20.05: Lens 1 – Who
Today we are introducing the “lens of who” – which means talking about characters. We try to break big character ideas down into their elements. For instance, what do terms like “relatability” or “depth” of character really mean?
One of the main take-aways from this episode is that your characters each have different sets of experiences, which *should* mean they could each describe the same exact thing differently. And you should know how to write this.
Homework: Interview two friends and yourself, asking them the questions below. Write down their answers (and yours) as completely as possible.
1) The most pain they’ve had
2) The happiest memory they think of first
3) A description of a person and circumstance that positively and dramatically influenced them *before the age of 18*. Family member, teacher, boss at 1st job, etc.
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, 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: You and I must have seen a different movie or read a different book? Save the world or dragon killing game? Relatability. Depth. POV. Emotionally compelling moments. Relationships. The why of a character enriches the who. What is the lie that your character believes about the world? What is the truth that your character is afraid to know? Interesting details! What makes this person tick? Specificity. I’m so happy you noticed that. Tabletop gaming gives you a world, a story, a setting reflected and refracted through the players and the characters lenses.
[Season 20, Episode 05]
[DongWon] We’re excited to announce that our 2025 retreats are open for registration. Join us in Minnesota June 15th through 21st for a regenerate retreat where you will learn new skills, generate new ideas, or focus on your writing. With lots of opportunities for restoration and networking, you’ll leave refreshed and reinvigorated. Tickets start at $1500 per person. You can also sail the high seas September 18th through 26th. We’ll sail out of Los Angeles on the Royal Caribbean Navigator of the Seas and explore the Mexican Riviera while refining our writing. Whether you’re revising a story, reworking a character arc, or tweaking your prose, you’ll leave more confident in your current story. Tickets start at 2650 for writers and 2350 for family members. To learn more, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.
[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 05]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Howard] The lens of who.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] And we’ve got a whole bunch of episodes queued up for you talking about the lens of who. I want to introduce this tool, this lens, by asking a question of my fellow hosts, and, sure, of you, fair listener, what’s the most, you and I must have seen a different movie, or, you and I must’ve read a different book, moment you’ve ever had with a friend?
[Erin] So, mine is actually a game, and it’s one of my favorite examples, so I may have said it before. But when I played Dragon Age Inquisition, a friend of mine also played it, and it’s a game where you save the world and magic, what have you. But my friend was like, “Oh, I love that dragon killing game.” I’m… I was like, “Dragon killing game? I guess there’s a side quest where you can kill dragons…” He was like, “Yeah. I killed every dragon in the game. And then I was upset because there’s no achievement for that.” I was like, “Yes, because that’s not what the game is about at all.”
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] The game is not… That’s not the purpose. But, for him, he was playing this epic dragon killing game, and only saving the world enough to level up to kill more dragons. I thought, wow, how exciting that this game has room for both your hunting experience and my actual narrative saving the world experience.
[DongWon] This is a face of me trying to remember, there are dragons in that game?
[Chuckles]
[garbled]
[DongWon] I mean, it’s called Dragon Age, but like… Anyways.
[Howard] The point here is that, and I’ve said this before, the largest part of what you get out of a book or a movie or a game comes through what you brought with you to the book or the movie or the game. I can’t count the number of times where I’ve come away from a film, just having loved it and talk to somebody. They’re like, oh, that was cliché, it was awful, it was boring, it was whatever. And I’m like, it was exactly what I wanted. I… How are we so different? Often these conversations, jokingly, end with, well, I guess you and I can’t be friends.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Our perspectives are two different for us to have had that.
[DongWon] Yeah, but I think what you bring in with your interests and your… How you engage with it does change it quite radically. Right? Like, to bring another game example, I’m a huge fan of From Soft games. Those games are this is the Dark Soul series, Eldon Ring, Blood Born, and they’re most notorious for having a part of the community that we derogatorily call the Get Good part of the community who just insist that you’re not… You have to play the game in the hardest way possible, never looking anything up, never asking any friends, and that… If you’re not good enough to do the game, then you just shouldn’t be playing it. And I think they could not be misinterpreting the intention of the design more. That, to me, the game is very much about how difficult it is to go… To do things by yourself, and that instead, what we need to do is to reach out to the people around us, to the community, and find resources, find information and find help. But also, like, how hard it is to get clear information, to get help. I think it’s a really beautiful meditation on the human experience. Because of its difficulty, but also because of its community. But that’s maybe just me bringing my own lens to it, or my own perspective of what it means to be a person in the world.
