Writing Excuses 20.33: Raising Children as a Metaphor for Writing
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wetranscriptsWriting Excuses 20.33: Raising Children as a Metaphor for Writing
Key Points: Relationships change over time. Do your best, but you can revise a book, but you don't edit a child. As you grow as a book parent, you may relax your control. Agents and editors as aunts and grandparents may be able to listen to your book. When a book leaves the house, it has its own relationship to the reader. Presume competence. Grieve, then forgive.
[Season 20, Episode 33]
[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 33]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] Raising Children as a Metaphor for Writing.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[Dan] And, we have been doing this series of episodes where we talk about different metaphors for writing. And when this series was pitched to me, the first thing that came into my head was, oh, I will do an episode about raising children. And I have regretted that ever since.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Because, first of all, only two of the five of us have children, and, second of all, there is a fundamental difference, I think, in how we think about these two things. I do think that this would be a valuable way to think about writing. But, when we raise children, we have clear goals for them. But they tend to be very general. I want my kids to grow up and be happy and successful. But the real joy of raising children comes in watching them express their individuality and meet those goals in very unique and different ways. And we could look at media and how many movies have been made, how many books have been written, about parents that have much more specific goals for their children and the children react, and they have horrible relationships with each other… Because I don't want to be a doctor, dad. Just because you are.
[Mary Robinette] This actually sounds like a great metaphor, I think.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Dan, you were telling us at breakfast that one of your sons had just returned from studying…
[Dan] In Taiwan.
[Howard] In Taiwan. Which is fascinating and wonderful and cool, and my memory of that child was him jumping up on the table and shouting, "Pepsi, Pepsi, gun gun gun."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] Okay. And these are two very different things, but it's the same person. And your process for raising that child has likely changed.
[Dan] Yeah. I don't have to keep him off the table anymore. It's great.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Just one thing I want to say at the top of this conversation is we are very intentionally not prescriptive about writing advice.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] We are, however, saying there's only one way to raise children, and that…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] No. I mean, Dan, only… I mean, I don't have kids, I would never be in a position where I'm going to try and tell a parent, here's how you do it. But I think in the way that we talk about writing, there's a lot that we can take over… Take from individual processes, individual experience, and sort of extrapolate from them. So, anything that we say about how to raise kids…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Don't take it as a prescriptive, specific list of things you must do.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I mean, my child is covered in fur and is actually a cat.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Well, we have two dogs at home. So most of my children are covered with fur as well.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] No, but, like you said, Mary Robinette, I do think this ultimately is a very good metaphor for how writing works, because we've all experienced this, where we're trying to write in a certain way, and the characters have a mind of their own, and they go off in a different direction. Or the book itself takes a different tack. When we write it, we realize it's about a different thing than we thought it was about when we started it. And this happens all the time. And so, why does this happen, I guess is my question. It seems so ridiculous from the outside to say, well, what do you mean the characters have a mind of their own? You're the one writing them. And yet every author can attest that that's true.
[Mary Robinette] I'm not actually one of those.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Interesting. Tell me about that.
[Mary Robinette] But I think it has to do with what you talked about a little bit at the beginning, which is that you have this intention. And I also think that it has to do with my own personal background as… Coming out of theater. So when I do have a character that's not doing what I want them to do, I recast them. And you can't recast a child. But, having said that, the reason I was like, oh, this is a really good example, is that I may have an intention, but my relationship with the book changes over time. And so, as a result of that, my understanding of what I want that book to be also changes. Which, for me, is different than my characters have a mind of their own.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] One of the healthiest attitudes that I've found with regard to writing… Writing. Yes, but also mostly raising children, is I'm going to do everything I can to provide the setting, to provide the inputs, to provide whatever needs to be provided, so that this child will grow into someone that I like and who is also happy and able to succeed and so on and so forth. But at the end of all that, they have the agency to choose what they are going to choose. And I have to be willing to say I've done what I could, I've done my part, I've done my best. The fact that they're able to express agency has to be enough. Whereas with books, if all my book can do is choose for itself… Okay, that's wrong…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] If my book is wrong, then I get to go back and try again.
