We Make Books Podcast

Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz)

[Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music]
This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books.

We Make Books Ep. 62 Transcription

After intro: [00:26]

Kaelyn: We’re talking today about reader tension and tense situations and managing these things. And you know getting the, kinda grabbing everyone and wanting to be like ‘this is important and there’s peril and stakes here, and you should pay attention to this.’

Rekka: This was another topic that was suggested to us by an uncredited listener, because I failed to write down all the people who suggested a very long list of topics that we will be going through. So I apologize, feel free to @ us on Twitter and take credit for the topic. But the original question posed was how to manage reader stress, and I assume they mean the tension and anxiety that our reader feels as they go through your plot. Because, as Kaelyn pointed out, you don’t want to get so anxious and wound up over a plot that you can’t finish the story and you need to protect yourself for self care reasons and back away.

K: We’re interpreting this question as not managing the external stress of readers. There’s generally not a lot a book or an author can do about that, so please don’t try.

R: Although! A good book can really help you escape.

K: Absolutely, yes. Maybe a book that’s just full of pictures of puppies.

R: Also good!

K: Yeah.

R: Yeah. So, the anxiety and tension that we’re talking about is being cast upon the reader intentionally to draw them into your story. But how do you make sure you don’t go too far, and how do you ramp up tension where you want it so that they aren’t just kinda reading it and being like ‘I don’t care about any of this.’

K: Building tension is, it’s difficult. For two reasons: one, it’s a hard thing to do in writing, but then two, it’s also very difficult to place it in a story. Let’s qualify here depending on your genre, if you’re writing a suspense thriller that’s just going to be a tense situation [laughing] throughout the book. Most books, I would argue the majority of books, have some sort of conflict in them. There’s going to be a point at which things come to a head. It could be physical, it could be mental, it could be, you know, strictly verbal confrontation. It could be characters that never actually meet but you know were seeing each other’s perspectives as they, I dunno interact over the computer, they’re both trying to hack the same database at the same time.

K:I have a friend who trains people in various business ventures, and one of the things she always says is “conflict is crucible.” And what she’s kinda saying there is that when you’re trying to solve a problem you have to resign yourself to some conflict, because conflict helps you get information, it helps you understand what you’re looking at, it helps you understand the stakes. And I think that applies well to writing, because the conflict, first of all, builds richer characters, it builds a better storyline, it helps us understand motivations and actions better. But it’s also really engaging. That’s kinda what we’re here for.

R: Yeah, I would say that a story without conflict is going to be a very milquetoast kind of story. It doesn’t matter what scale the conflict happens on, but -

K: Mhm.

R: - you want some kind of ‘what’s going to happen’ to linger, right up until the end of your story, you just want to kind of change like ‘ooh! Now that happened, what’s going to happen now?’ You know, it kind of elevates in stages. So every story is going to have conflict that’s on a - that is proportional to the scale of the story being told. So, it doesn’t always have to be end of the world scenarios; it can be ‘this person needs to sort their life out, and will they get that job they want, and will their roommate discover that they’re actually a sorcerer?’

K: I mean I hope so.

R: Right? Those kinds of conflicts can be big or small; it’s the stakes of the story. And you want your reader invested in the stakes of the story, so you want them to feel a little bit of anxiety about how the story’s going to go. If they don’t, then they can drift away from the book at any point and forget to pick it up ever again.

K: I look back at things that I read as an adult, and things that I read as a kid, and the like really intense parts where you’re like trying to keep yourself from skipping ahead on the page -

R [overlapping]: [giggling]

K: - and you know reading as fast as possible -

R: Kaelyn that is cheating.

K: I know! But like I - tell my brain. [laughing]

R [overlapping]: [laughing]

K: You know but where you’re like ‘oh my god I gotta know what happens, I gotta know what happens!’ And then sometimes -

R: Just so everyone knows, as an editor Kaelyn wants to know the end -

K [overlapping]: Yeah.

R: Like as soon as the author knows it. So don’t feel like she just skips to the end in books she picks up at the bookstore, no she wants the spoilers all the time.

K: I need to know the end to a story. I’m not one of those people who waits ‘til a series comes out to read the books, because I can’t wait that long -

R [overlapping]: Mhm!

K: - to be [???], I need a fix in there somewhere. But this is why I’m like weirdly into unsolved mystery kinda things, because I just need to know what happened, like [laughing] I always say if I could have a superpower, it’s not that I want to time travel. I don’t wanna like go back and interact and change things.

R: Or go forward and get lottery numbers.

K: Yeah I just wanna be able to like astral project or something so I can just, I just wanna see what happened. I just wanna know what actually happened, you know, who shot JFK? What’d they do with the aliens at Rosland? Did we land on the moon? I mean -

R: Roswell.

K: Roswell, yes. Why did I say Rosland?

R: Maybe you know something we don’t because you went back in time.

K: It’s possible. It’s very possible. But yeah, I am someone who like feeds off of that tension. And I love intrigue, I love building the story, and by the way I just touched on another way you build tension here, which is not always necessarily conflict; sometimes it’s mystery. Sometimes the stakes are trying to find something, or figure something out, or solve a puzzle, or learn someone’s true identity. There was definitely a heyday for this sort of thing in the 90s and 2000s, especially with young adult literature, where a lot of the tension that was building in the book was people trying to get answers about a mysterious prophecy or an object or find a lost relic.

R: Ohhh, I love a good lost relic.

K: Ah, the best. Romantic tension is also a thing.

R: You would have to imagine it is, because in the romance novels like that is -

K [overlapping]: Yup.

R: - the main plot of the book. So a will-they-won’t-they is a ‘what’s going to happen next?’

K: Yeah, a will-they-won’t-they, or how will they get through this, will they ever find each other again. So I think when we say like tension in the book we’re picturing like a big Lord of the Rings style -

R: Oh I’m imagining the boulder in Indiana Jones just hovering over everybody.

K: Okay! Or that, you know we’re thinking of like direct action and conflict. But tension can be built a lot of different ways. It’s not always ‘I’m going to fight this knight now to free the dragon,’ and yes in my scenario we free dragons, we don’t slay them.

R: Absolutely!

K: Dragons are people too.

R: Yeah.

K: Creating tension for readers is part of what’s compelling about a book. Now, sometimes these get a little out of hand. I’m gonna qualify that again, genre matters a lot here. If we’re talking about like a spy thriller, if we’re talking about a murder mystery, a suspense thriller, something like that. Yeah, you should go in expecting a lot of tension, you should know what you’re getting out of that genre. Rekka, can you think of any books offhand that you had to like put down and walk away from?

R: Because there was too much tension?

K: Because the situation, the intensity of the situation was making you uncomfortable.

R: Hmm.

K: I can think of a couple. I’m not gonna say what they are, but I’ve definitely had that happen.

R: So you’re asking if that’s happened?

K: Yes. Has that ever happened to you?

R: No. I’ve never put down a book because I was uncomfortable with high levels of tension; I’ve put down books because there was little tension and I wasn’t grabbed.

K: I’ve got a really thick skin when it comes to this stuff, there isn’t a lot that bothers me. There’s been two books that, one where it was just like the violence and the tension was just getting gratuitous. With that case it wasn’t that it was making me uncomfortable. It was almost like coming full circle and getting pedantic. This is so ridiculous it’s almost erased the tension, I’m no longer able to suspend my disbelief.

R: Okay. So, what does that say about the author’s ability to manage the tension?

K: Not doing a great job.

R: What was broken, if you wanna use that word, in that case?

K: I think in this case, there was too much trying to shock people. Trying to shock the readers reading it.

R: Okay, is that tension though?

K: The scenario of the book was a group of people going through some kind of a building, I don’t even remember what it was, and they’re getting picked off by monsters and booby traps the whole time. It started out well, because it’s dark, there’s a lot of sounds and things and nobody’s quite sure what’s like, is that us, is it something else, is something following us, we know this place is full of danger okay we just have to get through here, and then what was happening was characters were dying. They were dying in horrible ways, and they were being very - described in great detail. And again, I have a really thick skin for this. That kind of stuff doesn’t bother me. But what was happening was it was actually getting to the point that it was breaking the tension a little bit, because they were losing me there.

K: So I think the author’s intention was to really up the scale and the stakes, because it wasn’t just like ‘and a hole opened, and Jonathan fell through and we heard screams and then nothing.’ Like first of all it was breaking the tension of the story stopping to describe all of this stuff. But beyond that, it was - I don’t know. It was a very strange reaction, a very strange feeling, where it was kind of like I can’t tell if this is making me nauseous or if I’m bored.

R: Okay. This is making me think of the movie Thirteen Ghosts.

K: Yes.

R: Does this, is this ringing true for you?

K: That is definitely ringing true for me. I had a similar experience with that movie. On the flip side, the other one that I had to put down and walk away had to do with sex. The tension that they were building with this couple that wasn’t really a couple, and the dichotomy and the power struggles here, and the clear anxiety of one character vs not the other that I think was supposed to be building romantic tension, and ooh they’re so into each other, it didn’t at all.

R: Okay.

K: It was actually, I can’t read this. As I’ve been talking through both of these you sort of pointed something out: was it the tension or was it things that writers were trying to use to create tension that weren’t actually tension-building devices?

R: Right. It sounds like people are trying to use some visuals and elements that are, let’s say, flashes in the pan -

K: Mhm.

R: - in terms of the effect they have on the reader, versus something that’s actually building a landscape over which the story is traveling. And it’s the landscape I would argue that you want, because jumpscares are great for a horror movie, but once you’ve calmed down, that’s all there is. Versus actually building, in that case, dread or fear. So things that have an intense effect but the effect is not lasting I don’t think are going to be what you want to use when you’re trying to control how the reader paces themself to get to the end of your book.

K: I think in the example I used with the violence one, you know you have these characters, they’re trying to get from point A to point B, and they’re getting picked off or killed horribly one by one. And on some level I understand what the author was trying to do there. Instead of simply saying ‘and this person’s dead now,’ they’re upping the intensity of the situation by showing that they’re not dead, they’re dying horribly. So you’re getting the collective fear and horror built into the group of the remaining survivors so you’re empathizing with them more. In that scenario, I see what they were doing. They were trying to use this gore and this violence to instill an intensity in you, but it got to the point that it was too much.

R: So it wasn’t flash in the pan, it was just overreaching?

K: Overkill, if I can make that pun? [overlapping] A little bit, please?

R [overlapping]: You cannot. I’ve checked with our producer and -

K: [grunts]

R: - they’re shaking their head.

K: Alright, fair. [chuckling] There can be times that you just take the device you’re using too far, and it jumps the shark a little bit and becomes ridiculous.

R: In the case of something getting to the point of ridiculosity, are they even employing the tools that would work and just overdoing it, are they overutilizing the tools, leaning on them too heavily, abusing them, or are they in the wrong toolbox entirely?

K: Exactly, yeah.

R: No, I’m asking you. [laughing]

K: Oh. [laughing] Um no I was going to say those are all things to consider. I think that’s something you have to work with an editor on, and I think that’s something that you have to have readers give you feedback about, because this for a lot of writers becomes a can’t see the trees for the forest scenario. You’re so deep into this, you’re not reading this for the first time like most readers will be, you wrote this. Rekka you tell me, when you’re rereading things that you wrote, either for fun or doing revisions, does your heart beat a little faster when you get to these scenarios?

R: If it’s been long enough that I forget where I’m going with them. [laughing]

K: Exactly, yeah.

R: Because you know what you’re trying to build to, and when you’re trying to write it sometimes you can feel like you’re being sooo hamfisted about it.

K: Yeah. Writers need help for contextualizing this, I think. Because first of all you know what’s gonna happen, hopefully. [laughing] Second, you’ve been through it so many times it doesn’t have the same punch, the same meaning that it did.

R: That’s one of the frustrating things about being a writer, trying to know whether you’re being effective. You burn through beta readers because you need somebody who hasn’t read it before to tell you whether it’s working.

K: Yeah so circling back to is it too much, are you leaning into it, are you in the wrong toolbox entirely, that can be a really hard thing for writers to understand. I’ve definitely read books where I’ve felt like after a few revision paths, every time the author was going through and trying to up the scare factor or the intensity factor in everything, I think that’s something where you need an editor or a very good friend to help you there.

R: [laughing]

K: It’s a balancing act. You have to maintain believability. There is a difficult-to-track issue of understanding when a situation is intense and when it’s not tense enough or too intense. I’ve definitely read books where important things have happened, and I didn’t realize that was an important thing because the writing and the way the characters were behaving didn’t indicate to me that that was a significant event. And if you’re going ‘oh well, what does that have to do with it?’, that’s building intensity.

R: I recently gave someone feedback that said like ‘hey, I think this moment needs to slow down for a second, and I know there’s a lot of other stuff going on, but like if you don’t linger on this, it’s not going to have the impact you want.

K: You don’t wanna have to be in a position where you gotta insert a character in the story jumping up and down screaming at the reader that something that’s happening is important, but if you can’t signal to them in some way that it is, that’s not great.

R: You have to figure out how to signal it without really putting a wavy-armed balloon man in front of it.

K [laughing]: Yes. Exactly. It’s difficult, and there’s a reason that authors that can do this well are very successful in writing, you know, murder mysteries and spy thrillers and suspense novels and stuff. Because there’re people that eat that up. That’s like what they live for. I can take it or leave it. But then there are people who avoid it like the plague.

R: Like you said, genre has a lot to do with it. We’re getting to a point which I think is good where people are starting to put content notes on books just like you would get at the beginning of a TV show. So you know this has depictions of graphic violence, sexuality - um, there’s a difference between sexuality and nudity - endangerment of a child, trauma, stuff like that. And that helps people dial in, like ‘do I wanna read this book, is this the kind of intensity I’m looking for or not?’

K: Now, and that said, there may be things that happen in the book that it never would’ve occurred to you to put a content warning about.

R: And hopefully maybe your beta readers can highlight a couple things too.

K: What I’m getting at is there’s going to be things that happen - in books, in movies, in TV shows - that are upsetting for a specific person for a specific reason.

R: Mhm.

K: There’s no way to predict all of these -

R [overlapping]: Yeah.

K: And try to compensate and notify for that. It sounds terrible to say stick to the obvious and take in the advice of others, but that is what I would say. And I’m not saying don’t write these things. Be aware of what you’re writing.

R: Be aware of what you’re writing and then be willing to take the responsibility for the people who are going to be upset by that and say like ‘yes, this is something I felt was necessary to the plot, but I promise you I gave it thought and hopefully the people who’d be extra upset by it will be warned by friends or somebody before they pick it up.’

K: For anyone who’s sitting at home going - and to be honest I don’t think many of our listeners think this, but maybe who knows - ‘why do I have to bend over backwards to accommodate this?’ You know what, honestly, you don’t.

R: It’s a choice you make, yeah. [chuckles]

K: But it’s really shitty not to when it’s so easy to do. And believe me, people who suffer from particular anxieties or trauma and everything, they’re ultra-aware of this stuff. They’re typically not going to go into a store, pick up a random book, and say ‘I’ll just read this now’ because, exactly for that reason: they don’t wanna put themselves in a position where the intensity of the book is going to induce an anxiety spiral. And if you think that doesn’t happen, I don’t know what to tell you at this point because you’re wrong. [laughing] So!

R: And it’s also not necessarily the intensity of the book, but the specific situations and the intensity of that person’s personal experience laid over top of that.

K: Yeah. Exactly. So, for readers who are saying “how do I keep myself safe from this kind of thing” so to speak, read content warnings. Read reviews online. Here’s a thing: read the bad reviews, read the people who didn’t like the book, because the ones who are complaining about things are gonna give you a little bit more insight probably, into areas that you might find distressing.

R: And you can always just post a question on Twitter, like “hey -

K [overlapping]: Yeah.

R: “ - here’s something that really bothers me in books; I’m thinking of picking up this one, anything you wanna warn me about, I’d appreciate.”

K [overlapping]: Yeah. You know, I’m not saying this to put all of the onus upon the reader who’s concerned about this, but, I mean do your research. If you know this is something that’s important to you and something you need to manage and minimize as best you can, the best judge of character for that’s gonna be you.

R: For the writer, you know, sensitivity reads are not a bad idea. Like we said, we can’t cover everything with a single sensitivity reader but they might be able to give you more insight. If your intensity of your plot is overlaid with a certain kind of life experience, I guarantee you can find a sensitivity reader for it. And if you don’t, ask around and someone else will be able to help you.

K: Yeah but I mean beyond that, content warnings do a lot.

R: You can’t cover everything and everyone, like -

K [overlapping]: No.

R: - Kaelyn was saying, you can give it a fair attempt.

K: Listen, if your fair attempt is something along the lines of ‘contains violence, gore, and depictions of furries,’ like, that’s that’s giving everyone at least a heads-up of what’s in here.

R: And a Venn diagram of figuring out where they fall in that. [chuckles]

K: I will defend the writers a little bit here in saying that there’s only so much you can do, to a certain point. [laughing]

R: In order to indicate everything that happens in your book, you literally have already done that, you’ve written the book. You can be broad and you can welcome people to send you a note and ask you if they have a specific concern they’re afraid of running into.

K: I would call it a good faith gesture to do that. And, I think if there’s parts in there where you’re going ‘I wonder if I should explain this,’ the answer is, maybe decide what it is and then just mention that that’s a thing that’s gonna happen in there.

R: Okay, so this is managing the readers’ stress literally, and kind of the external forces as we said we weren’t going to cover.

K: Well I mean I was joking about just like daily life stress. [laughing]

R: Right, but I mean this is kind of tied to their personal experience. So, going back to considering it now a positive to build stress and anxiety, what would you say to an author who brought you their story, and it reads as a little flat. What would you tell them, how to increase anxiety in the reader, by which I mean tension in the story?

K: I’m gonna flip that and ask has that ever happened to you? I know the answer to that is no because I read your writing [laughing], so!

R: You know, I am really surprised by how many people have told me that my books are really tense.

K: Yeah my blood pressure’s definitely spiked a few times over the course of events. [laughing]

R: Is it just because of Hankirk? Like is it just because he’s infuriating?

K: It’s a lot of things, um -

R [overlapping]: [laughing]

K: And actually you’ve touched on something that I think is very interesting that you do in your writing - and this is another kind of tension that I think we don’t really appreciate as a different kind of tension to build - is hopelessness. And despair.

R: Aw, now I’m mad. I didn’t mean to be hopeless!

K: No, you weren’t, but this sense of like ‘what are we going to do?’

R: Mm.

K: And things just like um, a sense of despair and despondency, and I’m not necessarily talking about -

R [overlapping]: Look, my characters have to come back from like their lowest low, like I’m gonna make that low real fuckin’ low. [laughing]

K: Yeah, exactly, but that’s a kind of intensity too. So yeah, you definitely do not suffer from not having well-built intensity.

R: You’re avoiding my question. You turned it back around on me, as though we needed to analyze me, but we’ve just clarified we don’t need to analyze me -

K [overlapping]: No, no.

R: What do you say to an author who is not me, who needs a little dose of, I guess some me-ness?

K: I’m very much into helping writers solve their own problems.

R: Yeah you do that.

K: Yeah. I find that authors frequently know there’s a problem and at least have the inkling of an idea of how to fix it. I would write them back and ask them, first do you have an outline of your story? If you don’t, well, depending on our timeline here, write one; if we don’t have time for that, I want you to highlight for me what you think the most important points of the story are for the plot. And depending on what was going on, I might tell them I’m gonna do the same. And let’s see if we match up. I like to do that one a lot.

R: Yeah you do.

K: I want them to highlight the most important parts of the plot, and then I’d want them to pull out some areas where maybe it’s more introductory, more worldbuilding, more establishing, and compare how those are written versus the important plot points. And look at your language, look at the way you’re communicating with this, because this is - and I won’t go too far into the weeds on this because it’s slightly off topic, but it is worth mentioning - your language changes when writing intense situations.

K: The way you describe things, the way characters communicate with each other, the way they take in their scenery, a lot of times you’ll notice writers that do this well have short-clipped sentences that match the franticness of the situation. Minimal description, because they don’t have time to stop and look and describe something. So I would say that you know look at this and if these very important points of the story, these parts where it should be intense where the reader should be concerned and involved and engaged, and you’re writing it with the same tone and cadence that you do with the part where they’re walking through a meadow -

R [chuckles]: The meadow is full of velociraptors.

K: Ugh. You’re describing heaven.

R [muffled]: Stay out of the long grass!

K [laughing]: I’m just picturing them with flower crowns now.

R: Ohhh, they’re so happy.

K: [laughing]

R: Beautiful queens!

K: [with accent] “Don’t go into the long grass!”

R: We really just need to admit that this is a Jurassic Park fancast.

K: Yeah we do talk about it a lot. So, I would say that that’s a good place to start. And in terms of like exercises you can do, read it out loud. Act it out! I stood in a room with a manuscript and like held in front of me and like done both parts of the characters and imitated how they would be yelling at each other or what have you, just to make sure that like it sounds okay and it’s coming across the right way. Because if I’m doing this by like kinda like staging a play here, then hopefully you’re getting that across to the reader. I think also developing your characters and having a good idea of how they would react in intense situations. If they’re acting the same across the book no matter what, well, I don’t know, maybe they’ve got a really good valium prescription.

R: [laughing]

K: You should see changes in not just their actions but their body language, their speech. If Rekka and I were trying to diffuse a bomb right now, I wouldn’t be telling “okay, so um cut the green wire, um,” okay and then like imitating the scene from Jurassic Park where John Hammond’s giving Ellie instructions over the radio and he’s like talking so calm and everything - but that’s a good example because even though he’s talking very calm and walking her through everything, his voice is very intense.

R: And he’s having an argument behind the scenes. [laughing]

K [overlapping]: Yes. He’s having an argument with Ian, but like his voice is very intense. And now granted, movies get to use music to help with this kind of thing.

R: Yeah they cheat.

K: Yeah but if I were having a conversation with Rekka and it was a genuinely tense situation where I’m trying to give her instructions on how to diffuse a bomb - now granted– Okay so we’re getting a little sidetracked here but I just wanna point out Rekka says he’s having a funny argument with Ian, part of the reason for that was the shock value of the next scene.

R: Right.

K: You’re luring the reader into a false sense of security of going like, oh look it’s fine, John and Ian are arguing, Ellie’s got this, and I think - “Mr. Hammond I think we’re back in business!” And then an arm falls on her. Oh no, wait first the raptor attacks her, then the arm falls on her. That’s a good instance of diffusing a situation only to re-intensify it immediately. If I were talking to Rekka and I was talking even in the same tone that like we talk in this podcast, like ‘well you know I guess if you wanted, like, so think about the green wire, think about why the green wire is important to this bomb. And if you take the green wire out what’s going to happen?’ Like that, you know, that’s not a good way to write that scene.

R: Yeah ‘cause meanwhile Mr. Arnold’s arm has fallen on my shoulder and I am flipping out. [chuckles]

K: I always wondered why the velociraptor didn’t eat that, or how that happened. Like -

R: I assume it like got bit off and then went flying and got caught in that little corner -

K: I guess, but like it seems -

R: Look, they needed it to fall on Ellie’s shoulder.

K: I know, but like it seems like it was in like wires, and it’s like how did that get there? Did the raptor go back and -

R [overlapping]: This is, this is going back to the believability of the situation and is it going to suck your reader out of the moment and go, ‘wait, how?’

K: I remember being 10 years old and watching that and going, ‘how did that get there?’

R: I also had that thought but I didn’t linger on it, because -

K [overlapping]: Ah, no.

R: Ellie was being chased by a raptor, dragging a big flashlight, and I was worried like the flashlight was gonna get stuck on something and she wouldn’t be able to keep going.

K: But yeah it’s, that would be kind of where I would start. And if the problems are still persisting, if we still can’t get to a place where I feel like okay I understand that something important is happening, I understand that there’s peril here, I understand that these two characters have left very angry at each other, that sort of thing, then that’s a different conversation. That’s a conversation about writing style and technique. And, that’s harder to fix.

R: You can’t just add six more raptors and fix it.

K: Six more raptors fixes everything, Rekka.

R: Okay. Back up. You can just add -

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: - six more raptors; there’s your fix for everything.

K: Yes.

R: But you do have to exercise it with extreme care.

K: More raptors!

R: - because people will pick up if you just do it every time.

K: Yeah. If your solution to everything is add more raptors -

R: Get your own solution -

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: - my solution to everything is add more raptors.

K: Yeah that’s, that’s fine.

R: Yeah, I thought so.

K: It solves multiple problems, not just intensity of the situation problems, so.

R: Mhm!

K [chuckles]: I think that’s it. If it’s something you’re struggling with, I hate to say this, but like this is something you just kinda have to work on. It’s one of those style and technique things that, I won’t say can’t be taught because absolutely you can take writing classes that would help you with this, but I think it’s something that also just comes from practice and learning.

R: And I would suggest doing it with short fiction, because that’s a really great way to learn how to control the pedal.

K: Absolutely.

R: To adjust your pressure on your reader. And also to build it quickly, because in a short story you don’t have a lot of room, so it’s a boiled-down condensed version. And also being shorter you get more practice, ‘cause you get to write more of them.

K: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, that’s my final thoughts on managing intensity in books is: it’s not easy. There’s a reason people who do it well make a lot of money off of it.

R: It’s not like if you aren’t making a ton of money off of it that you’re no good at it. To that point, pick up a book and see how someone else is doing it.

K: One of the best ways to get good at writing is reading a lot.

R: Yep. And steal everyone else’s tricks. Except mine; the raptors are mine.

K: Only Rekka’s raptors. Ahh, that’s what we need, a book series called Rekka’s Raptors!

R: Vick’s Vultures but -

K: I know.

R: But it’s dinosaurs.

K: I’m already unfolding it in my head, trust me.

R: Oh yeah.

K: [laughing]

R: Send me the outline. [giggles]

K: See this is the problem is, I have all of these ideas of books that I would love to exist in the world and I need someone to write them for me. [laughing]

R: That’s what I said, send me an outline, I work really well off an outline!

K: Yeah. So I think that’s, that’s the end of the episode. Hopefully it wasn’t too much for you.

R: Even if it’s not the end of the episode, we’re done. [laughing]

K: Yeah. I think that -

R [overlapping]: The raptors got us. We’re in the long grass.

K [laughing]: Does he say ‘the long grass’ or ‘the elephant grass?’

R: You know what? I recently read an article about how we all remember lines differently -

K [overlapping]: Yes.

R: - because of the different aspects we’re focused on. So let’s just assume that anybody quoting Jurassic Park to the point where you get the quote, has said it right.

K: Okay. That’s fair.

R: I think that’s like a way to be kinder to other people.

K: Tension! It’s good.

R: The right amount is good. The wrong amount is bad.

K: Yes. I can’t even say in moderation because sometimes it’s not moderation that makes it a -

R: Sometimes the whole point is not moderating it. Except moderating the effect that you want in terms of, ‘hey, I the author have control and am moderating how much I want,’ there. That’s -

K: Yep.

R: That’s the moderation that we’re talking about. [laughing]

K: Exactly.

R: We should stop.

K: [laughing]

R: This episode isn’t going to have a nice end, it’s just going to -

K: Ooh, maybe it just cuts to black mid sentence. [laughing]

R: Well that’s not a great pressure valve on your tension. Yeah no, let us know how this episode needs to end. You can @ us on Twitter and Instagram @wmbcast, you can find us and all our old episodes at wmbcast.com. Please remember to subscribe, please remember especially to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and if you somehow just really wanna support my love of velociraptors, you can go to Patreon.com/wmbcast and send us some financial support, and I promise I will spend it on dinosaur plushies.

K: Oh, I was gonna say velociraptor food.

R: Well, I am the velociraptor food.

K: Which now that I’m saying it I think is just goats, so. [laughing]

R: No that’s T. rexes, and it didn’t work anyway.

K: Yeah, they dropped the cow in the velociraptor.

R: Yeah that’s true - oh wait am I a velociraptor? Because I’ve been eating cow this week.

K: You have, yeah.

R: Hmm.

K: Hmmmm.

R: We’ll have to investigate this in a future episode.

K: Hey, because the mystery is building tension.

R: Yeeeah, that’s it.

K [laughing]: Alright everyone, thanks very much for listening.

R: For your indulgence.

K: [laughing]

R: Take care everyone!

Tuesday May 25, 2021

Episode 61 - Who's in Control of the Plot? (Character Agency)

Tuesday May 25, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz)

Kaelyn: So it’s funny you picked this when I was still studying history, that was something we always had to consider. Is this group, is this person part of determining where they fit into historical context as determining do they have agency? Can they act on their own behalf? Structure is what keeps someone in place; agency is what allows them to act freely.

Rekka: Where would you put Odysseus, in this context?

K: I would make Odysseus a failed attempt at agency.

R: [laughing]

K: Well, maybe failed agency isn’t the right--because he is displaying agency. He’s trying to do something, and he’s having to frequently overcome obstacles. That said, those obstacles are things that keep happening to him, rather than him directly engaging.

R: Right.

K: So it’s a little bit of a, uh.

R: Weird example.

K: No it was a good one, I liked it.

R: No it’s a good example but it’s not a good role model for agency in your novels.

K: Odysseus isn’t a good role model for a lot of reasons.

R [laughing]: That’s just one of them.

K: [laughing]

R: Be the person who ties yourself to the mast, rather than give in to the sirens. Actually fuck it, give in to the sirens. It’s 2021, let’s just go for it.

K [laughing]: That’s a very bad--I feel like 2020 was the year to give into the sirens. [laughing]

R: Yeah, but what is 2021 but 2020 persevering?

K: No, we’re slowly defeating it. We’re claiming some agency for ourselves.

R: I am still in this room.

K: [laughing]

R: I have always been in this room. How are we defeating anything?

K: I think I was born in this room.

R: Kaelyn, have you and I met for smoked meats in a restaurant?

K: We haven’t.

R: Right. So, nothing has changed.

K: Yeah.

R: Have we hung out in a library with random strangers at the same table?

K: No. Some of whom are handwriting books.

R: Yeah, no. This is not happening. So today I called you here to talk about agency.

K: So in that scenario do I have agency? Because I made the decision to join you. But--

R: But--are you allowing this topic to happen? Or are you actively engaging in the expression of our ideas?

K: Oh both.

R: [laughing]

K: Definitely.

R: Once you get past some of the other, like, identify your theme, and helpful advice for writing like that--

K: Strengthen this character arc, you know, the really nice vague feedback.

R: The really helpful, helpful specific feedback. You might also end up hearing that your character needs more agency in a scene, or in the story overall. And as with the others, this can be really helpful advice. If you know what it means.

K: Yeah um, it I think falls into the category of frustratingly vague advice that is absolutely rooted in important context.

R: But it’s also really true.

K: Yes, yeah.

R: Which is just the worst part. There’s nothing worse than vague advice that is also correct.

K: It is vague advice, but I think when you’re dealing with things like ‘work on your character’s agency,’ ‘strengthen this arc,’ ‘identify the themes in your story,’ those are big picture things. So. Definition—as always love to start off with that—uh, agency in general, the definition is “an action or intervention, especially as to produce a particular event.” Acting, essentially. Taking action. Doing something. Trying to influence the outcome.

R: Not just action but pro-action.

K: Yes. For characters in books, agency is basically when a character can make choices and act on their own behalf.

R: What is it about agency that gets turned into a secret agency that acts against aliens, or whatever--I’m just playing around with etymology here--

K: [laughing]

R: But how’s that word get turned into that meaning?

K: The way I always took that was that an agency is meant to act on behalf of a group of people or towards a certain end. So, if we wanna take S.H.I.E.L.D. -

R: Okay.

K: So agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Their job, their directive, is to protect Earth from large-scale global threats. Everything they do, every action they take, is to further that outcome. Real world example: the CIA, Counter-Intelligence Agency. They have a very specific job. It’s to try and out-maneuver, out-intelligence if you will, foreign and domestic hostile powers.

R: Okay so the word is not trans-mutated in any way, in the way that it’s applied to an organization. It still means taking proactive action toward a goal.

K: Yeah, so I did look up the definition of agency in that regard: “a business or organization established to provide a particular service, typically one that involves organizing transactions between two other parties.”

R: So like, a literary agent.

K: There you go. Here’s a good example, the Environmental Protection Agency.

R: Mhm.

K: Their directive, their job is to protect the environment. What do they do? They organize, they create scenarios, be they either laws or policies or transactions even, that further their goal of protecting the environment.

R: This is a group of people that are acting for one goal. In our writing, when we talk about agency, we’re generally referring to character agency. As in we have a main character, they are serving as our POV - point of view - and think of that term as the window through which you experience the story. Your viewpoint into this story and this world. So, everything that this character chooses to do is how you experience the story. So by acting on a desire, they create tension as to whether there will be an obstacle that they can overcome, whether they make a decision to do something that frightens them a lot, or whatever - you get to experience that tension. So if this character goes with the flow -

K: [laughing]

R: - how much tension do you get to experience?

K: Yeah so what this means when you get this feedback, ‘I need you to work on your character’s agency here,’ is that it means the character is being very passive. They’re being more reactive than proactive. Oh I’ve got a good example: Twilight.

R: Bella is a classic example and often referenced example of a character who doesn’t actually do much. And this is part of that Mary Sue criticism that gets used in the wrong places a lot, but in this case what we’re talking about is Bella is a bodysuit for you to crawl into, and see this world.

K: Well Bella is almost worse than that. In some cases Bella is an object. She is sort of a MacGuffin that furthers this story. Something I always like to trot out is, if this character weren’t here, would things go that differently?

R: [laughing]

K: Now, in Twilight yes they would. Because a lot of conflict, a lot of the story, whatever, does center around Bella, but it is more just the fact that she exists than anything else. If she were a particularly tasty cow that all of the vampires also wanted to eat, well - that’d be a different story too. [laughing]

R: Yeah, that’s a weird one.

K: No, but if she were something like a magic ring that lets the vampires turn back into humans or something, you could possibly just sub her in with a magic ring. And a lot of those story elements could still happen.

R: So is your character interchangeable with an inanimate object?

K [laughing]: My favorite one, ever, that I promise I’ll stop on this side note - Indiana Jones.

R: Mhm.

K: - is completely irrelevant to the first movie. If he weren’t there, everything would go exactly the same way. That said, Indiana Jones has agency.

R: He is trying.

K: He’s trying. He’s not doing the best job, but he’s trying. Um so, you can have a character that maybe if they weren’t there things would progress as normal. My whole point is Indiana Jones, regardless of whether or not he not only shows up, exists, the storyline with Marion and getting the Ark of the Covenant, we still end up with the Nazis opening the Ark of the Covenant on a remote island.

R: Just turns out it was a bad idea. [chuckles]

K [laughing]: Just turns out you shouldn’t go poking around in these things.

R: Yes. And that had more to do with Belloq being his agency to, as he put it, take whatever Indiana Jones had, and possess it himself.

K [overlapping]: Yes.

R: And then him not being able to resist looking in the Arc. Now, had the Arc made it to Hitler, would Hitler have known how to use it? I mean, he studied all this stuff. It’s very possible that he might’ve put it to more diabolical use, rather than just frying himself as Belloq did.

K [overlapping]: Yeah. Yes. Um, you know, in Twilight, the character that has agency there is not Bella, it’s Edward.

R [overlapping]: Mhm.

K: He’s the one who’s making all the decisions, he’s the one who’s making the choices. He chose to stay and pursue Bella. He chose to let her know that he was a vampire. He chose to eventually make her a vampire.

R: Mhm.

K: Bella is a thing that all of this is happening to.

R: The prize to be won.

K: Yeah. Bella’s a very passive character, and there’s points in the story where she does make decisions, but the choices then are even things that are forced upon her.

R: Here’s an example of not, apparently, including much agency in your character, and still having an incredibly successful book series.

K: And movies.

R: So as with all advice-

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: - feel free to break the rules and have a smashing success and good on you.

K: There is an exception to every rule to be sure. But, as you kinda said right at the get-go, one of the biggest criticisms of Bella is that she is an empty skin suit for the reader to crawl into and make themselves feel as though they are the star of the story. People who have agency don’t feel like that. It’s part of character development. If Bella were making a lot of choices and decisions and stuff, you’d have readers going “Well that’s not what I’d do, why would she do that, that’s so ridiculous.” And then you distance yourself from that character because you’re establishing them as a fully realized person.

R: Right.

