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20.45: Now Go Write- Break All The Rules (Part 1) · Writing Excuses

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey everybody, this is Erin, and I've got a question for you.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: What have you learned from writing excuses that you use in your own writing?
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, we talk a lot about tools not rules, which means there are things that we're gonna say that you're gonna be like, yes, that is for me.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the tool I'm gonna use in my next project.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there are others that you're gonna be like, I'm gonna leave that to the side.
• 0:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what we wanna know is,
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: have really worked for you.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: What's the acronym you're always repeating?
• 0:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: What's the plot structure you keep coming back to?
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: What's a piece of advice that has carried you forward when you've been stuck in your work or that you've been able to pass on to another writer who's needed advice or help?
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: However, you've used something that you've learned from us.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: We want to know about it, and we want to share it with the broader community.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Every month we're going to put one of your tips or tricks or tools in the newsletter so that the rest of the community can hear how have you actually taken something that we've talked about and made it work for you.
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm personally just really excited to learn about these because a lot of times y'all take the things that we say and use them in such ingenious and interesting ways to do such amazing writing that I'm just like chomping at the bit to get in these tools and tips and share them with everybody else.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you're interested, please go to our show notes and fill out the form there and be part of this project
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: share with us what you're doing, what you've learned, and how you're using it so that we can share with everybody else.
• 1:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Really excited, again, to get all this in because honestly, what we say is made, real and important and meaningful by what y'all do with it.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: With that, you were out of excuses,
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now go tell us what works for you.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com-writingexcuses.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Season 20, episode 45.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is Writing Excuses.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Mary Rubinette.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Delong.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm Erin and I am excited to be talking about one of the sections that I am writing in the now-go-right craft book which is Break All the Rules.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I am very excited about writing rules and not following them because I like to destroy things, I guess.
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oppositional, even to yourself.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're like, why?
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so what I started doing when I was writing this section is I kept coming up with different rules and how to break them.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they each spun off into their own little mini essay.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so what I thought I would do for this episode is I have four of them that I want to talk about.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I want to just sort of throw them out and say, like, what do you all think about this particular rule when it should be broken?
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm going to have Mary Robinet roll a virtual die to decide which one we talk about first.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're starting with number four, which is passive voice.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the rule here is, do not use passive voice.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Can one of you explain what that is?
• 3:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: In case somebody missed it in all their writing glasses?
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if you can say, it's basically, she will be chased by zombies.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's different than zombies chased her.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And zombies' chaster is active, she will be, or she is chased by zombies, is passive, and it's supposed to be a distancing thing, that you can pick a more active fur, that you can make it more immediate.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I often see this as, like, don't ever use is, like, if is exist in your story, beat it to death with the adverbs that you also should be taking out of the story, which we will not be talking about today.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I really think that passive voice can be very, very useful.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a couple of ways that I think of that you can use passive voice to good intent.
• 4:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll tell you, tell me what you think and if you have other ones.
• 4:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So one is by de personalizing actions on purpose.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: So like she is chased by zombies is a couple things like maybe the point is not who's doing the chasing but that she is being chased.
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: in the way that police actions are often reported in the news where it's like the person like was you know killed by the cops versus the cops killed this person yeah shows the attitude of what is important in this case which is struck by 17 bullets exactly yeah.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're like, who even shot the bullets?
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, who knows?
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were just struck by those bullets.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: The important thing is that they were stopped, and here's how, not who did the stopping.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It shows where the focus of the story is, and if you're trying to show, hey, in this particular story, the focus is on the 17 bullets, and the person being ended, not like, who is doing it, then that's a way to use passive voice.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would say another one is if the who is doing it is a surprise.
• 5:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I was bitten by a zombie.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it from them?
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: A zombie bitten me if you don't know a zombie exists in the story.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was bitten by like gives you a chance to ramp up into the reveal of the sentence, which is the noun.
• 5:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like it is like the, oh, you weren't bitten by your dog.
• 5:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: You were bitten by a zombie.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Holy crap.
• 5:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so that's another reason to use passive voice, yeah, I mean, I think active voice in general or like the activity level of the voice is a dial right and you can be spinal type and say this always has to be 11 or you can crank it down sometimes and like you can deliberately slow things down and can deliberately add a little padding in there and sometimes those extra words will slow your readers paste down when you want them to slow down a little bit and be a little bit more abstract and then ramp it up again later as things pick up for whatever reason.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I think being able to use the passive voice is just another tool in your kit, right?
• 6:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, not to be too on the point, but tools not roles.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a tool that you can use.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do people overuse it when they're first learning to write?
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Probably.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 6:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's also a tool.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like you can also use it to do some really creepy as things.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like if you want your character to be a prisoner in their own body.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, the door was opened by her own hand.
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but she has no control over that that that that can be like the yeah and I think also to like super agree about the the dial it's like if you ever go out not to use karaoke for everything and here somebody who's like a great
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: At first it would be like, oh, exciting that you can do that, and then you'll be like, oh my gosh, like again.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think that sometimes you see people use so much activity that it just becomes like, you know, Jane ran up the hill, like Jane grabbed the bucket, like, and everything becomes kind of see me.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think another thing a passive voice can do is to provide like,
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: a frame or a bed for the activity that is happening, the thing around it that makes the more active voice sentence stand out because it is the one that is doing it differently.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is belting out of a slow, calmer verse that brings all this attention to why have you become loud at this moment.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It can give us what were you think of in film as an establishing shot, you know what I mean, like a broader framework of the action, and then we zoom into the more active thing that's happening.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, she was chased by a hoard of zombies.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: She, or she reaches for the gun.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know what I mean?
