A Word in Your Eye

Writing Excuses 21.17: The Up and Down Escalators

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-17-the-up-and-down-escalators

Key Points: tension and release, macro level, escalation and de-escalation. Where are you using tension, and when do you take your foot off the accelerator? Not just tension, stakes, romance, pacing. Flat stakes or escalating too quickly. Reality checks. Personal stakes. Distraction. Escalate something else. Competence de-escalates and models good behavior. Romcom miscommunication. False escalation, the almost kiss. De-escalation for transitions. If it works, we don't have a movie. PUDs. De-escalation of one thing usually means escalation of something else. Use beta readers to identify changing stakes or escalation off track.

[Season 21, Episode 17]

[Mary Robinette] This 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/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 17]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The up and down escalators.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] This week, we're going to sort of continue our conversation about tension and release from last week, but shift it a little bit, and sort of zoom out from the sort of micro building and releasing tension, and instead talk about how you're using tension in your... Well, intentionality in the story. Right? And that is about creating a feeling of escalation and then, when you want to, move that into a de-escalation. So, instead of thinking about the individual moments of tension and resolution, this is more about what on a meta level, where are you using tension in your story and when do you want to, like, take your foot off the accelerator a little bit, and sort of ease off of it in those individual moments?

[Mary Robinette] One of the reasons that I started thinking about this is that it's a thing that you can apply to not just tension but to other aspects of the story. For instance, if stakes feel flat, you can escalate stakes. If a romance is moving too fast, you can de-escalate a romance, make them less attracted to each other at that moment. And you do have to make a decision. This is why it's so closely linked to tension, because both of these are also tied in with how the pacing is working. So, a thing that I see happening sometimes is that at the beginning of a story, the... We have stakes and they're kind of flat. It's like if I don't win this beauty contest, I won't have won this beauty contest. It's like no one cares.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So sorry. But if I don't win this beauty contest, I won't be able to afford to buy my grandmother's medication. That's an escalation of stakes. And then the follow-up danger to that is the people who escalate too quickly.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] It's like, I won't be able to buy my grandmother's medication, and then she will become a terrorist.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like, well, that happened...

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Like...

[DongWon] This is Erin's [garbled]

[Howard] That is the meme.

[DongWon] [garbled interrupted stakes]

[Howard] That is the meme, right there, the, well, that escalated quickly.

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Or... And that's exactly it, that sometimes you're like, what just happened?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, thinking about how to use these, escalation and de-escalation, on purpose so that you aren't suddenly...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Terrorist grandma.

[Howard] We're laughing right now because, well, because it's funny to us. But it reminds me that one of my favorite... In humor, one of my favorite tools for de-escalation is the character who says, wait, wait, wait, is this really a big deal? Because I don't think it's a big deal.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And they issue a reality check, and everybody takes a step back and realizes, oh. Oh, the beauty contest doesn't matter. Oh, grandma isn't going to become a terrorist. Oh, I actually have that medication right here. Now you just go be pretty and relax, and off we go. I love de-escalation via humor.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Just because...

[DongWon] And I think sometimes there's such an instinct to keep ratcheting it up...

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] To increase your stakes, to increase all these things. And so much of my critique of... Especially superhero fiction is the stakes get to a ridiculous level so quickly. And I think the superhero stories that we've seen succeed in things like the MCU are ones that are about personal stakes. Right? The Guardians of the Galaxy movies work because it's about Peter's close relationship to his father, not the fact that his father is a planet that's going to destroy the universe. That part, nobody really cares about. What we care about is how he feels about his dad, and how his dad feels about him. And so when you escalate your stakes too quickly and too dramatically, then you can really lose focus on what makes this story interesting.

[Erin] I think you can also, if you escalate too much, lose control of your reader's emotions...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And have them go in a direction you don't want them to. Howard, you talking about comedy reminded me of something I saw recently, where a comedian was doing crowd work, which is very popular these days, and I think she asked someone in the crowd, like, about their relationship, and they said, "They said I love you after like...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Two days." or something...

[DongWon] I've seen this [garbled]

[Erin] And the audience starts laughing at this person.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] But she then refocuses, and she's like, wait. But... We've all been there. Right? Right? Right?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And uses repetition to refocus the audience, and, like, de-escalate it from something that is shocking and bad to something that is hilarious and fun and is in the realm of comedy. And by shifting the focus back to herself from the audience member at a key moment, she is able to de-escalate it just a little bit.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If you think about... If you're trying to de-escalate a fight, or, like, if you've ever had, like, a rowdy friend at a bar, like, one of the things you do is distraction. Like, they're mad and they want to, like, beat everyone up, and you're like, wait, look over here. Like, let me tell you this story. Or, do you want some water? And you, like, move the focus elsewhere...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And that helps to de-escalate it. Otherwise, the emotion of that friend, like the emotion of that audience, could get away from you.

