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21.17: The Up and Down Escalators · Writing Excuses

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patrion.com slash writing excuses.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Season 21, episode 17.
• 0:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is Writing Excuses.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Up and Down escalators.
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  [SPEAKER_02]: tools, not rules, four writers, by writers.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Mary Rappinette.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Don Lawn.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Aaron, and I'm Howard.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: this week we're going to sort of continue a conversation about tension and release from last week, but shift it a little bit and sort of zoom out from the sort of micro building and releasing of tension and instead talk about how you're using tension in your, well, intentionality in the story, right?
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that is about creating a feeling of escalation and then when you want to
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, instead of thinking about the individual moments of tension and resolution, this is more about what in a meta level, where are you using tension in your story?
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_03]: And when do you want to take your foot off the accelerator a little bit?
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: In sort of ease, off of it, in those individual moments.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the reasons that I started thinking about this is that it's a thing that you can apply to not just tension but to other aspects of the story.
• 1:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: For instance, if stakes feel flat, you can escalate stakes.
• 1:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: If a romance is moving too fast, you can de-escalate a romance, make them less attracted to each other at that moment.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you do have to make a decision.
• 1:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is why it's so closely linked to tension because both of these are also tied in with how the pacing is working.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So a thing that I see happens sometimes is that at the beginning of a story we have stakes and they're kind of flat.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, if I don't win this beauty contest, I won't have won this beauty contest.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like no one cares.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So sorry, but if I don't win this beauty contest, I won't be able to afford to buy my grandmother's medication.
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's an escalation of stakes.
• 2:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the follow-up danger to that is the people who escalate too quickly.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's like I won't be able to buy my grandmother's medications and then she will become a terrorist.
• 2:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's like, well, that's happened, you know, like, this is, I'm right.
• 2:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is not my apocalypse.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is the meme right there.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that escalated quickly.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, and that's exactly it.
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: But sometimes you're like, what just happened?
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, so thinking about how to use these, you know, escalation and de-escalation on purpose so that you aren't, you know, suddenly, you know, terrorist grandma.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're laughing right now because, well, because it's funny to us.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Is this really a big deal, because I don't think it's a big deal.
• 3:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the issue of reality check and everybody takes a step back and realizes, oh, the beauty contest doesn't matter.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, grandma isn't going to become a terrorist.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I actually have that medication right here.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now you just go be pretty and relax and off we go.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love de-escalation via humor.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_03]: just because.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, and I think sometimes there's such an instinct to keep ranching it up to increase your stakes to increase all these things.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so much of my critique of especially super hero fiction is the stakes get to a ridiculous level so quickly.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think the superhero stories that we've seen succeed in things like the MCU are ones that are about personal stakes, right?
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies work because it's about.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, Peter Cull's relationship to his father, not the fact that his father's a planet that's going to destroy the universe.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: That part nobody really cares about.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, we care about is how he feels by his dad and how his dad feels about him.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so when you escalate your stakes too quickly and too dramatically, then you can really lose focus on what makes this story interesting.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: And you can also, if you escalate too much, lose control of your reader's emotions and have them go in a direction you don't want them to.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_04]: Howard, you're talking about comedy reminded me of something I saw recently where a comedian was doing crowdwork, which is very popular these days.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I think she asked someone in the crowd like about their relationship and they said they said I love you after like two days or something.
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_04]: And the audience starts laughing at this person, but she then refokuses and she's like, wait, but we've all been there, right?
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: Right?
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: Right?
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_04]: And uses repetition to refocus the audience and like deescalate it from something that is shocking and bad to something that is hilarious and fun and is in the realm of comedy.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: And by shifting the focus back to herself from the audience member at a key moment, just able to deescalate it just a little bit.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: if you think about if you're trying to deescalate a fight or like if you've ever had like a a rowdy friend at a bar like one of the things you do is distraction like they're mad and they want to like beat everybody up and you're like wait look over here or like let me tell you this story or do you want some water and you like move the focus elsewhere and that helps to deescalate and otherwise the emotion of that friend like the emotion of that audience could get away from you.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well you can also deescalate by escalating something else right
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: The one time I've been in a street fight was a friend of mine that I was out and drinking with decided to start something with some guy and My one experience being in a street fight was I slapped my friend in the face and told him to stop being an asshole I escalated things with one person and completely D escalated with the other person the fight stopped like and no further point was the other guy going to be a problem
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because I redirected the energy back into an existing relationship, right?
