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20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders · Writing Excuses

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I swear detective I was nowhere near the polar lounge on the night my poor darling husband Charles was murdered.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was on a hoodon of mystery cruise with my assistant, Dudley, a darling boy.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: You two can join us on our next deadly cruise February 6, 2020, 6, 7 nights out of Los Angeles on the Navigator of the Sea is called now, if you dare.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: 3174516150 or go to hoodonacruises.com.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writing excuses.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Season 20, episode 38.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is Writing Excuses.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: An interview with Charlie Jane Anders.
• 0:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Mary Robinette and I'm going on and we are very excited to have our special guest, Charlie Jane Andrews joining us today.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hi.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So for those of you who've been listening along, we've been doing a deep dive into Charlie Jane's book, All the Birds and the Sky and we're excited to have her here with us to talk about process and to talk about tone and
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: some of the other really cool narrative tricks that she was using when you were wouldn't have been playing this book.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, and I think it turns out this is fairly time-laced since you're working on a sequel right now.
• 1:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, it's kind of on the back burner at the moment, but I wrote about 30,000 words of a sequel and people who pre-ordered.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: lessons in magic and disaster.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: By the time you listen to this, they will have gotten a PDF with the sequel plus and deleted stuff from all the birds.
• 1:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: But it's, I've read about 30,000 words and I kind of, I have to kind of stop and think about it.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: So that's on the back burner.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: I have other projects and probably going to work on first.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: But that's, I've written a chunk of a sequel.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: amazing.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Interesting.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you know, we're such huge fans of the first book and it's been such a delight talking about it for the past of a few weeks here.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm so excited for any news about a sequel when it comes around.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Eventually.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is, I feel like this kind of conversation is probably actually really reassuring to new writers who are like, oh, oh, I'm not the only one who just 30,000 words of a novel and then has to sit there and go, huh?
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I promised, like, I decided to promise people who pre-order lessons in magic and disaster.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: this thing as a pre-order reward, and so I always kind of knew I was just going to like, just because I was having fun playing around with writing a sequel, and so I was like, I know that I have enough of an idea of what I'm doing to get that much done.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, originally, it was going to be 10,000.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: It just kind of bullied me to put to 30,000, because that was just the section I was writing got to be that long.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, I mean, you know, it's going to be, I think the rest of that book is going to be a lot of work,
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'll wait until I'm in a point where I feel like I've got some breathing room and can really slow down.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, do you want to talk about some of the works that you did with the first novel?
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because there were, there were a bunch of things that we were very excited about when we picked it one of the reasons I was particularly excited about it was because you were using more than one puvian because you were dipping into omniscient puvian just something that we don't see used a lot but I thought that you were using it very effectively to kind of move the reader around a story that takes place over decades.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean it's interesting like I kind of felt like I was being a little rebellious kind of dipping it to Omnition POV with that book like and I didn't do it that much I did it here and there like there are versions of it where it gets much more omniscience and like I go much deeper.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: Into that omniscient thing like I'm just much more like leaning into that But I you know, I feel like it worked really I thought it worked pretty well sparingly like I thought doing it like once in a while Was really like fun and If I tried to push it it might have gotten I don't know I was aware that a lot of people have issues with omniscient POV I think for reasons that are kind of misguided
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know, literally be omniscient and like just tell you everything that's going on which I don't think has ever been the case with omniscient narrators like they don't like there's always a degree of like selective and listen what the omniscient narrator tells you and how intrusive it is.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: like even going back to when it was more ubiquitous.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, I mean, there's a scene in all the words in the sky, which I'm sure y'all have already talked about, where Lawrence and Patricia are sitting under the escalator at the mall and they're looking at the shoes of the people who go by and they're trying to guess who these people are based on their shoes and then
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: the narrator comes in and says that the last person that they guessed they actually guessed right and he is an assassin and he's actually trying wants to kill them and like that was like I was like okay this is going to be the part where everybody's going to throw the book across the room and quit reading and instead I don't know how many people have come to me at this point and said that's their favorite moment in the book or that's when they got hooked which is so funny because I was like I almost cut it out I was like oh my god this is going to this is going to make people stop reading the book it's kind of like
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's going to destroy the book to for me to just like throw that in and I just I thought like it was a fun playful thing and I think the playfulness was a important thing with the omniscient narrator in general And I did feel like there's a lot of choices I made in that book where I was kind of giving a middle finger to people on the internet who say you can't do X, Y, and see and I was just like I'm going to do all those things because.
