[SPEAKER_00]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Season 20, episode 39.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Writing Excuses.
[SPEAKER_03]: Rapping off our conversation about lenses.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Mary Robinette.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Don Lone.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Dan.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Aaron.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm Howard.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm going to start this episode with a confession, which is that our entire conversation about lenses came from the fact that Mary Robinette and I were in a conversation and I was like, what if we just talked about writing as like, who, what, when, where, why, and how?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, we all remember that from when we were children.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's super easy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like we found out that there's so much complexity within these very simple theoretical lenses that each of these lenses
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you take all this and like synthesize it?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we've been talking about it and how it was done in all the birds in the sky, but for people who are trying to figure out how to take all of this knowledge and put it together into one mega lens, how the heck do you do it?
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, my advice would actually be to not do that and to ignore us entirely.
[SPEAKER_04]: During the process of composing and writing a book, I really feel like it has to come from you as a person.
[SPEAKER_04]: It has to be an expression of yourself and of what's interesting to you and of how you're feeling.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then in the revision process, you could go back and look, use all these lenses to say, well, what have I done?
[SPEAKER_04]: what did I do?
[SPEAKER_04]: How did I do it?
[SPEAKER_04]: Is there a way that I can, you know, amp that up a little bit?
[SPEAKER_04]: Or is there a lens, you know, when I look through the lens of who there's nothing to see, clearly I need to characterize better.
[SPEAKER_04]: They, at least for me and how my process works, these all feel like really great revision tools, but using them as first draft writing tools,
[SPEAKER_03]: just being too formalized and overwhelming.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, you know, one thing I think about with how we approach this podcast and what our pedagogy is as a group, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is so much, I mean, the phrase we use all the time is tools not rules, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: We're not giving you guys rules.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're just trying to give you a deep,
[SPEAKER_03]: toolkit that you can pull from when you need to.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so the way we think about putting together a season and this season in particular, I think, was a lot breaking down these lenses into a bunch of subtopics.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so giving you the ability to be like, I'm struggling with X, Y, or Z. And then you go back and cherry pick and be like, I'm going to listen to this episode or re-listen to this one or whatever it is, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know,
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to continue along Dan's trend here.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not being very good at marketing the podcast, but there's a way in which that you don't need to listen to necessarily every episode that we do.
[SPEAKER_03]: What I want you to do is to feel like this is the thing I need to be hearing right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the thing that's useful to me.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, plenty people do listen to us back to front, but also plenty people dive in individual moments, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so,
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I'm doing a little bit of an end run around your question Aaron in some ways because we are all synthesizing all of these things as we write, so hearing it once is helpful, but don't try and hold it all in your head.
[SPEAKER_03]: I guess is what I'm saying and be more targeted about like, I'm struggling with this issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just jumping off of that, but then to actually answer Erin's question.
[SPEAKER_00]: I tend to think about the idea that the technique is there for when you're struggling with the art.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've talked before about when I was learning to do this particular style of puppet.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to walk the puppet around the table.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that my mentor was looking for me for the point when I had internalized how to do the technique so that when I was performing I wasn't thinking about technique I was just thinking about art and in an ideal world when you are writing you are just dealing with stuff that you have internalized
[SPEAKER_00]: And you are, you are, you know, the artist is just happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're chasing the emotion, you're chasing the attention, you're chasing the things you want to read and the things you enjoy.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't think that these things are limited to, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: using them in the editorial process I think Dan is absolutely right that's a great place for them but I also think that when you're writing and you hit a wall and you're like oh I don't know how to move past this that you can reach for one of the lenses kind of snap it in and go okay
[SPEAKER_00]: is this where I'm having problems, am I having problems with the who, am I having problems with the wear, and that that can give you a way to use technique to move forward to find your way back into the art again.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that when I am dealing with depression, that's when I'm most likely to reach for the techniques because I can't trust my own judgment as well because I am at a
[SPEAKER_00]: So the way I learned to use things like this is what Darwin was saying was to try pick to pick and choose.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say, you know, pick one of the things that we've talked about.
