Writing Excuses 20.31: Framing the Lens
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wetranscriptsWriting Excuses 20.31: Framing the Lens
Key points: Frame? How do you choose what's in your story and what's not? How do you select your focus? MICE Quotient. These are the questions I'm asking, and these are the answers I'm giving my readers. Set the frame in the beginning, a promise to tell you about this thing. What does the reader need to know? You may be writing your way into the story, and adjust the frame later. Think about how your readers will connect the dots. Verisimilitude... Captivate your reader, and keep them in frame as long as possible.
[Season 20, Episode 31]
[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 20, Episode 31]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] Framing the Lens.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
[Erin] And... Wow! We are almost to the end of our entire lens lineup. We have gone through many, many lenses. And before we get into this one, I just want to make sure that you're aware that in two weeks, we are starting our deep dive into All the Words in the Sky. So if you haven't read it, this is a great time to get in there and read it, because we will be dropping so many spoilers and we want you to have a chance to experience the book before we get into it. But first, we're going to talk about frame. And the reason that this one I thought would be a great one to kind of go last, is we've talked a lot... A little... A lot about what happens when you're using whatever lens you 're using. But not how you choose what the lens is actually focused on. How do you choose what's in your story and what's not? All the decisions that we've been talking about sort of presume that you already know what you're focused on. But how do you make that choice? And how does it inform all of the other choices that we've been making?
[Mary Robinette] I think that that's actually one of the hardest things, especially for a new writer, is deciding what to leave out... The... You've got a story in your head, but there's so much detail and you can't capture it all. It's not possible, and it's almost like not pleasant to read. So I wind up using a couple of different tools for my frame. One of which, will surprise no one, is the M.I.C.E. Quotient. Beause that gives me a way to articulate for myself these are the questions that I'm asking. Here are the conflicts that arise because of those questions, and here are the... Here's the answer that I'm giving the reader. Like, are they going to be able to get out of the place? Oh, no, more rocks fall. Ah, yay, they get out.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's a milieu story. And so, I then know that if part of the thing that I really want to talk about is did you know that the lichen that are growing in this cave are.. It's like, I wonder why they glow? Let me tell you about the glowing... It's like the glowing does not matter to them getting out of the cave and surviving the rocks falling. It's not actually important, even though I'm really interested in it. It allows me to say, no, I can set that aside. I don't have to explore that.
[Dan] Yeah. Whereas, if it were an idea story that is specifically about the glowing lichen or whatever is causing the glowing lichen, you could tell the same thing with the same characters and the same setting, but in a way that focuses more on the lichen and the escape from the caves is less of a story element.
[Erin] It's funny. I, I think, go a lot more by gut on this. And it's a lot of, like, how we tell stories. I think a lot about, like, if you were to sit around a campfire and tell a story, and this is also why I like short stories, because it's hard telling a novel around a campfire. It's a good way to lose friends, because…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] Actually, the fire goes out and they're really cold and hungry. But, like, when you tell… When people sit down, like, oh, my gosh, I gotta tell you about the time, like, I set my teacher on fire. Don't do this at home. Actually…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Do you want to pick a different example?
[Erin] Yeah. Okay. As a teacher, I have failed myself. Let me tell you about the time I went into this cave with glowing lichen, and did not set my teacher on fire. Then, that is, like, you sort of… You set the frame at the beginning, and I think a lot of this makes me think about when you start a story, in some ways, you are saying, whether explicitly or implicitly, you're making a promise. You're saying I'm going to tell you about this thing. I'm going to tell you about the time I got trapped in the land of the lichen caves and had barely got out by the skin of my teeth. Or, I'm going to tell you about the time I figured out why lichen are glowing in this cave and used it to save the world. Same place, like you were saying, same characters, but you set the frame in the beginning. And so I think remembering that when I'm going… When I'm tempted to go off on a side note is too much like when someone's telling you a story and they're like, and that reminds me of my coworker… But you know what, actually, no, we were talking about the caves… Is to remind myself what is the promise that I made? What's the frame that I set when I started? And then let me continue going. And if it starts to feel like that is a stricture, like, I'm like so mad because every two seconds, I want to go off on this side story, then maybe I've set my frame incorrectly, and I need to rewind, reset, and tell the story I want to tell.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's… I think of it… As you were talking, I was thinking another way to talk about it is what does the reader need to know? This is a thing that I think about all the time. What does the reader need to know to continue the story? And if you think about it as navigation, like, what does the reader need to know to navigate the story? If you have ever ask someone who learn to navigate before the Internet, you will get things like, okay, so you have to go down the street. Now, there used to be a school bus parked on the corner. The school bus… Do you remember Johnny? Johnny used to drive that school bus.
