Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/11/21/16-47-believable-worlds-part-1-the-illusion-of-real/

 

Key points: To give a secondary world the feeling of reality, use similarity, specificity, and selective depth. Readers believe in a fictional world because of what is similar in it, what they can relate to, what is universal. Situations, every day details, recognizable truths, all can help the reader step into that world. Pay attention to what can go wrong! What do people hold onto? Specific is stronger than vagueness. Go ahead and invent specificity, add names. Selective depths, removing ambiguity or adding emphasis. Depth in one place gives the impression that there is depth everywhere. Where do you want to go deep, and what does the story your protagonist is involved in need to make it work? Put similarity, specificity, and selective depth to work, and make your world come to life for your readers.

 

[Season 16, Episode 47]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Believable Worlds Part 1: The Illusion of Real.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're all real.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I might be an illusion.

[Dan] That's Howard, by the way.

 

[Dan] We're going to talk about how to create the illusion of realness, which is still important even though you're writing something that is not real. Where do we start with the illusion of real?

[Fonda] So, I love creating worlds that feel as real as possible. So one of my goals is to create a fantasy world where the reader feels like they could get on a plane and fly to the place and walk around on the streets and go into the restaurants and see the cars and that there is texture and verisimilitude to the fantasy world. Not all fantasy and science fiction worlds are meant to be believable. Some are wacky and comical and outlandish. But if you are trying to create a secondary world that feels very real, how do you do it? I have three principles that I follow. They are similarity, specificity, and selective depth. So, to dive into each of these a little bit, similarity is what I… Is based on the idea that the reader believes in the fictional world, not because of what's different about it, but because of what is similar. They are going to grasp onto things that are relatable and things that are universal. So, if you have a character who is in a situation where they're working in a dead-end job and they have this demanding boss, but they've got to stay in the job because they've got to pay their bills. That is a really relatable situation, even if that character is an apprentice magician working under the thumb of some really demanding high mage. They are also going to grasp onto the everyday details that mirror what they already know. So if you are walking through a fantasy market and you infuse your prose with things like the smell of baking bread or the garbage behind the food stall, those are all things that readers already can very easily bring to their mind, and so they can very quickly fill that in. Then, finally, the last element of similarity is just recognizable truths about our society, about the world, about human nature… We all have… We all know things like there's inequality in the world, people will sacrifice for those they love, those things, those sort of thematic elements that even if you're in a far future thousand years from now, or a completely different fantasy world, those are going to make your reader feel like they are a part of that world.

[Howard] There's a thing that happens on small aircraft where you have a ribbon of stuff next to the cockpit that's okay to walk on. Next to it, there will be a sign or a shoe print with a red X through it or something saying not a step. Basically saying this part of the wing is not made to support your weight, please don't walk here for our flight today will not be good. Walk on this part. Putting the no step or not a step label on a piece of a spacecraft immediately makes the entire spacecraft feel real. Because somebody has used this enough to figure out how to use it wrong and what people are going to do wrong. So I love just the no step label as a whole category of things that let me very quickly rubberstamp something to make it feel real.

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly one of the things that I was going to say, is that one of the ways that I try to make things look real or feel real is figuring out how they are misused and broken. So, like the garbage, the no step, the piece of clothing that you've had since you were in high school that you really shouldn't have any more but you still do. One of the mistakes that I see people make when they're writing historical fiction is that all of the characters will be wearing clothing from the year the novel is set. No one does that unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong in your life. So I do tend to look at how things can break and how we hold onto things. I used do props for theater when I was living in New York. One of the things that I had to do was… Like, the set designer would build the set, and I had to fill it with the minutia of a character's life. It's those little weird pieces, like when you're digging in a bag, how many things are there? So, anyway, those are things that I get excited about, the things that break.

[Dan] Yeah. The clothing point is a really good one. There's a YouTuber that I love to watch named Bernadette Banner who talks about historical costuming in movies and television. One thing she will always point out if there's a show that has done their costuming really well, one of the things that they will often include is having the servants wearing clothes that are 10 to 20 years out of date, because they can't afford the new stuff. They saved up and they finally got this one thing or they got it secondhand and they just keep wearing it. Because that's the best thing they can afford even though it's out of fashion.

[Howard] Yeah. I recall Michael MacLean telling a story about I think it was Jimmy Durante. Mr. Kruger's Christmas? Is that Jimmy Durante?

[Dan] It's Jimmy Stewart.

[Howard] Jimmy Stewart. James Stewart. Yeah. Going through the costuming department and looking at what the costuming people were offering and him saying… Touching the fabric and saying, "No. No, that's the right time, but old Mr. Kruger, he would not be comfortable in this. But this. This is about five years older. Kruger would have kept this coat." Going through… Old man going through the wardrobing and helping with the worldbuilding by saying, "This is what this guy is going to wear." Fascinating.

[Fonda] Yeah. That sounds pretty well to the second point…

 

[Dan] Before you start the next point, let's do our book of the week.

[Fonda] Sounds good.

[Howard] Oh. Book of the week. I have that. I have that and I will hold it up for the camera that nobody but our guests can see.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Starshipwrightone. That's starship, then w.r.i.g.h.t. All one word. One by Jeff Zugale. This is not a novel, it is not a short story. It is a… For lack of a better term, it's a coffee table picture book of Jeff Zugale's starship designs that were not tied to any particular project. It is a delight to flip through, because as you flip through and look at these starship designs, these spaceship pictures, you start to do the same thing the artist does, which is imagine how is this vehicle being used. Who built it and why? What was their budget? How did they make some of these decisions? Why does it have a red stripe? Why does it… And, there's little notes from Jeff all the way through about his thinking and his process. It is a fantastic reference, mostly for sci-fi writers, not because you are going to steal Jeff's ship designs and put them in your own books, but because you are going to fill your head with pictures of spaceships and reasons why these spaceships look the way they do. Full disclosure, I wrote the introduction, but I've already been paid. I'm done. I'm out.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] All right. So, Fonda, let's talk about specificity now.

[Fonda] Yeah. So, the idea behind this is that when you're writing and describing something in your prose, specific is more powerful than vague. So, let's say you have a line in your story and it says, "She drove the car down the road." That's a perfectly serviceable sentence. Everyone who's reading it is going to think that they know what that means. But that is a lot less powerful than "She urged her 1997 Honda Civic down the I 5 freeway." Now you have information about her car, that it is old and is probably on its last legs, and she is somewhere on the West Coast of the United States. Right? So this goes not just for contemporary fiction, but also for speculative fiction. You can absolutely invent specificity that conveys more information and does the heavy lifting of worldbuilding for you without really being noticed. I love to do this by creating names for the luxury car in my world. The restaurants. The businesses. The street names. The districts in the city, like all of that invented specificity does a lot of worldbuilding without stopping to explain anything. Like, there is a… There's a line in actually my young adult science fiction novel. It is… If you were writing that in a non-science fiction story, it would be, "He heard the helicopter descend." But I wrote it as "He recognized the distinctive thrum of a micro fission T 15 self copter." Like, what the heck is a micro fission engine T 15 self copter? Who knows? I made it up. Right? But, like, the fact that he recognizes that noise says something about the protagonist, and it orients the reader as this being a military sci-fi in the future. So that's the sort of specificity that can really on the edges make your worldbuilding more fun and feel more real.

[Howard] We did that so much in Schlock Mercenary and the Planet Mercenary world book, the role-playing book where I had to sit down and fill in the holes. I'm like, "Well, I created a couple of restaurants." I've got the Popsill Vending and I've got the Taco Bufa restaurant, which… Dan's already grinning because Taco Bufa… Bufa is Puerto Rican for to throw, as in to throw a fark. So I love that name. But I then had to go through and fill out the rest of the universe with at least three more restaurant names and at least three more manufacturer names. The whole place just comes to life when you start naming things. Even if you don't know why it's named like what it's named.

[Dan] We're using a lot of science fictional examples for this because it's very easy with brand names and stuff. But even in historical or in fantasy, you can still do this. An example that leaps to mind is the first scene with William Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean, the very first Pirates movie. Where he arrives and he shows the governor or mayor or whoever it is the sword. He gets very specific about the type of hilt that it has and where the tang is and all of these aspects of the sword that still ground you in the world and then make him look very competent and tell us, "Oh, he knows what he's talking about. This is a world where swords matter." And all of these… This specificity, but in a kind of fantasy non-technological way.

 

[Mary Robinette] Which I'm going to used to segue us to Fonda's final point, which is about selective depth. Because you don't want to do that with every single thing that your character interacts with. So when you're trying to make choices about when, the metric that I use is you're trying to choose places that remove an ambiguity or add emphasis. So, adding emphasis that this is a slightly stranger place or removing ambiguity about this. But the other piece for me is… Relates to something we talked about previously about things like character interacts with. If my character is going to interact with a sword, and it's going to be an important plot point later, I want to make sure that they have an interaction with that sword in three… I'm making up the number three, but like in three different ways. Otherwise, if every time they have an interaction with that sword, it's exactly the same kind of interaction, it's telegraphing to my reader how that's going to be used in the big climactic plot point. It also makes it seem very flat and artificial. Like, a butter knife is normally used to spread butter. However, in the past week, I have also used a butter knife to unlock a door…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And to scrape paint off some tile in our new bathroom. These are not either of them approved uses for butter knives, but if I were doing that in a novel, that butter knife would feel absolutely real and very much part of the world. So when I used it in a fourth unanticipated plot specific way, it wouldn't, as… It would both be a surprise, but also it would be an established piece of the world and it would feel very real and lived in.

[Howard] Butter knife as flat head screwdriver in order to get the computer cabinet open because the screwdriver I picked was a little one, and the screw was too tight, so I needed the leverage of a great big long handle. Don't @ me bro. That's… Yes, I'm using a butter knife to open my computer.

[Fonda] I think sometimes where you choose to apply selective depth is also on the expertise level of the author. I use this example of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy has so much detail on the language. I mean, he was a linguist. So he created an entirely different language, and then also partially created something like 10 other languages. So, languages were just his jam. That part of Middle Earth feels extremely well developed. But it's not like he really went into the economics of Middle Earth. Like, I still don't know how orcs got paid, like, I don't even know what… How people are making money. But in a… Sometimes, when you go really deep in one area of the world, you kind of create the impression that that depth must be everywhere else as well and people will kind of give you credit for where you did an A+ job. While in contrast to that, that is to say Pat Rothfuss's Name of the Wind, where he's not a linguist and he does not create 10 different languages. But Pat has said he's a geek for old coins. So his, like, the currency in that world is very well described. Like, he has even little… Makes them and auctions them off for his fundraiser. So he's gone deep in a very different area. So, sometimes there's an element of where you want to go deep as an author. What's your protagonist, the story that they're involved in, and the needs of the narrative, right? If you have, let's say a jailbreak as a really big part of your story, you'd better do the worldbuilding around like prison security really well because that's so vital.

 

[Dan] All right. That is a perfect segue into our homework, which is also about selective depth.

[Fonda] Yeah. So, this week, I want you to use your own project, whatever you have in progress, and consider where you might want or need to go into selective depth in your worldbuilding to create the greatest sense of real in your world.

[Dan] All right. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/11/07/16-45-world-and-character-part-2-moral-frame/

 

Key points: Morally gray? Are the characters rebelling against what society says they should be doing, or are they doing what society says they should? Is it the society, or the characters, who are gray? Society gives us a moral framework. For your fictional world, it depends on your worldbuilding decisions. History, environment, government, magic system, technology, it all affects customs, social norms, accepted behavior, which then influences your character's goals, desires, attitudes, and behavior. Pay attention to the history of your character. If your character is an anomaly, why? Just because there is a moral frame doesn't mean everyone will interact with it the same way. Look for the things that your character believes about the opposite end of the spectrum, but is wrong about. Look at subgroups, both from within and from outside. 

 

[Season 16, Episode 45]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, World and Character Part 2: Moral Frame.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm morally ambiguous.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] We are talking about… Following on the conversation last time about character bias. This time we're talking about moral frame. Fonda, what do you mean by that?

[Fonda] So, moral frame is an element of worldbuilding that I don't think gets talked about a lot. I want to talk about it because I have noticed that many people refer to the characters in my books as morally gray or morally ambiguous. It got to the point where I started to kind of think about it and dissect that a little bit. What I realized is that there is a difference between characters who are morally gray because they are acting against what society tells them they should be doing and there are characters who are morally gray because they are acting in accordance with what society tells them they should be doing. So I have responded often times two people saying that I have morally gray characters by saying, "No, I don't actually have morally gray characters. I have characters who live in a morally gray society." What I actually write is morally gray societies. This is something that I realized over my six books is that that is something I tend to gravitate towards. I mean, honestly, what society is not morally gray? We all live in a society that is full of moral ambiguity. So we have a moral framework that is given to us by our society. Whether or not each individual person adheres to that and to what extent they adhere to that is another issue, but that moral frame depends on our time and our culture and what society, what type of society we live in, and differs widely. I mean, we are seeing, right now we are seeing a global response to the pandemic in which that is… That is highlighting differences in moral frame when it comes to how much we value individual freedom versus duty to community, for example. There are times in human civilization when that moral frame has been very different. There… At one point, there have been cultures where human sacrifice was not just acceptable but was actually the morally right thing to do. So, your moral frame of your fictional world is going to be determined by the worldbuilding decisions that you make. They include things like history, the environment, like Mary Robinette mentioned a few episodes ago, the governance of that society, and also its magic system and its technology if you have those speculative elements in there. All of that has a really powerful effect on the customs, the social norms, the behaviors of people, what they accept or don't accept. Then, that has a cascading effect on your character's goals and desires and attitudes and behavior.

[Dan] Yeah. I ran into this when I was writing my Partials series, my YA post-apocalyptic trilogy. They… There's a plague that destroys the world, very timely story right now that I don't promote much in these pandemic times, but I realized quickly as I was doing this worldbuilding that I had created a situation in which the characters were faced literally with the extinction of the human race. Like, that was what they were up against. When that is the failure mode of your society, a lot of things that would be completely immoral in any other situation become, as you said, not only the right thing, but the responsible thing to do. Some of the aspects of their culture, in particular regarding reproductive rights, seem completely beyond the pale to us today, but in the society of the book, that was the right thing to do for a lot of the characters. That was the way to save the human race. So this is, I think, a really important part of worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's… I think one of the other things for me when you're talking about these morally gray worlds is to understand that none of them exists… We keep talking about this. None of them exists in a vacuum. But this also includes a time continuum. So one of the things that your characters are going to be doing is pushing every… Historically speaking, every society thinks that they are more enlightened than the society before them. There are very few exceptions where this doesn't happen. When it does happen, it's the "Oh, in the golden times." What you're remembering is generally your childhood. When you didn't have power and when things went well for you because people were doing things for you. So this is part of why we get these 20 year cycles in society. That there is this push and pull between resistance to authority figures and wanting to have authority for yourself. So when you've got these characters in your trying to figure out kind of where those moral gray areas are, you also want to think about what society… What their parents society looked like. Like, what are they rebelling against, and what did society look like when they were children? Like, what are they… What is their ideal of things were comfortable then? If… Assuming they came from a comfortable childhood.

 

[Fonda] Yeah. I think one thing to think about is if your character is an anomaly in some way. Why is that the case? If they're acting against the norms or the expected behavior, then why them? Why now? What are the logical consequences of them doing that? To create, like, a very simple example, let's say you have a fantasy story in which only the boys are trained to be dragonriders. You have a character who is going to be the first female dragonrider. You can't just have a story in which true grit and perseverance and pluck, she becomes the first female dragonrider, everyone claps and cheers, curtains come down, exit. Because if just through hard work and grit and pluck, a woman could become a dragonrider, then someone else before her would have already done it. So what is it about this time or her circumstances or changing society or something going on in the world… Is there something that is happening that is making her become the first female dragonrider, and what are the consequences of that on her and her community? So, I think, if when you ignore culture and environment and moral frame, that's where you potentially get stories that feel like modern era 21st-century people dressed up and dropped into the trappings of a fantasy world.

 

[Dan] Let's pause here for our book of the week, which, Fonda, I believe comes from you this time.

[Fonda] Yeah. So, my book of the week is The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. The reason why I want to make this my pick is that it is… It is not an easy read, it's a pretty harrowing read actually, so be prepared. Have some tissues with you. It is a great example, though, of a book in which the character is existing under fighting and trying to change a world that is governed by a very strict, very homophobic moral frame. So it is… The world itself is uncomfortable to live in, but is a great example of how the author uses this moral frame to advance the journey of the character.

[Dan] Cool. That is The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson.

