Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology

by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler

  As Sixth waited, his corpse slowly vanished from the shadows, fading like a shadow blending with darkness at the fall of night.

  Vathi finally left the fortress. Alone, thankfully, though two more men joined the guards at the gate. All bore weapons similar to the one she had used to kill the nightmaw.

  She had not changed. Her muddied skirts were stuck with twigs, her hair a mess. Her eyes were alight. She stepped up to him.

  The surf washed against Patji’s rocks. He could not decide if he found it a violent sound or a peaceful one.

  “It is done,” she said.

  But he already knew that it was. The vision had ended. The danger had passed.

  “Eusto was not pleased at my survival,” Vathi noted, “though he could not say so. He was reluctant to stop the device, but my authority supersedes his own.”

  Sixth nodded. His eyes fell again on the dead shadow.

  “Come into our fortress,” Vathi said, glancing at it. “Get some rest, some food.”

  “I must return and check on my Aviar.”

  “They will survive another day without you. They live on this island for weeks at a time without your presence.”

  He did not reply.

  “Sixth . . . we could use your knowledge. Your wisdom.”

  “I know,” he said. “You could.” He turned back toward Patji. He could not interpret events of the night. Had the nightmaws been Patji, seeking to cover his secrets? Or had the flower been redemption, sent by his father? Which was Sixth? Condemned or rescued? Neither? Both?

  “What happened to the One Above,” Sixth said. “The one who died while eating, the one to whom these devices of yours belonged?”

  “His body was reclaimed by the others,” Vathi said, frowning. “Why do you ask?”

  “I do not think he is really dead,” Sixth said. “They have tricked you.”

  Vathi raised an eyebrow at him.

  “The machine is a trap,” Sixth said. “They expected you to use it, and they knew the damage it would cause.”

  “That’s an interesting theory,” Vathi said, studying him in the morning light. She looked exhausted. The things she had been through . . . It had been less than a day since his arrival back on Patji, and yet, so much had happened.

  “It is true,” Sixth said. “You were to use it, and in so doing endanger the Aviar.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “It does. They Ones Above seek an excuse to come down and take control of these islands. Just as you have sought an excuse to do the same. If they could prove—to themselves, perhaps to those who watch them—that you are dangerous to the Aviar, they would come and rescue them. To protect a resource. Is that not the argument you used? They will use the same.”

  “You don’t know them, Sixth,” Vathi said, shaking her head. “They’re strange. Though they look like us, they’re as different from you and me as . . . well, as we are from the Aviar.”

  “Yes, so different,” Sixth said. “The Aviar use the worms. We use the Aviar. And now the Ones Above seek to use us . . . It is the way of things. I am right. This was a trap. I can see traps. It is what I do.”

  “Perhaps,” Vathi said.

  He climbed off of his rock. “I have brought you back to safety,” he said. “Farewell.”

  “Sixth . . .”

  She seemed to search for words. That seemed odd for a homeisler. They always seemed to have plenty of words, piled atop one another, ready to spew out.

  Of course, those were the wrong words. Right words were far more difficult. He understood her silence, then, as he walked away from her back into the jungle.

  His trip back to his safecamp was accomplished with far less difficulty—and far less speed—than had been required by frantic crossing during the night. He tried to get into the rhythm of trapping, the familiar motions that had been his companions for many years.

  However, the jungle looked different to him now. It had been conquered. Oh, the outpost was new, but the secrets were out and the peak had been crossed.

  By the time he reached his safecamp, dusk was again approaching. He did only a cursory check of things here before finding himself striking out toward the beach. He arrived as night settled, and despite Kokerlii’s complaints, he shoved his canoe back out into the waters and climbed aboard.

  He rowed all the way out into the waters, where he could look upon Patji as a whole. He sat there, dark waves undulating beneath his ship, as the moons rose and the stars came out.

  Patji. Father. Killer and provider. A dark wedge in the night, crammed with life—so much that it seemed to spill out sometimes. The waves rolled and shook.

  Sixth slept on his canoe that night. In the morning, while the sun rose behind him, he paddled around the island and came back to the fortress. He landed and went to its gates, demanding to speak to Vathi.

  She came to the gates, changed, refreshed. She smiled as she saw him.

  “I will come in,” he said, “and I will help you. But you will do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “Eventually, the Ones Above will take some of the Aviar with them,” Sixth said. “They will find a way around their laws; they will get what they want. It is inevitable.”

  “You are probably right,” she said, cautious.

  “When those birds go,” Sixth said, “I go with them. Into the Above. I don’t care what it takes. You will find a way. If you send Aviar, you send me.”

  She frowned. “There has been talk of sending an ambassador with them, to their worlds in the Above. It was thought a politician or scientist should be chosen.”

  It was not a question. So Sixth did not reply.

  “A trapper, though,” Vathi said. “That makes a kind of sense, in and of itself. Who better to explore where none of us have yet gone.” She chewed on the idea. “I will try. I cannot promise anything, Sixth, but you have my word to try.”

  She held out her hand to him.