[Mary Robinette] Well, this is one of the things that I see with people who have more than one child. So, with the first child, they're extremely precious and very like, here's how we're going to do things. And the second child, they're kind of like, well… Good luck.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And the third, they have three or four, where it's like, all right, I mean, you won't be eaten by wolves. And I think that happens with writers, that the writers who have only the one book… On your first manuscript, you get very tight and very controlling and very fearful, because you're going to mess it up somehow. And that as you go along, you realize, no, actually these things have a lot more resilience. If I let it read, if I let it do its own thing, it's… I don't have to be that controlling. So I think the idea of kind of relaxing your control over the books as you grow as a book parent is probably useful.
[DongWon] As I mentioned, I don't have my own kids, but I did have the great joy of being able to be an auntie to a couple of children who are now full adults. And it's funny, it strikes me as that is a little bit similar to my professional role. Right? Where I'm not involved in the process at the beginning, but I do get to drop in from time to time and encounter them as they are. Right? And so I was able to have very different relationships with those kids than their parents did, and got to be sort of the one that's like, yeah. I see you. You're here, this is the thing you're interested in. This is who you're trying to be. And I'll support you in that or listen to you on that or, like, just talk you through whatever crisis is happening right now that you can't talk about with your parents for whatever reason. Right? And, I think, what you're saying, Howard, there is a lot of truth to it, in terms of you can edit a book in a way that you can't edit a child…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] But there's also a reckoning process. I think that happens is an author of having to confront what the book is. Right? Which may not have been your idea that you originally had when you went out with it. But a lot of times what you do is you encounter the book, having written it, and say, okay, what are you now? Right? Who did you grow up to be? And then, now, how do I respond to that and help you achieve those goals? Right? And so, as an agent and as an editor, I get to come in and say, "What was your intention here? What was your vision for this book? And how do we align that with what the book is?" Right? And that is so much the editing process.
[Howard] The quote I come back to all the time, Ralph Vaughan Williams, upon hearing a symphony that he'd written performed, responded with, oh, I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] I love that so much. Because, yeah, he acknowledges that's what I wrote, that's what I meant. I don't know if I like it, but…
[Mary Robinette] I just want to check. Are you using music as a metaphor for raising a child and for writing about books?
[Howard] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Okay. Good.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] It's the dobosh torte of…
[Laughter]
[Howard] [Fourier?] cakes. Sorry, now it's food.
[Dan] This is our turducken of writing…
[Laughter]
[Dan] I love what you said, DongWon, about being able to come in from the outside and, maybe this is the exactly what you said, but it's what I got out of it. Coming in from the outside of that process, you can often see more clearly what's going on than the author themselves. Which is, absolutely, I think, true of children as well, and it's one of the reasons that we rely so heavily on some uncles and grandparents and neighbors and stuff, because when I see my children, I… It's my first instinct, to see what I have planned for them. And it can take a lot of time and a lot of emotional intelligence to kind of meet them where they are and see them for who they are trying to be, rather than who I want them to be. And, going back to writing, that's the same reason I use a writing group. That's the same reason I rely so heavily on my agent, is they can kind of see what the project is, rather than the idealized version I have of it in my head.
[Mary Robinette] And I will say that I think one of the things that is most helpful for… Is not the auntie who comes in and says, well, this is how you should raise your child. That's someone that you are like, nah, I'm not going to hang out with you.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] But the ones who listen and ask questions, whether of you or of the child, those are the ones who can actually be helpful, because they are trying to meet that child or that book where they are.
[DongWon] And meet the parent where they are. Right?
[Mary Robinette] And meet the parent. Yeah.
[DongWon] A lot of my job was supposed to be as the nonjudgmental third-party who listens to everyone complain about each other.
