19.36: A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual
Today, we’re talking about the tension that is actually happening on the page, and the contextual tension is what the reader is bringing to the table. Ring Shout lives in a place of contextual tension and we are excited to dive into how you can use both types of tension in your own writing. Your readers will always bring their own context to your work; and if you think about this, you can use tension in both big and small ways in your work.
Thing of the Week: Random Friday – Solar Fields (Album)
Homework: Take a scene you’re working on, and put a piece of information at the start that is only meant for the reader. Then, revise the scene, believing that the reader has that information.
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, 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: Narrative tension is tension happening in the story, on the page. Contextual tension is what the reader brings to the story. How much do you assume your readers are bringing context with them? Language and dialect. Narrative structure, tension, all that is a pitcher, and the writer puts whatever they want in that. The audience brings you their glass, and you don’t know what kind of glass they will bring. It may not match the drink, but they can still enjoy it. There’s always context. Use the characters having memories to bring context onto the page. Characters always carry their context with them.
[Season 19, Episode 36]
[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.
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[Season 19, Episode 36]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Tension: Narrative vs. Contextual.
[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] I’m Howard.
[Erin] I’m obsessed with the topic that we’re going to be talking about today…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Which is narrative and contextual tension. So, just to give a this is what I mean when I say that, to me, narrative tension is the tension that’s actually happening in the story. It is when your characters are tense, when your… the setting is tense, anything that’s actually happening on the page. Contextual tension is what the reader is bringing to the table. The example that I always use is if you write a story called Last Dinner in Pompeii, and it’s just a normal story of people having dinner, we all know that Pompeii will be buried by ash the next day, so we will bring plenty of tension to the table, even if they’re just talking about how next week they’re going to go shopping. We’re like, “Oh, you won’t.”
[Laughter]
[Erin] That brings [garbled]. That’s contextual, but not narrative at all. I think this, Ring Shout, is a work that obviously lives in a place of contextual tension…
[DongWon] The context that I’m bringing to this is I’ve been so excited for this episode because I think three years ago on the Writing Excuses Cruise at like one in the morning, you explained this idea to me after a day of hanging out, and my jaw was on the floor. Because I’d never thought about it this way. It’s such an important concept, and it is so useful. So, getting to finally talk about it on mic for the podcast is a resolution of the kind of tension for me. So.
[Erin] Love it.
[Mary Robinette] That’s also one of the reasons that some works don’t translate, because they bring a lot of contextual tension from their home locations that the audience in the new location doesn’t have. It was one of the things that happen to me when I was reading Three Body Problem, that there was a lot of context that I was just missing. With Ring Shout, I had, because I am from the American South, there was a lot of contextual tension for me that was layered onto the book where I was anticipating things. I think that P. Djèlí Clark was using that very intentionally throughout the book.
[Erin] It’s an interesting question, though, which is how much do you want to assume that your audience is bringing that context with them? I also… My family… I have family from the American South, family from slavery, family who experienced racism in the South. So, for me, I’m like, “Oh, this feels very tense on a lot of levels.” But if you’re from another country or you’ve never heard of the Klan, do you think that the story still works? Or do you think that there’s something that is required in the context in order to make the tension happen?
[DongWon] I remember around the launch of the TV show Lovecraft Country, there was a lot of conversation. Because the opening scene of that show is an actual historical massacre of Black Americans in the American South. It’s referenced also in Ring Shout. It’s mentioned. I had never heard of this event. I didn’t know about it. I also grew up part of it in the South. Racial politics is a personal interest, of things that I’ve read about and studied. But I just didn’t know this particular event. So a lot of the press coverage was about what an incredible work it is, both that it’s bringing in all this contextual elements, but also educating such a broad audience about it. Right? So I think it can do sort of both and it’s one of the challenges of leaning on that contextual tension is you need to work with your audiences to some extent, but it’s also not your responsibility to educate them about it in the moment. But if you sort of give them enough of the context clues to understand what kind of thing we’re talking about and then they can go into doing the research about it on their own.