  He considered it as he would a cutaway vine hanging from a tree ahead. His corpse appeared at her feet, and Sak chirped warningly. Danger.

  He took Vathi’s anyway and stepped into the fortress.

  WRITING EXCUSES 9.28 and 9.29

  WORKSHOPPING SIXTH OF THE DUSK

  (Listen on WritingExcuses.com: 9.28, 9.29)

  Brandon: This week we’re doing a critique of my story “Sixth of the Dusk,” and we’re going to run this like I run my writing group. A lot of people ask us questions such as “How do you guys workshop? What’s your process?” This critique will cover the way my process works with my writing group. When we do Mary’s story, we will use her writing group’s process. This way, you’re learning two things. You’re seeing how our critique groups work, and you’re also seeing how we go about revision.

  Brandon: In my writing group, we start off talking briefly about what’s working in the story, so the author doesn’t accidentally take that out, doesn’t screw it up. We talk about what’s good, what’s fun, what we enjoy. Then we go on to large-scale problems with the story. And from there, if we have time left over, we talk about medium-level issues. So, let’s start off with “Sixth of the Dust.” What did you guys like?

  Mary: I thought the worldbuilding was a lot of fun. It was compelling. The journey across the island was tense, and you managed the geography quite well. The characters were consistent. The prose was serviceable. Which I wouldn’t say to anyone normally, but . . .

  Brandon: My first drafts have a weakness: the prose.

  Mary: Actually, the way you described the prose, I was expecting it to be awful. And it’s not.

  Brandon: No, it’s just wordy, and each sentence could be a little tighter.

  Dan: I liked the details in it. In particular, you don’t just tell us the main character is a trapper. You show us the animals and the plants and the tricks that he uses and the culture that he’s from. It’s very well developed and really pulled me into the story.

  Howard: First of all, I enjoyed the whol
e story. Beginning, middle, end, I thought the plot structure worked. The emotional arc of things was shaped right. The reveals felt like they were, for the most part, in the right places. The thing that struck me the most, that I think I liked the most, was the subverting of the “noble savage” trope. Your trapper recognizes that metal tools and pants are superior to what his people have been using for a long time. So, he’s just fine with metal tools and trousers and boots and those things. I liked that.

  Brandon: Listening to what Mary, Dan, and Howard just said, I wrote all of this down with the name of the person who said it. Usually, before I do a revision, I’ll set this aside for a while and then I’ll come back. So when I look at my notes, I want to know the context, who said what. This is because I know my writing group, and I know sometimes to pay more attention to someone I know is specialized in a certain area they do a really good job with. For example, when Howard says, “This is where your humor was working,” I think, “Okay. I need to look at that and see what I was doing that actually made Howard laugh.” Now, we’ll move on to the large-scale problems.

  Dan: I have one more thing I want to say before we move on. This is a minor note, and I know this was your intention the whole time, but it’s worth pointing out that you successfully wrote a very unique world. Fantasies set in jungles are few and far between. This stands out just because of that.

  Mary: Yeah. You did manage to make psychic birds make sense. So, kudos for that.

  Brandon: All right. Big issues. In my writing group, it’s not one person taking a turn. Just throw it out there, and then I encourage everyone to have a conversation about what they felt about that.

  Dan: Does the dude’s name count as a big issue? This was not by any means the biggest problem in the story, but “Sixth”—that is very hard to say. It was really getting on my nerves by the end. I was wishing he had an older brother so he could be Seventh.

  Mary: No, because then he’s Seventh of Nine, which was the thing that triggered me in the beginning.

  Howard: The problem I had is: Statistically speaking, every other child is going to be named either First or Second. Which just seems weird.

  Dan: That was cool. I’m willing to accept a weird naming convention. How many Jasons do we have?

  Mary: It’s not even that. That’s not unusual. That’s the way they were doing things in Rome. That’s the way they do things in China, people going by their birth order.

  Howard: That’s a fair cop. If the first name is more like a surname. They don’t have surnames. So many of you are going to be First, Second, or Third that it seems to be what would actually be differentiating you is what comes later. Which for him is Dusk. Which turns out not to be time of day.

  Mary: It’s the combination.

  Dan: I apologize for starting this rant about a relatively minor thing. But a triple consonant cluster, or when it gets possessive a quadruple consonant cluster, was just hard for me say every time.

  Brandon: Got it.

  Mary: So, your ending.

  Brandon: I will say, this is unfair to the readers. I did warn you that my ending had issues.

  Mary: Yes, but I would flag that anyway. What I feel like is that you’ve got, basically, a triple ending going on. The reason I think that’s happening is you’ve got the thing where they defeat the monster, which is not really the ending because that’s an internal event. The bigger event that they have to solve is the stopping of the . . .

  Dan: Machine. The mapping machine.

  Mary: Which they do, and then he leaves and goes off to sea. And then he comes back, and then they go away. Leaving and going off to sea was a second ending, and going out into space is your third ending. I think there’s a couple things going on besides that. One suggestion is to combine all of those so that you only end once. Because he needs to wrap up all of the problems. But I think the going away and coming back is currently not working.