[DongWon] Well, you can also de-escalate by escalating something else. Right? And the one time I've been in a street fight was a friend of mine that I was out drinking with decided to start something with some guy. And my one experience of being in a street fight was I slapped my friend in the face and told him to stop being an asshole.

[laughter]

[DongWon] I escalated things with one person and completely de-escalated with the other person. The fight stopped. Like. At no further point was the other guy going to be a problem. Because I redirected the energy back into our existing relationship. Right? So you can use an escalation of something else to deflate a thing that is becoming a problem.

[Mary Robinette] I think the other thing that happened with that is that you ceded territory.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, like, I'm actually not on his side...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Even though he's my friend.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But, like, de-escalating is super hard in real life, and it's really hard in fiction, because so much emphasis is put on making things tighter, making things faster,...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Making things tenser. It's like actually sometimes you want to slow things down, you want to de-escalate the tension, because of some of the stuff we've been talking about, making sure that you give your audience a breather. But also, sometimes, it is about ceding territory for one... From one plot point to another in order to make space for that tension.

[Howard] One of my favorite things in fiction is people... Not just people who are really competent, but people who model good behavior. And watching a fight scene develop where I realize, man, this would not actually be that hard to de-escalate. You just have to not say the stupid thing that's on the tip of your tongue, and instead be the character that you were two pages ago. And a lot of books, a lot of media in general, will model bad behavior in order to generate those kinds of scenes. I love it when competence de-escalates things and gives me room for the realization that, oh, well, these are now competent people. Anything that actually causes them a problem...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Is going to be a big deal.

[DongWon] People love to complain about the trope you see in romcoms about the miscommunication. Right? Somebody says something and it's misinterpreted like... I don't know, the line's crackling or something. Right? The reason those scenes are irritating is not because miscommunication is ineffective as a narrative tool. I think it can be very effective. People are irritated because there wasn't enough escalation of stakes between the characters ahead of time. Nothing felt truly at stake. And so it feels like, oh, you're just relying on fake conflict to create this escalation of tension which wasn't there in the first place. Right? So I think in that case, it's a misdiagnosis of the problem. The problem isn't the trope, the problem is the lack of build to get us to a place where we actually care that these people are fighting. The problem is it feels like the relationship's already resolved, so we don't care about the fighting. So that's the case where you might need to increase your escalation, and not worry about the de-escalation so much.

[Erin] I also think one tool you can use is the false escalation, Which is my... One of my favorite false...

[DongWon] This escalation goes nowhere?

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Yes. One of my favorite false escalations...

[whee]

[Erin] Which, again, comes from my soap operas, is the almost kiss.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Erin] Almost kisses are great, because, like, it does escalate it a little, but it seems like you're going there, and then you, like, take the off-ramp, which escalators don't have, but in my new world, they do...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] And so you jump off the escalator before you can get to the top, and you're like, oh. wow. Like, I didn't want that. But you learned something about yourself. So I think what's really nice in escalation and de-escalation is that while it is often about something external, thinking about how it reverberates internally. So you've set off a new escalator internally for that character, even though you... They jumped off what was happening externally. And I think a lot of times when escalation and de-escalation fall flat for me, it's because it... Everything comes to a stop. But even de-escalating a situation... If you slap your friend in the face...

[Chuckles]

[Erin] To stop the fight, at some point, your friend might be like, whoa, that was a lot...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, in that moment, in that...

[DongWon] I'm a good friend.

[Erin] In a future moment, like... Because...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And then the audience is thinking, oh, well, that's interesting.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Here's a new thread to follow...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Whereas if something happens that doesn't go anywhere, or isn't rooted in relationship...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Then it just feels like you stopped the tension to stop the tension.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] As opposed to for some other reason.

[DongWon] If this were a novel, then what needed to happen after this scene was a conversation where we talked about why I was having a problem with him and the way he behaves in public spaces. Right? Oh, and like, just something about our friendship, something about our relationship that leads to us kissing or something. I don't know. But, like, in real life, that doesn't necessarily happen.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] We never talked about that. Right?

