19.49: Getting to Know You
As we wrap up our Close Reading Series, we’re shifting our focus towards helping you integrate what you’ve learned. For December, we’ll be releasing episodes designed to help you make measurable progress on a writing project. So dust off your current work-in-progress, or pull out your brainstorming documents—we’re here to help you finish the year strong.
What can we learn from romances? Today we’re talking about using elements of romance in your story (even if you have no romance in your current WIP!) Character relationships and dynamics are often at the heart of our stories, so what can we learn from the romance genre?
We’re thinking about the power of one character putting another one at ease, a character dismissing another (“I’ll never be interested in you!”), or two characters finding a commonality between themselves. Mary Robinette also introduces us to her family’s theory of compatibility, which measures these M-words: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and mirth.
Thing of the Week: Ancient History Fangirl (podcast)
Homework: In the scene you’re working on, what is one thing your character finds attractive about the other character in the scene? Also, what does your own character think is their own least attractive trait, and how can you make them more anxious about that right now?
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, 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: Complex plot structures. Multiple plot threads. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Write things down and set them aside. Escalate existing problems! Somebody’s gonna get burnt buns. Aka problems coming to a head at the same time complicates things. Multiple points of view can help. Go ahead and write scenes even if you don’t plan to use them. Figure out the major beats. Avoid tools with speedbumps. Square brackets and thinking right in the text, cut it out later. Breadcrumbs at the end of sessions. Placeholder scenes when you realize you might need it later. Notes to yourself. Boneyard at the end for words that don’t fit yet. Sense of wonder moments. Use your own sense of wonder moments.
[Season 19, Episode 50]
[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 50]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] All Systems Go.
[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] [Blooie] That was me, all systems going. I don’t know if the microphone picked that up well.
[DongWon] Well, with that rocket launch Foley work, we, this week, are talking about complex plot structures. So we’re kind of talking about science fiction and some fantasy, especially space opera and epic fantasy. Really, it’s how do you have multiple plot threads moving at the same time? Things that are dependent on each other, things climaxing at different points, and keep all of those balls in the air, keep it all straight in your head, and not lose the thread for yourself or overwhelm your reader?
[Howard] The… [Sigh] How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do you… I can’t hold a huge plot in my head all at once. I have to break it down into pieces. I have to write some of those pieces down and set them aside so that my brain can focus on the next piece. That lesson, in and of itself, was the one that was the hardest fought and took the longest to learn. Because I thought the whole story should just burst itself fully formed from my mind onto the page, and complex plots don’t go that way for me.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that if I look at the kinds of problems that I have on the page, that it is possible for me to discovery right my way through a thing. Thinking back to the lessons that we learned from Memory Called Empire, one of the things that you can do is interrupt, create barriers and problems with escalations of existing problems that you already have established. So, if you are already dealing with, oh, no, our ship is overheating, then, like, what are the cascading effects of that overheating? It’s not just that it’s overheating, it’s also going to fry out something on the ship. So that allows you to escalate without introducing and now there’s another ship that’s attacking us, which is a totally new thing that now you’re also going to have to manage and solve by the end. So if you can look at existing problems and just escalate them, I find that that’s one of the ways that you can balance having multiple threads going on at the same time.
[Howard] When I first started reading science fiction, I worked fast food, and the most impressive crisis I could have was when three timers went off at once.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Oh, no, the fries need to come up. Oh, no, the patties need to be turned. Oh, no, the bunds need to be pulled out of the toaster. I cannot do all three of these at the same time. Something’s got to give. Somebody’s gonna get burnt buns. Just that principle, knowing that you don’t need to have another spaceship attack, you can just have two of these problems you’ve been building come to a head at the exact same time so that your protagonist has to choose.
