21.30: Chapter Breaks Soon

Introduction

0:00[SPEAKER_01]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends. [SPEAKER_01]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patrion.com slash writing excuses.

0:15[SPEAKER_01]: Season 21, episode 30.

0:19[SPEAKER_01]: This is Writing Excuses. [SPEAKER_01]: Chapter breaks in. [SPEAKER_01]: Tools not rules. [SPEAKER_01]: Four writers, by writers. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Mary Rubinette. [SPEAKER_03]: I'm Don Lone. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm Erin. [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm Howard.

Chapter Breaks

0:31[SPEAKER_01]: And today we're going to be talking about how do you use chapters? [SPEAKER_01]: So we've been talking about scenes and narrative transitions. [SPEAKER_01]: We wanted you to have kind of those building blocks before we dove into chapters. [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of times I get this question a lot and I wanted to know when I started like, what is the ideal length for a chapter?

0:50[SPEAKER_02]: And it's a funny question because if you read Terry Pratchett, there are no chapters. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, just scene breaks. [SPEAKER_03]: And if you're reading James Patterson, it's about two pages. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: And I've seen chapters that were once in and so long. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Basically what we're getting to is there's no hard and fast rule here, right, unsurprisingly given our general theme. [SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, I think chapter breaks can be really useful, you know, we've talked about scene breaks, we've sort of talked about transitions, but when do you want a bundle up a group of scenes into a defined

1:24[SPEAKER_03]: section, which is effectively what a chapter is. [SPEAKER_03]: You know, we're not going to have one specifically around like section breaks or act breaks, but I think in thinking about what makes a chapter a chapter, you know, how do we feel like you have enough scenes together to make that break?

Pacing and Chapters

1:43[SPEAKER_01]: So I go back to the thing you've been talking about all season, which is the microcosm macrocosm, that there are times when a chapter is actually a single scene, or as we've said a single sentence, and there are times when I want to group them together. [SPEAKER_01]: For me, when I'm thinking about the chapter break, I'm thinking about it in terms of pacing. [SPEAKER_01]: The things we were talking about when we were talking about transitions about whether and I want to frame our group a set of things together for the reader to kind of think about them as a contextual whole.

2:17[SPEAKER_01]: If I'm trying to use a chapter break to interrupt action, to really underline a moment, then I will, I will often group stuff. [SPEAKER_01]: So that the chapter ends after a scene that has been a...

2:32[SPEAKER_03]: Well, one thing to think about is readers read in chapters, right, often they will get to the end of a chapter and finish a reading session of that point, right, whether or not they had planned to, but sometimes they will be like, I'm going to read till the end of the chapter, right, when you came into recording this morning, you had said that very thing of like, oh, I meant to read until the end of this chapter and then I realized, you know, so on and so forth. [SPEAKER_03]: And so, I think part of the reason why a James Patterson or a thriller writer uses very short chapters is their audience is generally one that's reading in smaller chunks, right?

3:05[SPEAKER_03]: Then say an academic reader who is used to very long very dense chapters, right? [SPEAKER_03]: And so, I think for you one way to think about it is in terms of audience and the audience experience, it's not. [SPEAKER_03]: can be difficult to think about that at the drafting stage, but as you're getting into editing, sort of thinking about that experience, can be a useful one.

Writing with Chapters

3:25[SPEAKER_00]: I'm wondering, how much of the chapter is a sort of, a thing we would naturally do if we were writing in a world in which chapters did not exist? [SPEAKER_00]: Like, and how much of it is the way that we are used to reading stories at this point. [SPEAKER_00]: And the reason I asked that is not because there's any way to know, but because it makes me wonder, should you be writing with chapters in mind? [SPEAKER_00]: Or are chapters something that like you've written and then you go back and look for, [SPEAKER_00]: Dividing lines and think this makes a good chapter.

