21.38: Rules, Tools, and History’s Fools

History of the Turkey City Lexicon

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 38.

0:19This is Writing Excuses. Rules, tools, and history's fools. Uh, tools, not rules? For writers by fools? I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Erin. I'm Donglan. I'm confused and also Howard. This cursed episode is for my birthday. Happy birthday to me, everyone. I spend a lot of time, usually in the opening, saying tools, not rules.

0:49So for my birthday, I thought I would try to flip it on its head and think about rules that we can use to develop tools. And I was kind of curious about rules from the past. Rules, writing rules that existed, that people have passed down, and whether or not we still find use in them, and whether or not we're like, these ones need to go away. Um, because history makes fools of us all. Uh, and so in order to do this, we're going to take a look back at the Turkey City Lexicon,

1:20a thing that I think not a lot of people maybe know about, but was passed around a lot as a large piece of writing advice, uh, in the early aughts and late 90s. So 20 years ago, a whole generation ago. And it came out of a writer's, a writer's workshop that I think was called Turkey City. And people would use all these terms over and over again. And so it is a bunch of rules. It is written somewhat snarkily. We will link to it in the description because it's, I think, of a group who all knew each other.

1:51And my point in bringing it today is not to necessarily, like, say how we feel about it, but I'm curious, like, what of the moment in which this thing took place is actually still helpful today? What are things that we think, like, the field that the genre that writing has sort of maybe moved on from a little bit, the way that we don't all write in a top-down third person anymore? And then I'm kind of curious what we would do if we had to make our own writing excuses lexicon. Oh, boy. After having read Turkey City Lexicon, I realized that every one of those line items was built

2:30on a truth, but the entire document was proscription. It was all, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. And I came away feeling like, man, if this was the extent of the toolbox or the rulebook that you gave me, I would not know how to write better.

Jargon and the reader experience

2:50I mean, I think the tongue-in-cheekness of this document saves it in a lot of ways, right? I think everything in here is meant seriously, but is kind of framed in a very snarky, confrontational way, which I can see a lot of young writers taking it too literally and too seriously. I'm giving a little bit of generosity to the creators of this, as there is probably a little tongue-in-cheekness implied here. But what I found interesting was each of the items on here, I could find use in and exceptions

3:25to. And I think this really goes to the core of our tools, not rules, is all of these are things that I could see applying. And if you're overdoing it, or if you're leaning into it too much, or if you're applying it, some of them were like, yeah, I'd never do this. Um, uh, I think there was one about, um, uh, you can't fire me, I quit, was it, was the name of it? And it's like, uh, diffusing the reader's incredulity with the preemptive strike is the way they phrase it. Um, which is like a character being like, I never would have believed it if I hadn't seen

3:56it myself. And it's sort of like, yeah, don't do that. That's just kind of annoying. And it's just kind of you apologizing for your story before writing it. Now that I say it though, maybe there are cases that it can work. I think almost in any of these, you can make them work, but as a rule of thumb, I see the utility in most of these. So I was definitely handed the Turkey city lexicon when I started writing. So I started writing seriously in 2005. Um, and this was floating around already at that point. Uh, and, and, and it was, it was a thing.

4:30It was a thing that we were using. And the, what drove me, what frustrated me, um, was that the way it was being used by early career writers in critique groups is that if they identified something from the Turkey city lexicon, they thought it was a flaw, whether or not it worked in this context. So there are situations where people like, um, as you know, Bob, this is a phrase that exists

5:02where it's two characters who are explaining something to each other that they both know. You know, as you know, Bob, um, we are recording the episode of writing excuses, writing excuses is a podcast. So it's like, I don't need to explain any of that to you, but there are situations where it does make sense to have characters do that. It's often like emotionally driven, but you'll see people say, Oh, no, you did.

5:32You did that. Or show don't tell you're showing or you're, you know, you're, you're telling and you should be showing and I find that the, um, the focus on the, the jargon of it causes us to stop thinking critically about how it actually functions in this particular story. I think the current implementation of, of this, of the Turkey city thing that that's more useful

6:03and, and yet, uh, far more insidious and dangerous is, uh, TV tropes because you've got a bazillion names for a bazillion things you might do. The thing that I like about TV tropes is that they're not saying that these things are bad. They're saying that these things are things and they happen often enough that we've given them names and it's helpful to know the name for it so that you know when you're doing it. So you don't necessarily do it the same way it's been done a thousand times before.

