wetranscripts | Recent Entries

Writing Excuses 16.02: Publishers Are Not Your Friends

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/01/10/16-02-publishers-are-not-your-friends/

Key Points: Publishers, the companies, are not your friends, even if editors and individuals may be your friends. The businesses have different incentives, which may not match your incentives as an author. Example: the corporation will try to take worldwide rights in all languages, but they probably won't exploit them well. Another example, when you want to change series or genres, the corporation wants to keep you in that well-worn slot, but you may want to change. Also, be aware that your agent and you may have different incentives. Remember, you are the person who cares about your career, so take care of it. Your relationship with the publisher and the agent is a business relationship.

[Season 16, Episode 2]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Publishers Are Not Your Friends.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And I'm Brandon.

[Dan] We are back for another episode of Brandon's intensive course on career planning and kind of the inside of publishing. This time we want to talk about publishers. Now, Brandon, you named this episode Publishers Are Not Your Friends.

[Brandon] Yep.

[Dan] That's not what I want to hear.

[Brandon] Well, yeah. It's not what I wanted to hear, either. Actually, I got told this by my agent early in my career. Working on, I think, my first contract. I'm like, "But, no. I want to have a really good relationship with my publisher." The thing is, when I say publishers in this, I'm not usually meaning the individual, the publisher, I am meaning the company, the publisher. My editor is, indeed, my friend. Right? Indeed, many people at the publisher are my friends. But the corporation that is publishing you, traditionally published, is not your friend. This can be expanded to, unfortunately, Amazon is not your friend. Indeed, to an extent, your agent is an individual might be your friend, but your agency might not always be your friend. What do I mean by this? I mean that everyone is, when you're looking at yourselves as businesspeople, everyone has different incentives working on books. Your incentives as an author do not always align with your publisher or your agent. Almost always, it's going to align with your agent's incentives. But there are a lot of times where the publisher's incentives and yours are very different. I've got a bunch of examples of this. We'll go through them. But the idea is that I want you to start thinking about this. Because the publisher as a corporation will pretend to be your friend. Indeed, you will have good relationships hopefully with the people at the corporation. But they will make the corporate decisions rather than the friend decisions when money is on the line.

[Howard] Several years ago, my friend, Dave Brady, wrote a piece on loyalty to a corporation and the madness that it is. I want to read a little bit of this text from my friend Dave because it's so amazing. "A corporation is not a living creature. It has no soul, it has no heart, it has no feelings. It can neither experience towards you nor enjoy from you even the concept of loyalty. It's a legal fiction and it exists for one purpose, to make profit. If you assist in this goal, your ongoing association with the organization is facilitated. If you distract from it, will be cut. Family is where they have to take you in, no matter what you've done. A corporation is the exact opposite of that."

[Brandon] Exactly. Again, none of us want to hear this. I didn't want to hear this. In fact, it took me years to understand what my agent was saying. I'm hoping that with some of my examples here, you will be able to understand. Like, let me talk about one of them that happened in my career. So, when you sell the rights to your book to a publisher, there are lots of different rights that you can sell. You can sell… What is normally sold to a US publisher is US or North American English rights. They will want to take worldwide rights in all languages. They will not be able to exploit those very well. But they'll want to take them. Well, why do they want them? Well, think about it this way. If they take all of those rights from you, and they make an extra $2000, then, they have come out ahead in that contract. Those rights are only worth maybe $2000 to them. To you, those rights may be worth $50,000. The corporation is not going to look and say, "Wow. If we let him have these, it's $50,000 to him. If we keep them, is $2000 to us and $2000 to him." They're not going to think that way. They're going to think, "$2000 of profit is $2000 of profit. We should not let go of these." But to you, those mean a ton. How did this work in my career? Tor fought to try to get world English rights out of me. They let go of all the other English rights… Or all the other language rights very easily, but they wanted to sell my books to their imprint in the UK, which was going to give them a couple thousand dollars for them. My world English rights, which is usually considered the UK, Ireland, Australia, and other places they export, like India. That was worth, when we finally sold it, somewhere around $50,000 on that same book. Tor would have been perfectly happy taking that $2000 and never launching me in these other countries. And really kind of ruining my career worldwide. They would have done that in a heartbeat. We took it to a publisher in the area who had unaligned incentive with me, that wanted to sell me really big in these countries. Tor would not have lost any sleep or even shed a tear if they had made an extra couple thousand dollars off of me by ruining my career worldwide.

[Dan] Let me give an alternative perspective on this. Because, first of all, that's absolutely true. I make a vast majority of my money outside of the US. So I am all aboard for international rights. On the other hand, some of my early deals with HarperCollins, they wanted to maintain international rights and we didn't let them. We kept them because I wanted to be able to sell to Germany and South America, which are my big markets. The result is that me as a person, my contract to them was actually worth less, because I was only making them money through one channel, instead of through multiple channels. We were able to work around that, and Partials was still a very big success. But it's definitely something to think about. I had to find other ways to make myself more valuable to the publisher.

[Brandon] Yeah. Part of this equation for us, and this goes back to last week, learning your business, was understanding that Tor had a poor business in the UK, and indeed, would not have been able to do for me, in the UK and world English markets, as well as going to a local publisher. It was worth such a small amount of money to them that we didn't think it would really add anything. But it is a consideration. There are times when you want to give up some or all of these rights for one reason or another.

[Mary Robinette] Just to add on to that. The… When I had the Glamorous History series, Tor also held the English language rights. They never sold the rights to Of Noble Family in the UK, which is book 5. There's a reason, in the UK, you can only get books one through four, book five wasn't sold. That is the one that took the longest to earn out. Because we only had one stream for that, which was the US.

[Dan] Yeah. Now, I want to pause here for our book of the week, which is actually a little bit about my story with HarperCollins. On my second series with them, the Mirador series, which is my cyberpunk YA, that series didn't fit well with them. In hindsight, it was not a good fit. My age… My publisher, my editor, I should say, my editor loved it. He was 100% behind the book. But, as Brandon was saying earlier, the publisher at large was not. We kind of had to convince them to take a risk on it. What that meant is that they didn't really understand the book, they didn't really understand how to sell it. So the series, every book in that series sold worse than the last one. By the time we got to the third book, they essentially just opened their window and threw a bunch of copies out and hoped people caught them. It got zero marketing, zero publishing. That one is called Active Memory. It's the best book in the trilogy, and I would love for you to all go read it. Because it's great. Even though the publisher did not know what to do with it, and therefore didn't support it.

[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, another place that this happens is when you are trying to change up your career. Starting a new series. Starting a new genre. Another thought experiment you can have, and of course, this… There are lots of different things that play into each of my examples here that could change around the numbers for you. But let's imagine that you are pretty good at writing fantasy novels. You make, say, $50,000 at fantasy with each of your new fantasy novels. But you, as a writer…

[Mary Robinette] I would love to imagine that.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But you as a writer love the idea of writing different thing, because your artistic pursuits take you different directions. Indeed, let's say you could write science fiction books, and they make $40,000. Which to you is a good trade-off, because it lets you do something else. It lets you avoid burnout. It lets you just explore new areas and potentially get new fans and things like this. Publisher's not going to want you to do that. They would rather have you not be writing that $40,000 book, in fact, they would rather you just not release it. Because they would rather slot into that slot a science fiction writer earns 50,000 a year, rather than have you do $50,000 with a fantasy and the other side… And then your science fiction next year do $40,000. They would just rather have two $50,000 books and have you not publish a book that year. Now that obviously is a very different alignment in interests. I've known lots of writers who are like, "You know, I want to try a fantasy now." Publishers are like, "Oh, that's a bad idea. It's a bad idea for this reason and this reason and this reason. You shouldn't do this." Well, a big part of this is that, but even if they were making the same money, it is very… Much easier for a publisher to brand an author as "This is our fantasy person." The marketing people want to know this is our person who writes this style of book. They want to be able to have the sales force go into the bookstores and say, "You buy this sort of book from this author." That's just way easier for them, and it's actually way… They have strong incentives to have that kind of list. They don't want to have this person who does all these eclectic things that they have to explain to people. Where that may be where you want to take your career.

[Howard] I wanted to point out that in this situation, in this circumstance, it's really difficult for the individual author to wrap their head around the full list of things that the publisher is looking at when they're making those kinds of decisions. But the agent you may have partnered with may have a really good grasp of that. This is one of those cases where having a friend was also a business, who is an agent, can really help you deal with the publisher. Because you can talk to your agent and you can say, "Look. I want to write science fiction. That's what's going to keep me happy. What do you and I need to do, writer and agent, what do you and I need to do in order to find a way to make money with publishers for that?" The discussion after that point is going to take all kinds of shapes depending on you're publishing with.

[Mary Robinette] To that point, harkening back to the first thing in this, when we were talking about thinking of yourself as a business as well, be careful about branding yourself by whatever it is that the publisher initially slots you into. So, I was initially slotted into historical fantasy. Right now, I am writing science fiction, historical science fiction. But whatever. But the point is, I am doing much better… My sales numbers are much, much better with the science fiction. If I had branded myself solely as a historical fantasy author, if I had done that with my twitter handle, my website name, and all of those things, that would have locked me into something that did not represent everything that I could do. George RR Martin, his first books were about vampires on steamships. Like, you don't want to lock yourself into whatever that first book is, because something else may happen. The publisher, if they are paying attention to your numbers, which is what happened… The reason we moved over to Science Fiction was because they noticed… With me, they noticed that I kept winning awards with science fiction short stories. I was not winning awards with fantasy short stories. So, they're like, "Why don't you try a science fiction novel?"

[Brandon] It is much easier, and we'll have a whole episode on branding later on, but it is much easier for the publisher to brand you as a series. This is really common in YA. They lips us it's easier for their sales force to sell a series than an author. It's easier for the publisher to be like, "We have this series." You want to brand your name. They're going to want to brand the series. This is just very… Historically, what I've seen in almost every instance. The other thing I want to mention before we leave, even though I know were running a little low on time, is, there are a couple of places where you and your agent will have different incentives. Not nearly as many, but I do want to bring them up. It's happened in two cases, most often I've seen in the industry. One is that, particularly early in your career, a small amount of money to you might be life changing. Right? You may be able to pay your rent with an extra $500 from your book getting sold into a foreign market that does not pay a whole lot of money. Your agent will make 75 bucks off of that $500 sale. Their incentive, if you look at an hour to earnings ratio for them, it might take them three or four hours of work to get that sale to happen in that small country. They may look at it and be like, "This just isn't worth the money. I'm not going to spend the time there." Where that $500 coming to you could mean the difference between making rent and being able to be full-time and not. So you need to be in charge of your career and saying to the agent, "I really want you to go and spend this time." They... A good agent will recognize that selling you worldwide is going to help build the brand of the author in ways that are beyond that extra 500 bucks. But I've known a lot of agents who just don't do the extra work to sell those small markets.

[Howard] I was almost published by Steve Jackson games. The publisher is not your friend. Steve Jackson is my friend. The original contract that came out, I looked at it and realized if you're planning on selling a couple of thousand books and paying me 5%, I will run out of money before these hit print. Steve came to me, my friend Steve, not the publishing company friend, my friend Steve said, "The only way for you to eat is for you to self publish." Then he put me in touch with his spouse Monica who walked me through building self-publishing. Monica has since passed away and I love her and can point at that friend is one of a handful of people… A handful of people who made my career possible. But that handful of people does not include a company. It was somebody who was acting against the interests of their company in order to help me. I was very fortunate.

[Brandon] Yeah. Kind of pulling us to a close here. We'll talk about this later. But we'll keep coming back to this concept. Just get it in your head. You are the person who needs to care about your career the most. You are the person who needs to watch out for yourself and make sure you're not being taken advantage of. You can't expect an agent and a publisher to do this for you. Maybe at times they will. Maybe at times they'll help you out. But at the end of the day, you have to understand, you have business relationships with people in addition or alongside your friendships.

[Dan] Awesome. Now we do have one closing bit of homework, which is also from Brandon.

[Brandon] Yes. So, one thing that was related to this is that Dan and I when we were breaking in, one of the things we found very useful to do, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, but I want to give you the homework for it. Which is, make a little black book, so to speak, of publishers. This is write down all the publishers in traditional publishing who are releasing new books by new authors consistently into the bookstores where you shop and you can find them there. Write those names down, write those publisher names down, and start watching for the books that they release and the editors who work there. So that you start having a grasp on the industry and who are the players that are in the industry. Read all of the acknowledgments pages for those books. Find the names of the agents. Start actually treating yourself like a businessperson who is looking how to network and how to understand your business.

[Dan] Fantastic. So. Thank you for listening to Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.01: Your Career is Your Business

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/01/03/16-01-your-career-is-your-business/

Key Points: Look at becoming a writer as a business. You are starting and running a small business. You have to manage your business, the publisher and the agent will not do it for you. They are partners, they will help, but it is your business. What do you want, what do you imagine it becoming? Think about a creative mission statement. Make sure your career is deliberate, not accidental. Ask yourself questions. How are you going to handle health insurance? How will you balance your time between writing and promotion? How are you going to handle email? You might silo the non-writing things into one day a week, or chunks of time spread through the week. How are you going to handle taxes? Hire an accountant or DIY? Think about placing a dollar amount on an hour of writing time, and use that to decide whether to pay someone else to do it or do it yourself. Try balancing money, audience, and shininess. Money, how much does it pay or cost. Audience, how many people will you connect with. Shiny, how much do you want to do it. Think of your writing as a career, a business, and make deliberate, informed choices.

[Season 16, Episode 1]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Your Career is Your Business.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] As you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary…

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] Robinette.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] We're all fine. I'm Mary Robinette, we've done this a lot.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] This, as you can tell, is the very first episode of 2021. We are excited to be here. We've got a cool thing that were going to do for the entire year, is, we have split this year into a series of what we are calling Master Classes, or intensive courses is maybe a better way of thinking about this. So each of us has come up with a topic and we'll spend eight or nine episodes diving really deep, kind of teaching the rest of the group about that specific topic. So we are going to start with this really cool kind of inside look at the publishing world class that Brandon has put together. Brandon, do you want to tell us a little bit about your course in general?

[Brandon] Yeah. So, the idea is to have a course that starts training writers to look at becoming a writer as a business. This is something that took me by surprise when I started into this. I was not aware that writing is a small business. I didn't know I was starting a business. In fact, I didn't incorporate for several years. That's very common. But not knowing that led me to make a large number of mistakes before I'd got my feet underneath me. Even still, I'm making some of these mistakes. But I thought, you know what, one of the things that I really wish I'd known when I began was that I was starting a small business. I wanted to give some tips to writers starting on this journey or who are in the middle of it who just may not have given enough thought to this aspect of it. We all want to be artists, that's why we become writers. This whole thing isn't to dissuade you from your artistic intents. But it is to start you this class and this mindset that just isn't often shared in writing courses. Because we all want to be artists, and sometimes it feels like talking about the business side of things is crass, and we don't want to monetize our artistic intentions, but when you start on this path, you are starting a business.

[Howard] Speaking briefly as the parent of four hungry adult children, who still don't all have their own jobs, I very much want to monetize every last little bit of my everything that I do.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Crass or not crass, I want to eat.

[Dan] Yeah. So, I am very fortunate in that one of my best friends got published about a year and 1/2 before I did. So when I did get my contract, Brandon, the very first thing he said to me was, "You need to think about this. Think of yourself as a small business owner," and gave me some really great advice. So what are some of the bits of advice you want to give us, Brandon, about starting to think of ourselves as business owners?

[Brandon] Right. Well, the first idea is just this mindset change. Which was the biggest hurdle I think I had to overcome. That's why I named this first episode Your Career Is Your Business. A lot of writers, myself included, when we begin, we have in our head that once we get published, the publisher and the agent are going to be in charge of the business. We're going to have people managing all of the business side. We will be able to spend our days in artistic pursuits. This just isn't true. An agent is not a business manager. An agent will certainly help. An agent is, if you're going traditionally published, an agent is the number one resource you will have for these sorts of things. So certainly it's nice to have them. But it's your business that you're starting. It's not their business. They have a lot of different clients they'll be working for. You're going to be expected to care about your career.

[Howard] One of the things that I like to… I developed this mindset when I was in the corporate world. My career in the corporate space really was defined by the people I was working with, but my career as a person who makes things, a person who imagines things, a person who wants to be paid to operate the oven that bakes the cookies that only come out of my brain, that is not a career path that can be managed by somebody else. That is a career path that has to be managed by me. So a literary agent is a business partner. A publisher is a business partner. I already had, when I started doing comics, I already had a big framework in my head for what business partnerships look like and what they don't look like. So that gave me a quick leg up, and it made a lot of things easier early on. But Brandon, you're absolutely right about this mindset. You have to start from that point, believing that what you are doing is your business and, it is, to layer the meaning, a little bit, it's your business, it's not anybody else's business. They're going to try and get all up in your business from time to time, but it's really all about… It's all about what you want and what you imagine it becoming.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm really glad Howard mentioned what you want, which I'm sure Brandon is going to get into. But I come into this from theater, and being a freelancer for my entire adult life. So, for me, the small business was transforming the small business that I already had. Which was puppeteer, audiobook narrator, and then writer. One of the things that I find helpful when thinking about this small business is to actually have a mission statement. You can think of it as your creative mission statement. But it's going to change over the course of your career. So, initially the mission statement that I had was fairly simple. It was to be able to turn down the gigs I didn't want to do. I've gotten to the point in my career now only gigs I've got are the gigs that I want to do. So now I have to figure out actually what kind of work do I want to be doing and who do I want to be and be presenting myself as. Because I have to start figuring out how to turn down the gigs I do want to do in order to focus on really refining who I am, and this thing that Brandon is talking about and Howard about monetizing. Because it's not… It's not always a straightforward path.

[Dan] Let's pause really quick. Do our book of the week. Which is coming to us this week from Howard.

[Howard] Well, I wish I could take more credit for this one. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I read it years and years and many years ago, and absolutely loved it. It has one of my very favorite uses of footnotes. It's widely regarded now as a classic space in which it sits, and recently was made into a TV miniseries available on Amazon Prime. I have really enjoyed and benefited personally from comparing the two. I'll circle back around to that later at homework time.

[Dan] Awesome. So that is Good Omens from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

[Dan] Now, I loved what Mary Robinette said about mission statement, which ties into what I've heard Brandon talk about a lot in the past, is making sure that your career is deliberate rather than accidental. Brandon, what do you have to tell us about that, and how to do it?

[Brandon] So, there are all kinds of questions I feel like you should be asking yourself during your unpublished years and during your early parts of your career that you have answers to for when the need arises. For instance, a good one if you live in the US, unfortunately, is going to be how are you going to approach health insurance? This is a big question that you need to think about. I never thought about it a single time in the early part of my career. You would think that that would have come up, but it wasn't until I was married and publishing my first books and realizing, wait a minute. In America, for some stupid reason, health insurance is attached to your job. I'm just not going to have that. How do I get that? Talk to other people, who are self-employed, and figure out how you're going to approach this. Other questions are how are you going to balance your time as an author? How much time are you going to spend on doing the actual writing, how much time are you going to spend on promotion? We'll talk about promotion in a later week in this master class, but right now, the question is when are you going to put these things in? When are you going to do email? I wasn't expecting how much more email would come in…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And how much of it would involve publishers' panic… Panicking about little things. I had to set aside specific times. What I've done in my life right now is I have taken all of the things that are not writing, and I've tried to silo them into one day a week. Thursdays. This is when I'm going to do all of these things, the longer emails. The short emails that can get a quick answer, I'll do at the beginning of my workday. But if there's something that is going to take a long, in-depth thing, I'll say, "Hey, I'm going to respond to you on Thursday." If there's an interview that I need to do for promotion, I always schedule them on Thursdays. If there are company meetings, I put them on Thursdays. This allows me to take off my writer hat for a day and approach being a business person for a day. With me, this helps keep me from being frustrated. If I have good siloing of these sorts of things, I'll stop being resentful of the time that I have to spend not writing.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to chime in here, because I'd heard Brandon talk about this before, so I also tried siloing my non-writing things to one day a week. It turns out that doesn't work for me, because my brain is wired differently. That wound up causing me to have more fatigue. But I did have to block out time. So I have blocked out specific chunks of time, but spread them through the week. This… I just want to point out that, much like when we talk about writing, there's no one process that will work for you, but the principle behind the process, which is to be deliberate about it and make space for it, is going to be consistent. You just have to figure out which form it takes for you.

[Dan] I'm going to give a third perspective on this for the very, very early career writers. This is one of the very first bits of advice I got from Brandon when I got my very first publishing contract. I said, "This is happening. It's real. What do I do next?" He said, "What you do now is you sit down and you write as much as you possibly can, because this is the last time you'll have all of that free time to write." That did help me a lot. I was able to finish, I think, a full book and a half of new stuff before all of the revisions and the emails and the editing process in the proofing and all of that business side crashed down on me. So, just for the very early aspiring writer, that is, I think, a fantastic piece of advice.

[Brandon] I do have more time to right now than I did when I was working a job while trying to write. But, one of the most shocking things to me was that by going full-time, I didn't gain nearly as much free time as I thought I would. Because all of these other things crept in. Doing my own taxes. My first few years… I was used to doing my own taxes. Indeed, again, in the US, we have to do our own taxes, for some stupid reason. So… But then publishing made it infinitely more complicated. Because suddenly I was getting a 1099 instead of a W-2. Suddenly, I had sales overseas. Understanding that you're either going to have to hire an accountant or you're going to have to learn how to input sales from other countries and money coming in from other countries and all of this stuff with 1099s instead of W-2s. That's a huge time sink once a year for US writers that I had just not even understood was going to come along and steal a week of my time.

[Dan] We've got an episode coming up about networking, but this tax idea, the finances of being a writer, is a really good reason to rely on other people. My agent, before she became an acquiring agent on her own, worked as a tax person for an agency house. So she was able to help me a lot, which was fantastic. Brandon and I and several other local writers all use the same accountant because the accounting process for professional writers is very different from a lot of other careers. So, using these networking opportunities to find out hey, how do you handle this, is a good way to help you figure it out.

[Brandon] One other thing that I would recommend that you think about… This doesn't work for all writers. In fact, this is one of these things I've noticed that can be debilitating for some writers. But it is something that I do that is very handy for me, is, I find out what the dollar amount of an hour of my writing time is worth. Now, you can't be writing 16 hours a day. But, once you become self-employed, as Howard so elegantly put it in an early episode, you… It's great being self-employed, you get to work half days and you decide which 12 hours it is.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Meaning, there is a danger here in that you can work all the time that you want which would lead to burnout. So be careful about that. But I keep a dollar amount assigned to an hour of actual writing time to me. Then, that dollar amount of an hour of writing time allows me to understand what things I can pay for to gain an hour of writing time. If doing my taxes is going to cost me three hours of writing time, and indeed, I will make more money writing that I would hiring someone to do that, it just gives me an opportunity cost method of determining what I should hire out and what I should do myself.

[Howard] When we started putting Schlock Mercenary books into print, we quickly realized that between cover work and bonus story and whatever else, it took a block of time to put a book out, and putting a book out generated several tens of thousands of dollars of money all at once. I could look at that and say, "Well, I have books that are not yet in print, because I've got this archive online." Going to Comic Con saws three weeks out of my life. There's the week of prep, there's the week at the event, and there's a week of recovery. It's miserably stressful. I did the math and realized that unless I was bringing home $15,000 from Comic Con, it didn't even begin to be worthwhile. We looked at it and said, "Well, gosh, instead of doing Comic Con, if I really want to sell T-shirts, I can just spend that week making a T-shirt and selling it and make more money." Now, we've never done that because I don't love making T-shirts. But that was what I had to balance it against. Without knowing how much your time is worth, without establishing a benchmark over time, you will make lots and lots of very, very bad decisions about your time and not realize what you're doing until you wake up one morning and realize that you're stressed and broke and hating the things that you're doing.

[Dan] This kind of deliberate financial thought is how I knew when it was time for me to hire an assistant. Because I hit the point where I realized, oh, giving me an assistant will allow me to write one extra book per year, which will more than pay for the assistant. So that made it a very easy choice to make. We need to wrap up soon, but I know Mary Robinette has something else she wants to say.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Which is, when you're super early career, the idea of assigning a specific number value to your writing work, especially when you haven't actually sold anything yet, that's difficult. So let me give you another metric which you've probably heard me talk about when I've talked about how to decide where to send a story to. A short story. Which is that you're balancing three thing. Money, audience, and shininess. So money is literally how much is this going to pay me. Or, how much is this going to cost me. Audience is how many people will this connect me to. Then, shiny is just like how much do you want to do it. So, like, going to NASA, it cost money, does not actually connect me to audience, but it's so shiny. So that's a choice that I make. I also know that it's something that I can use, and then will, later, down the line, have the potential to bring me audience and money. But depending on where you are in your career, you're going to value those differently. Like, when you are very, very early career, you may say, "Hey, it's totally worth it for me to go to a convention, because it is… Spending that money will allow me to connect with my peers, and audience, and that networking, the audience layer of it, is totally worth it, and the shininess aspect of it is totally worth it." So it's going to be this constant balancing act, and it will again shift over the course of your career.

[Dan] Exactly. Ultimately, this idea of thinking of it as a career, as a business, and making all of these choices deliberate and informed is what's really going to help. So, thank you everybody. This is a wonderful start to our new year.

[Dan] We have homework from Howard.

[Howard] Okay. In 2003, at Comic Con, my friend Jim met Neil Gaiman, and Neil introduced himself, saying, "Hi, my name is Neil. I write comics." Okay. That's a fun story. Neil Gaiman rights way more than just comics. He wrote the adaptation that took Good Omens from being a wonderful novel to being a really amazing television series. You don't know, or maybe you do, the path that your career is going to take the number of different things you might write. I posit that it will be extremely valuable to you to take something like Good Omens, your book of the week, and the TV show. Consume them both and make notes. What kinds of writing decisions were made between the two that you would have made differently? What kind of writing decisions were made that just blow your mind? The adaptation between mediums may, at some future point, be something that you get to do. As an added bonus, I think this homework will be fun for you.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.52: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts in Just a Very Few Words Which Must Fit In A Very Very Small Box, With Patrick Rothfuss

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/12/27/15-52-economy-of-phrase-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: Be brief. Expanded version: Let the art or other medium do the heavy lifting. Treat each sentence as its own dialogue bubble.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 52.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts in Just a Very Few Words Which Must Fit In A Very Very Small Box, With Patrick Rothfuss.

[Mary Robinette] 15 or so minutes long, give or take.

[Dan] Because you may or may not be in a hurry.

[Pat] And we are…

[Laughter]

[Pat] Not that smart.

[Howard] I'm no longer allowed to write the titles for episodes.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Pat] And I'm Pat in a small box.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] All right.

[Laughter]

[Howard] We recorded… I'm just going to give you the back story on this episode. We recorded Pros and Cons with Pat, and at the end of the episode, he turned to me and said, "I really wanted to talk to you about writing comics and fitting all of those ideas into tiny panels." As we discussed this, we realized that that level of compression of information is something that all of us have done. Mary Robinette, you've done it writing a children's book.

[Mary Robinette] Picture book, radio, and also flash fiction.

[Howard] Flash fiction. Dan…

[Dan] I've written three audiobooks at this point, intended as audio dramas.

[Howard] Yup. And Patrick, you wrote… It's one of the… What was it, Rick and Morty?

[Pat] Yeah. The Rick and Morty D&D crossover comic, which was an interesting exercise in editorial control for me. Two IP's that I did not control, but also writing… Only getting 21… 20 pages. 20 pages and only so many words in a box. I'm also doing a comic, another comic with Nate Taylor. So, like, how… Brevity is the soul of wit and that is not necessarily my jam.

[Howard] My very first convention panel was called Crispy Crunchy Writing, and we were asked to introduce ourselves. I was last in line. One of the guys on the panel was Jerry Pournelle. We got… They introduced themselves and I said, "My name's Howard Tayler and I'm on this panel because I write comics, and I have to fit all the words in little bubbles." Jerry pounded on the table and said, "Son, you're the only one here who's qualified to speak. I get paid by the word."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Which is one of the best moments of my life. But in looking at what I have to do in order to… In order to fit everything into dialogue bubbles. We've had discussions about revision, we've had discussions about editing. There are two key pieces for me that I want to lead with and get your ideas on. The first is that when I'm writing for comics, I am allowing the art, I am allowing the sequential illustrations to do a whole bunch of the heavy lifting. Whether it's facial expression on a character that's going to convey emotion or background that's going to tell me whether or not the room's on fire. That's the first piece. The second piece is arguably the harder part, which is the pith, which is the compression. For my own part, I've found that some of my most interesting experiences have come when I was writing for a different artist, and I would write some descriptions and the panels came back and I realized that 75% of the dialogue that I'd delivered was already now being told in the story. So I pulled all of those words out and put in new dialogue and had way more story to work with. It's a fascinating experience. With Rick and Morty…

[Pat] Rick and Morty was interesting. I should say, while I have… I was forced to like deal with short dialogue, short spaces… Jim Zub, who helped me script, we were a writing team there. He, in a couple of different interviews, you can find them online, has gotten very salty. Because Jim has written a bunch of stuff. He's an absolute consummate professional, gets the job done. I am Patrick Rothfuss. Who has kind of never done a comic before in a professional way. But… And he tells the story, like, he's written for The Avengers. At one point, he said that he had… He goes, "I write for this little comic called The Avengers. One of the issues, I had to write off 24 different characters in 20 pages. Because it's a 20 page comic. Comics are 20 pages." He goes, "And then I worked on this comic with Patrick Rothfuss, and…"

[Laughter]

[Pat] He goes, "I had to argue… I begged them for another page, so I had 21 pages to write off these 24." He goes, "Rothfuss turns in his third script, and here we are with 25 pages. Approved by the editors."

[Laughter]

[Pat] So, I didn't necessarily have the knee on my neck that would have taught me as much as it could have. But also, I really am thankful for the editor, because one of the things you learn with the compression is that sometimes to tell the story you want to tell… I'm curious about your experience here, because again, with this sequential medium, you can't just add another panel. That's like one of the first lessons I learned working with Nate Taylor, because we did a comic together years ago for the Numenera game, to introduce the character and the world. And he says, "Okay. Here's the thing. We're going to do a script, and then I'm going to do some blue lines, and I'm going to lay things out. I'm going to do some panels. You're going to approve those. Then we're done, because you can't just stick something in. You can't just add another panel." I'm like, "Oh, no, I get it. I get it.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Then the realization sinks in. A bit of fun back story. Jim Zub and I are good friends. When Zub said, "So I'm working on Rick and Morty and D&D with Patrick Rothfuss," I may have snerked so hard I hurt myself.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because this conflict that you have described is one that I saw coming a mile away, because Jim… I studied Jim's scripts to try and find out how to write for other artists. Jim's got a Patreon where you can look at the scripts that he does. It's a brilliant resource. I struggle all the time with being too wordy. What I've found is that sometimes… We talk about killing our darlings. I will turn a phrase… I just had to do this today. I will turn a phrase and love it and think it is key to the story. Then I take a step back and realize that I need that panel for a reaction shot.

[Yeah]

[Howard] I need that panel for a character to say nothing, but to react to someone else's dialogue. Which means that line's got to go. Because I can't make the book longer. I've got a hard page count. So I have to remove something. The boneyard is full of that kind of thing. I'm interested to know how these sorts of things play out in children's books.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's very similar for me. That… One of the things that you're looking at which is where the page turn is…

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] Because you want them to… You want to make a promise so that they want to turn that page. You want to make sure that that hits in the right spot. So then when you're trying to get in more information, and like I have written a science fiction… A hard science-fiction children's book, which is set on the moon, which means that I have to explain lunar gravity two small children while still moving a plot forward, and I have a specific page number. I still need to make all of the things hit the right point. So it was very much about trying to compress and having things do double duty in making sure that anything I put on the page was an ambiguous, so that I didn't have to have a second phrase to explain it. Making sure that those pieces of language were really, really clear.

[Dan] Yeah. That was the same thing I was going to say. My audio dramas that I wrote were hard science-fiction middle grade.

[Mary Robinette] I love them, by the way.

[Dan] Thank you very much. The second one comes out… Will actually have already been out by the time this airs. But having to explain how zero gravity and microgravity works in a fast-paced children's story means that it does have to do double duty like you're talking about. You can't just sit there and explain cryogenics or zero gravity or the Kuiper belt or any other thing. So my solution was, well, this is going to be fun. If I'm explaining zero gravity while my main character is screwing around with it and doing some mean thing to his brothers, then I… Then it's still exciting, while also explaining what I need. So that making sure that it's always doing extra multiple things is something we’re all supposed to be doing anyway…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] But I feel like I learned that lesson even harder when I had to reduce everything down.

