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Writing Excuses 20.30: Using Why To Shape Tone

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-30-using-why-to-shape-tone

Key points: Tone? Emotional beats. The vibe. Contrasting tones. In space, something always goes wrong. Sentence level tone? Assonance, consonants, emphasis. Sentence length and word length. Punctuation. Imagery. Sensory details. Cherry red, lipstick red, or blood red?

[Season 20, Episode 30]

[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 30]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Using Why To Shape Tone.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] Today we're going to be talking about tone. Now, I know that we did a whole episode in Season 18 on tone and mood. We're coming back to tone, because I love talking about it.

[Yay!]

[Mary Robinette] Tone is one of those words that people use when talking about fiction in a lot of different ways. The tone of horror, or the tone of the scene. What we're going to do is we're going to break down what it means, how we use it, and how it can be a tool in your toolbox. So, when we're talking about tone, what are some of the things that you all are thinking about in terms of what it means? Let's start with the meaning.

[Howard] I treat tone in fiction as an emotional word. Like a happy tone, a sad tone. I mean, I come from a music background and so the domain of the word tone is very heavily overburdened. But within the domain of writing, I think of tone as a set of emotional beats that the prose will deliver independent of what kind of story it may be. You can have a horror story that has a cheerful tone.

[Dan] I'm not sure that I have a good answer for this. I think about tone in similar ways.

[Mary Robinette] Same.

[Dan] Yeah. That tone is... tends to be primarily emotional for me. And I love picking tones that are not happy.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Really? Shocking!

[Dan] As exhibited in most of my books. I am really taken by the idea of sadness. I love sadness as, like, a tonal texture in which to tell a story. Dealing with loss, dealing with sadness, dealing with whether or not it is worth hoping for something. This was all long before I developed depression. But I find that to be such a fun thing to play with. I guess I need to ask, though, what you mean by the meaning of the tone?

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, when I'm thinking about tone… Very similar, that it's the emotion. That it tends to have words associated with it, like, oh, this has a bouncy tone, or a loving tone, or a scary tone. But I also think that you can talk about tone in a large-scale thing. It's like, this is the tone of the book. When you open the book, you're like, Nnnn, I am in for a horror thing. That it can hint at the genre, it can hint at this is the emotion that I'm going to have when I walk away from the book. But I also think that it can be within a scene. We sometimes talk about the dark night of the soul, which is a specific tone. That there's… Like, there's a specific mood, there's a vibe that's going on. I'm not sure that tone and vibe are that different, honestly. But it exists in the same way that in a horror book where you… Instead of having the all is lost moment, you have the aha, you're going to get away… Nope, nope. You get sucked back in…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] To hell. And so, there are places where you're going to lay two tones against each other. But the overall tone of the whole piece, the overall vibe, the sensation, the experience that the reader is going to have… That… There's… Um… It's still coloring that contrasting moment.

[Dan] Yes. I see what you mean now. I'm thinking about my book, Partials, where I establish the tone right off the bat, the very first scene, very first chapter, is about a dead baby. The plague that has killed everyone is still around, and the baby is born and passes away. And it's horrible, and that's part of the point, is because I want to establish right up front that is the tone that we are dealing with in this book. Which is not to say that the entire book will be dismal. In fact, most of the book is much more upbeat than that. Because another thing that I was specifically trying to play with in that series was the idea that the adults who remember the world that we lost our always sad and angry about it, whereas the kids who have grown up post-apocalypse, this is the only world they've ever known. They are finding joy in ways that the adults never do. And so there is… That was the easiest best way to get that juxtaposition across was to present the horrible thing and then show the different reactions that everyone in the book has to it. And so that kind of overriding sense of this is a world where babies die is important to establish the stakes, to establish what the emotions are going to be like. But then it also makes the joy and the happiness that the main characters experience that much more meaningful, because you know what they are feeling joy in spite of.

