18.51: So You Wanna Play With Format?
Are you interested in experimenting with different writing forms? Do you want to try an unusual or different way of writing? Well this week, we have an episode dedicated to non-traditional formats for writing.
In this episode, we think about experimental short fiction from the point of view of publishing and writing. DongWon shares about the incredible success of their publishing of .. Why short stories might be the perfect place for new ideas.
We talk about second-person narratives, epistolaries, footnotes, and stories written as research papers. When does it make sense to use a non-traditional format for a story, what should you know as you do it, and who exactly decided on those traditions anyway?
Homework:
Take a scene from a story you’ve written or are working on (maybe from NaNoWriMo!) and put it into a new format. What did you learn in the process?
Thing of the Week:
These Vital Signs: A Doctor’s Notes on Life and Loss in Tweets by Sayed Tabatabai
Liner Notes:
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Love, Death, and Robots (Netflix)
Bite Size Halloween (Hulu)
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: Playing with format? Short fiction often is more experimental. Epistolary, a story told in letters. For verisimilitude, the feeling of reality. 2nd person POV — You are there! Stories in nonstory formats. Research papers, etc. Helpdesk responses. Chapter bumps, aka epigraphs. Footnotes!
[Season 18, Episode 51]
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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Seaons 18, Episode 51]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, So, You Wanna Play With Format.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] ‘Cause you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Erin] This is a fun topic to talk about, because I didn’t do it, really, in any of the stories that I had y’all read. Do anything really spectacularly different with format. But I think that short fiction is a place where you see people play around with format and put stories into different forms that you don’t see necessarily as much at the novel length. So I thought since we were talking about short fiction, it’s a perfect time to talk about format. So, what do y’all feel about it?
[DongWon] It’s one of the things I love about short fiction as well, is you can be more experimental. You can push the boundaries. It’s almost an expectation of playing around a little bit when it comes to short fiction. Not that every author has to do it with every story. But it’s a thing that when we see it can be really exciting. One limitation, just from the publishing perspective, is that when you’re publishing novels, it is pretty difficult to be experimental with format. Readers have certain expectations, booksellers have certain expectations, and publishers are trying to meet that, and so, often default to being very conservative about it. Trying to get a book published that has lots of different formatting or style or is in a different mode or a different length even can be difficult. That said, I’ve really had great success with certain books that have an unusual trim size, for example. Seanan McGuire’s Feed, we did an unusual trim size, that helped it stand out. Right? I’ve had great success with epistolary books. Some… But it is an uphill climb. Whereas in short fiction, you’re sort of given carte blanche to be a little freer with it. Publishers aren’t as concerned about it, and you can definitely do a lot of fun stuff.
[Howard] Two of my favorite things are, on Netflix, Love, Death, and Robots, and on Hulu, Bite-sized Halloween. I like these because both of them are collections of short, unrelated except in the most general thematic sense, things. I don’t know what I’m going to get, but I know that I’m only committing about 15 minutes of my life to getting it. Short stories are the same way. You sit down with a novel that’s doing something hugely experimental… That’s a big ask for a reader is to dive into this and just be completely unaware of how the format may shift, what may change. Whereas with short fiction, a lot of readers love short fiction for this exact reason. I want to see something new. Short fiction was where I first discovered 2nd person POV. I would have struggled trying to read an entire novel in 2nd person POV. But now I’ve read enough of it in short fiction that it feels like, oh, that’s a thing. That’s… Yeah, that totally works.
[DongWon] Yeah. Earlier this year, we got to have a really big viral moment for This Is How You Lose the Time War from our dear friend Bigolas Dickolas, a tri-gun community member who posted about it. The main thing about their appeal for this is you can read this in one sitting. It’s a short book, you can read it in a night, you can listen to the audiobook, it’s only a couple hours. So I think that…
[Mary Robinette] It’s important to say this is an epistolary novel.
