Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/08/23/15-34-writing-deliberate-discomfort/

 

Key Points: How do you write when parts of what you are writing make you uncomfortable? Cursing, sex, violence, racism, misogyny? Where is the discomfort coming from, and is it desirable? Do it on purpose. Signpost what you are doing. Let other characters balance. Don't kick the puppies! Consequences! Be aware that for marketing, this may be hard to place. You may be uncomfortable, but you may also be hurting specific readers. Listen to your beta readers. Make sure you have thought through the discomfort, and you are doing it for a reason. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 34.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Deliberate Discomfort.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Lari] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm definitely not that smart. My name's Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Lari] I'm Lari.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] We are very excited to have Erin Roberts back with us. I won't make you introduce yourself this time. But she's amazing.

 

[Dan] We want to talk about deliberate discomfort. This was a really fascinating question that came in from a listener, and I'm going to read it to you. It says, "What do you do when your writing includes elements that make you uncomfortable, but you're writing the story you want to write?" Someone asked this a while ago in the comments section in relation to a character cursing, but I'd like to ask this question in a broader sense. What if my mom reads this? This is uncomfortable to write. Thank you for submitting that question. I think this applies to so many things. Whether it is you are not a person who uses curse words, but your characters do. Maybe you are uncomfortable writing the sex scenes, or the violence. Maybe you're writing about racism or misogyny or something like that that makes you very uncomfortable. How do you deal with this as authors, as editors? Deliberate discomfort. For yourself, or for the reader.

[Mary Robinette] I think all of us are uncomfortable about jumping on this one.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, I've done this a couple of times. What I find is that there are… There are different degrees of discomfort, and you have to understand where that discomfort comes from, and also think about whether or not it's desirable. So there's the what will people think aspect of it. So, like, I have a story Cerbo en Vitro Ujo, which I've told my parents, "Do not read this." Like, I just… I don't want to have that conversation. That's a different kind of discomfort then when I am writing sexism in a novel, because that is stuff that I have experienced directly and I am putting things in that made me uncomfortable when they happened to me, and I know that they're going to make my readers uncomfortable in the same ways, hopefully, that I was uncomfortable, and that for some people, it's going to be even more painful than that. So… And with those, I am like, that discomfort, I know that I'm doing it on purpose because I want to invoke that sense of "Oh, this is really… Oh, God." But other times, it is about making sure that I am reflecting the shape of the world. So, for me, it's really about interrogating why am I putting that discomfort in there. 

[Dan] Yeah. I had to have this conversation with my editor with my historical novel, Ghost Station. There are two major plot points that kind of turn on sexism. The fact that the women in the main character's life, he doesn't necessarily respect them as much as he should or consider them as equals. Which sounds horrible, and it is horrible. What that meant was that for the first two thirds of the novel, there's a lot of kind of gendered language that I worked for 15 years to edit out of my own writing. Making sure to include more inclusive environments and cast of characters and so on. For this book, I was deliberately pulling back from that, so that we would be building this character towards the moment… Two different ones, like I said, where he realizes, "Oh. I screwed up because I have this massive blind spot in my life." I had my beta readers, I had my editor, I had the copy editors, all of them for those first two thirds of the book were like, "You did this wrong. This is a wildly sexist book." I had to say, "Yes. But it's on purpose. I know that it's painful to read. But that's what we're going for at the end, and it does pay off."

[Erin] One thing that I love to do and stories in general is write horrible people that are… I like to call them sympathetic monsters. One of the things that you have to do, or at least that I have to do, when I'm writing a like really not the greatest person, is to remember that there is a difference between the story the character is telling and the story that I am telling about them. Even in a first-person perspective. There, you can signpost out there that what they're like… I'm stuck in my horrible evil world, but you can still indicate by how other people see them and react to them, by what else you put in the descriptions of what they're doing, to show people that it's not necessarily… That you are not your character, and that they're something that you're trying to do, and that the discomfort is there for a reason.

[Dan] Relying on other characters is a good way of doing that. Because then you can still have that character, whether it's the viewpoint or a side character, expressing an opinion that you as an author disagree with, but then you still get to have the balance in there through the other characters.

[Mary Robinette] I think that one of the…

 

[Erin] I was going to say, you could also use objectives… So I do a lot of unreliable narrators as well. I think there's a similar craft there. If you take something objectively wrong, and the character is agreeing with it, it helps to show people that they're… Something is off in the way that they see the world and that there's… And that you realize the difference. They talk about it sometimes as like the kicking… Kicking puppies is always a good example people use in film. Like, if you have a character kick a puppy, and be like, "That's the greatest moment of my life," then you're showing… Everyone objectively agrees that kicking puppies is wrong. So you're showing that there's… That the discomfort of living in that character is something you know about, and that you know the reader is experiencing and you're saying that's on purpose.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think also giving consequences to some of the horrible action that… Even if it's your protagonist doing it, like, not letting them get away with it is something that you can do to kind of mitigate that and indicate that it… This is not acceptable behavior, there are consequences. Lari, I'm curious. How do you handle this as an editor?

 

[Lari] Also… I wanted to point out from a market perspective, just how what Dan did with 1/3 of the novel being a misogynist character is not something that everyone can do at any point. I do think that there should be… There is discomfort for yourself, like we were saying, there is discomfort for… In terms of who's reading this. Then, I do think that when you're trying to break through, there are a few things that I would consider inadvisable. That is one of the things, if you just spend a lot of time in it. As incredible as the second and third part would be, if that's your breakthrough, that might be really hard to place.

[Mary Robinette] There was something that I recently saw someone say about Calculating Stars. I was like, "Oh, yeah. That's a really good point." It was on Twitter. It was a Black reader saying that she wondered when Elma's friends would get tired of her continually making the same basic nice White lady mistakes. And that she found it exhausting to read because she had to deal with it so much in her own life. I think that that's an important thing to understand, that when you put in something that's deliberately discomforting… Uncomfortable, that it is often going to be significantly worse for… Like the misogyny that Dan was putting in. That's uncomfortable for him. For me, reading that, that's going to be worse for me reading it because it is an environment that I live in all the time. So you do have to think about the cost that you're putting in there is that you are… You're not just making yourself uncomfortable, you're also potentially hurting specific readers. That… It's like is that… You probably need less of the deliberate discomfort than you think you do.

[Dan] I definitely want to dig really deep into this. Everyone's raising their hand, they have something they want to say.

 

[Dan] Let's pause first for our book of the week, which is actually a short story, and then we'll get back into it. Erin, you've got the story of the week.

[Erin] So the story of the week is The Lamentation of Their Women by Kai Ashante Wilson. It can be found, I believe, on Tor.com originally, and then it was republished at PodCastle as an audio. What I love about this story is it wants to make you uncomfortable because it has a point to make. So it is a story that has curse words in it, it has violence in it, it has a really stark look at policing in America in it. It is something that… Where discomfort is used as a tool to try to be part of the story that it is telling.

[Dan] Excellent. That is The Lamentation of Their Women by…

[Erin] Kai Ashante Wilson.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you.

 

[Dan] So, yeah, let's dig into this. Being deliberately uncomfortable in your work is going to affect your readers. It is going to cause discomfort in them, and, like Mary Robinette was saying, it's going to be a lot more painful for some readers than for others. So why do we put it in? What is the purpose of this? What value does it have? I know Lari and Erin both have comments they wanted to make. Lari, let's start with you. What were you going to say?

[Lari] I was going to talk about the importance of beta readers. I think it's really important when you're writing uncomfortable scenes to have people who are in that group make some comments. They might be something that you want to incorporate or not. But sometimes it's a little hard to know where you are in that line. If… How far you've gone, how hurtful it might be. So I do think it's really important to have people make comments.

[Erin] What I would say, to build on all that, is that you need to do the discomfort work first. If it's something that you're not comfortable enough with to write well, and to really do the work and make yourself feel horrible and all that stuff, don't do it. Because… If you're not doing that work, you're putting it on your readers. It is unfair to ask readers to do work that you are not comfortable doing yourself. So make sure you're in a place where you can use that discomfort as a tool, because there's a specific thing you're trying to get out of it. I would also say don't do it as a thought exercise, like, "Can I write horrible people just for funsies?" When I do it, it's usually because I'm trying to make a point about the way that culture… Oppressive culture can warp the people within them. So for me it's important to show how a monstrous culture turns a person into a monster. But there's a point that I'm trying to make. I'm not just doing it like to see if I can.

