[SPEAKER_03]: Hey everybody, this is Erin, and I've got a question for you.
[SPEAKER_03]: What have you learned from writing excuses that you use in your own writing?
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, we talk a lot about tools not rules, which means there are things that we're gonna say that you're gonna be like, yes, that is for me.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the tool I'm gonna use in my next project.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there are others that you're gonna be like, I'm gonna leave that to the side.
[SPEAKER_03]: And what we wanna know is,
[SPEAKER_03]: have really worked for you.
[SPEAKER_03]: What's the acronym you're always repeating?
[SPEAKER_03]: What's the plot structure you keep coming back to?
[SPEAKER_03]: What's a piece of advice that has carried you forward when you've been stuck in your work or that you've been able to pass on to another writer who's needed advice or help?
[SPEAKER_03]: However, you've used something that you've learned from us.
[SPEAKER_03]: We want to know about it, and we want to share it with the broader community.
[SPEAKER_03]: Every month we're going to put one of your tips or tricks or tools in the newsletter so that the rest of the community can hear how have you actually taken something that we've talked about and made it work for you.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm personally just really excited to learn about these because a lot of times y'all take the things that we say and use them in such ingenious and interesting ways to do such amazing writing that I'm just like chomping at the bit to get in these tools and tips and share them with everybody else.
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you're interested, please go to our show notes and fill out the form there and be part of this project
[SPEAKER_03]: Share with us what you're doing, what you've learned, and how you're using it so that we can share with everybody else.
[SPEAKER_03]: Really excited again to get all this in because honestly, what we say is made, real and important and meaningful by what y'all do with it.
[SPEAKER_03]: With that, you are out of excuses, now go tell us what works for you.
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[SPEAKER_05]: Season 20, episode 49.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is Writing Excuses.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm Mary Robinette.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Don Juan.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm Aaron.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm Howard.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I have brought this topic to the table because it's a class that I taught from my Patreon because I started thinking about what Tonyn mood did and that they are one of the most powerful storytelling tools, but we always talk about structure, character arc, and things like that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Here is why I think it's important and then we're going to tell it what we're going to,
[SPEAKER_05]: It's basically, I think plot tells us what happens, structure tells us how it happens, and tone and mood shaped the emotional experience of the reader.
[SPEAKER_05]: And my example of this, I've got two of them for you, is that Wizard of Oz is structurally a heist.
[SPEAKER_05]: So you have the catalyst, which is the tornado.
[SPEAKER_05]: You have scouting the territory.
[SPEAKER_05]: Welcome to us.
[SPEAKER_05]: You have gathering the team, meet the scarecrow, 10 man currently lying in the wizard.
[SPEAKER_05]: You have practice and prep for the heist, which is the mario bland of us.
[SPEAKER_05]: Song, you have committed to the heist, the wizard sends them to get the broom, their forced are alter the plan.
[SPEAKER_05]: There's flying monkeys.
[SPEAKER_05]: then the plan comes together, the team rescues Dorothy.
[SPEAKER_05]: Bigger thing goes wrong, they get chased by guards in the witch's of the castle, they've got a parent total loss where they've caught, mascara curled catches on fire, and then the actual win, which is melted, and we could have the true plan revealed, which is that that was the wizard's goal all along.
[SPEAKER_00]: So more heist movies need flying monkey.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right?
[SPEAKER_05]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_05]: But it doesn't feel like a heist because tonally, it is a wonder tale and it's a coming of age story.
[SPEAKER_05]: and then Pride and Prejudice actually secretly a mystery.
[SPEAKER_05]: You've got the crime, Mr. Darcy is an asshole, the investigation, Lizzy investigates and continues to find proof that he's an asshole.
[SPEAKER_05]: Then you have the twist, Rick and Run's away with Lydia, and then the breakthrough, like what, Mr. Darcy saved Lydia from ruin, and then the conclusion that he's not an asshole and that they're in love and then you have marriage.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, but again, it's tonally, it's not that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, this connects to elemental genres.
[SPEAKER_05]: Exactly, it gets into elemental genres, but I think that tone and mood are things that we can play with.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so what I want to do is talk about tone in the first half of the episode and mood in the second.
[SPEAKER_05]: And my thinking is that tone is about the narrator's
[SPEAKER_05]: So I am curious what they're having just spewed at you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Here's my thinking.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm very excited about this idea.
[SPEAKER_05]: What do you think about that?
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think there's a number of different ways that we control tone.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I'm curious what you think now that I've been like, Hello, here's the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am one, I'm reluctant to disagree because this is very well thought out and I love it, but too, I think that tone might be the structure and so on and so forth and mood might be a more readerly thing that comes into the narrative because in the context of
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, you know, what I bring to sitting down to watch Wizard of Oz, Wizard of Oz doesn't feel like a heist.