[DongWon] Yes. It’s an epistolary novel. So the fact that it was very short made it possible for a lot of people to get very excited about this unusual format. The epistolary novel, it was cowritten, it’s experimental in several different ways. Going back to voice, the voice is very elevated, very distinct. There’s a lot of things that are boundary pushing about that book. I feel a large part of why we were able to get away with it… Not just get away with it, but have enormous success with it, was in part because it was a very tight experience. You’re in and you’re out before it over stays it’s welcome.
[Mary Robinette] I’m also going to quickly define epistolary…
[Erin] That’s…
[Mary Robinette] Which…
[Erin] Yeah. Go for it.
[Mary Robinette] You do it…
[Erin] No, no. What I was going to say is we’ve been dropping some terms, epistolary, 2nd person POV, and I thought what a fun thing to do might be is to take like a bit of a Godiva chocolate box approach to…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Nontraditional formats, which is to talk about them, say what a couple of them are…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] What are they doing, well, when might you want to use them, and when might you want to throw them away. So let’s start with epistolary. What is it, Mary Robinette?
[Mary Robinette] It is a story told in the form of letters.
[Erin] Yay. What… Why tell a story in letters? Like, what… Why would I want to make that choice if I can decide to write a short story, do you think? Or a longer story.
[Mary Robinette] So, there’s a couple of reasons. Many of the early novels, back in… Back in the day. People were very concerned with verisimilitude. Convincing people that these were real things that really happened. So, putting it in the form of a travelogue or an epistolary convince people… Was to convince people that this is real. This is… Someone actually had this experience.
[Howard] The book version of found footage.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. It is… That’s a great way to describe it.
[DongWon] Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an early classic example.
[Mary Robinette] Exactly. So the… One of the things that that does is it allows you to bring in multiple voices, it allows you to actually be pretty telling with the story. So you can cover a lot of ground in a very compressed area. Also, if you want to do unreliable narrators, they’re just baked in… Baked into that. What are some of the reasons that you think?
[Erin] I think… I was thinking about This Is How You Lose the Time War, and I think part of what’s really fun about that book is that part of it is the actual letters themselves, but it’s also how are the letters getting from person to person.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, the actual act of sending letters is not something we do as much… I don’t know, maybe you all do… As we used to. So, thinking about the way that you present yourself to others is, I think, a big thing that happens in epistolary. How is this person… Who are they sending the letter to? Why are they sending it at this time? What has happened in the interim between the last letter that they received? Or if it’s back-and-forth… Or, since the last letter they sent? So there’s a lot of really interesting things that you’re learning about the broader world even in just the dates…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Between letters. There are a lot of ways to do a lot of little, like, tiny detailed worldbuilding.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That says a lot.
[DongWon] Going back to our conversation last week about unreliable narrators, epistolary is such a wonderful way to just reinforce and remind the reader of the subjectivity of who’s telling you this story.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Right? Also, because it’s telling it to another person, you can feel them shaping their worldview to meet the other person’s expectations. Right? So, In Time War in particular, the story… The letters from Red and Blue, they start opposed and end up together. Really, as that journey progresses, you can feel the change in the relationship by how they are talking to each other. So it just gives you, like, all these extra levers to play with. It’s very hard to pull off in an engaging way, because, sometimes, if it feels like reading someone’s letters, that’s not always the most exciting thing to do. But when you do it right, it gives you such a way to embed you in a world, embed you in a voice, and a perspective that is hard to do with other tools.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] I’m going to go out on a limb here and invent a term because I don’t know the term. I don’t know that a term exists. It is the semi-sequitur sequential art. John Rosenberg’s Scenes from Multi-Verse, every installment of Scenes from Multi-Verse is a new little universe, in the name of the universe is usually part of the joke. It’s 4 panels in which we explore often some sort of political issue about which John Rosenberg has strong opinions and we get a punchline and we get ridiculousness and it’s comic. I think semi-sequitur because you rarely come back to these universes and get what happens next, but every so often you do. When you do, it’s completely unexpected. I just picked up several collections of these, and it’s a weird format. John, why didn’t you just take all the ones that are from this one universe and put them together? Well, because you needed a palate cleanser. You needed to forget that was a thing, before you could come back to it. It’s a weird format, but…
[DongWon] Juxtaposition can be such a powerful tool.