[SPEAKER_00]: And say, okay, today I'm going to write and I'm going to do the thing and I'm just going to chase the emotions, but I'm also going to keep this one lens on while I'm doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: To see if there are any opportunities that can occur while I'm writing and when you do that you will train yourself over time So that you do internalize that you aren't having to think about it consciously But yeah, if you try to do all of these all at the same time That's that's trying to learn you know 15 new techniques Samaltani is then you won't learn any of them well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would do targeted practice with them
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, there's a, there is a process that I'm working on learning right now, and it is creating comic pages using clip studio paint, and I'm going to break it down into three pieces here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Peace number one is laying out the panels because panels sort of dictate pacing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Peace number two is penciling the illustrations, you know, composing the picture because that's drawing the eye in, you know, telling the blocking and whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: And peace number three is the dialogue.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't obviously do all three at the same time.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I know that I have to do all three.
[SPEAKER_02]: And sometimes I'll get stuck on the dialogue because I don't know the pacing yet.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I have to stare at a blank page and I have to just put panels on it.
[SPEAKER_02]: until I know where that line of dialogue has to go.
[SPEAKER_02]: And once I know that, I can write the rest of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes I have to pencil something, relating this to the lenses.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, sometimes you're working on characters, and you feel like you've really grounded yourself in lens of who,
[SPEAKER_02]: But you're stuck and you take a step back and realize, oh, that's because everybody is standing in midair in a white room.
[SPEAKER_02]: I need to come back to the lens of where and I need to create a place and until I've created the place, these people aren't going to be able to walk anywhere because their feet won't have any traction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, something I love that and something I find really helpful for myself is to try to think about the lenses as also exercises.
[SPEAKER_01]: So sometimes, like, if I can't figure out, like, let's say I've got two people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, oh, I love these two who's, they're whoing around.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't have a place for them, but I can't figure it out for this story.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it's helpful for me to take them out of the story and write, what would these two people be doing in four different places?
[SPEAKER_01]: And that will give me a better sense of who they are and a better sense of which settings I think resonate with one them in which don't or let me think of like eight things that could happen to them if I'm stuck on what because I think I am someone who can sometimes get really into one lens and then it'll only take you so far like at a certain point if you only have plot and no character and no setting like you can run out of interest in the story yourself because it feels like you're just painting by numbers and so I'm really interested in kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: Figuring out how that all works like how can I figure out this lens of who even if that means taking the people out of the story and working on them separately in some sort of separate exercise and so I hope that for you this could also be something that you do maybe you can
[SPEAKER_01]: think about something that you want to do from one of our exercises as just a way to like remind yourself that you still have this lens that you still have the capacity to use it even if you can't figure out where belongs in your current work.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something you know how to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a technique that you have that you can rely on.
[SPEAKER_04]: I wanted to add to that because I've done that accidentally a couple of years ago I started getting a lot of jobs writing audio scripts and in audio scripts at least in the the type of format that I was writing for there was no narrator and so everything that was in the scene had to be conveyed audibly.
[SPEAKER_04]: uh... if there was a machine it had to be uh... and so i got really good at writing dialogue i think it improved my dialogue so much because i didn't have a narrator there there wasn't you know this third party saying he said exultantly um... you know i wasn't able to rely on those kind of tricks and all of that had to be conveyed just through the dialogue the and then
[SPEAKER_04]: I went back to do a regular old prose fiction book project and realized that I was no longer writing setting into anything that I wrote that I had forgotten how to
[SPEAKER_04]: to write narration and how to let the characters feel like they're actually in a place instead of floating in an empty white room, like Howard said.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then I had to relearn that whole process and get good at that again.
[SPEAKER_04]: It was painful, and like I said, I did it accidentally, but it was really great to go through, because I feel like I'm better at both of those things now, having focused on them individually.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it makes me think of a deeply personal question that I will ask you after the break.
