Your Brain:
Hello. You don’t know me? Well, that’s what you tell yourself anyway. I’m the one who told you this is going to be a short project. I’m the one who said, just one more pass, fourteen drafts ago. I told you the outline was basically done. I told you the hard part was over. I told you that you work better under pressure, that the deadline was actually good for you, that sleep is optional, that this time it’s going to be different. But it’s never different. I am the voice in your head that has been confidently, enthusiastically, and completely incorrectly narrating your entire creative life. I have the track record of a weather forecast and the self-awareness of a raccoon who just knocked over a trash can. And here’s the thing: you keep listening to me, because without me, you never start anything, and we both know it. I’m your brain. You’re welcome.
Pete Wright:
Welcome to Craft and Chaos, where today we’re finally talking about your creative brain and the lies it tells. I’m Pete Wright and I’m here with Mandy Fabian and Kyle Olson and Ryan Dalton, and we’re all liars. Hi, team.
Ryan Dalton:
Oh, you’re the worst brain.
Mandy Fabian:
Oh, yes.
Kyle Olson:
Someone let my inner critic out.
Mandy Fabian:
God, who gave him tickets to this show?
Kyle Olson:
Put him back.
Pete Wright:
Oh, he’s the worst.
Pete Wright:
He’s kind of like a cheap knockoff of Sam Elliott trying to do a Sam Elliott impression.
Mandy Fabian:
I’m flashing back to the bigger one.
Pete Wright:
Let us begin with a very brief creative round table.
Ryan Dalton:
Oh, yeah.
Pete Wright:
What are you working on creatively this week? And I’m gonna go first because I’m the host and I’m the best. And I’m very excited to tell you because Kyle gave us an assignment, and I don’t want him to take credit for giving us the assignment before I tell you I already did mine. And I’m so excited about it.
Kyle Olson:
Whoa, very nice.
Pete Wright:
That’s right. I’m the guy who has no time to add anything to my life, but I stayed up real late because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I wrote my play that you assigned.
Kyle Olson:
That’s how I get sure.
Pete Wright:
You can talk about the assignment later, but I’m very excited about that. And the other thing that I’ve been working on, my secret project for the last couple of weeks — you guys, I told you weeks and weeks ago that I was going to resuscitate an old sci-fi story that I wrote years and years ago.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
I did that and I right now already have the KDP Amazon self-publishing page. The entry is in draft mode. I’m almost ready to publish my novella. That’s right. Self-publishing my novella.
Ryan Dalton:
Wow, milestone.
Pete Wright:
And it’s all because I made a promise to you, nincompoops. And I don’t think it’s very good, but I don’t care.
Mandy Fabian:
I’m not thinking that you’re going to be able to do that.
Pete Wright:
It’s done.
Kyle Olson:
Well, I think we need to come up with the name of our new imprint then. Because since we helped inspire it, I guess we need to have our own imprint.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I mean, you don’t — you’ll get a sniff but in name only. I’ll take it.
Ryan Dalton:
I mean, I feel like Nincompoop Press is right there.
Kyle Olson:
So we’ll have to work on that. Oh, yeah.
Mandy Fabian:
Nincompoop Press is absolutely — yeah.
Ryan Dalton:
I mean, you said it, Pete.
Kyle Olson:
And that does track with how my business has gone for my career.
Pete Wright:
I did, I own it. It’s mine. Yes.
Kyle Olson:
So that’s always —
Pete Wright:
Don’t worry, Kyle. In your honor, I won’t put my name on it. Too soon? Too soon. All right, Mandy, what do you got? You directed a commercial.
Mandy Fabian:
I did, and I actually got to see a first cut and it was really fun. They’re not gonna run me out of town, I guess, is what I’m saying.
Pete Wright:
That’s outstanding.
Pete Wright:
They still won’t give you a credit card, but they will not run you out of town.
Mandy Fabian:
Well, that’s because I’m a woman.
Mandy Fabian:
That doesn’t have anything to do —
Ryan Dalton:
Wait, can you own property yet?
Pete Wright:
Can you at least — oh my God.
Mandy Fabian:
Yeah. No, but my husband is working on it.
Pete Wright:
Can you tell us the product that you’re pitching? Do you know?
Mandy Fabian:
Oh, yes.
Pete Wright:
Do you remember?
Mandy Fabian:
Mm-hmm.
Pete Wright:
Okay.
Mandy Fabian:
It was called Freely, which is an app where all of the free television is, but all in one place.
Kyle Olson:
Ah, okay.
Mandy Fabian:
Yep.
Pete Wright:
Oh.
Mandy Fabian:
So if you had Tubi and whatever the other free — all I can think of at the moment — Tubi, Freevee, all that stuff.
Kyle Olson:
Got it. Yep. Freevee, I think it was.
Pete Wright:
Tubi, Freevee — they’re all in Freely.
Mandy Fabian:
It would be all the things. It’s the UK’s version of Freely, but there’s also football, aka soccer, as you know. And that’s gonna be running during the World Cup. So a lot of drunk people are gonna be talking loudly over my commercial.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Over your commercial.
Mandy Fabian:
I’m really — yes.
Pete Wright:
I can’t wait.
Kyle Olson:
Behind all the football chants, they’ll be able to see your visuals go by.
Mandy Fabian:
That’s right, that’s right.
Ryan Dalton:
That makes me flash back to some of my last days when I was in the corporate world. My last manager was German. And I had encountered a meme that said the top was how Americans see British people, and it was a professor with glasses and a pipe and a library. And the bottom was how other Europeans see the British. And it was a guy passed out in a gutter. And I sent that to my boss and I was like, is that true? And he just responded, yes.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, this is right.
Pete Wright:
All right, Kyle, what do you got?
Kyle Olson:
I got a chance to be part of a 24-hour playwriting festival. I got the prompt on Friday and it got performed on Saturday. But it happened just a couple of days before we’re recording here, so I thought it would be fun to share the experience I went through. So I’ve sent it out to my fellow hosts. And so we’re going to do our own little read. So I will save the conversation about how it went and what I did until next episode. A little teaser for next time. But it was very, very fun.
Mandy Fabian:
Yeah, it’s exciting.
Pete Wright:
I can’t wait.
Pete Wright:
Has anybody else done their assignment yet? Or is it just me, first in the front of the class?
Kyle Olson:
It was only a couple days ago, I mean.
Mandy Fabian:
You are the star A student, Pete.
Pete Wright:
Anybody? That’s what I wanted. That’s what I wanted.
Mandy Fabian:
Nailed it, man.
Kyle Olson:
A-plus.
Mandy Fabian:
I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I will, because there’s nothing I love more than doing something besides what I’m supposed to be doing.
Kyle Olson:
That’s right.
Ryan Dalton:
Gotta get that laundry done before you do this project and clean things that are already clean, all that.
