19.27: A Close Reading on Character: An Overview and Why We Chose C.L. Clark’s Stories
Today we introduce our next close reading series—we’re focusing on character through the lens of three of C.L. Clark’s short stories: “You Perfect, Broken Thing,” “The Cook,” and “Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home”. They are all hyperlinked above and available online for free through Uncanny Magazine.
We are so excited to shift our focus to short stories! We love the compressed form, and C.L. Clark’s stories exemplify the freedom that exists within the genre itself. They masterfully combine light world-building with deep character development. We’re excited to dive into each story over the next five episodes, ending with an interview with C.L. Clark!
We recommend reading these short stories ahead of time, but this episode is fine to listen to as a primer for why you should read them!
Thing of the Week: Monster of the Week (a tabletop role-playing game) AND Sandra Tayler’s new book, Structuring Life To Support Creativity. Preorder your copy today at sandratayler.com.
Homework: Write the sentence “[Character] is someone who….” with different endings for an entire page. Read them over and pick one that surprises or intrigues you, then write a short scene showcasing that trait.
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were DongWon Song and Erin Roberts. Our guest was Arkady Martine. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key Points: Short stories are like tapas, a bite-size treat. Relationships. Backstory. Choices. Ability, what the character can and cannot do, role, tasks and responsibilities, relationship or loyalties, and status, where they are in a power structure. Sequence and anticipation. Momentum or velocity. You are who you choose to be. Dragon’s tears, and nebulous expectations.
[Season 19, Episode 27]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Howard] You’re invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles about the Navigator of the Seas from September 14th through the 27th of 2024. With stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions. An ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
[Season 19, Episode 27]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Close Reading on Character: An Overview and Why We Chose C. L. Clark’s Short Stories.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Erin] I am very excited that we’re doing a trio of stories for this section of our close reading. Because I love to write short stories, but also, I think that there’s a lot that you can learn from looking at one author doing a few different short stories. So, as a reminder, we’re going to be doing C. L. Clark’s stories, You Perfect, Broken Thing, The Cook, and Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home. Which were all actually published in Uncanny Magazine. I think, Mary Robinette, you were the one who brought these stories first to our attention. What made you think of them?
[Mary Robinette] So, I have known C. L. Clark for a couple of years, and one of the things that I love about their writing is that they can be extremely emotional, get deep into a character, within a very compressed space. One of the first things that I read of theirs was You Perfect, Broken Thing. Like, even today, I had to reread just to prep for this, it still makes me cry when I get to the end. That’s a really beautiful gift, from a short story, is to have this kind of in-depth emotional response. The other thing that I love about it is that there’s a very clear character arc that happens, and the character is encountering several different emotional spaces. Not only is the character inhabiting those different emotional spaces, the style of writing that C. L. Clark deploys to convey that is so specific to each moment, that it’s… I thought that it was a really good example of “Look at this! Look at how much freedom you have when you are attempting to convey character.”
[DongWon] We hear the word character-driven a lot when talking about different kinds of fiction, different kinds of stories. C. L. Clark’s work really drives that home. It definitely feels like the character has taken the wheel of the car of this story and has just taken us wherever they’re going to go. Right? There’s so many unexpected choices for surprising or nuanced things that the characters say or do that in each… All three of these stories will catch me off guard in a way that was so delightful and so fun. In a couple of them, really, making choices that were almost borderline [garbled] choices in ways that I think are so relatable and understandable and… I can’t even be mad at them when they’ve done something that I so heartily disagree with.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly. The other thing that I really like with this is the second story that we mentioned, The Cook, is supershort. It’s like 800 and… It’s less than 900 words. There is major action that happens offstage and all we’re looking at in this story is the difference in the way to people are relating to each other, based on this major action that happens offstage, but the major action is not the interesting part. So it just gets quickly referred to in just a couple of lines, and then we go on. I find that very compelling, that… There are a lot of these character portraits that I find in their work.
[Howard] I want to tie a couple of things together here and clarify something. Erin, you said you love to write short stories, and, Mary Robinette, you mentioned The Cook. I love to read short stories. I was trying to figure out why, and I realized I think I like to read them for the same reason I like to eat tapas. I love being able to get in one bite a million flavors all at once. You think of a novel as… It could be a three-course dinner, it could be a pepperoni pizza with everything, it could be… If you think of it as a pepperoni pizza, or a pizza with everything, thinking of short stories as deconstructions of the pizza, as tapas, little bits of those things that would be in the full meal, and which, in and of themselves, are complete. That, coming back to the idea of just being a cook, that is the mastery that I found in reading these. That… They’re small, but there is so much in there.