[Dan] That might be valuable as a writing exercise. But if it's something that you are going to put in front of readers, then, yeah, I think you're right. It is important to have a purpose, and have a purpose in mind. Why am I including, for example, racial oppression in my fantasy world? It doesn't have to be there. I'm making this world up. So if it is there, why is it there?

[Mary Robinette] Within that, also, the… Like, again, that… It was just a single tweet. I don't want to make it sound like I'm spending my entire life… But it did make me sit back and go, "Oh, yeah." I knew that I was writing this book for an audience… For me. But this is a really good reminder that that also meant that specifically I was… As much as I want those books to be inclusive, that I was writing this book for a White audience. The realizations about race that are in there, that I… Like, I see a lot of people who are like, "Ah. I realize that I was doing the things that Elma was doing." I'm like, "Yeah. Yeah. That's… I mean, that is the realization that I want you to have." But Elma's realizations are all in there because I had friends who did the emotional labor to teach me. But that means that I have to recognize that any Black readers are also having to do emotional labor to like my character. That wasn't something… That was not a deliberate choice. Like, that part of it was not a deliberate choice. That's… That is the piece that I'm like… That was a thing that I missed when I wrote it. And that I'm trying to think about when I'm writing other things. Which doesn't mean that I'm going to leave out the discomfort, but I'm also… It does mean that I'm going to think about… I'm going to think more carefully about how much is necessary to have that character arc and growth. It's usually less than you think it is.

 

[Dan] All right. Well, let's have some homework. Lari, you have homework for us.

[Lari] I'm calling this an exercise in confession. It is a short story in first person about a character whose point of view you completely disagree with.

[Dan] Excellent. A short story or a paragraph, write something with a character you disagree with. Excellent. This has been… I've been looking forward to this episode because I was hoping for a great discussion, and we got one. So, thank you, to all of you. This was awesome. Wonderful listeners, thank you. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/08/09/15-32-short-story-markets/

 

Key Points: Do you need to be prolific to make it in the short story markets? No. How do you find short story markets? Look for the lists, such as The Submission Grinder, or collections of award-winning short fiction, and see where they were published. Pay attention to what you like. Look at the audience size, the pay rates, and is it shiny for you? Do you need to be famous as a short story writer to break in as an author? No. Be your own kind of writer. How do you stand out from the crowd? Write the story that grabs you. Learn to write a competent story. Then learn to trust yourself. 

 

[Transcriptionist note: I may have confused Erin and Lari at some points in the transcript. My apologies for any mislabeling.]

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 32.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Short Story Markets, 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] Thank you. We are very excited to have Aaron Roberts with us for this episode. Erin, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[Erin] Sure. I am a writer, primarily of short stories. I've had short fiction published in Asimov's, and in Clarkesworld, The Dark, and PodCastle. I also was, which is great for this particular episode, a slush reader for EscapePod for about two years.

[Dan] That is fantastic. Thank you for joining us.

 

[Dan] This is, as most of our episodes are this year, a topic that was requested by listeners. So we've got several questions, and most of these rather than about fiction writing are about fiction selling and fiction markets. So I'm just going to start. The first one here, the question is, with so many short fiction markets, does a good short story author need prolific-isy to gain notice and readership?

[Erin] No.

[Dan] Maybe the first question is what are… He says with so many short fiction markets. The short fiction market is so different today than it was when I was breaking in like 15 years ago. What are the short story markets? What are… I mean, without an exhaustive list, obviously. Where are the places people can look today to sell short fiction?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things about this is that… I'd like to try to give this advice in a way that's as evergreen as possible. So… Because markets are constantly appearing and disappearing. That's been true through the entirety of publishing. So, what you're looking for are markets that you kind of want to be in. The best places to find those are places that collect lists. So you can go to some place like The Submission Grinder or Duotrope or Ralan's, or you can go to an anthology of books… Of fiction that is award-winning and look to see where those pieces were published. These are all places that you can find markets, but the process of figuring out which market you want to be in… Like, giving you a list of "Ah, this market is…" Like, we can do that, but it's not…

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] The chances of it being outdated a month after we record this is pretty strong.

[Erin] I also think that a lot of it's about you. The kind of stories that you like. The markets are different, they all have different styles, they all have different sort of editorial focuses. So, I would always say, read a lot of current short fiction, and see, are you gravitating to a certain market? Are you like, "Ah, the stories in X are the stories that I would love to be alongside." Because one of the best things about being published in a short fiction magazine is saying, like, "Well, my story's great," but also, "Oh, my gosh, these other stories, I'm so excited to be a part of this."

 

[Dan] So, back to the question, then. In order to really get out there, to gain a readership, to gain notice as a short fiction writer, do you need to be prolific? Do you need to be constantly publishing in tons of different markets?

[Mary Robinette] I don't think that you do. I mean, when you look at someone like Ted Chang, he does not constantly publish. Like, it is a thing you can do. But the question I would ask is why do you want to be noticed? Like, what are you trying to gain from that? So, here is my advice when you're thinking about like, what market to go into, and this is taking on to what Erin says about like what is important to you. That there are, I think, three things that help you decide what market to look at. One is the size of the audience the next is the pay rate. The third is the shininess. So, audience is literally how many people are going to see this thing. Pay rate is exactly what it sounds like, are you being paid adequately for your effort? Then, the shininess is how much do you want to be in this particular market? Like, there's… I grew up reading The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So, getting into that magazine was… That was shiny for me. Even though they didn't have the best pay rate when I got in. Shimmer Magazine is beautiful, and I wanted to be in Shimmer, even though the market size is very small. So, that varies. But at other points in my career, where… Like, there was a point when we were in New York and I was supporting my husband and myself on our… On my theater and writing income, which is exactly as large as you'd imagine that to be. So, at that point, pay rate was the most important thing. So, like the number of markets that you go into, the only thing that that affects is… The two pieces of that that you are affecting there are the number of eyes that are seeing your words, and how much money you're getting paid. So, for a career, it's like which piece of that are you trying to manipulate?

[Erin] I'll also say that both as an editor and an agent, I was very scared of the word prolific. I didn't know prolific-isy was a word, but I'd be… I'm even more scared of that one. It's possible to be prolific and be really good, but I think when there's… The stress is on the quantity, it always makes me fear for the quality. So if someone's trying to just write and write and write, it immediately makes me suspicious that there isn't that much attention to editing and just letting the material rest so you can take a new look at it. So, I would say, for me, it's always best to just pay attention to what you're putting out there, first and foremost.

 

[Dan] So, I suspect part of the thought process behind this question is someone who wants to break into the market, someone who wants to gain notoriety, either because they want to move on to getting a big publishing contract or something like that. So, Lari, you as an editor may be the one to answer this. To what extent does that matter? Does somebody need to become famous quote unquote as a short story writer in order to break in as an author?

[Lari] Absolutely not. I also think editors use a little bit too much the idea of falling in love. I think we kind of lean on it a little bit too much. But it is true that a lot of the publishing process involves a couple people just falling in love with your writing. So an agent falling in love with your writing, and an editor falling in love with your writing. Often, that doesn't really have anything to do with your previous platform.

[Erin] I just want to build on that to say that I think this question may also be coming from the idea that there is a way to sort of game the system of publishing. Like, if you do this thing correctly and follow this path, it will lead you to glory. So to speak. But I just don't think that's a good way necessarily to go. Because you have to love the writer you are, instead of dream about the writer you wish you were. And figure out, if you're a prolific writer, and that's your style, then go be prolific. But if you're not, don't stress about the fact that I will never succeed, because I am not this other person. Live in your own career and your own writing style and process.

 

[Dan] Excellent advice. I want to break right now for our book of the week, which is, actually, appropriately, the Nebulous Showcase. Mary Robinette, can you tell us about that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, one of the things that we've been talking about is how to find good markets. Looking at a collection of award-winning fiction is a way to figure out which markets people are publishing in that are… That other people are also reading. So the most… We've got the Nebula Award Showcase 2019, which was edited by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. That has a collection of the winners and nominees for the 2019 Nebula awards. So it's got people in there like Rebecca Roanhorse and K. M. Szpara and Sarah Pinsker. It's got just a ton of really good fiction. So, if you're wanting to get a better idea of the sort of landscape, grabbing the most current Nebula Award Showcase at whatever point you're listening to this. It may be that you're listening to this and are grabbing the 2020. But grab that, and enjoy some really… The fiction of people who are at the top of their game right now.