[Dan] I kind of wish that we had used somebody’s gonna get burnt buns as the title of our relationships here.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Ah well, it’s better than having burnt meat cubes.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Meat cubes and burnt buns. [Garbled]
[DongWon] Exactly. Well, one thing I think about, as we’re talking about these escalating problems and things like that, is also the utility of having multiple points of view. Right? Having… You can have somebody on the bridge of your starship observing things going wrong, and then you can cut to the person in the engine room dealing with the fire, and then you can cut to the person at the weapons console realizing they don’t have any power for the phasers. Right? You can use all of these things to show different sides of the crisis, and then introduce more micro problems as each of them are dealing with the core thing, which is something’s wrong with the engines.
[Mary Robinette] On the flipside of that, if you are writing something that has a single POV, the fact that they do not know what’s happening in the other places can become the source of the micro-tension as they’re aware of the fact that the lack of information is making things worse. That’s also, I think, a fun thing to play with.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] When my phone rings and Discord beeps and an email arrives all at the same time, and my brain says, “[gasp] One of those beeps was important.”
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Which one? Which one? Which one?
[Dan] That’s when I just silence all notifications.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I will tell you a trick that I will use in cases where I am writing single POV and I know that things are going wrong in another part of the ship. I will sometimes write that scene, count it for my total word count, even though I’m not going to use it in the book, because it helps me place where the people are and what else is happening, so that my character is reacting to something that is more grounded.
[Dan] This… Those kinds of writing exercises are so valuable, and I wish more people did them. We… So many writers, and I was the same way when I was starting out, we still have that kind of junior high mentality of if I write this, I’m going to use it. I’m not going to waste a single second of my life writing words that I will never publish. No. Those kinds of free writes can be so valuable, and in a case like this, where you’re trying to juggle many sides of a problem or multiple different plot lines going at once, they can be incredibly helpful.
[Mary Robinette] It’s also a really good exercise to do with your antagonists.
[DongWon] I’m going to be a little chaotic here and throw something sort of counter to this in, which is, one of my hobby horses in general is people are too rigid in how they think about POV. They always think it has to stay just this POV, if I shift at all, then it’s breaking the structure of the book. All the time, I see writers be more fluid with it. So, sometimes, even if you’re primarily one POV, sometimes slipping into another person for just a couple paragraphs or jumping into the antagonist’s head for three paragraphs, a page, or a scene here or there, it can do so much to make your world feel richer, more lived in, to understand the shape of the problem better, and 95% of your readers aren’t going to get mad. Right? Maybe there’s one person on Goodreads yelling about it, but you can safely ignore that person most of the time.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] If everyone else is liking it. Right? So I just want to encourage everyone to think more openly about how you use POV, and realize you can be more flexible with it than I think a lot of writers starting out realize.
[Erin] But I think there are a lot of really fun structures, like, in the middle of the spaceship blowing up, if you’re, like, 10 things my character X really wishes she knew right now.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Then, like, work them all out. Like, put that in the middle of your scene. Will you use it? Maybe not. But, like, that is something…
[DongWon] Maybe it’s funny and [garbled]
[Erin] Maybe it’s something that could go in the middle of your story, because it’s something that’s really, really fun. I love structures like that. I will say that Archive of Our Own and fan fiction in general have a really great random POV structures…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because people are trying to fill in the gaps of larger stories. So it could be great to go in there and look at, like, what are the things, like, six times their glances met and one time they didn’t.
[DongWon] There’s no such thing as wasted words.
[Howard] Um, I can’t remember the name of the song, but there’s a verse in it that but the words get in the way. I so very, very often realize that I can’t write the thing that the story is telling me I need to write next, because there are words in the way in my head, and just write those words, maybe in a different document, maybe in a different chapter, maybe on the refrigerator, on note cards… It doesn’t matter. But get those words out of the way, because that’s how you get the words that you need.
[DongWon] Speaking of juggling multiple plot threads, we need to take a break.
[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We’re off… [Background noise] As you can probably hear, my cat says we’ve got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You’ll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
[Howard] Laboratory Conditions is a short film starring Minnie Driver and Marisa Tomei available on the Dust channel on YouTube. Somebody has been taking terminal patients out of the hospital as part of an experiment to prove once and for all whether the human soul is real by trying to trap it. Yes, this is a horror story. It’s absolutely delightful. It’s just 17 minutes long. Laboratory Conditions, starring Marisa Tomei and Minnie Driver on YouTube.
