21.33: When To Shift Gears
A story doesn’t always need the same tools from beginning to end. In this episode, we talk about recognizing when it’s time to shift gears—and how to make those changes feel intentional rather than abrupt. Our hosts look at transitions between action, dialogue, and tone, while exploring ways to signal those shifts to the reader. We also discuss how to use your own writing environment to help you change modes– sometimes the right gear is simply the one that makes the story easier to write.
Homework:
Choose a scene and write down your intention for it. Change something about your physical environment—your music, lighting, chair, etc.—to match that intention, then write the scene. Next, give the scene a different intention, change your environment again, and see how your writing changes.
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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler, DongWon Song, and Erin Roberts. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
Key Points: When to shift? What is each piece doing? Seat of your pants. Win state! Faces. Links and mode switches. Signalling. Music, lighting, chair. What’s your intention?
[Season 21, Episode 33]
[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 21, Episode 33]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] When to shift gears.
[Erin] Tools, not rules.
[Howard] For writers, by writers.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[Erin] And something that I’ve been wondering about is we’ve got all these different tools, not rules, that, you might use one structure or another, you might use one technique or another. And sometimes I think about them, probably the short story writer in me, as like one tool per work. Like, this is the work where I will do this structure. This is the work where I will do this technique. But, especially in longer works, I’m assuming that you’re going to need to use different tools, and you might have to use different structures or different techniques. So, in this episode, we want to talk a little bit about how do you know when to shift, and then how do you do it effectively without it seeming like you’re careening across 10 lanes of traffic in the middle of your work?
[Mary Robinette] I think this is a great question, because, like, when I was going from short fiction to novels, it was one of the problems that I had. In short fiction, I could usually hold the whole story in my head. Early on, I didn’t understand how to end things. I would just stop writing, and it was not good. Or I would have an ending that had nothing to do with the story. But, this is a thing that happens in novels. It’s more visible in novels, often in the saggy middle, where the writer knows that they need to start wrapping things up, but they don’t actually know how to switch gears. And so, what I do is I look at, okay, what does this part do? What does that part do? How do I blend them? And this is whether I’m going from middle to end or whether I’m going from conversation to action. Like, or narrative introduction. Like, here’s a voice-driven opening. How do I move into actually things happening instead of saying and navel-gazing? So I look at how each… what each thing is doing and then I try to sprinkle it together. This is my when I am in failure mode and it’s not just happening naturally, I should say.
[chuckles]
[Howard] In the interest of overextending the metaphor, I’ve driven a manual transmission for decades, and when I first started, I was told to watch the tachometer because when the needle gets between 3500 and anything above 3500, it’s time to go up a gear, unless you’re trying to really accelerate. And for a long time I did that and then I realized that the noise the engine was making told me when to shift. And then I realized that with my hand on the stick, I could actually feel what was happening in the engine and it just became instinctive. And for writing, yes, when I am shifting between I am writing something very thinky or I’m… the characters are talking and I need them to be clever. I need this to be bantery and clever. And then I’m shifting into, oh, no, everything’s on fire, we’re all running. I know that I need to shift. I have some tools that might help me just change the environment I’m in so I write that way. I might change the music that I’m playing, but I immediately know I need to be in a different headspace in order to put the right words on the page for this next bit.
[Mary Robinette] So what you’re talking about, I love this example because it gets to the… to a thing about pantsing. Like, we talk about pantsing, but the root of pantsing, as in I don’t plan my things, is the seat of the pants. And the root of that is flying by the seat of the pants because in the early days, pilots, when they didn’t have instrumentation, would fly by the way the plane felt. They could literally feel the plane through the seat of their pants. But, in order to do that successfully, you have to be an experienced pilot.
[Howard] You have to put your pants in a lot of planes.
[Mary Robinette] You have to put your pants in a lot of planes. And before that, in order to acquire that skill, that’s when you’re working with instrumentation. That’s when you’re reaching for these tools that we’re talking about. So, that’s… the whole season we’ve been talking about, we’re going to give you a toolbox, but none of these are rules. Except keep your plane, like, not dropping out of the sky.
[Howard] Do not stall.
[DongWon] I mean, there are failure modes, whether or not you have rules, right?