[Howard] I want to take a quick break for a book of the week which is not a book of the week. I want to break for it before we moved too far away from his name. JimZub.com, he's written… He's got some tutorials on the sidebar of his website. Comic writing number one, brainstorming to, pacing, page planning, scripting dialogue, action, and analysis. It's seven parts. We'll link to it in the liner notes. These are little older, but I would encourage you to go out and read this. Yes, it sounds a little bit like homework, but there are going to be pages from his comics in there, so it's also fun to read. I can't emphasize strongly enough the importance of reading the things that the experts decide to write about this subject. I still learn from Jim when we talk about these things. So that's JimZub.com, sidebar on comic writing.

[Pat] Can I also just throw out, since we have talked about comics, reading… And I wouldn't be surprised if you guys have already recommended over the years, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Now, I imagine people who work in comics could have different feelings about it. I read it before I really read comics, and it changed the way that I thought about a lot of elements of storytelling. Just pacing and like where action happens. It was an absolute narrative game changer for me in sort of developing my writing philosophy.

[Howard] Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. That is also an excellent book of the week. We'll link to that, too.

[Mary Robinette] One thing that I want to flag that is allowing for this compression with words when we're looking at comic books or audio is that there is another medium that is carrying part of the story. Whether that is the voice of the actor or the visuals on the page. That's part of what you're looking for when you're trying to trim is everything where that other medium is carrying the story. This is a thing that you see a lot in puppet theater where the characters will… In an early draft, people will feel the urge to have the characters… You'll have the character say something and then you get it up on its feet on the stage and the puppets are moving and you're like, "The characters don't need to say that, they're expressing it with their body," and so you cut the line. Because that physicality does the job more for you. So, what I find when I'm working in one of these other mediums is that it forces me to really consider what pieces are important. Then, when I return to prose, with straight prose, where I'm just dealing with words on the page, a lot of that economy of language comes back with me and allows me… I know, this is a very long-winded description, but it allows me to be more focused in what I'm doing, because I've learned to be unambiguous, because I've learned which pieces you actually have to have.

[Howard] It's difficult perhaps to understand the importance of audio as an additional medium without an example. My favorite is, "I can't believe you did that. I can't believe YOU did that. I can't believe you did THAT." Those are three completely different sentences. All exactly the same length.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] All exactly the same length. That's the kind of thing… Now, when you're writing for comics, when you're writing for prose, often you will have to put text emphasis in, in order to ensure that those things are there.

[Pat] What you mentioned there, I realize, now, actually this is true of some of the script notes I've been giving for the Kingkiller TV show, which, when this airs, will probably be dead. But a lot of times, I'm like, "Hey. This isn't really perfectly clear, or this or this." They would say, "You know, we're going to worry about that after we have an actor."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Pat] Because… Which again is such an alien concept to me. I've gotten to thinking about picture books. Because like, I'm going to show a picture, and there will be a picture and text. Then it's like comics is sequential art, depending on how you want to argue that, but like a series of picture and text. Then they're like, "Well, no. The actor will sell this."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Pat] "You don't need to explain the emotional beats. You will see the actor's face. You will…" I'm like, "Oh, gah." It's so hard for me to trust, but also, it's really hard for me to give up control.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That is one of the things that I love about writing for an actor. Like, I wrote for Defense Grid 2…

[Pat] Yeah!

[Mary Robinette] And also for Brass Tactics. What I had to do was… Because it's a game, I had to create a spreadsheet of lines of dialogue that could be delivered by the AI at a point, theoretically, in a way that follows narratively. But I had to write lines that actually did have some ambiguity to them, but that gave… That the actor could make… Give a consistency to. One of the things that, the first time I worked with them, they wanted me to make the lines in my mind a little more purple. We had this conversation about trust the actor. When they get into the booth, when the actors get in there, the lines play. Because I've given them space. I've given them space to bring this character in.

[Dan] Yeah. I remember talking to a videogame writer at Gen Con. She was telling me that she had to write a bunch of different dialogue options that had specifically different emotions. Here's the happy response, the angry response, and all of those. She realized that she could cover all five of them with just the word hey.

[Mary Robinette] Yup.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And just have them delivered differently. She convinced them to pay her separately for all five instances of the word hey. Because the actor was going to sell them.

[Pat] That's great.

[Mary Robinette] I have done the same thing.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Not with hey, but with what?

[Dan] Oh, yeah. That's another good one.

[Pat] When I wrote for the Numenera game, similarly, like, you only have… You have a very small box. Numenera was amazing, in my opinion, because they were doing a return to this older style of game where you had legitimate narrative options which could impact your relationships in the game. Like the old Planescape. This was sort of the spiritual successor to Planescape. For some of the old Fallout games, or the more character driven RPG's as they use to exist. Before graphics sort of ate up all the… Read up all the air in the room. It was like… They honestly went crazy. You could have nine different dialogue options to choose from, and go in any direction. They really leaned into it. But thinking of that sort of economy, where you want it to be clear to the player, like, the person actively engaging in the narrative… There it was, without an actor. But you're still on the screen.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Pat] And you're sort of… You are the character. You're the character that's speaking. In this theory… How to do that in 12 words. 12 words is a lot if you're going to do five different dialogue… It's like you've overfilled the box, you've got to have a little scrollbar, that's not elegant. So, yeah, it's… This is a remarkably transferable and universally useful skill.

[Howard] One of my least favorite forms within comics is the fact that the fontography for comics is sans serif, all caps. There's a huge amount of information that is lost when you're text is like that. I've found that the tools… And I'm saying this for people who specifically want to write comics. The tools that I use to work around this, first and foremost, you know the whole hit the spacebar twice for the period. Instead of hitting the spacebar twice after the period, hit the return key a few times and treat each sentence as its own dialogue bubble. Because the period can get lost and you will find yourself reading a wall of all-caps comic text, and you haven't read it correctly. If you lose the reader in that way, you've got a problem. The second is use bold and italics. These things, they have to be there…

[Pat] I hate the use of bold in comics. I'm sorry. I hate…

[Chuckles]

[Pat] I mean, it's… This would be fine if it was William Shatner reading this in my head all the time. But it's a convention in comics that started like way back… Like, these days… I really want to hear how you feel. But I feel like we have the narrative technology these days… Not even like to script, like, we are better storytellers now. We… And like Zub really leaned into it, and, honestly, the editors wanted it. There like, "You're doing a comic." So he would always bold these words, and I would kind of… In my editorial pass, I would go through and unbold as many as I thought I could get away with.

[Howard] That's not going to stick.

[Pat] I got away with a few. But, like, if it's a well written sentence, you don't need nearly as much of that. Do you? I mean…

[Howard] That's… That is one of the tools that I use. If I find, wow, I've got to bold half a dozen words in here in order to get the emphasis in the right place, it's time to rewrite the sentence. It's time to rewrite the sentence.

[Howard] We are out of time. So ironic that we could…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Talk about economy of phrase being the concentrated… I'm not going to do that again.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That we could talk about economy of phrase and just keep going and going and going. Homework. Take a scene that you've written of prose. Remove all of the blocking. Just space out the dialogue. Draw stick figures and smiley faces, and attempt to convey with a different medium all of the things that you were conveying with those other words.

[Pat] That's a great one.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Pat] That's really great.

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write. But short.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.51: Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with special guest Mahtab Narsimhan

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/12/20/15-51-feedback-when-to-listen-and-when-to-ignore-with-special-guest-mahtab-narsimhan/

Key Points: Prescriptive advice, suggestions about how to do it, are going to come your way. But when do you look for it? Until you show me you can articulate your reactions in a way I understand, I may not accept your advice on how to rewrite a scene. Tell me how you feel, then tell me how to rewrite the scene. Arrange your readers by the type of advice you want. Subject matter experts, sensitivity readers, tell me what's wrong and how to fix it. Most readers, just tell me your reaction. Editors, suggest how to fix a problem. When you get feedback, you decide whether to accept it or not. Follow your vision. How do you find people you trust to tell you what to do? Professionals. Agent, editor, writing group. Organizations can help, but you have to pick and choose. Audition, or vetting, process. Start with media you both consume, and see what they think of that. Reactions, fresh perspectives, the feedback echo chamber... stay true to your vision. You know how to fix your story better than anybody else. But be open to brilliant ideas from someone.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 51.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with Mahtab Narsimhan.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Mahtab] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] And I'm Brandon. Which I keep telling you and I'd like you to take that feedback.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, we talk all the time about how to give feedback, how to construct a good writing group, how to train your alpha and beta readers, and one of the points we hit on a lot is that what you're looking for in that feedback stage is reactions rather than specific prescriptive advice. But, as one of our listeners pointed out in an email, asking this question, "Prescriptive advice is incredibly valuable and we all do it and we all get it." So, we're clearly not saying ignore every suggestion that comes to you. What we need to talk about now, then, is how do you decide which pieces of advice you're going to listen to and which ones you're going to discard. When should you actively seek out that kind of specifically prescriptive feedback? So, first ideas, like, when do you seek it out? At what point do you say, "Hey, I need you to answer this question for me?"

[Howard] Approaching it from a different angle, until I have gotten reader reactions from someone and they been able to articulate their reaction to me in a way that I understand, I'm not going to accept feedback from them. If someone hasn't yet told me that this scene made them feel a certain way, I'm not ready to accept their feedback on how to rewrite the scene. I want to know that you can tell me how you feel before you tell me how to rewrite the scene so that you feel what you're supposed to.

[Brandon] Yeah. That's a good piece of advice. Although one thing I do is I kind of arrange my readers by what type of advice I want them to give me. For example, when I use a subject matter expert… I recently wrote a story about someone who's paraplegic. I went and I hired several people to read this story. To them, I said… They were paraplegic and I said, "I want you to tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it, specifically, how this differs from your life experience in the life experience that you know other disabled people have. I want you to tell me." For other readers, though, I say I just want to know your reaction. I want to know if my characters are working and my story's working. The way you help me with that is by telling me your just feedback emotionally. I'm looking for different things from different people. From my editor, I want them to tell me what they suggest I do to fix a problem when they've noticed it, because I might not take that, but there's a much better chance that I will take it when it comes from an editor who really knows what they're doing.

[Dan] Let me follow up on that subject matter expert thing. When you've got feedback from them, how much of that feedback was just kind of the mechanics of daily life of a para… Someone who is paraplegic and how much of that was the story or the characterization are broken, and here's how you can fix those? Because that seems like it kind of straddles that line between subject matter and storytelling.

[Brandon] It was actually weighted toward the latter. I would have thought it would be weighted toward the former. But those things are very easy to fix. When someone says, "I usually keep a pole next to me so I reach things and pull them across the desk to me," that's like, "Oh, that's really handy. I will do that. That's an easy fix." But when they say something along the lines of… A piece of feedback I got on this piece which was really helpful was all of them noticed… They say, "We work in a community. We talk to other people." A lot of people write… When they write a story like I had done, they talk about this person in isolation, which is not how we do it. It makes it seem like this person is the only person who is paraplegic in the whole world. That's very common. I hadn't realized that's what you do, but of course, you're part of a community. I'm part of a community of writers. I'm part of a community of people who share a faith with me. I'm part of a community of people who are parenting. We look for people who have a shared life experience so we can help each other. This is something that I had done flat-out wrong that required a really big revisitation of how I was viewing the character and the story because it was just… It was flat-out wrong. That sort of thing was a harder revision, but it was also more surprising to me, and it's the sort of thing that needed a subject matter expert to explain to me.

[Mahtab] Okay. I would call those instead sensitivity readers. I mean, that's what happens when you're writing a piece, middle grade YA fiction, and your writing someone with whom you don't share the identity or a marginalized status or what have you. I mean, you just… You do not have a similar background. That's when you get someone who we call like a sensitivity reader, who's going to look at your story and tell you, "Okay. This is what it is," or "This is what you need to think about as you write." You said, Brandon, they're not in isolation, but sometimes when we're writing from an outsider's perspective, we almost make that kind of an issue story or the issue with that character is their disability or whatever. Sometimes having someone with that background read it often gives you a whole different perspective because they do not see it as an issue, because they're part of a community where this is not the center stage. You can get other feedback from it, but just coming back to your point, Dan, as to when do you seek feedback. When I've taken a story to a certain level and I do no more with it, is when I would actually send it out to my critique group. One of the good things is I have a group that has different strengths. Someone is really good with the big picture perspective. So they would like really look at the forest. There are some who actually look at the trees, and they go down to the bush level, and they will absolutely look at the pacing and the plot and the characterization. So that's when you take the feedback from these people which is… Each one gives you a different idea or a different facet of what your story is. Then once it comes back to you, I think the onus is on you, and it goes with your gut feel of should I accept this feedback or shouldn't I. If it does not fit with your vision, no matter who's given it to me, I would probably not follow it.

[Dan] Okay. I want to pause now for the book of the week, which we get from Howard.

[Howard] Yes. It's not really related to the topic, but I really, really enjoyed Dan Rather's book What Unites Us. Dan Rather has been a fixture in American and, let's be honest, world news broadcasts for… I want to say 50 years, at least 40 years. His experiences… It's kind of a retrospective of the way he sees the American nation and the people who are in it. I really loved it. I needed it when I listened to it. I don't know if you do, but the audiobook was quite good, and that was the way I experienced it. So I can't speak to reading the words on the paper with my own eyeballs and brain.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's for other people to discover. But the book is called What Unites Us by Dan Rather.

[Dan] Thank you.

[Dan] Now, the common thread between all of your comments in the first half of the episode were heavily kind of focused around this idea that you have curated your groups of people that you get feedback from and that you… When you look for specific feedback, you are trying to get it from specific people and for specific reasons. So let's talk just really quick about that. How do you find these people that you trust… Not talking about specifically subject matter experts or sensitivity readers, but just, in general, how do you find those people and how do you decide, yes, I trust what this person is going to tell me to do?

[Brandon] Well, with beta readers in particular, them, it doesn't matter, right? Because I'm not asking them to tell me what to do. So, people who tell me what to do, that I let… That I'm looking for, are professionals. Right? Which is a different sort of thing. I find my beta readers, generally, they are people who have been long-term friends, people who are active in fandom, or people that other beta readers have recommended. We do that a lot. We try to add a few new people every book that I do and not have everyone do every book, right? So we shake it up. It's just a process of watching who makes astute comments on forum posts about the books, who are active on our Facebook posts, those are the people I look for. But for alpha readers, they're giving me direct, fix this, I'm generally only looking at like my agent, my editor, or my writing group for that.

[Mahtab] I think, for me, I join a lot of organizations, and again, we've got forums, so you can connect with people on the forums and say, "Okay, I'm looking for… I'm looking for a critique partner," and everyone kind of just exchanges emails and then goes for it. In case… That's how I started with, but then, over the years, I kind of got closer to a group of people because they write similar stuff that I do, and I like their work and they like my work. So we kind of broke off and formed our own groups. But if you're looking at the children's section, SCBWI, CANSCAIP, these are the… I guess for the US, it's SCBWI, you join those groups, there are areas where you can exchange information and find critique partners. I would say, start out with maybe a chapter or two, see what the feedback is like, see if they're on the same wavelength as you are, before you go deeper down the rabbit hole, and then become good critique partners, because sometimes… What if you're not at a similar level or if the level of feedback that you're getting is not what you're looking for? Then that relationship or that critique is not really helping you. So you also have to pick and choose. Don't just say yes to anyone who says they're going to give you feedback.

[Dan] That kind of audition process, so to speak, I think is really important. Because, we've talked before about how to find fellow writers and form your little groups and things, but going through that kind of vetting process, of saying, "Okay. You know what, I really like your feedback," or "You're giving me feedback that I don't think is valuable," that's a big step. It can be difficult to say, "You know what, this relationship isn't working. I think we should break up."

[Howard] There is… To my mind, there is an easier and much lower pressure way to get to that point. That is to socialize… And I guess Zoom may be the way that we're doing this for the foreseeable future… Socialize with people right and who consume media that you consume, and talk about the things that you're consuming. If Dan and I both sit down and talk about The Mandalorian, and I say, "Oh, my gosh, it's my favorite Star Wars ever, because it's like a cowboy movie Star Wars," and I don't know what Dan's going to say about it. But if Dan's feedback about Mandalorian makes me feel like the two of us watched a completely different show, he's out of my group.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because… Not because he's wrong, but because connecting might be so very, very difficult. Initially, for seeking feedback, I want to get feedback from people whose critiques I'm able to understand. We both watched a movie and we both agreed, "Wow. The protagonist fails to protag for the entire first act, and by the time the second showed up, we were… We didn't like him anymore," and we both get that. Oh, yes, this is someone I… Because when they critique my work, I'll be like, "Oh. Oh, yes. You're right." And when you prescribe something to me, I'm more likely to get it. Now that, that initially is going to create kind of a bubble, and you want to branch out from that. But start friendly first, I think.

[Mahtab] Yes.

[Dan] Yeah. It is a very tricky line to walk, because you don't want to get into that feedback echo chamber. I always really value opinions that are different from my own. Because that, I think, is going to help me look for new solutions and new answers. But on the other hand, someone who is constantly suggesting ideas that don't fit with my style at all, that's not going to be valuable to me. So, it all comes back to this idea of just very carefully deciding who you're going to talk to. Well, I guess, who you're going to get that prescriptive feedback from. The person whose ideas are super different from mine, yes, give me all your reactions. Please. But when it comes to how am I actually going to change this, that's when I do tend rely on people who have similar sensibilities to mine.

[Brandon] Or, I would add, the further someone gets in the professional field of writing and storytelling, the more it seems they are able to help a story become a better version of itself, rather than trying to push it one direction or another. That's not to say that all agents and editors are perfect at this, or even all writing group members, but I've noticed that people who write a lot… For instance, Dan tends to be better at looking at one of my books and saying, "Here's what I think you're trying to do. Here's how to make it better." Where there are other people who are longtime writing group members of mine who like my books, who often give good feedback. But if you give them a book that's outside their normal reading comfort level, they'll give bad feedback on it. Where I've never gotten bad feedback from Dan, because as an industry professional, he reads a lot of things and even things he doesn't like, he can say, "Here's how I think you can make a better version of this thing that I don't necessarily like." Which is a really great skill for a storyteller to learn, I think. But it is not something you can expect from your average even writing group member, I think.

[Dan] I want to print up business cards that say, "Dan Wells. I will help you make a better version of a thing that you're doing that I don't like, even though you're doing a thing that I don't like."

[Mahtab] Where do I sign up?

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] But just very quickly to say something about what you said, Dan, was sometimes you can get that same feedback from the same group that you're with. So getting a totally fresh perspective, even if it does not gel with your own thinking, I think is very valuable. But at the end of the day, you have to decide am I taking it or leaving it, and that decision rests entirely with you. So you just stay true to your vision. No matter who gives you feedback.

[Dan] Yeah, well and…

[Howard] One of… Sorry. One of the things that Brandon said, the ability to say… As a critiquer, the ability to say, for instance, it feels like in this scene you are presenting me with a red herring and you want me to feel doubt about this and you want me to become convinced of this. If that's the case, you need to punch this bit up more and punch that bit down a little bit in order to adjust the balance. But if this isn't meant for a red herring, whatever, then ignore everything that I said. I will give feedback like that to Bob all the time, because I don't know where Bob's book is going. But I will tell him this is my response and this is where I think maybe your levels need to be set. Bob will smile and nod, and I have no idea if he's going to take my advice or not. But he knows what to do with it.

[Dan] So, as a final word, I suppose more than anything else, I just want to give you as a writer permission to get prescriptive feedback, to take suggestions from other people. Don't feel like we have told you you're not allowed to. I do believe that at the end of the day, you know how to fix your story better than anybody else. But that doesn't mean that someone is not going to come along with a brilliant idea that will solve your problems for you. That does happen, and absolutely be open to those experiences.

[Dan] So, let's end with some homework from Howard.

[Howard] Okay. Bear with me.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You're going to want to do this with a friend. Okay? Step one. Each of you prepare a quick written critique of a movie. Maybe one… I mean, they can be different movies, but something that you've watched and has problems that you're willing to critique. Now. Share your critiques with each other, swap them. Now you take the critique that your friend gave of this movie… Oh, and when you wrote the critiques, you anonymized it, you didn't say like character name, you just say like protagonist or antagonist. Anyway. So you get this feedback from this movie. Now. File as many of the serial numbers off as you can. Set it down next to your manuscript and treat this bit of random, utterly random, feedback as if it was aimed at your manuscript. Why are you doing this? So that you can see what absolute nonsense looks like with regard to your manuscript AND so that you can have the broken watch is right twice a day experience of "Oh, my gosh. That thing that you said about the phantom menace applies to my book."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, no. It may seem really weird, but by doing this, what you're going to do is refine your filters for the sort of feedback you receive and it's going to knock you out of the box and maybe make some of your writing better.

[Dan] I really like this homework. I think it is a cool idea to teach you how to sort through the value of a bunch of feedback. So, cool. Anyway, that's our show for today. Thank you so much for listening. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.50: Juggling Ensembles

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/12/13/15-50-juggling-ensembles/

Key Points: How do you manage a large cast? In outlining, include the characters who are NOT going to be in the foreground, who are going to be left out. Start with a few, and then expand out. Don't try to treat all point of view and ensemble characters equally. How do you connect multiple different POV's in different places into a cohesive narrative. Common bits, e.g., dialogue. Groupings and teams! Don't exceed the reader's threshold for people and lines. Make sure every member of your ensemble serves a purpose in the story. I use multiple POV's for different places. Make sure your story is big enough to justify multiple POV's in different places. Switch to the POV who is in the most pain. Be careful of cliffhangers. Make sure the reader can follow your narrative, don't shift too many perspectives and timelines at the same time. How can one primary viewpoint character interact and build relationships with a large ensemble? How do you develop relationships without sending all the other characters out of the room? Don't treat all characters equally. Treat your ensemble cast like a group of real people. Use shorthand and cues to remind the readers who certain characters are. Sometimes caricatures work. Give the readers space for their imagination. One or two weird idiosyncrasies of character go a long way.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 50.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Juggling Ensembles.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We have questions from you guys about how to manage a large cast. This is tricky. I was not good at this early in my career. In fact, I have a story, I think I told you guys before, but when I first sat down to write the first Stormlight book, this was in 2002 before I sold any books, I failed because of the large cast. I wanted to do a big epic, like George RR Martin, like Robert Jordan, that had a large cast. I, even though this was my 13th novel, still crashed and burned trying to write this one. It didn't work until I had been handed the Wheel of Time and had to get up to speed on juggling a large cast very, very quickly. 2600 named characters in the Wheel of Time. That was like going to the gym and being like, "All right, personal trainer…"

[Howard] How many point of view characters were in the Wheel of Time?

[Brandon] 50, I think. Somewhere around there. How many main viewpoint characters? A dozen or so is what I would say. Maybe two dozen, depending on how you count main. So there were a lot.

[Howard] Using your gym metaphor,

[chuckles]

[Howard] There are people who go to the gym and overhead pressing 45 pounds, boy, that is a lot. Then there are the bodybuilders overhead pressing 450 pounds is also a lot. What you're talking about here really is the ultimate bit of heavy lifting. I don't… I haven't counted how many point of view characters there are in Schlock Mercenary, because the point of view is the camera instead of the character. But I think I realized around 2008, 2009, that my nascent outlining process needed to include which characters whose names I know, whose backstories I love, am I going to leave out of this book except for we get to see them in the background so that we know that they're not dead. Because unless I did that, my brain would latch on to the fact that oh, we haven't talked to so-and-so for a while, I should put them in a scene. That was a disaster. So, for me, large cast was about taking the huge cast, and then for an entire book, setting a different set of limits.

[Victoria] I mean, this is interesting. So, in the Shades of Magic series, I think I have four point of view characters in the first book, eight in the second, and 12 in the third. I like an expansion project. I like the idea that we can root in a few first, and then expand outward from there. I think it allows for focus. I also, though, and I think this will come up a few times, I'm a really big fan of not treating all point of view characters equally. They do not all get the same amount of pages. I have a primary cast, a secondary cast, and a tertiary cast. The primary cast always gets point of view time. But I'll throw in some secondary and some tertiary just to break it up. I don't think you have to treat all members of the ensemble equally from a perspective.

[Brandon] Do you get fan anger from that? Because I get a lot of it. From not treating my tertiary characters… People will read it and they'll write me notes and say, "I feel like I've been promised much more from this character, because my brief glimpses of them were so evocative. Why are you ignoring this character? Why do you hate this character?"

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] You know, that's one you can't win. Like, I love writing characters who are on page for maybe a page or two, and feel holistic enough, complete enough, that you can imagine that they're the protagonist of a different novel. I want all of the characters in a book to feel like they have legs in that way. But no… I mean, I get people who are like, "I want more of this person." I've been lucky in that I don't get the anger of it. Maybe when I… It's because in each subsequent book, I shift that a little bit and I give more space to the ones that I've established. I like having this almost ripple effect, where if a person is a secondary character in one book, they will have a primary status in the next book. So I'm almost seating them, letting you get accommodated to their presence in the room, so that then when I focus on them more, you already are like, "Oh, yeah, I know that dude. I'm really excited to learn more about them."

[Howard] That was the second season of Community, we're introduced… In one of the humanities classroom scenes, we're introduced to Fat Neil. Where John Oliver says, "Oh, Fat Neil." Neil says, "Neil is just fine." Then it's two or three episodes later, when we get Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where Neil's character arc is super important, and the fact that people are calling him Fat Neil is super important. But for that episode, he's… I thought… When I first saw that episode, I thought, "Who's cameo'ing? Why is that person important? He just now showed up, we called attention to him, I don't think I've ever seen him before."

[Brandon] So, one of the questions here is how do you connect multiple vastly different POV's into a cohesive narrative, especially when some characters might be in totally different places in the world.

[Howard] Common tone modulation. It's a cheat that I use all the time, where I will take words from somebody's dialogue at the end of a scene and I will work them into someone else's dialogue. They are literally an entire galaxy away doing something different, but I have picked this tiny thread that shows that there is a similarity between the two of them and away I go.

[Victoria] I like the groupings. I like physically grouping different teams. I like to think of them as my A Team, my B team, and my C team. Because we… Like as readers, we are trained that if you start showing different teams, we're waiting for the coalescing. We are expecting that at some point in the narrative, the teams are going to begin to physically cross, or they're going to begin to come together. I think that it is… There's a threshold for reader balance, where they can hold a certain number of people and lines in their mind at a time. You have to be very careful not to exceed the threshold for reader balance. That's why there are whole sections of George RR Martin books which focus on a narrowing slice of the cast. Because to ask them to hold all of the cast in their mind for a long time… One, you're diluting the impact of any one of your cast members. So I always encourage when people want to have a large cast to make sure that every member of your ensembles are serving a purpose in the story. But I love a good physical grouping.

[Dan] See, for me, the question about how can you handle multiple POV's when they're in very different places… That's when I use multiple POV's.

[Victoria] Exactly.

[Dan] Right? Because if they're all in the same place, then I'm just going to stick with my main character, and we're going to follow her. But in the Partials series, this is how I eventually started using multiple POV's. The first book is all Kira. The second book had to have a second one because we needed to know what was going on and she was in a different part of the world. Then, by the time we got to the third, I think I have five or six POV's because that is how I can show the different parts of the world. So, for me, this is less a question of POV than it is of is your story big enough to justify having people in all these different places at once.

[Howard] One of the most important things I learned recording Writing Excuses with Brandon and Dan during season one back in 2008, was the discussion of… I can't remember whose writing book it was, but the idea that the point of view character that you want to switch to is the one who is currently in the most pain. Because I'm writing comedy, and pain is funny. That is, it is a conflict from which I can always exact a punchline.

[Brandon] Another thing that's useful here is determining just how you use cliffhangers and not, particularly if there's going to be large spaces and large gaps. Different authors do it different ways. I'm not going to say there is a right and a wrong way, but I've found as a reader that having to keep track… Like if you… If the author doesn't tie it up somewhat neatly, before leaving this character for a long time, it's going to be much harder, because you're going to feel like this is dangling over you. Now sometimes you can be neat and still have a cliffhanger. Right? You can sometimes be like, "All right. This character, this thing's happened, you only have to remember they have fallen off a cliff." But if you have to remember they have fallen off a cliff while there in a political negotiation that has not finished and their loved one is over here with… And keep track of all that, and you're going to leave them for 100,000 words and come back, then you're setting yourself up for some failure.

[Victoria] This is really interesting. I learned this lesson through timeline. I tell a lot of alinear narratives, and I also have multiple perspectives in them. So I have multiple perspectives, multiple timelines. I learned that basically my reader could tolerate shifts between perspectives or shifts between timeline. Could not tolerate a shift from perspective and timeline. So if I wanted to follow a character's present and then into the past, I needed to come back to the present for I switched to somebody else's present. It's a matter of sandwiching. It's a matter of understanding that threshold for pain that a reader has in terms of like being able to keep track of the narrative. It's the worst reason to lose your reader is that they can't actually follow your narrative. They're like, "There are too many threads here. Those quote

[Howard] That is a great exploration of the difference between prose and other mediums. Because in comics and TV, visual medium, we can make this sort of jump and take the reader with us because we have text and we have video and we have audio and all of those things can be used to cue the change.

[Victoria] And you have palletes and you have everything.

[Howard] Color palette… All of those things can be used to telegraph it. But, yeah, in books, I really like the idea that you've limited yourself. You need to switch between all of these things, you're just not going to throw all of the switches at once.

[Victoria] You have to be very careful which switches you throw in which order, or else you genuinely will end up with a very confused reader.

[Brandon] Let's talk about a book this week by one of our favorite people ever.

[Victoria] This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, is one of the strangest, most beautiful examinations of perspective. I think it fits perfectly into this theme. It is an epistolary love story between two characters, Red and Blue, two women on opposite sides of an alinear, intergalactic, inter-spatial, interdim… Inter-everything time war. They begin leaving letters for each other. It is almost impossible to describe, and that is all right, because it is only… It is novella length. I read it on a single plane ride. I would recommend to everybody just carve out an hour or two in their evening or in their morning or in their lunch, at some point, and just sit with it and just devour it. There is something so powerful about it.

[Howard] Structurally, it's fascinating because you have two third person limited points of view and you have two epistolary points of view. So there are four POV, and they alternate very… Mechanically is the wrong word. Formulaicly. There is a formula for the delivery of these POV's. On my second iteration through that formula, in that book, I realized, "Oh. That is letting me perfectly keep track of where I am. That is brilliant." They used the pacing structure of chapter breaks to tell me who was talking and when and why and how.

[Victoria] It's a master class on a lot of the things that we discuss.

[Howard] It is so awesome.

[Brandon] So…

[Howard] This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Max Gladstone and…

[Victoria] Amal El-Mohtar.

[Howard] Amal El-Mohtar.

[Brandon] So, another question we have on POV takes this a slightly different way with these ensemble casts. One of our listeners has a character who is going to be the main viewpoint character. This character needs to interact with a lot of different people and build relationships with all of them. How do you give time to a large ensemble when you're using one primary viewpoint character and you need to characterize all these different people? One of the things this listener says is, "How can I isolate certain relationships for development without always having to send the other characters out of the room?" Which actually is a thing I think about a lot. Because I find that personally, I don't know if it's the same with you guys, if I have too many characters in the scene, I will naturally start to forget about some of them, and they just won't participate. If I get beyond about four or five people, characters start slipping, and I've realized I have to create scenes where if I have more than that, I have to use other tricks to tell the story.

[Victoria] Two things for me. Hierarchy. I don't treat all those characters in that ensemble equally, and I don't think in a relationship or any group of five or six or 10, that we all would have equal relationships and equal time. Two, one of my own personal favorites. I write characters who hate each other. The nice thing about writing characters who hate each other is that they're not terribly enthusiastic, even if they're on a spaceship or on a boat, they're not really great at being in the same room as each other at all the same times. So, remembering that in any group of 10, most of those people probably don't like each other equally and are going to gravitate into their own almost small subgroups. You have to remember to treat your ensemble cast like a group of actual people.

[Howard] I would ask our listeners to think about a time when you've been super happy that a friend of yours has fallen into a wonderful relationship. You are now the POV character for their love story. How do you write that? Because that's… If you have a single POV in your novel, and other people are falling in love, that is exactly what you're describing.

[Brandon] One of the other things here is the larger your cast gets… This isn't always the case. But the more often you're going to have to use shorthand to give readers reminders on who certain characters are. Some of these characters who don't get equal time with all the others, you're going to have to be okay the fact to just aren't going to have a lot of time to develop them. A great writer can take a short amount of time and characterize someone in a really interesting way. But then one note of that is going to stick in the reader's mind, and you have to remind them who that character is when they come back, and not violate what that note is.

