[SPEAKER_01]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Season 21, episode 33.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is Writing Excuses.
[SPEAKER_01]: tools not rules for writers by writers.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Mary Rebenett.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Dom on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Aaron.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm Howard.
[SPEAKER_00]: And something that I've been wondering about is we've got all these different tools not rules that, you know, you might use one structure or another, you might use one technique or another.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes I think about them probably the short story writer in me as like one tool per work.
[SPEAKER_00]: like this is the work where I will do this structure, this is the work where I will do this technique.
[SPEAKER_00]: But especially in longer works, I'm assuming that you're going to need to use different tools and you might have to use different structures or different techniques.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in this episode, we want to talk a little bit about how do you know when to shift and then how do you do it effectively without it seeming like you're
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this is a great question because when I was going from short fiction to novels, it was one of the problems that I had.
[SPEAKER_01]: In short fiction, I could usually hold the whole story in my head early on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't understand how to end things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would just stop writing and it was not good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or I would have an ending that had nothing to do with the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this is a thing that happens in novels.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's more
[SPEAKER_01]: Often in the saggy middle where the writer knows that they need to start wrapping things up But they don't actually know how to switch gears and so what I do is I look at Okay, what does this part do?
[SPEAKER_01]: What does that part do?
[SPEAKER_01]: How do I blend them?
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is whether I'm going from, you know, middle to end, or whether I'm going from conversation to action, like, or narrative introduction, like, here's a voice driven opening, how do I move into actually things happening instead of saying in naval gazing?
[SPEAKER_03]: In the interest of overexcending the metaphor, I've driven a manual transmission for decades.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when I first started, I was told to watch the Tacometer because when the needle gets between 3500 and anything above 3500, it's time to go up a gear unless you're trying to really accelerate.
[SPEAKER_03]: And for a long time I did that and then I realized that the noise the engine was making,
[SPEAKER_03]: told me when to shift, and then I realized that with my hand on the stick, I could actually feel what was happening in the engine and it just became instinctive.
[SPEAKER_03]: And for writing, yes, when I am shifting between, I am writing something very thinking, or the characters are talking,
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I'm shifting into, uh, oh, no, everything's on fire.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're all running.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, I know that I need to shift.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have some tools that might help me just change the, the environment I'm in.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I write that way.
[SPEAKER_03]: Or I might change the music that I'm playing.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I immediately know, um, I need to be in a different headspace in order to put the right words on the page for this next bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what you're talking about, I love this example because it gets to the, uh, to a thing about pancing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like we talk about pancing, but the root of pancing as in, I don't plan my things is the seat of the pants and the root of that is flying by the seat of the pants because in the early days,
[SPEAKER_01]: Pilots when they didn't have instrumentation would fly by the way the plane felt.
[SPEAKER_01]: It could literally feel the plane Through the seat of their pants, but in order to do that successfully, you have to be an experienced pilot Have to put your pants in a lot of planes.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to put your pants in a lot of planes and before that
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in order to acquire that skill, that's when you're working with instrumentation, that's when you're reaching for these tools that we're talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's, you know, the whole season we've been talking about, we're going to give you a toolbox, but none of these are, none of these are rules.
[SPEAKER_01]: Except keep your plane like not dropping out of the sky.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do not stall.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there are failure modes, whether or not you have rules, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: There are failure modes, and I think what Howard is, are actually sort of like, over the course of the season, so much of what we're saying is, here are the specific tools, here the specific structures and details, and we're talking at a high level in a way that I think it's very easy to hear what we're saying to be like, I don't know how to apply that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what that means.
[SPEAKER_02]: The thing that we're reassuring you of is as you do this over time, you will develop these instincts, like how we're learning to listen to the engine, like feeling the plane, you know, through the city of your pants, you will also learn to ingest these concepts and tools and be able to apply them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me give a concrete example of moving from one thing to another.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've got a character that's going to a goal, this is a tri-fail cycle, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: You've got a character that's moving towards a goal.
[SPEAKER_01]: I talk about the question, will they succeed?
[SPEAKER_01]: And you've got yes, but or no end.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's two other things that you also have, which is yes and so yes represents movement towards a goal.
