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This week, in part 1 of a two-part episode, Suzy sits down with prolific and award-winning Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer. They discuss the fascinating backstory behind the decisions for the structure of his newest Audible exclusive audiobook and The Downloaded One.
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Podcast Episode Transcript (unedited)
75. Robert Sawyer Episode part 1
Suzy Vadori: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. Don’t Tell Writing Podcast with me, Suzy Vidori, where I peel back the layers of how to wow your readers with your fiction, your nonfiction. Anybody can bang out a first draft, but it takes a little more work to make your book as amazing as it can be. Join me as I share the step by step writing techniques you could apply to your writing right away.
As I host successful writers who share a behind the scenes look at their own writing lives, and as I live coach writers on their pages giving practical writing examples that will make your own writing stronger. Nobody is born knowing how to write an engaging book. There are real and important skills that you need to learn on this show.
I cut through the noise and get you all the info you need. I can’t wait to see how this information is going to transform your writing.
You are not gonna wanna miss this conversation [00:01:00] with Robert J. Sawyer. It is. Exactly what I had in mind when I started this podcast because I want you, listeners and writers to be able to access the thinking behind some of the world’s greatest books out there. I’m gonna read out his bio in a moment, and you haven’t met Rob before or know his work.
It’s gonna blow your socks off what he’s done in his long, long career. But more importantly, he teaches writing. He’s supportive of new writers. He actually came to my very first big signing at a bookstore just to support me more than a decade ago, and has since become a trusted colleague and friend and one that I am very, very lucky to know.
So when his latest book, the Downloaded two, came out as an Honorable original, it won’t be out until spring in book format. I’ve listened to it right away the, that it came out I was traveling and so it was perfect. It felt like I’d watched movie. It’s actually narrated by [00:02:00] Brendan Fraser. And it is absolutely terrific.
As I listened, I realized some of the things that I work with on writers all the time. When they come to me with a really complex structure where I say, Hey, let’s simplify this. Rob actually pulled off flawlessly. Knowing Rob, I was hoping that he was really deliberate about his choices and I wanted to talk to him on the podcast.
I wanted to talk to him about it anyway, but I wanted to do it on this podcast so that you could also hear his answers. You could hear how that book was masterfully crafted and he did not disappoint. In fact, he shares so much information about the choices that he made in the novel and what made it so amazing.
That we split it into two episodes. ’cause there was just so much to say and I didn’t wanna cut anything. Robert J. Sawyer has been called the Dean of Canadian Science Fiction by the Ottawa citizen, and just about the best science fiction writer out there by the Denver, Rocky Mountain News. He one of only eight writers in history and the only [00:03:00] Canadian to win all three of the science fiction fields.
Top honors for best novel of the year, including the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Rob is a member of the Order of Canada, the highest honor given by our country and of the Order of Ontario, the highest honor given by his province of Ontario. He was also one of the initial inductees into this Canadian science fiction and fantasy Hall of Fame.
According to the US Trade Journal Locus, Rob is the number one all time worldwide leader in the number of award wins as a science fiction or fantasy novelist. And in the height of my career as a business executive, it was really fun for me when they traveled around the world to Asia or Europe, to go and find his books in all the languages in the bookstore on the shelf and send him a picture.
The 2009 and 2010 A BC TV series. Flash Forward was based on Rob’s book of the same name, and he was a [00:04:00] script writer for that series. Rob also hosted the Canadian TV series. Supernatural investigator wrote the two part series finale for the popular web trek series. Star Trek continues the New York Times, calls him a writer of boundless confidence and bold scientific extrapolation.
His 24 now 25 novels. Once the downloaded two comes out in the spring as a novel, include the Oppenheimer Alternative Quantum Knight, calculating God and the www trilogy of Wake Watch and Wonder each volume of which separately won the Aurora Award. Canada’s top honor in science fiction for best novel of the year.