[Dan] So, the novella that I wrote for Magic, the Gathering, has a fairly large cast of… By the end of it, six or seven main characters. They're… I did this trip with them. I gave them… Here's one or two identifying traits that will just be shorthand, because they're not main characters, they're there because they need to be there and they're flavor. It was really fascinating to me to read the editor's notes, because one of those, who's just a very thinly drawn character with one or two traits, that was the editor's favorite character. He's like, "I love every scene that this guy's in. His characterization is so strong." I'm like, "That's because he's a caricature." But that works. Don't feel like it doesn't work.

[Victoria] I'm going to say as well, I think that we don't always give readers enough credit or space for their imagination in these things. We feel the need to dictate all the details of characters, when the truth is, like, sometimes you really just do need a few cues and shorthand, and allow the reader to fill in, and kind of fill-in like smoke, spread out into that space. I am somebody who I'm not great with spaces, personally, and so I love the visual cues shorthand. I will use an article of clothing, I will use a color, I will use a piece of jewelry, and that will be the thing that tethers an entire primary cast in my readers minds to each of those characters. Yet, when I look at the fan art that comes in for the series, they're all identical. There's just enough there that they get the main pieces of it.

[Howard] Back in September when we talked about writing under deadlines, I mentioned the importance of falling back on craft. Dan, what you've described, that is absolutely a craft trick. You know you've done it right when your editor can't see the trick.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You know this is a very well painted cardboard cutout. But a trick of the eye, from the reader's perspective, ah, it's fully fleshed out.

[Victoria] Also, to that, beyond the physical details, giving one or two like kind of weird like idiosyncrasies of character can go such a long way with characters that don't spend a huge amount of time on the page.

[Brandon] It really can. It can be really, really handy. Sometimes I feel bad about doing it, because I'm like, "This character deserves their own book." But these are the things you have to do, if you want to have a large cast.

[Howard] This character deserves their own book, but I deserve to be able to write The End and turn this in for money.

[Victoria] Yep.

[Brandon] So, we're out of time, and this is our last podcast with Victoria.

[What? Oh!]

[Victoria] I've had so much fun, though.

[Brandon] But we're going to give you a last homework.

[Victoria] Yeah. So. This is a good old favorite of mine. I want you to take something that you've written, preferably something with an ensemble cast. Let's say a cast of at least three. We're not… It doesn't have to be a whole gathering, a whole gaggle. Take a cast of at least three, if you have a viewpoint character, or even in your mind a main character in this group, I want you to pick one of the other two or four or six or however many you're choosing from. I want you to think of how you would tell the exact same story, and, by shifting the leadership role, shifting the primary and secondary and tertiary roles around, so that this new character, hopefully a minor character you've chosen, is now at the center of the narrative.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Victoria, thank you so much.

[Victoria] Thank you.

[Brandon] You're all out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.49: Maintaining Passion for a Story, with special guest Mahtab Narsimhan

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/12/06/15-49-maintaining-passion-for-a-story-with-special-guest-mahtab-narsimhan/

Key points: How do you stay excited about writing a book, especially in the middle? You may not be excited and thrilled about writing every time you sit down to write. Muscle through it, but watch for "I'm bored with the story," because if you're bored with the story, the reader will be too. Leave out the boring parts! For each scene, think about why this scene could be somebody's favorite scene in the whole book. Why does this part give a sense of progress? Stopping and then starting again is hard. To rekindle the passion, to get interested in this story again, look at your outline, your notes, and the ending. Look at the original pitch, what got you started. Beginnings are exciting because they are new, endings are good because they are climactic, but the middle? So when the middle drags, think about that. Often, there's a lot of processing (sequel) to be done. Use clever dialogue, reveals, and such to re-ignite the first. Watch out for the attraction of shiny new ideas, finish your middle first! Stick with it, to the end. How about staying passionate during revision? Again, beware the attraction of shiny new ideas. Set yourself a deadline, with a carrot for doing it, and hit that goal. Check, is it hard because it is boring, or am I trying to do too much at once, and I need to reorganize my revision process. Think about the fun of solving the puzzles, of fixing the scenes or characters. Talk with a critique partner.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 49.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Maintaining Passion for a Story, with Mahtab Narsimhan.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Mahtab] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] And I'm Brandon.

[Dan] This is a topic that was requested by some of our listeners, as has been most of the year. How do we stay excited about a book? There's a lot of different parts of a book that we need to stay excited for. So we're going to talk about those. So what I want to ask first is how… What do you do if you are in the middle of a book? Books take a long time to write. Many months or perhaps even years. So if you're in the middle, and you been working on this for so long, and you know that there's a bunch of it left, how do you stay excited about it?

[Howard] At risk of saying the unpopular thing here, I long ago gave up on the illusion that I was going to be excited and thrilled about writing every time I sat down to write. I allow myself to… Not necessarily be miserable, because when I miserable, the writing's not going to come out well. I allow myself to just muscle through it, with the understanding that not wanting to write is not the same as having become bored with the story. Because if I've become bored with the story, that might be symptomatic that the reader is also going to be bored with the story, and it is time for me to do something different with it. But I don't always have to be excited to write. I mean, I love being excited to write, that's one of my favorite things, and it's wonderful when it happens, but I don't assume that that has to be the case.

[Mahtab] Okay.

[Brandon] Yeah, I think that's really an astute comment, that should frame the rest of this conversation. Howard is absolutely right. Everything that I'm going to say takes into consideration that you are understanding that aspect. For me, one thing that is key, particularly for a long book, is… It's glibly said, and I don't know who said it first, try to leave out the boring parts. Right? And non-glibly said, what that really has always meant to me is I ask myself for every scene, "Why is this potentially going to be somebody's favorite scene in the book?" There's a fallacy I think you can fall into where you're like, "If I can just get through these boring bits, I can get to the exciting bits." Where the really great stories are the ones where they make what would be the boring bits in another book the exciting bits in this book. I talk a lot about promises, progress, and payoff, and that progress is the big chunk of your book. Asking yourself why is this clue, why is this development, this character moment, why is this thing going to give this sense of progress? Why is it exciting that this step on the journey is happening? There's a lot of tricks that you can use to do that, starting with that has always been helpful to me.

[Mahtab] I think, for me, it's always been… Like, because I don't write very long novels, for me the hardest part is when I have to stop in the middle of a novel or in the middle of a first draft, and work on something else, and then come back to it. For me, that has always been the hardest part of how to rekindle the passion or how to get interested in that story again. What I always go back to is I go back to the outline, I go back to all the notes that I've made about it, maybe any videos that I had, that I've seen about it, and I definitely look at the ending. For me, the ending is so important. If that ending is something that I love and I want to work towards, that's how I kind of recapture the excitement to make sure that I finished the novel or get back into it. For me, that's the most important.

[Dan] I agree with everything that Mahtab just said. I want to add, going back not just to the notes and to the ending, but to the initial pitch because that's what got me excited about this in the first place. Right? There was some cool idea or character or something that I was super thrilled about that made me want to write this book. Just remembering what that was and thinking, "Oh, yeah. That's… That was the hook that pulled me into this story," can help get through those middle parts as well. So, one of the things that hasn't been mentioned yet is beginnings. Beginnings are usually, beginnings and endings are the really exciting parts of a story. Because we're either just starting it and it's brand-new and fresh, or we're finally wrapping it up and it gets to be climactic and exciting. I think one of the problems that people like the person who ask this question are running into is that new things are exciting because they're new, not because they're good. If your idea is both new and good, then that's awesome and you should write it. But that makes the middle, which is good, but not new, kind of pale in comparison. It makes it not as thrilling. So it's important to remember that as well, I think.

[Howard] I've been re-watching some episodes of The Blacklist, which has James Spader as a career criminal who's now working with the FBI. James Spader can absolutely chew scenery. Absolutely chew scenery. There are action scenes, exciting reveals, and stuff in this TV show that are not the whole show. Then, some of my very favorite moments are these things in the middle where Spader's character, Raymond Reddington, relates a weird offbeat story to someone like he's talking just to fill space, and you realize this is very entertaining, and what does it have to do with the story? It's just Reddington being random, and then he ties it into the story in a way that's suddenly very sinister, and you're like, "Oh. Oh no, you just foreshadowed our plot twist." That model, for me, if you're in… We've talked a little in the past about scene-sequel format, the idea that scenes are where things happen and sequels are where we process what happened. Sometimes when your [story] bogs down in the middle, it's because there's all this processing to be done and it doesn't feel exciting. I love clever dialogue and fun turns of phrase, and when it's actors chewing scenery, I delight in that. There's a lot of fun to be had in the middle of a book, when one character brings us up to speed with their journey, just like re-ignites all the fires at once.

[Dan] Mahtab, what were you going to say?

[Mahtab] Oh, I was going to say sometimes people find the middle difficult or they kind of get stuck, it's because as you mentioned earlier the starting of a story or a shiny new idea is always good because it's so hard to get through the middle and then to the end. So you always get attracted to, oh, this is a fabulous idea, let me go pursue this. But what you've got to realize is that once you get through that hump of beginning and go back to the middle, it's going to be hard again. The main, I would say the mettle of a true writer is being able to go all the way to the end. So, no matter how hard, stick with it. Just stick with it because you'll always have these shiny new ideas jumping around. Ignore them. Go to the end, however difficult.

[Brandon] That's really good advice. Extremely good advice right there.

[Mahtab] Thank you.

[Dan] Now, I've got another big question, a big topic for us to get into, but first it is time for our book of the week, and Mahtab has that for us.

[Mahtab] Yes. I would love to recommend Dust by Arthur Slade. Arthur Slade is a Canadian writer. He writes a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but that's just one of my absolute favorites. Because he's really melded middle grade horror with science-fiction, and all of this is set in Saskatchewan, which is a prairie town in the 1930s. The story starts with a young boy disappearing. He's about seven years old. His older brother, who's 11, is devastated and the entire town goes looking for him, but they don't find the boy. Around the same time, a stranger comes to town. He promises to start up a rain machine or manufacture a rain machine that is going to end the drought in the area. As the story progresses, more and more kids are disappearing from the village… Or from the town, but the parents don't seem to know what's going on or they seem to forget about it. The ending is just fantastic. So… He's also, the great part is, Arthur has also narrated this book himself, so it's almost like he's reading the book out to you. So I would definitely recommend Dust by Arthur Slade.

[Dan] Thank you very much.

[Dan] So we had another listener question about maintaining passion for a story, but this one was about how do you stay passionate about a story during the revision process? When you've already finished it, and you look back at it and realize it's terrible, and that you're going to have to fix all this broken stuff, and you see all these horrible flaws, how do you stay excited about it then?

[Brandon] This is what I've been thinking about this whole time, because I don't often lose passion for a book in the middle of it. Where my passion wanes is when I'm on the fourth draft of that book, or even the third draft, right? We're talking… I just finished Rhythm of War revisions earlier this year, and that's a 450,000 word book, right? That I had to do five drafts of. That needed significant revisions in some places. I would say, the only tips I have on this are, number one, remember what Mahtab just said. That's when the shiny new ideas really start to pop out at me. A big problem in my career early on was that I would go chase those instead of revising. I'd figure, "Oh, I've got this book done, I'll go chase that idea and that idea." I would never get to the revisions. I never learned revision. It held me back quite a bit. The other thing that really helps me as a solid deadline imposed on myself of a number of words I need to do in a day. I learn how much is a good day's work for me. On revision, I say you have to hit this goal. Then, usually, there's a bit of a carrot at the end. If you hit this goal, you may go take this time off and do something else. Like, the sooner you hit this goal, the sooner you get to take that time off. That structure, for the way my personal psychology works, is the way to make me do this. Is just to set it out and have a deadline and go.

[Howard] Gamification is key and a number of pursuits for all kinds of different people. Gamifying it so that you are looking at this horrible task in front of you, and it's a game and once you beat the game, you look at your score, you get a prize, whatever. The… It's… It is difficult, and I gotta tell you, fair listener, viewer, you want to be a person who does difficult things. That's who you want to be, right? You don't want to just do easy things. You want to be someone who does difficult things. Sometimes, when I look at revision, I'm just… I'm wrestling with it, and it's difficult, I'll remind myself, well, if it was easy, everyone would do it. It's supposed to be hard. Then I ask myself, "Why is it being difficult? Is it difficult because it's a slog, and I'm bored? Or is it difficult because I'm trying to hold too many things in my head at once, and I need to break down my revision process in a different way?" Having participated in Brandon's writers group were a bit, the fact that he breaks down some of these editorial passes in character voices and other things access I look at that and think, "Oh, gosh. That's a lot of organizational work." But for a manuscript that's got half a million words in it, that's the only way to get it done consistently. So I had to ask myself, when I'm stuck in the middle of a revision, am I stuck because this is being too hard, because I can't think of everything at once? If that's the case, well, I'm just going to have to make some notes for myself. I'm going to do the pass this way and then I'm going to do the pass sway. It's going to feel like it takes longer, but suddenly I'm more efficient, and it actually kinda becomes fun.

[Dan] Now, both Brandon and Howard have been talking about treating this like a job. Which I definitely think is an important way to go about it. But, I do think that there are some moments of excitement to be found in the revision process. I've heard both of you talk about puzzling over a problem and being stuck on it and I cannot make this scene or this character work until finally you find it, and that thrill that just floods in, that makes the whole arduous problem-solving worth it. So many authors, every author I know, I think, has had that moment of "Oh, my gosh, I finally made this work. I am as happy as I've ever been in my life." That's worth looking forward to.

[Mahtab] What I'd like to add here is sometimes just talking about your manuscript with a critique partner, it doesn't have to be a whole group. I've got about five or six people that I regularly go to. But just one trusted person. If you are able to discuss what your issue is, or what is stopping you, or what you're unhappy with, sometimes just talking it out (a) helps you get over that barrier and you start thinking of different things, and someone giving you feedback on what they think may not be working just helps you get past whatever was stopping you and think of new ideas. So sometimes I feel just speaking it out helps you get through it.

[Dan] Agreed. Now, our time is up. So we do have homework for you, and this comes from Mahtab.

[Mahtab] Okay. So I think this kind of almost encompasses what we been speaking about. For one, go back to your notes and your outlines and take a look at what was it that excited you about your story. The best thing to do is don't look at it on a computer. Try and write it out in longhand. Because there is… I feel there is a deeper connection when you're actually writing down stuff on paper using a pen, pencil, whatever. It helps you slow down stuff rather than when you're typing at a very high speed. The other thing I would suggest, again, is what I do. Speak to a critique partner. It just needs to be one person whose opinion you really trust and see if they can advise you on something. I think the third most important thing is take a really good look at your ending. If your ending is not spectacular or really fantastic, that's what probably is not… Why you're passionate about getting to the end. As Brandon once said, plot backwards and write forwards. I think that's my mantra right now. So, it really works for me.

[Dan] homework is take whatever you're doing right now, go back to the original notes and write down in longhand what excited you, what attracted you to that in the first place. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.48: Deliberate Discomfort, Part Two

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/29/15-48-deliberate-discomfort-part-two/

Key Points: Have you been uncomfortable writing something? Writing about my own bad mental health issues. Writing about fitting into Canada as an immigrant. Trying to write live in front of an audience. Having someone reading over my shoulder while I'm writing. An explicit lead in to a fade-to-black scene. How do you do it? Remind yourself that your audience doesn't have the same experience. Read and analyze how some other author does it. Some lines I'm not likely to cross, but others... The most uncomfortable scene for me to write was a spanking, a disempowerment of an antagonist. How do you decide to include something that makes you uncomfortable? Basically, if I think the book needs it, try it. Then look and see if it works. Think of an actor, inhabit the character and write from their perspective. I have two lines, one for things I don't do, but it's not wrong for my characters to do, and another for things that I probably won't depict in detail.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 48.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Deliberate Discomfort Two, with Mahtab Narsimhan.

[Howard] Fifteen minutes long.

[Mahtab] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] And I'm Brandon.

[Dan] Awesome. We are recording this live. When this airs, you will be able to go and look up a YouTube video and watch us do this. But right now, we're very excited to be talking about deliberate discomfort. We didn't episode on this topic earlier in the year that focused on writing things that are uncomfortable for your readers. Topics like sexism or racism or things like that that you know could be triggering issues for your readers and how to handle that appropriately. This episode, we're going to focus on writing things that are uncomfortable for you as an author. Maybe that is a sex scene, or maybe you got a character who swears a lot, something that you're worried your mom is going to read or that a character does or thinks something that you would never say, but your character does. All of those kind of questions. So what I would love to start with is actually just asking our podcasters if they have some experience they want to share where they had to write something that kind of made them uncomfortable to write it.

[Howard] The best example I can offer for me is the piece that I wrote for the… I've forgotten the title of it, the Robison Wells benefit anthology.

[Dan] Altered Perceptions?

[Howard] Altered Perceptions, called No, I'm Fine, in which I was writing about a bad mental health episode that I had. As I began writing, it began to hurt. I mean, it was actually physically painful. The sensation that I sometimes get when I'm depressed is that I'm so sad that I'm feeling pain. There's a physical pain associated with it. As I was writing, I was excited to sit down and write, because the story was in my head and I was good to go. But putting the words on the page was painful. Sandra and the kids, we were taking a little spring break at a cabin, and they had gone to see… They'd gone out to see the sights or something. They came back and Sandra took one look at me and was like, "What happened to you?" I said, "Well, I wrote for two hours and this piece is done and it's beautiful and please don't ask me to ever write this again because it hurts so much to do." After having done it, pretty much all of the other things I'm afraid to write about because they make me uncomfortable, I sort of shrug off and I'm like, "Eh. When the time comes I need to do 'em, I'll do 'em because I've already eaten the live spider today. Everything else is easy."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, to be clear for people who aren't familiar with that other anthology, this is kind of a first-person perspective on your own mental health issues and not wanting to have to rely on medication for them.

[Howard] Yup.

[Dan] Which was very painful to write.

[Howard] I can link to it in the writer notes. It's free for people to read now.

[Dan] Awesome. Brandon or Mahtab, have you got an experience of writing something that was uncomfortable or painful to write?

[Mahtab] Yeah. I can definitely relate to that. A few years ago, a friend, a writer friend, had asked me to contribute to an anthology. This is the only nonfiction piece that I've ever written. But it was about stories about fitting into Canada as an immigrant. I was like, "Yes, sure, no problem. I'll write it." But as I actually started writing it, I just found myself being so uncomfortable because there were so many painful things about fitting into Canada, not knowing the people, of course luckily language is not an issue. But just… Some of the stupid things that I did. I just remember that I really had to dig deep to be able to write my experience of how I spent the first year out here, not knowing people, working a job for a very long time and then… It was actually cathartic when I finally finished writing it, but I found myself cringing, very, very uncomfortable. But I think the main thing is I pushed through it, and it was one of the best things that I wrote.

[Dan] Oh, that's awesome.

[Brandon] For me, it's a little bit different of an experience I want to share. What I… Probably the most uncomfortable I've ever been when writing was when I tried to do it live in front of an audience. This was at Jordan Con. They… We were going to run a charity drive for Worldbuilders. Pat Rothfuss was the guest of honor at Jordan Con that year and I thought we'll just do a kind of live writing session where I brainstorm with a crowd and start writing a story and we did it on Twitch. Then, Pat would stop by and answer some questions, and I thought this would actually be easy for me for two reasons. One, in my class, we often do live brainstorming sessions where we come up with a story. So I thought I've done this before. Number two, I'm not very precious about my early draft. I released Warbreaker, one of my novels, chapter by chapter as I wrote it. It doesn't really bother me for people to read unpolished work of mine. So I thought these two things would combine together. I found it enormously uncomfortable to be writing… For whatever reason, it was the idea that there were now several thousand eyes looking over my shoulder at everything I did. Even when I present an unfinished draft to people, it's at least something that I'm aware of what it is, right? I'm comfortable with it and I say release this. As I'm writing, I'm not sure what's going to come out. I'm not sure how things are going to flow, how the words are going to look. It was really, really uncomfortable. To the point that I've never done another one again. Despite raising $1000 for Worldbuilders, I think, during that session, which was pretty good.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It shocked me by how uncomfortable I was.

[Dan] That makes a lot of sense to me. That is, for me, one of the most violating feelings in the world is knowing that somebody's reading over my shoulder as I am writing. If my wife comes into the office, or one of my kids comes in, I have to stop, because I can't write while someone's looking at it. It feels so wrong. I don't know how to explain it. Some of my own experiences… The one that I wanted to point out was my most recent novel, Ghost Station, which is a Cold War spy novel on Audible. There is a… Not a sex scene, but definitely a fade-to-black, these people are about to have sex, kind of scene. Which I've never written before. Even as lightweight and as preliminary as it was, it took a lot for me to put that in there. The explicit this is what's about to happen, we all know it, that's put this in this book. Maybe it's because I come from a primarily YA background, maybe it's because I am a very religious person, I don't know what it was, but it was hard for me to write that. It's interesting to me that it was harder for me to write that then to write all of the grisly murder stuff that's in my horror novels. But there are certain lines that are harder to cross then others. I think that's very individual.

[Dan] So, as you were working on these, as you had to write these uncomfortable things we've been talking about, what did you do? How did you psych yourself up? Or what did you tell yourself that says, "It's okay, I can do this?"

[Brandon] One thing, for me, while I was working on this thing, like, as it became uncomfortable, I had to keep telling myself, no one else thinks that this is awkward. Right? Like, no one is pointing and saying, "Oh, you typed that word wrong, how can you possibly…" All of these things that were going through my head, they weren't true. Despite them being valid emotions, I could counter them with a little bit of logic and saying, "Look, people are enjoying this. This is what they expected when they showed up. Yes, it's uncomfortable for me, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad experience."

[Mahtab] Yeah. For me, I don't think I've still managed to write… I mean, though I write mostly middle grade, I did attempt a YA a few years ago in which I did want to write some sex scenes, but it was so badly written and it… I mean, I'm lucky… I'm so glad that the book is not sold yet. But it was hard. So I started reading other books to see how well they did it. I love the way Diana Gabaldon writes her Outlander series. It comes so naturally, her… I mean, her sex scenes are fantastic. I was like… That's… I'm not cringing reading that because it's so well-written, and it's… It just sounds so natural. All I can say is I have still not discovered exactly how to do that because a great part of my culture is such that we did not have open discussions about this. We don't have talks about sex or body or feelings and stuff like that. So it's really hard as a writer to make myself do that. So, I'm still struggling with it, and maybe at some point in time, I might pull out my YA book again and see if I've become braver. But, at the moment, I'm so glad that I'm in the MG world and I don't have to cross that line.

[Dan] I want to ask Brandon, speaking of sex scenes, I remember when you were kind of given the reins of the Wheel of Time, there was a lot of discussion about this online. Because the Robert Jordan books did have… I mean, not like erotica, but there were sexual situations which up to that point readers did not think that you could write that kind of stuff. Outside of maybe one scene in the Mistborn series, you hadn't really written that kind of stuff. So, how did… What did you do to kind of get into that, to ease yourself over that obstacle?

[Brandon] Honestly, it wasn't hard for me. I have a certain threshold that I just personally am not likely to cross. Perhaps that will change. Wheel of Time had never crossed that, reading it, for me. Right? Wheel of Time does mostly fade to black. With some… A little bit of explicit things before. Actually, way more uncomfortable for me… I'd say the most uncomfortable scene for me to write in the Wheel of Time was a different one, which is… There is a scene where a character takes another character over his knee and spanks her.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Maybe it's a woman that takes a character over… Anyway. They… It's an intentional disempowerment of a female antagonist. He had written for me to do this scene. I think I probably would not have put it in if I were writing it today. It just made me uncomfortable, because I thought this feels like the wrong way to disempower a character. But this is a book series kind of from another generation. This sort of thing had been more common in the Wheel of Time. It's not something that I commonly put in my books. The sex scenes, two characters consenting who are in love, that didn't bother me. Right? Now I have different standards in my life, but I think that this is kind of what life is about. We choose our lines and we think about them and we may change them as we go through life. That's what life is for. Someone having different lines for me just means that they're looking at this differently. Certainly, I didn't have a problem writing those scenes. But something like that… Does that make sense? Like, in that case, I think it's a different thing. I think, looking back, because I was a newer author then, I think I would have gone to Harriet and said, "I just don't think this is the right way to disempower a character. I would rather not put this in the book." And see what she said. So there's an example of something uncomfortable that I'm writing that I think perhaps should have nudged me the other direction and not had it be in the book.

[Dan] That is great. I definitely want to have a discussion about that. But first, we need to do our book of the week. That's actually me. I'm doing not a book but a role-playing game. This is one that some of you may have heard of, because it has an Amazon series. It's called Tales from the Loop, which is a really neat kind of 80s nostalgia weird science fiction game. The reason that I thought it applied to this topic is because it doesn't have traditional hit points or damage or anything like that. But as bad things happen to your characters, you instead take conditions. Those conditions are things like upset, scared, exhausted, injured. Then the way that you get rid of those, the way you heal yourself, is that you have to go and have a conversation, a meaningful conversation with an important person in your life. Which just feels like a really fascinating way, in fiction, to deal with those kinds of trauma issues and, for players and authors to work through those through the kind of role-playing improvisation. So, Tales from the Loop. It's by Free League. It's a really great game. That's our book of the week.

[Howard] All my characters are going to be dead by act two.

[Laughter]

[Dan] All right. So, let's get back to what Brandon was talking about, because I think that's really interesting, this discussion of everyone has lines they won't cross, and what I really think were talking about in this episode is what happens when my characters have lines that are different from my own. I need, I have decided as an author that this person is going to use words that I don't or this person is going to do something that I would never do. That makes me uncomfortable, because those lines are different. So I want to ask, first, how do you make that decision when you're writing a story that you really want to include something that makes you uncomfortable? How and why do you decide that?

[Howard] Honestly, if the thought crosses my mind that this story needs this and such a scene, that's not the sort of scene that I'm comfortable writing because reasons. But if I had the thought that this is possibly the right sort of scene, then the odds are pretty good, at least in this stage of my career, the odds are pretty good that I need to trust my instinct and acknowledge that this book needs me to write something I'm not comfortable with. If, after I've written it, or after I've struggled to write it, I go back and look at it and I feel like, no, this is wrong, this has changed the tone of the story, or I didn't do it well, or I did it so badly I'm not allowed to say I didn't do it well… Which, I gave that two votes because that's what's most likely going to happen. Then, I'll revisit it and… Oh, I can't count the number of times in Schlock Mercenary I had an idea for a panel and realized I do not have the skill within the format I've created for myself to illustrate that the way my brain is illustrating it. So I'm going to move the camera. I've made that compromise a lot of times because I'm not as good at things as I want to be. But I'll never get good unless I try to write the scene, unless I try to draw the picture, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me, so I can step back from it and say, "Well, that was miserable. Did I do it well?"

[Mahtab] I got some very good advice from one of the editors that I worked with on a previous novel called The Tiffin. There were some scenes of violence against a child. I was having a bit of difficulty writing it. One of the… My mentor at that time said, "Think of yourself as an actor." An actor sometimes has to do a lot of different roles. They just have to inhabit the character. So inhabit your character's skin and write from the character's perspective so that… You basically have to forget yourself, you have to forget that you're the author writing the story. Inhabit what your characters are going through or the violence that is happening against your character, and just write as honestly as possible. Somehow, removing yourself from the equation and just writing from inhabiting the character's world helped me get through my barrier and write that particular scene. So, sometimes just have to do that. I don't know if that makes sense.

[Dan] No, it does. I think that's great advice. Brandon, do you have any last thoughts on this topic before we end?

[Brandon] It is something that I've thought about quite a bit as a writer. It's something I had to be comfortable with early in my career. I've told this story before, about my younger sister, Lauren, my youngest sister, when I was writing Mistborn. I mean, the cursing in Mistborn is very light, but I don't just generally curse at all, and my characters were. Why did I do that? It's because… I often come up with fantasy curses in my books. In this particular book, it was a gang of thieves and the fantasy curses were sounding silly coming out of these characters' mouths. It's something I'm very conscious of. In certain worldbuilding you can make, and with certain fantasy worlds, you can make them not sound silly. But sometimes they just do. Depending on how you're making them. That was ruining the tone of the story. I said, I'm just going to have to come to our world swears for these characters. Again, they're very light. Right? Most people wouldn't even consider them curses. But my little sister was one of my beta readers at like age 14. She crossed them all out. With a black marker.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] She was super offended. It was my first experience of this, people are going to be like, "Wow, Brandon is cursing." Right? Like, it is the weakest. But everyone again has their different lines. So I had to kind of ask myself. I said, "Well, it didn't bother me." I decided I was going to go forward with it. But there are certain curses I've just never used in my books. There are certain derogatory terms for people that I just don't use. I don't anticipate myself ever using them because of the way… I don't like what those words add to our society. So I don't. That's just kind of a personal choice on my part. So it's like I have two lines. I have a line of things that I don't generally do, but that I don't think actually are… That's not wrong for my characters to do. Then I have lines that I probably won't depict, at least in explicit detail, my characters ever doing. Because it's just not something that I want to write. It's odd, because I don't necessarily think these things are bad for other writers to write. But it's just not where I want to take my stories.

[Dan] Awesome. So, let's give you some homework to finish up. If you have decided that you want to put some kind of these elements into your fiction, but it's hard kind of getting over that first little hump, breaking the ice, here is an exercise. For this one, I'm using swearwords. I just want you to open a file and write down every swearword you know. Every cuss, every bad word you can think of. Put them into sentences, write them as dialogue. It will be uncomfortable, but it is going to kind of… Like I said, it's going to break that ice a little bit. Then, after that, delete the file, burn the paper you wrote it on, destroy it forever. It doesn't matter. Because it just kind of… Once you've written them down once, then later it will be much easier. Anyway, that was our episode. Thank you so much for watching. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.47: Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow

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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.46: Crafting Chinese-American Characters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/15/15-46-crafting-chinese-american-characters/

Key points: Are there representations of Chinese-American characters in media? Literature, TV, and movies do have representative characters, but it's not as deep as it could be. Mostly focusing on how do you merge the two heritages, and recent immigrants or second-generation learning about early trials. Good characters are aware of stereotypes, and control them. They are aware of language. And then there's food! Tastes, emotions, a metaphor for making connections with heritage? Comfort! Make the influences from the past little nods, spice for the character. How can you write about a culture that you didn't grow up in? Admit that this is just your viewpoint. Focus on one character, one place, don't claim that it represents everyone, just that one character's life.

[Transcriptionist note: (1) I may have confused Piper and Tempest. Apologies for mislabeling. (2) I may have confused emigrant and immigrant.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 46.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Crafting Chinese-American Characters.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Yang] Because your time is valuable.

[Laughter]

[No. No. Laughter]

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[That just finishes… Garbled]

[No]

[Yang] See, I was a Chinese-American… [Garbled]

[Piper] Getting back to… I'm Piper.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Yang] I'm Yang Yang.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Piper] This is already off the rails. So… I get to be Howard this time. This is the best. All right, so. Welcome to the next episode… Our continuing episode about Writing the Other. We are here with Yang Yang Wang.

[Yang] Hello.

[Piper] You're so awesome. You do so many things. But, yes, when I said I want to do these episodes and we're going to do them in Seattle, Nisi Shawl, who is the godmother, the mystical goddess of Writing the Other, was, like, "You should talk to Yang Yang." So I think…

[Yang] Oh, thank you. Whoever she is.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Thank you. Thank you so much, Nisi. Yes. So tell us a little bit about yourself, as an author, is a Chinese-American, as whatever.

[Yang] So, currently, I am an author and actor. I mostly specialize in commercials. I've done everything… Every brand in the Seattle area, from like Amazon to Microsoft to Washington State Lottery. I think it's cool that I found some success in that. I feel like it's a combination of good timing and my own personal brand. I don't know if… For those who have met me, I have a very good, what they call a developer look. Believe it or not, that is very hot in Seattle.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Yang] [garbled]… A lot of tech companies.

[Piper] In my day job, I actually work with a software development company, and I agree, you have a great developer look.

[Laughter]

[Yang] Oh, thank you. Yeah, so besides that, I've been dipping my feet into more on the production side. I wrote and directed a short film last year which took a best short film award at the Oregon independent film festival.

[Dan] Cool.

[Yang] I recently just opened a short film at the Wing Luke Museum, who's doing an exhibition on Asian Americans in science fiction. You should definitely check that out. Like, it is an amazing exhibit.

