Writing Excuses 20.34: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Who
Key points: Who? What makes up a character, what makes up our experience of them? History and community, motivation and goals, stakes and fears. How do they react to things? What is our proximity to them?
[Season 20, Episode 34]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 20, Episode 34]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Deep Dive on "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Who
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] So, what we wanted to do is take this… These things that we've been talking about, the who and the way there and why the when, and take one work and look at how a single work is deploying all of these things. Last season, we took different works to represent different concepts. This season, we're taking one work, because, in reality, when you're writing, you're doing it all in a single work. We're going to start with this lens of who, and I'm just going to briefly remind you of some of the tools that we were talking about. When we were talking about the lens of who, we were talking about, like, what makes up a character, what makes up our experience of them. There's the idea of history and community, motivation and goals, what their stakes and fears are, how they react to things, and then there's also our proximity to the character. Are we looking at them in first person or third person, third person omniscient? Those are the kinds of things that we're thinking about. There's the mechanics of it, the… Which voice we're using. But there's also the… Their… Our experience of them as a person. One of the reasons that I pitched this particular book to the group, All the Birds in the Sky, is because it takes a look at our two main characters, Patricia and Lawrence, at three different points in their life. There is their childhood, when they're like six years old. Then we see them in middle school, which, as we all know, is a brutal time. And then we get to see them… Actually, I guess it's four different times. We get to see a little bit of their teenage years. And then we get to see them as adults. So, one of the things that I liked about it is that there is this opportunity to talk about who and talk about… And we see the impact of their history as we move through the book. So I think one of the questions for me for you all is, when you are thinking about how these characters move through this book, I'm taking things kind of sequentially, when we think about history and community, how is Charlie Jane using those to shape our understanding of the characters through the book?
[DongWon] I love that we're starting with the lens of who, because to me that is the primary question of this book. Right? This book, more than anything else, is a character study about a relationship between two characters. And using the time jumps is such a beautiful way for us to get a sense of how things that happen to them in early childhood influenced the adults they became and the choices that they make. Right? So, seeing these lenses evolve over time is, to me, the joy of reading this, of this deep commitment to asking questions about who are these people and why are they the way they are. Which starts with… At home… It starts with their family lives. Who are their parents, who are their siblings? And the community that they're embedded in from the very, very start.
[Howard] There's a tendency for readers to… Just because this is the character who is my point-of-view character, and because these two characters have had a moment together, as a reader who is reading a thing that the author has just given me this moment, I will inflate the importance of that moment way beyond what in the real world that moment might be like. And that's one of the reasons why I so love a point later in this book where Lawrence and Patricia are talking, and they've kind of been… They've been apart and they realize they have a very different perspective on some of the things that happened as children. As a reader, I'm like, oh, that was hugely formative, that's critically important to the rest of the book. And one of the characters is like, ah, that was just this thing I did one time. And then someone else says that was the most important thing that you… You saved my life.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] And I love that, because it grounded me in my experiences of growing up. I have memories of things that were super important to me, and the other people are like, oh, that was just a Tuesday.
[Erin] Yeah. I also think, though, one thing that I find very interesting about this book is, like, picking… What you're talking about, Howard, is like picking the moments, also, as a writer, what are the moments in your characters' lives that you choose to dramatize. And there's a moment later in the book in which… I can't remember which one of them says something like I realize that may be, like, I recontextualized my entire life through the lens of this relationship. And this entire book is that. The book actually recontextualizes their lives through the lens of this relationship. There are whole periods of their life that are really important that either get told way later, or, like the schooling part, like all the interesting parts where they were growing their separate selves, and instead, it's the moments when they are together which tell you what's the arc of the story that we're trying to read. And so, there's so many things that happen in your characters' lives that you can focus on, but this book knows what it's about, and therefore picks the specific moments that make that point.
