19.10: Introducing Our Close Readings Series
You’ve probably seen us posting about our Close Reading Series, and in his episode, we finally officially introduce it!
For most of the remainder of 2024, we’ll be diving into five core elements of writing by focusing on five different literary texts. We’ll spend five episodes on each one, and then we’re going to… drumroll please… interview the author(s)!
As you know, we’ve spent lots of time reading, writing, talking, and recording our thoughts about different elements of the craft. But this year, we wanted to ground our episodes in specific texts that you could read along– and analyze– with us!
Below is the schedule for each book or short story we’ll be diving into. The date on the right in parenthesis is the air date of the first episode in our series that will begin talking about that text. We highly recommend you read the book by that date, as we will be talking about the entirety of the text for all 5 episodes (including spoilers!)
First up: This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar
You can buy this (and all the other books!) through our bookshop link— this is linked in our bio in addition to right here. CL Clark’s short stories can be read for free on Uncanny Magazine and are all linked below.
Close Reading Series: Texts & Timeline
Voice: This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar (March 17)
Worldbuilding: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (May 12)
Character: “You Perfect, Broken Thing,” “The Cook,” and “Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home” by CL Clark (July 7)
Tension: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark (September 1)
Structure: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (October 13)
Thing of the Week: SHINOBIGAMI: Modern Ninja Battle RPG
Homework: Take a scene from a work that you love and five highlighters/crayons/colored pencils – use one color to underline/highlight places where the voice comes through, one for great worldbuilding, one for character moments, one for any moments of tension, and one for moments that move the plot forward. What colors do you end up with? Where do they overlap? What are the colors of the moments you love the most? What would the colors of one of your scenes be?
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: Close reading, so you have concrete examples of how these techniques work. There will be spoilers! Voice, worldbuilding, character, tension, and structure (see the liner notes for the novels, novellas, and short stories). Close reading gives us a shared language and shared examples to talk about craft. Close reading? Open the book with a question in mind. Read it for fun, then go back and look for examples of a specific technique, and look at the context. Reconnect with the joy of writing, reading, and great fiction. Find your own examples, too!
[Season 19, Episode 10]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 19, Episode 10]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Introducing our close reading series.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Erin] I have a confession. Which is that we are actually recording the introduction to our close reading series after we’ve recorded most of the close reading series…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because, honestly, we wanted to get a sense of what this was going to be like. It’s our first time doing this, and, I’ll be honest, even as a teacher, when I hear the words close reading sometimes I think boring class, it’s going to feel like going to a bad college class all over again. But I think it’s been really fun.
[Mary Robinette] This is been some of the most fun that I’ve had doing episodes. One of the things that people talk about in our previous episodes when we been trying to give examples of things is that we often reach for film and television because we feel like there’s a higher likelihood that you will have seen the thing and that you’ll have read a particular work. With this, because what we’ve done is we’ve picked 5 books… Actually, 2 books, 2 novellas, and a collect… A bunch of short stories, so that you can read along with it. But we’re doing all the heavy lifting. We’ve done the close reading and we’re using these to tell you kind of how these techniques work, with very concrete examples.
[Howard] We’re also leaning all the way into this and reading directly from the text during the episodes. Which is, to my mind, critical for helping you understand what it is that we love and what we see in the words that we read.
[DongWon] Because, as Howard said, we’re going to be quoting from the text, you don’t necessarily have to have read all of it before hopping in with us, but do be aware that we are not holding back on spoilers. Because we want to talk about the structure, we want to talk about how certain things unfold, so we will be referencing elements of the plot and the story from throughout the entire book. So if you hate spoilers, then read along with us. If you don’t have time, don’t stress about it, we’re going to walk you through it.
[Dan] Well, also, not for nothing, we picked really great works that we love. You’re going to want to read these anyway. So if you can, definitely read at least part of them. I think you should read all of them. You’ll get a lot out of it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That thing where people will say, “Okay, spoiler alert,” and you know to plug your ears or whatever stuff… We didn’t even bother with that. We just sort of… The spoilers are scattered, like.