In addition to his Neanderthal, parallax, Trelegy consisting of hominid, humans and hybrids won the Aurora Award for best work of the entire decade, for the first decade of the 21st century. Are you getting the idea here? Rob has been around the blog. Rob is a force in the writing world. [00:05:00] He’s here today to share all of his secrets with us, and we are so grateful.
I hope you have a pen and paper ready. Check out the downloaded and the downloaded two. We were careful not to share any spoiler quote. We are gonna talk about the structure of those novels, so make sure you take a listen so that you know what we’re talking about. Welcome to the show Robert G. Sawyer. So glad that you agreed to talk about this book be, I couldn’t wait to discuss it with you.
Robert S.: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here. Sus.
Suzy Vadori: So can you just before we get started in talking about all the choices that you made when writing this book, can you tell us a little bit about the downloaded series and downloaded two and what it’s all about?
Robert S.: Yeah, so the Downloaded two Ghost in the machine is just out from Audible and it’s a sequel that I never intended to write a a few years ago.
In fact, a pre COVID Audible approached me to write something original for them. I agreed to do so, and I created a novel [00:06:00] called The Downloaded, which they produced as a full cast immersive audio experience mixed in Dolby Atmos and so forth. Directed by Gregory Sinclair, the former head of Radio Drama at the CBC, who sadly has passed away in the interim, and it was quite a hit for Audible, much bigger I think, than they expected it to be, which gratified me enormously.
So I had to write a sequel. They approached me, we negotiated, and it just seemed sensible from their point of view and from my point of view to do a sequel. But I had never intended one, which made the downloaded two very difficult to write because I thought I’d put a nice little bow and ribbon on all the plot lines and all the character arcs in the original, the downloaded.
But it’s a series about two cohorts of human beings, one who are a series of. Astronauts who have uploaded their consciousness into a quantum computer so that the multi-hundred year voyage they’re planning to take to proximate cent, [00:07:00] to the closest star to our sun, uh, on a colonization voyage, will pass much more quickly for them while their bodies are shipped There frozen in cryonic suspension.
The second cohort is a group of murderers who have been offered the chance to serve their prison sentences. In virtual reality with the clock speed slowed down, so it’ll seem like 20 years, the sentences they’ve been given will pass for them, but only 10 months will pass in the outside world. From a rehabilitative point of view, this gets them back into the workforce, back into their families.
You know, when their skillset is still valuable and their children are still young, and of course if everything went fine, we wouldn’t have a novel. What happens is after both groups upload. Just days later, there’s a nuclear holocaust. The civilization collapses, and when they emerge 500 years later from cryogenic suspension and download back into their [00:08:00] bodies, the astronauts haven’t gone anywhere.
The prisoners are angry that their sentences lasted much longer than they expected, and these two disparate groups have to learn to live together to rebuild. Some sort of civilization of the ruins of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. That’s the setup for the downloaded. Downloaded too. We’ll talk about the development of that as we go along.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, I love that. So then you felt like you wrapped all of that up and then how did you go about figuring out, you know, how to blow it up again and make a new book out of it?
Robert S.: So I’m a huge Star Trek fan, particularly the original series. Yes, you were one of the great games. We original series fans or all Star Trek fans play is try to find rational explanations for things that are clearly contradictory in the canon.
And it’s a game we play where, well, Kirk said this in this episode, but he said that in that episode. How do you reconcile that? So it’s always been a game I’ve enjoyed playing, but I’ve never had to play it with my own text before. [00:09:00] I went back and of course went through the original download it beginning to end, and really it was fine as in terms of setting up a sequel, except that in the original I included an epilogue and the epilogue put a button on what had happened.
It said, duh, this, they went up here, this people did da, da, da, da, da. And that painted me into a corner. Now one of the things I say when I teach, uh, creative writing. For me, every novel has to be a challenge. There were great challenges in doing the original download or we can talk about, but the challenge for downloaded two was how do I get a sequel out of something that was never built to have a sequel?
