21.19: Getting Everything Connected

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2:03This is Writing Excuses. Getting everything connected. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong On. I'm Erin. And I am going to be talking about getting everything connected, which gives me the opportunity to use a phrase that I did not learn until I started, like, taking writing classes, which was the causal chain. Yes. Which is the idea, I believe, that each thing in your story links to the next thing with some sort of,

2:37I don't know, chaininess in between it. But perhaps one of you has a better way to describe or explain that than I do. Well, there's this thing that, there's two things when we're talking about a causal chain. One is the idea that everything has a consequence and that, you know, each thing that your character does leads to the next problem. So that there's this continual link. And if you pull one thing out of the story, that the whole story collapses.

3:08And that if you can't, if you can pull something out, then it's not connected and you should pull it out. Then there's another thing, which is not exactly the causal chain, but that Edgar Allan Poe called unity of effect, which is that things are thematically connected together or tonally. Yeah, I mean, one thing I think of, causal chain is one of those things that I think of as an artifice of fiction, right? It's one of the places where fiction is different from real life. Because in real life, not that, I mean, things are causally connected because we live in a universe,

3:43but also it often doesn't feel that way, right? The world is complex enough that what happens to me now feels very disconnected or is impossible for me to protect based on what happened five minutes ago because, you know, some event will happen overseas or on a national political scale that affects me personally that I truly had very little control over, right? But in fiction, when something is happening on the page that feels really disconnected from everything else,

4:15it will feel random and it will be an unpleasant narrative experience for your audience. Your reader wants a causal chain. They want everything to feel connected either in a plot-oriented way in terms of action A had a consequence that consequently leads to action B or in a thematic way of, you know, somebody is dealing with personal strife at home and they turn on the news and war has broken out overseas, right? So I think there's ways to do it of have that randomness, but that randomness needs to feel integrated in the bigger why of the book.

Reader Participation

4:50And if that's missing, it will feel purely random and unpleasant. One of the funny things, this is not a writing thing exactly, but it occurs to me that when you hear people talk about their writing careers to sort of connect that part, you will see people attempt to create the causal chain out of the randomness of life. Oh boy, yeah. You know, so they'll be like, well, obviously I took that one class on a Tuesday that day and therefore, and like, and this and this and this, and it all led to why I'm a best-selling author today.

5:21And in truth, life is a lot more random than I think we want it to be. I think also a lot of conspiracy theories are built out of the idea that we want things not to happen at random, that we want there to be a causal chain. And so I think one thing I'm curious about is, do you think there are ways to exploit the human desire to create cause, even where cause doesn't exist, in order to create momentum in a story? Yeah, I mean, it's, in life, I tell my clients all the time, don't narrativize this, right?

5:52Just because this book didn't work doesn't mean that the next book's not going to, or just because this book did work had nothing to do with the previous book, you know what I mean? And it's like, there's such an urge because we are creatures of pattern recognition, right? I talk about this all the time. We want to find a story. We want to find patterns everywhere. And so when you encounter events in life, you will build a story out of them. It's impossible not to. It's important to resist it sometimes so you don't take away the wrong lesson from it. But when you're writing fiction, you should be using that against your reader, right?

6:24You should be letting them draw the connections, right? And so going back to what we were talking about, contrast and juxtaposition from the last episode, the reason that works is because of the urge to narrativize, is because the urge to make A and B connect even when A has nothing to do with B, right? So if you show me two different things, I'm going to try and connect them reflexively. And if there's truly no connection, then I will realize that later and be annoyed, and it'll feel like you made a mistake.

6:54But if you can make me connect those two different things, that feels like magic, right? Yeah. There's a thing they say about, I think, Philip K. Dick that maybe it was Harlan Ellison. Who knows? One of them had a list of titles, random list of titles. And when they wrote a short story, they would just slap a random title on it. And the reader would draw a connection and be like, oh, well, that's why it's called this. I haven't heard that. I wouldn't believe that about both of them, given their titles. Well, it's the Kuleshov effect. My chance to talk about the Kuleshov effect.