 

[Dan] All right. So, talking about characters who are anomalies within their culture, I think brings us to a question about characters who all think alike or characters who don't think alike. If we need to be careful of anomalies, does that mean that everyone's going to end up with the same kind of perspective and the same moral frame?

[Fonda] Yeah. No, that's a trap that I think people fall into sometimes and use to excuse things. Like, so if they… You end up with situations where, well, every… That's just how it was back then. Everyone was sexist. That's used to justify a world that is portrayed as being unremittingly sexist. But that's… That is not an excuse, because in any given society at any given time, people are interacting with the moral frame in different ways. They are either embracing it, they're reinforcing it or upholding it, they're opposing it, they're questioning it, they're trying to change it. We see that very clearly in our own world. That we… We have many different types of people, factions of people who are trying to push and pull at this moral frame in different ways. We are in constant conversation within society's moral frame. That would be the same in your fictional society as well. So, you are choosing to tell that story and to show the relationship that your characters are having in a moral frame. It is actually lazy and boring to have all your characters interacting with the moral frame in the same way.

[Mary Robinette] I got to take a class by Donald [Moss?] in which he was talking about the dichotomies of society and that there's… That we tend to, when we go into fiction, think of these polar extremes, that either someone is the super sports fan or someone hates all sports. And that most people actually exist somewhere along a spectrum. So there might be someone, like, who enjoys a particular sport, but not all sports. Or, there's someone who's a fan of this team, but is okay with not seeing anything else. Or there might be someone who's like has all of the televisions in their house tuned to different sports game happenings simultaneously. And that it's… If you start thinking about these, then you can use the polar extremes as a kind of mechanism to find where those gray areas are. It doesn't have to be about sports, obviously. But it's an interesting thing. One of the things that he says that is a good thinking tool for this is like what is the thing that they are absolutely wrong about the other end of that spectrum? So, like, the person who doesn't watch sports at all saying, "Well, sports don't have any drama or narrative at all." Without understanding that there is a narrative that is brought to it. They're wrong about that. So, like, looking for the thing that your character fundamentally believes. I think Dan calls this the lie that your character believes. But about a big societal position can give you some interesting ground to play in.

[Howard] A very useful real-world principle here, and it's one that most folks aren't familiar with because the establishment doesn't want us familiar with it, it's called jury nullification. It is the idea that when you are a juror, even if the case is super clear, yep, the defendant is absolutely guilty of… I'm going to make something up… Using potions after 9 PM. Okay? They're absolutely guilty of that. And the punishment is something horrible. But, if the jury feels like, wow, that's a terrible law. Who picked 9 PM? Who picked potions? I sometimes drink potions after 9 PM. The jury can say, "Not guilty." The jury, in legal terms, is allowed to be wrong, but their decision is final. This idea of jury nullification is built into our system and it is a method whereby a group of 12 people can decide that they don't like the law or they don't think the defendant should be acquitted or they've all taken bribes and now we really are in a terribly morally ambiguous… That's actually not ambiguous, that's just really dark brown. But the principle of jury nullification will never be explained to a jury in a courtroom because none of the attorneys nor the judge nor the defendant even… Nobody wants the jurors to know that the truth is we don't actually have to listen to you, we can just sit here and twiddle our thumbs, and at the end, we can decide something.

 

[Dan] It occurs to me, as we're talking about this moral framework, that it is a really good way of talking about subgroups within a society as well. My own religion is the one that leaps to mind. I'm Mormon. Most people, I suspect, have a fairly solid stereotype in their minds of what a Mormon is like. Whereas for me, living inside that subgroup, there are countless… There are thousands of different ways to be Mormon. I am very, very different in a lot of ways from my neighbors, while also being very similar in maybe more visible ways which is what the outside rest of society when they look at us.

[Fonda] Yeah. This is a… That's something you can really do in your fiction is to break down the idea of there being a homogenous group. Right? You see this in something like Star Trek, for example, right? The original series has all Klingons are warlike. There's just no nuance to the Klingons. They're all a type. They're all warlike, they're all just about dying in battle. Then, in future seasons of Star Trek, you start to break that down, you actually see Klingons as individuals, and they are not all… They have a moral frame that is around more and being warlike and honor, but within that soc… That moral… That Klingons society which does have an overarching moral frame, there is many different personalities and they are different on their spectrum of how much they adhere to that moral frame or not, and they're in conversation with it. So keep that in mind as well, when you're thinking about moral frame and how your characters interact with it. I think that a useful thing to do when you're thinking about morally gray characters is I like the contrast someone like Walter White in Breaking Bad. Right? Who is… He is morally gray because he is… He's breaking the law of our society. Like, clearly running a meth lab is illegal, and we can all agree on that, because we're all sharing a certain moral frame with that, Walter White is acting in opposition to. Another one of my favorite shows is the miniseries, Rome. In that show, the main characters kill and crucify I do all sorts of horrible things, but they are doing it in accordance to their moral frame. Because they're soldiers and generals and leaders in ancient Rome. So they are, from our perspective, 21st-century viewers, acting immorally, but they are actually acting morally within their own society.

 

[Fonda] So that actually leads me to the homework, which is what I want listeners to do this week. Take maybe about a handful, 4 to 6 characters, in stories that you enjoy, that you would consider morally gray. See if you can identify if they are acting in opposition to or in accordance to what their society or group would be saying is allowed or not allowed.

[Dan] Fantastic. There's your homework. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/10/24/16-43-the-narrative-holy-trinity-of-world-character-and-plot-with-fonda-lee/

 

Key points: The story is like a three-legged stool with world, character, and plot working together. Worldbuilding is a part of all kinds of fiction. Most stories start with a kernel, either a world kernel, a character kernel, or a plot kernel. Then you build out from there. For example, starting with a world kernel, look at what attracts you to this world and what kinds of conflicts does it have. That will suggest potential plots, and lead you to types of characters. Starting with a character kernel, think about the character's journey, and what kind of world would make that journey more compelling and difficult. From a plot kernel, backfill, and think about what kind of world would make the stakes of that plot compelling and gripping. The world, in turn, is made up of environments, culture, and technology. Think about the ways things are interconnected. Wherever your story starts, take that kernel and build the world around it, tie the world, characters, and plot together.

 

[Season 16, Episode 43]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Master Class with Fonda Lee.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We are incredibly excited to be starting a brand new eight episode series. We're going to be talking about worldbuilding. We have one of, in my opinion, the very best worldbuilders working today. Fonda Lee, can you tell us about yourself?

[Fonda] Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm Fonda. I write science fiction and fantasy novels. I'm best known for the Green Bone saga, which begins with Jade City, continues with Jade War, and concludes with Jade Legacy, which is coming out November 30. I'm also the author of a few science fiction novels, Zeroboxer, Exo, and Cross Fire, and a smattering of short fiction. I live in Portland, Oregon, and I love food and action movies.

[Dan] Cool. Well, thank you for being on the show. We're really excited to have you here.

 

[Dan] You have prepared a class for us about worldbuilding. This first episode, we're going to talk about what you call the narrative holy trinity, world, character, and plot. What… Start us off with that.

[Fonda] Yeah. So, I love worldbuilding. It's one of the topics I always enjoy talking about. People often ask me about my worldbuilding process, how do I actually go about it, how long do I take, what steps. I often have a difficult time describing the actual process for them, because in my mind it's really impossible to distinguish the act of worldbuilding from that of developing the plot and character. The reason I called this episode the holy trinity is because in my mind, the story is like a three legged stool, or perhaps a three cylinder engine, that only functions because the pieces of world, character, and plot are working together. When you ask yourself as an author, "Well, why do you go through all the effort of worldbuilding in creating this entire fictional campus?" On one hand, you could say, "Well, it's really fun." Which is true, a lot of us authors worldbuilding because it's really enjoyable. But for me there also has to be a reason why that invented world exists and contributes to making the story uniquely what it is from a narrative perspective. I feel like we often talk about the relationship between plot and character, and what I'd really love to do in this master class is dive into the relationship between the world and the other elements of story.

[Howard] As I was thinking about this, I looked at the outline last night, I was reminded of an anecdote that I love to share about college Howard. Which has each of these elements in it. I was waking up in the morning and thinking, "Oh, I'm so happy that today is Friday, because I don't have my 7 AM class. I'm so glad that today is… Or, no, I'm so glad that it's Thursday because I don't have my 7 AM class, and I'm so glad it's Friday because the weekend is beginning." Howard is lying in bed, mulling over these things and suddenly realizes, "Wait, those can't both be true." I asked my roommate, "Hey, David, what day is it?" He's like, "It's Friday." "Oh, good, I'm glad it's Friday. Wait, what time is it?" "It's 6:45." At which point, I leapt out of bed. The worldbuilding detail that I've left out is that the day before, David and I had installed bunkbeds, and I was on top.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] So I pancake on the floor and David looks at me and says, "If this is going to happen every morning, we can trade."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The point here though is that there is this character who's kind of doofy, and there's this plot about what he likes and what he doesn't like. Then there is this worldbuilding detail which arrives a little late, but which sells the whole story. If you don't have all three of those, it's just another story about me waking up late.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The other… And there are so many of those, honestly.

[Fonda] Now I want an entire series of just Howard's college exploits.

 

[Mary Robinette] Right! But actually, this is a thing that I do want to point out for our listeners, because I know that while we tend to focus on science fiction and fantasy, and people think about worldbuilding as being a science fiction and fantasy hallmark, and it certainly one of the things that drives us, worldbuilding is something that you have to do with any kind of fiction. Even something that is set contemporary in your real home because you are still making narrative decisions about every piece of the world that goes on the page. So all of the things we're going to be talking about are things that you will still be able to find and apply, even if you're writing something that is contemporary.

[Fonda] Yeah. I've often said that even if you have your story set in a small town, or a nuclear submarine, the odds that your reader has actually been to that small town or has been on a nuclear submarine are vanishingly small. So you have just as much work to convince your reader of that world as you do a fictional world. The only advantage, or really difference, that you have when you're writing that is opposed to a speculative fiction story is that you have more… You can count on your reader having more real-life cues to help them along in building that world in their mind than you necessarily would if you're creating a completely secondary world from scratch.

[Dan] Yeah. I made this mistake yesterday, actually. In the book that I'm writing, I have a scene set in a law office. I wrote it. It just didn't feel wrong, it felt hollow and weird, and I realized I had included zero worldbuilding details in it. There… If someone doesn't already know exactly what a law office looks like or how it works, they would be completely lost trying to read that scene and understand it. So, yeah. You need to include this whether it's real or… Real stuff or stuff you make up.

[Fonda] If you don't get those details right in a real-world setting, there are people who will tell you that you got your worldbuilding details wrong.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Even if you do get them right, I'll just say, FYI, even if you do get them right, people will still tell you that you're wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yes, but at least you can feel good about yourself.

[Mary Robinette] I know. So, what are some of the tools that we can use, Fonda?

 

[Fonda] Well, often times people have asked how do you come up with the ideas for your story? Like, every single one of us has had that question put to us, at a reading or a book signing. The reality is that there's no idea factory. Most of the time, we have some little kernel, and we glom additional material onto that kernel in order to make it turn into something that could potentially be a story. I find, at least in my case, that the story tends to show up as an initial kernel of either a world kernel, a character kernel, or a plot kernel. This is happened to me with each of my different projects. They've come to me as different kernels. The Green Bone saga, for example, that came as a world kernel first. So the world, the premise of the world, was what first arrived, and then I had to do the work of developing plot and characters. So if your world comes to you first, I think the thing to ask yourself is what attracts you to this world and what inherent conflicts are there that are present in that world? That will lead you then to what kind of potential plot might unfold as a result of the conflicts. It might lead you to what types of characters will enable the reader to experience that world and to experience those conflicts. But if you have, let's say, a character kernel come to you first, then you can ask yourself, well, what is the character's journey and what is it that you can do with your worldbuilding that makes that journey more compelling and difficult. Then, finally, if you have a plot kernel come to you first, it may be a twist or a cool climax idea, then you can backfill it with, okay, now you're going to go do your worldbuilding. What kind of external worldly pressures are going to make the stakes of that plot extremely compelling and gripping?

 

[Dan] I am excited to talk about all three of those and dig into some examples. Let's do a book of the week first, which is actually me. I'm going to talk this week about a book called She Who Rides the Storm by Caitlin Sangster. This came out just a couple of weeks ago, and it is an epic fantasy heist novel, with some really just incredible worldbuilding. One of the main characters has this incredible magical sense of smell. So, not only is it written with this really wonderful sense of sensory detail, but the smells that she is including in her fantasy world are all incredibly compelling. It has kind of driven her to create all kinds of interesting foods and medicines… She's an herbalist… Things like this that came together through the sense of smell to give a really fascinating sense of place to the world that she is telling the story in. So that is She Who Rides the Storm by Caitlin Sangster.

 

[Mary Robinette] Cool. Well, there's a thing that Fonda was talking about right before we took the break that made me think of a thing, which is that when we're talking about the world, that I also find that the world is another three-legged stool. That it's made up of environments, culture, and technology. And that each of those pieces influence the others. One of the things that I want you to be thinking about as we're going through this whole thing is that just as the culture's influenced by the environment… If you're in a very warm place, that's going to affect the kind of clothing that someone wears. The technology that you have will affect that as well, because if you're in a warm place with air conditioning, you're going to have a completely different reaction than if you're in a warm place without air conditioning. So there's this kind of cyclical interconnectedness. When we're looking at all of these things, again, through the whole master class, one of the places that people come part with their worldbuilding is that they don't think about the way things are interconnected. So they don't think about how the technology affects the character and that then affects the plot. Or they don't think about the way the plot affects the technology. Like they don't think about the ways… That there's a web. The thing about a three-legged stool is you can't take any of those legs away without the whole stool falling over.

[Howard] There's the classic example that we used in one of the very first episodes of Writing Excuses, which is the continual light spell in the Dungeons & Dragons setting. Which, if it's been around for a generation or more, candlemaking is dead. Because I don't care how much those things cost, now… They're continual. You've upset an entire economy. So contemplating the implications of that cool stuff that attracts you to the world is key to making that world feel believable. Because at some point, we walk through these worlds that people create and something rings wrong and we realize it's because, "Oh, wait. If A, then definitely not B. We're spending all this time on B. We need to skip straight ahead to M."

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] Right. I mean, there's so many choices that you make in worldbuilding. Ideally, you want all of those choices to continue to reinforce your characters, challenges, and their choices, and enable the story that you want to tell and make your plot more compelling. You don't want your worldbuilding to undermine your story. I think we'll talk a lot over the course of this master class about how do you make choices that help your story as opposed to just acting as a backdrop for the story.

 

[Dan] I really love this idea that you gave us about the kernels. World first, character first, and plot first. I'd love to dig into those a little bit and get an example. I kind of want to ask about the Green Bone saga. You mentioned that idea came to you as world first. Can you give us, very quickly, kind of a sense of how you developed that? How starting with the world informed the way that you came up with the plot and the characters?

[Fonda] Yeah, so my initial kernel for the Green Bone saga was Jade City. That was… Those were the two words, it's the title of the first book, and that's what came to me first. The premise of it was almost an aesthetic one. I wanted to create a world that had these… An awesome kung fu magic powers that I saw in my favorite films. People being able to like leap off buildings and punch through walls, and ground that in a story where that made sense and there was a magic resource that explained that. Then mashed it with my favorite crime drama aesthetics. So that was the premise of the world. In order… Where I built off from that was saying, "Okay. Well, what kind of world is going to most fulfill this vision?" That allowed me to decide where to set it in terms of time. Because the default with a lot of fantasy stories is to set it in like a medieval period. But I had a really clear aesthetic in my mind. I'm like, "What is a gangster family drama unless it's got luxury cars and the submachine guns and the dark alleys and the men in suits smoking in rooms?" So that led me to the decision to set a fantasy… An epic fantasy story in a more modern, latter half of the 20th century time period. Because I knew from the start that I wanted to invoke a family saga, like the Godfather, that made me make a decision around characters. They have to be… I had a multiple POV story with a cast of characters, and each of them has a different role in the family. Then, that led me to a lot of plot decisions, around how the characters would interact. So it's sort of a cascading effect in which you come up… You have a kernel, and then you make a number of choices in your worldbuilding that help you tell the story that you want to tell.