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a,
[SPEAKER_00]: Wizard of Oz might feel like might feel more like a heist.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so mood might be more related to the conversation that you we talked about this earlier this year, the conversation that your piece is having with other pieces that are similar in the mood that you're shooting for.
[SPEAKER_05]: I see what you're saying.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think the question is, if we're thinking about this as being an intentional thing that we can control it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why that's the other reason I'm reluctant to do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: How would I control that?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, and I think the reason you control that is through how the character feels.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like Dorothy, when she walks into Oz, when she steps out into Oz, her reaction to being in Oz tells us how we should feel about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the moon, and the tone is the high structure of it.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, the structure is this thing that's happening, the tone is, so the tone is the narrator's view of the world.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's the imagery that we use, so it's the fiction, it's the word choices, it's the sentence structure, in Wizard of Oz, it's the color palette and things like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was going to actually say what you would say for mood and then I have a theoretical analogy.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_05]: So for mood, the tools that I think that we're using to control things are the character's physical responses, their internal reaction, the actions that they take and the things they pay attention to.
[SPEAKER_05]: I see.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the way that I'm thinking about this, of course, is with karaoke.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I'm thinking like, so the tone, because to me what you're saying is the tone is the way that it's how the teller tells the tale.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so when you sing a song, like you can decide, like if you, it could be the weirdest song ever that's like who knows, could be the most emo screamo song.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if instead of screaming it, you decide to sing in a sultry jazz voice.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like you have changed the tone of the song.
[SPEAKER_03]: The song's trying to do what it's doing,
[SPEAKER_03]: put your foot down and said, this is the way that I'm going to do it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I sing everything as a soldier jazz number and I'm a care what it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's the part of the experience that you're going to have.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the mood to me is more like the crowd.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like the mood is like I'm telling the tail in this way.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the mood is like looking around and seeing like.
[SPEAKER_03]: is everyone poking.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's going to give a different node.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then no matter what, so parts, and those two things intersect.
[SPEAKER_03]: And one of the things I think is interesting, number one is to say, does that even work for you as an analogy?
[SPEAKER_03]: And number two, then what happens if the tone and the mood?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, do they always have to line up?
[SPEAKER_03]: Or can we be in a conflict with each other?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I have a great example, I think of where they'd average.
[SPEAKER_01]: What's fun about this episode is you brought us this idea.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we didn't talk about it much on flight.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is sort of a little bit of a class situation class and a little bit of like, let's interrogate the instructor and find out what this means.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, this is, this, for me, this is out.
[SPEAKER_05]: Let's kick the tires out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, no, I love it.
[SPEAKER_01]: OK, so Mike Flanagan, who's a horror director, made an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story is called the Fall of the House of Usher.
[SPEAKER_01]: The tone of this is this big dark family drama horror story of a man being hunted by the deaths of his children that are happening over the course of week where all of his children die and increasingly or not increasing their all equally horrible ways.
[SPEAKER_01]: tone of this story is told in this like bombastic way, this like big, grand family drama.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the experience of watching the show is almost horror comedy.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's can't be, it's over the top.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think a lot of people reacted badly to the show because of this, but it's it's a deeply unserious show with a serious core message.
[SPEAKER_01]: But as a deeply unserious show, as you watch these characters
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in ways that feel very Edgar Allan Poe in terms of being wildly over the top of watching a guy go insane because he thinks there's a cat in the walls right like in it to me, it wasn't utterly delightful experience, we were like howling and cackling through the whole thing, but it
[SPEAKER_01]: It strikes me that there is a real difference between the tone and the mood where the tone is like reading Edgar Allan Poe poems like verbatim as narration and with like a somber music behind it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you're watching someone run around with the sledgehammer trying to find a cat.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like fantastic, but there's such a difference between those two experiences in the
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the dissonance between them led to so much of the space for Flanagan to say the serious things he wanted to say while also entertaining the hell out of us of watching a bunch of awful incredibly wealthy people get got in ways that they deserved.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: So to Erin's point about candies to candy things work in opposition to each other, can you can you create a juxtaposition and contrast?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, I absolutely.
[SPEAKER_05]: One of the things that I was thinking about is that in this is how you lose a time war, or this is how you lose the time war, the t-shop scene.
[SPEAKER_05]: The tone of that is like, look at how lovely Britain is and how beautiful this is.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the mood of the character is quite different from that.
[SPEAKER_05]: While the character is there to enjoy that, the character is inhabiting it as a, this is quaint.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is, and I'm also having all of these big feels about this person.
[SPEAKER_05]: that that I'm having these these battles with it this is a battleground that's the mood that's going on one of my other favorite examples is Jane Austen you do not have to read the entire novel but if you take a look at North Anger Abbey chapter 21 and 22
[SPEAKER_05]: And 20, basically, the character arrives and she's in this room and she's like, Oh, no, this room is so gothic and terrible and it's really it's frightening and there's mysteries in it and the author, the tone of it.