[SPEAKER_01]: So thinking about your experience, Dan, working with one lens and forgetting another, I'm curious for everyone, is there a lens that you personally resonate the most with and is there a lens that you struggle with?
[SPEAKER_01]: And then what's the difference between the way you approach those two?
[SPEAKER_00]: So we all stare at each other, going, oh, no, I have to think about my process.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I think I can answer that first because, you know, most of the writing I do is game oriented right as someone who runs games who does world building for games and things like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: So for me, I mean, where is the obvious like hands down winner right?
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm thinking so much about what I call critical world building.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a term I stole from Austin Walker.
[SPEAKER_03]: And friends at the table, but it's this idea of the world building you use is a way to communicate your intention about the thematics of the world, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: So it derives from why, but you can use all the things about cultures you create, physical landscapes, and just constantly asking why is the world like this, why is this physical space like this, why do I want there to be a desert here, why do I want there to be forest here, why do I want?
[SPEAKER_03]: this culture to eat this kind of food, and that provides a space for my characters to bounce around in, or my players really to bounce around and create character and from that we get story, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so delineating the place space by creating the world is so much of the primary tool in my kit, or at least the starting point for prep.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the rest of it is all just like desperately grabbing whatever you can in the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: I tend to start—where I start my stories from, who knows, sometimes it's plot, sometimes it's situation and all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the of the lenses, the one that is that comes the most naturally to me, is the lens of who.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that is really because I came out of live theater where we did not have control over the where, we didn't have control over the why.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody else was telling, you know, there was somebody else created the structures.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the thing I was in charge of was, what is my motivation?
[SPEAKER_00]: How does this character sound?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do they move?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's the lens that I, like, I am just, I understand that one, that's the one I've internalized most.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the, the where also I tend to, because I was a set designer, I tend to think about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't always think about the win.
[SPEAKER_00]: like, which is funny because I write historical stuff, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But a lot of times when I go back when I'm looking at my stories where I have fallen down is not thinking about implications of calendar.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that is the part that I have to pre-plan the most.
[SPEAKER_00]: You will sometimes hear me talk about these massive spreadsheets that I've got to figure out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of it's because I have to deal with
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of it is because I know that just like in my real life, I will have two things happening at the same time that could not possibly happen at the same time.
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, why will this be a cool place to have a fight?
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and, and I'm not, you know, propping them up or disning them or anything.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just saying that that attitude, that idea, that mindset of,
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, I want to have a thing happen in my story.
[SPEAKER_02]: What's the piece that I need?
[SPEAKER_02]: How can I get as many glass pains in one scene and lastly?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's the reason I do me one ladder for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, the ladder fight is so epic.
[SPEAKER_02]: The best for me, it for 20 years.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's come down to which character is going to be able to deliver the punchline.
[SPEAKER_02]: and that reverse engineers into a very detailed understanding of who I have to know all of the who because, I mean, early days, yeah, I was just telling dad jokes and it was fun, but I very quickly realized I don't want to make fun of science fiction.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm telling social satire,
[SPEAKER_02]: I, this is all character driven humor.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, no.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can't have character driven humor.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you don't understand what makes each and every one of these characters thick.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so for me, yet, it always comes back down to who, which is problematic because when I need to draw back grounds, I have to know the where.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, oh, backgrounds are the worst.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it's interesting that Howard and Mary Rubinette both said, who, because that would be my answer to this question as well, is who, who is in this story?
[SPEAKER_04]: Who's perspective are we going to see this from?
[SPEAKER_04]: I can't write something until I know who I'm writing about.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think that's true of all the lenses to some degree, but who is the one that preoccupies my mind more than anything?
[SPEAKER_04]: uh... for my book extreme makeover i had this incredible new science fiction technology that i wanted to write about and i knew what was going to happen in the story but who does it happen to who is going to be the most interesting person with whom the reader can experience the story i have in my mind that is for me the the very most important thing
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I mean it makes sense to me that all three of you said who right because for me, you know, as a reader as an editor and all these things plot to sense from character right who the person is determined so much and what they want determine so much of what action is going to unfold from that right and so I love hearing that from your perspective it's the who the in my second role or.