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] There are failure modes. And I think what Howard is… or actually, sort of like over the course of this season, so much of what we’re saying is here are the specific tools, here are the specific structures and details, and we’re talking at a high level, in a way that, I think, it’s very easy to hear what we’re saying and be like, I don’t know how to apply that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] I don’t know what that means. And the thing that we’re reassuring you of is, as you do this over time, you will develop these instincts. Like Howard learning to listen to the engine, like feeling the plane through the seat of your pants. You will also learn to ingest these concepts and tools and be able to apply them.
[Mary Robinette] Well, let me give a concrete example of moving from one thing to another. If you’ve got a character that’s going to a goal, this is a try-fail cycle, right? You’ve got a character that’s moving towards a goal. There’s… I talk about the question, will they succeed? And then you’ve got yes, but or no, and. But there’s two other things that you also have, which is yes, and. So, yes represents movement towards a goal. No means moving away from a goal. And is a continuation of motion, but is a reversal. So, yes, I’m getting closer to my goal, but something happens and I get farther away from it. Or no, I’m getting farther from my goal, and I get farther away from it. And you use that in the first part of the story. I didn’t… even though I had used those tools for a long time, I didn’t understand that the reason I was having trouble shifting into the latter part of the story where I was giving my character a win state is that I had to change those up to move my character closer. So, that’s yes, I’m getting closer to my goal, and I get to take another step towards it. Or no, I’m getting farther from my goal, but something nice happens and I get to move closer to it. And so once I realized that, once I understood that, on days when I was having trouble, I could mechanically look at it and say, “Okay, I need to stop stalling and I need to move them forward. What win state can I give them?” And so, I could still use my instinct for the yes or no, but I could kind of subvert that and use that one instrument to say, “You have to give them a win state right now in order to get closer.”
[DongWon] Um to talk about this in terms of games for a second, a thing that gets discussed a lot in gaming spaces is the idea of railroading, right? Of putting your players just on one track and they have to do this thing and if they don’t do this thing, you punish them for that, right? But I think there’s an opposite failure state, which is… and you see this a lot at transition moments when they arrive at a new location and nobody knows what to do, right? If you’ve given them an or instead of an and or a but, right? And if you’re not giving them parameters to engage with and a clear goal to be moving towards, or the goal is so far away and abstract, then you’ll end up with all the momentum dying and a lost session where nobody knows where to go or what to do, right? And I think I see this a lot in fiction, too, where, as you’re trying to shift modes, you sort of end up in this dead space in between, where there isn’t enough of that sense of direction, there isn’t enough of that sense of here’s what I’m trying to do at a higher level, and you can sort of lose that momentum in the shift.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Several episodes ago, we were talking about narrative transitions, and I joked with Mary Robinette about, do you make the did I leave the stove on face when you were writing the did you leave the stove on passage? I make faces when I draw, I make faces when I write. I am experiencing, at some level, what it is that my characters are experiencing. And I found that there are some passages that are just so emotionally draining, that I remember writing a story and Sandra came home and saw me, and was like, “Oh, my god, what is wrong? What happened to you?” I said, “Oh, I wrote a thing and I felt what was in it.” Understanding that that happens is both… it’s both predictive and it’s a way to recover from it. If I know what kind of a passage I need to write, I will emotionally tool myself up as if I have to go have a difficult conversation with someone, because I’m going to be feeling those emotions.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] And at the same time, if I know that I am… later today, I will have written that, I will plan later today to recover from having written that, because I understand how that part of the engine of my particular vehicle works.
[Erin] Speaking of being in a vehicle, I think that one of the things that can really get me stopped in the middle of doing all that is if I don’t know exactly where I’m going.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] If there is a lot of or. Like, I think this is… this can be because you’re flying by the seat of your pants, but it’s also can be just because there are a couple of routes in the story that you could take. Like, you know maybe, like, what you’re trying to get to at the end of a scene or a chapter or story, but you’re like, “Oh, I could have them do this try fail cycle or that try fail cycle. I could go with this type of structural change or I could go with that one.” And it can feel very much like I don’t know what to do and therefore I won’t 100% do anything. I will try to do a little bit of everything. And I find that a lot of times it’s easiest if I go back and just try it two ways.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Try it three ways. Like, there’s no… having things that don’t end up in your final manuscript is not a failure. It’s just part of the process. And so I will say, “Okay, well, what happens if I shift to…” I don’t know how driving works. What happens if I shift to second gear? What happens if I shift to fifth gear? Is there fifth gear?