[SPEAKER_05]: is that Jane Austen, the author's voice, is gently mocking the character while the character is having genuine feels and in chapter 22 she wakes up in the morning and discovers that the terrible scratch anything at the window was actually a beautiful rose bush.
[SPEAKER_05]: and that the wardrobe that she thought was locked was actually unlocked and that she had locked it and that that was why it was hard to get open.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so the tone remains quite consistent, that you know, I'm gently mocking you while the characters mood switches and so it causes you to experience the same room in two very very different ways.
[SPEAKER_03]: thought I'm having is that it seems like mood in some ways in terms of tools and how you work with it that mood is a more primal.
[SPEAKER_03]: It seems like it's like more like a lizard brain thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And by that, I mean, things are scary.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are certain things like when things feel, when it's just a scary mood plays on things that we are afraid of.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is dark.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is a strange sound.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are a lot of ways to bring different tones because we can do a lot more small control over the way our narrator thinks about it and talks about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But things like hitting a wall with sledgehammer's looking for a cat.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like if you frame that, well, like there's something that we will just think that's funny because there's something funny in the visual that hits us on that primal level.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I'm kind of curious like how you thinking for myself how to set up that kind of like this is the landscape in some ways like mood is the landscape and tone is the person walking through the landscape.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we can control how they see it and what they say about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: If they make fun of it or whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: But in some ways, the landscape is still there.
[SPEAKER_03]: And if you want to change the mood, you're making broader changes to the landscape in front of you.
[SPEAKER_05]: That sounds like a great thing for us to talk about when we come back from the break.
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[SPEAKER_05]: So I love this idea of thinking about it as a landscape.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I think the reason that I have been thinking about mood is that as a thing that is very character centered is because different people react differently to the same landscapes.
[SPEAKER_05]: and so the narrator has set for me.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's like, okay, folks, here's your landscape.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm going to maybe I'll set up some fog and some scary lighting and this is amazing.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the character's like, I love fog and scary lighting and then another character's like, no, this is this is much worse.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that that for me, a lot of the what a character does when we are in tight third person or
[SPEAKER_05]: is that they are my view point into the story.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're my way of imagining how I would feel in that, and it does activate my lizard brain.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I think that that's an interesting way to think of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: You bring that up, I went through a haunted house once a couple of decades ago, and the mood that I brought with me was
[SPEAKER_00]: I have heard that they have spent a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of effort and they've got really good, they've got a really good team working on this and it's being hosted at what used to be the actual mental hospital up on the hillside in Utah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was giggling genuinely joyful, happy the whole time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, somebody does a thing where they pull down a lever and crush a dummy, and something squirted on my face.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I squealed with laughter and one of the cast members stepped up to me just right in my ears like, dude, what's wrong with you?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I hear you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could you, would you like to work here because you're frightening all of us?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so yeah, for me, the, the tone and the mood are, are dependent a lot on what I bring into that, that landscape.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I'd love to turn at this point to talking a little bit how we can use this as a tool right I think understanding we've gotten to a little point where we kind of understand the terms here, how do you deploy this in your fiction or how should we think about this as an active use.
[SPEAKER_05]: Let me actually use an example from an early early piece of my own writing.
[SPEAKER_05]: This was one of the pieces that made me understand that tone was something that I should be consciously manipulating.
[SPEAKER_05]: So there's a short story called Serbo and Vitro Ujo, which was the first horror story that I sold.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I'm like, this is, I'm not very deep into my career.
[SPEAKER_05]: I have, you know, I don't have novels out at this point.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so I'm going to read you the first paragraph or so, first three sentences, ish.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then I'm going to read you the revision of it after I talk to Ellen Datlow who gave me some lessons about horror.
[SPEAKER_05]: So behind the steady drone of the garden's humidifiers, Greta caught the wish snake as the airlocked or opened.
[SPEAKER_05]: She kept pruning her sunset glory rose bush to give Kai a chance to sneak up on her.
[SPEAKER_05]: He barreled around the Mill Holland's prize Emperor Artichoke without a hint of stealth.
[SPEAKER_05]: Something was wrong.
[SPEAKER_05]: Greta's breath, quickened to matches.
[SPEAKER_05]: Kai's dark skin seemed to covered by a layer of ash.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the thing that Ellen said when she read that was that there was nothing visceral about it.
[SPEAKER_05]: There was nothing about the language, the tone of my language.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right now I'm setting up something that could just be a meet-tooth kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: He could be about like, oh my goodness, I'm going to have to propose marriage.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like anything could be happening right now.
[SPEAKER_05]: So when I revised it, all of the actions are exactly the same, but I've switched my language.
[SPEAKER_05]: Greta snipped a diseased branch off her sunset glory rose bush like she was a body harvest her looking for the perfect part.