[Dan] This is how I give people directions…
[Laughter]
[Dan] And I feel a little called out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, again, you learned to navigate before there were paper maps… Before… Before there were paper maps…
[Dan] Before there were paper maps?
[Laughter]
[Dan] Navigating purely by the stars…
[Erin] You look great, I have to say.
[Dan] Thank you.
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] when you said that thing about navigation, I was reminded that I'm like… This is unrelated to our topic. But there are two types of people in the world, people who navigate, like, by memory, by this thing, and people who do compass, like. There are people who will be like go three blocks, turn Northeast by Northwest. Then go six blocks in an easterly westerly direction. And, like, that's how they go. Versus, like, actually using things that kind of are more about, like, who lived there and what did things. And it makes me think that, like, frame is partly about what's in the story, but also in how your setting up the telling of the story. Like, directions given by a person who talks about Johnny in the bus is very different than directions by the person who has a much more compass-oriented way. And I think they work, as long as you don't switch from one to the other mid story and confuse the reader, because you've gone from a frame of one to a frame of the other without signaling that you're making that change.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And different readers need different things to navigate through a story. Like, if someone who is familiar with faster than light travel with science fiction stories, one of the things that they do not need you to do is to define FTL, faster than light travel, they've got it. But if you try to have that story go mainstream, you do have to define it because they have no idea what FTL is. If you're… So a lot of times, the frame is not just what is… What promises you're making about the kind of story you're telling, but also the conversation that you're having with the reader.
[Dan] Yeah. And I love thinking about this idea of what you include and what do you not include. Because it really does change the entire tone of the story. One of the things that I chose with the I Am Not a Serial Killer books is to include John's family. They are thrillers, they are about investigations to try to find monsters that are killing people. But we see his family constantly. The first book is basically a string of holidays, and we get to see how he and his mom celebrate them. And does his sister come to this one or not? And is his aunt there? And what do they talk about and what do they do, and how does it matter to them? And the reason that I did that is because I very much wanted the story to be about how John is and isn't a person. How he fits into the world and how he doesn't fit into the world. And using these really common resonant things like Halloween parties and Christmas vacations helps that come forward, because that's something most of us have experienced. And if that were not in there, you wouldn't get that same view of who he is.
[Mary Robinette] I made similar holiday decisions for somewhat different reasons, but also overlapping ones, when I was working on Martian Contingency, because I wanted to talk about what does it mean to create a culture. Like, when you're going someplace, what do you take from home that is part of making you who you are? Part of making you people from Earth, but now you are also Martians, and so there are new holidays and new ways of marking time and new blending. And so for me, if I didn't include the holidays, the parties, the giftgiving, the conversations about the time, it would have just been, oh, things have gone wrong in space. Oh no!
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Which was… Which is fun, and like… It's really fun to torture people by dropping rocks on them and stuff like that. But it is… It's a mono dimensional thing. And so, thinking about the frame, thinking about what I want to include, I want to include more than one kind of thing inside that frame. I don't want to include, like, just holidays. Like a story that's just holidays, that's fine. That's also fine. But holidays, rocks fall… Those things are more interesting than a frame with a single object in it.
[Erin] I love that. And I am… We are going to give you, I should say, a brief holiday from us, and then we will return on the other side of this break.
[Erin] So, to pick up on something from before the break, I am really curious about sort of how do you decide what… If you're like, I want to include a holiday or I want to include the sense of being a person, how do you know when you're getting off track, like, when you're expanding your frame too far and when what you're doing is actually supporting the story that you're trying to tell?
[Mary Robinette] I think, for me, it's going back to an earlier lens that we used, which is thinking about the why. And that's the… Why do I… Am I telling this story? What are the questions that I'm exploring? And within the frame, when I'm thinking about what goes in it, I'm thinking about the why, but the why has then allowed me to set up, again, the tools that I particularly use, which is the MICE Quotient. So if the conflict, if the problem that is directly in front of the character, is not something that is related to the questions that I have already raised, then it's opening up a new tangent. That's when… It's like, oh. Oh, I'm going to need a bigger lens to fit everything in, a bigger frame to fit everything in. Or things are going to get really cramped and confusing, because it'll be so piled on top of each other that you can't actually tell what's important anymore.