7:26It was just like a film thing from the early days of filmmaking, where a guy, he would show a picture. Let's say it would be like a grave and then a man's face. And then he would show an apple and a man's face. And then he would show like a wedding and a man's face. And he would say, OK, well, what is being shown here? And they would be like, in this first one, you can see how sad he is. In this second one, you can see how hungry he is. And then you can see how joyful he is. And it's the exact same clip of the exact same man making the most neutral thing ever.

7:59And but because we want to make the things connect, we will actually say, like, see in someone's face an emotion that is not there. And I just think that's such a fun thing. I think it's used a lot more, to be honest, in games where people will take something that's like a visual and associate it with an action that is happening and use that to make the player fill in the rest of the gaps of the story and find space for themselves within it. And I think as you were talking about that, I was thinking, oh, you know,

8:31you can also use this, the reader, like making those connections. You can also use that with the logical causal chains of world building. Also, it's like, well, if it's like this, then why isn't it like that? Or they've done this, ergo, that must be the way it works. And the author's like, no, that wasn't what I planned. I mean, I talk about world building as playing the game of Go sometimes, right? And the thing is, when you play Go, or Paduk, as we call it, is you're trying to capture territory on a board, right? And so one thing you will do at one stage in the game is start putting pieces down in random open parts of the board

9:07where you haven't had a big fight about it yet. And what you're telling your other players, I'm interested in this area, but we're not dealing with that right now. I'm just letting you know that we're going to have a fight about that later. And so sometimes when you're doing world building, it's in game principles, we call this draw maps and leap blank spaces, right? Where you will put a marker down somewhere and be like, yeah, there's something about how magic works over here, or there's some geographical feature over here. And then we'll come back to that and build out that detail. But sometimes you can just do that for your reader, too. Let your reader fill all that in.

9:38You don't need to tell them the thing. Let them do the work of drawing the connections and building that out. And that gives them participation and buy-in to the story in a way that is hard to get other ways. I think this is, going back to video games, part of why FromSoft fans are so feral about those games. Because in the Dark Souls games, there's no very little narrative that's told to you. You're forced to assemble it all from two-line descriptions of items. But when you start piecing together, it feels really magical to feel that world cohere,

10:08even though what you're getting is a bunch of random little points on a map. What I love about that analogy is that we can go from that back over to plot, where you can put something that looks like a little random point on a map that later links to something huge that you deploy. And so that link is still there. And that is a fun thing to play with as a conscious tool. Yeah, and it's interesting because I think in novels, you see that more. In short fiction, I love the random outside world-building point as a way to make the world feel bigger and say, like,

10:42I'm not going to explore that in this story. Like, you're playing the game. You're like, in another story, perhaps, we would talk about, you know, what's going on there. But today, we are not. Like, you know, it's like you're, like, talking about, like, and I suddenly met this orphan whose parents were killed in, like, the geese plague of 2028. And you're like, not going to, I've given you just enough. Yeah. And what I think makes those work is they usually have a chain or two within, like, they have a couple of links within themselves. Usually they have, like, a word that tells you something,

11:13like a geese plague. You know what a geese is. You know what a plague is. That sounds bad together. Who knows? Did they cause it? Were they the victims of it? But it gives you enough that you can create a couple of links of chain and then store them somewhere else and think, hmm, that's a chain, that's a causal chain of another story. Or in a bigger story, eventually these links of chain will connect with the links that I already have. And it'll be this amazing moment of revelation that, oh my gosh, that's why that is suddenly important. What else is important is our break.

11:44And when we return, we will talk. Don Juan has a hand up and we'll talk about something. They call it the best four days in gaming, and I am disinclined to argue. Gen Con Indie is my favorite convention. There's a symposium for writers, and it might well be the best four days in writing. Will you be there? I will, as will Mary Robinette, Aaron, Dan, and Sandra. As you're putting together your Gen Con schedule, be sure to look us up by name so you can sign up for our events.