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] To highlight… Right… It gives you that parallax of being able to see it from one perspective and then another perspective immediately.
[Mary Robinette] That’s one of the things that epistolary in particular…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Offers you. That juxtaposition.
[Erin] Nice.
[Howard] Can we…
[Erin] I was going to say, before we go to break, I want to pull one more chocolate out of the box. This one was mentioned earlier by Howard which is 2nd person. So, you know, you are listening to a podcast. Using the you directly, either directly to the reader or to an unknown kind of 3rd… Another party within the story. We don’t have a ton of time before the break, but any quick thoughts on 2nd person? Love it, hate it, want to marry it?
[Mary Robinette] So, I think it’s a form that is a natural way that we tell stories. You know, like… So imagine, you’re standing in the grocery store line, and then, what do you see in front of you? You know, this is the thing that we do all the time whenever we’re talking [garbled] where it falls apart, when it’s… Where it becomes difficult is that you… When you’re telling that story, you’re deciding for the reader what their emotions are, so… If it is not in sync with the emotion that the reader is actually having, then it can be jarring for them, they can be like, “No, that’s not how I feel right now.” So, walking the line between creating this world where you’re telling the reader this is the thing that happens and adjusting it so that you’re not throwing them out of the story by having it be not in sync with their own experience of the story can be a real challenge.
[Howard] The reader has to let go. A line like, “And you draw your pistol,” and my first thought is, “Wait, I’m carrying a pistol?” No, I need to let go of that.
[Erin] And you will experience a break right now.
[Howard] during 2020, 2021, I, like tens of thousands of other people, was privileged to discover Dr. Sayed Tabatabai on twitter as he was writing stories about his experiences in the hospital in tweet format. These Vital Signs by Dr. Sayed Tabatabai is these tweets in book collection. Think of it like a book of poetry, where each poem is a poignant wonderful true deep story about… I don’t know… Life, death, medicine. It’s amazing. I love this book. Love this book. These Vital Signs by Dr. Sayed Tabatabai.
[Erin] All right. We’re back and we’re still talking about 2nd person.
[DongWon] the one thing I really love about 2nd person, to just sort of pick up on what Mary Robinette and Howard were saying, is… There was a period a few years ago where I noticed I was reading a lot of short fiction that was using the 2nd person. There was like a mini, like, little trend of it. A lot of it was coming from marginalized authors. I had this thought that one of the beautiful things about 2nd person, and one of the things that readers sometimes respond badly to, is it, in the way that unreliable narrators are about the subjectivity of the narrator, the 2nd person forces you into a particular perspective, into someone else’s subjectivity, because you are being brought into the story in that way. You are doing the thing, you are experiencing the thing. So what I saw was a lot of people who were trying to write about experiences that were not of the quote unquote mainstream audience, where using 2nd person as a way to sort of almost, like, forcibly grab people and bring them into their world. Right? So Violet Allen uses this super effectively in The Venus Effect, Elisa Wong has a few stories in this mode, N. K. Jemison’s The 5th Season uses this in particular moments. Sometimes that 2nd person direct address can really loop someone into an experience in a way that would… They would struggle to relate to in another format.
[Erin] I also think if you want to be more antagonistic in some ways…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] With your 2nd person, it can be a way to mirror of feeling of marginalization.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] You are being told what you do and how you feel, and I am going to make you feel that way with this narrative. That can be a hard line, because you can lose the reader, but if they stick with you, like, it can create that sense of being off balance that I think is a really fun one that 2nd person sort of makes available. Some… A theory that I have about 2nd person as well is that games have actually made people…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] A lot more comfortable with 2nd person. Because games spend a lot of time telling you that you have a pistol, and even though your character does, there’s a certain amount of having to like lose that, “But what about my id?” feeling, and my ego, that I think we’ve gotten used to…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Because that’s now a storytelling [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It’s part of the change from doomed guy never gets to speak to [garbled master shave and halo?] has dialogue. Right? We saw like Destiny famously started with dialogue, they took it away, and then they put it back for your character, in part because there was this debate over what gives you subjectivity of the character, what can you tell people to do? I think we have all found that letting your character speak makes a more engaged experience, that people are sophisticated enough to be able to ride with some of these things that we sometimes assume is too much for the audience.
