Today, we’re taking a higher view on the techniques we’ve been talking about over the last four episodes and focusing on how you can use our takeaways in your own writing. We’ll go over our final thoughts on C.L. Clark’s short stories (until next week’s episode, when we interview them!). We’ll also try to summarize the lessons we’ve learned from Clark and our favorite bits of their writing. 

Thing of the Week: Rude Tales of Magic (podcast) 

Homework: Write a character study in which two characters meet twice. Something momentous has happened in between the meetings. Imply it by the way those characters have changed.

Liner Notes: 

Axis of Power (available on Patreon) – Ability, Role, Relationship, Status

DREAM from Elizabeth Boyle – Denial, Resistance, Exploration, Acceptance, Manifestation

Close Reading Series: Texts & Timeline

Next up is Tension! Starting September 1, we’ll be diving into Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark. Please note, this novella uses tools from the horror genre to add tension, and this can be intense for some readers!

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Recap. Personal stakes engage readers. Specificity. Embodied. Sensory details. Voice. Muscular prose can be both forceful and sensory oriented, with poetics and imagery and rich language. Ability, role, relationship, and status. DREAM: denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, manifestation. Make a choice! Pick the protagonist who is least suited to solve the problem. 

[Season 19, Episode 31]

[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 aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 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 31]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Character: Tying It All Together.

[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.

[Mary Robinette] So, we have been looking at the short stories of C. L. Clark. We’ve looked at three of them, and we’ve been using them to examine character. This is the episode where we take the kind of higher view and just talk about the techniques that we’ve been looking at and how you can apply them to your own work. So, kind of think of this as a summary recap. What are some of the techniques that you were kind of most excited about as they are embodied in these stories?

[Howard] The first, and it’s probably the most concrete for me because I actually have an example for it, is the blending of tools about agency and choice and barriers versus stakes. Because when you talk about a character choosing a thing, the stakes have to matter, not just to the character, but to the reader. At the end of the lighthouse story, our Sigo has chosen to return to the lighthouse with medication for the lighthouse keeper, for Audei. This has two sets of attached stakes. One is, yay, ships won’t crash, and the other is, oh, Audei won’t be lonely. I’m making light of both of them, but only one of them resonates with me. That is that Audei won’t be lonely. It’s the personal stake that resonates for me. The lesson that… The piece of tape that I would use to label the tool for myself is that personal stakes will engage the reader. Impersonal stakes might be fun for worldbuilding, might be cool for scope of story, but if you want to engage the reader, making… Letting characters make choices that have personal stakes is… That’s the tool. That’s…

[Mary Robinette] It is about the specificity, I think. The specificity and tying it to individuals. As humans, we tend to respond to stories about people. So if you read about there’s a war that’s going on in another country, that’s very sad. But when you see the photo of the child who has been orphaned, that makes it much more immediate, because you can imagine that child. That a specific child who’s lost specific parents. You can also, I think, tie it to an experience that you have yourself. So any time you can kind of create space for the reader to insert themselves by having those common experiences, those are times when that specificity of the author choice is going to make the character seem richer and more alive.

[DongWon] Well, this is the thing that Clark does so well. I’ve mentioned this a few times on past episodes, but the way that they write embodied characters, the way they use sensory details, physicality. Because those things are very relatable. I don’t need to have been a warrior going off to war to understand the pleasure of smelling rosemary in a kitchen, of tasting a beautifully cooked potato, to have exercised to the point that I’m having trouble walking down the stairs. Right? These are all things that we can experience in our own lives. Those sensory details carry us into these fantastical situations. The way they use external information to give deep, deep interiority into the character is really fascinating to me. For me, because we have very little access to what these characters are thinking and feeling necessarily, but a lot about what they are doing.

[Erin] What you said about embodiment also made me realize that all three stories, I believe, have a sex scene.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] But they’re all in… some are very embodied and there’s sex happening, which is a very embodied act…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And yet it feels so dreamlike in its own way…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] In each of the stories.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It feels, in some ways more to me personal, and it resonates more than an… A really explicit scene might. Because it… The way in which each of these characters view their bodies comes through in the way they view using their body in that way. So, you have the… In You Perfect, Broken Thing, it’s about the stretching and the concentric and the muscles, because this is somebody who’s actually going up and using their muscles. For The Cook, I think it’s a lot more of, there’s like food involved…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it’s about feeding someone. So each of these things are about the way… In the lightkeeper, it’s about the light in some ways…

[DongWon] And the burn.