[Howard] Yeah. I am… I keep tripping over just the word tone in context with my music background. And I'm thinking of pieces of music where what fiction, in prose, we would call tone, in music we would call timbre. We would call maybe texture… When you have the brass all standing on a note versus when you have the strings all standing on a note. It's very, very different. That is analogous to, in your prose, the word choice. The line level word choice. But Dan, when you talk about the content of… I am telling the story of a baby dying, that is the minor key versus the major key, the tri-tone versus the dominant seven. That is the tone of the content as opposed to the tone of the turn of phrase. And as a humorist, I'm always balancing the two of those, because if I take the tri-tone, if I take the very dissonant tall jazz nineteenth chord and play it with nothing but woodwinds and harps, that's almost silly. And it's light, and it's airy, and I love taking the tone of my words, the tone of my prosaic turns of phrase, and contrasting them against the tone of the content of what I'm writing. That is a chewy delight for me that I just never tire of doing.

[Dan] Oh, man, that's one of my favorite things to do.

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.

[Dan] If I can get a reader to feel two contrasting emotions at the same time, I know I have succeeded at something.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, as we're talking, you've made me think about a thing that was happening when I was working on Martian Contingency that goes back to the last episode where we were talking about authorial intent. I honestly, when I sat down to write that, what I wanted to do, I just wanted to write a cozy. I just wanted to… Like, my characters have been having a really tough time. I just wanted them to have a nice time on Mars. I just wanted to write about let's have a party. Let's have meals. This is… Let's grow some plants. This is what I wanted to write. And also, the book before that in the series is Relentless Moon which is a really intense thriller. And I knew that that motion for the reader, that coming into this tone of we're growing some plants, that the complete lack of tension was not going to work. So I had to come up with a tone and a reason… Like, I had to come up with an authorial intention for it. But I came up with a tone of tension and keeping tension on my characters all the way through. But most of the plot points, most of the things that are actually happening in the book, I am… Like, there are multiple parties in this book. There's multiple discussions of clothing and sexy fun times and food and gardening. And I'm masking it under this tone of tension. I have created the tension using authorial intent and all of the other tools that we've been talking about. But I had to put that tone in of oh, no, things are going to go terribly, terribly wrong, and I did that on the first page when I had my character looking at the beautiful sky and thinking how lovely it is, and then think, but of course, this was space, and in space, something always goes wrong. And using that contrasting tone between those two things to create tension for the reader that I then play with through the whole book.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of creating contrast, we are going to take a pause now. And when we come back, we're going to talk more about how to actually use this concept.

[Mary Robinette] So I find that when I am learning a new tool, that one of the things that works for me is to deal with it on a fairly small… Small level. And then I can scale it up to see how it works on something bigger. So when you are talking about the tone of a sentence, what are the pieces that were using to manipulate the tone of a sentence?

[Howard] Assonance and dissonance… Or assonance and consonants. Repeated vowel sounds, repeated consonant sounds. Or the absence thereof. Putting emphasis… Almost like rhymes. Words with similar emphatic patterns, similar accent patterns. Putting rhymes in. Emphasized and non-emphasized places. If this sounds like poetry, I'm so sorry.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's kind of the way my brain works. But when I'm crafting, when I'm really trying to craft one sentence that matters, the whole shape, the lilt, the beat, the song of the sentence is governed by every one of these pieces. And… I mean, I can't think about that for every sentence I write, for an entire book, but it's when I know, gosh, like, first line, I have to establish tone. I will shape that sentence very, very carefully.

[Dan] Yeah. A lot of it is also sentence length, word length. Am I using big, long words, am I using short ones? How much punctuation is in there? There's all of these little tools you can use to change whether a sentence feels very fast and punchy, whether it feels fast and simple, whether it feels long and mellifluous. Lots of word length and sentence length and punctuation are tools that I use all the time.

[Howard] The tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Ah. So tasty.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and it is that like word choice, sentence structure, the imagery that I choose. Those are the things that I will look at. The difference between describing a fallen leaf is moldy or golden red. Like, those are both leaves that are dead, but they convey a different tone. So, some of what I'm also looking at is shared context.

[Dan] Yes!