 

[Dan] Excellent. All right. There's another question here that I think is similar to the first one we had, but takes a different approach. What the question says is by submitting to one of the most famous sci-fi/fantasy magazines, I learned that they receive about 40 stories a day, but publish about 12 stories every two months, including those from established authors. I imagine many submissions are good, but how do you stand out from the crowd? So, rather than using short fiction to stand out in some other way, how do you stand out just enough to get published? How do you get noticed? How do you grab the attention of a short story publisher or editor?

[Erin] When I was… I'll say when I was a slusher, we just read stories. A slush reader for a magazine reads all the stories that come through the door, and decides which ones to pass up to the editors. At EscapePod, actually, the process is blind. So we don't know who's sending it, and if it's like my favorite author ever or someone I've never heard of. What I learned from that is just write a story that grabs a reader. A slush reader is just a reader that has been given a particular title in a particular role. They're not any different then you as a reader, except maybe that they do it more. So when you're reading stories, what grabs you? That's the same thing that's going to grab someone at a magazine. So if you write a great story, then it should grab someone's perspective and make them want to read more and publish it.

[Mary Robinette] So, I'm going to add on that. That is absolutely true. And also, there is a thing that happens… That I've seen… It happened to me… Happens to a lot of writers. Which is that your publishing… Or submitting, and then you start getting the personalized rejections. Then you make a sale, and you don't know why that story sold and none of the others have sold. Like, what did I do, and you try to replicate it. You can't. Then you go through a dry spell for you don't sell anything. Then suddenly you sell something, and you have no idea why. Here is what I think is happening this is based on having done the slush reading that Erin did, but in a slightly different form. I slushred for Asimov's, but I was… They divided their slush into three piles. The first was complete unknowns. The second, the B pile, was people who had some credits. Then the A list was people who had already sold to Asimov's. All that that was really doing was triaging the sort of process. Some people in the B pile were people who'd been in A… Or been in the C pile and gotten moved in for a slightly closer read. But what it meant was that I was reading stories and all of them were competent. Like, every single story in that pile was competent. The thing that was frustrating was that for a long time, I was like, "Ah yes. I understand why editors so frequently say write a story that rises above. And that they can't describe what this rises above means." But, comparing what is happening with that pile with the authors that I know, and myself who can't… Who are like, "Why did this one work?" Here's what I think is happening. I think what happens is that you learn to write a competent story. Then you learn to trust yourself. That there is a period of time in which you are writing competent stories, and there's nothing structurally wrong with that sucker. But you are so focused on the technique of it, but you aren't actually thinking about all of the things… You aren't interrogating any of the things that you are actually interested in. You're trying to mimic things that other people are doing. So they're a little bit stiff. They're a little bit predictable. But there's nothing wrong with it. Like, no one can point at it and go, "This is wrong here." Then there's a point at which you write a story that is coming very much from your own self. Those are the stories that are unique and stand out. Because they are stories that no one else could write. The stories that don't stand out are the stories that anyone could have written. They're just… There's… Again, there's nothing wrong with them, they're just not doing that extra step of letting your own voice out. In this case, what I mean by voice is your own personal taste out. So I think that one of the things that you can do is… As a writer, is to remember that you have honed your reading experience over your entire reading career, which is much longer than your writing career, and to trust your reader instincts over your writer instinct.

 

[Dan] That sounds like awesome advice. We, unfortunately, are out of time. We've got some homework coming from Lari.

[Lari] Yeah. So, I want you to pick a couple of contemporary published short story writers, and just trace their publication history. So you can see where they've been published, at which points in their career, and hopefully that will help you start sketching a roadmap for your own.

[Dan] Awesome. All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/26/15-30-write-what-you-want-to-know-with-laurell-k-hamilton/

 

Key Points: Write what you want to know! Dragons, fantastic things! What interests you, what moves you emotionally? Write about that. When you want to know about it, you are passionate about it. Do the research, so you know what's real, but you can also use the cool. Have fun! Find out what you love and write about that. Do your research, with books, multiple sources, and then experts. Pay attention to the Dunning-Kruger effect - are you too dumb to know how dumb you are? Look for encyclopedias, dictionaries, and bibliographies.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 30.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Write What You Want to Know, with Laurell K. Hamilton.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Laurell K. Hamilton.

[Woo hoo]

[Laurell] Hi, everybody. Glad to be here today.

[Brandon] We are recording live at SpikeCon.

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Howard] SpikeCon, which, this year, 2019, is also the host of the North American Science Fiction Convention, NASFIC.

 

[Brandon] We are very happy to be here. So. Write what you want to know. Laurell, you're the one who pitched this idea to us. It was really pithy and we loved it.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Where did you come up with this phrase and what does it mean?

[Laurell] One of the things that I have always had a bugaboo about, since college, is one of the things they tell you in the writing courses is write what you know. They say, "Write what you know." Well, I was a Midwestern girl, raised in farm country, raised below the poverty level. I didn't want to write what I knew. I wanted to write about fantasy things. I wanted to write about dragons, like Anne McCaffrey. Dragons of Pern. I wanted to write about the fantastic. Well, there was a lot of fantastic in my life. So I get to college and they tell you write what you know. The teachers get mad at you that you wanted to write something that didn't exist. So, I thought, no. I want to know about X, or Y. I want to know about… Like, for… When I sat down to write the Anita Blake series, I didn't know anything about guns. I'd shot one gun in my entire life. I had a series where she carries a gun to work with the police. I had to go out and find out about guns and do research. I found out about what I wanted to know. So, pick something you want to know. What you're interested in as a writer. If you're… Most of us who write fantasy and science fiction, we want to write about something that makes us happy or that we're fascinated by or that horrifies us. Something that moves us emotionally. For those of us who write in the genre, that is going to be something that we're not going to be able to do in our real life, so we have to write about what we want to know.

[Howard] One of the things that I love about this concept is that… I mean, when I've heard it spun before, it's been, oh, don't bother with write what you know, you can go research and figure out the stuff that you don't know. The difference here is the passion that's going to go into what you want to know. Yeah, you want to write about dragons, you want to write a hard fantasy novel that has something to do with the way in which dragons fly? If that's what you're passionate about, you're going to study bird wings and bat wings and some aerodynamics and pieces of your story… Because that's what you're excited about. Pieces of your story are going to grow out of that research in ways that will grab readers because it grabbed you. You were passionate about it. It's what you wanted to know.

 

[Laurell] One of the things I found is as you research ru... Like, I wanted to put zombies. My main character raises zombies. So I actually researched voodoo. There are no such things as shambling dead in real voodoo. I'm just going to say that upfront. It doesn't exist. I'm sorry. But no matter what the movies say, it doesn't exist. But I did my research in real voodoo. It came up with other ideas. I finally… Somebody was in an audience and had… It was a part… Or this was their religion. I was waiting for them to lambaste me, and he came up, he says, "Thank you for doing the research in my faith." He says, "Most people ignore it and treat it like it doesn't exist and they don't do real research." I said, "Yes. But the shambling movie zombies, I still use them." He says, "Yeah, but they're so cool."

[Laughter]

[Laurell] So, if you do your research, you find out other ideas and things. Also, people will forgive you going that one step further. I wanted to write about the monsters in the real world as everybody knowing them. I am still having a great time. Give yourself enough toys when you're writing. Don't… You want to be having fun. Think of yourself at seven and you want all your toys. Well, if I wrote a straight mystery series, I don't think I'd be in the 20 plus book of the series. Because I wouldn't be having fun. I have a great time, every time I sit down to write, because I gave myself enough toys that interest me. Be passionate about your writing. You have to be interested.

[Dan] I like to think that research has kind of two main benefits. That story you told shows both of them. Number one, you're getting the right stuff right. People who know what they're talking about are not going to throw the book across the room because you wrote guns or horses or whatever it is wrong. The other thing is, you are buying goodwill with that research. So that then you can get other stuff wrong and people will go along with it, because it's cool.

 

[Laurell] Yes. Very, very much so. But think about… Make a list of the things. As a beginning writer, make a list of the things that interest you. Look at what you love. Look at what you've loved since you were small. Make a list of that. Because, think about it. Not only can you be a writer, but you can write about the things that… At five, I would beg to stay up and watch Boris Karloff in the original Frankenstein. By myself, because nobody would watch it with me.