[Erin] And the fire and the burning. I love the way that it’s not just embodied, but it’s embodied in different ways. In seeing the same act take place in three different stories really shows you how different those characters are, and how embodiment can be different from one story to the next.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing is… That I just want to point out is that C. L. Clark is using a tool that we’ve talked about in our first series, which is voice. The specific language choices are underscoring the choices that the characters are making, not just the now we’re going to be talking about food, but in You Perfect, Broken Thing, that wonderful section when the character is actually running the race. We’re just like, “Punctuation? What is that even?” Like, we are breathless, we are… It is nonstop, it is completely in the moment. I love that. It’s again, one of those things where I’m like, am I being too… Is there someplace where I should just pull all the punctuation out?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It is something that I got very excited about.

[DongWon] I think when we talk about muscular prose, people have this idea of, like, Hemingway. Six word sentences. Very short sentences, that are very to the point and very grounded in literal. I just want to point out the way in which C. L. Clark has incredibly muscular prose. Like, very forceful, very clear, very sensory oriented, but still incredible poetics in it, incredible imagery and richness of language and word choice. These stories are incredibly beautiful on in imagery and sense level, and the fact that those things don’t have to be in tension with each other. I think sometimes people talk about it as if they are.

[Mary Robinette] So, since we’ve just drifted over into language, because we get very excited about it.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Some of the tools we’ve been talking about our ability, role, relationship, and status. The thing that I… This is a tool that I find so much fun, and that they use in all of the stories to shift kind of what the characters focus is, what their motivation is, by shifting which aspect of self is most important to them, which one is highlighted on the page, at any given moment. That’s something that you can do. Look at your work in progress. This isn’t even homework. This is just like a good practice. Look at your work in progress. If you’re stuck in your scene, take a look at it, and just jot down, like, what is challenging my character’s ability right now? What is challenging the tasks that they have to do? What responsibilities are they feeling like right now? How can that break for them? Which loyalties are being tugged on in this scene? How is their status affected? Just… By… A quick reminder for you, status involves a lot of different things. If you have imposter syndrome, that’s a status issue. That’s where your internal status does not match the external status. Where your idea of what you can do is very different from what other people think you can do.

[Howard] If you turn that upside down, imposter syndrome, you have Dunning-Kruger effect.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So those are things that you can play with in your own fiction, whether writing short form or longform. These… This is a tool that works at any length that you’re playing in.

[Erin] What I also liked in looking at all these, because a lot of these are tools that are, like, newer to me, so I’m always like trying to figure out how they work and like get inside of them. I think thinking about that, you can… It’s like twisting the facet like of a diamond, and looking at different facets. But also, that you can create, when we were talking about barriers, I was thinking, you can create different barriers on all of these axes, you can create different stakes on all of these axes. You can have them, like, fight each other. You can have a story where it’s my ability against my status, and I’ve got to pick one or the other, and that’s the choice that I’m making, and that’s the agency that I have in the story. So I think with all of these tools, no tool is static. It’s, like, you can take a tool and use it to do a lot of different things. So I’ve had a lot of fun thinking about how can we use these tools in very different ways and think about them in our own stories.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You actually just made me go, oh, yeah. Actually, one of the things that’s happening in the lighthouse is that we have the role of I am a pirate in the relationship of Audei, and these are in direct conflict with each other. Yeah. That’s smart.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Well, let’s take a moment. We’re going to pause, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about some more of the tools and how you can apply them to your own fiction.

[DongWon] I’ve talked before in our thing of the week about Rude Tales of Magic. But it’s one of my very favorite podcasts. It’s nominally a D&D actual play show, but the cast takes D&D more as an inspiration and runs from there, and tells hilarious improvised stories that still find a way to have deep character work and heartfelt storytelling. I’m talking about it again because we just started a new season last fall, so it’s a great time to jump in and discover how delightful a rude tale can be.

[Mary Robinette] Welcome back.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Okay. We are back now. So, one of the things I got so excited about I didn’t even know how to express it in words was the DREAM…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because I think this is the first time that I’ve been hearing about it. My bad, I’d forgotten about it and having it come back was really exciting for me. I was thinking about how that all works. So, that was a tool that I think… I know it was just in our last episode, but… What was it again?