3:57[SPEAKER_02]: When we had our discussion with Margaret about three-act structure, specifically how it applied to writing for TV, there are norms, there are expectations, there is a meta. [SPEAKER_02]: If you are writing to a genre that typically has 4,500 wordchapters on the average, [SPEAKER_02]: and the editor you are sending your manuscript to, edits for this genre, I would argue that you should have 4,500 word chapters, that you should force yourself to work within that form, because that's the expectation that you are publishing into.

4:48[SPEAKER_02]: And to your question, Aaron, would chapters exist if we just invented writing out of whole cloth and decided, you know, I don't think they necessarily would until we reached a point where someone said, you know, I would like for reading to have break points in it. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that they would have because you see chapters arising independently in multiple different cultures. [SPEAKER_01]: And to your point about writing to, you know, it's like, this is genre expectation.

5:22[SPEAKER_01]: There's genre expectation, and then there's also playing against expectations so that you stand out. [SPEAKER_01]: The chapter links, like, I stressed about this so much when I was starting out with, like, oh, my chapters only to be about the same length. [SPEAKER_01]: And now I realize that it was very wrong about that. [SPEAKER_01]: It is in the same way that repetition can become boring on a sentence level or a tonal level. [SPEAKER_01]: The same thing can happen with chapter links.

5:53[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not telling you that all your chapters need to be different links. [SPEAKER_01]: what I'm saying is that you're doing that variation as a way to control pacing and when you're thinking about chapters, I think about it as a way of controlling pacing. [SPEAKER_03]: I agree that I think chapters emerge organically kind of going back to this point because readers need breaks, right? [SPEAKER_03]: A book is long and at some point we need a point to stop and take a breather and think, right? [SPEAKER_03]: Terry Pratchett in some ways can get away with not having breaks because of the propulsive nature of his books, and you can find natural break points where it's easy to set it down of bigger scene breaks than others, right?

6:31[SPEAKER_03]: But one thing I also want to point out is that the existence of the chapter in English language, western [SPEAKER_03]: publishing is very tied to the history of print publishing, right? [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of novels in the 18th and 19th centuries were distributed as cereals. [SPEAKER_03]: They were distributed in segments, right? [SPEAKER_03]: The printing press has a thing called a signature, which is a certain number of pages that are bundled together. [SPEAKER_03]: I think it's 32. [SPEAKER_03]: 16 is a signature.

6:59[SPEAKER_03]: Because of the way paper is printed and then folded and then cut right and so the size of the signature was also very relevant to the size of a chapter for physical distribution right and so all of these things do kind of align to put some constraints in the origins of printing that are now [SPEAKER_03]: kind of present, right? [SPEAKER_03]: But I do still think thinking about white space, you know, I'm sorry to constantly be on the negative space conversation here, but like the white space on a page is really important and a chapter break is a way to sort of visually give your reader that breather in that momentary break.

7:35[SPEAKER_00]: I am curious, that makes that all make sense to me like that we would have chapters are inevitable, like the rising of the sun. [SPEAKER_00]: But I'm wondering, is there a lens, like, you know, hard mentioned, like the 4,500, you mentioned things that were set based on the printing press, has that continued forward where there is something, you know, even though you can have those variations, do you think there's something that like readers are kind of you stew in terms of like, [SPEAKER_00]: a general chapter of land and then things that are outside of those windows like really stand out.

8:08[SPEAKER_02]: I do think it is genre specific and demographics specific within a genre. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, like why it's honest. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's honest. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Of course, if you publish your retirees, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: And also like how old the book is, you know. [SPEAKER_01]: But I think the thing that signals to a reader that a chapter is coming to an end. [SPEAKER_01]: Again, macrocosm, microcosm. [SPEAKER_01]: It's grouping stuff, right? [SPEAKER_01]: And so when you when you feel like this grouping is coming to an end, this arc that I'm on is coming to an end.

8:47[SPEAKER_01]: And that I think is kind of one of the things you're looking at. [SPEAKER_01]: At the same time having said all of that, like when we were talking about interruptions in transitions, sometimes I have had the thing where I'm... [SPEAKER_01]: I've looked at my other chapters. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, they're all around 2,000 words, and this is 8,000. [SPEAKER_01]: So what's going to happen is this chapter is going to feel slow. [SPEAKER_01]: Even though there's a lot of stuff happening in it, because my reader is spending more time reading it.