And it meant a lot of, if I’d had any hair pulling out my hair, trying to find answers. But that’s what made it creatively interesting to do. And when I finally did come up. With a, uh, paradigm and a scenario for the sequel, I was enormously pleased. The people I work with at Audible were [00:10:00] enormously pleased, and I actually think, honest to goodness, that downloaded two is a better book than downloaded one and downloaded one.
Got some of the best reviews of my life, including, you know, a starred review from Publishers Weekly, the industry Bible, that’s their highest accolade. So congratulations,
Suzy Vadori: but it’s so well deserved, Rob. Well, thank you so much.
Robert S.: So much. So, you know, it was all, uh, pulling, beating my head against the wall and thinking this little line here, which was just a throwaway line.
Can I expand it? Can I find a way to fill in or build upon every little bit? And I made a rule for myself. Sometimes when people write sequels, and this is notorious in filmmaking, you just ignore the inconvenient facts. From the first, or you
Suzy Vadori: make it all a dream or you, you
Robert S.: make it all a dream or
Suzy Vadori: you do something right, negate everything.
Robert S.: We have a term in, uh, mostly used in film intelligence. It’s comic books used it too called Ret conning, which is retroactively rewriting the [00:11:00] continuity ret con. And I refuse to do that. In fact, somebody wrote to me and said, I think you re conned and downloaded too, because I don’t remember Roscoe deciding to kill the guy Roscoe’s the main.
Character who kills a guy because he had, uh, said something about his daughter in downloaded one. I said, no. That in fact is exactly what happened, and I sent him the passage from downloaded one, so I refused to retcon because that made it more challenging for me, even though I probably could have gotten away with just ignoring.
The inconvenient facts have downloaded, one because people, most people consumed it as an audiobook. Yes, it’s available as a print book and as an ebook, but most people listened to it and they listened once, and it’s not easy. If you’ve listened to an audio book to say, now wait a minute, what did he say three or four chapters ago?
Can I find that flipping through a paper book, or most easy of all, searching in an ebook? No problem. But in the [00:12:00] audio, forget about it. I, I’m sure what he said was what I remembered, and that’s all fine. So, uh, yes.
Suzy Vadori: And, and that’s how I caveated this conversation with you. I said I listened to the audiobook ’cause that’s all that’s owned right now.
I will buy the book when you come and do a launch here. But yeah, it’s hard ’cause you can’t go back. And, and I did take notes through it ’cause I knew as soon as I started listening and you, you mentioned that you do teach creative writing, you’re incredibly generous. You’re very deliberate with what you do, which is why I knew that this was gonna be a fun conversation because as I’m listening.
I’m like, Robert made some really difficult, like you didn’t make it easy on yourself. I actually think that you chose a structure and made some choices that most newer, like I work with new, a lot of the newer writers who are writing their first, their second, their third books, and if they came to you with the structure, I’d be like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Let, let’s simplify that. Right? I wish you guys could see Rob’s face right now because he is, he is smiling ’cause he knows that he didn’t make it easy on himself. So 26 novel in. [00:13:00] You are still keeping it fresh.
Robert S.: Yes, I have to because you know, not to brag or anything, but I’m set for life financial. Don’t brag, Rob.
If
Suzy Vadori: you did it, it’s not bragging you. I
Robert S.: have zero financial concerns. I have no reason to write a book unless I want to. Yeah. And at this point in my career, which is a wonderful place to be, but the only thing that makes me want to is if it’s something I haven’t done before. Hopefully, you know, and I, I used to, I mentioned on taught creative writing.
I used to take creative writing at the ban center. Used to be called the Ban Center for the Arts, not just the Ban Center in Band Alberta, Canada. And one of the teachers in a parallel stream was the great master of, uh, mystery writing in Canada, or one of our, possibly the best, and certainly one of the most published.