[Laughter]

[Howard] [garbled] when you say shared context. I lean into sensory details. We often forget when we're writing to describe what a room smells like. What a small room sounds like, when empty as you walk through it, versus a large room, versus the great outdoors when you walk… Those are different acoustic spaces. They… At least… Okay, I have an audio engineering background, I can't not hear these things. But I think even to the untrained ear, you can tell if you're in a small room versus a large room, even if the lights are out. And if the lights are out, and the experience the character is having is hearing that they have stepped from a small alcove into a larger room, you've established the tone. And it's probably pretty cool.

[Mary Robinette] You're making me think about and wonder if our readers can tell the difference between the episodes that we record when we are all sitting in the same room, which we are doing right now, and the ones where we are on zoom and we are separated, we're distant.

[Howard] And I think the answer to that question is Alex wants the answer to be no…

[Laughter]

[Howard] [garbled] That's the guy who masters our episodes, and so masterfully masks the sounds of the ship or the sounds of the…

[Mary Robinette] But it…

[Howard] Lawnmower outside my window.

[Dan] Yeah, but there's so much more to it than that. There is how much we step on each other. Like, just now, you were still talking and I talked over you. And when we record on Zoom, we tend to not do that as much. Or two people will start out talking at the same time, and then stop, like there's a lot of…

[Yup... bup... nup...]

[Dan] Very weird tonal etiquette kind of things that we do that are very different.

[Mary Robinette] And these are the kinds of very small nuanced things that often a reader won't notice, there won't be a conscious piece of it. So, sometimes you're going into a scene and you may not have a conscious thought, as you are writing, about what this tone is going to be. And this is something that I think you can go back and layer in later. You can add in… If you want a little bit of tension, you can look at the way the characters are interacting with each other, you can look at what are the… Where am I adding in words like tintinnabulation to direct our attention.

[Howard] To the first line.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You've got my attention.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You have got my attention. If you describe something, if you describe a car as cherry-red, or if you describe a car as lipstick red, or blood red, it might… I mean, those might all be the same color of car to your mind's eye, but to the reader, the blood red car is in a very different book than the cherry-red car.

[Mary Robinette] I think that that, Howard, actually is a great segue for us talking about homework.

[Mary Robinette] What I want you to think about is to take this idea of tone. Just thinking about it in terms of these very broad things that we're talking about, word choice, sentence structure, the feeling that you want the reader to have. And I want you to have your character do an action. They're just going to have a very simple thing. We're going to write a little vignette in which a character is pouring tea for a beloved partner. I want you to try for a joyful tone. Everything in this is just joy. The tea is joyful. Everything is joyful. Think about the word choices, the sentence structure, the way the character… What the characters notice. The imagery that you're showing us. And I want you to do it again. But I want you to try for a tone of terror. It's still tea, it is still a beloved partner. One character is pouring tea for the other. And there is a sense of terror for the entire scene.

[Mary Robinette] You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Entry tags:

Writing Excuses 20.29: Authorial Intent

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-29-authorial-intent

Key Points: Authorial Intent, or Why am I writing this? Message versus content. Features inform, benefits sell. Execution. Macro level versus micro level. Area of intention. What do I want to achieve? Theme and meaning are often heady cerebral things, but why is very visceral. Sit down and do more writing. The intention that you have when you start a book does not have to be the intention that you have when you later. Make sure authorial intention and character intention are lined up. Make sure you know why those scenes are in the form (genre, etc.) that you are working in.

[Season 20, Episode 29]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Howard] Authorial Intent.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

[Howard] And we are gonna talk to you about this particular did this little aspect of the lens of Why called authorial intent. AKA Why are you writing this book? Or this thing? Or this scene, this chapter, this screen play, this whatever?

[Mary Robinette] Line of dialogue.

[Howard] This line of dialogue.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I want to start with an example from my marketing background. And the example is message versus content in advertising. The message for an auto ad is like this car will make you sexy. But they can't just come out and say that. That's their intent. This car will make you sexy. Their intent is for you to buy the car. The content has to say it subtly. How do you intend a book and then not heavy-handedly just stamp Authorial Intent all the way through it on every page?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] How do you do better than the auto advertiser does?