[Howard] It’s worth pointing out here that the narrative versus contextual dichotomy is enormous. Absolutely enormous. I’m sure you’ve all had that experience where you’re talking about a film with somebody and halfway through your like, “It’s like we watched two different movies.” It’s because, yeah, about 80 percent of what you get out of a thing has to do with what you brought into the thing.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I mean, there are things that I’ll watch where the lead actor or one of the actors whose prominently featured is someone I just no longer like because of a me too or whatever, and that is a new context that didn’t exist when it was created, but it’s a real thing. Planning for it is fantastically difficult. My counsel to writers is don’t assume that everybody has the same context that you do. But on your first draft, trust your context and write the story that you want to write. Then you’re going to have to work with your beta readers, with your editor, to see if those narrative…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Versus contextual bits are fighting.
[DongWon] Well, one of the things I like most about this was the confidence with which P. Djèlí Clark…
[Howard] Oh, my goodness, yes.
[DongWon] Approaches the historical context.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] We’re dropped into a situation, we’re dropped into a scene. Nothing’s explained to us, other than the fantastical elements. Those are explained to us. But the political historical context, we are assumed to either know it or pick it up from atmospheric clues around what’s being discussed. I found that to be very powerful and very useful.
[Erin] I think that one of the reasons that that works so well is in that opening scene, you’re dropped into that sort of primal life versus death tension. You get a group of people who obviously know each other, and are… We sympathize with, who are immediately trying to kill some horrific monster. So it tells you, okay, I understand what the stakes are. I understand who I’m rooting for, and who I’m not. Now, as I get more context, I can use that to build out the world. But I think it grabs you so immediately that you’re not worried about the context, because you’re like, oh, if there’s a giant monster in front of you, you should probably hack it to death. I totally get that. Now that I’m in, now you can tell me about why it’s important and what’s going on around it.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that that particular scene… That was the first scene where I had that layer of… That extra layer of tension. Because I was… What I was fully anticipating was going to happen is that they would defeat that monster, and then they would get… Have a bunch of angry white people running after them. That’s not what happens in the book. What happens is worse and different. Maybe not worse. It’s different. That’s one of the things that I… When I say that I think that P. Djèlí Clark is doing it very intentionally. That a lot of what he’s doing is setting up, here’s this… Here’s the context. Here’s a thing that can go wrong. But I’m not going to do that one. I’m going to do a different one. That’s… That, again, is that thing for me when you’re playing with… When you’re using historical work and you’re playing with someone’s knowledge of that time, where you can put some additional tension on the story by putting those two things in opposition, by moving directions you weren’t necessarily expecting. But also, if you don’t know that’s a possibility, it still plays… Like, you don’t need the contextual tension for it to be really terrifying.
[Howard] In the… In the previous episode, we talked about how this book uses a lot of horror techniques. But it’s kind of a fantasy action adventure historical. That particular tool of setting up… Having our characters be aware of what could go wrong and prepare themselves as best they can for this worst-case scenario that they’re imagining, and then discovering that the worst case scenario is actually 25 degrees to the left and is way worse. That’s straight out of the horror playbook. So you are not wrong in feeling like this is a horror novel, because that’s done so expertly and so often.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think it’s interesting, and one of the reasons this is such a great example of this is the contextual tension remains contextual. It doesn’t really… It never fully finds its way into the narrative and into the in text tension. He kind of makes an agreement with us in that opening scene…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And kind of sticks to that boundary in a way that I think is very savvy, but still leverages the awfulness of the actual history to increase… To add extra weight to a lot of the character [garbled], to a lot of the characters decisions and to the emotional intensity that we feel throughout.
[Erin] Yeah. I will now pause because of the context that we are on a podcast and we need to take a break.