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] I was begging at five to watch a monster movie. Now, here I am, all these years later, and that's what I write. Find out what you love and do that.

[Brandon] Dan taught me this lesson. Actually, because it goes back to the origin of I Am Not a Serial Killer, his first novel that was published. If we can kind of look at our careers, when we were young, in this way, like, we thought that we just needed to write what was being published. Right? The things that we read a lot, we were trying to mimic those. Which is how a lot of writers begin. You read a lot, you mimic what's being published. But we hadn't kind of hit upon yet was what are we going to add to this? What little aspect of the genre is really fascinating to us, that we can balloon into being our thing. For me, it was the magic systems. For Dan, it was a conversation on the way home from writing group, where we were talking about his fascination with serial killers. Dan, you'd always been writing epic fantasy.

[Dan] A very healthy thing.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah. I grew up reading fantasy and assumed that I would be a fantasy author. Wrote five really terrible fantasy novels.

[Brandon] They were not really terrible.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] They were just moderately terrible, like all of ours were at that time.

[Dan] But it wasn't until I learned this lesson that Laurell's talking about, of what are you passionate about. Well. Serial killers. I'm not ashamed of that. Sitting down saying… I think what Brandon said was, "You always talk about this stuff, why don't you just stop flirting with it and write about it?" I don't know if those are the words he used, but that's the message. I did. Some of that, I didn't have to do a lot of research on, because I'd kind of spent my whole life learning everything I could about abnormal psychology and serial killer behavior. Other parts, I had to do copious amounts of research, so that a mortician would not, again, throw the book across the room when I talk about an embalming or something like that to make sure I got it right.

[Howard] The homeless population in our town dropped by like 80%.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Lots of hands-on research.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] Okay. On that, let's stop for our book of the week.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Laurell, you're going to tell us about Noir Fatale.

[Laurell] Sorry, you just distracted me. I'm going, "Wait…"

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] I am in a short story anthology called Noir Fatale. It just came out about a month ago, I think. It has, for me, an original Anita Blake short story called Sweet Seduction. Larry Correia is in it, David Weber is in it… I am blanking. I'm going… I'm terrible with names. I can see everybody's face. Nope.

[Brandon] Lots of really great writers.

[Laurell] It is lots of really great writers. It's based on the idea of the femme fatale from the old movies. Old noir movies. The femme fatale, in any way you wanted to do it. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror. So we're taking the genre of the detective, part detective, Sam Spade and everything, and mixing it with our genre and what we love most. So, it was a lot of fun to sit down and try to do something short where I usually get to write so long. I love short stories. One of the things… A short story anthology is like one of those compilations that they used to do before you could download every song. You would find musicians you had not heard before, and sometimes things you really love. Anthologies are like that. It's like a preview. You buy it for one person, and then you find somebody else that you love. Then you have a new author to follow.

[Brandon] Awesome. So, Noir Fatale.

[Dan] Noir Fatale…

[Brandon] Baen Books put that out.

[Dan] So if you are here at the con, there's a whole page ad for that book in the program book. So look that up. If you're listening to this online, you can find it everywhere, I assume.

 

[Brandon] So, Laurell, we'll… For my next… Kind of, the next part of the podcast, let's talk about your process of doing research. Let's say you've come up with something you want to know. It's a… There's a bit of it that you're really fascinated by. You've always wanted to learn more about it. What is your first step, where do you go?

[Laurell] First step is books and reading about it. For the Merry Gentry series, I researched anthropology. Okay. First of all, I grew up with a… My grandmother… We were Scotch Irish, so she would tell me the bogeyman… If I wasn't good, that Bloody Bones would get me. Raw Head Bloody Bones would get me. Which is a Scottish nursery boggle from the border countries of Scotland. Of all the things for my family to keep, that one bit of folklore actually narrows the geographic area where my family comes from for generations. I thought, growing up like that, I thought I knew something about the Fae in Scotland and Ireland and England. No, not really. I thought I did. So, I started with what I thought I knew and then go to books. One of the things I do is I make sure that I… Books, not. The. Internet.

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] I'm sorry, you can start with the Internet, it's a stepping off point, but you also have to make sure it is a book and not someone's opinion on the Internet. Because contrary to popular opinion, just because it's on the Internet doesn't make it real. So, don't just take one source either. Take multiple sources. So, start off with books. Then, if you need an expert… I would have talked to an anthropologist or a psychologist about the belief in fairies and how that had affected people and is it… How is it treated? Is it still thought of as a delusion? Or do people still believe? Like, I went back to the 1700s, to a folklorist who went out and interviewed people who had actually seen the high court of the Fae. Not as a delusion, but actually said, "No, they came to my farm. They rode by." So, first, do your book research before you talk to a person that you're taking their time up for. I really sincerely believe… So you have better questions. Don't just go to somebody and say, "Tell me everything you know about X or Y." You need good questions, because you don't want to waste their time. Their time is valuable. So start with books. I now have two shelves of books on the fairies, on Fae, and anthropology and archaeology and anything in that area. It is… It's taught me things about my own folklore that I grew up with, with my grandmother, that I realize now that some of it, she made up.

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] She started with a little kernel of truth, and then she kind of built on it, or my grandfather, great-grandfather did. Because she believed everything my great-grandfather said was gospel. So somebody in my family told a few big windy's…

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] As they used to say. I guess it runs in the family.

 

[Howard] When I'm starting research on anything, I try to remember the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is when you don't know enough to know just how little you know. You're too dumb to know how dumb you are. Imagine, for a moment, that you are sitting in a car and there's a place you want to be and there's a person standing next to the car, and you ask them for directions. They give you directions. You don't know how to drive the car.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay. That's Dunning-Kruger. The directions you just got will not get you there, because you don't even know where to start. One of the things that I've learned, a skill that I have developed, when I search for things on the Internet, and I search for a lot of things on the Internet. Sorry, Laurell. When I search for things on the Internet, one of the first things that comes up is going to be the Wikipedia page. I've gotten really good at skimming it and looking for keywords that I don't recognize that are linked. I will click them to pop open new tabs. All I'm doing now is learning about steering wheels and driveshafts and stick shifts and… Oh, wait, automatic transmission, that's going to make it easier… And filling my head with that. Then I jump down into the bibliography and start finding books. But I'm not actually looking for the books, because I'm way too lazy to go get a book. What I'm looking for is the names of the people who wrote the books. Because often what I can find is that person's blog in which they will say something about this topic. After… Okay, this is time consuming. I'm four hours in at this point, depending on the topic. But at this point, I know enough of the keywords that when I start reading those blog pages, the knowledge is dropping and I have hooks to hang it on. Now, if I go talk to somebody, I'm going to be able to get directions to ShopCo and make the car go there.

[Laurell] One of the things is for… You can use Internet as a jumping off point, you just can't stop there. The other thing you cannot do is use other people's fiction as your only research.

[Dan] Yeah, yeah.

[Laurell] You'd be amazed at how many people try to do that. But I also start with, like, a book that has in its title Encyclopedia or Dictionary of… The Dictionary of Fairies and… There's a long title that goes with it. Catherine Briggs. That was one of the jumping off points for the Merry books. Encyclopedia or dictionary, you have, usually, a lot of information, small bits, and they have a great bibliography. If it doesn't have a great bibliography, don't use it for your research, because you don't know if they did their research or not. I could never do it the way you do it, Howard, my dyslexia would slaughter me.

[Chuckles]

[Laurell] I can't do keywords, I can't skim that fast.

[Howard] I… About… Oh, gosh, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I recognized that I had an I/O problem. I didn't type fast enough and I didn't read fast enough. So I learned to touch type the Dvorak and learned to speed read and it's saved us some time.

[Laurell] I can… I touch type just fine, but I have trouble skimming.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Laurell] Because of dyslexia. So, yes. I am dyslexic. Lucky for me, it's the middle of the word that moves, the ends of the words stay still for me. That means I can kind of figure it out, what it says and what it reads. For those who have dyslexia where the whole word moves, that's much harder.

 

[Brandon] We are actually out of time. This has been a great topic, and a great audience. Thank you, audience from SpikeCon.