[DongWon] Yeah. 100 percent. And then this also plays into the unreliability later in the narrative. Right? When they're young adults out in the dating world trying to build relationships, there are a couple moments that I really loved where someone would break up with the character or the character would break up with somebody. I'm thinking about this with Patricia and Kevin, I think his name was, the guy that she was seeing. Where she was like, yeah, I don't know what this relationship is. Is it a relationship? We keep trying to talk about it and not talking about it. And then he breaks up with her, being like, hey, I tried to talk to you about this so many times. You wouldn't talk to me about it. And just seeing that inversion, and… Because we have all this context of where she comes from, we understand why her communication style is like this, we understand the trauma that she went through, this like rupture she had with her best friend who was the only person who saw her, and then ran away. And just her fear of commitment makes so much sense. And being able to put us in the moment of that inversion, of her having to step back and be like, oh, no, I see it now of what happened here. I think would have been a hard trick to pull off if we'd just been in this story about adults. But because we know what her relationship with Lawrence was like as kids, we can see the echoes of that reverberating throughout that. And Lawrence's relationship with his girlfriend, that he like puts on a pedestal, which is like a little bit how he related to Patricia when they were children. And, like, all of these different elements. And it just creates all this really rich, interesting context for us to understand relationship dynamics of young twentysomethings in San Francisco in whatever era this is. I don't know. That really, really works for me.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And there's something that Patricia says when they're in their middle school years. In narrative, this was a metaphor for how it was with Lawrence, Patricia realized. He would be supportive and friendly as long as something seemed like a grand adventure, but the moment you got stuck or things got weird, he would take off. And it is… I don't know that that is necessarily true of Lawrence all the time, but I think that that is how she has assigned him in her brain. We…
[DongWon] It makes the heartbreak later makes so much sense.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other thing that struck me as I was reading was that both… Because I had read the book initially, and then I was doing a reread to prep for this. And one of the things that I was struck by was that both kids have this incredibly special moment when they're little, when they're six, where they feel… Or not six. Patricia's is when she's six, Lawrence is a little bit older. But where they feel like they belong. And that they are seen and they're understood and that they have a gift and that they are special. And then they spend the rest of their life trying to get back to that place. And that is frustrating, like watching the frustration and how that manifests and they're both… They both are pushing against it in different ways because of the… Who they are, but they're both pushing against it… Pushing against the same kind of thing.
[Erin] I think that's a really interesting lesson to maybe take from this is that… We've talked before, I believe, on the podcast about sort of essence expression, like what something is at its core versus how it's being shown in the world right now. And I think sometimes it can be really easy as you're trying to make a story or a book go forward to get really focused on expression. What is the character's goal in this moment? What are they trying to achieve, did they achieve it? Did the thing blow up? But why they are doing it is really interesting and also, like, should be really consistent, I think, or have a real reason for changing. And so I think sometimes, like, the character arc can become an arc of action as opposed to an arc of reason for action, and what's interesting about this is this book really focuses on all the things they do are, like, watching a friend, like, make the same kind of mistake, but differently. It's like if you know a friend who has a specific, like, dating habit. They date different guys, but it's like the same thing. You're like, oh, you're doing this again, but in a slightly different way.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, you learned this lesson, but not the underlying lesson.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And I think that is the thing that's really interesting to focus on, and to take away as a writer.
[Mary Robinette] There's another thing that Charlie Jane does that I thought was kind of subtle and interesting. And I will talk to you about that when we come back from the break.
[Mary Robinette] Welcome back. There's this thing that she does where there are multiple times where Lawrence and Patricia define, even though, like, one is fantasy and one is science-fiction, where they define the thing that they want is the way the other one moves through the world. So there is the example of this is I wish I could sleep for five years and wake up as a grown-up, except I would know all the stuff you're supposed to learn in high school by sleep learning. So that's a science-based solution for her problem. But then Lawrence has a magic based thing, I wish I could turn invisible and maybe become a shapeshifter. Life would be pretty cool if I was a shapeshifter. And it's the idea of, like, even though they are very different people, they are the other… They want what the other one has. And they both see the other one as you have it figured out. I wish I could have it figured out like that.
[Howard] I think one of the most powerful things that Charlie Jane accomplishes with these two characters, and it relates to what you just described, in the world building, these characters have to see the magic, see the science-fiction. And the way they are differently embedded in that universe is… I found it very, very immersive. From the first chapter, where Patricia is in the woods, I was there. And I think that's… That use of POV in order to communicate the world building was very, very well done.