[Erin] I have a burning question about writing and parenting that I must ask you…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] After the break.
[Erin] Okay. We are back. And I am so excited to ask this, because when you talked about like seeing your children for who they are, there's a reflection, theoretically, of you as the parent based on who your children have become. Maybe there shouldn't be, but I think a lot of times, a parent is sort of a, like, if your kids are doing something, like, kids are crying on the plane, you'll see parents feeling this shame as if, like, if I were better at this, my children would not be reacting to their ears popping and would instead just be staring into space and, like… I don't know, doing their homework. And so I'm wondering, as a writer, how do you deal with that feeling? If you write a book and you love your book, but everyone hates it or they see something in it that you didn't, and then they want to reflect back on you as a writer, that seems like that would have that same feeling of shame as, like, I thought I did this, and I see it this way, but no one else sees it the way I do.
[Howard] Don't say kill your darlings. Don't say kill your darlings. Don't say kill your darlings.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I need some time to think about an answer for the question.
[DongWon] Well, the thing that strikes me, both in sort of this as a topic, and specifically what Erin was saying is that in a lot of ways, from the outside, again, so much of parenting is about knowing when to give up control. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Because when they are an infant and a toddler and a thousand percent dependent on you for every single thing in their life, you have total control over that. That child. In many ways. Right? You can't control them necessarily when they're going to sleep or whatever it is, and that's the thing you're trying to figure out. But, once they grow, as they become teenagers, as they become adults, as your book is published and put in the world, you no longer have that control. Right? And your relationship to what that book is needs to change. Right? At some point, it's not your book anymore, it's the reader's book. Right? They're the ones with the relationship to it, their reading and their interpretation of it become… Not necessarily more important than yours, but it is different from yours in a way that you don't get to touch. Right? How they feel about it is something… It's really hard, I see authors struggle with this. When authors get in trouble online, it is often because they are trying to control reader response to the book in a way that is not only unwise, it is impossible to do. Right? And so, I think, I could see this parallel… I mean, in terms of, like, oh, you're now a full-grown person with your own ideas, your own emotions, your own thoughts about how the world works. I may disagree with them, but also, I kind of got to let you do your thing now.
[Dan] Well, what I have found with… I've got six kids, three of whom have moved out. Aged up, been adults. And kind of the year when they are 18 years old, in every case, they have ceased to be my beloved child, and they have now become an adult houseguest that I can't kick out.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] This does sound like my novel.
[Laughter]
[Dan] And there is that transitional period where… And it was very, very difficult the first time, and slightly easier the second and much easier the third, where I have noticed that and had to come to terms with what you were just saying. I cannot control you. I should not control you. The whole point of making you in the first place was to let you go off and do greater things than I have done.
[Mary Robinette] When the book leaves the house, it has its own relationships with the reader. And that's… This is a thing that I do think that a lot of us forget. Like, when we were talking about the metaphor for puppetry, I talk about the fact that I think about the reader as a collaborator. In this is very much the same thing. It's like the reader… The reader is not a coparent, they didn't help you raise the book. But they are relating to the adult book that you sent out into the world. I…
[Dan] Glad he's not going to buy a motorcycle.
[Mary Robinette] Right, right.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Um… Children as metaphors for books for me is very different from raising children as a metaphor for writing. Because with both raising children and writing, I feel like the very best course material available is just go get started. Good luck. People will yell at you as you go and tell you you're doing it wrong or you're doing it right, or this is how I do it. Because the process of raising children is… Evolves so dramatically, not just as the children age but as the parent matures and finds strategies that work for them with their set of resources and their set of cultural contexts. And… I mean, yeah, there's the… With the first child, if the binky falls on the floor, you throw it in the boiling water and break out a fresh binky, and with the fourth child, if the binky bounces off the dog dish, you wipe it on your jeans, stick it back in the baby, and then consider taking the dog to the vet.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But it's…
[Mary Robinette] Again, this sounds like my novel.
