Thing of the Week: Planet Crafter
Homework: Take a sentence from your work in progress and rewrite it to adjust the age of the character to make them a child. Do it again to make them from a different region. And again to give them a different profession.
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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]]>On our first episode diving into Voice using the short novel “This Is How You Lose The Time War”, we talk about why Voice is essential and some working definitions of how we want to talk about it. We also explain why we chose this book and highlight some of the things it’s done well, and what you can learn from it!
Thing of the Week: Scavengers Reign
Homework: Take a sentence from a work you love that has a strong and clear voice. Write a scene based on that as a prompt, in the same tone and voice as the original.
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Join Our Writing Community!
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Key Points: Voice in fiction. Voice, mechanical, aesthetic, and personal. Tools for voice on the page: pacing, accent, attitude, and experience. Pacing is cadence or rhythm, pauses, punctuation. Accent is word choice and sentence structure. Attitude is attitude. Experience is how the character views the world. Aiming to give you tools so that you say, “Oh, I can do that.”
[Season 19, Episode 11]
[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 11]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice — An Overview and Why We Chose Time War
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] 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.
[Howard] And I’m Howard.
[DongWon] So, this episode is the first of our close reading series. I’m very excited to dig into this one. We’ve chosen for our first module here to focus on the aspect of voice in fiction. We thought what better book for that than Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar’s This Is How You Lose The Time War. This was a novella that was published in 2015 that features two alternative voices from two different POVs and [garbled] as letters written between them. It won a bunch of awards. It’s been very popular. I think the voice in this book is very distinct and very powerful and much of the charm of the book is in how these two different writers are approaching these characters and how the voice is carrying through.
[Howard] There’s also the elephant in the room which is when I got this book out to reread it and showed it to my 22-year-old and told them, “I think you might like this book a lot,” they said, “Yes. Bigolas Dickolas said the same thing.”
[Ha]
[Howard] “I will get to it eventually.” They will get to it eventually because I’m going to bring this copy back and shove it in front of them. Yes, this book got huge props… Was it 21, 22?
[DongWon] It was the… Oh my gosh… What, 23?
[Howard] I do not remember.
[DongWon] Summer 23.
[Mary Robinette] 23. Summer of 23.
[Howard] This is… I mean, we’re recording this in fall of… Or in December of 23. So…
[DongWon] It was this summer.
[Howard] It was this year.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It won all of the awards when it came out, and then it was rediscovered by Bigolas Dickolas, and now is a phenomenon sweeping the globe.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Howard] Part of the reason it’s doing that is that the voice is so strong and so… It speaks to a lot of people. I think voice is the reason it does that.
[Mary Robinette] So, I want to just put something out, that is we’re talking about voice, that the voice of this is one of the things that is so important. But voice is also one of those wiggly words that we use a lot. I find that it tends to mean 3 different things. There is the mechanical voice, which is, like, the style. First person, 3rd person, the mechanics of it. There is the aesthetic voice, what it sounds like. Then there’s the personal voice, which is what the author brings to it. We are primarily going to be focusing on the aesthetic and mechanical voices when we’re talking about this. In part because we don’t know which parts which author wrote, so it’s harder to pin down and say this is because of their life experience.
[DongWon] They have said who wrote which part.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, they have now?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] For a long time, they refused to.
[DongWon] Yeah. Oh, I’m pretty sure that’s public. So I have the other elephant in the room is that I have a particularly inside perspective on this book, because the first 2 books we’ve chosen, I swear to God, I did not do this on purpose, I did not suggest these, are both books that I have worked on is a literary agent. So, Max and Amal are both my clients and I have worked on Time War since its inception. So I have a little bit of inside perspective and sometimes filtering out what is public and what is not is a trick for me.
[Howard] Drop the knowledge, DongWon.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] But I will very gladly give a few peeks behind the curtain when I can.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Double check them on that one.
[DongWon] I will.
[Mary Robinette] So, the… For me, one of the things that struck me immediately the first time I started reading this was that there was a poetic denseness to the language that you see less often in science fiction. It’s… I can think of other examples, but the poetic denseness was one of the things that pulled me in, and also, slowed me down. Because I felt like I needed to savor the book as I was going through, that the language, the voice itself was as important as the plot. That it was inextricably tied together.
[Erin] Yeah. I think some of that is the form of the book itself. Because so much of it is epistolary, it’s in letters, I think that there’s a certain indulgence in some ways that, as readers, we give to a letter. We sort of assume that it will be like… That you’re going to lean into maybe the poetry of things when you’re writing a letter to another person and what… I think it was such a smart idea, because while in like non-letter prose, you might be like, oh, this is a lot, in a letter you’re like, oh, no, this completely makes sense, because it’s such an expression, such a personal expression, and therefore a way in which a voice can come out so cleanly and clearly.
[Mary Robinette] Interesting, because I actually have the opposite experience when reading, which is that the letters are the more straightforward prose than the 3rd person passages.
[Erin] Interesting.
[Mary Robinette] Isn’t it interesting?
[Howard] An example. The piece… There are 2 pieces that hooked me on the first page. The first piece, 2nd line and beginning of the 3rd paragraph, “Blood slicks her hair. She breathes out steam in the last night of this dying world. This was fun, she thinks.”
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Okay. I’m on board.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I’m on board. Then, paragraph 4, this is where the prose gets dense and does a whole bunch of worldbuilding for us. “She holds a corpse that was once a man. Her hands gloved in its guts, her fingers clutching its alloy spine. She let’s go, and the exoskeleton clatters against rock. Crude technology. Ancient. Bronzed depleted uranium. He never had a chance. That is the point of Red.” Okay. You’ve thrown a bunch of cool technical terms at me, and I’m like, “Oh, wow, future battlefield… Wait. Crude technology. Wait. What?”
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Now I have… That’s the 2nd hook.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] The first hook is, “[gasp] That was fun.” The 2nd hook is how advanced is this? Please world build some more for me.
[Mary Robinette] Right. I think that that was part of what I’m thinking about… And we’re going to dive into this way more in the next episode, when we’re talking about… Like, we’re going to do really close reading about Red’s perspective, looking at these first pages. But, in general, one of the things that Amal and Max are trying to do in this book is describe this time war which is technology that we don’t have and an understanding of time that we don’t have. So they are using this metaphor poetic language to attempt to communicate something to us because we don’t have the language for it. So that juxtaposition of those 2 things, of, like, this is a very highly technical thing I’m going to attempt to explain to you people who are locked into this single timeline… It makes things really juicy and lovely.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it’s one of the main reasons I wanted to pick this. I wanted to pick it both because I deeply love the voice of this book, I find it very affecting and very sort of pleasurable to engage with. But then, there are really almost 4 different voices in this book. Because you have the Red sections, you have the Blue sections, you have Red letters and Blue letters. Each of them has a distinctly different voice that is communicating different information and different worldbuilding as we go. So one of the reasons I wanted to examine this one is we get to sort of do that contrast between, okay, what’s happening here versus what’s happening here versus what’s happening here. So it felt very useful as a teaching tool in addition to one that is just, oh, they are executing this at a very high level and is delightful to engage with.
[Howard] Yeah. Let me circle back on that teaching tool briefly. You can pick up to similar books by different authors…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] And compare voices and ask yourself, why do these sound different? Why do these feel different? Why do these work differently? That’s valuable. Having that experience in one book where the same narrative, a singular narrative is being run in multiple voices is utterly invaluable. There’s… I cannot think of a better teaching tool for voice then reading and rereading and analyzing your own experience as you pick up the book again and again than this book.
[Erin] While this book is… Has a very sort of unique style, it’s also something that you can do in books with multiple POVs. So if you wanted to take what we’re doing in this close reading and apply it somewhere else, you could take a book that has a lot of different points of view and think about how is the voice being done differently by the author from one character to the next.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is just an extreme case, which I think is what makes it so useful. Right? Of having such distinctly different voices, and it’s such a voice-y book. What I mean by that is there just leaning so much into that voice as a forward component of it. Which, in part, they get away with because it’s a shorter book. Right? It doesn’t overstay its welcome. This might be more difficult to do at great length. But, given the compactness of the book and how quick the experience of reading it is, you can really push pretty hard on the voice lever. Which they’ve done in this case.
[Howard] I have a question that I’m going to pose after our break.
[DongWon] I want to talk to y’all about Scavengers Reign. Which is one of the best things I saw in 2023. It’s an animated series on Max that tells the story of a group of survivors crash landed on an alien planet after their colony ship malfunctions mid journey. What makes the show wonderful is its incredible art style, but also its approach to how they portray alien life and how humans interact with it. It’s really deeply interested in systems and ecologies, and tells a really beautiful story about how humans interact with their environment and with each other. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.
[Howard] The big question is if you are but one author, but one mortal author…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Trying to write multiple voices, as you said, a novel with multiple POVs. Can you do it this well?
[DongWon] Yeah. Well, one thing I want to point out as we go into this close reading series is we’re picking these as examples we hope are instructive. We’re not saying you have to do what these authors are doing or replicate these. We’re picking examples that are really pushing the boundaries of what is possible in this particular severe. So, this is pushing the boundaries of voice. When we get to Memory Called Empire, that is pushing the boundaries of what you can do with worldbuilding. When we get to Fifth Season, that’s going to be pushing the boundaries of what you can do with structure. I do not recommend trying to replicate these things. We’re showing you big examples so you can take lessons from them and learn from them.
[Mary Robinette] So, I’m going to give you a couple of words that we’re going to be using as we’re going through. As you probably know, I am an audiobook narrator, and when I’m trying to learn how to do character voice, when I’m teaching it, there’s a couple of tools that we use that are very useful for doing voice on the page. So, pacing, accent, attitude, and what I call experience. So, pacing is kind of the cadence, the rhythm of the voice. Where they pause, whether they’re doing long sentences or short sentences. Where they put the punctuation. That’s something that you manipulate really by punctuation. It’s replicating the way we pause in speech. Accent is all about word choice and sentence structure. It’s not about pronunciation, which is what a lot of people focus on. So you’ll hear us talking about the word choice and sentence structures that are specific to each character. Then, attitude is exactly what it sounds like. When you’re talking to someone on the phone, and I know that a lot of people never do that anymore, but you can tell… Well, when you’re listening to us, you can tell if we’re smiling or not smiling. Mechanically, that’s because the shape of our facial mask changes. But really it’s that our attitude is driving the way that everything happens. On the page, you’re manipulating that with word choice, sentence structure, and punctuation. Then, experience is about what… How the character views the world. So, specifically, when you’re hearing us talk about Red and Blue, you’re going to hear us talking about the use of botanical metaphors versus the use of mechanical metaphors, depending on which character we’re talking about. That comes from their experience. So those are a couple of levers that you can push very consciously without having to, like, have this extensive acting career or, in Amal’s case, Amal is a poet and is using a lot of additional tools. But these are 4 things that I find very useful.
[Howard] In… Oh, gosh, this would have been 40 years ago. I was reading the liner notes… Liner notes? Must have been, on a Billie Joel album. Billie Joel talked about getting his start. He said, “I listen to things on the radio and I told myself I can do that.” That… I wanted to be a rock star for years. Then I got into cartooning and into writing because I looked at things and said I can do that. I look at Time War and think I can’t do that.
[Laughter]
[Howard] If you are feeling the same thing, I just wanted to express some camaraderie, a little bit of commiseration, and a little bit of hopefulness, which is that as we go through these, we want to give you the tools so that on your 3rd or 4th reread of one of these close reads, you begin to tell yourself, “Oh. Oh, I can do that.”
[Mary Robinette] It doesn’t even have to be doing that entire… Like, you can’t write Time War because that’s where the personal voice comes in. Their own experience, the thing that drives them. But you can use the tools that they’re using in Time War. That’s the piece that we’re hoping that you’re going to get out of these really close readings, that here’s this tool that you can use and apply to your own personal voice and your own experience, that that will come out on the page.
[DongWon] Well, one thing to keep in mind is also that this is 2 people. Right? This is a collaborative process. They’re bringing double the firepower to this project, and anybody who’s read Amal and Max’s work individually knows that those are already some pretty heavy guns that they’ve got. So, there’s something special that can happen in a collaboration where the sum is even greater than the individual parts. It’s very hard to get to. I don’t love a collaboration project, actually. It’s one of the grand ironies of this book, is I tend to be fairly opposed to them because they’re so difficult to do well. But in this case, those 2 came together in a way that their voices really braided together in this really powerful way that leads to the reading experience that we have in front of you.
[Mary Robinette] So, Erin, you tend to do fairly voice-y fiction also when you’re writing. What are the things that you think about when you’re looking at Time War in kind of relation to the way you approach your own work?
[Erin] I think, I like the way that you broke down sort of the different stuff, pacing… I’m going to forget them all now.
[Mary Robinette] Pacing, accent, attitude, experience.
[Erin] Pacing, accent, attitude, experience. I really wanted that to be like something I could say, like PAAE. That’s not really…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.
[Erin] It’s okay. But I think that pacing, especially… Like, I love to look at the way in which other folks use punctuation. Because, like, really as writers, I find us to be a controlling lot.
[Laughter]
[Erin] You know what I mean? We don’t just want you to read it, we want you to read it how we would read it in our own homes. So thinking about, I wonder if this… If the way I’m reading this is the experience that they intended me to have. Why is… In the thing that Howard read earlier, okay, there are some shorter bits in there. There are things that are 2 word sentences. Why is this. Here, why not a dash? Why was this not a semicolon? Oh, it’s because I need to stop all the way here. I like to really think about that because when I’m doing it, I know the effect that I’m going for. What I like to try to do is listen to somebody else and wonder about the effect that they are going for. It’s sort of like the listening to the song on the radio and going I think this song is meant to make me sad. Why and how? Because if I’m writing a song that wants to make somebody sad, I should think about if I understand how they did it, then I can understand the way that maybe I could do it better.
[Mary Robinette] My… One of the arguments that I will occasionally have with copy editors who will never see the argument back, like, the book is never returned to the copy editor with my No!
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But I’ll have things that are phrased like a question, but I do not have a question mark, because they are not said with a rising tone. Like, “What did you say.” Like, what did you say… Like, there’s a falling tone there. If you put a question mark, it’s a very different, “What did you say?” That kind of thing. I see early career writers, and I know I did it myself, get hung up on the grammar and having something grammatically correct is not what you’re trying to do when you write. Grammar is there for when you need to express clarity in some way. But most of the time, what you’re looking for is just do these rhythms flow?
[Howard] I look at grammar as the rule set that we play by when things are complicated and we need to make sure that everything is working well. Breaking those rules is what we do when we need a new rule in order to communicate something different. So we will deliberately throw down a word like mis-underestimate which isn’t a word, but which we can kind of tell what it means and away we go. The copy editor will say, “Hey, this isn’t a word,” and you say, “But it’s my word for this book.”
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] One way to think about voice is that voice is about clarity for the reader. It’s about clarifying the reader’s experience of all the information you’re trying to give them. Right? Because it is the vessel with which that’s handed over. So, sometimes, the way you achieve that clarity is by breaking grammatical rules, by using a very complicated language, or inventing your own word sometimes. Because what you’re trying to do is communicate what the emotional experience that you want the reader to have is. Right? So voice is your first interface with them. It’s the first… It’s why we’re doing this as our first module, is voice is the first and the last thing that you will encounter while reading a book.
[Erin] Yeah. I also think… Something else that just occurred to me, a bit of a side note, is that the other thing that I really like to look at is that… Is… Once you create voice and people understand what that voice is, you have to keep doing the work, but in some ways, you’ve already established who this person is. The way that they talk, the way that they think, and it actually helps to put their voice in the mind of your reader.
[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, one of my favorite English sentences is, “I didn’t say you got to keep the money.” Because you can put the emphasis on every single word in that, like, I didn’t say you got to keep the money. I didn’t… Like, it’s a different… It’s a slightly different meaning. If you have the voice of the character established, they will emphasize, hopefully, the word that you would emphasize when you were writing it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is very similar to what happens in audio fiction. There are character voices that I cannot sustain for an entire thing. Like the [low shack] Luidaeg in the October Daye books. I’m talking like this. I can’t do that for an entire page. So I hid it really hard at the beginning, and then I back off and use it for emphasis where I want to drive home this is the [low shack] Luidaeg speaking. I find the same with… When I’m writing, that I will use those embellishments, the… Sometimes it’s just as simple as italics, but sometimes it’s like the flourishing words at places where I want to remove ambiguity about who’s speaking or what they mean or places where I want to add emphasis. It’s like, no, this is seriously this person.
[DongWon] Well, one last thing I wanted to point out here is another reason I think this is a great book to use is so much of the character development and plot development is communicated through alterations in voice. The voice evolves over the course of the book, and as it does, we grow with the writer. Or the characters, and our understanding of the world that they live in also evolves. Right? So we get to sort of see how you can use voice as an active tool in your fiction.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] I think people think about it as kind of a passive set thing. Right? In the first paragraph, you set your voice, and then it’s the same throughout. That, ideally, is not true. It grows and changes with you. I think this again is a pretty radical example of how you do that.
[Howard] Before we jump to our homework… Isn’t that what we’re getting ready to do next? Before… I would like to send us home with a passage that I think fits beautifully. “I am glad to know you love reading. Perhaps you should next write from a library. There’s so much I want to recommend.”
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That’s perfect.
