20.03: Polishing Your Writing Lens
One of the most important tools that a writer brings to their work is their own personal lens. This is shaped by your hobbies, your job, your history, and your experiences. In this season, we’re going to be looking at personal lenses as well as the narrative lens through which stories are told. We’ll look at how the questions of Who, Where, When, and Why shape a story. Also, we’re going to do a Deep Dive later in the year with the novel All The Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders, in which we analyze it using the lens we’ve been talking about.
Homework: What lenses from your non-writing life shape the way you see things?
P.S. Want to come write with us in 2025?! Our retreat registration is open, and we are starting to fill up! We are going to unlock our creative processes in Minnesota and explore Story Refinement as we cruise down the Mexican Riviera! Learn more here.
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: Your personal lens! Writing metaphors! AB comparisons, where B might not really fit. Using experiences from your own life is not cheating. How many of you have been an elephant? How would James Bond say it? Try out different lenses! The more specific, the more general. Specificity! Avoid head bobbing. How do you find your lenses? Think about it. What’s important to you, what annoys you? Introspection! Therapy! Self-examination! Do you understand? Try to explain it to a friend.
[Season 20, Episode 03]
[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 20, Episode 03]
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.
[Mary Robinette] Polishing Your Writing Lens.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Erin] And I’m Erin.
[Mary Robinette] We’re going to be looking this season at the idea that… We’ve been talking about these toolboxes, but specifically, one of the most important tools that a writer brings to their work is their own personal lens. You’ve heard us say this before that that’s the thing that makes the story interesting is you, that no one else can write your story. So, that’s shaped by your hobbies, your job, your history, your experience. This season, we’re going to be looking at all of these tools, but we’re also going to be doing these additional episodes where we’re talking about writing metaphors. The lens that we look at… That’s these personal lenses that we bring to the work. For me, you’ve heard me talk about puppetry a lot, you’re going to get a whole episode later in which I just talk about… I just ramble about puppetry for a long time.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But everybody has these. Everybody has these personal lenses that are based on their experience. Sometimes it’s a lens that you bring just to a single scene. It’s like, oh, this is like that time my grandma did that thing. Other times it’s just… It’s the mindset that you have when you approach something.
[Howard] I have joked in the past that… And, am I joking or is it true? That I’m a one trick pony. The trick is AB comparisons, where B might not really fit. I’m thinking about lenses, and realized the story of the Hubble telescope is so beautiful, because they put it in orbit and then realized the lens was warped. It was polished to perfection, but it was shaped wrong. In order to get clear pictures from the Hubble, they had to study the distortions of the lens and understand them to the point that they could write software to correct for it. I’m here to tell you that if you know your personal lens well enough to make those kinds of corrections, you will be able to write anything.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is my twentieth year in publishing, dear God, and if there’s one question that I’ve been asked more often than any other in my career, it’s what am I looking for? Right? As an editor, as an agent, whatever it is, like, what’s the thing that I’m looking for in a text, and the answer I give more often than not is, I’m looking to see you in the text. Right? If I can feel the writer as I’m reading a pitch, as I’m reading those opening pages, that’s always going to catch my attention more than anything else. Because in tech culture, they talk about the unfair advantage. Right? Your unfair advantage is you. No one else has your perspective, your experience, your interest. So when I read something, what makes it feel undeniable to me, is feeling your perspective in it. Knowing that nobody else could write the story that you’ve written. If it feels like anyone could have written this thing, then, sure, I’ll look for anyone. Right? But if it feels like you wrote this thing, now I’m locked in.
[Mary Robinette] I was talking to a writer who said that they worried that they were quote cheating because they kept using experiences from their own life. I’m like, no, it…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Is not cheating. That is the whole point.
[Howard] If that’s cheating, I belong in jail.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] It was cheating, because I used heat to cook food.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Oh, no. Oh…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And we so often discount the things that are… We discount our own personal experiences, because, oh, well, that’s not interesting, because it’s something that we experienced, therefore it’s part… It has become part of our normal, and we forget that other people haven’t had those experiences, like, how many of you have been an elephant?
[Dan] Me.
[Mary Robinette] Okay.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Thanks, Dan.
