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21.09: Grounding The Reader · Writing Excuses

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  [SPEAKER_03]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
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• 0:15
  [SPEAKER_03]: Season 21, episode 9.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: This is Writing Excuses.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Grounding the reader.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: Tools not rules for writers, bywriters.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Mary Rubinette.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Erin, and today we are going to be talking about how to ground the reader in the story from the very beginning.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: What we mean by sort of grounding the reader in the story, at least what I mean is making them feel like they are fully engaged and fully immersed in the story.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's true, whether it's a short story or a novel.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of times we talk about novels as being more immersive, but even if you're only reading a 300 word flash piece, you want to feel like in some ways you are in it, and you understand where the character is in it.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: But I have two questions to start y'all off with.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: One is, what are you actually trying to ground the reader in?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it the place?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it the time?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it the emotion?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: What do you think is the most important?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: emotion.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I think starting with how the character feels is the most important for me.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, but I'm always like very emotion-forward and how I think about storytelling.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And then if I know how the character feels about the environment they're in, feels about the situation they're in, then starting to build out all of that around them, that comes secondarily to me.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: But you had a different opinion.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I do.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I think that there's three basic things that you want to establish at the beginning, where who in genre.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think that you can do those in the first three sentences.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think you do where with a link to sensory details about the location.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think you do who with their attitude or their emotion, but also what their role is and what action they're engaged in, if you're doing an action-driven opening.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And then the genre you do with the
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm using an example, this is an action-driven opening from one of my own stories, from Ghost Rockers.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: The Germans were flanking us at Deville Wood when I died.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Ginger Stuyvesant had a dim awareness of her body repeating the soldier's words to the team's stenographer.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: She tried to hold that awareness at bay along with the dozens of other spirit circles for the working for the British Army.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So, the first thing I start is not actually character, right?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: The Germans were flanking us from Deville Woodwood and I died.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: What that tells you is, we're talking to a ghost, so we get our Dejanra specific detail up right at the front.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: We get a sense of where she's someplace that's large enough to hold dozens of other spirits or holes in it, some sort of military thing.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And we have a sense of who she is because she is the one who's repeating.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: You may not know the word medium yet, but that is the action that she's engaged in.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And you also know from the dim awareness of her body and trying to hold that awareness at bay, that for her, this is in everyday occurrence, this is her job.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm doing all of those things, and that's one sequence, but I could have tried to, I could have flipped that.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I could have started with Ginger's stifescent, tried to hold the awareness of her body at bay.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: along with the awareness of the dozens of other spirit circles working for the British Army.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: She repeated the soldier's words to the teams to now refer.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: The Germans were flankin' us at Deville Wood when I died.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So I'm hitting those same things.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: The sequence doesn't matter.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: What I'm doing with that, the choice to start with that opening line was, I'm gonna give you a question and I'm gonna answer it coming from the previous thing, of building the reader trust.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: But I don't think that the order that it comes in matters.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I would agree with that.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I also want to add a little bit of extra thought to the thing I was saying early met a motion.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the motion can also be trying to establish a reader emotion in addition to or a character motion because I think what was interesting to me about both those examples was I had an emotional state in hearing both of those that was very evocative in both cases but different.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: right, the first was almost the sense of immediate panic of like, oh, the Germans have surrounded us and I died, right?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Then it's like, oh, that's so bad.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: The other is a professionalism of person doing a job and trying to channel a thing under extreme stress and circumstance.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think the emotional state communicated about the character and then therefore my emotional state was both really different.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: But really grounding in both cases, because I was immediately
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  [SPEAKER_01]: not necessarily embodied because it's a spirit, but like I felt in the scene in a very immediate way, because you were controlling my emotional state really, really effectively.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I agree with that, 100%.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: No.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I was thinking, I was trying to recall those in my head.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I think one thing that is in there that you didn't mention in the three things, or maybe it's a part of the who, is also the culture and I guess tail-telling style of the piece.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Is this a more like what we learned in that section also is there is dialogue?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: even if it is dialogue of the dead, there's like reported dialogue and action, like we know that we're in, we know what POV we're in, we understand like, you know, whether we're going to be getting something that's distanced or close, some of the things we talked about last season.
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there is also kind of the grounding in the way the story is told.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I completely agree with that.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So something we're going to talk about later is this idea of a voice-driven opening versus an action-driven opening.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think that them is two ends of a spectrum.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Most stories are a blend of them.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So in a voice-driven opening, like the far extreme of it, I think about the aesthetic voice of it.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's some of what you're talking about,
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  [SPEAKER_03]: encapsulating both the authors ideas, but also the sort of the voice of the character, their history, a lot of the things we talked about last season about how to make a character feel alive.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I often think of it as like for me like grounding in the the storyteller because I am more of a focus is kind of like is this an interesting person to from whom you would like to hear a tale like if this person it's like the person coming up to you being like you'll never guess what happened to me at the grocery store yesterday and you're like
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I wouldn't like, all right, let's hear about it and something about the way in which they say that makes you feel like you're in good hands because even if you don't understand everything that's going on, you don't understand all the action, you understand who is taking you through it and you feel confident that that person is going to do it in a really interesting way.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: Is the difference between the ancient mariners stopping you versus like some guy at the bar right like there's a difference in tone and vibe between those two things and one of those is just really grounding you in two different kinds of stories.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, although I would not go any place with either of those just to be really clear.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: What if you miss ancient mariners at the bar?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: The promise we can't go anywhere with the ancient mariners.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: He's stuck from going into the wedding.