[Mary Robinette] Let's actually talk about that a little bit more, because that's one of the other lenses that we use, is that proximity to the character. That's something that I think Charlie Jane plays with a fair bit through the thing, that there are places where we go omniscient and all the dialogue is reported. And then Patricia said… Not and then Patricia said. And then Patricia told him about everything that had happened. But there are other times where we do go deep into it, and we live it, and we have all the tactile experiences. What do you think about the ways that that's being manipulated?
[Dan] So, one of the things that impressed me the most about this book was the way that she was able to immediately, in one or two sentences, tell me exactly who the side characters were.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Even though we never really get close proximity to any of them. This is so focused on Patricia and Lawrence, and to a lesser degree, Theodolphus. But I remember being so delighted early on, in like the first or second chapter, when she illustrates this beautifully that both kids are messed up by their parents, and have a terrible relationship with their parents, but into completely different ways. And if I remember correctly, it's Lawrence's parents are kind of distant and don't pay a lot of attention, whereas Patricia's parents demand perfection. And we just get that in, I think, one sentence each. And it's so powerful when you immediately know exactly who these characters are, and why they are problematic for our leads.
[Erin] Well, I also wonder… It's funny, thinking about POV, like how… Like, if you were an outsider, like, looking at these parents and kids, like… There's something very childlike in the way they perceive the punishment. Like, do they really send Patricia to her room for like 18 years and only passed sandwiches under the door? Maybe they did or maybe… But that also sounds like something like a kid would say. Like, and then for like a year, I had to like only eat sandwiches with one bread. And, like, how much of that is in the POV of a child…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] And how…
[Howard] Lady, that was 15 minutes.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Exactly. You had to go to your room for half an hour. It was not like… But I don't know. Because…
[Howard] Yeah.
[Erin] We're so in the POV that we so get the other characters through this specific lens. And I think that's why they come through so clearly. Because the characters, the main characters, have such a very specific point of view on their parents or on the adults in their life that it comes through super clearly whether or not it's objectively true.
[DongWon] Well in… This goes back to the thing I was talking about earlier, in terms of the inversion around understanding what their relationship was. Because that's a tool of proximity. Right? We're zoomed in so close on each of their experiences of this relationship that we're getting this, like, 20 something I don't know how to date kind of perspective.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] And we're embedded in that until suddenly we get that revelation, and then we zoom out. Right? Everything just sort of snaps into focus in this relationship in a very cinematic way where we can look back on the relationship that's been described to us and then, like, oh, yeah, that is how she's been treating that guy, or oh, yeah, he's doing this thing to her, and her experiences of what the hell is happening the entire time. Right? And so I think that is such a masterful use of proximity and creates this feeling that I couldn't shake throughout the book where I wasn't, like, experiencing characters, but, like, I was like, oh, these are like my friends, was this feeling that I had throughout, which was, like, an interesting sensation, and they felt like people I was in community with rather than people I was learning about. And I think it is a little bit of that, trying to parse the thing that your friend is telling me, they were like complaining about their relationship, and you're like, but this is your fault, though? You know what I mean?
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Like that little bit of a thing, of trying to be like figure out how to help your friend, and I'm doing that same math with like how to help Lawrence with this situation? How do I get him to chill out about this girl that he's dating so that he doesn't ruin it? And you're like, my gosh, he's going to ruin it. And the only way he's going to figure it out is by ruining it. So…
[Erin] And, it's funny, is I also see this about the entire world. So we'll probably talk about this more in one of the other lenses, but what I think is so… What I found really interesting and what I highlighted the most in this entire book were all of the horrible things that were happening in the world…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] That were asides to the characters' lives. They're like, and then that thing in Haiti, and… I don't know, the thing and the heat and the… And they would just mention it among, like, things that were impacting… They're like, I can't go on a date here because, like, I have to remember to not flush the toilet because of that water crisis…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Back to my date. And so, it's so hyper focused in some ways on their own lives as we all are, that they let the broader parts of the world, which we mostly get in omniscient kind of asides go, until they cannot let it go anymore because it intrudes on their worlds.