[DongWon] That is perfect. On that note, I have our homework for you this week. So. What I would like you to do is to take a sentence from a work you love that has a strong and clear voice. So think about what are some voice-y pieces that you’ve read that you really enjoy. Take that sentence and write a scene based on that as a prompt in the same tone and voice as the original. So, I’m not trying to get you to replicate the original scene, but take that… Take what you love about why it sounds the way it does, and try and extend that into your own fiction and make that voice a little bit your own.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[Howard] Hey, podcast lovers. Do you know that you can upgrade your experience here with our ad-free tier on Patreon? Head over to patreon.com/writingexcuses to enjoy an ad free oasis as well as access to our virtual Discord community where you can talk with your fellow writers.
]]>For most of the remainder of 2024, we’ll be diving into five core elements of writing by focusing on five different literary texts. We’ll spend five episodes on each one, and then we’re going to… drumroll please… interview the author(s)!
As you know, we’ve spent lots of time reading, writing, talking, and recording our thoughts about different elements of the craft. But this year, we wanted to ground our episodes in specific texts that you could read along– and analyze– with us!
Below is the schedule for each book or short story we’ll be diving into. The date on the right in parenthesis is the air date of the first episode in our series that will begin talking about that text. We highly recommend you read the book by that date, as we will be talking about the entirety of the text for all 5 episodes (including spoilers!)
First up: This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar
You can buy this (and all the other books!) through our bookshop link— this is linked in our bio in addition to right here. CL Clark’s short stories can be read for free on Uncanny Magazine and are all linked below.
Close Reading Series: Texts & Timeline
Voice: This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar (March 17)
Worldbuilding: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (May 12)
Character: “You Perfect, Broken Thing,” “The Cook,” and “Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home” by CL Clark (July 7)
Tension: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark (September 1)
Structure: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (October 13)
Thing of the Week: SHINOBIGAMI: Modern Ninja Battle RPG
Homework: Take a scene from a work that you love and five highlighters/crayons/colored pencils – use one color to underline/highlight places where the voice comes through, one for great worldbuilding, one for character moments, one for any moments of tension, and one for moments that move the plot forward. What colors do you end up with? Where do they overlap? What are the colors of the moments you love the most? What would the colors of one of your scenes be?
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Key Points: Close reading, so you have concrete examples of how these techniques work. There will be spoilers! Voice, worldbuilding, character, tension, and structure (see the liner notes for the novels, novellas, and short stories). Close reading gives us a shared language and shared examples to talk about craft. Close reading? Open the book with a question in mind. Read it for fun, then go back and look for examples of a specific technique, and look at the context. Reconnect with the joy of writing, reading, and great fiction. Find your own examples, too!
[Season 19, Episode 10]
[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 10]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Introducing our close reading series.
[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] And I’m Howard.
[Erin] I have a confession. Which is that we are actually recording the introduction to our close reading series after we’ve recorded most of the close reading series…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Because, honestly, we wanted to get a sense of what this was going to be like. It’s our first time doing this, and, I’ll be honest, even as a teacher, when I hear the words close reading sometimes I think boring class, it’s going to feel like going to a bad college class all over again. But I think it’s been really fun.
[Mary Robinette] This is been some of the most fun that I’ve had doing episodes. One of the things that people talk about in our previous episodes when we been trying to give examples of things is that we often reach for film and television because we feel like there’s a higher likelihood that you will have seen the thing and that you’ll have read a particular work. With this, because what we’ve done is we’ve picked 5 books… Actually, 2 books, 2 novellas, and a collect… A bunch of short stories, so that you can read along with it. But we’re doing all the heavy lifting. We’ve done the close reading and we’re using these to tell you kind of how these techniques work, with very concrete examples.
[Howard] We’re also leaning all the way into this and reading directly from the text during the episodes. Which is, to my mind, critical for helping you understand what it is that we love and what we see in the words that we read.
[DongWon] Because, as Howard said, we’re going to be quoting from the text, you don’t necessarily have to have read all of it before hopping in with us, but do be aware that we are not holding back on spoilers. Because we want to talk about the structure, we want to talk about how certain things unfold, so we will be referencing elements of the plot and the story from throughout the entire book. So if you hate spoilers, then read along with us. If you don’t have time, don’t stress about it, we’re going to walk you through it.
[Dan] Well, also, not for nothing, we picked really great works that we love. You’re going to want to read these anyway. So if you can, definitely read at least part of them. I think you should read all of them. You’ll get a lot out of it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That thing where people will say, “Okay, spoiler alert,” and you know to plug your ears or whatever stuff… We didn’t even bother with that. We just sort of… The spoilers are scattered, like.
[Dan] It’s all spoilers all the time.
[DongWon] We tend to focus on the first half of the book just naturally and how we’re talking about it. But, yeah, absolutely, be prepared.
[Erin] Okay, so we should probably talk a little bit about how we got here in the first place. It started with, I think, DongWon, it was you and I and maybe even Mary Robinette, we were all scheming on the cruise…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] We had nothing to do during a lunch, and we said, “Let’s start scheming and plotting, and figure out how we can bring like these really interesting close readings in a really cool way to the listeners.” Is that… Do you remember it that way?
[DongWon] I remember it being not so much nothing to do during lunch, rather than season 19 curriculum meeting…
[Laughter] [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] It was a nice lunch, too.
[Dan] It was a great lunch. Halfway through the curriculum meeting, you remembered that it was supposed to be a curriculum meeting.
[DongWon] Yeah. You were eavesdropping on us, clearly.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But the thing that really is like so often when I’m talking about a technique, it would be easier if I had a sentence that I could show it to you with and we’ve got those. What we wanted to do was not just pick books, but pick topics that were going to be useful to you. So, we’ve got the season broken down into 5 topics, each of which has a representative work that is tied to it. So we’re going to be starting the season with voice…
[DongWon] Starting with voice, yes.
[Erin] That makes sense for a podcast.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] We recorded these out of sequence, which is part of why I was like, it was voice, right? Voice, interestingly enough, was How to Lose the Time War, which is just ironic, considering the out of sequence nature of our recording schedule.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Erin] I think we’re winning the time war.
[Dan] That’s true. We organized the time war joke that we made.
[Mary Robinette] There we go.
[Dan] We set this up in advance where, like, someone’s going to make a time war joke. That was it, folks.
[Mary Robinette] There we go. That’s the only time war joke you’re going to get.
[Dan] That’s all you get.
[Mary Robinette] We will have done this several times.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] So, we’re starting with voice, and then we’re going into worldbuilding after that, reading Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire. Then we’re going to do character, using C. L. Clark’s short stories. There’ll be a list of these in the liner notes. Then we are going to do tension with P. Djeli Clark’s Ring Shout. Then, finally, we’re going to talk about structure using N. K. Jemison’s The Fifth Season.
[Mary Robinette] We’ve tried to set this up so that you’ve got novellas, you have plenty of time to read it, because it’s a shorter thing. Then we go to a novel, so you’ve got a little more time. Then you get a breather, because we do some short stories. Then novella, and you have a lot of time before you have to read N. K. Jemison’s Fifth Season. So we’re thinking about 2 things. One is your actual reading time. The other thing that we’re thinking about is a little bit of the arc of how you think about a story. Thinking about a story as driven by voice versus thinking about a story as driven by structure. You can start either place, but often the structure is something that you refine at the end during the editing process. So we’re hoping that you’ll be able to use these tools all the way through the year on the works that you’re writing yourself.
[Howard] Just to be perfectly clear, Arkady Martine’s Memory Called Empire does a bazillion things well, including worldbuilding. We’re focusing on the worldbuilding. Don’t go thinking that it doesn’t have amazing voice, or amazing characterization, or brilliantly executed tension. All of the stories that we picked could have served as examples for any of the topics that we covered. We just picked the ones that we did because, to us, that’s what seems to fit.
[DongWon] Trying to pick titles that fit the topics was incredibly difficult.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Right? Like…
[Erin] I was going to say, one of my favorite things was our little [tetra see] trying to figure out…
[DongWon] Oh, my God.
[Erin] Well, this could be this, but also that.
[DongWon] Yeah. Howard’s exactly right, some of these move from category to category. Right? Where we were, like, okay. Maybe we should do Fifth Season for voice or tension or all these different things, and ended up settling on structure and sort of why we picked one versus another is maybe slightly arbitrary. There are certain focuses. Time War is a very voice-y book, so it felt like it fit really well there, even though the structure of it is also really fascinating, the character work is fascinating. So, don’t take any of these as being completely silo, but it was what have we really loved, what’s in the genre that’s exciting right now, that does at least address in a core way one of these topics.
[Dan] So, it’s worth pointing out as well that these kind of close reading series are very specific. Talking about worldbuilding with A Memory Called Empire, it is not a broad and generic talk about worldbuilding in general, it is how did Arkady Martine use worldbuilding in this book for this purpose. The same thing with voice in Time War, and all of the other series that we’re doing. I think that that actually ended up, at least for me, being a lot more interesting than trying to cover all of worldbuilding in 6 episodes.
[DongWon] One thing I really loved about this project was… You heard us do deep dives before. We’ve gone in depth on projects, but those have always been our own projects. Those tend to be from a holistic angle of talking about one of Mary Robinette’s books, or, all last year, you heard us go through Erin’s short stories, Howard’s last couple volumes, all these different things. So, being able to focus in a really laserlike way on a single topic on a single book, using a handful of lines or quotes from passages, really let us dig into the topic in a really mechanical way that, for me, at least, was one of the most fun I’ve ever had on this show.
[Howard] You say dig. 30 years ago… The math gets fuzzy… When I was studying music history and form and analysis, one of the things that are professor said was, “Imagine yourself as a… You want to find out what’s under the ground. Do you want to dig a thousand one foot holes or one thousand foot hole?” Then he said, “For our purposes in this class, we’re going to dig only ten 10 foot holes and then one 900 foot hole. We’re going to do a little survey work, and then we’re going to drill way down on one thing. In the past here with Writing Excuses, a lot of times, we’ve taken the… A 100 ten foot hole approach. Now we’re going mining.
[Erin] Actually, I think this is… We’re about to go to a break. When we come back, I want to talk about how do you do close reading well. Because we’ve been talking about it, I want to make sure that you’re prepped for what you need to do or what you might want to do when we start this series.
[Dan] Hi. This week, our thing of the week is a role-playing game called Shinobigami. This is a role-playing game written and published in Japan, translated into English. One of the reasons I love it and the reason I’m recommending it is because it is so interesting to see a role-playing game from a completely different culture. One of the things that stands out as different, in Western role-playing games, we tend to avoid any kind of player versus player conflict or combat. This game is entirely about player versus player combat. As the name implies, Shinobigami, everyone is a ninja of some kind in modern Japan, and you are fighting each other. Trying to accomplish secret quests or secret missions at the expense of the other players. It’s a lot of fun, it’s way different from what you may have ever played before. It’s great. Check it out. That again is called Shinobigami.
[Erin] So, how do you close read? What does this mean?
[DongWon] I wanted to toss this one to you, actually, because…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] You’re the one who, among all of us, is the one who’s actively teaching in a classroom environment. Right? You’re teaching writing to students. Do you use these techniques? Do you do close reading examples in class, or… How does that structure work for you?
[Erin] Just when I thought I’d gotten away with it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] So, I do use… A lot of what we do, what I do when I teach is to give the students let’s all read this story, let’s all read this book. So that we all have a common thing we’re talking about. I find it to be very helpful because when you want to give an example later, when you’re reading somebody else’s story and you’re like, “Oh. Oh. I really like the way you built tension like…” And you reach for an example, if everyone is speaking the same language and everyone has read the same story, we can make those references really quickly. It basically creates a little environment, a little community for the classroom, which we’re going to kind of replicate here where everyone’s speaking the same language, everyone knows what we’re talking about, and therefore it makes it just so much easier to reference things and talk about craft.
[Dan] Well, not just easier. But it allows us to go, as Howard’s metaphor was saying, much deeper than we normally would because we don’t have to cover a lot of the basic stuff. We don’t have to start each sentence by saying, “Well. In How to Lose the Time War, we…” Because that’s understood. We have more time to get into the real meat of each of the stories.
[Howard] For me, the secret to close reading was opening the book with the question already in mind for me. The question might have been when do… When does the… It’s a very specific, very detailed very 400 level question. When does the likability slider for characters move in this book? I would just ask myself that question before I started reading. I would find phrases and it would resonate with me and I’d realize, “Oh, that’s where that thing happens.”
[Mary Robinette] So, the way I often approach it, because I will often do close readings when I’m trying to learn a new technique. So I brought some of that to this, when we were working on this project, that I will… I’ll go ahead and just read it for funsies. With a question in mind. But then I go back and I kind of open it a little at random or 2 things that I remember, but I think, “Okay. I want to go through and I want to look for…” Say, with Time War. I want to go through it and look for places where they’re using cadence, where they’re using the rhythm of the language. So I’ll skim through the book, looking for an example of that. Then, this part is for me really important, I will read the whole page, I will look at the context of how that thing is being used. Because none of these examples, you’re going to hear us read an isolated sentence, but none of these sentences exist in isolation and the connective tissue is the part that’s really, really fun. So it’s quite possible for you to just read the book for funsies. Then, you’ll hear us say a sentence, and you go find that sentence in the book, and just read the stuff around it. It’s also possible for you to not read the book, wait for us to say something, and just go read it and be like, “Well, I don’t have anything else, but I can see how even on this page, this technique is working.” It’ll be techniques like pitch… No, not pitch. It’ll be techniques like cadence, or something like sentence structure, word choice…
[DongWon] Punctuation.
[Mary Robinette] Punctuation. Or, when we get into talking about character, we’re talking about things like ability or role and really unpacking those that you can look at in context, to see how they work, and how they work over a span of pages.
[DongWon] One thing for me, there’s a hazard of my job where I spend so much time reading manuscripts. Right? Reading client work, going over drafts, editing, that sometimes it can get a little mechanical for me. Where I end up so in the weeds, and kind of like, “Oh, I’ve got to get through X number of manuscripts by the end of this month, to stay on top of things.” So, being able to do this, where we got to dig into these books and dig into certain passages in a very specific way, kind of really reminded me how much I love writing. Like, there was such a joyful conversation to be like, “Oh, it is so cool that in this paragraph they did this. Look how they did this thing, and how that’s going to have consequences later,” and, I hope that that also works for some of our audience, too, that sometimes when you’re writing, it can be easy to lose sight of what matters. This is a way to sort of reconnect with the joy of writing and reading and experiencing great fiction.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We didn’t want to call this book club, but in some ways…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It’s kind of like…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Being in a book club with the entire Writing Excuses audience. In fact, this is also a good time to let you know that our Patreon has a Discord attached to it. If you want to come in, the Discord is brand-new. But, if you want to come in and yell about these books with people who have also read them, we have a space for you to do that.
[Howard] I’d just like to put a pin in the fact that coming up with the term close reading…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] As opposed to book club was way more painful for me than picking the books.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Picking the books is easy. But coming up with a 2 word name, that’s misery.
[Erin] Yes. I would say, going back to the idea of the joy of the reading, like, I love the idea of like reading with a question in mind or really being very intentional about it. But I’ll be honest, like when I give my students things to read, I’m not asking them to do much other than read it. Then, when we come back in class, we ask questions that get to why it’s working. So, something I like to do sometimes when I’m reading a book is read it, and then think, what are the 3 things I would tell someone about this book that I either loved or hated. Because, look, you may be like these are the worst 5 books that we have… I have ever read. I hate them all. I hope not, because we enjoy them. But you learn something either way. You learn something… It’s like you learn something from the people you dislike, just like you learn something from the people you like.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled]
[Erin] About the way you relate.
[DongWon] More from a book that you hate then you will from a book that you love. Because you can sort of see in contrast the things that they are doing that you don’t like, but you can start to understand the techniques as a result.
[Erin] Exactly. You can ask yourself why. So, if it’s the 3 things you love or hate, it’s, well, I hated the character. Well, why did I hate that character? Usually, it’s like something they did, or something that happened in the text. Then you can say, “When did I know that happened?” Like, if I hated them because of the fact that they stabbed 6 kittens, when did that happen? What was it about that kitten stabbing that like, really made it horrible. Sorry, kittens.
[Dan] Made it so different from my other kitten stabbings that I loved in the past?
[Mary Robinette] A John Cleaver book.
[Howard] Being able to ask yourself and come up with an answer why you don’t like something is… That’s an exciting ride. I well remember the movie Legion which a lot of other people thought I would love. But the loser guy who gets everybody killed is named Howard…
[Laughter]
[Howard] And his wife is named Sandra. That’s a dumb movie, I hate it.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Another really valuable thing on this topic is if you hate one of these books, this gives you the opportunity to see what other people saw in it that you didn’t. It’s okay to hate books. I hate so many books. But, as an author, especially as a working author who wants to make this a career, it’s important to understand what the market likes, what people who are not me are looking for in a book.
[Erin] It’s also great to see the variety of opinions. Because some people will love it, some people hate it, some people will be in different. I think sometimes as writers we think there’s some objective measure that this book is good and everyone loves it and this book is bad and everybody hates it. But any book, like the book that you love the most, is somebody else’s least favorite. The book that your least favorite is somebody’s most loved book. I think seeing that variety of opinion helps you realize that, like, in your own work, you don’t have to meet some mythical standard. You just have to try to use these techniques that were talking about as best you can, and put it out there, and find the audience of people who will love your work.
[DongWon] All that said, we hope you love these books. Because we love these books.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] It’s okay if you don’t. We get it.
[Dan] I doubt they hate them.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] But one of the reasons we hope you love it is we’re going to also be talking to some of the creators behind these books and doing interview episodes at the end of each series where we get to interrogate them. Hey, how did you do this thing? How did you think about these things? I am so looking forward to those conversations, because I think it’s going to be really fun to pick the brains of some of the most talented people in this space and talk about these big ideas.