Writers from Peter Robinson and Peter and I had very similar careers in that we both had about the same number of books. We about published about the same amount of time, had equal numbers of accolades worldwide, but all of Peter’s [00:14:00] books were in, except for a couple of little oddballs, were in one series about detective Inspector Alan Banks of the Yorkshire Constabulary and mine were all as different as I could make them.
Peter’s career path would’ve been purgatory for me. Once I had done something, I didn’t wanna do it again. I wanted to do something different. I like being known as the guy, so I can’t believe that the guy who wrote say the Oppenheimer Alternative. An alternate history about the Manhattan Project, also wrote about talking dinosaurs in Far Seer also wrote this romantic hard SF novel Rollback also wrote Flash Forward basis for the A BC TV series.
I wanna be a A guy where. As John Scalzi, my shelf mate, he comes to the next author alphabetically after me in most bookstores said, opening a new Rob Sawyer book is like getting a present from an old friend. You never know what you’re gonna get when you unwrap it, and that’s what I always wanted. But a lot of the [00:15:00] structural complexity of downloaded because it has nine different first person narrators.
Was not my idea. Uh, it would’ve been something I would’ve undertaken. ’cause that’s a, as you say, you would’ve said to any, uh, one of your clients, okay, I’m gonna do nine different first person narrators and keep the voices straight. So let, let’s
Suzy Vadori: start
Robert S.: with
Suzy Vadori: three or four and
Robert S.: Right. Exactly. But what happened was an external reality, which is, as I mentioned, they commissioned this from me just before COVID.
And then because this was gonna be an audio production, right? There were realities. I was going to write it as this interactive multicast thing where, you know, different actors were voicing characters simultaneously in a scene, and they said to me and to the director, Greg Sinless guys flag on the play.
Our audible safety coordinator isn’t going to allow more than one person in a recording studio. For the duration of the [00:16:00] pandemic, because of course you can’t do audible if you’re wearing a mask, right? You have to be able to articulate. So one person in studio, who the heck are we gonna do this? And Greg said to me, one word, Robbie.
So one word, Rashman, which is a sala film where a series of separate narrators give conflicting testimony to an unseen judge. I thought that’s right. I can do it that way. So it ended up being this series of first person narrations, and it just grew and grew to the point where there were nine different first person narrators, which meant nine different actors in nine different recording sessions.
Principally our main narrator, Brendan Fraser, the Academy Award winner, but eight other actors, all of whom, including Brendan are Canadian, did the other voices, but it was because of COVID. Uh, the fact that we could only get one actor in studio at a time that I ended up with that [00:17:00] very complex structure, but it was a challenge and that’s what made it worth doing.
And I love the fact that, of course, in the audio, you can easily tell which character is speaking a line because each actor is a performer. But. In reading the book as it’s out as a book as well, people say they’re astonished that they can flip to a page at random start reading, and without the pa, the chapter headers saying which character it is, still know immediately which character is because the voices are distinct for all nine characters, and that’s what made it worth doing for.
Suzy Vadori: And, and, and I love that you answer my questions before I even ask them. And although I, I didn’t know that about the COVID piece and the fact, but I just love that you were able to adapt and just saw it as a challenge because I would think that would be more expensive to have nine different actors. And so in, in normal times, maybe that would’ve been discouraged.
Robert S.: It’s funny you mention the expense because of course, [00:18:00] Greg, the director, was the guy who first suggested Brendan Fraser. I said immediately. I said, yes, that’s perfect. And we’d approached Audible and said, who do you want? And he said, we, we want Brendan Fraser fine. And then Brendan had the enormous bad taste to go ahead and win the Academy Award for best lead actor for the whale.
And so Greg and I said, well, there’s no way they’re gonna get Brendan now. He’s too expensive. And so we did up our B list. Of actors who we would be happy to have and send it into Audible. And our producer there said, what’s this? And we said, well, you can’t get Brenda now. And we, they don’t, you still want ’em?