[DongWon] The one that really stuck out to me was in the moment where Patricia and Lawrence are like, finally, like connected and they're in the middle of that sex scene… That's very intense and we're in their experience. There's a sideline about the, like, and on the television they're talking about how superstar whatever the name of the star was obliterates half of the East Coast. And I went, damn, that's a really broad way to phrase that. And then forgot about it, because of the intensity of this scene. And then she gets the call that her parents are, like, trapped and dying in this, like, thing. And it's like, oh! Obliterate was used literally and intentionally. They just weren't observing this catastrophe that was happening outside their window. And it's like you feel the heartbreak of experiencing joy while the world is falling apart around you.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And that is… Again, that use of coming in and back out again.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] With the proximity is so interesting. Before we wrap up, I did want to touch about the motivations and goals and the stakes and fears, because… And I realize that I am wrapping like three lenses all into one…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But it informs the way they are reacting through the whole book. How much do you think their motivations, goals, stakes, fears are set up in the beginning and consistent through the book, and how much do you think they change?
[Howard] Um… In the beginning of the book, these were kids who were trying to figure out how to interact with the world, how to survive the world, and they arrived at two completely different toolsets. By the middle of the book, I feel like they've both figured out the world is broken and there are things that they can be doing to help. And they have completely different toolsets. And the fact that they have different toolsets and blind spots… The inability to see what someone else's toolset might provide leads to the conflict at the end where these two characters, who are both the good guys, are each other's antagonists.
[Mary Robinette] All right. I think what you said about how they… One of the things for me was that they… It sets up that they are trying to survive N, and that that's something that they are constantly trying to do. But in the early part of the book, because they are children, their reactions are not how do I survive this thing that is happening to me. And that as we progress through, their reaction becomes how can I influence things so that those things don't happen to me or anyone else again?
[DongWon] I think my one critique of the book, or my major critique of the book, I think comes to some of the stakes questions. Right? Because we have these world stakes in terms of the world is getting worse, and we have this sort of tech bro attitude of, like, I can save the world, in which… The Sam Bankman-Fried kind of perspective…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Which we've seen the flaws of. And we have this other perspective from her coming from this more holistic magical thing. Sometimes that felt a little… Like, there's a version of this book that I would have really enjoyed which is a contemporary realist novel about these two kids growing up and then living in San Francisco and experiencing this tension that is really core of what's going on in this city and has been going on in this city, especially when this book was written. And so sometimes, I felt a little disconnected to me from the supernatural state. Right? Because we have this thing where the tree at the beginning of the book asks this question, and that it establishes as a major stake. We have the AI that he builds in the closet. That's established as a major stakes. And so by the time those two things come back in, I've been thinking about them this whole time, and kind of wondering where they are, and knowing in the back of my mind that those are the stakes that are going to matter at the end of the day. But there a little disconnected from the moment to moment action. Right? And, like… They are connected to the characters motivations in that they are central to the questions that they are interested in in terms of conductivity, community, helping people, in terms of Patricia, and these technological solutions and sort of abstract ideas in terms of Lawrence. But in the specificity of those two things which are important for the end, they disappear for a very long time. But because they're highlighted at the very beginning, I never forgot about them. So there was a little bit of friction around the stakes of the story in that way. Even though the emotional stakes were so well rendered and so established, the plot stakes felt… I felt a gap…
[Howard] I agree. I look at that problem and I think, dang it, Charlie Jane Anders wants me to read smarter than I want to read.
[DongWon] Yeah. I think that's true in so many ways. What I loved about the way the character interaction works in this book feels very queer to me in a specific way, because it is about holding empathy and understanding for the characters, while also holding them accountable for the things that they're doing. Which is a thing I think we strive for in the queer community. I think we strive for it in a lot of communities, but it's a thing that I observed, and something about the way the dy… Social dynamics work and the way the characters talk to each other felt so familiar to me in a certain way that I really appreciated about this book. Because I think she is asking a lot of us to hold in our heads, here's who this character was as a child, here's who this character is now, and keep that empathy, while also holding them accountable.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled] So what's interesting, and I see that Dan has something…
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] That he wants to say, but I'm just going to slip this in. One of the things that I particularly liked about the tree and the AI was that both of them were things that would be explained away as childhood make-believe. Because I remember Eliza, the computer, and the way ChangeMe is described at the beginning does not seem any different than Eliza. Right? But they are pretending that she's… That this is real and this is… And so I liked the tension.