[SPEAKER_03]: primary role, honestly, as an agent and as an editor, for me, that lens that I'm coming to fictional with is the wine.
[SPEAKER_03]: Why do you write this book?
[SPEAKER_03]: What is this book?
[SPEAKER_03]: Why are you the one to write this book?
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's the lens with which I'm analyzing what you've done, but I think as a writer, starting with who makes the most sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: But Aaron, you never answered this, I jumped in.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to answer your own questions, please.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was on the rules, I said,
[SPEAKER_01]: No, it's funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I want to say who, and some of this is actually looking at, and if you're trying to answer this question for yourself, how do I engage with other stories?
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the lenser which I am interested in the way things are told?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm a big soap opera viewer because soap operas are just characters slapping each other and making out.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's very who focused lots of things happen, but it's very who.
[SPEAKER_01]: I like the WWE for the same reason big people with ladders Meeting men slapping meat, you know, but it's about It's about who is Are we safe here I'm sorry What is just men slapping to the that's why I'm getting the lens of slaps
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what you have to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I can tell you continuing the process.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I can tell you that who is obviously important, but something I've been realizing recently is I've been talking a lot about in my own life about the weight of thing, the weight of the story and feeling like the characters are moving through a space and that they are carrying all the things that they brought with them and who they are and the when and the where, the setting, the culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: So all of that is who, but I think it's like,
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very embodied who.
[SPEAKER_01]: It gets a very, to me, it's a very like voiciem of voicy writer of voicy who.
[SPEAKER_01]: And like part of that is like, how do you tell that story?
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's why I find what the plot really difficult because when you're telling a great story, you, the person can bring people through a lot of things that don't make sense because they enjoy the way you're telling them.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it doesn't work as well in prose as it does if you put people around a campfire once you print it You can't control the setting in which they are enjoying your words, and so therefore you have to have more Actual structure to go through that brings that who along so you don't just feel like you're wandering after an interesting person into the desert to like start to death
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, what you're talking about makes me think about the way I answered that question, which is I told you which lens I was using, like, came most unconscious, like to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that an interesting thing would be to look at which ones are you using, or are you grabbing because it is uncomfortable because you do want to, you do want to experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: The difference between telling a story around a campfire, the awareness of that versus telling a story from a stage, makes me think that one of the reminded me that one of the things that I've been playing was recently is thinking about consciously changing the who I am writing for.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, because I tell different stories, I put different things in because I know this person really loves found family, this person really loves queer fiction, this person really just wants to see pirates and that that changes my choices a lot and so, you know, character comes
[SPEAKER_00]: thinking very consciously about the outward expression of that, whether that's the win or the where or the who, I think is kind of fun to play with.
[SPEAKER_02]: Kind of like the lens of who for me is
[SPEAKER_02]: his a contact lens.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just always on my face and the other lenses are things that I will pick up and grab as I need them.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm always grabbing for all of them.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I'm writing science fiction that has an epic scope.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, obviously, there's going to be when there's going to be where we've talked a bit about the why, you know, I tell any of these stories.
[SPEAKER_02]: All of these are
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that I may have come closest to fully internalizing the tool of who at risk of sounding like I'm way better at it than I really am because all of these are things that I need work on.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, I think it's good to celebrate like what we're good at, just going to lead me to the homework.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want you to think about all the lenses and think about something that you think you do really well.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lens that you think comes most naturally to you, that you enjoy the most.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just want you to write down what it is, maybe one place that you've used it and really congratulate yourself for using the lens that you are using the best, the best way that you can.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that homework.
[SPEAKER_00]: This has been writing excuses.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're out of excuses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now go right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Dong Wan Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Taylor.
[SPEAKER_00]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
[SPEAKER_00]: For more information, visit writing excuses.com.