[Applause]

[Brandon] Laurell, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Do you have, by chance, a writing prompt you can give our audience?

[Laurell] Do I have a writing prompt? I was walking home from work one day. Start with anything. Start with anything, any sentence. Start with anything. Write from there. Because what I've found that stops a lot of beginning writers is they don't have… They stop themselves before they start. Sometimes, they have the fish head, and the fish head is what you chop off so you have a fish you can cook. Until you sit there and write, you don't know how… You don't know if you are writing fish head or story. But to get your whole fish to fry up for your story, you have to write the stuff at the beginning. Just get started. Take that first step.

[Howard] So our fish head prompt is, "I was walking home from work one day."

[Brandon] And go.

[Laurell] Yup.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Brandon] Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

[Dan] Thank you very much.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/12/15-28-small-evils/

 

Key points: Small evils are easy to relate to, we all have felt them. Small antagonisms turn into small evils, which make nuanced villains. Motivation separates the antagonist and protagonist. Contrasting philosophies. Villains are interesting because they can move upward, while heroes can only fall from grace. Redemptive villains can become heroes. Team sports stories often have small evils villains. We like villains with small evils because they let us see someone who feels things we have felt, and acts out on them. We see ourselves in the negatives of a character, rarely in the positives. We like to watch people be bad. We, the writer, chooses who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist. Consider what would happen if you flip the narrative, shift the perspective. It's important to know why the villain, the antagonist, feels the way they do about the protagonist. When you shrug off external costs, you become a evil. Use escalation, and remember the process that takes a person from human to villain or vice-versa. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 28.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Small Evils.

[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 trying to be bigger.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Victoria, you pitched this idea to us. Will you explain what you mean by small evils?

[Victoria] I do. I will, I will. I am fascinated by villainy and antagonism. It's one of the guiding principles in all of my stories. The thing that I'm really interested in is the idea of, as I said, small evils as compared to big ones. The way… The example I always give is it's Voldemort compared to Umbridge. Dolores Umbridge, one of the prime villains in chapter 5 of the Harry Potter series. The reason is that world domination is not a very grounded concept. It's not something that the vast majority of people can relate to. But almost all of us, I'm pretty sure, have felt a small evil inside of us. We've either been jealous or covetous, we've felt slighted, we've felt as though somebody hasn't given us the attention or the spotlight. I am fascinated by the way in which these small antagonisms can become small evils, that can make very grounded nuanced villains.

[Dan] I love the way that you told us about this earlier, that none of us have met a Voldemort, but we've all met an Umbridge. Right? Some domineering or tyrannical person that we've had to deal with at school or at work or in our own home. So we can relate to that, instinctively.

[Victoria] Yeah. I love it. I was writing a series I called the villain series, Vicious and Vengeful, which genuinely explored this on the most grounded level possible. I wanted to see if I could write a book without heroes and still make you root for one of them. So it became an exploration of small evils, it became an exploration not of the things that people do, but of the things that motivate them to do those things. It becomes about the relatability of the motive. I have a character who basically had a God complex. That was not relatable. So people had a very easy time casting him in the role of the villain. I had another character do the exact same evils in terms of the what, but his why was very different. The why was simply that he wanted revenge on this other character because of the massive falling out that they had. What I found was that people could absolutely relate to the sociopathic character who was bitter about his falling out, and nobody could relate to the sociopathic character who had a God complex. So it became an exploration of motive, and of really cre… Motive turning antagonists into protagonists.

[Brandon] We've often talked about how a lot of times the stories with the strongest villains tend to be the best stories. Strength of the protagonist is directly related to how difficult it is to overcome the villain and how interesting that villain is. It's not all one-to-one, but…

[Victoria] It's not, but… So I'm very anti the concept, like, when you're talking about love stories, that two halves make a whole. When we're talking about hero and villain, or protagonist and antagonist, I absolutely believe that two halves make a whole. That our hero and our villain, our protagonist and our antagonist, for a less dramatic turn of phrase, are in constant conversation. Really. One of the examples I always give of this is Batman and the Joker. Because if you look at what kind of character Joker is, he is formed directly to fit all of Batman's fears. Like, Batman is a complete control freak who wants to have power over his environment, control over his city, who wants to set things right. Joker is an avatar of anarchy. An avatar of chaos, and of everything that Batman fears and can't control. I absolutely believe in writing your heroes and villains not only with the same amount of thought in the same amount of humanity, but also of thinking about them as things which are foils, in constant conversation with each other.

[Brandon] Right. The best hero villain pairs are the ones that espouse contrasting philosophies about life, or have the same goal but very different philosophies getting there. Magneto tends to be my favorite…

[Victoria] Yeah. Mine too.

[Brandon] Villain from comic books. Because they have, over the years, built this contrasting philosophies between him and Prof. X that you can see they both are aligned on trying to achieve the same thing and approach it in very different methods.

[Victoria] Yeah. Talk about a philosophical divide. But one of my favorite things that I heard recently from another writer was that the thing that makes villains so much more interesting is that they don't have a fall from grace that can happen, they can move upward. So they tend to actually protect certain people, or have caveats to their villainy. Whereas the hero can justify almost anything they do for the right cause. So there's a fascinating space between the hero and the villain where one has the ability to rise and the other one has the constant tension of falling.

[Brandon] So, some of my best… My favorite moments in books are when the villain has a chance to… You see, and you bring it, and you're like, "Wow." They could, at this point, make the decision to go… Good… Good is kind of difficult to talk… They could make the decision we want them to make and they don't and we totally see why they don't, and it breaks your heart. Right?

[Victoria] Exactly.

[Brandon] Like, a villain breaking my heart is one of the things that I just… I love when a story is able to do that.

 

[Dan] Well, connected to that, I love redemptive villains. I love that moment where you get there and then they do the thing and you're like, "Wait. You've been the antagonist for two whole books. Now in the third one…" Zuko does this in the Avatar series. He becomes one of the heroes by the end. It's handled so well.

[Howard] In terms of genre, in terms of story type, I think that the small evils villain sees a lot of play in the team sports stories. Because ultimately the triumph of these stories is team comes together and wins. It's not team comes together and overthrows the Dark Lord. That story can work just fine if there is no villain at all. But they really become grounded for us when we have minor antagonists who may be on the same team. People were not getting along with who are preventing us from coming together, or a rival on the other team who is doing things they shouldn't be doing in order to undermine us. But that's still not super villainy. It's small and we can relate.

 

[Victoria] I'm going to make an argument for why we love villains with small evils as compared to large evils. It is the slight, almost like virtual, sadism of the reader, a little bit, but basically they allow us to look at avatars of people who feel the things that we have felt in our lives, and who act out on those things in ways that we cannot. I think there's an immense satisfaction in reading like a villain lowercase V or a villain with small evils because we do see ourselves in them. We always see ourselves in the negatives of a character, very rarely in the positives. Very rarely do we go in the adventure, and be like, "I can relate to that hero, I feel just as brave." Usually, it's like, "I can relate to that antagonist, I have felt this way before." So I think… I don't know, when I write my villain series, I get a lot of messages from people who are like, "This woman got to act out in a way that I obviously can't because society dictates that I don't go burn my ex-husband into ash, but it was very satisfying to read."

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I think we get some satisfaction from getting to watch people be bad. It's sometimes why we enjoy watching a hero have a fall and descend. I remember growing up on Smallville and loving when Clark Kent got his hands on red kryptonite, because we got to see that let loose. That letting loose, which is the thing that villains do so much more readily than heroes, is a very enjoyable reading process.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is a book called King of Liars by the author Nick Martel. This is an arc that I was given by my agent for a new epic fantasy. I honestly don't know if it will be out yet, by the time this episode goes live. It should be around this time. I really enjoyed this. Debut authors are always fun to read. I like to see what the new writers are doing. Often, they make me try to level up my own writing, because I'm like, "Man, if the kids are doing stuff like this these days, I gotta get better." This story is very fun, because it's about a family, they're called the Kingmen, not the King's Men…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] The Kingmen. This family, whose job was to kind of help protect the throne. The protagonist's father, instead betrayed the throne. He lives under the shadow of his father having been the Kingmen who went against the rules they have. They have a very stratified society. It's got all sorts of interesting politics and things to it. It's got a very cool worldbuilding, with a shattered moon that is constantly dropping debris on the planet, which is a very science-fiction concept taken into fantasy, which is the sort of stuff I like. It's kind of about his story of deciding is he a villain, is his father… Was his father a villain, what is… Where is the evil? And there are small evils all over this story. It's less about superpowered characters fighting other superpowered characters and more about the sticky messiness that comes from family expectations and societal expectations, in an epic fantasy package. So. Kingdom of Liars by Nick Martel.

