21.33: When To Shift Gears

Shifting gears in longer works

0:00This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com slash writingexcuses. Season 21, Episode 33.

0:19This is Writing Excuses. When to shift gears. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Wan. I'm Erin. And I'm Howard. And something that I've been wondering about is we've got all these different tools, not rules, that, you know, you might use one structure or another. You might use one technique or another. And sometimes I think about them, probably the short story writer in me, as like one tool per work. Like, this is the work where I will do this structure.

0:50This is the work where I will do this technique. But especially in longer works, I'm assuming that you're going to need to use different tools and you might have to use different structures or different techniques. So in this episode, we want to talk a little bit about how do you know when to shift and then how do you do it effectively without it seeming like you're careening across 10, you know, lanes of traffic in the middle of your work. I think this is a great question because when I was going from short fiction to novels, it was one of the problems that I had.

1:21In short fiction, I could usually hold the whole story in my head. Early on, I didn't understand how to end things. I would just stop writing and it was not good. Or I would have an ending that had nothing to do with the story. But this is a thing that happens in novels. It's more visible in novels, often in the saggy middle, where the writer knows that they need to start wrapping things up, but they don't actually know how to switch gears. And so what I do is I look at, okay, what does this part do?

1:56What does that part do? How do I blend them? And this is whether I'm going from, you know, middle to end or whether I'm going from conversation to action or narrative introduction. Like here's a voice driven opening. How do I move into actually things happening instead of staying in navel gazing? So I look at what each thing is doing and then I try to sprinkle it together. This is when I am in failure mode and it's not just happening naturally, I should say.

2:29In the interest of overextending the metaphor, I've driven a manual transmission for decades. And when I first started, I was told to watch the tachometer because when the needle gets between 3500 and anything above 3500, it's time to go up a gear unless you're trying to really accelerate. And for a long time I did that. And then I realized that the noise the engine was making told me when to shift. And then I realized that with my hand on the stick, I could actually feel what was happening in the engine and it just became instinctive.

3:08And for writing, yes, when I am shifting between, I am writing something very thinky or the characters are talking and I need them to be clever. I need this to be bantery and clever. And then I'm shifting into, oh, no, everything's on fire. We're all running.

3:32I know that I need to shift. I have some tools that might help me just change the environment I'm in. So I write that way. I might change the music that I'm playing. But I immediately know I need to be in a different headspace in order to put the right words on the page for this next bit. So what you're talking about, I love this example because it gets to a thing about pantsing. Like we talk about pantsing, but the root of pantsing as in I don't plan my things is the seat of the pants.

4:07And the root of that is flying by the seat of the pants because in the early days, pilots, when they didn't have instrumentation, would fly by the way the plane felt. They could literally feel the plane through the seat of their pants. But in order to do that successfully, you have to be an experienced pilot. You have to put your pants in a lot of planes. You have to put your pants in a lot of planes. And before that, you know, in order to acquire that skill, that's when you're working with instrumentation. That's when you're reaching for these tools that we're talking about.

4:38So that's, you know, the whole season we've been talking about, we're going to give you a toolbox, but none of these are rules. Except keep your plane, like, not dropping out of the sky. Do not stall. I mean, there are failure modes, whether or not you have rules, right? There are failure modes. And I think what Howard is, or actually sort of like over the course of this season, so much of what we're saying is, here are the specific tools, here are the specific structures and details. And we're talking at a high level in a way that I think it's very easy to hear what we're saying and be like, I don't know how to apply that.

5:11I don't know what that means. And the thing that we're reassuring you of is, as you do this over time, you will develop these instincts. Like Howard learning to listen to the engine. Like feeling the plane, you know, through the seat of your pants. You will also learn to ingest these concepts and tools and be able to apply them.

Mechanical tools and try-fail cycles

5:29Let me give a concrete example of moving from one thing to another. If you've got a character that's going to a goal, this is a try-fail cycle, right? You've got a character that's moving towards a goal. There's, I talk about the question, will they succeed? And you've got yes, but, or no, and. But there's two other things that you also have, which is yes, and. So yes represents movement towards a goal. No means moving away from a goal. And is a continuation of motion, but is a reversal.