[DongWon] Well, you can write your own voices elephant story.
[Dan] Yeah!
[Howard] The one place where… Sorry, thinking about me being in jail for cheating by using metaphor. If I were asked to write Drax’s dialogue in Guardians of the Galaxy, Drax, as a person who does not understand metaphor, and I found a way to paper over me using metaphor for Drax’s dialogue, even though he would… I would call that cheating. I would need to… Sorry. Howard, you need to step away from this tool you love, and you need to write something you’re unfamiliar with, because that character would not talk like you want to talk. So, yeah. In that respect, okay, sure, using your own voice in some regard might be cheating because you need to stretch a little further to write a character who is unlike you in a specific way. But that’s the only example I can think of.
[Mary Robinette] Well, that’s not so much… The character is still going to be having the thoughts that you want to have them, and one of the things that I love is that you can tell everyone… I know this for a fact. I give this exercise where I say, okay, we’re going to say, “What did you say?” And everybody needs to change the way it means to be a specific character. And we go through a bunch of them. I will give James Bond, and everybody comes up with different ways that James Bond would say, “What did you say?” That is still the individual lens affecting the idea of James Bond.
[Erin] Yeah. I think… I love… The idea of cheating is really interesting. I also think that sometimes there are some lenses that feel fragile. They are lenses that are close to our identity, they are lenses that are maybe close to experiences that we’ve had that we have complex feelings about. And I think that sometimes it can be hard to try to use those lenses as opposed to more well-worn lenses that, like, we have less connection with or, like, we know well because like you seen… Like, it’s like if you’ve seen a hundred James Bond movies… Confession, I’ve never seen a James Bond movie in my whole life…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] But I know he’s a guy…
[Laughter]
[Howard] He is a guy.
[Garbled]
[Erin] He’s a spy guy.
[DongWon] He’s a spy guy.
[Erin] Spy guy. So, I’m like, but if you seen… If you are not me, and you’ve seen a lot of James Bond movies, like, you have a certain thing, and if you were going to write a spy guy, you might be, like, okay, this is what they do. This is how it’s done. This is what they say. This is what the world looks like. Even though you might say, well, actually, I have a completely different understanding of what it means to spy, or what it means to work for one government on working against other governments, and because I have a complicated feeling about how I relate to the powers that be in my own country or what have you. But I think those are the things that are really interesting. But I do want to just call out that they are hard.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And it is possible to bump them, to bruise them, to sometimes even crack them. But I think that in testing things, in testing ourselves, that’s how we strengthen our understanding of ourselves. And if a lens gets cracked, and then you, like, polish it out, where you figure out the program that works through the distortion you discovered, you actually have a stronger lens than you did before.
[DongWon] Absolutely. And, just to build off of that a little bit, the reason I’m so excited to be talking about our personal metaphors of how we think about writing and craft is, we started this year in our first episode talking about intentions. Right? And how important approaching your work with intention is. And so, as you’re talking about your lenses, yeah, some get used more than others. Some are like reflexively at hand. Right? I’ve been working on a project recently which has involved me GMing a bunch of games pretty quickly that are pretty short. This feels like I’ve written a bunch of short stories in a row. And I realized how much I’m reaching for a couple repeated tropes and themes, and especially, because games are so improvisational, you’re moving very quickly, so it really is like so easy just to grab that first lens. And now I need to push myself to be like, okay, what lenses are little deeper? What lenses are little less out of reach that I’m not using as much? They might be a little dusty and could use a little TLC before putting them into the rotation, but when you think about intention, when you think about why we use certain metaphors, or why we approach our craft through certain processes, I think that allows you to tap into a wider range of these lenses than you might on your own.
[Dan] Well, I want to make sure to point out as well, back to that idea of cheating. Bringing your own perspective to something, bringing your own lenses and your own personal experiences, is what makes the story relatable. In fact one ongoing true principle is that the more specific you can be, the more general it becomes. Which doesn’t sound like it’s true, but it’s true. If I am trying to describe some kind of generic experience, that won’t be relatable to the audience. Whereas if I describe my own experience or bring my own lens and my own background to a character’s very personal experience, then it does become instantly more relatable to the audience.
