20.09: Lens 4 – Reaction
What do emotional beats and action scenes have in common? Well, they both need to land with your audience in order for your story not to fall flat. On today’s episode, we’re talking about the importance of reaction. Everything from portraying your characters’ reactions to letting readers sit with—and witness— these reactions. The actions that a character takes—or doesn’t take— as a part of their reaction let the audience know what they are thinking and feeling. And this lets the audience react alongside the character, even if they haven’t experienced (in their own life) what just happened to the character. We’ll give you tips and tricks for building this level of resonance between your characters and readers.
Homework: Look at one of your characters’ reactions and flip it. If they take an action that escalates a situation, how would that scene play if their reaction de-escalated the situation? Can you still get to the end point that you want?
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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Dongwon Song, 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: Reaction is everything. Reactions sell the impact. Slow down, let us see and feel the reaction. Give audiences reactions they are familiar with. When we write too quickly, we often leave out reactions. Watch out for reactions that don’t match the character’s goals, motivations, fears, or seem completely opposed to what they want. Sometimes reactions line up with something else, but tell us what that is. No plan survives. Make a list of possible reactions. Don’t forget the other characters! Use your own experiences. At the end of a scene or chapter, what do you want the characters, and your readers, to be feeling? Tell us how they’re going to feel, tell us how they are feeling, and tell us how they felt.
[Season 20, Episode 09]
[Howard] Writing doesn’t have to be a solitary activity. That’s why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you’ll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you’ll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at 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 09]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Howard] The reaction of who.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Dan] And I’m Dan.
[Howard] I’m sure many of you writers out there are saying, Howard, it’s supposed to be the reaction of whom. But if you’ve been following along with us, you know that right now we’re in our fourth episode where we’re talking about the lens of who, the lens of the character. How we are approaching our writing through a specific lens. In this episode, we’re finishing that up by talking about the fact that really, reaction is everything.
[Mary Robinette] There’s a saying in theater, acting is reacting. Where there is something that happens on stage, and then you react to it. The actions that you take during that reaction let the audience know what your character is thinking and feeling. Because on stage, you don’t get to go inside their heads. As writers, we do get to let the reader inside their head, but often there’s a mismatch between what’s going on inside their head and the actions that they are taking.
[DongWon] Or, if you’re not showing enough reaction, things will feel really, really flat. Right? There’s a video essay I really love by Tony Zhou who does Every Frame a Painting about martial arts movies. One of the things that he shows is that in a lot of great martial arts movies, what you’ll see is… You see the actual blow land three different times. You see the first strike, you see a… Usually, like, a slow-mo zoom in of the strike, and then you see the reaction of the person who got hit. It’s that reaction that sells the impact. Right? Because these are [stunt] performers. They’re not actually hitting each other, their hitting each other very lightly. So when I see an emotional beat not land, when I see an action scene not land, it’s because we don’t see and feel the reaction. So I’m always telling people, it’s okay to slow down. People think that to get through an action scene, it’s got to stay fast to keep things moving really, really well, and we’re missing the reaction and that’s why things start to fall flat or not have the impact you want.
[Dan] Yeah. In… Since we’re on the subject of martial arts, one of the things that I love about martial arts fight scenes, and I saw this as well in a YouTube video, but I can’t remember which one it was. I can’t give my sources as well as DongWon can. Someone was talking about the importance of familiarity and resonance in a fight scene. The idea that I, as a person, have never been through a pane of glass. I’ve never broken through one. Whereas I have bumped my head on something. I have knocked against a wall. That sort of thing. So you watch Jackie Chan, for example, and you’ll see him crashed through a bunch of panes of glass, like in the beg… The one I’m thinking of is the big fight scene in the Lego store. He goes through several panes of glass, and then crashes off of a wall. What that does is it gives us a reaction, it gives the audience a reaction they’re familiar with. So that right at the end, that last bit of it, we go oooh, because we know what that feels like. That lets the audience react with the character. [Silence] That was so weird that now nobody has any follow-up.
[Mary Robinette] No, no.
[Howard] No, this is the reaction of…
[Ha, ha]
[Howard] The reaction of me looking to Mary Robinette and thinking, oh, you have a response, and Mary Robinette looking to me and saying, oh, that look on your face suggests that you’re about to say something.
[DongWon] Reaction and reaction.
[Howard] Both of us were wrong.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I was just trying not to make this whole episode about martial arts movies, because Dan and I could talk for an hour on this topic.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I’m there with that. So, here’s the thing that I was thinking earlier about the… Showing the reaction multiple times. That when you’re dealing with that reaction on the page, you’re dealing with where does the character feel it in their body? What are the thoughts that go through their head? And then, what is the action that they take as a result of those things. And how does it link to the things we’ve already been talking about, which is, like, motivation and their goals? How do these things tied together? I will see characters who receive terrible shocking news, and all you get is a line of dialogue from them. Like, how does that sit with them, where is that… Where do they feel that? That’s part of that, that’s slowing down and letting us feel it. It’s not that your character needs to have a reaction every single time. But it is a way of disambiguating what their response is. Sometimes it’s very clear what’s going on, you don’t need to put all of those things in. But sometimes you really need to slow it down so that we can… That we can link to it. Like, when you let us know how we feel it in our bodies, a lot of readers will also map that to their own body. They tighten their shoulders, unconsciously, you can tighten your own shoulders.