• 6:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I think there's like a very, very vocal, but very small minority of readers who get very fixated on POV and get very rigid about what the rules of POV are and how they can be deployed.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know,
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you're exactly right that there's such a sense of play to the way you use the POV here that makes it such a delightful reading experience.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can totally see why people.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that moment jumped out of me, too.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's such a great little moment.
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, definitely sliding from one perspective to another and then opening up more of the world.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I want to go back to one thing that you were saying about having an omniscient narrator, not really being, you know, quote unquote omniscient.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, they're not a character in the book, but the narrator still has a perspective.
• 6:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: How do you think about POV when you're not grounded in a particular character, man?
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I think that, you know, like I said, most of the time we are grounded in a particular character, and I think if you do omniscient narration, it does kind of become a character in the book at some point, and like I've read like three or four novels published in the past year, and I can think of the title of one of the most top of my head, but I don't know it's kind of a spoiler, so I don't even know if I should say the one that I can think of the title of, but I've read like a few books in the past year where the narrator
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: and then at a certain point like halfway through the book you find out it's actually a character who just knows a lot of stuff and is narrating all this stuff from their vantage point of like you know and like that's a trick that I've seen people do lately of like oh you think as an omniscient narrator but it's actually Fred who Fred knows a lot of stuff and is just hasn't introduced themselves yet and they're just kind of like
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: hiding who they are from you until a certain point in the book and you know obviously I feel like it's been out for long enough that like the saint of bright doors you don't find out who the narrator is until like almost the end of the book yeah like I feel like that's a trend right now the hidden narrator the narrator who is actually is a specific
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_04]: viewpoint, but we don't know until we get to almost the end.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's such a good start for that for sure.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sorry?
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Every single time I find it really delightful and enjoyable, so, you know, maybe I'll order the trend here.
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: like I feel like it could get over done at some point, maybe we'll be like okay enough of the hidden narrator like you know I definitely but I think yeah I I really like that but I also think that it's that's a sneaky way to do an omniscient narrator without doing an omniscient narrator like have a narrator who you know just by virtue of being some kind of supernatural entity or you know a person who just isn't a privileged position
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: has a degree of what appears to be omniscience, and then is like, ha-ha-ha, and you know.
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's probably a version of all the birds where it turns out it's marinated by Peregrine the AI and like I made various attempts to adapt the book for screen a few years ago.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_04]: And you know one of the things I taught with was like maybe you know if we need to have to have a narrator speak up occasionally it could be Peregrine the AI is narrator because Peregrine does have this privilege viewpoint but I actually like having an omniscient narrator that's just an omniscient
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: came up like one of the traditions that kind of influences me as the tradition of like loosely like Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut who at least when I was young they were compared a lot in fact how I got into Kurt Vonnegut is people kept comparing Douglas Adams to him and they're almost even pretty in some ways but they do have that kind of they do have a narrator who is chatty and overshare and kind of like often will kind of intrude on the story in various ways
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I love that.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think it's really fun and funny.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I think we've lost something by not like I think it's there it's not just that there's a minority of readers who don't like
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: I'm sure they're lovely people, but they should shut the hell up or learn to be less per crisp, prescriptive, really, but yeah, I like the playfulness.
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: I like that I think when you're right, but to return to your question, don't one, because they didn't really answer it.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: When you have, when you're not in a particular character's POV, I think.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_04]: it really helps if the narrator has like maybe not opinions necessary but like they are telling you information that is relevant to the story in a way that is kind of like commenting on the story from a particular like they're giving you perspective and often it's perspective that the characters are not aware of or that is not
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: white like, you know, within the confines of what people on the scene know.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so the narrator is sneakily giving you little extra pieces of information.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so I like I like a mischievous narrator, I guess.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you see that as your perspective or do you see that as something external again?