[Laughter]
[Howard] But it's this evolution…
[DongWon] That immune system is so much stronger than [garbled]
[Howard] It's this evolution of process…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] And I love that… Here we are with Writing Excuses, trying to fill a void for people in the learning to write aspect of the process, by telling about the learning to parent aspect of the process, and we are not going to help you much.
[DongWon] Well, and the reality is, in both these cases, there's only so much prep we can do.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] There's only so much education and learning that's going to help you. I mean I… In both cases, I think it's good to do some. Right? It's good to do your research, it's good to know what you're getting into, but also, it's going to be different. Every book is different, every child is different, every parent is different. Everyone's life looks different. And so, what your process is going to be is something that you will uncover by doing it. And that is (A) terrifying, but also (B) that openness to finding out what it is as you do it can be really beautiful.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And that is exactly where people get into trouble with both children and books is when they think this is the way it has to be and this rigidity. It doesn't work, because of that evolution.
[DongWon] Wait. Is Doctor Spock Save the Cat?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that's exactly what we've just said.
[Dan] I…
[Mary Robinette] Save the Vulcan? Is that…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Writing Excuses, what to expect when you're expecting.
[Dan] Save Picard. The… I feel like I understood my own writing process a little better when I started GMing role-playing games a lot more. This… Which is a very similar process, I think, to raising children, because you… We have so many layered metaphors and mixed metaphors in this episode. It's amazing. When you are the GM of a campaign, you have in mind a story that you want to tell, whether you bought the book or you've come up with it yourself. But if you go through and just tell that story straight the way it is in your head, you're missing the entire point of role-playing, which is collaborative storytelling. You need to leave room for the players to be the heroes of that story and you are facilitating the story, rather than directing it, rather than kind of mandating it.
[DongWon] I think… Again, chasing this too many metaphors thing… For me, the greatest skill any GM or any player at a tabletop game can have is listening. Right? I think what distinguishes a truly great player from everyone else is their ability to listen to what other people are saying and respond to it. And in all of my experiences with kids, and I love hanging out with kids because they're just fascinating, because they're all just trying to figure out how the world works with their entire brain every second of every day. Because they don't understand yet. Right? And so whenever I've encountered a kid, and I just generally listen to what they're telling me and I responded as if they are having a conversation with anybody I would have in the world, with the full respect and attention I would give another adult, they love that. Right? And they respond so well. I think that's really true of the writing process, too. Right? As you come into your book, and really listening to what the story you've told is and what elements you've put there. You have all the control, you have all the techniques, you have all the tools that we've talked about for all these seasons of the show. But, at the same time, as you're crafting it, I do think that sometimes you need to step back and look at it with fresh eyes and really try to listen to what the story is and what your characters are doing and all of that.
[Mary Robinette] There's this thing that we say in the animal button community, which actually comes out of working with nonverbal children. Which is, presume competence.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] And I think that this is a thing that would actually help a lot of writers, that when you're looking at the manuscript, and, like, this manuscript isn't working, I'm a failure as a writer, I'm a failure as a storyteller, this story is a failure. That that's the wrong way to go. That if you presume competence, and you look at what things is this story doing intentionally and how can I support the things that it is doing intentionally, that that's the way you support a child, that's the way you can support your own narrative process. Like, there's stuff that you do well, this stuff a child does well. You don't think that a child is a failure because they don't know how to cut with scissors yet. You look at, you've made good color choices, let me teach you how to work with scissors. And you can level them up slowly. And I think you can do that with a manuscript too, that you presume competence, you presume the idea that I had was good, the idea that I want this story to be, these things that the story is doing well, let me focus on those things, let me help that story level up to what it can be.