Mandy Fabian:
That’s right.
Kyle Olson:
It’s a little bit on the side.
Pete Wright:
All right, Dalton, what’s the latest?
Ryan Dalton:
Well, I continue to write murder.
Pete Wright:
Yes, you do.
Ryan Dalton:
Since we last spoke and I wrote my first murder scene, I have since written two other murder scenes, and I feel like they have also gone pretty well, at least for first draft.
Kyle Olson:
Except for the victims, of course.
Pete Wright:
Right, right. You’re now three for three on bad days.
Ryan Dalton:
They’re not around to comment though. And some of which are likable, some of which are not, none of which so far have deserved it. Which to me only makes it more fun.
Ryan Dalton:
So yeah, continue with that. And when we’re done here today, I will continue with more.
Ryan Dalton:
And then just this morning I was actually doing something sort of creative adjacent. I’m always collecting music for book soundtracks and things, just stuff that I think could be useful. One of the types of music that I tend to collect is, especially if you go on YouTube, you will find lots of YouTube musicians that will take themes from kind of geek-oriented movies and TV shows, and they will sort of remix and reimagine them as epic versions. So they’ll just pump them up, which can be great for certain scenes.
But now as I’m sort of coming out of allergy season, feeling better and getting back in the gym, I also want better music for the gym. So I’ve taken some of the most bombastic superhero themes that were epicified, and I’m putting them in a superhero exercise playlist to go to the gym.
Ryan Dalton:
So anyone here in Phoenix, if you go to the gym and there’s a guy running flat out on the treadmill just screaming, that’s probably me listening to this amazing epic music mix.
Pete Wright:
I just want to take a step back and say I wonder how many people’s entire creative rhythm is based on their allergy schedule, because that slays me.
Kyle Olson:
And we had a hot spring — came early and something bloomed and everybody went kinda like —
Pete Wright:
Yeah. It’s brutal.
Ryan Dalton:
No, no, Kyle.
Kyle Olson:
Denise was down for the week because of how bad it was.
Ryan Dalton:
Kyle, something’s bloomed.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, oh yeah.
Ryan Dalton:
And it’s the worst allergies I’ve ever had in my life.
Ryan Dalton:
And where I live now in the valley, I’ve heard it described — someone told me once, look, during allergy season, what happens here is the wind funnels all of the allergens down into the center of the bowl of this valley, and that’s where I live. And so it was a rough couple of months and I’m starting to emerge and feel human again, which feels great.
Mandy Fabian:
Oh God.
Mandy Fabian:
See, I’m allergic to exercise, and it’s been a painful struggle for my whole — yeah.
Pete Wright:
It’s really hard. Heard. Heard.
Mandy Fabian:
It’s a daily — it’s not a seasonal thing, it’s year-round.
Pete Wright:
It’s every day.
Pete Wright:
What a great segue. Allergies into what I would like to begin our conversation with today. Because how many times do I wake up in the morning feeling like crap and just say, okay, it’s clearly not allergies because surely I would never get allergies? It’s always allergies.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about this from the creative perspective. That creative brain, the brain that’s constantly lying to us. I don’t know, I’m probably alone. I didn’t check with any of you guys before, so maybe no one understands this. And I guess that would be okay. It’ll just be me putting my heart out on the podcast table and we’ll just see what happens.
Kyle Olson:
While we laugh at you.
Ryan Dalton:
You’re the only one, Pete, who experiences this.
Kyle Olson:
It’s just you.
Pete Wright:
Dalton, don’t you start with me. You know you’re my antagonist in this because you never have anything wrong with you, and we’re gonna try to litigate that further today. So today I want to talk about necessary fictions to begin. The lies that work, the lies that wreck you, and the ones you are still telling yourself right now that get you through the day. What is the lie that gets you out of bed and into the work?
Ryan Dalton:
I can kick us off. When you asked for this, something immediately came to mind. And that is: once this project is done, you can take a break.
Mandy Fabian:
Yeah.
Pete Wright:
That’s a good one.
Ryan Dalton:
That rarely happens.
Pete Wright:
Oh my God.
Ryan Dalton:
I have too many ideas. I have too many things I want to do. It’s rare that I’m not working on something or multiple somethings. I mean, once in a while I’ll hit a wall and I’ll have to take a few days and do nothing but read or paint.
Ryan Dalton:
But more often than not, I’ve got some project moving forward at any given point in my life. And mostly I love that. There are times it’s exhausting, of course. I’d mentioned before in another episode how because of a sleep disorder I’ve dealt with, I felt like I sort of lost a decade. So now, even years later, I still love that I have not just the drive, but the ability to work on all the things that I want to work on. So I tend to embrace it. But then I also sometimes will just smash into a wall and be like, okay, I have to be done for a couple of days for sanity and just to refill the tank.
Pete Wright:
And that’s the thing — I totally relate to that, and you don’t see it coming, right? I feel like I’m on fire, on fire, on fire, right up until I am exactly not.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, when fingers touch keyboard and nothing comes out.
Mandy Fabian:
It’s hard.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, nothing comes out.
Ryan Dalton:
Yeah, that’s happened where I’ve sat and gotten ready, gone through the whole ritual of getting ready for a writing session, and then I’ll sit and be like — oh. It’s just an echoing void right now. I got nothing.
Pete Wright:
All I can hear is echoes.
Kyle Olson:
There’s a reason we got Wall as a sponsor at one point because we’ve spent a lot of time together.
Pete Wright:
All I hear is echoes of superhero theme songs. Why is that? Kyle, what do you got?
Kyle Olson:
I had the good fortune to meet one of my all-time favorite writers before he left this mortal coil. And that was actually someone who is much more revered in the land where you currently reside, and that’s Terry Pratchett.
Pete Wright:
Ugh.
Kyle Olson:
The Discworld series is massively popular there. Here, not so much. But there are some diehards. But while he was on tour, he came out and happened to come to the Twin Cities to promote his new book, and so I got to meet him and I got an autograph. And there’s a couple things that he said that I will — I wish I could remember all of it verbatim because of course there’ll never be another moment like that. But there’s a couple things that he said that I have kept with me the entire time.
And one of the things was, as he did the Q&A, somebody raised their hand and said, what is your favorite book that you’ve ever done? And he said, the next one.
Mandy Fabian:
Oh.
Kyle Olson:
And I’ve always went, oh yeah, yeah.
Kyle Olson:
And so every time — that’s the lie I always tell myself. Every time I sit down, I’m like, this is going to be the best thing I have ever written. And I firmly believe it. Sometimes I look back and go, oh, really? That? But when I sit down, yeah.
Pete Wright:
My track record is terrible.
Kyle Olson:
I got some corpses. There’s some that are in unmarked graves. But every time I sit down to actually finish this thing out, I think, this is it. I’ve taken everything I’ve ever learned in my life. This is going to pour it into here. This is going to be the greatest thing I’ve ever written.
