[SPEAKER_03]: This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends. [SPEAKER_03]: If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patrion.com slash writing excuses. [SPEAKER_03]: Season twenty. [SPEAKER_03]: Episode thirty two. [SPEAKER_01]: This is Writing Excuses. [SPEAKER_03]: Revision and Character Consciousness. [SPEAKER_04]: With Tara Obrecht. [SPEAKER_04]: I'm Howard. [SPEAKER_04]: I'm Mary Robinette.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm Erin, and we are joined today by our special guest, Taya Obrecht. [SPEAKER_04]: Taya and I have the same agent, and Seth said, hey, you should have her on because she's super smart. [SPEAKER_04]: And it turns out when you do even a tiny bit of digging, she is in fact very smart. [SPEAKER_04]: And also a damn good writer. [SPEAKER_04]: Taya, would you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for that, Mary Robin, and I'm going to mortify myself now as a result of this high praise. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm, I'm Taylor, I am a short story writer and novelist. [SPEAKER_00]: I have three books out. [SPEAKER_00]: The Tiger's wife, Inland, and this year, the morning side, they touch on Balkan diaspora and myth and folklore in different applications throughout history and time.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's like, they are so, I don't, fun is the wrong word, but I love the way that you play with John right in them. [SPEAKER_04]: Specifically, the way you're using a lot of the things about character and expectations through the whole thing. [SPEAKER_04]: We are going to be talking as much as I want to spend a lot of time actually talking about the books. [SPEAKER_04]: We're going to be talking specifically about revision and character consciousness.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now this is something that you had pitched and I was excited about it because I feel like a lot of people think that you have to get all of the beats about a character right immediately the first time around. [SPEAKER_04]: And it is actually something that you can address in revision. [SPEAKER_04]: When you are thinking about it, what are some of the things that you're thinking about when you're saying revision and character consciousness? [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's a great question.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think I think of my characters in the layers essentially. [SPEAKER_00]: I suffer in the generative phase horribly. [SPEAKER_00]: I find the first draft of any project, especially when I'm entering it with a character I don't know very well. [SPEAKER_00]: I find it to be a harrowing slog. [SPEAKER_00]: It feels unstable. [SPEAKER_00]: It feels shaky, it feels unreliable. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think some people really love the adventure of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They love to explore the unknown and see what will come out. [SPEAKER_00]: But for me, writing is really about getting down to the nones and being able to shape them kind of as efficiently as possible. [SPEAKER_00]: which is why character exploration becomes such a frustrating enterprise and I've learned now to sort of take the basic elements of somebody's life and try to start with one thing at a time.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is their emotional condition entering the stakes of the plot? [SPEAKER_00]: What is their job? [SPEAKER_00]: Do they have, what's their relationship with their mother? [SPEAKER_00]: That's a really fun one for me. [SPEAKER_00]: And to sort of work outward from that one kernel, especially if I can't see the totality of somebody right away.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I think sometimes characters kind of walk in and they're fully formed and I've had that miraculous experience and it's just the most wonderful thing when it happens, you know? [SPEAKER_00]: But for me, for the most part, it's trying to circle around and around and like a widening jire around these characters. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, do you have a hearing loss? [SPEAKER_00]: Go ahead. [SPEAKER_02]: No, I'm curious.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, as you're doing this, is this something you're doing sort of as you're writing or is this sort of [SPEAKER_02]: before you start that first track like are you knowing the relationship with the mother before page one or are you on like page a hundred and you're like actually now that I think about it. [SPEAKER_00]: How does she feel about her mother like when does that process take place.