[Howard] These authors will be more excited about those episodes if we use the word interview instead of interrogate.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] No. Interrogate the writers.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] What I’m looking forward to with those is where we say, “Oh, I really love it when you did XYZ,” and they’re like, “Hmm, I’m glad you noticed that.”
[Laughter]
[Howard] I am so happy that work for you.
[Erin] Why did you… Why do you think I did…
[DongWon] I think it’s something you might have been on the other end of once or twice.
[Mary Robinette] One thing that I’m going to say, this is not your homework, but just something I want you to think about as you are listening to these episodes all year is that we’re going to be citing examples. But the examples that we cite are not the only examples of each technique in the book. So, one of the ways that you can enhance your own understanding is go and find your own examples. Then, find someone to share that example with. Because that’s going to really help you cement the techniques that we’re talking about in your own brain. Then you can take it to your work and see if you can use it there. Which is what we’re really hoping. That’s the reason we’re doing these close reads is we’re hoping it will help you level up your own writing.
[Erin] That sounded like the homework. But it wasn’t!
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It was not. I know. That’s why I said this is not the homework, but…
[Erin] That was great. I wish I’d come up with that.
[Erin] This homework is, like, super complicated, too. So… One thing, we talked about these 5 things that we’re going to be thinking about. Voice, worldbuilding, character, tension, and structure. So, I want you to take a scene from a work that you love or from your own work and create… Pick a different crayon color or colored pencil for each of those things and underline where you think it’s happening within the scene. So, underline all the cool voice places, underline all the different worldbuilding in a different color, and just take a look at the pallette that you’ve created for yourself. Because we’re going to be talking about all of these things, and they can be found in all of these works. It’s a good way to remind yourself of all the ways that these techniques come together on the page.
[DongWon] I love that so much.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go read.
[Howard] Hey, podcast lovers. Do you know that you can upgrade your experience here with our ad-free tier on Patreon? Head over to patreon.com/writingexcuses to enjoy an ad-free oasis as well as access to our virtual Discord community where you can talk to your fellow writers.
]]>-How do you build traditions and rituals in your fictional world (choosing what becomes a tradition or ritual and what doesn’t)?
-How can you use rituals or traditions to advance a novel’s plot, give characters more depth, and create conflict?
-What are the pitfalls to avoid (depiction of closed practices, over-ritualizing common traditions)?
Homework:
Pick a ritual or tradition that you are very accustomed to and make it the center of a fictional scene. You can change its meaning or impact, but the content of the tradition should stay the same.
Thing of the Week:
Shanghai Immortal by AY Chao (especially the audiobook version)
Liner Notes:
This podcast episode idea was inspired by ReaderCon 2023, where Erin Roberts was a panelist.
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Fonda Lee and Mahtab Narsimhan. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Key Points: Rituals, rites, and traditions: making beliefs tangible as practices. Building the rites helps you discover a little about your characters, about what they believe, and helps make them more real. Incorporating them into our fiction makes characters more believable, realistic, vibrant, and tangible. Births, weddings, and funerals are what make a culture work. Do you work from culture to tradition or ritual, or start with the ritual, and then work out the culture? Start with an existing culture, but add elements and tweak it. Start with the premise of the story world, and then think about the implications of that. When you’re working from a real culture, what can you take or not? Be respectful. Don’t dip your quill in somebody’s blood. Use characters, individuals, who are resistant, lack understanding, or are trying to understand as buffers for the culture. Rituals, rites, and traditions can do so much heavy lifting for you. One takeaway? Show how communities come together. Remember that rituals, rites, and traditions reflect how people relate to the world, community, and each other. During revision, go for depth, and work out the rituals. Remember that rituals and traditions are not just something that other cultures have, we have them too!
[Season 19, Episode 09]
[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 09]
[Erin] This is Writing Excuses. Rituals, rites, and traditions.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Fonda] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Mahtab] And we’re not that smart.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Fonda] I’m Fonda.
[Mahtab] I’m Mahtab.
[Erin] We are going to talk today about tradition. We’re going to be talking about what happens when you take beliefs in a world and make them tangible by turning them into practices. This happens in our real world, and it often happens in our fiction. I’m wondering how do you all do that? Have you done it, are you interested in doing it, how do you tackle it?
[Mahtab] It would absolutely… I think it is definitely a very important, I would say, a part for worldbuilding, because that is how people… Like, first of all, when you develop rites or any kind of rituals, which is… And I’m talking my experience when… Which is what I did for my novel Valley of the Rats. I built up these traditions and these rites that the people in the village go through. That was actually how I discovered a little bit more about my people. It’s what they believe. It makes them a little bit more real. And, it was an aspect of worldbuilding, which made it really interesting.
[Fonda] Same. I love incorporating rituals, rites, and traditions into my worldbuilding. If you think about our own daily lives, we go through the world performing a whole series of rituals, rites, and traditions, many of which we’re somewhat unconscious of. Right? Everything from our day-to-day practices of holding the door open for another person to the order in which your family members talk when they’re gathered together to big scale traditions like our holidays and our societal values and principles, like, those all feed so much into our day-to-day lives that, to the extent that we can incorporate them into our fiction, it will make our fictional worlds that much more believable, that much more realistic, and that much more vibrant and tangible.
[DongWon] Yeah. One of my clients once told me, Kate [Ballahide] said that the 3 things you need to define a culture are births, weddings, and funerals. If you have those 3 parts of a person’s life, you have a strong understanding of what makes that culture work. Because, when I think about worldbuilding, I think less about material physical things that make up that world and more about what are the rules that define this society. Right? That’s important to people, what are the taboos that you can’t break. So those 3 points of how do we treat a new life, how do we celebrate 2 people coming together, and then how do we honor a loss, I think are the things that we really communicate to the audience this is what our characters value, this is what they aspire to, and this is what they’re afraid of.
[Erin] I’m curious, does it come that way for all of you? Like, is it something where you decide here’s the value, here’s the culture, I’m going to create this tradition or ritual? Or are you like, I want to make this really cool ritual, I will figure out the culture that would make it happen? Is it always the same way for you, or one or the other?
[Mahtab] I’m always… Because a lot of my stories have been set in India, I take that… The culture that’s currently exists as the starting point, but then I will try and add a few fantasy elements, or I’ll try and switch it around a little bit, and go against people’s norms of beliefs and just try and make it a little bit more interesting. And, because I love scary stories and horror, I will add a horror element to it as well, which is… Most people are not going to, but the main thing is that I want some kind of a reaction from the reader. So I will take something that’s existing, and then I try and tweak it. I think sometimes, you know what, when you take something existing and tweak it, not only are you showing differences between what people believe, but sometimes you can even show similarities between different cultures or different beliefs and different people. So it’s a good way to play with things and play with the character and the world, and I love doing that.
[Fonda] I start with the premise of my story world. Which, for me, involves some speculative element. Then I go through the thought exercise of what are the implications that that entails for the society and for the individuals that navigate that world. So, the example of the Green Bone saga, I have a coded East Asian society, but there’s a speculative element that doesn’t exist in our world. Which is this magic jade that confers powers. So an entire society has been developed around this one resource and there’s a whole culture that is grounded around the practices and traditions and beliefs surrounding this speculative element that I’ve introduced into the world. So I couldn’t just go and wholesale take an East Asian culture and then transplant it into my story world, I had to create this hybridized world where I was cueing certain rites and rituals and traditions that readers would pick up on as being East Asian in origin, but then just weaving it together with my own imagination based around what kind of world I wanted to create around the speculative element. The more that you can get down to that microlevel of even the things like the idioms, the sayings that people have, the day-to-day interactions that they have around the speculative element and the rich… Religious aspects, the spiritual aspects, social aspects… Hopefully, if I’ve done my job right, it will feel like a very grounded place that’s been built from the starting principles.
[Erin] I feel like you’ve hit on two really, really exciting things. One is, I think, a question people often have when they’re working from something that’s real. They’re working from a real culture, is, what can you take and when can you not take? This is something that I’ve thought about. I’ve used rituals that come from basically conjure, like, folk magic, that come from, like, a black American folk magic tradition, and I don’t want to depict closed practices, which are basically practices only meant, rituals and rites that are only meant to be done by the group themselves. If you’re not in the group, like, don’t do it, and you’ll know if you are. I think, number one, I don’t want to be disrespectful. Number 2, I actually don’t want a bunch of folk magic practitioners mad at me. They were like… That’s not a good group to have on your bad side. So I think that is something that I thought about, is, what is the essence of what’s going through? I think that’s what you’re talking about. What is the core value that is underlying that tradition, which is the thing that that tradition is meant to do. Or what was it originally developed to do. Then, how can I develop it in a different way? What if this same objective was expressed differently? What if it had a different practice, but the same underlying goal? So I think a lot about that in, like, trying to avoid doing things that just seem like I’m kind of using somebody else’s closed practices or, as I like to say it sometimes, dipping my quill in somebody’s blood. Which is not a good thing unless that’s what your story is about.
[DongWon] That is such an evocative image. I love that.
[Yeah. Chuckles.]
[Mahtab] I think one thing that we must remember whenever you do… Whenever you’re writing something like this, is be respectful. Like, make sure that if, one, there is no misappropriation of someone else’s traditions or practices. Use your own, something that you have, but whatever you change it into, whatever you tweak it into, make sure that it’s respectful. If there is a fantasy element or a speculative element to it, that’s fine, but try to make sure that you’re not offending anyone by just making it so egregious that it’s like it’s wow, but it’s really, really bad. So, just respect. Keep that in mind.
[DongWon] I think one of the things that can really help there is, especially in fiction, we’re seeing these rites and rituals and traditions through an individual’s perspective. Individuals have an imperfect understanding of the traditions that they’re embedded in. Right? Nobody fully understands why it is that we do this ritual on this day, or why we honor this tradition in this way. So, having a character that is resistant to it, or doesn’t quite understand it, or is trying to understand, I think are great ways to build a little bit of a buffer between the culture that you are referencing, that blood that you’re dipping your quill in, and what’s actually on the page. When you grounded in someone’s specific experience, I think that does a lot to add that texture and that subjectivity that makes it feel less like you’re just picking something up wholesale from someone else’s culture, even from your own culture. Right? So, just remember that as people are experiencing all of these things that we’re talking about, you’re writing it through characters, you’re writing through individuals embedded in that culture. I don’t know, my experience is a lot of, like, trying to understand how my culture works, both as an American and coming with… My parents coming from Korea, there’s, like, all these different things that I’m trying to puzzle out all the time and trying to get them to fit together. So I think letting that be felt in how your characters experience these moments can be a really thrilling way to go about it.
[Fonda] One of the things I love about incorporating rituals, rites, and traditions in fiction, in worldbuilding, is that they do so much heavy lifting for you. You don’t need to have pages of exposition when you can show your characters living their day-to-day lives and going through the traditions of their society. It just provides this natural in, where you can very seamlessly include the exposition that you need to. For example, if I was to write a story set in the United States of America and it was for an extraterrestrial audience, rather than explaining the origin of this country and how it came to be and etc., etc., I could have my characters celebrate the 4th of July. There’s an automatic in for me to, through the traditions of the society, give a bit of background on where… The origins of the society and how people celebrate it. So, think about that when you are doing your world building. Can you have, as much as possible, these grounded day-to-day experiences of your characters that give you this automatic in, where you don’t have to make an awkward cut to explain something about your world?
[Erin] Which is a perfect time for a tradition of our own, to pause, so that we can have our little break, and so, traditionally, this would be the time for the thing of the week.
[Fonda] Our thing of the week is a debut fantasy novel called Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao. It is a very action-packed, funny book, that takes place in a Chinese underworld that resembles 1920s Shanghai, and I especially recommend the audiobook that was narrated by Mei Mei Macleod. The reason why I’ve chosen this is the book of the week is because it is a great example of how one author took rituals, rites, and traditions from our own world and shaped it for a fantasy world. For example, in our world in Chinese tradition, there is the ritual of burning offerings for ancestors, and in Shanghai Immortal, some of these offerings show up in the underworld in very unexpected ways. So, like the lucky ro… Joss roosters that get burned in our world end up just over populating the underworld…
[Chuckles]
[Fonda] And there are roosters running amok everywhere and there’s a disaster. Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao.
[Erin] Now that we’re back from the break, I’m going to break from tradition in a little bit, and actually, we’re going to do a quick wrap up section because we are on a ship right now and they are telling us that they want this room for secret rituals of their own. So, if you… We can go down, starting with DongWon, what is the one thing that you wish people knew when they were writing rites or rituals or traditions? One take away, what would it be?
[DongWon] [garbled]
[chuckles]
[DongWon] I think the thing that I wish people would really bring to it is really showing how communities come together. I think these are… The opportunities to make your characters feel embedded in a specific place and a specific group of people. Often times, when we see these scenes, it feels very individualistic, we’re so focused on that person’s emotions emotional experience going through it. But a thing that I often feel is missing in stories is a greater sense of a wider cast of characters, even if we’re not seeing them all as individual POVs. That feeling of community, that feeling of connections, I think these ritual moments are such an ideal place to get that in and, often times, people can be very focused on the isolating experience of the character in those moments.
[Fonda] I would say that remember that at its core, rituals, rites, and traditions reflect how people relate to the world, to the community, and to each other. When you incorporate them into your fiction, they are an incredible opportunity to not just world build on a macro level, but also on a micro level, and weave in really tangible details, like food. Food is a part of so many of our rites and rituals and traditions. Dress. Is there special dress associated with certain occasions and traditions in your society? Money. Entertainment. So many of your world building blocks can be put together through the lens of the rites, rituals, and traditions of your fictional world.
[Mahtab] What I would say is try… And the first time that you’re writing it, you may not know how many or what kinds of rites or rituals or traditions you want to, but I think during the revision is when you really need to figure out if you have too many strands, too many things going on, how you can roll a couple of things into one another and deepen your plot and deepen some of the things that you put in there, rather than widen it. Just give it some… Like, I would say during the revision process, go for depth, and really work those traditions out or rituals out, whatever it is that you want to work on. But narrow them down and just really work them out. I hope I’m making myself clear.
[Erin] You are. What I would say is to remember that rituals and traditions are not just things that other people have. I think sometimes we can think of rituals as that is a different culture has this ritual or tradition, but I’m just doing things because I am. But there are so many traditions that we have, like holding the door open or moving to the other side of the elevator or even blowing out the candles on a birthday cake is a ritual that exists in the birthday celebrations in America that may not exist everywhere.
[Erin] With that, I have the homework for you. Which is to pick a ritual or tradition that you are accustomed to or familiar with and make it the center of a fictional scene. You can change its meaning, you can change its impact, but keep the actual actions of the ritual or tradition the same.
[DongWon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you’ve applied the stuff we’ve been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
]]>First off, a reminder that your agent, your editor, and you are all on the same team! They are all trying to make the same book (your book!) a better book. Whether you’ve published before or are just starting your first short story, we are so excited for you to dive into this episode.
For our final episode in our three-part series on revising your NaNoWriMo manuscript—or any other large writing project—we are diving into how to work with an editor! We wanted to show you a peek behind the curtain that is publishing and editing– what does this relationship look like? How do you handle differences, conflicts, and priorities? What IS an edit letter?
Our guest for this series has been the inimitable editor Ali Fisher, who works at Tor. Thank you, Ali, for your advice, stories, and time!
Homework:
Take a work written by someone else (anyone else!) and come up with three questions you have for the author that would help them clarify their intention in the text.
This could be a movie you’ve seen, a project you’re beta-reading for a friend, or a short story you’ve stumbled upon.
Then, apply these questions to your own work in progress!
Thing of the Week from Ali:
Ali has two podcast recommendations for you!
Oh These, Those Stars of Space!
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Ali Fisher. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Join Our Writing Community!
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Key Points: Working with an editor or agent! First, your agent and your editor and you are all on the same team, trying to make your book a better book. What’s an edit letter? There are stages of editing, starting with developmental or structural. This tends to be broad structural questions. E.g. this character arc doesn’t seem to line up with the rest of the book. These are often phone conversations, not letters. Edit letters should be a compliment sandwich, starting with what is good about the book, and ending with more things that are working. When the editor asks you to do something, can you say no? Absolutely. That helps the editor or agent know what is important to you. When the editor or agent offers a suggestion, they are asking whether you can come up with a better idea. Sometimes they offer ideas that they know are not good ideas, to help you react and find a direction. Suggestions identify that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Ask questions! Sometimes “no, this is a terrible idea” shows that you are tired, and it’s time to take a break. Editors and agents are people, too. Alignment comes with asking questions.
[Season 19, Episode 08]
[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 08]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A mini-series on revision, with Ali Fisher. Working with an Editor.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Ali] And I’m Ali Fisher.
[Mary Robinette] Now, I am very excited about this episode. Let me tell you what we are about to do. I’m about to ask DongWon and Ali all of the questions that I wish I’d been able to ask an agent and an editor before I had published a novel.
[Ali] [garbled]
[laughter]
[DongWon] We are so excited to answer these questions. I wish I could transmit from my brain all the information I know about how this process goes to every writer in the world. Because that’s the whole point of this. We want them to feel comfortable coming into the process and see how it’s not scary. Even though it is difficult at times, that we’re all pulling for the same goal at the end of the day.
[Ali] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. I will say, one of the things that’s straight off the bat, dear writers, that you should know is that your agent and your editor and you are all on the same team.
[Ali] Yes. It’s true.
[Mary Robinette] You’re all trying to make the same book a better book.
[Ali] Amen.
[DongWon] One of the reasons I wanted to have Ali on in particular is that we are working together on several projects at this point.
[Ali] Yes.