[Dan] Yeah. In the first draft of I Am Not a Serial Killer, there was a whole chapter about civil disobedience in some social studies class, and that became a way for John Cleaver, the main character, to decide to take matters into his own hands and start fighting these monsters himself. And it was… First of all, I realized that very few people in my writing group understood what civil disobedience was, which was complicated… Anyway. But there was also the issue that it just felt wrong. It was a story where it became very didactic. It became the author saying, "Look. This is what's going to happen next." And it was getting far away from that thing I was trying to show about does he fit into the world or not? And so even though it was this chunk slice of life that was able to show some of his classmates and how he was different from them, but it was the wrong thing. It was… It didn't feel organic to the story. Which is what I eventually… What eventually made me decide to cut it out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Most of the cut scenes that I have from short stories or novels are things like that. Things that… If they don't… It's not necessarily that they're didactic, but they… They're taking the story in a direction that is not the direction that I'm interested in going. Again, I can… I will often use MICE Quotient as a diagnostic tool. But it can also… Sometimes it's not that, it's… It's like, yeah, MICE Quotient wise, this fits in, but the tone of the thing is wrong. Like, I'm trying to show people, in Martian Contingency in particular, what happens if you make a kinder choice. And this scene is a character being actively and deliberately cruel to someone. And sometimes it is because it is something that I have seen in media, and I've accidentally regurgitated it without interrogating my own text, my own intentions, without looking through my own lens.
[Erin] It's funny, what you're both describing makes me think of something that I think a lot… I do all the time, and I think a lot of people do, which is, sometimes you're not actually finding the frame of the story, you're just writing yourself into… You're writing your way into the story. It's why… There's that old trope of, like, don't ever start a story with the character waking up. You can start a story with a character waking up.
[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. Yeah.
[Erin] Go for it. But sometimes you're doing it because you know that later in the day, the character needs to do X, and you're still trying to feel your way through the story. So you start with, like, something that feels like a very obvious beginning. It is like… Opening your eyes is a very obvious frame to any day. Like, once you're awake, the day has begun. And so you start, and you write your way end, and so you're finding… You're choosing a broader frame than you actually need because you're kind of doing all the fluff in order to, like, get yourself in the mood and rev yourself up. And I would say, on that note, if you… You're working on a story, you're at the beginning, you're like, I don't know if this is the correct frame. Sometimes you can't know until you get to the end. It's like if you take a panoramic shot, you may not know where to crop it until you look at the whole picture and go, this is where the interesting thing is happening. This is where the action is. And so it's okay to, like, come in and figure out the frame after you've written more and sort of excise the parts that turned out to actually be kind of you figuring out where to go, and what's important.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Sometimes I find that I will start earlier because the story isn't in focus yet, much the same way that when I get up in the morning, as someone who is quite nearsighted, the world is not in focus…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Until I put on my literal lenses.
[Erin] 100 percent.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Time has been shooting away through this episode. There is one thing that you mentioned earlier, Mary Robinette, that I want to circle back to. Which sounds so corporate, but I said it anyway. But you mentioned the idea that if you talk about FTL in a sci-fi story for a sci-fi audience, they understand it. But if you take it to a mainstream audience, they're like, FT what? And so I am wondering about frame not just as like the frame that you're putting on the story, but frame as a conversation between the story and the reader. And, like, how do you frame a story depending on who your audience is, what they might be bringing to the story, how you think that it might be received without getting paralyzed by the idea of, like… Or just getting stopped in your tracks, by the idea of what the reader might take from your story?
[Mary Robinette] So, we've talked about some of this, like, when we were talking about the idea of theme and meaning. But I, in particular, when I'm doing my historical fiction, there's language that has always been a slur, but is historically accurate for one character to call another. But it will hit completely differently for a modern reader than it would for someone back in the day. I was talking with someone, is one of the least charged versions that I can demonstrate this with… Talking with someone who said that you can turn any sentence into a sleazy pickup line by adding the word "ladies?" to the end of it. Can I change your microphone, ladies?
[Laughter]
[Erin] Exactly. I feel gross.
[Mary Robinette] But you can also do something with the word "see" which will turn anything into a gangster film. Can I change your microphone, see? It's like I don't know but you just threatened me. You want me to change your microphone, see!