[Erin] One of the things I like is that… To just build on this pizza analogy, which I love, and is making me hungry, is that these are three different lengths of stories. There short stories, but one is this very tiny pizza bite type of like…
[DongWon] It’s a bagel bite.
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] trying to think of a name for them. It’s a little… Thank you. Bagel bites. You have one that’s basically, like, maybe a cross section…
[DongWon] A hot pocket.
[Erin] The hot pocket. You’re…
[DongWon] I’m on it.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay, I just want to be clear that the story is way better a story than a hot pocket is a food.
[DongWon] Hey, some people like hot pockets [garbled] hot pockets.
[Erin] The third is maybe a slice. So, each one of them… Because it’s the same author writing them, there’s a certain… There’s certain things that are done in all of the stories that makes us… Like, there’s cheese in all three of those things. Theoretically. But the way that that cheese would be expressed is different.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Erin] Similarly, like, things like a description of another person, all of these have relationships also at their core. But the way that people are described is slightly different when you have three words to do it versus a sentence versus maybe a paragraph.
[DongWon] One of the reasons we chose Time War is because there’s like 3 to 4 different voices in that book. So it’s really useful to break it down and compare. Short fiction, similarly, because they’re bite sizes, the metaphor we’ve landed on, it’s very easy to figure out how to talk about different aspects and highlight different aspects. Being able to cover a collection of short stories, a handful of them here, let’s us really compare and contrast how the author is highlighting different aspects of character, drawing out different elements of character, across all three stories. So I think it’ll make for a really dynamic and fun conversation.
[Howard] When we do close readings, the power of these, for me, is being able to reference the text, being able to read to you, fair listener, the words that did the thing. With the short stories, it’s so much easier to find the words. Because, you know what, in this one, there’s only six sentences to choose from that did this bit of lifting on that character.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find, having gone from short stories to novels, is that the skills that I learned in short fiction, I deploy in novel form so that I have more space for… Like, I establish a character very, very quickly because I’ve learned these skills in short form. Which gives me more space to have character development, to have other things that are happening and interesting. Whereas I see a lot of people who are early career spending chapters and chapters trying to establish this character and all of this painful back story of the character. Frequently, when you look at short fiction, you’re able to establish painful back story in just one or two sentences, maybe a paragraph. Especially when we get into You Perfect, Broken Thing, there is so much worldbuilding in that that’s just conveyed superfast in super economical terms.
[DongWon] Well, that’s kind of the thing that I want to talk about is there something Clark does so masterfully here, which is have this laser focus on character and be so late with worldbuilding. So much of the worldbuilding is defined in negative space. Right? The Cook is a great example of this, but all three stories do this in different ways, where there is very little that they are telling us about explicitly here’s why this contest is happening, here’s why the world is like this, is why these people have been persecuted out of existence. All that is left in the margins of the story, and not addressed. Because they don’t matter, unless they matter to the character interaction. So we understand the world enough to understand why characters are making the choices that they make and that’s it. It’s a stop at that point. I think that is so cool, and is such a great demonstration of how much you can do if you really hone one of the tools in your kit. Then, when you carry that into novel writing, I think when you have that more expansive space to do the stuff that is offscreen in these stories, you still have that strong foundation in knowing how to write character, how to write that element.
[Erin] Yeah. I love when you said the worldbuilding sort of just comes in when it’s needed. I remember in Your Eyes, My Beacon, that there’s this the high court, which is…
[DongWon] Yeah. But barely mentioned.
[Erin] Like, all of a sudden, they were mentioned and I’m like, “Oh. Actually, I think this is the first time I hearing about high court. But it’s very cool that both of the characters are very familiar with it.” But didn’t… It didn’t need to be mentioned to me until this moment. I really thought this was like sort of an audacious but amazing choice. Because the time that you spend explaining the high court takes you out of the moment between these two characters is there trying to figure out what to do within this lighthouse.
[DongWon] It barely comes up again, but is this constant threat throughout the story. I never forget about the high court for the rest of the story, but it’s mentioned maybe twice, off the top of my head.
[Erin] Yeah.