[Howard] I find it really useful to prioritize the things that you loved early on, the decisions that you're making. Because I inevitably in my worldbuilding in my storytelling will arrive at a point where I can see very clearly, "Oh. This is the thing that I absolutely need to be exploring, but in order to do this, I have to knock down that very first piece of foundation I built because those don't work." Because I'm working in comics or in prose, that's not terribly expensive. If I were working in cinema and had already built a movie set, then that would be a terrible decision to have to make, but I don't. So that's not the way it rolls.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We are running… Letting this episode run slightly long because we wanted to introduce the full master class. Let me give a really quick example of a plot first story kernel. With my Zero G middle grade books on Audible. The whole impetus behind that story was Home Alone in space. The idea that there is a kid on a colony ship who has to defend it from pirates, because everyone else is asleep. In order to tell that story properly, starting purely with the plot, that created or forced a lot of worldbuilding decisions such that I didn't want it… If he has to defend the ship by himself, then the cryo-technology that keeps everyone asleep can't be something that he can just undo… He can't wake people up and put them back to sleep again. It forced a lot of the technological details because I needed a story in which a 12-year-old boy had to solve all of the problems by himself. Does anybody very quickly have an example of a character first?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I do. Ghost Talkers started with the character of Ginger Stuyvesant. All I really knew about her, the sense that I had, was that she was this glamorous heiress, and that she was a medium. That was kind of all I knew. I wanted there to be some banter, and that there was a noir feel, kind of a… Then I had to figure out sort of where she lived and figure out what the world was that she inhabited that allowed her to be a medium that solved crime. Which I knew that… That also then gave me the plot. It's like, "Oh, she's solving mysteries. That's what she's doing with this thing." But it definitely started… I had a very clear image of Ginger. Then I had to figure everything else out around her.

[Fonda] What I love about all these examples is that it shows that wherever your story starts, you are taking that kernel and you are building that world around it as opposed to just sort of putting it up against a backdrop. You're trying to find ways to tie the world into all the elements of character and all the elements of plot.

 

[Dan] Awesome. Well, this has been a fantastic episode. We're going to end with some homework. Fonda? What would you like our listeners to do?

[Fonda] I would like you to pick a favorite book with worldbuilding that you admire, and see if you can identify in what way the worldbuilding supports the character journeys that happen in that story, supports the plot, and also supports the themes.

[Dan] Cool. Well, there you go. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/22/15-47-worldbuilding-science-fiction-with-cory-doctorow/

Key points: Extrapolating to make futuristic parables? Think of a throat swab, one factor to focus on. Take one technology or phenomenon and build a world around it. Enduring issues are that we only know how to make one kind of computer, and that encryption works, so computers are colonizing everything. Or consider organ transplants from something like pigs. Take a single point and follow logical causal chains and branches to see where it goes. What about worldbuilding for stories set in the present? For example, romance writers need to think through their setting, even a small town. Worldbuilding gives you opportunities for conflict and to add depth to characters. Don't forget economics! What do people do, what are their jobs?
 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 47.

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow.

[Piper] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Cory] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Cory] And I'm Cory.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we're talking about worldbuilding and science fiction. Most of the time, when we talk about worldbuilding, it's very fantasy oriented. But worldbuilding is actually something that you need to do, regardless of what kind of fiction you're writing. Since Cory writes science fiction and is… often near future, just around the corner science fiction, the worldbuilding that he does has to tie pretty tightly to what's going on in the real world. So how do you get there, how do you extrapolate?

[Cory] Yeah. So extrapolating is a good word for it, because I like to be really clear that it's never predicting. Right? There's nothing more fatalistic than the idea that we can predict the future, because one thing I believe, and that kind of animates me, is that we can change the future based on the choices that we make. So I like to feel like futuristic parables are a good way to understand the present, but they only work as parables if they feel plausibly futuristic. There are some good cheap tricks for that. I often analogize near future SF to going to the doctor to get your throat swabbed. Right? The doctor goes… The doctor takes a swab of your throat, she puts it in a petri dish, she gives it 72 hours. What she's got then is not an accurate model of your body. She has this, like, usefully inaccurate model of your body. Where she's taken one fact of your body she wants to use to understand a factor that is otherwise drowned out by the noise of the thousand other processes going on in your body. She's reified it so it's the one fact in this little world in a bottle. As science fiction writers, we can reach into the world and we can take a technology or a phenomenon and we can build a world around it in which that is… Has a centrality that isn't… It isn't predictive, because there would be all the confounding factors that would go into it. But by elevating it to this like… To the center of a narrative, we can equip the readers to understand the subtle effects of that technology as we're living in it now. Which gives them a benchmark to understand it in the future. It becomes a kind of emotional architect's fly through of a 3D model of what it would be like if… As this technology becomes more significant, more important.

[Howard] Worldbuilding strep.

[Cory] Yeah. Well, exactly. So, drones are never going to be the only important thing in our world, but drones are going to have a big important effect on our world. You could write a drone story where drones had a centrality that would let you think through some of those issues and let… Give readers a vocabulary for comparing the world that they're in to it, in the same way that we can say that mass surveillance is Orwellian. You might be able to say that it's Robinette-Kowalian, or Doctorow-vian, or whatever. For Drake-ian. If you found the right narrative and hooked it up the right way. So that diagnostic tool, that kind of predicting the present for me is a really useful way to think about science fiction and its role in the world.

[Howard] I bought some solar powered sidewalk lamps at Walmart for like five bucks. Opened them up and realized they had AA rechargeable batteries in them. What I had was a six dollar solar powered AA battery charger.

[Cory] Right.

[Howard] It forced me to rethink every post-apocalyptic thing I had ever read, because, now, boy, the lights aren't going off until I run out of rechargeable batteries.

[Cory] Right.

[Howard] Because… And I'm not likely to run out of those soon, if it's like a zombie post-apocalypse. This kind of extrapolation is so much fun, because we are living through some fun tipping points. The tipping point of solar and renewable, tipping points of surveillance sue-valence drone technology. Extrapolating these things just 20 years forward is fun.

 

[Cory] Yeah. I also want to say that if you want to give your work an enduring legacy, if you want to make it continue to feel realistic in the future or at least salient in the future, one really good way to do that is to understand that computer science theory is actually pretty static. Computer engineering is a very fast moving field, but the theory on which it's built is pretty static. Like, since the war years, we've known how to build really one kind of computer. It's the Turing complete computer, that can run every program that we can conceive of. Now, this has been a huge boon, because it means that if you can make computers faster and smaller, then any program you can think of can run on them. It means that computers colonize everything. The device that you're listening to this on is a computer. The house that you're in maybe a computer at this point, in the sense that if you took the computers out, the house might become uninhabitable. If you have a pacemaker, you have a computer in your body. Your car is definitely a computer if it was made in the last 10 years, and you trust your body to it. It whisks you down the road at 80 miles an hour. 5 miles an hour if you live in Los Angeles.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] That computer design, the one computer that can run every program, also has this major downside, which is we don't know how to not make it run undesirable programs. Right? We don't know how to not make it run programs that pirate copyrighted works, and we don't know how to not make it run programs that are malicious, and we don't know how to not make it run programs that are… We don't want criminals to have access to like encryption technology. There's this move now to restrict access to encryption technology, so that criminals can't have conversations in secret, and it's somewhat of a moot question, because you might say, "In this country, we don't let you run that program." But how do you stop people from downloading that program and running it on their computer? We don't know how to make a computer that can't run the program period. We don't know how to make an iPhone that can't run software that's not blessed by Apple. So this is a really interesting point, because our closest approximation is the Apple solution, which is a program that has spyware running on it that checks to see whether you're doing something that the manufacturer disapproves of. If you try to do it, it says, "I can't let you do that, Dave." So that fact, that's a really important fact that like plays out in our policy all the time. Then a related fact that I alluded to is that we know how to make encryption that works and we know how to make encryption that doesn't work. What we don't know how to make is encryption that works only when we need it to stop working.

[Gasp]

[Cory] Right? Like, when criminals use it. Like, we keep trying. It is a catastrophic failure, because encryption is how we make sure that the firmware update in your pacemaker doesn't kill you in your boots. If we say, well, we're going to ban working encryption, then what we really say is that we're going to make it so that we can't validate the payloads that we send to your pacemaker to make sure that it's getting new firmware.

[Howard] We can keep criminals from conspiring, we can't keep them from killing you with the thing in your chest.

[Cory] Right. Indeed, they will continue to conspire.

[Howard] Right.

[Cory] So, both of these facts, and then the third fact about technology is that governments are really struggling to come to grips with both of these two other facts, that encryption works and that we only know how to make one kind of computer. They will not cease to struggle with it because computers are colonizing every category of device, which means that they're central to every policy problem we have. Which means that they'll keep making this mistake. If you make any one of or all three of those facts central to your fiction, it will continue to be a parable about all the bad things going on in our world, unfortunately, for the entire foreseeable future. That means that you can have a book like Little Brother, the novel of mine that I'm really best known for, that I wrote in 2006, that continues to be cited as an incredibly, like, gripping futuristic salient tale that has something to tell us about our present day only because it has this techno-realistic element to it.

 

[Piper] You can also take a look at science from another aspect as well. That's from medicine, which you touched on with pacemakers. But you think about what we can do with DNA at this stage. For a while there, we wouldn't… The main basis for why the FDA wouldn't allow organ transplants and organs to be grown in something like porcine, like pigs, was because pigs had a retrovirus that could potentially be transferable to humans, which was… Would be terrible, considering the timeframe and what it could do. But now we have the ability, now, in today's day and age, to adjust their genetic makeup and composition to eradicate that virus in that string of pigs. Therefore, making it safe. We do now… There's a company that does it, that grows kidneys in pigs and have gotten to successful transplants in primates, and has proposed to potentially go to successful transplants for humans. Which could change the lives of people who are on the list waiting for kidneys. Now that doesn't take that much more in terms of steps forward to imagining what that kind of science, that kind of medicine, can do to change the near future. Or, if we play with the zombie apocalypse, because at least one of my series has done that, we look at vaccines, like, BSE is a major thing that I do in my day job, or not do. But that's related to what I look at in terms of data in my day job keep it safe. It's bovine spongiform encephalitis. It is nontransferable to humans. But. What if it became transferable? What if that virus became transferable? You have zombies now. You have people with brains that look like Swiss cheese when you take a cut of it. So…

[Howard] Delicious, delicious Swiss cheese.

[Cory] I mean, we have [garbled cases of it?] already, right? That's the human form of it, but it's thankfully, very, very rare.

[Piper] Very rare. But still, it's not that far in the future, when you can see the zombie apocalypse coming out of that.

 

[Mary Robinette] What you're basically talking about here is taking a single point and following logical causal chain to see where it goes and the branching effects as you move forward. In many ways, what you're talking about is treating technology like a magic system.

[Cory] Sure. And not trying to… Yes, it's good to have lots of texture in their other technologies, but not trying to play Nostradamus.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes.

[Cory] Instead, trying to make a little parable.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, let's go ahead and pause here for the book of the week.

[Cory] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of yours.

[Cory] Yeah. I wrote… The most worldbuilding-ish novel I wrote, I think, is called Walkaway. It's the one with the fewest of what Karl Schroeder calls the Backless Maiden, from the Arthurian legend of the knight who meets the beautiful maiden, but she never shows her back to him, and then she steps in front of the fireplace and the fire flickers through her eyes and he realizes she has no back. That's really so much of our fiction doesn't have a back to it. Walkaway I really thought a lot about what was going on behind the scenes. It's an optimistic disaster novel. A utopian disaster novel. It's about people being good to each other in times of crisis and working to rebuild. It's not a world in which there are good people and bad people. It's a world in which there are people who think the world is made up of good people and bad people and people who think that the world is made up of people who think that there are good people and bad people and people like themselves who know that most people are just a mixed bag of goodness and badness, and that incentives and structures and exigencies determine whether we're good or bad at any given moment, and who are trying to make a world that brings out the good in everyone. It's full of people doing things like using drones to find our bridge in blighted climate wracked badlands and then using software to figure out what kind of fully automated luxury communist resorts they can build out of garbage and then moving into them and then reveling in how cool it is until weird oligarchs come along and say, "Hey, that's my garbage." Then they walk away and find some more garbage in another blighted brownfield site to build on. This is kind of their journey. It goes well until they have a shot at practical immortality, which they acquire from scientists from the oligarch classes who decide that they're not going to be complicit in speciating the human race into infinitely prolonged plutocrats and mayflies disappearing in the rearview mirror, which is the rest of us. They steal the fire from the gods, bring it to us so that we can be immortal too, and when rich people realize that they're going to have to spend the rest of eternity with us, they cease to see these walkaway communities as like cute bohemias that they can steal fashion and art from, and instead, bring out the hellfire missiles. That's when it kind of all gets interesting and kicks off.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's a simple novel?

[Cory] Yeah. It's got a lot of moving parts, that book, for sure.

[Mary Robinette] It's a really fantastic audiobook, I have to say.

[Cory] That's very kind of you.

[Mary Robinette] It's very good. I'm very picky about my audiobooks.

[Cory] I produced the audiobook myself. The readers are spectacular. The bulk of it is carried by Amber Benson from Buffy. But also we have Wil Wheaton on it and Mirron Willis and Gabrielle de Cuir and a guest appearance by Amanda Palmer. It's really a terrific audiobook.

[Mary Robinette] So that's Walkaway by Cory Doctorow.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, let's talk about worldbuilding for stories that are set in the present, because this is a thing that I think a lot of people overlook. They forget that you have to establish a world for people in the real world. Especially if you're tweaking things a little bit. Whether that's adding a single technological element to your present day or just even establishing a world within a closed ecosystem, like a high school or a corporate structure that doesn't actually exist. So what are some of the ways that you think about worldbuilding when you're used to… Doing something in the present day?

[Piper] I will say, and this is kind of a dangerous thing, but I will say that romance writers get a lot that we don't have to do worldbuilding. Because…

[Mary Robinette] That's not true.

[Piper] Exactly. Particularly contemporary or romantic suspense romance writers, because of the fact that it is set in the modern-day or contemporary times. But we do. One of the best worldbuilding that I can think of right off the top of my head is the Lucky Harbor series by Jill Shalvis because it is a small town. It is a made-up small town in the Pacific Northwest. It feels so real that you think the town is there. The people are real, the bed-and-breakfast is real, you go into town, the diner is real, and buildings feel real. You almost have a mental map in your head of where everything is. That's because the worldbuilding is done so very well by that author. Because the author took the time to think about where this was going to be, what the weather was going to be, even what the highway would be like driving up to it, and how long it would take to walk down to the bed-and-breakfast. That is one of the key points. And what the actual focal points around the town were that built up over the course of all the books in the series. The series itself is successful, but it's going to like, I could be wrong, but I think it's around 9 to 12 books. That's pretty amazing for a contemporary romance to have the kind of worldbuilding where people… You think you know where, like, the Ferris wheel is, you think you know where the pier is, you think you know where the boat is docked that they hanky-panky'ed in, in this book, and then the tree that they fell out of that the person broke their leg in.

[Mary Robinette] The thing is that this kind of worldbuilding gives you opportunities for conflict, it gives you opportunities to add depth to the characters, it's not actually just worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding. It definitely makes things feel more real and gives the reader some… A way to ground… I read a novel for professional reasons that I can't recommend and so I'm not going to name, in which all of the love interests were retired baseball players. Like…

[Cory] That narrows it down.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. In a small town. I'm like, the economics of being retired baseball players in small towns, and they were all people who had been forcibly retired. So… But none of them had other jobs. It was like, how does that…

[Howard] This sounds paranormal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It does, and it was not.

[Cory] It's the "how do the friends afford that apartment in New York" problem.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly that problem. Which is why the worldbuilding… It's like… The only one who had a job was a barrista, as far as we can… I mean, technically, the others had jobs, but it was…

[Howard] The… I talked about it in other contexts, the CBS Elementary, the Sherlock Holmes show, is set in present-day New York, but the worldbuilding… There's the massive criminal organization run by Moriarity. There's the massive business organization run by Morland Holmes. These elements, there are callbacks to these things throughout it. The precinct, the officers, the judges, the brownstone that Holmes lives in, all of these details have been overlaid on a New York that feels very real to me, who doesn't live in New York. But the series gets good reviews from people who do live in New York. They've managed to blend location research with some fun worldbuilding and some fun callbacks to the Conan Doyle Holmes from…

[Cory] My favorite example of contemporary science fiction worldbuilding is William Gibson's Pattern Recognition trilogy. These are science fiction novel that were set about two years before they came out. So a science fiction novel set in 2000…

[Howard] Oh, wow.