[SPEAKER_01]: No means moving away from a goal and is a continuation of motion, but is a reversal.
[SPEAKER_01]: So yes, I'm getting close to my goal, but something happens and I get farther away from it or no, I'm getting farther from my goal and I get farther away from it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you use that in the first part of the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't, even though I had used those tools for a long time, I didn't understand that the reason I was having trouble shifting into the latter part of the story where I was giving my character a win state is that I had to change those up to move my character closer.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's yes, I'm getting closer to my goal and I get to take another step towards it or no, I'm getting further from my goal, but something nice happens and I get to move closer to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so once I
[SPEAKER_01]: On days when I was having trouble, I could mechanically look at it and say, okay, I need to stop stalling and I need to move them forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: What wind state can I give them?
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I could still use my instinct for the yes or no, but I could kind of divert that and use that one instrument to say, you have to give them a wind state right now in order to get closer.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, to talk about this in terms of games for a second, you know, a thing that has discussed a lot in gaming spaces is the idea of railroading, right, of putting your players just on one track and they have to do the thing and they don't do this thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: You punish them for that, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think there's an opposite failure state, um, which is, and you see this a lot at transition moments when they arrive in a new location and nobody knows what to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: right, if you've given them an OR in 7 and or a but right and if you're not giving them parameters to engage with and it clear gold to be moving towards or the goal is so far away and abstract then you'll end up with all the momentum dying in a lost session where nobody knows where to go and what to do right and I think I see this lot in fiction too where as you're trying to shift modes you can sort of end up in this dead space in between where
[SPEAKER_02]: There isn't enough of that sense of direction.
[SPEAKER_02]: There isn't enough of that sense of here's what I'm trying to do at a higher level and you can sort of lose that momentum in the shift.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Several episodes ago, we were talking about narrative transitions, and I joked with Maria Robinette about, you know, do you make the, did I leave the stove on face when you were writing the, did you leave the stove on passage?
[SPEAKER_03]: I make faces when I draw, I make faces when I write.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am experiencing, at some level, what it is that my character is, characters are experiencing.
[SPEAKER_03]: just so emotionally draining that I remember writing a story and Sandra came home and saw me and was like, oh my god, what is wrong?
[SPEAKER_03]: What happened to you?
[SPEAKER_03]: I said, oh, I wrote a thing and I felt what was in it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Understanding that that happens
[SPEAKER_03]: is both predictive and it's a way to recover from it.
[SPEAKER_03]: If I know what kind of a passage I need to write, I will emotionally tool myself up as if I have to go have a difficult conversation with someone because I'm going to be feeling those emotions.
[SPEAKER_03]: And at the same time, if I know that I am later today, I will have written that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I will plan later today to recover from having written that because I understand how that part of the engine of my particular vehicle works.
[SPEAKER_00]: Speaking of being in a vehicle, I think that one of the things that can really get me stopped in the middle of doing all that is if I don't know exactly where I'm going.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there is a lot of ore, like I think this is this can be because you're flying by the city of your pants, but it's also can be just because there are a couple of roots in the story that you could take.
[SPEAKER_00]: like you know, maybe like what you're trying to get to at the end of a scene or a chapter or story, but you're like, oh, I could have them do this tri-fail cycle or that tri-fail cycle.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could go with this type of structural change or I could go with that one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it can feel very much like I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: what to do and therefore I won't a hundred percent do anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will try to do a little bit of everything and I find that a lot of times it's easiest if I go back and just try it two ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, try it three ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like there's no having things that don't end up in your final manuscript is not a failure.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just part of the process.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I will say, okay, well what happens if I shift
[SPEAKER_00]: Grabbing works.
[SPEAKER_00]: What happens if I just have two second gear?
[SPEAKER_00]: What happens if I shift to fifth gear is our fifth gear?
[SPEAKER_00]: Nice gear.
[SPEAKER_02]: How many gears have you got to start driving?
[SPEAKER_03]: Driving a manual transmission in Los Angeles traffic is a little bit like what you decide What you've described because you know, I'm I'm in third.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've gotten on to the I've gotten on to the freeway And I am ready to shift into fourth and maybe into fifth
[SPEAKER_03]: But traffic might slow down.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do I really want to be in fifth already or do I want to be in fourth?