[DongWon] Having a sense of Ali’s perspective, but also so that you guys can hear a little bit of the working relationship between an agent and an editor working together. I think there is this idea that is the agent versus the publishing house sometimes, and that it’s the author versus everybody sometimes. The more that, I think, if we can find ways that… To be clear, that we are all trying to accomplish the same thing. That doesn’t mean that conflict doesn’t happen, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems. But at least we’re starting from a place of understanding and conversation and alignment in what our goals are.
[Ali] Yeah. Yeah. Which doesn’t mean that your agent won’t advocate for you when needed and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be conflicts of sort of ideas or like [garbled thoughts on] campaign, etc. Like, that’s just smart people working together. But when it comes to the book itself and especially… I don’t know, overall, I think, there’s no question that success of the book is a win win win for the whole team.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yes. So, writers, you’ve probably heard that at some point you’re going to get something that’s called an edit letter. What’s an edit letter?
[Chuckles]
[Ali] Never heard of it. Sounds suspicious.
[DongWon] Sounds like to me…
[Ali] Well, DongWon, do you want to start with the types of, like letters or calls you do before I do?
[DongWon] Yes. So, I think, there are different stages of editing. Right? What we sort of think of as developmental or structural. Then, sort of like editing. What I tend to do is very much on the developmental stages. I love to be involved early in a project. Or when a submission comes to me, and it’s a debut, then I’m doing a lot of structural edits working with the editor to make sure that the book is in a great place before we send it off to the publishing house. So I’m asking… I tend to be asking incredibly broad questions, like big structural questions, word count questions, of, like, can we add 20,000 words? Can we cut 30,000 words? Right? Like, that’s scale of question tends to be what I’m doing. So, often times…
[Mary Robinette] Can you give some examples of what a structural question is?
[DongWon] Yeah. So, a structural question can be as much like, “Hey, I’m not sure this arc for this character is lining up with sort of the central themes of the book.” Right? I’m being a little bit abstract. I’d say it more specifically of like, “This character’s situation feels really disconnected with our protagonist’s situation. Can we make that feel more connected, or should this be here?” Like, what are… What was your intention with writing this character into this book, and how are they tying into the rest of it? So that might be a structural question I’m asking that could affect an entire character arc, which is… A solution set could be rewriting that character’s entire central conflict so that there arc ties more closely in. It could be cutting that character entirely, because we all realize that they’re extraneous and were vestigial from a previous draft. Or it could be changing the central thematics of the book, because that character is actually really important and their arc is more important than the protagonist’s arc, and we need to make those pull into alignment in a different way. Right? So, when I’m asking these structural questions, they are kind of that big and that broad about, like, “Hey, the pacing doesn’t feel great here. The act two turn, the big reveal, isn’t landing in an exciting way. This character isn’t feeling like they’re exciting and connected. This romance isn’t working right, these 2 characters don’t come together in the way that I kind of wish.” So that’s kind of what I’m doing at that stage. Because they’re such big broad questions, and because I really do frame them as questions, not like, “Hey, do XYZ,” I tend to do that is a conversation. So I’ll get on the phone with the author. I know, everyone’s dreaded phone call. I will have edit conversations that are 2, 3, 4 hours, sometimes. As we’re really just talking through the book, like, what were you trying to do, what… How does this work? What are possible solutions? For me, those are some of the most exciting, most fun conversations I have. They’re very difficult and stressful for me, and for the author, but in ways that I think are really energizing when they go well.
[Ali] Yes. So, not dis-similarly, by the time it comes to me, normally, it’s in more polished condition or it is… It fits more firmly within the expectations of the types of things that the house that I work at publishes. Right? So, like, it tends to be in a state that is quite recognizable to me. Then I do a lot of the same things. I’m a different reader, different eye… A different sense of… Understanding about where the author’s coming from or, probably a lot less understanding of where the authors coming from, and probably just a lot more sort of like generic reader experience. I’ll ask a lot of the same questions, very high structural things. You mentioned worst-case scenario twice, and we never saw it. Which made me want to see it. So, something like that. Right? Then, all the way down to sometimes through sentence level style questions or suggestions, mostly for matching things up or, like smoothness, that kind of thing. Just, for anyone out there who’s curious, I am an acquisitions editor and an editor, and not a copy editor. Bless them, because I am not nearly qualified enough to make sure a book could actually go to print. But, so a lot of the same things, a lot of the same questions. So brace yourselves, this is also a part where, I think, the agent turns into a little more handholding as someone’s going back into…
[Chuckles]
[Ali] Revisions after they felt like we just finished, and then we went out and the book sold, it’s so exciting. So, sometimes that happens. Similarly, I also… I love and I offer a phone call as often as I possibly can because an edit letter, even though those are really fantastic, and I’ve also obviously found that authors with audio processing issues or who just need the time… They just need to read it, they need to think about it, and otherwise it’s just not a free flow conversation. Happy to write it down. But if we get the chance to have that conversation, you avoid sort of the asynchronous issue of my assumptions running through the entire thing, whereas there can be a quick, like, “Oh, I actually intended this,” and then that changes a lot of my responses. Right? So, I guess all I’m doing is sort of pitching the concept of if you can muster the confidence or the desire to get on the phone with an agent or an editor, I do think it’s a really helpful thing. If you can’t, that’s totally fine too. Edit letters themselves look really different, editor to editor, and, for me, book to book. Sometimes it is… I go through… I have big chunks that’s like character A, character B. I’ll have worldbuilding questions. Then, sometimes, they’re 2 pages long, and it’s like bullet points of, like, this is where I cried, this is… My one big question is this. And can you add like a whole section where she’s getting from here to here? Because I was desperate to know more.
[DongWon] Yeah. Sometimes they can be really brief, like you were saying, like, one or 2 pages. I think my longest edit letter, back when I was at Orbit, I think was 25 pages.
[Ali] Whoa!
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] I think sometimes…
[Ali] Oh, my God.
[DongWon] Hey, I know people who wrote longer letters. You ask [garbled] sometime what the longest letter she wrote was…
[Ali] No.
[DongWon] So, sometimes, like having… Sometimes you just need to dig into lots of detailed things. Especially if you’re going chronologically through the book, of, like, chapter 1, Chapter 2, like, breaking things down. Depending on the writer and what they need and what kind of conversation and what kind of changes you’re suggesting, sometimes, a lot of details was called for. But the long edit letter, I think, is very rare, don’t let that scare you. That was something that was produced in conversation with the author, I didn’t just spring that on them.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] But one thing that I wanted to point out about edit letters that’s really important is what I think of as the compliment sandwich. Right? Where you start your letter with talking about the things that are good about the book, and hopefully you end the letter also with reminding the author, here are the things that I liked about the book, here’s the things that are working. Right? I think… I see sometimes younger editors, newer editors, skip that. I think that’s a huge mistake to do so. Because it’s not just… We’re not just like blowing smoke and we’re not just complimenting you for no reason. It is… Kind of going back to what we were talking about last episode, it’s showing that we are in alignment about what your intentions with the book are. If I’m telling you, here are the things that I think are working, and you read that and say, “That isn’t the book I wrote. That’s not what I was trying to do.” Then nothing in between that compliment section matters anymore. Right? Because I don’t understand what you were trying to accomplish, so all of my critiques aren’t going to land now. Right? So those alignment sections are… Perhaps as important if not more important than all the critical stuff in between. It’s not just to make you feel good. It is to make sure that I understand as deeply as I can what it was you were trying to accomplish, so I can help you write the book that you meant to write. To make it the best version of the thing that you want it to. So don’t skim those compliments, don’t cut them, don’t not give them, if you’re an editor yourself. I think they’re really, really important and really interesting, and very fruitful conversations come out of them.
[Ali] Also, that’s… I think I flagged this in our last episode, so we share credit, but it’s also where I say, like, please don’t cut this. Like, I love this. Like, I might be telling you to make some sweeping changes, and this could get caught up in that, and I don’t want to lose it. So those are genuinely… I find those very important.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. As a writer, I can also say, that now I recognize that those compliments are some of the most useful things, because it is telling you what I’m doing well, and, as writers, we are spectacularly bad at understanding what our strengths are, because those strengths are usually things that come easy to us, so we don’t acknowledge them as being valuable. Having someone else recognize that allows us to be like, “Oh. Okay. So that’s something I’m good at. I should look for more places where I can do the thing that I’m good at.”
[Ali] Yeah. It… A lot of parts of the process to focus on what could be improved or, like, what opportunities are there that aren’t here yet. So it’s very important to focus on the things that are there and that are working and can be expanded, like you’re saying.
[DongWon] Yeah. Again, flagging the things that, like, this is great. This made me cry. This made me laugh. Like, as you go through the manuscript, are just really helpful, because getting… Somebody telling you the stuff that doesn’t work about your book over and over again for a long period of time can be quite demoralizing. We understand that. So I encourage any people who are trying to be editors or agents out there to really remember that. Even [garbled] just like have your little notes of like, “Yay, thumbs up,” like, this part is so important just to make the whole process go more smoothly. Whenever I see an edit letter that’s like too harsh and sometimes even sarcastic a little bit, it’s like, “Uhh, this is not working, we can’t do this. We gotta switch up how we’re approaching this writer.”
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, when we come back, I will ask my 2nd question.
[Laughter]
[Ali] My things of the week are 2 incredible podcasts. One is called Rude Tales of Magic, and the other is called Oh These, Those Stars of Space. Both of these podcasts just so happen to feature me regularly on almost every episode. So if you like the sound of this, what’s happening now, I simply must recommend Rude Tales of Magic and Oh These, Those Stars of Space. Rude Tales of Magic is mostly fantasy. It’s a collaborative live-action role-playing…
[DongWon] I believe the phrase I said earlier is that it’s a collaborative improvised storyteller podcast that is…
[Ali] Yes.
[DongWon] Roughly using the rules of Dungeons & Dragons to lightly flavor the type of story that you’re telling.
[Ali] Correct. Then, Oh These, Those Stars of Space is the science-fiction version of that. Also, we have so much great merch. Go to rudetalesofmagic.com/store, get a sweatshirt, and don’t listen. It’s entirely up to you. The sweatshirts are so soft. I’m wearing one right now. Thank you.
[DongWon] I can attest to the quality of the merch. As someone who owns some. I’m a huge fan of the podcasts myself. As you can tell, as I’m stepping all over Ali’s pitch here. But, Rude Tales in particular is a really wonderful podcast if you like things like critical roll and Dimension 20, then absolutely you should check out Rude Tales. It is much more irreverent than those, but it is a group of truly hilarious comedians and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
[Ali] Yes. Thank you.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I… As… I’m just going to flagged here for our listeners, even editors can be really bad pitching their own stuff.
[Laughter]
[Ali] What do you mean?
[Chuckles]
[Ali] Yeah.
[DongWon] I promise we’re all better at talking about other people’s stuff…
[Ali] I know.
[DongWon] Then our own stuff.
[Ali] That’s… Other people’s stuff…
[DongWon] That’s why we do what we do.
[Ali] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Anyway. All right. As we come back in, I’m going to ask another question. So, we talked about what the edit letter is. One of the things I just wanted to draw a line under is that a lot of the edit letters that I get and that you all have talked about is really about the editor asking questions rather than giving an answer to the author. It really is about the… A trust between the editor or the agent and the author. But when you’re a new author, you don’t necessarily know that that trust is there, and you don’t know what the rules are. So they’ve asked you a question, they’ve asked if you can add more of this and more of that, can you really say no?
[Ali] [deep breath] I don’t know. What do you think, DongWon?
[Chuckles]
[That’s really tough]
[DongWon] No. Absolutely. Please say no. [Garbled] people say no all the time. You have to say no. It’s your project, you know it better than us. Know what you… This goes back to what I was saying earlier about loving your darlings, know what you can change and what you’re not willing to change. Right? Know what the things are that are untouchable to you. That’s fine. We will work around that, because what we want to know is what do you care about and why have you written the book that you’ve written and how can we make that the best version it can be. Right? So we will constantly be poking at stuff, and you say, “No. Actually, I don’t want to do that.” My best case scenario is I make a suggestion of how to fix something and the author does something completely different. They do answer the question, but they just run off into the distance and come back with something wildly different. That’s always more exciting than whatever stupid idea that I had.
[Chuckles]
[Ali] Yeah. Oh, 100%. I have a piece of text that I put at the beginning of all of the edit letters that I send to new authors that I’m working with. I really hope it gets through. This is what it says. It says, “I’m trusting you to safeguard what makes this story for you. When I offer you suggestions for changes and opportunities for deeper exploration, I’m hoping to initiate your creative process. I fully expect you to come up with better ideas than the examples and suggestions I come up with to illustrate my thinking.” Because that is really how I think of it, which is, when I’m offering a suggestion, or like a directly actionable specific recommendation, I’m really saying, like, “can you think of something better, actually?”
[DongWon] I love that so much.
[Ali] This is kind of what I mean, is, really what I’m trying to say.
[DongWon] There’s a thing that I’ll do, and this sounds worse than it actually is. But there’s a thing that I do sometimes where I will suggest something that I know is not a good idea because… And that the author will also recognize is not a good idea. Because then, they’ll have a reaction to it. Right? When you have a reaction, now you have a direction. Right? I do this a lot with titles most clearly. I’ll just start suggesting the worst titles in the world…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] So that they’ll bounce off of it, and in bouncing off of it, a direction is going to start to emerge, because, like, they keep running in this direction, like, “No, that’s too comedic, it has to be more like this…” Then I’m like, “Okay. Now we have more information that we can start building around.” So, the… When I make a suggestion about an edit, I mean, usually it is sincere of, like, what if we did this, what if we thought about it this way, but really what I’m looking for is a reaction to the suggestion, not an execution of the suggestion.
[Ali] Yes. 100%. Did you see Hannibal? The show?
[DongWon] Not that much of it. Only the first few episodes.
[Ali] Okay. Well, in the first season, there’s an episode where Hannibal commits a murder in the style of a murderer…
[Chuckles]
[Ali] To show Will Graham, like, what it isn’t. Like, what is actually special about that. I think about that all the time. How I’m committing bad murders to show…
[Chuckles]
[Ali] How their murders… This other murderer to try to figure out that’s actually like this.
[DongWon] If you take nothing else away from this episode, please remember that we are the Hannibal to your Will Graham.
[Ali] Yes. That’s all I’m saying.
[Mary Robinette] That’s beautiful, and I’m making notes about being alone in a room with both of you.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But it is… I will say that, as an author, the thing for me is, is that suggestion, for me, it identifies that there is a problem that I need to address, and the suggestion is usually wildly wrong. But the problem is usually one that’s present. So, when I don’t understand why a suggestion has been made, I will go back to the editor and I will ask clarifying questions.
[Ali] Beautiful.
[DongWon] Yes. I think if there’s anything you truly do take a away, not joking this time, is that if you don’t understand what the editor is asking you to do, or if you don’t feel it’s right, just ask questions. Just start a conversation.
[Ali] Yes. Please.
[DongWon] Whether it’s your agent, whether it’s your editor, if you feel that you cannot go to them and have a conversation about what is going well and what’s not going well, then there’s something that needs to be tweaked about that relationship. Because it’s your book at the end of the day, and you should feel empowered to make sure that your writing the book that you want to be writing. That means asking questions, advocating for yourself, advocating for your ideas. If there is something you really care about that they’re really pushing back against, then that should be at least a conversation, if not an adjustment that everyone’s working around what your goal is.
[Ali] Yeah. I remind myself all the time, it’s your name on the cover. Right? Nobody else that you’re working with, their name’s going to be on the cover. So, that’s your… It is your vision, it is your job to safeguard things and to also, like, keep your ears open and be really honest with yourself if something causes friction within you. But that discomfort might settle into a realization of an opportunity. Right? So, sometimes our initial reaction can be really intense, and we thank you for your 3 day waiting period before telling us.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Right. That too.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, I’m going to give writers a quick moment of perspective from some of my experience. And then a tool that’s extremely valuable. The first is that, with my first series, I would hit things that my editor would say, and I’d be like, “No. This is very wrong, and I’m doing this for a reason, I’m going to keep it.” I only did that a couple of times, but without exception… Without exception, my editor was right, there was a problem, and that is a thing that got [garbled] in reviews, that people would say… It would get brought up. So, my editor’s suggestion on how to fix it was the thing that I was objecting to. I didn’t recognize that at the time. But now, when I get a suggestion and I don’t agree with it, I will ask for more clarification, but I will see if I can dig into it and find a way to do something that makes me happy that addresses whatever the problem is. The other piece of that is that sometimes the reason that you are having the no, this is a terrible idea, is just because you’re tired. You’re feeling a little bit defensive, because your baby… Someone has come in and told you that your baby is ugly. So if you hit 3 editor notes in a row that you think are stupid, walk away from the edit letter. Go take a walk. Go do something else, you’re just tired and angry.
[Ali] I mean, clear your vent. Tell them how stupid we are. Get mad. Be… It’s…
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Ali] It’s totally, absolutely appropriate and shows that you give a shit about your book if you’re mad at… Like, suggestions that don’t feel right immediately.
[DongWon] I would encourage you to do that in private.
[Ali] In private.
[DongWon] And not on Twitter or Blue Sky.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Ali] yes.
[DongWon] That is a thing that I don’t recommend you do.
[Ali] Ideally in private. Rage in private. But then come back and then see what still feels bad. Or feels different.