[Mary Robinette] Denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, and manifestation. I learned about this from Elizabeth Boyle, who was describing romances. So you… The thing that I have been enjoying about this series is that previously when I have talked about it, I’ve had to use really, like, very loose examples of it, but I think seeing it applied to a story makes it much more concrete. I got super excited when I was in Elizabeth’s class and learned about it. So, denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, and manifestation.

[DongWon] Yeah. I love this framework, because I can see how it came from romance. Right? I can… When we talked about it last episode, we were applying it to a romance arc. But I can see this applying to so many character arcs. Right? Because accepting your role in the world, accepting your limitations, accepting the various aspects of the other framework we were talking about in terms of… accepting what your status is, what your ability is. Then, getting to that point of manifestation. All of these things are stages of any character arc along any of the axes we’ve talked about before. Right? So, again, we’re not talking about these tools in isolation. They are all mix-and-match, and you pull from different aspects and apply them to other aspects. That’s how you get a rich nuanced character, like the ones that we’re meeting in these stories.

[Mary Robinette] You’ll see that again, also, in You Perfect, Broken Thing. Like, yeah, I can totally do this race. I’m going to be tired and exhausted, but I will do it. Then, oh, actually, no, maybe I can’t, maybe I in fact dying. Okay, what happens if I run this race for someone else entirely? Yes, that is what I am doing, I am going to win this race for someone else. Then, the manifestation of you take the shot.

[DongWon] Then in The Cook, it’s the same thing. The stages are externalized into we’re going off to war and coming back, more and more traumatized, more and more injured, as she’s forced to accept the condition of her life until she can get to a place of manifestation.

[Howard] At risk of briefly confusing and conflating the tools, it’s easy to look at DREAM and to see symmetries between that and the very popularized stages of grief. What I love about DREAM is that we don’t and with acceptance. We and with manifestation. Because this isn’t for how to recover from grieving, this is for a writer who wants to make that plot turn or that character turn or whatever towards the end of the story and then and the story with something that is hopefully satisfying.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Acceptance, in and of itself, can be satisfying, but a manifestation of it that meets… Surprising yet inevitable or that mirrors… Creates a bookend from something at the beginning of the story… That’s where I start blending these tools together.

[Mary Robinette] I should say that Elizabeth actually got this from an anger management class. She tells this when she’s teaching the class.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That she was forced to go to an anger management class while she was working for Microsoft, and she’s like, “Well, this is ridiculous. I don’t need to be here.” Still in denial. Then, as soon as the teacher put that up on the board, she’s like, “Hum, I suddenly became the best student. Sat in the front…”

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Because it’s like that is a romance arc right there.

[DongWon] Well, what’s great about the manifestation point, as you were talking about it, Howard, is it’s a framework to getting the character to make a choice.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Because manifestation is about claiming one’s agency, claiming one’s choices. So that is a character arc. An arc has to end with a character choosing something. That choosing may be accepting their fate in some way, in which case acceptance and manifestation are very close together. But it’s getting a character to make a choice is the thing that you’re really trying to do to get us to understand and empathize with a character’s journey.

[Howard] In You Perfect, Broken Thing, the acceptance is I will choose to give my prize to others so that they can live. The manifestation is, for me anyway, the surprising yet inevitable of somebody else did the same thing. Other people are now looking at this, and are now sharing the gift. The character already made their choice. They are now helpless to further influence the story. But other people begin choosing things that carry that choice even further, that make it manifest as a satisfying ending.

[Mary Robinette] You made me think of a thing that I’m going to talk about, because one of the things that people ask me about when I teach this elsewhere is how it applies to series. We’ve been saying all along that you can take all of the tools that we’ve been talking about and you can use them anywhere. So we’ve been talking about a tool in short story. But DREAM will work for novel length, but it will also work for series. Basically, whatever manifestation point your character winds up at at the end kind of becomes the problem for them for the next thing. Or, another way to look at it is, they think they’ve solved the problem, but it only lasts for a moment. The best example that I can give this for you is extremely rude.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, denial. I’m not a writer. Resistance. Well, okay, so I’ve written some things. But I’m really not a writer. Exploration. Okay. Maybe I’ll try finishing something. Acceptance. Oh, I finished it. I finished. I think I a writer. Manifestation. I’m going to show it to somebody. But I’m not really a writer, because I haven’t submitted anything yet. Okay. So maybe I’ll submit it to a market, but I’m going to get rejected immediately. Okay, fine. So I submitted it to a market. Then acceptance, I got rejected. But I’m going to submit it again, because getting rejection means I’m a writer. Manifestation. I sent it out again. But I’m still not a writer. This is a thing where every time you think I have solve this thing, you haven’t. Because what you’re shifting here with this DREAM are these things we’ve been talking about before, this ability, role, relationship, and status. You level up, but then there are new monsters in front of you.