[SPEAKER_03]: So I get this way.
[SPEAKER_03]: We have an automatic transmission for the road trip that took us here because manual transmission in that kind of traffic, I don't know what's ahead.
[SPEAKER_03]: I will let the mechanics of the vehicle do the shifting for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when you're doing a shift, like, one of the things in a car or a bicycle, which more people will have experience at this point at this century with shifting gears on a bicycle than they will with a car, the reason you do it is to make the work easier.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's to match the conditions that you're approaching.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you'll shift down to make things easier when you're climbing so that the bike is assisting you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll shift up when you've got like you're going downhill because you can go faster and that and all of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you shift from modes in order to make it easier.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the same thing when you're writing you shift for the mode that will make the writing easier.
[SPEAKER_01]: Make the story go speaking of shifting.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's time for the break.
[SPEAKER_00]: We will now shift into ninth gear.
[SPEAKER_03]: I believe it's real.
[SPEAKER_03]: I had a shwintens fee.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know what?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, you can shift into ninth gear in a bicycle.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have a single speed because I'm dumb and I live in a very early city.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: That is a choice you have made.
[SPEAKER_02]: It worked in Brooklyn.
[SPEAKER_02]: It does not work in Los Angeles.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyways, continue.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a question I have, what you said about shifting, making it easier is, do you shift to make it easier for you, the driver slash rider, or do you shift to make it easier for the reader?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you know who the shift is serving and whether or not you're doing the right thing that you need to be doing on the page?
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, this gets into I am weird and I always think about my reader as a collaborator and so for me the shift is to make it easier for both of us.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of the time, it is a shift to make it easier for me as the writer because I am doing something.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, like when I'm doing it very consciously, it is a shift to make it easier for me as the writer.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the shift is happening because that I'm following the terrain of the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, if I, if I don't want the story to feel, if I don't want the ending to feel rushed, I have to shift modes so that
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm making sure that I'm allowing time for things.
[SPEAKER_01]: My instinct is the writer.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's to just have the thing done, but that doesn't make it better for my reader.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that mode shift and being conscious of that, it's like, okay, this is the part where we're wrapping things up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes I go back and fix it in post.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am just like, I'm gonna be done with this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I'll go back and slow it down.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that is often, that is the place where the writer experience in the reader experience are like,
[SPEAKER_01]: wildly out of alignment, but the same tools can make it easier for both of them.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a pretty good idea when I'm putting a story together of what I want the reader experience to be like from the thing that I am sitting down to right next and and so that's
[SPEAKER_03]: that's the known terrain in front of me, therefore I know what gear or what gears I need to be in.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so when I think about, when I think about this gear shifting, it's really all about me putting myself
[SPEAKER_03]: in the right frame of mind, in the right context, in my studio or in my office, in the right head space, the right health space, to do the thing the way, at least in my mind's eye, I believe it will best be done for the reader.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let me talk about this on a, we've been talking about this very philosophically.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let me talk about this in kind of a more action thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I talked in the first half about how you can kind of sprinkle things in and I mentioned if you've got a very voice driven opening, how do you move into something that is more action?
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that you can look for are the links.
[SPEAKER_01]: We talk about when you're going from, when we're talking about transitions, the transition episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: We talked about the idea of a match cut as being something that you use going from one scene into the next scene.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can also do this when you're doing a mode switch from a tonal mode switch.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if I were doing like this opening about a character who has a pebble that's on the headboard and how they think about it and they've had that pebble there since the night their father died and it's going to be this whole thing and and now I have to get into into action.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can do something like I shifted the pebble on the headboard and then turned around to face my mom.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that is an interior version of a match cut that I can use to transition.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I can also layer in a little bit more if I want to bounce back and forth between those.
[SPEAKER_01]: I shifted it, shifted the pebble on my headboard as I turned around and faced my mom.
[SPEAKER_01]: We never talked about my dad.
[SPEAKER_01]: I asked her and then started to dialogue.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the kind of thing that you can do very mechanically if it's not just like flowing.