6:02So yes, I'm getting closer to my goal, but something happens and I get farther away from it. Or no, I'm getting farther from my goal and I get farther away from it. And you use that in the first part of the story. I didn't, even though I had used those tools for a long time, I didn't understand that the reason I was having trouble shifting into the latter part of the story where I was giving my character a win state is that I had to change those up to move my character closer. So that's, yes, I'm getting closer to my goal and I get to take another step towards it.

6:33Or no, I'm getting farther from my goal, but something nice happens and I get to move closer to it. And so once I realized that, once I understood that, on days when I was having trouble, I could mechanically look at it and say, okay, I need to stop stalling and I need to move them forward. What win state can I give them? And so I could still use my instinct for the yes or no, but I could kind of subvert that and use that one instrument to say, you have to give them a win state right now in order to get closer.

7:04To talk about this in terms of games for a second, you know, a thing that gets discussed a lot in gaming spaces is the idea of railroading, right? Of putting your players just on one track and they have to do this thing. If they don't do this thing, you punish them for that, right? But I think there's an opposite failure state, which is, and you see this a lot at transition moments when they arrive at a new location and nobody knows what to do, right? If you've given them an or instead of an and or a but, right? And if you're not giving them parameters to engage with and a clear goal to be moving towards,

7:36or the goal is so far away and abstract, then you'll end up with all the momentum dying in a lost session where nobody knows where to go and what to do, right? And I think I see this a lot in fiction too, where as you're trying to shift modes, you sort of end up in this dead space in between where there isn't enough of that sense of direction. There isn't enough of that sense of, here's what I'm trying to do at a higher level. And you can sort of lose that momentum in the shift. Yeah. Several episodes ago, we were talking about narrative transitions

8:10and I joked with Marie Robinette about, you know, do you make the, did I leave the stove on face? When you were writing the, did you leave the stove on passage? Um, I make faces when I draw, I make faces when I write, um, I am experiencing at some level what it is that my characters, characters are experiencing. And I found that there are some passages that are just so emotionally draining that I remember writing a story and Sandra came home and saw me.

8:41It's like, oh my God, what is wrong? What happened to you? I said, oh, I, I wrote a thing and, and I felt what was in it. Um, understanding that that happens is both, uh, it's both, uh, predictive and it's a way to recover from it. If I know what kind of a passage I need to write, I will emotionally tool myself up as if I have to go have a difficult conversation with someone because I'm going to be feeling those emotions. Yeah. And at the same time, if I know that I, I am later today, I will have written that.

9:17I will plan later today to recover from having written that because I understand how that part of the engine of my particular vehicle works. Speaking of being in a vehicle, I think that one of the things that can really, you know, get me stopped in the middle of doing all that is if I don't know exactly where I'm going. If there is a lot of, or, like, I think this is, this can be because you're flying by the seat of your pants, but it's also can be just because there are a couple of routes in the story that you could take.

9:50Like, you know, maybe like what you're trying to get to at the end of a scene or a chapter or a story, but you're like, oh, I could have them do this try-fail cycle or that try-fail cycle. I could go with this type of structural change or I could go with that one. And it can feel very much like I don't know what to do and therefore I won't 100% do anything. I will try to do a little bit of everything. And I find that a lot of times it's easiest if I go back and just try it two ways, try it three ways.

10:21Like, there's no, having things that don't end up in your final manuscript is not a failure. It's just part of the process. And so I will say, okay, well, what happens if I shift to, I don't know how driving works. What happens if I shift to second gear? What happens if I shift to fifth gear? Is there a fifth gear? Fifth gear. What happens if I shift to ninth gear? How many gears? No, they're too far. You've gone too far. Driving a manual transmission in Los Angeles traffic is a little bit like what you've described because, you know, I'm in third.