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like is it another layer in between you and the text?
• 11:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's a little of both, I guess.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, it's not Mimi.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's not like me being like high.
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's curly day and I'm gonna tell you stuff.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: But it is kind of, it is, it is my kind of, obviously everything in the story comes from me in the end, of course, as it always is the case.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think, you know, it's a viewpoint that is kind of closer to authorial than that of any of the characters, I guess is what I would say, but it's still not the authorial viewpoint necessarily.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: And like, you can have a narrator who is wrong about stuff, where you can have a narrator who provides misleading information, or, or, you know, I feel like part of why people don't like omniscient narrators is because they think it's just going to like spoil the story or like
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: And ammunition narrators can actually mess with you in various ways and give you more perspective but also maybe tell you stuff that's actually going to lead you astray or whatever or I don't know.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the things that I liked about the way you were using the omniscient narrator for me specifically was the way you were using it to shape tone because in the the first part of the book when they were little it takes on this kind of
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: flummy British like children's fantasy novel or children's, you know, and then as we as we move the unniscient narrator there's a there's a continuity of tone but but also the narration style ages up very subtly each time we go so that when we get to them as adults we get very few
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: the omniscient narrator, they just appear at really, I think, very key points because the rest of the time it is stylistically more like an, and, quote, adult novel, which is either, you know, which is tends to be in science fiction and fantasy type third person.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Were you doing conscious decisions about that sort of pushing or pulling or was it just sort of happening in revisions?
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, I liked the idea that the book kind of grows up with the characters.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: That was something I thought a lot about for sure.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I thought, I mean, I dialed it way back, like the earlier drafts, like the first couple chapters, like the opening Patricia chapter was written in a much more fairy-tile style, like almost like once upon a time, there were two sisters.
• 13:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: It wasn't quite that, but it was pretty close to that.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_04]: And people were like, this is too hard to like,
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's too jarring that transition from like straight up fairy tale like kind of to you know something more grown up I also like when I had the more fairy tale stuff in the beginning the omniscient narrator was going to be much more front and center because
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: I was going to start out with like, you know, two girls in the wood and like it's very fairy tale and, you know, but Roberta was going to grow up to be a serial killer and like just kind of throw in pieces of information that would just let you know on page one that this is not that story.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: And in the end, I cut that because I ended up not going quite that far into a fairy tale landed.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: It felt too trusive to just start throwing spoilers at you on page one.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: She has killed someone, but it was, there was a continuing circumstances.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: He kind of deserved it.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, I mean, the tone kind of evolving with something that I really struggled with and in general, the level of whimsy was something that I really struggled with.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like I didn't want it to go too far into whimsy.
• 15:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: And in fact, in my subsequent works, I've really kind of moved away from whimsy a little bit
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: I, it, that can kind of take over and it can become like to the exclusion of like character and emotion and stuff like I feel like I had to pair back the whimsy a lot in order to make the characters feel fully like fully realized and emotional and make their relationship feel as real as it needed to and you know so there was a lot more kind of for lack of a
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: whimsical, cuteness in the first draft and I really drilled it way back and like only kept the stuff that felt like it really belonged.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well why don't we go ahead and take our break and when we come back let's talk about how we make decisions about humor and whimsy.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And as part of our break, uh, Charlie Jane I think you're going to tell us about your newist book.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, thank you.
• 16:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: So my newest book, which came out on August 19th, is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: And it's got a lot of that sort of quirky whimsical tone as well.
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: It does get a little darker and sadder in places.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: It is about a young,
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: Transwoman who is a PhD student in English literature, but more importantly, she is a witch, and her mother Serena has been depressed and kind of hiding from the world for several years since some really bad stuff happened.
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: And Serena decides the way that to bring her mother back to the world and kind of help her mother kind of re-embrace life as to teach her mother how to do magic.
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: which magic being magic has some unpredictable results.
• 17:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: And magic is kind of a mirror for your desires and your sense of self in this book.
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so, not surprisingly, Jamie's mother comes, views it very differently than Jamie does.