[DongWon] Okay. So now that we’ve done some talking about how to sort of write these scenes in, how to build tension in them, I’m curious what you all’s tools are for managing these things in terms of your planning or keeping notes of it. Right? Howard, we started with this idea that you eat an elephant one bite at a time. I completely agree that that’s how you approach the writing process. How do you make sure that at the end of that process, you have an elephant instead of a pile of gray stuff?
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Well, I mean, if this is post eating the elephants…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Oh, wow.
[DongWon] This is my fault. I should not have gone in that direction.
[Dan] We’re not building an elephant one bite at a time. So…
[Howard] If you mix your metaphors correctly…
[Dan] What I try to do… If… I am an outliner, and I like to put together a really good outline before I start writing. But, in cases where I am not able to do that, because I am on a tighter deadline, or I am working with something else, or I have decided halfway through my book that everything sucks and I’m going to change it all, the first thing I try to do is at least figure out what the major beats of each plot line is going to be. Is there a midpoint where they change? Is there a distinct moment where they go from reacting to acting? Is there an all is lost moment? Is there an inciting incident? Not every plot needs all of these. If I want the main antagonist to come across as impenetrably undefeatable, then, yeah, they’re not going to get an all is lost moment because that would make them look weak. If I need an antagonist who we sympathize with more, then maybe I give them an all is lost moment that looks like the heroes have succeeded, and then they’re able to turn it around. Figuring out what those major beats are, the guy who’s going to betray them, at what point does he succeed? Can that… Can his victory moment line up with somebody else’s all is lost moment and line up with somebody else’s inciting incident? Then, that way, I know that the plot threads all feel complete by the end, and also that they feel like they’re part of a larger whole.
[Howard] If I may… Tools, whatever tool you decide to use needs to be a tool that doesn’t have a speedbump between you and it. Now is not a great time to try to learn Scrivener or Excel. For me, whatever works the fastest. For… Maybe it’s note cards. Scribble a thing, set the card next to me. Scribble a thing, set the card next to me. Then get moving. For me, as long as the tool doesn’t have a speedbump. Because the speedbump… I’ll derail myself. Oh, you know what, I should go through this Scrivener tutorial. I should… No! That’s time I’m taking away from my words.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I will just put square brackets in my text. Often, I will do thinking inside the manuscript where I’m like what is the next thing that happens, what is my protagonist thinking about right now, what is the next thing that they need to do, and I’ll just square bracket it and put it directly in that scene and cut it out later. I counted for my total words. But it also helps me find the next thing. The other thing that I’ll do… I have two other things. One is breadcrumbs, which is, at the end of a session, I will leave kind of notes to myself about, okay, next scene, Alma Nathaniel surfaces, some smooching happens. I will also, going back to Dan’s point about dark night of the… All is lost moment, I’ll kick open a new scene in Scrivener, like, if I suddenly realize that I’m going to need one of those things, and I’ll just put in a placeholder scene. And sometimes it… I have definitely had things in there that say something like, and later, she will use a piece of magic that I’ve established earlier. It will be plot important. Goes here.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I’m like, I don’t know what that piece of magic is, I don’t know how it’s going to be plot important, but I can tell, I can feel that that moment is going to be a necessary moment. So I’ll just mark it for myself until I get to it.
[Erin] I… Um, also, I’m a little chaotic with it, I’ll be honest. So, when I’m writing really quickly, I do it in a PowerPoint, but you could do it on note cards. I don’t know, I just like PowerPoint. Is that I will, as I’m writing, be like, oh, I did a thing. So I’ll be like, oh, and here they are in the tavern that has a microwave. And I will write, like, I invented fantasy microwaves.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] It’ll be a note to myself, so that later I can look at it and be like, oh, yeah. I did invent fantasy… Since I invented fantasy microwaves, I put my meat cubes in there in the latest scene.