[Piper] Awesome. How cool. Yay. It's not often we get someone with acting and writing experience. So, I guess the first thing I want to ask is about when you're thinking about the kind of Chinese-American characters that you do see in media, whether that's like film media or even books, first of all, do you see many? And, the ones that you see, are they the kind of characters that you would say, "Yes, I enjoy that depiction. That seems amazing. I would want every person to want to look at that, forever and ever, amen."

[Yang] So, first of all, I would like to start off by saying that my opinions do not represent everyone else's opinions.

[Dan] Certainly.

[Piper] Absolutely.

[Yang] Just my own. I think, growing up, I did see Chinese-American characters in literature and on television or in movies. I would say that I did recognize them. I wouldn't say that I felt, like, misrepresented. But at the same time, I felt like it just… It waded in the shallow end of the pool, if you will. I felt like there was more that could be depicted. A lot of the narratives that I was seeing was centered around like people struggling with merging their Chinese heritage and their American heritage. It would be a story about recent immigrants or like second-generation learning about their parents' trials coming to this country. Being… So, my own story is that I came over here when I was nine years old. I felt, like, while I recognized some of the trials that those characters faced, like, I was not picked on in school anymore than anybody else. My name was not made fun of. You know, when your name's Yang Yang Wang, there's a lot of wordplay.

[Chuckles]

[garbled… Yeah, yeah… Places…]

[Yang] I picked out one of the ones I wanted to highlight is somebody called me… You know, Yankee Doodle Dandy, but they called me Yankee Doodle Wanger.

[Dan] Nice.

[Yang] But, yeah. Kids… But I'd like to, again, stress that kids being who they are, I was picked on no more or less than like any other kid at my school. So, while I recognize facets of this, I didn't think that that was the complete story. So, like for me, some of the things that I think good Chinese-American characters are highly aware of are (a) their relationship to stereotypes, like, you grow up hearing these stereotypes and you decide and you have control over how you relate to them or not relate to them, how you let them affect you or not affect you, whether you want to embrace and make it your own. Because there's that… Let's take the example of, like, martial artists. While there's that stereotype, all Chinese kids know martial arts. But some Chinese kids love martial arts. By performing martial arts, it's not that they're perpetuating the stereotype, but they are definitely aware that that stereotype exists, but they are taking control over it, and not letting it affect their love of this thing.

[Right]

[Yang] Another thing being awareness of their relationship to language. I think whether or not you speak the language that your family, your ancestors, etc., like, did, you are aware of your level of relationship to that language. Like, what do you know, like, just a couple of words? Like whether you know a phrase. Whether you can just order a couple of food dishes at a restaurant. Maybe that's enough. But for other people, like, it's not, and it's a source of like common guilt from their family, etc. But I find that language… It is definitely something that a lot of Chinese-Americans, including myself, like, are hyperaware of.

[Uhum]

[Yang] The last one, I mentioned it before, was food. Like…

[Laughter]

[It always comes back to food]

[Yang] Yeah, absolutely.

[So many things about my life are food.]

[I'm there for you]

[Yang] Yeah. I find that, for me, like, food is something… I consider it like a safe space, like, where people can sort of like experiment with traditional…

[Yeah]

[Yang] And like mixing different influences, like, safely. But something about, like, food that really resonates with me is growing up, even without, like, knowing what it's called, I will have experience, something… I'll have eaten something and remember the taste and certain, like, emotions around it. I might have even, like, forgotten about this, but like years later, either going to a restaurant somewhere in America or somewhere back in China, I will essentially, like, rediscover this food and maybe this whole… Maybe the whole time in the back of my mind, like, this flavor will be, like, lingering and I'll seek it, like some sort of extended metaphor for, like… I guess you could take it as an extended metaphor for, like, seeking a connection with, like, my heritage. But you don't have to. It could be for some people, it could definitely be that. But for me, it's just like seeking, like, a comfort and an emotional connection.

[Piper] oh, I think that's really relatable. Because, for example, I'm Thai-American. I was actually born here, but I spent many, many summers of my childhood in Thailand. We just went to Thailand over the past New Year, and I took my partner, Matthew, with me. It was his first time in Thailand. So, it was one of those things where as soon as we got there, I hit the streets for the vendors, looking for my favorite things that I just can't get here or I can't find here. Or if I do find it here, it's not the same flavor. I was looking for that flavor. So I think that that idea of comfort foods or that feeling... Another friend of mine, Phillipa Ballantine, who's an author in steam punk and also epic fantasy, she was just recently back in New Zealand, and she pinged me just as I was getting back from Thailand. She was in New Zealand eating foods that she hadn't had for quite some time. She had grown up in New Zealand. She's like, "There's something about eating this food that brings you home." It's really, really all about sensory, not just what you remember, but what you're smelling and you're tasting and you're feeling, the emotions associated with it. So, yeah, I absolutely agree with that.

[I feel like there's… Garbled]

[Tempest] there's not enough, I feel like, about that in depictions where it's like… Not like own voices writing, it's writing the other. About just, like, all the foods that make us feel like who we are. Because, like, food is so important to just literally everyone.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Oh, yes. I try to incorporate that a lot in my series. In fact, it got to the point where some people thought that I was… That they would be able to re-create a Chinese dish based on my Chinese-American heroine's looking that she was doing through the course of a scene that I was describing, because she stress cooks.

[Laughter]

[Piper] The only way they can get any information out of her, she's like, "Look, you want me to answer your questions? Stand there. Let me cook, and I will answer your questions clearly. If you make me try to sit down, it's not happening." But, yeah, I mean, all of my series… I have a Korean American character who does the same thing. She has comfort foods, because she ended up in the hospital. Got shot at. Or actually exploded. But anyway…

[Laughter]

[Piper] Either way… It's romantic suspense, man. But either way, it comes back to what you're saying about the food and wanted to see that and see how food brings you back… And not necessarily back, but deepens insight into who you are.

[Yeah]

[Yang] Yeah, I guess it all comes back to the fact that, like, it's like these little nods. To your… To the influences from your past. Like, it doesn't need to dominate a character. It just needs to be… It's like the spice, to go with the whole food metaphor, right?

[Yeah]

[Yang] It's like the spice to a character. But it doesn't need to be like something… The only thing that a character obsessed is about or thinks over.

[Piper] All right. I'm going to stop us here, because I've been politely reminded that I totally forgot…

[Oh. Garbled]

[Piper] To watch the time, and it is time for the book of the week.

[Laughter]

[Piper] That is you. Would you please tell us what the book of the week is?

[Yang] I was just reading All Systems Red by Martha Wells. I think it is probably one of the… It's got one of the best characters, Murderbot, that I've ever encountered.

[Chuckles]

[Yang] I'm super jealous, I wish I'd thought of this character first.

[Chuckles]

[Yang] I wish I could, like, steel list character and like put it in like all the settings, all the time periods that can possibly exist. Yeah, I know I'm a little late in reading this reticular one…

[It is never too late.]

[Yang] Yeah. I can't… I say that it does not diminish my enjoyment of it anyway.

[Piper] Awesome.

[Dan] That is All Systems Red by Martha Wells.

[Piper] Awesome. Thank you.

[Tempest] So, one of the things that I know that some people who are either from a diaspora culture or they're from… They're like [garbled] emigrants, they were brought to whatever cultures their family emigrated to when they were very young, so, like, most of their experience is in, like, the new culture, is they worry about whether or not their writing about the home culture would be considered writing the other, because it's, like, it's sort of my culture, but it's not exactly my culture, because my culture is this, the culture that I mostly grew up in, and whatever. I know that there are, like, two aspects of it, there is the aspect of, like, from the inside, the person whose, like, having that thought about themselves, but then there's also, like, the voices from the outside are like, "That's not authentic."

[Chuckles]

[Tempest] Oh, Lord, we could have a conversation about authenticity all day long, and we won't.

[Chuckles]

[Tempest] But I'm actually, like, more concerned with, like, how… What would you say to authors who, like, they're from a… They're Chinese-American or they're Indian-American or whatever. They want to write about China. They want to write about India. What are the kinds of things that they can do to feel less... or to just be aware of the complicated issues around that?

[Yang] Right. I guess, one of the first things that they can do is just acknowledge the fact that they are representing it from their own viewpoint. Like, they are not trying to assume any sort of authority over the subject matter. I mean, to be fair, even citizens from like a country, such as China, can't necessarily write about China with all the nuance and all the complexity to do it justice for various reasons. Right? But I think after going past that, it's a matter of… So, whenever I read about a character, I always think about the author. Like, I look at the back of the book and I read the little, like, blurb about who they are and where they come from, and, like, I try to think about their relationship to the subject matter. I think that as long as they have, like, the proper research and they have access they don't try to tell me that this is how the country is. As long as I can see that there's, like, room that they think the country is this way.

[Their perception is theirs]

[Yang] Their perception… Yeah. As long as there's enough of that fallibility, like… I think I'm okay with that. Because that's the best that we can do, really. Like, we are all trying to have, like, some good intent and we want to explore and we want… It's really like celebrate. Like, part of the reason why, I think, that people want to write in these other settings is that there's something about setting that enraptures them. They want other people to love it, and they think it's exciting, and they want other people to feel the same excitement. So, as long as they… Yeah, as long as… Sorry, I lost my train of thought.

[Laughter]

[That's okay]

[Dan] No, I wanted to add onto that, because I think that's great. That's one of the reasons, one of the things we talk about a lot in this series is that the more specific you get, when you're talking about one character, then you have room for that fallibility. Because I'm not trying to say all Chinese Americans are exactly like this. But this one is. Then that gives us room. It doesn't feel like were trying to represent an entire massive nation or culture, we're just trying to show you one person's life.

[Tempest] Yeah.

[Piper] Yep. That's the most important thing. Cool. Well. Thank you so much.

[Piper] In wrapping up, I have today's homework. This is super exciting. I love giving homework.

[Woohoo!]

[Piper] Excuse me. So, for your homework, I want you to take a culture. It can either be a real-world culture or a culture that you have made up for your books. Then, I want you to create a character that is a descendent of emigrants from that culture. Then that character comes back to the home culture. How are they experiencing the home culture? What are they seeing? Are they saying, "Oh, that's so familiar?" What are they seeing? Are they like, "I didn't know they did it like that. Grandpa didn't do it like that?" Write that scene. Just explore what it can be like to be the person who is, like, of a culture, but not of a culture inside.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you, very much, Yang Yang, being on the episode. This was great.

[Yang] Well, thank y'all for having me.

[Piper] Thank you. All right. Listeners! You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.45: Worldbuilding Fantasy, with Patrick Rothfuss

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/08/15-45-worldbuilding-fantasy-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key Points: Timeless urban fantasy? Set in our world, but with magic, monsters, or some other wonder. How do you make it timeless, avoid pinning it down so that in a couple decades, it's irrelevant? Make the world close, but obviously different. Pull back a little, the phone is not the plot. Dodge it! Magic and tech don't mix. Use ubiquitous references. Write about things you know and enjoy. Focus on things that are always important, to make the story timeless, even if it is set in time. Write the story you want to write, don't borrow trouble from the future. Focus on the hidden world. Go ahead and tell us exactly what time it is. How do you make an interesting secondary world fantasy without a magic system? History, politics, relationships. Wonder! The place as character. Exploring a strange world. The numinous and wonder. Think about why you want to do a secondary world? What does it buy you? What does making it an urban fantasy in this world buy you? Focus on the things you are passionate about.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 45.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Fantasy Worldbuilding, with Patrick Rothfuss.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] 'cause you're in a hurry.

[Pat] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Pat] And I'm Pat.

[Dan] We have Pat Rothfuss with us once again. We are super excited to have you back, especially for this podcast.

[Dan] We're going to talk about fantasy worldbuilding. We've got some fascinating listener questions. The first one's actually about urban fantasy. How do you create timeless urban fantasy? I'm just going to read this person's question, because I think they phrase it really well. Stories set in fantasy worlds or distant futures don't have to deal with cell phone upgrades, but I can't write a story about magical teens from Baltimore without giving away the exact year by how they use their phones, laptops, tablets, etc. and by the music they listen to." So, someone's writing urban fantasies, something set in our world, but with magic or monsters or whatever it is. How do you make that timeless, how do you not pin it down to such a specific time that it eventually is no longer relevant?

[Pat] I will say, this is one of the great joys of writing secondary fantasy, is, like, my world gets to stand, like, separate from time. It doesn't end up dated like science fiction or urban fantasy. But what I've seen interesting is like the movie It Follows. I've seen this done more in movies than I've noticed it in urban fantasy. But in It Follows this is have you seen that one? Horror movie? Like, if you have sex with somebody… Oops, sorry, spoilers. If you have sex with somebody, a demon follows you.

[Mmmm]

[Dan] It's really good.

[Pat] It's very good. Better than my awful summary…

[Laughter]

[Pat] Depict it. This is why I don't do ad copy. But what's amazing about the worldbuilding there is, like, you don't know when it is. Like, one of them kind of has a cell phone but it's in like a weird clamshell. It has, like, a videophone in the top half. Sort of like a flip phone. It's… The world that is depicted is deliberately not this world, but obviously still pretty close to this world. Because of that, any discrepancies, like, or logistical inconsistencies don't necessarily damage the verisimilitude of things, which is a marvelous trick that you can do visually very easily.

[Howard] I think, coming back to the original question, you want to make something timeless, to my mind what you're saying is, "I want people in 20 years to be able to read this and to enjoy it without thinking that, oh, the technology changes of the last 20 years make this story irrelevant."

[Pat] Right.

[Howard] I don't know that the problem is as big as the person asking the question is making it out to be. I think you can tell a timeless story… I think if the teens in Baltimore are using phones and you describe them using phones in the way we use phones, and then pull back just a little bit. You don't need to tell us what apps is one running or what memes they were looking at or which version of the phone it was or which jailbreaking whatever they needed to do. The phone is not the plot. If the phone is the plot, then you're writing something that's an urban fantasy tech thriller and you kind of need to pin it down. But in this case, you don't need to pin it down. So, they can have iPhones.

[Pat] I would also say somebody who, in my opinion, does this very well is Jim Butcher. He dodges it. First off, cell phones are sort of off the map, because he very cleverly instituted that magic makes cell phones not work well.

[Dan] Technology in general.

[Pat] But, more important, as relevant to this question, he does not reference pop culture that is not ubiquitous. There's references to Star Wars and Burger King and stuff like that. I don't know how much he did it intentionally, or if it just was intuitive, but, like, he doesn't talk about that local diner.

[Mary Robinette] Well, he's also talking about his favorite restaurant, which is Burger King.

[Pat] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So… I'm saying this partly because I don't think that he's doing it intentionally, but he is writing things that he knows and enjoys. That's one of the ways that you can make something timeless is by talking about the things that you know and enjoy. In 20 years, are either of those things going to be in the public consciousness? Who knows? Like Charles de Lint, if you want to look at timeless urban fantasy… Charles de Lint is one of the first people who was really writing urban fantasy. We still read Charles de Lint. There's no effort to make that anything else. If you go even farther back than that, then we have Charles Dickens who was… I mean, Christmas Carol was urban fantasy.

[Mmm]

[Mary Robinette] It is unquestionably… The term hadn't been invented yet, but it is a fantasy set in a city, the city is a character, it is urban fantasy. It's timeless because of the story, not because it isn't pinned into a time.

[Pat] That is a real… I think that really deflates the entire underlying fear behind the question. It is set in time, but is a timeless story because it focuses on things that are always important, like character, whatever. I also, like, A Fine and Private Place is… Or, honestly, a newer one, that more people maybe have read, The Graveyard Book. People will read that for a 100 years. It is not… I think maybe what they may be touching on, though, is, like, how do I write something that is set in this world and have people in 15 years not be baffled. Because, like, here's an example. Did anybody read the Spellsinger books?

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Pat] Alan Dean Foster wrote a series called Spellsinger.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah. I did. Yes.

[Pat] It rocked my world as a kid. But now I think of going back to them, and I'm like, those were all modern day at the time rock 'n' roll lyrics that I kind of knew just because I listen to the radio. I think they are absolutely opaque these days.

[Howard] Yeah. They may be incomprehensible to a modern audience.

[Mary Robinette] but I think they'll play differently to a modern audience. But things that are old, they just play differently. Like, Jane Austen is filled… Granted, not writing urban fantasy, but still. Filled with references. Again, Christmas Carol is filled with references to things that are important in the contemporary world. But they play differently to us now.

[Pat] Well, I'll also say some things are timeless and some things do get stale. Like, weirdly stale. I think, like, I don't know if you can… Star Trek probably isn't going to go stale. But, I don't know… In some ways, that's the peril of the genre. Like…

[Howard] I want to take a step back on this question a little bit. Because the fear that it won't be timeless... boy, if you want your things to still be read 20 years from now, you may never write another word.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Really. Because, I mean, we've been comparing you to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and there's so many things in here that will be… Write the story that you want to write, and don't borrow trouble from the future.

[Pat] I think that is good… I'm just… To kind of contextualize that, I remember working on my book… It's the year 1999, and there was talk about The Lord of the Rings movie coming out. It was big news. Ooh, Lord of the Rings. I'm like, "These movies are going to be awful. It's going to ruin the public perception of fantasy. I need to get my novel out before that happens, and this huge gargantuan train wreck pulls the rug out from underneath, like, my thing." So, like, I was speculating on the future in a not unreasonable, but utterly unuseful way. I'm glad I didn't waste too much time worrying about that.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to mention two other urban fantasies that I think handle this question in another way. Harry Potter is an urban fantasy. One of the ways that that gets around the problem or the perceived problem is that most of our time is spent in the hidden world. Were not actually interacting that much with the contemporary world. So, like, the… Harry Potter, any of those books could play today. Because the people in the wizard and world don't use cell phones. They don't use the same technologies that we use. The other one is the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire. Those, the way she handles it is, at the beginning of each chapter, she gives you a date. She's like, "I am going to pin it." She just leans in and is like, "No. This is exactly when this is happening." So I think you can play it either way and that it's not a problem if you're pinned into a time, that people will still continue to read it. I just narrated book 13, and she puts out one a year. So people have been reading these books for 13 years. The beginning books, there are not cell phones. But that first book still plays.

[Dan] Yeah. I think, just to reiterate, as long as you got really great characters that we love and a plot that we care about, a lot of these other concerns are going to fade away.

[Dan] So, let's actually… Our book of the week is, in fact, a timeless urban fantasy. Pat, you were going to tell us about Something Wicked This Way Comes.

[Pat] It is… I don't know if it's my favorite book, but it's going to always probably be in my top three. It's amazing. I think it might be Bradbury's best book. I recently rere… I loved it before I was a father. Reading it as a father. Whoo, boy. Get ready to cry. Not that I'm a hard target these days in terms of things that make me weepy. It is so good. The language is beautiful and timeless is a perfect word for it. Despite the fact that there is, like, a traveling carnival. It is a great… I would think that would be a master class. Read that book and see how beautifully it depicts this world that you can still engage with. Now, that said, you will also probably see things and be like, "Hold on. What is a sideshow?" There are certain cultural predispositions that, like, we are lacking and that I imagine a 20-year-old would be lacking even more than I am. Because he's writing before my time, too. But nevertheless, the concepts… This is about being a child, being a father, feeling out of place. There's a traveling lightning rod salesman. Like, there are no traveling salesmen anymore. Like, there are no… Like, who thinks of a lightning rod anymore? But, nevertheless, this is a beautiful book.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you very much.

[Dan] So, we've got another question to talk about in the second half of our episode. Which is creating a secondary world fantasy that is compelling and exciting, but does not necessarily have or rely on a magic system. How do you make that world cool, without leaning on the magic system to do that work for you?

[Mary Robinette] Can we talk about Amberlough by Elena Donnelly?

[Dan] Yes, we can.

[Mary Robinette] And also Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner. Both of these books, neither of them… There is no magic in them at all, anywhere. Both of these books… What we've done is, we've just stepped to the side of the real world. They both look at actual history and file the serial numbers off. What they're looking at are the patterns of real history. In many ways, there are… In some ways, they feel almost like alternate history. Not… An alternate history rather than a secondary world. Because what they're doing is they're looking at the politics. They're looking at the relationships. Guy Gavriel Kay, I also find…

[Dan] I was going to mention him.

[Mary Robinette] Does much of the same thing. That there's not a magic system. Not really… Well, it depends on…

[Dan] It depends on which one.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But… Oh, shoot. I've just lost the name of the novel I was going to mention. You know the one I'm talking about, that doesn't… There's not really a magic system.

[Dan] Most of them. I don't know…

[Howard] Sailing to Sarantium is the one that I…

[Mary Robinette] That's the one, yes.

[Dan] Yeah. The… A follow-up he did, that's set in that same world, is called Children of Earth and Sky, which is actually my favorite of his. There is no magic to speak of, except for one sequence that last for maybe about a third of the book, where there is a ghost, following somebody around. He doesn't bother explaining how this works, because that's not the point. The story is not about the magic, and to some degree, it's not even about the ghost. It's what is the relationship between that ghost and the person that the ghost is talking to. The rest of it is, like you say, all politics and fascinating cultural details and how are these two cultures clashing against each other. That's what draws you in.

[Howard] I'm… My approach to secondary worlds… If you've ever taken a tour of say, the Grand Canyon, if you ever stood on a seashore… I got to stand on the shore of the North Sea when 50 mile an hour winds were blasting sand around and everybody's telling me, "You're an idiot. You're supposed to be inside when it does this. What's wrong with the American?" Well, the answer is, "I have never been sandblasted by icy sand on the shores of the North Sea before. This is amazing and kind of horrifying. And I'm going back inside now." There is no magic in. But there's a ton of wonder. When I build worlds… Okay, the worlds I build are usually for science fiction, I want interesting geography. I want geography that is built around conflict, I want geography that shows us that this world has a history, and that this world is a changing, dynamic place. And, boy, you set a fantasy, you build an epic fantasy in a secondary world whose geography is inherently problematic…

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you said that, because it reminded me of a thing that I love about these books, but also one of the things that plays in with urban fantasy, which is that the place is a character. With a really compelling secondary world fantasy, the place is a character. Which is one of the things that I like in your books, so much, is that the college is a character.

[Pat] I was going to say, "Really?" But, really, the University is absolutely… It is deep enough to feel real.

[Mary Robinette] And although there's magic, that's not…

[Pat] I would actually argue that there's, depending on how semantic we want to get here, I would argue that most of what happens in the University isn't magic. Anymore than, like, you could tell the story of a young boy who goes to MIT and learns about superconductors. I mean, it's fantastic. Like, hydrofluoric acid. Like, do you know about it? If you touch it, it is absorbed through your skin and eats all the calcium out of your bones and kills you while you're in excruciating pain. That's just in this world. Like, most of sympathy and sigaldry is pretty much thermodynamics. Most of alchemy, I mean, you could argue, but there's a sliding scale between pretty much science and then all the way over to naming. Naming is natural magic. I would say if you're making a secondary world, and you don't want to have a magic system, I would warn you, you might be really niche and unappealing to a broad market, like a couple of these other books I'm about to mention. Like, Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. Because, like, read those first two Game of Thrones books, there's no magic. Like, a dude just pours alcohol on a sword and lights it, like, that's the only… It's, like, somebody knows about a dragon once. Also, a dude who lit his sword on fire just by burning it. That's the only magic. In The Lord of the Rings, yeah, there's Gandalf. He doesn't do magic. He's putting cones on fire. He, like, talks loud, and, like, flaps his coat about. It's… I mean, yeah, he does do some magic, but to claim that there is a magic system? There's not.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Pat] At the end of the book, he's like, oh, yeah, the funking flame of Anor. Yeah, the third Elven ring. But, like, that's not a magic system. It's kind of a prop.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. The… I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like… You're right, there is no magic system.

[Pat] I would actually like to… I'm sorry to interrupt, but I would like to say, there is a difference between. Because these days, what you touched on is, what is the joy of secondary world fantasy? The joy there, one of the joys that is available to you, is the joy of exploration of a strange world. One of the things you can explore in that strange world is language. Culture. Geography. Technology.

[Dan] Food?

[Pat] Food. Magic. You could actually have magic as a subclass of technology in this breakdown. Because, like what the Taoist alchemists were doing in China might as well… I mean, you can call that magic or tech… Hell, Newton. What Newton was doing historically, it's like, eh, [horse of peace], like, maybe alchemy, maybe science. Kind of, he did both. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. Frightening.

[Laughter]

[Pat] But, magic is just a thing that you're… You have the opportunity to explore in a certain way if there's a system. Brandon creates a system, and one of the joys is learning the permutations of it. But you can have magic in a world and not have an explicit system and have it just be something that exists without exploring.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Pat] I think some things that you see there… There's a book by David Keck, In the Eye of Heaven. It was the secondary world dark ages fantasy that was written with prose like an impressionist painting. There… I mean, there were gods in it that were also kind of real, and dark things in the forest. Is that magic? Is that a magic system? Is Catholicism a magic system? Yeah, we could go way down the rabbit hole semantically here.

[Howard] But the… When we make this dividing line between urban fantasy and epic fantasy, I think the dividing line might actually be the word magic. Because with urban fantasy, you have people in the world who don't believe that these things are possible. Then, when they see elves, they're like, "Hum, well, magic." Okay. But in the worlds that Brandon creates, everybody's just kind of… They recognize that these are just physical principles. The word magic, as we use it to mean, oh, no, that breaks all the rules, it's magic. In a lot of these big secondary world epic fantasies, even if you're using that word, what you're really talking about is you've created a world whose rules are…

[Pat] You used the term wondrous earlier. I think on the spectrum, I… When I talk… Because I talk a lot about fantasy worldbuilding and magic systems, I think there's a spectrum. On one end of it, you end up with the scientific, and the joy of that is exploration and comprehension of the system within which the characters can be clever, and therefore the reader can enjoy their cleverness. On the other, far end, of the spectrum, you have the numinous. That is where wonder lives. There's not a lot of wonder in my… In the University about sympathy. It's clever. Over in the numinous, you have all wonder. Honestly, the numinous is where Lord of the Rings lives. There is a system, but it is implicit, not explicit.

[Mary Robinette] That's like some of it N. K. Jemisin's work.

[Pat] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Where she wants that numinous quality, and it… One of the things that I find interesting is that because people are pattern seeking creatures…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We will attempt to find a magic system even when there isn't one. That's one of the things that you… I think you can play with when you're doing your world building, is whether or not you have a magic system. You often have characters who think that there is magic or characters who think that there is not… And characters who are wrong about both states.

[Pat] Right.

[Mary Robinette] That's a thing that can be fun to play with. I think one of the questions that I would ask you, dear listeners, when you're thinking about writing a secondary world, is thinking about why you want to go to a secondary world?

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Why do you not want to set this in earth? What is that buying you? What do you buy by keeping it in earth, in this world and having an urban fantasy or something that is… I mean, you can have an urban fantasy that's secondary world. But what do you get by choosing those locations, what do those things buy you?

[Pat] I would love to say one of the things, because I've thought about this a fair amount, one of the choices you're making when you do that… If you set something in this world, the benefit you get is that everyone lives here and if you say Paris, you're done. You don't have to describe Paris, they'll go the Eiffel Tower, baguettes, there's people with berets and mimes.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] But that's also the problem, is that some people, like me, even though I've been to Paris, will go, "Oh, yeah. Paris. Mimes and baguettes." Whereas really Paris is… That's an awful way of thinking of Paris.

[Mary Robinette] Except the baguettes are really good.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] So that's… It's a double-edged sword, where you don't have to do as much work to describe… Like, what a car is. Or, like, how the dollar works. Or, like, a lot of those things. The problem is that everyone will come to the table with a different understanding of those things. Which means you're writing to many different complex audiences all at once, which can make your life a hell. The hell that you experience writing secondary world fantasy and doing the worldbuilding there is that you start from zero. If I make something, I'm kind of beholden to my audience to explain it. That means world, culture, geography, magic, religion, past religion, mythology, folklore, where the rivers come from. Like, you could… I mean, you can kill yourself going down every single rabbit hole, which is why it's better to focus on certain elements and make those the focus of the world that you're revealing. Those elements should be, in my opinion, the things that you are passionate about and that you feel love towards. Tolkien made his, as he referred to it, his silly fairy language, and he was into mythology and folklore. So all of Middle Earth is built around language, mythology, the Eddas, and folklore. But that's just because… That's what… That was his jam. If you are into like, stamp collecting and butterflies and… I don't know, scuba diving, like, turn that into… I would read that secondary fantasy.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] That would be awesome.

[Howard] Stamps are going to get sticky fast.

[Pat] C, there's conflict built right into the world.

[Dan] Perfect. Awesome. So, we do need to end. We could talk about this for a while. Thank you, huge thank you to Pat for being on here to talk about this for us.

[Dan] Pat, do you have homework for us?

[Pat] One of the things that I notice sometimes in worldbuilding, whether it be urban fantasy or whether it be secondary world fantasy, is people feeling the need to do everything and a bag of chips different and new and strange. Whereas the truth is, if you were to change just one thing in the world, and then follow the permutations logically through the culture… So, like, for example, what if a meteor hit the United States at a certain point in history? Like, well, how might that change things?

[Mary Robinette] I don't know. I've never thought about it.

[Dan] Someone really ought to write a book about that. I bet it would win a Hugo.

[Howard] It would take quite a bit of calculating.

[Yeah]

[Howard] Sorry.

[Dan] Oh, you just ruined it.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] My stars.

[Pat] The Difference Engine is a good example of that. It's, like, what if they hadn't given up on this really old first version of a computer? So, what I would recommend is, think of a thing, and maybe it might be easiest to do this in this world, but, here's my example, is assume that suddenly not even all of alchemy is real, just one piece. They find out how to turn lead into gold. What does this do in this world? The obvious answer is that it does a bunch of really interesting things to and economies, but not as much as you might think, because we haven't been on the gold standard in years. We exist in a fiat currency. So, actually, the US currency doesn't take, but a bunch of people's mutual funds do. So, like conserv… Like, blue-chip stocks are fucked. So, like a lot of rich people lose a ton of money, but that's very basic. Like, the fact is, computers suddenly get very fast and become more efficient. Suddenly, communities that are centering around copper mining collapse, because copper isn't worth nearly as much, because gold is a much better conductor. But even that is very basic. Like, what else would happen with this one change. You can go three levels deep, four levels deep, until you end up with huge social change. You end up, probably, with a rise of a huge class of people who can perform this alchemy. Like, those people are a power. Those people might become the target of governments. Like, is this suddenly a new value trade, or is this owned by corporations? All of those permutations are what make your story and worldbuilding interesting. So I would say, pick one thing that might… Pick one thing. Then experiment with how you would permute it in this world.

[Dan] Awesome. That's fantastic homework. So, do that, and you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.44: Rebooting a Career

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/01/15-44-rebooting-a-career/

Key Points: You might be orphaned by editors. Or maybe your books stop selling, the series doesn't click? You have to stick with it, keep going. Dedication, hard work, keep pivoting. Look at your brand right now, and think about how to build on that to do the thing you want to next. Diversify! Multiple pen names, projects, brands. Your skill set can carry across a pivot or reboot. You can use short fiction to explore where your strengths are quickly. "Never let more than 40% of your income come from one place." If you quit your day job and write full time, you are a freelancer. Diversify your income stream. Plan ahead. Learn how to track where your money is coming from.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 44.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Rebooting a Career.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm looking for something now.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Well, we have got something new for you. We teased this episode all the way back in our very first episode of the year. Which, for us, we recorded 10 minutes ago, but you…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Had to wait 11 months for it. Thank you for your patience. So, this is something, again, that came up in an audience question. I love this topic, because it has happened to me. I'm actually in the middle of it right now. I sincerely hope by the time this airs that everything's stable and wonderful. But I have been orphaned twice by editors.

[Mary Robinette] Let's define what orphaned means, in this context.

[Dan] Orphaned… Okay. In this context, what it means is the editor who acquired my book initially at a given publishing house, I am no longer with that editor. I was moved to a different one. Then that one actually left the publishing house altogether. A year later, I am currently, as of this recording, do not have an editor at that publisher. Which is sad because now the books are not being shepherded, and my own career is a little bit in flux. So this is something that I've dealt with personally, but I'm not going to answer the question, I'm going to ask the question of Dongwon. What does an author do when they've had some success, they've had some books come out, and then they either get orphaned, or their books stop selling, the new series they have come out just doesn't take off or it tanks completely? They need to change something. How do you know when you hit that point, and how do you know what changes to make? Now talk for 15 minutes.