12:17There will be a Writing Excuses podcast Q&A session, a Thursday night networking party hosted by Writing Excuses, and a session with Howard Taylor, that's me, and Maurice Broaddus called A Conversation With No Chaperones. I can't believe they're letting us do that one. You can also visit me and Sandra, along with Jim Zub and Stacey King, at booth 1349 in the Exhibit Hall. Along with our usual racks of merchandise, we will have some Writing Excuses loot.

12:48Gen Con Indie runs from July 30th through August 2nd in Indianapolis, Indiana. You can buy a membership right now, and then you can start creating your wish list for panels, workshops, and other events. On May 17th, event registration goes live, and your wish list will have you pre-registered for things. Get your tickets today and reserve your spot. We would be delighted to see you at Gen Con.

World Building Event

13:15For many writers, world-building is also an opportunity for world-breaking, a shattering of existing norms and assumptions of what is and isn't possible. If you've read the work of N.K. Jimison, author of the Broken Earth Trilogy and 42nd Grand Master for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, you'll know what I mean. This June, in Chicago, you can meet N.K. Jimison yourself, and attend a masterclass on world-building and world-breaking at SIFWA's 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference.

13:48I'll be there, too, along with other powerhouses in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. This year, for the first time ever, SIFWA's Nebula Awards include top prizes for poetry and comics. We are excited to welcome these mediums into the fold. The Nebula Awards Conference is an annual opportunity to gather as professional and professionalizing writers. Have you bought your tickets yet to join the conversation in person or online and to celebrate our latest stars at the Nebula Awards banquet?

14:20If you're in Chicago already, you can also freely attend our mass autographing session on Friday, June 5th. All details are available on sfwa.org. So tell your friends, nudge your fellow creators, and reach out to fans. Let's break down some old worlds and build new ones together in Chicago.

14:42Thanks to HomeServe for sponsoring this episode. Sandra and I have been homeowners for 30 years, and it's been wonderful. Of course, it's our biggest investment, and we have to literally live inside it without breaking it. We'd been in our house for two weeks when the waterline to the EVAP cooler on the roof broke, destroying 64 square feet of ceiling and almost 200 square feet of hardwood floor. Regular homeowners insurance usually doesn't cover that kind of thing, and that's where HomeServe comes in. You don't want to be on your own for things like plumbing failures, HVAC breakdowns, or electrical issues.

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17:26If the world were like a Sleep Number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, Sleep Number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses, plus free delivery when you add a base. Ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a Sleep Number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep Number, to a good life's sleep.

17:59If the world were like a Sleep Number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, Sleep Number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses, plus free delivery when you add a base. Ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a Sleep Number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep Number, to a good life's sleep. We are back.

18:30I'm so excited to hear what is it. The thing that I raised my hand to talk about before we went to break. I did not expect to get called out so explicitly. You know, my medium of storytelling is through TTRPG and actual play, right? And so what I'm doing is you have to be a pantser in that space. There's no plotters in this space because it's all improvisational, right? And so one thing that I was thinking about as we were having this conversation is the beauty of AP is that it ends up having this really coherent feeling narrative at the end,

19:02even though it's all improvised. And so how do you take a bunch of random stuff that comes from world building and then decisions that players are making and make it coherent into something that is fun and satisfying to listen to, right? And, you know, I think the failures of APs is sometimes they do feel a little random, but when they really work, they cohere into something that felt planned. And I think that comes down to what you were talking about in terms of the Edgar Allan Poe thing, in terms of thematic consistency, right? And character consistency is also tied into that, right?

19:36And so for me, the things I'm looking at early on are establishing really clearly for myself and the players what the thematic questions we're engaging within, and then they're building their characters in conversation with that. And so as they make character choices, it all is going to be pointing in a general direction until the really magical moment where everything coheres and snaps into a place of like, oh, here's our plot. You know what I mean? Yeah, it is. It's something that, like, I've been thinking about this since I've been reading a lot of fiction that's coming out of countries that are not Western-dominated.