[DongWon] There can be. It depends on the car.
[Erin] What happens if I shift to ninth gear?
[DongWon] No.
[Erin] How many gears are there?
[DongWon] You’ve gone too far.
[laughter]
[Howard] Driving a manual transmission in Los Angeles traffic is a little bit like what you’ve described, because, I’m in third. I’ve gotten onto the freeway and I am ready to shift into fourth and maybe into fifth. But traffic might slow down. Do I really want to be in fifth already or do I want to be in fourth so I get… That’s why I… We have an automatic transmission for the road trip that took us here, because manual transmission in that kind of traffic, I don’t know what’s ahead. I will let the mechanics of the vehicle do the shifting for me.
[Mary Robinette] And when you’re doing a shift, like, one of the things in a car or a bicycle, which more people will have experience at this point in this century with shifting gears on a bicycle…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Than they will with a car. The reason you do it is to make the work easier. It’s to match the conditions that you’re approaching. And so you’ll shift down to make things easier when you’re climbing so that the bike is assisting you. You’ll shift up when you’re… when you’ve got, like. you’re going downhill because you can go faster and all of that. So you shift for modes in order to make it easier, and that’s the same thing when you’re writing, you shift for the mode that will make the writing easier, make the story go. Speaking of shifting…
[Erin] It’s time for the break.
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[Erin] We will now shift into ninth gear…
[laughter]
[Erin] I believe it’s real.
[Howard] I had a Schwinn 10-speed, so, you know what…
[Mary Robinette] I mean, yeah, 10-speeds, yeah, bicycles, yes, you can shift to ninth gear on a bicycle.
[Erin] Yes.
[DongWon] I have a single speed because I’m dumb and I live in a very hilly city, it’s a problem.
[laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That is a choice you have made.
[DongWon] It worked in Brooklyn, it does not work in Los Angeles. Anyways, continue.
[Erin] But, a question I have… what you said about shifting making it easier is do you shift to make it easier for you, the driver/writer? Do you shift to make it easier for the reader? Like how do you know who the shift is serving and whether or not you’re doing the right thing that you need to be doing on the page?
[Mary Robinette] Again, this gets into I am weird and I always think about my reader as a collaborator. And so, for me, the shift is to make it easier for both of us. Most of the time, it is a shift to make it easier for me as the writer, because I am doing something, like… when I’m doing it very consciously, it is a shift to make it easier for me as the writer. But the shift is happening because that… I’m following the terrain of the story. And if I don’t want the story to feel… if I don’t want the ending to feel rushed, I have to shift modes so that I’m making sure that I’m allowing time for things. My instinct as the writer is to just have the thing done. But that doesn’t make it better for my reader. And so that mode shift and being conscious of that, it’s like, okay, this is the part where we’re wrapping things up. Sometimes I go back and fix it in post. I am just like, I’m going to be done with this. And then I’ll go back and slow it down. But that is often… that is the place where the writer experience and the reader experience are, like, wildly out of alignment. But the same tools can make it easier for both of them.
[Howard] I have a pretty good idea when I’m putting a story together of what I want the reader experience to be like from the thing that I am sitting down to write next. And so that’s the known terrain in front of me. Therefore I know what gear or what gears I need to be in. And so when I think about… when I think about this gear shifting, it’s really all about me putting myself in the right frame of mind, in the right context in my studio or in my office, in the right head space, the right health space to do the thing the way, at least in my mind’s eye, I believe it will best be done for the reader.
[Mary Robinette] So let me talk about this on a… We’ve been talking about this very philosophically. Let me talk about this in kind of a more action thing. I talked in the first half about how you can kind of sprinkle things in. And I mentioned if you’ve got a very voice-driven opening, how do you move into something that is more action? One of the things that you can look for are the links. We talk about when you’re going from… when we’re talking about transitions, the transition episode, we talked about the idea of a match cut as being something that you use going from one scene into the next scene. You can also do this when you’re doing a mode switch, from a tonal mode switch. So, if in a voice-driven opening, you have a character who’s ruminating about a thing. So if I were doing, like, this opening about a character who has a pebble that’s on the headboard and how they think about it, and they’ve had that pebble there since the night their father died. And it’s going to be this whole thing. And now I have to get into action. I can do something like, I shifted the pebble on the headboard and then turned around to face my mom. And so that is an interior version of a match cut that I can use to transition. And I can also layer in a little bit more if I want to kind of bounce back and forth between those, I shifted the pebble on my headboard as I turned around and faced my mom. We never talked about my dad. I asked her, and then start into dialogue. So that’s the kind of thing that you can do very mechanically if it’s not just like flowing.