[Cory] 2003 that came out in 2005, that sort of thing. They are science fiction novels about people, particularly New Yorkers, after 9/11, living true the rise of the surveillance state. A lot of the characters are spooks, and a lot of the characters are sort of spook adjacent or in the crosshairs of spooks. It's about people living through a moment of absolute technological upheaval. What he does is he approaches it, this thing that had happened in our recent past, he approaches it as though it were a great technological upheaval that people were living through, which we had. But it had been just long enough that we'd become adapted to it. The shock of them was just spectacular. It reminds me of my favorite Brian Eno aphorism. Brian Eno has this thing called the deck of oblique strategies that he used when he was recording Roxy Music and a bunch of other bands, which were these like gnomic aphorisms that you would draw out of a deck of cards and he would make everyone try and do it. My favorite one is be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before. There's so many times where this comes up, when I'm thinking about how you might try something new. Gibson wrote futuristic science fiction about the recent past. He was the first person not to set futuristic science fiction in the future. It was great.

[Piper] Every one of us has our mouths dropped open right now. Yeah, the faces that we have in the room.

[Cory] Brian Eno was a smart guy.

[Piper] Yeah.

[Cory] Came up with the Windows 95 chime.

[Mary Robinette] Really?

[Cory] Yeah. He made the start of music for Windows 95.

[Mary Robinette] I had no idea.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, on that note, [hum...] let's go ahead…

[Cory] I think you mean [huuh...]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Let's go ahead and give our fair listeners a homework assignment. Cory?

[Cory] Sure. One of the things that's often missing from worldbuilding is economics. I think it was Steven Bruce that observed that you can always tell if a Marxist has written your fantasy novel because the ratio of vassals to lords is right. I wrote a novel about gift economics. Gift economics are economies in which things are not given on a reciprocal basis, that's barter. Things are given with no expectation of return. We've just lived through a kind of forty-year social experiment in making everything transactional. Where there is no such thing as society and greed is good and selfishness produces pretty near optimal outcomes. It's hard not to reciprocate. But if you think through the things in your life that are nonreciprocal, you'll find that some of the most important things in your life are nonreciprocal, right? Like, you came out and said to your partner, "Look, the only reason I'm married to you is that I expect that when the day comes and I can't wait my own ass, that you're going to do it for me in thanks for all the times I brought you a cup of coffee," that you would be a kind of human monster. Right? Make a list of 10 things in your life that are purely nonreciprocal, that you do only for the pleasure of giving something to someone else, the intrinsic pleasure of giving something to someone else.

[Mary Robinette] That is a great homework assignment. With that, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/08/30/15-35-tools-for-writing-and-worldbuilding-with-erin-roberts/

 

Key Points: What do you use to organize your writing? Scrivener, Word, Aeon Timeline, PowerPoint, Excel, or maybe just a calendar or notecards. Multiple files. A world bible. What makes Scrivener good? You can chunk pieces, and move them around. Also, it has layers of version control and cloning. Sometimes you want to clone and rework, sometimes you should just start fresh. How do you keep track of your worldbuilding? Search. Plus notes. Excel columns. Focus on the parts that are relevant to the story. Sometimes you need to remember the mundane stuff, too. Other people can help, too, but you are responsible.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 35.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Tools for Writing and Worldbuilding, with Erin Roberts.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Lari] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Lari] I'm Lari.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] Awesome. Erin, thank you for joining us again for this episode. Do you want to remind everyone super quickly who you are?

[Erin] Sure. I'm a short story writer. That's about all you need to know.

[Dan] Well, excellent. We are excited to have you back.

 

[Dan] We have several questions that came in about writing tools. Some of them focused on worldbuilding and some of them just on writing in general. So I want to read the first one. It says, "Can you talk about the tools of the trade like Scrivener and Word? How do you organize your work? What features are invaluable, and why?" I know this process is different for everyone, I've never gotten the same answer from two different authors when we talk about the tools we use. So, what tools do you rely on and consider invaluable in the software or whatever that you use to do your work?

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, it's all about the pieces of the story that I can't hold in my head. It changes. So, I use Scrivener, yes. I also use Aeon Timeline. But in the last two things that I've been working on, I found myself going away from the computer and back to analog. So, for Relentless Moon, I actually printed out a calendar from 1963 and just used that to figure out my timeline. Divided it roughly into morning, noon… Morning, afternoon, night. That was… There were occasions where I'd get a little more detailed in there. That was what I used for a timeline. For The Spare Man, which I'm working on right now, I actually had everything in Scrivener, and then at a certain point, just bought packs of notecards and put it all on notecards and used a marker to mark which kind of plot thread I was using and also had a different… So I had some things that were labeled as plot point and some people… Some things that were labeled as story threads and some that were just labeled as information to track. So it's like, "Oh, you've got moving sidewalks here. Make sure that you have moving sidewalks all the way through the novel." But that was… It was very, very old school.

[Erin] For me, I've actually used PowerPoint before. Which… I've actually made a PowerPoint document for my story. The reason is that I'm a little more of a pantser, so I often am doing worldbuilding as I go. So I will throw a detail in, like a moving sidewalk, in a sentence, and then I'll go back and be like, "Oh, yes, I did say that. I should probably carry that through." So I would add to like technology in my world slide moving sidewalks, or I'd have one for characters. I like it because I'm not inherently a visual person. So having a PowerPoint reminds me to bring my visual self… Or to bring visuals to the story. So I often think the best tools are ones that kind of work with who you are and shore you up where you might need more support.

[Dan] So, talking about using visuals with the PowerPoint, are you like including reference arts and like character images and stuff?

[Erin] I do. It's because I have aphantasia, which means I cannot visualize things in my head. So every time I have a visual in a story, I am looking at a picture of some sort in order to draw on that as a writer. So I am the queen of visual imagery.

[Dan] That's awesome. I have… I am similarly old school to what Mary Robinette talked about. I know that I've said on the podcast before that I have tried Scrivener and just despise it. Which does not make it a bad program by any means, because many people swear by it. I prefer just the… I turn off every feature that my word processor has so it's essentially just a typewriter that I can delete things on. Then, I will keep different files. It sounds like that's common to a lot of us, that we will have one place, whether it's a file or a PowerPoint slide or a whatever where we can say, "Hey, remember this thing," or "Here's where I'm going to talk about all of my character traits and things like that." I build a world bible. I do use Excel in early stages of my outlining process. Just because it helps me keep all of the events in order. But then, by the time I'm done, I've put it back into a Word document and described it in paragraphs. I would love someone who does use Scrivener to very quickly tell people what makes Scrivener valuable. Just to counter my own hatred of it.

[Mary Robinette] I use it.

[Dan] [chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] Am I the only one in here that uses it? Okay. So I'll talk about Scrivener. The thing that I like about Scrivener is that it makes it very easy for me to kind of see the shape of the thing that I'm working on. So, you can chunk stuff in there, in at as kind of granular as you want to get. You can go like chapter and then scene, which is the way that I usually have it broken down. But what it means is that like if I realize that a scene is in the wrong place, I can just grab it and move the entire thing very easily. So it's… For me, that's handy. Being able to… Like what Dan does, where he has multiple iterations of… Saving multiple copies of a novel, that's how I used to work. The thing that I like is that I can just clone a scene… If I'm like, "Oh, I think I want to try this a very different way." I can just clone it. Save the original one someplace else. Throw it into my scraps folder. Then redo the one… Redo it on the clone. So that I have both versions. I can look at both of them. It has a lot of really good version control. You can take a snapshot every time you make a revision. So, when I want to go back and look for something… I'm like, "Oh, I accidentally deleted this thing that I love." No, no, I didn't. It's actually just a couple of layers deep, and I can go find it and it's still there. So that's what I like about it.

 

[Erin] So, I was going to add about the being able to save a scene. It's a little bit of a tangent. But you were saying that it's really great to be able to save the scene. I know that a lot of people like working in that way. But I also do know a writer who prefers to just delete it altogether and start from scratch. She thinks that she can get a lot more when she just has to go over and just do it all over again. So I think it's just interesting in terms of different ways of using your craft.

[Dan] Thanks for bringing that up, because I've noticed, most of the time, if I write something and I think, wait, this is in the wrong place. I will copy it, I will move it, and then I'll think, "Well, I need to transition into the scene." So I'll start writing a transition and end up writing the entire scene whole cloth as a new version of itself, and eventually realize, oh, this thing I copy-and-pasted is now useless. But, anyway…

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes that polite fiction to our own brain is handy, though.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] Yes. All right. We would like to pause here for the book of the week, which is Midnight Bargain.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk. I just read it in ARC. By the time we… By the time this airs, it will be out. The reason I wanted to pick this… I'm going to read to you the first three or so lines, because it is… Like, it is really a master class in setting up worldbuilding. It's… The clarity of it is so good. "The carriage drew closer to Bookseller's Row, and Beatrice Clayborn drew in a hopeful breath before she cast her spell." I'm like, "Boom." I know where we are, I know that this is like… I know something about the technology. I know that books are going to be important, and I know that this is a magic user. Then we've got this. "Head high, spine straight, she hid her hands in her pockets and curled her fingers into mystic signs as the fiacre jostled over green cobblestones." So I know that magic is something that she has to hide while she's doing it, which is also amazing. Also, I know a little bit more, she's given me this other breadcrumb, it's not just a carriage, it's like what kind of carriage. And green cobblestones! That's so beautiful. "She had been in Bendleton three days, and while it's elegant buildings and clean streets were the prettiest trap anyone could step into, Beatrice would have given anything to be somewhere else – anywhere but here, at the beginning of bargaining season." I'm like, "Oh, my God." I don't know at this point what bargaining season is, but I know that there is this stake, this thing, that she's not from here, that this is a thing that happens once a year. It's like it's so dense with stuff, but it's also just effortless in giving me the feeling of the character and the character's perspective on things. It is a lovely opening, and the novel holds up. It is, like, when I came… I thought this when I read that first paragraph. I thought, "Oh, this is a strong opening." Then, when I got through the book, and realized how important books were all through. The… That opening line about drew closer to Bookseller's Row, it's like, "Oh. Oh, she sets up everything in the opening, and then pays it off." It's great. It's a really good book.

[Dan] Awesome. That is Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] Wonderful. Thank you very much.

 

[Dan] All right. So, for the second half of the show here, we talked about general tools. Let's get into worldbuilding tools, specifically. So here we have another listener question. "How do we remember and manage all the information that goes with a fantasy novel? If you write 500 pages of story names, background, and rules, how do you stay consistent and remember all of it while writing the actual prose?"

[Mary Robinette] I use the search function. My basic philosophy is that if it's not in the novel, then it's not canon. So, I will… If it's something that I am consistently misspelling, I will probably make a note to myself. Like, what are the types of dragons? And, like, I made up that word, that's going to be hard for me to search for, so I'll jot that down someplace. But otherwise, I'm pretty darn lackadaisical about storing my worldbuilding stuff.

[Lari] As an editor…

[Dan] Lari?

[Lari] I use Excel.

[Chuckles]

[Lari] I think it's the version… I think it's… And PowerPoint as well as Excel. So I just add a lot of columns to explain… These are the characters, these are the… When I added a [garbled trans?] I had to do that a lot, just to make sure we were keeping it consistent.

[Dan] So, to be clear about the use, you have like each column in the spreadsheet is for a specific character, and then other columns for what? Different worldbuilding elements?

[Lari] Yeah. It depends on the novel, but I would often also need tabs. Usually, it would be like a column, like characters. Then a column for the kind of gear that they have on, for instance, where they come from. So I can keep it all straight through out a series, for instance.

[Dan] Okay. Awesome. I…

[Erin] I also… Go ahead, Dan.

[Dan] Go ahead, Erin. Go ahead.

[Erin] Well, I was going to say, I think it's also good to know what of your worldbuilding is just fun for you and what you're actually wanting to put in the story, because sometimes of those 500 words… Or 500 pages, sorry, even more. Not all 500 maybe things that actually end up being relevant to the story or that anyone needs to know except you. It's just like fun, it's like you're writing your own kind of back tome. But it's always good to go through, I think, and identify what of this actually impacts the character's world and journey, and then make sure that those you can really find. The other stuff, if you lose track of it, it's not going to be as important to the story you're trying to tell.

[Dan] Yeah. I think that that's, to some extent, a self-correcting system. If you've written in a world detail that you think is really cool, but you're consistently forgetting because it doesn't impact anything, then maybe it doesn't need to be there, or you need to find a way for it to impact something.

[Mary Robinette] I'm… Also, I will say that I also use Excel, but it is to track things that… Is actually specifically to track things that I don't have in the novel, but that I want to remember in case I need it later. Most of this… In previous episodes, you've seen me do, heard me talk about the axes of power. So I will… I track that, because for the most part, when I'm writing the Lady Astronaut books, the fact of someone's sexuality generally does not come up. But I want to know, because it will sometimes affect small things in a scene, and I want to make sure that I'm doing that. Or, if I have a Portuguese and a Spanish character, then I want to make sure that I'm actually remembering which one is Portuguese and which one is Spanish. Because I am… That is not my background for either of those, it means that I'm going to get someone to look at those scenes. That I'm handing the right scene to the right person.

 

[Dan] One thing that I noticed, when I have been writing the Zero G series, which is my middle grade science fiction, is that the details that I kept forgetting about the alien planet where they live in books two and three were the kind of mundane ones. So as I would be describing something, I realized about halfway through book three that I was describing things as impossibly alien. So, for example, the planet has huge crystals all over it. I had lost track in my head of the fact that there was still like normal rocks and dirt. That it wasn't just a giant crystal planet. That's because I was managing only the details that I thought were interesting. That meant that I was forgetting about the mundane ones. So I had to go back and mention, "Oh, yeah, there is actual topsoil. There are actual plants growing in it." So I had to change kind of my world bible. I actually had to note in there, don't forget, there's actual rocks and dirt on this planet. Like, the mundane parts of the world are the ones that I was forgetting. Because it hadn't occurred to me that I needed to manage these as well as the other ones.

[Erin] Actually, Dan, along those lines, one of the things I love to do when I'm planning stories is to read first person narratives, like people just talking. Especially if it's in a similar cadence to the kind of language that I'm trying to use in a story. What I love about first person narratives, and I'm talking like real world nonfiction narratives, is you get to see what people actually mention in the details that people actually think about when they describe the world around them literally. So, so often, you're like, "Oh, there is this huge tower," or "There's this great big…" And the person's like, "I'm going to tell you about my kitchen sink. Because, like, I spend a lot of time in my kitchen sink washing things. That's what I'm doing." So it's a good reminder to me to make sure that those smaller details, the topsoil of the world so to speak, is as clear and as interesting as the things that I'm excited about because they're new and different.

 

[Dan]We are essentially out of time, but it occurs to me that there is a tool that all of us as professionals use, that we don't usually talk about, because it is such a uniquely professional thing. We have other people helping us.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Dan] Brandon, on his… One of his live streams a couple weeks ago, he had Karen Ahlstrom, who is his lore person and keeps an entire like massive thousand page wiki just to keep track of his lore for him. I, as a published author, I have copy editors. When they send their copy edit document, it has a full list of every person, every location, everything that I have mentioned in the story that she has then collated and put into this very digestible form. So, relying on other people is more difficult if you are not yet professional and in a paid situation, but it's something that we all kind of rely on, and maybe is something that other people could try and find a way to use.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, although I do want to caution people that it is… You can rely… Asking… Excepting the help of other people is really important, but… And, Lord knows, be grateful for the saves that a copy editor hands you. But also, there will be mistakes that slip past everyone. So you do actually ultimately, at the end of the day, it is always your responsibility to have found things. Like, I think I've told the story about the giant continuity error in the Calculating Stars?

[Dan] I think you have.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. The fact that I kept talking about the seven lady astronauts, and there is, in fact, only six. Literally, no one caught it. At all.

[Dan] This is one of my favorite stories.

[Mary Robinette] Like, I just… I was working on book 3 and I was like, "Why can't I remember the name of the seventh lady astronaut?" I went back to a scene that I knew that all seven of them were in, and there are six people in that room.

[Choked laughter]

[Dan] I can't remember the context of the conversation I had with Mary Robinette. It was a phone call or a text conversation or something. It was endlessly amusing to me.

[Mary Robinette] There were a lot of caps.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Anyway. We need to be done with this episode. As much as I would love to keep talking about it. Erin, you have our homework.

[Erin] Yes. Using whichever tool you would like, take a look at some of your favorite worldbuilding elements. I know there's tons, but pick say five. Then, take a look at what your influences are. Are there any elements that are coming from a world that's our world? Are there any things that you're borrowing? Are there cobblestones, for example, like in the example Mary Robinette read? That is something that exists in our world. Make sure that those, all of those influences and those elements, are purposeful. Are they intentional? Why are you doing them? What do they bring with them to your story?