[Dongwon] I really… I could talk for an hour here. I really love this topic, because it's a really, really important one. I think the greatest determinant in whether or not a writer is successful in their career is their ability to ride with the tough times. Right? That's sort of stick-with-it-ness, that's sort of like ability to just keep going in the face of a lot of setbacks, is the thing that I see more often than not how people get to where they want to be. Right? I've been in publishing now for 15 years, and over that time, I've seen people over and over again who I looked at them, I looked at their sales numbers, I looked at where they're at in sort of the market, and I was like, "Ah. They're such a nice person, it's too bad their career's over." Then 10 years later, they're New York Times bestsellers. Right? I can think of half a dozen people off the top of my head of been in similar situations. Right? So many people we talk about as overnight successes really spent years and years writing books until something hit it. George Martin's a famous example. But I think the guest host for this year, Victoria Schwab's another great example of somebody who was writing for a long time before she really blew up in the way she has. It takes dedication and hard work, and the ability to keep pivoting and keep working with it. It's one of my favorite things is to take a writer who is in a position where… Not necessarily a bad position, but one where you could be doing more, and help them figure out, "Okay, what's next, how do we reposition this to grow from here?" So, I think there's a lot of different strategies. I think the thing that's really important is considering what's your brand right now, and how do you build on that for the thing that you want to do next. Right? So I think Daniel Abraham is a really great example to look at. He had a series with Tor, that was The Long Price Quartet, which was an absolute brilliant fantasy series. Sales were probably not where everyone wanted them to be, because it's a very worthy series, but not necessarily like the most commercial, like, it's not a lot of like big action romps there, right? The thing about Daniel is he had multiple brands going at once. He was also writing as M. L. N. Hanover, an urban fantasy series. Then, when urban fantasy started falling off a little bit, he was looking to pivot again. So at that point, he came to me, when I was an editor at Orbit, and pitched two different projects at once. The Dragon's Path, which is an epic fantasy sort of following in the vein of what he was doing at Tor. But then he also was like, "Hey, we also have this co-written science fiction project with this guy Ty Franck." That was what is now The Expanse. Again, that was under yet another pen name. Right? So the thing that Daniel kept doing is he kept writing new things and different things. He was doing it under different names with different brands. Until one of them just really clicked in and took off. I mean, The Expanse is really one of the big successes in science fiction over the past 10 years. Has the big TV show and all these things. Again, that's somebody who didn't have the kind of commercial success and attention that I think he deserved early in his career. But, just kept going and just kept pivoting and kept trying new things until finally something really clicked in, in the way that it did, with The Expanse.

[Howard] In 1998, I was working in tech support at Novell. I looked at some of the things I'd been doing and realized that within the company, within the industry, my brand was talking to people about the way the software works. Kind of being an advocate for the product and being educational about it and being entertaining. I wanted a position in the company where I could keep doing that. I got one. I like the sound of my own voice, and did a lot of presentations and a lot of traveling as a result of those presentations. Until I left the company in 2004. In 2008, I started doing Writing Excuses. Writing excuses has now been running for longer than my entire career at Novell.

[Dan] Wow.

[Howard] Okay. I was just doing the math as I was looking at the spreadsheet.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Sorry, this totally came out of left field. The idea that the career that nobody… I say nobody. I don't think many people are going to look at me and think, "Oh, yeah. That guy who was a software communications person back in the 90s and just vanished. Wow. Such a shame his software support career tanked."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] No. They're going to remember me for whatever's most recent. There was a huge pivot in there, from doing software to doing comics. But the skill set of I know how to stand up in front of people and advocate a thing and be educational about it and occasionally be funny, and leverage the comic drop of self-deprecating humor from time to time, that piece of my brand, that piece of my skill set has stayed with me and continues to serve me well. As we are having this conversation, it is September 2019. This is airing in November of 2020. Schlock Mercenary, the mega-arc, ended about five months ago, if everything went according to plan. From where I'm sitting right now, I do not know what my career reboot looks like from 2020. I'm coming up on that, and I'm terrified. But I know that the guy who is terrified is also the guy who has rebooted his career before and made good on it.

[Dongwon] There's always more opportunities, any time you find yourself in that spot.

[Dan] Okay. So. Our book of the week is one you've already talked about, Dongwon. This is Leviathan Wakes, the first one from The Expanse. What can you tell us about that book?

[Dongwon] Leviathan Wakes is a really wonderful space opera, that is examining, not necessarily galactic exploration, but the exploration and colonization of our own solar system. So the whole set up is, they don't have interstellar travel yet, but they can travel between the planets somewhat easily. So, the political situation is there's the Earth and then there is Mars, and they're in conflict and in tension over resources. Those resources are specifically being the asteroid belt, which is being mined by both of those great powers. Into the middle of this, a new artifact, biological weapon, has been discovered which kind of sets the whole system to the brink of war. This is a nine book series that is on the cusp of wrapping up right now. It's really, to my mind… And I am biased because I was the editor on the first couple books…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] But, to my mind, it's really one of the most exciting, wonderful, rich character work in a space opera series that I've really ever seen. I could not love this more. The show was also great, but read the books first…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Because they're even better.

[Dan] We did have Daniel and Ty on the show at some point a year or two ago. So if you want to hear them talk about it, you can find that in our archives.

[Mary Robinette] We'll include that in our liner notes.

[Dan] Yes, we totally will.

[Dan] Okay. So, I like what Dongwon was saying about trying new things while still staying true to what you've already been successful with. This is something that I have done. So, just very quickly, I hit the New York Times bestseller list with the Partials series, which is science fiction. Then, my next science fiction series, Mirador, really tanked. Like, I cannot overstate how little it sold.

[Mary Robinette] Which is a shame, because I love that series.

[Dan] Well, thank you. So do I. It did not click with the audience in the way everyone expected it to. It didn't click for the publisher the way we had hoped it would, to the point that they didn't even bother doing the third book in audio. I had to buy the rights back from them. So, as I set out what am I going to do next, I said, "Well, I'm going to continue with science fiction, but I'm going to twist it in a new direction." So I started doing middle grade science fiction. That's where Zero G and Dragon Planet and things like that came from. At the same time, because a far bigger success for me has been my thrillers, like I Am Not a Serial Killer, I didn't want to neglect that audience either. So I'm trying… This is a much more risky experiment. But I wrote a new… I started a new thriller career, essentially, by doing historical thrillers. That's where Ghost Station came from. So I'm trying these two different paths at the same time and just waiting to see, like you were saying, which one clicks in which one takes off. It's a lot of work, and it's a lot of faith, and you just kind of gotta hope that… And maybe neither of those does, and I'll… I don't know, come crawling to you at some point and say, "Dongwon, help me figure out what to do?"

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things is that… I also got the whole orphaned thing, right after Ghost Talkers. When I was working on Calculating Stars, my editor left, and I got transferred to another editor, who's been wonderful, but it was… The process of learning to work with her. But the reason that we decided to switch me from doing fantasy to doing science fiction was that we looked at what I had been doing in short fiction, and I write all over the map in short fiction. My science fiction that's short fiction kind of consistently gets noticed for awards. The general thing was maybe you should be writing to your strengths, which appear to be science fiction.

[Howard] Kind of consistently, that was… Oops, two Hugos?

[Mary Robinette] I mean, yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, anyway…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So, friends, we have to brag about Mary Robinette, because she's too modest to do it herself.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I only have four Hugos. One of them I got with you guys, so it really doesn't count.

[Dan] Barely anything.

[Howard] Thanks.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's actually the only one I've got.

[Dongwon] The one that doesn't count.

[Mary Robinette] No. I'm kidding. I am… I… Obviously kidding, or I would not…

[Dongwon] Of course.

[Mary Robinette] Have made that joke. But my point being that when people wonder when they're novelists, natural novelists, and they wonder why to do short fiction, one of the things that it does allow is a faster, easier way to see which of your stories are hitting with audience. Like, just, if you are getting more acceptances from your science fiction, that's a thing that's worth noting. So I didn't actually have to go through as many iterations as Dan did to figure out, oh, maybe I should be writing some science fiction novels. And, Calculating Stars have done significantly better than my fantasy.

[Dan] Or, phrased another way, you did do arguably more iterations than I did, but they were in short fiction, so you were able to do them more quickly and see results more easily.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. That is arguably accurate.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] The thing that I just want to point out is, following again on what Dan was saying, is the key to so much of this is diversification, right? Not putting all of your eggs in one basket. Sometimes that is a genre thing, sometimes it's a category thing in terms of adult or YA, and sometimes… That's even an industry thing, like writing for games and writing for comics and writing for film and TV if you can get that work. But often times it's also just not writing for one publisher, right? Having multiple publishers in place, so if you get orphaned at one, even if that's the thing that goes very badly, which it sometimes does, you still have other things in your pocket that you can turn to and emphasize. If that's not working there. Then, sometimes it takes a couple of years to cycle out, and then you can pick up with a new contract or with a different publisher or with a different editor at that publisher. But having lots of different things moving out once is often the way to sort of stabilize your career overall.

[Howard] In 2006, at Emerald City Comic Con, Robert Khoo, K-H-O-O, talked about the business of web comics. This is the guy who went to the penny arcade guys before they were big and said, "You're leaving a whole bunch of money on the table." They said, "We don't know what money is." He said, "I tell you what. I will work for you for free on the understanding that if at the end of the year, I haven't earned for you a marketing guy's salary of $80,000 a year, which you can very comfortably pay me, then I will quit and you don't owe me anything." They were like, "This sounds too good to be true, but it's probably not a trap. So, join us." Robert Khoo totally reinvented them. Out of his work grew the penny arcade Expo, which was the thing that replaced E3 as the big consumer thing of displaying… It was huge. Robert Khoo… So I've established his bona fides. He said, "Never let more than 40% of your income come from one place."

[Mary Robinette] This is a…

[Howard] That stuck with me. I'm not very good at it yet. But we go over our books, Sandra and I go over our books every year and ask ourselves, "What is the thing that will hurt the most if we lose it? How do we build something that will cushion that, in case it goes away?"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That is absolutely a thing that they teach you in puppet theater, as well. I mean, just in general as a freelancer, this is a really important thing to understand. If you quit your day job and decide to be a writer full-time, you are a freelancer. Your publisher is your only client, unless you're at multiple publishing houses, unless you're doing hybrid stuff which, in this day and age, is a sensible thing. It's a good thing that you can do if you get your backlist back is bring it out yourself. So, remembering that you are a freelancer and trying to diversify. Like, I diversify my income stream also by teaching. That's one of the ways that I diversify. It doesn't have to be writing. The other thing that I kind of wanted to say about what happens when this moment… Like, I was orphaned by an editor, and that handoff was actually very, very smooth. But it was also because the previous two books had done so poorly, and not through fault of my own. I think. Obviously, other people have different opinions. But I had… The first of those last two books had been Of Noble Family, which was the last book in a five book series. We… There is a thing that happens in a series, where you have a slow decline in numbers. Then, the next book, Ghost Talkers, which is actually one of my favorite things that I've written, came out, and they sent me on tour. My first day of tour was election day of 2016. Everybody's sales tanked. Actually. But mine… Just like, there was… When I was on tour, the audiences were half the size that they normally were. Everyone looked shellshocked. It didn't matter, actually, which side of the political spectrum you were on, that period of time was really fraught. So, yes, obviously, my numbers were lower. But what that meant was, when we were doing… With my new editor, who was working with me on the two new books, when she was looking at acquiring another book after that, there was no incentive to do it until Calculating Stars and Fated Sky came out and did very well. At that point, I realized that my agent was part of my problem because my agent was not advocating for me and was not explaining… Like, the narrative of what was going on. So sometimes when you're midcareer and things are not going well, if you're starting to think, "Well, I wonder if I should go with a new agent?" The advice that I got from a very good friend who is sitting on the couch with me…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Was that when you begin asking yourself that question, you should probably change agents.

[Dan] I had my book, Extreme Makeover, came out the same day. Mary Robinette and I did a signing together…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] In Chicago. Actually, the two of us and Wes Chu. So there were three authors, and I think maybe five people there…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] If you count the bookseller. I actually, like, I love Calculating Stars, but I still consider Ghost Talkers my favorite of your books. I think Extreme Makeover is the best written thing I've ever done. No one's ever heard of either of those books. Because they got completely lost. Anyway, I assume that there are a few people who are listening to this episode who are in this situation who need to reboot their career. But I… And I hope that they do. But I suspect that most of our listeners are still looking at this from the upcoming side. Right? That's why I really want to tell you what I did not know is that you need to be planning for this already. You need to have all these income streams in place before one of them fails. Which is the lesson that I have very painfully learned. And five years later have managed to build myself back up to the point where I more or less okay.

[Howard] Or back even further up from that, we've said… I quoted Robert Khoo. 40%. Don't let any more than 40% come from any one place. Do you know how to do the math to know where your money is coming from? If you don't know how to do that yet, learn to do that. Because if you can get ahead of that, for you start receiving royalties, before you start getting advances, then you are in a position to career plan and to build your bugout bag for…

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to do a plug for something called you need a budget dot com. Which, if you are like me, and not terribly good with numbers, is a very useful way as a freelancer… It's a bud… It's a financial planning kind of tracking thing. But it's very, very useful to get a handle on exactly how much you need to make, and to figure out how to have enough of a nest egg so that if you have a. Where you have to reboot, that you have some money set aside.

[Dan] Which is a great resource. Go for it.

[Dongwon] One thing I just want to point out is as were talking about 40% of your income coming from different places and all that, remember, your day job can be one of your sources of income. Right? So the people, the clients that I work with who have widely diversified careers in terms of doing adult, middle grade, and graphic novels, and tie-in work and film and TV, those generally are the full-time writers. Right? Those are the ones who are only writing as their day-to-day job. If people… If you have a day job, it's much more feasible to focus on one thing at a time and really focus on just having your one main series because you have the financial security of that day job. Which is why my general advice is hang onto that job as long as you can stand it. Or until your… The authoring that you have to do in terms of emails and touring and things like that make having it no longer feasible to do so, right? But then you need to be planning and preparing for that transition by starting that diversification work as early as you can.

[Dan] Absolutely. Now, we are out of time. Though obviously we could talk about this for a long time.

[Dan] But we do have some homework for you, which is coming from Mary Robinette.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that will happen to you when this happens, or in the early part of your career, is that the imposter syndrome is going to kick up. It's like you feel… You can feel a sense of despair, you can feel like blah. So here's a weird bit of advice, which is that I want you to write a letter to a role model. This role model does not have to be a living person. Explain to them all of the things that you're afraid of, and all of the problems that you're struggling with. Then, I want you to write a letter from them back to you with the advice that you think that they might give you. The reason I'm suggesting this is that a lot of times you, in fact, know the answer to the problem. But we are often kinder to someone else then we are to ourselves. So, by putting yourself in the shoes of someone else who has been through this, I think that it might be a way for you to access the part of your brain that knows how to handle this. You do. It's just terrifying.

[Dan] Sounds awesome. So. That's been our episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.43: Audiobook Narration, with Bruce D. Richardson

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/25/15-43-audiobook-narration-with-bruce-d-richardson/

Key Points: How do you get started in audiobook narration? Minor in theater and speech, puppetry, radio theater. You should do voiceovers. Good narrators interpret the words that are on the page. But you want a natural authentic voice, not performance. How does an audiobook narrator decide which meaning is best? Immediate textual clues, and the context of the whole piece. What tips would you give someone starting out? See Accenthelp.com. Get familiar with the mic. When you are starting out, you may have to treat your own recordings. Take a look at short story markets. Figure out how to handle mistakes while recording. Watch out for background sound, the noise floor or threshold.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 43.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Audiobook Narration.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we have no business in front of a microphone. I'm so sorry, my voice is terrible.

[Brandon] Oh, your voice is really charming.

[Dan] [garbled] like that, Howard.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I've been sick for a month. I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And we have special guest, Bruce Richardson.

[Bruce] I'm Bruce.

[Brandon] Also, you're branded as BDR as an audiobook narrator.

[Bruce] Yup. BDR or BD Richardson. You can find me online pretty much anywhere that way.

[Brandon] So, this is a podcast you, our listeners, demanded. How to do audiobook narration? So I'm just going to be pitching questions at these two, and we're going to learn from them, how did you get into narrating audiobooks?

[Mary Robinette] Well, I'll go first. Even though I think a lot of people have heard my story, which is that I started in puppetry. Actually, before the puppetry took off, I took a… I was… Minored in radio and speech, or theater and speech in college, so took some radio specific classes that dealt with character voices. I also trained, as part of the [forensics?] team, speech, debate, and interpretive reading, so was taught to read aloud and competed in it. Then, went on to the puppetry career. Then did radio theater. And then realized that audiobooks were like puppetry, but without the pain, and made the transition as rapidly as I could.

[Bruce] People said, "You have a great voice, you should be into voiceovers." I didn't know what that meant, so I finally decided to do it one day. I got lessons and figured out how to have… Do voiceovers. Found out that it's basically acting. I always thought it would be fun to be an actor, but my wife discouraged it. So…

[Howard] Okay. True story, Bruce. When you walked into Cosmere House today, and Dan introduced you, said, "This is Bruce. He's an audiobook narrator." I leaned forward in my seat a little bit and said to myself, "Say something."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Then you spoke, and I was like, "Oh, yeah. There is."

[Bruce] You can cut this. I don't know how you guys feel about something like this, but my wife had all the women in the house when she was entertaining her friends and they said, "Well, say something. Say something." That's what people say all the time. I could not think of anything to say, and then it came to me. I'm like, "I wonder if I should say that." "In a world where you need someone to talk dirty to you…"

[Laughter]

[Bruce] I could see them all just flutter a little bit.

[Howard] We're keeping that, my friend. We're keeping that.

[Dan] That's my new ring tone.

[Mary Robinette] But one of the things that we actually have the ability to do as narrators, and this is why getting a professional narrator is so important, is that we can twist the meaning of the words on the page based on our interpretation. One of the party tricks that I trot out sometimes is that I can make any piece of text you hand me sound like phone sex. It doesn't actually matter what's on the page, you can do that.

[Bruce] Press one.

[Mary Robinette] Right. It's so… It's a very easy thing. But you can also make it sound inappropriately cheerful, you can make it sound inappropriately sad. So one of the things that you're getting from that narrator is an interpretation of the words that are on the page. So you have to… I think that in order to be a good narrator, you have to be someone who enjoys reading for the pleasure of it. Not the act of speaking, that obviously helps, but that you actually have to enjoy an interaction with fiction and stories and audience. Because you can change things.

[Bruce] Well, it's interesting. Anytime anybody gets in front of a mic, I heard all of you do it, except you maybe…

[Chuckles]

[Bruce] You are performing for the mic. "We're rolling. Oh, I'm going to perform."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Bruce] There's a voice that… A natural, authentic voice that is sought after when you're narrating. People fight against performing for the mic. It's an interesting thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's a very, very true thing. The thing that I hear happen to authors when they get up to read in front of an audience is that they think about the shape of the words and saying them correctly. They forget that our job is to tell a story. And that we have natural rhythms to our voice, we have natural rises and falls, and that the listener, you, our dear listeners, have been trained your entire life to derive meaning from that. If we are delivering the wrong thing, if what I'm saying, the important thing about this is that I have said it correctly, that's boring. But if I think about the story, then that's something that is giving you this additional information through the power of the speech, the sounds.

[Bruce] Not to mention character, too.

[Mary Robinette] Correct.

[Bruce] I mean, this guy might. Be. Just. A. Little. Bit… Weird.

[Mary Robinette] [Mhm…]

[Howard] Coming back to the telephone touchpad…

[Mary Robinette, baby voice] Tell me about it. I'm listening, Howard. What is it… Why?

[Howard] Coming back to the telephone touchpad…

[Mary Robinette, baby voice] Why?

[Howard] Press 1 versus…

[Mary Robinette, baby voice] Why?

[Howard] Press one.

[Mary Robinette, baby voice] Why?

[Howard] Press 1 is push the button…

[Mary Robinette, baby voice] Press one?

[Howard] Press one is go ahead and pick. Go ahead and choose one of those. Those are two completely different meanings, and you, as the narrator, get to pick that. A friend of mine online… I forget his real name, on twitter he's Shecky is an editor, and has a sentence, "I never said she was the one who stole my money." Or "I never said she stole my money." Depending on which word you emphasize, there's seven different sentences there. I never said she stole my money. I never said she stole my money.

[Bruce] I never said she stole my money.

[Howard] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I never said she stole my money. Yeah. This is…

[Howard] It's huge fun. Once you learn that, when you're reading out loud, you look at a sentence and realize, "Oh, it's actually ambiguous." The contexts that have been provided with… By the author does not tell me which of those meanings is best. Which one do I want?

[Brandon] How do you decide, as the audiobook narrator?

[Mary Robinette] So what I look for are the immediate textual clues. Some of… Most of it is… It comes naturally, if the narrat… If the author has done their job, it's not ambiguous. But what I'm looking for are where they're placing their punctuation. If they are using italics, that does actually tell me which word they want emphasized. But punctuation exists who tell us where to pause. That's a way of encoding something that we do naturally.

[Bruce] If they're well edited.

[Mary Robinette] So… If they're well edited, yes. Also, really, seriously, the difference between narrating a book that is well written and narrating one that is not… You literally stumble over words when it is not well written. So when you're trying to make a decision about, like, what emphasis do I look for, you're not taking the sentence in isolation. You're looking at it in context of the whole piece. In much the same way you make those decisions when you're reading a book to yourself, that the author has provided contextual clues, but there's a consistency to the character, and you get a sense for them. At the same time, it's very easy for narrators to get things completely wrong, because the author has something in their head that's not on the page.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Which is Dragon Planet.

[Dan] Oh, I hear that's a really good one.

[Mary Robinette] It is really good.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, this guy Dan Wells wrote this thing for Audible Originals. It's actually book two. I loved Zero G very much. But Dragon Planet is the sequel. And I actually am pitching this because I love it.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, basically, it's kids on a planet and the atmosphere of the planet is such… And Dan has actually done the science on it… So that you can fly, you can float. Everything is… The atmosphere is very dense, and the gravity is low. It's one sixth of Earth's. So, it's so cool. It's a great exploration of a planet. It's a wonderful little coming-of-age. But mostly it's an adventure romp with dragons and flying and pirates. I mean…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's a lot of fun. Because it's created specifically for audio, it also has both a narrator as well as a full cast and then sound effects. So you're getting this really richly… I was going to say visualized world, but realized world.

[Howard] It's like a radio play.

[Mary Robinette] It's like a radio play. So that's… It's Dragon Planet by Dan Wells.

[Brandon] That's an Audible Original?

[Dan] Yes, it is!

[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. Let's say we have audience members out there who are wanting to do their own audiobooks. Or want to get into audiobooks. What tips can you give them, what techniques can you teach them, and what resources can you give them if they want to get better at this?

[Mary Robinette] There's a lot of stuff online. So, one of the things we have done…

[Bruce] It's on my website. Accent.com or whatever. Accent.com.

[Mary Robinette] Accenthelp.com, yes. Accenthelp.com is fantastic for learning how to do accents. But the other thing is to become familiar with the mic. Now, when we record these episodes, some of you may have seen pictures of us, that we're wearing headbands with a lavaliere microphone on our forehead. For this episode, we have brought in a handheld mic, so that Bruce and I can demonstrate some mic techniques for you. So… So what's about to happen right now for you is that my sound is going to change, because now I'm on a handheld microphone. This is a different sound. One of the things you can do with this is that you can change your relationship to the microphone. I just turned my head away, and now I'm coming back. That's useful for being loud. You also learn to avoid things like popping your P's, which is super annoying. But you learn to be able to say things like popping your P's without blowing air on the mic. Bruce, do you want to show them some stuff with the mic?

[Bruce] [mm…mm…mm]

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's okay. Otherwise, it's just me talking all the time.

[Bruce] So mic's have a diaphragm in them, so you want to… Most people talk off-mic, like this, so that they can't pop their P's… Or pop their P's. You can hear people do it all the time.

[Brandon] So, what he's doing is, he's taking the microphone and setting it up beside his head, rather than in front of his head.

[Bruce] Right. And it's pointed out my voice, where it's going to come out. You talked about, sometimes we yell, and you want to get the mic back here because you're yelling.

[Brandon] So you move the mic away from yourself to get louder.

[Bruce] Usually, my mic's set, so…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] So lean back.

[Bruce] Sometimes you go [whisper] I've got a secret that I need to tell you. [End whisper]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Bruce] I'll get up on it. You're not… I don't know if you're supposed to or not, but…

[Mary Robinette] I do the same thing.

[Bruce] [whisper] But this is really, really important. [End whisper]

[Brandon] So you get [way] in close to the mic for that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So when you're narrating, the microphone is on a stand. So it's at a fixed position, and normally you want to stay completely still, and not change your relationship to the mic so that you have a consistent sound. But there are times when you want to jump on or off… What were you going to say, Joe?

[Bruce] It's about this far… Put your thumb and your finger apart, and that's about how far you should be from your mic.

[Mary Robinette] Depending on the microphone. Because I've had somewhere they wanted me a lot closer. Like, I have an engineer who likes to record with a shotgun mic. So your farther from the mic at that point. But the key thing is knowing that your relationship to the mic changes. The closer you are to the mic, the more intimate a sound you're going to have. The farther from the mic, the less intimate of a sound. The reason you back off of a mic when you're getting loud is so that you avoid like blowing out the diaphragm. So it doesn't get that over modulated quality.

[Howard] There's a principle of psycho acoustics here that I learned in audio engineering three decades ago, which I've always been fascinated by. Which is that a quiet sound we will lean into him and our brains make it as loud as possible because it's important. A loud sound, we will lean back from, and our ears dial it back so if you want something to sound loud, step back from the microphone and turn the volume down. But then have that level as hot as you can get it. Our brains will tell us it is way louder than the whisper, even though the way it was recorded, those levels are exactly the same.

[Bruce] Probably the same. Do you have to treat your own audio, or do you have people for that?

[Mary Robinette] That's a great question. So, for people who are interested in getting into this. When you first start out, you probably do… You have to record your own stuff.

[Bruce] And treat it, and fix it with effects. Make sure it's level, and all that stuff.

[Mary Robinette] The treating is making sure that your highs and lows are not too spread out.

[Cough]

[Mary Robinette] Getting rid of room noise.

[Bruce] Yeah, because there's a thing called normalization. So when you listen to the radio, and you have a song that's really loud or something that's really soft, you have to adjust your volume. So for audiobooks, they want that to be at a certain steady level. So it's easy listening, so they don't have to hike their volume up and down, basically.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Then, the other thing about audiobooks which is different than music is that you actually have to have a room that is completely quiet. The noise floor… Or threshold is what the… Is it noise floor or threshold?

[Howard] Both. Both terms get used.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. But that's just grave silence.

[Bruce] It's -60 DB in a professional studio, is what it should be.

[Mary Robinette] Look at these numbers. Thank you, Bruce.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Most of the time, there is just sound going on all the time. There's…

[Bruce] The heater.

[Mary Robinette] Heat noise, refrigerator, street noise, the sound of your own body.

[Brushing sound]

[Mary Robinette] Cloth…

[Bruce] If you gesticulate, you're going to make noise in the audio.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Never wear corduroy into the booth.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm not making that up. So if you want to get into this, as someone stepping in, one of the easiest ways, and this is how I started, was to go to a short story market. Like an EscapePod, or a Pseudo-Pod, and do things for them. It may not be… You won't be getting union rates, but it's a chance to try stuff out. Recording things for your friends is also a good way to do this. What you'll do is, as you are speaking, you will make a mistake, and then… If you're recording for yourself, you have a couple of choices. One is that you can mark it and come back and do it later. Or you can pause and immediately backup to a gap and continue forward. Or, if you get really fancy, you can do something that's called a punch record.

[Bruce] That's knowing your software and…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Really knowing your software.

[Bruce] The tricks that your software offers.

[Mary Robinette] That's where you backup the recording in addition to your own place on the page. Start the recording rolling. Then, when you get to a natural pause and it, punch out. And you begin speaking. As if you had never stopped in the first place. Which is what you actually want to be getting to… I mean, that's the way I do it when I'm in the studio, is that I do punch records. It's the fastest way to get a fairly clean product. Then you have to do all of the engineering afterward, when you are doing a self record or starting out. If you want to do stuff and have other people do all of that, there are other options. You've been… Where are you mostly doing stuff, Bruce. Sorry.

[Bruce] Oh, I do business voiceovers, business trainings. I've done a dozen audiobooks. I've done two or three dozen kids' audiobooks.

[Dan] You record mostly in your home studio, is that correct?

[Bruce] Mhm. Yep. That's the sound booth I made that's got a -60 dB noise floor. There's a difference between soundproofing and noise treatment, as well. Acoustic treatment.

[Howard] You're probably appreciating that treatment that we've done here in Cosmere studio. We've taken what is essentially a bedroom in a house and mounted some nonparallel panels on the walls, so that we don't get parallel wall sound reinforcement at certain frequencies.

[Bruce] Correct. That really… I don't know if this is…

[Clapping]

[Bruce] You can still hear the echo. So there's still quite a bit of reverb that you're dealing with in here.

[Howard] It's not a perfect room, by any stretch.

[Brandon] We need stuff on the ceiling, probably, if we wanted to…

[Bruce] That could help considerably. The center wall that's open could help. But…

[Brandon] Well, we are out of time on this. This was a very different and interesting episode.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Mary Robinette, you have our homework.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So the homework for you is to experiment with what it's like to be an audiobook narrator. Everybody who thinks that they want to be an audiobook narrator thinks about reading books to family or just how much they would love to read books aloud. You're thinking about books, in this case, that you like. As a narrator, you don't actually get much choice about what you read. So, what I want you to do is to pick a book in a genre you don't like, and don't pick a good example of that genre. I want you to read aloud for an hour. Every time you make a mistake, you have to start that sentence again. If you like it, at the end of that hour, maybe… Maybe… Narration is something you might want to try. If you're like, "Oh, no." Then you've answered your own question.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.42: Writing The End

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/18/15-42-writing-the-end/

Key Points: How do you pick the right kind of climax? Your beginning, the first act, telegraphs the ending. How do you pick the right one for the story? Identify what kind of story fulfills the character's journey. Write backwards, plan the ending and let that determine the rest of the story. The ending defines the story. Start with who are the characters when we leave them, then rewind to figure out what leads them there. You need to know what you're making to figure out the ingredients. How can the characters fail and still satisfy the audience? Give them hope. It should be satisfying, but still a train wreck. Build up to it. Fulfill the promises, and still surprise them. Don't change your ending just because someone guessed it. Satisfying does not necessarily mean happy.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 42.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing The End.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And we're done.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Brandon] I don't usually get to do that joke.

[Brandon] We're going to talk about writing endings. We have questions from listeners, and a couple of them are really curious about how we pick what kind of ending we do. So, the first question is, how do you decide what kind of climax fits your story? They list battle, escape, conversation, inner turmoil, etc. All of those together sounds like a great idea.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Well, the… There's a school of thought that says your… Whatever your first line, your first paragraph, your first chapter, that will tell you in some sense what your ending will be. That will telegraph the whole story. That works much better for short things than for long things. But, by the end of the first act, you should know what kind of an ending… Whether this is going to end in a gunfight or a conversation.

[Brandon] Yeah, I agree. Now, if you're a heavy duty discovery writer, you may not discover that till the end, and then you need to rewrite it in. That's totally fine. But let's just say in the finished product, the reader should be able to anticipate what kind of ending it is… You are looking for after the first act of your story is done. Most of the time. That said, sometimes you do get twists, like, Into the Woods by Sondheim is a classic example of sometimes reversing expectations. It's very hard to do. But it's very rewarding if you do it right.

[Dan] I'm not sure that we're answering this specific person's question. Because they said, here's my list of things, a battle, a chase, a conversation. If I know that my book has to end with the hero defeating the villain, that could take the form of a battle, that could take the form of a chase, that could take the form of various different kinds of violence or action. How do you pick which one of those is going to be best for this particular story?

[Brandon] I like your reframing it that way. Because we're taking the easy answer to this…

[Yeah]

[Brandon] I think the harder answer, because… Looking at something like MCU films. One of my favorites is Doctor Strange. I know a lot of people think it's one of the weakest, but I love it, because magic and wizards. The ending of that one is basically a conversation.

[Dan] Yeah. And it's a very clever one. It is a puzzle, and especially coming on the heels of so many where, so many Marvel movies all ended with we're all over a city and the city is blowing up and we're flying around and shooting each other, that one ended with a conversation and a puzzle.

[Brandon] And you totally could have ended that one with a fight instead, and it would have felt appropriate for the themes that were happening through the story.

[Howard] Let's look at that ending a little bit. There is a whole bunch of very satisfying fight leading up to that ending. That ending is the capstone to the fight, the capstone to all of this action there at the end. To me, that's what made it satisfying. If he had arrived and immediately gone and had his chat with Dormammu, I wouldn't have felt satisfied.

[Brandon] That's true.