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now that we have a sense of like, what are we grounding in?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: How are you doing that?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, what are the tools that you use in order to ground someone in the story?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So sensory details are a big one for me.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I think that's one of the things that we're asking the reader to do is to sort of build pictures or words of like images and sensations.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: We're actually asking them to carry a part of that with them and to do some of that work.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So if I can tap into a sensory detail, that is going to be something that the reader, we talked about this with all the birds in the sky.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: When we were talking about there was a point where one of the characters sat down and the slushy ground
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And we, you know, we've all experienced that where you sit down on a bench that you didn't know as wet.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And so I think anytime you can use a sensory detail that is that reader can relate to, that's going to immediately make people feel more grounded, even if it's not something that they could ever have experienced.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: Dan talked about this in his, in a class that he taught on the, the crews about fighting Jackie Chan will get, you know, we'll have a character thrown through a plate last window then stumble back and hit their head on a shelf because everyone knows what hitting your head on a shelf feels like.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And so I think that if you don't know what getting through, but most of us don't know.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, for yourself.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So I think I think that if you can find a sensory detail that is that we can link to that that's that's one of the things you can do to help the reader feel grounded.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: That makes a lot of sense, but I have a devil's advocate question, but I will advocate for the devil after the break.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: All right, we are back.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: My devil advocacy is ready.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: This is for you, don't one.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: You talked about how difficult it is in a previous episode, sometimes for action to really grab you.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: But when Mary Robinette was talking about sensory details, I mean, what's more sensory than the spaceship blowing up around you and like all the sounds and the feeling and the noise.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if that has so many sensory details, is there a reason like, does that help?
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  [SPEAKER_00]: Or does that not help in terms of getting grounded in the story?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: sensory can help.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think sensory G has a really, really important.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I made to be really clear.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I said start with emotion, but also like then emotion is often embodied and grounded in a specific way.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: What we smell, what we feel, what we hear.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: But sometimes I find starting in a quieter moment, let's me learn more about how a person is experiencing sensory detail.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: in a really different way.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think about Arcade and Martin, I use this example all the time, but this is moment in the novel where a bomb goes off.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And the character experiences it.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: The way the character experiences it is by removing sensory detail first.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: She has very little sense of what happened and is very disoriented.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And then one by one, the author adds back sensory detail and that grounds me in that character's experience so much, right?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a description of like,
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  [SPEAKER_01]: learning what the word for bomb was because that's what they were yelling that wasn't any of the other words that she knew.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, and so like that thing of like being able to lock into a can't process everything that's happening.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to focus on this one detail feels really grounding and real to me even though there's an overwhelming amount of sensory detail.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I think part of the problem of starting with an action scene is as too much information.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I think oftentimes in an action scene, I need to know who my antagonist are.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I need to know what kind of technology levels are happening.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I need to know what this physical space looks like.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I need to know why I'm being shot at.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I need to know what my goal is, right?
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's so much information to get across very, very quickly.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, also trying to heighten the stakes in terms of like this fast-paced action scene that it's very overwhelming for me as a reader, which is part of why I think it's really hard to do well.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: I think what you're pointing at is context.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Yes, that often the reason that it's not working is because the reader lacks context.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So for instance, let's say that I'm at home and I have upstairs neighbors and I hear footsteps.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Contextually, that's fine.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Let's say I'm at home and I hear footsteps upstairs, but I know that my upstairs neighbors are out of town.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Let's say I'm at home and I hear my cat who uses buttons to talk and I hear my cat say hurry, stranger, and then I hear footsteps upstairs and I know my neighbors are out of town.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Like those are contextually several different things.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: That last one did happen, by the way.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: The dirty ones are the one.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: It was extremely unsettling.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: So those are those are very, very different context.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think what happens with an action with the fight scenes is we do not have the context, we don't know what we're supposed to care about what we're supposed to root for, what the objective is.
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: And it doesn't take a lot to give context, honestly.
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, funny.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: It makes me think of how often you see in film and television, but sometimes books as well, the one big moment of action and then the flashback like 24 hours earlier like I was just waking up and it felt great because in that case, it's like
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It gives us the anticipation of context.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The thing that just happened is going to have all this context that you're going to bring up, and this is a big promise, and you are making it, and we will actually get to see it fulfilled on the page, which I think is really exciting.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: But thinking about that bomb scene, the thing I remember is, I believe that's a scene that comes right after they're having a meal, and the character is looking at the person drinking all the water, and is like, or eating meat, or something where they're like,
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: meet which is like insane to them because they grew up on a space station.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: They're just eating like a big like slab of meat and there's a fountain going behind her and she's like That is such an insane waste of water and it was just like this complete moment of disorientation followed by physical disorientation
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I remember that moment like I remember the bomb, but I remember the like oh my gosh the water is gross and the meat like how could you be doing that because it's such a different perspective than I'm used to.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And therefore that's a detail that catches the eye.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I think one thing that's interesting with action is we see a lot of action.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: I think there's just like a lot like in film and television.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: We see a lot of things blowing up.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: We see a lot of people.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, for better or worse, getting, you know, shot and dismembered.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think sometimes we tune those details out because they don't feel new or different.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, but seeing somebody like freak out over a fountain is new and different.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So maybe part of the answer can be that when you're grounding, find a detail to ground in, a sensory detail that is going to catch the reader's awareness in a way that they might not be used to.