Mandy Fabian:
I have two lies. I hope you’ll indulge me. One is super embarrassing and silly, and let’s just get this out of the way.
Pete Wright:
Of course.
Mandy Fabian:
The first big, big lie is I actually think about, man, if I sell this thing for the kind of money that I think I’m gonna sell it for — I actually start to imagine a summer home. I mean, I look at people who have achieved that kind of thing and I think all about how I’m gonna relieve any financial woes, really set my family up for success, legacy wealth, if I can just sell my self-help book that I’m writing for my daughters.
So that’s the first lie that I tell myself. But I need it, and I’m not gonna hear any argument against it unless that’s what we’re doing next.
Pete Wright:
Of course.
Mandy Fabian:
But my second lie — actually Kyle, I didn’t even realize I was lying to myself about this until you just said what you said. Because that is such a clean, beautiful line: the best thing I ever write is gonna be the next one.
Kyle Olson:
Mm-hmm.
Mandy Fabian:
And I realized in that moment, oh no, my big lie is it’s okay to work on four things at once.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Mandy Fabian:
That’s my lie.
Pete Wright:
Oh my God.
Mandy Fabian:
Boy, is that a dirty, dirty lie.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. Creative polyamory is not for everyone.
Pete Wright:
Oh boy, that’s gross. The way you put that just now is gross.
Kyle Olson:
Well, there’s always somebody who’s not happy in the situation.
Pete Wright:
I have mine. I don’t know how to characterize it because both of you have just said things that are creative expansionist ideas, right? The next one’s gonna be my best one. And I’m gonna buy a summer home because it’s gonna be so successful. And mine is, you might say, the opposite of that. In order for me to keep plowing through, I have to say loud and repeatedly, it’s okay. Nobody’s ever gonna read it.
Kyle Olson:
Oh, wow.
Pete Wright:
Nobody’s ever gonna see it. That helps me get stuff done. And I think I’ve just at least uncovered the sharp edge of my brokenness compared to you three.
Ryan Dalton:
It’s sort of the Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide approach. No one’s gonna read it anyway, so —
Pete Wright:
It really is.
Kyle Olson:
Well, it’ll all end in disaster.
Kyle Olson:
What does it matter?
Mandy Fabian:
I understand that. I think I mentioned it earlier in the season. I do have a little bit of that. When I make something, it’s like I leave it in a field like an animal that’s defecated and then I run away.
Pete Wright:
Yes.
Mandy Fabian:
It didn’t happen. I understand that kind of like, I’m gonna make it, but it doesn’t matter what happens.
Kyle Olson:
Well, so Pete, you have a drawer of shame and Mandy has a litter box.
Mandy Fabian:
I can’t be attached to any outcome.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Mandy Fabian:
It’s more like a pile in a field.
Pete Wright:
Two for two on really gross ways to look at things, Kyle.
Kyle Olson:
Okay, okay.
Pete Wright:
Two for two.
Kyle Olson:
I’m just nailing the analogies today.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, no, really. Those hit home.
So that’s the entire purpose of today’s conversation — the lies, the things that we tell ourselves to do work, to create work, about who’s watching or listening or reading our work. And how our lies are perceived writ large by our community. And we’re gonna talk about the audience in our heads while we are creating, but first we gotta go to that sponsor.
Ads:
Begin text to voice. Sarah, I heard the last commercial and it was unacceptable. The Coalition of Procrastinators is having a hard enough time being taken seriously. You need to check the final file before you send it out. Maybe we can blame the intern. Here’s the scratch track for timing the new spot. We want to send our severe apologies for our previous ad. An unfinished version was sent in error. In our defense, it was on time. We’re the Coalition of Procrastinators. Our goal is to help creatives who have trouble meeting their deadlines. You can learn more by visiting — oh, crap. Where did I put the website info? Did we get the .com or is it still .fun? Replace this file with the final one from the voice actor. I am counting on you, Sarah. Do not fork this up again. End text to voice.
Ryan Dalton:
Oh, carp.
Pete Wright:
I can’t believe they’re back.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. I think maybe we should start screening their stuff before we put them on, but we sort of ran out of time.
Pete Wright:
Oh my God. Yeah, they need an editor.
Mandy Fabian:
Please promise me that for Sweeps Week you will be selling t-shirts with the Coalition of Procrastinators.
Mandy Fabian:
Please, I must own that t-shirt. I must.
Kyle Olson:
Well, last time I went to their website, it still says coming soon, so —
Ryan Dalton:
I think it says coming soon, right?
Mandy Fabian:
God, that’s fantastic.
Pete Wright:
All right, y’all. I want you to think about the last time you were really deep in a project. Not just starting a project, not the end of a project, but the middle, that messy private sort of middle where no one can see you yet. Who were you making it for? Not your actual audience. I’m really talking about the person living in your imagination while you worked.
Because I don’t make things for an abstract crowd. I am thinking about someone specific, usually. And maybe it’s a mentor, maybe it’s a critic, maybe it’s a version of myself when I was 16 years old, someone I loved, someone I cared deeply about, someone who doubted me. That person, that imaginary audience of one, is quietly shaping every decision we make. So I would love if we could name ours today. Who is in the room with you when you make things?
Mandy Fabian:
That’s a really good question. I heard the Brene Brown TED Talk about vulnerability and shame. Don’t worry, this is not gonna be a big downer. But one of the things that really resonated for me was what she talked about — being open and honest, not being a downside to a personality, but being something that every person has and therefore it should be nourished, acknowledged. Being vulnerable is not a bad thing.
And I get so vulnerable in the middle of a project because it’s just gonna take everything I have to get through it. The sparkle’s gone. The dreams of the summer home are probably fading. And I’m excited about finishing, but I’m nowhere near that ramp up of — oh my God, it’s all going — endings are beautiful, man. I’m usually on such a roll I can’t stop writing. It’s that middle mucky part that is just…
So I often — and again, this is probably a lie or some sort of noblesse that I give myself — but I think about people who are vulnerable, because typically I’m writing something that says something that I want to say, right? Either something about a relationship or about the world at large through a character story. So I typically think about the person that needs to hear it, needs to see somebody being weird or having this conversation or this moment. That’s literally what I do. I think about a person who needs to see this vulnerability and this weak spot. And I guess I sort of write to that person, which might be an extension of myself.
Pete Wright:
But they don’t have an identity. You’re not looking at them. They’re just fungible depending on what you’re creating.
Mandy Fabian:
When I was 16 and doing comedy, I would do comedy for big crowds and I loved not being able to see the audience’s faces. I loved communicating in that way. And I think I still have this “do it for them” feeling. When you know that you’re offering something and it’s being received, but you can’t see their faces, but you just feel the energy. I think I create that energy for the person that needs this moment. So I don’t really have a specific person.