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] It never became a thing. But if you... So there's a way in which... Have you ever been on an escalator where someone gets to the end of it and then they stop and look at their phone...

[Mary Robinette] Ouch.

[DongWon] Instead of moving. And then you're like, I'm going to run into you unless you move. And I think that feeling can happen a lot in fiction, where sometimes somebody gets off the escalator, but then doesn't move out of the way and everything has to come to a full stop.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] You've made me think of a thing that I want to talk about when we come back from the break, which is using de-escalation to... As a form of transitioning from one scene to another.

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[Mary Robinette] Okay. So, one of my favorite tricks... There's a thing that happens sometimes where you've got this really high tension scene, and then the next scene that needs to follow it is a pretty low, low tension, very quiet scene. And when you're writing it, or when you're reading it, you've had this experience where it's huge, and then you drop into this other scene, you're like, why do I care? This frequently happens when you have to switch POVs, because, like, one person is involved in battles and the other is making tea, and so what you can do is that you can do this false de-escalation. But you do a de-escalation at the end... As you're heading towards that transition, you do a de-escalation, and then you ratchet tension again. So that you bring it to the level that you're at for the next scene. So it's... People are like, oh, we're going down. Things are going to be okay. And then you just bring it up just a little bit, which you can do basically by like, ah, look, it looks like we've all defeated the villain, and we have another gem from Rohisla...

[laughter]

[Erin] The guy from terrorist Havana.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right. And then someone else says, but that's not a real gem from Rohisla, and then you cut your scene. And now it's not battle tension, it's question tension, and then the next scene we go into is also a question tension scene, but it's not the same question. And so you're like, but now I have two questions.

[DongWon] Top of mine right now... I'm in the middle of launching the new series Alien Earth. Right? And I'm a huge fan of the Alien franchise, and the thing about these movies is they always take place in one location. One spaceship, one planet, one space station, whatever it is. It's sort of a defining thing. And so in my primate brain, I expected this entire TV show that's many hours long to take place in this one ship that crash lands. And then, in the third episode, spoilers, they leave the ship, and my... I was shocked by this. And I was completely disoriented. But they made the transition incredibly smoothly, because of this exact technique. Right? There's a resolution to the primary conflict that carries you through the first three episodes, which then immediately leads into a question of what happens next? If they had had the final battle of that entire three episode arc at the end of the second episode, so many people would drop off of watching. Instead, they slip it into the first 10 minutes of the third episode, and then, now the doors open and you're already walking through it. The escalator seamlessly moves into the next one, and you're still on a people mover and you're still going.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It reminds me of watching... I think the movie was ParaNorman with my son, who was 10 at the time. And they have this plan, and I turned to my 10-year-old and I said, "Do you think it's going to work?" and he looks at me with that you gotta be kidding me dad. He's like, no. If it works, we don't have a movie.

[laughter]

[Howard] This is a 10-year-old.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] If it works, we don't have a movie. And that thing in Alien Earth, episode 3, you ask, well, oh, gosh, well, they defeated the xenomorph that was on the... That was loose on the ship. Is everything going to be okay now? No, there's eight episodes in this series and we're only on three.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Something else is going to go wrong. We've de-escalated, but the tension is still quite high.

[DongWon] Well, you realize the stakes of the escalation are different than you thought, and it's not about... Yeah.

[Howard] One part of that is the meta...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] The understanding that there is a lot more story to come.

[DongWon] 100%.

[Howard] That's... I guess I'm a big fan of meta.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Not the company?

[Howard] No.

[Mary Robinette] You've actually reminded me of actual escalators. So, at the latest WorldCon, as we're recording this, was at the Seattle Convention Center. And they had these, like, endless escalators. It was unbelievable, because you would go in and at first it seemed normal. You would go up an escalator, and that's fine. And then you would go around the corner and then you would look up through four more flights of escalators that were directly in a row, and you're like, what. Is. Happening. Now?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I think when you're thinking about your story, there is something to be said for letting people know that there's another escalator past this one, that like, oh, no, things are going to keep going up. That this can be a form of really nice tension, but it can also be a form of dread...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] As well. And so it's thinking about, like, what are you doing and why? How much of this do you want them to know?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, the thing with of course it's not going to work. Like, well, obviously we're going to go up yet another escalator. It was unreal.

[DongWon] Well, thinking about the meta, there's something that's really important to keep in mind. There is a term that we use in hiking, called a PUD. Which is pointless up and down.