 

[Victoria] Also, you hit on something in that pitch that I want to talk about.

[Brandon] Yeah, let's go for it.

[Victoria] [It's about] perspective. It's about… We obviously… It's a very trite phrase, like, that the villain tends to be the hero of their own journey. But we really didn't think about the fact that we choose when we're writing who is our protagonist and who is our antagonist. It's fascinating to analyze a little bit why we choose these things, understanding that if we flip the narrative or we shifted the narrative, one scene to the left, or one person over, we could end up with a completely different dynamic here. So I often challenge myself when I'm writing protagonist and antagonist to make sure that I write the antagonist as someone who doesn't necessarily feel like they're right, but could, through a different lens… I would say it's the… Like the Gryffindors and the Slytherins. There's like the Gryffindors are written as the heroes in that story from a perspectival sense. So they get centered in the narrative. But I'm always interested in what happens when you shift the narrative one over. There's a book for younger readers out right now called Nevermore that essentially follows like a girl who is kind of set up to become like a super-villain, like a Voldemort, magic villain, and it's about like what happens if she didn't choose this, but the world is so afraid of the kind of power that she has that they have essentially vilified her in advance. I'm fascinated by the idea that we choose the perspective, and in so choosing, we do choose who our heroes are.

[Dan] One of the… One of my favorite villain kind of series to look at is actually the Oceans series, Oceans 11 through 13. Partly because they do what you're talking about. Like, there is this small evil. The first movie is this big heist and it's all very stylized and all very cute. But, at the core of it, is you ruined my life and you stole my wife. So now I'm going to steal her back. Which, not only is it that very relatable thing and a very small evil, but you could totally flip the story around, like you're talking. If the casino owner was the protagonist, here's this old ex-con who's coming to wreck my home and steal my wife from me. I think that that's amazing.

[Victoria] Yeah, it's the comprehension of both sides. You don't have to root for both sides equally, but it's really important that you understand why the villain or the antagonist feels the way they do about the protagonist.

[Dan] To follow that on, you look at Oceans 12, which is the least loved and least successful of the series. It does not have a strong villain at all. The villain that it has, has no personal connection to the characters. So that's why when they got to the third in the series, they're like, "Nope. We have to bring this back to basics. We have to have a villain that there's a reason to dislike them." Because the hole that not having a strong villain leaves ruins every other part of the movie.

[Brandon] That movie in particular, that series… Like, there are series you can get away with your villain being a little bit weak. It works for certain situations. But in that series, you have to root for the bad guys.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] To do that, that series puts you against someone worse. That's the whole framing device of why you can root for these people doing pretty terrible things. Those movies absolutely need a strong villain for that reason.

[Victoria] I… Oh.

 

[Howard] I want to bring up a principle here. The principle of external costs. The idea that you profit on something because there is a cost that you didn't need to pay, but that someone else did. For me, one of the easiest definitions of evil is once you know about the external costs, you shrug it off and say, "Eh. Somebody else will pay it." A horrifying example of this which doesn't actually end in horror, this morning as we were picking grapes to bring to the craft services table, Sandra found actual ripe deadly nightshade in and among the grape plants. Okay? A handful of these berries will kill a child. The neighbor child, the toddler, loves wandering over to our yard and eating grapes off the vine. Deciding not to weed when we don't know about the deadly nightshade is just deciding not to weed and there's a tragedy. But once you've seen that plant, deciding not to immediately drop everything and rip them all up and tell the neighbor… Well, now I've become evil. It's just a little thing. Maybe nothing will happen. But that's evil.

[Dan] You should get to that at some point, Howard.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Yeah. This has to be the last point that I want to…

[Howard] I made my son do it. By which I mean, I asked Sandra to make my son do it. Then I checked before I left.

 

[Victoria] This has to be the last point that I want to make, which is one of escalation. One of my favorite examples to give from recent pop-culture is Vulture, in Spiderman Homecoming. Michael Keaton's character. What's so amazing about that character is it starts from such a grounded place. It is an escalation of minute choices. It is an escalation of a man trying to care for his family, who ends up having his job taken away from him, who then decides he'll just have to sell the products that he has on the black market. Who then escalates into a much larger business, who then escalates into obviously a villain and murderer and terrifying human. I think that is probably my favorite thing is to remember whether you're rewinding from villain back into human or fast forwarding from human, like your standard human character, into villain, that there is a process that happens there. Nobody just starts out and is like, "I'm going to take over the world." There is something that happens to displace them or set them at odds with the norms of society or with the good guys, whoever's on the other side, that makes them feel not only self-othering but as though they belong in the place that they're in.

 

[Brandon] So, we're out of time for this episode. Let's go to our homework, which you are very excited about.

[Victoria] I am, because it's a direct extrapolation of the thing that I was just talking about. So, often you'll be told, if you were the hero of the story, what would it look like? But I essentially want the listener to become the villains of the story. I want them to take their own petty grievances, I want them to take their own perceived weaknesses, their own cracks in their armor of life, the things that they know get to them. I want you to start asking yourself what steps stand between you as you are now and you as a villain in a narrative. What would it take, and what would it look like? I think this is important, because it is that reminder that all villains started normal at some point. So, like, just start extrapolating it out and see what kind of villain you would be.

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

[Howard] And do the weeding. Please.

[Chuckles]

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/06/28/15-26-taking-the-chance-with-david-weber/

 

Key points: Taking the chance, taking risks, is the only way to be successful. "He who will not risk cannot win." To succeed, take the risk of failing. If you don't submit, you can't make a sale. Be a storyteller. At some point, it will turn into work. Keep going. When you can't get the platonic ideal book on the page, what do you do? Write the damn book. Learn from it. Characterization is critical. You have to be you. Write the story that interests you. Choose your verbs wisely. Never bury dialogue inside a paragraph. Sentences are what you build books out of. Characters are what stories are about, sentences are how you tell the story. Get those two things right.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, episode 26.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Taking the Chance, with David Weber.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, David Weber. Thank you so much for being on the podcast with us.

[David] Thank you for inviting me.

[Brandon] David Weber is one of the best-selling science fiction writers of all time, so we are super excited to have him. We are alive again at SpikeCon.

[Whoo! Applause!]

 

[Brandon] So, this topic was one that you suggested, David. The idea of taking the chance, meaning taking risks with your writing. What made you want to do this topic?

[David] Well, it's not just taking risks with your writing once you're an established writer. I cannot tell you how many people I've encountered who I think could have been successful writers, except that they were afraid to take the chance of failing at something that they had dreamed about. I could have been published easily 10 years earlier than I was if I hadn't kept finding excuses to do other things instead. That means I've been publishing for 30 years and I've lost a third of the time that I could have been published at this point. I mentioned in the preshow when I was talking to our hosts that there's a quote from John Paul Jones which has become increasingly important to me over the years, and it has nothing to do with not giving up the ship. But Jones said that, "It seems to be a law inflexible unto itself that he who will not risk cannot win." So if you don't take the risk of failing as a writer, you can never succeed as a writer. So you're sitting there, and you have this dream that says I could be a writer. Perhaps you could. But if you keep saying I could be a writer long enough, one day you wake up and it's turned into I could have been a writer, but the opportunity is gone now. Okay? So if you want to write, you have got to take the chance of being rejected, and possibly being rejected over and over again, until you find the right first reader, the right publisher that says, "Oh. I could do this." Okay? You have to remember while you're doing this, you control, or writers in general control a resource that publishers have to have. Publishers exist to publish. That means they need things to publish. Which means that they are constantly on the lookout for things to publish. Yes, they get a lot of dreck and there's… the first readers pile is the slush pile, and people read it and they go, "Oh, my God." I actually know of one book that was submitted on brown paper written in purple crayon. Okay? You don't get read when you do that kind of submission. But if you don't submit, you cannot possibly make a sale. I cannot emphasize… Over emphasize how important it is to be willing to do that. The other thing that I think you need to bear in mind is you can learn to write better with editorial support and with the practice. You can learn to write better. But what you have to be to make it work in this business is a storyteller. You have to have that bug. You can increase the skill with which you exercise that need to be a storyteller. But that's a critical element. If you don't feel that inside, if you don't feel the story that needs… That's growing that needs to come out, then you don't need to try and be an author. Because you're going to be fighting your own nature the entire time that you're trying to write a story. Unless that is what it is your nature to be. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, storytellers have to tell stories. That's certainly true in my case.