There have been times, though — I do this a lot — where I write about something that is a true story. And then I’m usually constantly thinking about the person whose story it is or who was involved in that story and wondering what they’re going to think about it.
Pete Wright:
Thinking about them.
Mandy Fabian:
And that’s a more devious, less noble inspiration in those moments.
Pete Wright:
Diabolical. Do you just check the doors?
Mandy Fabian:
Oh yeah, yeah.
Pete Wright:
You check the doors and make sure they don’t come in.
Mandy Fabian:
Hurtful. Yeah.
Pete Wright:
There are no tickets to the — yeah.
Mandy Fabian:
Again, Pete, no one’s gonna see this.
Pete Wright:
No one’s gonna see this, Mandy.
Mandy Fabian:
No one’s ever gonna see it.
Pete Wright:
You’ve got it.
Ryan Dalton:
Full circle.
Pete Wright:
God. Yeah. All right, Kyle, who’s your avatar?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah — so we were talking about how all the energy just disappears when you get three-fourths of the way through. And I had the same thing of going, why did you think you could do this? This is the worst thing you’ve ever done. Where was all that excitement before? This is awful. But that’s that thing of just having to plow through.
A lot of that becomes those truisms like someone half as talented as you is working twice as hard. And so whenever I get to that point, I tend to think the opposite: I have seen some terrible things. I have seen some terrible written shows and everything. And as bad as this might end up being, it’s gonna be so much better than that. And so that little bit of spite will then get me further along towards that point where you can see the end now, and then it’s the straight drop downhill to the end of the roller coaster ride. But that’s the grit in the wheels to get up that hill — oh, this is still gonna be better than a lot of the crap that I had to sit through.
Mandy Fabian:
I love that.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah. That’s what I need. But for the avatar question, I don’t want this to be a cop-out answer, but it is honest. I don’t have one, because it’s usually situational.
Because when I’m writing a play, I’m thinking about the audience the whole time, because there are different ways of doing stuff that you would do with a screenplay versus a stage play versus an audio drama. So when I’m doing a play, I usually think about the physical space that it’ll be in or the approximate that I know of. I’ve been to most of the theaters sort of around here, so I kind of have an idea of what it would be. Big house, small house. You kind of have to adjust a little bit because you can’t be doing things that are too intimate when you know it’s gonna be a giant space and there’s gonna be tons of stuff around. You have to feel that way. So I am thinking about the audience and what they’re seeing versus what they can’t see.
Many have talked about that too — you can cut to a close-up of an actor and you get all of it, but on a stage they’re very, very far away, so you have to do a very different thing.
But when it comes to audio drama, that’s all me, baby. I am the audience because I have no idea who’s going to be listening to it. I’m only trying to please myself because I have no idea if anyone’s ever going to listen. Voice out in the wilderness. I release stuff all the time and then never hear anything back. And so I have to be the audience, the creator and audience, as far as I know. And after it goes out, I have no idea where it goes.
Because the thing that is different — and this is gonna lead us to Ryan Dalton — is that Mandy and I are blueprintists. We write screenplays, we write scripts. Our job’s only half done. Even for Jess Plus None, which obviously came out and is available now — find it on your streaming service of choice — I would say probably your screenplay, maybe a hundred people ever read it. For a published play, I’d say maybe twelve people in the world have ever read it.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Kyle Olson:
And it could be performed around the world and it would still only have maybe 20 people who ever read it. Just because the cast reads it — I’ve done shows that have run once and they’re done. So I wrote it. The director, the cast read it, and that was it. I’ve sold out houses, a hundred-seat theater, 20 shows, and so maybe a thousand people have seen it, but only 20 people ever read it.
Mandy Fabian:
It’s wild.
Kyle Olson:
So that’s the weird part — even when it’s done, it’s still sort of the shadow of what you’re going to see down the line. So yeah, it’s really hard to have that sort of one person when you know that’s the situation.
Pete Wright:
That’s fascinating.
Pete Wright:
Okay. So far we’re zero for two on my supposition here. Dalton, tell me you got something. Are you gonna be redemptive to this whole line of inquiry?
Ryan Dalton:
I’m never redemptive, Pete.
Pete Wright:
Damn it, team. Totally Daltoned me again.
Ryan Dalton:
My answer is a mix. It does change situationally. For each scene, one of the things I think when I go into creating it is: what do I want the reader to feel? That’s a nebulous general audience. But that’s one of my main questions because I really want to nail the emotion I want them to experience, both during the scene and at the end of the scene. Because I’m also thinking — I try to write things so that the end of a scene and especially the end of a chapter is structured so that it really beckons them to continue reading. The kind of, oh man, just one more chapter, and then suddenly it’s 2 a.m. kind of thing.
So there’s a nebulous general audience that I do write for. When I’m really deep in the thick of writing, really immersed in the world and the story, my audience is actually the characters themselves. They are living, breathing people, and they’re real to me in the moment. So what’s happening is happening both to and for them. It’s a little bit of a meta thing where the story folds in on itself. And I’m also doing this for the characters.
Sometimes, kind of like Kyle said, I am the audience. If it’s something that I think is funny, something that makes me laugh, then I may put it in just for me, not caring if anybody else responds to it or gets the reference. It’s something that is there because it pleases me.
There may also be veiled references to things that I love. In every single book I’ve written, there is at least one reference to Firefly. It may be a subtle nod to past books of mine, which kind of hits the joy button for me, but also is a reward for readers that have read all of my stuff.
Like in my superhero series, just randomly I dropped in a scene where they’re kind of looking at some artifacts — sort of a reliquary that the heroes keep. And there’s one item in there that is from my time travel series that I do not explain or anything. It’s just sitting there. And anyone who’s read the time travel series would know exactly what it is.
Kyle Olson:
I do the same thing for my fan scripts on AO3 too. I have an inner continuity of stuff, and so I will make references back even if they’re not connected just to see if anybody’s paying attention.
Ryan Dalton:
Right. Yeah, it’s just so much fun. And I have had people come back to me and be like, oh, it was that thing from the other thing. And that’s a nice little pop of, oh — a little payoff. But yeah, whoever the audience is is sort of situational.
Pete Wright:
First of all, as an aside, I love that story. It makes me think of one of my very favorite movies of all time that many people don’t understand, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension.
Kyle Olson:
I was thinking of the same thing, yeah.
Kyle Olson:
The watermelon.
Pete Wright:
Do we all know the watermelon story? What’s that watermelon doing there? I’ll tell you later. Anybody?
Mandy Fabian:
I don’t know that story.