K: Rather than the empty skin suit slash object.

R: Right. Now, Big Lebowski.

K [laughing]: Oh God, that’s a good one, okay! Um, God I haven’t watched that movie in forever, I love that movie.

R: So he starts out, he gets up, he goes to the grocery store, he gets the ingredients for his White Russian, he drinks half of it there, he goes home.

K: “Where is the money Lebowski?” [laughing]

R: This has happened to him so far. Somebody mistakes him because he shares a surname with a very rich person, and they walk into this very shabby home and somehow think that they’ve found the right place. Now he isn’t gonna do anything about it.

K: Yeah.

R: He goes on with his life. He just is kind of sad about it, but his friends convince him -

K [overlapping]: Yeah.

R: - that he needs to do something about it.

K: Except the guy pees on the carpet. And that carpet really tied the room together.

R: It really tied the room together! But he is not going to act until he’s convinced by his friends to act.

K: This is another thing with agency. It’s okay for characters to be sort of passive and have things happen to them. That’s what starts the story-

R [overlapping]: Mhm.

K: - going. You don’t, don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of stories out there with someone going “I woke up this morning and decided to do this thing.”

R: Mhm.

K: Or they start out with a quest, or they come up with something on their own. [overlapping]

R [overlapping]: You’re in media res, so you’ve already gotten to the point where they want something.

K: Yeah. But typically even if we pick up within that point something had to happen to them a lot of times beforehand, for them to want to go get the magic ring that lets you turn back into a human.

R: Yeah and often you find that the character starts off trying to do a thing that isn’t the thing they decide they need to do in the end. I mean that’s kind of part of the whole character arc, is deciding what it is they really want. The Dude really wants a nice comfy life with his White Russians -

K: And his bathrobe. [laughing]

R: And the rug that ties the room together.

K: Yeah.

R: So it bothers him enough to complain about it, but not enough to act on it. Then he is cajoled into acting upon it. And he goes and finds himself embroiled in a large plot, where things kind of continue to happen to him.

K: With movies you can watch a series of strange events unfold, because there’s the visual component that - often these are comedies. It’s almost slapstick. We’re just watching this person who all he wants is to go bowling with his buddies, sit in his bathrobe, and drink White Russians. And he ends up getting pulled into this bizarre situation.

R: Being sent to have a physical ‘cause turns out he’s gonna father a child, and also toes get cut off -

K: You want a toe? I’ll get you a toe next week. [laughing] Lebowski is a rather passive character. He doesn’t have a ton of agency. That said, once he gets involved in this he does make decisions even if they’re just ‘I want to get out of this alive.’

R: Yes. And he observes clues and he starts to put things together that probably they expected him not to do. They really thought that he would just kinda take the fall for things, or just go along, get paid, go home, and return to his life.

K: Yeah. By the time he gets to the end of the story, his motivation is something between ‘I need to figure this out’ and ‘I’m not letting this random guy who got me tied into all of this get away with it.’ Does the Dude have agency? Sometimes, a little bit, if he can get the energy and motivation together to feel like it, which is by the way very in line with his character.

R: Yeah.

K: It is very typical with books to start out with characters just living their life. People by nature are passive. But you ever notice that when someone says “I’ve decided to do this thing,” it’s usually an announcement. It’s usually like “I’ve decided to change jobs.” “I’ve decided to buy a house.” “I’ve decided to ask this person to marry me.” It’s a decision you make to take action. Whereas most of our lives are just kind of us living our life, yeah after I’m done here I’m gonna have some soup I made, I’m very excited about that. I’m deciding to have soup. Is that agency? I don’t think so. You know in your day-to-day lives, agency are things that you’re trying to act for your benefit. I’ve decided to buy this house, because I worked very hard and I think this is a good investment and I think I’ll be happy and comfortable here, and this will improve my life a measurable amount that I want it to.

R: Mhm.

K: When characters act with agency, you know a lot of times they’re in situations that are not normal day-to-day things. There aren’t a lot of books out there about someone’s decision to work really hard, save money, and buy a house.

R: Well that’s the first 25% of a book, that 25%, that storyline is gonna go away, or be severely altered.

K: That house is haunted as hell. [laughing]

R [overlapping]: Mhm.

K: For a character to have agency, they have to do three things. They have to be able to act in their environment, which means that if you said a character, let’s say a human being, and you put them on an alien planet where literally everything is made of gas, that character’s not gonna have any agency because they can’t do anything.

R: Right.

K: But not only is everything made of gas, but the lifeforms that live there physically cannot communicate with the human, or have no interest in doing so.

R: Right.

K: So that person can’t interact with their environment; they’re not gonna have any agency, they have to just sit there and wait for something to happen.

R: Unless the plot of that story is ‘how do I get to the point where I can talk to these aliens?’ There have been many Star Trek episodes like this, where you can’t communicate with the other aliens and the plot is ‘how do we find common ground?’ So, the decision to do so is agency, but the human who says “Well, all these molecules are just too far apart, I guess I’ll just sit here.”

K: [laughing]

R: That character has no agency.

K: So the second thing is a character has to be able to make meaningful decisions. So, in the case of our character sitting on the gas planet, they’ve gotta make the decision of ‘I’m gonna find a way to gather all of this gas and condense it into something solid that I can use to my benefit.’

R: Right.

K: They have to have a way to work towards their own benefit. Even if it’s not working towards their own benefit they have to be presented with situations in which they can make a decision. Even if it’s ‘the army’s invading, there’s two sides of this city, we’re only gonna be able to fend them off from one, we have to evacuate the other.’ The character making the decision of ‘okay, we’re gonna evacuate the east end, move everybody into the west end, and here are the reasons that we’re doing this and that’s why it’ll give us a better advantage.’ That’s displaying agency. The third thing is the character’s ability to affect the story. And this is different from making decisions. This is where Indiana Jones fails.

R: Right, right.

K: Because he doesn’t actually affect the story really. Sure, he’s got some wacky hijinks, he shoots a guy who just wanted to have a nice sword fight -

R: Cracks a whip.

K: Cracks a whip, somehow hitches a ride on a submarine, you know, things happen.

R: If it wasn’t for Sallah he wouldn’t have even made it halfway through the movie.

K: Exactly. Is he entertaining? Absolutely. It’s a delight. But he doesn’t do anything that changes the outcome of what’s happening. So, this is different than making a decision. Because a character needs to have an impact on the story. If you erase them from the story and nothing changes, that’s not a good character.

R: You have some characters who maybe aren’t the decision makers, but if they’re the person with the special skill, or you know they’re the person with the strength or the fortitude to go ahead with the story that the other character doesn’t have, and you end up with a nice balanced team-up of brains and brawn. Obviously if you take the brawn out of that story, it is going to affect the story. Now, take Indiana Jones out, and you definitely have a very different movie.

K: Absolutely, yes.

R: Sometimes the character is required for the tone.

K: Like a swashbuckling adventurer.

R: Think of Jack Burton in Big Trouble in Little China.

K: Okay.

R: He’s not actually the hero of the movie. At one point a big fight scene starts, and he shoots his gun in the air and ends up knocking himself out when the ceiling falls on him. And for the greater portion of this fight scene he is prone on the ground. He’s almost like the story’s style, but he’s not the story’s main active character.

K: Yeah.

R: You know there’s parts where yes, they need him because he’s tough and he can fight, but so can the other characters. There’s a lot of characters doing a lot of stuff in that movie, and Jack Burton - you would notice, if you saw it and they removed him and then you watched it again, you would definitely notice his absence. But does his absence change the story? Would his friend have not gone to rescue his girlfriend? He definitely would have. And he definitely would’ve done it without Jack, but he talked Jack into helping. It’s interesting how many stories we enjoy end up with characters who draw a lot of attention to themselves, like Indiana Jones, like Jack Burton, without actually making a huge difference in the plot of the film. Or, I’m saying film ‘cause we like to use movies as shortcuts. But um -

K: [laughing]

R: How does this work in a book? Let’s go back to our favorite, Gideon the Ninth. Gideon kinda doesn’t have a clue what’s going on!

K: Gideon is a little bit of a passive character.

R: Yeah! But it’s delightful [laughing], just like Indiana Jones and Jack Burton.

K: She gets dragged along on this adventure, which we find out is basically one giant series of death traps. She doesn’t know why she’s there. She’s there to serve as a lens of the story for the reader, because the other main character that we’re introduced to here is of course Harrowhark.

R: Harrowhark has a lot of agency, and it’s all off the page.

K: Because Harrowhark can’t be bothered to tell anybody about it. And, if she did, if she was the point-of-view character in that first book, we would have no idea what was happening. We need all of this to be told to us through the lens of Gideon, who is more like us than, like, Harrowhark.

R: Yeah. Right.

K: Of course by the end of the book you know this changes; we’ve learned some things, we’ve solved some mysteries. But Gideon is sort of a passive observer. Yes, she’s poking around, she’s talking to people, she’s gathering information, but really she can’t do anything with it until Harrow tells her what’s going on.

R: And she’s only there because Harrow has made her promise to go along on this venture and then she’ll get the thing she wanted in the beginning, which she was pretty close to succeeding except Harrow was the obstacle. So Harrow said, “Do this thing with me, and then I’ll give you what you want.” And so Gideon goes along specifically for that purpose, and how much more passive can you be than just being like ‘if I just tap my foot throughout this book, I’ll get to the thing I want.’

K: Yeah. She literally just wants me to sit in a room and do nothing.

R: Harrowhark has even said “do not speak to anyone.”

K: Yeah. Don’t talk to anyone, don’t do anything, stay in this room, be here when I get back.

R: So of course, the plot happens because Gideon’s like uhh you don’t tell me what to do.

K [laughing]: Yeah it’s not agency so much as annoyance.

R: Two people who can’t stand each other so why would one do what the other one wants.

K: Yeah. Exactly.

R: That is kind of the plot of Gideon the Ninth, but in the most delightful way that I just made sound as flat as possible.

K: You’re right, because Gideon serves the purpose of one: as I said providing the reader with context and perspective, but two: also, she’s awesome!

R: Yeah.

K: And we like watching her swing this giant sword around, and be muscle-y -

R [overlapping]: Yeah, flex for the other people in the book.

K [overlapping]: Yeah.

R: And also like look at people and go “There’s something wrong with you” [laughing], you know?

K: Yes. Yes. Um, be the perspective of ‘This is all really weird, how am I the only person who sees that this is all really weird?’

R: Mhm.

K: So. Um, yeah, so that’s a good example of characters who are passive but are compelling. So if you’re thinking to yourself ‘well, if that’s a thing that’s allowed, why do I need to strengthen my character’s agency?’ Because it depends on the story you’re telling. And it depends on what you’re trying to do here. If you have a character who is supposed to be your main character, your protagonist, they’re supposed to be leading the charge, and what they’re doing is they’re tripping from event to happening back to other event, just sort of letting stuff happen to them rather than doing things themselves, that can get really boring to read.

K: The second and third book in the Ember in the Ashes series, there’s a character in there named Helene. And - I won’t ruin too much for anybody who hasn’t read these, and full disclosure I’m still finishing the fourth one - in the second and third books especially, Helene is running around putting out fires. She is desperately trying to manage an unmanageable situation. At the same time though, she’s trying to figure out ‘how do I solve this bigger problem that I’m trying to face? How do I mitigate these circumstances?’ I was so excited whenever it was one of her chapters, because that was the thing that I thought was most interesting, was watching her just get things heaped on her. Every time she turns around something else bad is happening, that is just one more thing she’s gotta deal with. So was she displaying agency? In the second book I would say not as much, by the third book we’re certainly getting there. But, it’s still compelling because the way she is acting on her own behalf is not necessarily for herself maybe, but for other people.

R: Okay.

K: Watching someone deal with and try to mitigate overwhelming circumstances, I would say, is a form of agency. Even if they are just running around putting out fires.

R: Trying to survive -

K [overlapping]: Yes.

R: - this moment, as opposed to having a plan for the next two weeks to six months -

K [overlapping]: Yeah.

R: - toppling the empire, etc. It’s okay if they’re just trying to get back to normal.

K: Yes. Or, just trying in the case of Helene, just trying to make sure her family’s safe. Let’s start there. That’s small step number one, I’ve gotta work on that. Okay small step number two, now I’ve got a deal with the residents of this city. Now I’ve gotta figure out how I’m gonna deal with this other maniac, and there’s all of these forces and factors that she can’t really do much about. But she can make decisions.

R: Right, so in an earthquake, a character obviously isn’t going to defeat the earthquake.

K: I defeated an earthquake last week, Rekka, I don’t know what you’re talking about. [laughing]

R: Okay. In a typhoon, Kaelyn’s not gonna go punch a typhoon.

K: No no, earthquakes are far more punchable than typhoons.

R: Right. So you can trust that Kaelyn’s gonna go check on friends and family, uh, Kaelyn’s going to act in ways that clearly are important and have great meaning to her personally, even if they’re not going to fix the fact that there’s a typhoon, or the fact that you know FEMA’s gonna have to come in and that sort of thing. So what about characters with examples of great agency? Like the Quest plot. Is that agency or is that ‘this wizard told me I need to go do this thing’?

K: Well okay so I will, we can talk about the Quest plot and then I’ll give you what I think is a good example of someone who has agency and, I’m going to put them into the same story, which I know we’ve been talking about this series a lot, Shadow and Bone and the Six of Crows. For those who haven’t read or watched it, hopefully you know that one is a trilogy, the other is a duology, they’re separate storylines but the Netflix series collapsed them both into one.

R: So go read the books anyway, because Netflix made some choices.

K: So the first trilogy Shadow and Bone, Alina Starkov is a very, a little bit of, especially for the first book, a passive character. You know she discovers she has this power, and she is tasked with solving this big problem because she has this power. She does start to display agency in the story but if things had just progressed along that sort of Quest storyline - you could argue that it even does a little bit because ultimately there is a problem that she is the only one that can solve.

R: Mhm.

K: So, is that agency? Well, the way she goes about handling it in the story, breaking away from the wizard character and trying to decide to do this her own way is certainly displaying agency.

R: Right.

K: Conversely, in the Six of Crows, we have the character Kaz, who is sort of your underworld rogue-type but not in a charming way. I would actually say he’s quite the opposite of charming. He’s very stoic, very serious, very no-nonsense. But Kaz makes a lot of decisions to try to accomplish goals and to better the lives of him and his friends. There’s some revenge scenarios here, but in the revenge scenarios it’s reclaiming things that were taken from him.

R: Right.

K: There’s friends to liberate, there’s people to try to help and better their lives, there’s people they encounter along the way that get into bad situations. He is a character with a lot of strong agency. Even before we meet him, we can see everything he’s done, everything he’s worked towards to build himself up to a point where one day he can maybe do this one thing he’s trying to get to. I would say he’s a great example of somebody with a lot of agency.

R: Right from the start.

K: Yeah.

R: So he’s got a plan, and this plan is the focus of the story.

K: Yes. Of course, wrenches get thrown into it, because -

R: Just in terms of Luke Skywalker just wants to escape the farm life, that’s his desire at the start. But what he ends -- I mean he does get that, but it turns into a much bigger story.

K: Katniss Everdeen from Hunger Games. Does she have agency? She is mostly reactive. She only volunteers because her sister got picked as tribute.

R: But she’s volunteering to protect her family, which you might say is proactive decision.

K: At the same time though, if Katniss had not volunteered, would any of the subsequent events in the story have happened? No. Her decisions are impacting the story. That said, she is very manipulated a lot through this entire story.

R [overlapping]: Oh yeah. And I think that’s just the way that as a character, we express that just ‘cause you’re a hero doesn’t mean you can’t be fooled, you can’t be misguided, you can’t be manipulated as you said. I thought that was incredibly different from anything I’d read of an adventurer-hero story, because you realize a hero doesn’t always make the right decisions.

K: Yeah. I have a lot of mixed feelings about that book series as we’ve discussed in this -

R: I’m not saying I’m happy with the way it ended, but that definitely opened my eyes, and I think influenced me. As a result, my characters definitely made decisions that they thought were sound, or they thought were motivated correctly, or were the right thing to do or whatever, that end up making more of a mess.

K: Yeah. Now that said, with Katniss one of the things I will say bothered me a lot in this, and this is I think a product of trying to shoehorn motivations into areas where it doesn’t already exist, Katniss is -- there’s a scene, it’s much more pronounced in the movie but it is in the book -- where they’re at District 13. And they’re all sitting in this bunker and it’s ‘let’s talk about a time Katniss has inspired you, she’s this symbol. She is the Mockingjay.’ I don’t know if this was on purpose, I don’t know if this was the intent, but I couldn’t come up with a better way to just be like this character is almost inconsequential to what they’re doing. They just need her to stand heroically in front of people. I really think that a 16-17 year old girl was probably not the sole motivation for overthrowing an entire super-oppressive government, but. [laughing]

R: Again, I am not going to jump in front of a train for this book series -

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: But I could see the development of a character who stands up to the government on TV that the government requires everybody to watch.

K: Yes.

R: Like this is a program that the government is putting in front of people’s faces because they want people to know that people will pay for their past transgressions, until they deem that they’re done. And Katniss says, “No. It’s not gonna be one survivor, I’m not going to kill the person that I grew up with because I need to survive; we’re both going to survive” and that turns into a big moment-

K [overlapping]: Yes, it did.

R: Also she honors the person from the other district with whom she’s supposed to be competing, but they all see her treat Rue like a human being, which is not something that you get from this government.

K: There’s these tiny acts of rebellion. But I would say that it’s all undone by the fact that she doesn’t actually want any part of this. She wants to go back to her life and be done. Now that’s, I would argue, not agency, because what she’s having to deal with is the fallout of decisions that she made for survival, rather than because she wanted to make a statement.

R: No I understand that, but I’m saying again with the hero doesn’t always make the right decisions, also, person who makes a couple decisions where other people can see them suddenly find themself turned into this bigger than life character -

K [overlapping]: Yup.

R: I felt like that was part of the character arc, coming to terms with being this person everybody now expected her to be, and sometimes needed her to be, in order for them to go on.

K: I found book Katniss a very grating character, I didn’t -

R: You are not the only one, I have heard this plenty of times.

K: I didn’t like her much but one thing I appreciated about her was how much she just wanted to be left alone. [laughing]

R: Yeah! I mean, we can all relate to that.

K [laughing]: We can all relate to that. It’s just like, I get it. I don’t really like you that much but I totally get it. She’s capable, as you said, she’s a fast thinker, but she’s not a leader. In fact in the second book they have a whole plot going on behind the scenes that she doesn’t know about until the very end, because everybody looked at her and went ‘I don’t think she’s gonna be helpful here.’ [laughing]

R: Yeah.

K: We would be better off just doing this on our own.

R: Yeah.

K: And I really appreciate the writer’s acknowledgment of that. [laughing] But again, in the second book she is reverted back to a very passive role, this stuff is just happening to her. Even more so than in the first one.

R: And then it continues in the third book, where they take her on this SWAT team adventure, and she’s just like ‘what the fuck’s going on?’

K: Yeah ‘cause they’re gonna go shoot all of this war footage of her. But then, she does make the decision ‘I’m going with this because I wanna get us into the Capitol, so that I can go kill the president.’

R: Right, right.

K: So there we do have Katniss with agency, with a plan.

R: Mhm.

K: How important do you think plans are to characters having agency?

R: This is a really good question. We’ve just described a lot of main characters who don’t really have a plan.

K: No, no.

R: And who are all highly successful IPs. Sometimes I think figuring out the plan can be the character’s arc. They know they want something. They try and fail and try and fail, and it’s because they don’t know how to go about it, or there’s something that they need to let go of or gain in order to figure out the best way. You know like a heist movie.

K: I swear I was just thinking of a heist movie. [laughing]

R: The plan is happening all along.

K: Yeah.

R: And it’s the reader watching it, and being misled about things going wrong that it turns out were part of the plan anyway because there’s always that aspect of the heist that you don’t hear about ‘til the end, and you get to watch it again and go ‘Oh now I see!’

K: ‘Yeah that guy was in the background the whole time.’

R: Yeah so obviously in that case the plan is not the plot. The reveal is the plot. The red herrings are the adventure, I don’t know. Sometimes a character figuring out what they want is the plot.

K: Mhm.

R: The idea I think is that the character starts with a sense of the way things are right now are not good.

K: I think there’s a lot of this in anime. I’m thinking of Inuyasha right now, did you watch that?

R: No. You’re gonna have to talk Sailor Moon if you’re gonna keep me on your level.

K: Okay, let’s talk Sailor Moon. Let’s talk the original anime run, where they really fleshed out a lot of the episodes, and remember at one point they’re trying to track down the seven rainbow crystals. You know Sailor Moon becomes Sailor Moon not by choice, she just is.

R [overlapping]: Yup.

K: And she’s got a talking cat that tells her to fight demons.

R: And yells at her for not doing her homework.

K: And at the same time, she’s not only gotta find these other sailor scouts, and identify them and get them to accept their fates and roles but because this is anime everyone’s like ‘Ah yes! This is what I was meant for the whole time!’ In the first season of the anime they’re tracking down these seven rainbow crystals. So they don’t necessarily know why they’re tracking them, and at one point Tuxedo Mask has one and they’re like that’s fine, he can just hang on to it.

R: [laughing]

K: They’re just like well we don’t want the bad guys to get these. We don’t know why. But then we find out, oh no wait, it turns out we actually need all of them.

R [overlapping]: Yeah.

K: Why? Well we’re not sure yet. Okay now we know why we need all of them. And, oh crap, there’s the princess! And why do we need the princess? Because the princess can wield this power that’s going to defeat Queen Beryl. The agency there I think is - well first of all accepting and embracing ‘hey this is something I have to do.’ But also then incremental goals. And sometimes your plan changes. Sometimes it turns out that Sailor Venus is not the princess.

R [overlapping]: [laughing] Yeah. Yeah.

K: It’s actually Sailor Moon. [laughing]

R: Yeah, well, certainly couldn’t be her. Look at her.

K: No, no, I mean she looks nothing like that other princess that she looked exactly like. [laughing]

R: With the same hairstyle and everything.

K [laughing]: Yes.

R: The importance of grace in a person’s identity is apparently paramount. But yeah, the idea of a plan changing with new information I think is overlooked, because we like our stories in small parcels.

K: Yes.

R: But something like, for example a manga that’s gonna go on in theory indefinitely -

K: [coughing]Naruto.[/coughing] Sorry.

R: You’re going to have to introduce new information that’s going to change the course of the plot, and make the characters do something that maybe they wouldn’t have done before, or something they hadn’t considered, or just go off in a different direction because they need a new costume.

K: And by the way this is why a lot of not just manga, but comic book series and even ongoing long-running television shows, have story arcs.

R: Yeah.

K: Manga especially you will see broken out into the such-and-such arc.

R: Mhm.

K: The this arc, they actually title them and they’re considered collections.

R: Yeah. The introduction of new information can help pivot the story in a way that, like the characters might not have made that decision based on the way that they were starting out or proceeding at any given point in it. Having a plan is good, but maybe it doesn’t matter what it is. [laughing]

K: But I think having a plan is a baseline that gives characters agency because they can make decisions to try to achieve the end results of that plan.

R: Trying to stay on the track.

K: Yeah. Again I’ll refer to the character of Kaz in Six of Crows. What’s so compelling about his character is he is a planner. He’s one of those guys who’s thinking of every possible contingency. He’s trying to stay two steps ahead of rivals and archnemesises - nemesii -

R: Nemeses.

K [overlapping]: Nemeses. I like nemesii. And that’s why we see him act so clearly with so much agency because then on top of that, we also learn that he is a person who’s very knowledgeable and very in control of things. You need a guy who can do this? He knows the guy who can do that who owes him a favor. He runs a casino, so all he’s doing is collecting information and favors and stuff to be traded in later.

R: Okay. What about competence porn?

K: Competency porn in general - if you’re not getting it from just saying, this is: somebody who’s always on top of things and always two steps ahead, and then it’s like all is lost, haha, no it’s not! See, I took the magic human ring from their pocket a long time ago, and now we can all -

R [overlapping]: Going back to the heist kind of plot we described, like Danny Ocean -

K: Yeah.

R: - was an extremely competent person who was never out of control at any point.

K: And even when we were left to think that he was out of control, that he was gonna derail this whole thing because of Tess, it turns out no, she was part of the plan the whole time.

R: Yeah.

K: So how do you have a character that has a lot of agency, can show forward thinking, without making them insufferable?

R: We’ll start with casting George Clooney.

K: Yes, yeah. All things are forgiven if it’s George Clooney.

R: [laughing]

K: Once you realize you can’t get George Clooney, what do you do? You have to make the character a person. Everyone works with somebody who, a situation will pop up and you know that no matter what you do, they are going to act irrationally because of something that happened prior. Everyone has a family member that won’t eat a certain thing, no matter how you prepare it, and the reasons that they won’t eat it are completely irrational. Everyone has the friend that just is constantly late, or changing plans last minute. These are X factors, these are things that make us human. And building a well-developed character who’s, even if they are hyper competent and they have planned everything out, still has to deal with base urges and moments of irrationality that are going to make them act in a way that maybe isn’t furthering the plan. But, they’re still showing agency when they do it. So for instance, you know the character standing at the thing and it’s like ‘okay I’m supposed to be following this guy who’s got the thing, but holy crap, there’s the guy who killed my brother! He’s walking that way, but I need to follow the guy who has the MacGuffin, because we need the MacGuffin, but this might be my only chance. He’s getting on a plane, I might never find this guy again.’ And decides to leave and go - it’s still agency, he’s still making a decision to his benefit, but at the cost of something else.

R: Unless he figures out how to do both. So, as an editor, obviously you can’t name names -

K: [laughing]

R: - but what has been your experience with writers being told that they need to add agency to a story?

K: Frequently confusion.

R: Confusion because they don’t know what the heck that advice means, so they needed this episode.

K: The thing is that if you have a completed book, a lot of times I think that you think your character is doing the best that your character can. I haven’t had to have that conversation a lot, but the times that I have weren’t the story as a whole, it was isolated to individual areas of the story. And a lot of times I framed it as ‘character So-and-so needs to make a decision. They need to do something. They need to stand up for themself. Or they have this thing that they know, they need to act on that, or they need to tell someone about it so that person can act on it. When I find areas where I’m like, I need this character to display a little more agency, is typically when - I’ll be honest with you, a lot of times it’s when the story stalled out a little bit.

R: But is that a result of the character not behaving with agency?

K: Well frequently when we get the character to act a little bit more on their behalf or make some decisions, it takes the storyline back up.

R: Yeah.

K: Weird, huh? [laughing]

R: Funny how that happens.

K: This all goes back to what we’re talking about here of going ‘why is it a big deal if my character’s passive?’ Because that can get boring.

R: Yeah. And part of this is that we need the energy as a reader from that character’s desire to get from point A to point B, whether that’s an action or a target or an emotional state or whatever. That carries us along through the book and that makes the pages turn, versus the character just milling about with their hands in their pockets.

K: I’ll leave us with this thought. I find a lot of times that characters who lack agency are typically not well-developed characters. And I’m not talking about in a certain scene, I’m not talking about the weird spot where the story’s stalling out a little bit, I’m talking about pervasive through the entirety of the story. A lack of agency is frequently coupled with a character that maybe isn’t that well-developed and whose arc, yes I’m tying in other vague advice to this, but whose character arc maybe isn’t that well fleshed out. Because if you have a well-developed character, you should know in your head what they would do in certain situations. You should know how they would act. If the character’s personality or development is ‘I will sit in this place, watch everything happen, and wait for it to be over,’ well, maybe that’s not a character you should be writing an entire book about. [laughing] All of this ties to everything else. All of this has to do with the other major things about books: themes, character arcs, plot, and place. Because characters who are well-developed shouldn’t need a lot of nudging to help themselves.

R: Right, so if you have a character that knows what they want, sometimes this meandering comes out of the writer not quite sure how to get to the next thing, and might I suggest you just cut the scene and go to the next thing that is actually sometimes exactly what it needs.

K: You brought up a very good point. I think a lot of times when, especially if it’s not pervasive if we’re dealing with an individual scene, it’s more a product of the writer struggling in that area. Either not knowing how to get us to the next place we need to be, be it physical or otherwise, or not having a good understanding of what’s gonna continue to happen in the story and either not wanting to write themselves into a corner, or not having a good way to continue.

R: Yeah. And so then they get stuck in that character-introspective moment where they’re staring out the kitchen window, thinking about lots of stuff without acting in any way.

K: It’s okay to have quote-unquote “downtime” for characters. It’s okay to give them some time where they need to think and regroup. I would say that is even displaying agency, that’s a planning portion. I’m not saying that every character at all times in your book must be active and must be doing things to further themselves to a goal. What I am saying, however, is that if they’re not doing anything through the course of the book, or if there are big chunks of it where we’re kinda going ‘whaaat’s going on here?’, that’s a larger problem. And one is easier to fix than the other. [laughing] Anyway, so, that’s agency, and that’s kinda what I have to say about it. That’s all I have to say about that.

R: I doubt that very much.

K: Well, that’s all I’ll say for now then.

R: Yes, ‘cause we are over time. For me, if I get the feedback that my character’s lacking agency, I take a good look at what’s happening. And as Kaelyn said, if my character’s not a force that is causing things to happen in this story, or if there’s unnecessary downtime, or if there just isn’t a character arc, ‘cause sometimes I get this feedback for short stories.

K: Mhm.

R: And so that’s a good easy way to figure out like ‘oh, right, I don’t have a character arc. This character goes and observes a thing, and I’m trying to make commentary on the thing but I’m not actually having the character affect any change on the thing.’ Then it’s not really agency, it is the character observing the world around them and having an opinion about it, which isn’t the same as having a character arc.

K: Yeah.

R: If that happens in a novel, it’s more excruciating because it’s a lot more words that you’ve put time into. I rewrote SALVAGE, the first 60% that I rewrote, the first time I rewrote the first 60%, was because of an agency issue.

K: Mhm.

R: My characters start out the book; they’re stuck on the island, and all I did to change it was change the way they were planning their stuck-ness.

K: [laughing]

R: They’d been there the same amount of time, they were the same amount of frustrated, they were in the same amount of danger and having to make sure that nobody noticed them that shouldn’t notice them. But, in the second version, there’s a heist. Versus the first version where there’s a lot of watching the clock. And which one would you rather read?

K: Exactly, yeah. There’s certainly an argument to make -- I think, a strong argument that I would say is borderline law -- that watching characters act with agency is far more engaging than watching them as passive observers.

R: Yep.

K: Unless it’s Twilight, and then you’re just gonna sell a billion copies of basically a weird choose-your-own-adventure, but not really.

R: Yes. Well, not all our characters are as beautiful and attractive and wonderful and captivating as Bella, so we’re just gonna have to give them agency.

K: She doesn’t know how beautiful -

R [overlapping]: Right no of course not -

K [overlapping]: No of course not, no -

R: The plot is her finding out that people find her attractive.

K: And she smells really good.

[Both laughing]

R: A fine vintage. Okay.

K: Twilight is one of those things that like, I wonder if 150 years from now when we’re all dead, and they look back at this and go like ‘God, people in the earlier 2000s were weird.’

R: I mean, you could say that about most ages I think.

K: That’s true. Yeah.

R: There’s plenty of evidence throughout history of humans being just freakin’ weird.

K: Context is everything, but.

R: Yep.

K: Yeah, so anyway, that’s agency.

R: It is. Go get some, and give it to your characters.

K: And always agency on your own behalf, you as a real life person always get to have.

R: Yeah! I mean, especially when you’ve been locked inside for a year and a half. It’s about time to get some agency.

K: Yup.

R: So if you have questions or comments, or you still don’t know what agency is or what to do with it when someone tells you you need more, then you can @ us on Twitter and Instagram @wmbcast, or you can go back to some of the other episodes we talked about; they are all at wmbcast.com. We would love if you would leave a rating and review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And also we are super grateful to all our patrons at Patreon.com/wmbcast who support the costs involved in making these episodes for you. So if they are helpful, and you have the cash and the agency -

K: [laughing]

R: Please head on over there.

K: I see what you did there.

R: Oh yeah, you like that? Thanks.

K: I did, I did. So thanks everyone, we’ll see you in two weeks!

Tuesday May 11, 2021

Episode 60 - Worldbuilding Tricks and Traps

Tuesday May 11, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Worldbuilding for Masochists Podcast

Links for this episode:

Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide

Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer

Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz)

Rekka: She was tuuckered out yesterday. I was tuckered out yesterday. [laughing] The trainer had us running around a field and it was the first time I had done any real, like, quick movements, certainly out in the sun on an 80 degree day, when I had forgotten water for both me and Evie, and the trainer only said “oh I have some in the car,” she only gave it to Evie, she didn’t give me any. But she’s like “jump around! Be active! Be real animated!” And I’m like ohh my goodness, do you not realize, that this is me animated.

[both laughing]

Rekka: So I was like, how about I lay down and pretend to be a dead squirrel, dogs love dead squirrels. [laughing]

Kaelyn: [laughing] Aww.

R: So we were all tired yesterday. So today, we are talking about worldbuilding.

K: We are.

R: We are. We are talking about mostly not overdoing your worldbuilding.

K: And because it’s me, we’re certainly going to be talking about some of the elements of worldbuilding as well. Worldbuilding is the process of creating, constructing, and coming up with the rules for an imaginary world, or sometimes an entire fictional universe. There’s a lot of elements that go into this - interesting fact that I found while doing some research for this: the first time “worldbuilding” was used was actually in 1820.

R: The term, or..?

K: The term “worldbuilding” was first used in 1820 in the Edinburgh Review.

R: Okay.

K: Fiction has existed in one form or another all through the course of humanity, obviously, you know, as we got into more recent centuries, literature became a little more organized? I guess? For lack of a better term.

R: So that’s the first time it appeared in print as far as we know, in English, and presumably someone would have said it aloud and said “hey that sounds pretty good.”

K: Yeah, you know what, I have to - I’ll try to dig up the article because I am curious but, the Edinburgh Review was, of course, just reviewing published stories and literature and reviews of different things. So the term really gained a lot of traction in the early 1900s when we saw a lot of science fiction and fantasy writing. A really good example, actually of thorough worldbuilding based off of existing history, would probably be Huxley’s Brave New World, and I think that was 1932, I believe.

K: Regardless of where your story is set, what time it’s set, how much you’re using and building off existing human history, or if this takes place in a galaxy far, far away, there’s certain elements you have to have in worldbuilding. One of the good places to start is geography. If it’s Earth: you’re done. No problem. [laughing] You have established that the world is Earth.

R: But do you? Do you even say [laughing] that you are writing a story on Earth, if you are on Earth?

K: You name a place that the reader would presumably have context for. If, you know, the story is set in Delhi, India then yes we’re on Earth. Tokyo, places we’ve heard of.

R: So in fair Verona, on planet Earth where we lay our scene.

K [laughing]: On planet Earth, yes, Shakespeare did always make sure to specify that.

R: That’s what I was kinda saying is that -

K: Yeah.

R: - because of context, because of cultural understanding, some books, current for the audience they were intended for, are going to need less explanation of the setting than others.

K: Yeah, now the other component of geography then, especially if you’re writing a fantasy or a science fiction story, there’s probably some hidden world elements in there. It may not be a hidden world story, but there’s probably some things that regular people don’t see, or some locations that you have to create. So that’s part of establishing your geography.

R: Hidden or invented?

K: Well, invented and hidden.

R: I’m just making you define your definitions.

K [laughing]: Okay.

R: When you say hidden, do you mean literally, like underground caverns? Or do you just -

K: Could be!

R: - mean secret societies -

K: It could be any of those. For secret society, we’d be talking about the place that the secret society meets. In some cases, this could be established places that you’re repurposing for your story, but you still need to establish the geography of what these are and where these are.

R: The Mall of America.

K: Exactly.

R: Where my cabal meets every Sunday.

K: Wait, that’s where I’m hiding my Deathstar.

R: It’s a big mall.

K: It is a big mall. Yeah.

R [overlapping]: You could do both things.

K: So [laughing] geography is just a good way to get yourself grounded of where things are especially in relation to each other and that’s very important if your story is set on the road. Because otherwise we start ending up with some Game of Thrones style jetpack -

R: You mean like fast travel? [laughing]

K: Yeah, there were some characters that the running joke was like, for them to have gotten from place A to place B in that amount of time they must have some secret Game of Thrones jetpack that they’re [laughing] doing this with.