9:19[SPEAKER_01]: So I will put in a deliberate break. [SPEAKER_01]: as a way to make it feel as a way to speed up the pace, which is why I keep going back to, I think it's a way of grouping things, yes, but I primarily think about chapter breaks as a way to control pacing. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: I really like thinking about it that way and I think it's an excellent point that if you have a series of short chapters inserting a long chapter, it's very, it can be very tricky to do because of reader expectations doing the opposite is very easy.

9:49[SPEAKER_03]: If you have long chapters during a short one end can feel very impactful or surprising in an interesting way where the opposite feels slow or feels, you know, or just define reader expectations. [SPEAKER_03]: I've 20 minutes

10:07[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that you can, in much the way when we were talking about the long run on sentence that feels incredibly breathless, I think that you can do that with a longer chapter, like a big action battle scene that is enormous and has a lot of impact. [SPEAKER_01]: I think that you can do something like, say, all right, this chapter is just going to be long, because you know that there's enough other stuff going on.

10:38[SPEAKER_02]: I think that we should probably have a chapter break.

10:45[SPEAKER_02]: And we're back.

Chapter Length

10:47[SPEAKER_02]: I love the idea that chapters are for pacing. [SPEAKER_02]: I find that in my own writing, [SPEAKER_02]: I will often think of chapters almost like TV episodes that get their own title, and I will try to tell the overarching story in ways that a chapter is a satisfying beginning

11:17[SPEAKER_02]: because if I want the reader experience to be, a chapter is a satisfying place to put the book down and pick it up again tomorrow, I wanted actually to feel satisfying. [SPEAKER_03]: is kind of why I brought up the idea that chapters were sort of serialized in some earlier fiction, or you know, 19th century fiction, because I think that set an expectation for the modern reader of that beginning middle, and not that they should be short stories.

11:49[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think they should be that, but they definitely should have a beginning middle and kind of flow to them in a certain way. [SPEAKER_01]: I think, yes, and I think that there's a place for that. [SPEAKER_01]: The one thing that I want to caution is the danger that I ran, or that the problem, the failure state of this. [SPEAKER_01]: When I was making the transition from short stories to novels, I was also thinking in terms of beginning middle-end. [SPEAKER_01]: And what happened to me is because I was used to short fiction, I would have chapters

12:22[SPEAKER_01]: and there was absolutely no reason to open the next chapter. [SPEAKER_01]: And so I think when you want the reader to be able to take a break, like our friend Brandon, who writes, you may have heard of him, I don't know, Brandon Sanderson, someone, known for his very short books. [SPEAKER_01]: His very short books. [SPEAKER_01]: Brandon says that he will deliberately put that's one of the reasons he puts interludes into the Stormlight Archives so that people have a spot to put the bookstown because he knows how long they are. [SPEAKER_01]: What I was doing as an accident was that I was creating these places to put the book down at the end of every chapter, which made the book very slow and very easy to abandon.

13:00[SPEAKER_01]: But when you look at Dan Brown, [SPEAKER_01]: The Da Vinci code, he sets up the ends of his chapters. [SPEAKER_01]: He's a master at this, despite my other feelings about he's a master at that. [SPEAKER_01]: He's a master at making you reach the end and you still have to turn the page. [SPEAKER_01]: So what I've learned is that I do the beginning middle end and then essentially, [SPEAKER_01]: That reaction shot that we were talking about previously the did I leave this the stove on I Tack one of those on at the end or something that says there are still stray questions open episodic with a cliffhanger Yeah, it's episodic with a cliffhanger, but it's also it's not always a cliffhanger because that again It's very repetitive, but it is a reminder that there's still more story of us

13:47[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: And when I say end, you know, I don't mean coming to a conclusion. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't mean that falling action. [SPEAKER_03]: Like they go back to a woman time out of scenes. [SPEAKER_03]: I think having a chapter start with a slow rise and a drop off does mean that you put it down and don't pick it up because I think that's a really big risk.