[Mary Robinette] You’ve just made me realize that in much the way that geeks are coming into the mainstream now, because all the people who consumed it as kids are now in power, all of us who thrived on choose your own adventures are now adults, writing fiction.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I’m like, oh, yeah.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I remember, kind of vividly, playing SkyRim and playing as a Khajiit and playing as a female. The enemies would sometimes use derogatory terms specific to me being female, or me having for. Because I was in first person camera, I would forget that that was what I looked like, and it was kind of a slap. Yet, I looked back on it and realized, no, this is a valuable experience for me. Because this is the way people other than me often experience the world.
[Erin] Love that.
[Mary Robinette] What’s our next chocolate?
[Erin] I was going to say, time for the next chocolate. The next chocolate is stories in nonstory format…
[Oooo…]
[Erin] So, stories that are pretending to be research papers. Stories that… Anything that, like, it seems like something else, but really, it’s a story.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] One of my very favorite things I ever wrote, it’s in the Planet Mercenary books, in the liner notes. It is a story being told in the comments section of a document. The comments section was not supposed to go into print, and in the very beginning of the book, we see the miscommunication where they decide, “Oh, okay, the document comments are going in the margins.” It is a 12,000 word white room story about a group of people trying to finish the book you are holding. It has a beginning and a middle and an end and a murder and kittens. It was so much fun to write, and it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. Because I played with format in such an amusing way.
[DongWon] Yeah. Because it’s not clear how much I love nontraditional formats, I’m going to continue to talk about client books or client stories. There was one from a client, Sarah Gailey, who wrote the story called Stet. Stet is… The basic format of it is it’s an abstract of an academic paper, and one of the authors is leaving notes on the paper. In the marginalia, in the footnotes, is where the action of the story is happening and you begin to feel the unreliability of the character and start to understand what happened to her as related to the subject matter of the academic abstract. I’m very biased, but I think it’s an incredible piece of short fiction, it’s heartbreaking, it’s thought-provoking. If you have any concerns about AI, I recommend reading it. There’s so much that you can do with that format. I think again it’s a very short story so sometimes that experimental format lends itself to being like a quick… A single bite of chocolate…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] To really continue with the metaphor.
[Mary Robinette] There’s a story, and I cannot remember the title. So I’ll see if I can find it to include in the liner notes. But it is told from someone who’s like in a Mars rover and it’s broken down and the entire story is just the auto responses from the helpdesk. So it’s like, “How to use emergency oxygen.”
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Then… It’s just hilarious because you can see exactly what is going wrong, and “I’m sorry, we don’t recognize those words.”
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I also do want to sort of argue with myself for a 2nd. I’ve been continually saying that this really works in short formats, and I do think that’s true. It also can work in long formats. It’s difficult to pull off. Very famously… I’m blanking on the author’s name, but House of Leaves is a very long novel that uses a variety of found format documents. It is printed in a very unusual way. It’s full-color. There’s a fully epistolary section, there are journals, there’s descriptions of movies in there. It is a brilliant novel. It is one of the most terrifying and unsettling things I’ve read, even though… I’m not sure I would actually call it horror. It just… I found it to be a very dis-orienting read. It’s a brilliant novel. I absolutely adore it and highly recommend it for anyone who’s interested in how can you push the boundaries of what you can do in a printed book.
[Howard] When you’ve got a novel that’s got chapter bumps, lots… Lots of authors find ways to tell stories through the sequence of chapter bumps.
[Mary Robinette] Will you define chapter bumps?
[DongWon] What’s a chapter bump?
[Howard] Oh. Chapter bump. It’s the little blurb at the beginning of a chapter that might be a quote from the Encyclopedia Galactica at the head of one chapter…
[DongWon] Oh
[Howard] At the next chapter, it’s another thing. Brandon Sanderson’s Way of Kings…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I just call them something different.