 

[Brandon] Howard, you had something you wanted to say?

[Howard] Yeah. I was just going to… I like the John Paul Jones quote. We've had the opportunity to visit NASA a couple of times. They have that famous slogan, failure is not an option. Because there are times at which, boy, you just… You can't allow yourself to fail. I created a maxim within my own universe, which is "Failure is not an option. It's mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do."

[David] Yeah.

[Howard] The idea there… I mean, that doesn't get you past the John Paul Jones quote, which is that you have to take that chance in the first place. But I am always reminding myself that I am going to fail. It's just gonna happen. All I get to choose is whether or not I learn from it and whether I let myself quit.

[David] Well, NASA's failure is not an option stands on the shoulders of every single thing they did that failed as they were doing the engineering, when they were developing…

[Howard] They blew up so many rockets.

[Laughter]

[David] Absolutely. Okay? Failure is not an option means that ultimately we must succeed. It doesn't mean that we won't have the occasional catastrophe along the way. That we won't have Columbia. That we won't have…

[Dan] But, to your point about the whole premise of this episode, if NASA had never done anything that could have failed, they never would have gotten into orbit, they never would have gotten on the moon.

[David] Exactly.

[Dan] They had to be willing to take those risks and screw up horribly in order to achieve what they eventually have achieved.

 

[David] That's absolutely true. It's… Okay. No task worth doing springs fully blown and fully performed from the brow of Zeus. Okay? You have to go out there and make it work. All right? Now, most of the successful writers that I know would write whether anyone was buying their work or not. We have to do it. That's part of that storytelling bug that I was talking about. Okay? Whether we're writing for our own entertainment, our family's entertainment, or just because, my God, it's 2 o'clock in the morning, I can't sleep, I gotta do some more writing, we write. If you don't have that kind of… Robert Asprin once said, and Robert and I did not necessarily see together on all things…

[Laughter]

[David] But he said, "Successful authors are like rats. If we don't wear our fingers down on the keyboard every day, our fangs grow through our brains and kill us.

[Laughter]

[David] Okay? It's still a valid metaphor, even though I use voice recognition software when I write now. But it's true. If you… I have this need to be crafting stories. Okay? Now, for the last year or so, I haven't been, and that's because I face planted into a cement floor in Atlanta the day before Dragon Con and gave myself a concussion, broke my nose into places, stitches inside my mouth, the whole 9 yards. It has taken me effectively a year to recover from the concussion status to where I am once again really writing. Okay? It's been a real trial for me and for people who were expecting books from me and everything else, but sometimes, the need to tell stories is sort of temporarily stymied by the fact that, you know what, my brain's not working.

[Howard] One of the first things that I learned about… I'm a web cartoonist, and one of the first things I learned in this regard was when I still had a day job, early 2000's, we would take… I was in the software industry. We'd take two weeks off around Christmas, because kind of the whole industry wound down. For that two weeks, I told myself my Christmas present to me is that I'm going to pretend I'm a cartoonist full-time. I'm just going to do this. I would tell my plan to people. They're like, "You're going to pretend to have a job over Christmas?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "Okay, one, you're a broken human, and, two, what does your family think?" What I found is those are some of my fondest memories of this. Yeah. Storyteller gotta stug… Gotta story tell."

 

[David] There comes a time, in a given project or whatever, where it turns into work. Where you have to drive yourself to it. You have to do that. I have, in every book, I have what I call the chapter. That's the point at which I say, "This entire book is dreck. What was I thinking? Oh, my God, I can't get this to come together." The only thing that I can do is just keep grinding it out and saying, "Boy, this is sucky." Okay, that kind of thing? Then, when I get to the final edit, I can't identify the chapter.

[Howard] I was going to say, you've refined your process to the point that only happens for one chapter doing a project?

[Laughter]

[David] No, that's… Pretty much, yeah. You know. It's this kind of thing.

[Howard] Winning.

[David] Yeah.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and… Let's stop for a book of the week, then we'll get back to it.

[David] Okay.

[Brandon] You have our book, or books of the week, this week.

[David] I have two. One is The Gordian Protocol, which came out in May, with Jacob Holo. Who is a BMW engineer in an alternate universe. I think that our backgrounds, the synergy was really, really good. He's got three or four self published novels out. This will be his first traditionally published novel. Is his first traditionally published novel. This was not one of the two I was thinking about, but he has just handed me the draft of the Valkyrie Protocol, which is the sequel. It's pretty much ready to go. We have to wait for him to get a hiatus in that real-life job to do a little tweaking that I pointed out to him. The other book that I've just handed in is the sequel to Out Of the Dark, which, yes, is the one with vampires in it. This one is rather cleverly titled Into the Light. I did it with Chris Kennedy, of the Four Horsemen universe and whatnot. He was my co-author on it. I'm really pleased with the way that it worked out. The vampires are a little flamboozled when they begin finding out some things about their own past and their own existence that neither they nor the earlier writers who didn't like the vampires didn't know. Okay? For… I won't go any deeper into it than that. But suffice it to say, that Vlad Tepes was a tiny bit mistaken about exactly how and what he became when he became it.

[Brandon] Excellent.

 

[Brandon] This topic's very interesting to me, because I work with a lot of aspiring writers. I teach at the University, and of course the podcast, and things like this. Looking back at myself when I was first making the choice to start writing, one of the things that I think holds back new writers, and I've kind of found some language that I can describe this more recently, is that, for me, there was this beautiful book I imagine somewhere out in the aether, right? It was like the Platonic ideal of a book. As, having read for many years, and sitting down to write the first time, it was like I knew this book was out there, but then my crude fingers could not get that book on the page. It was really frustrating to me. Because it felt like… It wasn't fear that I think stopped me, it was this sense that I was taking something beautiful and I was making it something flawed and terrible, because my skill wasn't good enough. I've found multiple other aspiring writers that kind of have this same attitude that… Less fear, more like, I guess I must not have done enough worldbuilding or I must not have thought it through enough, because this beautiful story, I just can't make it come out on the page.

[David] Well, that's…

[Brandon] So, I guess my question to you is strategies for writers who are having trouble making that transition, taking that chance, giving themselves permission to fail. What are some strategies that people could use to do that?

[David] Write the damn book.

[Laughter]

[David] And when you're done, if it's not what you thought you were going to come up with, file it under this was a learning experience, these are the things that I can see that I did wrong. Do those right in the next book. I have an entire file cabinet at home that has probably 300 short stories in it, that were written solely because they were things that I wanted to play with as a writer. How was I going to describe this? How was I going to handle this bit of characterization? You… Basically, this is one of the crafts that the only way you can learn to do it is to do it. There's not a credential program somewhere that is going to say, "Okay. Now you have a diploma. You'll go out there and be a successful writer." Okay? There are all kinds of courses that you can take and training that you can seek that will help you, give you tools that you might not have otherwise. But there's nobody out there who can teach you how to be a writer. Anybody who says we will teach you how to be a writer is taking your money. Okay? Because what they can do is they can teach you how they are a writer. They can teach you how these three guys over here are writers. They can't teach you how you're a writer. Okay? Characterization. Characterization is a critical component of any story you're going to tell. How do you build a character? Okay? One of the things that I do when I'm doing writing workshops is I rollup a character from one of the role-playing game series. I tell my students, I say, "Okay, this is the character that you have. This is the age, this is the gender, everything else. Go home, and between now and the next session, write me an explanation for why this character exists with these skills, these abilities, these disabilities." They frequently turn it into what is actually a very good short story. Okay? In getting out who this character is. That's the kind of thing that you have to be able to build on your own. I can give you that assignment, and tell you to go home and do it. But I can't say to you, the first way that you should do it is by doing thus and so, because the best that you could learn from that is how I do it. What makes a writer succeed is that writer's voice. You can take exactly the same story, the exact same plot, even the exact same characters by name. Okay? And have two different writers do the story. You have two totally different stories. Okay?

[Brandon] Absolutely.