I said, of course we want ’em. But he just won the Oscar. You want ’em, you get ’em. So that was fine for the first one, but for the second one, uh, downloaded two, they said, can you keep it to three actors this time? Because you know, Brendan’s pretty damn expensive now. And, um. We went back and forth. I said, I need four.
I need four. You gotta gimme four. Not nine, but [00:19:00] four. And they agreed. So we have four actors in the piece this time.
Suzy Vadori: So I wanna talk about in a moment how you kept all those voices distinct. ’cause I think that’s gonna be really interesting. But just staying on this track tactically, you had less actors, but to challenge yourself, you duplicated everybody.
Robert S.: Yeah. So that’s right. They weren’t gonna give me nine, but if I had four and duplicated them, I got eight. Repeat.
Suzy Vadori: Exactly. And so I just love that you did that and, and now this all makes sense. ’cause I was like, wow, why did you do that? That’s even harder. And so you, you kept it to four point of view characters technically, but, and this was in the blurb, so I’m trying not to do any spoilers, although you may learn something about it and it’s gonna get you excited about reading it or listening to it.
But yeah. So in this one, the ghosts and the machine are actually digital duplicates. So you have, so each character actually has two different characters, if that makes sense. Who are separately, separate thoughts, separate everything? [00:20:00] Is that just a challenge that you wanted to It’s a
Robert S.: challenge, absolutely.
I was looking for something interesting to do with those characters and not only are they duplicates, I mean if, you know, if you were to duplicate me right now, we would say, what did you have for lunch? I’d have the same answer. Both of us would’ve the same answer. Right. The duplicates and ghosts in the machine are displaced in time, seven years from each other.
They’ve diverged as people they’ve grown. One of the originals have grown as people and experienced all this post-apocalyptic horror of seven years in living in post-apocalyptic Waterloo that the others haven’t experienced. So I got to not just have two versions, but two different versions. Had their own agendas.
You know, you say that’s hard, that’s challenging. That’s catnip for me as a writer. It’s gotta be something hard and challenging or it’s just not worth doing. And yeah, it was great fun to duplicate the characters and have them [00:21:00] play off each other sometimes as adversaries and sometimes as collaborators, but each with their own agenda sometimes.
And no spoilers here with, uh, hidden agendas that only. Become apparent much later in the narrative. It was enormous fun to do. It was enormously hard to write because when I’m doing two separate characters, is McHale Russian always talk like this. Never say, never say, uh, you know, um, the, or, ah, he was easy to write because he got a distinctive cadence.
But say, uh, Leticia, who was the captain. Who is very articulate, brilliant. A woman doesn’t necessarily have a distinctive way of speaking, although the performer who did her Vanessa Sears Spectacular, Toronto based actress, brought every bit of emotion to it that I could have hoped for, but the two versions of her sound the same.
You know, I sound pretty much the same as I sounded seven years ago. I’ll sound pretty much the same seven years from now. The voices are hardly [00:22:00] different at all. And that was a real challenge for me to write them to come across as differently, and for Vanessa and the other actors who performed in the piece to perform ’em so that people could tell which version they were articulating.
Suzy Vadori: Okay, it, we haven’t blown our listeners minds yet. So we went from nine point of view characters. Rob was told, no, you can have four. So we duplicated them and essentially had these four times two. So go listen to the books, you’ll understand what we mean. But Rob, what did you do? Okay, so accent or part particular cadence is one technique to make those voices unique.
What else did you try? What else did you
Robert S.: Yes, exactly. And the. The easiest thing for me to do is to say they have different accents and leave it up because of an audio book. Leave it up to the narrators to do that, but that doesn’t do anything on the page for the eventual reader of the book,
Suzy Vadori: it would be very tiresome, I would imagine, to have, you know, dialect [00:23:00] or.
Robert S.: Dialect is enormously hard to maintain in a written form. You know, there writers like, uh, Walter Mosley who do quite a bit with diction when he’s doing, you know, easy Rollins, and that is mystery novels that are set in Louise, Louisiana. And a lot of the characters are speaking African American vernacular English.