[DongWon] What is the word that we use for them? I’m blanking on it now… Epigraphs!
[Mary Robinette] Epigraphs.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] I was like… Epithet was coming to mind…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] And I’m like, “It’s not that.”
[Laughter] [garbled]
[Howard] Telling stories in epithets is fun, though, too.
[DongWon] You can have an epithet as an epigraph. The author of the book is Mark Z. Danielewski. Sorry. [Mary Robinette] So… But speaking of that, a lot of the techniques that were talking about here are things that you can mix-and-match.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Exactly. I was going to say, like, you don’t have to dive all the way into the pool, you can dip your toe in the water.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] I was thinking about, like, those types of epigraphs are great way to, like, practice with a particular form of thing. You can have a recipe, for example. I was thinking of…
[Mary Robinette] The Spare Man. Yes.
[Erin] The Spare Man, like, in between the chapters. Sometimes it’s just something that’s fun. It can be… One thing to think about is why are you doing this format…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Non-traditionally? You can just do it because you want to. So, you don’t have to have a reason. But it can be something where you’re like, the reason those Encyclopedia Galactica things exist is to tell you something about the world that there’s really not a good place for within the narrative, but the author still thinks that you should know.
[Howard] The… There was an update to WordPress a few years ago where they introduced what they called the block editor. Which I absolutely hated. They took away my big free-form editor and they forced me to write in little blocks. I realized what they were doing is saying, “Look, you people have been using Twitter to tell longform blog posts. You’ve been thread in these twitter things. So here is a writing tool that will let you write in the same way that all of you have been thinking anyway on social media.” I remember looking at it and taking a further step back and realizing, “Oh, my gosh. Twitter is… It’s like a poetic form now. I am telling a thing in tweets and there is a character restriction on how much I can put, which is as rigid as any poetic forms.”
[DongWon] I’m going to sneak one last chocolate from the box. That’s because I want to talk about footnotes, which…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Is one of my all time favorite modes of doing something experimental. They can do all kinds of things. Terry Pratchett used them throughout his entire career absolutely brilliantly. It’s… The way he does it is so funny, but also cutting and revealing. More recently, Babel by R. F. Kuane uses them to great effect.
[Mary Robinette] Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell uses them.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I use them?
[DongWon] Yeah. Absolutely.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Why footnotes? What do you guys like about them?
[Mary Robinette] I like them because they are an aside to the reader.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I think that that… While they break the flow of the story… They can break the flow of the story in some ways, but it’s also… It also feels like you’re being invited a little bit further in.
[Erin] Yeah. They’re both… It’s like a little Venn diagram. I feel like they’re both explicitly in conversation with the story and explicitly in conversation… Implicitly in conversation with the reader.
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] So you’re getting this really cool thing where you’re getting just a little bit closer and seeing sort of how the sausage is made in the way that the writer wants you to…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] See it. Which is great.
[DongWon] You’re not going full epistolary, but you’re going a little 2nd person. It’s like a little bit of, like, have your cake and eat it too.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] The footnotes in Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens… The footnote about “Well, this is what might have happened to the 3rd… The extra baby. That’s much nicer than what would have happened.” They talk about tropical fish, whatever. Then, much later in the story, we meet this character who… This young boy of the right age who plays with tropical fish, and the footnote says, “We liked your version better.”
[Chuckles]
[Howard] It’s so delightful, having been invited in…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] And told, “Yeah. This is a more pleasant version of the story.”
[Erin] All right. We have gone in, we’ve explored our chocolate box of nontraditional formats, and now it’s time for your homework.
[Mary Robinette] So, for your homework, what I want you to do is take a scene from a story that you’ve written or you’re working on, and put it into a new format. So if you’ve written it straight 3rd person, try turning it into 2nd person. Try turning it into epistolary. What did you learn in the process?
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[DongWon] Hey. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Congratulations! Also, let us know. We’d love to hear from you about how you’ve applied the stuff we’ve been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at [email protected].