[Howard] I looked at… And I’m not going to name any names, but I looked at a marketing page for an AI writing tool with before and after text. And the before text was simple, workmanlike prose that described how a character felt about the sunrise. And the AI reworked text was much more flowery, and as I read it and reread it and reread it to figure out what was wrong with it, I realized the character was now gone.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Their perspective was gone. It was no longer how they felt about the sunrise, it was words to describe color and light and warmth and whatever. But the character was now absent. So… You say, when you get more specific, you get more general. Yes. When you get more specific, when you tell us how one person feels about a thing, the general population can now feel that as well. But if you take generalized AI built on large language models, it’s… You lose that completely. Because that specific experience is now gone.
[DongWon] Heading into the new year…
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[Mary Robinette] Specificity, when I was doing puppetry, was the thing that we kept coming back to over and over again. There was a… There’s something called head bobbing, which means that the character’s head moves with every single syllable, and it stops having any meaning at all. So you start looking for that one specific movement that underscores the thing that you’re trying to convey. And I think this idea of specificity is not just on the biggest level of you specifically have the ability to write this, but what is the specific story you’re trying to tell, what is the specific goal that you’re going for, who is the specific audience that you’re writing for? But often… When you start writing for someone very specific, that more people have access to the story. Sometimes not the in jokes. I’ll grant that. But… Speaking of specificity, let’s pause specifically now.
[Erin] I have a question for all of you, which is, how do you know what your lenses are? I mean, we’ve kind of talked as if, like, at hand, we all have, like, a nice lens catalog…
[Laughter]
[Erin] But how do you… Which I do… But how do you actually figure out what your lenses are, and, like, that you are bringing yourself versus the things that you’ve experienced, the things you’ve written, the things you’ve seen to the table as a writer?
[Howard] I… Sorry, you said what your lenses are, and I’m reminded of the optometrist. When he opened up, he had his box from school that’s, like, roll and row after row of brass ringed lenses that are labeled, and I realized I have never before wanted something more that I don’t need then I want that right now. It’s just a big box of lenses. Why? I don’t know, but I want it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Maybe that’s one of my lenses, is covetousness of brass.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I mean… You’re not alone in that one. See! Specific and general. I think that it is actually something that you have to think about. Because… For those of you who wear glasses, you forget… Your brain tunes out the frame. There’s a frame, and there’s a part of the world that your peripheral vision that is fuzzy. And you forget that. You tune it out until you start consciously thinking about it. And I think that one of the things you have to do as a writer, potentially, if you want to be aware of these lenses, is to think about what are the things that are important to me? And those things that are important to you are going to be things that are linked to who you are, that are going to be sometimes different than other people. So it is… Is it important to you, the sound of the prose? Is that important to you? Is the feeling important to you? What are the things that annoy you? I get really annoyed by head bobbing, like, I can’t watch certain actors because I’m like, I know that you’re human, but, like, don’t move your head like that.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] We’ve attributed a quote to Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. I’m not going to say that anybody’s life is not worth living, but I will say that the unexamined life is a very difficult life from which to write effectively.
[Mary Robinette] I think you’ve just given me a way to unlock one of Erin’s questions. In a previous season, I talked about the axes of power. That this was a thing that we do with characters to figure out age and all of those things. All of those are part of your lens. So if you actually take that casting worksheet and you filled it out for yourself, those are all things that affect the way you move through the world.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, my glib answer to Erin’s question is therapy. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.
[DongWon] Like… And whether or not you participate in Western therapy or psychoanalysis or whatever it is, the important thing is introspection, the important thing is self-examination. Right? There’s a lot of ways to get there, there’s a lot of tools for that. I mean, therapy is one that helped me very much. But it can be just finding time to sit and reflect. It can be journaling, it can be meditation. But what I encourage you to do as writers is to take time to understand yourself, to understand your own story, to understand the things that made you who you are, and the things that trouble you on a day-to-day basis. What are the things that make your life hard for whatever reason? And what are the things that bring you joy? Understanding all of these helps you understand where you come from and what your perspective is. That clarity helps you create art. Right? Because the more you understand yourself, I think the clearer you have an approach to making the art that you want to be making.