[DongWon] One more thing I just want to point out that may be too obvious to bring up, but editors, agents, are people. Right? There individuals with strengths and weaknesses. Yeah, I know, we’re…
[Questionable]
[DongWon] We’re all just robots and… Yeah, very questionable. But have their own personality quirks, have their own modes of communication, have their own styles. Right? One thing that may be happening if you’re feeling really frustrated is an editor might just have an abrasive style or a style that just doesn’t vibe with you. Sometimes I will get an email from a client being like, “Hey, I got notes from this editor. Can you take a look at them and tell me what’s happening here?” Sometimes the answer is, “Oh, they’re missing XYZ,” or sometimes I’m just like, “They just kind of talk like that, and that is rubbing you the wrong way.” I’ve seen that both go in the too harsh and too nice directions. Right? I’ve seen both send up a flag for the writer. So much of this is matching personality, matching style, matching how we communicate, how we connect. Again, that alignment stuff I’m talking about, this is where it becomes really important. So, sometimes, if your editor has left or you didn’t choose your editor or for whatever reason, you might be stuck with someone for a second that… And you need to find a way to work it out. But other times, it is a question of, like, make sure that you’re working with someone you’re excited to work with. Don’t just be taking the first thing that’s offered to you or the biggest number that was offered to you when you don’t like the person. The connection with your team is so important to making sure that everyone is happy with the end result.
[Mary Robinette] So how do you get that alignment with… Between the writer and the editor on a project? Like, are there tools that are useful to make sure that everyone’s actually on the same page?
[DongWon] I mean, I think it’s asking questions. Right? We kind of keep coming back to the same things in certain ways, but it’s that… The compliment section of the edit letter, not to sum up what’s wrong, but talking about what’s going right. Sometimes it’s taste stuff, right, like sometimes even talking about other books, other movies, and things that you both like can be really useful, because then that gives you a shared language of, like, “Okay, we both love Hannibal. So our series [murder] like, we want it to feel more like Hannibal than we do like Scream.” Right? So having that shorthand of vibes that you both are feeling can be really, really helpful to think about it.
[Ali] Yeah. Even on that… If you have that initial call with an editor who’s interested in your book, you can ask mildly irrelevant questions. Obviously, nothing like to personal or inappropriate, right. Because that’s probably not your business. But you can ask questions, because the more someone talks, the more they display their values and their interests and their thoughts, and, like, it’s kind of just reaching out and touching someone else’s mind for a little while and seeing if you like it.
[Mary Robinette] Right. Well, with that, let’s segue to our homework as we try to touch the minds of our listeners.
[Ali] Yes, yes.
[Mary Robinette] Not creepy at all.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Not creepy at all.
[Ali] For my final style…
[DongWon] Exactly.
[DongWon] So, I have our homework this week. I would like you… Thinking about this alignment question, I would like you to take a work you haven’t written, and come up with 3 questions you would ask the writer to help them clarify their intention in the text. Whether this is a project your beta reading for a friend, a short story, even like a movie that you’ve seen, take a piece, a story that you engaged with and really figure out what are the questions I would ask the creator of this to really help them understand better what it was that they were going for. Then, for bonus points, I want you to apply those questions to your own work in progress.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go edit.
[DongWon] Hey. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Congratulations. Also, let us know. We’d love hearing from you about how you’ve applied the stuff we’ve been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
]]>We’ll be diving into 5 elements of writing by focusing on five different literary texts. We’ll spend five episodes on each one, and then we’re going to… drumroll please… interview the author(s)!
As you know, we’ve spent lots of time reading, writing, talking, and recording our thoughts about different elements of the craft. But this year, we wanted to ground our episodes in specific texts that you could read along– and analyze– with us!
So it is with great pleasure that we announce our Close Reading Series! Below is the schedule for each book or short story we’ll be diving into.
The date on the right is the air date of the first episode in our series that will begin talking about that text as a way to explore an element of craft.
You can buy the books through our bookshop affiliate link (and support local bookstores!)
*For C.L. Clark we are doing a set of their short stories. You can read them all for free:
Ali talks with us about how its important to be kind to yourself — and your writing– during the revision process. She also gives us advice for how you, as a writer, can lean into what you do well.
Homework:
From editor Ali Fisher: write down what you like best about your book. Find a spot in your book where you can incorporate that element where it isn’t now.
Thing of the Week:
I Will Not Die Alone by Dera White, illustrated by Joe Bennett
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, and Ali Fisher. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Join Our Writing Community!
Powered by RedCircle
Key points: Editing for intention, focusing to make the book more of the book that you want it to be. What effect do you want to have on the reader with the book? Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose. You read your favorite author because of what they do well. So lean into what you do well, and what you enjoy. Don’t kill your darlings. Why is this here? Do consider where and how you are planning to publish. Don’t write to the market, but you can edit to the market. Having someone tell you what they think the book is about can help. Focus on the question the novel is asking. What is the tone of the book? The vibe? What is your lodestone, your guiding light?
[Season 19, Episode 07]
[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 07]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A mini-series on revision with Ali Fisher, editing for intention.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Ali] And I’m Ali.
[Mary Robinette] We are delighted to have Ali Fisher back with us for this episode, where we are going to be talking about intention. This is, like, how you’re approaching the editing when you’re not thinking about the length, but thinking about really focusing to make the book more of the book that you want it to be. There’s a thing that Edgar Allan Poe said that I referenced in our last episode about writing and editing for unity of effect. That is, in his view, what is the emotion that you want to leave the reader with. That’s a… Something that I share as well, and I think I’ve certainly heard both of you talk about that quite a bit. Like, thinking about what effect you want to have on the reader with the book. So, what are some of the questions that you ask your authors when you’re trying to get them to focus their book?
[DongWon] Absolutely. When I’m approaching a manuscript, so much of what I’m doing in the initial pass is trying to make sure I understand very clearly what the author was intending to accomplish. Right? What was the unity of effect that they were going for? Since everyone else has a quote on this topic, I also have one…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Which is a Dolly Parton quote…
[Yes]
[DongWon] which is, “Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose.” So much, I think, of writing a book is a process of figuring out what is this book, who is this book, why did you write it? I think sometimes you’ll have an idea going into it, and sometimes that idea isn’t clear until you’ve finished it. Or, what you originally thought it was about turns out not to be what the book is about. Right? So, I think the process of writing it is often, no matter how much planning you do, discovery of what your intentions were, and are, and what you want them to be going forward. Right? So, that’s so much of the thing that’s going to be informing your editing process and your revision process as you dive back into it.
[Mary Robinette] I love that so much. That Dolly Parton quote makes me so happy. It also ties into something that… I just took a class with Tobias [Buckell?]. He was talking about finding your spark, but one of the things that he said just set off all sorts of fireworks and sparks in my head, was that you read your favorite author because of what they do well, not because of what they don’t do well.
[Ali] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] So, like when you’re reading Asimov, it’s not because of his characterization.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Like, that’s not why you read Asimov.
[Ali, DongWon chorus] Nope.
[DongWon] Truly not.
[Ali] She likes jewelry. End of character.
[Mary Robinette] Yep. That’s all you need. Really. It goes with the diamonds. But, for me, it was like thinking about… Like, really leaning into what you do well, and the things that you enjoy as a representative audience member yourself, as a writer.
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] That’s, for me, I think just an exciting way to think about it. It’s, like, what do I love about this and how can I make it more of what I love.
[Ali] It’s such a good reframe. Author Jo Walton had a series of posts. I don’t know if they were critiques or love letters, but they got all published in a book by tour that was called What Makes This Book so Great. That was what the series was called. I just thought that was such a wonderful way to approach, like, the reading experience. But also a very helpful way to approach the revision period which is when you’re expected and most likely will be extremely hard on yourself. We’re not talking about the fallout trial process in this episode, but stay tuned until next week or 2 weeks from now…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Next week.
[Ali] Stay tuned. But I will say one of the things that, when talking about revision and intention, I always do my best to try to remember to flag the things that, like, what’s so awesome here, like, this made me cry, don’t touch it. I want it, I want to get hurt. Let’s talk about how to hurt me more. Or, like, what… This is so great. So, what else is like that? Or, like, what else can we do to sort of… Putting those flags down I think is just really helpful. Because it can be… It’s a really hard time, it’s a really hard time to be with the story and just remembering what all these good things is really helpful.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think 2nd only to show, don’t tell, which is something I complained about last episode, one of the most common repeated refrains of writing advice that just drives me bonkers is kill your darlings.
[Mary Robinette] Ugh. Yeah.
[DongWon] Right? There’s this idea that… There are times when you do have to cut something you love. Right? We talked about this a little bit less time, about cutting a character or cutting a scene or an element that isn’t tying… That is slowing your pacing down or isn’t supporting the main action of the story or the main intention of the story. But that’s different from this idea, that’s like, oh, if you love this thing, then it shouldn’t be in the book. You wrote this book, the reason we are here is because we like the things that you’re doing well. I mean, this is exactly… Going back to Tobias’s quote, I don’t remember the exact wording, but it’s this idea of, like, we’re reading this for a reason, and that reason is probably the thing that you’re most excited about. Because your energy and enthusiasm and interests are going to come through. Right? Now, don’t overindulge in that. Right? Don’t, like, luxuriate in that at the expense of all the other elements that a book has to have. But, don’t kill your darlings. Love them. Find ways to support them and give them an environment that they can be best observed, appreciated, and so they can flourish for the reader.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. For me, it’s that you have to be willing to kill them if they are pulling the book out of alignment. That’s… Sometimes, if you’ve got a book that’s got this really clean, spare, austere sense of language, and then you’ve got one sentence that has a lot of flourishes in it that you love, that sentence stands out, not because it’s a bad sentence, not because you love it, but because it is in contrast to everything else that’s happening in the book. It is not part of that unity of effect. There are times when you want to contrast, but you want to make sure that it’s a contrast that is applied deliberately and for an effect itself.
[Ali] Right. Do you want that attention, because you’re grabbing it. Is this the subject or the topic or the moment that needs that spotlight because it’s got it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, for me, when I’m thinking about this editing for intention, the thing that I’m coming back to is always like why is this scene here, why is this moment here? If I’m trying to fix something, sometimes I’m looking at it like I can’t get this sentence to work. Then realize it’s because it does… It just… It doesn’t fit. There’s some part of me that knows that it doesn’t belong there. If I query, like, what is my intention with this and what function is it serving in this scene, then I can usually either swap it out for something different that serves better or recognize that it doesn’t have one and cut it. But it is always coming to the why is my starting point.
[Ali] Yeah. We’ve talked about sort of philosophical and essentially political, but, like the effect that the book is having and that intention. Do we also want to talk a little bit about the intention of like how to publish it and, like, whether or not you’re planning on going to a major publisher or publishing yourself or making it into a zine, like printing your own booklet? I think knowing the expectation, or like excitement of the reader in different spaces, or, like, what is more exciting to people right now, like, they’re [garbled]. We were talking about the [Oops La] battle novel in…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Right.
[Ali] In our last episode. I feel like there are certain areas that that could potentially hit stronger. I think maybe knowing where you’re going with the story or where you’re hoping to take the story out is a good thing to keep in mind, because there will be expectations based on whatever that publishing process looks like.
[Mary Robinette] That’s a really great point. There is the reason that you write is not the same reason that you publish.
[DongWon] I always really strongly encourage writers not to think about the market when their drafting or coming up with a book. Right? Like, don’t write to the market. But what you can do is edit to the market. A little bit. Right? You don’t want to overdo it. But there’s ways in which once you have a drafted thing, and now you’re sitting there figuring out, like, okay, here’s the book I wrote. I love it. How do I get this in front of as many readers as I can? That’s the point at which you can now start to consider, okay, what categories does this fit in? Is this for adults? Is this for teens? Is this for a middle grade audience? Is it genre? Is it literary? These are so where you can start to edit and start tweaking things to push it in one direction or another. Sometimes, it can be hard to completely do a 180 in terms of your direction once you have the draft, but you can move it 10° this way, 10° that way, and I think start to hit a really specific audience and a specific reader that you’re aiming for.
[Ali] I mean, even within like traditional publishing and within my work, I’ve had a situation where cover art comes in before the book is finished and, like, we realize, like, oh, there’s… Like, there’s an expectation here, like, an even cozier… Even, like, whatever expectation… Let’s put in more food, more delicious like moments, like more textures. Then, the sequel, like, oh, what if it’s snowing, and there’s a little cozy fire. Like, there are things that can be really surprising that can have an effect. This is obviously very down the line. But you might be surprised at some of the things that affect the revision by the end of the process.
[DongWon] Yeah. I’ve had situations where we wrote up the copy to pitch it to publishers, and in writing the copy, we both went, like, wait a minute. There’s something that’s not working. There’s a huge piece of this that needs changed, because it just wasn’t hitting, it wasn’t… That intention wasn’t coming through, both in terms of what the author was trying to get across, but also how we were trying to publish it and who we were trying to publish it for. So we really, like, took it back, broke it down, and like added a whole other… We added like 20,000 words, added a whole new character arc, and a new POV, based on trying to write the pitch for the book. Like, we were ready to go out with it, and then suddenly, like, 6 months later, we’re like, okay, now we’re ready to go out with it. Sometimes it really is that much of a process of figuring out how do we target it for who we’re trying to get it to.
[Ali] I’ve absolutely been in the same situation, where I’ve been like…
[Chuckles]
[Ali] But, wait, I’m like working on addressing some copy and been like, I actually don’t know what the stakes are, but I don’t care. So what does that mean? You know, like… During the read, it didn’t bother me, but now, like, is there space for that? Is it needed? That kind of thing.
[DongWon] Yep
[Mary Robinette] So, when we come back from our break, we’re going to talk a little bit more about intentions and how to figure out what your intention is when you’ve finished a book, but actually don’t know what it’s about.
[Ali] So, DongWon assures me that they’ve already pitched you Scavengers Reign, an animated show, I assume you’re all now watching. It is gorgeous, vivid, kind of psychedelic dark science fiction. A while back, I got to work with the cocreator of that show, Joe Bennett, on illustrating 2 books with us. One that he also cowrote with Dera White called I Will Not Die Alone about learning the end is nigh and basically just playing D&D with your friends. He also illustrated a book by comedian Joe Pera called A Bathroom Book for People Not Pooping or Peeing, But Using the Bathroom to Escape. Both are now available from Tor books, and you should check them out.
[Mary Robinette] So, we’ve been talking about different types of intention, but one of the things that I will hear early career writers say, and indeed have experienced myself, is I don’t know what this book is about.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Nancy Kress, who is a phenomenal writer, said this thing to me that just… Like, I shivered in my very bones. That she writes a draft, and that that is what tells her what the book is about. Then she throws that draft away completely, and start writing again from scratch now that she knows what the book is about. I’m like, I cannot. Uh-uh. But I’ve also heard other people and myself say this, and then someone will say, like, one chance thing, and I’m like, “Oh! That’s what my book is about.” So, how do you help your writers understand what their book is about? Like, what are some of the questions that you ask? I’m hoping for pearls of wisdom that will help me.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Oh, great. How do we… No, I mean [garbled]
[Ali] One of the things that I do is I tell them what I think it’s about. Then get to watch their face and find out if they’re like, “Oh, no,” or like, “Oh, yay,” or “I hadn’t seen that,” or whatever. It’s… I love to go in there with a very like, I’m often wrong, here’s what I think attitude and just sort of see what that surfaces for somebody. But in terms of actually identifying it?
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is… I think people ask a lot… I have an undergraduate degree in English literature, and I think people ask a lot, if, like that’s useful in what I do, and in most ways, it isn’t. Right? It’s not like I learned grammar from that or how to compose prose from that. But one thing it did give me was critical reading skills. Right? And how to think critically about the stuff that I am reading. Thematically, what there is in it. It’s not even so much the formal instruction that helped me do that, it’s just reading a ton of books. Right? I think this is one of the reasons why I so strongly encourage, if you want to be a writer, if you want to work in publishing, you have to like books, first and foremost, and you have to read books, first and foremost, and try and stay current with what’s happening out there. Because when you’re consuming enough media, when you’re consuming those things, you start to understand why you like something, what it is about it that… Even if you don’t know how to articulate it. When we say that we want you to understand what your book is about, I don’t need you to be able to sum it up in a sentence. I don’t need you to be able to tell me. In part, you wrote the book because you don’t have a simpler way of explaining whatever it is that you were trying to get to with writing the book. Right? That’s okay. That’s great, actually. That’s my job to figure out how to frame it up in a pithy few sentences so they can go on the back of a book or go to an editor or whatever it is. So, I think, for me, it really is putting those critical skills into place as I’m reading to figure out, okay, what is this project? What are they trying to accomplish here? What are the thematics of it? What are the things that are really jumping out at me that seem to resonate with the person behind this book? Now, that’s me as a third party coming in, and again, what Ali was saying, I think is so true of sometimes it’s about presenting that idea and watching it bounce off the person you talk to, and hopefully you’re close…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] And sometimes it’s like, oh, wow, I’m way off here. Then we can approach the edit with that sort of refocus on the intention.
[Mary Robinette] When you don’t have access to an editor or an agent to do this for you, because I have absolutely had that happen… On the Spare Man, Claire looked at the book and said, “This is a story about a woman of privilege who wants to get her hands dirty.” I was like, “Oh. Yeah.” The… For me, the thing about that is that that is a declarative’s statement. But when I go into the book, the thing that I have found most useful is to figure out what question I’m asking. This is a… I’m reframing something that Elizabeth Bear said, like, you know how you’re having a casual dinner conversation and someone just says something brilliant? You’re like, “Well, that is going to save everything I write from now on.” She said that the difference between a story and a polemic is that a story asks questions and a polemic answers them. The thing for me about a novel, in particular, is that a novel can show so many different answers, so many different possible ways, and leave room for the reader to decide what their own answer to that question is. So, for me, one of the things that helps when I’m trying to focus a story is to think about what is the big question I’m asking. In… It’s… It varies. Sometimes it’s something like how do you handle it when your spouse is depressed. Sometimes it’s a very straightforward one like that. Sometimes it’s a big societal one, like how do you create community? Like, what does community mean to you? Like, what are the different ways that community expresses? Then, when I’m writing, I can evaluate against that question. It’s like does this scene explore that question? If it doesn’t, is there a way that I can add that? If there’s not, what is this scene doing? Why is this scene in here? It’s not that every scene has to be providing an exact answer to this. But it’s… Even if it’s just one moment in the scene where that is explored, it still helps me. It helped me with focusing and making decisions about what to include in that.