10:54I've gotten onto the freeway and I am ready to shift into fourth and maybe into fifth. But traffic might slow down. Do I really want to be in fifth already or do I want to be in fourth? That's why we have an automatic transmission for the road trip that took us here because manual transmission in that kind of traffic, I don't know what's ahead. I will let the mechanics of the vehicle do the shifting for me. And when you're doing a shift, like one of the things in a car or a bicycle, which more people will have experience at this point in this century with shifting gears on a bicycle than they will with a car.

11:33Um, the reason you do it is to make the work easier. Um, it's, it's to match the conditions that you're approaching. And so you'll shift down to make things easier when you're climbing so that the bike is assisting you. You'll shift up when you're, when you've got like, you're going downhill because you can go faster and that, and all of that. So you shift for modes, uh, in order to make it easier. And that's the same thing when you're riding, you shift for the mode that will make the writing easier, make the story go.

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Serving the writer and the reader

14:21We will now shift into ninth gear, which I believe is real. I had a Schwinn 10-speed, so you know what? Bicycles, yes, you can shift to ninth gear in a bicycle. Yes! I have a single speed because I'm dumb and I live in a very hilly city. It's a problem. That is a choice you have made. It worked in Brooklyn. It does not work in Los Angeles. Anyways, continue. But a question I have, what you said about shifting making it easier, is do you shift to make it easier for you, the driver slash writer? Do you shift to make it easier for the reader? Like, how do you know who the shift is serving and whether or not you're doing the right thing that you need to be doing on the page?

14:57Again, this gets into, I am weird and I always think about my reader as a collaborator. And so for me, the shift is to make it easier for both of us. Because most of the time, it is a shift to make it easier for me as the writer because I am doing something, you know, like when I'm doing it very consciously, it is a shift to make it easier for me as the writer. But the shift is happening because that I'm following the terrain of the story. And, you know, if I don't want the story to feel, if I don't want the ending to feel rushed, I have to shift modes so that I'm making sure that I'm allowing time for things.

15:37My instinct as the writer is to just have the thing done, but that doesn't make it better for my reader. And so that mode shift and being conscious of that, it's like, okay, this is the part where we're wrapping things up. Sometimes I go back and fix it in post. I am just like, I am going to be done with this. And then I'll go back and slow it down. But that is often, that is the place where the writer experience and the reader experience are like wildly out of alignment. But the same tools can make it easier for both of them. I have a pretty good idea when I'm putting a story together of what I want the reader experience to be like from the thing that I am sitting down to write next.

16:16And so that's the known terrain in front of me. Therefore, I know what gear or what gears I need to be in. And so when I think about this gear shifting, it's really all about me putting myself in the right frame of mind, in the right context in my studio or in my office, in the right headspace, the right health space to do the thing the way, at least in my mind's eye, I believe it will best be done for the reader.

16:55So let me talk about this on a, we've been talking about this very philosophically. Let me talk about this in kind of a more action thing. I talked in the first half about how you can kind of sprinkle things in. And I mentioned if you've got a very voice-driven opening, how do you move into something that is more action? One of the things that you can look for are the links. We talk about when you're going from, when we're talking about transitions, the transition episode, we talked about the idea of a match cut as being something that you use going from one scene into the next scene.

17:34You can also do this when you're doing a mode switch from a tonal mode switch. So if in a voice-driven opening, you have a character who's ruminating about a thing. So if I were doing like this opening about a character who has a pebble that's on the headboard and how they think about it, and they've had that pebble there since the night their father died. And it's going to be this whole thing. And now I have to get into action. I can do something like I shifted the pebble on the headboard and then turned around to face my mom.

18:10And so that is an interior version of a match cut that I can use to transition. And I can also layer in a little bit more if I want to kind of bounce back and forth between those. You know, I shifted the pebble on my headboard as I turned around and faced my mom. We never talked about my dad. I asked her and then started to dialogue. So that's the kind of thing that you can do very mechanically if it's not just like flowing. To give another, a different mechanical example.