[SPEAKER_00]: It usually takes place like in the in the meat of the work so so I'm I write towards event first and then the character sort of come creeping out as themselves. [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah for me it's usually I get to page about a hundred and then I'm like.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then an interaction happens with another character that forces a reckoning about the relationship with the mother or the fact that they secretly ran over a best friend's cat last week and actually this is the thing they're hiding.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then the revision kicks in almost immediately because [SPEAKER_00]: the reverse engineering of that fact into every element of this person's interactions has to happen sooner rather than later so that it can set the tone for the rest of what's coming. [SPEAKER_00]: So that's how I work, going to be a disorganized mess. [SPEAKER_01]: In one of the episodes, I don't know if it's going to air before or after this one because time is weird that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's this famous saying that all acting is reacting. [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes you don't know what a character is until you see how they react to something. [SPEAKER_01]: You can have them be proactive and just do stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you see their response to [SPEAKER_01]: someone else getting angry or someone else being sad or someone else messing up their order at the drive through or whatever that's when for me the characters really start to come to life and I recognize it and sometimes I have to be careful wait is that character reacting the way I would or they reacting the way they would and and so I have to dive back in on that filter yeah absolutely
[SPEAKER_04]: I often will do some of this work before I start writing when I'm working in novel. [SPEAKER_04]: In short fiction, I'm just like, let's see who they are. [SPEAKER_04]: And then in novel, even though I've done some pre-work, [SPEAKER_04]: I will always have that moment of discovery where there is a piece of information that I didn't have about them that comes out as you say because of that interaction because of the way they are moving through the world.
[SPEAKER_04]: For listeners who have read the relentless moon, I will say that there is a compelling character trait that I did not know until that scene happened. [SPEAKER_04]: And you will know what I'm talking about if you've read the book. [SPEAKER_00]: I love a real world example.
[SPEAKER_02]: I find it like I personally fall a little bit in the middle like I often know the what but not the why if that makes me sense so because I tend to be very voice focused in my work it'll I'll take a long time to hone in on the character's voice but I don't necessarily know why that voice works for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: like it's like there's some subconscious character work going on that I don't understand and then sometimes in the middle of writing I'll be like oh that's why that character speaks in this particular tone that's why they use this level of language it's because you know [SPEAKER_02]: It sounded right to me that they always use ten dollar words where a five cent word would do.
[SPEAKER_02]: And later I figured out this because they feel embarrassed about their level of formal education. [SPEAKER_02]: And this is their way of making up for it. [SPEAKER_02]: But at the time, it just felt right. [SPEAKER_02]: So I feel like sometimes I'm like deep diving on my own consciousness.
[SPEAKER_02]: getting back to the phrase of the character because I'm doing things subconsciously that I have to surface consciously so that I can really work on them and like make them a real thing. [SPEAKER_00]: Can I ask you if you don't mind? [SPEAKER_00]: Do you find it when you're trying to zero in on that thing? [SPEAKER_00]: Do you feel a sense of panic about it?
[SPEAKER_00]: And like when you don't know it yet and is there sort of a time limit by which you hope to have the answer beyond which you don't want to progress with your work until until you have it? [SPEAKER_01]: You know that scene in Avengers where banner says, that's my secret captain. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm always angry. [SPEAKER_01]: That's my secret. [SPEAKER_01]: I'm always panicked. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I feel it's true.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, sometimes I, sometimes I fret about it, but it's a lot of times it is that the fretting happens because I need the character to do a thing for plot purposes. [SPEAKER_04]: And do not feel like I have laid the groundwork to have them make that a realistic compelling choice. [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely. [SPEAKER_00]: And then it feels then the work itself feels wasted, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You've arrived at this point or suddenly it feels this way for me like you've arrived at this point hoping that you will know who this person is inside and out. [SPEAKER_00]: And they were supposed to be maybe three layers that were revealed [SPEAKER_00]: to you by the time you got to this interaction or this choice they have to make or this event that's going to impact them irreversibly, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And instead, they're a little bare.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now you were forced to write this [SPEAKER_00]: kind of important scene without all the correct knowledge. [SPEAKER_00]: And I find that the only way to relax myself venturing into that is to say, this is not, this scene is going right in the trash. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to find something in here that is going to reveal that extra layer to me. [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of work left to do, not just in the scene that's coming, but everything that precedes it.