[Dan] Well, you're talking about advertising now which is reminding me of my old advertising days. And one of the advertising maxims that gets shared around a lot is features inform, but benefits sell. Like, you can talk about all the things the car does, that's not going to sell the car. But what will the car do for you? That's what will sell the car. And now I'm thinking about that with stories that we tell. I can absolutely think to myself about what the theme is, what the meaning is, what the structure is, all of the stuff that I have put into it. That is not going to make you as a reader enjoy the thing. That is not going to sell the book to you. Whereas the execution of it all absolutely will. And so for me author intent has a lot of different meanings. Because some of it is what have I put into this, what am I trying to say with this? But a lot of it is also just I haven't explored this type of character before, and it is my intention to give this very different type of character or setting… It is my intent to explore this kind of magic or this kind of conflict. Those are more of the benefits. That's the execution, and that's what I think is going to grab readers.

[Mary Robinette] I… I find myself that when I'm thinking about like grabbing readers or something like that… But I often do not think about the why of the book. Like, why on a macro level. Because honestly most of the time my why is Cool! I love this idea.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Like, that's my why for writing it.

[Howard] I get to write another book?

[Mary Robinette] Great! It's like Dragons! Yay! That's my intention. Like, I just want to play… Spend a couple of months playing with dragons. That's my why.

[Howard] Can we just put another pin in that and say that's absolutely valid?

[Mary Robinette] I hope so.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That is enough why for me.

[Mary Robinette] Right. But when I get into the book, for me, when I'm thinking about why, that's where I start thinking about how I'm engaging with the reader. And I'm thinking about something that Jane [Espenson?] Calls the area of intention. Which is the… She was talking about this when you were… With jokes. Why… What am I trying to do with this joke? Why is the character doing this? And I find that this idea with the area of intention helps me make decisions on a line by line basis on why this scene is in the book. And what I often in thinking about is, for my why is, what effect do I want to have on the reader? What conversation do I want to engage with? If I think about why on a macro scale, it is that what conversation do I want to have, what question am I asking? But most of the time, when I am using why personally, it is not on the big project level. Because most of the time that upper-level intention really is just Nifty!

[Howard] Dan?

[Dan] Yes?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Why?

[Dan] Why? Well, so the project that I'm working on right now… Middle grade fantasy. The intention behind there, the why of the book, why am I writing this book… We've talked about theme and meaning before, and there is theme there that I've got something that I'm trying to say with the book and we don't need to go into that because I think that those discussions where they get into the very strict details, are kind of boring for readers. They're English class kind of stuff. Whereas why am I telling the story in this particular way…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] Well, because I got very excited about it. I was reading a… Some kind of peripheral material to Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion and talking about the land of Eriador, which is the land west of the Misty Mountains and how it is basically a vast unpopulated wasteland that used to be a huge kingdom, that used to be two huge kingdoms. And now there's basically Rivendell and the Shire and the Grey Havens and nothing else, of any particular import. And that, for whatever reason, the idea of this vast lonely land completely captured my imagination. And so why am I telling this story in the way I'm telling it? Because I wanted to capture that almost post-apocalyptic fantasy kind of idea. The idea that this takes place not in a bustling kingdom, not in an enchanted forest, but in this huge empty wasteland where there's just a couple of little villages here and there and very little else. And capturing that feeling, capturing that tone, that is absolutely my intention for the book.

[Mary Robinette] And I think that that's… Like, when you're talking about that… What you made me think of are some of the things we talked about when we were in our Who module. That in many ways, we're talking about the author's motivation, the author's stakes and goals. Your goal is to explore this, the Rivendell, and so the why, for me, as an author, is, like, what do I want to achieve? Why am I making these decisions? And it usually goes back to this… To a core idea of some sort. For me, it was the Thin Man in space with the Spare Man.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's a mood that I want to evoke for the reader. There's… Which will be talking about when we get to tone. But there's something at the core of it, and experience that I want to have and that I want to share with the reader. And, for me, that is often the why, is about the experience. Where is theme and meaning is about the heady cerebral things.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But the why for me is often very visceral.