[Dan] It’s all spoilers all the time.
[DongWon] We tend to focus on the first half of the book just naturally and how we’re talking about it. But, yeah, absolutely, be prepared.
[Erin] Okay, so we should probably talk a little bit about how we got here in the first place. It started with, I think, DongWon, it was you and I and maybe even Mary Robinette, we were all scheming on the cruise…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] We had nothing to do during a lunch, and we said, “Let’s start scheming and plotting, and figure out how we can bring like these really interesting close readings in a really cool way to the listeners.” Is that… Do you remember it that way?
[DongWon] I remember it being not so much nothing to do during lunch, rather than season 19 curriculum meeting…
[Laughter] [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] It was a nice lunch, too.
[Dan] It was a great lunch. Halfway through the curriculum meeting, you remembered that it was supposed to be a curriculum meeting.
[DongWon] Yeah. You were eavesdropping on us, clearly.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But the thing that really is like so often when I’m talking about a technique, it would be easier if I had a sentence that I could show it to you with and we’ve got those. What we wanted to do was not just pick books, but pick topics that were going to be useful to you. So, we’ve got the season broken down into 5 topics, each of which has a representative work that is tied to it. So we’re going to be starting the season with voice…
[DongWon] Starting with voice, yes.
[Erin] That makes sense for a podcast.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] We recorded these out of sequence, which is part of why I was like, it was voice, right? Voice, interestingly enough, was How to Lose the Time War, which is just ironic, considering the out of sequence nature of our recording schedule.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] I think we’re winning the time war.
[Dan] That’s true. We organized the time war joke that we made.
[Mary Robinette] There we go.
[Dan] We set this up in advance where, like, someone’s going to make a time war joke. That was it, folks.
[Mary Robinette] There we go. That’s the only time war joke you’re going to get.
[Dan] That’s all you get.
[Mary Robinette] We will have done this several times.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] So, we’re starting with voice, and then we’re going into worldbuilding after that, reading Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire. Then we’re going to do character, using C. L. Clark’s short stories. There’ll be a list of these in the liner notes. Then we are going to do tension with P. Djeli Clark’s Ring Shout. Then, finally, we’re going to talk about structure using N. K. Jemison’s The Fifth Season.
[Mary Robinette] We’ve tried to set this up so that you’ve got novellas, you have plenty of time to read it, because it’s a shorter thing. Then we go to a novel, so you’ve got a little more time. Then you get a breather, because we do some short stories. Then novella, and you have a lot of time before you have to read N. K. Jemison’s Fifth Season. So we’re thinking about 2 things. One is your actual reading time. The other thing that we’re thinking about is a little bit of the arc of how you think about a story. Thinking about a story as driven by voice versus thinking about a story as driven by structure. You can start either place, but often the structure is something that you refine at the end during the editing process. So we’re hoping that you’ll be able to use these tools all the way through the year on the works that you’re writing yourself.
[Howard] Just to be perfectly clear, Arkady Martine’s Memory Called Empire does a bazillion things well, including worldbuilding. We’re focusing on the worldbuilding. Don’t go thinking that it doesn’t have amazing voice, or amazing characterization, or brilliantly executed tension. All of the stories that we picked could have served as examples for any of the topics that we covered. We just picked the ones that we did because, to us, that’s what seems to fit.
[DongWon] Trying to pick titles that fit the topics was incredibly difficult.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Right? Like…
[Erin] I was going to say, one of my favorite things was our little [tetra see] trying to figure out…
[DongWon] Oh, my God.
[Erin] Well, this could be this, but also that.
[DongWon] Yeah. Howard’s exactly right, some of these move from category to category. Right? Where we were, like, okay. Maybe we should do Fifth Season for voice or tension or all these different things, and ended up settling on structure and sort of why we picked one versus another is maybe slightly arbitrary. There are certain focuses. Time War is a very voice-y book, so it felt like it fit really well there, even though the structure of it is also really fascinating, the character work is fascinating. So, don’t take any of these as being completely silo, but it was what have we really loved, what’s in the genre that’s exciting right now, that does at least address in a core way one of these topics.