[DongWon] But if your book isn’t feeling like it has a clear purpose, that it has a clear direction, then I think that’s a great way to go about it, is asking these questions of is this particular scene supporting the central question that I’m asking? If the answer is no, then does this scene need to be here and does this scene need to shift in its purpose to better support whatever that central thing is. Right? So, I think being able to have some clarity about what that question is, and also what your personal connection to that question is… I see a lot of times someone will come into a book and they’ll be asking a big question about society or about how a certain relationship would work, but I can’t feel why that question is important to the person in particular. Sometimes digging until you get that personal connection, where you can feel the author in the story, is the thing that really makes a book pop for me. That’s when I get very excited, when I can suddenly be like, oh, I see you. You’re here. This matters to you because X, Y, or Z. Sometimes it’s something as simple as a shared identity, and sometimes it’s very nuanced and complex in a way that could not be explained without 30 hours of conversation about the author’s like life. But whatever that is, you should feel a connection to the questions that are being asked by your book and find a way to really focus on that and make sure you’re really highlighting that in all the major pieces of your story.
[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. One of the other things that I’ve found along these lines is, again, that personal connection is thinking about the tone that I want the book to have. Because I’m measuring against a bunch of different things. In an ideal world, I’m just writing it and I’m feeling it and it’s there. But when I’m revising it, and I’m having to make decisions, like, my first series, Jane Austen with magic, it’s like how does this feel like Jane Austen with magic right now? Spare Man, Thin Man in Space. Does this feel… Does it have that feel? No. Okay. Fine. There needs to be more cocktails, obviously. Like, who’s… Where is the small dog right now? So, I think that that’s another question that you can ask yourself, is, like, what is the tone that I want? What’s my vibe? Is this supporting it or is it a deliberate juxtaposition?
[Ali] Yeah. That’s so helpful because I do feel like purpose can start to feel sort of like academic. It can feel a little like intellectualized in a way that I think rightfully a lot of people would bristle against. But it can be really basic. It can be like I want to give people a laugh. Or, like, I want… I want to show how cool explosions are. Like [garbled] probably.
[DongWon] [garbled] by the fire. Right?
[Ali] Yes. There probably is more there, if you wrote a whole novel, like, there’s more there. But, also, like that is a very legitimate and exciting and cool sort of jumpoff point that needs to be honored in a very similar way, I think. Especially…
[DongWon] Again, it’s not something you need to necessarily be even able to articulate. You just need to have like a feeling of what the vibe is. If you lock into that vibe, that’s all you need. You just need a tone, or like an image, a thought, a question, any of these things can be your guiding light. I just encourage you to try and figure out what that sort of lodestone is for you that is going to pull you through it, and keep you consistent when you’re asking questions about should this stay, should this change, whatever it happens to be.
[Ali] Find your vibe.
[Mary Robinette] I think that’s a great… Yeah. I think that’s a great segue to take us to our homework for the week. Ali, I think you have that.
[Ali] I do. Thank you for asking. Or telling or saying. Okay. Yes, I do. Your homework this week. Write down what you like best about your book. Find a spot in your book where you can incorporate that element where it isn’t now. Godspeed.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you’ve applied the stuff we’ve been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
]]>First up: length! How do you edit your work—whether it’s a book or a short story or a novella? Maybe you wrote a draft during NaNoWriMo, maybe you didn’t– either way, we want to help you figure out how to make your writing the perfect length.
Homework: Find two scenes next to each other from your writing. Remove the scene break and write bridging text between the two of them instead. Then, find a different scene that has that bridging text, and cut it into two different scenes so that you are removing it and creating new signposts. See what this does to length and your perception of the pacing.
Thing of the Week (from Ali Fisher): Infinity Alchemist by Kacen Callender
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, and guest Ali Fisher. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Join Our Writing Community!
Powered by RedCircle
Key Points: There’s no Goldilocks zone when you finish a novel. First, look at unfulfilled promises, or runaway atmosphere, and adjust those. What tells the story most effectively? Is the pacing off? Consider the master effect, what is the intended impact of the story, and do the separate elements support that? Often authors write their way into or out of a scene, and leave that extra text there. Cut it! NaNoWriMo, high-paced writing, may focus on whatever you’re excited about, and leave out the parts that are harder for you to write. Take a look at filling those in! When layering, look for natural pause points. Watch for shorthand or compressed spots, which you can unpack to add emphasis or remove ambiguity. To add length, try sending them to new locations. To cut length, cut a character or a side quest. READ, review, do the easy fixes, audition (outline, then try changes on the outline), and do it! Adjust signposts and bridging material. Use narrative summary (aka summarize your darlings). Let things happen offstage, and have someone refer to it.
[Season 19, Episode 06]
[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.
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A mini-series on revision, with Ali Fisher. Length.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[DongWon] With us this week, we have a special guest, which is executive editor at Tor Publishing group, Ali Fisher. Ali acquires and edits speculative fiction and non-fiction across young adult, middle grade, and adult categories, and is, as a bonus, a cast member of the podcast Rude Tales of Magic, which is a D&D flavored comedy podcast. But really Ali’s here in her capacity as an editor, and has worked on a very wide range of incredibly successful titles in speculative fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy. Yeah, so welcome, Ali.
[Ali] Thank you. Hello, world. I am so excited to be on this podcast. Longtime listener, first time being on the podcast here. I’ve been listening to Writing Excuses since, I think, 2010.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Ali] Is that true? You’ve been doing this that long, correct?
[DongWon] I mean, next season will be year 20 soon, so, I don’t remember what year we started, but… It’s been a minute.
[Ali] Yeah. I… I’ve been listening to Writing Excuses longer than I’ve been in publishing. So, it’s a real pleasure.
[Mary Robinette] This somehow delights me. And also makes me feel impossibly old.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] revision, which is also something that makes me feel impossibly old when I get into it.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] We know that… We’ve timed this because we know that a lot of people have just finished NaNoWriMo, and you have written a novel and now you have to figure out what to do with it. So, that was why we invited Ali in, because as an editor, she has a certain understanding of what happens with novels. So, the first thing we’re going to talk about is length. Because most of the projects coming out of NaNoWriMo are going to be too short. Having said that, every time I talk to someone about a novel, I always hear them say either, “Oh, yeah, I just finished this novel, but it’s too long.” Or, “Oh, yeah, I just finished this novel, but it’s too short.” I never hear anybody say, “But it’s just right.” There’s no Goldilocks zone when you finish a novel.
[DongWon] Exactly, exactly. Even when novels come to me as an agent or when it goes to the editor or the publishing house, I feel like that is one of the first things we’re talking about, that’s, like, where does this fit in terms of length. So, Ali, when a project comes across your desk, when I send you an email with the most brilliant thing…
[Ali] Uhuh.
[DongWon] Attached to it…
[Ali] Of course.
[DongWon] What is your immediate reaction when you start thinking, oh, I wish this was a little bit on the shorter side, I wish this was a little bit on the longer side. What are the questions that start coming to your mind to help you figure out how to answer that?
[Ali] Yeah. Absolutely. So, working in speculative fiction, often we’re sort of… We see the higher range of word count on like different novels, novellas, or whatever, because there’s a lot of additional writing that sometimes takes place in those books, especially at Tor, known for door stoppers.
[Chuckles]
[Ali] A wide range, though, really. So, depending on the age group it’s for, there tend to be different sort of hopes and requests coming in from retailers for their shelves and what are their assumptions of those readers’ reading lengthwise. Right? Middle grade being slightly shorter. YA has really run the gamut at this point, but… With adults attending to have potentially the longest word count that I’ve seen. Those are very broad generalizations, but it tends to be something that is absolutely always on the table in the conversation when books come in. But that word count conversation also tends to happen after an initial read and just sort of taking stock of… There were promises that were never… That I was excited to read about, we never saw them, or there was a lot of atmosphere here, but it felt a little exploratory to your process, and I actually think that it could feel bigger if there’s less in there. So, stuff like that is a little bit more… A little less like let’s chop this to a really specific length, and more of a what else… What’s helpful in telling this story most effectively?
[Mary Robinette] I’m really glad you said that, because one of the things that I see a lot with early career writers is that they will have internalized these rigid ideas of how long a book needs to be. Sometimes they think that they have to cut 10% when they finish a book. I think they’ve picked that up from Steven King. But it’s not just cutting. Like, shorter is not better, longer is not better, it’s the why of it, for me. Like, why are you trying to cut or expand? That helps inform the places that you’re doing it. For me, length, like description, that sort of thing, has a lot to do… Has a strong relationship to pacing.
[DongWon] Yes. Exactly. I think sometimes when a book can feel too long, that is because the pacing is… It’s too drawn out. It’s not moving fast, I’m not getting pulled enough… Pulled through this as forcefully as I want to, to have like a really great reading experience. So, I think sometimes the idea is, okay, there’s some fat, we can cut here. There’s some extra elements that aren’t quite landing with the reader for whatever reason, and if we remove those scenes, then maybe things will move on a little bit quicker. Then, sometimes, we make sure on the other side too of everything is always up to 11, it could be exhausting as a reading experience. We kind of need those breaks and those breathing points to kind of absorb character information or background information or worldbuilding, and kind of like really settle into the story in some ways. So, I think length and pacing often feel very connected.
[Ali] Definitely. It is very hard to know before you get to the stage where you have confirmed beta readers or an agent or an editor who will read your book and tell you about things like pacing and tell you their [garbled] responses to stuff like that. I’m going to bring in something from a book that I read once…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Excellent.
[Ali] Right off the bat here. There’s a book called The Fiction Editor, The Novel, And the Novelist. It’s very short, I think it’s like 170 pages, by Thomas McCormack. I don’t know much about Thomas, but he was an editor once upon a time, and he has a concept called the master effect. The concept was the master effect is the cerebral and emotional impact the author wants the book as a whole to have. It goes on to say it can be… It’s sort of like it’s propped up by observation and insight and emotion and experience. So, like what does this all lead to? I think, when you’re looking at length, it can be helpful to look at the separate elements, as they like relate to what that big overall feeling is that you want. It can be sort of like interesting to see what inspires that feeling most, and what doesn’t really add to it. Right? Especially if you’re looking at like tension or something, you might find with an eye really clearly set on, “Oh, I want this to feel really tense,” then you realize like, “Oh, this traveling isn’t quite getting me there,” or something.
[DongWon] It’s sort of like… We were talking about word count expectations by category and genre, that the publisher wants. If it’s an epic fantasy, you want it to be this length, whether that’s like 100,000 or 120,000 words. If you wanted to hit with middle grade office, you want it on the shorter side. Whatever that specific range is. But those aren’t… They are arbitrary and they can be very frustrating when you run into them in a rigid way. But the logic of it does come from somewhere, which is, when you’re reading an epic fantasy, so much of what you want to be hearing… Experiencing is that expansiveness, is the breadth of scope and perspective, and to get a sense of the politics and the magic and those kinds of things. So you’re expecting a slightly slower pace when you’re coming into an epic fantasy than you would if you were coming into an adventure fantasy, which you want it to be moving a little bit at a brisker pace, getting from action scene to action scene, from tension to tension, a little bit quicker than you would when you’re not having big feast scenes or big courtroom political scenes. Right? So I think a little bit of those length expectations really are driven by genre and category, because those connect to certain types of pacing and certain types of reading experiences. So if you’re thinking about that, you call it the master effect? Is that what the term was?
[Ali] Yes. Yeah. Thomas called it.
[DongWon] When you’re thinking about the effect that you want to have on your reader for your particular category, that’s where length can really be part of the conversation coming into it.
[Mary Robinette] That’s something that we’re going to talk about in our next episode, where we’re talking about intention. Edgar Allan Poe has a similar concept, which he calls the unity of effect, where you kind of think about what is the overall emotional goal that you’re aiming for, and then everything that you put into the novel goes into that, and I think that length is one of those things that you’re also manipulating as you’re moving through. One of the other things that you said, Ali, at the beginning was talking about… Or maybe it was you, DongWon, talking about… Oh, I can see you’ve left some of your homework here. But there’s another thing that I see authors do, and I’ve done myself a lot, which is that we don’t really know where the scene is going so we write our way into it to discover it. But then all of that text is still there. So I frequently find that often the beginnings of scenes and sometimes the ends of scenes are places where the author is trying to figure out how do I get into this scene or how do I get back out of it. That you’ve done the thing that the scene required, and then you’re kind of floundering, going like, eh, I don’t… It needs a… I don’t know, let’s… Eh… Then there’s just a lot of text where you were trying to figure out the perfect line, and then you don’t cut any of it, because you don’t know which pieces are actually supporting it.
[DongWon] Exactly. I think… I would love to dive into more about how you identify those and some techniques for cutting or adding, depending on where you need to do that. But let’s take a quick break first, and we’ll talk about the specific techniques when we come back.
[Ali] For my thing of the week, I wish I could pitch every book I’ve ever been able to work on. But, since it’s 15 minutes long, and we’re not that smart, I’m going to constrain myself to just the most recent publication that I had the genuine pleasure to acquire and edit. This is Infinity Alchemist by World Fantasy and National Book award winning author, Kacen Callender. Kacen is the author of Hurricane Child, King of the Dragonflies, Felix Ever after, Queen of the Conquered, and many more. Infinity Alchemist is their YA fantasy debut. It rules. It’s basically dark academia burn the magic school down. In it, 3 young alchemists come together to find and then protect the rumored Book of Source before others use it for alchemist supremacy. Of course, these 3 heroes end up in a legendary love triangle, and please remember real love triangles connect on all 3 sides.
[Chuckles]
[Ali] [garbled] is clear, mostly trans, mostly POC, and polyamorous. The magic system is inspired by quantum physics, so it’s very original, very cool, and available just now as of last week from Tor Teen.
[DongWon] As we come back from break, I would love to start digging into some of the techniques. So, say you… Coming out of NaNoWriMo, the expectation is you’ve written 50,000 words, and now you’re sitting there thinking, “Okay, how do I make this a little bit longer?” How do I make this feel like a full novel that is ready for a fantasy reader, or ready for a YA reader, whoever it is you’re trying to reach? So, how do you know where to add length? What are the points at which… How do you add to the volume of the text without slowing down your pacing too much, or disrupt or throwing off your plot structure or your character arcs or whatever it is?
[Ali] First of all, congratulations. Well done. I don’t… Every time I hear about NaNoWriMo that sounds absolutely bonkers to me. That is extremely impressive. My understanding is writing at that sort of sprint pace, for a lot of people… Some people that is a very standard piece of writing, for a lot of people it is, like, pedal to the metal, tough situation. My guess is you gravitated towards like writing things you’re most excited about, or, like writing towards characters if that was what you’re most excited about or writing towards just the world if that was what you were most excited about, so it could well be that, like, there are full category elements that are somewhat missing, that just don’t feel as instinctive or easy or smooth for you as a writer, to, like, write when you’re in that zone, when you’re in that kind of sprint zone. So there may be whole categories that have opportunities for lengthening.
[DongWon] That makes sense. So you’re really looking at it overall and saying what are the things that I was drawn to when I was putting this together, but maybe not feeling the sort of holistic sense of I want to have this effect on my reader, here’s the things I didn’t put in there. I’m writing an epic fantasy and all I did was right cool battle scenes. Now I gotta go put back the court intrigue, now I have to put a romance in here, now I have to put in those character arcs that maybe aren’t as fleshed out as they were when I was thinking about how to get enough words down on the page. Right? So I think that’s a great place to start, I’m just feeling like where are the elements of this story that I want to be putting in that I wasn’t thinking about in that moment.
[Ali] Yeah. Unless you’re pitching [garbled] battle scenes, and then…
[Chuckles]
[Ali] It’s just a collection of battle scenes, which sounds…
[Laughter]
[Ali] [garbled] and you should do that, but then you need 20 more battle scenes.
[DongWon] I would recommend Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes, which is basically just one battle over 3 days for the entire book. So…
[Ali] Awesome.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Ali] Very cool.
[Mary Robinette] So I… What I look for when I’m doing this… The kind of thing that you’re talking about, the layering of… Layering in the romance element or sometimes you’ve written a scene and it’s only dialogue and there could actually be some description… Maybe we’d like these people to be some place. So what I look for when I’m going to like layering description, for instance, is I look for natural pause points. Because when you… When you’re spending words on a description, the reader has to slow down to read them. So every word you’ve got on the page is basically creating a pause in the readers head between one line of dialogue in the next. Which is why… Sometimes you’ve had the experience where you see a character answer a question and you don’t remember the question that was asked. Because there’s been a ton of description in between those 2 things. So I’ll look for those natural pause points to put in descriptions, but also to unpack emotion. One of the other things that I find when I got a finished novel is that at the… Especially the last 3rd of the novel, I just want to be done with the novel. So I, like, shorthand every emotional experience my character is having. This is a place where you can add length by going back and unpacking the things. You don’t want to unpack every emotion that the character has. You want to unpack the ones that are… Again, going with that unity of effect. So I think about it as places where I want to add emphasis or remove ambiguity, as some of the places that I’m looking at for unpacking the emotion. Is this an emotion that I want to add emphasis to, because it helps you understand the character better? Or, is this moment ambiguous? Can I give a little bit more here? Like, did I completely forget to give any physical sensation to my character experiencing an emotion?