[Howard] I wouldn't have seen all the fun magic stuff I wanted to see.

[Brandon] Although, I will say, part of the reason I like that ending is it was a theme for the character, learning patience…

[Right]

[Brandon] We had seen that his trouble was he wanted it now, he wanted to be the best, and he wanted his answers. If you haven't seen the movie, he travels to get healed from a terrible injury so he can go back to being a doctor. He finds people who will help him, and they turn him aside. They send him out. He's like, "No, no, no. You've got to help me." But he has to learn to be patient with his flaws and with himself to find inner peace. Then he uses that to defeat the enemy.

[Dan] Now, to Howard's point, a lot of what's going on in the early action stuff is try-fail cycles. I think we can win by this. No we can't. I think we can win by this. No we can't. Then he puts the pieces together and completes his own inner arc, and that's when he figures out how to do it.

[Howard] I think that comes back to the original question. Am I going to end with a battle? Am I going to end with a chase? Am I going to end with a conversation? Well, Brandon's first answer was, these all sound nice.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You can have all of those. You can have, in the final six minutes of act three, you can have a battle that… Or, excuse me, a chase… Well, a battle that fails and someone gets away and you have to chase them and you catch them and you have a conversation, and then we're done.

[Brandon] I think the key here is for you to identify what kind of story will fulfill, not necessarily what you need to do, but will fulfill the character's journey. Then you could pick any one of these things. Whatever feels right at the time. As long as you are completing that character's journey. That's the harder decision.

[Victoria] So, I feel like I'm the monster at the end of this conversation.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Right? Like, the thing is, I have been waiting to talk until the end of this because I write my books backwards. So I actually don't do anything until I've planned the ending. The ending, for me, and that climax basically through the last page, determines the entire story I'm telling. So, for me, the total cohesion of it is second to figuring out the ending of the story. So I feel like I have perhaps a different perspective on this, because rather than write toward the end, and think what kind of resolution do I need in order to fulfill the promises that I've made early on, I write backwards, from the end to make those promises from the ending that I know I want to achieve.

[Dan] So, you are still then at a point in the process deciding how your ending is going to work. I actually write the same way. I think about the ending first. So, how do you pick?

[Victoria] It's the story I want to tell. I feel like the ending is not a culmination, it's the definition. For me, the ending is the punctuation at the end, it's the thing that we're working toward. An entire sentence has to end at that moment. I… It is part of the fundamental questions I am asking myself when I begin to have an idea and when I begin to ask what kind of story I'm telling. I really treat the ending is the opportunity for the absolute collision of all of the ideas that I have, of all of the places that I want to end. The thing that I actually ask myself, before I figure out if it's a battle or a chase or anything, is who are my characters at the moment we leave them? So, really, it comes down to who's alive, who's dead, where are they act physically and psychologically, and then, from there, I begin to rewind their last moments in order to figure out what is the thing that leads them there, and I rewind from there all the way until I get to the beginning and figure out who the characters are when we first meet them.

[Howard] Your Doctor Strange metaphor is feeling even more fitting now.

[Victoria] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The bit about working backwards from the ending, it does not feel backwards to me. When I'm outlining, these days all of my discovery writing tricks are now rolled into my outlining process. The… I've talked about the process where my first outline is a 10-year-old boy tells you about his favorite movie at high speed. The 10-year-old boy will say, "Ohohoh, I forgot to tell you this one thing." That actually goes into my first pass at the outline, because it's silly and it's fun. But I begin that process thinking, "What is the big awesome moment at the end that got the 10-year-old boy to come home and tell me, 'Oh, I have to tell you about this movie, it's so great!'"

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Howard] "Because there was this thing. But before I tell you about the end…" And then off we go.

[Victoria] Also, I have used, I feel like over the course of the episodes that I've been here, a lot of food metaphors. But to use yet another food metaphor, it's like the ingredients, like, you're gathering apples along the way, and you end up with an apple pie or something. I don't want to end up with, like, an orange cake. Like, if I grew… Like, I don't want to, like… If you write towards a discovery and you don't actually have a plan in mind, you risk gathering ingredients which result in a different end, which result in something that doesn't feel cohesive. Whereas I want to know what it is I'm making, so that I can figure out the ingredients that I need to find along the way to make that dish. It is all about that dish.

[Howard] If you're gathering apples, it is entirely possible to end up with cyanide.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because there's cyanide in apple seeds.

[Victoria] Okay. Different fruit, then.

[Howard] But that's… No no no, but your metaphor works perfectly, because you can gather apples, you can be gathering these things, and still have some options for what happens at the end. That's, for me, where surprising but inevitable will come in.

[Brandon] Let's stop and talk about your book.

[Howard] Oh, yes.

[Victoria] Yeah. I have a new book out. Or I will, by the time this airs. It is called The Invisible Life of Addie Larue. It is essentially about a young woman in 18th-century France who is deathly afraid of dying in the same place she was born. She decides to summon the old gods to help her out of her life, out of her predicament.

[Brandon] As one does.

[Victoria] As one does. As one does. But the problem is, none of them answer. She prays that Dawn, and no one answers. She prays at midday, and no one answers. She prays at dusk, and no one answers. The one rule she has been taught all her life, never pray to the gods that answer after dark. She makes a mistake, and she does this, and she accidentally summons the devil. When he asks her what she would be willing to trade for her soul, she wants time. She doesn't know how much, she wants to live forever, and the devil says, "No." Because if you live forever, he doesn't get your soul, he gets the soul at the conclusion of the deal. So, in a moment of desperation, she says to the devil, "You can have my soul when I don't want it anymore." Sensing an opportunity, the devil agrees. The deal is done, and she discovers afterward that he has granted her the ability to live forever and cursed her to be forgotten by everyone she meets.

[Brandon] There you go.

[Victoria] I did not start writing it until… I had the idea eight years ago, and I didn't start writing it until two years ago when I figured out the ending.

[Brandon] What an awesome premise.

[Howard] And is this under the name…

[Victoria] V. E. Schwab.

[Howard] V. E. Schwab. The Invisible Life of Addie Larue.

[Brandon] All right. So. Another question we had… Kind of take this from a different direction, is, how can you end a climax without neatly resolving the conflicts, or, also, how can you have your characters fail without leaving the audience disappointed? How can you build up all this tension, and build up all these indications that there's going to be a heroic victory, and then… Not. Give. It. To. Them?

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Well, in YA, you would say you would need to have hope. So you can end with a bad ending or a failure in YA, but the thing that you don't want to end up with is the lack of hope. I'm also a really big believer in saving the day, but not the world. I love it when your characters survive to fight again, maybe solve one of the problems, but in so doing, much like the try-fail cycle, end up creating another problem that they're going to have to face at some point down the line.

[Dan] Yeah. Unsatisfying endings are like my favorite thing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Unsatisfying is the wrong word, because if you do it right, it will still feel satisfying and it will still feel resolved, even though you didn't get what you want. So, in all of my John Cleaver novels, except, arguably, the very last one, he does what he's trying to do. He fills the goal he sets out to fill, and then looks around at the wreckage surrounding him and goes, "Oh, my gosh. What was the cost of actually destroying this demon? I've lost my family, I lost everything that I had." And I just over and over for five books because I'm an awful person.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] The ending of Extreme Makeover does this same thing. It has an incredibly dark, desolate ending that a lot of people come back to me and they're like, "How… Why did you do that?" Because that's where it needed to end. That is actually the resolution of the arc that I set up, is that these characters are going to fail in the world is going to end.

[Brandon] It's why everyone on Seinfeld should end up in jail…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] At the end of the series. That is the satisfying resolution, under some understandings of how the plots were going.

[Dan] Okay. So. Taking Extreme Makeover as an example, all of my early readers, all of the offer readers, the writing group that I ran it through, they all came back and said, "What? How dare you end it there? We thought they were going to pull it out." I realized, okay, this is satisfying to me, but I need to make it satisfying to the audience. So, I played a lot of tricks on you. First of all, I started every chapter, and this came very late in the revision process, started every chapter with a countdown to the end of the world. So that you know, even if you think that I'm going to cheat at the end and pull it out, you at least have been told, every couple of pages, nope, the end of the world is coming.

[Brandon] That worked really well. What it did was it made the end of the world become a thing you're anticipating, and kind of looking forward to.

[Dan] Yes. Then, the other thing was, I kind of amped up the darkness inside of all the characters, so that when it happens, you're like, "Oh, good. That one just got his comeuppance." Then, "Oh, good, that one just got it." We get to the end and you realize, like, the worst thing that any character does in that book, in my opinion, happens in one of the last couple of pages. If you actually look at the dates and the times of this countdown, it's not counting down to the end of the book, it's counting down to that one betrayal. So, by the time you get there, you're like, "Well, yeah, he deserves to die. I've been following this whole time, I've been waiting for him to pull it out, he just did this awful thing to her, I want him to die."

[Victoria] This comes back, again and again, to promises. Right? To promise versus expectation, to finding a way to surprise people even when they know what they want. Because that's essentially the bargain that you're trying to strike here, is, a reader reads and, if you have a cohesive narrative, they have an idea of how they expect it to end and how they want it to end. You, somehow, have to find ways to surprise them, and not be predictable, while still fulfilling the general promise. You made a tonal promise over the course of your book. So, then, they can't be betrayed by the tone. They can't be betrayed by the ending. So there's like… It's a lot of promises to keep up with. You're going to end up with somebody upset. Like, no matter how well you end a book, somebody is going to wish you ended it differently. That's one of the hard parts of this.

[Howard] The one counsel I'd give is that if you have a public audience for a series, and you have not yet published the ending of the series, don't let the fact that someone correctly guessed the ending of a thing make you change the ending. I was on a panel with a guy who wrote for comic books. He would go through the letters and if somebody guessed his ending, he would just change it. I thought, "That is no way to live."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I assume that somebody is going to put all these things together, even if they're just rolling dice, and figure out what I had planned. That person gets to do a little dance…

[Victoria] [garbled… They get a cookie]

[Howard] And know that they are smarter than me, and that's fine.

[Brandon] Going back to some of the things that Dan and Victoria were saying, I think satisfying doesn't have to mean happy. If you can learn to split apart those two things… George Martin made a career on being satisfying but not happy in his epic fantasy. That is what people came to expect. That… Being satisfying… Even satisfying deaths is like a thing in the Game of Thrones series, that if you don't fulfill on, reader expectations are like, "Wait a minute. This is not what I was promised. I was looking forward to satisfying deaths."

[Dan] You can see that in the final season of the TV show.

[Victoria] We can't… I can't even talk about it, I'm so angry.

[Dan] So many people…

[Victoria] I'm still angry.

[Dan] Started to complain about halfway through the season, "Wait. All of the main characters are going to live through this!" That is not what they had been promised, years and years ago when that first book started. Then the show kind of flinched and stopped killing off main characters. It didn't satisfy.

[Victoria] That is a tonal promise break. You promised not only death, but satisfying death that adequately reflected the crimes which were perpetuated in life. It is one of the only things we all had to look forward to…

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I am still upset about it.

[Brandon] Moving on. Let's go ahead and do some homework. Dan, you have our homework.

[Dan] Yeah. So what we want you to do is just practice this. Take something you've already written, whether it is a short story, a novel, or whatever length. Then, rewrite your ending so that the opposite thing happens. This is not just let a meteor land and kill all of your heroes before they succeed. Find away that they can fail, but that it's satisfying. Whether you do this the opposite kind of tone or the opposite kind of… The opposite person wins. However you want to define opposite. Write it, but do your best to make it feel satisfying.

[Brandon] I'm really curious to try this on some of my own stories. I think it would be… This is going to be a fun exercise to practice kind of pantsing an ending, where you're taking all the things you've set up, and then coming up with a new ending. Very hard for someone like you or me who always knows our endings.

[Victoria] I was going to say… You've gathered all your ingredients for apple pie, and now…

[Dan] Now I'm telling you to make orange juice.

[Victoria] You have to go and bake something completely different with it?

[Howard] I've already told you, there's cyanide in there.

[Victoria] I know, I know. [Garbled] poison.

[Howard] You've got this.

[Brandon] You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.41: Researching the FCK Out Of Things, with Cory Doctorow

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/11/15-41-researching-the-fck-out-of-things-with-cory-doctorow/

Key Points: When you don't know the facts, tag it with FCK for later fact checking. Do layered research, and check later. Watch out for Wikipedia click holes! Texture detail or plot related? Use FCK for internal consistency checks. Beware research procrastination. How little research can you do? For locations, use the Internet. Use "modified" to get the reader to help fill in. One hard-core, 100% true detail can support a lot of vagueness. How much research do you need to do? It depends on how you cover it.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 41.

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Researching the FCK Out Of Things, 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 wondering what FCK stands for.

[Cory] And I'm Cory.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, how do you research things?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] A couple of us write things that are based in some form of reality, not Howard. I know, he's making a face at me.

[Howard] Nonono, that's totally fair. I've… Let me just say that I love the term FCK, which means fact check, and the idea that you can just be hammering away on a manuscript and realize I don't know the facts here, and just say FCK and keep going.

[Mary Robinette] So this is a concept that I use a lot, which is I do layered research. The first thing is that when I am writing something, I tend to gravitate towards things that I am already excited about. So I tend to have a general knowledge of the thing that I am writing about. I will make a short thumbnail sketch of the thing. Then I do slightly more targeted research as I begin to drill into it, and then more targeted research. Then, as I'm writing, if I hit something I don't know, I hit a squ… I just do a square bracket and throw in a descriptor of what is supposed to be there, and then keep going, like [And then the captain said jargon as he handled the thingie that you used to control a ship] and all of that's in square brackets. Cory, you said you use FCK.

[Cory] Yeah. It's an old journalism thing. There's two useful journalism bits. One is TK for to come. That's for a thing that you need to go out and get later. FCK is fact check. The Brooklyn Bridge, all 819 FCK feet of it, would be fact check. TK would be like if there's a quote to, or a thing that you're waiting to look up or what have you. I think, for me, the great benefit of it is not merely that it reminds me to go and look stuff up, it's that it avoids the temptation to engage in what I call writing-related program activity.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] Which is writing adjacent Wikipedia click holes.

[Piper] I do that. Or I used to do that. Or I won't do that after this podcast.

[Cory] It's like, you're… If you're like me, and riven with imposter syndrome and self-doubt, as you work, there's a part of your brain that's just going, "You're screwing this up. Just stop." When you give it an excuse, too, like, go down the Wikipedia click hole, it is going to grab the tiller, and it is going to like take you so deep into that swamp… It was a hole, now it's a swamp… That you will just never find your way out again. Or at least not until your next writing session. So, this is a way to keep going. I guess there are some exceptions where it comes to a… Where you really just can't proceed unless you know an answer.

[Mary Robinette] I find that this method works great for me when it's a texture detail. But if it's plot level, then it's a terrible idea. Because I have written scenes… I'm like, "What about this?" And have written scenes and built novels around something that was wrong, and the thing comes apart. I just recently critiqued a manuscript, and the person had not done their homework. On a plot level. It wasn't the… Like, the details, that wasn't the problem.

[Cory] Right.

[Mary Robinette] It was the things that they had wrong affected the plot. So this is… I'm…

[Cory] I hear y'a.

[Mary Robinette] It's…

[Piper] It's another case of it depends.

[Cory] Well, okay. Let me try and square that circle. So, first of all, the other thing that it's really good for is internal plot consistency. Like, if you can't remember…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Cory] Whether they still have the pen. You try to… If you write FCK, make sure they still have the pen. Then you can go back and back shadow your foreshadowing. But… The… For me, the research starts with not an idea, but with the world as it exists in the world. Because I write Science Fiction for the most part, and it's mostly futuristic, mostly near future. I, like you, am non-consensually eyeball banged by headlines all day long. They make me anxious and sad. For the longest time, now 20 years, I have done this thing that sounds like Gollum with indigestion, I've been a blogger.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Borp…

[Piper] I was waiting for you to do that.

[Cory] The thing that blogging, for me, does is it is a way to be reflective instead of reflexive about all the fragmentary ideas that cross my transom. What I do is I block out time every day, and I take all those things as they fly over my transom, and I make sense of them to the extent that I can. I talk about where they fit, how I'm thinking about them, and so on. It has this ancillary benefit that it becomes a thing that other people want to read that is separate from my novels, and makes them interested in my work, and so on. But I would do it if no one read it, first of all for my mental health. Right? Like, it is how I organize narratives about things that are going on in the world, and helps me feel like I have some mastery over it. But also, there's a powerfully mnemonic element to gathering these things and explaining them for notional strangers that differs from a commonplace book. When you write in a commonplace book, you can cheat. Right? You can make these notes that when you go back to them, you have no idea what you meant. But for a notional stranger, you have to be more thoroughgoing. Then you end up with a subconscious that's just kind of like a supersaturated solution of fragmentary story ideas that are banging together and they nucleated and they crystallize into often like semi full-blown novels and short stories and essays and speeches and whatnot. So now you've already done the research. Right? You're already cruising along, the foundational premise, you already know about, because you chased it because it was in your feeds. Right? That's where the story grew out of.

[Mary Robinette] That's very much what I do. It's like why did I write about space? Because I was already reading and thinking about space. Why did I write about Jane Austen era magic? Because I was already reading and thinking about Jane Austen era magic. I have done stuff that's set in a period or a time or dealing with something where I'm like, "Oh, this would be really interesting," and I have to chase it is I don't know anything about it. There I find that I have to do more reading, but the reading is very much to give me that kind of foundational feel of it. It's very organic. I often will read in parallel to writing whatever it is, because it's still just continuing to feed and churn in my mind.

[Piper] I think when I was… Oh!

[Howard] I was going to tell a joke in Schlock Mercenary that involved drawing our solar system millions of years ago. I realized that the age of Saturn's rings would determine whether or not I was going to draw them. I really liked this joke I was going to tell. I can't remember it, which means…

[Cory] It wasn't that funny.

[Howard] It really wasn't that good. But I burnt two hours reading the research and realized they are probably young, but not enough people are convinced that I can get away with drawing Saturn without rings or with proto-rings without making the fans angry, and I don't have the time for that crap. I don't have the time for that crap was the result of two hours of research. But that is a thing that happens, and that was a case where I knew I can't do this without doing the research upfront. There are lots of cases where I'm getting ready to draw a panel, and I realize I need reference art for this. Get Ref is the penciling that goes in that panel, and I set it aside until I got time to get the reference art.

[Piper] I think one of the dangers, though, that we look into… Because we've talked a lot about when it's absolutely needed and absolutely a point, especially when it has to do with plot, or how the plot comes together. But some of the dangers, particularly for those of us who do have imposter syndrome, is that it becomes… Research becomes a form of procrastination, because you justify that you're doing writerly things. Right? You're doing writerly things. It's to improve your book. It's there to prove the veracity of your storyline, add to the plausibility, all the things. Therefore, you've spent hours procrastinating when you actually should be writing the thing. You have a whole bunch of facts that you have checked, but you have not written any further scenes or chapters in your book. You have to make a judgment call as to how important this is to your ultimate storyline.

[Howard] It's the writer's version of $10,000 worth of legit business expense lunches with people, which theoretically would contribute to the bottom line, but the bottom line is not supporting $10,000 worth of lunch.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly. I want to approach this from a different way, but let's first pause and talk about our book of the week.

[Cory] Sure. I want to talk about Annalee Newitz latest book. It's called The Future of Another Timeline. It's a time travel story. It's a world in which there are these great regoliths, these huge stone monuments, that if you hit them with mallets in the right way, you go back in time.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] If you're lucky, there's someone there who's got mallets that can send you forward in time again. There are all these protocols, as you can imagine, and there's historical researchers and people do stuff around it. But, men's rights advocates are trying to end feminism. There's a group of feminist time travelers who are trying to head them off at the pass.

[Laughter]

[Cory] It's built around the punk scene in Orange County in the 80s. Now, Annalee Newitz was a poke in Orange County in the 80s. You want to talk verisimilitude and bad… I want to say… Crappy dudes. That's not the word I usually use. Terrible dudes in the punk scene in Orange County in 1980, boy, she's got their number. They say write what you know, and Annalee Newitz knows what a time traveler… Time traveling feminist from the 1980s in the Orange County punk scene would be up to. They're great books. They're really fun. They called them… The secret cabal is called the Daughters of Harriet for the first African-American senator, Harriet Tubman. Boy, is it a lot of fun, and, like, it's madcap in places. There's chase scenes. It's great.

[Piper] I kind of wonder what the mallets look like.

[Cory] Well, they're diff… When you get very far back in time, they get very different, too.

[Mary Robinette] And you'll have to read the book to find out. That book was…

[Cory] The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz.

[Howard] Which, as of this recording, isn't out yet, but… As of this listening, has been out for almost a year. So…

[Whee!]

[Howard] Your timeline…

[Cory] Time traveler.

[Howard] Your timeline has this book in its past.

[Cory] Although someone is coming back in time to stop me from promoting this feminist time travel novel.

[Garbled]

[Mary Robinette] We will keep the mallet away.

[Mary Robinette] So the thing that I want to say is we keep talking about how much research do you want to do, but I think actually the question that most writers should ask is how little research can you do?

[Cory] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] so, like, if you're doing location research, do you have to go there? How little research can you do you want to use a relocation in the real world? Opinions? I mean, it has not hurt the Dresden books.

[Laughter]

[Cory] Right. I have a stupid writer trick that is not location based. So you talk about location, and then I want to get in a stupid writer trick.

[Piper] There's never any stupid tricks. It's just the trick.

[Cory] No, I mean like David Letterman's sense. It's delightful.

[Piper] So, I once talked about how much I enjoyed finding a location and soaking it in, to be able to add to my book. Like, I will literally walk around and be like, "I see a story," and start writing it. But I also travel 475 to 80% of my time as part of my day job. Not everyone can travel that way. Not everyone has an expense account for that kind of thing. Also, not everyone wants to travel for various reasons. So, how do you research it? One of the answers to you is the fact that we have this wonderful thing called the Internet, and the Internet, particularly certain platforms like Google maps, actually allow you to not just check something out geographically, not just look at something from a sky level view, satellite map wise, but you can actually look at street-level things. Then you can even research further. There are YouTube videos out there, so you can hear what a place sounds like. One of the recent things that Mackey did with me was take me to a location which, again, we had the lucking us of the fact that we could go to this location. When I took video as reference, I recorded it with sound. Other things are, you write about the place you live in now, or you write about the place that you're visiting now, you take advantage of that, and save that in notes for when you might use it in a future book. But mostly, I really like the fact that the Internet is there for that. You can actually call out. Like, I had a friend who was traveling to a place, and she took pictures for me, and she gave me her impressions of the feel of the place and the people that were there, and the taste of the water out of the tap, which was disgusting.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] Those were cool, like, things that you could capture and put in the book to make it feel like it is actually that thing.

[Cory] If you do have a yen to travel, though, it should be noted that any place you go to research a book, if you're going to generate taxable income from it, becomes a tax deduction.

[Piper] Oh, yes.

[Cory] So, this is very nice. I've written a lot of fiction about scuba diving, as it turns out.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] The… My stupid writer trick I got from James McDonald. He is a gun person, and I am not a gun person. I'm a Canadian who's naturalized British, and I know nothing about guns. But I'll tell you his top tip was anytime you put a gun in your book, people are going to find errors. Because people who like guns like to find errors in the way that guns are treated literately. However, if you put the word modified before you insert the name of the gun, a modified Walter PPK, not only will they forgive you any errors that you've made, they will tie themselves in knots thinking of which modifications you had in mind to make that gun work. They will create elaborate theories. The further they have to reach to make that gun do what you need it to do, the more satisfied they will be with your amazing gun foo.

[Laughter]

[Cory] And the cool gun modification you came up with to make that gun work. It is my favorite super writer trick. I think it applies to other things that people [inaudible]

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] A modified Saturn five.

[Right. Laughter.]

[Mary Robinette] Like, I have so many modified rockets in my… That is… Like, I have used a similar trick. My trick is to drop one piece of knowledge that is absolutely hard-core, completely 100% true, and then be vague about everything else. They assume that I've done my research.

[Cory] Yeah. It's a Douglas Adams tell.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yeah.

[Piper] I will say that modified works for recipes, friends, so if you have food… Food reflecting your character building in your books, modified recipes, you have readers for life because they want that recipe.

[Cory] Yeah, software too. Just like, if you want to make your character like a bad ass super nerd, have them download the source code, modify it, and recompile it. Now it does anything!

[Hooray!]

[Mary Robinette] So these are handy ways. Basically, the answer to the question is, how little research do you need to do? Very little sometimes if you have a way to cover it. The… I think that we're going to wrap it up here. There's some other topics we could talk about in terms of research, but I feel like we've given you some good meaty tools to dig in with.

[Mary Robinette] So let's go ahead and give them some homework assignment. Piper, I think you have that.

[Piper] I do. Actually, it has to do with my little tip. So, often we want to research by going to a place that will be our setting. So we want to go in person and get a feel for the place. But that's not always feasible, due to cost, due to timing, what have you. Maybe it's not even safe to go. So, go onto the Internet, friends, and research a place. Not just for the geographic location detail. But for the feel of the place. What it's like for people walking in the streets or not. For what it looks like at street-level, or if there's no streets at all, and even how it sounds. Bonus if you can get actual details about taste and scent from first-person accounts.

[Howard] You know what's a fun way to find first-person accounts? Go to your location, Google your location, discord, Pokémon go…

[Cory] [garbled]

[Howard] Find the Pokémon go community in that location. The things that they have to say about wandering around. So many fun facts.

[Cory] I thought you were going to say Yelp reviews.

[Piper] No. No. Ingress. Pokémon go. Harry Potter. All by the same company. All gathering all that data. Friends. Have fun with that.

[Mary Robinette] So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write and research. And write.

[Cory] Can we take a moment to appreciate the sunset?

[Mary Robinette] We can.

[Howard] I'm facing the wrong direction, then, so I will play the part of the listener who didn't get to see it.

[Mary Robinette] I'll give you the word picture if you want, Howard.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Beyond the reflections of my balcony window lies the smooth ocean that is wine dark. Above it, the rosy colored fingers of dusk creep across as the ocean undulates gently.

[Cory] There's some trees out there, too.

[Mary Robinette] There are no trees.

[Cory] Yeah, there's a little island out there.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, is there really?

[Piper] Land ho!

[Cory] Oh, no, sorry, it's clouds. False horizon.

[Mary Robinette] But you didn't know that, listeners, did you?

[Piper] No.

[Cory] The magic of radio.

[Howard] You're out of excuses. Use the Internet to pretend to visit a place.

[Mary Robinette] Secretly, we're in a basement.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.40: Researching for Writing the Other

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/04/15-40-researching-for-writing-the-other/

Key Points: Start with your community library. Triangulate between texts and sensory experiences like ethnic festivals. Look for seminal textbooks, and at the bibliographies. Watch for biases! Sit down and talk to people, talk to scholars, too! Universities, art galleries, etc. have events. Go, listen, and talk to people. First read the books, then talk to a specialist. Be aware of when and who wrote the books. Sometimes you can compare sources.

[Transcriptionist apology. I am almost certain that I have gotten some of the labeling mixed up between Piper, Tempest, Sylvia, and Nisi. My apologies for any mistaken attribution.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 40.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Researching for Writing the Other.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.

[Tempest] And we're not that smart.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Sylvia] I'm Sylvia.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Nisi] I'm Nisi.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And we're super excited to have you all on our show today.

[Yes! Hooray!]

[Piper] So, today, for our special guests, we have author Sylvia Moreno-Garcia and we also have Nisi Shawl, fabulous author and editor and the person who wrote, cowrote the book Writing the Other, which is why we wanted to have her, but I wanted to have you both here because we are talking about research and writing the other. Both of you have written several works that require some research and in which you have written people who are not exactly like you. But first, I would like you both to sort of introduce yourselves. Tell us a little bit about you, and about what you write. So let's start with Sylvia.

[Sylvia] Hello. I am Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. I am a writer and an editor. I actually won a World Fantasy Award for working on a all woman Lovecraftian anthology called She Walks in Shadows a few years ago. Most recently, I wrote a book called Gods of Jade and Shadow, which is set in the 1920s, in the Jazz age, but has elements of Mayan mythology. So pre-Hispanic, mesoamerican elements set in the 1920s in Mexico.

[Dan] Cool.

[Wow. Yeah.]

[Nisi] I'm Nisi Shawl, and also a writer and editor, and had the extreme pleasure of editing and anthology in which I was so honored to get a story by Sylvia. The research that I engaged in was for a novel called Everfair. Set in the Congo, in an alternate past in which King Leopold was defeated…

[Tempest] That's always an alternate past.

[Laughter]

[Tempest] Any alternate past where King Leopold was defeated is an excellent one. So the [garbled]

[Tempest] Sylvia, you're actually the one who suggested this topic. So, I also want to say, like, why was it that you were thinking specifically about research when it comes to thinking about writing the other?

[Sylvia] Well, I think it's an integral part of any writing process. But, of course, an integral part of writing about somebody that you don't know or a culture that you don't know would involve a lot of research. I think people are sometimes overwhelmed and they don't realize the resources that they have available in their community. There are many. We will probably go through some of them. But, libraries, your community library, is a really good resource. I don't think it gets mined enough the way it should. So some of that. But there are other sources of information, and also how to evaluate how good this source of information is going to be for you, because not every source of information is going to be useful for your research, and not all of them are exactly on the same level of accuracy. We talk a lot about fake news. But this is not necessarily a new phenomenon.

[No]

[Sylvia] Where things are colored in a certain way. You have to know that, and think about that a little bit ahead of hand, I think, when you're engaged in this kind of research.

[Nisi] Absolutely. You have to triangulate a lot. My contribution would be that while you're doing research with texts, with writing, that you should back that up with other sensory experiences in your researching, and that my favorite way to do this is through an ethnic festival. When you're not like invading other people's spaces. You're actually being invited to experience a cultural phenomenon.

[Piper] That's very good. A very good note. Yeah.

[Piper] When you are first starting out on research, like you just said, like a lot of people can get overwhelmed. I also think that there are a lot of people who just like literally do not know how to do it. Like, they know how to Google…

[Exactly]

[Piper] But they don't necessarily know how to Google well.

[Exactly]

[Piper] And they may know that, like, they can go to a library, but they don't know that they can say, like, actually go up to a research librarian and say, "This is what I'm researching, can you please help me?" So… But what are some of the other, like, things you would tell someone who's, like, literally does not know, like, where to begin or, like, who they can tap to even, like, begin that research process?

[Sylvia] I mean, books are always a good entry point, but you should look at a good textbook. For example, if you're doing something like I did, like, say, Mayan mythology, you should look at a good solid seminal textbook. Something that students are studying. Then, look back at the bibliography. Look at all… Is going to be like a long list of texts. Kind of go through them, and see which ones are available to your uni… Sometimes, it might be your university library. Some of these might be available if you have a university library nearby. But also, just your regular library could get library loan. But, just make a list of the ones… First, what's easily off-the-shelf, you could go and grab and check it out. Really, quickly, just kind of like open it. Take a quick look, look at a few pages, see what it is, might this be something that I might want to read later on. If no, just cross it out, so you don't go back and like, "Did I see that book already?" Just, with this, construct just an initial pile of things. Every book will have another bibliography at the back, which will lead you down kind of like a rabbit hole, a treasure hunt, more and more. But this is just like initially to get kind of like a lay of the land. Like, what is there available? Like, are there even enough books about the art or the time? Sometimes they might be about some specific aspect of the culture, but not of the other. So maybe there's a lot of stuff about visual arts, but there's almost nothing about culinary arts. With that initial hunt, I think you'll get maybe an idea of, like, kind of, like, how many books are out there on this topic, and that kind of thing. Keep really good track, yeah, crossing the ones out you don't need or that you're not going to have access to. But you probably have more access to than you don't. Because with electronic databases, there are many expensive books that, like, I wouldn't be able to buy, but they'll lend them to me through [garbled F scholar, Cisco papers?] and things like that. These books are like $100 books if I went and bought it from the University press. But you can normally get like an electronic part, and just like, really like I say, quickly peruse it. Just flip through if you can. Be like, "Is this something really interesting or not?" And then kind of move on.

[Piper] I think that you bring up an interesting point when it comes to flipping to the back of a book or to the bottom of an article, whether it's online, for example.

[Sylvia] Exactly.

[Piper] Because seeing the references… That can also tell you a little bit about how much research went into the writing of the current article you're reading. That can also sometimes inform you as to how much has gone behind this article, or whether this article is more of a personal perspective. Right?