R: Well, then you need fossil fuels.

K: Yeah, or dragons.

R: This really - well, yeah, how about you just hop on a dragon! Turns out, everybody was riding dragons in these books -

K [laughing]: Yeah.

R: - it’s just that some people made a bigger fuss about it than others.

K: [laughing]

R: We all ride dragons! All the time! You’re not that cool.

K: So geography is a good way to get your story grounded, so to speak. Now if you’re building one from the ground up—a world, that is—you may not know exactly where everything is when you start writing, and that’s okay. But having a rough idea is very helpful, especially - as I said - if your characters are going to be traveling from place to place because knowing how long it should take them to get from place to place is critical to the story.

R: Yeah, I was just gonna say this is a very story critical element, not just -

K: Yeah.

R: - the setting, some stories could happen almost anywhere, and the setting is not 100% ingrained in the story.

K: Yes, and geography then also plays into one of the other major elements of worldbuilding, which is culture. So where your characters live and what their setting and environment looks like, is really going to affect what type of people they are. But if you have an entire village set on a rocky island in a stormy area in the middle of nowhere isolated from the rest of the people of this kingdom, and those people aren’t good with boats, that’s probably a problem.

[Both laughing]

R: Well, it depends how rough the water is, maybe the water is an actual obstacle.

K: Well, see? And there you go.

R: [laughing]

K: Because the geography there comes into play, because maybe this is an isolated group that never gets off this island because the water is too rough.

R: Maybe the water’s frozen!

K: Maybe the water’s frozen!

R: [giggles]

K: This is going to feed into their culture and what these people are like. This isn’t just culture based on their surroundings though, you have to establish everything about culture which is: their past, their current social structure, religious elements, what do they eat, what do people do there for a living, are they part of a greater entity and if so, what is their contribution to this greater entity.

R: I feel like now would be a good time to make a nod to the podcast Worldbuilding for Masochists.

K: Yes! Yes. [laughing]

R: Which, if you haven’t heard it, goes episode by episode just taking one aspect, and for a while there the hosts were actually building a world with no intention of writing for it, just literally like “okay what’s another thing to consider about this world?” and each host was handling a certain element or a certain region and it’s good evidence of how you can worldbuild and never ever ever get to your story. Because as Kaelyn’s outlining, there’s a lot to go into a finely detailed world for your narrative story, so this way trouble lies -

K: [laughing]

R: - if you are on deadline, for example. [laughing]

K: And there’s a good example of this: Tolkien.

R: Mhm.

K: Tolkien wrote a lot of his books because he was a linguist and he came up with all of these languages and then created history around the languages - because languages are intrinsically linked to history - and then developed this very rich, millenia-long history of Middle Earth, and then he wrote a story set well after he’d actually established all of these things. So he spent a lot of time creating a world and this history to not tell stories that were necessarily set in that, but to tell stories that were a product of everything that he had created.

R: But for this later world that he writes his setting into, the history he created is their history and you can tell.

K [overlapping]: It’s very important to the story as well, yes. If you’ve ever read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you will know that there is an exhaustive amount of time spent with characters having conversations in different languages, and that’s because this is what Tolkien was all about.

R: That's what he really wanted to write. [chuckles]

K: Yeah, he was very into creating languages. And that, by the way, is why people can learn Elvish, because it’s an actual language with an alphabet - so to speak, if you want to call it that - grammatical rules, syntax, all of the things that need to be there to create a language.

K: But anyway, so culture elements are important because, especially if you are creating a brand new world, if you’re fabricating or you’re building from nothing, you have to have a world that these people live in. You can’t just take a group of people, plop them down, and say: “and then one day a dragon came!” Because we have no context then for: is this a good thing? are they happy the dragon’s there, or did the dragon come to eat them? Is this a frequent problem, are dragons kind of like rats, do they just pop up every now and then and you’ve gotta deal with it? Do they have methods for this? If the dragon eats all of them, is that the end of the story, or what happens to the dragons? [laughing]

R: Was the dragon prophesied? Have they been anticipating their arrival or -

K: Exactly.

R: - was it a surprise? [laughing] like surprise dragons.

K [laughing]: A surprise dragon! The best kind of dragon.

[both laughing]

K: So, establishing the culture, apart from being good for worldbuilding, helps a writer figure out how characters would react or act based on certain events. Leading in from culture, next I would say is cosmology. And I’m gonna put this in two different perspectives here: the science fiction and the fantasy. For science fiction, you gotta establish what’s up there.

R: [giggles]

K: Stars and planets and who lives on what and how fast can you get to them, what's the gravity like, what’s the air situation like, are they all just the planet Venus which is incredibly toxic, or are they all just Saturn and we don’t really know what they’re made up of? [laughing] For worldbuilding and science fiction, that’s very important especially if your story is set in space. And you still, by the way, can absolutely have science fiction set on Earth, in which case the cosmology is ours. And that’s fine, just establish that. But anytime you’re involving space marines, aliens, wormhole travel, you gotta establish, not just Earth, but everything else that we’re interacting with.

K: So then on the fantasy side, it’s a little bit more metaphysical. This kind of leads into the culture aspect. We need to know you know, on this planet - or setting or town or wherever it is - how do these people think about their place in the universe?

R: Is it the center of the universe? Do they have awareness of other life sustaining planets? Do they understand that there are planets or is it just sparkly things in the sky?

K: Are they the dominant species? Is there another one that’s equivalent to them? But also how do they see themselves in the world? Are they a chosen people of a deity that put them there? Are they the rejected children of an angry god? Did they just accept that they evolved from whatever was swimming around in the primordial ooze and now that’s -

[both laughing]

K: - that’s where they are? A lot of times in fantasy, there’s beings of varying degrees of power and there’s frequently like a hierarchy of these and now, granted, some of them - they may be all the same species and some of them are just more powerful than others.

R: Mhm.

K: But typically when you involve magic there’s an otherworldliness to it; the magic is coming from somewhere, so that’s something that needs to be addressed in the cosmological metaphysical scale, if you will.

R: Okay.

K: So then that bleeds into the fourth one, which is physics.

R: You know what, just throw physics out the window, it’s very optional.

K: Well, ‘cause you gotta decide: are you sticking to real world physics? If so, what are you gonna do when you need to invent things, are you gonna try to apply the rules that we theoretically would apply to these things? Or are you just gonna kind of make up like, “yes and we’ve invented a way to take dark matter and make it into energy.” Don’t do that unless you can really back that up. [laughing]

R: Hey, lots of people try. The other thing is, if you can find out the largest argument against doing that, like if other people have tried it in their books and real world physicists have offered their criticism of the method, then you have a scene where one character says: “how did you solve the such and such quandary?”

K: Yes.

R: And you invent a method, give it a name but do not explain it, and just hand wave the heck out of it.

K: Yeah, so how much are you gonna stick to real world physics, and how much is gonna be magic? And obviously magic tends to dabble more into the fantasy side, but you can still apply physics to this. You still have Newton’s primary laws involved there, you know an object in motion tends to stay in motion, okay so a spell that’s already cast tends to continue to be cast -

[both laughing]

K: Maybe you get a little more into a Fullmetal Alchemist with the equal exchange principal, which by the way, is also rooted in physics: matter cannot be created or destroyed.

R: Right.

K: That, though, ties into cosmology frequently which is: where is the magic coming from?

R: Mhm.

K: All of these things that I’ve talked about here, these are how you are going to establish your “rules” of this world. Be they geography, travel, physics, magic, society and culture - this is how you have to set these up in order to place your characters in a setting that makes sense.

R: Okay. Would you say that concludes the definition?

K: Well I would say those are my four elements that I would highlight.

R: Okay.

K: There’s definitely more, and like, subelements within those but I think those are always a good place to start.

R: Okay. So this episode topic was proposed to us as: how do you create worldbuilding that doesn't trap you in both rules and details? So now that you’ve just told people to invent everything -

K [overlapping]: [laughing]

R: - from the Big Bang to the point of your story, how do you make sure you don't?

K: I’m assuming in this scenario we’re talking about multiple books or short stories set in the same world.

R: Why does it have to be multiple?

K: Because, if you are building a world and worried about trapping yourself, you would be able to write your way out of it if it was one book.

R: You think.

K: I think, yes.

R: My answer to this is don’t put all the details in the book.

K: Yeah, absolutely.

R: Understand your rules and understand your basic principles, but don’t reference them in the book because that does then therefore hold you accountable when you get readers who are so enthusiastic about the world you’ve created that they start to write these things down.

K: Writing yourself into a corner with world building - I’m not saying this to be critical of anyone’s writing style, but this is why planning is important. There are certain things that you kind of just need to know are gonna happen in the story in order to construct the world properly. If you get too far into it, you keep adding too much backstory, too much history of the characters, you’re gonna start to run into situations where - like Rekka was saying - there’s contradictions. When you really start to have problems with writing yourself into a corner is when your stories and characters get large enough that they have to keep expanding, that you’ve gone on and on and on in this world for a while.

K: George R.R. Martin has fans who are sort of archivists for him, that he will send them the books or novellas or even like preview chapters, to check against what he’s already written to make sure he’s not contradicting himself in any way. He let them write The World of Ice and Fire book, that was written by just fans of the series that were documenting all of this stuff, so they worked in conjunction with Martin on this, and even with that, he still - things still slip in those books. The scale and sprawl of the world in A Song of Ice and Fire is gigantic; I would argue it’s the biggest problem in getting these books released now -

R: Mhm.

K: - because you’ve flung all of these characters to such far corners and come up against these problems of how do we get this person to here to interact with this person but then get them back over to where I need them to be at the end of this story.

R: A dragon with a jetpack.

K: Yes. Yes. Oh, so the dragons have jetpacks now?

R: I mean it makes more sense; they’re the fireproof ones.

K: That’s a good point, yeah. So in terms of not writing yourself into a corner. This isn’t maybe the most encouraging answer, but I’m going to say that if your world keeps growing and you have to keep adding history and new characters, it’s going to happen.

R: It’s absolutely going to happen. This is a problem that, on the one hand is frustrating, but on the other hand can be good to have. You end up writing more about your worldbuilding and more about your details than writing out your story.

K: This, again, falls into a lot of early epic fantasy where it felt more like there were characters that we were just watching interact with a world so that we could learn more about the world. And the story itself [giggling] wasn’t as important. There’s definitely a balance, but the thing about worldbuilding - about good worldbuilding - is that once you establish it, your reader shouldn’t need a lot of context for it. They should kind of understand: this is the world that this story and these characters are set in, and be able to apply that to the rest of the book as they’re reading it.

K: I wanna distinguish here between setting and worldbuilding, because worldbuilding is not necessarily describing a specific place -

R [overlapping]: Mhm.

K: - it’s describing all of the places and giving the reader context for them. A setting is “places that the characters are.”

R: Right, but if you are showing off your worldbuilding -

K: Yes.

R: - by describing your setting -

K: They certainly can cross, yes, but they -

R [overlapping]: - how do you stop yourself from doing that? Just get a really good friend to smack your hand and tell you “no you’ve gone too far here?”

K: You mean when you’ve gone too far in the world building and we’re getting into like, an exposition dump?

R: Yeah!

K: Yeah, that’s editorial to be honest with you. That’s something that you revisit in drafts, that’s something that you get feedback on. If you have a really richly built and developed world with history and culture and all of these interesting things that you’ve spent time and effort thinking about, there’s gonna be this inclination to just dump all of it at once, to just do a lot of: “these such and such people lived here, and they had spent a lot of generations at war with this and that people who were allies of the third people.” There’s ways to do this and it’s a skill you have to develop, it takes a certain amount of finessing.

R: Usually, some allow more for it than others.

K: Yeah absolutely, and there’s a lot of clever ways to squeeze this in there, and by the way, this isn’t to say that there’s something wrong with a character giving the reader information - either through an internal monologue or explaining something to someone. There’s all sorts of great articles - and, I would imagine, Youtube videos, subreddits - about worldbuilding tips and tricks. So there are ways of incorporating that into your story without having to give a long, tiresome, and confusing explanation. Dropping a lot of information on the reader, they’re not going to retain that.

R: Mhm.

K: Whenever I’m reading a book where I have to keep track of certain places or groups of people or what different types of magical abilities do and mean, I need to re read that a couple times. When there’s a page that has information on I usually bookmark it so that when later -

R [overlapping]: [laughing]

K: - I see it referenced, I can go back and be like okay, yes, those are the people that control fire, you know? [laughing]

R: Kaelyn doesn’t read with bookmarks, she reads with post it notes. [giggles]

K: I - yes. I do still read physical books and sometimes it is bookmarks and post it notes. [laughing]

R: So that brings to mind the idea of how much a reader has to remember what you write in your exposition. If you’re just describing a setting, can you get away with more than laying out the way things work?

K: My experience tends to be that readers will remember descriptions well, because when they’re reading through something and you’re describing, you know, vast mountains capped with snow and trees stopping at a certain point because of the -

R: So that’s imagery.

K: Yes, because you’re giving them something to picture in their mind. What is kind to do for readers, especially if these are things you’ve made up - let’s pretend in Avatar, waterbenders were called something specific. [laughing] You remind them, Katara was a whatever the word is, she controlled water. There are ways to drop those reminders in there so that readers don’t get frustrated by like “I don’t even know who this person is or where they’re from at this point.”

R: But that is a good point. When you’re naming things -

K [overlapping]: Mhm.

R: - consider being a little bit more explicit in the name than to come up with secondary world terms.

K: Yes but, if you do decide to do that - this is where I’m gonna, not derail us a little bit, but talk about another element in the book that can be helpful here which is maps and glossaries.

R: Mhm.

K: We did a whole episode about maps and why they’re so useful and helpful, one of the great reasons is worldbuilding. It’s really nice to open a book and, assuming you can do it without spoilers, see a map there to give the readers some context of where the world is and what’s going on there. I always, whenever I get a map, I like to take a look at it and look at some of the names of places and get an idea of like “okay so I guess we’re going here eventually, we’re probably going there eventually.”

R: Mhm.

K: Glossaries are good for that too, especially when you have to create a lot of stuff, it’s good for the reader to be able to flip back to one of those terms to go like “oh yes, okay, that’s this kind of magic.”

R: Right, and this is a spot where unfortunately, digital and audio do not help us.

K [overlapping]: No.

R: Like if you’re reading a paperback of something you can flip to these things, you can keep your finger in it as you go through, as opposed to - you can put a post it in it! - whereas it is really difficult on, say, a digital reader. It’s still not as natural an experience -

K [overlapping]: Yeah.

R: - as flipping to either the start or the finish. All of my Peridot books have glossaries in them and I feel bad every time I think of anyone reading it in audio.

[both laughing]

R: Because it’s not there, and while yes you can download the files to pair with the audio, you’re generally doing something while you’re listening to an audiobook.

K: Yeah.

R: But I agree with you about the map. The worldbuilding that you get out of a map is pretty impactful in terms of the distance between things, as you started off saying, like how many jetpack refuels does your dragon need -

K: [laughing]

R: - to get from point a to point b in your story.

K: I’ve also seen a lot of books now, especially where there’s a large caste of characters and certain groups or family units, in the beginning of the book they’ll just have a list of them or maybe a family tree.

R: Speaking of Romeo and Juliet again like you have the dramatis personae -

K: Yes, exactly.

R: - a real quick rundown of how they relate to other characters and stuff, again not helpful in audio. Again, this is front matter back matter - if you had the clout, you could print a separate book of your world bible.

K: And by the way, if you have a glossary, a map, a dramatis personae in this, that is not an excuse to not do the worldbuilding.

R [overlapping]: Right, that’s what I was gonna come back to was like, okay so you’re sticking it outside the actual story, but I would argue that it’s important to be able to read the story and understand everything without supplemental reading material.

K: Yeah, that should be there either for prestory context - reader, I’m gonna throw a lot of people at you, I know it’s gonna be a little tricky to keep track of it have this helpful guide to who these people are -

R: Mhm.

K: - or it’s just a “hey heads up here’s everyone in here,” but that still means you need to do the actual worldbuilding and do the work in the book.

R: Right. So using a prime example, a recent example is the Gideon the Ninth -

K [overlapping]: Ah, yes, one of our favorites [garbled through laughter]

R: [overlapping]: - The Locked Tomb Trilogy. I would much rather talk about Gideon all day than A Song of Ice and Fire, let’s be real.

K: [laughing]

R: So, it begins with names from each of the houses. Not only that but it sets a little bit of tone -

K: Yeah.

R: - for each of the houses without saying “these houses are like this.” So it begins with, in order of House appearance: “The Ninth House, keepers of the Locked Tomb, house of the Sewn Tongue, the Black Vestals.” And that in itself is worth like six paragraphs of explanation that -

K: Absolutely.

R: - this is just what goes with that name. And then you have the multiple names of the characters that you’re going to encounter from this House, and no explanation as to what they’re like or anything like that. So you’ve gotten a tone for the setting, the Ninth House, you get that like, the names all sort of have a structure to them, and that’s what you get from that pre reading list. And then you get in and then you get the characterization, just like you would if you were not going to have forty characters dumped on you in the course of this book.

K: Yeah, and by the way, because this author is diabolical, by the time we get to the second book, the dramatis personae in the beginning is doing an extra level of work here because they had to do it without spoiling things. So it’s actually creating this air of mystery - which absolutely contributes to worldbuilding by the way. There’s something weird going on here because there’s some contradictions in this, or some people that you can tell are deliberately left out, and then you have to start wondering why.

R: And Kaelyn was very aware of this -

K [overlapping]: I -

R: - jumped right on those little details after reading it the first time, before the second book was out; the second book came out, Kaelyn read it and was texting me like “I have questions!”

K: [laughing]

R: But yeah in the first book you’re introduced to twenty-eight people in three pages, and their alliances that they’re gonna start the book out with, and then you get to meet them. So a dramatis personae is not all the details, it’s not the hair color, it’s not attitude, it’s not history, it’s just “here are the names so you can keep them straight, who was that again, okay that was this person” and maybe then you remember that they had a pinched little mouth.

K: There’s a [laughing] a lot of ways to do this, it just depends the amount of effort and detail you wanna put into it.

R: And some genre expectations too.

K [overlapping]: And some genre expectations, to be sure, absolutely.

R: Always.

K: This can get as straightforward as set in Denver in the present day, and it's primarily just regular human beings and -

R: At a grocery store.

K: At a grocery store, yeah. You still need to establish that so you’re still building your world there -

R: Mhm.

K: - or you can take this as far as something like -

R: New Denver Colony!

K [laughing]: Yeah, exactly, something like Lord of the Rings or Star Trek where there’s just layers and layers of history and characters and different races and species and it’s so expansive that you can just keep adding and adding to it. So what’s the right way to make sure you don’t write yourself into a corner? Well the thing is, if you’re gonna keep developing your worldbuilding, you’re going to [write yourself into a corner] eventually.

R: Yeah. The fun part of being a writer is figuring out how to get yourself out of that corner without being able to change the stuff that’s already been published. I’ve done it! [giggles]

K: Yeah! Leaving yourself some backdoors, if you will, is not a bad idea.

R: Although that requires that you -

K: Plan them.

R: - predict a little bit of the trouble you might run into.

K: Which is a very possible thing to do.

R: If you have a magic system that has a bunch of rules, you could always say “but then there’s Chaos Magic.” And then Chaos Magic can just be a little bit of the antirule that you need later on.

K: Yeah, making something forbidden or the lost art, something that no one has access to, just to have in your back pocket -

R: But just know your readers are gonna wanna hear about it.

K: Yes, absolutely.

R: You might have to write a novella outside your main storyline just to satisfy some readers about that lost locked tomb art of chaos magic.

K [overlapping]: Yeah, Chekov’s Chaos Magic. But again, Rekka’s right then, if you bring something like that up and you’re like yeah, well, that’s forbidden, nobody practices that anymore, you don't have to say, but you have to indicate why. Was it because they destroyed the world, was it because whoever used it died horribly -

R: [giggles]

K: - was it because they just forgot how to do it? There’s historical instances of that, Greek fire is a real thing that existed that we lost the recipe for and nobody can make. There’s theories as to what it was but [laughing] no one can recreate it.

R: And maybe we should leave it that way.

K: Yeah probably but -

R: But what kind of book would it be if we did?

K [laughing]: Exactly.

R: And that’s the other part of it, it’s not just making it explained ‘cause you don’t wanna be like “there’s this forbidden art which we don’t do ‘cause it killed people,” like okay yeah fine, but that forbidden art is gonna be in this book. You say forbidden as a storyteller and I expect somebody to crack that nut.

K: Yeah, the readers will start salivating at that point.

R: Mhm.

K: I’ve read books where there were things that were mentioned that never were discussed again and it's infuriating.

R: Yeah, what happened to the fireworks factory?

K [laughing]: Yeah that’s exactly -

R: That’s a Simpsons reference, yeah.

K: Got too close to the Greek fire.

[both laughing]

R: Yeah, well, there ya go.

K: So how to not write yourself into a corner, the best advice I can give is try to leave yourself a backdoor. And this means that you have done a really good job of worldbuilding, because as Rekka said, you’re anticipating where you could run into problems. And that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t go down that road, it just means that you also need to have another road that you can diverge onto -

R: [laughing]

K: - in order to circumvent this problem and come up behind it, attack it, defeat it, be victorious over your own book.

R: I mean that’s the goal every time.

K: Yeah. Yeah, you really are just sort of in the act of defeating something.

R: Take your project and beat it into submission.

[both laughing]

R: That’s actually writing.

K: [laughing] Will be defeated into the ground.

R: Hey, I am learning right now with puppy training that what you wanna do is be more interesting than the problem -

K: Yep.

R: - so that you can distract and be fun, and reward. So I feel like that’s a good way to - can we apply that to writing, can we just distract the reader from the flaws -

K: No.

R: - in our logic, and the rules -

K: Nope.

R: - that we backed ourselves into?

K: Nope. [laughing]

R: But it works - what if there are liver treats?

K: [laughing] I don’t want any of those.

R [overlapping]: Squeak toys?

K [laughing]: Okay, I’ll take a squeaky toy.

R [laughing]: Okay.

K: But you know, the thing is Rekka, eventually I’m gonna chew the squeaky toy apart and then I’m gonna be like hey, wait, hang on, you promised me forbidden chaos magic.

R: Well, too bad, I have to take you to the vet because you swallowed the valve and now we have to have [laughing] your stomach operated on.

K: [laughing] Yeah, so you can keep trying to distract the reader but eventually you’re gonna have to answer for these things.

R: Okay what if your story is so interesting that the forbidden magic is actually the least interesting thing that you’re talking about in your plot?

K: Alright, I’ll give you a pass there.

R: Alright! I win!

K: [laughing]

K: I’m curious what you’re gonna come up with that’s more interesting than [laughing] forbidden chaos magic.

R [overlapping]: I didn’t say I was gonna write this. I’m not gonna write this.

K: Now I need it, I need to know what you’re gonna come up with that’s more interesting than forbidden chaos magic.

R [groaning]: Fiiiine.

K: [laughing]

R: Fine, I’ll work this into my next project.

K: Excellent. So yeah, I think that’s some of the fundamentals on worldbuilding. I’m sure we'll talk more about this in the future. Oh, you know what, one last thing. If you’re having trouble with worldbuilding and you just really do not know where to start, go get the Dungeons & Dragons official manual, because it actually has a guide for worldbuilding in there.

R: Hm.

K: It’s not perfect, it’s not the end all be all, but if you’re just really at a loss, not a bad place to start to help get some of your thoughts organized. And there are things online that are similar to this, they’ll give you steps to take like, “okay think about this, now think about this.”

R: Yeah I would say that Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer et al is about writing but it’s also - there’s a lot of worldbuilding in there and could get your brain really juiced about different things to consider.

K: By the way, if you’re having trouble with worldbuilding, if you’re going, well I need to create this whole alien society and culture and religious system and everything and you’re really having trouble coming up with it, maybe that’s a good time to take a step back and go: maybe that’s not the kind of book I should be writing right now. Can the story be set on Earth and with people and maybe the aliens are just on Earth so that’s minimized your worldbuilding requirements.

R: It’s about the size and shape of the story you enjoy writing. Because you could enjoy watching a movie where it’s all way deep space, but do you enjoy writing it as much as you enjoy when other people do that work.

K: Yeah, exactly.

R: You have a choice.

K: Got a few of them. [laughing]

R: Unless you were hired to ghostwrite this story and you’re stuck.

K: No, then that’s your problem.

R: If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re being hired to write other peoples’ stories, it probably means you already know what to do here.

K [laughing]: Yeah.

R: So write in and tell us.

K: And Rekka, if they wanna write in -

R: You can find us on Instagram and Twitter and at WMBcast.com for all our old episodes and if you are loving the commentary [laughing] along with the puppy barks and actual useful advice from Kaelyn, then you can support us at Patreon.com/WMBcast.

K: Hopefully as always, this was at least educational and entertaining.

R: Or at least useful.

K: At least a little bit useful, yeah, if nothing else, you go to hear some puppy sounds in the back.

R: Yes. [laughing]

K: That’s always a bonus.

R: Let’s see how many I can edit out.

[both laughing]

R: This might just be Evie’s episode, co-host Evie.

K: So thanks everyone and we’ll see you in two weeks!

R: Talk to you next time.

Tuesday Apr 27, 2021

Episode 59 - Is it a duology? You don't know!

Tuesday Apr 27, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz)

Kaelyn: Did you get your second shot yet?

Rekka: We get it on Saturday.

K [mumbling]: Okay.

R: ‘Cause cool people get the vaccination.

K: You hear that kids? Be cool, get vaccinated.

R: Be Extremely cool. Be cool like me. [laughing] I don't know if that’s selling it but-

K: [laughing]

R: -that’s what i’m gonna go with.

K: I get mine May second. I got the moderna one so I had to wait four weeks and -

R: Mhm. Yeah, I get two weeks between mine [loudly] it depends on your publisher.

K: [laughing]

K: Speaking of things that come in part two-

R: Yep, speaking of duologies-

K: The covid duology, oh there we go.

R [overlapping]: Yes, well the vaccine duology, not the covid itself-

K [overlapping]: Yeah.

R: Because you don't wanna get covid and then long covid, that’s one duology. The duology I’m all about is the mRNA duology, let’s do that one.

K: We’ve got shots part two coming up here.

R: Mhm.

K: And you know, in many ways the vaccine is kind of similar to a duology. The first one’s the build up, the first one’s to get you a little bit of a taste there, get your immune system going like “hey, what is this? What's going on? What's happening?” and then the second one, that’s BAM, you know? like-

R: That’s when it all happens

K: - fully immune. Yeah and that’s [laughing] that’s why everyone’s getting sick from the second one.

R: Ugh yeah, I don’t think this metaphor’s gonna last us too much longer. But, we are talking today about duologies.

K: As promised.

R: Yes, we are following through on the promise, the commitment we made, to follow last episode’s trilogy discussion with a discussion of duologies, and why they are harder than the thing we made sound really hard.

K: Yeah, so. You know, last episode we talked about trilogies, and how trilogies can be really challenging, and one of the things we touched on was: if you’re really having a hard time with this, maybe you don’t have a trilogy. Maybe you have a duology. So, a duology, obviously, is a series of two books rather than a trilogy being three, although quadrilogies are becoming a thing now. Four books is getting super common. So, just to clarify some things here. If you’re going “I did not hear the word duology ever, until about a year ago, or so,” you’re right, you didn’t. [laughing] This wasn’t really a very common thing.

R: This wasn’t a thing, there was a book and a sequel but there wasn't a thing called a duology.

K: Yeah and by the way, let’s clarify this real quickly here, the difference between a book and a sequel, and a duology. A duology is a story split up into two books. A book and a sequel is, presumably, one complete story and then another complete story.

R: In the same world, usually featuring the same characters, spun off somehow.

K: Yes.

K: Contractual finite book series are kind of a relatively recent thing. You know, for those of you who have been reading science fiction and fantasy for a long time - especially, you know, when it first started, you know, the trade paperbacks and the pulp and everything was really popular - will know that series, especially genre series - and not just science fiction and fantasy: mystery, murder, thrillers, spy novels, war novels -

R: Mhm.

K: - they tended to go on infinitely. Each book would be a standalone story, sometimes encompassing a bigger arc. Fantasy, this was very common, I mean, look at the Wheel of Time -

R: You could start a series, see success, and the publisher would just keep printing it because they felt like they were printing money.

K: Yeah, and a lot of times what they would do is: you’d get a book published, and you’d establish a, typically a main character or a world, or - maybe something like an overarching story plot -

R : or a concept at least.

K: Yeah, in fantasy that was a lot more common in this sort of epic quest that was just gonna keep going and going. Lord of the Rings is actually kind of unique, in that it was a specific trilogy published at that time. That wasn’t very common.

R: Right.

K: You know, these epic fantasies tended to just, they just kept writing and writing, and that's why so many of them have such complicated character family histories, a lot of world building, a lot of different races and imagined and created history in them. But anyway. Then you have some of these other series that, each book was its own individual story, and they just keep going.

R: Mhm.

K: That is not a trilogy or even a duology, even if it ended up being only two books. Trilogies and duologies have an overarching story that it’s gonna take three, two, four, however many books to tell. But with a duology - there’s a reason there aren’t a lot of these: they’re really hard to write. A lot of times when you have a duology on your hands, you’re deciding either: do I have a standalone, single book, or do I have a duology, OR, do I have this whole trilogy, or do I have a duology.

R: How much of this ends up being up to the author, and how much of it ends up being a way to market the story? Like, trilogy in general, I would imagine that an author comes in thinking: okay, I have this story and then I can see where it’s going from there and I can wrap it up in three, versus I have this story, is it too big for a book?

K: You kind of hit on something interesting there and something we talked about in the trilogies episodes, is: I have this story, is it three books? Remember what we said in the trilogies episodes, a lot of them - a lot of contracts are: “we’re buying the first book of your trilogy, and then the next two are contingent on sales.”

R: Mhm.

K: So the first book, typically, is somewhat a self contained story. It’s enticing you to the second and third books, but if that’s it, it's a satisfactory ending.

R: Mhm.

K: That does not happen with a duology. Duology -

R: You will not have a satisfying ending, got it. [giggles]

K: You are not gonna have a satisfying ending in the middle of a duology. There is an appeal in marketing for duologyies. Some people don’t want to commit years to waiting for the next book to come out. They just want two books to be done and come out and, by the way, that tends to happen with duologies. Because it’s one big story, you probably get it out faster. Duologies, when someone sits down to write them, you tend to write the entire thing, or at least do really good draft work on the entire story, because at some point you gotta decide where to stop the first book.

R: Can’t you just, like, divide the page number in half?

K: What I would do usually is drop it on the floor, pick up one page, and that was the end of the first book. [pause] Sometimes it was the fifth page into the book, it was really awkward. [laughing] but you know-

R [overlapping]: I was gonna say like, if I just picked up a stack of papers of a printed manuscript and dropped it on the floor, I think the cover page would be the first one I pick up.

K: Well, you have to throw it down the stairs so that it gets a nice -

R: Oh, you have to be specific about your method -

K: Yeah, yeah I’m sorry, you’re right.

R: - we’re supposed to be providing usable advice.

K: Stand at the top of the stairs, face backwards with the stair behind you. You take the unbound pages, throw them over your head, walk halfway down the stairs and pick up a page from the middle stair. And then that’s the end of the first book.

R: What if nothing settles on the middle stair?

K: You gotta get all the pages and do it again.

[both laughing]

R: But you have to put them back in order first-

K [laughing]: Yeah, exactly.

R: - because otherwise it’s not authentic. Okay but joking aside, I think you were about to give us very good advice on how you do choose that moment.

K: Okay so, this goes to why duologies are so difficult to write because stories, traditionally, have a beginning, middle, and end. Anything that you’re telling somebody, be it what you ordered for lunch, or your epic road trip doing the Cannonball Run, is going to have a beginning, middle, and end. Granted, in one of them you end up in Los Angeles, exhausted and smelling funny, and in the other, maybe you have a disappointing sandwich from Subway.

K: But there is - so, in a duology, you’re not breaking this up into three pieces, you're taking something that is three segments and doing it in two. This is why they’re hard to write, because where does the “middle” of the story go? There’s some different schools of thought on this. One of the less popular, if you will, is that the first book of a duology is actually setting up the main story of the second. I don’t buy this. [chuckles] I don’t go along with that because -

R: Yeah, ‘cause that’s what you were sort of saying the trilogy does.

K: Exactly, yes. But also because it’s only two books, you've gotta get going here a little bit. You can’t make the reader think that they just read however many hundred pages of world building. The middle of a duology, in my estimation, should be at the of the first book. This is where everything should really pick up, and the plot and the stakes should be clear. If you finish the first book in a duology and do not have clear, compelling stakes, motivation, and reasoning behind the characters and what they were doing, that’s probably not a good place to end the duology. And if you’re going “well I don't get to that until this point,” maybe you don’t have a duology. Maybe you have a single book and it’s really long and you’ve gotta trim some stuff down.

R [laughing]: I thought you were gonna say “maybe you have a trilogy” and I was like wait a minute!

K [laughing]: No, no.

R: I feel like I’m stuck in an infinite loop!

K: No, but at that point, you may have a single book. And this is hard to - it’s hard to make that distinction of: “Is this a standalone single book or is this a duology?” So, what might make something a duology, why might you want to write a duology rather than a single book?

R: This is sort of what you're describing to me is that I’ve got like a 225,000 word story -

K: Mhm.

R: - and there are, as you described, as a failpoint in choosing where to split them, that there’s a lot of world building.

K: Yes.

R: So what you seem to be describing to me is a book where the author really takes their time developing a world and developing concepts and digging deep into whatever the story elements are.

K: Yes, nailed it.

R: So where I break that is, I assume, where a smaller plot point that maybe had some big stakes is resolved but the overall story is not resolved.

K: I’ll give you the opposite of that, what about a point at which it’s escalated?

R: Well, of course by solving a thing, you’ve fucked up and made it worse.

K: [laughing]

K: Of course, of course.

R: Of course, so that’s - that’s the solve point, is that you didn't solve anything by completing the action you thought was going to solve things.

K: Yeah, so duologies have this weird balancing act where you can't backload the end of the first book and you can't front load the beginning of the second. The way these kind of work, and you have to remember that coming at this from the perspective of a reader, there are absolutely very successful books that the next in a series picks up and it’s just chaos and you get thrown right back into it. But frequently you've gotta build the story up again, you’ve gotta ease the reader back into what was going on, remind them of what was happening here, and then, typically reassess and recenter your story and characters. Because at the end of the first book, something should have happened that’s gonna require that they do that.

K: So, duologies are really great for when authors wanna take their time and give a lot of attention and detail to characters, to worldbuilding, to story arcs, to history. It’s taking a long story and breaking it up into two. And so if you’re wondering: well how come there's like 700 page books in the world, why -

R [chuckling]: Right.

K: Yeah, “why isn’t everything just one really long book?” There’s a few answers for that. One is that some publishers are going: “No one is going to just pick up your 700 page book and read this. We need to break this up into two books.” But the other is that in some cases, those giant 700 page books, they’re really just one story. And even though I keep saying a duology is one story, you’re telling it in two parts. So they each have to have their own story elements to them.

R: So there’s an intermission, the curtain drops, you feel like that could have been a mini play but it’s not over yet, you know, let’s come back to see where that cliffhanger leads us.

K: An intermission’s actually a really good way to describe it. You know, think of most plays that you’ve seen or even old movies like Gone With the Wind where there was an intermission. The intermissions are not typically dead smack in the middle of the story.

R: No, when you come back the story has changed -

K: Yes.

R: - something has shifted. I think an example of this that everyone is probably fairly familiar with, at least from Spotify, is Act I vs. Act II of Hamilton.

K: Yes.

R: Very very different experiences. Act I is energy, it’s building up, it’s all this hope, and then Act II is all this grief, and all this loss, and all this settling, and rediscovering hope. It’s very -

K [overlapping]: I was gonna say the Phantom of the Opera.

R: Yeah.

K: Act I is very mysterious and almost enchanting and like wow, you know, look at this.

R: Mhm.

K: Act II of Phantom of the Opera, you come back and you’re like, oh this Phantom is dangerous.

R: Yeah.

K: The tone of everything has shifted to this sort of fanciful “oh yes haha the opera ghost, oh this is such a funny, silly little inconvenience” to “this guy’s gonna kill all of us.”

R: Yeah.

K: So there’s renewed sense of urgency, the stakes are much more clear -

R: Mhm.

K: - and there’s -

R: There’s an immediate action that needs to happen in order to save someone’s life.

K [overlapping]: Yes. Exactly, yes, that’s what I was trying to articulate there.

[both laughing]

K: So that is another good component of a duology is, by the second part of the story, something should have shifted.

R: And you gotta act right away, there’s no time to open up your world and introduce characters and all that kind of stuff, you have to get going.

K: The best duologies I’ve read have such a distinct difference between the first and second book, with what I think of the characters and how they’re behaving. If you Google “duology” right now, the first thing that’s gonna come up is The Six of Crows.

R: Mhm.

K: Part of the reason for that is because the Netflix series Shadow and Bone is being released two days after we’re recording this, and they’re incorporating elements from the duology into the trilogy. So, search engine algorithms being what they are... but I read the books; I thoroughly enjoyed them. The first one is very much a heist book. The second one is as well, but the stakes of it have been escalated to the point that it’s “oh, it’s not just that we’re stealing this thing that we want, we are now having to get stuff to save, not only ourselves, but a lot of other people from suffering a terrible fate.”

R: Yeah. You said it was hard though, but then you said it was just “picking a good spot in your book to split it,” so why is that specifically hard?

K: I think, where that becomes hard, is if you don’t know what you have on your hands. If you have -

R [overlapping]: So it’s more in the determination of whether you should split it, or -

K: Yes.

R: - extend it or just publish as is.

K: Well, so there’s two components of this. First is identifying: do I have a duology vs a standalone book or a trilogy.

R: Mhm.

K: If you have a standalone book, and you’re like “well this is just gonna be long and that’s just how it’s gonna go,” then you write the book and that’s what it is. If you’re looking at this and going “I have a duology,” there’s something in there that is indicating to you that this is a duology rather than a standalone book. A lot of times that is that breaking point, so, sometimes finding the part where the first story should stop and the second should start isn’t that hard, but then actually digging down into it and making sure that you’re telling a compelling, engaging story in both parts, can be very difficult. Because you may say “oh this is the perfect part, the door has burst open, everybody’s gasped and we’re cutting it off there.” Is that the best place to end your story? Or do you go to the Pirates of the Caribbean route and reveal that it’s Captain Barbossa coming down the stairs at the end.

R: Mhm.

K: And intrigue the heck out of everybody else.

R: I feel like we could do a whole episode on reveals, so maybe we’ll -

K [laughing]: Yeah, maybe we will.

R: - just put a pin in that one ‘cause I wanna talk about that but let’s do that in another episode. Okay, so is that a matter of how much satisfaction you are willing to give your reader at the end of book one, versus just lopping it off where it is the most convenient between what is essentially the midpoint of an arc that can feel like a partial arc or a semi completed arc.

K: So I think with duologies, there’s a lot more leeway to, I don't wanna say mess with, but to play with -

R: [giggles] Be honest, we are messing with our readers. We are always messing with our readers.

K: [giggles] - to play with reader expectation because people who are reading a duology presumably understand that what they’re reading is part one of a story that’s gonna be told in two parts.

R: Do we know when we have a duology though? Is it made very clear when the first book is released? ‘Cause I don't feel like it is.

K: I think that’s a matter of advertising and publishing. Most duologies that I’ve come across, and by the way, this is very common now in publishing because they plan much farther ahead than they used to. The series are finite, you’re contracted for this much, so typically, before a trilogy or duology is actually released, the series already has a name, the books might say, you know, definitely in their description and Amazon and Barnes and Noble, if not on the book itself, book one of however many in the series or book one of the such and such duology, book two of the such and such trilogy.

R: I would say that there are as many new books on my shelf that do not indicate how big the series is going to be as there are that do.

K: Mmkay. But in Amazon -

R: In fact - well maybe in Amazon but you can only create series on Amazon when you have more than one book in it. You know what I mean?

K [overlapping]: Yes, yes.

R: So -

K: But in the description a lot of times it will say that, the cover copy could say that. Publishers sort of expect at this point that anybody who really enjoys a book or even things that they’re thinking of reading, they’re gonna go research it, and, if nothing else, the publisher will likely have something on their website or some description about how long the series is going to be.

R: You give the reader a lot of credit for researching a book.

K: When you go to pick up a book, and it’s clear that it’s a series, you don’t go and see how many books it’s gonna -

R: [overlapping] You think it’s clear that it’s a series, that’s the part I’m debating. I cannot tell you how many books I’ve picked up only to find out - I’ve got one right around here somewhere - I picked up this book -

K: [speech garbled through laughter]

R: Endgame by Anne Aguirre.

K: Yep.

R: “A Sirantha Jax novel” is all it said on the cover. To me, that did not indicate that this was the last book in a six book series. I read the last book first.

K: [laughing]

R: And I read it anyway even though I figured out within a few chapters that it was the last book in a series. But I have done this my entire life. You’d think that, after a few, I would learn. So what is it that does not indicate anywhere on here, that this is a long running series, this is book six in a series? I picked it up because of the cover art. That is always what I do.

K: [laughing]

R: And there was nothing on this to indicate it was book six out of six. That - it was called Endgame and I did not understand that it was endgame of the series.

K [laughing, overlapping]: Yeah, I’m starting - I’m starting to think that -

R: So you may be doubting me, but I’m just saying, I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, I would like to think.

K: [laughing]

R: But on a bookstore shelf, this was the only one there, the bookstore didn’t put out the other books next to it, you know? So why was I supposed to know that this was from a series? There’s literally nothing on here that says “by the way, you picked up a book that’s part of a series, you might wanna go check out book one.”

K: Well, I will say that’s bad marketing and bad work on the publisher’s part.

R: But I wasn’t exposed to the marketing, other than the cover. I was not exposed to the marketing, this was before I started writing and publishing. So -

K: But the cover is marketing.

R: No, I understand that. The cover is product design and marketing, just like the box for a microwave would be. So yes, this was supposed to be marked as book six. If I had seen “book six,” I might have looked for book one. But Ace Science Fiction, an imprint of Penguin, did not deign to make any sort of indication on the outside, presumably because they thought it was pretty clear because of course you’ve heard of Anne Aguirre and of course you have heard of the Sirantha Jax novels by then. But I hadn’t, so I picked up book six in a series and I read it without any backstory, and I really did feel rather dumped into a world that other people knew about.

K: How was it?

R: Um. It was fine.

K: So, here’s what -

R [overlapping]: Some things were not my mode but that’s okay.

K: [laughing]

R: It’s still in my shelf so it can’t be that bad.

K [laughing]: Okay, fair. Yeah, listen, the - how do you know that something is a duology, a trilogy, a what have you?

R: And is your publisher making the conscious choice to not indicate that?

K [overlapping]: That’s very possible-

R: - do they think they are indicating that, you might wanna run it by your grandma or -

K: Rekka.

R: - somebody who hasn’t -

K: [laughing]

R: picked up a book off a shelf apparently without ever failing to pick up the third book in a series.

K: You did tend to to do that quite a lot.

R: I did it a lot as a kid, I think - I picked up The Babysitter’s Club at book number twenty-four and I guarantee you that bookstore had all of them.

K: Wasn’t that all like, standalone stories, kind of, though?

R: Well they were procedural in that every book started with the main character’s POV introducing all of the babysitters in the club, and giving them some tidbit to characterize them that was also a little bit of backstory from one of the other episodes, and - I mean they really were episodes, they were not so much sequels as episodes - and then you’d go into the meat of the story, and everything would return to normal, there might be small developments and like, there was continuity through the books but the characters got older, they added new babysitters to the club, some left, you know, stuff happened and then it didn’t unhappen at the end of the book. But even though, yes, any book would have been an entry point in the series, I guarantee you I just picked up a book from the middle of the long, very uniform looking line of Babysitter’s Club books, and this one was about a cat, so -

K: Aw, kitty. [giggles]

R: - I got that one. ‘cause Tigger ran away and was missing -

K: Aw :(

R: - so that was the first book I read out of that series! And then I read them a lot, this was my first experience with sequels, so it’s no wonder that I have no problem imagining that you would stick with a world forever and ever and ever and never write anything else. But I also read the rest out of order.

K: Yeah.

R: Like I had no respect for the concept of “oh! I should go back to the beginning and read forward,” that - I read number ten and then I’d read number eighteen, then I’d read number two; I just didn’t care. So it’s interesting to me, like, yes that was me at age twelve -

K: Well, also -

R: - that was very different from an adult reader, but as an adult reader obviously I have continued this. The Chanur saga, I think I read book two before I read book one, I didn’t care. Plus, if the book’s written well enough, you get introduced to it and you don’t lose anything for not reading the first one first in a series, an intentional series, but here we come back to the idea of duology; if you pick up book two in a duology, you have missed some shit.

K: Yeah, and I completely disagree with you, and this may just be -

R: [laughing] Of course you do.

K: No, this may be just a compulsive thing on my end: I can’t not read a series from the beginning.

R: No, see, I am completely all about my organizational tics, but for whatever reason, growing up, reading books in order was not a big deal to me. And I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was not aware that if I asked the bookseller to get me book one because I was picking up book two and I wanted to start from the beginning, that I would have it pretty soon. Like, in my head, that would be -

K: Yeah.

R: - weeks and weeks and weeks of waiting. Plus, in my head, it probably cost more. Like I thought I would have to pay for shipping, I thought I would have to pay for a book that would, like he’d charge me twice as much just because I wanted it.

K: And see that’s just -

R: And also I would have to speak to a human and ask for something which I was very much not all in for, so.

K: And this just goes to show how funny and different we were as kids, because I remember there were book series that, I would go to the library and I would - this is, I’m about to demonstrate something about myself that I have kept secret - I’ve read all of the Wizard of Oz books.

R: Oh, cool! I always meant to.

K: And - they’re interesting. [chuckles] and my library didn’t have book seven, out of, like I think there’s like ten or twelve of them in the series, and I had to get it from my county’s huge central library, and my mom was like “well, just get book eight!” and I was like I can’t, I can’t do that, I will wait two weeks for that book to get here -

[both laughing]

K: But something like - okay, well, getting back on track [chuckles] here, something like The Babysitter’s Club, as you said, each book - the reason the POV character is introducing everyone is there’s a lot of books in this series. The Boxcar Children was like that; the first one is about a group of relatively young children running away from some abusive family member and deciding to live in an abandoned boxcar in the forest, and then eventually their wealthy grandfather finds them, and then every other book is about them solving mysteries [laughing].

R: Oh! Okay.

K: The first book is like a weird survivalist book and then every other one is just them [through laughter] travelling with their grandfather and solving mysteries.

R: At least the continuity is intact.

K: But with duologies, we’re gonna assume that this is a known duology - and I couldn't find any example of this, I swear I did look - a duology that started out intentionally a duology but then became a trilogy after book one was published. I couldn’t find any examples of it, I’m sure it’s happened but, in theory, especially in publishing and especially with contracts being what they are now, you’re going to have - especially for a duology - a contractual set of the books that are going to be in it, the two books. You may even have some specifics in there about book one: this stuff has to happen, book two: this stuff has to happen. Publishers are a lot more hands on with these kinda things now, because before it was just like “cool, you got another one? cool, you got another one? Alright, let’s get the next tale of the otherworldly alien investigator who came to Earth to find the stolen gem of her people but solves mysteries along the way.”

K: So, with a duology, and with where the middle of this is, and what you can play with with reader expectations. I would say you absolutely have a little more leeway. “What if they don’t know it’s a duology?” Well, that's on the reader. I don’t - there’s no good answer -

R: Or is it on the publisher and their marketing department? [laughing]

K: Or that. The thing is that you could stick right on the cover: Book One of the, you know, We Make Books Duology. Maybe someone doesn’t read it, there’s no way to make everyone understand what this series is going to look like. I never buy a book before I know, you know - is it a trilogy that I’m getting myself into here, is it a duology, is this just gonna keep going on and on forever? I understand not everyone’s like that, most people are far less - what’s the word I’m looking for here - less fussy than I am. [laughter] Some people are just pure chaos like Rekka, who walk into bookstores, pull something off the shelf, and just go “look’s good!” [laughter]

R: I’m here for a good time!

[both laughing]

R: Look, I’ve found a lot of books I liked that way.

K: Yeah! No, that’s great.

R: Mhm.

K: But I remember going to Barnes and Noble back when I was in high school and college and we used to hang out there, and they would always have the table of the $5 books -

R: Mhm.

K: If they didn’t have books one and two and this was just book three, I wasn’t gonna pick it up and read it because I needed to know how it got there [laughing]. I think with duologies, you definitely have a little bit more room to play with that because the understanding is that this is more like a first and second act. And the reader should understand that: “you’re being presented half of a story, the second half is coming.” And there’s a difference between having halves of a story versus having to present a whole coherent story like you have to when you get into trilogy mode. Because if you’re breaking up a story into three parts, the first part is going to be really dry if you’re just telling one long, giant story.

R: Yeah ‘cause that’s set up still, that’s just pure set up.

K: Yeah. Find a 700 page book. Go to page - what would it be? - 233 and, in that area, decide if you think that’s about a good place to end a first book that seems like a good story has been told. Now conversely, I would say that picking up a 700 page book and going in the middle could go either way. Depending how the story’s structured, maybe that is an interesting middle-halfway-stopping point. There’s a good chance that it’s not because standalone stories tend to be backloaded.

R: Right.

K: Most of the action, adventure, and intrigue, happens in the last third of the book.

R: I would even say -

K: Last quarter?

R: Last quarter of the book, yeah.

K: How do you know if you have a duology vs a trilogy vs a standalone book?

R: Someone tells you.

K: [laughing] You know what? Honestly, that might be the answer.

[both laughing]

K: That really might be the answer.

R: Please, someone tell me!

K: [laughing]

K: An agent, a publisher, a good friend who reads your stuff might say: “This isn’t a standalone story, this is two books.” You know, with a trilogy it’s a little easier. Are you having trouble filling the middle book? Are you having trouble figuring out what’s gonna happen in book two, and are you just coming up with stuff because you need to create -

R: A third book, yeah.

K: - about 300 pages of content so that you can get to the third book? That’s a good indication that maybe you don’t have a trilogy, maybe you have a duology. For a standalone book, it gets a little harder. One is length. There aren’t a lot of 700 page books published anymore and, depending on the genre you’re writing in, there might be none of them. Fantasy tends to have a little bit more tolerance for that kind of length -

R: We wouldn’t have the phrase “doorstopper” in our current lingo if they weren’t really happening anymore. I think they are still happening. Like you have Jenn Lyons.

K: Yep.

R: Jenn Lyons writes some big books and there’s like, five of them [giggles] in a single series.

K: But you brought up a very interesting point: why we have those doorstopper books. Because, for a publisher - first of all, a duology however many years ago, even a decade ago, that was not a very common thing.

R: Mhm.

K: But if you had a long story, and especially if the publisher was uncertain about it, it was cheaper and less of a risk for them to just do a giant run of one big book, rather than two smaller or three smaller ones.

R: Okay. Because you lose readers as you go further down the series.

K: Well you lose readers, but there’s also overhead.

R: Right.

K: It’s cheaper to publish one giant book than it is to publish two smaller ones.

R: Right because you need cover artists, you pay the printer for each one of those sets, you print a minimum quantity for each of those, yeah. No, I’m not arguing that with you, I’m just saying like -

K: Yeah.

R: - one of the considerations is also to be: how will you be able to earn that back if you lose 20% of the readers each sequel down the line.

K: Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of factors in why publishers might say, “nope, this is just gonna be one giant book.”

R: No, there’s one factor: it’s money.

[both laughing]

K: There’s a lot of factors that go into the money factor. [laughing]

R: The accountant is taking many things into consideration.

K: Yeah [laughing]. Touché, Rekka.

R: Mhm.

K: But, if you’re writing this story and there is a lot of stuff happening in the first half of the book that is then still not resolved when you’re getting towards the end, you might have a duology on your hands. Now granted, you may be like: “Oh well it’s only 180,000 words.” Well, yeah, maybe you gotta write a little more and flesh this out a bit. The times that I see books where I tell myself this should have been a duology - or authors that I’ve spoken to - are when I'm having trouble keeping track of everything that’s going on because you’re packing too much into this. The best case for a duology is when the reader is feeling like they’re being bombarded with information without proper time to absorb it and apply it to the story.

R: So are you squeezing everything into one side or the other of the fold which is the tear that becomes the intermission in your duology.

[both laughing]

K: Yes, exactly.

R: That’s the official term for it.

K: Yeah, and look, there’s - thankfully in publishing, there’s no standards, there’s no ‘we always do it this way’, ‘if you have this then it’s this,’ no one is going to go: “Sorry Random House, you’re not allowed to publish a 700 page book.” They can publish whatever they want, so if they -

R: I mean there is a point at which the book is structurally unsound because it’s more spine than cover.

K: [laughing] Yes, alright, fair, fair.

K: You have leeway, and publishers have leeway for this, and really, there is no correct answer except: what serves the story best? How is this best told? How are you best engaging the reader? In some cases - I’ll use The Six of Crows as an example. I don't think that book works if you take the two halves of that, smoosh it together, do a little creative bridging in the middle, and just present it as one giant book. It doesn’t work. The tone shift between the two is so important that there’s intermission and that you come back and you’re like: “Oh boy, what’s gonna happen now?”

R: Okay, so is that - do you think that’s a critical part of it? Do you have to do that, or you think it just happens naturally because you’re taking a break from one story and coming back with the second piece?

K: I think it tends to happen naturally but, at the same time, this is kind of going into what we were talking about last episode with book two of a trilogy which is: you can’t tell the same story all over again. So presumably at the end of book one, enough has happened to the characters and the story arc where things have changed. So, by virtue of that alone, book two is going to be different.

R: Right.

K: I’ll make the argument, in a trilogy the same thing’s gonna happen. The tones of the books as the progress should be getting more urgent or darker or more mysterious, hopeful, whatever you’re building towards -

R [overlapping]: Sort of like an adventurous story to a, like the fate of the world -

K: Yeah.

R: - literally the fate of the souls of the world are at stake.

K: The stakes should be being escalated, the characters should be very clear in their motivations. The plot should be very clear cut at that point and there should be a clear point to which the characters, the objects, the McGuffins, the story is moving towards at that point. The end of book one, the reader should have a very good idea of what the objectives are of book two. Now if they work out that way or not, that’s up to the reader, you know, maybe throw a twist or a loop in there or something, and the plan never goes according to plan because plans shouldn’t go according to plans in books -

R: Right. Right.

K: But the reader should have an idea of what they’re in store for in book two. Even if it’s not how that ends up going, the characters should be telling them: “Okay, we've gotta do this.”

R: Mhm. Aaaaaand cut.

[both laughing]

R: “We’ve gotta do this, and we’ll see ya in a year.”

K: Well, you know, duologies tend to come out a little closer together because, as I mentioned, the overall story is frequently written at the same time. And then maybe - okay you’ve done a lot of work on the first book to get it published and now it’s time to do that, but a lot of times it’s written already, it exists -

R: Whereas they really throw writers out and to the wolves for their trilogy like, yeah, we’ve signed you up for a trilogy, how’s that coming? “Uhhh, I don’t really know how it’s gonna end? But it’s great?”

K: You also get all of these contradicting things of: don’t tell them you’ve written all three books already; no, tell them so they know that they’re done; okay, but we just really want book one to have a nice conclusive ending, so I’m gonna need you to rewrite the end of that and then retool the beginning of the first two and figure how that’s gonna fit into the third.

R: And you better hope that the first two sell well, or you don't get to see the third.

K: Writing’s hard.

R: Yeah, so that’s a big part of it though, I never considered that when you sign a duology, you might have already talked to the publisher about where the pair of books is going to go.

K: Yeah, nobody writes a duology with the understanding of: “You need to have a nice neat ending for book one. [laughing] We’ll see how that -” I shouldn't say no one, I’m sure it’s happened. But I would argue in that case that that’s not really a true duology; that’s more of a couple standalone books.

R: So a short sequel run -

K: Yes.

R: - of a single world.

K: Yeah, exactly.

R: So, going back to your definitions then.

[happy go lucky ukelele music]

Rekka: [sing-song] Definitions!

Rekka: And listeners, Kaelyn doesn’t know what I did with that, so don’t tell her. So I think we need to reset our definition because you were defining it earlier in the episode and, to a degree, it felt like you were defining it as a single story divided in two pieces, and then later you said it was not a duology if it’s not a single story, but then, kind of maybe it is? I’m a little confused, so start over.

Kaelyn: SO definitions of duologies and trilogies. The actual definition of them is: “however many stories - two, three, four - of related work in a group.” So this might be the same story, the same world, the same characters. What they typically do is they say: “If you’ve written three books, they’re all about an alien investigator but they’re all individual stories” - Alien Investigator Trilogy. Duology, same thing. Technically any three books or any two books or four books, or whatever you wanna call it, is a “that.” Now, at a certain point - and I don’t know where this point is - I think you stop applying the duo- tri- quad- etc. to it and it just becomes a series. Now, from my side, what really defines a duology or a trilogy is the intent of the overarching story plot. That you didn’t just write three books because you had three stories in you so it ended up being a trilogy. You didn’t just come up with two stories and now it’s a duology.

K: There’s some - I won’t say argument about this, but I think it’s something that we see more in publishing now, that if you're contracted for a trilogy, the presumption is going to be that the trilogy is three books explaining a single story. It’s a single story arc. It may take a long time to get there, but -

R: Mhm.

K: - if they’re signing you up for three books that’s in the same world but not in the same story arc, that’s a three book contract, that’s not a trilogy contract.

R: Okay, fair.

K: So that’s the distinction I would make. That said, by broad definition, duologies - trilogies, we’re just obsessed with the number three?

R: It’s a nice balanced number, you know?

K: Yeah. Three and seven. But I think this goes back to the ease of the beginning, middle and end. And that’s where I think trilogies and duologies really shine through is this intentional story of : It’s gonna take me this long to do it versus just writing books and however many you end up with, adding that number label to it. I would say, something like a duology contract vs a two book contract, and I don’t know that I’ve ever really heard of two book contracts unless [laughing] it’s a duology.

R: But I have seen a lot of contract announcements, book sale announcements lately that said: “So-and-So’s Title plus an unnamed future book.”

K: Yes, but those would likely be standalone books.

R: Right, but it’s still a two book contract.

K: Okay, fair.

R: As opposed to just saying future works -

K: Yes. [laughing]

R: You know what I mean?

K: Yeah. And so by the way, what we’re talking about here - and I know we’ve touched on this in previous episodes, specifically the contract ones - a lot of times if you sign on with, sometimes an agent, usually a publishing house and they really like what you have and think you have the potential to grow a fanbase, they’re gonna try to lock you down. So they’re gonna say: “Cool, you’re gonna write a trilogy and three books to be named later.” It’s like signing athletes to multi-year contracts, a lot of times you have to take a chance on somebody after college or, sometimes in the NBA, right out of high school. You don’t know how they’re gonna perform, they’re gonna need training, they’re gonna need help. So you have to put the time and investment into them and you wanna make sure that if they turn out to be really good they’re not just gonna go “Hey thanks but I’m gonna go to New York because they’re gonna pay me twice as much as you did.”

R: Right, right, now that you’ve proven yourself. Now it’s good if you get a multi book contract from a single publisher and maybe your debut launch isn’t as strong as you hoped, and it takes two books to kinda gain some traction. That’s good for the author but -

K: Yep.

R: Like we said, if the other team would have paid you twice as much, now you’re stuck selling your book for debut prices. Which, okay yes, we’ve all heard about the debut windfalls, but debut authors don’t typically make a whole lot of money.

K: [overlapping] Yeah, there’s a reason you hear about them, it’s because they’re a big deal.

R: Yeah, it’s ‘cause they’re outliers -

K: [laughing]

R: - much like all things we make a big fuss over, ‘cause we love a rags to riches story.

K: Yeah, so that’s why my clunky - and this is personal, sort of clunky definition of this - but I would say that that is certainly the trend of where you’re seeing these definitions in publishing is: if you’re signed on for a trilogy, the understanding is that it’s going to be a three book story arc, if it’s a duology, it’s gonna be two.

K: When Rekka and I are finished here, I’m going to go sit down, pour myself a glass of wine, and finally try to finish the fourth book of The Ember and the Ashes quadrilogy. That’s one that I really thought was a trilogy, and I don’t know what happened there, I don’t know if it changed and they were like -

R: Aha!

K: - “ah we’ve got more story to tell here” -

R: They got you, too. [giggles]

K: Yeah, they did get me on that one and I had to wait for quite a while for that book to come out and I just, I need to sit down and get into it, you know? [laughing]

R: Alright, well let’s wrap it up. What the heck are we talking about when we say it’s harder? Did we give concrete advice on how to tell? And you can say, like, yes, I feel like I did.

K: I feel like I did and I think I didn’t because sometimes, as you mentioned, someone else is gonna have to tell you. I think it’s easier to tell if you’re working on a trilogy that, maybe it’s a duology. Because I think when you’re hitting a wall with the trilogy, trying to come up with ways to fill the middle, that’s a good indication that you actually have a duology.

R: And now that’s gonna be harder to write because you said so.

K: [laughing] Yes.

R: Congratulations, you just leveled up.

[both laughing]

R: You had a hard time filling a middle book, now you’re gonna somehow make it worse by trying to fit everything across the divide of an intermission between two books.

K: [laughing] Yeah and, to go back to what I said -

R: So you’re welcome.

[both laughing]

K: To go back to what I said about the standalone, I think a good indication there that you may have a duology on your hands, is if you feel like you’re sprinting through information, and you’re feeling like you’re having to take things out to stay within whatever you consider to be a reasonable word count. If you feel like there’s more story there - and writers, I know you always feel like there’s more story there - if you feel like you can’t tell the story and that it’s going to be confusing, or that it’s going to lack context or information or character development or anything, that’s a good indication that you might have a duology. Because what that’s indicating is that you have a lot to show the reader, and duologies give you great room to do that.

R: So here's a thought I just had.

K: Uh oh.

R: You mentioned word count.

K: Yeah.

R: So if you’re drafting, you don't know how many words you’re gonna end up with necessarily. Is this a decision you make during revisions?

K: Listen, there’s no definitive “this is a duology” time.

R: [giggles]

K: No one’s gonna bring you into a room, put the Sorting Hat on you and go: “Duology!” [laughing]

R: So it’s not going to suddenly smack you in the head.

K: Some people absolutely set out to write duologies. They say: “I have a story that I am gonna tell in two parts.” Some people draft the whole story and go: “This is too long for a single story, or this is too short for a trilogy, maybe I have a duology.” I feel like with duologies, unless you set out to intentionally write one, you're going to have to figure it out organically somewhere along the writing process.

R: Here’s another thought.

K: You’re just full of these today.

R: Yeah, sorry about that. I will stop, next time I won't have a single one, I promise. We’ve been mentioning word count a lot as the moment where you realize you might have too much or too little, but could it also be story elements?

K: Absolutely.

R: In that, I could wrap up some of these plot elements in one book, but not the whole thing, and that there’s an equal, if not mathematically equal, number of plot elements that could wrap up if I kept going in a second book. I mean, basically, it’s all magic, right?

K: Yeah, absolutely. There’s no definitive answers here unfortunately, like so much of this. I hope if you’ve been listening to this podcast this whole time and you have come here for somebody telling you: this is how it always is, you figured out a while ago that you’re in the wrong spot.

[both laughing]

R: Or that you still have to trust our word. Just grab a big glass of wine and go read a book. It may or may not be the last in the series, we don’t know. Nobody knows!

K: We don’t know, nobody - what is even time by now? [laughing]

R: Alright, so duologies are hard, trilogies are also hard, standalone books are hard. Have I covered it?

K: Everything’s hard.

R: [overlapping] Got it. Okay, cool. We did it.

K: But they’re all hard for different reasons. [laughing]

R: Oh, now I get it. Okay.

K: Yeah. Yeah.

R: Now I get it, alright. So the point is: you write the story. Hopefully, either you know how many books you’re supposed to end up with and you can calculate out from there how you’re gonna write the story. Or you write the story and you break it up into the number of books it demands that it should be.

K: Exactly.

R: Or that your publisher demands that it should be. [chuckling]

K: My advice to people always is: write the story. Just write it. Then take a step back and see what you have.

R: [overlapping] Then do the math.

K: There’s no formula for this, there’s no ‘this must happen at this time.’ If I had astounding amount of money to just throw away at whatever, I swear I think I would hire people to select books from different genres and map out common elements of them and put them into some sort of excel spreadsheet where I could make a nice pivot table, and see where these common element points occur, and I guarantee you almost none of them would line up.

R: Okay, I know there’re people who would disagree, but we’ll have to have a debate episode sometime.

K: [laughing] Excellent, excellent.

R: So, wrapping it up, write a damn story. It’s gonna be hard enough to get it published anyway, don’t worry about it.

K: It’s gonna be hard enough just to write the thing!

[both laughing]

K: So just write it and then work from there!

R: [overlapping] Okay-

K: Tell the story you want to tell.

R: - so with that sage advice, I probably shouldn’t tell you that you can find us on twitter and Instagram @WMBCast and on Patreon.com/wmbcast, which you are definitely not gonna want to support after listening to this one.

K: [laughing]

R: But it would be helpful if you could leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and remember to subscribe using whatever podcast app you like. And we will see you in two weeks with another poorly formed episode discussion. Thanks everyone.

K [laughing]: Thanks everyone.

Tuesday Apr 13, 2021

Episode 58 - Book Two Jitters

Tuesday Apr 13, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Episode Transcript

Rekka (00:00):
This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books.

Kaelyn (00:26):
Y'know, it's funny because in movie trilogies, I always think it's the third movie that kind of slumps.

Rekka (00:33):
Okay. So maybe this is a poorly conceived episode. I don't know. Um, but the impression I have from the person asking us the topic... They did say "writing Book Two in a series of three or more." Assuming that you come out of the gate strong on Book One, you are heading toward some final book, and we'll assume trilogy for the purpose of this conversation.

Kaelyn (01:01):
Yeah, I was going to say, because writing Book Two in a planned trilogy is very different than writing Book Two in a, "Oh, we'll see how this goes."

Rekka (01:08):
Exactly. Uh, which is my experience of writing Book Twos, both times, even though they're now both trilogies. But anyway, so assuming that it's going to end in the following book, how do you tell a chunk of your story, keep the reader interested by—one supposes that you are ramping up action, and tension and danger and all these? Oop. I've already said something wrong.

Kaelyn (01:40):
No, no. I was going to say, I understand the question that they're trying to ask now and whatever they're trying to write should probably be a duology.

Rekka (01:49):
Oh no! Okay. That's a separate episode. We already figured that out before we started recording. Assuming that we are going to end this in the following book.

Kaelyn (02:00):
Well, that's fine. If we, if we start recording and we talk about this, I can explain what my thinking—

Rekka (02:05):
Oh, no, we're recording, and this is the episode now. Cause I phrased it very well and I felt very eloquent. So now we're going to go with it.

Kaelyn (02:10):
Oh goodness. Okay. Yeah. So, um, you know, we're talking about second books in trilogies and um, I think that for a lot of authors, this is going to be either the easiest thing they ever write or the hardest thing they ever write. It really depends on how, how your story's going. So if you're asking this question, "I feel like I'm trying to come up with stuff to fill the time in between the beginning and end of my story."

Rekka (02:34):
Okay. That's one way to interpret it. I have a second interpretation, but let's talk about that one first.

Kaelyn (02:38):
Well, wait, I want to hear your interpretation.

Rekka (02:39):
No no no. No, we're gonna go with that.

Kaelyn (02:43):
Okay. Um, there there's two reasons writing the second book in a trilogy can be, um, very difficult. One is that what I just said. You're, you feel like you're just trying to come up with, you know, stuff to happen so that you can get to the end of it. And that's what I was— the point I was making that, if that's the case, maybe you shouldn't be writing a trilogy. Maybe you should be writing a duology. Your story is your story. Um, unless you have a contract for a trilogy and they're like, you must generate this. And by the way, I would hope that before you signed that contract, you had discussed, um...

Rekka (03:15):
Where the trilogy was going.

Kaelyn (03:18):
Yeah, some outlines and some, uh, some story points there. Um, the other reason is you have a beginning and you have an end and sorting through everything to get to that end in a satisfying, fulfilling way is overwhelming. Um, so sometimes it's that you have too much and sometimes it's that you don't have enough.

Rekka (03:38):
Isn't that every book though? I mean... The misery of the writer is that every book has to have a beginning and an end and you have to get there without losing everybody on the way.

Kaelyn (03:50):
I'll make it worse for you. A lot of them also have middles.

Rekka (03:53):
No! No, this is a lie.

Kaelyn (03:56):
And uh, and the middle, the middle is what takes up most of the series.

Rekka (04:01):
Okay. So—

Kaelyn (04:03):
What was your interpretation of that?

Rekka (04:05):
"How do you structure a book that doesn't begin and end your story?"

New Speaker (04:13):
Okay.

New Speaker (04:13):
You see what I'm saying?

New Speaker (04:15):
Yes.

New Speaker (04:15):
You have this—

New Speaker (04:16):
It's the middle.

New Speaker (04:17):
It's the middle, but it's also not the middle-middle it's part of the middle, because the middle is actually going to expand into the end of the first book and the beginning of the third, book it— by the 25% arc, you know, act structures. The middle is the middle 50%. So in this case, it's bigger.

Kaelyn (04:39):
And this, by the way is why I have trouble with authors who are pantsers.

Rekka (04:46):
Okay. Since you're targeting, probably like 80% of our audience, please explain yourself.

Kaelyn (04:53):
Nope. Um, I shouldn't say trouble. I'm a planner. Like in every aspect of my life, especially when it comes to writing though, because you have, I, I kind of think that if you're writing a story, you should at least have an idea of where it's going.

Rekka (05:08):
What is the structure of Book Two, when Book Two falls in the middle of a larger story arc?

Kaelyn (05:15):
Things that typically happen in Book Twos. And in this case, we'll also throw some movies in there because I have a lot of, uh, a lot of examples I like to use there.

Rekka (05:23):
Let's just say that movies are not a substitute for books. Everyone knows the book was better, but, um, movies are a quicker consumption item that if you haven't seen for some reason, then you can go and see what we mean without investing 18 hours in reading a book. So that's why we keep popping back to movies. Not because movies do it best or do it right, even.

Kaelyn (05:47):
Yeah. And let's clarify here. Movies are frequently written by committee. Um, I want you as the author to imagine writing a book, polishing it, having some other people look at it, then handing it to an editor and the editor gets to do whatever they want with it. Without consulting you, because that's frequently how a lot of movies go.

Rekka (06:06):
And then the producers come in and say, "we want giant mechanical spiders."

Kaelyn (06:09):
Beware the giant mechanical spiders.

Rekka (06:11):
So we are using movies. Not because they are the perfect examples, but because they are easily grokked.

Kaelyn (06:17):
Yeah. I'm assuming most people listen to this have seen Star Wars. If you look at famous trilogies and you know, I had mentioned Star Wars, I'll throw the Godfather in there. Spiderman. Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, something a lot of these have in common is everyone seems to like the second movie of the trilogy best. Why is this? Well, there's two different—

Rekka (06:39):
You stopped before we got to one of the best trilogies ever.

Kaelyn (06:42):
Which was?

Rekka (06:44):
Back to the Future.

Kaelyn (06:45):
Oh yes, obviously. Yes. And I would argue back to the future or back to the future too. Is that what it's called? What's the second part called?

Rekka (06:55):
Yeah it was Back to the Future II.

Kaelyn (06:57):
Two, okay. I couldn't remember if they started doing funny things with the names.

Rekka (07:01):
Like Forward to the Future, Back to the Past?

Kaelyn (07:04):
Yeah, exactly.

Rekka (07:04):
Oh, we also forgot the Matrix.

Kaelyn (07:06):
You're highlighting a good point here. Um, both when writing for books and movies, but especially books, there's a big difference between writing something that is a standalone and you know, ends on a conclusive note, ends with resolution and, you know, satisfaction versus writing something that is planned to be a trilogy the entire time. You know, in movie-making as in publishing, um, producing these things is expensive. So a lot of times what happens is you have a contract in which you're contracted for Book One with option for Book Two and three, should they be successful.

Rekka (07:43):
That option may not even be for more books in the series. They may just say, you know, we want your future works and you don't even know if they want more of this story or if they just want more.

Kaelyn (07:53):
Yeah. This is why in so many trilogies, you'll kind of feel like the end of Book One was a complete story. Good writers always find ways to leave the story open for more to happen. They may even tease you with ideas or open-ended scenarios where it's like, okay, well I understand that like right now they're safe, but what's going to happen when the wizard realizes they took his medallion? Because eventually he's going to come looking for them and surprise, guess what happens in Book Two? Um, this is a lot of times, as I said, why you see sort of a wrap-up if you will, in the end of Book One. If that's the end of the story, that could theoretically be a satisfying end of the story. Not all trilogies are structured like that because sometimes somebody goes in with such a amazing pitch that they say, "yep, three book deal right off the bat. You're going to write all of these." One is not necessarily better than the other. Um, it's I mean, obviously everyone like to say like, "yeah, they took all three books right away. That's how great they think my book is."

Rekka (09:00):
However, if you go in and you expect to write a trilogy, but then the trilogy is cut short because of poor sales or something, but you still have fans that liked the first book, you've left them with a cliffhanger or an unsatisfying ending. So just because you know you're going to get to do the trilogy, maybe, maybe starting the first book off with a satisfying ending would not be the worst thing.

Kaelyn (09:27):
Yeah. So when you're writing a trilogy where you're not sure if or how you're going to write the rest of the trilogy, it can be tricky because you're actually doing two stories. You've got the bigger story and then you've got the story that fits within the bigger story. And then books two and three are another slightly larger story that also fit within the bigger story.

Rekka (09:48):
So would you say books two and three, by your recommendation, would be a duology in the same world as Book One?

Kaelyn (09:54):
Not in, not by those definitions. No. Um, I understand what you're saying there. That, yes, you're kind of doing a standalone and then a duology, but all together, they're all one sort of story. And you know, for those of you paying close attention, what you're noticing is that I'm saying that well, Book One is usually its own encapsulated story and then Book Two usually ends on a cliffhanger and yes, that's the case. Um, think back to any trilogy you have read or watched, you will see that over and over and over again. And there's a reason for that. And this feeds into my reason for why I think so many times, the second book or the second movie is usually a fan favorite. It's because after we see success from the characters, after we see them, you know, make progress, achieve some measurable amount of victory, or even just settle to the point that they can feel safe and peaceful, that is completely upended in Book Two. This is where we usually see characters fail, or we see their plans fall through. Where we see that they weren't the smartest, the fastest, the strongest here.

Rekka (11:04):
This is where we prove that their adversary is insurmountable.

Kaelyn (11:10):
Yes. And Book Three then is where they have to regroup. Um, one of the other things we were talking about before we recorded was I think what is interesting going into a lot of Book Twos and you know what let's talk about Book Twos and what to put in them. And some things you should keep in mind while working on them.

Rekka (11:31):
Since that was the point of, I guess we should, we should broach that at some point. Also, I feel like, um, we need to say at this point that all of this is coming from a very Western perspective on storytelling and that storytelling in non-Western countries and, um, traditions may not fit this formula of where these beats fall and everything like that. Not all storytelling falls in the three-act structure.

Kaelyn (11:57):
Absolutely not, but it does have a beginning middle, and end. Doesn't necessarily mean it's divided up into three acts, but anyway.

Rekka (12:05):
Right, right. There we go.

Kaelyn (12:06):
So when you're starting on a second book, it's hard, because—especially if the first one was successful—because the instinct is going to be, everybody loved this stuff about the first book.

Rekka (12:20):
Do it again.

Kaelyn (12:20):
I should do this stuff again. Yeah. That's great. Except they probably don't want to read the same book again, just slightly different. So it's hard, there's a balance between keeping what worked and what people liked and what made them intrigued and want to read this in the first one, versus putting a new enough twist on it now, that it's not the same thing happening all over again. And this is plot.

Rekka (12:45):
Which is really rude.

Kaelyn (12:48):
It's straightforward plot. This is where you have to move your characters along. Things have to happen to, or around them that influence them and cause them to go forward or to not stay where you left them at the end of the first book. Um, it's really tempting to just pick up exactly where you left off and say, and now these things are going on. And by the way, some, uh, some books do that very effectively with, um, you know, the last sentence of the book, dropping a new bit of information that changes everything. Um, I will admit that I watched too much of True Blood. Um, I didn't get all the way to the end of it because it just got absurd. But one of the things that I always enjoyed about that show was literally the end of every episode is a cliffhanger. So then they were very cruel about that. Next episode always picked up exactly where the last episode left off.

Rekka (13:46):
Keep in mind. This was not the, you know, Netflix weekend-premiere of an entire season. This was every Sunday for however many weeks, and all week long, you'd be like, Oh my Godddddd, what is going to happen?

Kaelyn (14:03):
Yeah.

Rekka (14:03):
And that was, that was very effective use of cliffhangers. They, they resolve the story plot, but then there was also a new complication every time.

Kaelyn (14:14):
It's hard to balance these things. Um, there's, you know, I think there's also a lot of pressure on writers to sometimes start introducing new elements to the book, either through new characters or if it's, you know, a fantasy based book, maybe new magical elements or, um, new locations, to try to keep it fresh. And by the way, that's not a bad thing to do.

Rekka (14:36):
But as you add these new characters and places and elements, you have to know how they're going to wrap up. Unless like we said, you're creating impetus for a five book series or something like that.

Kaelyn (14:48):
[cough] Song of Ice and Fire [cough]

Rekka (14:51):
It's a garden that grows.

Kaelyn (14:52):
Yeah. It's, it's a series of weeds that are strangling everyone at this point. Um, but you know what, that's actually a good example because, um, Song of Ice and Fire was, uh, pitched and signed as a trilogy and he kept adding stuff and kept adding, you know, the world kept growing, had the adding mythology and characters, et cetera. And now we're up to seven books. So, you know, that is something to keep in mind: if you are contracted for a trilogy and you're not George R.R. Martin, you better make sure that you're actually writing a trilogy. So, well—

Rekka (15:30):
I mean, I kind of wish George R.R. Martin had also made sure he was writing a trilogy.

Kaelyn (15:33):
Yeah. Yeah. But along those lines, here's the other thing about the second book? The stakes have to be different now. It's funny because we were talking again about, uh, the Hunger Games. And I remember like I finished the first book and then I was like, "Oh wait, the Hunger Games, it's like the Hunger Games Part Two: Hunger Game Harder. Like, what are we doing here? This is exactly—"

New Speaker (15:55):
The Hungrier Games.

New Speaker (15:56):
There you go, the Hungrier Games. But yeah. And I was like, "wait, so this is Book Two? We're just doing the Hunger Games all over again?"

Rekka (16:07):
Can I say, though, I really liked the world building of the, like the arena? I was kind of sad that I didn't think we were going to get that.

Kaelyn (16:18):
Oh yeah. I absolutely enjoyed that. And I think that's, you know, one of the, this is a good example of one of the strong points of the book that readers enjoyed. So you want it to carry through because then even by the time we get to the third book, the city itself kind of becomes a Hunger Games arena. So there's still that consistent element through the book of anything could kill us at any time and we don't know how.

Rekka (16:40):
If you didn't have that aspect in each book, you might lose some readers who really, like, bit into it because of that.

Kaelyn (16:49):
Yeah. If the Hunger Games had suddenly turned into a super political machination centered book, or I would say even the elements from the beginning of the third with, you know, the secret underground rebellion and stuff, I don't know if there would have been that appeal to the readers who, I think, one of the things they really enjoyed was the suspense and the love triangle (of course, know your audience), but the suspense of trauma dome.

Rekka (17:15):
Right. And there was the, um, seeding of like, what is District 12, you know? And that, that comes around in the third book. So that neatly stitches the series together by the overt trauma dome, you know, element. And then the more subtle, like here's a mystery of like, what did this government do to its people? And why was there an uprising and what happens next?

Kaelyn (17:46):
Yeah. And this is by the way where we come to themes and I'm—for the record, I am not calling the trauma dome a theme.

Rekka (17:55):
Survival in the face of designed disaster?

Kaelyn (18:01):
That's what the themes are: survival, uncertainty, um, staring down at the odds, and constantly feeling unsafe. They do a very good job at creating this sense of not only could you just like we show up 'n arrest you at any moment, you could just die horribly out of nowhere for no reason. And you have very little power to stop it. So that underlying theme of, I will just call it terror through the book and overcoming that is something that carries through. So, you know, all of this talk we've done before about themes and plot, and you know why this stuff is important. This is why it's important. That said it's tempting to clutch everything, to hold on to everything you don't want anything to change. But often it has to for the story to progress, you know, the characters can't be in the same situation, setting, and I would even go so far to say same characters as they were in the first book. Um, it can get very dry.

Rekka (19:06):
I wonder how much of this is, um, that the author is writing the second book under contract after the first book has already been well-received and like, we assume that there've been arcs out already or something when they're drafting the second book—how much of this comes down to confidence and that imposter syndrome? Feeling like they need to follow a formula because they no longer have confidence in anything except for the thing that was already sold?

Kaelyn (19:34):
Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know, I would say that's, there's no good answer to that. There's certainly something to be said for taking feedback or maybe criticism and incorporating that and addressing it. Um, there's also something to be said for, you know, if you're getting rave reviews, this author can do no wrong. Don't take that as a challenge.

Rekka (20:01):
Well, you're taking that the opposite of what I'm saying—

Kaelyn (20:04):
No but I understand. You know, there's, there's extremes, you can go to, you can over-correct and you can just throw the entire manuscript into a mulcher.

Rekka (20:11):
You can over-swagger.

Kaelyn (20:14):
And suddenly there's clowns from outer space in, in Middle Earth.

Rekka (20:20):
Okay. So we've said what you want to do, but have we? Like, have we answered the question?

Kaelyn (20:29):
So let's go all the way back. We were talking about these stories within a story. And I think we do ourselves a disservice when we start to think of all of these as different parts of a story. Yes, it is a beginning, middle and end, but within each of those books we're kind of still following the same basic story structure. I hate using this, but it's correct. The same four act structure. We have a setup, a response and attack a resolution. The resolution does not have to be good. It just has to resolve the setup does not have to take a long time. It doesn't have to be the same as the first book where you're establishing and world-building and introducing characters, but you still need to set up—and by the way, the setup at that point in the second book and definitely into the third book is setting up what the story is going to be at this point, rather than setting up the characters in the world themselves.

Kaelyn (21:29):
So the setup is, you know, establishing the stakes, the quest, the incident, whatever you want to call it here, then we've got the response. You know, the characters have to react to what's happened either, you know, by force or by choosing to.You have the attack portion of this, where the characters have to proactively do something and the villain has to as well. And then it resolves. And I think we, you know, because second book, second movies often end on, you know, a lot of open questions and threads and scenarios. We don't think of it as a resolution, but it is it's "okay, I need the next steps now."

Rekka (22:14):
So when your resolution is a lack of something like, "whoops, the kingdom fell."

Kaelyn (22:21):
I hate it when that happens.

Rekka (22:25):
You know, like we tried really hard in this book to protect the kingdom from the big dragon, but the dragon attacked the kingdom. We got the important people to safety, but we lost the kingdom and we still have to fight the dragon. So like, would you, would you say that's a place where you could pinch off the second book?

Kaelyn (22:43):
Let's look at a great example of that. Avatar, the Last Airbender. Just a great example of everything. The second season ends with the line, the earth kingdom has fallen as they're all escaping on Appa. Aang is incapacitated. Zuko has apparently gone back over to the dark side. Everything is a disaster. At this point, the resolution there is "we have to start over."

Rekka (23:09):
Is that satisfying, though?

Kaelyn (23:11):
No, but it's not meant to be satisfying.

Rekka (23:14):
But it feels like, okay, so maybe here's the problem is: our pressure is on to make a book that makes the reader happy when they've finished reading it. They go, "I am so glad I read that. I am so excited for the third one," but not angry. Like, "Oh my God, the earth kingdom has fallen. That guy's cabbages..."

Kaelyn (23:33):
That poor guy's cabbages. Exactly. So when you watched that, I'll tell you what I felt: "Holy crap, what are they going to do?"

Rekka (23:42):
Right. And why do I have to wait to find out? I get angry. And maybe that's the problem. The pressure is on. You don't want to leave a reader going, "well, it really likes the first book, but at the end of the second book, I was just angry."

Kaelyn (24:00):
I think there's a difference between leaving a reader angry and leaving them intrigued. In my case, I, I mean, granted, you know, I desperately want to know what happens next, but when I read the end of something and I'm just like, "Oh my God," I'm impressed!

Rekka (24:18):
It is very difficult to read a second book. So here's, here's part of the, this is the scenario:

Kaelyn (24:22):
Okay.

Rekka (24:24):
Someone has read your first book and they really liked it. And they were very satisfied by the ending. Because as you said, it ended in a good place, a solid, there was solid footing. Even if there was still a threat in the larger world, there was a feeling of triumph at the beginning, at the end of the first book, agreed?

Kaelyn (24:42):
Books often have satisfying endings. Yes.

Rekka (24:46):
So now we've got someone who's interested in our, in our world. Book Two comes out. They've, pre-ordered it. This is awesome. This is very good. We love pre-orders as authors. Um, and then they read it in a day.

Kaelyn (25:01):
Yeah, now they've got to wait a year and a half.

Rekka (25:03):
Now they've got to wait probably 18 months to read the third book, and the book no longer ended on triumph and satisfaction. Now your reader's going to wait 18 months and they don't really feel great about your story anymore. They're left uncomfortable. When they think about your world, like what— There is tension, there is, um, perhaps sadness, perhaps pain, perhaps loss, perhaps anxiety at the very least. How does that reader separate—And this is a totally different question from what was being asked, but I think it's the pressure. And I think it's part of the concern is that—if you're creating a new arc, it's going into the third book and you stop the reader before you get to the end, that will satisfy one way or the other. And I realize this is coming down to the reader, the writer, trying to please the reader, as opposed to trying to write the story. But I think that's, maybe the fear is like, how do I create a second book that has all this great tension? Is the only way to do it by putting a big battle toward the end so that it feels like the middle book had that surge of energy and can come down from that before it has a bigger surge? And I guess, I guess this is part of the problem is like: does every book have to be bigger than the last book, because that's what Hollywood thinks about trilogies, right? Every, every story has to have a bigger dinosaur than the previous work. It's not just good enough to have a T-Rex. Now you have to have a spinosaurus.

Kaelyn (26:39):
The more explosions, the better, to be sure. Um, listen. To, you know, to address the first part of this. Um, I'm not saying this to sound heartless: there— You're never gonna—

Rekka (26:48):
No, it's fine. I just dumped my heart out on this table in front of you. And please by all means, tell me that I'm being silly.

Kaelyn (26:56):
No, you are, you are never going to be able to control the way a reader feels about your book.

Rekka (27:04):
But what if I was a really good writer?

Kaelyn (27:06):
You are a really good writer. You still can't control that. Yeah.

Rekka (27:10):
I don't like that answer.

Kaelyn (27:11):
I'm sorry. You're never going to be able to control the way a reader feels about your book. I can't tell you how many people I talk to that tell me, "well, I don't read books until the series ends," and my answer to that is always, "that's fine. Just make sure you're buying them and putting them away for when you're ready for when the series ends."

Rekka (27:29):
Yes. Can we, we should say that. If you are a reader listening to this: if you want your trilogy complete, you have to buy the books and support them because the publishers are not looking at whether the story is done. The publishers are looking at the numbers.

Kaelyn (27:43):
Yeah. I, I completely understand the people who say, "I'm not reading this until it's done, because I just want to be able to take a weekend and go through the whole thing." That's fine. Buy them when they come out and wait until they're done and then read them all at once.

Rekka (27:57):
At the very least get your library to pick them up.

Kaelyn (28:00):
Yes. At the, at the minimum.

Rekka (28:03):
Yeah. Honestly, buy four copies. That's really....

Kaelyn (28:07):
I think that, you know, having a reader have a visceral reaction to something, having them be taken aback, having them need to know what's happening and what's going on next. Um, that speaks well of you as a writer. That means that you've really struck a chord. So to speak. That also means hopefully that that person is really excited to read what's coming in Book Three now. Now, do you have to top it? I think that's not a good way to look at this. You don't need to top it, but it needs to be different and interesting in a new way.

Rekka (28:43):
So what you did in Book Two, where you changed the scenarios and you changed the stakes and you make the characters do and try and fail and succeed in different ways... Now you gotta do it a third time?

Kaelyn (28:53):
Do what Star Wars did and go back to the way you did it the first time.

Rekka (28:59):
Star Was has done that several times.

Kaelyn (29:01):
Several times. Um, it's all building, it's all leading up to what your ending is. And it can be very hard to order these things and to keep it in a satisfying way. Before when I was talking about the four act structure: you can't have a second book that is just a middling of events happening with no real climax leading to anything in that book, because the climax is in the third book.

Rekka (29:29):
Okay? So this is going back to "this isn't filler."

Kaelyn (29:34):
This is not filler.

Rekka (29:36):
And you're not stretching out the middle act just to make it three books.

Kaelyn (29:41):
This is still a story. It's still, even though the trilogy is a beginning, middle and end, your second book still needs a beginning, middle, and end. It still needs a setup, a response, attack, and resolution. It's a very basic form of story structure, but it's a good one to kind of build off of. And it's broad enough that you can interpret it. And by the way, it's not at, "I must be at the resolution at 75% of this." No, like, you know, you can, some of the books I've enjoyed the most are books where I'm like reading through them and going, like, I feel like there's a lot to go here still, and we've only got 15 pages left. And some of them are rushed and I'm kind of like, "all right. I just, they finished that." But some of them, you know—

Rekka (30:25):
That last 15 pages is not what you expected, but it wraps up the story in a new way.

Kaelyn (30:30):
Yeah. And some of them, we just drop an Ex Machina in there and call it a day. You know, it's, um.

Rekka (30:36):
It's a choice. Some of our greatest playwrights've done it.

Kaelyn (30:41):
But sometimes that works. Sometimes it's kind of like, "yeah, that makes total sense." And sometimes—

Rekka (30:49):
The thing is like, if it makes total sense, it's not a, I mean, it may function as a Deus Ex Machina, but if you've set it up, it's still going to be satisfying.

Kaelyn (30:59):
Yeah. And then sometimes it's the Tyrannosaurus Rex at the end of the first Jurassic park movie who absolutely could not fit through any of those doors and creep up quietly behind everybody, but we still really enjoyed watching it because it was cool.

Rekka (31:11):
Yes, it was, it was extremely cool.

Kaelyn (31:13):
It was very cool.

Rekka (31:14):
That roar with the banner. I mean, I would, I would live in that moment if I could.

Kaelyn (31:18):
And it's standing on top of a skeleton of itself.

Rekka (31:22):
Yeah.

Kaelyn (31:23):
Yeah. That was great.

Rekka (31:24):
That was good stuff. Give me more of that. And then they tried to, and then they failed. Okay. So to wrap up what we're trying to say here: you can't wrap up what we're trying to say here, cause this is Book Two. So you can't really wrap it up.

Kaelyn (31:41):
No, but.

Rekka (31:41):
So we're just going to stop. No satisfying ending, just the anxiety of, "where are we going from here?"

Kaelyn (31:48):
I don't know. Some cops are going to burst in and arrest me and we'll call that the Ex Machina.

Rekka (31:51):
I heard a lot of sirens before we started.

Kaelyn (31:52):
There were a lot of sirens.

Rekka (31:54):
Book Two is still a book.

Kaelyn (31:56):
It's still a book.

Rekka (31:59):
Write a book. Plan it out, according to Kaelyn. And frankly, I agree, especially, okay. So if I were, um, just real quick, like my method for, for what I do with a trilogy, which is bullshit because I wrote every Book Two thinking that there'd be at least five books. But! What I did was I imagined the end that I was trying to get to with the end of my story. And I picked a clinch point in that story that I could use to write up to with Book Two. But I didn't like just think of this as writing to the end of my story, but stopping early. I thought of this as, what is the structure of this? Like where are these people moving?

Kaelyn (32:42):
Rekka, you're singing to my heart right now.

Rekka (32:44):
I, yes. So once I picked where that story was going to end, that became the end that I was looking at. And like, yes, I, I seeded it in things I could use later, because we're still in the middle point. I can still Chekov these Rifles, um, for a little bit longer. And then, um, and then I write the story and I make it, again, you know, the right number of acts. I put things in the right place. I, I make sure that there's an arc to it. And then I adjust it in revisions. That's the nice thing! You can re adjust all these things in revisions.

Kaelyn (33:22):
No, No, Rekka. Once it's written, that's it.

Rekka (33:22):
No! You can! You can adjust them a heck of a lot. So maybe don't worry about it too much... question mark?

Kaelyn (33:34):
Well... Again, I think if you're concerned about it, make sure, take a step back and make sure that you are not writing a second book in a trilogy for the sake of writing a trilogy.

Rekka (33:46):
And also make sure you are not worried about writing the second book in a trilogy because you're worried about the reader's reaction.

Kaelyn (33:53):
Absolutely. Um, this is the, the heartless thing for me to say: you are there, you were writing a book to, write your book to appeal to the people who are going to like it. It is not necessarily going to be everybody's particular brand of vodka.

Rekka (34:08):
It is literally not going to be for everyone. So if you write the story along the lines that you approached the first story, but treat it as a slight broadening of the world, you know, you're not, you're not just trying to like make the same souffle the second time.

Kaelyn (34:34):
I'm going to say something that is going to horrify Rekka. So I apologize for the—

Rekka (34:39):
I can edit it out. It's okay.

Kaelyn (34:41):
Your job is not to make the reader happy. Your job is to make them interested.

Rekka (34:48):
As exemplified by George R.R. Martin.

Kaelyn (34:50):
It's an excellent example because I am so frustrated with that man, for a lot of reasons, the day The Winds of Winter comes out, I will probably take a day off work and read the book. Am I proud of this? No, but I resign myself to the fact that this is probably gonna happen.

Rekka (35:10):
I've read all the books and, given the HBO series, and given his history, and given his obvious inability to take this in for a landing, I think I'm done.

Kaelyn (35:31):
Oh, no. I'm not.

New Speaker (35:31):
I will let you tell me... but like one of the books—

Kaelyn (35:36):
In six years when this comes out, I'll let you know.

Rekka (35:37):
Well, that's the thing. Okay. So here's our advice for writing the next book in your series, whether it's Book Two in a trilogy or book 18, in a maybe-he'll-survive-long-enough-to-finish-this. Just write the book so that your audience isn't waiting six years between books.

Kaelyn (35:59):
Yeah. Um, you know, there, look, there's definitely something to be said for like the books come out when they come out. Um, you know, not just George R.R. Martin. Authors in general. Um, there is a point where you kind of feel like this is starting to feel a little rude. Um, you know, anyway, all of this is to say that like, there's, I, I know a lot about like the, uh, the history of going into the, you know, how these books were written and the versions and things that changed. It's frustrating. I wish I didn't know this stuff. I wish I just thought that he was just a really slow writer. That said, I'm not necessarily happy with all of this stuff; I am very interested and intrigued because I want to know what happens here. And that is what your job is as a writer. It is to entertain, to interest, and to intrigue. You want to keep people coming back for more.

Rekka (36:55):
Okay. So go from, "there is no war in Ba Sing Se" to "there is no Ba Sing Se" and, um, and leave them wanting more for Book Three, which hopefully you know where it's going. At least roughly.

Kaelyn (37:13):
I will say that watching the season finale of the second season of Avatar was possibly the most stressed I've been watching a television show in a long time. Yes. And I, I was, I was DVRing all of these and like getting home and watching them immediately. And when it concluded, I was kind of like, "of course that's what had to happen. That's the only thing that could have happened here in order for the story to make sense. I still want to kill the writers of this because how dare they!" But I can take a step back and go, "This is excellent storytelling. And I cannot wait to see what happens next."

Rekka (37:52):
Right? Well, hopefully, listener, you are going to write us a trilogy where we are carried by the momentum you create into the third book to finish it off to a very satisfying third book ending.

Kaelyn (38:08):
If anyone listening to this is going, "well, I know what I'll do, I'll just write all three of them upfront and that way they'll all be queued up and ready to go so nobody has to get mad at this." That's not how this works. That's not a thing that happens. A publisher will not release a trilogy all at once. They probably won't even release them six months apart.

Rekka (38:25):
Okay. To be fair. This has happened.

Kaelyn (38:27):
It has.

Rekka (38:27):
It is rare though.

Kaelyn (38:29):
When these things happen, typically what goes on there is that that author already has a massive online built-in following. You know, Andy Weir with the Martian—obviously that wasn't a trilogy, but we're talking that level of like interest.

Rekka (38:45):
Popularity. Yeah. And anything outside of that is probably an outlier. And even that is an outlier. So don't count on that. Also as a point of, um, you know, if this is your first book, you're going to be shopping around potentially for an agent. And if you shop around with a project where you've been spending all your time writing three books in one world, and then Book One is rejected, you don't get to bring them Book Two.

Kaelyn (39:12):
Yeah.

Rekka (39:12):
So if you are looking to go the traditional agent-then-publisher path, um, you might not want to plan to break into publishing with a trilogy.

Kaelyn (39:22):
I will go so far as to say that it could almost be a little off-putting. Um, I've definitely had things submitted that were just hundreds of thousands of words of multiple books. And it's like, "what do you expect me to do with this?" Um, it's not, again, it's not unheard of. But anyway, so don't, don't think you're going to skirt this by going, "that's fine. I'll just write everything at once and then it'll be done and I don't have to think or worry about it."

Rekka (39:51):
Well, like we said, so a publisher is not going to necessarily be tempted by a trilogy. Neither is an agent. You've just spent years, potentially. You don't have any other projects now to shop around if it doesn't work. And then also, if it does sell, the editor will give you changes to Book One that will ripple all the way to the end and you will be rewriting those books anyway.

Kaelyn (40:12):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Nothing, nothing wrong, by the way, with having drafts or outlines or whatever, just don't, don't think you're done.

Rekka (40:20):
If you just want to write a trilogy and you just want to have it done at the end and this isn't about business and this isn't about selling it and this isn't about anything like that, by all means, write it all at once. Write it as a full story and find the spots where it makes sense to, you know, twist your balloon animal into three segments. I'm going for a new metaphor.

Kaelyn (40:42):
Those weird snakes. I like those. I like the, you know, the snakes with the twists in them. Yes.

Rekka (40:47):
So your balloon sausage hopefully has three satisfying segments and then you're done.

Kaelyn (40:58):
Balloon sausage!

Rekka (40:58):
And I think we're done, on that note. I hope this was helpful. I hope this made sense. I hope this gives you hope that it's just writing another story.

Kaelyn (41:07):
It is. It really is. And to be honest with you, if, you know, as I said, if you're struggling with that, maybe take a step back and try to identify why.

Rekka (41:16):
Yep. Think about it as objectively as you can, because chances are your anxiety comes when you are subjected to the subjective worries.

Kaelyn (41:25):
Yes, exactly. So, well on that note, so this is the end of the podcast.

Rekka (41:31):
Forever?

Kaelyn (41:32):
Well no, this episode, because remember each of them are their own story.

Rekka (41:36):
So what are you going to do that's going to leave me with anxiety?

Kaelyn (41:41):
Oh goodness, I feel like just by talking to you, I can—

Rekka (41:45):
Okay, fair. All right, yeah. I am speaking to an editor. There's always anxiety.

Kaelyn (41:49):
I was going to say. I feel like Rekka, you can just look at me sometimes. So here's what I will end with, with trilogies. There is a reason they are one of the most commonly used forms of storytelling.

Rekka (42:02):
Is it because they're easier?

Kaelyn (42:04):
They're easier.

Rekka (42:06):
How? We just said like, you're filling in the gaps, and make it two books.

Kaelyn (42:11):
Well, you're going to have to wait to find out, Rekka.

Rekka (42:14):
Awwwwwwwww!!!! Boo!

Kaelyn (42:14):
Yes. So next episode, we're going to talk about duologies. We're going to spend a lot of time comparing them to trilogies, and we're going to spend some time talking about why they're really hard and why trilogies, for everything we just said here, are also comparatively much easier.

Rekka (42:30):
So two weeks: we're talking about two books, the two of us with too many opinions, is that about right?

Kaelyn (42:39):
I was hoping we were going to be talking about this on the 22nd.

Rekka (42:41):
Nope, no luck. 22nd is Thursday. Yeah. I mean, we can release the episode late if you want. Or wait. That would be early.

Kaelyn (42:50):
Yeah that would be early. That would be early.

Rekka (42:52):
Woooo no. I have to edit that. Okay. So I'm done for today. Done for trilogies. Done for Book Two in a trilogy. Probably not done for trilogies.

Kaelyn (43:00):
We're never done for trilogies.

Rekka (43:01):
We're never done on any of these topics.

Kaelyn (43:03):
Thank you so much, everyone for listening.

Rekka (43:05):
We are at wmbcast.com for all our old episodes. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at @WMBcast. And if you'd like to support our show, you can either leave us a rating and review—and please make sure to subscribe—on whatever podcast app you're using and also at patreon.com/WMBcast.

Kaelyn (43:26):
And if you have a question or, you know, something you'd like to hear about, send it to us, we love those.

Rekka (43:30):
Send it to us. If you want it anonymous, you can send it in DMs. And, uh, we will feature it in a future episode. Cause that's where this one came from.

Kaelyn (43:38):
Thanks again, everyone. We'll see you in two weeks when we're talking about duologies.

Tuesday Mar 30, 2021

Episode 57 - Writing What You Don't Know That You Don't Know

Tuesday Mar 30, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Titles referenced in this episode:

Episode Transcript:

Rekka (00:00):
Welcome back to another episode of, we make books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. I am Rekka. I write science fiction and fantasy as RJ Theodore.

Kaelyn (00:11):
I'm Kaelyn. I am the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press. And today... So today we're talking about the phrase, "write what you know," and how I dislike it.

Rekka (00:22):
Quite a bit. As it turns out.

Kaelyn (00:24):
I feel like it can be, without context as Rekka points out in this, a little bit of a cop out. A little bit of a, like, I don't know what to do here. Well, write what you know. Um, as a writing exercise, I think that's fantastic. But as a problem solving technique, I think it's lacking. Now, granted, as we point out, Rekka and I are coming from a genre fiction background, so we don't actually know a ton about aliens yet; we're working on it. So, yeah, I, um, I don't know. I'm not a big fan of the phrase, but, uh, we, you know, get into all different aspects of this. And then we spend a lot of time talking about, okay, well, how do you write what you don't know? And how do you know what you don't know? And if you don't know what you don't know, what do you do about that?

Rekka (01:12):
And do— and what if you don't know that you don't know anything, are you allowed to write?

Kaelyn (01:16):
Certainly hasn't stopped people.

New Speaker (01:19):
That's a, we didn't get into that. So, uh, here comes the music and we'll keep going on this. On the other side.

New Speaker (01:40):
I'm running out of cappuccino.

Kaelyn (01:43):
Sorry to hear that.

Rekka (01:44):
I'm getting very low.

Kaelyn (01:45):
So what happens when you've run out of cappuccino?

New Speaker (01:48):
I switch to water.

Kaelyn (01:49):
But how do you feel?

Rekka (01:52):
Um, let me tell you about it... In prose form? Were you trying to make that a segue?

Kaelyn (02:00):
Yes, I was.

Rekka (02:00):
I was not on the, uh, the wavelength of how that was exactly going to transition.

Kaelyn (02:05):
Well, that's because you're running out of cappuccino and you're caffeine deprived and your brain is not working at the, uh, super caffeinated level that you would like it to be.

Rekka (02:13):
Gotcha.

Kaelyn (02:14):
So if you were writing a character that was in desperate need of coffee...

Rekka (02:18):
I would know exactly what to write.

Kaelyn (02:20):
Yeah. So today, um, we're talking about the, uh, pervasive and very strange phrase, write what you know. And I say very strange, because everybody seems to have different opinions about what this means. And Rekka and I even have different opinions about what this means.

Rekka (02:38):
Well, the people who've said it to me have had different opinions about what it means. Um, sometimes it's somebody saying literally dig into your own life, and that's the only place where your inspiration or subject matter can come from. That kind of precludes the entire genre of science fiction and fantasy.

Kaelyn (03:00):
I don't like when people say that, because I think what ends up happening is you have a character or multiple characters that's experiences are limited to your own experiences. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to read a book that's just about me. I'm not interesting enough for that.

Rekka (03:18):
Writers already have to struggle to vary their characters enough so that you can identify them by their dialogue alone, for example. don't then tell that writer to rein it in and make the characters more alike by making them all like the author.

Kaelyn (03:34):
I think it's a little bit of a trap and a trick to tell people, write what you know.

Rekka (03:40):
Well, I know Star Wars. Can I write Star Wars?

Kaelyn (03:43):
Absolutely.

Rekka (03:44):
Okay, cool. All right. I'm happy with that answer. I think we can end it there.

Kaelyn (03:49):
All right. Problem solved. End of episode. Excellent.

Rekka (03:51):
Everybody write Star Wars or your favorite thing.

Kaelyn (03:54):
Quick clarification. We're obviously talking about fiction here, because if this is a nonfiction book, then you're doing research essentially. Um, or you're telling a narrative story that happened, presumably there's documentation to back up. Um, obviously Rekka and I work in genre fiction. You know, we tend to lean a little more towards the science fiction and fantasy side of things here, but I think this applies to characters and stories across the board. Although we will get a little, as we get, dig a little more into this, we'll get a little into things that are unique to science fiction and fantasy. And in this regard, I think though, that saying write what you know, and limiting yourself to your own experiences— I mean, I don't have that exciting a life ... if I'm limit— If I'm writing a book, and we limit it to my own experiences, it's going to be a lot of pizza. Beer, Mets games, pizza, hockey, a lot of documentaries.

Rekka (04:56):
Makeup styling?

Kaelyn (04:58):
Yeah. A lot of makeup. So, I mean, do you want to read 80,000 words about that? Cause I don't.

Rekka (05:04):
So you don't like the minutiae of write what you know.

Kaelyn (05:09):
No.

Rekka (05:12):
So allow me to talk about the minutia for a minute. This is the knowledge you have that sinks the reader more deeply into the character at any given time, even though it is what you know about a situation, it's what you know about being deep in that situation as a human being in that space. And even though sometimes we write aliens, we still occasionally need to feel like humans in a space, uh, to connect with our readers who are, in theory, human. So in the case of the cappuccino, because one example is probably as good as another. If you know what it's like to be busy and reach for your cappuccino and realize you drank the whole thing without appreciating it, because you were so distracted by whatever you were focused on. Or, you know the feeling of looking into the bottom of your cup and seeing just that little bit that sinks into the depression formed by the curve of the bottom. And you still have a headache and you still need coffee, except it was a cappuccino and you just spent $5 on your coffee instead of a proper $2. And now you can't go get another one. Um, the feeling of realizing that it's time to switch to water and you didn't really want to drink water because it's cold and you wanted to be cozy and you're in a bad mood and you just wanted your favorite cozy drink. Um, these are all little details that you can apply to a scene that doesn't have to be cappuccino. Uh, you know, if you're relating your cappuccino experience to your science fiction character's favorite beverage that they drink in the morning could be raktajino, could be caff. The characters who can't live without it. Uh, there's also the characters who can't live without their coffee, but only on a chemical level. They actually don't like the flavor and they drink it as fast as they can. These are different kinds of relationships that people can have with something. And so you are writing what you know, and you know it, but it may not be universal. And these are very micro, visceral things that people can generally relate to. Because even if people don't like coffee, they might love tea and they know what it feels like to not have their tea in the morning. Um, or they just know what it's like to not have that piece of their routine, or for the piece of their routine that they hold sacred to be forgotten because something else is going on. So these are all things that can draw your reader in because they create a more relatable experience. And you don't need to have a degree in coffee roasting to understand how this works. You don't need to look, on the internet, what other people say about drinking coffee? Um, if it's not coffee, you know, you don't want to talk about coffee? Talk about your favorite pillow. Talk about your favorite sweater, your slippers. Write about these little things that matter. Um, write about what it's like to be sad, and then have the weather does change and the sky opens up on you, and now you're sad and soaking wet. Like these are all things that readers can relate to, even if they can't relate to your science fiction scenario or your fantasy world. And that's how you write what you know on a micro level.