[Erin] What I love about that is thinking about fiction, like, if you took your get good player and you your bring your community in player, and dropped you both in the zombie apocalypse, how differently would you approach things? Like, how differently would you take the exact same urgent problem… Like, you would be like, who can I reach out to, and they’d be like… I don’t know… Get good killing zombies or what have you?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And I think that’s so interesting, is that a lot of times… I think it’s easy to get really attached to a character as a person, like, you’re like…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Embody them like, this is what Ginny would do. So you sometimes don’t get a chance to think about what are all the things that make up the character that you’ve created, and, like, what are all those lenses that they bring from other situations that happened before they were in this plot of this story right now.
[Mary Robinette] That’s also… That’s one of the things that will lead a character to being mono dimensional is that the writer only brings one lens…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] To the character, that… I mean, how many characters have you seen in stories that appear to not have a family or friends outside this story? Like, they don’t have anything outside the story, they exist only to do this one quest, and they feel extremely flat. When you start thinking about all of the different lenses that you can apply to that character, often by looking at the lenses in your own life, that’s when you can start making a character that’s multidimensional.
[Howard] In talking about this, this overarching concept of the way who we are colors our perception, influences our perception of what’s around us, the lens of who is how your audience will relate to what’s on the page. If you don’t understand how that lens works, you will put things on the page and the audience will have reactions that you did not expect. Or not just that you didn’t expect, that you didn’t want. Because the lens may have been distorted. When we say lens, though, there’s so many pieces to this that we’re going to cover in episodes that come up. Relatability. When we say that a character is relatable. When we say a character has depth. When we talk about POV tools. First person, second person, third person, omniscient, limited, so on and so forth. All of these are aspects of that lens we’ll be covering in upcoming episodes.
[Mary Robinette] We’ve been talking about this. The last episode, we just discussed puppetry. That was a lens that I bring to the way I experience the world. Much like that, one of the things that will happen to me as a puppeteer is that when I am performing some types of puppetry, I will remember the scene later as if I am looking through the character’s eyes, view, gaze. Even though it’s obviously an object that is in front of me or above me. This is a thing that will happen to readers as well. If the character is having moments that are emotionally compelling. It’s always, like, the really emotionally compelling things that happened to… When this happens to me in performance. If the character’s having emotionally compelling moments on the page, your reader is going to remember things through the character’s eyes. They’re going to… How many times have you had this experience, right? Where you’re like, oh, yeah, I can’t remember much of that book, but I really remember being at the side of the road, I remember the rain pelting down, as if you had actually experienced it yourself.
[DongWon] It’s important to remember that humans are wired to care about other humans. Right? It’s why when I talk about, like, stakes, right, in a story, I’m always like, well, what relationship is at stake here? That’s where tension comes from, because… But that’s true of the reader to the character as well. Right? We want to know the person’s emotions, interiority, and perspective, and that’s how you pull people into the story. That’s how you get people to understand it. Because we are always already seeing it through the lens of the character. There’s… It’s impossible for us not to do so. I think.
[Erin] Yeah. I think also you don’t have to share… And I don’t think any of us are saying this, the character’s lens, in order to care about that character.
[DongWon] Oh, yeah.
[Erin] Because I think sometimes there are characters who are difficult, who challenge us in some way, who make us uncomfortable, that we don’t want to be necessarily looking through that lens. But, it’s still so compelling. In the same way that people look at horrible things online all the time, that they don’t wish they were, but yet they keep doing. So I think it’s really interesting to think about the main thing is that the lens is true to the character, not that it is necessarily both shiniest or the prettiest, just that it is actually emotionally grounded.
[DongWon] I mean, so many of my favorite characters are just absolute miserable bastards.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] You know what I mean? And, just like… But one that comes to mind is… I watched True Detective Night Country recently. Jodie Foster plays the main character in it, and is just miserable. Just like an awful person who is still trying to do good, and is still trying to do a thing, and is still the protagonist of the story. I ended up caring about her very deeply. But the joy sometimes of having a character that you don’t necessarily automatically align with is it starts… It gets you to ask the questions of why is this person like this? Right? What made them this way? What are their reasons for being the way that they are? Then that gives you an excuse to dig into all the context of that character. Where did they come from? What was their childhood like? Why did they believe what they believed? What systems are they embedded in? All of those things. So the lens of a character… you don’t have to do an awful character. I think that’s fun and delicious. But, to each their own. But the excuse to dig into the why of a character… And I know, we’re jumping ahead a little bit, but like, that is the thing that enriches the who.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely.
[Howard] I’ve got another exciting question for my cohosts. After these messages from our sponsors.