The diction is very good, but he doesn’t do oddball spellings whereas say, um, ed McBain. Who did the 87th Precinct Series was, uh, fairly notorious for falling into not just dialect, but dialect with phonetic spellings that become tedious to read on the page. I didn’t wanna do anything like that. Whenever I’m trying to differentiate voices, the first thing I try to do, and it comes organically as I’m writing the characters, but I take note of them, come up with either a catchphrase or a unique bit of vocabulary.
The character uses and then I sequester that so that [00:24:00] only that character ever uses that bit of language. Or if somebody else uses it, they’re deliberately saying, well, as Pinal Long would say, be that as it may ’cause be. That as it may is Pinal longs. No matter what argument you give him that he’s a little robot, that you should obey his order.
He said, well be that as it may, I’m gonna do what I want to do. So having a unique vocabulary reach character, paying great attention to the educational background of each character. I mentioned these two cohorts. The astronauts are mostly PhDs or other highly educated, highly trained individuals. The prisoners on the other hand are, you know, the sad law of life is that it tends to be people with a lesser degree of education who tend to fall afoul, at least major crimes of the um.
Judiciary system. And so you look for a simpler level of vocabulary and you know, if somebody’s more rough and tumble, they drop more F-bombs. If [00:25:00] somebody is more sophisticated, they avoid that. So profanity specific language that only those characters would use length of sentences. A very sophisticated character will talk in long meandering sentences as I have a tendency to do myself and a less sophisticated character will be more declarative.
So you, it’s very much a conscious effort for every sentence you write to not say, how would I, Robert Sawyer, the author best say that, but how would Roscoe Kadian or Leticia Garvey, or whoever the character happens to be, express that in their own way of speaking?
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. And that effort certainly paid off.
That’s when I, when I started listening to you and I was like, yeah, the listeners need to learn this or hear this because. When those writers come to me with this complex structure, yes, you can do it, but it’s effort and it’s hard. And you did it masterfully. Thank you. You’re welcome. You’re on this show Don’t Tell podcast, and [00:26:00] we love to dig into the ways to make your writing immersive.
Right. So we’ve talked about how you use different techniques to make sure that each person actually sounds different. Each point of view character has a totally different way, and that we know immediately. Then you double down because you’ve got each of them in their own silo. They’re not even in the same way.
’cause they can do anything that they want. And what’s interesting about this construct, again, you don’t make things easy on yourself, Rob, when, I mean, there was a time a couple of years ago when I was working with five separate writers. All had magic in fantasy stories or a, a storyline in science fiction where people were sort of in their own heads.
So in this case you’ve gone a cryogenically frozen body and then they’re sort of in their minds in the computer. And so, and when I told people, Hey, we’re working on this in different ways. Then they’re like, oh, is it overdone? No. They were all different. They were all different reasons why they either had telepathic [00:27:00] communication with somebody, but they were in their heads, and so it was really hard to make it feel immersive and feel real and do all the traditional show, don’t tell things, but you’ve created this AI world or this virtual reality world for each character.
How did you do that? And still make it immersive and not make it feel like we’re watching somebody laying in a coffin, cryogenically, frozen. And hearing their thoughts, right? Like, that’s, that’s hard. What did you have to it?
Robert S.: It is hard. The most important reason I think people still write and enjoy or read and enjoy prose fiction is because you get into the inner life of characters.
And I think that’s the most immersive thing of all. I am a, a great, uh, movie buff. I love live theater. I love good television drama. You never know what those characters are thinking unless they, unless they, unless they
Suzy Vadori: egregiously. Yeah. Or unless they egregiously portray it by a facial expression,
Robert S.: gesticulation.[00:28:00]
Or Unless you do. And you know, one of the great science fiction movies of all time is Blade Runner and the original theatrical cut of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott was overruled by the studio. They made Harrison Ford come in and record voiceover narration, explaining what he was thinking and what was going on, and of course it was awful.