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: So you can use an escalation of something else to deflate a thing that is becoming a problem.
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the other thing that happens with that is that you seeded territory, which is you're like, I'm actually not on his side, but like de-escalating is super hard in real life, and it's really hard in fiction because so much emphasis is put on making things tighter, making things faster, making things tensor.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, actually, sometimes you want to slow things down, you want to de-escalate the tension because some of the stuff we've been talking about making sure that you give your audience a breather, but also sometimes it is about seeding territory for one plot point to another in order to make space for that tension.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of my favorite things in fiction is people, not just people who are really competent, but people who model good behavior and watching, you know, watching a fight scene develop.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: where I realize, man, this would not actually be that hard to descalate, you just have to not say the stupid thing that's on the tip of your tongue, and instead be the character that you were two pages ago, and a lot of books, a lot of media in general, will model bad behavior in order to generate those kinds of scenes.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love it.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: when competence deescalates things and gives me room for the realization that oh well these are now competent people anything that actually causes them a problem yeah it's going to be a big deal people love to complain about the trope uc and romcoms about the miscommunication
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: somebody says something and is misinterpreted like, I don't know, the lines crackling or something, right?
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: The reason those scenes are irritating is not because miscommunication is ineffective as a narrative tool.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it can be very effective.
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: People are irritated because there wasn't enough escalation of stakes between the characters ahead of time.
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_03]: Nothing felt truly at stake, and so it feels like, oh, you're just relying on fake conflict to create this escalation of tension, which wasn't there in the first place, right?
• 8:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: So I think in that case, it's a misdiagnosis of the problem.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: The problem isn't the trope.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: The problem is the lack of build to get us to a place where we actually care that these people are fighting.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: The problem is, it feels like the relationships are resolved, so we don't care about the fighting.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: So that's a case where you might need to increase your escalation and not worry about the de-escalation so much.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_04]: I also think one tool you can use is the false escalation, which is my one of my favorite.
• 9:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: This is the leader goes nowhere.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's one of my favorite false escalations.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_04]: What you get comes from my soap opera is the almost kiss almost kisses a break because like it does escalate it a little but it seems like you're going there and then you like take the off ramp
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: I see jump off the escalator before you can get to the top and you're like, oh wow, like I didn't want that, but you learn something about yourself.
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: So I think what's really nice in escalation and de-escalation is that while it is often about something external, thinking about how it reverberates internally.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: So you've set off a new escalator internally for that character, even though you they jumped off what was happening externally.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_04]: It's because it everything comes to a stop, but even de-escalating a situation.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_04]: If you slap your friend in the face to stop the fight At some point your friend might be like, whoa, that was a lot like in that moment I'm a good friend in a future moment like, but you know because and then the audience is thinking, oh, well, that's interesting Here's a new thread to follow Whereas if something happens that doesn't go anywhere or isn't rooted in relationship Then it just feels like you stop the tension to stop the tension as opposed to for some other reason
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: If this were a novel, then what needed to happen after that scene was a conversation where we talked about why I was having a problem with him in the way he behaves in public spaces, right?
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: And like, there's something about our friendships, something about our relationship that leads to us kissing or something, I don't know.
• 10:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: But like, in real life, that doesn't necessarily happen.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: We never talked about that, right?
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: It never became a thing.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: But if so, there's a way in which if you've ever been on an escalator where someone gets to the end of it and then they stop and look at their phone and say,
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: moving, and you're like, I'm going to run into you, you unless you move.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think that feeling can happen a lot in fiction, where sometimes somebody gets off the escalator, but then doesn't move out of the way, and everything has to come to a full start.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: You've made me think of a thing that I want to talk about when we come back from the break, which is using a de-escalation to, as a form of transitioning from one scene to another.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so one of my favorite tricks, uh, there's this thing that happens sometimes where you've got this really high tension scene and then the next scene that needs to follow it is a pretty low, low tension very quiet scene.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when you're writing it, or when you're reading it, you've had this experience where it's huge, and then you drop into this other scene, you're like, what do I care?
