your friendship with that person that are like all boiled down to this sentence, that you have no… It’s really difficult to explain. That can happen in your own relationship to your happy memories. Like, you have a very deep relationship with why this particular thing that happened is so meaningful for you, this food, this sound, and you have to make sure to bring the reader along and give them enough of it that they can understand it, so that they don’t feel like they’re eavesdropping on a joke that they will never get.
[Dan] Absolutely. I remember… There was an episode of Babylon 5 where the captain had been given a teddy bear. It was so weird, the way he interacted with this teddy bear in the way he kind of growled at it all the time. I was convinced that this was part of some plot centric supernatural or science fictional something that was going on. No, I found out afterwards, that it’s just that the guy writing that episode really hated toys and really hated funny cute things, and assumed that every member of the audience would share that exact relationship…
[Laughter]
[Dan] And… So all of… None of the jokes landed, none of the stuff he was trying to do made sense without the context that was inside of his brain. So making sure that you give her the reader all of these…
[Howard] The director pranked him…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] By filming the whole thing and giving it to us.
[Ha Ha!]
[Dan] No, but you have to provide the audience with the right signposts, the right breadcrumbs, the right context so that this emotion, whether it is good or bad, whether it is painful or whatever, this inside joke makes sense to them as much as it makes sense to you.
[Mary Robinette] I think that brings us to our homework.
[Howard] Well, fair listener. As you may suspect, the homework is going to feel pretty obvious here. I’m going to make this a three-part assignment. Take something that is joyful for you, that you think about and that brings you joy. Take something that is painful for you, that you think about it, it brings you pain. Take something that is vivid for you, that when you think about it, there are sensory associations. Those three things, give those things, either individually or altogether, to a character or characters in whatever you are writing and see if you can express those things in ways that feel real to you.
[Mary Robinette] Our next episode will feature a special guest. It’s Kirsten Vangsness, who is best known for her role as Penelope Garcia in Criminal Minds. Kirsten is also an incredible writer, and we loved talking with her about imposter syndrome and using tools from your non-writing life to fuel your writing.