Pete Wright:
It’s a fantastic story. They were making the movie, cutting it together, and they were getting a lot of notes from the studio, and then they suddenly stopped getting notes and they kind of wanted to make sure they were still watching or test to see if they were still watching dailies. So they threw this scene that makes no sense into the movie. There’s two characters walking by, there’s a watermelon on a shelf, and one of them says, “What’s that watermelon doing there?” And the other guy says, “I’ll tell you later.” And there you have it. It made it into the movie. Nobody was paying attention.
Mandy Fabian:
Oh my God.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. I love how all three of you are sort of approaching this with the circumstantial approach to your audience avatar. Except for Kyle, who when he’s making audio sits alone in his office and pleasures himself.
Kyle Olson:
Yep.
Pete Wright:
And for me, I think more often than not, it’s a specific person. It’s a person that I grew up with. For me, it’s a former teacher, his name was Chris Lowell. He was my French teacher and also the theater director in our high school theater department. As a French teacher, he was incredibly competent and a dick.
And my junior year, I auditioned for a play he was directing. It was a Jean Anouilh play, Ring Round the Moon, and he saw my audition and thought I could play twins in a very complicated play and had a lot of faith in me. And I realized, there’s a relationship we’re gonna build here. And it turns out we were lifelong buddies. We ended up staying in contact well beyond high school.
He ended up being a Ben Franklin live historian performer and traveled around the world. He did a residency at Versailles as Ben Franklin in French.
Ryan Dalton:
Wow.
Pete Wright:
The dude was talented.
Pete Wright:
And I find — he passed away, I don’t know, probably eight years ago now — but I find if I can make my headcanon version of Chris Lowell laugh or cry or smile or nod or just say, yeah, I don’t get it, then I feel like I’ve done something. I have this meter in my head. It’s the LOL meter. And if I can make him just nod along, then I’m okay.
Pete Wright:
It’s a real dude. Well, it’s a real imaginary dude who’s sitting in my head.
Mandy Fabian:
Not at all. I think that’s really cool that you have that. I think it would maybe change the tone of what I’m writing.
Mandy Fabian:
One of the things I have done is, if I’m in love with an actor, I have absolutely —
Kyle Olson:
Oh, yes, yes.
Mandy Fabian:
If you have an actor in mind and you imagine that actor reading it, then the comedy is in their tone, the character’s written so they could execute it beautifully.
Ryan Dalton:
Oh yeah. The rhythm is there, yeah.
Mandy Fabian:
So that is, I would say, an audience. It’s an audience for them. Like, are they gonna read this at some point? And if so, I want it to be as good as I think they are.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, ’cause Jane Espenson was talking about this when she was talking about writing these miniature films and stuff too and saying the way Sandra Bullock delivers a joke is different than the way that Angelina Jolie would deliver a joke. And so you have to adjust for the person.
So yeah, I love doing actor passes. Once people have been cast, going through and going, oh, okay, I know this now, and let me make it so it’s gonna be much more in your wheelhouse as opposed to trying to push them into whatever vision I had in my head. Yeah, that’s always great.
And even — I think probably Dalton’s gonna say you can have a character and you can have them be played by an actor as you write them.
Ryan Dalton:
I cast all my major characters, yeah.
Pete Wright:
And why are they all Joel McHale?
Ryan Dalton:
Yeah. Half Joel McHale, the other half are Meryl Streep. She can do anything.
Mandy Fabian:
Anything, yeah. Even the Joel McHale parts.
Pete Wright:
Even the Joel McHale parts.
Ryan Dalton:
Yeah, it’s Joel McHale as played by Meryl Streep. It’s really meta and it’s great.
Pete Wright:
That’s how they did Assassination Nation, I think. Oh, dark pick. Hey, this has been really fun, and now we need to step away and do another sponsor.
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Pete Wright:
That was so beautiful.
Kyle Olson:
And you were already thinking about the person.
Pete Wright:
I was already thinking about it and now he was walking on those clouds.
Ryan Dalton:
That actually ties back into the audience, because as you were talking about that, Pete, it made me think — there is someone that I don’t really consider part of an audience, but I do think about.
I think I’ve mentioned her once before in season one, but my main teacher in eighth grade, kind of my homeroom teacher — I remember her being the first teacher who really read some of my stuff and was like, you could for real do this. And it was the first teacher I can remember that was so supportive.
I stayed in touch with her when I was through high school because she moved up to teaching high school at the place that I was at. And so whenever I would write things, I would always bring them to her.
And I have thought plenty of times, I would love to be able to find her and be like, hey, I actually did it. But she is a ghost online, so I can’t find her. But I do have in the back of my head, at some point, oh, wouldn’t it be fun if she showed up at a signing or something?
Pete Wright:
Well, that’s beautiful. And hopefully not like mine — dead.
Ryan Dalton:
Well, it’s been a few years since I’ve talked to her, so I don’t know. Really.
Pete Wright:
I just want to say, in defense of myself, Chris Lowell would have loved that bit.
Mandy Fabian:
Well, there’s your audience.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, he’s my audience. All right, I’d like to have a little conversation that I like to call Guilty or Not Guilty. Here’s how this is gonna work. I assigned you all to bring a rule, a creative commandment in your field that you violate or have violated or violate endlessly. You’re gonna tell us all this rule. You’re gonna tell us your crime. And before we vote, you have to make the case against yourself. You have to argue that you are wrong in violating this rule, that the rule existed for a reason, and you broke it anyway, like an anarchist. And then we get to vote, and we’ll tell you whether, no, you’re okay, or if your shame is earned. All right. Mandy, what do you got?
Mandy Fabian:
Okay, well everything I’ve done is truly stupid, so there’s no way you’re ever gonna tell me that I was right to do this. The biggest one that I broke was not putting stars in a film. You cast a celebrity in a movie. That is what makes people interested in it.
Now, I know some of you softies are gonna say, but what if the actors are really talented and if the script is good enough? Which it probably is. If it’s a good story, it wants to be made. That’s fine. But when you’re making something like a feature film, you need to be able to put it someplace and people need to be able to watch it. And it’s better for the movie. It gets more eyeballs if there’s a celebrity. More festivals will pick it up. More streamers will give it the time of day. It might actually make money because those people have a built-in fan base and they might just be looking for the next thing that their favorite star is in. So yeah, don’t make a movie with the best people if they’re not the best famous people.
Pete Wright:
Wow.
Mandy Fabian:
That’s my rule.
Pete Wright:
Okay. The jury is out. I struggle with even hearing that, especially because I know Mandy’s movie that I’m sure she’s probably talking about. And it already had the world-famous, internationally famous Matt Walsh. Broadway star Rory O’Malley — how much more famous can you get than the lovely and talented Abby Miller? There are some really legitimately great names. So what counts as fame?
Kyle Olson:
From The Magicians.
Pete Wright:
May it please the court. What counts as fame if not this?