6:37Well, I think that's true, but not true because I think people will often call other people's works tropey. Like they're like, Oh, this feels predictable is I think what they're saying. I, I knew where it was going already, uh, because it followed this set pattern that TV tropes has told me exists, which is interesting because they literally document anything that could exist from the thing that only happens in three random anime to like, you know, using capital letters at the beginning of sentences is probably a trope in there. And so it's like, it has a wide

7:08range. And so I think it is, it is a lot about how we do sometimes grasp for rules. Like we want to know if what we're doing is right or wrong. We want to know if somebody else is doing something and we don't, it doesn't work for us, but we don't know why sometimes we'll look for, okay, like if I can pinpoint, Oh, you're doing X, then I can say number one, that like, I am right about my feelings in the story. And like that, it gives me some backup. Other people have also, this is obviously a problem in a specific way, even if that doesn't turn out to be the issue at all.

Reemerging patterns in writing advice

7:40Um, it's easy to look at this document and be like, Oh, what a crazy thing that happened in 1986. But one thing I want to emphasize is that we see these patterns reemerging over and over again. People love to come up with writing advice, right? And I want to be careful and say this in a way that isn't a kids these days kind of vibe, but there's a lot of writing advice that I see kicking around on book talk that people like to cherry pick and respond to because sometimes to me, it will sound completely crazy, right? Um, there's a lot of talk out there about whether or not you should

8:13write in first person because the reader is not actually doing these things. So how could you ever write in first person? How could that throws them out of the experience? Uh, I've also seen the advice of never write in third person and it just like gets, there's a lot of conflict happening right now around these conversations. And I see them flare up consistently on threads and on TikTok that are around a specific desire to conform to certain types of reading that a certain audience wants. And then that gets generalized out, right? And I see this, this Turkey city lexicon as having emerged

8:45from one of those moments. And this is a pattern that repeats itself over and over and over again throughout history as people are looking for what's the easy solve. I mean, it, you know, what's the advice that somebody can give me that'll fix my writing and let me write a bestseller and access whatever promised land there is. So I, I have also run into this as well. And there was also a period when people were saying, Oh, you, if you're writing first person, then it must be in past tense. And

9:15we, and it's refuse, it diffuses the entire thing because we know that they survived and it's like, Oh my God. Um, if you're writing in present tense, are they sitting there and scribbling it? It's like, no, it's a, okay. But for me, one of the things about a document like this, um, I tend to think about criticism as coming in three layers. There's, uh, symptoms, there's diagnosis, and there's prescription. Often when you have something like a Turkey, Turkey city lexicon, or a new thing that is

9:49being developed, what happens is it's like people who've injured themselves and then Google for medical terms to describe what they're happening. And, and it is often coming from a place where they are not actually subject matter experts, but having terms makes it feel like they are. And so they, um, say things that just aren't acknowledging what the actual reader experience is. Like, um, the, you know, one of the problems with, um, the, the white room syndrome, which is listed here as a

10:27clear and common sign of the failure of the author's imagination. Most often seen in the beginning of a story, she awoke in a white room. The white room is a featureless set for details, which have yet to be invented. Okay. So this is a thing that does happen that sometimes you don't give the reader grounding details, but there's a story in Asimov's where the character literally wakes up in a white room and they've got amnesia. And I'm like, oh my goodness, I have read about this problem. And it is a, it is a thing, this, this author, and how did this get in Asimov's? And as

10:59the story unfolds, it becomes extremely clear that why this was so important, because it was a clone that was waking up. And the reason they didn't have memories before that moment was because they were a clone waking up and it, it's like, this was being used to such good effect and was completely appropriate. But I, as a young writer would have tossed that story if it had come to me in a slush pile because I had read the Turkey city lexicon and had learned that the white room syndrome was a flaw.