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the difference between those two things, let's assume out in zoom in in a way that I think is really, really useful.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's just a great tool in your kit.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: The last thing I'll say about this one, sorry to me, is to like, I think things like weather, time, setting.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, yes, the sun can beat down upon you and like the wind can beat you down or buff it to you, but like sometimes like the setting is just existing.
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not actively opposing you.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is merely the thing that you are moving through and it is nice to just kind of give it a bit more of
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: it is passively there and doing things and you are doing things in the setting as opposed to the setting is doing things to you.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes the wind was blowing through the trees is a better sentence than the wind blew through the trees.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes you want that extra little bit of softness there.
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the feeling of ongoingness, like the wind was blowing through the trees sounds like something that's happening over time, where's the wind blew through the trees seems like it just started and it is a new action that you have to pay attention to right in this moment.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 9:10
  [UNKNOWN]: Okay.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Two, two, this is very similar in some ways.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: The inactive protagonist, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh,
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: and are to some degree aware of their lack of agency.
• 9:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that they have to do something, but that something can be internal, not externally focused.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So a protagonist who survives, if you think about a lot of horror movies are about survival.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes that survival is active, like I grabbed the knife and threw it at the zombie hoard, but sometimes it's just like I waited, I listened, like which are actions, but they're very like, they're not actions of agency, they're actions of reaction.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm trying to figure out what the threat is and how to deal with it.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, ironically, we see this a lot in video games, actually, of a protagonist who's very passive and very reactive to the situation around them, and then the active choices are being made by the side characters, the companion characters, NPCs, things like that, in part because they don't want to put too much on the perspective of the player.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, at sort of why we often see fan arc or fan stories about side characters more than the main character.
• 10:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: you think about like Mass Effect or Dragon Age fandoms, those are all obsessed with those side characters and less interested in the main characters, the main characters just reacting to whatever's going on.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, we see this a lot in anything that has an audience surrogate kind of character a lot of.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: weirdly superhero movies fall into this model too, where a lot of times the main character is kind of inactive for a lot of it.
• 11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is responding to the things happening around them as the world gets crazy and crazy, but the big choices are being made by the villain, the big choices are being made by companions with them.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that can create such an exciting feeling of tension.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because often in our own lives, we don't have as much agency as we wish we did over the broader events happening around us.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so we can really identify, I think that's why it works for an audience, sir, again.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: If the character has really strong agency,
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: We maybe don't feel as much like we identify with that character more as we enjoy them But we don't feel like that could be me because if you know aliens were attacking my town I also would be hiding out in a closet and not necessarily like fighting them, you know, tooth and nail Scraping right there
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it is one of those things where like I just finished a short story where the main character was in a literal inanimate object and so there is no action that the character can take because it does not have movement.
• 12:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it has all of the tension because it's because it can't react.
• 12:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: So like aliens coming in and you need to hide.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're not going to go out and fight the aliens.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, that's going to be a really tense thing because.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because at any moment, they could come and you still have no agency there because they're aliens from another world.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would argue that the Pikarask is an entire genre based on having a very inactive protagonist.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they're active in that they go from point A to point B.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they're not the ones who are inspiring the events when they arrive at that place.
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're observing and reacting to it.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So something like Confederacy of Dunces.
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: actively making any real choices in his life.
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you'll see his kind of the same, the choices you'll see is kind of the same thing of kind of arguably the original of the elicis too.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anyways, but mostly that these characters are just wandering around and stuff is happening around them and they're observing it without really having a lot of influence on the outcome.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, these are some brilliant works of literature.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're very specific.
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They may not be for everyone, but there's absolutely space for a story in which your protagonist is kind of in the pocket.
• 13:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but I think what Aaron said about the, uh, that they are still doing something even it's only an interior, yes, and yet evaluating or re-reacting or having the motion.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And often like you said with video games, like side characters will feel that role, like so something is changing usually in a story.
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So who is changing it?
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: either it is something that naturally changes like the seasons, it is something that a character is changing, but it doesn't necessarily have to be your character.
• 13:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So a thing I would say is if you want to have a more inactive protagonist figure out where is the activity, where is the change coming from?
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it the world?
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it the other characters in the world?
• 13:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then how is your protagonist either a reflection, a survival of a, you know, a reaction to those active changes?
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now it is time for us to take an action, and that is to go to break.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: So when Aaron says, take a break, what we actually mean is it's time for homework.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: When we originally recorded this, it was going to be one episode, but we've decided to split it into two.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: So your homework for this episode is to write down some of the rules you think you follow most
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, are you a big fan of Show Don't Tell?
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you think that you should cut all words that end with LI?
• 14:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: But take one of these rules and begin to think about ways you can challenge the rule.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can break it.
• 14:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can soften it in some way.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: What happens if you invert it?
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's your homework.
• 14:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're out of excuses.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now go right.
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Your hosts for this episode were a merry-robinet co-walled, dumb one song, and Aaron Roberts.
• 15:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: For more information, visit writing excuses.com.