[Howard] I write best when I got music to isolate me and my personal acoustic space from the rest of the world. Music with no words in it works best for me, and one of my very favorite playlists is Random Friday, the 2011 album from Solar Fields. It’s through composed, each track flowing both thematically and seamlessly into the next. So I never get distracted by a gap telling me I might need to restart the music. Solar Fields really leaned into this, because there’s an eleventh track which is a 78 minute continuous mix of the first 10 tracks. Just in case your player of choice doesn’t do gap lists gaplessly. But what does it sound like? Well, it’s upbeat ambience and electronic and I listened to it while I wrote this.
[Erin] And we’re back. I want to take this moment to talk a little bit about in detail, because we love to get into the text in these close readings, and talk about the use of language in this. Because I think that some of that what do you have from context and what do you have on the page is really evident in the way that the text uses Gullah. Now Gullah is a real language, and it’s used here occasionally, mostly in the Nana Jean character uses it, and that’s the way that she speaks, and if you have the context to be able to understand Gullah, you’ll understand what she’s saying more readily. But what I love is that she actually, in text, warns, very drastically, that bad things are coming. So it’s an important narrative tension moment, but it still lives within the context of being in Gullah. If you give up and sort of don’t read that part or skim past it, you could, theoretically, miss that moment of tension. What I think that Clark does so well here is that it’s repeated. So she says, “Bad weather’s coming,” essentially, and then it comes in at the end of the chapter in italics. So it’s like, did you miss all of this? Because the context held you back? I’m going to bring it back on the page in a narrative way so that there’s no way you can miss that bad things are coming. The word bad is there, even if you don’t understand anything else. I just really love that. So I wanted to throw it out…
[Mary Robinette] It is one of the things that I enjoyed so much about this book, and why I wanted to listen to it in audio, because in audio, you get all… Because that’s not the only language that’s showing up in there, that’s not the only dialect. So you… Getting all of that interplay is so much fun. The other thing that it does, besides that is that it brings in the contextual thing about different class perceptions that people have. That frequently when people hear someone… People will think Gullah is a dialect as opposed to a language. They will hear it and think that the person in modern day is like low class, uneducated. Whereas Nana Jean is a very powerful woman. I love the fact that he is using that, he is subverting some of the expectations that we often have from modern day, some of the contextual expectations. He’s subverting those in the narrative tension that he’s using. I think it’s so much fun.
[Howard] Even without the Gullah, the narrator speaks and often omits definite or indefinite articles or conjunctions of to be. We up on the tower. Or no… Yeah. We up on the tower, rather than we are up on the tower. It took me five or six pages to realize, oop, no, this is just the voice of my POV character, and I’m all in. Had I… I’m not sure if there was a context that was expected of me or if the narrative taught me that. But it was definitely there, and it was a little while before I stopped noticing it is a linguistic thing in the book.
[DongWon] Well, I think the language does a really good job, I mean, both in the use of Gullah, and the use of [garbled] dialect things, and then overall, the general use of a particular voice of the narrator. I think this is such an important thing when it comes to a lot of fiction of communicating who this book is for. Right? It’s being written for a specific audience, while still being accessible to everybody. Right? Like most of us here are not of the culture that this was written in the perspective of, but I got a ton out of it. I had a great time reading it, and I learned a lot reading it and all of that. But the idea of it is written for an in community reader, that is still accessible from a broader perspective, I think is really powerful.
[Mary Robinette] There’s an analogy that I use sometimes when I’m talking about this, which is that you can think of narrative structure, tension, all of this, you can think of it as a pitcher. You can put anything you want to in that. Then, your audience comes to you with their glass. You don’t know what glass they’re coming to you with. So if I am… Say, if I’ve got a fine Pinot Noir in a beautiful crystal whatever, and I pour it into a Riedel glass, a Riedel wineglass which is the glass that it’s intended for, it’s like,, this is a perfect match. But if you come to me with a red Solo cup, you’re still going to enjoy the wine, just maybe not the way I intended it. On the other hand, if that pitcher is filled with hot apple cider and you come to me with a wineglass, it’s going to shatter. So, one of the things that… When you’re talking about this in audience, writing it for a specific audience, you’re writing it knowing some of the context they’re going to bring to it, knowing that that’s who you want to write it for, and that… Everybody else can enjoy it, but that’s not the intended audience.