[Dan] So, it’s worth pointing out as well that these kind of close reading series are very specific. Talking about worldbuilding with A Memory Called Empire, it is not a broad and generic talk about worldbuilding in general, it is how did Arkady Martine use worldbuilding in this book for this purpose. The same thing with voice in Time War, and all of the other series that we’re doing. I think that that actually ended up, at least for me, being a lot more interesting than trying to cover all of worldbuilding in 6 episodes.
[DongWon] One thing I really loved about this project was… You heard us do deep dives before. We’ve gone in depth on projects, but those have always been our own projects. Those tend to be from a holistic angle of talking about one of Mary Robinette’s books, or, all last year, you heard us go through Erin’s short stories, Howard’s last couple volumes, all these different things. So, being able to focus in a really laserlike way on a single topic on a single book, using a handful of lines or quotes from passages, really let us dig into the topic in a really mechanical way that, for me, at least, was one of the most fun I’ve ever had on this show.
[Howard] You say dig. 30 years ago… The math gets fuzzy… When I was studying music history and form and analysis, one of the things that are professor said was, “Imagine yourself as a… You want to find out what’s under the ground. Do you want to dig a thousand one foot holes or one thousand foot hole?” Then he said, “For our purposes in this class, we’re going to dig only ten 10 foot holes and then one 900 foot hole. We’re going to do a little survey work, and then we’re going to drill way down on one thing. In the past here with Writing Excuses, a lot of times, we’ve taken the… A 100 ten foot hole approach. Now we’re going mining.
[Erin] Actually, I think this is… We’re about to go to a break. When we come back, I want to talk about how do you do close reading well. Because we’ve been talking about it, I want to make sure that you’re prepped for what you need to do or what you might want to do when we start this series.
[Dan] Hi. This week, our thing of the week is a role-playing game called Shinobigami. This is a role-playing game written and published in Japan, translated into English. One of the reasons I love it and the reason I’m recommending it is because it is so interesting to see a role-playing game from a completely different culture. One of the things that stands out as different, in Western role-playing games, we tend to avoid any kind of player versus player conflict or combat. This game is entirely about player versus player combat. As the name implies, Shinobigami, everyone is a ninja of some kind in modern Japan, and you are fighting each other. Trying to accomplish secret quests or secret missions at the expense of the other players. It’s a lot of fun, it’s way different from what you may have ever played before. It’s great. Check it out. That again is called Shinobigami.
[Erin] So, how do you close read? What does this mean?
[DongWon] I wanted to toss this one to you, actually, because…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] You’re the one who, among all of us, is the one who’s actively teaching in a classroom environment. Right? You’re teaching writing to students. Do you use these techniques? Do you do close reading examples in class, or… How does that structure work for you?
[Erin] Just when I thought I’d gotten away with it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] So, I do use… A lot of what we do, what I do when I teach is to give the students let’s all read this story, let’s all read this book. So that we all have a common thing we’re talking about. I find it to be very helpful because when you want to give an example later, when you’re reading somebody else’s story and you’re like, “Oh. Oh. I really like the way you built tension like…” And you reach for an example, if everyone is speaking the same language and everyone has read the same story, we can make those references really quickly. It basically creates a little environment, a little community for the classroom, which we’re going to kind of replicate here where everyone’s speaking the same language, everyone knows what we’re talking about, and therefore it makes it just so much easier to reference things and talk about craft.
[Dan] Well, not just easier. But it allows us to go, as Howard’s metaphor was saying, much deeper than we normally would because we don’t have to cover a lot of the basic stuff. We don’t have to start each sentence by saying, “Well. In How to Lose the Time War, we…” Because that’s understood. We have more time to get into the real meat of each of the stories.