[Howard] On the subject of taking you into and out of the moment, we’re going to take a quick break, and be back in a moment.
[Dan] This week, our thing of the week is called… A role-playing game called Monster of the Week, which, as that name implies, is based around this kind of TV show Supernatural or Buffy or X-Files. The kind of show where each week there is another monster and you have to figure out what it is and deal with it. The reason I am recommending it is because it gets so creative with the powers that you have in the way that these powers help you to tell a particular kind of story. So, for example, one of the character classes has the power of getting captured by the monster. That is literally their superpower. The reason that that is useful is because getting captured helps reveal all kinds of things, where does the monster hang out, what kinds of powers does the monster have, and it fits into that genre of storytelling that you see on shows like Supernatural, where someone will get captured and then gets to talk to the monster or see how they work. So the sh… Game, once again, is called Monster of the Week and it’s awesome. Check it out.
[Mary Robinette] Right. As we come back from the break, I want to give you a couple of very specific tools to be thinking about with character. Then, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to read to you the opening of… Just the first paragraph of each of the three stories, so you can hear how these tools are being manipulated even in this… In these tiny, tiny spaces. So these tools are about a character’s identity. Ability, role, relationship, and status. We’re going to dig more into these in the next episode, but right now what I want you to think about is ability, the things a character can and cannot do. This is all about how a character self defines. So the things they can and cannot do. Role are the tasks, responsibilities, that move them through the world. Relationship is about their loyalties. Then, status is about where they are in a power structure. So, as you are listening to us read these, think about ability, role, relationship, and status, and how they are manifesting even in these compressed spaces. Just these first paragraphs.
[Erin] I’ll start with the opening of You Perfect, Broken Thing.
When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women’s locker room. I can’t stand anymore, but I know if I sit, I’ll never get back up. At least, not for another hour.
[Mary Robinette] The Cook.
The first time I see her, it’s just a glimpse. I’m standing in the inn’s common room and the other warriors straddle chairs and call for ale. While some reach for a serving wench or boy, cheeks to pinch, a life to grasp—my stomach growls a monster’s growl. I should be slain; the growl is that fierce. I smell the roasting lamb, the unmistakable sneeze of freshly ground peppercorns, and garlic, but it’s all hidden behind the kitchen door.
[DongWon] Your Eyes, My Beacon.
She is light. Until she is not, and the lighthouse goes dark as the waves crash against the cliffside, the rocks at its foot jutting and jagged, a peril to even the most skilled navigators’ ships.
[Mary Robinette] So you can see how they are manipulating those things, even in these tiny spaces. That first one, we’re seeing ability, the ability of the character completely manipulated. In the second one, we’re looking at the tasks, I’m hungry and need to eat, and in the moment, that’s everything that’s defining this character. Then, in this last one, she is light, again, we’re back to tasks, but also this role…
[DongWon] The status really comes in here.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] As she’s failing to complete this task, as her ability fails her, suddenly her power and her status becomes very much in question.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I think to do that with something that was really interesting I noticed between The Cook and Your Eyes, My Beacon, is, I think The Cook is very much relationship. The first time I see her, it’s just a glimpse. It’s about a specific other person, is being centered, really early on. Whereas in Your Eyes, My Beacon, when it talks about the lighthouse goes dark, a peril even to the most skilled navigators’ ships, you can tell it’s a role or status, I guess, because it’s affecting all the ships. It’s no longer about a single… It’s not that ship. It’s all the ships out there. That’s where you can tell, like, it’s a specific person’s status or place in the world versus their place with regards to another individual.
[Mary Robinette] So this is just kind of a little bit of a preview of some of the things that we’re going to be talking about over the next couple of weeks. And why we’re so excited to be exploring the work of C. L. Clark.
[Howard] I want to look at The Cook again, because this, the shortest of the three, that first paragraph gives us so much information, and some of it is inherently mimetic, in that we are being given information by being asked to recall things that are not in the story. The sentence I’m talking about, I’m standing in the inn’s common room and other warriors straddle chairs and call for ale. Inn, common, warriors, ale. Pathfinder or D&D. You are there. Those are words that get used all the time. If you tell yourself, oh, I’m in a D&D setting, or I’m in a Pathfinder setting, or I’m in some sort of Western fantasy-esque role-playing game setting, except I’m telling a story, you know what, that’s good enough. The story will play with that backdrop you’ve painted. We were told to paint it by being given those four words in quick succession.