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: This frequently happens when you have to switch POVs because like, one person is involved in battles and the other is making tea.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what you can do is that you can do this false D escalation, but you do a D escalation at the end as you're heading towards that transition.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: You do a D escalation and then you ratchet tension again so that you bring it to the level that you're at for the next scene.
• 12:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's people are like, oh, we're going down.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Things are going to be okay and then you just
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, which you can do basically by like, ah, look, it looks like we've all defeated the villain and we have another gem of Roheesla.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: got it from Pharaoh's man, and then someone else says, but that's not, that's not a real gym of Roheesla, and you, you cut your scene, and now it's, it's not battle scene tension, it's question tension, and then the next scene we go into is also a question tension scene, but it's not the same question, and so you're like, but now you have two questions.
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: top of mine right now.
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm in the middle of watching the new series Alien Earth.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm a huge fan of the Alien franchise.
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: And the thing is about these movies is they always take place in one location, one spaceship, one planet, one space station, whatever it is.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's sort of defining thing.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, in my
• 13:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: primate brain, I expected this entire TV show that's many hours long to take place in this one ship that crash lands.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then in the third episode, spoilers, they leave the ship, and my, I was shocked by this, and I was completely disoriented, but they made the transition incredibly smoothly because of this exact technique, right?
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a resolution to the primary
• 13:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: which then immediately leads into a question of what happens next.
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: If they had had the final battle of that entire three episode arc at the end of the second episode, so many people would drop off of watching.
• 13:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: Instead, they slip it into the first 10 minutes of the third episode and then now the door is open and you're already walking through it.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: The escalator seamlessly moves into the next one and you're still on a people mover and you're still going.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Reminds me of watching, I think the movie was Paranormal with my son who was 10 at the time, and they have this plan, and I turned to my 10-year-old, and I say, do you think it's going to work?
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he looks at me with that, you know, you got to be kidding me, Dad News.
• 14:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, if it works, we don't have a movie.
• 14:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: 10-year-old.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: If it works, we don't have a movie.
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that thing in Alien Earth, episode 3, you ask, well, oh gosh, well, they defeated the Xenomorph that was on the ship.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Is everything going to be okay now?
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: No.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's eight episodes in this series, and we're only on three.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
• 14:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: Something else is going to go wrong.
• 14:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've de-escalated, but the tension is still quite high.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, you realize the stakes of the escalation are different than you thought.
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and one part of that is the meta.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: The understanding that there is a lot more story to come.
• 15:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I guess I'm a big fan of meta.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: Not the company.
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: No.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: You've actually reminded me of actual escalators.
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So at the latest world con as we were recording this was at the Seattle Convention Center and they had these like endless escalators it was unbelievable because you would you would go in and at first it seemed normal you would go up an escalator and that's fine and then you would go around a corner and then you would look up to four more flights of escalators that were directly in a row and you're like what?
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: is happening now.
• 15:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think when you're thinking about your story, there is something to be said for letting people know that there's another escalator passed this one that like, oh no, things are going to keep going up that this can be a form of really nice tension, but it can also be a form of dread as well.
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so it's thinking about like,
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: how much of this do you want them to know?
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like the thing with, you know, of course it's not going to work.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, well, obviously we're going to go up.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: He had another escalator.
• 16:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was unreal.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, thinking about the meta, there's something that's also really important to keep in mind.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: There's a term that we use in hiking called a pud, which is pointless up and down.
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: is what you do to a ridge and you know you have to get to the next ridge, but you got to go down first and you're like, God damn it, this is going to be so frustrating to have to go down just to go back up, right?
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I think you see that a lot in stories and this is sort of where again, going back to the rom-com miscommunication trope, that often feels like a pud.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: right because you know where the story is going so it just feels like you're spinning your wheels for a little bit because this has to be a movie and we're only at minute 40 and you know this is a 90 minute movie right and so knowing you have to go back down just to go back up means that there wasn't enough escalation of the actual stakes of we need to go from floor one to floor three instead it feels like we're just staying on floor one and why did we have to go down
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the thing that I really like about the the pud is that the problem isn't the going down and back up it's that you don't earn anything by going down and that's the thing that will happen with that that trope we aren't earning anything by their their breakup.