[Dan] Wonderful. Thank you very much for listening. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/01/14-48-how-to-practice-worldbuilding/

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 48.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How to Practice Worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] Granted, this entire season has been about practicing your worldbuilding, so I understand if you've given me a kind of quizzical look as I have introduced this to you…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Listeners. But we are in our last month of our year of worldbuilding, and I wanted to ask some questions that just didn't fit into any of the other episodes, and talk about, like, some of our favorite worldbuilding exercises and things like that. So, one thing we like to do when we wrap up a year is kind of ask is there anything you've learned this year or anything now you've been trying in your fiction, just kind of relating to worldbuilding?

[Howard] Your brain isn't big enough.

[Brandon] Hmmm.

[Howard] You cannot…

[Dan] Speak for yourself.

[Howard] Keep all of this in your head. So, ultimately, your worldbuilding… You're trying to build an entire world. Of course it's not going to fit in your head. Heads go inside worlds. You are going to have to use some sort of tool to record this. It might be index cards, it might be a spreadsheet, it might be a wiki, it might be some sort of relational database, I don't know. But for me, that discovery that I cannot hold all of these things in my head, and I have to write them down, I have to record them in some way, was intensely liberating. Because the moment I did, I gave myself permission to forget those things. Oh, I can forget that, because I've written it down, my computer will remember it. It definitely won't crash. Ever. Sure enough, the ideas flow faster, the world deepens itself much more quickly, as I commit things to paper.

[Mary Robinette] Ironically, mine is the polar opposite of that.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Which is that I don't need to preplanned before writing, once I have internalized a lot of other things. So, one of the things that I was working on this year was a novel, just for fun, which is a Alfred Hitchcock writes the Dragonriders of Pern kind of thing.

[I want to read that!]

[Mary Robinette] It… Rather than doing what I would usually do, which is sit down and think about the breeds of dragons and all the… It's a secondary world and all of that, I just started writing. Because what I realized was anything that wasn't on the page in the novel isn't canon. So I only… And if it's in the novel, then I can use my find function to just go back and find the thing. The only things that I'm writing down in a separate research document are the things that are difficult to search for, like, "What was the name of that dragon? I made up the spelling of the word." So I've got a document that I say breeds of dragon, and I go and put them… At the end of a writing session, I will go and drop it in there if I've come up with a new breed of dragon. But it was… It's been… That novel came faster than pretty much anything that I've written up to this point. But… It's also not something that I would have been able to do early in my career, because of the number of different other pieces of story structure that I would have… That I hadn't internalized.

[Howard] You already know how to cut worldbuilding… The unnecessary bits from the dialogue, from the exposition, from the whatever. So you can discovery write your way on the way in and it will feel like what you have written before… It's like kinesthetics. It's…

[Mary Robinette] I had to learn it. But that has been… It's been interesting, because it also means that I'm not being bogged down in details that I will never use.

[Dan] One of the things that I have started to rely on more and more this year in my worldbuilding is randomizers.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Dan] Because I… If I'm trying to come up with whatever it is, if it's geography, if it's a religion, if it's anything… If it looks exactly like what I need it to look like, it's going to feel fake. So, using random generators or just asking three-year-olds for ideas, whatever it is that you're doing, that adds enough noise into it that it feels more real. It forces me to figure out, "Well, why is this religion… Why are horses so important to them?" It's not something I planned, but the randomizer spat it out and now I've got to deal with it. That ends up producing something much more layered and much more textured than what I probably could have come up with on my own.

 

[Brandon] That kind of plays into something… It's not necessarily worldbuilding related, just writing related, that I've come more and more to see the books that I'm writing… I talked before about this on the podcast… As performance art. In that you are capturing a moment of my life and the way I respond to things in a story. It's like, I've often thought when I was younger that something was either right or wrong in storytelling. I have to find the right way to tell this story, I have to find the best way to tell this story. The older I get, the more I'm looking at this is a capture, a snapshot of who I am as I'm doing this. So previous things that I feel like now I've gotten wrong… I feel more liberated from them. That it's not like I did this worldbuilding element wrong, or this part of Mistborn One wrong. That was a snapshot of who I was, and how I viewed storytelling, at that moment. Which also helps me to kind of avoid the impulse to Lucas my old things…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right? Because what they are is, they are a piece of performance art that was me at that point in time. Now, what I'm writing, it's a piece of performance art that is me. The… Adding the randomizer and things to it kind of captures this essence, because it's less about making sure that all the pieces are exactly right, and more about what does the person that I am with the skills that I have trained myself in do with this set of inputs? What piece of art comes out of it?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Sorry. It's just making me think about the project that we worked on together. Because… So Brandon gave me a story bible, and then I… And an outline, then I wrote from that. There were pieces of the worldbuilding that I'm reading and I'm like, "This makes no frigging sense at all. Brandon, what? You're supposed to be so good at worldbuilding, what is this?"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The conversation that we had was that… Which I thought was really interesting was that a lot of times, it's not so much that you have it all worked out ahead of time, it's that when you get to it, you can make the interstitial pieces work. So, like, coming into it and going, "Okay, so I just need to figure out how to make this work." It was like having a randomizer. There were a number of things where I'm like, "This does not make any sense at all."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But the thing that I forced out of not changing it is way more interesting than just like, "Well, I'm going to change it so it makes sense to me." It's like, "No, let me see if I can find the connecting pieces that…"

[Howard] So it was a Brandomizer.

[Mary Robinette] It was a randomizer.

[Howard] A Brandon…

[Mary Robinette] A Brandomizer!

 

[Dan] Whoo ho ho. You know what that is reminding me of is… The current theory that dinoswaurs were most closely related to birds.

[Mary Robinette] Did you say dinoswords, because I really want...

[Dan] I tripped over that. Dinoswords is actually the title of my next writing prompt.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So. No. One of the things that I've seen recently is there's this big focus on we think dinosaurs look so weird. But look what happens when we take all the feathers off a swan. That is one freaky looking thing. So that's kind of what a lot of outlines are, is they are just the swan with no feathers, or the bear with no hair. Of course, it looks weird, and of course, it doesn't look right. While you're writing, that's when you add all the rest of the stuff and make it look like a real thing.

[Howard] The flipside of that, and I would encourage readers to go look this up. What do penguins look like with no fat? What does a penguin's skeleton look like? A penguin looks like a weird, waddling swan. Their neck is enormous. They don't have no neck. They're like all neck. The artist who looked at this says, "Well, what happens if I put that much fat on a dinosaur?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] The answer… They all look like very frightening slugs. As a worldbuilding practice, sort of trick, that sort of turn the knob all the way to 11, turn the knob all the way to zero, and see what you get. That visualization is just beautiful.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which is a really interesting story… Not story, nonfiction book.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, this is The Incomplete Art of Running by Peter Sagal. I read it because it was given to me, and he's a friend. I'm like, "Oh, I don't really like running. But, okay, I'll read your book." A book about running should not make me cry as many times as it did. It is part memoir, part why you should run, part kind of reflection on culture, and filled with stories. It begins… Oh, the storytelling in this is so good. But it begins with him running in the Boston Marathon right… He crosses the finish line right before the bomb goes off. That is not the most heartbreaking story in this. It is just wonderful. I… The reason… I'm encouraging you to read it because it's just good, honestly, and I'm excited about it. But I also feel like it's one of those books that is useful to apply to other aspects of life. Like, persevering when something is difficult, and finding the reason… One of the things he talks about in this is that you… Sitting down and practicing etudes is not going to get you to Carnegie Hall. Having a goal, that is the thing. I feel like it's that way with writing, too. It's not just like, "I'm going to put down a bunch of words." It's like, "I'm writing with a goal." So read this. It's a great book.

[Brandon] The Incomplete Art of Running.

[Mary Robinette] By Peter Sagal from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

 

[Brandon] So, another question I had, that didn't quite fit into anything else, but I think kind of comes here. Have you guys ever used non-writing hobbies or parts of your life, things you've done, as practice for your writing? I'm, of course, targeting RPG playing, because I know Dan and I have both done this. How has playing role-playing games…

[Dan] So here's one that I would… The most fascinating part of the Sleeping Beauty story for me are all the people who woke up after 40 or 80 years or whatever it was and found their home and their whole country covered with thorns and realized that they now lived in what was essentially this post-apocalyptic wasteland because of a curse that it happened generations ago that everyone had slept through. I would love to tell that story. But I don't know exactly how everyone would react. So putting that into a role-playing game, presenting a group of four or five players and saying, "Okay. You wake up. Check it out. What do you do?" is a really great way to kind of run an experiment and say, "Well, how would people react to that situation? What would they do? What would that look like?" Then, kind of collaboratively figure out here's a really compelling story that could come out of that premise.

[Brandon] Howard, have you ever used role-playing as a way to try out a character, an idea?

[Howard] I don't know that I've done it with role-playing in that way. The thing that I keep coming back to is the music composition study that I did. The shaping of a piece of music is very similar to the shaping of a story. The dominant pedal which is that key change thing that happens right towards the end in a lot of Western music that tells you we are approaching the end. That exists in fiction. That's a thing. Often I will look at what I'm writing and ask myself, "Okay, which of these threads is the dominant pedal?" Which is not a question anybody who doesn't know something about music would ever ask. You wouldn't think about it that way. It's perfectly possible… Perfectly possible? Lots of writers don't have any music training at all. They successfully signal we're approaching the end of the book. They talk about it differently. I think that's part of what gives us… I'm moving wide now… That's part of what gives us our different voices, is that the analogies, the metaphors, that we use for the tools that are in our toolbox cause us to deploy them perhaps a little differently.

[Brandon] Now, I would pitch this at you, Mary Robinette, but we know that there is nothing in your past…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Like a another career that has ever informed the way that you…

[Mary Robinette] I know. Just go… Was it Season Three, Episode Six, I think? Yeah, or whatever it is. Yeah. You hear me talk about puppets all the time. The thing that you probably don't hear me talk about is… As much, is the relationship that I have with my family, which winds up informing pretty much everything that I write. It's not quite using role-playing where I'm running scenarios with them. But I will… I will think about how like, my mom would react to a situation, or how my dad would react. They're very different people. They're best friends, but they're very different people in a lot of ways and where their commonalities are. So sometimes, I will cast… Recast a character briefly as a family member in order to figure out a true honest reaction for that character. Even if that's the only piece of the family member that goes in there.

[Brandon] People ask me a lot, because they know one of my nerd hobbies is Magic, the Gathering. They say, "Oh, how does Magic, the Gathering influence your stories?" I've had to think about this. They, I think, are going to assume, oh, it's the worldbuilding or you like cool magic systems, so maybe the game mechanics or things like that. It's very hard for me to separate that out, because I just grew up in an era where you played video games, you played lots of boardgames. All of these things are a jumble in my brain. I can't point to any one that Magic has done with that. But there's an unexpected one. Which is the politics of four people playing a competitive game against one another…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Ooooh!

[Brandon] Where you're each trying to win the game and have certain tools and resources at your disposal, has really influenced the way I do political work between nations in my books. In fact, I was writing an outline yesterday where I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to use this aspect." How, if you are the weaker party, how do you win in a war? Well, if there's three people, you look for the person who's strongest, and you gang up on the strong person with the other weak party. Almost always, the person who is doing best in the game loses first. Almost always. Because if they're a threat, everyone else gangs up on them. So… That's not the case in a one-on-one…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But in a four-person free-for-all, you don't want to be the strongest party. So I actually wrote in my outline, a character's like, "I know how I can bring this person down. It's by exposing how strong they are, so everyone else will gang up on them." Those sort of political games has been really handy for me in designing epic fantasy stories.

[Dan] This is why, back in college, the number one rule of any Magic game we played was kill Brandon first.

[Brandon] They always ignored you when you told them that.

[Dan] Nobody ever believed me. You always kill Brandon first.

[Brandon] If you don't, I will figure out how to get everyone to gang up on you, and then… But that sort of stuff was really fun for me to figure out…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] How human beings work. So, there you go. You can trace my political intrigue stories to me playing Magic with Dan.

[Dan] To multiplayer Magic.

 

[Brandon] We are out of time. So, homework. What we would really like you to do is do the thing that we have done in our writing careers. Take something that's very familiar to you that may not seem like it has anything to do with writing. Like audio engineering. Or puppetry. Or playing card games. Look at something you're fascinated by. Try to see if you can extrapolate from that storytelling principles that'll help you understand the way that you might tell stories and the way that your life experience might turn you into a better writer. Kind of a philosophical one for you this week. But, hopefully, it will be really handy for you. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/10/20/14-42-alternate-history/

 

Key points: Worldbuilding alternate history stories? First, an alternate history is extrapolation of what would have happened if something different had happened at some cusp point. Often set some years after the breaking point. There are also stories where the world is basically the same plus X (e.g., magic). Extrapolation? Use the patterns! Worldbuilding, and research, for both types involves much the same approach, a broad view, an inciting incident, and thinking about what are the ripples and ramifications from that. There is also historical fantasy, which is grounded in the real world, plus an addition. It's somewhat like the question of time travel stories, of how resilient the time line is. Does crushing one butterfly change everything, or do even major changes (such as the addition of magic) have ripples, but leave things mostly the same? When some of your readers may know more about something than you do -- be willing to let it go and be wrong. Focus on telling the story, not being right. Talk to the experts! If you don't know the answer to something, don't put it in the story. Use a character who is not an expert, so even if they get it wrong, the reader can say, "Of course." Have your character show they are competent with something you do know, then handwave past the other things. Be aware, common knowledge may insist that you have made up things in your alternate history, even if they are actual real things. Also, just because this wardrobe or furnishing is this year's best, does not mean everyone has it! Most people have older items in their house!

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 42.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alternate History.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] We have a really fun topic today. We are going to talk about how to worldbuild your alternate history stories. Mary, what is an alternate history?

[Mary Robinette] Well, an alternate history is where you take a cusp point in real… Like, you go back and you look at actual history and then you pick a cusp point and then you extrapolate what things would have looked like if a different thing had happened.

[Brandon] Okay. So usually the alternate history is taking place some years after this breaking point, this cusp point as you called it. How do you do that? Like, how do you guess what would happen?

[Mary Robinette] Well, as the person who writes alternate history… The thing is that history goes through patterns all the time. We… There are certain things that are fairly predictable, like the way people respond to certain stimulus, the way we respond to certain events. So what you do is just kind of look at the way those patterns shape when the different thing happens. For instance, we know that there's a kind of 20 year cycle in fashion. So if something happens where there's a cusp point, then fashion is going to go through a predictable change between veneration of the artifice and one of the natural. So you can kind of look at those things. We know that people react to Empire in predictable ways. We know that people react to oppression in predictable ways. That there are patterns there. So you can apply those. Like, a cusp point that I never got to exploit, but was really fascinated by, was the Prince Regent's daughter died in childbirth bearing a male son. A male son. Well done, Mary. A male heir. Queen Victoria was born in response to that. There was a race to produce another child, because Princess Charlotte was the only option at that point. Had she survived, and the pregnancy was survivable… The doctor, her obstetrician, refused to use forceps. If he had used forceps, chances are she actually would have survived that childbirth and the sun would have, too. The British Empire would have looked totally different. Completely, completely different. So that's an interesting cusp point, where you can sit there and go, "Well, we know how we reacted when Queen Victoria took the throne. What happens if we map that on to something that happens earlier?"

 

[Brandon] Now, I've heard people who talk about alternate history, kind of, maybe this is an artificial distinction, but make a distinction between books that are trying to explore what would have happened, like you say, on these cusp points, and books where one thing about our world is different, and instead of trying to go all the way back and extrapolate, you're writing a story where our world is basically the same plus X.

[Mary Robinette] Like Naomi Novik's…

[Brandon] Yeah. His Majesty's Dragon.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Like the Glamorous Histories.

[Brandon] Exactly. So do you see these as a real distinction? Are they approach… Worldbuilding approached in different ways?

[Mary Robinette] I think the worldbuilding is actually approached in exactly the same way.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] You're looking at the ramifications and ripples. The inciting incident is different.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] In both case… In one case, it's an action, a cusp point. In the other, it's the… And now we have magic.

[Brandon] Right. Do you make kind of… I remember you talking about Glamorous Histories where… Something along the lines, I'm going to put words in your mouth, you can change it. But it was something along the lines of you were not interested in the butterfly flaps its wings and so America is suddenly communist. You're not looking at "Oh. If humans had magic way back when, I'm not looking at now 2000 years later that we have completely different nations." But some people might be writing history that way. I don't know.

[Howard] I think of these… I do draw a dichotomy. There is the event-based, the trigger-based, the cusp-based alternate histories, and then there are alternate histories which I think of more as parallel alternates.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] Where the events that we know all kind of happened, but they happened and magic was running along parallel to it. What we are exploring in some cases is… I think of the Glamorous Histories in this regard… How would the Napoleonic wars have fallen out had there been magic? Yet we still win the… I say we. The French don't win the Napoleonic wars.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In the Glamorous Histories.