[Dan] Reaction is such an important one to focus on, because, like you’re saying, it is one of the first things that we leave out when we start to write too quickly. When we think to ourselves, well, I know how this person feels about what just happened, the audience is going to pick it up as well. I don’t have to make… State it explicitly. It’s one of the first things that disappears.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I will go through, when I’m doing my revision, and I will look for places where I need to layer that back in. Where I’ve gone too fast, and I’ve left it out. So, if you’re thinking, oh, my goodness, there’s so many things to think about when I’m writing, remember that you can layer that in later. But it’s absolutely true. It’s the other thing that I see people do is that they… The character will have a very cinematic reaction that is completely at odds with their goals, with their motivation, with the things that they’re afraid of. The classic one is two people… Like, someone wants to get back together with someone else, and they go into a room, and they yell at them. I’m like, how does… How do you think that’s actually going to work? Like, that’s not how that… Or all of the stalkers, like, out there. Like, yeah, I want to convince this person that I’m loving and safe. I’m going to stand under their window with a… In the rain with a radio. I’m like, that’s not… Like, that’s not going to get the reaction you think it’s going to get.
[Howard] One of my very favorite examples of reaction to things not going as planned… It’s cinematic… Is in the, as of this recording, most recent Mission Impossible movie. There’s a car chase in the middle, where Ethan Hunt… No, wait, I mean Tom Cruise… No, wait, I mean Ethan Hunt, is handcuffed to… I forgotten the actress’s name and I forgotten the character’s name.
[Dan] Hayley Atwell.
[Howard] Hayley Atwell. They’re handcuffed together and they’re handcuffed so that Tom Cruise would not be in the driver’s seat. They switch vehicles, I think three times, and the reactions of, wait, I’m not driving. Wait, you don’t actually know how to do this thing with the car. Wait, you don’t have a free hand to use your weapon. Over and over again. Things don’t go as planned. Sandra and I and my youngest son watched this… I say youngest son. 21. Watched this in a hotel room at Gen Con. This was his first time seeing it, and he, about three quarters of the way through, said, this is the most interesting car chase I’ve ever watched.
[DongWon] That’s a great one.
[Howard] It is so… It’s because it’s all about reactions. It’s all about watching how the characters who have their motivations, who have their skills, are continuously dealing with something going wrong.
[DongWon] Exactly. The reaction sells the emotion in that moment, and, Mary Robinette, you bring up a great point, the reaction and the action don’t match when a character… That’s when they feel really wrong. However, I will also point out that sometimes you could use that to paper over other flaws in your story. Right?
[Laughter]
[DongWon] So I watched Twisters last night. Which is one of the most fun blockbusters I’ve seen in a while. Truly, Hollywood remembered how…
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[DongWon] How to make movies again. There’s a whole thing where the first half of the movie, there’s a rivalry between these two groups, and I stopped at one point and was like, it makes no sense. It doesn’t matter if they’re both at the tornado at the same time. It’s a tornado. They can both be there. It’s big enough. Right? But there papering over that by the characters reacting to each other constantly as they’re creating this rivalry. It was so fun watching them make faces at each other, make fun of each other, and outrace each other that I didn’t care whether it made sense or not. Right? Because they were selling me the reaction, they were selling me the emotional stakes and reality of these characters that it stopped me from doing the step back and think about it for a long time, and 90 percent of the readers would never have done that… Or viewers would never have done that. I just think about story too much.
[Dan] Yeah. Another thing to think about when we talk about reactions that don’t line up with your goals is that they might line up with something else. When you mentioned stalkers, that’s now the thing that I’m talking about. I apologize. Because that’s a real thing that happens. People really do take actions that are not plausibly ever going to get them what they want. But it’s because they are not reacting in that moment to their goals. They are reacting to something else. If you are able to present that properly in your story, that may be they are reacting to a previous experience, maybe they are reacting to a past trauma, maybe they are reacting to a desire rather than a goal which can be different things. If you don’t put it into your story, the reaction will seem wrong. If you do put it into your story, then that dissonance creates a really nice moment.
[Mary Robinette] Speaking of contrasts, I think this is probably a good time for us to take a little bit of a break.
[Howard] It’s been said, and I wish I could quote who said it first, that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. This is not only an excellent foundation for military doctrine, it’s also a very solid principle for writing. Your characters have a plan. If their plan survives from formulation all the way to the end of the book, assuming it’s something they formulated in the first act, there probably wasn’t enough reaction going on. We want to know what happens when the plan suffers and you have to come up with a new plan.