[Howard] For me, the secret to close reading was opening the book with the question already in mind for me. The question might have been when do… When does the… It’s a very specific, very detailed very 400 level question. When does the likability slider for characters move in this book? I would just ask myself that question before I started reading. I would find phrases and it would resonate with me and I’d realize, “Oh, that’s where that thing happens.”
[Mary Robinette] So, the way I often approach it, because I will often do close readings when I’m trying to learn a new technique. So I brought some of that to this, when we were working on this project, that I will… I’ll go ahead and just read it for funsies. With a question in mind. But then I go back and I kind of open it a little at random or 2 things that I remember, but I think, “Okay. I want to go through and I want to look for…” Say, with Time War. I want to go through it and look for places where they’re using cadence, where they’re using the rhythm of the language. So I’ll skim through the book, looking for an example of that. Then, this part is for me really important, I will read the whole page, I will look at the context of how that thing is being used. Because none of these examples, you’re going to hear us read an isolated sentence, but none of these sentences exist in isolation and the connective tissue is the part that’s really, really fun. So it’s quite possible for you to just read the book for funsies. Then, you’ll hear us say a sentence, and you go find that sentence in the book, and just read the stuff around it. It’s also possible for you to not read the book, wait for us to say something, and just go read it and be like, “Well, I don’t have anything else, but I can see how even on this page, this technique is working.” It’ll be techniques like pitch… No, not pitch. It’ll be techniques like cadence, or something like sentence structure, word choice…
[DongWon] Punctuation.
[Mary Robinette] Punctuation. Or, when we get into talking about character, we’re talking about things like ability or role and really unpacking those that you can look at in context, to see how they work, and how they work over a span of pages.
[DongWon] One thing for me, there’s a hazard of my job where I spend so much time reading manuscripts. Right? Reading client work, going over drafts, editing, that sometimes it can get a little mechanical for me. Where I end up so in the weeds, and kind of like, “Oh, I’ve got to get through X number of manuscripts by the end of this month, to stay on top of things.” So, being able to do this, where we got to dig into these books and dig into certain passages in a very specific way, kind of really reminded me how much I love writing. Like, there was such a joyful conversation to be like, “Oh, it is so cool that in this paragraph they did this. Look how they did this thing, and how that’s going to have consequences later,” and, I hope that that also works for some of our audience, too, that sometimes when you’re writing, it can be easy to lose sight of what matters. This is a way to sort of reconnect with the joy of writing and reading and experiencing great fiction.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We didn’t want to call this book club, but in some ways…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It’s kind of like…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Being in a book club with the entire Writing Excuses audience. In fact, this is also a good time to let you know that our Patreon has a Discord attached to it. If you want to come in, the Discord is brand-new. But, if you want to come in and yell about these books with people who have also read them, we have a space for you to do that.
[Howard] I’d just like to put a pin in the fact that coming up with the term close reading…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] As opposed to book club was way more painful for me than picking the books.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Picking the books is easy. But coming up with a 2 word name, that’s misery.
[Erin] Yes. I would say, going back to the idea of the joy of the reading, like, I love the idea of like reading with a question in mind or really being very intentional about it. But I’ll be honest, like when I give my students things to read, I’m not asking them to do much other than read it. Then, when we come back in class, we ask questions that get to why it’s working. So, something I like to do sometimes when I’m reading a book is read it, and then think, what are the 3 things I would tell someone about this book that I either loved or hated. Because, look, you may be like these are the worst 5 books that we have… I have ever read. I hate them all. I hope not, because we enjoy them. But you learn something either way. You learn something… It’s like you learn something from the people you dislike, just like you learn something from the people you like.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Erin] About the way you relate.
[DongWon] More from a book that you hate then you will from a book that you love. Because you can sort of see in contrast the things that they are doing that you don’t like, but you can start to understand the techniques as a result.