  Brandon: So you’re saying not the “defeat the monster.” But the other ending.

  Mary: Right. No, the “defeat the monster” I don’t count as an ending.

  Brandon: The ones you’re talking about are the “stop the machine” and the “go away and come back.”

  Dan: Going away works, in a sense. It’s obviously in there because you knew you needed to separate those two endings in some way. One solution would be giving him a reason to come back that is actually good with this story. I liked having the breather to go out, look at the island—look at his Father—and then come back. But there wasn’t anything bringing him back.

  Mary: Yeah, I agree with that. But this is where I was going to head—the very end with his decision to come back and then go into space. At the beginning of the story, he is not dissatisfied with his life. He has a life that he likes. He feels like he’s good at his job. Yes, the job is changing, but there’s nothing about his life that indicates that he’s lonely or wants to leave. You end with him taking her hand, which symbolizes a connection with someone else. There’s nothing about the way his life is structured that indicates that the fact that he is not connecting with other people is a problem. None of that seems to be an issue for him. I think that if you want to keep that part of it, you have to go back to the beginning and insert something so that he is somewhat dissatisfied. If we’re using the classic MICE structure [milieu, idea, character, event], right now you have a milieu story, and then you have an event. Then you wrap up the event and you wrap up the milieu. Then you suddenly have this character ending. And hello, where did this come from? And then he goes away, which resolves “I am not satisfied with my position in life.” Also, there are two disruptions to the status quo. One is what is happening to the birds, which represents the larger disruption. There’s also that we have space aliens coming down to visit us. Those are both related things. Right now, with the way the ending is structured, you have them as two separate things. I think that you would have a stronger emotional punch if you could find a way to have him come to that decision at the end. I also like him going back out to sea, but I don’t think it’s working.

  Dan: It’s not. So, he either needs to go out to sea and then have a compelling reason, something that drives him back—or we need to remove the need for him to go out to sea.

  Mary: If we’re looking at the process, you know your structures. The story starts with a character and ends with a place. Or leaving a place. We could count the entrance into the fortress as the exit from the island. He arrives on the island on his boat, but he is leaving via another door. That could count if you go back to the beginning and add in some character stuff.

  Dan: Or just have him get onto their other boat—the iron boat. Coming in on a little canoe and leaving on a big iron boat solves that very subtle problem. We keep interrupting Howard.

  Brandon: This is Mary’s expertise. So I’m willing to just let Mary talk.

  Mary: I just wanted to second what Dan said, in particular. Putting him on the iron boat allows you to have that look back at the island. And that is a really strong image.

  Howard: I had a process question. I’ll be blunt: Dan and Mary are fixing your story. Is that the sort of critique you’re accustomed to getting?

  Brandon: That’s a good question. In my writing group, I always want Dan in particular to fix my story. Here’s the thing. This may be a bad example for the readers because I’m sitting with two of the authors I respect most in the world, and with Howard. (That’s for the thing you did between sessions, by the way.)

  Howard: That’s just fine.

  Brandon: Dan and I know each other really well. We have been workshopping together forever. We know each other’s stories. In some cases, this can be a bad thing in that since we know what the other is trying for, sometimes that gets us into trouble. Since Dan knows my writing so well, he’ll miss things that are wrong because he assumes he knows what I was trying for. And he’s right. But a really good critiquer can dig into “This is the problem, and here are ways to fix it.” Now, you as the writer ma
y not take those suggestions. I’m experienced at getting critiqued. I know when to take advice and when not to take it. So, allowing two really good writers to go back and forth on what is wrong with my writing and what can fix it—I’m perfectly willing to let that happen and be excited by it. But for a lot of new workshoppers, I suggest not to do this. I suggest they describe their emotions and not give fixes to the writer.

  Mary: I’m going to second you on that. If I were critiquing someone else, I would not be offering the prescription.

  Brandon: This is one of the reasons I wanted readers to know that I said to you, “I think my ending’s broken. Do you guys have any suggestions?” Because I’m actively soliciting help, which is different from my usual goal in a critique session. And now, I’m going to open the floor to any other major issues the story has that you noticed.

  Howard: Now, the readers may be familiar with the episode we did with Lou Anders, on the Hollywood Formula. One of the ways in which I think this ending failed is that, while I could feel the presence of the various emotional threads, they didn’t all hit close enough together. I think that’s a good way to sum up what Mary said. All of these things kind of needed to happen, but they needed to happen closer together. Aside from the Hollywood Formula, the two biggest problems I had involve me wanting clues. First, I wanted some foreshadowing with regard to “Dusk” a little bit earlier. That was a neat reveal; I liked that. But when by the end of the story we realized that he’s mulling over his name as a foretelling, I thought maybe he should have been mulling over his name as a foretelling earlier. That could be the discontent that he’s feeling, that Mary suggested. The second issue is that I think we were almost halfway through the story before it mentioned that they had made contact with people from the stars, and that needed to drop a little bit sooner.

  Dan: That needed to at least be hinted at earlier. I don’t mind the revelation coming where it does.

  Howard: Oh, the revelation was awesome.