[SPEAKER_00]: but I have to do this with the, you know, with the bare stick that I have. [SPEAKER_00]: I had hoped to arrive here with, you know, a better, our smoke, but here we are. [SPEAKER_00]: I've got a twig. [SPEAKER_00]: I tore off a tree. [SPEAKER_00]: And now that's what we're doing. [SPEAKER_04]: Yes. [SPEAKER_04]: So when we come back from our break, we are going to talk about what I like to call, how to fix it in post. [SPEAKER_00]: All right, I have a recommendation for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: The husband and I are rewatching deadwood. [SPEAKER_00]: Start to finish. [SPEAKER_00]: I saw it in the early odds and then I made him watch it kind of as a compatibility test when we were first dating. [SPEAKER_00]: He passed. [SPEAKER_00]: We've been married now for almost eleven years. [SPEAKER_00]: Deadwood is so sorted and it's so tough going and there are scenes of such brutality, but it's such an incredible study of character.
[SPEAKER_00]: and such a profound reminder that you can do anything if you find the right voice for it, you can create a whole setting, a whole mood out of language alone. [SPEAKER_00]: I really think that show would work just as well if the actors were wearing track suits and walking around an empty stage. [SPEAKER_04]: So, we have been talking about that moment of arriving and realizing, oh, I don't actually know as much about this character as I thought I did.
[SPEAKER_04]: I sometimes call this internal motivation, character consciousness. [SPEAKER_04]: There's a bunch of different terms we can talk about, like, the characters into your life. [SPEAKER_04]: And when you're like, oh, hello. [SPEAKER_04]: So I have a couple of tools that I use to audition characters to try to draw this stuff out.
[SPEAKER_04]: When you find yourself in that phase, you already talked about one tool that you use, which is that you give yourself freedom to say, this is fine. [SPEAKER_04]: This is just an exercise. [SPEAKER_04]: Are there other tools that you have found useful for drawing that character consciousness out? [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I love to give them a discomfort.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we have a real impulse and a very understandable impulse particularly I think in the early phase of something to protect our characters. [SPEAKER_00]: to some extent, right, to protect them, maybe physically from the world, to protect them from their own bad decisions, and maybe to protect them from the worst aspects of their own character. [SPEAKER_00]: And it's really that, or their own personality.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is that worst aspect of this person's [SPEAKER_00]: of this individual's personality that I'm looking for that I often feel unlocks the character for me. [SPEAKER_00]: So I like to give them an injury or I like to give them an injury or just like really or [SPEAKER_01]: What a thing is, like protect our characters from us. [SPEAKER_01]: From itself. [SPEAKER_01]: It's a weird word to enemy, really. [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly, they don't stand a chance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I like the idea of, I'm very, I'm always very curious about how people react to things when they're in pain, right, or when they're hungry, or when they're thirsty, or when they're tired. [SPEAKER_00]: I think it reveals so much. [SPEAKER_00]: It reveals a lot about me, you know, I wouldn't want anyone to meet me in any of those states for the first time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, I think discomfort is a very good way to kind of force the character into a corner and have them react as poorly as possible. [SPEAKER_02]: You're reminding me of that acronym halt, you know, they say that if you are like grumpy, that you should halt and see if you are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, and that those things, because no one works well under those conditions.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I love the idea that you should not halt and give all of them, not maybe at the same time, to your characters. [SPEAKER_01]: No, and then it is powered, asshole, leave the room. [UNKNOWN]: You [SPEAKER_04]: I want to sign around in the room and expose your pain for the character. [SPEAKER_04]: Oh goodness. [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I love the term character consciousness that you've kind of introduced us to. [SPEAKER_01]: I've been mulling over it this whole time.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the idea among psychologists, psychiatrists, students of neurology, you know, what is consciousness?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's [SPEAKER_01]: kind of this blurry foggy gistalt of everything we experience and everything, everything we are thinking and moving and if you take everything that you know about your characters on the page, how they feel about mom, what's giving them pain, what are their motivations and start to roll that into this gistalt, this consciousness, they start to become [SPEAKER_01]: people in your head.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't realize that for years, I had it super easy because with Schlok mercenary, there were a dozen different characters that I knew well enough that I could just, as I laid down in bed for the night, I could just say, all right, you two, talk about something I'll check in on you in the morning. [SPEAKER_01]: And it practically, once you have that consciousness, it almost rates itself. [SPEAKER_01]: You just put them in front of things and cool things happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think part of that too is like the longevity, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Of that notion, this idea of like getting to steep in these, well, getting these characters to steep in themselves and then getting to steep yourself and them until you're sort of almost inextricable for each other and like maybe their reactions are not the reactions that you would have in real life, but it is so clear who they are, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's why we spend so long in this idea of like character development, what makes up [SPEAKER_00]: the personality of someone that we're crafting on the page. [SPEAKER_00]: And then the consciousness part, I think, has to be rounded out by this idea of, like, how does this personality react to this stimuli around it, given all the factors that it's been filled with? [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: So we're fixing it in post. [SPEAKER_01]: We're fixing it in post.