[DongWon] Think of this as a try-fail cycle.

[Howard] You level up, but…

[Mary Robinette] Exactly.

[Howard] So your imposter syndrome leveled up with you.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. So you can do that over a series, that every time they level up, they… That core problem in them, that hole in them, is still there.

[Erin] Something that’s really relatable about that is that this is… Like, you’re saying this is what humans do. We tend to, like, go through something, it’s like extending a long rubber band. Then, the minute you get to manifestation, you kind of forget…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Like, all of the difficulties that happened. You snap the rubber band back and you’re like, “Oh, I manifested it. So it couldn’t have been that hard to do. All that stuff I did was obviously meaningless. Like, now, I’ll never be able to stretch this next rubber band.” So, when characters are doing that, there’s something that, even if they’re going through something will never experience in our lifetimes, we understand it a little bit and it feels very human. It keeps people wanting to be invested in your character and in the story.

[DongWon] Giving your readers these micro arcs are the things that are so satisfying that ultimately, as you stack those arcs on arcs on arcs, ends up feeling like a fully realized three-dimensional character, as we call it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You can also… I’m glad you said the word micro arcs, because you can also use DREAM within a single paragraph.

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It’s a lovely tool. I… It’s… I… Also, I’m not going to pull them out in the text, I’m going to let you all do that. But there are multiple examples in all of these stories where there are… The DREAM arc happening within a single paragraph. Also, things where the different ability… Different aspects of self are tugging on each other. It’s… These stories are just fun. I really enjoyed this.

[DongWon] They’re wonderful stories. I found them also meaningful in the way that the characters always come back to community and connection over everything else. Right? As we were talking about last time, seeing that resistance to the call to adventure and sort of that disruption of traditional fantasy narratives, you can get there by routing it in character. When you root it so deeply in a person’s perspective and wants and needs, then when they’re making those choices that run counter to our expectations of here’s how a fantasy story is supposed to go, it feels organic and exciting. Nothing is more thrilling than in the lighthouse story, her choosing to come back to the lighthouse, her choosing not to be living the life of adventure. It is… And then she has to do this difficult task. She has to prove herself, by climbing the wall and getting the herbs and things like that. It really rewards us for that journey that were going on with her, even though it’s a nontraditional one.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I learned from a class on writing middle grades was that you should pick the protagonist who was least suited to solve the problem. That was fascinating to me, because previously, I had heard that you should pick the protagonist to… Only they can solve the problem. But thinking about who is least suited. It causes the character to have to make different choices that constrain to the agency that you were talking about. So who is the least suited to win a race? Someone who is dying of a disease. Who is least suited to stay in the lighthouse? An adventurer who is… Who chooses to go from place to place. Realizing that by introducing these characters and this… The people who are least suited to this thing. Who is least suited to stay in a kitchen? Barbarian warrior. But those…

[Howard] Hygiene? Come on.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Those… That kind of shift of discovering that something is more important to them, to me, is significantly more interesting than the stories where we start with a character who is deeply flawed, so flawed that they are an ass hole that I don’t want to spend any time with…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] On the page. That’s something that I love about these, is that these are complicated characters, but it’s about them learning what they value.

[Howard] And there’s more to it than just us connecting with the story. There’s also the fact that you as a human person, us as human people, we were not cut out perfectly to be the best possible person to solve the problems that will face us. Life does not follow that sort of narrative. So these kinds of stories where a character makes choices, where they choose between different sets of stakes, where they exercise their agency in ways that hadn’t occurred to them earlier, in order to bring about positive change. Boy! I would like us all to be able to do that kind of thing, and… This, there might be a little bit of envy speaking here… I want to be able to write the kind of story that makes other people feel that way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I want to be able to write things that make you feel like you can change in amazing ways.

[Mary Robinette] Well, you’ll be happy to know that I have homework that’s going to feed into that. So, for your homework, I want you to write a character study. This does not have to be a full story, but, as you’ve seen with The Cook, it can be. Write a character study in which two characters meet twice. Something momentous has happened in between the meetings. It’s offstage, and I want you to imply it by the way these characters have changed, using all of the tools that we’ve been talking about.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now? Go write.