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's there's usually nothing of interest on the other side of that argument and so that's I think one of also the problems when people are just repeating something that they see in media without understanding the stuff that's behind it.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_04]: And I was going to say that you don't learn anything by going up and down.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_04]: So if you thought you were doing a pod, but then it turns out there's like a magnificent view that you weren't expecting, then you'd be like, wow, I still have to go all this way.
• 18:03
  [SPEAKER_04]: But I would have never seen this.
• 18:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: I didn't realize it was around this corner.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so ideally, if you're going to use a miscommunication, you should learn something about the character, or they should learn something about themselves, that therefore means that when they come back together, they both have a better sense of who they are.
• 18:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: And they're just arguing over, I don't know, whether the sky is like blue or teal, that is not going to tell you anything about who they are.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_04]: But if they're arguing about something important, which that may be depending,
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: If this gives up at the bottom of the escalator going down, that turns out to be a surprising delight, then it's fine to be down there, right?
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: You need to have true character development along the process to make it work.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and that risk of overextending and we've already done that.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I over-extended a knee.
• 18:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: going down on a hike.
• 18:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, people who've hiked know this down is not necessarily easier than up.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, it's worth it.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you do down wrong, you do down for quite a distance before you stop doing down and you injure yourself badly.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Downing with a real pain is.
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is why I don't ski.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: So bringing it back, bringing it back to the metaphor, de-escalation does not necessarily need to be easy on the characters.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: It does not need to be pointless.
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: There can be lessons learned.
• 19:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's because hiking down is not riding an escalator down.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think going back to our last episode, we were talking about tension and release.
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think one thing we are sort of indicating here is that de-escalation of one thing usually means escalation to something else.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: If all you're getting is de-escalation in no escalation, then it truly does feel deflating, right?
• 19:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And to avoid the feeling of deflation, you need to make sure that when you are
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: taking your foot off the accelerator on one level, you need to be presenting the reader with something else to be interested in.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: Right?
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_03]: And so in the rom-com example, when you have that moment of breakup, what question are they actually grappling with to understand what their relationship to this situation is?
• 20:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: You mentioned Guardians of the Galaxy, the second one with his dad.
• 20:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a point in the first one where they're talking about the powerstone, saving the galaxy.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Rocket says, why do we care?
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: What's the galaxy ever done for us?
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, he's...
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: he's passing on this escalation of the stakes, and then we draw those characters back in by making it personal.
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're not going after the infinity stone.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're rescuing Peter from the pirates.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that lesson, I learned that lesson years and years earlier,
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it's important to have big stakes sometimes, but if you really want to get the characters moving, the thing that escalates the stakes for them is their connection to those stakes.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_04]: And to go back to something I was thinking about from the previous episode, the escalation can be in the minds of the characters.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_04]: It also cannot.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_04]: The characters don't need to know the stakes are escalating, just the reader does.
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_04]: So to go back to the gems of Roheesla, if you have discovered one, and it's the final one in the scene that, you know, that I'm in, and then we flash over to Mayor Robinette, who's like, I'm glad we put that fake gem of Roheesla out there.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_04]: You know what I mean?
• 21:28
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 21:29
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 21:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 21:30
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_04]: But the reader knows that there is some new piece of information when will I discover that?
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_04]: And so it raises the stakes on the level on that metal level of consciousness, the reader brings to the table, which makes the reader such a fun partner in discovering the story.
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, the thing that everyone forgets about McGuffins or, you know, maybe not everyone, but like the failure state of a McGuffin story is when the creators forget that the McGuffin is a trick right the point of the Mcuffin is to keep the readers eye on something not to be the actual stakes of the story.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_03]: Nobody actually cares about the goddamn eagle.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is the experience of the characters going along the way and the relationship to each other.
• 22:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's the thing that actually matters.
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's his view of humanity as it develops over the story, not the Maltese Falcon.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and things like that, you know, the, with the multi's Falcon, it represents a proximity to success, which is often one of the things that escalation and de-escalation can do is that frequently when you're escalating something when you're raising things.