[Erin] I also think you can presume past competence. This is also like forgive your past self. So one thing that… I don't have any kids, but people who I know who are parents will talk about is, like, the frustration of, like, figuring out something like late… You're like, oh, no, if I had known this when my first kid was doing this, that I figured out on my third kid, I would have done it differently. But you know what? I was the person I was then. And I remember talking to… I can't remember who, but a writer who was, like, a prolific writer who was like, I hate some of my early short stories. But I don't ever pull them out of circulation because they reflect the writer I was at the time.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And I want to honor who that writer was, and presume that they were as competent as they could be with what they had. Just because you have more tools now doesn't mean that your old self was bad or wrong, just that you were different.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] The three words that I lean into in those circumstances are grieve, then forgive. I am allowed to grieve having made the mistakes. But now that I've done that, I have to forgive myself and move on. I do want…
[Dan] Yeah. This is why my early manuscripts all have deep-seated trauma from being poorly raised.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I want to… I actually want to talk about grieving and writing and… Which is, I think that this is one of the reasons that rejection hits so hard, especially when you're early in your career, because you do think of it as this story has died. And I don't think that that's… This is one of the places that it is not the same. We have invested ourselves in the story, we have this grief for the potential of the story. But the story always retains that potential, the work you've put into it always retains that potential. And when a child makes a mistake, when they mess up, when they are disappointed because they… Like, they don't get into the University they wanted, where they turn out to not be capable of the thing that you thought that they would be capable of, you grieve the loss of that potential, but the love is still there. The child is still there, the worth is still there. And so I think for writers when you think about a story that's been rejected, you can still… Like, that value is still there, that worth is still there.
[DongWon] I also want to flag one thing which is… And maybe this is slicing something too thin, but I think there's a space between forgiveness and acceptance. Right? And so when you look back at your juvenilia and you can see the errors that you made there or the things that you wish you had done differently, you don't necessarily need to exactly forgive your past self, but you need to accept that you were the person who made those choices and who wrote that thing, and that's not going to change at this point. And that's okay. Right? And I think there is an important distinction there.
[Mary Robinette] Like, for instance, if you go back into the archives of Writing Excuses, you're going to hear me talking about a manu… A middle grade manuscript that I was trying to work out. And we talk about it on the podcast. But the thing we don't talk about, because I had not yet learned this thing, was that that manuscript was white Savior complex and cultural appropriation all the way down, baked in, there was no fixing it. And I am… Like, I forgive myself for having made that mistake. Should I have known better? Probably, but based on the way I was raised in the time I was raised in, I didn't. But I don't continue making the mistake just because I made it in the past.
[Howard] But it's important to recognize, and this is why I lead with grieve. It is important to recognize that sometimes when you're looking at something that you just… You're filled with regret, you're filled with longing, you're filled with remorse, and you have to recognize, oh, wait, I'm grieving the lost time, the lost effort, the lost whatever. Oh, this is grief. I just need to treat this like grief so that I can grieve and then move on.
[DongWon] And get to that place of acceptance, that clarity of seeing the critique of what went wrong and still be able to deal with it.
[Dan] So I'm going to make a final point, and this is going to lead us into our homework. There comes a point in writing, as in raising children, where the thing you are working on does something that you don't like. Whether that is something you've put in intentionally, something you've done accidentally, a character with a mind of its own, or a scene that just doesn't work or whatever it is. And we talked about this in the past where that is an opportunity not for you to immediately, and say, well, this isn't in my outline, and so therefore it is bad, but to take stock of it and say, is this something that I need to change so that it matches my plan, or is this new thing it's doing better, and I need to change my plan? And that is, I think, is true with children as it is with writing.
[Dan] And so for homework, what I'm going to say is do that in reverse. Whether you have a child of your own, a child you interact with, or just a person in your life that you are mentoring or that you are friends with. If they are doing something you don't like, take that moment to consider, is this actually better than what I had planned or assumed, and kind of give that moment of grace to them. And sometimes, yes. You need to step in and correct. Other times, you need to realize that they are their own person, and what they are doing is right for them. So look for those moments in your life, as well as in your writing.
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