Mandy Fabian:
Well, these days in the movie business, which is struggling but is still a business, what counts as fame is — before you saw Jess Plus None, which you probably only saw because you are my friend, right? That’s how you would have heard about the project.
Pete Wright:
Liar.
Mandy Fabian:
Well, but I’m saying —
Pete Wright:
Okay, maybe I did. Yes.
Mandy Fabian:
Right.
Pete Wright:
Okay, that’s fair.
Mandy Fabian:
That was before we decided to end our disagreements and become friends. That was it.
Mandy Fabian:
No, so it would be like, hey, pass the bagels, oh my gosh, did you hear about what happened with Abby Miller? And somebody at the table of, let’s say, 10 people will go, oh my God, I love her. She was in The Magicians. You would know her by name, not by seeing the movie and going, oh, that’s the girl from The Magicians.
There’s stuff like that — recognizable face and name. And for movies specifically, again business-wise, Rory O’Malley is super, super famous for Broadway, but can’t probably mention movies and television that he’s done without looking at IMDb. And Matt Walsh is pretty niche. Veep fans know him, but he’s kind of that guy. Most people probably know his face and love his work, but only real comedy aficionados know Matt Walsh.
Kyle Olson:
That guy from that thing.
Mandy Fabian:
I know Matt Walsh because of UCB. He’s a freaking legend.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Mandy Fabian:
So it’s not like he’s not famous, but somebody who you don’t have to make that explanation. “You know the guy from Veep? You know the guy who did UCB?” That kind of thing.
Pete Wright:
Okay. Guilty or not guilty? Kyle, you have thoughts?
Kyle Olson:
I say not guilty, because the only way you get stars is by giving them chances. We have a lot of — I understand the business part of it, wanting to put a face on a poster and do it. I mean, there was that long period where Nicolas Cage was in all these things. We found out later it’s because he had a lot of debts he had to settle. But you put him in the movie, even if he’s only in for a short amount of time, and then suddenly it gets picked up by distributors and all that.
I get that. But the only way we’re going to have people for the next generation is if we give them their chance. And this is the perfect place. Why should stars have to have everything? They can appear as 11th lead in a Marvel film, but I think this is the place where you come to do some proper acting. So I say not guilty.
Pete Wright:
Dalton, guilty, not guilty?
Ryan Dalton:
Yeah, in a perfect world — and I understand that the business does have to intrude — but in a perfect world, the concept of a story would be enough to draw people. And then it could end up serving as a star maker, which I think would be ideal.
I’ll give you an example that was sort of a blockbuster movie. When Sucker Punch came out, it didn’t have — I mean it had a couple of faces that you would know from other things, not a lot of really big stars or household names. But for me, I’m a nerd for that kind of thing. So the concept is what drew me to it. Now, to be fair, the movie was garbage.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, yeah, it was. Execution — yeah.
Ryan Dalton:
Utter garbage. However, there was an antagonist character who was an actor I’d never seen before. And I remember sitting there in the theater going, this movie is trash. But that guy has something special. And I would bet I will see him again. And that was Oscar Isaac. And then a few years later, he is everywhere and everybody’s like, oh, this guy is insanely talented. And I’m like, I knew it in that crappy movie I watched because I thought the concept was cool but ended up hating. But he was the part that I was like, I’m really glad I saw what he did.
Kyle Olson:
For me it was The Girl Next Door. Just a random R-rated comedy and her boyfriend was Timothy Olyphant and I went, holy crap, who is that guy?
Ryan Dalton:
And he was so good in that role.
Kyle Olson:
And from there, the sky’s the limit. But unless someone had given him a shot — if that had been Ryan Reynolds, then we wouldn’t have Justified, we wouldn’t have Deadwood, we wouldn’t have all these things.
Pete Wright:
But Ryan Reynolds already had Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place, so he had his shot.
Kyle Olson:
That’s true, that’s true.
Ryan Dalton:
So I’m also a not guilty.
Pete Wright:
I am also not guilty. And I think that, Mandy, your subservience to capitalism is lauded, but you can let yourself off the hook. It was a great movie.
Kyle Olson:
And well cast.
Mandy Fabian:
Okay.
Pete Wright:
All right, Kyle, what’s your rule?
Kyle Olson:
So in screenplay and script writing, sort of one of the tenets they put in any of the professional books or the classes they teach is: keep yourself out of the work. You are telling the story, but you are not part of the story. Your dialogue is your character talking. Everything else has to be neutral in terms of interior things. “We open on a scene of destruction. The camera moves through…” But it’s all supposed to be very specific and general. Nothing flavored. Don’t tell the camera where it’s going to move. Don’t tell the actors how to act.
And the same thing goes for stage plays. You have to put in lighting cues and what’s on set, and the rest of it you’re supposed to keep neutral.
I don’t like to do that. And I got that from Shane Black. I read some of Shane Black’s scripts, and he will put in stuff that’s basically — like I was saying before, only maybe a dozen people will ever read it, even on a giant movie. A lot of the actors in the Avengers movies have never even read the script. So it’s only gonna be seen by a limited number of people. So I’m like, well, I’m gonna talk to these people.
He would put in stuff like — and I think it was in The Last Boy Scout — something like, “The stadium explodes with as much money as Warner Brothers will give us to use” or something. Because he’s just talking to the executive or whoever is reading it.
And so I do that stuff in my scripts all the time, even though they say it is unprofessional. But I have gotten more comments from people — actors and directors — who come up and say, that was really funny. I’ll have someone say some line that’s devastating. And for my stage direction, where it would be “he moves across stage,” I’ll just say, “Ouch.” Just to tell it a little bit.
Or I do some of those same kind of things, like, “Well, we fill the stage with as many non-speaking kids as we can get to be in this.” I like that — hey, we’re in this together. It’s just me talking to you. So I put a lot of personality into that. And maybe that’s why I’m at the level that I’m at.
Pete Wright:
Well, everybody knows you’re at the level you’re at because you don’t put your name on it, in spite of all this stuff.
Kyle Olson:
That’s true.
Pete Wright:
And see, that callback is never gonna stop giving.
Kyle Olson:
That’s true. Yeah. Well, if you search for me, you will not find me because there’s another guy who’s doing other things.
Pete Wright:
Okay. Dalton, guilty, not guilty?
Ryan Dalton:
Not guilty. I find that delightful. And this is supposed to be fun, what we’re doing. And if that makes it fun for you, man, go ahead.
Pete Wright:
I realize I said guilty, not guilty before Kyle even argued against himself. Do you have an argument for the court against yourself?
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, I mean the work is supposed to be doing the work and not you doing the work. They should be thinking about the story you’re telling, not the person who’s telling it. They shouldn’t be thinking about Kyle. They should be thinking about whoever it is that’s on stage doing the things, the story that’s being told. So every time I pop in, it’s to remind them they’re reading something and they’re not getting lost in the actual story that I’m trying to tell.