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It feels like we are moving closer and closer towards the climax of the story.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes when you start de-escalating things in the wrong place, people are like, oh, is it over already?
• 22:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: We just didn't say that you shouldn't de-escalate in the first part of the story.
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just recognizing that it has this effect of causing us to think about how close we are to the success,
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of my favorite tools for identifying that is the beta readers asking them how they feel, how they are responding to each chapter as it unfolds, and a beta reader who is
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: uh, adapt enough in the, the, the lingo to say, um, the stakes feel like they've changed.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: The stakes feel like they've escalated in a weird way.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: The stakes feel like you're now telling in a different story.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Uh, that's,
• 23:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a super useful barometer for me because often I know what I have planned, but I haven't communicated the atone or whatever that this escalation, de-escalation is part of a structure that actually is going to hold together.
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_04]: I was going to say I think like even if they don't know the language, a lot of times people know it without being able to know it.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_04]: If somebody's writing like, oh no, oh no, and then the next chapter like this chapter feels long.
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_04]: Whether saying it's like in the previous chapter, the stakes were escalating.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_04]: And now that they're not anymore, I have lost interest.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_04]: So you have to like read through sometimes it figure out.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like this is the worst metaphor in the history of
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like the O'Hare, the O'Hare airport, you go down this escalator and they've got some stuff up to kind of distract you from the fact that you're descending.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then you've got this endless corridor with another people mover that is totally level, but there's...
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's neon lights over your head like literal neon and it's playing music and the lights along the sides are lit up and the first time you go through it You're like amazing.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is so cool.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you're not paying any attention to the fact that you've just descended into the battles of hell.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then on the other side, they don't need to do any of that when you go back up the escalator because you can see the light and you know that you're going out of that.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that when you do do a de-escalation and you've got one of these scenes, you still have to distract the reader with something bright and shiny to keep them from being like this.
• 25:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: It seems really long.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: In New York City, at the 42nd Street subway station, there is a connecting tunnel that goes from the ACE line, which is the 8th Avenue line to the Broadway line and our line.
• 25:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: That tunnel is very long and it is packed with commuters.
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I used to take this tunnel every day to get to work.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: And as you're walking along this narrow underground jam-packed, sweaty, billion degrees tunnel,
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: on the beams overhead are signs that are put up that are a poem that you see line my line as you walk down this tunnel that I don't remember these act text of but it is a very belief poem about the experience of being a commuter and having to wake up every day to do this thing and you
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: encountering that message as you walk through this, it's such a different shift of escalation because you were already being like, it's 8 in the morning, I'm on my way to work, this already sucks.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm being told that my life is meaningless and empty because I'm doing this every day.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: That is a very big bowl of risotto.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: In incredible shift.
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_03]: of the escalation that I genuinely love because it was this weird moment of reflection every day of reminding me what's important which wasn't the fact that I was commuting to work.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: It was the greater context of what am I doing in my life and my living with purpose and all of these things that I think is actually incredible art even though the rage I would feel it seeing this thing in the mornings was boundless.
• 26:44
  [SPEAKER_04]: I will say before you give the homework which you're sure about to do, that the minute you said tunnel, I was like, you're that poor.
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_04]: You knew what I was saying about the meeting that's so loud.
• 26:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: Anyways, on that escalation, I'm going to write you things up here in front there and give you a little bit of homework.
• 27:04
  [SPEAKER_03]: Um, what I want you to do is to look at the outline for your work in progress, whether it's a short story or novel, take a look at the high level beats, not like super detailed, but sort of the major beats of your story and make a mark as to whether or not you are escalating or de-escalating each of your individual plot lines.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_03]: And then once you have that map of the terrain, look for pudds, look for things that are just meaningless drops, look for things that feel deflationary without an uprising, escalation, happening on another level.
• 27:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: And once you start to see that structural map of it, I think you'll have a much stronger sense of how to make sure your reader experience is still pulling them through the story at maximum speed.
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: This has been writing excuses.
• 27:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're out of excuses.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now go right.
• 27:55
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• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: For this episode, your hosts were Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor.
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
• 28:11
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