[SPEAKER_01]: What are your steps for this? [SPEAKER_01]: You know, you're going back through a manuscript, you're revising [SPEAKER_01]: And you either have a clear picture of character consciousness or you don't, but you're making your way, how do you tell us how it works? [SPEAKER_00]: Does it work? [SPEAKER_00]: I think of the generative phase as like my first time in an abandoned house, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I've gotten in somehow and I'm finding my way around and there's no electricity and there's no heat and there's no power and I'm stumbling around the darkness by the aid of like a pen light and I can't see very far ahead and then like trip and over furniture.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no logic to the layout and then my job in the next phase in the in the in the revision phase is to curate this experience having having had an emotional and psychological connection to the character or an emotional and psychological [SPEAKER_00]: experience within this house. [SPEAKER_00]: My job is to curate this experience for the reader, right? [SPEAKER_00]: And they're way into this character might not be through the same way that I stumbled into the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe they're falling in through a window, whereas I found the downstairs door. [SPEAKER_00]: And my aim is to get them to have as close to as possible [SPEAKER_00]: to to get them to a point where they're if not mirroring at least echoing my own my own sentiments about the character.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that for me starts with truth like is this reaction true to this person or is it as you were saying earlier is it true to me or is it what I would like them to do and [SPEAKER_00]: Are they aware? [SPEAKER_00]: Are they aware of how messed up they are? [SPEAKER_00]: Like, what is their level of self questioning?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's an enormously important sort of part of the rubric for me, where to question whether a character [SPEAKER_00]: has any feelings about being a good participant of this interaction, being a good citizen in this reaction, or whether they just want what they want. [SPEAKER_00]: So what is the level of self doubt is like an early revision question that I often ask of my characters too.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're reminding me of a conversation that I had with my therapist in which she was telling me about trauma points that there are these points that we anchor to. [SPEAKER_04]: Something happened in our very, very early childhood and it's around safety, connection and empowerment. [SPEAKER_04]: The thing that I realized was that most of my characters have not done the therapy work that I have done. [SPEAKER_04]: So I don't actually have to know actually what that event was.
[SPEAKER_04]: I just have to know what kinds of things trigger them like, looking for those consistencies. [SPEAKER_04]: So I also will find myself working in layers as you've described and going back and saying, how do I [SPEAKER_04]: How do I bring this out? [SPEAKER_04]: How do I make it clear this thing? [SPEAKER_04]: And I've described it to my to Seth to our agent as, oh yeah, I just have to go back and add a line here and add a line here and add a line there.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I know what I mean. [SPEAKER_04]: which is that what I mean is that I need to think about, are they having an emotional reaction at this moment? [SPEAKER_04]: Or are they feeling it physically in their body in this moment? [SPEAKER_04]: And that often it's not revising an entire scene, it's just [SPEAKER_04]: adding that layer in.