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's kind of like the thing that you're saying with the Jackie Chan thing of you need to have him hitting his head on a shelf too Because I know what that feels like.
• 14:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know when getting shot feels like seems bad But like I don't have experience with this.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't have a visceral reaction to it, right?
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so this is again returning to the idea the microcosm I find the microcosm to be really really useful to jump media a little bit, you know, as a GM
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: in sort of an actual play setting.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the things is the players are my audience in addition to the people who experience the story, right?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: You have sort of two layers of audience, but one thing I need to do when they have really learned to do is when starting a campaign,
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I need to put my players in a small, relatable situation to ease them into the character.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: I need to give them a small-steg school, and so when I'm introducing characters, I'll do little vignettes that are actually like pretty quiet moments, but that sort of give them a way to figure out, okay.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: If I'm this person, how do I solve challenges?
• 15:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right?
• 15:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: How do I figure out who I am?
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  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's not just like a bombastic opening of like, I'm so-and-so.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: And here's my thing in the tavern.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, okay, if you are trying to get across town to make it to a meeting on time, how are you doing that?
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: And this goes back to the thing you were saying before about the grounding starts from emotion that with that and also the example that you brought up from a memory called empire that you could have just grived that scene and eating at the restaurant and made that food seem totally normal and ordinary.
• 16:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: in most fiction, not all fiction.
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  [SPEAKER_03]: And so thinking about thinking about that lens, why are they doing that?
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  [SPEAKER_03]: Why are they experiencing things this way?
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: I do think about it as what is their attitude, their opinion, about things.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: You mentioned a thing in a previous episode about sometimes last season about how sometimes you'll write a character having a big emotion that's a scene that won't actually appear in the story.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it's funny, I was thinking about, I think earlier you're talking about embodiment.
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  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think in some ways it's like you want the embodiment and the emotion side by side.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you're leading with like something physical, you want enough emotion so that you understand like, why is this physical, why, how do they feel about this physical thing happening to them?
• 17:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: If six people get slapped, they will all feel it probably the same way, but they won't all like emotionally feel it the same way, depends on who's doing the slapping, what's happening, where it's going.
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why do you get slapped?
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
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  [SPEAKER_01]: No matter as a lot for how you respond to that, and that's the emotion I want to be grounded in.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it a stranger slapping you?
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it your mother?
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's a very different thing that's going to be happening even though the feel of the hand on the face is probably very similar.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then on the other side of things, like if you start from emotion, how can you embody that emotion so that you're not like floating around just being like,
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am sad, but like, or I don't understand this culture around me, there's something in it that is an embodied sense so that that emotion has somewhere to live because I think sometimes I don't feel grounded in a story when it's so emotional that I don't understand like what is even happening like it's gone to just like feeling the feelings with no understanding of why they're happening where they're happening or like to whom they're happening.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I've been using this acronym recently, fast reactions, focus, action, sensation thought.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: That these are the places that we feel, reaction, the things we notice, focus, the actions we take in response to the thing.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: The sensations where we feel it in our body,
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And in the things we think about it, and it's not that a character has to have all of those all at the same time.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: But when they're having reactions, they're probably going to have at least one of those.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: When I want them to have a really big emotional, like, clump them.
• 18:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: But for me, it is thinking about where does this character hold tension?
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: for the sensation, where does this carry to hold tension, what things are comfortable for them, what things are uncomfortable using the slap again, if we add one more possible person, if this is someone who's into BDSM, they're going to have a different reaction, they're the action that they take the sensations that they have.
• 19:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: are going to be different on that slap if it's a consensual slap, then it would be if it was a non-consensual slap in a totally different, even if it's the same character, those reactions are going to be different.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love that, and we're going to now ground you in some homework, and I promise it is not go slap people.
• 19:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or at least if you do it, don't do it because we don't do it because we don't do it and it's essential and we love you very much.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think what I'd like you to do for the homework is to take something that you're opening and just write the actions, just write what is physically happening, where the person is, what they are doing, if they're being slapped, what are the sensations that are happening?
• 20:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then go through and actually figure out like write yourself a little annotated notes what is the emotion that you want to have associated which each of those actions.
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is how they're going to feel.
• 20:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is what's getting into it.
• 20:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And finally, once you've done that try writing the scene where it's integrated, where you have the emotions that you annotated, mix with the actions that you've already described and see what happens.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love that.
• 20:24
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• 20:30
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• 20:34
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• 20:40
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