[Tempest] Actually, since you were researching Mayan stuff, I know that Nisi researched a lot of different West African stuff when it came to researching the Congo for your book. I'm currently writing a book that's set in ancient Egypt. So I know that I have come across this problem a lot, where I've discovered that a resource that I have been using is super biased in a really terrible way. It has a lot to do with, like, the way that for Egyptology, the discipline that we have now, that's the academic discipline, was started by a bunch of men who were from Europe or America who were Christian. Bringing those views into interpreting what was going on in ancient Egypt, and how then what they said the ancient Egyptians did or what they thought or whatever was influenced by that. But, like, may not be actually what the ancient Egyptians did, thought, or whatever. So… And I know Nisi had a hard time finding some unbiased, like, from the perspective of the Africans who lived in the Congo at the time…

[Chuckles]

[Tempest] Sources. For your book, did you also encounter that? I assume that for the Mayans, also, it's a very similar sort of situation.

[Sylvia] I think it is, in the sense that most of the Mayan codices were destroyed. We have only a handful left. So we only have… So the actual pre-Hispanic material that we have in codex form is very limited. We do have post-conquest accounts, which are written many times by priests, who went there and wrote down some stuff. So there's a limited amount of that stuff. When you read the post-conquest documents, yes, sometimes there is that kind of bias of, like, they were doing really bad things, these were really bad people. So you have to… Yeah, kind of, like, make your pile of primary and secondary sources, and also be careful of when they were published. Because… Like, when… I did say that it was good to get an important textbook. Sometimes those textbooks can be quite old. They can be… It can be a seminal textbook from the 1950s. Right? It's the one we still use, maybe, today for Egyptology or any other material. So you have to also think about, well, yes, but it comes from the 1950s. So what does that mean now that we are not in the 1950s, and maybe our understanding of Egyptian cultures or cultures from the Congo or from the Americas has maybe changed, and maybe it's because simply we have more information or maybe there was like a really bad bias. In this case, there might be a really bad racial bias.

[Nisi] Or there might be someone who made their reputation, their career, based on a certain bias.

[Sylvia] Exactly.

[Nisi] I'm thinking of E. Wallis Budge. I'm thinking of Evans-Prichard, who wrote a book that I used, but at arms' length, called Witchcraft among the Azande.

[Sylvia] I read that. I read that.

[Nisi] There's really not too much hiding the bias there. I'm wondering…

[Piper] Let me just pause you for just a second for the book of the week. But hold that question. Don't forget it. Okay? So. Would you please tell us about the book of the week?

[Sylvia] Oh. The book of the week is the one that I was talking about, about Mayan mythology that I wrote, set in the Jazz age. It's called Gods of Jade and Shadow. It takes place in the 1920s. But it does have Mayan gods interacting with my character who is a young woman, gets sent on a sort of a quest, she opened the box, a chest, and a splinter of bone goes into her finger which restores to life the Death God, the Mayan Death God, Hun Kame, who needs then to find some pieces of himself that are missing and reclaim his throne. So that's the book of the week.

[Dan] Sounds awesome.

[Garbled]

[Piper] All right. Thank you. Let me see. That question?

[Nisi] So the question that I was thinking of asking is as you go through bibliography after bibliography, are certain titles repeated…

[Sylvia] I think so.

[Nisi] And what do you do with… When you find that they're basically talking about the same five books, say?

[Sylvia] That tends to happen. If you've ever done any kind of academic research, you also find… That can be quite true. The other thing that happens, and why it's good to go back… Try to find the source, the original source of something, is that many times they are paraphrased or quoted, only certain segments are quoted. If you go back and you read the first book on that, you realize sometimes that it's not exactly what the others… The other people said it was and interpreted it. So I think trying to go back to the first time that that was said in that book, because we do tend to… As Jane Jones said, in her seminal text, whatever whatever. Some academics don't read everything either.

[Laughter]

[Sylvia] But sometimes they think they know what Jane Jones said. You go back and you find a different picture. But if you do have, I think, a text that keeps coming up over and over, which is the reason that looking at the bibliographies is so good, it should be marked as something to look at. Because if five people are quoting this, maybe it's something to look at. You may find out it's like not very good, but…

[Chuckles]

[Sylvia] Then, at least, you know. Well, not very good, and five people quoted it.

[Thank you]

[Sylvia] One of the other things that we also talk about we tell our students about research is the value of actually sitting down and having conversations with people.

[Exactly]

[Sylvia] And sometimes it's... I'm writing a character who is a black American, so I'm going to sit down and talk to some black Americans about their experience, to sort of, like, make sure that I understand certain elements of whatever. This is what sensitivity readers are for good for. But I've also found it really invaluable finding scholars in that particular discipline that I'm actually writing in to talk to as well, because then they can… I can ask those questions, like why does everybody always quote Jane Jones.

[Yeah]

[Sylvia] From the thing. So is that something that you would also just suggest to sort of like every writer, or is that something that maybe should happen after a certain amount of research, or…

[Nisi] Yeah. I think once you've done a certain amount of research, there may be some natural questions that will start forming in your mind. It may include like why is so-and-so such a scholar on this kind of monument or that kind of stuff. When you have that, if you can, talking to a specialist can be very good. Also, sometimes, universities will naturally put some type of programming that may be useful for you to explore. Not all of them. But the history department of a local institution, you can check what events they're having. If they're having something that is slightly related to something that you might be interested in, Egyptology in this sense, it might be a good idea to just kind of go, sit, listen to a lecture, and then when it's done, maybe talk to the professor. They're always really glad. Not a lot of people kind of show up for these things. So if you show up and you're interested and you're like, "Oh, I know today you were really only talking about this aspect, but I'm interested in this other aspect. Could we maybe have a chat later on?"

[That's brilliant]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Nisi] I think a lot of them will be very willing to have it. If you live in a large city, I would say, take advantage of that. Art galleries, also, tend to have sometimes things that are open to the public where you can interact sometimes with curators and things like that. It's a good point to be like, "I love it. And, by the way, could we talk more about this kind of thing?"

[Dan] I do think it's a really good point to bring up, that going to a primary source, talking to a specialist, is maybe the second step rather than the first, because they don't want to hear the same 15 obvious questions over and over and over again. You can kind of get those out of the way by reading the books and doing the articles and all of that, and then, when you need to know more, that's when you go to the specialist.

[Sylvia] I think that's very true across the board when you're doing any kind of learning or researching. How often have we, as authors, also said to people who are aspiring authors, like, "Hey, do your research first?" If I can send you a "let me Google that link" to you…

[Laughter]

[Sylvia] That answers your question, perhaps you shouldn't have wasted that time, both yours and mine, on that question asking it directly from me. But rather show me that you've done this foundation of research, and you're taking a question and asking me a question that's interesting and stimulating for me, because it's a question for the next level. And it also gives you deeper insight that you wouldn't have gotten if you had spent all of your time on that foundational 101 set of questions that you could have googled anyway.

[Exactly]

[Piper] My last question for the both of you is, we talk a lot about own voices fiction, and how important it is. But I've also found that own voices is really important in scholarship as well. You're going to get a different view of say women in ancient Egypt from a woman Egyptologist. It doesn't necessarily mean that she's going to, like, always be the best, and she doesn't have her own biases. But like women writing about women in ancient Egypt are going to say different things, or are going to notice different things, then, like, man writing about women in ancient Egypt. Do you find that that is true, like, in terms of any of the stuff that you all have researched, like, the people who are closer to it, who actually come from that culture or are descendents of the people who are from that culture tend to bring something different, that are deeper, to their scholarship, and that may be something that a writer should seek out?

[Sylvia] Want to go first, Nisi?

[Nisi] Okay. Well, I actually have been thinking about that book, Witchcraft among the Azande, because while I was really skeptical of what this anthropologist had written, I was able to compare it to practices, contemporary modern practices, by people who were doing these so-called witchcraft themselves. So that was how I was able to triangulate it. So it wasn't that I was necessarily buying what they said wholeheartedly, either, especially because they were 100 years removed from the time I was writing about. But it did help, it did, I think, provide some depth, and, yes, a very valuable different take on what was going on.

[Sylvia] So I read… I had already read the Popol Vuh in high school, and then I read it again. I ended up reading three different translations of the Popol Vuh. The last one that I read, I think the translator worked with an indigenous author or a member of the indigenous K'iche' community. It came with footnotes, I think, that one. It was very interesting to see how the translations were different, one from the other. But also, in this case, what the footnotes, what these footnotes… And each one of those versions had different footnotes… What these footnotes were like, because he was tying it to the local community and to contemporary practices and things like that. So it was a different experience. So I'm glad that I read all three versions. It was kind of like reading the extended… Seeing the extended cut of a movie and the directors talking in a certain part. So that was very, very useful, I think. If I hadn't done that, I might have missed out on some stuff that I ended up feeling and thinking about during my writing process.

[Dan] That's really cool. I know that we're over time, but I just wanted to add onto that one point that I wanted to make. We are accustomed, in research, especially in sciences, that the most recent work is the best. When we're researching culture, that's not always true. It may be that the translator that worked with the indigenous communities and really did this really detailed study of this one particular aspect, might be a very old book compared to some of the others. So, making sure that you are looking for the unbiased sources, or as unbiased as they can be, it may be that the book that has the right information that you're looking for might be very old. So don't discount something just because it's old.

[Good point]

[Piper] At this point, we're going to ask you to recommend to us the homework.

[Sylvia] The homework. I want you to find a news story, news clipping, from before 1980 about a topic that you're interested in researching or learning more about. So if you're interested in learning about feminist discourse, find something before 1980 in a newspaper and take a look. See what it's like.

[Piper] All right. Thank you. Well, listeners, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.39: Translation, with special guest Alex Shvartsman

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/09/27/15-39-translation/

Key Points: How do you translate somebody else's work into a different language? First, what kind of translation are you doing? Literary translation for fiction, you want to satisfy the reader. Remember traduttori traditori, translation is betrayal. While translations should be windows, often the translator needs to make it readable and pleasant for the reader. Translation often requires changing the style. Finding equivalent concepts and pop culture references. Different cultures may go farther in changes. Watch out for wordplay and references. When you are writing a book, tell the best story you can, and don't worry about translation. Maybe make notes about wordplay or other things to help the translators. The agent and publisher will usually sell the rights for translation for a novel, while short fiction is more likely a labor of love by a volunteer translator.

[Note: there may be mistakes in the transcript where foreign names and words were introduced.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 39.

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Translation, with special guest Alex Shvartsman.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Lari] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Lari] And I'm Lari.

[Mary Robinette] And we have our special guest here today, Alex Shvartsman. Alex, do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

[Alex] Hi. I'm a writer, editor, and translator. I've had over 100 short stories published all over the place. Places like Analog and Strange Horizons, and Fireside, and many other markets. I've edited over a dozen anthologies, primarily the Unidentified Funny Object anthology series, which is an annual anthology of humorous science fiction and fantasy. As of about five or six years ago, because I felt that I didn't have enough on my plate, I decided to share really, really cool Russian science fiction stories with fellow American fans. So my journey into the translation began. Now, I've had translations published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Apex, Samovar, and many other places, and I've done a number of longer projects as well. So I've been spending more and more time in translation lately.

[Dan] Cool.

[Mary Robinette] Awesome.

[Dan] Excellent. Well, I am very excited to have both Alex and Lari on this one, because they have both done a lot of translation work. We got actually a lot of questions from our listeners about translation, both from the side of the translator, how does it work, and from the side of the author, how do you get your stuff translated, how does that work? Let's start from the translator. Can… Talk to us a little bit about the ins and outs of translating somebody else's work into a different language.

[Alex] So, the first question to ask is, what kind of translation you're doing. There's literary translation, which is translating fiction, essentially. Then there is scholarly translation, something that you're doing for a university, for a library project, things like that. So that kind of translation is really different. In that kind of translation, the fealty is always to the text. You don't care how nice it is to read, you don't care how smooth it is, your job is to correlate it almost word for word as clearly as possible and with lots and lots of footnotes. Now, footnotes are the tool of the devil. We do not use footnotes, as much as possible, in literary translation. Some people will argue with that, but that's my stance and I will die on that hill. Now, with literary translation, my job is to satisfy the reader before satisfying the writer. Which means that I will betray the writer every once in a while, and stab them in the back gently, very gently, in order to make a story more readable for the intended audience. There is a concept in translation for that, it comes from Italian, it's called traduttori traditori. What that means is that to translate is to betray. That concept originated when the French translated Dante, and the Italians felt that they had done so badly. So they came up with that, because Dante's language is so rich, they felt that translation was a betrayal of his work. We translators use that term to say, "Hey, we need to betray someone." Sometimes we betray the writer in favor of the reader, and sometimes were forced to betray the reader to better translate what the writer had to say.

[Dan] That is a fascinating concept to me. I'm sorry, Lari, go ahead.

[Lari] Yeah. There are also different schools of translation, and there are a few that will say that you… It's fine for you to see the writer or the original behind the curtains. That is, lately, I think, nowadays has fallen into disuse. Nobody does that anymore. Currently, most translations, especially literary translations, will say that a translation's supposed to be a window. As a translator, you want to make that window look like it's not there. So if… You're polishing the glass [to the last one] so that people will look into the room and they will feel like there is no window. So mostly… I think most translators would agree that you're more often than not betraying the author to make it more readable and pleasant to the reader. Maybe it's not a great thing to hear.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] No, this is fascinating to me, especially because recently, kind of, the news hit the Internet of the 120-year-old Icelandic translation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Which, once somebody who knew the original took a good look at it, it turns out to be just essentially fanfiction of Dracula, wildly rewritten. Which, I think, is clearly an extreme case, but this idea that you would change things and betray the author in some sense… I'm sure there's a very fine line. Can you give us any examples of when you have had to betray the author in the service of the reader?

[Alex] Certainly. You don't actually have to go 120 years back to find a good example of this. Ken Liu, who is, a few would argue one of the greatest if not the greatest translators working in genre today, was working on The Three Body Problem, which won the Hugo, as you know. The style in which the Body Problem was written is very different from the way novels are written in English. So, in the Body Problem, you didn't have dialogue the way that we think of dialogue. You didn't have just clearly marked this person said this, this person said this. Instead, you had the narrator telling you, person A said this while he smoked a cigarette. Person B responded with this, and she did this. All of this in a block of text. That block of text would be almost entirely unreadable to an average Western reader who's used to novels the way that we know of novels for hundreds of years. So Ken had a decision to make. He could either be loyal to the author and translate the block of text as it was, which would make it really, really difficult for most of us to enjoy the actual plot of the book, the actual text, or he could significantly rework those parts and turn them into actual dialogue. So the great advantage of working with living authors is that we can ask them. So Ken was able to ask the author, Cixin Liu, whether or not he could make these changes, and he got those approved. So he made significant changes to that. We all do these sorts of things. I have to find concepts and find popular culture references that are equivalents in English to those that original author would use. So if you're translating a story from English to another language, and the story says that somebody just ran into a wall like in the Roadrunner cartoon, you're assuming that most of your readers are familiar with Roadrunner. But the readers in China or in Nigeria or in Russia might not be familiar with Roadrunner. So you have to find an equivalent cartoon there to use in this instance. Of course, you're not going to have 100% correlation. There is going to be… It is going to be a little bit different, and that's where the art of translation versus the technical skill of translation comes into play.

[Lari] I have a fun fact about this. JK Rowling speaks Portuguese, because she lived in Portugal for a while. So she was involved in some of the translations of the Harry Potter… The different houses, how the school was called in Portuguese. The translator actually checked with her for a few of the names. I also… Another interesting point is that how each culture is going to think about how far they can go from the original when they're doing their translation. So, very often, I would say that French translation really goes much further from the original when translating to make it more… Sound more French. It has a lot to do with how the country thinks about readers and thinks about how the readers receive translation. So in Brazil, people are used to reading translations, it's not a big deal. It's not quite the same in the US. So there's this sense that it needs to be adapted more. So the readers interact with it more.

[Mary Robinette] Well, let's go ahead and pause here for our book of the week. Alex, I think you had something you wanted to share with us?

[Alex] Sure. So, in this case, it's actually a magazine. I wanted to highlight Samovar. Samovar is affiliated with Strange Horizons, but it's actually sort of its own thing. They're one of only two magazines in our field that are exclusively focused on international fictions. Samovar publishes each story both in translation and in the original. So people who are able to compare the texts can do so. I've had several short stories appear there. Most recently, there was a story called The Green Hills of Dmitry Totzkiy, which is a really weird story in the sort of the VanderMeer style of weird, I would say. By a Russian [Kazoff] author, named Eldar Safin. It's his first English-language publication. The story is so strange and so unusual that it was just a pleasure to get to translate it. So I wanted to highlight that, and highlight his work, since it's his first appearance. Which is what we translators love to do, we love to bring material that you would not otherwise have access to.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's wonderful.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that occurred to me as you were both speaking was that one of the biggest problems with when you're doing translation is wordplay. Which often winds up affecting the titles. Because a lot of things I think you can get around with by providing additional context, but titles wind up being really, really tricky. Like, I have my… Shades of Milk and Honey in the Japanese is, I think, Mrs.… Miss Ellsworth's Magical Neighbor because the biblical reference of milk… Land of milk and honey is meaningless. Calculating Stars doesn't actually translate well because it's… There's a joke there. So it's… Or not a joke, but there's some wordplay with the different ways that you can use calculating. So what… Do you have… Is that a piece that the translator thinks about or is it much like books here that it is often the sales and marketing department that thinks about what the new title should be?

[Alex] Oh, it has to be the translator, because the translator understands what the load… But the cultural load and the meaning of what the pond is in the original language. The marketing department will not have the same benefit most likely. So, I actually have a perfect example for this. One of my favorite stories that I've translated, which also was published in Samovar as a matter of fact, was a story by [Катерина Бачило] writing as K. A. Teryna. The name of the story in Russian is Бес названия [Bes Nazvaniya]. Now, Bes Nazvaniya is, if you change one letter, could mean one of two things. It could either mean Untitled or it could mean The Demon of the Name.

[Mary Robinette] Hah. Wow.

[Alex] So, Bes Nazvaniya… Bes is a demon and Bes is without. So I had to come up, and this is relevant… I couldn't just randomly change the name of the story without referencing it, because this is actually referenced in the text itself. So I had to find something that was even remotely workable with the plot of the story. So the name of the story in English ended up being Untilted. Untilted playing off of untitled. It's an intentional misspelling that's mentioned in the story, and is justified within the story itself.

[Mary Robinette] Wow.

[Lari] I'll mention, though, that it's very… If you're dealing with a very commercial publishing house, it is possible that marketing will just change the title. That has happened to me a couple of times.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah. Let's talk about this from the author's side as well. I suspect I know the answer to this one up front, but when someone is writing a book, knowing that it will be, or hoping that it will be, translated, is there anything they can or should do to make that process easier?

[Alex] I would think not. I think when you're creating a work, whether it's a novel or a short story or a screenplay, any creative endeavor, you're creating it for the medium for which… In which you're working. So if you stop yourself and start thinking, well, how is this going to work in my audiobook? How is this going to work in translation? How is this going to work if someone tries to adapt this to screen? You are literally limiting yourself instead of being as creative and telling as interesting a story as you can. So, no, I don't think you should. I think your job is to tell the best possible story in a medium, and then let the professionals figure out how to convert that to podcast, to translation, to any other medium that… If it is indeed possible.

[Dan] That is what I expected you to say. So, hurrah! I was right.

[Alex] Yay.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to fight against.

[Dan] Okay. Cool.

[Mary Robinette] Because… Since I do audiobooks, I actually do think about it when I write. With audiobooks. But I've also talked to other translators, and they've said that there are some things you can think about that when it's time to have your work translated, that can make it easier. For instance, if you know that you've done wordplay in something, if you make a note of it so that when the translation… Is one this book is going to translation, that you can have a note ready for the translator about this is the wordplay. Because one of the things that I've… Like, not all translators are equal. Some of them will not actually catch the wordplay that you have put in, or the deep cultural significance of a thing, so that there are something you can do that don't involve erasing your creativity.

[Garbled]

[Dan] I have, like, a thousand translator stories that I would love to tell, but we don't have time. We, in fact, are out of time, but I want to ask two more very quick questions. If someone out there is writing a book, and they are hoping to have it translated into other languages, so more people can read it, how do you go about selling foreign rights, selling your book into foreign markets, and then how do you get that translated?

[Mary Robinette] I think you can answer this from a novel or a short fiction.

[Dan] Yes.

[Alex] So, it's actually two completely different answers, though. For novels, your agent and your publisher will work to sell the rights, and your involvement in this may actually be minimal. You will work with a translator, of course, if you're able to, and you'll answer questions, but you aren't necessarily going to do a lot to influence. The best way to sell your novel in translation is just to do really well with your novel in English. Or whatever original language that it came out in. But for short fiction, it's a completely different landscape, because there's very little money involved, so agents and all these professionals generally will not be involved. What ends up happening with the vast majority of short stories that are translated is you have translators who are volunteers who are fans themselves, like myself, find a story, read it, fall in love with a story, and then reach out to the author and ask their permission to translate a story. Once they've translated the story, I then shop it around to short fiction markets in the same way as I will my own short story. I send the submissions with a cover letter and all that. You prearrange with an author, typically, the deal is if you sell a story to somewhere like Fantasy and Science Fiction or whatever, you split the money 50-50. Because there's no money upfront, nobody's paying you. Because, typically for professional translation, their rates are about $0.10-$0.15 per word. So that's already more than most markets will pay for the translation. So the money is not there. As such, it has to be a labor of love for the translator, and they have to be willing to do this on [scrap] the overwhelming majority of the time.

[Mary Robinette] Lari, did you have something that you wanted to say about that, too?

[Lari] Yeah. Just on the editor and the agent's side, since I have that side of the experience. I will just kind of to give an overview to everyone on how that works. We… Once I have a manuscript, we'll decide at which point we're sending out that manuscript for international publishers. So we might do that at the first point when it's being sold and get that into the [unclear] publishing houses, or we might do that when it's already closer to publication, depending on what shape the manuscript's in. Then, that's going to be sent to publishing houses around the world who publish that kind of book. I think the thing to keep in mind here is that the person who's deciding if they're publishing that or not is also an editor in the different country. I don't know if that is obvious for everyone. So we're talking to editors again. It's a whole new submission process. What's interesting is that often there are things that people think will not work internationally, and then the book becomes really big in the US, and suddenly, it works. So, even the idea that there is something that you can do or shouldn't do to not make it harder or to make it easier for the translator to translate, really, it depends on an editor in a different country connecting to a story and seeing value in making the translation.

[Mary Robinette] Well, that's a great note to wrap up on. So, let's leave our listeners with a little bit of homework. Alex, do you have something to help them with?

[Alex] Sure. So, the prompt that I came up with is linguistic misunderstanding. I would love for all of you to write a story where the characters are in trouble some way because of a cultural or linguistic misunderstanding. Something has gone wrong in translation. Really build that into the story, don't just have that be an inciting incident and then completely walk away from it.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great suggestion. All right. You are out of excuses. Now go write. Does anyone want to say that again, in another language?

[Dan] Yes. Please do that.

[Alex] [Russian… Google translate suggests У тебя нет оправданий. А теперь иди пиши. (U tebya net opravdaniy. A teper' idi pishi.)]

[Lari] [another language…Portuguese? Google translate suggests Você está sem desculpas. Agora vá escrever.]

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.38: Depicting Religions That Are Not Your Own

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/09/20/15-38-depicting-religions-that-are-not-your-own/

Key points: Mainstream religion, historic religion, made up religion? Widespread? In the open or hidden? Beware of exoticizing and making them evil. Respect their beliefs. Research, practitioners and texts. Try to get into the head of someone who believes that. Understand it and respect it. Don't just default your characters, think about how they see their relationship to the cosmos. Religion also sets morals, ideals, ethics. Do they practice it, or do they just live in a culture where it is practiced? How does the religion stand in the community?

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 38.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Depicting Religions That Are Not Your Own.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Tempest] Because you're busy.

[Nisi] And we're not that smart. Clearly.

[Laughter]

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Nisi] I'm Nisi.

[Tempest] And I'm Tempest.

[Tempest] And I called it.

[Laughter]

[Tempest] [garbled] gonna miss this one up.

[Dan] That's okay. Because they are busy.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's why they're in a hurry.

[Laughter]

[unclear] They're so busy, that's why they're in a hurry.

[Dan] It's still accurate.

[Tempest] It's all true.

[Unclear] Oh. Okay.

[Dan] Okay. So we went back and forth on this one as to exactly how we wanted to title it, and we like… Depicting religions that are not your own.

[Piper] Right. But really, because this is a writing the other episode, it's also going to be about depicting religions that are not necessarily mainstream ones. Or at least not mainstream ones…

[Dan] Where you live.

[Piper] Where you live, right. So, for us, our context is mainly Western and American. But for… In other places, that context may be different. But for whatever context you're in, there's some things that are important to remember when depicting religion. That includes, like, a living religion, a religion that maybe people have worshiped in the past but may not be worshiped at this time, and, I think, a little bit about religions that we make up. Because a lot of the religions that are come up with in worldbuilding, some of the same problems with inventing religions comes up in depicting religions that are not your own.

[Tempest] A lot of the time when you're building your own religion, you're not just creating it out of thin air, you're building it from factors and events that you have drawn from other religions. Religions, as you were saying, that are living religions or religions that are no longer being practiced but that perhaps have contributed somehow importantly to a living religion.

[Nisi] Exactly.

[Piper] So we're here with Nisi Shawl, again, who is the co-author of the Writing the Other text and the person who came up with the idea for the seminar that became the text. One of the reasons why I especially wanted to talk to you about this is because you practice a religion that is not a mainstream religion here in America, but is a religion that often ends up in fiction depicted badly.

[Nisi] Yes. Well, I've been thinking about whether it was a mainstream religion or not. I would have to say it's not familiar, but it is widespread. Because my religion is Ifa, and it is related to Santeria,Vodun, Lucumi... Which is very widespread in Brazil. So there are a lot of practitioners of my particular religion. The thing is that they may not be out in the open about it, and that you may not know that you're hanging out with someone that practices this religion. Actually, I remember I got on the bus once and I was talking with someone I know about whether or not we could keep up with our religious duties when one of us was suffering from a broken arm. Then my friend got off, and the bus driver started singing one of our sacred songs. It was an Ifa bus driver. So, you never know. So I would say that person was a practitioner, but not out in the open. They weren't like wearing regalia for it or anything like that. When it comes to the depiction, my least favorite is the movie Angel Heart with Lisa Bonet. Yeah. It was supposedly taking place within New Orleans. There are like people with like goat eyes, it was like all this devil stuff. I'm thinking, "This is Christianity. This has nothing to do with anything that I have ever experienced." When I think of good depictions, I immediately think of… First of all, I think of Tananarive Due's Good House. Because that is a horror novel, and the temptation often in horror novels is to exoticize the other and make them evil. She did not do that with my religion. She had problems going on that people were trying to solve with my religion. Thank you, Tananarive.

[Piper] So, of the good examples that you can think of, what are some of the other hallmarks of what makes them good? You mentioned not exoticizing or making the religious practitioners the evil ones.

[Nisi] Respect. And research. Respect in that often people are trying to think of my religion as magic, and trying to play it down, lessen it, belittle it, because it's unfamiliar to them. They would classify it as magic rather than religion. So to flip that, I would say respecting any kind of traditional practice and realizing that what is magic to some people's religion to other people. So there's that. Doing research and finding out from practitioners as well as from texts, how things actually went. In the bad example that I keep thinking of, they have people sacrificing babies, they have people like stabbing pins in dolls. Nah.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Nisi] You could just go to a very open ceremony and you would not find any of that going on. You would think, "Oh, well, maybe they're just hiding that from me."

[Chuckles]

[Nisi] No.

[They're not doing all that.]

[Nisi] No.

[Piper] I'm going to pause us and ask you for the book of the week.

[Nisi] Oh. Okay. My book of the week is an anthology that I edited that came out in 2019. It's called New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. 17 stories from writers of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds. From as many places around the globe as I could get.

[Piper, Tempest] Awesome.

[Thank you chorus]

[Dan] Cool. I wanted to ask you a question really quick. The… A lot of what you're talking about, Nisi, is this idea of letting… Treating that religion on its own terms, rather than trying to see it and therefore portray it through the lens of your own beliefs. I think we see that a lot. Especially here in the West, which is very, very predominantly Christian and all of these other things that come along with that. So, if somebody wants to present a religion, whether it is a real-world one or just one they've invented for their own fantasy novel, what are some good ways that they can kind of break out of that mindset they grew up with and really see that new religion for what it is rather than some… I don't know, altered version of Christianity or of whatever else it is?

[Nisi] That is really hard. That is what separates a writer from someone who's just kind of fooling around with words.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Well said.

[Nisi] I mean, I myself have tried to do this in my own work. I was very conscious of doing it with Christianity, actually. Because that is not my tradition. Actually, I was taken to a Christian church as a child, but my mother told me we just go to this place because people will talk about us bad if we don't. So I had a basis of skepticism to work from. So I had to write a missionary woman in Everfair, and I had to make sure that I was respectful of her take on things. I think if I can do that, then anybody else that wants to be taken seriously can try.

[Tempest] I think though… What I find interesting is that with religion, that's the one that I have noted that our students have the most resistance to, in part because of there being so much emotionality bound up in religion and religious choices. You say to them, like, you need to get into the head of the African-American woman if you're going to write her. Okay. You need to get into the head of the deaf person if you're going to write them. Okay. You need to get into the head of a person who believes this about angels. They're like, "Yeah, but that's not true."

[Laughter]

[Tempest] But they're… But that's wrong. You're like, "You can… I'm not telling you that you have to believe what your character believes about angels." But you need to understand why your character and people like them believe what they do and respect that in order to then depict that in a respectful way. But it just seems like that's one of the places where people catch, that makes, like, this particular identity category different from the others that we talk about.

[Nisi] I think so. I think another thing came to mind when you were talking about our student, is that we have a spreadsheet of characteristics, traits for different characters in a book. You have students fill this out. They almost always leave the religion column blank. They have not thought about are their characters atheists, are they agnostics, are they practicing Buddhists, what are they? They just… They deliberately, or more likely, unconsciously, don't think about how their characters see their relationship with the whole cosmos.

[Right]

[Piper] I would actually challenge that a little. Not a lot, but a little. In the fact that I think that sometimes, rather than not think about it, they default. Well, of course, it would be this way. There's nothing other or different about what I have in mind for this character when it comes to this topic. So they default. Right? Because there's so much about thinking about religion that also sets your morals and your ethics and your ideals. There's so much that's ingrained, that when a person is developing their character, if they leave religion blank, they're defaulting to the set of morals and ideals and ethics that may have been established. They may not recognize or they may compartmentalize, but it is bound up, often, in your religion. Right? There are certain tenets, or there are certain values that, unless they're atheists or unless they're completely agnostic in some way, deliberately so, they're unconsciously defaulting to the religion they're most familiar with whether they technically practice. Right? Because there's a difference between being a Christian and living in a Christian culture, and the defaults that come with living in a Christian culture. Like, in America, we live in a Christian culture, not because, like, everyone is Christian, but because Christmas is a federal holiday.

[Yeah]

[Piper] Like, that's an artifact of the fact that we live in a Christian culture. Like, so Christmas is a national… Or a federal holiday. Like Rosh Hashanah isn't. But then I always think about the fact that when I lived in New York City, the New York City school system, Jewish high holidays were days off from school. That was a reflection of how much there is a Jewish culture in New York City, and how much that has to be respected because of the fact that it's a large community. You can't just ignore their high holidays, so they get incorporated. But that's one example in one place. I don't know of other places that have that. But I'm sure there are, I just don't know about them. It was a thing that I keyed on to specifically because it was so very different from what I was used to growing up.

[Nisi] Yeah, I agree. I think that that brings us to another point that's really important in representing a religion that's not your own. That is to think of how that religion stands in the community that your writing about. Is it like the majority religion in that community? Is it a minority religion? Are there sects? Are there different kinds of… Is there a historical curve to it? To the practice of this particular religion? Are there insiders and outsiders, orthodoxies, heretics? So you definitely have to think about that in depicting my religion or a religion that you make up or any religion that is not familiar to you as your own.

[Piper] Exactly. That actually brings us to our homework for this week. Which is that I want you to choose an aspect of culture that ties in with religion. My favorite example of this is how do people in your culture deal with those who have died. What do they do with the bodies? What kind of ceremonies are done around them? Whether you are writing and what we will call mimetic fiction, present-day America, whether you're writing in a secondary world fantasy, sit down and write 500 words about what happens when a person dies, what happens to their body, what happens to their soul, according to the religious or cultural values, and how does that play out with people in the family, in the town, in the immediate area.