Pete Wright:
Okay. All right. Mandy, guilty, not guilty?
Mandy Fabian:
This is a very hard decision. No. Not guilty.
Mandy Fabian:
Not guilty at all. And here’s why. Yes, it’s supposed to be fun, and good writing is good writing. And you’re a good writer. So it should be in your voice and it should tickle you. And those things are what make a script pop. They read hundreds of scripts, thousands of scripts, and the more succinct and entertaining a writer can be, that only makes your script stand out.
And if you’re not a great writer and too verbose and leading them down all kinds of red herring paths because you’re being cute, then maybe you’re guilty. But good writing is good writing. And I think putting personality into it lets them know there’s a person there and it wakes them up. They feel the human connection. So not guilty.
Pete Wright:
I completely agree, and I would add that putting on a play, producing a play or making a movie — they’re collaborative sports. And what role does the screenwriter or playwright have if not to contribute the wholeness of their idea? And sometimes that wholeness is represented in non-dialogue elements, and that has to be represented in the team sport.
I think that is so valuable, and I say it’s one of the stupidest rules of the craft. I immediately thought of Shane Black when you mentioned that. He’s like an avatar of narrating his own screenplays and I love it. It makes it a better experience. So not guilty.
Kyle Olson:
I will caveat that for young writers out there — do this sparingly.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. Be good at it first.
Kyle Olson:
It’s cilantro. Just a little bit will go a long way.
Ryan Dalton:
Yeah. We should probably classify that as — it’s a rule until you learn how to write by the rules, and then you’re probably at the point where you can bend them.
Kyle Olson:
Then you can start to bend them.
Ryan Dalton:
So learn the rule first.
Mandy Fabian:
There’s a really wonderful thing I want to share with you guys.
Pete Wright:
That’s foreshadowing.
Mandy Fabian:
There’s a wonderful talk from — oh my god. Oh no, he did — Charlie Kaufman, sorry. Charlie Kaufman.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, okay.
Mandy Fabian:
I can’t believe it took me two seconds to get his name. But he has a whole speech on really bringing your voice to your work and really not giving a crap what people think. And he’s also used as the rule of, well, when you’re Charlie Kaufman, you can write that.
Kyle Olson:
You can get away with that, yeah.
Mandy Fabian:
The rest of us should try to stick to structure and characters that are likable and stories we can actually understand. But he gave a great speech on that that I’ll share with you guys and maybe you can put it in the show notes.
Pete Wright:
Yeah.
Mandy Fabian:
It’s so inspiring just for bringing joy back into your process. I’m gonna bring my voice to this.
Pete Wright:
Yeah, I love it. All right, Dalton, what’s your rule?
Ryan Dalton:
Okay. The rule is: don’t edit as you go. And the argument for it is: look, just write the first draft. Just be in the moment and write it and write whatever. It’s supposed to suck. It’s supposed to be messy. It’s supposed to need tons of fixing and be broken by the time you reach the end.
I do not write that way at all, nor have I ever written that way. Now I would file this under: if you’re a writer who likes to embrace that kind of chaos and actually feels better with that as part of your routine, great. But to me, you cannot call that a rule. You could call it a method or an approach.
But I lightly edit as I go. So when I sit down to write a chapter, I start by reading the last chapter that I finished. And not only does that re-immerse me in the story, but it allows me to catch mistakes, do little tweaks, fix little things here and there in that chapter as I go so that it’s in better shape by the time I’m done with it and ready to write the next thing.
And I really like doing that. I don’t like writing super messy first drafts that just feel like I gotta salvage them. It’s one of the reasons I outline as much as I do. And because of that, because I do so much pre-planning, my first drafts tend to be a lot cleaner and a lot farther along than a lot of authors. For me, this makes subsequent edits so much easier, so much more enjoyable, because I know I’ve already done the best that I could on that first draft. So I’m gonna go back and be able to much more easily do the best I can on all the other drafts.
I just feel like it puts me ahead of the game and makes it more enjoyable for me to do the whole process. So yeah, I basically don’t ever treat that as a rule or think it should be one.
Pete Wright:
But you, like Kyle, are terrible at arguing against yourself. You’ve made a great case about why you’re doing it, but why shouldn’t you?
Ryan Dalton:
Oh, why shouldn’t you do that? Because — well, let’s say you are especially a new writer who is struggling with your confidence and struggling to finish something. Maybe you need to just finish a project. Not a product. Ugh, product’s gross.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, gross.
Ryan Dalton:
Just to finish a project. Maybe you’ve had such a hard time really finishing something, getting it over that initial finish line to say, hey, draft one is done, and now I can go back and edit it. If that has been a problem for you, then at least at the beginning, this could be a good rule for you because it takes away the excuse of, oh, I’m polishing, oh, I’m editing, oh, I’m making sure this is good. Just sit and go until you can’t go anymore, until the story is done, and then go back and fix it. So that to me is the situation where I think if someone needs it to be a rule for them, sure, go ahead and do it.
Mandy Fabian:
May I approach the bench? I have a question for the prosecution before the jury deliberates.
Pete Wright:
Okay. Watch yourself, counselor.
Mandy Fabian:
My question is: what would you say to the perfectionist writer who goes back to tweak a chapter and spends the entire four hours of writing time just tweaking that chapter, doesn’t get to the next chapter? Is that similar to what you were addressing in your previous statement, Counselor?
Ryan Dalton:
I think as long as that’s a one-off. If you lose one writing session because you really got immersed in what you did in the previous writing session and it comes out a better product, sure. But if you’re going to spend an entire week going back and tweaking that one chapter, maybe because you’re secretly afraid of going ahead and pushing it forward to the next part, then I think that’s a good time to maybe apply that as a rule for yourself. Okay. No more editing. I’m just gonna go write the next thing.
Mandy Fabian:
Satisfied.
Ryan Dalton:
How’s that, Pete?
Pete Wright:
Okay. Yeah, no, I’m satisfied. That was good if not full-throated. It was a throated defense. I think that this one is easy to come down not guilty because it’s one of deeply personal practice, not aphorism, not axiom. And you have proven time and again that your method satisfies your need and your work product. Not guilty.
Kyle Olson:
There is a famous, possibly apocryphal story about James Joyce who was notoriously a slow writer. And so his editor visited him and said, how many words did you get down today? And he said, seven. And he said, seven? James, that’s great. At least for you. And he said, yes, but I don’t know what order they go in.
So yeah, I think it comes down to practice. For myself, I tend to pre-edit before I put the stuff down because I want to have a clean usable draft right at the start because I find my inner editor and my inner writer don’t always get along. And so if I’m activating them at the same time, then they fight and that slows things down.