[DongWon] I was going to say, what does a meat cube fear more than the fantasy microwave?
[Howard] Well, now I need to invent fantasy packets of thought bombing.
[Dan] The great thing about a fantasy microwave is that the inside of the meat cube is just as hot as the outside. It doesn’t stay frozen.
[Erin] Yes. Absolutely. So, keeping track of what I have done is great, because I also tend to write the notes with that level of joy. So, when I’m not happy in the middle of writing something, I can go back and be like, I was so clever, I invented cool things, I’m a cool writer. I should write more.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] I find… When I’m going back and rereading, I find at the end of almost every one of my chapter files, a section called boneyard that I have to remember to clean up. Which is, when I looked at a paragraph and thought, oh, this isn’t right, and I don’t know how to fix it. The temptation is just delete the whole thing. No. Copy the whole thing to the clipboard, throw it to the end of the document, throw a bunch of line feeds in front of it so I don’t have to look at it anymore. But I don’t throw away any words.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] One, because word count. And two, because the first time I wrote those down, I wrote them because something felt right about them. I may need them later. That’s… It’s a silly tool, but it superfast to use.
[Mary Robinette] As we were talking and the fantasy microwave just made me remember another tool of science fiction and fantasy we have not been talking about that is extremely useful, which is the sense of wonder. This is actually a place that’s really great for getting word count because one of the ways you generate a sense of wonder is by letting your character really sink into a moment and unpack it and spend a lot of words on this is a really cool amazing thing. Giving your character big emotional reactions to it. Showing the way it’s in use.
[Dan] That is so important for this specific issue of how can you juggle a giant complicated story, because it is so easy to get blinded by the complexities of your story and the needs of the plot that you forget those kinds of character moments. You need to slow down, you need to let them be in awe of the forest or the spaceship or whatever. You need to let the characters breathe and react to things instead of just running from one plot point to the next.
[DongWon] If you go back through the episodes we recorded this year for the close readings, you’ll find tons of these moments, whether it’s Memory Called Empire or Time War, where they really slow down and let the climactic moments breathe. Right? So one trick to… A lot of the time are about creating a sense of freneticness, creating all this tension as these different things stack, but one thing you can do is let those individual moments breathe. So, when you move on to the next one, people have a more complete understanding of the problem, and so the next layer of complexity is that much scarier, is increasing the tension that much more. Just because your characters feel panicked doesn’t mean you should or the reader necessarily should. Sometimes letting people breathe into the moment increases our tension and fear over what’s happening.
[Howard] If you take the time to introspect, to remember when you have felt wonder about something. Late 2023, I became a grandfather. Holding my grandson. Sense of wonder. Late 1990s. Walked in New York City for the first time, stared up at the big buildings. Sense of wonder. I draw on these all the time when I write. Because the feelings that I have about those things are far more important than any description I could give of them. Once you get in touch with how those sorts of things make you feel, you’ll have the tools you need to write them so that your readers feel them and if you can make your readers feel a thing, you win.
[DongWon] Exactly. Sense of wonder and tension are not at odds. Right? I had the good fortune to climb Angels Landing at Zion National Park recently, and when I got to the top, it’s very steep, it’s a very difficult climb, you’re there. Every single person looks down at how far down it is and says, oh, God, we have to climb back down this now. Right? There is that sense of wonder being up there and seeing the view. There’s also the forced realization of that’s a long way we gotta go back down at this point. Right? So you can embed the tension, embed the complexity of what comes next, in the interaction with the thing that is giving that wonder. Right? So, don’t think that slowing down and giving people those moments means you’re somehow deflating the action. You’re actually increasing it by showing how incredible the thing is.
[DongWon] With that, I think I have some homework for you this week. So, what I’d like you to do is take a piece of technology that you’ve already introduced into the story, and find out a new cool way you can use it in the next scene that you’re writing.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There’s an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon’s expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.