[Mary Robinette] I think this is one of the reasons that we have the useful other term, historical fantasy.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So what I write are… With the Glamorous Histories, are historical fantasy, which is very similar to an alternate history in that it's as much grounded in real world as possible, with this… But it has this addition. Calculating Stars, on the other hand, is a straight up alternate history. Things happen differently, but I'm not violating real-world in any way, shape, or form.

 

[Brandon] Okay. So, how have you specifically done research for say the Glamorous Histories or the Calculating Stars or Ghost Talkers?

[Mary Robinette] It's… It's, honestly, not any different from the way I do research for anything else. I start with a broad overview to kind of get a sense of the world. Then I start thinking about how things shift. With the Glamorous Histories, in particular, with my addition of magic, I didn't want to shift the world very far, so I was very careful when I was constructing the world that I… That's choices I made did not shift the world too far when I was constructing the magic. So, for me, the distinction is less about the kind of research I do and more about the ways in which I'm applying it. It specifically the way I'm dealing with the worldbuilding based on that research.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Margaret] It feels almost like you're dealing with the effects of what… How do you see the timeline, and the resiliency of the timeline, if you were telling a time travel story. Whereas, do you believe, that… Is it a time travel where you crush a butterfly and everything changes, or is it a belief that the timeline is basically resilient, but if you go back in the past and make changes, you'll see some ripple effects, but it's not going to send us careening off into left field.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with the Glamorous Histories, with the insertion of magic into the world, everybody has magic. Every nation, every people on the planet, have magic. So that's… That doesn't shift power dynamics at all. The fact that every… Because I gave it to everybody. If I had just given it to one nation, that would have shifted power dynamics. That would have been a very different story.

 

[Brandon] So, kind of a more general question. How do you approach writing about something, like, for instance, World War I, where you know a certain percentage of your audience is going to know way more about the topic than you will?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Howard, you run into this, I think, with Schlock Mercenary with the… You are very good at the sciencey parts, but I'm sure many of your audience are better at the sciencey parts.

[Howard] [sigh] At some point, I just have to be willing to let go. Because I'm more interested in telling a story than in being right. That's… I found that that's a healthy attitude in a lot of cases. It's not that I don't need to be right. It's that I can say, "Oh, yeah, got that wrong." But I'm going to continue to tell the story that I'm telling, because I'm enjoying telling it, and people are enjoying reading it. If I find a way to work better science into it, I will. The trickier bits to recover from if I've gotten it wrong are when I've misrepresented an existing culture in ways that future extrapolation don't account for. Specifically, in my case, the interactions between officers and grunts. The whole military culture. I've been fortunate in that I've stuck the landing several times just by having talked to the right people and gotten a sense for… Through being an old guy… A sense for how people react to other people. Because a lot of those things translated straight across.

[Mary Robinette] I think the talking to the right people is really key for a lot of this. Like, I basically went out and said, "I need World War I people to read this thing." With Calculating Stars, I'm like, "I need astronauts." I mean, I just want to hang out with astronauts, too, but I need rocket scientists, I need fighter pilots, I need… Asking the right people to talk to you. But the other thing is if you don't know the answer to something, don't bring it up in the story. Like, this is one of the things that makes me look like I really know what I'm talking about. In Calculating Stars, I very carefully never talk… Never tell you how much that meteor weighs.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] I never tell you how big that thing is. We did research… There's a range that I am comfortable with it being within that range. But I am not going to get specific about it, because the moment I'm specific about it, that opens the possibility that I am wrong.

[Brandon] Yeah, we talk about this a lot, particularly in fantasy, that sometimes it is better to leave these things unsaid, because sometimes when you start down that path and start explaining, you work yourself into making it harder for the reader to suspend disbelief. One tool I also have found in this area, and I think I mentioned before on the podcast, is if it's an area about which I know I'm not an expert and I know some of my readers are, I will generally take the perspective or viewpoint for that given chapter of a character who is not an expert. Who can be cabbage head. When they describe things wrong, the reader, who are my experts, can believably let themselves suspend disbelief and say, "Well, Kaladin just doesn't know a lot about horses. Yeah, he got that wrong. He obvious… He talks about not knowing a lot about horses."

[Margaret] One of the things that I've hit before when I'm working on a television show. One of the shows where I worked as a writer's assistant was called The Unusuals. It was a cop show that took place in New York City. So, there are a lot of cop shows that take place in New York City. So the audience is familiar with them. We had police consultants that we talked to about things. One of the first things, one of the first cops we talked to said, "You guys know that there's no such thing as an APB?" The All Points Bulletin is not a thing that the New York police use. If you put out what we think of when we think of an APB, it is called a Finest Bulletin.

[Mary Robinette] Huh!

[Margaret] Because like TV…

[Howard] You're contacting all of New York's finest.

[Margaret] New York's finest. That's what it's called. We're there, and we're like, "Okay, this is accurate." If somebody mentions a Finest Bulletin in dialogue, we're going to have to stop and explain to everyone in the audience what we mean. Whereas, if we say, "We're going to put out an APB on the suspect," everyone watching knows what it is and we're going to roll ahead with it.

[Howard] Elementary handled it a little differently the first couple of times they introduced that. It was… You need to put the word out. I'll put out a Finest Bulletin. Then they just called it that. I see the decision going either way.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Our book of the week is The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

[Margaret] Yes. The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon. Which is… It's funny, when it came up, I don't think of it as an alternate history book, but it absolutely is. It takes place in an alternate version of our world where Jewish refugees during World War II, instead of settling eventually in what was then Palestine, are in Sitka, Alaska. This was based on actual historical research in… There's this worldwide refugee crisis. Everyone's trying to figure out where. One of the proposals somebody floated in the day was, well, we could send them to Alaska. Who's up there? A lot of native Alaskans, but… Leaving that aside, as I'm sure they did at the time. So it takes place in a world where Sitka is this bustling Yiddish-language city, and you are following this intricate mystery which ends up tying into the politics of how everyone wound up in Alaska in the first place. One of the things that was so delightful to me reading this is, especially as an American Jew, seeing the ways it was both the same and different, the relationship that American Jews had with Sitka that you see American Jews having with Israel. That was really kind of cool and often funny.

[Brandon] I believe it won that Hugo, didn't it?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. It won basically everything.

[Brandon] Everything that it could win.

 

[Brandon] Mary, before we jumped to [garbled] I saw you scribbling notes furiously.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things is slightly off-topic of alternate history, but… Which is how to handle it when your character is actually an expert about something that you are not, and you're trying to deal with that in the alternate history. I'll very quickly brush past this, which is that you have your character demonstrate competence on something that you do understand. Then, the reader believes that the character understands it.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So they will grant you when you handwave past other things that you have thought it through.

[Brandon] That's awesome.

[Mary Robinette] I use that trick all the time, because Elma is a mathematician and my math skills do not exist. The other thing that I was going to say is that one of the biggest problems with writing alternate history, like the all finest, is fighting common knowledge. There are things that people think they know because of the media that they have already absorbed. So when you go into the alternate history, sometimes you put something in there that is not actually a deviation and people will totally think it is. Like, so, Andy Weir read Calculating Stars, and was on a podcast talking about how he loved my alternate history touch of NACA, which is the NACA, the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics, which was a real organization that predated NASA. This is someone who knows aerospace. But because common knowledge is so hard-core about NASA, NASA, NASA, NASA, it's a thing that he just missed. Similarly, when I was writing the book, I was… I had… My beta readers were going, "Wow. I love this alternate history where there are women of color in the computer room." I'm like, "These are based on actual real women." But Hidden Figures wasn't out yet. As soon Hidden Figures came out, those… That commentary totally went away. This is the thing that you have to fight when you're doing an alternate history is… Is that line between how much do I want to shift the reader's awareness and how much do I just want to tell this story and… It is an alternate history, so maybe the common knowledge thing is the way things happened.

[Howard] I was on a panel talking about how right do you need to get things. Somebody brought up the use of Chinese as swearing in the Firefly series. They loved how this was used to represent a melding of Western culture and Eastern culture. The linguist on the panel said, "But they got it all wrong. There's no way that these people would be speaking in Western intonations and then would correctly inflect the Chinese profanity. There's no way they'd get the pitches right."

[Margaret] They should have crappier Chinese accents?

[Howard] They should have crappier Chinese accents. He's absolutely right. Except if they had done crappy Chinese accents, the rest of us would have seen it as a slur on Chinese. So…

[Margaret] Or laziness on the part of…

[Howard] Laziness on the part of the actors. So, I'm happy that they decided to be wrong in their extrapolation of…

[Brandon] There's a pretty good YouTube series called History Buffs which takes a look at historical movies and kind of goes down what they got wrong. But one of the reasons I like it is because about on half of those, they'd say, "I agree with this change. By doing this, you are actually emphasizing this part of history which is a real part that didn't happen during this time or didn't happen this way, but when you presented for audiences, you make this tweak and get the right effect so that they actually learn the history even though it's technically wrong." Once in a while, I think that's what you do.

[Mary Robinette] When you were talking about going back and looking at movies and things that got things wrong or right… One of the things that I want to talk about when we're talking about alternate histories is actually fashion. This is a thing that I see people get wrong all the time. It's not, "Oh, your fashion is wrong, how dare you?" The problem is that when people do the research, they look at it and say, "Okay. This book is set in 1893. What were people wearing in 1893?" But if you look at your own wardrobe, you have clothes in your wardrobe that are at least 20 years old. Sometimes more. We are all nodding. If someone is wearing everything that is from that year, if there home is decorated in only things from that year, then either that is an enormous wealth display, or something has gone terribly wrong in their life, because they've had to replace everything that they own. Either way, you are making a character statement, and you are making it by accident, because of your research patterns.

[Brandon] That's really cool. There is a very good tip. 

 

[Brandon] I'm going to have to cut us here and give you guys some homework. The homework I want you to write is I want you to do an alternate history of an event in your life. We've been talking about macroscopic scale, changes to historical events and nations. I want you to just look back at something that's happened in your life and write that event as if it could have happened differently. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 40.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Vs. Wide.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] I've shared this story before on Writing Excuses, but it is one of my favorite stories. I once read a review of a videogame that was an RPG game that was known for having an expansive world. The review was critical because they said, "Yes, it's really, really expansive, but it's like an ocean that's an inch deep. Every town you go to has the exact same copy-and-pasted rooms and things. There's nothing to explore. All the dungeons are exactly the same. Yeah, there's 4000 of them, but if you just copy-and-paste the same three dungeons 4000 times, then you're not exploring 4000 locations, you're going into three places 4000 times." This has stuck with me, because the more I worldbuild, the more I realize that I prefer as a writer to have depth to my worldbuilding. I ran into this policy early in my career, where I had started to get popular. I had three magic systems in the Mistborn series, and fans are starting to hear that I was working on something new, the Stormlight Archive, which was going to be big. They started asking me, "How many magic systems do you have in this one? You had three and your previous one, how many are in this one?" I would be like, "There's 30. There's 30 different magic systems." I kind of fell into this more is better sort of philosophy. When I actually started working on the book, I realized one of the things that had made the Way of Kings fail in 2002 when I tried to write it the first time was this attempt to do everything a little bit, to have 5% worldbuilding and characterization across a huge, diverse cast and a huge setting, where the book had failed because nothing had been interesting, everything had just been slightly interesting. So I want to ask the podcasters, with that lengthy introduction, what constitutes a deep story to you, specifically when you're talking about worldbuilding? What draws you to those stories, and how do you create it in your own fiction?

[Mary Robinette] For me, it's looking at causal chains, the ways things link together. A lot of times when I see something that is shallow, there is an item, but it doesn't appear to have any ripple effects, it doesn't have any effects on the rest of the world. Whereas with deep things, you can see that there's a history, and you can also see that there are consequences to having this thing in the world. When I'm teaching my students, I talked to them about, and when I'm doing it myself, I think about why. Why did this thing arise? What was the need that caused this piece of technology or magic to occur? How does it affect everyone, and what is the effect, with what effect does using it? It's not like necessarily the personal toll, but what is the effect on the society? That's the piece, for me, like looking at how it affects the society, that I feel like a lot of worldbuilders fall apart, because they think about the effect on the individual magic user, but not the connections between those things.

[Dan] So, during the time that I was writing the Mirador series, there was a cyberpunk TV show called Almost Human with Karl Urban, if you remember that one. They did that, they had this very shallow worldbuilding. I remember in one of the episodes, a guy walked by an electronic billboard in a mall, and it like read his retina or did facial recognition and knew who he was and called up his shopping history and offer him a product. I'm like, "Oh, that's a cool detail." But if they have that technology, it would be in so many other places in the city. It would enable so many other things. They didn't explore any of that. It really frustrated me. So when I started building my cyberpunk, I'm like, "Well, I can't do that with everything. I'm going to do that with… Here are three or four branches of technology's, and just drill really deep into them and try to figure out how is this going to change society?" How will the entire city feel different if all cars drive themselves, for example? Just really dig into those and try to figure out what the ramifications are.

[Howard] For me, the decision point on deep versus wide occurs after I've only gone deep on as many things as I go deep on, because I will find the one which in conjunction with the others, gives me surprising yet inevitable. Gives me all of the pieces I need for the story to unfold in a way that it's going to do the things that I want it to do. At that point, I feel like… Whatever that thing was, and whatever pieces it touched in order to function in that way, that is where the depth has to be. Everything else, I'll go wide, and, if I have more budget, all sink an extra couple of holes over here as red herrings. But for now, that's the research that needs to be done.

 

[Brandon] You bring up an important point, which is that you can't go deep on every topic. We've been talking about this concept all through the year. But this idea that sometimes you do need to touch lightly on things, basically to pitch yourself ideas that you can catch in later books or later scenes.

[Howard] I wanted to tell a joke about the history of our solar system 75 million years ago. I was wondering how old Saturn's rings were. So I started doing research. What I determined is that in 2006, Saturn's rings were as old as the solar system. In 2018, when we dove Cassini through the rings, Saturn's rings are about 100 million years old, and will probably be gone in the next 200 million. The more I looked into this, the more interesting it got. The reasoning behind, the math of all this, which I'll spare all you. At the end of that session, I had four hours of information in my head, and zero jokes.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Now that's familiar.

[Howard] So, I left all of that out, because I realized, "Yeah, I totally write things about that. But it's not going to move my story forward, it's going to make people argue because it's not every… Some people know the 2006 science." I just have to give it a wide miss. The point here is that portions of my week are absolutely lost in that way. I'll research something and come away with nothing useful. But I don't get to have useful things if I don't do at least some of that research.

[Brandon] For me, where I went wrong on Stormlight Archive, looking back at it, when I first tried to write it, was I was a big fan of the Wheel of Time, which was, at that point, on its 10th book, 11th book soon to come out, I believe. I was trying to compare my series with one that had been going for 12 years.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] I wanted to jump in at the 12 year mark and say, well, this is what I love about the Wheel of Time. So I'm going to write a book that evokes those same feelings without doing the groundwork and characterization that the Wheel of Time had been doing for over a decade in order to create a really spectacular experience later in the series. What I ended up doing is, I ended up just touching lightly on all these things that I had spent my worldbuilding time on preparing. I ended up with a story that just wasn't satisfying because of that. Have you guys ever been working on a book and realized I need to do a deep dive on this one topic? What made you decide to do that, and what was it?

[Mary Robinette] I'm actually in the process of doing that right now on the Relentless Moon. One of the things that I went a little shallow on in the Fated Sky was the political situation on Earth. Because most of the book takes place on the way to Mars. Well, the Relentless Moon is a parallel novel that takes place on Earth and the moon, while Fated Sky is going on. Which means that I actually have to dig deep. In order to dig deep into the political situation on Earth, I have to do some… A deeper dive on the climatology of the planet after the asteroid strike. Because I'm like… Like, I have actually no idea as we are recording this whether or not the jetstream is still functional. Because where that asteroid strike was, it's like it may not be. I… So, I have to sit down… I've got an appointment with a… Someone who specifically does computer modeling of this kind of thing to figure out what the climate looks like. Because I didn't need to know. Now I do. It's… Yeah, it's…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Irradiation…

[Mary Robinette] Totally stalled on the novel right now.