[Dan] All right. That's really cool.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Okay. Well. All of you. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.37: Writing Under Deadlines

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/09/13/15-37-writing-under-deadlines/

Key Points: Writing to contracted deadlines is hard. Sophomore slump! Writing in a bubble. It gets worse! New level, new devil. Train yourself to write against deadlines. Train your good habits. Build sustainability. Watch out for the year and a half deadline -- you need to work consistently at the start, to avoid crunch time at the end. Remember you won't have a boss. Pay attention to your own nuances. Make time to have a flat tire. Watch out for the other cooks in the kitchen! As your career grows, more things take time away. Learn to juggle early! Build a trunk full of pieces to use. Being good at deadlines, able to juggle multiple projects, means you will always have work. Learn to make your own schedule.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 37.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing under Deadlines.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're in a hurry, too.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I've gotta go. I've got writing to do.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I'm not sure if we ever even talked about this before. Maybe briefly. But I don't think we've ever had an entire episode on writing to deadline. Which is something we should totally do, because, I don't know about the rest of you, but the first time I had a contract, I was surprised by how much harder it was to write under someone else's deadline than my own goals.

[Victoria] Yes. I think this is called the sophomore slump for a reason. The first book you write usually is not under contract. If you're lucky enough to get a contract, and the contract extends for more than that book, the next book you write will be the first book that you write under contract. I say that it's like going from riding in a cave to going into writing in a bubble. Where all of a sudden, everyone can see you, and everyone has a stake in it, and everyone's watching you, and you no longer have unlimited time, you have give or take six months. It is one of the most trial-by-fire processes. It's one of the reasons that second book hits so many people so hard. Because second book… All books are difficult, but the first book you write under contract is an eye-opener.

[Brandon] For me, I had two big distinct moments like this. The first was writing my first book under deadline. The second was when I had The Wheel of Time. Suddenly, a lot more eyes were on me. I'm glad I was able to step into that. That I… My early books were not as… I was a brand-new author. They did fine, but it was when I suddenly had everyone at the company, at the publisher, focused all of their attention on me, that suddenly writing under that deadline was a very different experience.

[Victoria] Well, that's the horrifying thing, right? If any of you out there are writing your first book under deadline, it's only going to get so much worse…

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Because you're still a new author. That first book you write under deadline feels like… Much like when you're a teenager and everything feels like a 10 or like the end of the world. That first book you write under deadline, you feel like it's never going to be this hard again. Until something else… My agent would say, "New level, new devil." The idea that every time you step up a level or into a new spot, you have that same sophomore horror reaction again at a new hurdle.

[Brandon] I think a lot of our listeners will, again… I say this a lot… Will be thinking, "Wow…"

[Howard] Luxury!

[Brandon] I know, wouldn't it be so nice?

[Dan] Wish I had that problem.

[Brandon] but I do think training yourself to write under deadline can be very helpful for preparing for a career in writing.

[Victoria] Absolutely

[Brandon] I've had many friends as writers hit this in it be really hard for them. A lot of times you'll find someone whose first book comes out and then there's a long gap to their second book. I'm not even talking about the famous examples that you might point to. A lot of my writer friends, one book came out, and then it's like four or five years til their next book. That's a really bad time to be making a big gap between books. Really bad time.

[Dan] So, when… Brandon and I were in writing groups together forever until he finally got published, and he got published a year, year and a half, two years before I did. So I watched this happen to you. I thought, "Okay, well, this is what I need to be ready for." Because as soon as you had a contract, then your time was not your own, and you were under all these other pressures. So I was trying to teach myself how to write. So I started setting my own deadlines. Because I knew this was coming. So that was, I guess, the first step, if we're going to give people advice. Give yourself an artificial deadline that you know is going to push you, that you know is going to be much harder than you want to deal with, and see what you can do with it.

[Brandon] This is part of why we like Nanowrimo and why… I did it years before I broke in. It was really helpful. For doing that first time I actually had a deadline to have practiced having deadlines.

[Howard] In the world of web cartooning, I made my entire career out of this deadline thing. Because I went 20 years without missing a daily update. There's this rolling deadline which says there will be a comic strip up every day. As we are recording this episode, that deadline, the inked buffer is only seven days out. Which is a terrible place for me to be, but I know, after 19 years of practice, I know exactly how long it takes to get out of this hole. Do I know exactly what I am going to write for the two weeks of scripts that I want to write and pencil and ink next week? No. But I've done this enough times that I am confident that if I focus myself on Monday and I look at my outline and I fall back on craft… Mary Robinette has talked about this a little bit, there are times when we just fall back on craft. It's not about inspiration, it's not about the Muses, it's chopping wood and carrying water. I know that I can do that. I just have to knuckle down and make it happen.

[Victoria] Part of this is a matter of training yourself into good habits. Because, as I said, it's only going to get harder. The better habits you can devise, the better habits that you can really start… Not perfecting, but creating for yourself early on, are really going to come in handy if you move farther into a career and you have multiple deadlines or multiple publishers or multiple anything. Really, like, they also come in handy if at any point you move from writing as hobby to writing part time or writing full-time. Every one of these habits about enforcing your own deadlines, finding accountabili-buddies, like finding a generational buddy, like finding anybody that you can really look to as support system and people to keep you accountable, these are key things for more sustainability of deadline.

[Dan] You have to decide at what point you want to add this. Because if you don't know how yet to write a book at all, you don't necessarily need to step up to this hard mode. Play easy mode first, because that's what it's for. But if you look at your own career, your own writing that you have done thus far, and you think that you are ready to add a new skill on top of it. Even if you maybe haven't even finished a first book, this is something to start building early.

[Brandon] The difficulty with being a writer… I mean, you may be sitting there thinking, I've dealt with deadlines, I've had schoolwork. We all have. This is a familiar thing to all of us. That's good. You have some practice. But there is something very dangerous about having a year and a half to do something, that if you don't do it consistently every week for the first eight months of that, your life is going to fall apart trying to do it for the last whatever, eight months of that. So, learning to be able to when it's not a pressure, keep to your deadline, that's a key skill. The other thing you've got to remember is you won't have a boss telling you to. Even if you have an editor, most of the time, your editor's not checking in that often. There assuming the book is working fine. They will go four or five months for checking in, and seeing how things are going, sometimes, if they're busy with other projects. If you have let yourself spend these five months being like, "Oh, I can get to it," or "I'm feeling really stressed right now, I'll play Xbox," and then… You're just setting yourself up to crash.

[Dan] My grandmother grew up on a ranch. She had all these awesome aphorisms. One thing that she always told us as kids was, "If you don't have time to do it right, you definitely don't have time to do it twice." Which is a principle that I apply to this. That it is about not just setting a deadline, but making a plan that is going to work now. So that you are using your time well now while it's not crunch time, because you don't want to get to crunch time, you want to avoid that as much as possible.

[Victoria] Also, especially early on in your deadline-written career, when you don't quite know all of your own nuances yet… All of your own… Like, I know that the first third of a book takes me roughly three times the amount of time to write that the last two thirds do. I cannot allot the same amount of time for every act in my book. So… You really only learn these things, because whatever works is what works for you, you only learn these things by doing. You need to make sure that you don't lean into procrastination techniques early on, or else you might find out the hard way that you don't work like that.

[Howard] Back in May, we talked about mental wellness. Just how to take care of yourself, and how sometimes you need to take days off. I mentioned the Munchkin deck project that I was involved in, and how incredibly educational that was. Crunch mode is definitely a thing that many of us, a lot of us, can do. But it's not something that you can maintain. It's never something that you should build into the project plan. The… When I have… It happens all the time. People will say, "I can't believe, how did you do this without missing a day? How is that…" Well, you do it, not missing a day, by having a huge buffer. My dad used to say, "You don't leave for the airport unless you've got enough time to change a flat tire." Which is not something I've ever had to do on my way to the airport, but that was just the way he built the plan. You have time to change a flat tire. I have time in my buffer, except this week, to get sick. To have the sewer line rupture. To have whatever.

[Victoria] Well, there's something else that I do want to bring up, which is once those deadlines become contractually inputted instead of personally inputted… The reason that it's so important that you stay on top of your side is because you're not the only cook in this kitchen. You can hit every one of your deadlines, but if you're the only person that you're planning on, something at another point in the pipeline can go wrong. An editor becomes late, a publisher becomes late, and all of a sudden, your very carefully orchestrated machine falls apart.

[Dan] And once you have multiple projects going, and you've made your perfect plan and you think this book is working great, then the other project that you've already handed off to the editor, they throw it back and say, "Hey, sorry this took me an extra month. I need you to turn around these edits by the end of the week." You're like, "But… That ruins everything!"

[Brandon] Well, I mean, this even happens with… This year it happened to me with, I got beta reads back on a book and there were some responses to the book that I was not expecting. Where I'm like, "Oh. I need to do another revision. I can see now why these are happening. But it means I need to take an extra month on this book." Although I was going to say, when Victoria was talking about editors being late, Dan and I know nothing about that.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Oh, no.

[Brandon] Let's do our book of the week, which is actually a YouTube channel that I really like. This isn't to give you excuses to not write. But, Overly Sarcastic Productions is a delightful YouTube channel where they do summaries of history, summaries of mythology, or look at various writing and storytelling tropes, and present them in a funny way. Just explaining to you what they were, give you the Cliff Notes version of the history of Herodotus or the Cliff Notes version of what it is, the amnesia plot, and how it's used in various books. They are funny writers, they are funny deliverers. The woman who runs… Who is part of it does sketches for all these things and her art is a lot of fun. I just highly recommend it as 15 minute, 10 minute beats that you'll probably like because you like this podcast, that are focusing more on tools that can help you be a better storyteller. So, give them a look, Overly Sarcastic Productions.

[Brandon] Now, coming back around on this idea of deadlines. One thing that I wanted to bring up is it actually gets harder and harder the better your career goes. This is not something I was prepared for. You usually do get, when you first go full-time, a nice breathing room dump. Where you're like, "Oh. I have extra time. I have more time than I thought, than I ever had for my writing before." That's the most time you'll ever have. That year while you're writing before your first book comes out. My experience has been that once a book is sold, agents tend to be really good at getting you another project if you want one. It's generally a good idea to get a second project and be working on that. Once the book comes out, suddenly there's publicity to do and promotion. The more popular you become, the more successful you become, the more this takes a bite out of your time. To the point that I have less time to write now than I did when I was full-time working a job. Now, granted, I had a weird job where I could write at work. But I have less time than I did then. You would think, "Oh, Brandon, you're full-time as a writer. You would obviously have more time now."

[Dan] Just to give our listeners an idea, arranging this recording session with both Brandon and Victoria took us almost a year of planning.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] To find the right holes in the schedules. Because they're so busy.

[Victoria] I will say I'm definitely one of those that… I'm very grateful for how my career is going right now, but between… I have four publishers and I've been in 16 countries so far this year. If you don't think that takes a bite out of writing… And I know, I can hear people saying, like, "Oh, but you're so lucky." I am, but if I don't also find time to write more books, that luck is going to run out very quickly when I run out of products.

[Brandon] This is a good time in your lives, before you're published, to practice being able to juggle all of these things and know that you can work to a deadline even if other things are interfering. I wish I'd practiced it a little more during my unpublished days.

[Howard] It's… Boy. It may seem hard as a new writer to take the novel you've been working on and that you've revised and to say it's really just not ready yet and put it in the trunk. But… Boy, I gotta tell you, late career, having a trunk full of things that you know exactly how you put them together and you know exactly how to fix them and you've got a pretty good idea of how quickly that would go. That means that when an opportunity comes up where, hey, maybe I could file all the serial numbers off of this and turn it into some money, you can do exactly that.

[Victoria] Related to that, as well, I just want to say, do not undervalue the time between when you sell your first book and when that book hits shelves. That is the most beautiful time you will ever have. It is the clearest, free-est mental time you will ever have or reviews start coming in and before your monologue becomes a dialogue when it comes to your creative energy. But, like, cache anything you can, ideas, balance, learn good work life balance. Also, my favorite productive… Like, procrastinatory technique is the idea that social media is absolutely part of my job. I can do a whole lot of not writing being on social media and justify it as marketing. Really start to analyze, figure out what your best times of day for writing are, figure out when you can do this, figure out what's going to be anything sustainable. Because it's only going to get more complicated as you go down that path. So any… I know I've already said good habits, but any good habits that you can build early will serve you later.

[Brandon] If you can become one of the people that is really good at deadlines, that is worth gold in the industry. Because so many writers are… I won't say bad at this…

[Victoria] I'll say bad at it.

[Brandon] I would say…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] There are a lot of professional writers that the best they can do is keep up to date on the one thing they're working on, and that's a struggle. People who can juggle multiple things become very in demand. Even if you're not ending up as a bestseller, if you are a mid lister, but you are someone who can deliver something on time, there'll be work waiting for you at every corner. You'll never go hungry if you can turn in things on a deadline that is good quality work.

[Howard] My friend Jake Black has said on several occasions, be… You can be on time every time. You can be the absolute best in the industry. You can be awesome and fun and enjoyable to work with. If you can only pick two, you'll probably find work. Pick easy to work with and always on time, because being the absolute best at everything in the industry… Boy, that one's hard. The other two are so easy.

[Dan] Well, I wanted to say, that this is extra valuable, especially if you are mid list or even low list. Because you're going to need multiple revenue streams to pay the bills and feed your children. My kids want to eat every day. I don't know…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Where they get off. But you have to have so many different projects and so many different irons in so many different fires that being able to come up with a good schedule is really valuable. I literally will take a print calendar, old caveman style, and I will mark on it every time that I can't write. Then I will start reverse engineering. Well, I've got this project that needs to be done by this day. Build into that how much do I think I can write in a day. How much… Give myself some extra days when I know I screw up, so that I am not immediately behind on the treadmill. Give myself some self-care time. Then, see how much I can compress that. That's how I do it.

[Brandon] Let's go to our homework, which hopefully will help you with this.

[Victoria] So. This homework theme of the day is, writing friends, not surprisingly, trying to get you to put some structure into that free-form of writing. I use a very particular app called the Forest app, it leans into the Pomadera method, essentially a timed writing sprint. The thing I like about the Forest app, it's only a couple of dollars. It is gamifying the entire process. You essentially pick a tree. You earn different kinds of trees to go in your forest. You grow different kinds of trees or certain amounts of time, while the Forest app is going. You cannot touch your phone and exit the app, or else the tree will die. The tree dies, and at the end of the day, you have a sad little dead defecated tree in your forest. The only thing I think could make it better would be if it were kittens or puppies instead. But, in the meantime, the Forest app is a nice way to keep track of writing sprints and find a way to just add a little bit of structure.

[Dan] You heard it here first, Victoria wishes she could kill kittens and puppies.

[Victoria] No one wants… I would never kill kittens and puppies.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I would never miss a writing sprint.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/09/06/15-36-collaboration-with-shannon-and-dean-hale/

Key Points: How do you do collaboration? Plot together. Outline. Outline, revise, split it up, revision again. Love your collaborator. Work times? Not really. Book, then screenplay, may make the story worse, or make it better. How can you encourage better? Check your ego. Collaboration takes time. Collaboration forces you to explain why things happen, and sometimes it helps.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 36.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Collaboration.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Shannon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] Once again, we have Shannon and Dean Hale, our awesome friends.

[Shannon] Whoohoo!

[Dean] I'm Shannon.

[Shannon] Opening so much…

[Dean] I'm awesome.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You guys collaborate quite a bit.

[Dean] Yes, we do.

[Shannon] Some would say too much.

[Dean] Ooo. Two children too much.

[Chuckles]

[Dean] But which two?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, we have talked about collaboration before on the podcast, but whenever we get an opportunity to talk about collaborat… Talk with collaborators, we like to bring them on because it feels like everyone's collaboration style is so different from every other one. Basically, we just want to know how you guys collaborate. I guess I can kind of start you on the how did it begin? What were your first collaborations like, and how did it start?

[Shannon] Besides the children.

[Dean] Yes. The actual, like, literature… Like, books.

[Shannon] The very first one, I'd been publishing novels for a while…

[Dean] First Kiss Then Tell was probably the first one.

[Shannon] Oh, that's true. We did write… We wrote a short story about our first kiss in an anthology.

[Dean] Yeah, she was asked to do an… It was like a YA anthology about first kisses, all the different authors were asked to do it, and she wrote about our first kiss. Which I don't think was her first kiss, really.

[Shannon] Well, it was not my first kiss. But it was my first kiss with you.

[Dean] Right. Right, exactly. Then I read it, and wrote a rebuttal. They published that, too.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] They did. Then, our official first book was… I'd been writing novels, and I wanted to write a graphic novel. This was pretty early, most publishers were not doing graphic novels yet. But he was a lifelong comics reader, so I thought he would have a lot of insight into the medium. So we did a book called Rapunzel's Revenge that came out in 2008.

[Dean] Nominated for an Eisner.

[Shannon] So, but now…

[Dean] [for those inaudible]

[Shannon] We've done…

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] 15+ together. Graphic novels, early chapter books, novels. We've done quite a lot.

[Dean] Everything except for one that I've written has been a collaboration with you.

[Shannon] Yes, you did that special picture book, all on your own.

[Chuckles]

[Dean] Out-of-print.

[Shannon] So, how do we do it?

[Brandon] So, how do you do it?

[Dean] She does it.

[Shannon] So, at first it was really important that we identify who was the chief writer and who was…

[Dean] Who was…

[Shannon] The subcontractor.

[Dean] Exactly. Exactly.

[Shannon] But we had to establish who was in charge.

[Dean] The steward.

[Shannon] That was obviously me.

[Dean] Yes. That was how everything worked at home anyway.

[Chuckles]

[Dean] So we just fell right into it.

[Shannon] Yeah. But we've done it so much now that I think we've kind of ironed out the process. I would say the biggest thing that we do that is…

[Dean] Different from when you write alone.

[Shannon] Yeah, we plot together. This is… I mean when you… It's unusual to cowrite in novels, but it's like very common in screenwriting and in television, of course. So that kind of getting into a room with one other person or a few other people…

[Dean] And breaking the story.

[Shannon] And breaking the story is like really a healthy great way to work. I used to not like to outline, but when you collaborate, you have to outline, you have to outline completely.

[Dean] [after we made an error]

[Shannon] Or you have many errors. So we get together, we figure out the plot, we break it…

[Dean] We walk around the lake holding hands.

[Shannon] Like every time a commercial.

[Dean] Chatting plot.

[Shannon] It's beautiful.

[Dean] It is. I love this job.

[Shannon] Actually, it's really kind of a fun process.

[Dean] Yeah, it is.

[Shannon] We make sure we get good food, [pestering all of those]

[Dean] We're just banging ideas out. Ideas are the most fun part of it.

[Shannon] For us, we're not precious about ideas. So, for people who, like, ideas are the harder part, that might be harder. But for us, we have never-ending ideas. So it doesn't bother me if I throw out an idea, and he's like, "No."

[Dean] Bleah.

[Shannon] It's not like I don't have 12 more waiting.

[Dean] Right. It doesn't bother me because I only have three.

[Shannon] Right. Whatever. You're the idea engine. Then we outline, extensively. There are times, for example when we're doing a graphic novel, when our outline can actually be longer than…

[Dean] The script.

[Shannon] The final book. Then, we, after we've outlined and revised the outline over and over again, then we split it up.

[Dean] Yeah. There are certain pieces of the story that often call to one or the other of us. Or, if during the pitch process, I'm totally behind this idea…

[Shannon] This particular idea I'm excited about.

[Dean] I can visualize it more than…

[Shannon] Or if we have different characters. So, in our Squirrel Girl novels, there are different point of view characters, so I did all of Doreen's chapters. This is in the first draft. I wrote all of Doreen's chapters and all of Sephia's.

[Dean] I did the squirrels.

[Shannon] You did the squirrels and the villain. Then we both wanted to do Squirrel Girl chapters, so we split them. But then in revision, we just trade it back and forth, so… We're not precious about it. So… We can read and add and delete and add...

[Dean] We each take credit for the best… For the funniest parts.

[Shannon] We have no idea what… Who wrote what.

[Dean] Except I did the funniest parts.

[Shannon] No, but they were probably mine.

[Dean] Oh, okay.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] Does that clarify everything?

[Brandon] Oh, yes.

[Mary Robinette] That's completely repeatable, too.

[Shannon] Everybody needs to take that model…

[Dan] Replicate it right across…

[Shannon] Take it home.

[Dean] It does help when you love your collaborator. I mean, when you know that whatever they're saying, how rude and insensitive and evil it sounds, you know at the end of the day that they love you.

[Shannon] I cowrote a screenplay with Jerusha Hess, and her process was any time I said anything she didn't like, she'd say, "That's stupid." It took me like a couple days to get into it, and then I was like telling her what an idiot she was in return, and it was lovely.

[Dean] Then, our next collaboration, I'd say something and she'd say, "That's stupid."

[Shannon] He's like, "Whoa!"

[Garbled]

[Brandon] So, let's talk about that. Keeping the relationship…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And the work relationship, like intertwining those, how have you made that work?

[Shannon] I don't think it's healthy for most people what we've done.

[Dean] Yeah. I don't know that it would work.

[Shannon] Honestly, the main question I get from most people is how are you guys so happily married?

[Dean] Right.

[Shannon] We talk about…

[Dean] And you say, "Are we?"

[Laughter]

[Shannon] Well, I want to keep some mystery in there.

[Dean] Right. Exactly.

[Shannon] I think… I've also collaborated with LeUyen Pham, the illustrator. So, there… I've collaborated closely with three different people. It is different when it's your husband…

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] And you live in the same house and you have relationship outside of work. I think we're just lucky.

[Dean] Yeah. Yeah.

[Shannon] We like and respect each other.

[Mary Robinette] Do you have… I mean, you talked about, like, go for a walk by the lake and… But do you have specific like work times and…

[Shannon] When the kids are at school.

[Dean] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, I was wondering if you had separated work and family relationship a little bit… By time or if it's just like…

[Shannon] I mean, not really officially.

[Dean] Yeah.

[Shannon] Yeah. No. It just… Just because logistically it's easier when they're out of the house.

[Dean] Yeah. Yeah, no, it's true.

[Laughter]

[Dean] I mean, sometimes I try to… Like, when you're… Just this last week, you were on a heads down deadline.

[Shannon] I was working 10, 12 hours a day, which is really unusual for me.

[Dean] I'm trying to run interference with the kids, but… Oh, man.

[Shannon] He's really bad about running interference with the kids. Let's be honest. He's really good at ideas, but…

[Dean] I only practiced football one year.

[Shannon] They slip past him.

[Dean] Yes. Like, what, where… Hmmm? Then I found them in your office. "Mom!"

[Shannon] Weeping at my feet. I'm like…

[Mary Robinette] But you're so tall and they're so tiny.

[Dean] I know. It's hard. Slippery.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Which is Kind of a Big Deal.

[Dean] It is. You're right.

[Shannon] It is Kind of a Big Deal. I have a new YA novel. It is just bra… I haven't done one in years. It's just out. It's about a girl named Josie Pie. She wanted to be a Broadway star, dropped out of high school to pursue Broadway, and failed spectacularly. A year later, she's trying to figure out her life and she starts reading books and being pulled into them. Trying to figure out what's going on…

[Brandon] Like, magically pulled into them?

[Shannon] Like magically pulled into them. So she's trying to figure out how at the same time using this opportunity to, like, live out her truest fantasies.

[Brandon] Awesome. And this…

[Dan] Just to be clear, for listeners who didn't get it, the actual title is…

[Shannon] Kind of a Big Deal.

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] And the release date is…

[Dean] Not sure.

[Brandon] Right around this time.

[Shannon] I have no idea. We are just… We're having so much fun with it, even now, because we're… We're recording this in advance. One of the books she gets pulled into is a comic book. Which we just are getting the pages of that right now. It's really fun.

[Dean] All the books… The fake books that you've made up for this are super funny. They're like examples of a genre.

[Shannon] Yeah. So she gets pulled into a tawdry romance, a historical romance, and…

[Dean] Post-apocalyptic horror.

[Shannon] Yeah. And a YA rom-com. A horror. She gets pulled into Anne of Green Gables, that's the only real book that I didn't make up. A fantasy. Anyway. A nonfiction book.

[Dean] I've read it, it's very good.

[Dan] Someone's going to read this, not realize that Anne of Green Gables is real…

[Dean] That's true.

[Dan] And encounter it like 10 years later…

[Shannon] I know. I thought of that.

[Dan] And it's going to freak them out. It's going to be awesome.

[Shannon] I wrote a book that was called The Goose Girl that's based on a Grimm Brothers fairytale.

[Mary Robinette] Which I love.

[Shannon] I would get letters from people saying, "I saw this story in a book at school. You didn't make it up. The Goose Girl's a real story."

[Dan] You cheated.

[Shannon] "This is plagiarism." I'm like, "Oh, no."

[Brandon] So, looking at some of the collaborations I've been involved in, a lot of mine lately have been I write a book and someone writes a screenplay of it, which is a collaboration, but a different style of collaboration.

[Shannon] Yeah. You're not in the same room.

[Brandon] I've noticed that sometimes this turns into a process that makes the story much worse.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Let's just say that.

[Dan] None of his screenwriters listen to our show.

[Brandon] One time…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled with him]

[Brandon] One time, I got back a screenplay, and every aspect of my story was better in a way that made me embarrassed.

[Oooo…]

[Brandon] At every turn, they took the better option that I hadn't considered, and just leveled up the entire story to an amount where I was really excited, but also kind of embarrassed. Right? It was like, "Oh, man. They just…"

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Brandon] So, I got to see it work, finally, right? Because that's what's supposed to happen in collaboration is that the things that you both bring to the table, you enhance each other's abilities, you make up for one another's maybe weaker areas in writing, you get something better than you could have done alone. This has happened to me in writing with Mary Robinette where we did a story together. But only once in screenplays. So I guess my question is how do you make sure it goes that direction instead of the other direction? Dan actually raised his hand on this one.

[Dan] Well, I was just going to say that you and I just did a convention last week, and we've collaborated on a novel. It's still unpublished, and we did a reading from it. Which was the first time that either of us had really heard it out loud. It was astonishing to me, first of all, how well it worked, but second, how I couldn't tell what was mine and what was yours.

[Brandon] Right. I…

[Shannon] I thought that's what…

[Brandon] You doing a reading of that chapter made me think, "That book's way better than I remember it being."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It's gotta be Dan's influence. But I can't figure out what was Dan's influence. It made me really excited about… I have to dig into it and fix part of it, but… Yeah. So. Collaboration can be energizing and it can be exciting, and when I got the screenplay back, I'm like, "Wow." Again, how do we make sure that collaborations go that way?

[Shannon] You have to check your ego, first of all.

[Dean] That's true. Definitely.

[Shannon] You can't be remembering this was my piece and this was your piece and you can't touch my peace. I just don't think it works that way.

[Dean] Yeah. Well, you can't be precious about anything. Like, I'll think, "Oh, I've got this awesome idea, and I still believe it's awesome." But you're like, "It just doesn't fit for the story." I have to be like, "Yeah. All right."

[Shannon] He'll send me pages and then I will see the heart of what he's trying to go for and I will delete 75% of it…

[Dean] She's the screenwriter in this case.

[Shannon] And then add a few more sentences. He'll get it back and go, "This is exactly what I was trying to do."

[Dean] It's so awesome. I'll be like… I'll feel like it's my work, but suddenly, like, better.

[Laughter]

[Dean] That's, I guess, what it is. But…

[Shannon] But I would say collaboration takes longer than doing it by yourself. So you don't… I think people often think, "Oh, there's two people, so you only have to work half the time." But it actually takes more work. So the benefit of it, as you were saying, Brandon, is that synergy that comes from two different people and you're wrestling out something together.

[Dean] You get more edit passes, because I go through and see what you've done, and then you go through and undo whatever I've done, and I go through and try to redo it.

[Shannon] I have a couple friends who collaborate and they said never they get to the point where they can't… They often agree, but if they each have an idea of what should happen and they can't agree, then they have committed to throw out both of those ideas and come up with a third option. But we actually don't really get there. We…

[Dean] No, I back off way too early.

[Shannon] We pitch to each other a lot, and, like, and really try to explain why we want to go that particular way. But often, in the process… What's great about collaboration, too, is that you're forced to explain…

[Dean] Why this is awesome.

[Shannon] This is what… Why this should happen, and sometimes when you're explaining, you realize…

[Dean] Ooooo...

[Shannon] Actually, it's not that great. But sometimes when you're explaining, you realize, "Oh, it is that great, and in fact…

[Dean] Even better…

[Shannon] Even talking about it is giving me more ideas about a way to expand it." So it is… It's a totally different kind of writing. I don't think it would… I actually really enjoy writing novels on my own, as well, so I don't think it's the only thing I need to do. But for certain books, I'm always like, "Oh, this would be better if I do it with Dean."

[Dean] Well, I love having an early reader. Like, sometimes when I feel like I can't… I feel like I don't know where to go, like what tack to take, I know that I can write for you. So I will insert a joke in there that I know is not going to be in the final one.

[Shannon] And I'm like, "Ha ha, that's funny."

[Dean] It's a gift for you.

[Shannon] Delete, delete, delete.

[Dean] I need to give you something to do.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Well, we are out of time for this podcast. We want to thank Shannon and Dean who have been here to record some awesome episodes with us. We're going to leave with Dean giving us some homework.

[Dean] All right. So this is a thing that I do with my kids. I collaborate with my children, and with my wife. That was named Picture Word by one of my kids, I'm not sure which one. What we do is we just get a single piece of paper, and we fold it into four so that we've got four separate like pages. We sit down and we draw pictures on each page. We're telling a story. It's like a picture book or a graphic novel. But you only draw the pictures. Then you pass it to the next person. They, sight unseen, draw… Or write the words that are supposed to go with that picture. Or you flip it. Or you start down and you write… You write the title, The Egg. You don't put any pictures on the next page. The Egg had something in it. Then whoever it is, the kid who's next, draws the picture that is related to that. You end up getting a story that neither one of you really thought was going to happen.

[Brandon] That's awesome. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.35: Tools for Writing and Worldbuilding, with Erin Roberts

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.

Profile

Writing Excuses Transcripts

January 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.02: Publishers Are Not Your Friends
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.01: Your Career is Your Business
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.52: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts i
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.51: Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with special guest Mahtab Nar
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.50: Juggling Ensembles
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.49: Maintaining Passion for a Story, with special guest Mahtab Narsimhan
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.48: Deliberate Discomfort, Part Two
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.47: Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.46: Crafting Chinese-American Characters
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.45: Worldbuilding Fantasy, with Patrick Rothfuss
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.44: Rebooting a Career
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.43: Audiobook Narration, with Bruce D. Richardson
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.42: Writing The End
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.41: Researching the FCK Out Of Things, with Cory Doctorow
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.40: Researching for Writing the Other
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.39: Translation, with special guest Alex Shvartsman
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.38: Depicting Religions That Are Not Your Own
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.37: Writing Under Deadlines
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.35: Tools for Writing and Worldbuilding, with Erin Roberts

Style Credit

Base style: Patsy by sforzinda
Theme: Clay Deco by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jan. 10th, 2026 11:44 am

Navigation

Writing Excuses Transcripts

Recent Entries

Writing Excuses 16.02: Publishers Are Not Your Friends

Writing Excuses 16.01: Your Career is Your Business

Writing Excuses 15.52: Economy of Phrase, Being the Concentrated Concatenation of Complex Thoughts i

Writing Excuses 15.51: Feedback -- When to Listen, and When to Ignore, with special guest Mahtab Nar

Writing Excuses 15.50: Juggling Ensembles

Writing Excuses 15.49: Maintaining Passion for a Story, with special guest Mahtab Narsimhan

Writing Excuses 15.48: Deliberate Discomfort, Part Two

Writing Excuses 15.47: Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow

Writing Excuses 15.46: Crafting Chinese-American Characters

Writing Excuses 15.45: Worldbuilding Fantasy, with Patrick Rothfuss

Writing Excuses 15.44: Rebooting a Career

Writing Excuses 15.43: Audiobook Narration, with Bruce D. Richardson

Writing Excuses 15.42: Writing The End

Writing Excuses 15.41: Researching the FCK Out Of Things, with Cory Doctorow

Writing Excuses 15.40: Researching for Writing the Other

Writing Excuses 15.39: Translation, with special guest Alex Shvartsman

Writing Excuses 15.38: Depicting Religions That Are Not Your Own

Writing Excuses 15.37: Writing Under Deadlines

Writing Excuses 15.36: Collaboration, with Shannon and Dean Hale

Writing Excuses 15.35: Tools for Writing and Worldbuilding, with Erin Roberts

Profile

January 2026

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags