Short Stories Explained (SiWC 2015 Master Class Notes)

Now that I've got my explanation of where I've been out of the way ... as promised, let's get back to notes! By special request, here's my first set, straight from the most recent Surrey International Writers Conference. We'll start with a bang: the wonderful Mary Robinette Kowal's very useful Master Class on writing short stories.

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Master Class: Short Stories Explained

Mary Robinette Kowal

How Puppetry Affects her Creative Process
- When learning, there are four principle ideas to make the character look alive.
- With writing, there are certain consistent principles for creating believable characters, too, regardless of novel or short story.
- Puppetry: break things apart into small steps. The goal is that the technique is internalized so you just think about the art.
- Applies to other arts, too. Drawing, violin, etc.
- As writers, there’s a tendency to say “I’m going to write a novel” and try all the things at once. Pacing, description, character development, should be learned separately.


Principles of Puppetry That Work

1. Focus.
- Indicates thought. What the character is looking at/thinking about. True also for what you’re writing. The thing you’re writing about, whatever you’re putting down is what they’re focusing on, paying attention to, regardless of POV.
- Don’t think about the little things that don’t matter. If the aliens are attacking you are not thinking about how the car you’re riding in reminds you of your parents, not
Controlling your character means controlling the focus of your audience.
- Order in which you present the info to them. The theatre spotlight shows you what to focus on. In writing, the order of information you present to your readers is imp because you are presenting your work to your readers one word at a time and they have to build an image in their heads.
“The man walked into the room. There was a blonde sitting in the chair.”
versus
“The man walked into the room. In the chair was a blonde.”
The first thing is the first they think of, the last is what they last focus on. Anything else in between doesn’t matter as much, just the first and last thing. They’re subtle differences, but very much changes your perception of the things. Order of info is incredibly important, and part of focus.

2. Breath and Rhythm.
Breath: You don’t notice it unless it carries information. The only time you notice someone breathing unless it carries information. Sneeze, sharp intakes, sighs, exhalation, laugh. Speed of motion reps how much we should engage with it. But don’t over use it.
Rhythm: the speed with which the motions happen
Relates to how long, how much time you spend on something. “Action scenes should have short, choppy sentences” – because that mimics what happens when you’re breathing faster. Also, sentence structure and punctuation show this.
Focus tells you what character is thinking about, breath tells you how your character feels about it. This is how you can get a lot of info without a lot of chatter/explainy stuff.

3. Muscle/Internal motivation.
With writing, you need it to look like your characters are making the decisions rather than it looking like the author is moving the character along the page. It’s not just about the plot itself, but to put the words on the page to explain it.
- Free indirect speech: Take a thought and write it in third person.
- The man walked into the room. There was a blonde sitting in the chair. “He lifted her out of the chair because it was broken.” vs. “he hadn’t seen her since California. My god she looked beautiful.”
- Word choice: Lifted vs. Jerked. Free indirect speech shows internal motivation.
- Can use it when things are ambiguous.
- When used for emphasis: to make an action stronger. “Hell no she wasn’t going down like this.”

4. Meaningful movement.
Head bobbing. NOT when a puppet bobs its head with every word.
Body language reads very clearly. Meaningful movement to remove ambiguity or emphasize something. Pick one movement per phrase.
- “What did you say?” Aggressive movement, passive movement, and regressive movement.
- Aggressive: things you want to engage with further. Curiosity, happiness, delight, possessiveness, etc.
- Regressive: things you don’t want to engage with. Revulsion, anger, disgust. Different sense depending on how the character moves.
With writing: the body language you give your character can not only make your character come to life. “What did you say?” followed by: putting hands on hips, removing paddle from drawer, or leaning away from speakers blaring too-loud punk rock, etc. There’s lots of double-duty doing this. Don’t do it all the time, but include when you want to disambiguate who’s speaking, emphasize a tone, etc.


What are the Story Parameters?

Parameter: Size of the theatre.
So you know how much scenery you can have on stage, and how big your audience will be and how much they can see. For writers: How long will your story be? How many scenes you can have, how many characters, etc.
Every character or scene implication you add to a story adds 500 to 1000 words even before you get to story.
- 5K limit: 3 characters, 2 scene implications (scenic locations).
- Scenic locations: when you have to move the “camera” into another room.
- Time of day can also count as a scene implication. Can change the characters’ reaction to the same setting.
- Plot structure can double or triple those numbers.
- If your character has a name, they’re typically a main character. Otherwise, they’re spear-holders. Very proportional.
- When writing short fiction: the moment the character speaks, they’re a character.
- Named pets count, even with nonverbal communication.
- Don’t allow characters to speak unless they’re a key element. So proportional and so dependent on what story you’re trying to tell.
- THESE ARE NOT HARD AND FAST RULES. JUST GOOD RULES OF THUMB.
- Typically, the initial story choice when writing shorts is that it’s too big.

Parameter: Length of the show.
How many scenes you have. With a very long show, people welcome the intermissions. But to stop in a 45 minute show halfway through for a 20 minute intermission – you could lose the audience.
- When writing something that’s only 4000 words long, and it’s split 3.5k/0.5 K, there will be a sense of let down because there won’t be time to build up the scene again.
- Why did I have that dip there? Check your scene breaks.
- Difference between novels and short stories: you have to keep things in proportion. With a novel, you can spend 3k setting up the story before you get into it. In a short story (1k-7.5k), your setup length is much shorter. Bear in mind the percentages. Don’t think in terms of absolutes, but in terms of percentages.
- Every scene break is a reset. Every scene break is the brief moment where the audience gets to reset. In a novel, there’s not much impact. In a short story, too many don’t work as well. Be mindful of proportion because scene breaks throw the reader out of the story.
- Short scenes don’t get into the character as much.

Parameter: Style of Puppetry (Voice).
- 2 choices to make: technical style and aesthetic style. With writing, that means technical (POV), and aesthetic (voice: like Austen or Southern character, or educated middle class white person, etc).
- Erase “invisible prose” or “transparent prose”, the idea that you can be neutral, and don’t think about the words and do think about the story. There is no neutral/invisible prose. There is prose that fits into the Western mainstream narrative. But that’s not the only way to write.

Senses and Character
- You have ingrained aspects of yourself that you bring to your character’s POV. So try to make sure that whatever your character’s POV is matches who they are, to inform your reader without taking up a lot of space in the short story.
- We are all experiencing the room at the same time of day in distinct reactions based on our life experiences.
- When we talk about POV, it’s not just about where our character is standing now, it’s where they were standing in the past.

Exercise: In 3 sentences, describe the room from a specific POV. Pick a person with a certain job, and we should be able to tell their job based on what they notice. Depending on what they notice, the point of view and focus, you can convey what their job is.

Now, with same character, use three emotion. Resetting to zero with each emotion. Can include their physical reaction, but just use their reaction. How long they linger on something, the words they choose to describe it. Anger, delight, fear.

Within 3 sentences, the reader should know where they are, who the character is, how they feel. Shortly after that comes the plot.


Plot and Structure

The MICE quotient: how you decide where your story stops and where it ends.

- Millieu: the place where things happen
- Idea: the questions you have during the story
- Character: who’s in the story
- Event: the things that happen

The thing that drives the story is going to be one of those elements. One of these is the most important.

Where stories start and where they end:
- Milleu – driven by the pace – these stories start when you enter a location and end when you leave it. About the place. Gulliver’s Travels, Wizard of oz, etc.
- Idea – the question your main character has. Starts when question is raised, ends when it’s answered. Mysteries, e.g. Sherlock Holmes.
- Character: Begins when your main character is dissatisfied with their role, ends when they are satisfied/reconciled. Reconciliation in different forms. Transformation into something better, better understanding of their current role, e.g. Coming of age stories. Romance stories: character story – dissatisfied with being single, ends with “now I’m not!” (though that’s a gross oversimplification). Character stories are very much about an internal conflict. The character wants for themselves to be something they’re not.
- Event: about an external conflict. Begins when the status quo is disrupted, and ends with restoration of status quo (or new status quo). Begins with disruption, ends with restoration.
- Usually these things are mixed. It’s rare to see a story that is just one thing.
- This concept can shape the story you’re telling. Know your POV character and how they’re affected.

How to use these elements when dealing with more than one:
- You deal with these like they’re nested code.
- You start with one type, then add a different type, then must close the different type. Must close each type in the reverse order you open them.
- Wizard of Oz: Starts Character, then event, then Milleu, then Idea. Idea is solved, then milieu is solved, then event is solved, then character is solved.
- When you end these out of sequence, the big question that is pulling the reader thorough the story, if it is answered too soon there’s not enough time to build tension for the next release point. Usually, the ending tags are out of order.
- Narrative tension can be lost if it’s not done out of order. Can cause a sense of letdown.
- Epliogues, depending on the novel: a classically-structured epilogue is a very tiny short story tacked onto the end that has is a brief repeat of the initial theme (e.g. code).
- In short fiction, you’ll have two, maybe three types of story. Because of length. When you add another type/element, it has the potential to double or triple the length of your story.
- Could have a tiny arc closed out before you start the next element.
- You can also have a story that is predominantly a character story with a light event frame.

Because Math Makes Everything More Fun: The Equation To Remember
Length of story = the sum (characters + scenic locations) × 750 (the average) × number of MICE elements


Middles
- The bulk of your story happens in the middle.
- The reason it’s important to know what the elements are is because each of them comes with a different sort of conflict.
- Sometimes you think you’ve identified the story type, then all the conflicts are character-based conflicts, so you’ve chosen the wrong frame.
- The beginning is the question gets asked. The middle is the character trying to answer that question and being constantly stymied. The end is when it gets solved.
- The middle is all of the setbacks along the way, and touches on all of the MICE elements you’ve included.
- If a conflict will serve multiple functions, it will shorten the length of the story.
- Often two try/fail cycles, then success on the third, but that’s a common trope. Three try/fails shows the character has earned stuff.
- Conflicts: A series of questions. What does your character want, and how do they go about getting that, and do they get it.
- Answer: Yes, but; No, and; Yes/No.
- Where people are running into problems in their stories is they’ll introduce information related to a different part of their story, or changes the type.
- Middle conflicts may have been related to something else.
- Look at it and decide what’s the smartest way to achieve their goal, and systematically deny them. Look for conflicts related to the story questions you introduced in the beginning.
- Milleu: systematically keep them from leaving the place.
- Idea: about answering the question – keep them from answering the question.
- Character: dissatisfied with their role. Stop them from achieving a new role.
- Event: character is trying to restore the status quo. Keep them from restoring the status quo.
- You must deal with your chosen elements all the way through.
- If your character is not dissatisfied, they don’t need any growth, and the story can be something else.
- Short stories typically need more than one element. Otherwise it’s a very short story.
- All of these elements are going to be present, but it’s about how many are major drivers.

In an ideal world, every scene should advance the plot, establish the setting, develop the character, and most importantly, entertain the reader. And if you fail at entertaining the reader, the other three don’t matter. If you were bored while writing it, chances are it’ll be bored for your readers.


Exercises and Further Discussion

Exercise: Write a synopsis. Think of the middle first. Then figure out what frame you need to support the MICE quotient element you’re interested in. Just one element.

Exercise: Little Red Riding hood has been told many different times and ways. A scifi/horror is very different from a kindergarten puppet show. Are you interested in the defeat of the wolf, or who the wolf is? The rescue of grandma, or the seduction of Red?

Me: Microbiologist Rebecca “Red” Jones’ has devoted the last five years to The Grandma Project, in an attempt to discover the chief DNA sequence for predisposition to knitting sweaters and baking cookies. When she encounters a particular sequence, she thinks it’s a breakthrough, except not everything is what it seems. Turns out they cause other problems – they affect the eyes, the teeth, and elements that don’t fit her needs. But after a late night in the darkened Huntsman’s café, she makes her breakthrough: the code involves the same genes that affect touch and scent. 

Exercise: Now come up with an original idea. Again, the thing that trips people up is that they have too many characters, too many locations, too many MICE quotient elements. For the purposes: two characters, only characters, and one scenic location.
Think about: Who they are, where they are, and things that can go horribly wrong.
Conflicts involving internal angst: for example, two ex-lovers, trapped in a room, have to decide whether or not to cooperate. Think about the things that interest you, and what you’re excited about, to write your idea.

Me: Some people count the exits when they get to a new place. Seismologist Nancy counts the safe spots. She knows the Big One’s coming; it’s just a matter of time. When stuck at her crotchety, aging father’s used bookstore as the earthquake finally hits, she must convince him to find a safe place to duck, cover, and hold, then abandon the building that is so not up to code before it falls on them, or else risk losing the only family she has. Only by telling him about the earthquake insurance she secretly paid for a decade ago is she able to save him—and herself.

MICE can be used as a diagnostic tool once a story is written.

Flashbacks: this framework is about how you tell it, not about the sequence in which the events happen. Sometimes a novel will start with 24hour previously/later, then jump back. Structurally, they’re moving the MICE question to a different spot. Incorporating them at different points to affect the order of info in which the reader is getting things, and the context to understand the reaction.

Character: not just about where they’ve been, but the role they define themselves as.


Endings
- When you get to the end, with a short story,
- Short stories and novels: audience is expecting different things.
- \think about it like the Olympics. A clip of a gymnastic trick should start right when the gymnast’s routine begins, do their stuff, stick the landing, and they’re done. When watching the coverage, you want to see them warming up, the emotional backstory, do the trick, finish the trick, go talk to their coach, get their maeks, watch the interview with them after. Short stories are the clip; the novel is watching the entire thing.
- Denoument: not such a big deal with short fiction. In a short, it’s usually only a couple of sentences. Stick your landing, and get out. Close your last tag. One things you can do to heighten the emotional oomph: two basic tricks – try to resolve all of the conflicts right at the same time.
- The Hollywood ending: when you get to the end, your main character needs to defeat the villain, overcome the problem, and reconcile with their sidekick/romantic interest. Sometimes the villain and the sidekick are the same person.
- Father is both villain (stopping her from escaping the bookstore), and person she loves and needs to save. She gets things happening in all the same moment. Usually in novels, it’s defeat the villain, solve the problem, and reconcile spaced a tiny bit apart.
- The closer you can get the closing tags (the big driver tags) at the same time, the bigger emotional punch you have.
- The other trick: resonance. Simply: ppl like patterns. We are pattern-seeking creatures. It’s the way our brain is wired. Children watching/reading stuff over and over: thrill of recognition.
- You can repeat something that happens at the beginning. It can be an inversion or a repetition depending on where your character is going. If you have a beautiful resonant ending at the end of your story, don’t change it; go back and change your beginning.

Remember character motivation: pick a thing that matters to your character that doesn’t need to be directly related to the plot. Something they desperately want (to do) that the event status quo disrupts their ability to do/have.


Markets
- SFF: when you are trying to decide on a market, always read the guidelines.
- Three factors to consider: 1) Money, 2) Size of Audience, 3) Shiny/Cool. Depending on where you are in your career, the importance of each will change based on what matters to you most. How much does the market pay, how many do you reach, and how much do you want to be in that market. All three of these elements *need* to be there.
- You should be paid.
- Start at the top and work your way down. Don’t NOT send something because you don’t think you’re good enough for it. Do not self-reject.
- When it hits a point that it’s a market that won’t pay you, doesn’t have an audience, and you’re not interested in, put it away instead.
- No matter how much the market pays or how big the audience is, if it’s not a market you don’t want to appear in, don’t submit to the market.

Future Funny (SIWC 2012 Writing Panel Notes)

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! Don Rocko and I were at a benefit concert for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation yesterday, so we missed out on his family's typical turkey celebration. But the concert was worth it! We saw three bands in this year's Peak Performance Project: Rolla Olak, who sounds like a young Bob Dylan (complete with harmonica); Jasper Sloan Yip, whose combination of stringed instruments and guitars reminded me of the Airborne Toxic Event; and of course, the host of the afternoon: Greg Drummond. Don Rocko put it best: they're like Great Big Sea meets Mumford & Sons. They have so much energy. And while they're all multitalented, their keyboardist is a riot, because he also plays the trumpet, the accordion, and as needed, the banjo. It added a tiny note of humour to a concert I was already enjoying.

Which is a great segue into today's notes: writing humour in the SFF and speculative fiction context.

Only 11 days left until SIWC 2013 begins!


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Future Funny
Mary Robinette Kowal, Robert J. Sawyer, Sam Sykes
Moderator: kc dyer

Note: Every writer approaches the concept of writing humour in their own way, so this is not a prescriptive class.


Who has influenced you in writing humour?

kc: Terry Pratchett

SS: Joe Abercrombie: A British writer with the basest of gallows humour, can spin a joke while stabbing someone in the face.

RJS: Douglas Adams, Spider Robinson, Robert B. Parker
-    RJS doesn’t write books in terms of funny plot, but the dialogue is snappy.
-    Read broadly, not just your genre.
-    A deep understanding of your genre / category can really, really help.

MRK: Influences are all from theatre:
-    Douglas Adams’ radio plays, learned how to translate timing onto the page.
-    Puppeteer John Ludwig of Sesame Street: lots of hilarious stuff that doesn’t get in the way of the story. Things don’t have to be funny so long as someone isn’t looking at it saying, “I didn’t get that”.

It's not just about making everyone laugh.
-   Even if you put a cultural reference, at least try to use the 80% rule (make sure 80% of the audience will get it).
-    There's a certain thrill of an in-joke that not everyone will get, but those who do will love it. (Case in point: The Firefly reference in Castle.)


When is humour an asset to the story?

SS: To deal with stress; when something bad, a tragedy happens.
-    A joke doesn’t necessarily decrease the tension; it can increase the tension.
-    Often people joke when they first get nervous. Gallows humour can ratchetup the tension.
-    It keeps the narrative from being relentlessly depressing, too.
-    Use the best joke at the right time so long as it pertains to the situation and comes from the right character.
-    All humour should derive from character and be approp to the plot. That joke at that time lets your audience breathe while keeping the tension of the plot.

MRK: Laughter is a physical reaction. It maintains tension in the diapraghm, and gives the audience a chance to catch their breath before the suckerpunch.

RJS: Scriptwriting: “On the nose” humour (what exactly is the character thinking) is not done. But you can make a joke to get at something without being on the nose, deflect it with humour while the subtext is the truth.

kc: When you know that something else is coming and this is just a chance to sustain the tension.


Do you use humour to move the plot forward?

MRK: Humour can move the plot forward, but it’s not the only thing that can do so.

SS: Anything coming out of the body when they aren’t intended to come out of the body can be funny. Bodily functions. But be careful: Jokes can sometimes do more to hold the plot back than to move it forward.

MRK: TV writer Jane Espenson (another SIWC 2012 presenter) was saying in an ep of BSG there’s a food shortage and people were starting to eat paper, “Well, the good news is people is stoped eating paper” “Oh good” “because there’s a paper shortage”. Laughter goes on so long, moves the character forward


Audience Question: Is there a difference between humour presented by characters, and humour presented by the author (dialogue vs. narration)?

RJS: Most writing is limited 1st or 3rd POV. An omniscient narrator cracking jokes is clumsy or intrusive, so it's better to have the character thinking something. You are *in* someone’s POV when you narrate.

MRK: Omniscient is out of fashion these days. But as an example, with Jane Austen: the cracking of the joke doesn’t get in the way of the story, it adds to it.

kc: the way you can work it in is the setting, have it in the scene

SS: the cardinal sin is explaining the joke. Don’t make a big deal of the joke because that will shatter everything.

MRK: The Carol Burnett Gone With The Wind sketch – new dress, wearing curtain rod – juxtaposition between her believing it and what she actually looks like, not cracking a smile – If you laugh before you tell a joke no one thinks it’s funny. This is also true with crying. Need to take character to the point where they almost cry, and the audience will do the crying for you. Catharsis. If you let your chars laugh too much the audience doesn’t need to laugh.

RJS: Don’t do things at character’s expense just to make the reader laugh. Don’t do it to make them look dumb if they’re supposed to be a smart character.

MRK: However, most humour does derive at the expense of the character, but other places where it’s the main character, it depends on the char and the situation.

SS: There's a difference between breaking character and just humour at their expense. From Pixar's 22 Rules for Storytelling: Coincidences that get characters into trouble are good; coincidences that get them out are cheating.


How do you capture visual humour?

MRK: John Scalzi does this well (Redshirts, The Android’s Dream)

SS: Humour is funniest when it’s unintentional

MRK: Slapstick that happens to other people is different from when slapstick happens to the main character.

RJS: It tells you about your character: how they deal with being the butt of the joke.

SS: It's a great way to draw subtext for other issues going on, too.

RJS: Obama joked about having lost the first presidential debate of 2012, and elevated himself by realizing he failed, and that people were making fun of him. Have slapstick happen to your characters so they can grow in your audience’s eyes: the way they respond helps to round out your character.

MRK: This American Life – the Fiasco. Having characters own humour when things are going so terribly wrong that if you don’t ackqonledge the fact that things are going terribly wrong then the audience will start to find it funny: Appropriate application of humour from the character.

SS: If things are relentlessly depressing the audience will reach a point where they HAVE to take a breath. Humour is an excellent chance for things to turn out better, a break. “For the moment we are not relentlessly depressed.”


Audience Question: How does humour in SFF differ from humour elsewhere?

SS: There's more absurdity, tropes, and idioms that can be played with. Especially because fantasy is kind of undergoing deconstruction at the moment.

MRK: The way you set up a joke is still the way you set up a joke. Your readers are in a modern context. But language-based humour doesn’t work well unless people understand it. Makes an opportunity for worldbuilding – jokes that involve ethnic slurs about the races can reveal chars, set up societal norms (eg. whether or not prostitutes are accepted), describe alien vegetables with jokes. Jokes that make sense in that world that the reader doesn’t necessarily get can help them connect with the story.


How has satire shaped your work?

RJS: Galaxy Quest is a satire, but also a comedy. Original Planet of the Apes was a satire (with moments of humour, but stil very funny). There's the satire that’s not overtly humourous (sometimes, dark), the satire that is social commentary, the digs not said in polite commentary (eg. Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal). Stephen Colbert is best when he doesn’t break character.

kc: Same thing with Borat.

RJS: The beauty of SFF is that you’ve got the most brilliant audience on the planet. Your SF audience is such that no matter how obtuse the joke, you can trust they’ll get it. The worst thing when you’re doing comedy is that it falls flat. Some of your best jokes will kill a few bright.

SS: Don’t blink. Don’t acknowledge it’s satire.

MRK: You may have 20% of the audiece that doesn’t get it, so you need other things to be happening in those same words. Galaxy Quest is still a funny story even if you don’t get the satire.


Audience Question: What about recurring jokes?

RJS: Set up your jokes in advance, so you can bring them back.

MRK: Called a “call-back” – when you refer to something and it retains a level of humour. This is especially funny in threes (in the Western tradition). The tricky thing is making sure there’s not too much separation between the call-backs so that the reader hasn't forgotten.

RJS: A call back is often the end joke of the scene.

MRK: Make sure that call back works on its own in case people forget the first joke.


Is humour dead? (e.g. hackneyed plot devices)

RJS: No. We live in a dark time – fear of terrorism, global warming, evil politicians – but even in the darkest time, the advent of sitcoms without laughtracks. Curb Your Enthuisam and Arrested Development, The Office (especially the British version). There are no laugh tracks, but we understand humour, and the writers trust us to.

kc: The laugh track dumbs down the humour – as does the overuse of the sarcastic expression “Really.”

RJS: Cultural memes become adopted by the general public, but the problem with any catch phrase is that it loses its potency with overuse. Anytime people fall back on a tired old cliché, it means "you’ve done something I think is cool so I’m going to pull the stock out of its cupboard and use it for the umpteenth time", and then it falls flat. You don’t know what will take off and become a catch phrase.


What about making cultural references?

MRK: Puts a Dr. Who cameo in each of her books. An in-joke and cultural reference. The key is that it can not break the story, pull the audience out. It has to be in a moment that even for people who don't get the joke it is an appropriate time for a laugh. It cannot break the moment. A cultural reference that calls attention to itself not good.

SS: There's a difference between referencing pop culture and having a pop culture reference be the joke. Eg. South Park. And Family Guy, which is not funny itself, but gives a pop culture reference and expects the audience to do the work (which they usually do).

MRK: Sometimes the humour is all about the cultural references, so the audience is in on the joke.

RJS: Readers can date the novel based on the scientific assumptions in the text. The cultural refs, too. But they matter for verisimilitude.

SS: There's also a difference between tipping the hat to something, and throwing the hat at the audience.


Audience Question: Is it important to make a distinction between whether characters know they’re making the reference?

MRK: Sure, people making cultural references (e.g. Ready Player One – but the humour depends on the setting, the reference, and the why.

RJS: Spock is a very funny man, way wittier than he lets onto be.

SS: You can not acknowledge the joke.

RJS: Unless it bombs, and then you acknowledge that. (e.g. a joke told that no one gets).


What about the collaborative nature of humour in writing? As a writer, how do you know what works when you use humour?

SS: Like any comedian, you have jokes you can fall back on at reliable times, jokes you know that work. You have to write for yourself. But most of all if you don’t find it funny, the audience won’t find it funny, either.

MRK: Read stuff out loud, see if people laugh. She also uses alpha readers bfore beta readers, asks if anything is boring, confusing, unbelievable, how the story plays, (no sentence-level feedback); whether the humour is tedious. Will read novels aloud and put them on her blog.

RJS: If you want to make money, make sure the joke can translate well to other languages. Spider Robinson – most of what he does is word play. Word play actually isn’t the way to go to make money because they don’t translate well. Douglas Adams and RAH and others don’t use word play. Make sure the jokes don’t depend on puns or word play so your work will be translated. (But oh, is Spider's word play ever so entertaining and that's why he's still one of my favourite authors. Just sayin'.)

MRK: Douglas Adams about is about rhythm and juxtaposition.

SS: The point: A pun makes whoever hears them just a little angry, and if you can’t go for humour go for angry, but the truest humour comes from character, plot, and especially voice. Pop culture references and puns are side jokes, the tips of the hat, the brief mentions. Pirates are funny. So is anything that goes out of or into the body. Et cetera.

Writing on the Fast Track (SiWC 2011 Notes)

Ooh boy what a month this has been. In the past week I have finished my NaNoWriMo 2011, which I have something to say about (just not this post), *and* the rewrites based on the feedback I received from a rejection letter. I successfully hosted weekly write-ins in my living room and for my NaNo, after realizing that my writing brain was suffering Janni-related fatigue, I let myself work on something fun that is nothing like what I've been writing of late: an adult-level (as opposed to YA) urban fantasy that has been in my brain for years. The point is, I've been busy. So busy that I still owe my great-aunt a reply to her letter from mid-October—

Okay. I'll stop ranting my absence excuses now. Notes time!

The subject on writing fast has come up a few times this year, especially if you've been following Magical Words, but I found the approach in this class to be different. (It being a class rather than just a post to read may have helped.) Author Mary Robinette Kowal (from The Intersection of Puppetry and Speculative Fiction notes I posted a few weeks back) had a great way of dissecting the subject, complete with exercises. (Bear with me. I left most of my attempts here.) The exercises were all about knowing your story. From there, we went on to discussing the actual art of writing faster.

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Writing on the Fast Track

Mary Robinette Kowal

A lot of writers try to learn all of the techniques at the same time. It’s best to look at the techniques as individual things, and how they can be used to write a story very fast.

Part I: Know Your Story:

Exercise 1: Describe the room. Use all five senses.

-     The hum of the A/C. The scuff marks on the striped-wallpaper walls. The checkmarked pattern of the carpet, a burgundy and indigo and tan  pattern that was probably once vivid, but with years of foot-traffic and dust has faded to ugly shades of brown. The taste of dust on the tongue, as the air is overheated and my nostrils tingle with an allergy that before this weekend, I didn’t know I had. My throat burns with the dry air and the knowledge that, thanks to this weekend’s gathering of people, I’ve probably caught another cold. 

-          As you start doing this, if you keep describing this for long enough (try half an hour), you’ll start to notice all the tiny details that make a story pop. 

-          Description can reveal character. Point of view is what a character notices. 

-          Focus indicates thought, what the character is thinking about. As a writer, you have control of what your character is looking at, what they notice first.

Exercise 2: Take your description and take a specific point of view. Write three lines based on that, and they should reveal the character’s occupation.

-          The padded chair promised to be comfy, but already I could feel its rigid straightness wreaking havoc on my lower lumbar.

-          The seats were just a shade too high, and my IT bands were seizing up.

-          The overheated air tried to overcompensate for the rain outside, burned my throat.

Breath and motion: typically we don’t notice breathing unless it carries information. Breath indicates emotion. The speed and focus can reveal different details, depending.

- Action uses short, choppy sentences because they represent fast breathing on the page.

- Just by putting an extra line of description can show a character is fixated on something.

- Aggressive motion: anything tha is motion towards; passive is no action; regressive is movement back.

- Unpack an emotion: with motion, reveal emotion

- Avoid crutches: looked - Instead of she looked away, try she turned her face into the cotton pillow.

Exercise 3: Transcript: Go to the exercises posted on Mary's blog at maryrobinettekowal.com. Change the context of the scene without changing the dialogue. Frequently, the dialogue is meaningless without the context behind it.

Other things to consider:

- Understand what the rules are so that when you break them, you break them with intention.

- Orson Scott Card: Character and Viewpoint: Think about what's the focus of the story you're telling, using MICE. Then structure your plot around that focus:

- MICE: Millieu (settting), Idea (question), Character (dissatisfied, become resolved/resigned), and Event (something upsets the status quo, ends when status quo is returned). 

- Milleu – you go somewhere, have experiences, and come back. (e..g. Gullivers ctravels) – often dull on its own, often embedded with Character and event stories.

Rembember the Compact: Every story begins with a  promise to the reader. If you start the story with a promise, you follow through.

Think about the question: what does the character want? What to they need? Do they get what they want?

-          Yes, but

-          No, and

-          Yes

-          No

-          These questions can be in the scenes. What does the character want? Systematically deny them.

-          A scene should advance the plot, develop character, and establish setting. If it doesn’t do at least one of these, and preferably two or three, it doesn’t belong in the novel.

When approaching the plot, think: who is the character, where do they come from, who is their family, and why? Why?

Exercise 4: Write, just thinking about plot, with beginning/middle/end, thinking about MICE: Write one each of five separate plots for five separate stories.

Milleu: Goldilocks leaves home, has an adventure and comes home.

Idea: Bears come home and find a small girl asleep in their bed.

Character: Goldiocks is unhappy at home and runs away, has a bad experience and comes home.

Event: Someone has broken into the bears’ house! But when Papa bear fixes the broken chair, everything is happy after all.

What excites you most?

Think of a “what if” question.

-          Who has the most to lose?

-          What do they want?

-          Do you want a happy ending or a sad ending?

-          Do the try/fail cycle.

Part II: Now, About Writing Fast:

- You must learn the individual elements of storywriting, so that when you sit down to write, all you think about is the story. Because everything else becomes natural. You don’t want to think about it.

- It’s good to learn things these that don’t come naturally because then when you need it, you’ll come back to it with ease.

- Use shorthand if you must, but then go back and fix it. If you need to write fast, get the story down then come back and tidy it later.

- When you need to write fast, give yourself a loose framework before you begin. Just start with knowing where your beginning, middle, and end are.

- Look at your opening scene and paragraph for things that you can repeat (a line, an emotional state, an image). That helps bring the story full circle.

How do I get into the headspace to write? (especially if I'm a procrastinator?)

-          Know that you have plans to write. Use an activity around that is not verbal to start gearing yourself up. Think about story constantly.

-          Set a timer. “I have only this much time; I have to see how many words I can get done in this much time, with this many minutes” (e.g. 15 minutes).

-          Don’t get up for a glass of water while the timer is on. Don’t get up because you’ve reached an emotionally difficult point in the story.

-          GooglePlus Hangouts: Start a hangout: “Hey, I’m writing,” chat for 15 minutes and write the next 45. (e.g. write-ins).

-          If really stuck, do NOT go to the Internet. What happens is that your brain is saying, “I need time to think, to get away”, but you need to do something physical that does not engage the storytelling part of the brain. The Internet is verbal and storytelling.

-          Find something else.

-          Take an acting class: that will help you with character motivation, dialogue, and pacing.

-          Learn a foreign language. It talks about different cultures and the way we use language reflects a different culture. It breaks up your natural assumptions.

-          Read outside your genre. Don’t pick randomly; go to someone who reads something you don’t and ask them for suggestions. 

-          Read heavily in your genre, too.

-          Travel. Go places. That alone can feed your creativity.

What do I do if I have a day-job that is heavily word-based?

-          The more time you spend on the computer for work, the computer becomes “this is my work” so if you're really stuck, switch to another medium (such as writing longhand). Or have a computer specifically Internet-less to write on. The medium in which you write can change the pacing of the words, the rhythm.

-          Do exercises. Give yourself permission to doodle.

-          Every day write one page of something different. Don’t think about the entire giant thing. Give yourself permission to start something and just play. Sometimes a story will catch.

-          If working on more than one project, considering having a buffer to switch between projects. Depends on how your brain is wired, may want to keep multiple documents open on a computer.

-          Keeping track of your wordcount can be useful, but not if it makes you depressed.

Exercise: Write down a list different random ideas (1-5 words each, pref. 2 or 3). Cross out the first three or five. Look at remaining list. What idea excites you? Combine two or three. Then ask why. Why is it happening? Have an internal dialogue with yourself, write it down so that it gets recorded and excites you.

Still stuck? Do the maybe chant, where you set yourself off on a cascade of brainstorming. (Note from Laura: I totally do this. And it works: "Maybe X is because of Y. Maybe Z happens. Maybe ZOMG maybe A B and C are true and that's why X is really happening!")

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So, there you have it. Maybe these notes are too late to use for NaNo, but NaNo itself is its own creature, anyway. This class reminded me of Rachel A. Aaron's post on how she increased her writing output: IMHO, it all seems to come down to knowing your story.

The Intersection of Puppetry and Speculative Fiction (SiWC 2011 Notes)

Hey everyone! It's notes time again!

A few weeks ago I attended this year's Surrey International Writer's Conference. This one happens a little closer to home, as in I could take transit to get to it if I wanted, but frankly, this was my sixth year and I've come to realize how intense of a weekend it is. Staying at the hotel helps keep me sane.

Once again I had an amazing weekend. I took two master classes in addition to the regular conference package, and overall? The word I came away with to best describe my conference experience was useful. And not in the off-the-cuff, dismissive way. I mean that I was in exactly the right place to learn exactly what I needed.

This year, I had the opportunity to meet a few authors new to the conference, and one of them was Mary Robinette Kowal, whose Jane Austen-style fantasy novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, came out just last year. In addition to being an author, Mary is a puppeteer, and in this class she spoke about how the art of puppetry is very much like the art of writing science fiction and fantasy.


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The Intersection of Puppetry and Speculative Fiction
Mary Robinette Kowal

Puppetry
- Puppets and Marionettes
- Many genres: hand, shadow, rod, body, and string
- Just with genre fiction, the red-headed step-child
- Deal with negative stereotypes (aren't puppet shows just for kids?)

The Intersection
- With SF/F, people think juvenile SF/F is the entire genre, just like with puppetry.
- We wait for the moment when we have to defend our choices
- Present it professionally, matter-of-factly
- As writers and readers of SF/F, we are the ambassadors of our genre.
- Don’t be embarrassed.
- We can be gateways as ambassadors: ask them what they read, compare genre (e.g. recommend Harry Dresden if they like murder mysteries, not if they read Danielle Steele they should read Ender’s Game) – find out what they’re intersted in and introduce them to an adult literary example.
- Point to mainstream examples of SF/F (e.g. The Time Traveler’s Wife)
- A Christmas Carol was one of the first Urban Fantasies.
- Find a popular novel to compare it to.