[Ali] Totally. So, like what you’re saying, it could be that at the beginning, you have a… When notable emotional experiences happen, you have the full range of… The emotion beforehand and the observation, and the tension, and then the emotion itself, and then the internal judgment on the emotion, and, like, go through the entire sort of the cycle of that. And watching then the reaction, or the dialogue that comes after it. By the end, it’s like, “Uh, she was sad.”
[Chuckles]
[Ali] Moving forward.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] You’ve read my manuscript.
[Ali] Yeah, but it works at the time. So, like, just… That’s also about balancing and finding that style… Style similarities across maybe when like different… Different days felt different levels of oh, no, I have to make up for 2 days now, or whatever, that you were getting through.
[Mary Robinette] One of the other hacks that I have for adding length is reverse engineering something that I do for short fiction where I need to compress. So, with short fiction, I try to have everything in a single location. With novels, sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I need to make this longer. Where can I send them that I haven’t sent them before?” Because it will make the world feel richer. It’s like, oh, reuse locations, but sometimes sending them someplace else gives me additional words that I have to write because I have to describe the new place. Again, it can make the world seem broader and richer and more interesting if I just change location of a scene.
[DongWon] Exactly. So, on the flipside of that, though, you’ve got something, it’s a 200,000 word manuscript, you need it to be 110. Right? You need to cut a lot of it because it’s simply too big for whatever reason. Either for the readership or even sometimes bumping up against physical limitations of publishing.
[Chuckles] [Yes]
[DongWon] It’s hard to remember that we are making physical objects that we’re shipping around.
[Yes]
[DongWon] And when you print more pages, it gets more expensive, and when it’s heavier, it’s more expensive. That can really affect things. So when, for whatever reason, your publisher is saying, “Hey. We would love this to be shorter.” Or if your friends are saying that, or just your own instincts, where do you start to make those cuts? What are the things that are either easy things that you can start to look at? I mean, like, okay, across the board, I could start pulling out these scenes, or, what are the more difficult interwoven elements that you’re starting to look at?
[Mary Robinette] As, apparently the only writer in the room…
[Laughter]
[Ali] But we have a lot to say.
[Mary Robinette] You have a lot to say. But I will…
[DongWon] We have a lot of opinions about how writers should do things.
[Ali] Yeah. Since you asked what’s the hard part.
[Mary Robinette] You have opinions about what I should do, but I can tell you what’s mechanically difficult and what’s easier. The easiest way to reduce a bunch of length very fast is to cut a character or a side quest. That’ll pull out a ton of length really fast. It can feel daunting when you are thinking about doing that because usually it’s a… It’s woven into the book all the way through. So I… What I will do is I will… I have an acronym that I use which is READ. I will review, do the easy fixes, audition, and then do it. So by audition, what I mean is that I will… If I have to do a really big at it like that, I’ll reverse engineer my outline. Then I will experiment with pulling out those scenes just in outline form to see whether or not the basic flow is still there. Then, when I get into it and start the do it part of it, I put all of those into a scrap been, because I will almost certainly need pieces of them later. Then, largely what I’m doing is I’m having to adjust my signposts, which is the way I exit and enter scenes, and the material… The bridging material from getting from one thing to another. When I’m cutting things. Then, when I’m cutting characters, often it’s, like, you just go in and you change the character names and then you have to tweak the dialogue to make it make sense for that character. But it’s one of the fastest ways to lose a lot of length.
[Ali] I also think there’s a… Maybe I’m wrong but I feel like, generally, out there, there’s a bit of like a demonizing of narrative summary. It can really go a long way to… There are scenes that are fully dialogue, beat by beat, like this is happening, that can probably be brought down to a couple of sentences. That’s like reducing your darlings, I guess. Or like…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Summarizing your darlings.
[Ali] Summarizing your darlings. Exactly.
[DongWon] I think this is where show, don’t tell can lead you astray. Right? It takes so many more words to show something than to tell sometimes. So, sometimes if you have this sense of I can summarize this, I don’t need to walk through every part of this group figuring out what their plan is, or having this interaction or this conversation, you can condense that into a few sentences. You can condense that into a paragraph. Provided you’re making that narration interesting and still connecting it to the character. I think there are ways that you can give us very large amounts of information very quickly. And then keep moving. That can really accelerate the read in the pace of the book in a lot of good ways.
[Garbled] [go ahead]
[Ali] I was just going to say I just love what you said about auditioning. Because I think it can be very daunting and emotionally taxing to cut things that you wrote and loved. I will say as an editor, I have recommended things and been very sad about them and felt like I genuinely know I’m going to miss this. But the audition process was such a smart move. Because then you can like be really honest about whether that’s going to take something away that’s genuinely precious to the book, or if it’s like something that was very cool, but isn’t needed.
[DongWon] Because sometimes you audition and find that, oh, that was loadbearing.
[Yeah]
[DongWon] This whole thing doesn’t stand up without that element. So it’s like, okay, we can’t touch that one. What else can we do? Unlike renovating a house, you can actually pull those out and see what happens to the whole structure.
[Ali] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, you don’t want to pull out a loadbearing wall under any circumstances. Unless you’re like, okay, I’m going to have to pull this out, but then a beam of steel…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So… But when you’re pulling things out, I like what you said about the show, don’t tell, and the narrative summary. But the other piece that I think a lot of people underestimate when they’re thinking about length is how much can happen offstage. In the gap between scenes, in the gap between chapters. You can… I found that I can cut an entire scene and just have someone refer to it having happened. That the implication is sometimes enough, if the scene was not doing anything loadbearing, aside from like one thing, that often I can just say, “Oh, yes, I see that you got the diamonds,” instead of actually showing them going into the store and buying the diamonds.
[Ali] Yes.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Obviously. A thing that all of my characters do.
[Ali] So fancy.
[DongWon] I did not assume that they were buying the diamonds, when you set up that scene, but… Yeah. I mean, you can just tell us that anything happened.
[Mary Robinette] That’s why you need the narrative summary.
[DongWon] Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
[DongWon] Well, apropos, I suppose, for an episode about length, we’re running a little bit on the long side here. So, Mary Robinette, I believe you have some homework for us.
[Mary Robinette] I do. I want you to… This is a way to play with length. You’re going to find 2 scenes that… Scenes that are right next to each other. What I want you to do is I want you to remove the scene break, and then write bridging text to connect the 2 of them. So that narrative summary about how they got from point A to point B. Then I want you to find a different scene that has that bridging text, and cut it into 2 different scenes. So that you are removing it and creating new signposts, new entry and exit points to get from those 2 scenes. I want you to try that. See what it does to length, see what it does to your perception of the pacing
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go edit.
[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you’ve applied the stuff we’ve been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
]]>Homework Assignment from Mahtab Narsimhan:
Take the first 3 chapters of your finished draft and distill it by 1) Chapter 2) Scenes 3) Key plot points per scene 4) POV 5) Setting 6) Time of day/timeline 7) How many pages per scene and/or chapter.
Thing of the Week:
Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend
Liner Notes:
The Revision Template that Mahtab mentions is a free resource on our Patreon! You can find it at www.patreon.com/writingexcuses
Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Join Our Writing Community!
Key Points: Revision is a mindset. The first draft is telling yourself the story. In revision, you are telling the story to readers. Use the template to distill your story into factors and notes, then revise using that outline. Your first draft is for what you want to say, your final draft is for how you want to say it. Revision is like writing a first draft all over again, but with spoilers. Try a trello board! A spreadsheet, including columns for the purpose of the scene in story terms, and the purpose in audience terms. While writing, add placeholder notes in brackets. Also note the purpose of the scene. Look at the emotional core of each scene. What works for you, works for you.
[Season 19, Episode 05]
[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 05]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Revisions with Mahtab Narsimhan.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Howard] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And if we were smart enough to write it well the first time, we wouldn’t have to revise.
[Mary Robinette] We are here with our special guest, who is a past season host. Hello, Mahtab.
[Mahtab] Hello, Mary Robinette.
[Mary Robinette] So, for people who have not had the pleasure of having you join us before, would you tell us a little about yourself?
[Mahtab] Thank you. So. For those who haven’t attended my session, I write books for kids. Everything from picture books, chapter books, middle grade, YA. Writing is actually my 5th career, because I have been hotel management, I’ve been sales, I have been recruitment. Writing, and I love it. This is my 5th one. It took me most of my life to figure that out, but now that I’m here, I am staying.
[Mary Robinette] So, basically, what you’re saying is you’ve been revising your life to get to…
[Mahtab] Thank you. Yes, yes. Yes I have.
[Mary Robinette] So, I’m excited about this. You pitched several topics to us, but I was like, “Yes, listeners are always asking us about revisions.” So when you said that you wanted to talk about it, I was like, “Yes, please.” So, when you’re thinking about revisions, like, do you have a process or is it different every single time you pick up a new project?
[Mahtab] It is different every single time, because, first of all, revision is a mindset. There are a lot of people who feel… They love the rush of writing the first draft, everything is new, everything is shiny, let’s just keep going. Then, when it comes to revision, it’s like, “Oh, gosh, I know this story already. Why am I doing this again?” For me, the first draft is actually the hardest, and then the real work begins during revisions. It really is a mindset, because you’ve got to realize that this is the time that you’re actually going to be telling the story to the readers. The first time, when you’re doing the draft, you’re telling the story to yourself. There are a lot of holes, there are a lot of gaps, there is no pacing, there is basically no story or structure, unless you’re a plotter. Or you might be a hybrid. But then, revision is when the real work, I think, begins. I… Like, for picture books, I’ve got a book coming out… Shameless plug, sorry about that, but I’ve got a book coming out in October, which is The Boy in the Banyan Tree. That, even though it’s a 700 word picture book, that took about 4 years to finally like finalize and revise. I had to keep reading and writing the same 700 words again. First, when I just wrote it on my own. Then when the illustrator’s notes came in, I had to write them again. I had to change my text to match what the illustrator did. So that was a whole different way of thinking about revision. Because most of the books that I write are middle grade, and those, I do have a revision process I have pretty much settled on which I really like. I do have a template which I will be sharing and people can download it. But it’s basically distilling your entire story into chapters, scenes, plot points, a point of view, the setting, a timeline when that is happening, and then, when you’re not distracted by dialogue or you’re not distracted by descriptions or anything else, when you’ve just distilled the story down to these factors, and then you have a column on notes, that is how I actually revise based on that outline. Then I go back into the full revision. That really helps. Because you’re not distracted with any of the other stuff. All you’re looking at is are your chapters consistent, do you have enough point of view characters? If you’ve got 2 or 3, are they appearing at regular intervals? It just gives you a very distilled snapshot of your story. Which is easier to revise.
[Howard] Last week, the episode on pacing with Fonda Lee raised for me the question of if your pacing’s wrong, how do you go about fixing it? Pacing, I think, is one of the most challenging things to address during the revision process. Because often you realize you’ve got scenes in the wrong order, you’ve got character whose arcs are not in the right places. The rewrite… For me, anyway, the rewrites for pacing often require me to take something that I just loved and set it aside, because it can’t happen yet in the book. So… But when it happens later, it can’t happen like that, and so I just have to rewrite it. Yeah, so, for me, often rewrites are about pacing. I want to get the flow correct, and it always hurts when I find that I’ve done it wrong, because I know that it’s not so much a few words here and there, it is a few pages here and there that just have to be rewritten.
[Dan] I’m really with Mahtab on the way she thinks about revision. I think revision is the most important part of writing, and it is definitely the part where the real work starts. I think it is incredibly fun to do. That took me a long time to come to terms with, because I’ve already written this book. Why do I have to write this book again? Why do I have to keep working on it?
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Why do I have to throw some words away? Why do I have to add extra words? I’m already done. But… That’s what helps you really fix it. One of my very favorite sayings is that your first draft is for what you want to say, in your final draft is for how you want to say it. That’s where you take all these words you’ve written and you polish them and you hone them and you reorganize some of them and make it into a story instead of just a bunch of stuff that happens.
[Erin] I like to think about it as a fun thing. So… I think because I’m a little bit of a pantser, I’ll be like, “Okay, I thought I was writing story X, but, oh my gosh, midway through, I realized, really, it’s story Y.” Now I get to go back and make it story Y all the way through. That’s so fun. So, for me, it really feels like writing a first draft all over again, but, with, like, spoilers. Like, you know what I mean, like this is where you were going with this, now build it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think of it… Because I… Before theater, I came out of art school, and we had sculpting, which was… When you were sculpting, it was, with clay, an additive and subtractive process. So you would get kind of your armature, which is an outline, and then you’d do the rough sculpt. Then you go through and you start fine tuning things and honing them and sometimes that means adding a little bit more clay, sometimes it means taking a lot out. I find that revisions, it’s much the same thing. It’s like sometimes I’m adding a scene, sometimes I’m pulling a scene out. Sometimes the revision is just, oh, I can fix this entire problem with just a single sentence. Those are like so satisfying when I managed to find that.
[Howard] That’s the point where you realize, “Oh. I am a writer. I am good at this.”
[Chuckles]
[Howard] My friend, Jim Zub, used to do portfolio reviews for comics, for illustrations, and he had some pointers for people on do’s and don’ts for portfolio reviews. One of the things he said was if there’s a piece in your portfolio that’s not on good paper, it’s something you drew and it’s on notebook paper, don’t put it in there. Draw it again on another piece of paper. If it’s on notebook paper, and I look at it, what you are telling me is you don’t like drawing things a second time. You have to be willing to take the original and do it again.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the… Sorry, that just made me start thinking about the tools of drawing. Which then makes me think about the tools of writing and the tools of revision. So you had mentioned that you have a…
[Mahtab] A template.
[Mary Robinette] A template. I find that my revision tools change kind of as I go through the process. So, when we come back from break, what I’d love for us to talk about are some of the tools that we use when doing revisions.
[Mahtab] Great. Absolutely.
[Mahtab] So, the thing of the week is I would love to recommend a story called, or rather, a book called Nevermoor, The Trials of Morrigan Crow. It is one of the… One of my favorite middle grade trilogy series that I’ve been reading right now. Such fabulous worldbuilding. It has got all of the tropes that you would need for the middle grade. You’ve got a child who’s cursed, who gets whisked away into this magical land where she has to get inducted into this wondrous society, and she has all of these trials to go through. The voice is amazing, and it is… Well, the writing is amazing, but the voice of Gemma Whelan, who has narrated this book, is just as delightful. So, I actually raced through the entire trilogy, and now I’m listening to it, which is a whole different way of enjoying the book. So I highly recommend Nevermoor by Jessica Townsend. It’s Nevermoor, The Trials of Morrigan Crow.
[Mary Robinette] So, now that we’re back… What I’d love to talk about are tools that we use. So you mentioned the template that you’ve got. I have a trello board, which is a newer thing for me that I’ve started using. Which I will also share in the liner notes. For me, one of the things that I find that is most difficult about revision is that it’s hard to mark that you’re making progress. Which is one of the things that the trello board gave to me, is that I got little ticky boxes that I got to check off. It’s like, yeah, I did the thing. What are some of the tools that other people use when they are diving into revision? Or do you want to tell us more about the template?
[Mahtab] You know what, actually, I went looking for where is versions or tips and techniques to look for revisions. I actually came across this blog post by a writer called Anita Nolan. Unfortunately, that blog post is not available, but I did have a chance to prepare the template based on what she had recommended, which is what I use. For anyone… Has anyone here opened the pie safe? Anyone cracked the… Wrote the number of words? No one here. But I did see… Any hands up? Okay, that’s… So that’s great. So you would have seen my first chapter revisions for Valley of the Rats. Which is the method that I use. I just found that even if I use it in a simple format, this particular revision method helps. Of course, the shorter the novel, I kind of… If it’s a chapter book, I would probably do it in a slightly different way. But for most middle grade, YA novels, this helps.
[Mary Robinette] So, I’m going to give a really good example of revision. Which is that often you have information that you should have planted earlier so that the readers understand where you are. One of the pieces of information that I failed to plant at the beginning of the episode was that we are recording this live for an audience on the Writing Excuses workshop and cruise. So that’s who we are talking to when we say for those of you who opened the pie safe. The pie safe, which is again information that you might have wanted…
[Dan] Vital worldbuilding exposition.
[Mary Robinette] I know. It’s so much worldbuilding exposition. The pie safe, if you are on our cruise, we create this thing we jokingly call the pie safe which are basically behind the scenes looks at different things that we’re working on as a prize for writers who have managed to write quote high, which is 3142 words in a single day. So, with that exposition out of the way…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Which I should have planted earlier, we’ll just all pretend that I… I’m going to go back and… Maybe we’ll ask Alex to put that in…
[Howard] We can tell our engineer Alex to revise the episode for us. He loves doing that.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. We’re absolutely not going to do that. But…
[Howard] One of my favorite tools is the spreadsheet that I use for my outline. Once I’ve written through a chapter or a scene or an entire book, I know a lot more about what an individual line in the outline might mean, and I will add columns to the outline for things like what is the purpose of this scene in story terms? What is the purpose of this scene in audience terms? Story terms might be I’m planting a clue or I’m creating a red herring. Audience terms is I’m building tension or I’m relieving tension or I’m telling a joke. I like to fill out that spreadsheet because as I do, it gives me a map for revision. It tells me what the scene’s for, it tells me… It helps me find the things that are wrong or find the things that are missing.