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[Howard] So, we’ve talked about getting characters as lenses. It sounds to me like it would be helpful if you just wrote the character… Every character’s biography before sitting down to write the story. But I’m pretty sure none of you have actually done that level of pre-writing. Where’s the shortcut?
[Laughter]
[Howard] Can you please tell me where the shortcut is so I can write less? Pre-write less, and be able to write write more.
[DongWon] When playing tabletop games, there’s a character generation sheet that I like to use that has a list of questions on it. Some of them are [just like what’s here] character’s name, blah blah blah. The one that I think is the most useful to understand where the character’s coming from, and this comes from Aabria Iyengar who’s an Internet professional GM [DM?]. She asked the question that blew my mind, and I use in every game now, which is, what is the lie that your character believes about the world? When you can answer that question, that automatically put you in so much deep context about the character. So if you just have that one sentence about each character in your setting, you can already have so much to play with in terms of how they’re going to bounce off each other, how they’re going to react, how they’re going to see the world.
[Erin] That just made me think of… I love that, and it just made me think of another question that I would ask, which is, what is the truth that your character’s afraid to know? Because I think those could be completely different things, or they could be related to each other. But I really do think that I wish I thought that deeply.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Honestly. Wow. I wish I knew that about my characters. I think a lot of times, I… Dan talked, in a previous episode, about details and the importance of details. A lot of times, I like to discover characters through the details. So part of that is that my own subconscious mind is doing some work somewhere. So that when I start writing, I will throw… Like, my mind will generate an interesting detail, like, she only ate grits for 10 years.
[Laughter]
[Erin] For every meal. Don’t know why. Then I’ll think, well, why the heck would anybody do that, subconscious brain? Then I try to take the things that are subconscious and make them conscious. That tells me a little more about the character. Maybe I’ve decided that she’s just, like, a grits enthusiast. Okay. Interesting to know. Then, knowing that, I keep writing, and maybe another detail comes out. She likes to light kites on fire. Okay, like, that’s an interesting second thing. How does that relate to the information I know? So it’s a very discovery… Because I’m a discovery writer, it’s a very discovery method of character. But the more details you add trying to make them all connect, it’s like having a friend that you learn a really interesting fact about and you go, well, how do I make this fact work with everything else I understand about you?
[Howard] Let me come to the grits really quickly, because… No, hang on. If I were to say oh, yeah, when I was in college, I ate nothing but potatoes for four years. Okay. That’s not true. Right? That might be a thing that I would say, because I was eating cheap. But if we roll back and look at my budget when I was in college, one of the things that I ate a lot of was other people’s pizza. They would share a slice of pizza with me. Maybe that, and I’m now speaking as if I’m the character of grits, maybe they did eat other things, but it was food that was given to them. There was some shame in having had to rely on other people for the actual nutrition. They remember making the grits for themselves, but they don’t remember the gifts of food that were keeping them alive. So we have this truth that they are telling themselves about how much they made grits, and the lie that they’re afraid to face, which is that they didn’t depend on other people when in fact they did. So… Yeah, when… The question that you ask about that one thing that they said explodes into so many different things.
[Mary Robinette] So, I don’t use either of those approaches. I love them both. But I don’t use either of them. The approach that I use varies… My shortcut varies. Sometimes it’s the, well, what is the hole that the character is trying to fill. Sometimes it’s the interesting telling detail. I do use that sometimes. But I don’t have a particular set thing and, using a puppetry metaphor, because I’ve got them. When I was an intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts, each of my… I was embedded in the show, and there were three principal characters… Three principal performers. Each of them took time to teach me. They would all say, this is how I approach the character. One of them said, you start with the figure, and you look at what the figure can do, and then that tells you the choices that you need to make to support the figure. Another one said you start with the text, and you figure out what the text tells you, so that then you can figure out how to make the figure do what you need to do to support the text. And another one said you start with the voice, and then you figure out how you use the voice to shape the text to support what the character does. The thing is that the audience didn’t know and didn’t care what their process was. At the end of the day, all the audience cares about is that your character feels alive. So whatever tool it is that we offer to you over the next episodes, that tool is the tool that works for you, and it’ll be a different tool for each character probably.
[DongWon] Well, this is what I love about talking about tools, not rules. Right? Because as we’re giving you tools, the lens of who you are as a person influences your tool choice. Influences your lens choice. What you reach for, whether it’s the interesting character detail, or, like philosophically, what makes this person tick, or a variety of different ways of reaching for things as Mary Robinette does, like, all of that are rooted in our experience and our perspective and our interests as people. Right? Like, I’m very much somebody who is, like, what does make that person tick? You know what I mean? Like… And what those things mer… Or how those things emerge will influence your writing and your process. But the goal is that the audience, you’re right, doesn’t know what tool you used. They’re enthralled by the story, they’re charmed by the character, they’re connected.