[SPEAKER_04]: And when I said to him, he's like, never let an editor hear you say, it's only going to take a couple of lines because they will not understand all of the other work that goes in to the decisions that allow you to do it with just a couple of lines. [SPEAKER_00]: I've had that same conversation. [SPEAKER_00]: It's no, but it's, but that's on candy and I love that too because it, yeah, it's sort of, it's, it speaks to this idea of like, I have understood that what's missing here.
[SPEAKER_00]: is the fact that in previous scenes of the emotional reaction that this character has, I have held the reader's hand and let them see it explicitly. [SPEAKER_00]: And for whatever reason in this scene, in this particular moment of the book, I've let go of their hand and I'm allowing them to make an inference about it. [SPEAKER_00]: When in fact, to make the book consistent, I need to be right there with them. [SPEAKER_00]: And I know all those things, but the editor doesn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is one line or two line. [SPEAKER_01]: This is something that as a cartoonist, you keep saying line and there are so many illustrations that I have fixed by adding literally one stroke with the pencil, with the pen. [SPEAKER_01]: Three little lines in one corner of an object can create the illusion of shadow. [SPEAKER_01]: And now suddenly the object has volume. [SPEAKER_01]: And so, I mean, I love the fact that this holds true and writing as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes I only needed to add three words to a character sentence. [SPEAKER_01]: in order for it to now have all of the emotional import that it needed to have. [SPEAKER_01]: They said the same thing, but it meant ever so much more with the addition of just three words.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, never tell anybody that, oh, all I need to do is add three words, but it's going to take me twelve hours of reviewing the manuscript in order to figure out where those three words go and what they are. [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, I'm in the process of doing that with a manuscript right now and I'm like, I know that it is one sentence and I just have to figure out where it goes. [SPEAKER_04]: And then you have to adjust everything around the sentence to make it fit also.
[SPEAKER_04]: See how they're saying that is always, always fun. [SPEAKER_04]: Well, you have actually already given me some homework because tomorrow I am teaching at class at the Surrey International Writer's Conference on Auditioning the Character. [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm like, I am inserting the hungry, angry, lonely, tired stuff in there into that class. [SPEAKER_04]: But since we are talking about homework, I think you have some homework for our listeners. [SPEAKER_00]: I certainly do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so the assignment this week, the homework this week is to write an opening paragraph. [SPEAKER_00]: Not too long. [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe three to six lines. [SPEAKER_00]: It can be something entirely new that you write as a result of this assignment or an already existing opener that you've been working on, feeling a little dismissive of, not sure. [SPEAKER_00]: Not going to micromanage the content, but due to the nature of the exercise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say it should be a paragraph that introduces a few new pieces of information or a few key pieces of information. [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe a character, maybe a conflict, maybe a desire, lack thereof, perhaps a problem event. [SPEAKER_00]: You're all listening to this podcast, so you know the drill. [SPEAKER_00]: I'd like you to consider the information that's contained in your paragraph. [SPEAKER_00]: And then rewrite the whole thing two more times.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately conveying the same information, but in three different ways. [SPEAKER_00]: How you do this is completely up to you, maybe in a different voice, maybe from a different perspective, maybe using only dialogue, framing it as a text exchange between two people. [SPEAKER_00]: As you write the different versions, you have to remember that it's about the information, it has to be the same from version to version.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then consider at the end of the exercise, the priorities of each different mode, how it's changing the way the information is relayed and whether that then changes the information itself and whether it changes the reader's feelings about it or your own. [SPEAKER_04]: It's great how I'm working on looking forward to doing it myself. [SPEAKER_04]: This has been writing excuses. [SPEAKER_04]: You're out of excuses. [SPEAKER_04]: Now go right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends. [SPEAKER_04]: Your hosts for this episode of Writing Excuses were Mary Rubinette Cole, Howard Taylor, Erin Rubberts, and Special Guest, Taya Albert. [SPEAKER_04]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. [SPEAKER_04]: For more information, visit writing excuses.com.