[Erin] A tool that I use as a short story writer, a lot of my tools are really micro, because, like, you’re getting into the individual sentences and paragraphs. One that I actually stole from essay writing is that sometimes when I’m writing an essay, I’ll put a spot in brackets and I’ll be like, “A brilliant sentence that summarizes all the things and makes it really make sense with this scene.” So… I don’t know if anyone remembers literal videos back in the day of MTV where they would tell you exactly what was happening in the video as opposed to the song? Sometimes I will go through a scene and actually look at what is this line doing? Not what’s the line itself, but I’ll be like, “A long, winding sentence that establishes the world and gives a little bit of character.” “A short punchy thing that like keeps the audience going.” I’ll actually look at what I’m trying to accomplish with each individual sentence. The reason to do that is it gets me out of the headspace of I love these words, I don’t want to touch them, to thinking about why did I put these words here in the first place. So that when I look at the literal video outline, it… I’m like, that’s a series of things that doesn’t make sense in a row, that tells me that the actual words that I wrote may need to be moved around as well.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I often find that when I’m sitting there, trying to revise the same sentence over and over and over, that it’s a clue to me that that sentence doesn’t belong in the manuscript at all, and that I was just desperately trying to make it fit in. When we’re talking about sentence level stuff. But, I also do the “really terrible German joke goes here” is one of my more recent ones…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Or “competence porn. Then Almo does more.” It’s like sometimes you just… You put in these placeholders and the revision process is honing them. So, one of the other things that I find useful along the lines that you’re all talking about is the purpose of the scene. That’s something that I also mark down. So, sometimes I will look for redundancies in my manuscript, where I can look at rolling scenes together. I find that that’s really fun. So, for me, what I’ll do because I get attracted to my beautiful, beautiful words, is I’ll pull the entire scenes all the way out, stick them in the scrap folder, start again. Then, when I’m like, “Wait, I’ve written this already,” I’ll go and grab a piece of it and drop it back in.
[Mahtab] What I also like to do is when I’m doing the revisions, also look at the emotional core of the scene. Sometimes, when you’re doing the descriptions or you’re doing the pacing, all of that, that might be missed out. So I also have an EC, and then for every scene, in the notes section, I will write in what is the emotional core. What is it that you want the audience to feel? How are you going to end the chapter to make sure that the audience feels… Or, it’s not audience, the readers feel that way and they want to turn the page? So there are many things that I will also look at in the revision, and that’ll all go into the notes column. Then, one thing I love to do is when I start a brand-new draft, I don’t… Or rather, when I start the revision, I don’t use the old… The first draft that I wrote. I start a brand-new draft. Then I just pick the pieces that I need, change it around so I’m starting with something very, very clean. It helps me in my head rather than looking at this whole jumble and getting bogged down by it and getting overwhelmed. I just go chapter by chapter by chapter and it just makes it a lot simpler and easier to kind of revise.
[Dan] I wanted to just say, really quick at the end here, that the method Erin and Mary Robinette are talking about, where they will insert placeholders, I will come back later and add this sentence or this scene or this dialogue… That is not something that I can do. So I just want to let you know out there that there isn’t a right way to do this. What works for you, works for you. For me, I have to write things in order. I can go back in revision later, and I can add a line, but I find myself kind of constitutionally incapable of planning to go back and add the line. If I know it needs to be there, I have to put it in right there because everything that comes after it will stem from it or grow out of it in some way. So, whichever way you do it is fine. There’s just lots of different ways to do it.
[Mary Robinette] So, with that in mind, it is time for us to give you your homework.
[Mahtab] Right. So, I would love for you to take your first chapter, whatever you’re revising, your work in progress, or even if you’re… Well, actually, this will work if you already have a draft. You will have access to the template very shortly, as soon as the podcast goes up. Try and revise your very first chapter by creating that template. The first time, I can tell you, is going to be a little bit painful, because all you’re doing is you’re picking out the plot, the chapters, the point of view, all of that. Just put that into your template, and aft… It will go a little bit easier, but I remember the first time I did it, it was extremely painful. It was very slow. I’m like, “Why am I doing it?” But, trust me, trust the process, it is going to work. Do that with your first chapter and see if you can see… If you can work out what’s missing, if you can write notes in the chapter, and then continue on with chapter 2, 3, 4. But, at least, try that with the first chapter to see if this is a process that works for you.
[Mary Robinette] Well, thank you for joining us, Mahtab. This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go revise.
[DongWon] Hey. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Congratulations. Also, let us know. We’d love to hear from you about how you’ve applied the stuff we’ve been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
]]>Homework Assignment from Fonda Lee:
Take a page of a work-in-progress project and experiment with the pacing. Ideally, this should be a page with some dialogue or tension between characters. First, try to speed it up: cut description, be tight with dialogue, move the scene quickly. Then do the opposite: rewrite the scene but this time slow it down. Include more context, character interiority, exposition, and scene building. Compare the two versions. Which serves your story better?
Thing of the Week:
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(as transcribed by Mike Barker)
Key Points: Pacing is subjective, depending on the genre, length, tone, author voice. Reader expectations! Pacing is not just speed, it’s the sequence of events, the prose style, the rhythm, and level of tension. It’s the reader’s perceived unfolding of the story. It’s the soundtrack of the story! How do you target the readership and pull them through the experience the right way? First, what are the conventions of your genre, and what are your readers expecting? Control the structure of your work, the beats and rhythm. Pacing is both speeding things up and slowing things down. Speed it up by trimming description, dialogue, and exposition. Make scenes do multiple jobs. Use dialogue to control pacing! Slowing it down? Space your action, tension scenes with quiet moments. Pacing is created by fascination, by interest. Build ebb and flow. Make the reader anticipate change. Switch things up!
[Season 19, Episode 04]
[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.
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you’re in a hurry.
[Fonda] And we’re not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.
[Emma] I’m Emma.
[DongWon] I’m DongWon.
[Erin] I’m Erin.
[Dan] And I’m Dan.
[DongWon] So, we’re here this week with our guest host, who is a guest instructor on the 2023 Writing Excuses workshop and retreat, Fonda Lee. Fonda is one of my very favorite speculative fiction writers. She is the author of the Green Bone saga starting with Jade City, which is probably my favorite fantasy series of the past decade. So, with that tough introduction, I’m going to toss it over to Fonda Lee to talk about herself for a second.
[Fonda] I don’t know if there’s anything else to say, DongWon. Thank you very much for that introduction. I’m delighted to be back on Writing Excuses. As DongWon mentioned, I’m the author of the Green Bone saga, as well as a number of science fiction novels. My most recent work is in novella called Untethered Sky.
[DongWon] So, when we decided to have you on the podcast, there was one topic that I immediately turned to that I wanted to hear you talk about. Because I think one of the strongest things about Jade City and the other Green Bone books is the incredible pacing of those books. They are very action oriented, there’s a lot of tension, but you also know how to lean into a character moment, sort of luxuriate in 2 people having a conversation, or even just a character walking down the street and the way that that can create tension, as danger escalates in those moments. So, I’m going to toss it over to you, to talk a little bit about how you think about pacing and what are some tools that are audience can use.
[Fonda] I love talking about pacing, because I think it’s a topic that isn’t covered quite as frequently in writing conferences, writing classes. One of the reasons is because it is so incredibly subjective and dependent on the genre, the subgenre, the category, the length of the work, the tone, the author voice, all of these things play into pacing and what the right pacing is for a story. If you go onto Good Reads and you pick any book, almost certainly you will find a five-star review that says, “This book was gripping. I couldn’t put it down.” And you will almost certainly find a one star review that says, “This book was so boring. I couldn’t finish it.” That is because so much of the pacing is dependent on reader expectations. So I like to think of pacing not just as the speed of the story, which is what I think a lot of people automatically assume it is. Instead, I think of pacing as the sequence of events, the prose style, the rhythm, and the level of tension in the narrative that affect the reader’s perceived unfolding of that story. So think of it as the soundtrack of your story.
[DongWon] Yeah. I love you talking about it in those terms. Because inside industry circles… The other reason I wanted to bring this up is I feel like it’s one of the aspects of writing that I understand at least well. Because inside’s industry circles, we use a truly terrible term where we say that book is pacey or that book is not pacey. Right? Which is a terrible way to say it, but I don’t know why we do it that way. Anyways, people are constantly telling me that, like, oh, that’s not pacey enough, or that book is very pacey. I’ll read it and I’ll be like, “I found this to be a very tense experience,” or… So there is that subjectiveness that comes into it. So when you’re thinking about how to increase that tension, how do you target what readership you’re going for and make sure for that audience it’s, like, pulling them through the experience in the right way?
[Fonda] Yeah. That’s a really good question to ask, because you have to first ask yourself what are the conventions of your genre and category, and what are your readers going to expect? So, if you’re writing for adults literary fiction audience, they’re going to have a very different expectation of pacing then if you’re writing a middle grade fantasy novel. So that’s the first thing to know is that you have to work within the expectations of your readership. You’re only going to know that by reading a lot within that category or that genre and understanding what conventional pacing is within the field that you’re working in. But also remember that the way that you just used pacing, pacey, which is essentially saying it’s a faster story is not always right. It’s not always appropriate for that work. That advice, I think, also comes often times because beginning writers are told you have to hook the reader right at the beginning. You have to track… Which means you have to track the editors, so they default to trying to make the beginning of their story as fast-paced as possible when that may not be the most appropriate beginning to their story. So, pacing is so inextricably tied to structure that you can really think about controlling pacing as controlling structure. If you have a good understanding of the structure of your work, the beats that are expected, the rhythm at which you want to unroll your story, you’re a good way of the way towards controlling pacing.
[Mary Robinette] That’s a really interesting way of phrasing that, because when I was coming in, I was very good at character, but the thing that I had trouble with was structure. Then, after that, I felt like the thing that I had to learn was pacing, and I’m only just starting to get a grasp on how to control it. Like, I had an understanding as a reader of what I wanted to see, but how to manipulate it was slower in coming. So I’m wondering, like, when you’re trying to speed something up or slow something down, what tools are you using?
[Fonda] Yeah. I think a really key point of your question is the also the slowing things down. Because often times people think of pacing in terms only of speeding things up. Often times both readers or your critique partners will give you the feedback, there’s too much going on. To me, that is code for you need to look at pacing. You may be trying to move too many things into a scene. Slowing things down is actually going to help your reader. So, in terms of the tools that you asked about for speeding things up, one of the ways that I think about speeding things up is being as economical as possible with description, with dialogue, and with exposition. So you’re going… There’s a few things that you can think about. One is, first of all, how do you make your scenes do multiple jobs. If you are… If you want to increase the pace of a particular part of your story, you can do that by accomplishing more and layering these ingredients into a scene. So let’s say you have an action scene that’s going on. You also want to reveal a bit of character in that scene. You want to have a tense moment, while the action is going on, a bit of dialogue that’s going to increase the tension there. You’re going to cut out all of that extraneous stuff that might slow your reader down. One thing also, just very tactically, is that your reader is going to move more quickly through prose when there’s more white space on the page. So, even something like the way that you put together your sentences to be more economical, to create more white space on the page, to make the I move faster, is going to increase the speed at which your reader processes. The other thing too is to look at dialogue. Dialogue can be a fantastic way to control the pacing of your story, especially making it feel almost artificially fast and punchy. If you look at some really good screenwriters, like Aaron Sorkin, for example, or in a movie like Glengarry Glen Ross. If you actually think about what happens in that movie, not that much, but it feels very fast-paced, because of the dialogue of the characters, the really snappy, witty way that they talk. The piece of advice here to remember is don’t try to write realistic dialogue. Realistic dialogue, normal people talking, is in… Is full of tangents, we go in weird directions, we have all these fillers. But look at really great scriptwriting in the way they write dialogue in the way that increases the speed at which their scenes unfold. Now, going to the other side of that question, the how do you slow a scene down, that is actually a really good thing that sometimes you need to do in order to give your story breathing room. Often times, books that are fast-paced suffer from having action scene after action scene after action scene. Where the characters can’t process what’s happening, and as a result, the reader doesn’t have time to process what’s happening. So, one of the things that I like to do in my own work is making sure those high tension scenes, those high action scenes, are spaced out in a way that the characters have these quiet moments in between. So they have a chance to process what’s happened. You can get an interiority in with those characters, that creates the sort of ebb and flow of tension.
[DongWon] We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about some of the common pitfalls that writers run into when trying to manage the pacing of their work.
[Fonda] So, my thing of the week is a short story collection. The reason why I want to highlight this is because one of the best ways to get a lot of different examples of pacing is to read short stories. Often times in a novel, there are many ebbs and flows, so the novel has varied pacing throughout. Short stories, you can really get a snapshot of different types of pacing by reading a bunch of short stories together. So, the anthology that I want to highlight is a little self-serving, it is The Book of Witches edited by Jonathan Strahan [garbled]. I have a story in it, as do many other fantastic speculative fiction authors, and it is out in time for Halloween. So, check that out. Book of Witches.
[DongWon] Okay. Dan, I believe you had something?
[Dan] I just wanted to go back to something Fonda said at the very beginning about how we often think of pacing as being speed, and it isn’t necessarily that. When someone says a book is boring, it’s not because nothing’s happening in it, necessarily. It’s because there’s nothing compelling or interesting to pull them through. People don’t need… Not like constant explosions, they need something that they are fascinated by, that they are interested in, that they want to know more about. So, people always tell me that my John Cleaver books, for example, are paced very well and are paced very quickly. The first several scenes of I Am Not a Serial Killer, like, nothing happens. The first scene, the hook for that book, is just a really kind of slow embalming where he talks to his mom and his aunt. Nothing is happening, there’s no real danger, but there is a lot of emotional tension and a lot of conflict between the characters and a lot of kind of intriguing worldbuilding stuff, and all of these other things. It is compelling to read through, even though really nothing’s going on and tell like chapter 4.
[Mary Robinette] By contrast, I have had people say that the opening to Relentless Moon is slow because it starts with a literal explosion…
[Laughter]
[Yup. Yup.]
[Mary Robinette] But my character is like, oh, I know how to handle this, because she’s an astronaut. So she’s chill about it, and I think that affects people.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think the thing that I see most commonly when somebody is trying to write a really fast-paced book or somebody’s trying to be really commercial is they’ll do a bunch of action scenes back-to-back or just start in action, but to me, that can end up feeling very slow, either because of something Mary Robinette mentioned, which is the character’s so competent in the moment or because we don’t know the characters yet, so you don’t have those individual character stakes. Right? There’s nothing that’s really putting them at threat in sort of a core identity way. For me, that’s where a lot of tension comes from. So, sometimes, just throwing someone into a situation where survival is the question can feel ironically less tense and less driving than a scene where a relationship is at stake, which could be as slow as a conversation with family members.
[Fonda] Yeah. Yeah. The question I always keep in mind is at any given time, are there things happening that are crucial to the narrative? Those don’t just have to be external plot things. Especially if you’re thinking of the release and buildup of tension throughout a story. You’re going to have times when, let’s say, there’s a scene where something has been resolved in your external plot, but that resolution scene has a buildup of tension in an interpersonal subplot. So you’re always thinking of the ebb and flow of tension throughout, and if you’re releasing tension in one area, are you building it in another area? Keep the reader anticipating change. I think that’s the key thing when it comes to maintaining that tension is… It could be a very minor character moment. It could be a conversation that’s just between 2 family members in a quiet room. But it could feel very tense because the reader is anticipating that whatever is happening is going to change something.
[Erin] Yeah. I love that thought about ebb and flow for 2 reasons. One is that I sometimes do think about sort of pacing as being in a car, that sort of metaphor, and often times you will not realize how quickly you’re going until you slow down. You don’t realize the speed until something changes. Then, that change makes you realize, well, actually, like, we all got used to being on a boat, and now the boat is moving a lot more today, and we are feeling that change, you all. So…
[Oh, boy]
[Erin] That is the thing that really let you know that pacing is happening.
[Yeah]
[Erin] I also think that you can change the distance between when you’re having, like, a… Something is introduced and then resolved. If things are introduced and resolved really quickly, that feels faster paced than if you introduce something and it takes a while for it to resolve. So, having those… That’s another way to make something feel, I think, for me, faster or slower paced.
[Fonda] Yeah. Being able to direct, control, and then twist your reader’s expectations creates variation in the pacing. Which is interesting to them and will keep them compelled. Because a monotonous dance track that’s very fast-paced is still boring. Right? If you are the DJ of the soundtrack of your story, you want to be switching things up, so that you’re moving seamlessly from song to song, but it’s not just one continuous beat. Even if it’s fast-paced, it’s going to get dull.
[Dan] I was watching an interview the other day with the guy who did the highest parachute jump ever. Remember the guy a few years ago…
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Dan] Went up into like lower orbit and jumped. What was fascinating to me is he said for the first long while of that, it didn’t feel like he was falling at all. It just felt like floating there. This is this incredible thing, he’s like something like 160,000 feet, and he said it didn’t feel like falling, it wasn’t exciting, it was just floating. That’s because there wasn’t enough atmosphere, there wasn’t enough to react against. So it wasn’t… Like Erin said, there wasn’t change of speed, there wasn’t the sign of something going on, it was just nothing.
[DongWon] I love that idea. I love the image that it’s the variation, it’s the change in rhythm, it’s the use of negative space. All of these things are what’s helping move your reader through the story at the speed that you want them to and keep them engaged throughout. So, Fonda, thank you so much for joining us. I believe you have our homework this week.
[Fonda] I do. Your homework this week is to take a page of a story that you’re working on, and I want you to first try to speed it up. So cut the description, be very tight with dialogue, and try to make this as fast-paced as you can. Then, I want you to do the opposite. So give the characters a lot more time, include more content, more interiority, more exposition, more worldbuilding, and slow the pace down. Make it a more extended scene. Then compare those 2 versions. See how they feel, and which one serves your story better.
[DongWon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you’ve applied the stuff that we’ve been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
]]>