[laughter]

[DongWon] It's when you get to a ridge, and you know you have to get to the next ridge, but you've got to go down first, and you're like, God damn it, this is going to be so frustrating, I have to go down just to go back up. Right? And I think you see that a lot in stories, and this is sort of where, again, going back to the romcom miscommunication trope, that often feels like a PUD. Right? Because you know where this story's going, so it just feels like you're spinning your wheels for a little bit, because this has to be a movie and we're only at minute 40 and you know this is a 90-minute movie. Right? And so knowing you have to go back down just to go back up means that there wasn't enough escalation of the actual stakes, of when you need to go from floor one to floor three. Instead, it feels like we're just staying on floor one, and why did we have to go down.

[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that I really like about the PUD is that the problem isn't the going down and back up, it's that you don't learn anything by...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Going down. And that's the thing that will happen with that trope. We aren't earning anything by their breakup. It's... There's usually nothing of interest on the other side of that argument. And so that's, I think, one of also the problems when people are just repeating something that they see in media without understanding the stuff that's behind it.

[Erin] And I was going to say that you don't learn anything by going up and down. So if you thought you were doing a PUD, but then it turns out there's like a magnificent view that you weren't expecting, then you'd be like, wow, I still had to go all this way, but I would have never seen this, I didn't realize it was around this corner. And so ideally if you're going to use a miscommunication, you should learn something about the character or they should learn something about themselves that therefore means that when they come back together, they both have a better sense of who they are.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If they're just arguing over, I don't know, whether the sky is, like, blue or teal, that is not going to tell you anything about who they are. But if they're arguing about something important, which that may be, depending on who you are...

[DongWon] If there's a Disney park at the bottom of the escalator going down that turns out to be a surprising delight, then it's fine to be down there. Right? You need to have true character development along the process to make it work.

[Erin] Yeah.

[Howard] At risk of overextending the metaphor...

[DongWon] We've already done that.

[Howard] I overextended a knee going down on a hike. I mean, people who hike know this. Down is not necessarily easier than up.

[DongWon] Oh, it's worse. Yeah.

[Howard] If you do down wrong...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] You do down for quite a distance...

[laughter]

[Howard] Before you stop doing down, and you injure yourself badly.

[DongWon] Down is where the real pain is. Yeah.

[Howard] And...

[Mary Robinette] This is why I don't ski. I just skid.

[Howard] So, bringing it back to the metaphor, de-escalation does not necessarily need to be easy on the characters...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] It does not need to be pointless. There can be lessons learned. It's... Because hiking down is not riding an escalator down.

[DongWon] I think, going back to our last episode when we were talking about tension and release, I think one thing we are sort of indicating here is that de-escalation of one thing usually means escalation of something else. If all you're getting is de-escalation and no escalation, then it truly does feel deflating. Right? And to avoid the feeling of deflation, you need to make sure that when you're taking your foot off the accelerator on one level, you need to be presenting the reader with something else to be interested in. Right? And so, in the romcom example when you have that moment of break up, what questions are they actually grappling with to understand what their relationship to the situation is?

[Howard] You mentioned Guardians of the Galaxy, the second one with his dad.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] There's a point in the first one where they're talking about the power stone, saving the Galaxy, and Rocket says, "Why do we care? What's the Galaxy ever done for us?" He's passing on this escalation of the stakes. And then we draw these characters back in by making it personal. They're not going after the infinity stone, they're rescuing Peter from the pirates. And that lesson... I learned that lesson years and years earlier. Yes, it's important to have big stakes sometimes, but if you really want to get the characters moving, the thing that escalates the stakes for them is their connection to those stakes.

[Erin] And to go back to something I was thinking about from the previous episode, the escalation can be in the minds of the characters. It cannot...

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] The characters don't need to know the stakes are escalating, just the reader does. So, to go back to the gems of Rohisla, if you have discovered one, and it's the final one in the scene that I'm in, and then we flash over to Mary Robinette who's like, I'm glad we put that fake gem of Rohisla out there.

[laughter]

[Erin] You know what I mean?

[DongWon] Yeah. Yeah.

[Erin] The stake's now like... Nothing has changed for me and my scene...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I'm still in celebration mode. But the reader knows that there is some new piece of information, when will I discover that? And so it raises the stakes on the level... On that meta level of consciousness the reader brings to the table, which makes the reader such a fundamental partner in discovering the story.