[SPEAKER_03]: When I say beginning and ending, I really kind of mean going back to the example used when we did scene of like, when that one sentence of here's what we're encountering in this scene and that one sentence of here's what we have encountered and what we have encountered can be that, oh no, did I leave the stove on feeling and I think you should have that, that you want momentum from chapter to chapter, you want them to make the jump across the gap because you are intentionally putting a gap there.

14:25[SPEAKER_03]: So finding a way to bridge it, find a way to catapult them whatever it is.

14:32[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny. [SPEAKER_00]: You, Mary, I'm in it said the thing that I was going to sort of pose as a question, which is, you know, the difference between a novel as just like a series of short stories that you put like a title on the front of, you know, like a story story collection and. [SPEAKER_00]: a an actual chapter. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think you've run into this on both ends. [SPEAKER_00]: I often will see students bring in stories that, you know, they're like, everyone always tells me to write a book about this. [SPEAKER_00]: And part of the reason is that there's short stories feel like a chapter in that I feel like there's always something that like, you

15:05[SPEAKER_00]: hasn't been addressed. [SPEAKER_00]: Often something like small has been addressed, but there's some larger overarching question that just is introduced and it doesn't go anywhere. [SPEAKER_00]: So it feels like, oh, a future chapter will deal with this bigger arc, and this chapter is dealing with this small moment within that arc that actually answers something or gives you some sort of feeling of having, it's like some sort of bite within this meal. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I see that happen to and people go from novels to short stories and a lot of times I think it happens because they just haven't read a lot of short stories and so their model for what something of that length looks like is a chapter and the chapters end with this promise of more which a short story typically does not because it does leave to this frustration.

15:53[SPEAKER_02]: You know, to Dongwan's earlier point about signatures dictating the length of a pamphlet, boy, back in that time, you did not waste paper. [SPEAKER_02]: There were words on every page, and so you learned to write to 16 or 32 pages.

16:14[SPEAKER_02]: That is a skill set. [SPEAKER_02]: And as a very valuable skill set, if you want to, for instance, write for comics, you are writing for a double signature staple in the middle book that has 22, 22 content pages and some ads. [SPEAKER_02]: And if you cannot write, [SPEAKER_02]: a beginning-middle-end story that can be broken into panels on that page, you don't get to work in comics. [SPEAKER_02]: You have to be able to do that.

16:45[SPEAKER_02]: And that's why I said earlier, if you're submitting to an editor who consistently writes to an average of 4,500 word chapters,

17:01[SPEAKER_02]: some factory publisher who and this is great work if you can get it. [SPEAKER_02]: Having that skill set, being able to take your story and carve it into same-sized chunks, skillfully. [SPEAKER_02]: So there doesn't feel like you shoehorned things into the chunks. [SPEAKER_02]: That's a really valuable skill to have. [SPEAKER_01]: It can be, but also, I agree with this that like being able to learn how to fit your work into the space that it needs is useful, and I just want to remind people that when you are drafting especially when you're early in your career, don't think about this stuff.

17:37[SPEAKER_03]: Totally. [SPEAKER_01]: just don't think about it like I actually when I am planning my books because I do at least to lose outline usually it just helps me keep all of the pieces in my head because I have so much disruptions. [SPEAKER_01]: I usually have what I call my holding area which is all of the scenes or beats that I need to hit and then above that I have the chapters and I will move things into chapters

18:05[SPEAKER_01]: quite quite far before I get to that section because I know it's like, oh, I really want I want this kind of ending there. [SPEAKER_01]: But usually I don't move things out of the holding area into the chapter area until I get pretty close to it because it is there is so much one of the joys of of writing novels is that there's so much flexibility. [SPEAKER_03]: Well, and one thing I do want to raise at this juncture is, again, I don't think this thing that you was a writer should think about that much, but I'm adding it for context of what's happening, which is we are in a moment of dramatically rising printing and paper costs, right?