[Howard] The secondary radiation of the regolith, the soil, the dirt, the whatever on a world where there is no magnetic field shielding you from radiation, and deep dove on this and came up with a quote from a Russian scientist who was asked, "Which one's worse on the moon, the solar radiation or secondary radiation from the regolith?" The Russian scientist said, "They are both worst."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Which means if you don't shield against one of them, you die. You have to shield against both. But again, this is a case where I was reading for four hours before I found that moment, where… For me, this is a moment where I laughed. Out loud. I'm like, "Okay. I even say that with a Russian accent." I'm not even going to put it in the book. But the idea that the dirt can be as dangerous as sunlight on a planet where there's no magnetic field… I tell jokes on that until the radioactive cows come home.

[Dan] In Partials, I am… That whole series deals with a lot of different kinds of science, but there was only one of them that was in the outline. It said, part of my thinking was, "And then Kira figures out how to cure the disease that's killing everybody."

[Laughter]

[Dan] Which meant that I had to figure out how to cure disease. Right? I could totally gloss over all the ecology, all the genetics, all the everything else, but, and I've said this before, I never want to write the sentence, "Then she did some science." So if I have my character actually using a science or a technology or a magic or whatever to solve a problem, I need to know how that works. So I did actually enough study into virology that I was later able to convince a doctor that I knew what I was talking about when my father was in the hospital. So finding out which one is key to the plot, which one hinges a whole story, that's the one I focus on.

[Howard] As a side note, writers tend to be dangerous that way.

[Dan] Yes.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and talk about Squid Empire.

[Howard] Oh, yes. Danna Staaff. Nonfiction book called Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods. Which is a discussion of… It's a… Well, it's a whole book about cephalopod evolution on Earth. The cephalopods were the first creatures to rise from the seafloor. They invented swimming. Then, at some point, fish invented jaws, and the kings of the ocean became the ocean's tastiest snack. This book walks you through all of that. If you are interested in worldbuilding, the discussion of this, just the way these things interoperate and interlock and unfold is useful. But it is also fun and beautiful.

[Brandon] Awesome. That was Squid Empire.

[Howard] Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods by Danna Staaff.

[Brandon] Awesome.

 

[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. How can you take a single culture in a say science fiction or fantasy book and build a bunch of characters who all maybe come from the same background, but all express something very different? The reason I ask this is often times I think our go-to in a fantasy or science fiction book is we're going to have this alien, and that's going to represent this, and we're going to have this fantasy race, and they're going to represent this. Or, this kingdom is the kingdom of merchants, and we're going to bring in a character from the kingdom of merchants. Where, sometimes what you end up doing is then creating a bunch of caricatures or things like this in your world. Digging deep, I found that sometimes, the best thing to force me, as a writer, to stretch and make sure I'm not making each of my races or my worlds or my settings or my kingdoms stereotypes of themselves is to say I need three characters who come from a very similar background with a very similar job who are cousins and who are all distinctive individuals, who offer something very different to the story. This has been a really good exercise for me in forcing my worldbuilding to stretch further, where I'm not just pigeonholing certain people from certain countries into certain roles in the story.

[Howard] I audition characters. I mean, I have a cast of thousands in Schlock Mercenary. I will often tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to be doing a scene. There's a side character here who is this particular race, and I haven't represented that race before. So, here are four different faces, and here are some different backgrounds, and here are some different attitudes. Which one of those… Which of these people gets to be in my story?" Then I pick one who gets to be in the story. The other three are now completely real to me. By keeping them real, by keeping those three real while the fourth is on the page, the fourth feels less like a stereotype to me. I don't know if it works for the readers, because I'm taking a comic strip.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It is actually something I think you do really well. When I pick up Schlock Mercenary, and I get different critters from all around the universe, I often… I will often associate the main character personality with that critter. Then they start acting different and I'm reminded, "Oh, wait. This is a culture of a bunch of different people who all act differently." You've actually really helped me to view this in a Good Way, Howard. So, good job.

[Dan] One thing that I am kind of, just now, really learning the depths of, is the idea that characterization is action. That who a character is has very little to do with where they come from and everything to do with what they choose and what they do. I think actually the hobbits in Lord of the Rings are a great example of this, because from a certain point of view, all four of those hobbits are the same. They're remarkably similar. But if you see one leaping recklessly into danger, it's probably Merry. If you see one screwing around and causing a problem by accident, it's probably Pippin. If you see one making a very grumpy, pragmatic choice, and planning ahead, it's probably Sam. So even though they come from the same place and they all like the same things and, given the opportunity, they will all sing a song in a bar, you know who they are, and they're all very different.

[Mary Robinette] So… I completely agree with you, that the actions are the things that we judge other people by. Since with secondary characters, we don't get to go into their heads. One of the ways that I make decisions about which character is going to do what is that I think about the axes of power, but specifically the way it affects… We've talked about axes of power on previous podcasts. But specifically, the way it reflects our self-identity. Which I find kind of breaks down into role, relationship, hierarchy, and ability. That we have… We are each driven by these things. Each person will have one of those that is kind of their primary driver. So if I have four characters that are all from the same background, then I make sure that each of them has a different primary driver. So, for instance, Elma, her primary driver is… She's very much driven by relationship and sense of duty. Whereas Nicole is very much driven by hierarchy and status. Even though they have exactly… Very similar backgrounds. They're both astronauts. They're both first… Among the first women astronauts. But they're driven by different things. Because of that, they make different choices and do different actions. So, for me, it's about the driver. That's one of the ways that I make… Differentiate… To try to make the world seem richer.

 

[Brandon] That's awesome. We are out of time. Dan, you have some homework for us?

[Dan] Yes. What I want you to do is a little bit of what I did and what I talked about earlier, writing Mirador. Is to take one thing, one kind of science or one kind of magic system, one aspect of your world, and just drill as deep into it as you can. Figure out what all of the ramifications are. I talked earlier about self driving cars. One of the recent discoveries, someone crunched the numbers and realized that it's actually much cheaper for a self driving car to putter around the city until you need it again, rather than park itself. What is that going to do to the city? What is that going to do to the traffic? When you really take the chance to look as deep as you can into one thing, you're going to find a lot of very cool story ideas you had never seen before.

[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/18/14-33-writing-imperfect-worlds/

 

Key points: Writing a setting where underlying ideas aren't what you believe? Imperfect, flawed worlds, with cultural ideas or norms that you don't agree with? We write these to help understand the imperfections of our world and how to solve them. Popular genre, with a flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair as the big bad guy. Take an imperfection in our world and push it. If you are writing historicals, beware of telling the reader that "this is okay." You might try to lampshade it, to have the protagonist stand against the prevailing attitudes. But they need to have spots where they are ignorant or unaware, which they confront. Fiction about imperfect worlds can give us a script, a lens, that we can use in the real world. When writing stories in a historical period or fantasy world, don't just pretend that problems weren't there, don't rewrite history by ignoring the issues. Instead, be aware of the unjust imbalances, the ramifications, the external costs. To write a character who is a realistic product of a society with biases we would consider reprehensible, make sure to include someone who can call them on their bullshit. Give the reprehensible traits real consequences. Think through why they have these beliefs or opinions. Don't give the protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they are the protagonist.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 33.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Imperfect Worlds.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] I'm going to ask you, how do you write a setting in which the pervasive ideas, cultural ideas or cultural norms, are not ones that you think should be?

[Mary Robinette] That's basically my entire existence with every piece of fiction I write because I am a woman in modern-day America.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You said imperfect. Any piece of nonfiction is inherently going to be the writing of an imperfect world. I would say that the question you're asking is more along the lines of writing deeply flawed worlds.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Howard] In order to help us… And I guess this isn't part of your question, it'd be part of my answer… You write these in order to help us better understand the imperfections of our own world and how we might go about solving them.

[Margaret] Well, I think we've seen a lot of popularity of this genre in recent world… In recent years. I mean, what else is something like The Hunger Games? They've created this deeply flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair. It exists to give Katniss something that's worth fighting against. It's… There's that… You're setting up a big bad guy and there's no bigger bad guy than society.

[Mary Robinette] Handmaid's Tale is another good example. A lot of times what you're looking at here is taking an imperfection in our world and pushing it, when you're creating a science fictional society. I write a lot of historical stuff, which is going into areas where… Like the 1950s, Jim Crow is still very much a thing. The Glamorous Histories. Regency England, which we all love, is built on a base of slavery. So these are things that… One of the challenges is writing it in such a way that it doesn't tell the reader this is okay and valorizes it.

[Brandon] Right.

[Margaret] I know one time when Madman was coming out, I think it was like season one or season two, and I watched a couple of episodes. I'm like, "Hey, mom, have you ever watched Madman?" Her response was, "No, thank you. I lived it." I had… It's not necessarily the imperfect world. Eh, it is not relevant. I need not cite this example.

 

[Brandon] Right. Okay. So, I would say the first thing that I have tried when I did this is kind of lampshade it. It can be difficult because I think your first instinct is to have your protagonist be the person who is not as sexist or racist or ist as the culture around them. Which, to be perfectly honest, I'm okay with picking up a story and then reading it and being like, "Oh." Because there were people, even back in Regency times, who were like, "This is not okay."

[Mary Robinette] The anti-… The whole abolitionist movement there.

[Brandon] That is certainly one approach to it, and I actually kind of appreciate, like, Mary, that you walk that line. I would say a lot of times your protagonists are several steps further along than the average person, but they are… They still have blind spots that they end up usually getting confronted by in the story. So it's not this perfect character who has no problems, but at the same time, it makes me sympathetic towards the character because at least they have the blinders a little bit further open. It kind of makes me think, "You know, I probably still have my blinders on to an extent."

[Mary Robinette] In fact, you're doing that right now, with blinder and blind as a pejorative term.

[Brandon] Okay. Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of those things that I have worked very hard to train out of my own vocabulary, and talk about spots where I'm ignorant. Spots where I have lack of knowledge or lack of awareness. But it is… It's very easy when you're writing these to trip up on stuff that society has imprinted you with. So one of the fun things about doing this, one of the reasons to do that, is to interrogate these things and to look at them and sort of hold them up to the lens and use science fiction and fantasy to tip them to the side.

[Margaret] For me, where I hit the line is where I'm reading a book… Because sometimes it's fun to read books that take place in worlds that are not like ours. That's why we read fantasy and science fiction. Sometimes it's even fun to read stories in a pseudo-medieval setting where gender equity is stepped back from where it is today, shall we say? For me, where I reach the line is where I start to feel as if I've started to read a Prussian porn. It's like this was just written to talk about oh, how terrible it was to be X in X time, or in this scenario. I love Bujold's The Curse of Chalion books. It's like there is a lot of sexism and allusion to sexual violence in those. It's not explicit, but there is this kind of threat of your main character being a woman, there's stuff that she is worried about. For me, that doesn't cross the line. Everyone places their lines in different places where there comfortable reading, but it's not a story that's about like, "Oh, no, I'm going out into the world. What's going to happen to me now?"

 

[Howard] In the… Around 2015, the Schlock Mercenary installments, our cast finds a giant, abandoned station if you will, world-sized, that makes them incredibly wealthy. In the 2018-2019 installments, the original inhabitants turn out to never have left and they want their stuff back. Yes, you can take a step back and look at this and say, "Oh, my gosh, this is exactly like what would happen if the indigenous peoples of the Americas or Australia or wherever rose up and demanded all of their land back. What would we do?" Well, it's not exactly like that. But having the protagonist deal with it in a way that says, "You know what, they're right. This isn't my stuff. It's their stuff. Not a whole lot I can do about that." We now have an enormous debt, which is part of our plot problem. The story is not about returning things to indigenous peoples. The story is about we made an enormous budgeting mistake and now we have problems to solve. It's fun to write and having a protagonist who recognizes, "Oh. Somebody lives here. Actually still does live here." And immediately said, "Well, okay. That's…"

 

[Mary Robinette] A lot of times what I think fiction is doing, and especially when we're dealing with imperfect worlds, is it's giving us a script that we can use and take into the real world. One of the things that I do that is actually the opposite of writing imperfect world is that I tend to write happily committed married couples. I do that because I so rarely see it in fiction. I see a lot of people who have taken their social cues from these narratives about men who are stalkers and men who are abusive. It's like that's not the relationship that you should be aiming for. So when you deal with an imperfect world and you have a character who is coming to grips with their own imperfections, it gives the reader a script and a lens with which to interrogate their own stuff. I know that I… That's certainly one of the things, the side effects, that happens when I read. It is one of the things that I think fiction and science fiction and fantasy particularly do very well.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is actually Mary's book.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I've been talking a lot, but I'll talk some more. So, The Fated Sky is the second book in my Lady Astronaut series. The reason I suggested this book for the book of the week is because it is set in the 1950s. It is set in the heart of the civil rights era. It is dealing with a lot of the problems that are inherent in the world at that time. My main character, Elma, is not actually a completely reliable narrator. It's first person narration. There's another character who has been her antagonist for the entire book. As this book unfolds, we find that as she is interrogating her assumptions, that… And he is interrogating his, that there is… There's actually more common ground than either of them thought. But the big thing for me with this is the idea of the narratives that we bring into relationships. That when we are describing our relationships to someone else, it's like, "Oh. I hate him, he hates me." That's the narrative. That's part of what happens with an imperfect world is that it's built by people who come with their own narratives that they're applying to just stuff that happens.

[Brandon] I haven't read the second one yet, but I've read the first one. The first one deals with the same sort of thing, and I loved it.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Brandon] It is one of those… It was just really, really interesting and fun to read, and eye-opening at the same time.

[Mary Robinette] I suppose I should mention that this is a book about going to Mars in the 1950s when women are the computers because we don't… Haven't miniaturized computers yet.

[Margaret] But with punchcards.

[Mary Robinette] With punchcards.

[Brandon] It's an alternate history.

[Mary Robinette] An alternate history. And imperfect… There is an entire chapter that is nothing but clean… Zero G toilet repair.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Selling point.

[Howard] Do you use the word milk dud?

[Mary Robinette] No, but we do talk about satellites in orbit.

[Howard] Okay.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So. Veering back…

[Laughter]

[Margaret] I'm just remembering all of the rocketry euphemisms in the first book. I'm like, what euphemism?

 

[Brandon] What do you guys… Do you have an opinion on stories that are set in a historical period or in a fantasy world that just tries to pretend the problem was never there? Meaning people who want to write a steampunk story and just say, "You know what, we're going to write an alternate history version where this isn't an issue." Or people who write a fantasy novel, where they say, "You know what, in my world, racism just isn't an issue. We're not going to deal with it."

[Mary Robinette] The thing is… There are parts of me that love these optimistic visions of the world. I think when you're doing steampunk and doing that, you actually have to move it to a different world. You can't just erase history. That is deeply problematic. It's taking a lot of people's pain and going, "Ah, I just don't want to deal with your pain, so I'm not going to. I'm not going to acknowledge that you've been hurt. I'm just going to… Goggles, dresses, and overalls! Whee!"

[Brandon] Right. Can I… I don't want to… But this is… This is something that is very natural to start doing, and is a place where you might end up having to confront some of your biases because natural human instinct is, "Oh, I'll make it better. Isn't it just better…"

[Margaret] If that never happened?

[Brandon] If that never happened?

[Mary Robinette] While, yes, that would be… It did happen. The other thing that I would say has just slipped out of my head, so, Margaret, you talk, since you had a thing you wanted to say.

[Margaret] I was saying that I don't want to say that you can… It's like, "Oh." I think a trap that one can fall into in, say, steampunk or historical period, and you know that racism was a problem or sexism was a problem, but you don't want to deal with that. The way to not deal with not dealing with that is to not have, say, any characters of color in your book, so that lets you ignore racism.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] That's a bad way of dealing with that.

[Mary Robinette] Don't do that.

[Margaret] I mean, clearly, if you're doing steampunk, you're creating an alternate history. There were not giant rail lines of flying zeppelins. I don't even know why you'd have a rail line if you were flying, but… 

[Mary Robinette] But still… 

[Margaret] Whatever, it wasn't there. But if that's the only thing you've changed, and everybody is also still white and upper-class and… Who is shoveling coal and how are we thinking about this?

[Mary Robinette] That, for me, is the thing that… Unfortunately, as a species, we tend to just always other people. If we're not going to do it along race lines or gender lines, we're going to find something else. There is always, unfortunately, going to be oppression. I wish that that were not the case, but I find it difficult to believe that there wouldn't be some form of oppression. So when you decide that it's like, "You know what, I'm not going to have racism." But there will still be some other… It's like there's something, unfortunately, is going to fill that gap. There's going to be…

[Howard] There needs to be an unjust imbalance somewhere.

[Mary Robinette] There's going to be ramifications of that choice.

[Margaret] It's ignoring the fact that this lifestyle was made possible because of an oppressed underclass.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Honestly, folks, and this is uncomfortable truth to hear, it's still the case.