Kaelyn (09:01):
It's useful. You're writing something and the character's exhausted, and they've just run out of cappuccino.

Rekka (09:06):
I literally did. Just so you know, I literally just ran out of cappuccino

Kaelyn (09:11):
And boy, do you know what that feels like.

Rekka (09:13):
I do.

Kaelyn (09:14):
That said I'd like to get a little bit more to a macro level. Do you have any other, any other thoughts?

Rekka (09:21):
Um, I'm trying not to cry. I'm in that moment where the cappuccino is gone. So continue go to your macro level. Cause I'm, I'm still here in the micro and I'm suffering. So pull me out of it. Take me with you.

Kaelyn (09:33):
So on the macro level, this is what I kind of call the research area. Now, people who are like true, write what you know people: if you're not a doctor, you have no business writing, anything that has to do with being a doctor. If you are not an astrophysicist, you should not be writing anything that takes place in space. This is nonsense. There are not a lot of astrophysicists in the world, so we don't get to have all of the astrophysicists writing perfectly correct science fiction. Limiting people to writing only what they know is going to produce a very limited amount of books that could end up being very dry.

Kaelyn (10:14):
This kind of then branches into, okay, well, you have to do research on the things that you don't know about. Let's start with research and how much of it you do and where you get it from. And then we're going to move into how you apply this to your writing and the worlds that you're creating and the characters that are living there. The research all depends on what you're researching. You know, if you're writing historical fiction, you better be really well-versed in what was going on in history at that location at that time. You better have some primary sources from people who were there. Uh, you'd better be really clear about, you know, the, um, you know, the location, the political environment of the time, the class of the—you know, let's say it's about a family—their social class, and you'd better know what the important things that you need to identify with them are like, for instance, if you're writing about somebody, um, living in reformation era England, you'd better know what was going on between the Protestants and Catholics. And you'd better say which one this person is.

Rekka (11:23):
That's why I write secondary world fantasy.

Kaelyn (11:26):
Yes. Exactly. So in some cases like that, you know, like if you're writing fiction that is set, you know, in, in our world at a different time period or, um, a different place, you need to do research to, to find out what that time or that place or that people are like. And you need to do it, not only just to build a compelling character, but to be accurate. Because if this is an area where, if you're setting something, you know, in our quote-unquote reality, you gotta be accurate there otherwise... Well, one, I don't think anyone's really gonna publish it, but two, it's not going to go over well when it's published, it's not something that a lot of readers and reviewers in the community have.

Rekka (12:15):
patience for.

Kaelyn (12:16):
Yeah, exactly. The example I always use is Ken Follet books. Uh, Ken Follet writes these thousand page tomes of meticulously researched stories. One of his series is about a specific family through various generations. And then the other is about a town in, uh, the high middle ages in England. And my God, the research this guy did into—I think it was like 12th century—English stone masonry techniques. And then, uh, the wool industry open— it, you know, like, uh, how they died and all of this stuff. And you know what, no one can poke holes in that guy's research cause, Oh my God, did he do his research! But he still wrote really compelling characters. And you know what? He didn't write what he knows, because he's not a 12th century peasant from England. He has no context for the series.

Rekka (13:14):
At least no one has found his time machine yet.

Kaelyn (13:16):
Yes. Yes. So there are certain scenarios in which, you know, you can't write what you know, you just have to do the research.

Rekka (13:26):
But there's also, you don't know what you don't know. And sometimes you're just going to get it wrong.

Kaelyn (13:33):
Yes, definitely. There are some instances of, "we don't really know, so I'm going to speculate or I'm going to make something up here" and you know, then sometimes, maybe a decade later there's a new archeological discovery and that thing that you made up, wow. That was exactly wrong.

New Speaker (13:48):
Yeah. Or exactly right.

New Speaker (13:50):
I was going to say, it'd be weirder if it was right. Then, you know, you have the Dan Browns of the world who take some theories and present them as fact and just really run with it. And sure, it makes for compelling reading and an interesting story and everything, but it's not correct.

Rekka (14:08):
And not going to hold up to much scrutiny.

Kaelyn (14:10):
Yeah.

Rekka (14:10):
Look, you're not there because you think you can take a college course in this.

Kaelyn (14:15):
Yeah.

Rekka (14:15):
I hope.

Kaelyn (14:17):
So. You know, historical fiction, obviously you really need to have all your ducks in a row, but we're talking about some different kinds of fiction here. So let's just talk about, you know, maybe not people set in earth.

Rekka (14:29):
Okay.

Kaelyn (14:30):
I live in New York city. There are a lot of books and movies and stuff set in New York city. One of my favorite things about when I'm watching something set in New York and there's a chase scene through Manhattan and I'm watching the famous locations that they're running by and none of these are close together. This person ran a mile and a half uptown, to turn around, run two miles the opposite direction, and now is somehow in New Jersey.

Kaelyn (14:59):
And so if you're, you know, even if you're just writing a, you know, a fiction story that is like, again, I'll use New York as an example, set in New York city and you say, "Oh yes, my, um, character lives all the way out in, um, you know, Flushings Queens in a giant 200 story, you know, whatever building," okay, well, that's not a thing that exists. If they're going to, you know, have certain places and settings and expectations of stuff that they should be doing based on that character, you need to be familiar with and you need to research these things.

Rekka (15:36):
Yeah. Your New York character is not going to hop in the car and go to the grocery store.

Kaelyn (15:41):
And this is ridiculous, but also like, just get out of map and look up the subway stations. If you're going to make it, like, if you're going to be specific, like, Oh, they got on the 1 Train and went to Queens. No, they'd didn't. The 1 Train doesn't go to Queens. If you're not sure, just say they got on the subway.

Rekka (15:58):
They definitely have maps of New York that you can reference.

Kaelyn (16:04):
Yes.

Rekka (16:04):
I think there's a danger of writing what you looked up, as opposed to writing what you know and understand.

Kaelyn (16:14):
If you remember, uh, you know, quite a few episodes back, we talked to Antoine Bandele was a, an episode about creating maps for your book. And I mentioned to him that I live in Astoria, Queens and he said, "Oh my God, I was just there. Uh, I needed to come and do research." And I said, "what do you need to do research on in Astoria?" He said, "I'm writing something set in New York. And one of the characters is Brazilian." And I said, "ah, and there is a small microcosm of Brazilian people in Astoria." And I mean, it's not even, you know, like, uh, Chinatown kind of concentration, but there is a small concentration of, uh, Brazilian shops and stores and restaurants and stuff. And he came out and had a look around because sometimes you just got to get out there and see it.

Rekka (16:58):
I mean, like, you will never understand, from a Wikipedia page, what it's like to walk through a place. And things are getting a little bit better with uh, Street View.

Kaelyn (17:09):
Uh, Google Maps can be a big help with. All of this is to say, "Oh, so what you're telling me, I should just write about my, you know, town that I grew up in, in Pennsylvania and nothing else?" No, absolutely not. I mean, but you also don't have to travel anywhere, but just be aware of, and try to do as much research on everything as you can, to get a level of authenticity there. Um, in this case, you know, you may not be capable of writing what you know, because you don't know what it's like to be in a particular place.

Rekka (17:41):
Yeah. Like don't write about rural Pennsylvania, if you are from Nebraska and you've never been to Pennsylvania and you don't feel like anything up about it.

Kaelyn (17:50):
Especially if you live in rural Nebraska, because then you could just write it there.

Rekka (17:55):
If you're writing a small town, why not pick the small town that you know, or at least a stand-in that's based on the town you know. Because then you're less likely to get the details wrong. So if you're writing about Grant's Pass, Oregon, but you've never been there and you're from New Jersey, do you honestly know what it feels like to be in Grant's Pass, Oregon, maybe write about your small town in New Jersey or, you know, put a little effort into it until you do know it and then you can write it.

Kaelyn (18:27):
Yeah. So, and this is, you know, we're still right now in the realm of things that actually exist in the world. They are, that's a lot easier to decide what you do and do not know. Um, once we get into the realm, Rekka and I operate in, science fiction and fantasy, where you're having to invent things, I think people get the, "well, it doesn't matter what the research is. I'm just going to make up whatever, whatever I want." Yes. However, your world and your characters still need to abide by rules. And unless you want to create an entire new set of rules from everything from biology to have gravity works, then presumably you're going to be carrying over some of our real life applications of this into the book.

Rekka (19:17):
What do you say to me, who does write science fiction on planets that, you know, from which the characters have never heard of Earth? Like, do I get to break every rule?

Kaelyn (19:30):
No, of course not.

Rekka (19:32):
Which rules do I get to break? Please, I'm asking.

Kaelyn (19:37):
You get to break whatever rules you want, Rekka. You know that. Just you though, not everyone else. Just you.

Rekka (19:43):
Give the qualifier because people are going to be confused.

Kaelyn (19:45):
Yeah. The genuine answer is it depends. Because it also depends on how much work you want to be put into the book of explaining why this rule doesn't exist in this world. And genre is going to matter a lot here, hard military SciFi, the expectation there is that we're adhering to the basic tenants of physics as we understand them on earth right now. Fantasy, I think a lot of times, doesn't get too bogged down in this, unless it has a reason to. Everywhere you go, the gravity is the same. The air is presumably breathable, unless it's not for a specific reason. Um, science fiction has a little bit more to make up for there, you know, because we're setting it in like, yeah, it's, it's fake in terms of, you know, in, in the sense that the author has made something up. But you know, what if something's set on Alpha Centauri? Like, we do know that Alpha Centauri is a real place. And while we don't know the exact conditions there or what, you know, for certain is orbiting it, we can make some speculations. Now you can, you know, of course, write in "everything we knew was completely wrong!" So I think the way you've got to sort of approach this and we're going to, we're going to talk large scale and then we're gonna narrow down from here. Okay. What are you keeping? What are you getting rid of?

Kaelyn (21:08):
Always start from a position of everything that is true on earth and physics as we understand them on Earth, I can apply across the board here. Your reader is going to start from that understanding unless you tell them otherwise.

Rekka (21:24):
Their default is everything they think they know.

Kaelyn (21:26):
Yes.

New Speaker (21:26):
Which you can't control if they're wrong. But whatever they think they know, that's what they're going to apply as the default understanding. So if you're going to break a rule, redefine it as early as you possibly can to avoid confusion.

Kaelyn (21:43):
Yes. So if you're getting to the point where you have to start explaining things that, you know, we're, we're beyond what I think the average reader is going to understand, you've got to decide, "am I going to make something up or am I going to do the research and explain this within the context of what we understand in terms of, you know, physics and biology now?" So all this research I'm talking about, how do you do this? Well, there's no good answer to that. And sometimes the best way is to hope, you know somebody who knows a lot about this stuff.

Rekka (22:20):
Sometimes, um, I would say, wait until you learn something that excites you, and use that as the opportunity to dig deeper into that subject and research. And you don't know what you don't know. It's hard to even research something that you're completely unfamiliar with because you don't know the right keywords to even type in.

Kaelyn (22:44):
So a really good example of this is Andy Weir's book, The Martian. Andy Weir is very lucky because he is the son of a particle physicist and an electrical engineer. There's all of these physics components that come in. So we've got mechanical and electrical engineering, biology, physics, computer science, all wrapped up in this. Andy Weir is not a, not proficient in every single one of those things. He had to do a lot of research and talk to a lot of people. And he wrote in a scenario that technically doesn't exist. Because we don't know how all of this would really go on Mars, but we can speculate.

Rekka (23:24):
Yeah. And he studied orbital mechanics, astronomy, and like the history of space flight in order to make this as well-founded a story as he could.

Kaelyn (23:35):
So that's an excellent example of science fiction grounded in reality, even when these things don't actually exist and we're still going, "well, maybe on Mars, this is what it would be like." But it goes to show you what comes with this kind of hard work. Anyway, The Martian is an excellent movie, excellent book. Um, and it is an excellent example of how far good research can get you. Whether, you know, it's The Martian or Harry Potter or Ender's Game or something. All of these things have fantastical elements to them, but there's ways to rationalize them and to make it seem like something that could be feasible because you've established that's what this is. But you're not writing what you know.

Rekka (24:20):
Yeah.

Kaelyn (24:21):
You're learning.

Rekka (24:21):
Yeah. You're learning in order to better write a more convincing scenario.

Kaelyn (24:26):
Yes. In some cases the, you know, write what you know is you've got to come up with something and teach it to yourself.

Rekka (24:35):
Yeah. And sometimes you have to seek out other people who can tell you what you need to know that you don't know.

Kaelyn (24:39):
Yeah. So let's talk about that a little bit. Let's say, um, you're writing something where there's a lot of biology involved for whatever reason. Human, alien, or otherwise. So what are you going to do here? Well, there's so much information on the internet and, you know, first of all, establishing what reputable sources are is very important, but you know, the American College of Physicians, uh, the Mayo Clinic, a lot of, you know, hospitals and research facilities, they have a lot of information online about these things. Um, the other really interesting thing is, uh, YouTube, there is a lot of interesting videos out there about "here's how this functions" and they're made by, you know, doctors, scientists, and reputable people. There's a lot of really good how-to videos out there. There's so much information out there. I think two of the biggest areas that, um, you know, where it's like writing what you don't know and not doing a great job of it, is probably, um, law related things and medical related things.

Rekka (25:50):
Yeah. And there are doctors who have written books to help you because they're sick of seeing you do it wrong.

Kaelyn (25:54):
Yeah. I remember a panel I went to at the, uh, Nebula Conference about death building. One of the panelists is an emergency room doctor. And you know, they're talking about there's tolerances that the human body is allowed to sustain in writing that in actuality would never happen. One of the examples he gave was like, Sean Bean's character in the first Lord Of The Rings movie, who's got like a thousand arrows sticking out of him, but he's still standing up and swinging a sword.

Rekka (26:21):
To be fair. He does die eventually.

Kaelyn (26:24):
He does. But as this doctor pointed out, he was like, "yeah, one arrow to the stomach is enough to make most people not be able to stand up."

Rekka (26:32):
But also he's Sean Bean. So that's what killed him. Not all those arrows.

Kaelyn (26:37):
That's very true. You know? So there's, there's a certain degree we're willing to accept there just because it's know it's stakes, it's intensity, it's, you know, trying to, you know, scare the reader a little bit. Um, if everybody in fantasy books and science fiction, really, any books got, uh, incapacitated the way they should from, you know, a basic—

Rekka (27:02):
"The way they should." Sorry, I'm getting punchy. We're super fragile. Who made us so brittle? So, so delicate.

Kaelyn (27:12):
Blow to the right, you know, area. Like I always laugh when I'm watching and there are these sword fights and like the people are whack at each other in the legs. And I'm like, "that's a shredded ACL." "That's that meniscus is gone." "That person doesn't have a knee anymore." Anyway, there's a level of tolerance we're allowed to have there, but that said, if somebody is getting cut in half and they survive, they'd better be living in a world where getting cut in half is part of the reproductive cycle or something, you know, they just become two smaller versions of, of that person. Although I will say in the same panel, I was listening to the, the doctors presenting, uh, give us an example of a guy who came into his ER in two different ambulances and survived. So...

Rekka (27:59):
On that note!

Kaelyn (28:00):
On that note,

Rekka (28:02):
What do you know, anyway? What does anybody really know?

Kaelyn (28:06):
You know, look, we've, we've all heard the stories of the fantastical and the extraordinary. But to kind of, you know, circle back to our original thoughts here, you know, of writing what you know, and writing what you don't know: research is very important. Um, limiting yourself to writing what you know—unless, you know, I dunno, maybe you've had a really interesting life. Maybe you've had a lot of things happen to you. You've done a lot of stuff. Um, then that's great. But you know, the other end of it is if you haven't, you're, and you want to write an interesting, compelling story, especially if it involves like fairies and leprechauns. I'm kidding. Those are real obviously.

Rekka (28:48):
Obviously.

Kaelyn (28:49):
You're going to have to do some research and you're going to have to come up with your world rules and parameters. And in the course of the research, identify what you decide you're going to keep versus what you're going to change. And then you have to explain that you're changing it.

Rekka (29:07):
I always come back to: the more detail you feel like you have to include to justify the things you're doing, possibly the more research you need to do so that you truly understand it.

Kaelyn (29:20):
I'll give you another really good example of this. And this is actually a nonfiction book that falls really interestingly into the write what you know category. John Krakauer's book Into Thin Air. It's about the 1996 Everest disaster. He got, according to his account, talked into coming on this Everest expedition. And it just so happened that while he was there, and this was in the May climbing season, this massive blizzard storm or what have you, struck the people as they were all trying to come back down the mountain and eight people died. This story, it's harrowing, it's terrifying, it's heartbreaking. And it makes you never want to go anywhere near Mount Everest.

Rekka (30:11):
I don't even want to read the book.

Kaelyn (30:15):
But the reason he went on this expedition was he was going to write an article about it for the magazine he worked for. And now he's writing a book about this terrible disaster that took place. So he's coming from a place where he's actually very knowledgeable about, mountaineering and know, you know, knew all of these people and knew how everything was supposed to go. And now he's got to do a bunch of research and collect information and accounts from different groups and stuff about why what happened happened. And he puts together a really interesting case and story about all different aspects of the, uh, culture surrounding, like, people trying to summit Mount Everest and, you know, the situation of like people who really don't have any business trying to climb Mount Everest and just paying a lot of money to guides to get them up there. There's all of this speculation that, um, one of the things that happened that made this so terrible apart from, you know, a blizzard on Mount Everest, was some kind of a pressure system came through and dropped the oxygen to nothing. So that's a nonfiction book where, you know, this guy was writing what—he set out to write what he knew, and then ended up having to incorporate a whole bunch of stuff he didn't know as well.

Rekka (31:26):
That is a very literal write what you know. We've already covered the micro writing, what, you know, in a very personal, um, tangible, you know, physical and mental sensation sort of way, to add realism to a scene. And that can create tension and, and, um, drama, uh, especially in like a, um, you know, third person limited perspective or first person perspective. But, uh, we've also covered researching to learn what you don't know so then you can write it. And we've covered writing what you don't know, because nobody knows it.

Kaelyn (32:15):
One thing I'd like to just point out quickly before we wrap up here, there is a difference between writing what you know, writing what you don't know, and writing something that isn't yours to tell.

Rekka (32:28):
Yeah. And we didn't go into that this time on purpose because that's a whole topic.

Kaelyn (32:33):
You know, saying that there's ways to degree search and gain experience is not the same as saying, "I am a straight white cis person. I am going to write about a gay black trans person, and I will just do a lot of research and that makes it okay." It doesn't. Don't do that. That is not your story to tell.

Rekka (32:52):
That is... Writing... Don't write what you think you know. Don't write what you think is hot, and just assuming you know enough about it. And when I say hot, I mean, popular, uh, will attract attention.

Kaelyn (33:10):
There's always ways to include diverse characters into your writing. But anytime, you know, you're really going like, "wow, I don't know anything about the type of character, this person, that I'm writing here." That's probably a good point to take a step back and say, "is this something I should be writing?"

Rekka (33:33):
If this person is nothing like me?

Kaelyn (33:35):
Yes.

Rekka (33:36):
In what ways are they not like me? And are those ways that I should not be attempting to explain to other people?

Kaelyn (33:43):
You know, like I said, this is a whole other episode. We're not going to, you know, go into this, but it was worth making the statement that it's one thing to research places, locations, history, physics, medical sciences, researching people, outside of historic context, to use as a character is probably a place where you should take a step back and decide whether or not that's something you should be writing.

Rekka (34:12):
Um, if you are looking for a resource on knowing when it's okay, you know, cause casual representation in books is good. So look for a series of lectures and of courses called Writing The Other. That's a fantastic resource. They cover all sorts of different marginalized identities. And, um, the courses are paid and they should be because this is someone's time and effort to educate you. Uh, so that would be the best resource I could think of. And if we were ever going to cover that topic, I would be bringing someone on from the Writing The Other courses in order to talk about it. So honestly, I'm just going to refer you to them.

Kaelyn (34:53):
For all of this, you know, saying like there's nothing stopping you from doing research and trying to learn and build here. There is a line where research does not matter anymore at that point.

Rekka (35:04):
Right. It's just not appropriate.

Kaelyn (35:06):
This will not ever be a situation in which you're writing what you know.

Rekka (35:10):
Yeah, exactly.

Kaelyn (35:11):
So, um, you know, on that note, that's, it, it turned into a little bit, I would call this writing what you know versus researching what you don't.

Rekka (35:19):
Right. Versus keeping your hands off what someone else knows.

Kaelyn (35:23):
Yeah, exactly. Um, look, you know, I have definitely, um, you know, in the course of my life, like when I was in grad school, I had people, you know, who would say like, "Hey, I, can you tell me about this historic thing? I need it as a point of reference for something," um, a lot of people who in specialized, you know, areas, professions, or educations or stuff are frequently very happy to talk to you about them. You know, this isn't to say that you can just inflict yourself on anyone and say, "tell me all about the human nervous system. I need to know about every ending."

Rekka (35:57):
Ideally you have something to offer them. Whether it's money or your own experience in a way that will help them.

Kaelyn (36:04):
Yeah. Or just let me take out to dinner. And if I can just bounce a few things off of you, if this is a friend of yours or something like that. Um, when we're able to go out to dinner again, don't take anyone out to dinner, right now.

Rekka (36:14):
Yeah. No, that's bad. Be a good person. Keep people protected.

Kaelyn (36:18):
Yes. So, you know, don't be afraid to try to reach out to actual human resources that are experts or have more knowledge about these things than you do. It never ceases to amaze me the hobbies that my friends have that mean they know all of this stuff that I can't believe they know a lot about. But yeah. I think, uh, I think that's a good place to end.

Rekka (36:45):
Okay, well, if we haven't hit all the marks or you still have questions, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram at @WMBcast, you can find us on Patreon at Patreon.com/WMBcast. Or you can even leave your question in a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. We would love if you would do that over there, because we want more reviews so that more people can find us and ask us more questions. So hopefully that answered some of your questions about this nebulous, strange advice that you hear so often.

Kaelyn (37:17):
It's just the worst advice.

Rekka (37:20):
I don't think that it's completely without merit. It's just not good without explanation. So, um, with context, it's, uh, a fun thing to consider and something to keep in mind. All right, we're done. I swear. We're done talking about it. We will talk to you in two weeks, hope you all have a lovely time. Stay safe, wear a mask, avoid other humans.

Tuesday Mar 16, 2021

Episode 56 - Dev Edits and Line Edits and Copy Edits, Oh My!

Tuesday Mar 16, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Tools Referenced in this episode:

Grammarly

ProWritingAid

Episode Transcript

Rekka (00:01):
Welcome back to another episode of, we make books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. I'm Rekka. I write science fiction and fantasy as R J Theodore.

Kaelyn (00:10):
I'm Kaelyn Considine. I'm the acquisition editor for Pu... Pu... Wait, I'm the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press. And we can edit that out.

Rekka (00:20):
Yeah. Is that a line edit?

Kaelyn (00:24):
Oh God. You know what? That's a good question. That, uh, I think that would be a line edit. Yeah. Uh, yeah. So today we're talking about editing. Um, I know it's something we've talked about before. I think we, we really were very focused on developmental edits.

Rekka (00:40):
Well, sure. Because that's your favorite, right?

Kaelyn (00:43):
Yeah. You know, there's, there's different components and different people you're going to encounter through the process of editing a book and they'll all want different things from you and be asking you to change different aspects of the book. So—

Rekka (00:56):
Oh, one thing we didn't say: that you are the author and your name goes on the cover. So all of these edits come from people who are hired because this is their specialty. However, this is your story. So it is up to you to stand by these edits. And if you don't feel comfortable standing by the edits, then you should not accept them.

Kaelyn (01:22):
Qualifier. I will have there: check your contract. Your book may have been accepted conditionally pending you making certain changes. So there's uh, there's contractual obligations for edits. But you know, as Rekka said, at the end of the day here, his name is on this. We talk a little bit at the end of the episode, about how, you know, people are, might yell at you online about things that you had absolutely no control over. So control the stuff that you can.

Rekka (01:47):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So anyway, um, there are lots of kinds of edits and they are variably painful each in their own way.

Kaelyn (01:56):
Some are far more excruciating than others.

Rekka (02:00):
And on the other side of this lovely ditty, we will tell you about them.

Kaelyn (02:17):
...that landing devices on Mars is becoming as routine as something like that can be, is, is very, is very cool. So yeah.

Rekka (02:27):
Yeah. Speaking of routine. How's that?

Kaelyn (02:33):
You've probably heard us say things like developmental edits, copy edits, line edits. And if you're going okay, well, what the heck is all of this art? Don't I just edit the book. No, you don't.

Rekka (02:46):
Sometimes you edit the book. Sometimes someone else edits the book, sometimes a third person edits the book. And sometimes you get a stack of pages and you hope that someone edited the book real well.

Kaelyn (03:02):
Yes. There's three main kinds of edits. You're going to come across while working on a book and then a fourth step in this order: developmental edits line edits and copy edit. Then after copy, edit, typically comes a proofreading. We're going to go through these step-by-step and instead of giving you definitions upfront, explain what they are as we're walking through them. So Rekka, as somebody who's gone through this process, what would you say your favorite part of all of these edits are? if you had to pick one of the three, what's your favorite?

Rekka (03:36):
Page proofs.

Kaelyn (03:39):
Really? Even as a writer?

Rekka (03:40):
Yeah. No, I mean, cause you're almost there. This is the point where you are just making sure that nothing weird happened in the process of getting this into a layout and you get to reread the book. You're in theory, looking at an immutable copy. So you can't keep fiddling with it. And all you're doing is checking to make sure that there's not like a weird space before a period, or something strange like suddenly you've got smart quotes and—.

Kaelyn (04:17):
Let's save that for when we get there.

Rekka (04:19):
That was the wrong answer, folks. Apparently I wasn't supposed to say that. I was supposed to say the dev edit is my favorite.

Kaelyn (04:24):
And that's because that's everybody's favorite because the dev edit—

Rekka (04:28):
No the dev edit means you have to tear out your heart and write it all over again.

Kaelyn (04:33):
The developmental edit though, is the part where you're still writing.

Rekka (04:37):
I'm not in this to write. I'm in this to have written.

Kaelyn (04:43):
Fair. Um, yeah. So the first thing you're going to hear about, you know, with the first one you're gonna encounter is developmental edits. Developmental edits are where it is what it sounds like you're still developing the story. Um, this is what's going to happen generally um, at any stage of this before your book is finalized, pretty much. So anytime you're getting feedback from anyone, be it a writing group, um, a friend, an agent and editor, uh, some random guy that you started talking to and told the story.

Rekka (05:16):
No, don't start talking to those guys.

Kaelyn (05:19):
That is, that's a developmental edit. There's obviously different levels of intricacy and sophistication to this. Um, if you're working with an agent, they'll probably give you some high level stuff, especially for the beginning of the book. If you're working with an editor, however, they're gonna be much tougher on you. This is the part where they're going to say, "okay, I like all of this. Here's the thing. Your magic system doesn't make any sense." Or "it seems to have some rules and then it's breaking them" or "the world-building is inconsistent" or "there's a plot hole here." Um, a lot of times you're going to start big, you know, like, all right, let's like, I've had authors where I'm like, ""I need you to send me a document of how magic works here. Or "I need you to send me a timeline of the events before this story because there's characters referencing things and they're contradicting each other. And I don't think it's a case of an unreliable narrator."

Rekka (06:16):
Unreliable author.

Kaelyn (06:20):
There's a lot of those. So your developmental edits are where you're finishing the big parts of the story where you're narrowing— you're nailing down, um, the rules of the world, the world, building the characters, addressing any plot holes. In some cases you may be making massive changes to the book. Sometimes it's not "this sentence contradicts something another person said," sometimes it's, "Hey, um, I don't think you need this character. They're really not doing much. Get rid of them."

Rekka (06:54):
Right. And in which case, all the threads of the story that have to change as a result.

Kaelyn (07:01):
Developmental edits can be, you know, for as much as they are probably the most fun, I guess, of the book, writing process.

Rekka (07:10):
That's a big question mark in your voice, there.

Kaelyn (07:14):
Well, they're the most fun for me certainly, but, um, you know, I think, uh, I would hope that people writing enjoy working on their books and look, it can, developmental edits can be like, they can be brutal. Um, a developmental edit can result in a significant overhaul of what you were writing. Now, this isn't to scare anyone because the thing is, if you're working with an editor at this point, they wouldn't have bought your book if they didn't like it and think there was something good in there.

Rekka (07:46):
Right.

Kaelyn (07:47):
So remember your editor just wants what's best for your book. You maybe not as much.

Rekka (07:55):
Well, what about for people who are self publishing?

Kaelyn (07:58):
So for people who are self publishing, you know, it depends on how you're doing this. Did you hire an editor? Maybe that's the person who's, uh, who's doing this. But if you're doing this on your own, hopefully your developmental edits have been more of the process of writing and refining your book, getting feedback, incorporating it into there. But that's where this is all coming from because somebody reading it and saying, "yeah, I like this" is different from somebody going, "okay, well you have this character, Laura. And she went into the bathroom and then we never heard from her again."

Rekka (08:37):
Look, this happens sometimes.

Kaelyn (08:39):
Sometimes people go into bathrooms and never come back out. Um, but that's, I mean, developmental edits is so broad compared to the rest of these because it's all of the work that gets your book to a point where it is quote-unquote done in terms of developing the story. You've stopped developing the story, everything after this now is grammar and syntax and prose and making sure the story is coherent and flows well. Um, Rekka, as someone who has gone through some pretty significant, uh, developmental edit overhauls...

Rekka (09:21):
Yeees?

Kaelyn (09:21):
How'd that feel?

Rekka (09:23):
Is 60% significant?

Kaelyn (09:27):
Oh, that's nothing.

Rekka (09:27):
What about when you do it twice?

Kaelyn (09:29):
Well, that's 120%.

Rekka (09:31):
Okay. So I've rewritten 120% of SALVAGE. Um, yeah, it's— look, it's funny because it's a lot of work, and I'm the type of person who will grind myself into the earth to get work done on a deadline, regardless of what that deadline's reasonable level is.

Kaelyn (09:55):
Well, now let me ask you this, because your books specifically, you know, especially as you got farther into the Peridot Shift series with various POVs and everything, when you change something, the, I imagine it's a bit of a butterfly effect.

Rekka (10:12):
Well.

Kaelyn (10:14):
Okay, let me rephrase that. I know it's a little bit of a butterfly effect.

Rekka (10:16):
No, but it even goes beyond that because the first revision was to add all the POVs.

Kaelyn (10:22):
Yes. Yeah, that's true.

Rekka (10:23):
Um, the, the first book was one single POV and I felt as though that was now a requirement of the series. Um, specifically an earlier editor that I contracted to help me revise FLOTSAM told me, "dump all these other POVs and just follow Talis." So that's what I thought I needed to do for book two, because that's what I had set up as an expectation for the reader, I felt. So it came as a shock when the publisher's editor that, um, I started working with on SALVAGE as a new editor, came back and said, "I think you could fix a lot of the issues you're having with this book, if you introduced new POVs." So you've seen that meme of like Cosmic Brain. Like that's what happened to me. I was like, "this is an option?? I can go in and add more POV's and show people more of the mindsets of the different people in the, in this world?" It was amazing. I was, I was pumped. I was ready to go. By adding other POVs I was able to go to where the action was happening and get the information to the reader without it having to pass third hand to my main characters.

Kaelyn (11:55):
You did a really significant overhaul, but then I'm sure that presented a challenge because after you overhauled and rewrote this book to include these other POVs, anytime you made a change, then you have to account for that.

Rekka (12:10):
Right? Because like, it was, most of my characters weren't even present, um, in the, between the two drafts.

Kaelyn (12:16):
It's not only, and this is, I mean, we could do a whole episode on this, but it's not only where Talis is, who she's with, and what she knows. You need to track these other characters, encountering other characters, other places, and gathering their own information that they may or may not be sharing with other people. So one change trickles down into all of these other characters and it's something you have to account for. Developmental edits, especially from a multiple POV book: It's a process.

Rekka (12:44):
It's probably where a lot of the, um, like the timeline inconsistencies happen that readers catch that no one else seems to during the process of getting it out into the world. Um, it's not that the writer was drafting in a flurry and forgot what they wrote. It's more that they drafted in a flurry, revised it themselves, send it off to somebody else. And then somebody else stuck their fingers in and said, "let's pull on these threads and see what happens." And then you have little details you forgot all about that you overlook even when you reread.

Kaelyn (13:17):
And this, by the way is the reason I am a big fan of having an outline.

Rekka (13:21):
Oh, but it's the little details.

Kaelyn (13:23):
There are books that I read that, you know, it's not even just the little details it's "this does not line up. This makes no sense." And in developmental edits, that's where you're supposed to catch things, but you know, a big secret here: uh, editors are people too. And sometimes we, you know, in all the course of all of these changes, miss everything. This is very much turns into, can't see the trees for the forest kind of situation. It's always good to have somebody who is not so in the weeds on this take a look at it, to be able to take a step back and point out, "hang on. That girl never came out of the bathroom."

Rekka (13:58):
Right. I know you're still worried about her.

Kaelyn (14:00):
I'm very worried about like, is she okay? Is she having a medical emergency? Was there a portal in there somewhere? What happened to her? So this is, this is making this sound scary and overwhelming. Developmental edits. I find are always the fun part where you really get to, you know, have somebody who's excited to talk to you about your book and you get to tell them all the details and you know, all the secrets and the nitty-gritty stuff going on here. So, um, I enjoy them, but you know, that's just me. I just get to torment people with them.

Rekka (14:29):
It is a very, very good thing to enjoy the teeny tiny details of your book. Both as the editor working on it and the writer creating it.

Kaelyn (14:42):
I find one of the most important tools for developmental edits, especially for books with a lot of characters or places is a timeline. Timeline of events before the book and timeline of the events during. I have had books that I've worked on where I've just gotten an Excel sheet to track which character is where at what time to make sure that we're not accidentally saying they were both in this town on the same day. Your editor is going to do a lot of work on this because your editor is going to be your sanity check here, to use the, uh, well, the developer term. Um, you know, does this make sense? Does this work? Is there something here that is very obvious that we're missing? Developmental edits are also where, you know, you're going to, besides all of these checking for problems, you're also going to flesh out characters, their arcs, their motivation, their stories. You're going to do some world-building as well. Probably. Um, again, some of it will be clarifying. Some of it might be like, "Hey, this is really interesting that you mentioned in passing. And later in the story, we need a new setting. Why don't you use this?" So developmental edits can seem a little like, "Oh my God, it's going to be all the mistakes. I'm going to have to rewrite everything." But they're also the time where you really get to have fun with your book. In my opinion.

Rekka (16:08):
I get really excited about developmental edits because someone has challenged me on something. For example, like how I handled my POVs or a detail of why my character does this, or suggests that, you know, a stake isn't high enough, or suggests that things are happening too conveniently, you know, dominos are falling in too straight of a line. And by being challenged on these things on a broad level, I tend to get all my gears really cranking and suddenly things that, you know, don't occur to me when I'm drafting on my own from, you know, building the outline on my own, coming up with the concepts and figuring out where the book is going on my own. Suddenly when you have another person reflecting back what your story is saying to them, it gets very exciting and I get very motivated, and inspired, to come up with new solutions that, um, address the concerns and probably do some other stuff too, that weren't even brought up. But like, you know, this is where suddenly like, "Oh, these two characters come together at the end and how perfect that they end up in the same spot and that just sets this up to happen...!" And those are the sorts of, um, it feels like serendipity when all your dev edits make the story you wanted to tell, come out of the story that you actually drafted.

Kaelyn (17:55):
Aww, Rekka, that was beautiful.

Rekka (17:56):
Thank you.

Kaelyn (17:59):
So, yeah. Dev edits: they're fun. You know what's not fun? Line edits. Yeah. So once your story's, you know, finished quote-unquote. And by that, I mean that the story exists, it's complete, everyone's happy with, you know, the plot, the character arcs, the timeline, everything going on.