[Erin] Exactly. You can ask yourself why. So, if it’s the 3 things you love or hate, it’s, well, I hated the character. Well, why did I hate that character? Usually, it’s like something they did, or something that happened in the text. Then you can say, “When did I know that happened?” Like, if I hated them because of the fact that they stabbed 6 kittens, when did that happen? What was it about that kitten stabbing that like, really made it horrible. Sorry, kittens.
[Dan] Made it so different from my other kitten stabbings that I loved in the past?
[Mary Robinette] A John Cleaver book.
[Howard] Being able to ask yourself and come up with an answer why you don’t like something is… That’s an exciting ride. I well remember the movie Legion which a lot of other people thought I would love. But the loser guy who gets everybody killed is named Howard…
[Laughter]
[Howard] And his wife is named Sandra. That’s a dumb movie, I hate it.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Another really valuable thing on this topic is if you hate one of these books, this gives you the opportunity to see what other people saw in it that you didn’t. It’s okay to hate books. I hate so many books. But, as an author, especially as a working author who wants to make this a career, it’s important to understand what the market likes, what people who are not me are looking for in a book.
[Erin] It’s also great to see the variety of opinions. Because some people will love it, some people hate it, some people will be in different. I think sometimes as writers we think there’s some objective measure that this book is good and everyone loves it and this book is bad and everybody hates it. But any book, like the book that you love the most, is somebody else’s least favorite. The book that your least favorite is somebody’s most loved book. I think seeing that variety of opinion helps you realize that, like, in your own work, you don’t have to meet some mythical standard. You just have to try to use these techniques that were talking about as best you can, and put it out there, and find the audience of people who will love your work.
[DongWon] All that said, we hope you love these books. Because we love these books.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] It’s okay if you don’t. We get it.
[Dan] I doubt they hate them.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] But one of the reasons we hope you love it is we’re going to also be talking to some of the creators behind these books and doing interview episodes at the end of each series where we get to interrogate them. Hey, how did you do this thing? How did you think about these things? I am so looking forward to those conversations, because I think it’s going to be really fun to pick the brains of some of the most talented people in this space and talk about these big ideas.
[Howard] These authors will be more excited about those episodes if we use the word interview instead of interrogate.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] No. Interrogate the writers.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] What I’m looking forward to with those is where we say, “Oh, I really love it when you did XYZ,” and they’re like, “Hmm, I’m glad you noticed that.”
[Laughter]
[Howard] I am so happy that work for you.
[Erin] Why did you… Why do you think I did…
[DongWon] I think it’s something you might have been on the other end of once or twice.
[Mary Robinette] One thing that I’m going to say, this is not your homework, but just something I want you to think about as you are listening to these episodes all year is that we’re going to be citing examples. But the examples that we cite are not the only examples of each technique in the book. So, one of the ways that you can enhance your own understanding is go and find your own examples. Then, find someone to share that example with. Because that’s going to really help you cement the techniques that we’re talking about in your own brain. Then you can take it to your work and see if you can use it there. Which is what we’re really hoping. That’s the reason we’re doing these close reads is we’re hoping it will help you level up your own writing.
[Erin] That sounded like the homework. But it wasn’t!
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It was not. I know. That’s why I said this is not the homework, but…
[Erin] That was great. I wish I’d come up with that.
[Erin] This homework is, like, super complicated, too. So… One thing, we talked about these 5 things that we’re going to be thinking about. Voice, worldbuilding, character, tension, and structure. So, I want you to take a scene from a work that you love or from your own work and create… Pick a different crayon color or colored pencil for each of those things and underline where you think it’s happening within the scene. So, underline all the cool voice places, underline all the different worldbuilding in a different color, and just take a look at the pallette that you’ve created for yourself. Because we’re going to be talking about all of these things, and they can be found in all of these works. It’s a good way to remind yourself of all the ways that these techniques come together on the page.
[DongWon] I love that so much.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go read.
[Howard] Hey, podcast lovers. Do you know that you can upgrade your experience here with our ad-free tier on Patreon? Head over to patreon.com/writingexcuses to enjoy an ad-free oasis as well as access to our virtual Discord community where you can talk to your fellow writers.