Puppetry breaks things down into separate techniques.
- As writers, people try to learn things all at the same time: worldbuilding, plot, pacing, dialogue
- Take these techniques and practice them individually rather than trying to learn them all at once
- Do it to the point where you don’t have to stop and think about what you’re doing so that when you’re in the throes of writing, of storytelling, you don’t have to think about technique
- People can lose track of things, know the story isn’t working, but not know why
- Description exercise: Find a place, describe the room you’re in, space you’re in, and write for half an hour. As you keep going, you notice the tiny little details that make the description *pop*.
- Practice character in much the same way: apply a character to the space and see how they react.
- Every puppet itself, every style of puppet, is different.
- The principles to make the puppet alive are much the same, no matter which genre.
- Likewise, principles of literature are the same

The four principles of puppetry: Focus, breath, muscle, and meaningful movement
- Focus: Indicates thought. What is the puppet looking at? That’s what they’re thinking. What they notice tells a lot about the character. As writers, we have complete control over what they’re thinking, and the order they notice things in (what’s important to them).
- As writers, we can only show the audience one thing at a time, so the order becomes more important. We control what they’re thinking about, looking at. By what we show them on the page, we control what the audience is looking at.
- Breath is a motion. Indicates how someone feels. Each different breath is a different emotional feel. With writing, it’s the same: the speed with which we do things controls how the audience feels. E.g. action scenes have short, choppy sentences because it’s a reflection of breath. Punctuation indicates whre people think, pause, breathe. Short, choppy sentences indicate someone is out of breath. Also, combined with Focus, changes the speed with which a person notices things.
- Muscle: Your characters are internally motivated. Know what your goal is when doing things. When a character does something on the page, if it’s not internally motivated, you can see the author’s hand. Give them sufficient internal motivation, emotional weight. That’s muscle. Changing the internal motivation changes the meaning of the actions, and gives the reader something to grasp.
- Not every single action should be a muscle action, but they need sufficient internal motivation.
- Meaningful movement: Because we can only show the reader one movement at a time, every movement should have some meaning. We rely on the character’s body motion to convey emotion. Is it aggressive, passive, or regressive? Aggressive: motion towards. Anger, happiness. Passive: don’t move back or forward. Regressive: Movement away. Open and closed silhouettes: open: anything we want to engage with more fully / closed: do not want to engage with.
- Helps us to define the surroundings, too.
- Be more specific about body language whenever you can. Does the body language you’re using do as much for your story as you can? Is it meaningful?
- Puppetry: head bobbing: amateur. Meaningless movement. Doesn’t add any meaning to the character or story. This includes nodding. Let them have a good reason for nodding. Don’t be redundant: “Yes,” she agreed, nodding.
- Do not assume that a nod means yes. E.g. in India: bobbing from side to side is yes, but a nod is meaningful.
- Can use two pieces of body language to play in contrast, to show a character is conflicted
- Don’t just insert body language to have body language.
- Some motions can be character traits, but don’t have them do ti so often it becomes meaningless.

Parameters of the story
- Puppetry looks at deciding what style of puppetry to be used based on audience: size, age; venue, budget, story you’re trying to tell: helps decide design.
- Look at the size of your story. Every character you put on the page, every set change, will take word count to establish and do justice to. Does the story you’re writing need that set change? How long is your target length? That’s the size of your theatre. Even with novels, you need to figure out how much plot you want, how many characters, etc.

The style of puppetry changes the style of the story.
- e.g. Marionettes: good at graceful movement, not fight scenes.
- Different voice (POV) is good at different things. E.g. First person: good for grounding in a single character and that character’s perception of the world
- The action of telling the story changes the narrator. They’re not the same person at the end as they are when they begin telling the story.
- Third person: good for grounding details
- Don’t choose a voice just because it is fashionable. Write to the expectation you’re trying to set. The voice you choose will shape the story.
- Your materials dictate what you can do.

Pay attention to how much detail your mind fills in.
- The same thing happens in the page: give the audience the right details, and the reader will fill it in. (Puppet e.g.: Miss Piggy doesn’t actually blink!)
- Facial expression can be less specific than body movement. Body language is a more specific tool. What are they doing?
- We betray ourselves much more with the body.
- Character description: point of view to describe it.
- POV no stopping in front of the mirror – just describe in terms of the people around them.
- If you have built sufficient credibility with your audience, sometimes your audience will believe it even if you didn’t intend, and they’ll forgive you for much.

Dialogue:
- The movement associated with the dialogue can completely change the audience’s perception.
- Although dialogue is important, a lot of how dialogue is perceived is affected by the setting.
- Why is your character saying something? Sometimes the character changes their mind midstream.
- Monologues do not typically work in fiction today because they’re out of fashion. Try to find ways to break it up: Insert questions, participation of another character (even nonverbal).
- Just remember that dialogue includes a nonverbal element.
- Exercise: Take a transcript of something. Write the setting around it. Look at how context affects the perception of dialogue and the perception of meaning.


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That was one of the coolest classes I've ever attended at Surrey. It got me thinking about character presence and movement in a whole new way. (And seriously. Miss Piggy doesn't blink? I hadn't realized it, because the puppeteers controlling her portray her movements that well. It's amazing how the mind fills in the blanks.)

More notes coming soon!