11:32It's the John Wick thing, right? You can never kill a dog in a movie. So John Wick said, we're going to do it in the opening, right? And build an entire movie around it. But you can do these things if you hang a lantern on it, right? It was so clear in that movie that they knew exactly what they were doing and that they were breaking a rule. And by breaking the rule, they were like, we're doing something fresh and new. You've never seen an action movie like this. You've never seen a story like this. We're going to show you something new. And they did a lot. There's a lot of like edgy elements to that movie. There's like the way they do like typography on the screen and things like

12:04that. Some of it works, some of it doesn't. But what's very clear is they're signaling to the audience. They're signaling to the producers who backed that movie. We're doing something different. We're fresh and new. And you can use some of these techniques in a very deliberate way to push that forward. Wow. This is so helpful, but not chaotic enough for my birthday. So when we get back from the break, I'm going to push us to go even further. Boom, boom, boom.

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15:53Okay, we're back, and I'm older. And in this section... Show us the chaos, Erin. Where are we going?

Proposed rules and writing hills to die on

15:58Yes. So what I want to have happen is I want to talk a little bit more about what you would do if you were forced to write one of these for writing excuses, and you can't say, oh, no, like, sometimes it won't work. No. I want, like, what is your intrusive Turkey City style rule that is something that's like a pet peeve of yours, something that never works, something that you would put in yourself for better or worse if you had to snarkily inform people of things that they had to do? What is your rule, not a tool?

16:29I didn't realize this episode was get canceled with Aaron Roberts.

16:36Yeah, see, that's the thing. I've reached a point in my life where even just speculating about what sort of bad advice would I give. No, but this has to be good advice. Good advice. What's the good advice you give that you believe you're right about that is universally or very close to universally applicable? Punctuation captures breath. It is not about grammar.

17:06A hundred percent. Ooh, I like that. A hundred percent back that. Say more. So I, like, where you place commas. Commas, those are about where you're going to breathe and where you're going to pause. It's capturing thoughts. I had to narrate a book that I affectionately call the goddamn Ukrainian novel. And this author decided that what they were going to do. So first of all, it is a book in translation. So we're going to grant them that. But there was a chapter

17:37with no paragraph breaks at all. And also sentences that were three quarters of a page long. So this author had made very clear choices, but it meant that there was no breathing room. Not only was there visually nothing on the page, there was no breathing room in the text. And it wasn't, it was, she had done it because it was edgy. Each chapter was trying a different edgy thing. Um, and so it, it frustrates me when I see people get uptight about how they should use

18:15punctuation without thinking about, and they're thinking about grammatic rules without thinking about, yeah, but the grammatic rules arose in order to capture this thing that we do naturally, which is pausing when we talk and breathing. And that's why we have M dashes. That's why we have ellipses. That's why commas are there to indicate these pauses. So that, that would be mine.

18:39Beautiful. Other victims. I mean, other volunteers. I'm like circling the shape of one that I can't, I don't have a pithy way to put it yet because this was sprung on us, um, and an act of cruelty. Chaos! But for me, I think my core one is readers care about relationships. You have to have a character in relationship to another character. And I'm going to put a caveat here that can be

19:10in relationship to themselves. That can be a division within themselves that they're trying to resolve. And the emotional interiority of a relationship is literally the only thing readers care about. Everything else that's happening around that is applying external threat to melodramatically demonstrate the nature of a relationship under threat. So if you have an action novel, somebody is trying to save somebody else, kill somebody else, whatever it is, it is about how they feel about another person. A revenge story works not because of you want to see that

19:42person kill somebody, but because of the sense of betrayal at the core of the revenge story. Somebody cared about somebody that was violated and now we're invested. You can't have a revenge story if you don't show me who the person loved to begin with. There will come soft rains. Where's the character? The character is the house. The house is in relationship to an off-screen person that it cared about. The house is, the reason we feel tenderness towards the house is because it is through action

20:16demonstrating, it is activating our desire to anthropomorphize action. And in the house's actions, we are reading care for the humans who are no longer there. The heartbreak of the story is that we are projecting emotions onto a thing that is gone. And the thing that doesn't exist anymore is the fact that that is an automated house that has no emotions, but we are feeling the relationship that it represents. Because it's doing the things that humans should do to care for each