[DongWon] For the context, Eliza's one of the first chatbots which was used… Claimed to be used as a therapeutic tool because it was responding in a humanistic way, but it is just canned responses.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, it's just… Yeah.
[DongWon] So… Wish [garbled]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, ChatGPT. That it gives the illusion of intelligence, but it isn't actually intelligent. The thing that happened to her as a child could have been a dream that she had.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And so I liked that… You describe it as stakes, but for me it falls back into the history thing. It's that there's an imaginary friend that they both had that is shaping a lot of the decisions that they make. But then it turns out maybe not so imaginary.
[Dan] Yeah. So, I'm glad you brought up critique. Full disclosure, I did not love this book. I'm kind of the dissenting voice here on the podcast to an extent. But specifically talking about what the stakes were, one of the realizations that I had partway through, and maybe this is a very different interpretation than some of the others had, is that what was going on in the world was really kind of beside the point. And a lot of the stuff with the tree and all of that, those stakes were there, but the real core of it was just who they were as people. And every time I would say this book is so boring, nothing is happening, I would have to stop and say, no, actually, there's a lot happening. It's just all internal to who they are. This is not a book where there are big action scenes. There are action scenes in it. But it is a book where… Like, the breakup with Kevin was a really big deal. And these kind of smaller moments were actually, for me, the real stakes of the book is who these people are, and what are the milestones of their progress on to becoming somebody different.
[Erin] And I think when it comes to stakes, one of the things that I took away from it was the idea that, like, you want to think that your life is so important and maybe it isn't. Even though these characters are in fact important to the world in some way, they felt like they were being… It felt, for me, for a lot of the book, that they were tools of greater movements they didn't understand. They were tools of people who had big plans that they would never tell them, and so they were just trying to, like, do the best they could to get from moment to moment of happiness, because everything they were doing was at somebody else's behest. Like, both of them were working for organizations they didn't fully understand, doing things that they didn't fully get, until it was happening. And so, I felt like in some ways maybe it's like… And there's all that thing about aggrandizement and, like, whether or not you're supposed to think you are the driver of the story or not in a story that's so focused on two characters. It's like this interesting contrast between how much does one person change the world and how much are they just trying to remain in the world as it changes around them.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that one of the things that worked for me was that I did come in reading it as a character story. And so, because there were so many other things in the world that were happening in the background, the fact that other… That action that I was interested in was also happening in the background, just kind of felt like part of the texture. That, for me, this was two characters who both just wanted to belong, and they also wanted to stop feeling insignificant.
[DongWon] One thing that… And I think Dan and I are sort of coming at the same critique from different directions. I think we had different eventual emotional responses to it. But one simple rubric I have, and this is very reductive, so don't yell at me, but, like, is the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction is often around this idea of literary fiction being primarily about portraiture, and genre fiction being primarily about building out a model. Right? It's about asking a question and answering it. Right? And this novel is, I think, attempting to do both. In that it is writing the literary and genre line in a certain way, and I appreciated its instincts to try and do both, but I think there's a little bit of friction between those, in terms of the overall question of how do we solve world problems. It's about connection, it's about integration, it is about, like, organic [garbled] network kind of things, which is the eventual… hybridizing community approach and technological approaches. Right? That is sort of the thing that she's arguing for at the end of the book. But then the substance of the book is primarily about character portrait and relationship portrait of two people feeling and bonding and coming together in this thing. And that becomes the metaphor, that becomes like the synthesis in this dialectical approach of these two different things. That relationship encompasses those two things. But what I loved about the book was primarily the literary project of portraiture.
[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to say that I wonder now how much of that is intentional. Because what you just described is actually what's happening in the book.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] The conflict between fantasy and science fiction, the conflict between two genres of understanding, the technical and the touchy-feely.
[Dongwon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] And with that, I think it is time for us to give you your homework.
[Mary Robinette] So, for your homework, since we are focusing on the lens of who, and one of the things that I found most compelling about these two is how they are shaped by the other person. Who does your character envy? And why? And what action can they take to act on that desire?
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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