Rekka (18:20):
I like how you say, you know, "once your story is finished, QUOTE-UNQUOTE..."

Kaelyn (18:26):
Yeah. You thought, you thought you were done here. Um, this is— so something that you notice in editing, as you continue down the chain here, the burden shifts more and more to the editor. So line edits are next. Line edits, you are probably still doing with your actual editor. This is probably still going to be the same person. A line edit is something that is addressing writing style, language use, um, combing the manuscript for obvious errors, like run-on sentences and redundancies, at a sentence and paragraph level. So this is where— and this is also typically, especially if you're, self-publishing where you do your read aloud. "Did I just use the same word three times in one sentence? I did."

Rekka (19:13):
You will not know it until you read that thing aloud.

Kaelyn (19:17):
Um, I did. You know why? Because there's only so many ways to say "rock."

Rekka (19:21):
Right. Well, sometimes you have a word that does not stand out when you use it three times in a sentence. Other times when that word is, you know, ostentatious, then you do hear it over and over and over again. Cause you just, when you're drafting or rewriting, you just like you get a groove somewhere in your brain and a word will stick in it and you'll end up using it over and over and over again until you clear that.

Kaelyn (19:45):
Yeah. So you're going line by line and looking at this now. You've got the broad stuff. Every step we take in the editing process, we're going through it with a finer and finer tooth comb. Um, you know, for developmental edits, everybody breaks these out different ways. You know, there's like, "okay, first, we're going to address this. Then we're going to do this. Then we're going to do this." Every book's different with, you know, how to address that. Line edits are much more standardized here. The read aloud is very helpful, especially if you're self publishing, but what you're doing here is you're going and looking for like repeated words, redundant sentences, unclear pronouns, you know, maybe there's like two men in a fight and you just keep saying, "he, he, he, he" it's like, "okay, well, who got stabbed here? Who's bleeding to death on the floor who, who died? I don't even know now." I like to not do line edits right after the developmental edit is finished because you, you become like unable to see things in the manuscript. But line edits are really important because what they're also going to come up with is this is a very, very strange thing, passages that just don't read well parts of the book that to a reader who hasn't been working on this for months are not going to make sense or are going to seem disjointed. And this could be something like a shift in tone or phrasing that is a really awkward. Um, this could be digressions in the narrative that sort of take away from the scene at hand, it could be pacing related. Now let's be clear. This is not the copy edit. We're going to get to that next. You are still going to have to do sentence-level work here where you may have to add, change, and remove things. This isn't like "change 'she' to 'Rekka.'" This is "rewrite this paragraph because the whole thing is very confusing. And I don't know who just died."

Rekka (21:48):
Right.

Kaelyn (21:49):
Um, I've gone through line edits where I've crossed out entire paragraphs and said, "I need you to condense this down to one sentence, one or two sentences for the pacing of this scene, because it's a fight and this is taking too long." Um, I've added notes where it's like, I mean, my, I think my most common line edit is "describe this more, expand on this."

Rekka (22:13):
Expand on this.

Kaelyn (22:13):
Expand on this. Expand on this.

Rekka (22:15):
Tell me more. Dive deeper.

Kaelyn (22:17):
Yeah or, you know, this is where a, an editor might say, "throw in a couple words here and tell us what they're thinking or how they're feeling, throw in a reaction." This is where you're checking to make sure everything is coherent and communicating what you want it to. Line edits are an incredibly time consuming process.

Rekka (22:39):
They do seem like they might be the worst.

New Speaker (22:42):
They're not my favorite. Um, I personally can't do them for more than an hour and a half to two hours at a time, or things start to wash off your back. And this is where you've gotta be really sharp on what you're looking at and making sure everything is, is making sense. Editors do line edits differently. In some cases I will, you know, when I do this, I put a note in there of, you know, for instance, "expand on this, tell me what this person is feeling at a reaction here." In some cases I will go in and just edit the sentence if it's a matter of, you know, flipping the, uh, the phrases in the sentence, or this sentence should come before this one. Now obviously, you know, all of these, are— none of this is being dictated to authors. If it's that way for a reason, we'll discuss it. Right. But this is the first time probably that you're going to get something back from an editor and have to go through an add and accept changes.

Rekka (23:45):
That's a whole new nightmare, if you haven't worked with track changes before.

Kaelyn (23:49):
If you are to the point where you're getting ready for a line out of it, and you've never done this before, maybe talk to your editor and sort of agree on how this is going to be done. There's different ways to track changes and you can always modify it. But, you know, it's just something to keep in mind. You know, developmental edits, you're going to be getting, you know, multiple passes of that. Some of it will probably be a letter then, you know, as you get farther, further into it, it'll be, you know, notes directly in the manuscript and that sort of thing. Line edits are when you're getting back a document that is marked up, that, you know, if it were a physical copy, it will have looked like someone's stabbed it to death because it's just going to be covered in red. There's no such thing as a manuscript that is so perfect it doesn't need line edits. Some of the best writers in the world have editors for a reason, because you need a fresh set of eyes on this. I definitely will. Sometimes when working on a manuscript, if I catch something really glaring right off the bat, you know, just take care of it right then and there. But the actual line edit pass is, it's a very lengthy process to do it well.

Rekka (24:56):
I can't even imagine attempting to do a line edit. How do you stay focused and not get swept up in looking at one aspect and forget what else is going on?

Kaelyn (25:09):
I think my record was 2000 changes in like a 90,000-word manuscript. That was changes, not additions and deletions. For the author, this is the first time where something like this can seem really overwhelming because you've got to sit down and go through all of this now, and now you've got to be clear and fresh on all of it. Um, and on top of that, then sometimes your editor is going to hand you something and just say, this paragraph doesn't work and it's unclear fix it. And you're going to go, "well, I'm the one that wrote it. How am I supposed to fix this? This seems clear to me." In that case, you know, you go talk to your editor and you work through it. This is another one where you'll have a couple of calls, probably, you know, minimum, a couple to get through the whole thing. That's line edits. It is definitely my least favorite of the edits. I will. I mean, really my side. I only do two, the developmental and the line. Um, I obviously definitely prefer developmental. Line edits are they're, they're hard, but obviously very, very important. Which brings us to our third step in the editing process and the last of our true quote-unquote edits. And this is the copy edit. Now the copy editor is probably a different person.

Rekka (26:34):
In an ideal world the copy editor is a different person, because you want a new set of eyes on this.

Kaelyn (26:40):
Copy Editors are magical creatures who can at a speed incomprehensible to the mortal brain, go through a document and check for things like spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax.

Rekka (26:55):
Just a mistaken word. Like you typed the wrong word or, or a homonym.

Kaelyn (26:59):
Yeah. Incorrect hyphenations, inconsistent uh numerical formatting, inconsistent formatting in general. Weird fonts. Weird capitalizations. Any factually incorrect statement that you may have made. A good copy editor will catch things that should have been caught in line edit that weren't for whatever reason. Copy editors are the people that go through and say, "this is correct English." Now, if you're writing nonfiction, this is more straightforward. There is, you know, what typically happens is a copy editor ascribes to a certain manual of style. Then there's also, you know, depending on which dictionary you're using, Oxford versus Webster, um, which that just tends to be American versus English-English. And they'll also have, you know, their, their stylistic format, um, even in non-fiction, you know, there's things you have to grade on, like, um, "how are we writing out numbers? Are they going to be a numerical value or is it going to be a Roman numeral? Or are you going to write out the entire number?" Now when you get into science fiction and fantasy, this gets a little more tricky, obviously. So, um, a lot of times what we've done with our copy editors is provided, you know, a list of characters. "Okay, here's their names. Here's the absolute definite correct spelling. Here's a list of places. Here's the absolute correct spelling."

Rekka (28:18):
I would like to suggest as you go over the line, edits from your editor, that this is a good time to catch any name and build a glossary, if you haven't already done it. Any proper name or unique word to your world that people might be like, "huh? I wonder what that is." This is a good time to make a glossary. And then you've chosen the official spelling and you can refer to it yourself. You are going to use this glossary more than your readers ever will.

Kaelyn (28:45):
Absolutely. If you have naming conventions in your world, if there is, um, you know, like "this is how this title is formatted," "this is how you address, um, somebody from this place," uh, "this should always be..." This is what you need to give the copy editor because the copy editor needs to know what to flag as possibly incorrect. Copy editors also, I mean, like auto-correct can do some weird things sometimes, especially if these are, you know, made up names and places.

Rekka (29:24):
Neo-pronouns. Autocorrect loves to just wreck havoc on them.

Kaelyn (29:28):
Yeah. So sometimes autocorrect will change something to make it correct as autocorrect sees it. And the copy editor needs to know that that's not what that's actually supposed to look like. So arming your copy editor with the resources and information they need is super important. A copy editor is going to give you back a manuscript that is going to have thousands of changes in it, because they have been moving commas and periods— and commas, by the way, are something that your line editor is going to go and have opinions about, and then your copy editor is going to say, no, that's wrong. So there is going to be a little— don't worry, it won't just be you fighting with the copy editor here, your regular editor's going to be doing that too.

Rekka (30:14):
She's not wrong, folks.

Kaelyn (30:16):
Yeah. And you know, generally you defer to the copy editor.

Rekka (30:20):
Right. They're hired for their skillset. The previous editor was hired to help you craft a better story.

Kaelyn (30:27):
Exactly. Yes. Copy editors are very, very special people. Always be nice to copy editors.

Rekka (30:35):
They're precious and wonderful. And you're not! Going! To anger them!

Kaelyn (30:40):
No, do not anger the copy editors. Copy editing, by the way, just as a side note is an incredibly valuable skillset. We talk a lot about "copy" over the course of these episodes: "back copy," "cover copy." "Copy" is words. It's words that you have written and you were getting ready to send out into the world. A copy editor's job is to make sure the words and the grammar are being held to the standard that they are supposed to.

Rekka (31:10):
That they're doing what you want them to, which is communicating efficiently.

Kaelyn (31:15):
Anything that you have read that is published, that is not a simple sign (and even in those cases, sometimes that could've used a copy editor) has probably gone through a copy editor, or it should have at least. They're— copy editors work in all sorts of industries that are publishing adjacent. You know, like marketing companies will frequently have somebody who, maybe it's not their full-time job, but can do copy editing for them. It's an amazing skill set to have and it is something that if somebody put a gun to my head and said, "you need to copy edit this. I don't think I could, because I can not maintain that level of detailed consistency.

Rekka (31:54):
That's the thing is like, when you're talking about a novel that could be a Sanderson novel of 500,000 words, a copy editor, you know, should sit on a throne of diamonds and wear a crown and be served all their favorite—

Kaelyn (32:12):
The skulls of their enemies.

Rekka (32:14):
It is absurd, the amount of work they do to make us look good.

Kaelyn (32:19):
By the way, if you are self publishing and you're going to hire a copy editor, not to scare anyone, this is a heads up. They're not cheap.

Rekka (32:27):
They shouldn't be. Like, listen to how much work they're doing.

Kaelyn (32:30):
Yes, exactly. It's obviously different, but it's like going to hire like, you know, a welder or, you know, a, a stone mason or something. This is something that they have been trained to do.

Rekka (32:42):
So pay them.

Kaelyn (32:44):
Yeah. Copy editors: wonderful people, pay them, be very nice to them. So that's really the last stage in like the editing editing. And you're going, "Oh, well, that's great. I'm done." You're not. You're not.

Rekka (32:55):
Oh, sweet summer child. You are not done.

Kaelyn (32:59):
Because next is proofreading. Now, if you're sitting at home and going like, "Oh my God, proofreading, like my teacher would tell us to do in elementary school before I turned something in? Like, 'Oh, make sure you proofread this.'" First of all, your teacher was using that word incorrectly. Um, what they were actually telling you to do is copy edit.

Rekka (33:19):
Well, no. Copy edit and then proofread. What your teacher didn't tell you was to do it twice.

Kaelyn (33:24):
Yes. Yes. So let's do some terms here. Cause you know how I love definitions. We talked about what a copy editor is. They edit copy. We know what copy is. Proofreaders: that's exactly what they do. They read proofs. So this is, you know, in the days when you still had to use to print these things and mark them up manually, you would print a proof. So like if you've ever gotten formal pictures taken and it says like there's a watermark on there that says like "proof only: not for distribution" or something, that means that that's the version that's not final. We have to look at this and make changes to it. A proof editor is checking for the quality of the book before it goes into mass production. "How does this look now?" Is, you know, and Rekka can certainly speak more to this than I can, being a graphic designer. Um, but is this like, "are there huge rivers through the text? Are the margins okay? Are there massive gaps between words?" A proof editor is also going to flag any mistakes that they see, obviously. You're always flagging mistakes as you're working through this.

Rekka (34:34):
And an author also gets their proofs, um, sometimes called galleys. And it's now your last chance to make sure that everything came across the way you intended. And sometimes, that can involve the placement of a word on a page. "Does this sentence get chopped up and become unreadable because of the way it falls across columns or pages?"

Kaelyn (35:02):
Yeah. And you know, I did this once with Rekka and there's all of these terms I had never heard before. Like um what do you call it? An orphan when there's like—

Rekka (35:10):
Right? You've got orphans, widows, rivers, there's lots of terms that, um, it's up to the graphic designer. The page layout artists has hopefully looking at these too. Uh, the publisher is hopefully looking at these too. Hopefully there's like the entire team is, either together or separately, sitting down. You know, you want to say that in this digital age, we don't need to print these out anymore, but you really do. Because looking at it on the screen is not going to show it to you the way it's going to appear in the printout. And keep in mind, we're not talking about the e-book proof here.

Kaelyn (35:47):
And it's funny. Cause I was going to say actually is the other thing that a designer and a proofreader is going to do is try to account for anything that could end up looking really funny on an e-reader. There's only so much you can do with that. But there are certain things that stand out that are like, "this is just going to look strange."

Rekka (36:04):
Yeah. So depending on how everything's structured, because it's entirely possible that you have a different person doing the design of the print book than you do creating the e-book, or you may have somebody who comes in and takes the designer's files and converts them to an EPUB to try and basically get the most recent version. Um, but then you have to watch out for things that a designer for print will do that does not translate well to EPUB. And um, so there, there's a lot of work on the proof that like, I'm aware of and this all may sound like a big pile of overwhelm, but basically what Kaelyn is bringing up is that there's a reason that people print out or create proofs. And that's where the word comes from for "proofreading," because basically it should be called "last chance editing" because after this, it costs a lot of money to make any changes. At this point, it will cost money to make changes. But this is one copy. When you have a print run of 10,000, now we are talking "Too late. Sorry."

Kaelyn (37:17):
I mean, it's also it's design and quality check too. It's you know, for all of the time we were talking about when you're doing a line that it's about, does this make sense? Is this going to distract the reader? The proofreader, the designer, is doing this too, where they're looking at this and going, "hang on, like something's weird here. And this is going to be confusing." That's really, as Rekka said, this is your last chance. This is when—

Rekka (37:47):
This is when you hope you find any mistake that made it through the cracks, because these are going to be the mistakes that those one star reviewers zero in on, and just drag you across the coals for. And sometimes it's nothing to do with you, the writer, um, sometimes it's a formatting issue. Sometimes it's the result of weird behavior from copy-paste between programs.

Kaelyn (38:10):
But I love those reviewers that are like, "and the author clearly did not check their margins." Like, no, they didn't. They're the author. That's not their job.

Rekka (38:17):
That's not their job. Yeah. Self-publishing maybe, but even then a lot of these things are outside the author's control depending on the tools they use.

Kaelyn (38:25):
So yeah. So then at that point you are actually done, that's it.

Rekka (38:31):
One hopes. Now it's time for your, um, launch strategy and your marketing plan and your book tour and... Sorry, you're not done.

Kaelyn (38:41):
That's your edits. And we, you know, we made it sound like this was just a neat step-by-step, but you know, let's, let's be honest. We all know that's not true.

Rekka (38:52):
Oh, God. It's like, "hurry, hurry, hurry. What the heck does this mean? I don't understand this grammar rule you're explaining to me and I don't have the Chicago Manual of Style. So I'm just going to try and interpret what you said or maybe I'll rephrase the sentence, so we don't have to even have this conversation. And then I'm going to submit it back to you..."

Kaelyn (39:11):
The times where I was like, "look, I'm done with this word. I'm not doing this anymore. We're just getting rid of it."

Rekka (39:17):
Sometimes we just write around a word. Yeah.

Kaelyn (39:20):
You know what I would say and what I hope anybody who, especially if you're going through this for the first time is: take this, and I'm not saying this to sound condescending, take this as a learning experience. This is a really difficult thing to do. Um, you know, like you thought writing the book was hard. Well now you've got to edit it, but take it as a learning experience where you can try to gather as much information about the thoughts and process and everything that goes into this on your own. You know, really try to engage and pay attention to what's happening. Not only because it's your book, but because this is going to help make you a better writer.

Rekka (39:57):
Oh, there's very little that you can do about having to go through this process except appreciate that, um, that it is making your book better.

Kaelyn (40:09):
And look, I think we've all at some point picked up a book that clearly wasn't edited. Well. Um, I can think of a few off the top of my head. I have one in particular, I remember mentioning to Rekka and she said, "Oh, how do you like that?" And I said, "I've never read a book more desperately in need of an editor in my life." Um, I think everybody, you know, kind of goes into this with the, "okay, well, whatever, then I just need to edit it." That that, child, will be your undoing. Um, editing's a process. The more you can learn about it as you're working through this process, the more it's going to benefit you as a writer in the long run. Rekka, Would you agree?

Rekka (40:56):
Nah, nah. Just, wing it.

Kaelyn (40:59):
Just slap a bunch of words on the page and be done.

Rekka (41:02):
You know what, Word has spellcheck. You're good.

Kaelyn (41:05):
Basically the same thing. Yeah and by the way, on that note real quick, you know, this is for both writers and self-publishers. Um, you know, for those who are going the more traditional publishing route, taking a pass at this, you know, in doing some line edits yourself before you submit it is a good thing to do. No one's expecting it to be perfect, but you know, addressing any sort of egregious errors is always a good step.

Rekka (41:29):
And you mentioned earlier, and we didn't really emphasize it enough. Reading your book out loud to yourself. This is something that like after the surgeries I had and the treatment I had last year, is going to be very difficult for me in the future. I am still going to do it. I don't care if my book is a Sanderson-sized doorstop. It is so valuable to read the work out loud and hear the words the way you put them on the page.

Kaelyn (41:54):
I, for my day job, send a lot of emails and um, a lot of times, you know, I'll be doing like some co-work time with people on my team, and I will have to keep muting things because I read emails out loud before I send them. Um, so yeah, if you are, you know, for tips for both people submitting for traditional publication, people who are self-publishing—obviously, if you're self publishing, you need to be much more thorough—take a pass at yourself, look word has, you know, some decent, uh, intelligence about this now. It's not perfect.

Rekka (42:30):
It's not great. I would not rely on it alone.

Kaelyn (42:32):
No. Well, we're, we're getting there. Read it aloud, but then also: Grammarly. And I didn't want to get too into the weeds on this in this episode because Grammarly is not a panacea. It is not a cure all. It is not going to make your book perfect, but it is a good way to take a pass at something and to also use it to start recognizing patterns of things that you've done.

Rekka (42:56):
Also, its algorithm is getting a lot better.

Kaelyn (42:59):
The algorithm is getting fantastic. I would say, especially for self publishing, obviously the paid version of this is worth it.

Rekka (43:06):
Yep. It's a yearly subscription.

Kaelyn (43:08):
Um, one thing is just do not let it integrate into everything on your computer because it's going to try to, and it will ruin your life. Yeah.

Rekka (43:15):
Yes I am— I have a Grammarly subscription and the only thing I do is go to grammarly.com, login, and paste my text into their editor.

Kaelyn (43:25):
It's going to be like, "Hey, you like Grammarly, right? Wouldn't you like to write fantastically all the time, give us access to your email, give us access to your web browser, give us access to your texts." And then you're going to hate yourself.

Rekka (43:38):
And it's like pulling out ticks to get it back out again. Plus it messes up forms. At least it did the last time I let it anywhere near my web browser. It will mess with the forms that you're trying to submit, um, that have like the built-in editors and stuff. It was a mess. Anyway, don't do that. On top of Grammarly, there is also ProWritingAid. It used to be like, it's basically Grammarly, but has a different algorithm. And so you would run through one and then run through the other and then maybe it would be cleaner for having done both. Now. ProWritingAid has a bunch of different modes. It lets you set the reading level that you intended to write at, and then tell you whether you are along the median for that, overall, and point out words that you are using that are not within your expected reading level, and all this good stuff. So if you write, um, middle-grade, ProWritingAid might be a tool that you definitely want to consider as well. Like we said, we didn't mean to get into the toolbox end of these things, but these are things that you can do on your own to really get as clean a draft as you can.

Rekka (44:43):
You know, people who read romance seem to be a lot more forgiving of typos and errors than people who read within a genre that is more typically traditionally published, which is not to say that traditional publishers get it right all the time. But the fans and readers are much less tolerant of that.

Kaelyn (45:05):
I think science fiction, especially hard military SciFi is the one, in my experience, that's going to go after you for typos the most.

Rekka (45:13):
Well, they're going to go after you for a lot of things. So we're not even going to go there today. All right. So, um, any last thoughts on editing and the different levels of editing and can you go backward? Like if you realize there's a big error— like here's, here's my worry as an author, is that the publisher is going to get me to copy edits and then in my copy, edit review, I realize, "Oh my God, that's an egregious, uh, continuity error." Or "this would be very offensive."

Kaelyn (45:48):
It's definitely happened where, you know, it's like, "Oh crap, Laura never did come out of the bathroom."

Rekka (45:54):
Yeah. Right. To use our example from earlier.

Kaelyn (45:56):
Like at this point, you, you know, you call a sit down and you say, all right, we got to figure out a way to resolve this. And by that point, you know, it's not, you're out of the traditional editing process at that point. You're, you know, you're doing containment strategy by then. Um, if you've gotten that far in the book and there is a giant mistake that's going to have massive rippling effects through the entirety of the book and nobody caught it to this point—because presumably at least three or four set of eyes have been on this by now—and nobody's caught it that's means there's probably some larger issues here that need to be addressed as well. Um, but look it's definitely happened where it's like, "Oh my God, well, what happened to that one character?" And then you've got to go find a way to address it.

Kaelyn (46:45):
And what I've found to the best way to do is to isolate it, to say, "okay, Laura went into the bathroom and never came back out." If the easy explanation to that is Laura is not an important character. She was just a friend that drops by,

Rekka (46:58):
Bye Laura.

Kaelyn (47:00):
Yeah. We add a sentence where "I heard Laura leave and the door closed behind her. I guess I'll catch up with her next week." If Laura is somebody that you know needs to be addressed, maybe this is a series. Maybe later we find out what happens to Laura. Um, there's ways to deal with it. But my, my favorite strategy is containment. Isolate the problem and then figure out where we're going to address it down the line.

Rekka (47:25):
In any level of editing, whether you are coming in too late to catch a problem, or you are coming in on schedule, and this is just your first line edit, or your, even your dev edit. Sometimes the solution is to remove a thing that's a problem rather than to write in why it's not a problem.

Kaelyn (47:45):
Did Laura need to be there at all? Did we need to see her? Did she need to come in and use the bathroom?

Rekka (47:51):
I mean, to Laura, she needed to use the bathroom, but for the purposes of our story, I'm not sure what kind of slice of life story this is, but I'm, it's not sold me so far.

Kaelyn (48:04):
Um, this will happen occasionally. My best advice I can give you is: don't panic, deep breaths, figure out a way to adjust the problem.

Rekka (48:13):
There's going to be a simpler solution than your first panicked worry might—especially you get more panicked later in the process, this all starts to happen.

Kaelyn (48:23):
Absolutely. Yep.

New Speaker (48:24):
You have a minute to take a breath and think of a simpler way out of it.

Kaelyn (48:28):
Take a breath. Your editor's there to help you with this. You know, bring in somebody else that's read the book if possible, and get yourselves a cup of tea, tea, coffee, wine, whatever, and figure out how to address this. There—I've never come across a continuity error or a plot hole or something so far into the process that it wasn't fixable.

Rekka (48:50):
No, I think that's, that's a good place to leave people. A little bit of hope. It's never, it's never too late. It's never too big to fix.

Kaelyn (48:56):
Yep. Well, anyway, so that's edits. Um, you know, the one takeaway I would have here is: try to enjoy them as best you can, because this is, this is part of the writing process. And it's a part of the writing process where you can really learn a lot. I think. So. Um, so anyway.

Rekka (49:20):
Yep. If you have any more questions about editing, if you really feel like Kaelyn missed the, the question that's been burning in your soul, you can at us @WMBcast on Instagram and Twitter. You can support us at patreon.com/WMBcast. And, um, if you could leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts for this episode or any episode, the podcast in general, just leave a little like half, half formed phrase. We'll edit it for you.

Kaelyn (49:50):
Or just make like a winky face.

Rekka (49:53):
Yeah. Like a Winky face is fine. Um, but if you have a comment or a compliment or a criticism or question, please leave it at Apple podcasts for our podcast, which will help other people find our podcast. Um, I've been hearing from a few people lately that they are tuning in for the first time and bingeing. Um, there's a lot of people, there's a lot of people on treadmills, um, who are listening and other, you know, kind of like time-consuming things. And I'm just like, thank you so much for spending that time with us and, um, appreciating what we have to say enough to continue spending that time with us. So, um, that's awesome. And, uh, that's a great thing to leave in a rating or review. Winky face.

Kaelyn (50:35):
"Winky face. Excellent treadmill listening."

Rekka (50:39):
There you go. All right. We will talk to you all in two weeks. Thank you so much again for listening and, uh, see you next time.

Tuesday Mar 02, 2021

Episode 55 - Poetry Brained with A.Z. Louise

Tuesday Mar 02, 2021

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!

Lots of links this episode!

A.Z.’s website https://www.azlouise.com/
@az_louise https://twitter.com/az_louise
“Chorus of the Captains” by Amanda Gorman (Performed at the NFL Super Bowl) https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/super-bowl-2021-read-the-transcript-of-amanda-gorman-poem-chorus-of-the-captains/
The Hidebehind: https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Hidebehind
The Iliad: http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.1.i.html
Shakespeare: http://shakespeare.mit.edu/
Poem “She’s Not A Phoenix” by A.Z. Louise (Strange Horizons): http://strangehorizons.com/poetry/shes-not-a-phoenix/
AASHTO Manual: https://www.scribd.com/document/118295981/AASHTO
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer: https://www.jeffvandermeer.com/book/annihilation/
Twisted Moon: http://www.twistedmoonmag.com/5/louise.html
Submission Grinder: https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/

Episode Transcript (by Rekka, blame her for all errors)

Kaelyn (00:00:00):

Welcome back to another episode of We Make Books, a show about writing publishing and everything in between. I'm Kaelyn Considine. I'm the acquisitions editor for Parvus Press.

Rekka (00:00:07):

I'm Rekka. I write science fiction and fantasy as R J Theodore. And I might start writing some poetry as R J Theodore.

Kaelyn (00:00:15):

Yeah, really? Gonna, you're going to take that dive, that plunge?

Rekka (00:00:19):

Well, look, I've written a lot of poetry in my life. I've just spared everybody.

Kaelyn (00:00:24):

I didn't know that about you actually. I feel, um, not betrayed. Um, what's the word I'm looking for here? Uh, surprised.

Rekka (00:00:33):

Surprised. But not disappointed. I hope.

Kaelyn (00:00:35):

No, no, of course not. I've never disappointed at any of your writing. Uh, so yeah, we, um, We Make Books took a little bit of a turn—but it turns out not too much, if you listen to the episode—um, into the realm of poetry, because you know, it turns out people do actually publish poems and stuff.

Rekka (00:00:52):

Yeah, quite a few of the markets that publish the short stories that we sub out (and sometimes trunk) are also seeking poetry and some exclusively, and some anthologies are all about poetry, and some single author anthologies end up being all about poetry. So if you've got a poetic bone in your finger somewhere, maybe this is the episode you need to hear to, um, try and draw some of that out.

Kaelyn (00:01:16):

Rekka was able to interview poet A.Z. Louise, who, um, was kind enough to take the time to sit down and, you know, talk about like some things I really didn't know about poetry and the publishing industry.

Rekka (00:01:28):

Yeah, it was great to have A.Z.. A.Z. Louise is a lover of birds, a killer of houseplants and a former civil engineer. Their love of speculative fiction has been lifelong, but they became a speculative poet by accident. Their work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fiyah, and The Future Fire.

Kaelyn (00:01:45):

I think poetry is a little intimidating. I don't know why a poem is so much more intimidating than a full length, novel to a lot of people, but it certainly is for me.

Rekka (00:01:55):

I think there's a certain expectation of highbrow, um, of elevated intellect that is required for good poem or to understand a good poem. There, there seems to be some sort of requirement to get in the door to poetry.

Kaelyn (00:02:16):

Yeah. I think everybody's got this notion in their head that like to understand poetry, you need to have gone to school for it, which I don't know why nobody thinks that about writing.

Rekka (00:02:26):

Well, I hope it's not true about writing cause I didn't go to school for writing.

Kaelyn (00:02:30):

Yeah, exactly. Um, you know, and I think there's definitely a lot of theory and craft behind poetry to be sure. Um, and you know, this is, uh, it's an area of publishing that I think, in mainstream publishing, is not talked about as much. So, um, A.Z. was kind enough to spend some time with Rekka going through some of the nuances of it. It's very interesting.

Rekka (00:02:51):

I think so.

Kaelyn (00:02:52):

Yeah.

Rekka (00:02:52):

And I wanna try it now. I don't know when it will, but I'm gonna.

Kaelyn (00:02:57):

Well, um, on that note, we're going to let Rekka go, uh, you know, compose us a nice haiku about—.

Rekka (00:03:03):

Maybe a Limerick to start.

Kaelyn (00:03:05):

Oh definitely a Limerick. Yes. To start.

Rekka (00:03:20):

The world has just seen the first major American sporting event with a poem as featured part of the entertainment, um, which is just wild to consider. Um, because it doesn't feel like the world is getting more open to that sort of thing. But at the same time, this was scheduled like long before the same poet, Amanda Gorman, um, read a very moving poem at the inauguration of the president. So somehow poetry was already on the schedule for— I'm talking about the NFL Super Bowl. I just don't know how that happened.

A.Z. Louise (00:03:57):

It was so wild, absolutely wild to see.

Rekka (00:04:00):

And I love it. And um, so it is total coincidence that we're doing a poetry episode not long after that. just like I said, I needed a cohost and I jumped on A.Z..

A.Z. Louise (00:04:11):

Hello!

Rekka (00:04:11):

Because A.Z. was missing podcasting. Um, so yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be very happy if poetry, I wanna say came back. I don't know if that's fair to say, but it feels like poetry is more of a 18th, 19th century thing. And here we are in the 21st century and we are getting a lot of poetry, but it's in the form of like, "I have eaten the Lego pieces that were on the carpet and which you were probably building into the razor crest, forgive me. They were delicious. So sharp and so crunchy." There's been a different sort of poetry discourse lately, but there are poems constantly being published and there are poets out there constantly creating new poems. So let's, um, let's talk about poetry cause I want to acknowledge it. And if anyone in our audience has felt like, okay, I love poetry, but I have to write short stories to get published. Like, let's, let's put that in the bin. And so tell us, cause you write both.

A.Z. Louise (00:05:15):

Yes.

Rekka (00:05:16):

Um, what makes you write a poem instead of a short story? And when you write a poem, what's your thought process in terms of like where it's going to go when you write it, or do they just sort of happen?

A.Z. Louise (00:05:34):

So I kind of have two different modes for poetry. Uh, one is where I feel like I either miss poetry or need a break from prose and I just need to let the ideas and images flow. And the other mood I have for poetry is I'm processing something. So a lot of times for me, poetry is a first pass on emotions. So if you have wronged me, I've written a poem about you. Because frequently that's where I go when I'm really upset about something and I don't feel ready to talk to another person about it. And I just want to process it with myself for a minute first. Um, so frequently I will just have a line appear in my head and it will be too strange or too unstructured to be part of a short story. Um, and then after I put it down on the page, I can connect it to other ideas and that's how it becomes a poem.

Rekka (00:06:47):

Okay.

A.Z. Louise (00:06:48):

So it's sort of a connect the dots process, which is different from my short fiction process, because my short fiction process, I typically have a specific scene in my head, um, with specific people who are doing or saying specific things.

Rekka (00:07:08):

Okay.

A.Z. Louise (00:07:09):

So it's much more primordial. Um, however, I have written a poem and actually submitted it a few times and the other poems I had submitted it with got picked up, but not that one. And I was like, okay, there's something about this that isn't working. And I ended up writing a whole short story out of it

Rekka (00:07:33):

Based on the poem or using some of the words from the poem and just making the poem flow less like a lyrical experience.

A.Z. Louise (00:07:41):

Yeah, it was... So do you know what a Hide-Behind is?

Rekka (00:07:48):

I do not. And I bet some of our listeners, don't either.

A.Z. Louise (00:07:51):

So it's um, uh, a fearsome critter. Um, so it's this Appalachian cryptid. Um, and one of the things you have to do to protect yourself from the Hide-Behind is to drink being drunk will keep the cryptid from eating you, I guess. Maybe he's on the wagon. I don't know. Um—

Rekka (00:08:15):

Or he doesn't care or, you know, like you just won't care if the Hide-Behind eats you at that point and that's the going advice.

A.Z. Louise (00:08:21):

So that, um, that idea really stuck with me in part because my mom is from that area. So I felt that kind of cultural connection, but also because to me, the Hide-Behind is, uh, a creature who is dealing with trauma. Because if you were a logger back in the day in the Appalachians, your life expectancy was not very long and you were losing friends all the time because it's an extremely dangerous profession. And so that hit me because, um, I am Black and that hit me as "We are drinking. We are coping with an inter intergenerational trauma." So I wrote a poem about a father whose job is to hunt the Hide-Behind. So he is drunk a lot, but when he comes home and he's sober, he's teaching his daughter small scraps of his hide behind hunting craft, knowing that she'll have to go into it. Um, even though he wishes she didn't have to. So it is like a Black parent coming home and having to talk to their kids about all the horrible stuff in the world. And you wish you could shelter your kids from that, but you have to tell them, so in looking at this little poem and what I had done with it, I was like, "Oh, that's a whole story." Yeah. Obviously that's an entire story that deserves more than like 14 or 15 lines, which is my usual length of a poem. So it just sort of—the poem grew beyond being a poem and needed to be a story, which is not to say that a poem is less than a short story. It is that, for me with a poem, I'm creating mood and emotion and with a short story, I am creating, um, more of a scene. So a poem for me is like a piece of music that you listen to. And a short story is a play that you would watch or a musical.

Rekka (00:10:40):

Yeah. Or even the music video sometimes. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, I, when you try and I mean, the plural, you, um, when you try to define poetry in terms of how much it should encompass, I find that really tricky because I mean, you have the Iliad, which is technically a poem. You have Shakespeare, which is technically poetry. Um, what, like— English class taught me in public school, so many things about the structure of poems and how poems should behave, never really encompassed the subject matter of poetry and the kinds of poems that I liked, uh, such as the Highwayman, were nothing like the poems I was writing, which were these scraps of teenage angst. And I'm not going to give myself any more credit for them than that, even though, like, I did have one of them published, but it was one of those like "Send in your poem and $40" kind of thing. So I'm going to put an asterisk on that one. But it's funny, I recently considered going back and sort of writing like a response to that poem from this end of my life. And—

A.Z. Louise (00:12:08):

That sounds like a really cool idea.

Rekka (00:12:11):

Yeah. And it was a short poem too. I think it was like nine lines or something like that. And I feel like it would be so completely an interpretable to anyone else even paired like that, even if I gave you some context. So I'm always curious how publications can say "this is a good poem," you know, or, um, "this is the kind of poem we're looking for." Do you think there's a format that commercial or literary poetry magazines are looking for?

A.Z. Louise (00:12:46):

Uh, so I write almost exclusively speculative poetry. Like, I write other poetry, but I don't usually go out and try and get published because I just love speculative stuff. I didn't even know that you could write speculative poetry, and then I saw a call for submissions. I was like, "Oh, hey, that's a thing." And then I went back to the poetry that I loved in high school and college. And for me, poetry is very much about feeling and metaphor. And I write mostly very short form poetry. So if it's not more than a page, it's poetry, like, and if I feel like it's going to be longer, it's not poetry. But you know, I try to work, uh, the poetic phrase and metaphor into each line of what I'm writing when I write short fiction. But I think that when you're trying to sell a poem, it has to encompass something.