[Margaret] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Like, the majority of the wealth in the world is in the United States, and even if you are poor, there are people in the world who are supporting your lifestyle who have it worse than you.

[Howard] There's a concept that super useful for trying to understand the unjust imbalances. Marginalizations. That is the concept of an external cost. If you want to write a flawed society, think about what the external cost is. A good example of external cost is secondhand smoke. I want to smoke. Yes, it cost me something, and it also makes everyone around me uncomfortable, and it changes the smell of the room, and that one's kind of obvious. What if the cigarette smoker couldn't get cancer, and there is no primary cost for them? Suddenly, we have an unjust imbalance that's really unjust. So look at external costs, and as you are creating your society, your secondary world fantasy, your far-flung future, ask yourself who benefits from the external cost and who is paying the external cost unjustly.

 

[Brandon] So, last question along this topic. You want to write a protagonist who is a product of their society, and therefore has certain biases that we would consider reprehensible. You don't want to… Say you're writing a historical novel. You want to be realistic, although sometimes realism is used as an excuse for things, as we've talked about before. But you want to… You want to be realistic. You don't want this character to be villainous, but you also want them to be a product of their society. Any tips?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I do is to always have someone that can comment or call them on their bullshit.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Because that's one of the ways that you can let the reader know that this character is reprehensible, but that you are not giving approval to that. Because there's a difference between the character being reprehensible and the text saying that that reprehensible trait is a good and positive thing. So having someone who can call them on it, having there be consequences for the reprehensible traits, these are things that I think can help when you're doing that. The other aspect of that is trying to understand why the character has those opinions. Sometimes it's just the way they were raised and imprinted and they have no idea that those things are false or bad or problematic. Sometimes it's… More frequently, when you're dealing with forms of oppression, there is a sense of safety that has been challenged in some way, and that they think, by maintaining this particular status quo, that they will maintain their own security. Or that they will lose something if the status quo shifts. So if you think about the why's of their choices and their opinions, that's going to help you have a character that isn't just "I have this terr… I'm evil." Yeah, evilness is evil.

[Margaret] I'm thinking also if you have a protagonist who is a product of an imperfect society, and being a product, you want to be able to say, "Well, yes, they probably hold some of these imperfect views." What I would be careful of is making sure, since I'll probably have other characters of the society who probably have similar views who are villains, making sure I'm not giving my protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they happen to be the protagonist.

[Brandon] That's a very good point. Yeah.

[Margaret] It's like, "He's a great guy, so it's okay that…" That's where I think it can get really sticky.

 

[Brandon] Yeah. I'm going to give us our homework today. Your homework's actually to take a character who is either in some media form or someone you have written who is a wish fulfillment character. This is a character for whom things have gone really well. Things might be easy. They're at the top of their power structure. Even though they might be facing very hard external problems in the form of slaying a dragon or rising to the head of their company or something like this, there are certainly obstacles to them, they are in a position where they're able to command a lot of weight of authority and privilege. Take that character, and move them to the bottom of a different power structure or put them in a place where suddenly those things no longer exist for them. See where that story goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/06/14-31-cultural-setting-as-conflict/

 

Key Points: To some extent, every story has some aspect of characters in conflict with their setting. Consider conflict as either a desire to move or resistance to being moved. Also, I don't like the way this is built, and I want to change it. A.k.a, ideals in conflict with reality. Immigrants are automatically in cultural conflict. Children of immigrants, growing up, face a challenge between what their parents want and what the culture around them teaches. Nobody represents 100% of their culture, we are all slightly in conflict. But don't use this as the main conflict, use it to make the characters more well-rounded. Start with a character in friction with their society, then let the main plot smash into them. Cultural conflict may not drive a story, but it often grounds us in the character. One story archetype is the person who doesn't fit saves society. Consider sensory writing -- what senses show the conflict of character and culture? What are the standard conversational moves that the character doesn't know? Casual or respect? Use conflict with your culture to add layers to the plot and enrich your story.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 31.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Cultural Setting As Conflict.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

 

[Brandon] Cultural setting as conflict. A little preface here. This is using my definitions for worldbuilding. I define physical worldbuilding as all this stuff that exists if human beings or sapient races weren't around, and cultural setting is all the stuff that they create. I think I announced that last month, too. But just so you know, when I say cultural setting for this particular podcast, we're talking about all of this. Religion, linguistics, economics, all of this stuff. We want to talk about how to put your characters in conflict with their setting, and with their culture. Obviously, this is one of the great ways to tell a story. In fact, I think every story that I write has some aspect of a character in conflict with their setting.

[Howard] I think the easiest place to start with this is to look at the conflict as either a desire to move or a resistance against being moved. For instance, if you are a member of the wealthy class, you do not want wealth to be redistributed, because that is moving you into a different place. If you are impoverished, perhaps you want to move into a different class. Those two work within whatever framework of the culture may exist. I mean, whether it's economic or gender or racial or multi-species or whatever. I want to move or someone is trying to move me, is one of the easiest ways to define the conflict. The other big one is I don't like the way this is built. I want to change it so that everybody can move. Or nobody has to move. Or something.

[Brandon] Right. Putting your ideals in conflict with the actual reality of the system.

[Mahtab] You know what, the very fact… Just from personal experience, the very fact that I'm an immigrant in Canada is straightaway a cultural conflict. Because there are certain things that I'm used to doing in India, there are certain traditions that we follow, certain norms. But take that out and put me in a North American setting or a Canadian setting, and all of a sudden, I want to follow certain things, but I cannot. So, I mean, just… For example, I love cooking Indian food. When I first came to Canada and the winters were cold, I would cook with the doors closed. I would be smelling like a day-old samosa. Maybe a week-old samosa. Then you'd go out into the world and you would have people just kind of… I was nose blind, but people would wonder, "Does she not know what she smells like?"

[Howard] What is that smell?

[Mahtab] It took me a while. I mean, I had to get onto an elevator with someone who was a lot more fragrant than I was till it hit me. So, the fact is, I can still cook Indian food, but even in the midst of an Ontario winter, I have to have all the doors and all the windows open… Not the doors. All the windows open, proper ventilation, and then… So it's just like… The fact is that you can have conflict if you just take someone who's used to following a certain cultural norm, put them in a different setting, and that's it. Also, with kids growing up. When, especially, the kids are young, the parents are not very well educated or not very well integrated into a certain culture. They are still holding to the old norms, whereas the kids who are growing up are now influenced by the culture they are growing up in. They are treading a very fine line between what should I follow, because this is what my parents want, and this is what my friends and teachers and everyone are doing. It can be huge. I mean, I've seen a lot of teens go through a lot of anguish because of that.

[Dan] There was a really cool movie a couple years ago, and I can never remember the title of anything. Sorry. That was about a group of Korean American teenagers, all of them first-generation Americans, who went to like a cultural summer camp. Their Korean families are like, "You need to know about our culture from back in the old country, so you're all going to go to this thing." It was just fascinating to watch that whole dynamic play out as they were trying to embrace their roots while also staying true to who they had become. There is a lot of cool compelling stuff that can be pulled out of this.

[Brandon] Is it called Seoul Searching?

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] I just googled it for you.

[Dan] Seoul Searching, Seoul being the pun. Ha ha ha.

 

[Brandon] I… It's interesting to think about this, because nobody 100% represents all aspects of their culture. None of us do. Which is this weird thing to think about, in that there is this nebulous sort of culture, right? Whichever set of culture… Religious culture or whatever. Society. There's nobody that is that thing. We are all not aligned exactly to everything in that culture. So we're all going to be slightly in conflict with our culture. There's not a person who isn't. We're just going to be in conflict with it in different ways. I think as writers, sometimes, we want to make this the main conflict of the story. Sometimes it's appropriate to do so. Sometimes this is what our story is about. But I think in every story, these sorts of things are what's… Are the sorts of things that are going to make your characters become well-rounded and feel real. People often ask me, "How do I make well-rounded characters?" Our kind of cliché but true response is don't write them to a role in a story, write them as they are and make the story kind of come along and make things messy for them. I think this is one of the ways you indicate this is these characters are going to be having friction with their society and culture, even before whatever the main plot of your story is comes along and smashes into them.

[Howard] It's not uncommon… I say it's not uncommon. I can't actually think of any examples off the top of my head. But you have a protagonist whose motivation is I want to fit in with my family. Or I want to get a promotion. It's very cultural, but then they are thrown into an adventure that has nothing to do with fitting in with their family or getting a promotion. At the end of the adventure, they have changed or their family have changed or the corporation has changed, and they have the thing that they need. So the cultural conflict there is not necessarily what's driving the story, but it's what's grounding us in the character.

[Dan] One of the books that I talked about last month, A Memory Called Empire. Like I said, it's a political story and it's a murder mystery, but the main character is an ambassador from one tiny nation who has gone to this massive Empire. What's fascinating about her attempt to fit in is that she loves their culture. So it's specifically kind of has this subplot in there of you're the big evil empire that's trying to consume my little nation, but I love your art, I love your stories that you tell, and I watch your TV shows all the time. It added a really interesting dimension of that cultural conflict.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do our book of the week.

[Mahtab] Right. So, the book of the week that I'd like to recommend is one that has been written by yours truly. It's called Mission Mumbai. This is a story of a friendship between two boys. One of them is an Indian, Rohit Lal, one of them is an American, Dylan Moore. They have a friendship that is based on their love of reading fantasy novels. But it's a very fragile friendship. When they take a trip to India, that is when they realize that there is a certain amount of jealousy involved. Their friendship is not as strong as they expected it to be. But one of the reasons that I love having written this story is that I take someone from a North American culture and put him into the Indian culture. Which is just as alien as having gone to a totally different place. I give both the boys certain problems. It's only when… Their friendship is stretched really, really thin, and it's only when both the boys decide to put aside their own issues and help one another is when their friendship becomes a lot stronger. So it's a coming-of-age, it's a friendship, it's a loyalty story. But it's also a fun way of exploring India from your own room.

[Howard] Less expensive than plane tickets.

[Mahtab] Absolutely.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Howard] That's Mission Mumbai.

 

[Brandon] For this podcast's second half, let's kind of try to drill into the why… Or the hows. The nitty-gritty details of how to use conflict with culture as plots in your stories. I'll give an example. Oftentimes, I notice that in films and in books, one of the things you do at the beginning is show the character not fitting in as a method of showing what their kind of arc is going to be. They're the person that doesn't fit into their society. Taking classic Disney movies, if we look at Mulan. Mulan doesn't start with her out sword fighting. It starts with her not fitting into the society of gender roles and the marriage rituals and things that she's expected to participate in as a way to reinforce that she's kind of outside her culture. So that when she leaves to go do something very different from what someone in her situation would do, you believe that she would do this. Because she obviously doesn't quite fit in. Then, the whole story is about this idea of the person who doesn't fit in being the one who saves the society. You see this used a ton. It's a really great story archetype. It's used in Dragonlance, it's used in a lot of different stories. It's one of those ways you use someone in conflict with their setting in a small way to inform your entire story.

 

[Howard] We talk about sensory writing quite a bit. Mahtab, you described the way you smell when you've been cooking. The smells of things, the colors of things. When you're uncomfortable with a culture, if you've been dropped someplace where you are not comfortable, which of your senses are uncomfortable? Which… Where are you feeling the conflict? Is it because it's too loud? Is it because it's too quiet? Is it because it doesn't smell like you want it to smell? Is it because the flavor of the food that makes you comfortable just isn't available anywhere? Is it because you're one of those people who is genetically unable to appreciate cilantro? Because there's a group of people for whom cilantro is just terrible. These sorts of… And Indian food, which I love, and I love cilantro too, has lots of cilantro in it. So you got this whole class of people who are genetically unable to appreciate the thing that you cook, Mahtab. Those senses are a great way to ground us in a character's fitting in or not fitting in. How much you love the smell? How much you love the color? How it feels like being embraced to all your senses?

[Mahtab] One of the things that I also felt or experienced when I came here is that there is a whole unspoken language which is just by looks and gestures, and some things that are… I mean, just to give an example. Whenever you start a conversation, now, I'm not saying that it's not done in India, but over here you discuss the weather a lot. In India, all you have is rain and heat.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] So you really do not open a conversation with, "Oh, we're having a really nice day today." So when I was doing sales and I was on calls, I would be like, "Hello. I'm calling from so-and-so and just wanted to talk to you about XYZ." I was told, "Nonono. You're supposed to talk about the weather," and this and a TV series going on or something. Or a little bit of the news. So, the thing is that in terms of making the story or the character a little bit more layered, it's not just the sensory, which is very, very important. But it's also the unspoken stuff that the… The norms that the culture that you're in follows, which is not quite what you do. So there are lots of clues that you have to pick up which are not… Sometimes, may be told to you, but sometimes you just have to observe. It took me at least a few years of observing, or being corrected or being told that this is what you're supposed to be doing. Again, I had no idea about time zones. I remember calling someone at 6 o'clock in the morning from the East Coast to the West Coast…

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] I'm like, "Hi." He says, "Do you know it's 6 o'clock?" I'm like, "Why did you pick up the phone, then?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] When I went to Korea for the first time, the thing I kept getting in trouble with is, Americans can be very casual with how they give things to one another. Which is nothing… Something I hadn't ever thought about. But, in Korea, a lot of people expect you… If you're going to give something… Just, like, if you say, "Hey, pass me a roll," that you're going to hand it and present it to them as a gift, with two hands.

[Mahtab] Two hands, yes.

[Dan] Two?

[Brandon] Two hands, and kind of respectfully. Whereas Americans, we'd be like, "Hey. Roll!" I did that to someone. They're like… I'm like, "Hey. Roll!" And threw it. They were like hugely offended. This was a teenager my age, but that is just not something you do in that culture. It was one of those things I had to really get used to. The kind of casualness versus respectfulness.

[Howard] I have to remember not to ask anybody to pass me the bread in Nebraska.

[Garbled] [without having my eyes open. Boom!]

 

[Dan] Just throw it at you. The Asian market where I shop, even the receipt. They will pull it out. They'll rip it off the thing. Fold it, and hand it to you with two hands. Because that is how you're supposed to do it. One of my very favorite cultural stories is a TV show called The Americans. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. It's Soviet spies, sleeper agents, living in the United States in the 1980s. So every episode has like an espionage story, but the overall story it's telling is how do these people who are like trained, practically brainwashed to hate America, how do they live and fit in and look and act like Americans.

[Howard] I grew up during the 80s. I would not want the job…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Of fitting in in the 80s. Oh, man.

[Dan] It's just a really compelling thing. They're doing a lot of the stuff that we're talking about. Where they will confront situations where they would do something the way it would be normal to them. Obviously, they have been trained in American culture, but it comes off wrong. Or they react the wrong way to something and they have to remember, "Oh, no. I'm American. I have to treat this like an American, not like a Russian." It's just really, really interesting, and really well done.

[Howard] There are a lot of cultural dialect sorts of things, whether it's jargon or just dialect things. In the UK, just now means immediately prior. What was that noise? A bookcase fell over just now. In South Africa, just now means really soon, about to happen. Yes… Not really soon, but kind of soon. I'll be there just now. I'm on my way, I'll be there just now. Are you in a hurry? Okay, fine, I'll be there now now. Okay, I like now now as a construct. When I first heard it, I thought, "Well, that's brilliant. That's a great way to say ASAP." But these sorts of things, if you don't… I don't want to crossover too much into the language discussion we'll be having later. But there have been a lot of times, especially online, where all participate in an online chat about a game and realize, "There is a jargon here." Somebody just threw a string of characters, and they are very clearly making a request, and I do not know how to respond, because there's like six acronyms in there.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And I don't know what any of them stand for.

[Mahtab] I would just like to say here that conflict with your culture is important, but don't make that the focal point of your story. Just use that to flavor it, to add layers to the plot which would make it richer. But don't make that the focus of the story. Because that would be too kind of clichéd or stereotyped, and you're just going to end up going a very predictable path. But use that to just enrich the narrative.

 

[Brandon] So, we're out of time on this, but we will come back later in the year and do an episode on worldbuilding culture and mores, so you can look forward to that. I have our homework this week. I'm quite tickled with this one. I want you to clone yourself and make an entire planet of clones of you. I want you to decide what the culture would be like if everyone on the planet were you. Then, I want you to create a trading post with this planet where people off world who are not you have to trade with you and what they have to go through in order to make trade deals with an entire planet of you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There's going to be a war, and my planet's going to get wiped clean…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Very, very quickly.

[Dan] The galaxy will decide we can't let this planet hang around any longer.

[Howard] Nope.

[Mahtab] I am going to try that prompt.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.