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And so there's stereotypes. There are all of these different pieces that we come equipped with when we are reading a story that change with generations, that change with culture. And so when I'm writing, especially historical or going secondary world, I have to think about how that is going to translate. If I have… Using a puppetry metaphor, I remember we were working on a show and I looked at my design and we realized that accidentally, because we had… It was a whole bunch of rats. I was… Pied Piper. And we realize that accidentally we had made all of the rats street rat colors. So they were all dark browns and dark grays and blacks. And it was like that was encoding something that is not the message that we want to be encoding. That is an accident that can be read very, very easily by an audience as, like, mapping it onto black and brown people in the real world. And that's not the intention. And so I… We went back and added in some, like, blonde rats, because do you know rats actually come in blonde? They're really pretty. Piebald rats, to go with the Pied Piper. So going through and breaking that up so we worked sending an accidental message. So when I'm evaluating something, when I'm writing my fiction, I look at what are the things that I'm accidentally encoding that are mapped on the real world regardless of if it's a secondary world fantasy or not.
[Erin] I've sort of two thoughts on this. One is a really tortured metaphor that I'm going to share anyway. Which is if you… People sometimes are in relationships that are [garbled] they're situation-ships, and I had a guy friend who had… Who had a young woman that he was in a situation-ship with…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] He started to make all these things that were like… I called it, like, couples bingo. And I was like if you do too many of these things, like now you're… Like, you can't like take her to Christmas, three weddings, and then, like, be like, why do you think we're dating? It's like, well, I mean, there are certain things that, like, if you hit enough boxes, if you hit enough like… It's like if you're drawing a connect the dots. If you connect enough dots, like, people can figure out what the picture is here. So don't get mad when she breaks up with you.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Because she realizes you're dating eight other people. Life lessons there. But the… Like, what I think about that is with stories as well, like, if you… Sometimes people will feel like I wasn't trying to map onto this real life thing, like, that was never my intention, and it can feel like, why do I have to change my story just because other people will read it that way? But, just like my friend's Christmas would have gone a lot better if he had been clearer or made different decisions early on, you don't want to end up having the entire story about your story be something completely different than your intention. You don't want to end up being defensive about your story or explaining what you really meant when you can make it clearer to the reader from the outset by not connecting as many of those dots or adding new dots to the picture or just doing things differently. And so, I know that sometimes it can feel like why should I have to change the story for the readers, or for the world, but the reality is that, like, the world is the world of people that will be buying, talking about, celebrating, marketing, and all of that stuff towards your work. And ultimately, if they don't feel comfortable doing that, the only person it really harms in the long run is you and your career because you are not able to escape the thing that you were not even trying to do in the first place, I think.
[Dan] Agreed.
[Erin] Thanks.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But it… It is absolutely true. And it's… This is a frame. The frame of the reader is one of the frames. The frame of the modern world is the frame through which your story is going to be perceived and enjoyed. When you're talking about, instead of the frame around the lens, when you're talking about the frame around a picture, the picture frame serves to give it context. And the modern world is part of the context that your readers will bring to a story. When you read… There's a reason, like, Huckleberry Finn has warnings on it now. It's still a fantastic story, there's still a lot of really great stuff in there, but there's pieces of it that do not read the same now as they did when Mark Twain wrote it, and then there are pieces that have always read that way, depending on who the reader is.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, like, again, using a less loaded example, Jane Austen use the word electricity in her novels. I 100 percent cannot. Because the frame of a modern reader is that electricity did not exist until they were children, and certainly not in Jane Austen's time. So if I write… Use it, in a story that is set in Jane Austen's time, it looks like an escape, it reads differently than it does when she was using it. Because our understanding of electricity has changed.
[Erin] Wow. Somehow, it's so funny, we've, like, come around to verisimilitude, my favorite ridiculously long word, for no reason, which is, like, the feeling of something feeling real. It's the old one people always talk about is the Tiffany problem, which is that Tiffany is a Middle Ages name, but it sounds like a Valley girl name. And so if you have, like, Sir Tiffany, people will not… Like, it will throw them out of the story. It will throw them out of the frame. Because they will automatically bring their modern frame to it, and they will no longer be able to focus on the picture you are trying to show them. Because they'll be thinking about everything else. What you want to do is captivate the reader and keep them in frame as long as possible. And with that, we have kept you in frame for a very long episode. And so I think this would be a great time to send us away to the homework.
[Erin] Which is, to get back to sort of our earlier thought about framing the lens, take a story that you're working on, and what I'd like you to do is think about what happens if you shift the frame just a little. The easiest way to do this is, is there a scene that you could take out that would, like, shift the way that the lens of the story sort of is focused? And what new scene would you add in in order to rebalance your story? Then go and write that scene. And have fun with it.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