A.Z. Louise (00:13:57):

Uh, so I have a lot of poems about anger because I am a Black person, I am mentally ill, I'm queer on Earth. So when I'm writing a poem about something like that, I am trying to—usually through metaphor because it's about like a dragon or something—I'm trying to encompass the whole world of things, uh, that are causing that anger into a very small package. So every single line has to inform the other lines and frequently my poetry is... It works in a bunch of different orders and I have to work and work and work to figure out what the best order for each line is. Uh, and because short fiction generally has more plot and more character.

Rekka (00:15:03):

Right. There's a sequence of events.

A.Z. Louise (00:15:06):

You can't write character development, say, out of order, it's going to be weird. And obviously there are stories that are told out of order, but, um, there is still, uh, a basic structure there.

A.Z. Louise (00:15:23):

And, uh, obviously people talk a lot about how, uh, many editors are—and readers and writers are—trapped in a very Western sort of three structure. Plot-driven conflict driven structure. And while that is true, and I'm very mad about it, uh, because I do work outside of that a lot because of my mental illness—my brain simply doesn't put things together in the way that other people's do—um, there are still many different structures outside of the Western Canon, the editor or reader just doesn't know about it, you know? Um, they're not structureless. Um, they just have a structure that is not known to the reader. Um, now there— obviously poetry has structure, but I read mostly freeverse. So I'm just out there throwing things out. Um, and then sort of collecting them. It's like catching butterflies in a net. And then I was going to say mounting them, but that's like really sad. That's real, real sad. Um—

Rekka (00:16:40):

And, and studying them before, releasing them

A.Z. Louise (00:16:42):

Again. Yes, I am taking, I'm taking each little butterfly, I'm drawing a little picture in my field notes, I'm taking my notes and then I'm setting them free. Um, and then I collate my notes into something that feels whole, if that makes any sense.

Rekka (00:16:58):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the ultimate judge of when the poem is doing what you want is of course you, the composer of the poem. Yes. Um, I, and, and that part makes a certain amount of sense to me. I have, in my poetry that I've written, and we're talking years ago, um, though like making the bed like a week ago, a poem sort of started to come to me and I was sort of like piecing together. Like, I didn't know where it was going, but I felt like, "okay, you know, this piece or that piece might need to change." Um, which was weird for me to be like analyzing it before I ever wrote it down. Cause you know, making the bed. Um, but then in my head I'm immediately going "Okay, but someone's going to judge this without any of the context of where I wrote it from, and to me, the only way to take something that was coming to me from a deeply personal reaction to something was to make it so, either vague as to be universal, or specific as to have a plot structure or something, uh, if not plot structure, then like thesis statement and supportive arguments.

A.Z. Louise (00:18:18):

They give the context to the reader.

Rekka (00:18:21):

Yeah, In your experience, do you feel like the magazines respond better to something that feels, I mean, feels universal or feels deeply personal? Because like, for example, She's Not a Phoenix, which you had published in Strange Horizons is clearly deeply personal.

A.Z. Louise (00:18:38):

Yes, yes. For sure. That's an anger poem, that's a slight poem. I have been slighted!

Rekka (00:18:45):

But it's something I can relate to, even though I do not have the experience that you do, that the poem came from. Um, and I— like, I'm just, I'm in awe of it. And I want to know how you did it and how it, how it developed and like why did Strange Horizons pick it?

A.Z. Louise (00:19:08):

That poem is obviously a metaphor for something that happened to me and—

Rekka (00:19:14):

And our listeners can find it in the show notes it's available online publicly, which is why I'm using it as an example. Um, so that they can go read it and feel the space in the chest where the bird belongs kind-of-thing that I'm reacting to. Like, um, the line in specifics is, um, "My rib cage, a crucible too hot to hold her." Like that is a big feel, you know? And I feel like everybody can relate to that. And I feel like this poem at the same time is ineffable to me because it came from you and I don't know why, even reading it.

A.Z. Louise (00:19:59):

So that one was about feeling betrayed. I am a person who often feels like I'm too much. Um, so that line is about all the times I have felt like I'm too much. And the thing is, is that everyone on Earth has felt betrayed. Most people have felt like they are too much for somebody else. And I feel that one of the beautiful things about Twitter is that, um, it is easy to see that almost every feeling you've ever had somebody else has had too.

Rekka (00:20:38):

Right, yeah!

A.Z. Louise (00:20:38):

And so when I wrote it, it did feel, it actually did feel so personal that I didn't think anyone would pick it up. And then the first place I submitted it took it and heck, Oh my goodness. It's Strange Horizons! I love Strange Horizons!

Rekka (00:20:54):

Yeah. I mean, what a, what a bingo card moment too.

A.Z. Louise (00:20:57):

I was shook. So it was kind of like, "Oh, this is one of those things where somebody tweets something super relatable and it immediately goes viral." Like I felt like I had captured that feeling of seeing a complete stranger on the internet experiencing the exact same feelings I'd had. And nobody, I mean, it's not that everyone has experienced the exact same sequence of events that spurred me to write that poem. But I do feel like even if somebody didn't get the idea of betrayal out of that poem, they probably still felt it. Um, and I'm not saying that you have to make your feelings universal because we can talk about how the entire whiteness and, you know, straightness and neuro-typicality et cetera of publishing frequently tells you that say, your characters are not relatable enough. So I don't think you want to be writing to be relatable so that an editor will read something and say, "Oh, I felt that before, I will buy this poem." Um, but to know that whoever is reading your poem will assign meaning to it no matter what you put in it, I mean, your making-the-bed poem: somebody might get something totally, completely different from what you put into it, but you have to make, um, you'd have to make the metaphors, um, speak. If that makes sense. It's really hard to describe.

Rekka (00:22:47):

Yeah. It's almost like the way you write it, you make it more personal, but in doing so, you make it more relatable.

A.Z. Louise (00:22:55):

Yes, yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. The, the, the more you dig down deep into yourself, the more people will read it and get some crumb of what you're feeling and be able to apply it to their own feelings. And I think that's why poetry is really powerful. And actually I wanted to bring it back to when you mentioned the poetry we're taught in school. Um, because one of the things I was not taught about, because I went to a incredibly white school, I think there were a dozen black kids in the whole school.

Rekka (00:23:29):

That is more than I had in my, very, very white school.

A.Z. Louise (00:23:32):

Yeah. So one thing I didn't have a huge education on is rap and hip hop, and that's poetry! And so popular is because even if you are rapping about something that somebody else has never experienced, people love it so much because they feel it. So.

A.Z. Louise (00:23:55):

Also forget iambic pentameter, to hear somebody rapping, it is the most like awe-inspiring jaw-dropping thing.

A.Z. Louise (00:24:03):

Yeah. I truly wish that my poetry felt like it could slide into that because I love it. So the form of poetry can go so many places and touch so many people. And I feel like that's why it's super important to drill deep down into what you are feeling because you never know who's going to read it and really feel it because one of the poems I love the most is "This is just to say," because my mom was getting her English major when I was a child and she had this gigantic tome, like four inches thick of poetry. And she would read to me out of it, um, for her reading assignments. And one of the poems she read to me was that one. And it reminded me of my grandma's house, um, where we would go in the summer. And it gave me such a feeling of belonging that has stuck with me my entire life. So I am that very corny person, who says that "This is just to say" is their favorite phone, cause it hit me exactly right.

Rekka (00:25:13):

And you know, when you expand poetry into, um, you know, the different forms we've talked about, like, I grew up reading the Highwayman and like, other European poems, and I am—you know, like I enjoyed them. I got stories out of them. There was, there was something in there for me. But as soon as I got out of my, you know, Connecticut life and I went somewhere where I was exposed to other peoples whose experiences I had never been exposed to before. And suddenly my favorite poems were music, talking about things that my poetry classes would never have considered appropriate subject matter. We'll just put it that way. Like I looked at while we were talking, I looked up the definition of poetry because I expected irony. And here it is: A poem is a metrical composition, a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme and characterized by imagination and poetic diction." Like, there is nothing in that about connecting to other people and their humanity and relating or anything like that.

A.Z. Louise (00:26:32):

I love it so much. I'm so happy right now!

Rekka (00:26:36):

It's just the worst, right? And I think that's, the problem is like we are, when we are instructed on what a poem is, we, we, I don't know. We get the implication that there are masters of it. And then everybody else who should not even try.

A.Z. Louise (00:26:53):

It, it, I think it's really similar to the way that, I mean, prose is taught, right? You get a book and then you dissect it into a million tiny pieces until it's no longer enjoyable. Um, and that's what your teachers teach you, is like, deep reading. And the thing is, I love deep reading and I love criticizing my favorite things. It brings me joy to pick apart the things that I love. Cause I'm the worst. Um—

Rekka (00:27:19):

No, I do the same thing. Like I exit a movie or something like that, and I absolutely spend the next hour and a half ruining it for my husband and he goes, "But I thought you enjoyed it?" I'm like, "I did."

A.Z. Louise (00:27:28):

Yeah. Yeah.

Rekka (00:27:30):

"But these things could be fixed."

A.Z. Louise (00:27:31):

My story brain completely turns off when I'm in the movie and that over the next week I start remembering things and I'm like, "Oh man, I have to annoy someone with this. Right now."

Rekka (00:27:43):

Yeah. So I understand like enjoying the, the criticism aspect of it. Um, but— I'm sorry, I cut you off to relate to what you were saying.

A.Z. Louise (00:27:56):

That definition is really funny to me because it reminds me of what's in the AASHTO manual, which is the manual of stuff you need to know to engineer a road. Cause I was a roadway design engineer. Um, and the thing is, is that this frigging book is impenetrable and all you really need from it is to know like what's the acceptable width of a sidewalk. It's five feet, because people who use wheelchairs need to be able to properly use a sidewalk.

Rekka (00:28:29):

Right. Let's say "clear space of a sidewalk." Exactly. Cause as soon as people start filling it with lamps and small gardens and railings and uh, let's say sidewalk dining, suddenly.

A.Z. Louise (00:28:42):

Yeah. Actually.

A.Z. Louise (00:28:43):

I'm sorry. I love accessibility. I — that's a whole other podcast [episode] we need to start.

A.Z. Louise (00:28:48):

The first engineering project I ever worked on was a sidewalk project. So I have a lot of feelings about accessibility for sidewalks and I will fight about it, and how much more frequently they need to be maintained. Let's be real.

Rekka (00:29:00):

Right. Yeah. Um, but I was, uh, I did a major in interior design temporarily before I switched to graphic design. And the, um, the rules of ADA were, um, like gospel to me, whereas everyone else in the room was like, "but I want to do this." So I, I have that. I have that sort of sense of like, "no, no, no, this is how it should be. And this is the bare minimum" versus all that. But this is unrelated to poetry, except that poetry is very accessible. Continue.

A.Z. Louise (00:29:34):

I'm metaphoring again, as you do. When you go into this manual, it's completely impenetrable and there's all this math and it sounds terrible. And it would never, in a million years be accessible to someone who didn't go to engineering school. But once you dig down, you actually have to use a lot of creativity to make your project work, because there's going to be a lot of stuff that gets in the way it's like, "Oh, you know what? The water resources guys are telling me that I have to put a manhole here." Or, "Okay. So the lady over in environmental engineering is telling me we can't disturb this because there's mussels." Um, so you have to use every ounce of your creativity to work around all of these things that are getting in the way of you just putting a straight dag sidewalk, um, and making sure it's wide enough to be useful for humans.

Rekka (00:30:29):

Right. Right.

A.Z. Louise (00:30:30):

That kind of idea is, uh, something I have taken into my creative life, which is that, when you write a short story, you're going to run up against stuff that you didn't mean to happen. Like, one of the things that writers say the most frequently is that "my characters are doing stuff I don't want them to make Them stop!" Um, so, um, you are kind of harnessing your creativity, um, to make it run in the directions that you want. You're kind of guiding the river. Um, and with poetry, you're doing that, but you're doing it in a little bit of a different way because it is so chaotic for me. Just immediate chaos. And you do, you have to go with it a lot more than, um, you might with like a short story or a novel, um, which you might be able to eat into your outline a little bit better. Right? So I think that's why I like free verse, because you take all of the rules and you slam dunk them directly in the trash.

Rekka (00:31:42):

And thank goodness for that.

A.Z. Louise (00:31:43):

Which is very freeing for me, someone who, uh, loves rules. It's also really counter intuitive.

Rekka (00:31:52):

I think in terms of like the, the rhythm of the piece. If even in freeverse, we sort of develop a rhythm to the way our words flow. It's not like no rules at all. It's, "I am going to honor my natural rhythm and the word choice is more important than, you know, how long the line is."

A.Z. Louise (00:32:14):

Yeah. I actually really mess with how long my lines are a lot, because I like a shapely poem. I like it to look nice on the page. But I think the best way to make a lyrical poem is to read it out loud. Because what is lyrical in your own personal voice is very different from what is lyrical in somebody else's. And if someone else reads your poem out loud, it might not sound as good, but you have to be true to your own personal voice, which is one reason that I frequently go to poetry when I'm sick of prose, because as an actual maniac—um, someone who experiences mania—as a complete maniac, I frequently have to wrangle by sentences into a form a non-crazy person, uh, will understand and enjoy. Um, in poetry, I can word it in the wildest possible way and somebody's looking at it might not like it, but they will be like, "Oh, this is, that person's style."

Rekka (00:33:21):

Right, right. It's a relief from fixing yourself for other people.

A.Z. Louise (00:33:28):

Yes. And so the more you are, the more you feel that relief, um, I think the closer you are to the bones of your poem, and I've read a lot of poems that I loved and hated the style, or didn't like the format was in, but because it was in that person's true voice, I was like, "Oh, this poem rules!" So I think that being true to your own voice is much more important than like trying to make it sellable. Because I do find that the weirder I write, the better my stuff sells. Uh, and that applies to, um, short fiction as well. I have started writing much more slowly because I am trying to poem every paragraph of my short fiction. The thing is, is that I get a lot more edits and the edits are, "This sentence is whack!" Because I'm writing more whack sentences. But the story itself is enriched by the poem, the poem that is, that lives within each line and within each paragraph. So, um, it needs more maneuvering. Editors are very helpful about that. They're very sweet.

Rekka (00:34:51):

But the fact is they're picking it up in the first place. So it's not like— having a lyrical quality is not barring you from, from sales. Like it's not like short fiction, it doesn't work and poetry, it does.

A.Z. Louise (00:35:03):

Yeah. I think because more of my true voice comes out when I am being more poetic-cal. Is that a word? I'm a professional writer.

Rekka (00:35:12):

Look, we all know professional writers can not talk.

A.Z. Louise (00:35:14):

Not at all. Or spell, let's be real. I do get a lot of feedback that, "Oh, this line is awkward." And because it is awkward read in somebody else's voice. So that's where the kind of line is. Like, how does the sound read in somebody's somebody else's voice? Which is one reason it's nice to have your computer reads your fiction aloud to you. Yeah. Because then it's like, "Oh." Because I feel like when you read fiction, you are reading it more in your own voice. And when you are reading poetry, you are just letting the voice happen. Yeah. You're just letting whatever voice is there wash over you. If that makes sense.

Rekka (00:35:55):

That, and that explains why you get editors more willing to correct that voice when you have it in prose. Prose, where in theory you have a plot, that they're going to be more willing to red pen it. Than when it's poetry. And therefore it's gotta be— I can't imagine being an editor for a magazine who acquires poetry and then has to somehow comment without completely trampling what's going on in the poem.

A.Z. Louise (00:36:28):

Uh, I, I feel like I'm lucky because my background as an engineer makes me better, I think, at taking criticism because I'm used to having a plan sheet handed back to me with just like red pencil all over it. Um, but most editors are very kind and they will tell you, "You don't have to change anything you don't want to." Um, but you can tell, you can hear the little, like, little tone in the comment. That's like, "I don't know what this means. You weirdo. You're so strange. But I like it."

Rekka (00:37:06):

Yeah. "I'm along for the ride. However, you might need some seatbelts."

A.Z. Louise (00:37:10):

Yeah, exactly. "You might want to strap your reader in on this one with a little bit, a little bit less, uh, poetic license in this sentence."

Rekka (00:37:21):

Which is funny because, um, in my short story prose, I don't feel like I get poetic and it's something I admire so much in a lot of my colleagues' short story prose is like, there'll be a turn of phrase and it'll just be like, "Oh, this is why I write! why don't I write like this?" And, um, so the occasion where I get a comment where it's like, "Wow, this sentence." I'm just like, that's what I'm going for.

A.Z. Louise (00:37:46):

That's my favorite type of comment. And I love it. It feels so good. And I have always been a very utilitarian prose writer.

Rekka (00:37:53):

And that's where I am now.

A.Z. Louise (00:37:55):

Yeah. And I think I started being more poetic in my prose when I started looking at sentence structure, which is completely counterintuitive, but you know how a sentence feels— a paragraph can feel really, really repetitive if all the sentences are structured exactly the same. So by going back and reading more deeply into each sentence for like commas and stuff, I am looking more at the words that I used and "why did I put this word here next to this comma? Why did I choose this word?" And that's where I'm like, "okay, so this sentence can have much more flavor." I write so many creepy forest stories and poems. That's just like my thing, I guess.

Rekka (00:38:49):

You have a brand. It's okay.

A.Z. Louise (00:38:50):

Yeah, I really have a creepy forest and like gay sentient plants brand. Um—

Rekka (00:38:57):

Hey, look its day is coming. This is going to be the next thing. I mean, we actually kind of like started that with Annihilation, with Jeff VanderMeer, like getting his book made into a movie and it's all about like plant body-possessing moss. So let's, uh, let's have more of that, please.

A.Z. Louise (00:39:14):

Yeah that kind of thing is totally my jam. So like, if a sentence is devoid of anything foresty, I will try and slip something in and then suddenly the sentence starts to read really poetically. So, um, I think that because I do write such short poetry, every single line has to be super punchy and has to contain a lot. And it's really easy when you're writing a longer form to accidentally not do that. Which sucks because I just really like to prose straight from brain to hands to keyboard with like no plan whatsoever. And then I go back and I'm like, "where are my metaphors?"

Rekka (00:39:56):

I think so often we focus on things like character development and arc and plot and, um, cutting words, as opposed to making sure our words are doing all the heavy lifting.

A.Z. Louise (00:40:09):

Yeah.

Rekka (00:40:09):

Like I'm really excited. Now I want to go write some poems after talking to you, because thinking about it in like a completely different way for poetry, not in "how short can I make this line," but in "how much can I make this line hurt my reader?"

A.Z. Louise (00:40:28):

Yes.

A.Z. Louise (00:40:28):

Okay. Maybe, maybe not every line has to hurt the reader. Maybe not all homes are meant for that, but you know, how much am I going to drag my reader with this line? And if I can develop that skill, one hopes that it would sort of trickle over on its own. And it sounds like in your experience, it does.

A.Z. Louise (00:40:48):

That's like extremely spicy because I started doing a wordsmithing pass whenever I write fiction. As someone who writes poetry and this may come as a surprise, my prose, uh, I'm very bad at writing descriptions. I love writing dialogue. That's just my jam. Uh, so my first pass is always, always, always description because my, my, uh, fiction is almost always 10 to 50% shorter than I want it to be.

Rekka (00:41:21):

The white room syndrome.

A.Z. Louise (00:41:23):

Oh, absolutely.

Rekka (00:41:23):

Especially when, when you love dialogue. And a lot of my, um, my prose short pieces also come to me as like, here's a snippet of conversation and like somebody's witty remark back. Or is it like sometimes it's, it's just the response. I don't even know what the response is to, and then I build a whole story around it. And very frequently, yes, it is a story. That's about a relationship between two people and they are floating in space. Because, you know, it's spec fic so there's stars, not a white room.

A.Z. Louise (00:41:53):

Yeah. It's space. It's space. Usually my description pass coincides with a world building pass, because it's so easy to have all the world building in your head and not on the page at all. So then once that's down, I will do a character pass or a plot pass. Those can happen interchangeably. There's no real rhyme or reason to which one I do first. Usually the one I feel is weaker. It's the one I get first. And then when all of that is done, that's when I do the wordsmithing pass. And I feel like that's a good, a good place to do it because then everything else is as fixed as you could get it. And it also allows you to skim the heck out of your previous reading passes. You don't have to be reading super, super deep and you can just be catching bullet points and then you get less of that feeling of having read your work so many times that it's meaningless.

Rekka (00:42:51):

Yes. Yeah. Anytime you can avoid having to actually deep dive into every sentence. For critical reasons.

A.Z. Louise (00:42:55):

Yeah. And for, for poetry, I write down my first pass and then let it simmer. I will touch it for like a week. So it's like, and then I might write four or five different versions of it and decide which one is better. Let that simmer for another week and come back to it. Because the same thing happens with poetry as with prose. Like, you just looked at it so many times that it's just nothing. You might as well be looking at a blank page. Who wrote this? Not me.

Rekka (00:43:25):

When the poem no longer gives you goosebumps.

A.Z. Louise (00:43:27):

Yeah. I do write a lot of very emotional poems. So like if I don't feel sad after I read it I'm like, "Oh, I read this too many times."

Rekka (00:43:36):

So, you know, you mentioned three or four separate kinds of passes. Do you do that with your poems at all? Or do you mostly do a pass for impactful language? And you figure what you had to say was already in there and it might just be reordering or rewording.

A.Z. Louise (00:43:55):

So, on my second draft of a poem, I that's, when I like identify the problems. sssss. Cause there's usually like one main problem. My frequent problem is that I love poems that just leave you hanging. And it's like, "well, where's the next line?" Um, that's like my favorite thing. And that's one thing I could tell you, editors don't like very much. So don't do that. So frequently, my second pass will be figuring out what is the punchy, uh, button to put on the end of this poem? Um, but usually if I just wrote something like in a fugue state, just like trying to get feelings out, I will probably need to add some metaphors in there. It's just a journal and it's just feelings. And that's where I'm like, "Okay, this is where the gay plants come in. Why am I like a gay plant in this poem?" After that one is where I will start reordering stuff to see where it works best. Because once the words sound really nice, you can start reading it all different orders and decide, "okay, this is where I want it to be." Especially if it's a poem, you want to be able to be read forward and backward. For me, I want all my words to be set before I start puzzle piecing it. I'm doing these very spidery motions with my hands right now.

Rekka (00:45:23):

They are good spider motions. I'm enjoying watching your hands. The process actually sounds pretty similar in terms of how set you want your piece to be. I love that you think about it in terms of "how do I edit this so that I still love it at the end and that I haven't overexposed myself to the story so that it no longer engages my brain critically so that I can create the best thing that I can?" Um, and it's funny that you mentioned, you know, the editors' comments and, um, editors wanting a story that feels like it wraps up at the end, cause I have a cheat for that.

A.Z. Louise (00:46:02):

Oooh. I'm so excited.

Rekka (00:46:04):

And it's one you probably already use. In fact, I'm looking at the poem still up on my screen and you have used it here, whether it was like the same thought process or whatever. But I basically take whatever my, um, my supposition at the beginning of the story is, and I rephrase it to create like almost a thesis statement, like reiterate what I was saying. And then, and then it has bookends. And then it doesn't feel like, you know—.

A.Z. Louise (00:46:30):

It feels complete.

Rekka (00:46:31):

Yeah. It doesn't feel like oatmeal running off a plate, it's oatmeal in a bowl. So I'm just looking at your, um, you know, She's Not a Phoenix poem and you have a line repeated multiple times, and it feels like it's got like, "this is my conclusion." Even though the line is very, very weighted with lots of different meanings, it's still a conclusion. Um, because "ah yes, I recognize this pattern and that feels like a properly framed, properly bowled oatmeal."

A.Z. Louise (00:47:08):

Yeah. That was, uh, I wrote that a zillion years ago, but I definitely, or for me, a person with ADHD is a zillion years ago. So like five. Could be dinosaur times, I don't know. But I didn't originally have that frame around it. It wasn't a structure and I kept looking at it. I was like, "this is like, like a wet t-shirt. It is just lying in a lump and it needs to be hung on something like it needs something more to make it feel like a thing and less like, just thoughts."

Rekka (00:47:41):

Well, in my opinion, you definitely found that thing.

A.Z. Louise (00:47:44):

Oh, thank you.

Rekka (00:47:44):

When you tell me that it comes from an angry place. Like, I feel this phrase as like the most like acid-dripping, like denial of the thing it's saying, you know.

A.Z. Louise (00:47:58):

Yesssssssss!

Rekka (00:47:58):

Like, um, the phrase is "it's better this way." And you're like, you understand from this poem, it absolutely is not.

A.Z. Louise (00:48:05):

Yeah. And you know, sometimes the thing you need to hang it up on is like a little bit of structure through like repetition, and sometimes it's, uh, so— I just, I love assonance and alliteration. Ooh. Sometimes it's metaphor. So those sort of poetic, um, tools are what you're using to hang the fabric of your, uh, your poem over. So you're just taking thoughts and it's like building a little tent.

Rekka (00:48:34):

You're creating a frame, you know, that lets people see the whole thing as it's meant to be, as opposed to the wet ball of cotton on the, on the deck.

A.Z. Louise (00:48:44):

I do think a lot of people feel roped in by structure because that's what they learned to write in high school because high school is always like, you have to write a sonnet. And you're like, "uhhh!" I find that limericks are really fun just for a warmup because I find that having constraints actually makes me more creative. Um, but a lot of people do feel really boxed in because that's what they learned. But they associate freeverse with like angsty teens and the worst slam poetry you've ever heard at a cafe. And so people are like, "Oh, if I do this without a structure, it's going to be a hot mess and it's going to expose too much of me. And people will think it is terrible and that it will hurt my feelings a lot because this is my heart I'm putting on the page." Yeah. So there's definitely, I think some people do have a fear of exposing too much of themselves in poetry. And—

Rekka (00:49:50):

But I think that's, you know, going back to what we were talking about before, like that's, what's going to sell a poem.

A.Z. Louise (00:49:55):

Yeah, yeah.

Rekka (00:49:57):

Which is cruel.

A.Z. Louise (00:49:57):

Yeah it sucks really bad, but that's a fear that you have to unfortunately work through. I'm not going to say get over because rude, um, and get over it implies that you simply stop feeling afraid, which will literally never happen because you're always emailing a stranger your feelings. So you will always be a little bit, uh, afraid. And um, so you have to find ways to work through being afraid and if that's structure, then good, if it's going to freeverse, then good. Um, if you have a specific metaphor that you love use that in every dang poem, if it makes you feel safer to send your feelings to somebody. Because artists always have those kinds of style things, like if there's a phrase you love just keep using it and then maybe it will change, but nobody's going to get mad at you for writing 10,000 gay plant poems.

Rekka (00:50:53):

Right. I feel like there's going to be, um, some like mycology references in my poems coming up.

A.Z. Louise (00:51:01):

Yeah. Oh, I, I love a good mushroom. They're they're so fun for metaphors and they glow and they're cute and they're just delightful. Yeah. It's definitely like maybe if you send poems with the same thing in it over and over again to an editor, they will be like, "can you stop sending those plant poems?" But there's so many outlets and you'll be sending so much.

Rekka (00:51:30):

Yes. Because even if they see it over and over again, they may not have accepted it yet. And it may be just a thing for them.

A.Z. Louise (00:51:36):

Frankly, they probably don't even know it's you. I do read slush and sometimes names look familiar, but typically you're just reading based on the merit of the thing itself.

Rekka (00:51:49):

Which is always good to hear.

A.Z. Louise (00:51:50):

Yeah. I mean, that's editors see so many dang poems and stuff. Like if you send two poems that are really similar, they will never notice. You don't have to be self-conscious about that.

Rekka (00:52:01):

How do you filter? Is like there, uh, a transformation process from taking an A.Z. personal moment and turning it into a spec thick piece of poetry?

A.Z. Louise (00:52:12):

I do sometimes send a piece of poetry, wondering if it's speculative enough. Because the line of what is speculative and what is not, is so blurry. Um, sometimes I go ham. Sometimes I will write some feelings down and I'll be like, "I'm angry. It's dragon time." Or, "I'm very sad. I'm very tired. We're gonna write about dirt and worms let's do that." Um, so I think that the most important part of the filtration process is to consume media. And I know that's like something people say all the time, you have to— writers read, you know? Um, but you don't have to be reading strictly speculative poetry. Nature documentaries have given me so much material because when you look at a beautiful eagle soaring, metaphors will come to you. And a beautiful Eagle and a Wyvern are not that different from each other.

Rekka (00:53:15):

Except in the way the word rolls off your tongue.

A.Z. Louise (00:53:17):

Exactly.

Rekka (00:53:17):

Or doesn't.

A.Z. Louise (00:53:19):

Wyvern's a little rough. You might want to go back to dragon on that one. So yeah, I think that, and since imagery is so important, I like to follow, um, on social media accounts that just post really beautiful photos of nature and things like that, or rad, uh, speculative art. Like I love those, um, like sixties and seventies, like fantasy and science fiction covers.

Rekka (00:53:45):

Yeah. Sometimes they are so painful. Like there was, there's a thread and it's just like nipples everywhere.

A.Z. Louise (00:53:51):

Butts all over the place. Butts all the way down.

A.Z. Louise (00:53:53):

Butts and nipples at the same time for the same person, somehow. But yeah, it's bizarre.

A.Z. Louise (00:53:58):

Well the great news is that there are a lot of really cool, uh, erotic, speculative poetry outlets. Um, I had, I had something out with Twisted Moon that is about gay plants.

Rekka (00:54:12):

I feel like I did you dirty by picking the one poem that I could that had no gay plants in it.

A.Z. Louise (00:54:17):

I know, right? No. Um, it's, it's, it's always it's, with me it's gay plants, it's like tearing your chest open, and it's dirt and worms.

A.Z. Louise (00:54:27):

Okay so we got the tearing your chest open part. At least, even if it was a phoenix poem.

A.Z. Louise (00:54:30):

Yeah we've got a bird inside of a chest. Yeah.

Rekka (00:54:34):

So, was that a decision—I mean, you said you did this ages ago, but—was it a decision to make a phoenix because a phoenix is a spec fic element that you could communicate this idea with? I mean, the poem itself does incorporate like the, the bird that you "thought was glass turning into ash." I mean, like there are phoenix elements in it. How early in the process did that come about? Or was it a decision because you wanted to submit it?

A.Z. Louise (00:54:58):

That, I think that what happened is when I got to that line that you read about "my chest to crucible too hot to hold," I was like, "Oh, this bird's on fire, baby." So that was me sort of following, uh, my maybe tortured metaphor down a little rabbit hole and finding a bird in there?

Rekka (00:55:20):

So it's not, like you said, like, okay, search and replace every instance of "Blue Jay" with "Phoenix." It's more than that. It's finding the spec fic element inside the metaphor you already have.

A.Z. Louise (00:55:32):

Yeah. That's, that's what I do a lot of the time. Um, and typically it's an elemental thing. Like I will have a reference to fire or dirt or leaves or something like that. Obviously nature is in my stuff a lot. Or if I want to get really weird and wild, I have one poem about stars. Like just like having a star relationship in space. Like, it doesn't make any sense, but uh, I have mapped feelings onto stars, so now we're in science fiction. Sure. Why not?

Rekka (00:56:10):

Yeah. No. And it still sounds to me, like most of these stories could get picked up in a literary poem magazine if you went that path because these metaphors— like, it's not like famous poems that we were taught in school don't reference stars, you know, it's not like they don't reference dragons. And how far toward spec fic it is, sounds like it's really debatable, honestly, because so many poems are metaphorical.

A.Z. Louise (00:56:42):

Yeah and sometimes I will write a poem where the only thing that seems speculative about it at all is the title, because I noticed something similar to folklore in there. Um, or something like that. Like I wrote a poem recently where I, I wrote the whole thing out and I was like, it feels mildly speculative, but isn't fully there yet. Um, but it's really, really similar to, um, the story of the snow queen. So, um, I titled it in reference to that. Has it gotten picked up yet? Absolutely not. But, um—

Rekka (00:57:18):

But it doesn't feel like an incomplete approach to that way of doing things.

A.Z. Louise (00:57:21):

Yeah. And the thing is, is that there are so many outlets out there that somewhere that says they take something like slipstream or, um, you know, like surrealism, they would be more likely to pick up something that only has a wisp of speculative elements. So I usually have a large bank of poems. And then when a call for submission comes along, I'll just yeet. But if I have something that I don't know how to place and I really want to that's when it's Submission Grinder time, baby!

Rekka (00:57:56):

Yeah. That's more poetry, obviously, than we've ever discussed on this podcast. And I loved every minute of it because... This is poetry centric, but I still feel like it's excellent advice getting in there and feeling your words and... Um, letting the reader feel your emotions through them is always good advice because we love when we feel things.

A.Z. Louise (00:58:22):

Yeah. You read to feel an emotion.

Rekka (00:58:25):

Yeah. And I think readers enjoy that moment that we referenced earlier when you're like, "Wow, that sentence." I think readers love that too. And um, so it's, it's good for everyone to get in your emotions and to be vulnerable as much as, um, as you think that doesn't feel right when you're going to market and trying to sell something. It's what we're all searching for, is that connection that someone else is feeling that too. And I am, I am feeling all squirmy and happy because I feel like maybe I'm not such a bad poet and maybe I do have some words to share and maybe that story will end up being, you know, a poem that I can share or if not, like I'm like just going to let the words start flowing a little bit more and, and write them down rather than just being like "oh that'd be a good poem."

A.Z. Louise (00:59:14):

My last thought on that is that some poems I write without meaning to send them anywhere at all. Some are just for you.

Rekka (00:59:22):

For you. Yeah. I think that's how you can allow yourself to be vulnerable from the get go. If you don't tell yourself like, "Oh, that one line is headed for Strange Horizons."

A.Z. Louise (00:59:34):

Yeah, and it's healthy to have things that are just for you, it's not healthy to try and monetize everything. As much as we live in capitalism and that's necessary.

Rekka (00:59:42):

Yay, Capitalism. But you did mention that sometimes you start your poem and it's more like a journal.

A.Z. Louise (00:59:46):

Yeah.

Rekka (00:59:47):

And, um, that's, I think that's healthy. That's a healthy way to approach any writing project is like, "this doesn't have to sell if I just want to live in it for a little bit. And then later I can decide, um, or..."

A.Z. Louise (00:59:59):

I have tons of trunked stuff.

Rekka (01:00:00):

Yeah. Yeah. And, um, it's healthy.

A.Z. Louise (01:00:04):

Trunk City in this computer.

Rekka (01:00:04):

Yes. I just really enjoyed that conversation. So thank you so much for coming on.

A.Z. Louise (01:00:07):

Thank you so much for having me.

Rekka (01:00:08):

And for all the bonus advice about editing and revising that I wasn't expecting to.

A.Z. Louise (01:00:13):

I wasn't either.

Rekka (01:00:15):

Thank you so much for coming on, A.Z. I really had fun.

A.Z. Louise (01:00:17):

Thank you, me too.

Rekka (01:00:33):

Thank you, everyone for joining us for another episode of We Make Books. If you have any questions that you want answered in future episodes, or just have questions in general, remember you can find us on Twitter @WMBcast, same for Instagram or WMBcast.com. If you find value in the content that we provide, we would really appreciate your support at patreon.com/WMBcast.

Rekka (01:01:00):

If you can't provide financial support, we totally understand. And what you could really do to help us is spread the word about this podcast. You can do that by sharing a particular episode with a friend who can find it useful, or if you leave a rating and review at iTunes, it will feed that algorithm and help other people find our podcast, too. Of course you can always retweet our episodes on Twitter. Thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you soon.

Tuesday Feb 16, 2021

Episode 54 - Does Anyone Get What They Want? The Happy Endings Episode

Tuesday Feb 16, 2021

Audio Note: Rekka's puppy, Evie, joins us for this episode and there is the sound of a squeak toy and a jangling collar during the episode. If you or a pet in your vicinity would be unsettled by this, it might be best to listen at low volume this time, or just stick to reading the transcript.

We hope you enjoy We Make Books!