Harrison Ford, a great actor, great voice, Ridley Scott, great film, and it comes out looking like a student filmed in terms of that level of dis construction in the subsequent director’s cuts. All of that was eliminated because it almost never. Works to have a character telling you what it occasionally, um, a device will be found to work around that.
Captain Kirk’s log entries in the original Star Trek or Picard, and later, you know, captain’s log and he gives you some of what he’s thinking was a way of dealing with that. But in general, no, no, no. In a play, in a [00:29:00] movie, in a TV show, you don’t know what they’re thinking. Uh, yet it’s more visually immersive than anything.
No matter how good you are, description, a writer can put on the page in a novel. So the immersion has to be, i i into the mind. And a lot of that is people will say, an amateur writer will say, I, you know, if it’s a first person narrative, let’s, the first third person, he was angry, I hate you, he shouted, right?
That’s not immersive at all. What’s immersive was he was angry, but he didn’t want to show it because Toho, it would reveal weakness, and yet his gut was roiling so much he knew that he was gonna explode if that person said that name to him one more time, despite his best efforts to keep it in. And the person said, Gordon.
It’s the person you hate the most and [00:30:00] you are, and he was still trying so hard, clenching his fists and then finally he just couldn’t stop himself and he said, F you on screen. On stage, all you see is Gordon F you, the inner struggle, which was enormously immersive. There is only possible in prose fiction and prose fiction that is being read aloud as an audio book.
So that I think is the key thing of the immersive quality is to have the stream of consciousness and our streams of consciousness aren’t just, here’s what I’m about to do, and then you do it, and then you say, oh, and now I’ve done it. It’s all the, I could do this, I could do that. The interplay of you in dialogue with yourself about what your next move is in this chess game.
That is the ongoing plot of whatever story you’re unfolding.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, absolutely. And thank [00:31:00] you for taking the time to create that example on the spot. I’m, it’s not easy to do that either. I know because I do it all the time. But what figures will say to me when we do things like this and, and we show them, but it’s longer.
Yeah, it is. But those decision points and that. Is so important. Spend the words, spend the time to show us how they are coming to those decisions, because that’s what your reader’s going to track, right? They’re trying to guess what are they going to do. Readers wanna be smart. We wanna guess, we wanna look ahead and we wanna try to imagine what it is.
And that’s keeps it interesting. That’s what keeps us hooked.
Robert S.: Yeah. So we have this, we, we talk about identifying with a character and in prose fiction that literally means. You take on the identity of a character you are that it’s very hard to do and watch.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah.
Robert S.: Yeah. It’s very hard to do in a play or a movie or a TV show.
That’s like watching a tennis match. You’re looking to the left [00:32:00] character, the right character, or the inner cutting between the two characters. You’re neither of those characters. You are quite literally a spectator. Whatever is unfolding in front of you, it’s only in prose fiction where you really can become Katniss Everdeen or Jean Val Jean or whoever the character might be, and live their life.
And living their life isn’t just what they do externally. It is so much more what we do internally. And, uh, you get to put that out on the page and as you said, it gets longer. You add up the pages. That’s a good thing. To get more and more pages. Uh, I date back to starting my fiction career writing, you know, for markets that short story markets that paid X number of pennies a word.
And you go right back, they say, oh no, I just don’t write for ’em anymore. You can’t afford me a pennies of a word anymore. And I don’t do short fiction anymore. But that goes right back, you know, to Charles Dickens. He was [00:33:00] definitely a penny, a word writer. When he wrote it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
It was the age of reason. It was the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He got, you know, 500 words. So $5 off of nothing at all happening, but just, he wasn’t even in a character’s head at that point, but we were in. Yeah, yeah. When you’re inside a character and explicating their thought process, think of all those pennies.