[Erin] Yet, sometimes…
[Howard] If I’m pouring whiskey and you’re coming to me with a sippy cup…
[Mary Robinette] If you’re pouring whiskey, I’m…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] You’re coming to me with a sippy cup and a baby bottle? No! Stop that right now!
[Mary Robinette] No. That was when my parents actually dealt with…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Colds with me. But anyway…
[Laughter]
[Erin] I was going to say, also, sometimes you gotta shatter people’s glasses.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.
[Erin] Sometimes, that’s okay. I think that’s one of the things that I love about what publishing I think is doing these days, though probably not as much as it could be, is letting people tell a story…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Where they don’t have to have the right context.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Because the narrative tension is strong enough in this piece that if you have no idea what’s going on, it is still a story of people killing monsters that are horrible and have…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Mouth eyes and just things that are not going to work for you. Like, no one’s going to be like, oh, yeah, love those mouth eyes.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So even if you don’t understand what is happening and the context, you’ll still get a great read out of it. I think that what has happened in the past is that sometimes people will see the context and shy away from it, and not see what’s going on in the narrative beneath it, or how the two intersect. So that if you have both, I think you get the perfect glass…
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] For the perfect drink. But, if not, you still enjoy it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. With me, I was like, oh, okay, I’m going to go need to get an insulated thermos…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] When I’m reading this right now.
[DongWon] To slip into the publishing conversation a little bit, one of my very favorite reads in the last several years is Torrey Peters Detransition Baby which is a novel about the trans experience. A very complicated aspect of the trans experience. But when Torrey Peters had that book published, she was very insistent to her publishers that it not be pitched and marketed as a quote unquote trans book or even a queer book, but as an upmarket women’s fiction book. At every point, she was very insistent that, nope, you market this how you would market any book for the broadest female audience you would normally publish for in terms of, like, contemporary fiction. I think that was an incredibly effective way to get a book that was very much written for a specific in community audience… So much of that book was for me and other folks like me who live in New York and are trans and are queer and all of that, and that was a very powerful, but it was read and was so accessible to such a broad audience that I think it really reached hundreds of thousands of people.
[Mary Robinette] I think the same thing is very clearly true with Ring Shout when you look at the fact that in the year that it came out, it was nominated for all the big awards. It won the British Fantasy, it won the Locus Award, it won the Nebula Award. So this is a book that was written for a specific audience, but clearly resonates…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Because of its use of all sorts of narrative devices with a much larger audience. So…
[DongWon] I think we did a great job of packaging it to make it clear what the book is, but then it didn’t feel tracked in a particular subcategory or only for a certain readership, which [garbled]
[Howard] Now when we talk about narrative versus contextual as a source of tension, there’s a part of me that can’t help but think that the greatest experience of that tension is on the part of the publisher, who’s like, “Boy. I hope we split the difference between the narrative and the contextual correctly in how we positioned this book, because what shelf does it go on? Does it go in sci-fi/fantasy, does it go in horror, does it… Where does it go?” Maybe that’s a little too meta-. But…
[DongWon] No. It’s…
[Howard] I can’t not think that.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] I will say that I think for our listeners, who are like, “I’m not planning to write in a fraught historical era.” There are still things to take away from it, even… Because there’s always context.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] Readers always bring context, even if it is the smallest. Even if it is I’m reading a romance, and I expect the characters to end up together, even though it hasn’t happened on the page yet, this is the type of experience that I’m bringing to the table. If it’s the pattern recognition that you, DongWon, that you were talking about in a previous episode, where it’s like, okay, things are happening and I know this tends to end this creepy way, so that’s what I think is going to happen next. So, thinking a lot about what is your audience bringing to the table at that moment, both in terms of their life experiences and their belief about narrative, what are they used to, what are the patterns that you think they’ve walked through, so you can figure out how do I want to either stay with that and reinforce it, or how do I want to subvert it? When do I want to use it for good or ill? But if you’re not thinking about it at all, then you can’t be intentional about it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I think it’s something that we often forget, because we bring our own context as writers, and we sometimes forget that readers will come from a completely different place.