[DongWon] Well, the thing that everyone forgets about MacGuffins, or maybe not everyone, but, like, the failure state of a MacGuffin story is when the creators forget that the MacGuffin is a trick. Right? The point of the MacGuffin is to keep the reader's eye on something, not to be the actual stakes of the story. Nobody actually cares about the goddamned eagle, it is the experience of the characters going along the way and their relationship to each other. That's the thing that actually matters. It's his view of humanity as it develops over the course of the story, not the Maltese Falcon.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And things like that, the... With the Maltese Falcon, it represents a proximity to success.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Which is often one of the things that escalation and de-escalation can do, is that frequently when you're escalating something, when you're raising things, it feels like we are moving closer and closer towards the climax of the story. And sometimes when you start de-escalating things in sort of the wrong places, people are like, oh, is it over already? Which isn't to say that you shouldn't de-escalate in the first part of the story, it's just recognizing that it has this effect of causing us to think about how close we are to the success or [garbled] complete failure. [garbled]

[Howard] One of my favorite tools for identifying that is the beta readers. Asking them how they feel, how they are responding to each chapter as it unfolds. And a beta reader who is adept enough in the lingo to say, the stakes feel like they've changed. The stakes feel like they've escalated in a weird way. The stakes feel like you're now telling a different story. That's a super useful barometer for me, because often I know what I have planned, but I haven't communicated, via tone or whatever, that this escalation de-escalation is part of a structure that actually is going to hold together.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] I was going to say, I think, like, even if they don't know the language, a lot of times people know it without being able to know it.

[Howard] If they can find a way to tell me, yeah.

[Erin] If somebody's writing, like, oh no, oh no, oh no. And then the next chapter is, like, this chapter feels long...

[laughter]

[Erin] What they're saying is, like, in the previous chapter, the stakes were escalating.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Now that they're not anymore, I have lost interest.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] So we have to, like, read through sometimes to figure it out.

[Mary Robinette] It's like the... This is the worst metaphor in the history of... It's like the O'Hare Airport. You go down this escalator, and they've got some stuff up to kind of distract you from the fact that you're descending, and then you've got this endless corridor with another people mover that is totally level, but there's neon lights over your head like luring me on, and it's playing music and the lights along the sides are lit up, and the first time you go through it, you're like, amazing, this is so cool. And you're not paying any attention to the fact that you've just descended into the bowels of hell.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] And then on the other side, they don't need to do any of that when you go back up the escalator, because you can see the light and you know that you're going out of that. So, I think that when you do do a de-escalation and you've got one of these scenes, you do have to distract the reader with something bright and shiny to keep them from, oh, this scene is really long.

[DongWon] In New York City, at the 42nd Street subway station, there is a connecting tunnel that goes from the ACE line which is the 8th Avenue line to the Broadway line, the NR line. That tunnel is very long and is packed with commuters. And I used to take this tunnel every day to get to work. And as you're walking along this narrow underground jam-packed sweaty billion degrees tunnel, on the beams overhead are signs that are put up that are a poem that you see, line by line, as you walk down this tunnel, that I don't remember the exact text of, but it is a very bleak poem about the experience of being a commuter and having to wake up every day to do this thing. And you... Encountering that message as you walk...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Through this. It's such a different shift of escalation, because you were already feeling like it's eight in the morning, I'm on my way to work, this already sucks, and I'm being told that my life is meaningless and empty because I'm doing this every day.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That is a very big bowl of risotto.

[DongWon] It's an incredible shift of escalation that I genuinely love, because it was this weird moment of reflection every day, of reminding me what's important, which wasn't the fact that I was commuting to work, it was the greater context of what am I doing with my life, am I living with purpose, and all of these things, that I think is actually incredible art, even though the rage I would feel at seeing this thing in the morning...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Was boundless.

[Erin] I will say, before you give the homework...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Which I'm sure you're about to do, that the minute you said tunnel, I was like, oh, that poem.

[DongWon] You knew what I was going to say.

[laughter]

[Erin] That [garbled] poem about the meaninglessness of life.

[DongWon] That God damn poem. Anyways. On that escalation, I'm going to ratchet things up even further and give you a little bit of homework.

[DongWon] What I want you to do is to look at the outline for your work in progress, whether it's a short story or a novel. Take a look at the high level beats, not like super detailed, but sort of the major beats of your story. And make a mark as to whether or not you are escalating or de-escalating each of your individual plot lines. And then, once you have that map of the terrain, look for PUDs, look for things that are just meaningless drops, look for things that feel deflationary without a rising escalation happening on another level. And once you start to see that structural map of it, I think you'll have a much stronger sense of how to make sure your reader's experience is still pulling them through the story at maximum speed.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.