[SPEAKER_05]: So you can see it like I'm not even going about a reading the rest of it, but you can see immediately the tone switch that that makes.
[SPEAKER_05]: So for me, when I'm thinking about tone, I'm thinking about the imagery that I use and that was one of the things that Ellen said was that I needed that there needed to be something diseased or something like why was a perfect rose bush.
[SPEAKER_05]: So imagery, the word choices, I body harvester, choosing that sentence structures, whether you're doing something that's flowing and languid or like choppy and breathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's where to my original attempt to argue with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's where we have control over.
[SPEAKER_00]: what the reader brings, what the reader brings to the experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because when you say, body harvester,
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, that's, that's the sort of phrase that is going to resonate with people, whether or not they have experience in sci-fi or horror, uh, diseased branch, diseased.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, these are things that carry imagery and which, yeah, they, you, you are controlling the mood really well.
[SPEAKER_05]: What I'm going to point out is that my character does not know that she's in a horror story, and that's why I think mood is a separate thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, if mood is the landscape, as Aaron sort of described, I'm seeing tone as the score, like the movie score, that's running underneath it, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you have a scene of a character's laughing with, you know, upbeat misbehind it, you were in a comedy, you put a discordant, you know, ambient sound underneath it, it's a horror movie now, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Howard showed me YouTube video the other day of
[SPEAKER_01]: The trailer for Mad Max remixed to the Acuity Saxong, and it changed the tone, let's say, you know, while the mood of the characters remains the same, because the landscape is the same.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is not important to writing, but this is why I have always wanted if I were going to have a superpower for it to be to be able to hear the orchestration of my own life so that I would know when to be afraid, when to be happy, when I'm like meeting a romance because it would come through and let me know that like while I might be in this place, something completely different is happening altogether.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what, Aaron, I think you're empowered to choose the music that is behind your own life.
[SPEAKER_03]: deep on of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I would say the other thing that's not to do with my own life is I think we a lot of times play around with this with contrast.
[SPEAKER_03]: I asked the question about the contrast and the example that I thought of was like your old school lawn order episodes were like someone has been killed in some horrible way and then Lenny Briscoe's like, guess he's not making it home for dinner?
[SPEAKER_03]: like frees like it's cuts because you're like, oh no, like, and it is a, you know, but it brings you to like this is a show that's about procedure and we're kind of having a fun time.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not a, it's not a horror.
[SPEAKER_03]: Law order is not a horror show that that would be interesting.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it, and it teaches you a little bit, but also it makes you laugh because the mood sets up one expectation and the tone comes and contrast and contrast I've learned from Howard is one of the tools I think that you can use to make humor happen.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's, it's also one of the things that you can use to make tension happen too, which we've been talking about in a lot of other places, that placing two things in contrast to each other.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's why you so often see the, hello, it's a giant battle scene with scores, like this, you know, like the classic one is it's what a wonderful world in the morning Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_05]: is fun to play with on a conscious level.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think a lot of us do it unconsciously, but I think it is as important to think about as plot.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tools that I find myself using are white space and sentence length, where when I want to make a shift and I think about that in terms of Aaron as you suggested, you know, the score.
[SPEAKER_00]: because the song of the music of the poetry of the prose on the page is so dependent on where the breath slant, that by adding white space, by shortening sentences, I can change the breath of what's happening and govern the mood in the same way that North-Castoral Square might.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, and so I think when you're looking at it, that you kind of have two choices that you can I when you're combining tone and mood, that you can either have the match or you can have them in juxtaposition and when they match the you get what a growing poll calls unity of effect.
[SPEAKER_05]: where you are reinforcing and underlining.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is things are real bad or things really good.
[SPEAKER_05]: And in juxtaposition, when they don't match, that you can create tension by the contrast between the narration and the character.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like, if the narration is like, oh, that stuff is going down and characters are like, I love this place.
[SPEAKER_05]: You're like, no, things are good.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, it creates that anticipation.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's funny that you mentioned that because the fall of the house of usher show is talking about there's one moment towards the end when the tone in the mood match and it is a devastating brutal beat in a show that has been mostly about yucks up until about point where he just kicks you in the heart and it's when there's a line it's like that's the trick he pulls is suddenly out of lines and then we kind of slip out of that again for the finale but it's it's interesting
[SPEAKER_05]: So, I have some homework for you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Your homework is that I just want you to take a mystery structure.
[SPEAKER_05]: And a mystery structure is five parts.
[SPEAKER_05]: You have a crime, an investigation, a twist, a breakthrough, and then the conclusion.
[SPEAKER_05]: I want you to take that structure and I want you to write something that is not obviously a mystery.
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[SPEAKER_04]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Dong Wan Song, Erin Roberts and Howard Taylor.
[SPEAKER_04]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
[SPEAKER_04]: For more information, visit writing excuses.com.