[DongWon] I think this taps into Mary Robinette’s metaphor in a certain way of you don’t know what cup your audience is bringing to this particular fountain. Right? It… You can’t control your reader. You have to make space for them in certain ways, but also be really true and honest to the story that you’re trying to tell and what you’re trying to accomplish with it. One thing that is very interesting about this book is it is in part about arts in the audience and reception of that art and the impact that art can have on how people think and behave in the world. Right? Because Birth of a Nation is such an important piece of how this story is told, and it’s about how you can use art as propaganda to manipulate people in really extreme ways. So, I think it’s really interesting that as we are talking about the contextual history of this story and the way that creates tension, it is itself engaging… I said earlier it doesn’t really engage with like the contextual tension. It does in this one specific way, which is what was the role of that film in American history, what were the consequences of it, and it… Go ahead.
[Mary Robinette] To that point, because that’s so important, not only is that a contextual thing, that’s something that is brought into the narrative of the tension. In order to make sure that the audience has the right context to understand this, we get a lot of information about Birth of a Nation and how it’s being used, both for the magical purposes of the book, but also the historical context of it. There is a… That’s, I think, an important thing for you to understand and also that if you are… If you want the book that you are writing to survive outside of the context, even just to survive down history, two… Then you have to… You have to make sure that it’s on the page.
[Erin] A great example of this is… I don’t know exactly where it is in the text, but I think there is a reference where it says, “1919 was a bad year…”
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] “For all of us.” For me, I know that that was in the red summer era of Klan rides and horrible numbers of lynchings in the South. But the fact that they all agreed, and then I think everybody had like a slight him bit of memory about why it was bad or what had happened brought it on the page in a way that.. I brought a lot more context to it probably as somebody who knows a lot about that era, but there was enough there that you understood that they all had this common experience in a little bit about what it was. It was on the page, but also, I was able to bring what was off the page onto it.
[Mary Robinette] I will also say that if you’re writing secondary world fantasy, this is a tool that you can use, because your characters will have context that the readers will never have because they’re living in a fantasy world. So this kind of tool is something that you can use to give context to something without having to have like, “And now, I shall tell you about the battle of the five red armies…”
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] “I’m going to pause this tavern brawl so that we all…” It’s like you don’t have to do that.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] You can just have these moments where the characters are all living memories and bringing it onto the page that way.
[DongWon] I think that’s also why there is so many prologues in secondary world fantasy and epic fantasy in particular is they’re trying to give you context so that you can have some of that contextual tension as you roll into the thing itself, but also, again, think about genre expectations. We read Lord of the Rings, so somebody’s going on a journey. We’re going to have some context and some expectations about what that means.
[Erin] I also think, and then we will give you homework and wrap up for the week. But I think it’s also important that characters carry their context with them.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Erin] I think that when you do historical, it’s easier to see how that has happened, because we understand how it happened in history. But one thing that I do not like is when you have a prologue that will give you all the context, but it doesn’t feel like it actually like it’s being carried. If there was a war of the five red armies, and, like, everyone involved was part of it, how does that war shape them? How does it change the way they see things? When do they recognize somebody from one of the other armies and it changes the way that they deal with that character? So, thinking of the context that your own characters are bringing with them is a great way to add more tension to the page.
[Erin] With that, I have your homework, which is to take a scene that you’re working on, one that has tension or could use more of it, and put a piece of information at the start that is only meant for the reader. Some piece of context. Could be historical, could be that you know that this is going to end in the death of a character. Anything that is extra context. Then think about revising the scene, believing that the reader has that information. How does it change the way that you actually write the scene and deliver the tension within that context?
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write.