[DongWon] So much of it is listening to your characters. Right? I mean, and this goes back to the mismatch, when you have that mismatch, it often feels like it’s because you needed something to happen for the plot. Not because the characters were organically responding to the thing. The thing I’ve learned from gaming as a GM, when I introduce a villain, when I introduce a scenario or an NPC, I cannot predict how my players are going to react. I might accidentally describe the bartender as being like two percent too hot, and now our session is derailed and now we’re just…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] In this tavern for the rest… For the next two hours.
[Howard] Installing air-conditioning?
[DongWon] Installing air-conditioning. Of course.
[Howard] Okay.
[DongWon] Yes. Because anyways…
[Mary Robinette] It’s compelling.
[DongWon] Sometimes your villain just isn’t going to have the impact that you want and you need to find another angle. Right? You can’t predict sometimes how your character will react and you need to listen to what their response is in the moment rather than what you need their response to be to move the plot forward. Sometimes that means either you need to change the dial on what the inciting incident is or you need to let your plot shift to follow the character’s response.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Sometimes I will make a list of possible responses that my character will have. I think about what is the goal, what are they trying to achieve, what do I need them to achieve, and I list out things that could possibly get us there. The other piece to that, to both of your points, is that often when we’re thinking about our main character, we are forgetting how the people around them are reacting to the actions that they are taking.
[DongWon] This is the solution to the passive character. So many times, there’s a passive protagonist. Right? The reluctant hero. You need people reacting to the situation that aren’t that character, because if they’re not reacting and taking action, it’s absolutely maddening for the audience and your story’s not going to move forward. So you need to surround them with people who are having the big reaction to move things forward in that way.
[Howard] When we began with this lens on character, I talked about… Or I invited us to use our own experiences as tools. I want to lean into that again, now, because I find in my own life, there are lots of times when something painful or unexpected or surprising happens, and I act quote out of character unquote. I discover something about myself that usually I don’t like. Boy, I’m not the sort of person who says unkind things to someone else just because I’ve lost my temper. But what’s wrong, what happened here? So the tool is, look at your own reactions. Are there times when you’ve reacted to something and you’ve learned something about yourself, whether it was pleasant or unpleasant? I’m putting that forward to our panelists as perhaps… Our hosts, perhaps as a question.
[Mary Robinette] So, I think that that’s… This is a… A great example, and it ties back into things that Dan and DongWon were talking about before is the… Is that thing where your character does do something that is out of character, and you… But when they do that, they still have to have a reaction to it. So if they snap at someone, and then… That’s the external reaction that they’ve done, but the internal reaction is, ooh, I just said that. Is there a way I can fix it? That’s a… That is a thing that can allow you to have both. There’s this great… One of my favorite celebrity interviews, Nathan Fillion is talking about being on soaps, and how they’re… He was a young actor on soaps, and one of the veterans said, at the end of the scene, they’re going to push the camera in on your face. And you’ve got no script, you can’t go anywhere. You can’t… So you have three…
[Howard] For heaven sake, don’t move.
[Mary Robinette] Right. So you have three possible reactions. Did I leave the gas on?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Oh, I did leave the gas on. I turned the gas off.
[Howard] I can now see…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Howard] Nathan Fillion making each of those three faces.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Once you start seeing that, it’s… Like, you see a lot of actors who have those reactions. But the thing about it is, what he’s talking about is letting the reader know how they are supposed to react…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] To what has happened. So I find that sometimes at the end of the scene, at the end of a chapter, that I will look at it and go okay, did they leave the gas on or did they turn it off? And think about how my character is feeling, but specifically, how I want my reader to be feeling. What reaction I want them to be having as well.
[DongWon] A lot of times what you want to do is… kind of going back to my initial example of the martial arts punch landing, is show it… Tell us how they’re going to feel, show us how they’re feeling, tell us how they felt. You know what I mean? Sometimes you need that structure to a scene. That can be as… That can happen all in one sentence sometimes. Right? You can do it real quick, you can do it real slow. All those things are really useful, but letting us understand the reaction, and giving us time to process what the reaction is, is hugely important.
[Howard] Yeah. As we’ve talked about throughout this season, we talk about tools, we describe them as lenses. We describe them as lenses because the things that you are putting on the page are the things that are informing the reader about what they are supposed to be thinking, what they’re supposed to be experiencing, what they’re supposed to be feeling. Reaction is a critical, critical lens. Are we ready for homework?
[Mary Robinette] I think we are.
[Howard] I feel like we’re ready for homework.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, what I want you to do is, I want you to look at one of your character’s reactions, and flip it. So if they take an action that escalates a situation, how would that scene play if they de-escalate it? Can you still get to the endpoint that you want? So take a look at those reactions and play around with them.
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. Surprise! You’re out of excuses. Now do something completely unexpected. Go write.