18:42So I have a story that I'm working on that has like sections of poetry in the middle of it that are like telling the story, but they are completely different mode than the rest of the prose, which is prose. And the way that I think what helps me at first is to think about what do I want this shift to feel like? And so for me, this particular piece in general feels very like sitting at a jazz club as different acts come and go. And to me, the poetry part is like having a smoky drink in the middle of the act. So it happens while the scene is continuing, but it's this like interesting break that happens versus, for example, like there are other things I've written where the shift feels like a palate cleanser in between courses, which is a lot more of a stark change.

19:27But in order to do that mechanically, one of the things that I do is all of the poetry pieces have a certain amount of musicality in them in that they use musical terms. They're about songs. They're about the way that you talk about music. And so I often have a sentence that has a little bit of a musical element to it, uses a word that has to do with music, and then move into these like poetic musical parts. Because what I'm doing is almost like in a car when you signal that you are going to the next lane.

19:58And once you teach your reader that this is the type of signal, like every time you get this signal, you will be shifting into this kind of thing. I'm going to mention music, and then we're going to sit back. We're going to have this moment of smoky drinks. And then like we're going to shift out of it back into something usually that's very concrete in the setting to say I'm moving out of poetry, which is a lot more emotional, and back into the world of the concrete what's happening physically. So I will use an observation about the room that the person is in as a way to come back out.

20:30So it's like here I am shifting back. But I think a lot of it is about those signaling, like saying I shifted the pebble, it's a way to actually subconsciously tell your reader, get prepared, a shift is coming, so that it doesn't feel abrupt when it happens. It's hitting the clutch. It's disengaging the gears for a second as you move.

Controlling the writing environment

20:49Yeah.

Controlling the writing environment

20:50There are three, I think, key tools for me for just controlling the environment that I'm writing in. The first that leaps to mind is music. It's really helpful to me to have music that doesn't have words, you know, orchestral or movie soundtrack or atmospheric or even techno dance beats playing while I write. I have a very long playlist of atmospheric music, and there are some tracks on there that have like creepy baby voices or something in them.

21:23And I keep meaning to yank those out because those break the gear shift. Those put me in the, I can't have those while I'm writing. They were fine when I was drawing, but I need to fix the playlist. The second is the lighting. If I'm writing on an illuminated screen and there is enough light or maybe there's a backlit keyboard for me to see my hands, I am free to change the lighting in the room completely because it's not, the lighting in the room is not about me seeing other things.

21:56It's about establishing an ambiance for, for what I'm doing. And, and the third is really is, uh, which chair am I in? Am I sitting upright? Am I in my zero gravity chair? Um, which, which mode do I want my actual physical body to be in when I type? And I recognize that all of these are variables over which I have full control. I should be consciously controlling them rather than just throwing them down and expecting myself, expecting me to be in the right frame when I start typing.

22:33Yeah. I think that's a good point that, that making sure that, that you have the right mindset. One of the, the lower lifts that I do, because I'm, I'm often writing while I'm traveling. So I don't have control over my environment. Playlists. Yes. But, um, but, uh, I will often start a scene by just writing down my intention. Um, and this can be an intention, you know, like, uh, an actual plot beat that I need to hit sometimes. But most of the time, the intention is more about how I want the reader to feel.

23:08Um, this is, you know, this is a cozy scene. Next time I'm going to start trying to use the, uh, the eight types of fun that we talked about in a previous episode. I'm going to start trying that. I'm just like, cause that feels like a really good focusing tool. But that helps me, you know, it's like start winding things up. This is, uh, this is the scene in which, um, and, and I think that that, that helps me keep it in, in the front of my brain. This is what I'm aiming for.

Homework and closing

23:36I think those two things combined are a perfect way to lead us into the homework. So what your homework is, is to take a scene that you are writing and you know what a scene is from our previous episodes, um, and write down what is your intention for the scene. And then think about a physical thing that you can do that matches that intention. Is it a playlist? Is it the chair? Is it the light in the room? And write the scene. Then go back and set yourself a different intention for that scene and change something about the physicality of the space that you're in

24:08and see how it changes the gear that you use when you write it. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

24:19Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com.

24:42Thank you.