[Dan] And that's such a… That's why I was going back to this old advertising maxim. Features inform and benefits sell. How fast can this car go is a very different question from what does it feel like to drive this car. What does it feel like to go that fast? What does it feel like when the windows are rolled down and you're on that twisting highway and the radio is on your favorite station? That is such a visceral experential thing, and that's what people are looking for. Beyond just the boring numbers or the high level engineering that goes into it.

[Howard] Let's take a break for a moment, and when we come back, I'm going to say a thing.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Why, Howard? Why?

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's a keeper.

[Howard] Earlier, Dan, you said discussions like in English class are just boring. And it occurred to me that if in my English classes in high school, we had discussions with the answer to authorial intent was the author wanted to write this book so that they could sell the book and make money… That never one time, never even one time, came up. My intent, in many cases, when I sit down to write something is, I intend to write anything that will give someone an experience, just when they pick it up and read the back cover, that leads to them buying it, that leads to them reading it, and enjoying it, that then plants a hook within them that will get them to buy other things that I write. And that's a pretty deep-seated intent, and that's not something that I would ordinarily state openly in any of my marketing copy, because it sounds a little insidious. And yet, it's a valid intent. It's every bit as valid as dragons are cool. And the Shire exists in the wasteland, and I want to explore a wasteland. My question now is what are the weird intents we would never talk about in English class, but that are perfectly valid? What are our motivations to write that are just out there?

[Mary Robinette] I mean… I guess… So here's the thing for me. On a certain level, I don't know how useful it is, because, like, I can tell you, like, that my intention is dragons are cool. I had a dream. This is the why of it. The Ghost Talkers. Why? Why does Ghost Talkers exist? I had a dream, and then I was like, oh, I think there may be a story there. And I teased it out, and other parts of Ghost Talkers are there because I put a Doctor Who cameo in every novel, and that's why. Like, why is it there? Because I needed a chuckle. But, so, for me, I think the why can be so personal to the reader. And the question that I'm interested in, and that I hope that we can kind of play with some with this intention is how are you using that intention? You've got an intention, but how are you using it? How do you use it to make decisions when you're measuring against the choice of making it feel like Rivendell versus in space, how do you measure that?

[Howard] At some level for me, the decision that… The authorial intent needs to lead to a decision on the author's part to sit down to and do more writing and I want to have... I want my intent to be compelling enough to me that it keeps me moving. And I feel like being able to… And I guess this is my intent for at least this segment of the episode… I want our listeners to evaluate their intents and to realize, one, hey, that's a valid intention, and two, I'm allowed to keep going back to that well if that's what gets me into my chair to keep writing.

[Mary Robinette] So with that in mind, here's the thing that I think is really important. The intention that you have when you begin the story does not have to be the intention that you have later in the book. One of the problems that I think happens to writers over and over again, especially those of us with ADHD, is that it gets boring after a while.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And I am not the same person today that I was yesterday. Yesterday I was extremely fatigued. I had had to do a bunch of teaching that I had not planned on doing. I was… I had been out in the sun, and the things that were interesting to me, the things that motivated me, were very different from today. So, for me, when… If you're talking about that kind of author… That's… For me, that's not authorial intention, that's authorial motivation. Like, what's going to get me to sit down in a chair. That, for me, I think every day you can ask yourself, why is this story important to me today? And it doesn't have to be why it was important to you yesterday. If I am trying to write a story… Here's an extremely personal example, Martian Contingency came out this year. I started writing that book and had ideas for it. And in the course of writing it, my mother who had Parkinson, went into hospice. As I was finishing that book. My authorial intention at that point became I have to finish this before mom dies or I will not pick it up again. That is not a sustainable authorial intention. When I finished writing it, it was months before I did revisions on it. I'm a completely different person. I was the one who's grieving. I was the one who's recovering. And that is a different person who is going through it. So this is why I feel like when we're talking about these big broad level authorial intentions, it's good to think about it and I think that you can use it to say why am I sitting down to write today. But the reader can't tell when that book comes out that that was my intention. So, for me, the thing… That's why I keep saying I find that thinking about it on a micro level of why do I have this sentence, why do I have this paragraph, why do I have this chapter? That is dealing with the person who is in the chair in that moment.