20:48other. So the love and the care and the connection between the family that lived in that house and the dog that comes in and dies in the house because it is so irradiated and poisoned, all of those are the heartbreaking things. The heartbreaking thing is the love of domesticity that is represented by the house. I don't know that I could argue with, you know, for or against Dong Wan's original point, but the facility with which you responded to Mary Robinette's question leads me to believe that at least in your own

21:24mind, you are a hundred percent right and I'm willing to be convinced. I'm willing to fight anyone on it. What's the hill you'll die on sort of? And like, I will die on this hill. And I'm willing to give you that hill. That's, yeah. Yeah. Like I fundamentally believe that readers need a reason to care. I have read stories where there is not an individual character in the way that we think about. I do think that relationships

21:56are often the driver there. There's a great story called crystallization by David Gerald, I think. We will correct that in the liner notes if I'm wrong, listeners. In which it is entirely omniscient, broad upper view of a traffic jam in LA and the way it fundamentally changes the city because it is a traffic jam that can't be undone. And there are no individual

22:31characters, but it's incredibly compelling. But it is because, I think, of this big overview of all of these relationships. Yeah. You can attenuate it, right? You can take that concept and attenuate it and abstract it to a certain amount. But when that abstraction breaks down, it usually could be saved by having more clarity about what is the emotional core, what are the people who care about other people, even if it is our idea of LA as a city or our imagination of the people in the cars. All right. I think I've got my writing advice rule now, and I'm going to put a pretty big stake

23:08in the ground. Your first book, write the book that you want to read. Forget the rest of the audiences, forget the market, forget everything else. Your first book, you write the book that you want to read. If you don't do that, you're breaking the rule and you're bad. Your fifth book, and I'm not picking five just because that's how many fingers I have on this hand, if you count the thumb. I'm picking five because physics, your fifth book, write something that isn't for you.

23:44Yeah, I'm going to disagree with that. That's the point in your career where you are ready to reach beyond. No, I think the books should always be for you. Yeah, I think so too. I think that you can write books that are for more than just you. I'm not saying the fifth one's going to sell, but I'm saying that's the point at which. I do agree that you should push yourself the deeper you get into your career. And you should ask yourself, what is it that I really want to be reading? And you should be expanding your horizons as much as possible. So I agree with you, I think, in the subtext of what you're saying.

24:17But I also think you should always write for yourself first. Yeah. Yes, I would agree with that. Erin, what is yours, first day girl? Yes, you have to write it. And by that, I mean, AI bad, human's good. That was a cheap cop-out. We all agree with that one. That's not controversial. I guess it is controversial. I didn't say it had to be controversial. I just said it had to be something that you 100% believe. Plus, I'm sure there's like three people right now canceling me in their head. Love you anyway. But I think that we should do the writing.

24:50I'm going to go over it. If you're canceling me because you think that AI should write books, then hate me. I'm good with that. Have fun selling your soul to the robot. But that is the thing that I really, because I think like ultimately what is, you know, all of these pieces of advice ultimately are about writing. And ultimately, if you want to write, you got to write. And you don't, you know, that is the thing. You have to do the writing at some point. You can have friends, you can outsource parts of it, you can have a whole cheering section.

25:21But really what we want is we want your words. We want the ideas that you have. And that is the birthday present that I want is your words and what you have. And so I'm going to end us a little

Listener homework and time capsule

25:33early with homework for you, listener, which is to make yourself a little time capsule of who you are right now as a writer, right? So you're going to pick one, a thing, a piece of advice, something that's really kind of working for you right now, something you do not agree with, like something maybe we said that somebody else has said that you're like, leave that in the past. And then what is the writing hill you will die on? What is the thing that you believe? It doesn't matter if it's right. It doesn't matter if it's true. I don't know, put those in a little envelope digitally or

26:04otherwise, and then it'll give you a sense of who you are right now. But also I want you to challenge yourself to open it at a date later that feels significant to you and see how many of those three things still are true for you then. So that's that. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

26:27Writing 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.