19.35: A Close Reading on Tension: An Overview and Why Ring Shout
Writing Excuses
Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler
4.7 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2024
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Compared to This is How You Lose The Time War, which we read earlier this year, Ring Shout deals with a very real world. This discordance, where authors make their audience uncomfortable by creating things that shouldn’t go together, is part of the power of this novella, and part of the reason we chose to dive into tension! Our favorite metaphor about tension from this episode comes from Howard: potential movement (imagine a rock at the top of a hill).
Note: this novella uses tools from the horror genre to add tension, and this can be intense for some readers!
Thing of the Week: Blue Eye Samurai (Netflix)
Homework: Take a movie or a book you've read that you find highly suspenseful and write an outline covering the major plot beats. Look at where tension is created and where it is released, and build a map of how it evolves over the course of the story
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Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.
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Transcript
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| 1:00.0 | Season 19, episode 35. |
| 1:04.0 | This is writing excuses. |
| 1:09.0 | A close reading on tension, an overview and why ring shout. |
| 1:12.0 | 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry. |
| 1:15.0 | And we're not that smart. |
| 1:16.0 | I'm Mary Robinette. |
| 1:17.0 | I'm Dung-wan. |
| 1:18.0 | I'm Aaron. |
| 1:19.0 | And I'm Howard. |
| 1:20.0 | So this week we are continuing our close reading series by looking at Ring Shout by P Jelly Clark. |
| 1:27.9 | We wanted to talk about this book in particular because as we're looking into this segment on tension and how do we talk about how you create |
| 1:38.4 | sort of build and then release tension over the course of a story we where you realize that shorter works can be really |
| 1:44.1 | useful in examining how those techniques work and the best ways to go about doing that. |
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