[Erin] To give another, a different mechanical example. So I have a story that I’m working on that has, like, sections of poetry in the middle of it that are, like, telling the story, but they a are completely different mode than the rest of the prose, which is prose. And the way that… I think what helps me at first is to think about what do I want this shift to feel like? And so, for me, this particular piece in general feels very like sitting at a jazz club, as different acts come and go. And to me the poetry part is like having a smoky drink in the middle of the act. So it happens… like, it happens while the scene is continuing, but it’s this, like, interesting break that happens.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Versus, for example, like, there are other things I’ve written where the shift feels like a palate cleanser in between courses, which is a lot more of a stark change. But in order to do that mechanically, one of the things that I do is all of the poetry pieces have a certain amount of musicality in them in that they use musical terms. They’re about songs. They’re about the way that you talk about music. And so I often have a sentence that has a little bit of a musical element to it, uses a word that has to do with music, and then move into these, like, poetic musical parts because what I’m doing is almost like in a car when you signal that you are going to the next lane. And once you teach your reader that this is the type of signal, like every time you get this signal, you will be shifting into this kind of thing. I’m going to mention music, and then we’re going to sit back. We’re going to have this moment of smoky drinks, and then, like, we’re going to shift out of it back into something usually that’s very concrete in the setting to say, I’m moving out of poetry, which is a lot more emotional, and back into the world of the concrete, what’s happening physically. So, I will use an observation about the room that the person is in as a way to come back out. So, it’s like, here I am shifting back. But, I think a lot of it is about those signaling, like saying I shifted the pebble.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It’s a way to actually subconsciously tell your reader get prepared, a shift is coming…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] So that it doesn’t feel abrupt when it happens.
[DongWon] It’s hitting the clutch. It’s disengaging the gears for a second as you move. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] There are three, I think, key tools for me, for just controlling the environment that I’m writing in. The first that leaps to mind is music. It’s really helpful to me to have music that doesn’t have words, orchestral or movie soundtrack or atmospheric or even techno dance beats playing while I write. I have a very long playlist of atmospheric music, and there are some tracks on there that have, like, creepy baby voices or something in them, and I keep meaning to yank those out because those break the gear shift. Those put me in the… I can’t have those while I’m writing. They were fine when I was drawing, but I need to fix the playlist. The second is the lighting. If I’m writing on an illuminated screen and there is enough light or maybe there’s a backlit keyboard for me to see my hands, I am free to change the lighting in the room completely because it’s not… the lighting in the room is not about me seeing other things. It’s about establishing an ambiance for what I’m doing. And the third really is which chair am I in? Am I sitting upright? Am I in my zero gravity chair? Which mode do I want my actual physical body to be in when I type? And I recognize that all of these are variables over which I have full control. I should be consciously controlling them rather than just throwing them down and and expecting myself… expecting me to be in the right frame when I start typing.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I think that’s a good point, that making sure that you have the right mindset. One of the lower lifts that I do because I’m often writing while I’m traveling. So I don’t have control over my environment. Playlists, yes…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But I will often start a scene by just writing down my intention. And this can be an intention, like, an actual plot beat that I need to hit, sometimes, but most of the time, the intention is more about how I want the reader to feel. This is a cozy thing. Next time, I’m going to start trying to use the eight types of fun that we talked about in a previous episode. Going to start trying that. It’s like… because that feels like a really good focusing tool. But that helps me, it’s like, start winding things up. This is the scene in which… and I think that that helps me keep it in the front of my brain. This is what I’m aiming for.
[Erin] I think those two things combined are a perfect way to lead us into the homework. So what your homework is, is to take a scene that you are writing, and you know what a scene is from our previous episodes. And write down what is your intention for the scene, and then think about a physical thing that you can do that matches that intention. Is it a playlist? Is it the chair? Is it the light in the room? And write the scene. Then go back and set yourself a different intention for that scene and change something about the physicality of the space that you’re in and see how it changes the gear that you use when you write it.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.