20:11Because, especially when I'm reading Japanese fiction, there's, the plot is often, there's this guy in a four-and-a-half mat tatami room and he's fucking up at school and that's about it. But there's this, there are these links, so there is this unity of effect that's happening. And, sorry, my brain made a whole diagram in my head while you were talking. I'm like, that is, that is a visual diagram and I don't know how to translate that. It doesn't usually happen to me on the podcast.

20:42I'm like, oh. But, but I think it is one of the things that made me start thinking about this idea of thematic links and unity of effect as one of the ways that you can have things that are in a story that look like they're not connected, but that, that on the surface, on a plot level, aren't connected, but are integral to the, integral? Integral. Integral to the story. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think you're talking about Japanese fiction. One of my

21:13very favorite films of the last five years, maybe the best film I've seen in the last five years, is this Wim Wenders movie called Perfect Dates. I've mentioned on the podcast before, it's a Japanese language film made by a German filmmaker that is mostly about a man who cleans toilets in Tokyo. He goes around, he's, it's literally partially funded by the, the Tokyo Toilet Bureau or something like that. Amazing. He literally goes around and cleans these incredibly beautifully designed public toilets around the city and has a series of encounters with people. It is the most plotless movie I

21:46think I've ever seen. There's no A to B to C in the movie. There's no like causal connection. Like sometimes he meets somebody and that person comes back, you know, later in the movie, but it's, it's not like that is building to a big conflict or a resolution. It is purely a sequence of events, but each one feels thematically resonant because the movie is deeply interested in character and deeply interested in a central question, which is about communication and connection and suffering, right? And the question of how did this guy get to be this way? Why is his life so magical and

22:21special? And why do I want to be him in spite of seeing the ways in which he suffers is like the questions of the movie. And by repeatedly showing me scenarios in which he gets to express that in different ways, the whole thing feels very coherent. Like one of the most like coherent pieces of art I've seen in spite of the fact that this thing literally has no plot. Right. And so I think it's really interesting to think about causal chains and causality in a story that has none. And so if you want to like see how to do that, I would go watch this movie. If you don't like art house cinema,

22:56you will be like, why did you make me do this? But go with this lens of trying to understand how to make a plotless piece of art that feels coherent. I am so glad you started talking about that because I think I can finally articulate this diagram that sprang up in my head. And that it is when you're talking about logical causal chains, when you're talking about thematic links, unity of effect, what we're talking about is engaging, actively engaging the reader's pattern recognition. That all of these things say to the reader, I am making a space for you to link things together

23:31in your head, to find patterns where there aren't necessarily ones, whether and so that when you are doing this successfully, you are kind of more actively collaborating with the reader than if it is all just, if it is only A to B to C, that sometimes those logical causal chains are the thing that Aaron was talking about, where you have three links here and then later three links, and then the reader assembles all of them into a beautiful charm bracelet at the end.

24:01And I think that that's a fun thing to think about. Like, how am I making space for the reader within in this network that I'm providing? And am I ever accidentally making space? Because I think you can also, like, accidentally create something you didn't mean to. And games often call this emergent narrative, which can be amazing when a narrative comes out of nowhere. But I love telling this story, so I'm sure I've told it before. But my good friend played Dragon Age 2, 3, Dragon Age Inquisition,

24:34and went and killed, there were several dragons, and he killed them all. And he just leveled up to kill more dragons. And then at the end, he was like, I didn't get like a trophy or anything. And I was like, because the game is about saving the world. And he's like, it's called Dragon Age. They had seven difficult to kill dragons. That was a cool number. It felt resonant. I did it, and I got nothing. And like, I am very disappointed that this game didn't know that I was going to draw these patterns. And I kept thinking, like, what would I do other than just make a trophy for that? But like,

25:06maybe you don't call it Dragon Age. Maybe you don't make it seven dragons, because like, we love those odd numbers that feel like... It's six dragons. It might not have felt that way. We were talking about this a while ago, about the way in which like rule of threes and patterns and things like that are part of it. Yeah. So something to think about is like, are you creating a unity of effect within in your story? And if so, is it the effect that you're meeting to unify around or not? This is, I'm going to also tell an anecdote, which is when I was working on Of Noble Family, I like my characters to be doing something. And so I was like, the pineapple reticule,