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: And that leads to a lot of interesting mother-daughter conflicts.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_04]: But there's also just like a lot of cozy queer vibes and occasional upsetting stuff,
• 17:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Queer activism of the 1990s and the 1730s as like we get flashbacks about Jamie's mom When when she was a young woman and also Jamie is researching Queers of the 18th century which turns out there was a lot of them.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, so yeah It's about kind of queer survival and queer joy and Healing and forgiveness and learning to understand your mother as a human being rather than as just like this icon from your childhood
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: It sounds so good.
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on that.
• 17:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it sounds really amazing and just what we need.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, so I'm sure that is lessons in magic and disaster by Charlie Jane Andrews.
• 18:08
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• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Alright, now we're back from our break and we are going to talk about how to make decisions about whimsy and humor and where to place it and how much to dial it up or down and it's a fun but complicated subject sometimes.
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: When you were working on all the birds in the sky, did you know going in that you wanted it to have that sort of whimsical tone or was that a discovery as you were writing it?
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, I think that from the jump, it was a very webisical novel.
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: And like, I was writing a different novel.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like, what happened is, backing up slightly, I had an urban fantasy novel that was a kind of noir, like paranormal detective.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_04]: It wasn't quite detective, but paranormal investigator type novel in the kind of vein of like,
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: you know, Jim Butcher or Richard Cajrries, Sandman slim novels or, you know, the october day novels, like that kind of stuff.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: And it was like, we're talking 2011.
• 19:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: I was working on this urban fantasy noir book.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I was walking in the park and this idea about a witch and a mad scientist just kind of bonked me on the head.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I had to go right down about your stuff about it.
• 20:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so I feel like every project I write, I kind of approached differently, that the urban fantasy novel also is very silly in places.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: stuff, but it also had that more noir tone.
• 20:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so I always knew that this was going to be more REMCICAL, and I always knew that this was going to be more of a fun kind of almost goofy novel, and like I said earlier drafts were much goofier, and I feel like as a writer, I am someone at least I have been someone to whom
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_04]: goofy humor comes really naturally.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like my first attempts at writing science fiction and fantasy were just pure zany comedy with like ridiculous premises and like just like the silliest stuff I could come up with.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: And they weren't very good.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: They didn't have the characters were one-dimensional.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: Often, they just ended, like they would just like, Alan, the story's over.
• 21:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: Now, go home, folks.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: Nothing to see here.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, you wanted a resolution.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, I'll do that.
• 21:09
  [SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, no, I was really good at goofy as Amy humor.
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: Basically, I would say that the course of the first,
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know how many years of my career from like when I started writing fiction seriously to all the birds of the sky was learning to kind of
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: learning to pair humor with other stuff and eventually kind of dial back the humor because I got the feeling and you know I got feedback from people that the humor was that I was like sacrificing character in a motion for the sake of humor and that and so now I think when I use humor it's something that is an intentional thing that I put in intentionally
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: But originally it was just like the automatic thing that I always did and, you know, and then I would add character and story and plot and stuff on top of that or, you know, under that or whatever.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: crack at all the birds in the sky was going to just be like completely like campy comedy of like you know scientists in which is battling it out with like you know lasers versus like spell books versus like you know
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: like, you know, ghosts and goblins and vampires and aliens and everybody just like, just like every silly trope from both genres just like bursting out all over the place and that would have been actually very boring because, you know, one zany trope is entertaining and fun 3,000 zany tropes is just like, it just becomes, it just, yeah, it just becomes like overload and
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: functionally, they all start to feel the same, like, you know, an elf and an alien or not that different unless you put a lot of effort into making them different, you know?
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so yeah, and so I realized that I really wanted this to be, and I had just written six months, three days, my short story that that intention, which was very focused on the relationship and was more emotional, and so I was like, I want to bring that energy to it.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so it was really like challenging myself to have that kind of physical humor, but also that emotion and that kind of feeling of like being especially the main part of the novel when they're grown up, being in your 20s and just like getting what you always wanted, but it's still kind of sucks.
• 23:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: And like, you know, you're you're finally in the city and getting to like have an awesome life kind of, but life's still kind of stuck.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: Also having to be delved.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, yeah, being in adult is just, yeah, anyway.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so yeah, and I feel like I really try to have more of the humor come out of character and I'll give a very specific example.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_04]: I think I've probably touched on before.
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: There's a moment in the book where Lawrence is starting to like,
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: His relationship with his girlfriend Seraphina is unraveling.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like they are just things are not working out between them.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: And there is a moment where the narrative, they've just run out of things to say to each other, and Lawrence is trying so hard to be like a good boyfriend, and it's actually self sabotaging, because he's just over.
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_04]: He's trying too hard.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_04]: And in an earlier drafts where the narrator said,
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: Which I thought was a clean line because like you can't do active listening if nobody's talking.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: Right.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then I was like, you know what?
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: That's the narrator coming in and telling us that Lawrence is a chump.
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: What if it's Lawrence reflecting to himself?
• 24:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: I wish I could fill the silence with active listening, or I'm just realizing in his own mind that he's trying to do this thing that's impossible.
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: And then it's got Pethos as well as humor because it's Lawrence realizing, oh, I'm screwing up.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: This thing I'm trying to do is not working.
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so changing, just changing like three words from like the narrator, like,
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: standing above and like looking at Lawrence and laughing at him to Lawrence kind of realizing, roofily kind of laughing at himself, but also realizing that he is, he's messing up and that this is not working.
• 25:24
  [SPEAKER_04]: That just made it, it was still funny, I think, but it was funny in a different way.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: So that was a light bulb moment for me, of just like, oh, the humor can actually,
• 25:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: come from within the characters and the characters can be part, they can be in on the joke to some extent or if we are going to make fun of them, we can at least respect their perspective in some way, I kind of, I don't know.
• 25:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, I really love hearing you talk about that because I can see now that you pointed out all the ways in which you've implemented that throughout the book, right?
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there's almost six different tones in the book because you have the fantasy side, the science fiction side, and then you have the three different age categories, right, and, you know, I can sort of see that.
• 26:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: You talk about the early version as being, you know, very whimsical, and there's certain whimsy and play in the book, but I don't think of that as my primary reaction to it a lot of ways, right?
• 26:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like,
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, that original concept you had of like laser guns versus spell books, you know, big explosive battle, that kind of makes it into the book, but when it does, is quite scary and really upsetting, actually.
• 26:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like, you know, we, we, we want you, which die pretty horribly, like on screen, someone who's been really interesting in compelling it.
• 26:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: God, I love the way her magic works in the book.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then, you know, I can sort of see where you start with this idea of like, oh, here's the fun big concept, but then adding that character depth to it, you don't hear lose the crazy energy of it because it's still a bunch of witches fighting a bunch of scientists with guns and there's something about that that's so delightful and exciting and strange.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then it's like grounded in this very deep way that lets you get at the core issues of how to be a person, how to be in community, how to be a partner to somebody, right?
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: All of those things that to me were so resonant with my experiences of growing up in a city of trying to figure out to be in community with people and all of that.
• 27:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, likewise, I feel like this book has so much heart to it.
• 27:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, and it really is about people just trying to connect and to be the best version of themselves while they are, have been influenced by someone else's idea of what the best version of themselves looks like.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I love watching them unpack the layers, but using the humor as this kind of scalpel to sort of, it's like, aha, that's funny, but now I'm going to make you hurt just a little bit more.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's not just this woman full of sugar right, but there is a little bit in that like that candy coating that gets us into the meat of the story a little bit.
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you know, it's interesting because you can you I think both are failure states in terms of only being wins in only being likeness and then only being darkness and greatness right like I think I've seen both cases where you lose the core message of what the authors trying to get at if it's just like.
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: overwhelming violence in a horror and upset versus, you know, overwhelmingly just charm and whimsy and both are hard to dig your sort of like teeth into, right, to continue with food metaphors here.
• 28:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's hard to get into the body of it sometimes.
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because like if you if you look at this book on a beat by the plot basis, it's very dark and grand.
• 29:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you crashed so.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like two to one kids who dealt with varying forms of abuse or neglect.
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then the increasing like escalating bullying, escape two places in which they experience different kinds of bullying.
• 29:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: They have a brief, they both get a brief headache of everything seems to be going well.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then they're both in relationships that are not the right relationship.
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then the world ends.
• 29:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like, it's pretty bleak, but it doesn't feel bleak while you're bleeding it.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, a couple of places that it does, but.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But in moments that feel very, very intentional that we feel that having as before heading into the next sort of emotional beat.
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, like the whole sequence with the hot pepper sauce.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, that was so I mean, that, you know, I, I think I went into roll doll mode a little bit like roll doll, sorry, that I read when I was a kid of like people being really kind of tortured by adults or by each other and like, I don't know, I, I, yeah, I, I didn't realize how intense some of those childhood scenes were until people told me dude, that was like, that was really a lot, you know,
• 30:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: And this is the thing, with every book I write, like I don't know, like I just, I don't know until I, until it's out in the world or until beta readers read it, there's some Desperate or something like, oh, this is funny and the people like, that's really horrified and I'm like, oh, okay.
• 30:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: Like I just, I don't know if that's because I'm a terrible person or if it's just because it's really hard to tell.
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: So it does when you're inside the story.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 30:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then I think it also,
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: you know, sometimes what community you're in, you know, and if you're surrounded by a lot of people who've been through a lot, then what is baseline funny in those circles, and sometimes not travel well in certain other communities.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: So yeah, that's very true.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: And like, yeah, I mean, I think this book was just me throwing everything out there and just being like, I'm just going to do all of it and see what, you know, see what I can get away with.
• 31:21
  [SPEAKER_04]: Kind of,
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Can I ask you, you said, you know, there's one version where it's like this and there's one version where it's like that, do you know how many versions or drafts you went through to find this book?
• 31:33
  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, for that, for you know, when I'm going to send people, when I hopefully by the time you hear this, we'll have sent people the PDF of bonus material.
• 31:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: I had to like one of the things that I did was grab deleted scenes that were like scenes that almost made you into the book like they got very close, but they were cut for like reasons, but also there's a whole like I'm calling it an alternate ending.
• 31:56
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like actually a little bit bigger than that.
• 31:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's like a whole other like version of the climax with a lot of stuff meeting up to it that was different.
• 32:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I sort of the other day I was looking back through the
• 32:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: 6th draft, 7th draft, but you know it's very arbitrary.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: What you consider a draft when you consider what's just another pass, but it definitely went through even before I got an agent and made changes for the agent and then made changes and went through editing with Tor.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: Is it already gone through a bunch of different versions before that for sure?
• 32:31
  [SPEAKER_04]: like it had already gone through multiple iterations and like there were versions that were very different like people who get that PDF are going to be like whoa this book was going to be much weirder like I and I had forgotten quite how weird it was going to be like the there was a very different version where like the climax is very different and the plot is much more elaborate like I think I doubt I paired back the plot a lot to try to reach something
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, speaking of pairing things back, it is probably time for us to pair back to our homework.
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Did you have some homework for our our fair listeners?
• 33:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I mean, since we've been talking about tone and like having a narrator that kind of like pokes like intrudes into the scene a little bit with like little touches of omniscience, I thought something that would be fun is take a scene that you've already written and just like add like five or six narrative aside that are providing information that the characters couldn't possibly know.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: in the scene.
• 33:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: Just like little bits of information, it doesn't have to be like major reveals.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_04]: It could just be like, oh, and by the way, this guy right over this someone's dog and nobody knew.
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_04]: He got away with it or something like just, you know, little bits of information that, you know, there's no way that anybody, any of the characters, other than maybe the character, were revealing a secret of, could have known, or, you know,
• 34:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: unbeknownst to these characters three blocks away.
• 34:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: This was happening.
• 34:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know, but it's make it at least relevant to the scene, not just like, you know, not just like completely like random information, but stuff that's like relevant to the scene and hopefully adds like a little bit of humor, but also just kind of a different perspective, a different way of thinking about what's
• 34:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's great homework.
• 34:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: This has been writing excuses.
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're out of excuses.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now go right.
• 34:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Your host for this episode, we're a dumb-on-song, Mary Robinette Koal, with a special guest, Charlie Jane Andrews.
• 34:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., Mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.