18:43[SPEAKER_03]: And so the design and layout of books is becoming more significant and, you know, [SPEAKER_03]: this part of the downward pressure on lengths of books right now, just because the more pages it has, the less money publishers will make on it, because it's more expensive expensive to create, right? [SPEAKER_03]: And all of this is just a note to remember that at the end of the day, if you're doing traditional publishing, a book is first and foremost a physical object that needs to exist in the world, and the decisions you make will descend to that.

[SPEAKER_03]: Now, can you control that in a useful way because so much depends on font choices, layout, design and all these things, not really, but it's something to be aware of in at a macro level, think about that publishing is still kind of a physical goods business in a very real way and that the materiality of your book will matter at the end of the day.

19:36[SPEAKER_02]: I think in terms of failure modes a lot. [SPEAKER_02]: And for me, there are two failure modes for chapter breaks. [SPEAKER_02]: And one is, well, why haven't we reached a chapter break yet?

19:50[SPEAKER_02]: And there's a lot of reasons why that can fail, and half of it is probably what I as a reader brought into the book. [SPEAKER_02]: And the other failure mode is, I wasn't ready for that chapter to be over yet. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to read the next chapter. [SPEAKER_02]: I want to read more of this one. [SPEAKER_02]: I bring those up because when I'm writing, I really want to avoid them.

20:18[SPEAKER_00]: I don't exactly, but I think you're talking about the two failure states, maybe think of a third one, which is, there's a third way to fail. [SPEAKER_00]: There's so many, there's so many, there's so many, there's so many, there's so many, there's so many, no, just, which is that they are. [SPEAKER_00]: There are three, like this one is where it feels like the chapters just there because somebody thought it needed to be there. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like this happens a lot with two POV levels where, you know, they're like, you can feel the writer thinking, you know what, I really think I need to check back in to so and so.

21:00[SPEAKER_00]: Or I committed to having every other chapter be this person and so like I have now finished person A's chapter. [SPEAKER_00]: I guess I got to do person B's chapter even though I don't have a lot. [SPEAKER_00]: to put in there and I think like my guess would be that the answer is you are less constrained by chapters like you control the chapters the chapters don't control you and so a lot of these failure modes have to do with when you're trying to force each after break at a time when you think it needs to happen because like the publishing world will make it happen or this is how on your friends chapters are versus when it actually feels like it makes sense for the story.

21:38[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I would agree with that completely. [SPEAKER_03]: And just to reiterate, that matters way more than anything I said about like publishing and in print size, it was, I just had an interesting one. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and my comments are aimed specifically to, [SPEAKER_02]: uh... the writer who wants to sell into a specific market where there are constraints that you don't have control of and you probably aren't shiny enough of a writer to to violate those rules yet

22:11[SPEAKER_01]: So when we're thinking about how to go in and out of a chapter, I just want to take us back to our transitions, which is that you're still thinking about the same kinds of things that you're thinking about with a scene, that you're still moving people in time and place that when they come back into a chapter they need to be grounded. [SPEAKER_01]: And thinking about how you're manipulating those, it's the same toolset. [SPEAKER_01]: It's just using it in a different place.

22:41[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm also going to call back to something we've talked about in other episodes, which is the resency privacy effect, that in much the same way that you can complete a circuit by hitting a point, talking about some things, and then hitting that point again, [SPEAKER_01]: the thing was the thing you were saying tell the person tell them again tell them what you're going to tell them tell them tell them tell them what you told them exactly that you can use that in a chapter as well and also because the chapter is an artificial thing it's okay to like do all of those things in a scene and then kind of have a through scene attachment at the end of it which is sort of the reaction shot that is moving you're on to the next thing

23:25[SPEAKER_01]: So you're thinking about all those things, but because chapters are longer than scenes you have more words to do it in. [SPEAKER_01]: So basically what I'm saying is, if you've learned a tool at one level, the proportions are going to stay the same. [SPEAKER_01]: It's just like the difference between going from making a cake to a cupcake. [SPEAKER_01]: Same proportion of flour. [SPEAKER_01]: You just use more flour in one of them than the other. [SPEAKER_03]: And it's a nesting doll, right? [SPEAKER_03]: But cake lives inside the cake, which lives inside the bed. [SPEAKER_03]: I don't know. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: What are you cooking? [SPEAKER_03]: And can I eat it? [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.