But even in the panel that you were on at Phoenix FanFusion, John Scalzi was talking about drafts and stuff too, and he is a first draft writer. He was a journalist, and so he trained himself to basically have everything done on the page. So when he turns it in, he gets minimal notes back and then off it goes. Now, of course, he’s John Scalzi, but the reason he became John Scalzi is because he was John Scalzi.
And I think we’ve said his name enough now. But it comes down to what works for you. So if you find yourself, like Mandy was talking about, getting caught up in the rewriting cycle, then maybe it’s time to throw in and write with abandon. But no one size of editing fits all. So not guilty.
Pete Wright:
Not guilty. All right, I’m going last. Let’s just say, as I told you earlier, I have a passage. I’ve been working on this novella, revising a very, very old manuscript. I have this passage — not gonna tell you about it, what it is, where it lives in the book — but it is, objectively, by every craft standard I know, too long and self-indulgent and probably stops momentum cold.
And I imagine even my inner avatar, Chris Lowell, would tell me it should go. My editing brain agrees. It is still there. It has survived the edit. It has outlived entire changes in subplots. It is unkillable. My crime is: kill your darlings.
Now, the case against myself. The rule exists because we fall in love with our own delights, our own cleverness, right? Love is blind. The passage isn’t there because the story needs it, I might say to myself if I were rational. It’s there because I need it, because I wrote something that delights me and I thought it was beautiful and I want to nourish it and get credit for it. And that’s not craft, I might say, if I loathed myself. That’s ego with a semicolon.
And I’m doing it anyway. I’m keeping it anyway because sometimes the stuff that we create, even the stuff that we create selfishly or embarrassingly — it’s still mine, and it’s a thing that makes the whole piece feel like it was made by a human being and not an algorithm following rules that I didn’t make.
Kyle Olson:
And again — you’ve circled back and now you’re defending yourself instead of —
Pete Wright:
I have, I did the whole thing. That was — it’s all staged.
Ryan Dalton:
May it please the court.
Pete Wright:
I’m very organized. So kill your darlings. I do regret it sometimes, but I say that is a rule that can be defiled, and I now lay myself at the mercy of the court.
Mandy Fabian:
Well, I’m gonna say not guilty.
Mandy Fabian:
Because yeah, okay, look. With comedy, you can absolutely kill a joke by not being willing to shape it or reshape it. Or by putting a C-plus joke when you’ve got mostly A’s — you should kill that darling.
However. When there’s a thing — there was a scene in the aforementioned Jess Plus None where she says, she screams, “Nobody Fs Brian!” and then Brian comes out of the woods having heard this and is kind of like, hey, thinking maybe she will F Brian this time. And it is a moment — he looks like kind of a little lost deer and a little eager, and she’s just broken enough to maybe consider it for a second. And it’s one of my favorite unexpected moments in the movie.
And I think everyone hated it but me. But a lot of people — because the first time he comes out, people go, oh, because they feel like he just heard her say nobody Fs Brian. But I know the character, he doesn’t care about that stuff.
Anyway, the point is, I would have missed it if I cut it. Everybody told me to cut it and I was like, no. And then one person said, I kind of like it. And I was like, great, I’m keeping it. Because if I still love it, and I still see something I haven’t seen — even though it probably doesn’t work traditionally — it’s part of the movie that I wanted to make and the part of something that I haven’t seen, a little something that I liked. So I say not guilty because that is the spark and somebody else is gonna see that and go, I haven’t seen that.
Pete Wright:
Yeah. All right. I imagine Kyle and Ryan are gonna be much more mercenary on me about that.
Ryan Dalton:
Well now, I’m just a simple country lawyer. Got my law degree in a box of Cracker Jacks. But I see it depends largely on the genre and the conventions and expectations of those genres.
Ryan Dalton:
If you are writing an action epic and you stop for ten minutes for the protagonist to bake a pie because you love pies, you should probably kill that darling. However, if you were writing something more experimental, more self-indulgent, more just “this is a thing because it’s a thing, come and enjoy it,” or you established from the beginning there will be lots of asides so you should expect it — then I say go ahead, let your darlings live.
So it depends. It depends on what you are writing, Pete. So I may have to declare a hung jury.
Pete Wright:
No, my first hung jury. Kyle?
Kyle Olson:
You can take cinder blocks and you can put them in a square and put a piece of metal on the top, and that is a building. If you then move into that, it becomes a house. But it’s when you start putting your things into it and decorating it that it becomes a home. So I think if you remove that stuff, it stops being yours and starts looking like every other house on the block.
So yes, I say, if your inner thing is telling you to keep it there, then that’s the filigree that sits across the top of the mantelpiece. That is the piece of decoration that people don’t have any context for — “Oh, let me tell you the story of why that’s there.” It makes it unique and it makes it yours.
Kyle Olson:
So keep it.
Pete Wright:
I love it.
Ryan Dalton:
I would say keep it unless it’s actively undermining anything. And that could even just be undermining the rhythm. I have been a beta reader for some novels where they’ve been really trucking along nicely, really good rhythm, and I’m really involved. And then they’ll stop and do something in the middle of what should be happening in the scene. It just kills the whole momentum. And I’ll say, look, this is fine. Maybe move it somewhere else. But right here, it is destroying the rhythm of your scene.
So craft has to be considered at some point. But I do agree that you can’t remove everything unique, but there’s also a line where you need to make the uniqueness work with what you’re actually trying to have your audience experience.
Kyle Olson:
And a good trick for that is, if you really have a sentence or something you love, have it be a quote that starts the chapter. Of a fake person. Just make up a fake historian and have that be the thing that they said and hide it in there. If it’s something in the universe, you can put it wherever you want.
Ryan Dalton:
Oh, yeah.
Mandy Fabian:
Or have it be a prologue or a curtain call or a — you know.
Kyle Olson:
Or something that they’re reading. We don’t want it hidden. We want it out there.
Pete Wright:
A stage direction. What? Okay.
Pete Wright:
We’ve won creativity today, team. Thank you so much for your participation in my weird conversation about lies and liars that live in our heads. I really appreciate you all and I appreciate everybody for downloading and listening to Craft and Chaos. Make sure to send us some questions. We’ve been getting some questions that we have not addressed, and I completely forgot to address them today. So maybe those questions we will be addressing next time.
Kyle Olson:
Yeah, so you still have time to get yours in.
Pete Wright:
Yes, you still have time to get them in.
Kyle Olson:
Where can they ask those questions, Pete?
Pete Wright:
Just visit craftandchaos.fun. That’s where you go. You can click on any episode page. There’s a button. It just says submit a question. We’d love to have them. Send them in and let us know what you’re thinking about with your craft and your chaos.
On behalf of Ryan Dalton and Kyle Olson and Mandy Fabian, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you in two weeks right here on Craft and Chaos.
Kyle Olson:
Go make weird art.
Mandy Fabian:
Chaos, chaos, chaos, chaos.