[Dan] Um. Therapy is such a good metaphor to bring into this. Because you can do the same thing with your writing that you do with your own brain. In fact, the writing is just an extra step in that process. If you take the time to look at things you’ve written, snippets that have never gone anywhere, or unfinished or even completely finished projects, and try to figure out what sort of lenses are in here? What kind of person produced this? You have to step back away from yourself a little bit. Similar to how you would do that in Western therapy as mentioned. And kind of analyze your own brain through your writing.
[Erin] Yeah. I agree. I was thinking the very same thing, which is that, like, when you read your writing back sometimes, specifically writing that you’ve written in a specific era, you can be, like, all the things I wrote this year, or three years ago. Sometimes you’ll find themes that you’d be, like, huh, I didn’t see that at the time, but it seems like I was working through something. And here’s where you can see, I no longer cared about that. Just because it’s coming through. But I also think we do a lot of self-analysis all the time. Or maybe it’s just me, but, like…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] No, it’s not.
[Erin] I really… It’s like…
[Howard] It’s not just you, but I don’t think it’s everybody.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Erin] But it’s like sometimes you’re in… People go to therapy, but also, like, any… If you’ve ever read, like, your sun sign, and been like, yes! That’s the Scorpio in me for real. Like, that is introspection. You’re like, oh, that part does… I’m not a Gemini in that way. That’s introspection. That’s saying, like, that’s part of a specific lens which astrology is, if nothing else, a lens on personhood, same as, like, if you like Enneagram or the Myers-Briggs or Buzzfeed quizzes…
[Chuckles] [garbled]
[Erin] You’re like, I’m not a Reese Witherspoon. I’m in fact whatever. Some other celebrity. Then you’ve learned something about yourself. I think a lot of times, we think of that as very separate from our writing. But you can use that to figure out what your lenses are, and then, how does that come through in the way you express yourself in your writing?
[Howard] As the quote from one of my freshman writing classes… I don’t remember who said it, but we said it all the time after we’d heard it once. How do I know what I think until I see what I say? I… No. Seriously. Until I’ve read what I’ve written, I don’t really know what I think. Because at the time I was writing it, I was thinking about the words as much as I was thinking about the thought. And reading the words, I can now see the thoughts more clearly and…
[DongWon] Well, some of the joys of doing this podcast or teaching for Writing Excuses generally is that a lot of times, people… I’ll be asked, like, what do you want to teach? What do you want to talk about? And what I do is I’m like, what’s a thing I don’t understand?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] What’s a thing I’m struggling with? What’s the thing that I’m like, oh, I need to dig into that more. Then I’ll take that, and then having to come up with the curriculum or in talking about it on the podcast, I will find the thought that’s in there. I will find the perspective that I have.
[Howard] I almost wish we had video of this session…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Because to my eye, there have been three epiphanies in this room during this session.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And that would be fun for other people to watch.
[Dan] I do the same thing…
[DongWon] Either that, or we’d all go to therapy.
[Dan] I do the same thing with classes, and I always hate myself at some point in that process.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Because I think, so, they’ll ask, what do you want to teach on the cruise this year? And I’m like, that’s months away. By the time we get there, I’ll have a much better handle on characterization. So, I’m going to teach a characterization class. Then the time arrives and I’m like, nope, I have not done any introspection or learning. It is time to make that happen.
[Mary Robinette] Yes
[DongWon] That’s like, I still don’t understand the thing that I picked, because I didn’t understand it. Dammit.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yup, yup. This is actually a really good way, I think, to understand where your own personal strengths are. You don’t have to have, like, a formal class. If you have been listening to the podcast and you’re like, ah, I think I finally understand this. Find a friend and explain it to them. If you cannot explain it to them, you don’t actually understand it yet. On the other hand, if we start talking about a topic and you’re like, I got that already. That may be something that you have a strength in that you have not previously recognized. So. That brings us, of course, to homework. Because would it be Writing Excuses if we did not give you homework?
[Mary Robinette] What I want you to do is I want you to do some introspection. I want you to think about what lenses from your non-writing life shape the way you see things. Puppetry shapes mine, woodworking shapes DongWon’s, gaming shapes a lot of us.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, what are the lenses from your non-writing life that shape the way you see things?
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.