23:57[SPEAKER_03]: And one of my favorite things, metaphors don't work. [SPEAKER_03]: No. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like a layer. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_00]: It's like a layer of cakes. [SPEAKER_00]: I never met a four. [SPEAKER_00]: I didn't like.

24:07[SPEAKER_02]: So here, it's a sandwich, it's a sandwich. [SPEAKER_02]: All right, chapters versus scenes, one of my favorite things about chapters is that for me anyway, I treat a chapter as another opportunity to deliver a great first line. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't look at that. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't look at scenes that way because that's exhausting, but I feel like anytime the page has turned, you know, there's a white space in between that opening paragraph of a chapter is an opportunity for me again to shine at

24:44[SPEAKER_02]: at the beginning of the thing. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, part of the reason this works is something we've talked about way longer go is the power of breaks. [SPEAKER_01]: We talked about the the white space on the page, but when I'm narrating commas periods, all of the punctuation exists to encode pauses. [SPEAKER_01]: And so for a period you, sorry, a comma you count for one, this is very mechanical, this is just when you're learning a comma you count for one a period you count for two paragraph break you count for three and chapters

25:26[SPEAKER_01]: and scenes are just bigger pauses. [SPEAKER_01]: So a lot of times you can build more of a punctuation by where you place that chapter break, which means that when you're coming back in, you've also got that ability. [SPEAKER_01]: And also, again, the danger of this is that because there's been this pause, you have to re-ground the reader. [SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes you need to ground them more thoroughly by [SPEAKER_01]: Like, where are we when are we? [SPEAKER_01]: Who are we dealing with? [SPEAKER_01]: Like, what is the connection of this to the last?

25:56[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's also possible, especially when you're doing the changing POVs for the reader to come back in and completely have lost the thread. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_03]: Don't think about it as a short story, but do recognize the very real possibility that your reader has not picked up this book in a week.

Conclusion and Homework

26:13[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: And with that, I think it's probably time for us to go to homework. [SPEAKER_01]: So for your homework, what I want you to do is I actually want you to go and look for a book. [SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be a little bit hard to find, but it's called chapter, a segmented history from antiquity to the 21st century. [SPEAKER_01]: And it is a history of chapters. [SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to read this book honestly. [SPEAKER_01]: It will not enormously impact the way you write. [SPEAKER_01]: But I do think it's really interesting to think about, Oh, this is how it developed.

26:46[SPEAKER_01]: And these are all the different variations of the ways chapters exist. [SPEAKER_02]: I wish I'd read the book before I tried to answer Aaron's question.

26:55[SPEAKER_02]: before I said a bunch of stuff. [SPEAKER_02]: It's a straight publishing that I hope is right. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, they had chapter divisions in scrolls. [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, that's it. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: This is why I was like, no, no, it's risen. [SPEAKER_01]: It's risen across multiple cultures. [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, this is just a fun assignment because we've been giving you a lot of homework that is, oh, I have to go. [SPEAKER_01]: I have to go write a thing. [SPEAKER_01]: Um, so this one is just for funsies, see if you can find into your library, uh, the chapter, a segmented history of antiquity from the 20, from antiquity to the 21st century by Nicholas James.

27:26[SPEAKER_02]: This has been writing excuses. [SPEAKER_02]: You're out of excuses. [SPEAKER_02]: Now go read.

27:33[SPEAKER_01]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. [SPEAKER_01]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. [SPEAKER_01]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Car Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. [SPEAKER_01]: For more information, visit writingexuses.com.