[Howard] And, as I said… I said earlier, you want to have a measure of control over what it is the audience is going to come away with. Except the audience has their own lens, so there’s really only so much of that that you can control. It may sound like a rule when I say, oh, you want to be a good enough writer to be able to have some control over this. And yet, the exception to that rule is so glorious. If you can be a good enough writer that what you put on the page, you have no idea how anyone else will react to it, well, that is its own…
[DongWon] This is why specificity matters. Right? Going back to what Dan said about Erin’s thing earlier, the reason specificity contains the universal in it is because if you’re trying to be general, you’re trying to control how your audience is going to react. When you’re trying to be broad, you’re saying, oh, this is for all of your lenses. Right? But if instead, you focus on your own, if you lean into the specificity of your perspective, lean into the specificity of a character, that they are a person who comes from a place, who has a context, then other people will connect their own lenses to that in their own way. If you try to do that work for them, it doesn’t work. Because we each bring our own things to the table so the best thing that you can do is to be as specific as you can, and accept that you can’t control everybody, and that your book, in being for someone, is not for somebody else. And that’s okay.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] That’s not just okay, that’s essential.
[Mary Robinette] I was just at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, and one of the things that they have is they have a place where they have three different literal lenses looking at the sun. One of them is showing you the sun in white light, one of them is showing it to you in only infrared, and another is breaking it apart into a spectrum. So you’re seeing the same literal object three completely different ways. That’s one of the things that the lenses we bring to bear does, is it… The reason it’s important that each of us bring our own lens is that we are looking at these universal truths in these very specific ways that allows people to understand and bring their own truths to it. But the thing is also that, again, everybody who approaches those… Somebody who is red green colorblind is going to look at that spectrum one and not see the same things that I do. They will still see something that is amazing and wonderful, but they will have a different experience. So thinking about… thinking about the experience that you want the reader to have, which lenses that you’re going to bring to bear to try to help them see the things you want them to see, but also be okay if they don’t see it, if they don’t get it.
[Howard] One of my favorite tools is one that… And this is an after-the-fact tool… Is one that Mary Robinette provided to me. Which is when someone comes up to you and describes something in your book that really affected them, and clearly it’s because you did this and this and this, and the response is, “Oh, I’m so glad you noticed that.”
[Chuckles]
[Howard] “I didn’t put that in there on purpose,” is not the thing you say. The thing you say is, “I’m so happy you noticed that.” Because, honestly, as a writer, and when I say honestly, I mean literally honestly, the thing that I get the most joy from is when someone notices a thing, when they feel a thing, when they have an experience with the thing that I put on the page. That is the best thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I love that I know a lot of other writers hate is I love listening to someone else read my stuff out loud. Because the way they interpret it is not the way it is in my head, and it is the closest I can come to experiencing it through someone else’s lens. It’s really disconcerting sometimes, but also glorious. One of the other things that I just kind of want to slip in here is when we’re talking about these lenses, I also want you… The reason we’re talking about let’s give you all of these tools is that you, as writer, will be a different person on every day you sit down to write.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] You’re having a bad day, you’re going to bring a different lens to the table. You’re having a really fantastic day, different lens. It’s just… This is why we want to give you as broad a toolbox as possible.
[Erin] I also just think that’s a fun thing to remember about character, is that characters grow and change. Not just in the big moments, but sometimes, like, characters can have an off moment, or say the wrong thing. I think there are sometimes where it’s like you love your characters so much that you don’t want them to, like, slip in any way. But it is the variations within us, it’s the variations in our lenses, that also make them so special.
[DongWon] And this really gets to the core of why I love tabletop gaming so much, because it’s entirely about character. Right? You’re always experiencing a world and a story and a setting through the individual character’s perspectives. But because it’s collaborative and improvisational, also, what I put out there immediately gets refracted back to me by filtering through the lens of all the other players at the table. So we are collaborating on a thing by reflecting and refracting constantly what each of us is bringing to the table, and through the character’s perspective of their own lens in addition to ours. So the interplay of all that is the thing that I find so delightful and fascinating and endlessly entertaining about tabletop.
[Howard] And I think those notes lead us perfectly into the homework. Sort of an inverted Mary Robinette here. Instead of having someone else read what you wrote, I want you to write what someone else says. Interview two friends. Write down their answers, and yours, if you want to contribute, as completely as possible. Just two questions. What is the happiest memory they think of first? And, describe a person and circumstance that positively and dramatically influenced them before the age of 18.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.