[Howard] Yeah. I actually have a spreadsheet to track those things. My authorial intent for this scene, this scene, this scene. What is this supposed to do? What is my intention for these things? But, yeah, you're right, at some level, it's authorial motivation for me to sit down in front of the spreadsheet and look at today's list of intentions for what needs to be written.

[Dan] Um… We're recording this on the cruise, the Writing Excuses cruise, and I just taught a class yesterday about fight scenes and why I think they're terrible.

[Mary Robinette] I really enjoyed that class. FYI.

[Dan] Thank you very much.

[Mary Robinette] And I have like… I, like, was taking notes and I'm very excited to talk to you more about that… But carry on. Please.

[Dan] So, one of the things that we talk about in there is why are you putting this fight scene…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] Into your story? Why are you putting this action scene into your story? And one of the comments that we got… Several of the comments that we got where exactly what I expected, which is, well, I've read better books before, and there were fight scenes at this part of it. Or I watched movies that I love and there's a fight scene at this part of the story. And I feel like, so often, that is our intention, and that is a very shallow intention. When we get to that level of thinking, why is this scene in the book, why is this chapter in the book, and if your answer is because I think it probably ought to be… I mean, yes, you might be right, but that's a terrible way to start. And that's not a helpful way to go into this scene. If you're writing it out of obligation, without a specific purpose, if the purpose is on… If it's purely tautological. This scene exists because I know that it should exist. You need something more than that. There needs to be some kind of question that you are asking or answering, there needs to be some kind of exploration of who the characters are or a revelation about the setting or the technology or the magic or something. There needs to be a specific intention beyond, well, I've read other books and they have this kind of scene at this point in the story, so I'm putting one in.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I find that there's the authorial intention and then there's the character intention. And often, when a story is falling flat, it's because the authorial intention… The author is, like, I need the character to do this. I need the character to have this fight right now. And the character… Like, there is no sensible reason that they would do that. Their intention is to try to… Based on everything that you the author have set up to that point, has them pointed in a different direction, but you force them to do it without providing them sufficient motivation, sufficient intention, all of the things we're talking about before with character. So, for me, again, it's like with the author, what is my goal for the story? That is the why that I'm interested in. What is my goal for the story? What is my goal in this moment?

[Howard] One of the things that you brought up, Dan, is the importance of understanding the why of the form in which we are working. Why are there action scenes in movies? Why are there fight scenes in other books? Why are there… Why are any of these things… Why are there happily ever after's in romance? And if you don't understand some of those whys, if you don't understand some of the intent of the authors who have come before you, the intent to ape what they have done by making your own book follow the same pattern is going to be broken. Because it's not what you mean. It's not…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] You don't understand why this was done and so you're doing it. I mean, I don't want to suggest that you're writing your book for the wrong reasons, but you might be writing that part of the book in the wrong way because of wrong reasons.

[Dan] Well, and that's often why someone says that a story feels formulaic is because the formula has become more important to the author than the characters, than the plot. Because we are following this because we know we're supposed to and not because the characters would naturally do these kinds of things.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and that's why one of the things that we're doing this season is a little unusual, that we are… We're doing a lot of really, really deep dives and we're going to do this whole extremely deep dive into structure in season 21, where we're talking about the what and the how of our big questions. And it is hard to evaluate something when you don't know why it exists.

[Howard] And I think that might be a good place for the homework. You ready for the homework? Take your work in progress, and in two sentences, describe to yourself why you are writing this. It might be a scene, it might be a chapter, it might be the whole book, it might be a screenplay. Two sentences. Why you are writing this? And then, for bonus points, one sentence. Why is that the reason that you're writing this?

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