That are adding up for you and how much more immersive it is, how much more money’s worth you’re giving your reader for the pennies they paid you in. In royalty.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. Okay. I love all of this. It’s a very leading question because I actually wanted to talk to you about, you’re talking about how immersive and when you do look back at something written 50 years ago.
It may not have been right. It might be a very distant perspective. And are you finding, ’cause what I’m seeing is in today’s market. That just doesn’t work. Right. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. A, yeah, [00:34:00] a page or two that, that aren’t even in a scene. Especially in genre fiction. Would you agree that, that this immersive piece in becoming more and more important as we compete with audio books, as we compete with video, absolutely.
VR
Robert S.: and
Suzy Vadori: all
Robert S.: the Absolutely Every medium has to distinguish itself from every other medium. Or why would you not all only consume film and television, which you know. They spent a lot of money making the downloaded as an audiobook, but nothing compared to a $200 million feature film. Right. Why would you even consume inexpensive art like print fiction, except that it’s distinguished from the other forms?
Yeah. There used to be a whole bunch of different narrative voices that were used in fiction and we’ve sort of cra it down. To really, almost all fiction is written in one of two very immersive voices. It’s either first person or it’s limited third person. And [00:35:00] the limited means that in each scene you are only privy to the thoughts of one character in that scene.
The viewpoint character, the one that you have identified within that scene. And of course, that’s necessary for any kind of drama. If you’re two possible romantic partners talking to each other and your viewpoint characters is, is it finally the moment? Should I finally say those magic words, I’d love you.
What if she, he, they don’t say it back to me. How can I go on, how do I get outta the situation if I say it and it’s not reciprocated works just fine as long as the next paragraph is. But she, he they, the romantic interest. Was waiting and knowing that he was about to say those magic words and decided to torture him a little longer by just waiting and waiting and drawing.
You have no drama if you know what everybody thinks, but you have great drama if [00:36:00] you know what only the viewpoint character thinks. And of course, obviously in mystery fiction. An omniscient where you know what everybody’s thinking doesn’t work at all. Who’s the murderer? It’s me. Hi. I stand up on page one.
It was me. I was hiding it. I was gonna hide it, but omniscient narrator, I can’t keep from you. So now that’s, it’s a story, the end.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah. And it, so many writers, you know, go back to their grade, grade 12 English. And say, okay. When they’re, when they’re starting out and say, I have these choices. First person, second person, third person on mission.
Yes. And the technician. And they come to me and I have to explain that it’s not the best choice. Now sometimes if it serves the story, you know, there are still a very small percentage of books that can get away with Omni, but the hardest one, it’s the
Robert S.: hardest one to have any drama in.
Suzy Vadori: Yeah, right. It’s,
Robert S.: it’s, it’s easiest one to write in a lot of ways, but ’cause everything’s transparent.
It’s the hardest one to get. I don’t always agree with the statement, but most creative writing [00:37:00] teachers say fiction is about conflict. There has to be something at stake. People at loggerheads over something. One person wants this, which is fine, but the other person also wants it and it’s indivisible.
Only one of them can have it conflict, and it’s very hard to have any kind of emotional conflict if it’s omniscient. So omniscient, yeah. Is it’s seductive. Because it actually is hard work. You, I’m always astonished when I’m reading a book by, um, from a, a, a big five New York publisher where the author is slipped up and had the viewpoint character be aware of something that he, she or they couldn’t possibly know, whereas an omniscient narrator would know, you know?
Uh, now I happen to be looking at a Zoom screen right now, so I do have the rare perspective of knowing what’s right behind me, but in my real life. No, I have no idea what’s behind me so that if I slip in my first person narration and [00:38:00] say, and there was a cola bear on a pogo stick standing behind me, I couldn’t possibly know that unless I had turned around to see that interesting apparition from down under, behind me.
Suzy Vadori: Thanks for tuning in to show. No. Tell Writing with me, Susie Vidori. I’ll me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you’re writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you’re listening. Also, visit susie vidori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you’ll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community.
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