142 | Charlie Jane Anders on Stories and How to Write Them

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2021

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Telling a story seems like the most natural, human thing in the world. We all do it, all the time. And who amongst us doesn’t think we could be a fairly competent novelist, if we just bothered to take the time? But storytelling is a craft like any other, with its own secret techniques and best practices. Charlie Jane Anders is a multiple-award-winning novelist and story writer, but also someone who has thought carefully about all the ingredients of a good story, from plot and conflict to characters and relationships. This will be a useful conversation for anyone who tells stories, reads novels, or watches movies. Maybe you’ll be inspired to finally write that novel.

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Charlie Jane Anders studied English and Asian literature at Cambridge University. She is the author of over 100 published works of short fiction and several novels, including the new Young Adult book Victories Greater Than Death. She was co-founder of the website io9, a blog about science and science fiction. She is a frequent event organizer, including the monthly Writers With Drinks. Among her accolades are Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Crawford awards. She is the co-host, with Annalee Newitz, of the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast. Later this year she will publish Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:03.9	I know I love the story I'm about to tell, so some of you may have heard it before,
0:07.5	but it fits in so well with today's podcast. Several years ago, my wife, Jennifer,
0:12.9	was the writer in residence at the Covley Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara.
0:18.1	Jennifer is a science writer, a journalist, and so her job was to put on weekly talks or seminars
0:24.8	or whatever workshops to help the physicists at KITP in Santa Barbara think about communication,
0:32.7	writing different ways of telling their stories to the outside world. And for the most part,
0:37.5	the physicist went along with this, be mused, but tolerant. At one week, she brought up a friend
0:43.5	of ours who is a TV writer. His job is to write TV shows, network dramas, hour long TV shows.
0:50.8	And again, this is not something that most of the physicists had as an ambition that someday they
0:56.1	would be writing for TV, but what lit them up at some point as they were listening to our friend
1:01.9	talk was he explained the idea that there is a theory of writing an hour long TV drama.
1:08.1	There is structure there. There are certain pre-existing beats that you're supposed to hit,
1:13.2	especially when you have commercials built in at certain time points, certain kind of action
1:18.7	events need to happen at the right time, certain kinds of character development, certain twists,
1:23.6	etc. It's not just it goes on this and this and this and this. There's an overarching structure.
1:29.2	Of course, everyone who's done a little bit of work in writing novels or screenplays knows about
1:34.8	this, the three-act structure, very famous in Hollywood dramas and so forth, but the idea that
1:40.5	there was a theory suddenly lit up all the physicists in the room like, oh, okay, so let's think about,
1:45.6	you know, how we can use this, how we can tweak the theory and so forth. So I think that this idea
1:50.9	of there being a theory of storytelling is useful not only if you want to write stories and who
1:56.8	amongst us hasn't either taken a hand at trying to write fiction or imagine that someday we would write
	...

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