[SPEAKER_00]: To give another different mechanical example, so I have a story that I'm working on that has sections of poetry in the middle of it that are telling the story, but they are completely different mode than the rest of the prose, which is prose.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way that I think
[SPEAKER_00]: What helps me at first is to think about what do I want this shift to feel like and so for me this particular piece in general feels very like sitting at a jazz club as different acts come and go and to me the poetry part is like having a smokey drink in the middle of the act so it happened like it happens while the scene is continuing, but it's just like interesting breaks that happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Versus, for example, like there are other things I've written where the shift feels like a palette cleanser in between courses, which is a lot more of a stark change.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in order to do that mechanically, one of the things that I do is all of the poetry pieces have a certain amount of musicality in them in that they use musical terms.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're about songs, they're about the way that you talk about music.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I often have a sentence that has a little bit of a musical element to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Users are worthy that has to do with music and then move into these like poetic musical parts because what I'm doing is almost like in a car when you signal that you are going to the next lane.
[SPEAKER_00]: And once you teach your reader that this is the type of signal, like every time you get this signal you will be shifting into this kind of thing I'm going to mention music and then we're going to sit back.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to have this moment of smokey drinks and then like we're going to shift out of it back into something Usually that's very concrete in the setting to say I'm moving out of poetry which is a lot more emotional and back into the world of the concrete
[SPEAKER_00]: what's happening physically.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I will use an observation about the room that the person is in as a way to come back out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like here I am shifting back.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think a lot of it is about those signaling like saying I shifted the pedal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a way to actually subconsciously tell your reader get prepared.
[SPEAKER_00]: A shift is coming so that it doesn't feel abrupt when it happens.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's hitting the clutch.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's disengaging the gears for a second as you move.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are three, I think, key tools for me for just controlling the environment that I'm writing in.
[SPEAKER_03]: The first that leaps to mind is music.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really helpful to me to have music that doesn't have words, you know, orchestral or movie soundtrack or atmospheric or even techno dance beats playing while I write.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a very long playlist of atmospheric music and there are some tracks on there that have like,
[SPEAKER_03]: creepy, baby voices or something in them.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I keep meaning to yank those out because those break the gear shift.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those put me in the, I can't have those while I'm writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: They were fine when I was drawing, but I need to fix the playlist.
[SPEAKER_03]: The second is the lighting.
[SPEAKER_03]: If I'm writing on an illuminated screen and there is enough light or maybe there's a backlit keyboard for me to see my hands,
[SPEAKER_03]: I am free to change the lighting in the room completely because it's not the lighting in the room is not about me seeing other things, it's about establishing an ambiance for what I'm doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the third is really which chair am I in, am I sitting upright, am I in my zero gravity chair, which which mode do I want my actual physical body to be in?
[SPEAKER_03]: When I type and I recognize that all of these are variables over which I have full control, I should be consciously controlling them rather than just throwing them down and expecting myself expecting me to be in the right frame when I start typing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's a good point that making sure that you have the right mindset, one of the lower lifts that I do because I'm often writing while I'm traveling so I don't
[SPEAKER_01]: playlists, yes, but um but I will often start a scene by just writing down my intention and this can be an intention you know like an actual plot meat that I need to hit sometimes but most of the time the intention is more about how I want the reader to feel
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, this is, you know, this is a cozy scene.
[SPEAKER_01]: Next time, I'm going to start trying to use the, the eight types of fun that we talked about in a previous episode.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to start trying that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, because that feels like really good focusing tool.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that helps me, you know, it's like start winding things up.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is, uh, this is the scene in which.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and, and I think that that that helps me keep it in in the front of my brain.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is what I'm aiming for.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think those two things combined are perfect way to lead us into the homework.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what your homework is is to take a scene that you are writing and you know what a scene is from our previous episodes, and write down what is your intention for the scene.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then think about a physical thing that you can do that matches that intention.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it a playlist?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it the chair?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it the light in the room?
[SPEAKER_00]: And write the scene.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then go back and set yourself a different intention for that scene and change something about the physicality of the space that you're in and see how it changes the gear that you use when you write it.
[SPEAKER_01]: This has been writing excuses.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're out of excuses.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now go right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Dong Wan Song, Erin Roberts and Howard Taylor.
[SPEAKER_01]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
[SPEAKER_01]: For more information, visit writing excuses.com.