25:40she's going to be making a, it's a handbag. So she's knitting this thing. And then my readers were like, I love the pineapple reticule. So I tossed it into the next scene. I'm like, she's not done with that. She's still doing this. And they're like, oh my goodness, pineapple reticule is amazing. And then in the third scene, I'm like, these take a long time. You know, this is only like three days later. I get this comment. I love the pineapple reticule. I can't wait to see the payoff. And I was like, oh no, because I had accidentally set up a rule of three and they were looking for a

26:10logical causal chain that was not there. And like briefly looked at, can I have her smack someone or stab someone? It was like not that kind of book. So I had to pull it out because of that accident. What I love about this conversation is we started from this point of, you know, how is everything connected? And the answer is sort of, it's not, you trick the reader into believing it is, right? And there's a way in which, I'm going to return to our favorite metaphor, which is a book is an act of hospitality, right? And there's a way in which when you are writing your

26:41story, if you crowd the entryway or every room or the sitting room with so much stuff that there's no space for the reader, they're going to actually have a bad time. If you try to draw all the connections for them, it's, it feels over-prescribed and it feels airless, right? But if you make a space that the reader can move through the space you've made for them, find their own place to sit in there, then they will have a different relationship to it, right? And, you know, that is an extreme that's making room for fan fiction, right? But it's also like making space for them to draw their own conclusions

27:15about stuff, to, to come to thematic ideas or those elements without necessarily having to draw it for them explicitly. I think the movie Sinners does an incredible job of this, of making space for the audience to reach their own conclusions about what's happening there and who's right and who's wrong. And I think some of the critiques of that movie is that I think it's very smartly, very resistant to a simple reading, right? And I think sometimes making sure that there's room for the reader to engage with

27:47your story and have their own say about their experience of it is the key to making things feel really connected, right? It's, it's letting them realize who the murderer is two sentences before the detective says it, right? And at the same time, not playing coy with them, like not saying, I want you to make a necklace, but tell them where none of the links are, you know? So you have to give them the tools. You have to make sure that, that they understand kind of what the goal is, but letting them have some participation in there. It is, it is a delicate balance sometimes.

28:23Because the risk is their necklace isn't going to look exactly the way you envisioned it, but that's always going to be true, right? Once it's out of your hands, once it's published, it belongs to the reader in a certain way. And so I think sometimes it is accepting that, yeah, their version is going to be a little bit different than what you had in your head, but that's okay because it's still all the things that you put in place for them. Yeah. And with that, we are going to move to the next step in our causal chain, which is the homework.

Homework Assignment

28:49For this week's homework, I'd like you to take a story that you have and take all the scenes and maybe like put them on different index cards and kind of write what happens in the scene. Like, you know, they go to the store, the world explodes, the geese attack, whatever happens, and just shuffle them all up and pick out two at random and write a scene that would fall in between them that would help you create a, either a unity of effect or a causal chain that would make

29:21them work in this random order that you now have them. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

29:31Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, Don Juan Song, and Aaron Roberts. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com.

29:54If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses. Sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses, plus free delivery when you add a base. Ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep number to a good life's sleep. If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort.

30:30Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses, plus free delivery when you add a base. Ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep number to a good life's sleep. There's nothing like the American Express Platinum Card. Find out your welcome offer after you apply,

31:00which could be as high as 175,000 points. Learn more and find out your offer at americanexpress.com slash explore dash platinum. Terms apply. 102 miles ago, the oil light came on. 100 miles ago, you noticed. Now, it's time to head to Take 5. This oil change, fall in love with your car all over again. In just 10 minutes, your dream technician will check your tire pressure, top off fluids, change your oil, and verify with Carfax exactly what your car really needs. All while keeping you

31:32in the driver's seat. Take 5 to stay in your car 10-minute oil change. Save up to 30% on your next oil change to Take 5. $15 value. Valid to participating locations. Terms and conditions apply.