[Mary Robinette] Exactly. It leaves so much more space to then explore character. So you don’t have to do a ton of worldbuilding. That allows you to then… The negative space that DongWon was talking about before, that allows you then to just focus on the character. Again, in that… In The Cook, the first time I see her, it’s just a glimpse. One of the other tools you’re going to hear me talking about is recency or primacy effect. By starting with this is the most important thing in this story. The first time I see her.
[DongWon] It’s funny, we almost get the inverse of that with Your Eyes, My Beacon, because we are starting with her, we are starting with the she is light, and by the time we get to the reveal of what’s going on with the lighthouse keeper, I… Me at least, completely forgot about this opening. Right? Completely forgot about the connection between the character and being light. Then, when that comes back, it’s such a thrilling moment.
[Erin] I also wanted to note that the first time I see her, it’s just a glimpse… The first time. Because you know there will be a next time. I love words like that, that help to create anticipation naturally in us by telling us there is a sequence of events, and if you wait, we’ll get to the next one in the sequence.
[DongWon] All three of these imply future action. Right? We have her leaving the kill floor, this sort of athlete pushed to her limits. We’re going to get more about this. Right? You get the first time I see her, you get the lighthouse going out, and the consequence of that. All three are such a great way of rooting yourself in character, but with momentum. Right? I think sometimes when people talk about characters, it can feel very static, because it’s a portrait of here’s a person who existed at a point in time. But the thing is people aren’t static, they are in motion. C. L. Clark is a master at giving us that velocity. Each one of these, I feel like I’m coming off the starting block, and just sprinting away into the distance.
[Howard] There’s a line from… I think it’s… I think Hogarth speaks it in Iron Giant where he tells the Iron Giant, “You are who you choose to be.” I love that line. You are who you choose to be. Just show us a choice. Show us the character making a choice. Now we know who they are in that moment. We don’t know what their next choice… What they’ll choose next time, but we now know enough. It’s motion.
[DongWon] Yeah. But I love how that also feels in tension with this idea of character as destiny. Right? They are going to make choices and they have choice… They have agency, which, we’re going to talk a lot more about in a future episode, but also, there almost trapped by who they are and what they need to be, and watching them struggle against that is so much the dynamism of these stories. Of how do you make a choice when you have to go fight a war? How do you make a choice when you can’t leave the kitchen? How do you make a choice when you need to save your family? That is so fun.
[Howard] I want to come back to the kitchen. One last comment about tapas and…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] About the length of short stories. I was served something called a dragon’s tear at a sushi restaurant. Which was basically a slice of habanero, teardrop shaped, wrapped around a little nugget of wasabi.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, no!
[Howard] Okay. That is one bite of heat and tears and sneezing and regret…
[Heehee]
[Howard] And joy.
[DongWon] What did you do to piss those folks off?
[Laughter]
[Howard] It’s… But, see, here’s the thing. I don’t want a plate of dragon’s tears.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I just want one. I want to go on that ride one time. Okay. I’ll go back to that restaurant and get another one. Because it was fun. That, for me, is what short fiction can do. I don’t know what this is going to taste like when I start reading it. It doesn’t have a book cover. It’s not shelved somewhere in the fantasy or science fiction section. My expectations are nebulous.
[Erin] I think that is a perfect time to go to the homework, which I have for this week. Which is to write a series of sentences. Each one… Pick a character that you have and write that character’s name is someone who… And then something about them. Then write it again, and again, and again and again and again. Until you run out of things and you have to continue to keep writing, because that will help you find levels to your character that maybe not even you anticipated.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[Erin] Are you struggling to find time and energy for creative work or writing? Sandra Tayler has a new book that might help. Structuring Life to Support Creativity is a resource book for creative people who want to make more space in the life that they have for the creative work they want to do. This book is drawn from 30 years experience in juggling creative work along with everything else life throws at us. Inside the book, you can find such topics as managing your mental load, arranging your physical space, how to come back to your creative work after life goes sideways, the problem of motivation, and more. The whole book is written with a focus on adapting for how your brain works instead of trying to change you to fit expectations. The book is not prescriptive. Instead, it provides concepts and tools so you can find the ones that work for you. This makes the book autism, ADHD, and neurodivergent friendly friendly. Preorder your copy today at sandratayler.com. Just make sure that Tayler has an e r in the Tayler.