 

[David] One of them is going to be the way that you tell the story, and one of them is going to be the way that somebody else tells the story. What makes you a successful writer is your voice finding its audience. You cannot do that trying to be someone else. You have to be you.

[Dan] Yeah. I… Finding that voice of your own is critical and it is difficult. I like to think about this in terms of Ender's Game. Because they had the kids in the Battle School, and they would fight against each other. Then there's this really critical scene towards the end of it, where Bean stands up in the lunch room and says, "Guys. We are doing the same strategies over and over and over. We will never learn anything new until we give ourselves the freedom to fail." That's when they kind of throw out the whole competition system and they say, "Okay. We're going to try this, and it probably will be awful, but we'll learn something from it.

[David] Yeah.

[Dan] So I imagine someone out there listening to this podcast thinking, lack of risk-taking is not my problem, I've tried everything I can think of. It's… I'm just not selling anything. Maybe what you need to do is something ridiculous. Maybe you need to change genre. Maybe you need to try something new. Maybe you need to put that big golden book that Brandon was talking about, that idealized thing that you have in mind, put that on a shelf and write something different.

[David] Okay. Let me tell you one of the most critical things that you should bear in mind as a writer. Write the story that interests you. They say, write what you know. Well, I don't know anybody who's been a starship captain. Okay? I'm sorry, there just aren't too many of them around for me to go interview, that kind of thing. But if there's a type of story that is especially suited to you, that you enjoy reading, etc. Point number one, you're not unique. That means there are other people who enjoy reading that same sort of story. It may not be what's currently hot. But publishers don't necessarily look for what's currently hot. They look for what they expect to be durable. Some publishers do. They want to push you into writing whatever is selling right now. Avoid them. Okay? I'm sorry. But you should. Okay? Now, if they say, "We'll pay you a stack of money to write it," then you can say to yourself, "Okay. They'll pay me a stack of money. I'll get some practice writing, and then I'll be able to go do what I want to do." But, point number one, if you like it, other people will like it. Point number two is if you like it, you will write it better than something you are writing that you feel that you have to write in order to be hot, in order to sell your work. Okay? Point number three is publishers are constantly looking for things to publish. Now, some publishers, for whatever combination of reasons, have blinders on or at least blinkers. Okay? Maybe, it's like, I don't agree with the political philosophy in that book. There's all kinds of idiosyncratic factors that can come into play. But the bottom line is publishers need stuff to publish. Keith Laumer once said that there's not the great unsold novel. There's only the great unwritten novel. Because if you write it, and it is good and you submit it long enough, you will sell it because publishers are looking for things to publish. The editor who discovered Thomas Wolfe… Thomas Wolfe had been rejected about eight or nine dozen times. Okay? Then this guy found… Discovered Thomas Wolfe and made his entire career out of the fact that he was the guy who discovered Thomas Wolfe. He was asked by another editor at one point. The guy said, "I read the first quarter of a million words, and it sucked. Where did you realize…?" He said, "About word 300,000."

[Hmm, hmm, hmm.]

[David] Okay? What I'm saying to you is that eventually, if what you have done is publishable, it will find a buyer. Sometimes, even if what you've done isn't punishable… Publishable. Punishable? There was…

[Laughter]

[David] I've read some horrible books before. But even if what you've written in its current form isn't publishable, sometimes you'll get that little comment back that will tell you why it wasn't. More often than not, you'll get a form letter that says, "I'm sorry. It doesn't really meet our needs at this moment. Etc., etc." But sometimes you'll get that little flicker of a response, and you go, "Oh!" Now, I've been doing this… I've supported myself as a writer since I was 17. I'm 67 this year. So I've been writing… I've been earning my living pushing words around for 50 years. Okay? I've been a published novelist for… Well, we sold the first… I sold the first book in April 1989. So this is the 30th year since I sold the first book. In the course of that time, I like to think I've learned a few things. Okay? There are some very simple things that an author… Okay. For example. Any aspiring writer should realize that the most important word in any sentence is the verb. Choose your verbs wisely. Don't say, "He came quickly to his feet." Say, "He leapt to his feet. He jerked to his feet. He jerked upright." Okay? Never use an -ing verb when you can avoid it, unless you want the voice of what you're writing to be passive. All right? Never bury dialogue inside a paragraph. If there's dialogue in a paragraph, start the paragraph with the dialogue and arrange the internal mechanics to make that work. Okay? Don't worry about choppy paragraphs. Worry about where you want to direct the reader's eye. You're setting the cadence, you're creating the rhythm. Maybe you need short choppy sentences and paragraphs at this point. Maybe you need one line paragraphs for emphasis. Okay? Maybe the one line paragraph that you need is, "In the world blew up." Okay? Because you're in the middle of a combat situation, there's a missile incoming, the character you're writing about doesn't know it. There's combat chatter, they're saying, "We're under fire," the character's turning around. Then the world blew up. As a separate paragraph. So think about those sorts of things when you're writing. That's not a question of my telling you to write in my voice. Because these are things that any writer can profit from, in the way that they construct and craft sentences, and sentences are what you build books out of.

[Brandon] We could probably sit here for another hour and listen to this.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because these are excellent points. But we are out of time. I want to thank our audience at SpikeCon. Thank you guys.

[Applause]

[Brandon] I want to thank Mr. Weber for coming on the podcast.

 

[Brandon] Do you have a writing prompt you can give to our listeners?

[David] A writing prompt?

[Brandon] Yes.

[David] Something to do. I would say, go home and create a character. Okay? Not one that you set out to build because this is going to go in your story. But give yourself the assignment of taking a character that you didn't create because you rolled it up or whatever. Then, build in your worldbuilding bible, in your tech bible, whatever, build why that character is who that character is. Because stories are about characters. If the character is not interesting to the reader, the story will go nowhere. If the character is not interesting to you, and understood by you, you will not be able to communicate it to the reader. Your characters will still, if you do this long enough, the characters will evolve in the storytelling, and they should. So, as the life experience of that character is shared with your readers in multiple books, you have to understand how that character changes and incorporate it. Characters are what stories are about. Sentences are how you tell the story. Get those two things right, and the story will usually succeed. A weak story that is well told will succeed, where a strong story that is weakly told fails.

[Brandon] Awesome. I don't know that we could put it better than that. So, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/06/14/15-24-keeping-it-fresh-with-jim-butcher/

 

Key points: How do you keep a series fresh? Do you reinvent the story? Try to write a story that is just a little bit more than you think you can do. Force yourself to stretch. Do you focus on specific things to improve in each book, or do you tackle different styles of stories? Some of it is different styles, but the basic skeleton of each story is the same. How do you write ongoing stories about a changing character, without losing what people love about them? Start with what is going to change in this book, and work backwards from that. Craft is fundamental. How do you use different genres to keep your career fresh? Different genres offer different opportunities. It's fun to try different characters, different arrangements, different stories. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 24.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Keeping It Fresh, with Jim Butcher.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Jim Butcher.

[Yay! Applause]

[Jim] Hello.

[Brandon] Jim Butcher, many many time best-selling author of many many awesome books. We are super happy to have you on the podcast, Jim.

[Jim] Thank you very much.

[Howard] We're recording here live at NASFIC Spikecon in Layton, Utah.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Howard] So that was the audience noise that you heard. Thank you, live audience.

[Applause]

 

[Brandon] All right. So, keeping it fresh.

[Dan] I love that this sounds like an after school special from the 80s about rapping. [wrapping?]

[Brandon] Yep.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Yep. Well, it would probably be an after school special about something important that would have rapping in it incidentally.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] Done by people who look like us.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Jim, we decided to talk about this because you have one of the longest-running series in science fiction and fantasy going right now. Some of the latest books and last books in the series are some of the best. So I consider you an expert at keeping a series fresh. It's something that's very kind of near to my heart because I am writing book 4 of a very big series right now.

[Jim] Of course.

[Brandon] That's kind of in my head. So I guess my first question to you is how do you keep the Dresden Files so fresh? How do you keep reinventing the story?

[Jim] To me, I don't think I'm reinventing… It doesn't seem to me that I'm reinventing anything. When I do a Dresden Files story… I kind of had the general shape of the whole thing in mind when I got started. So, I mean, I got to plan it all out. So I would know, well, okay, this is this. This is what's going to happen in this part of the story. This is going to be the book about necromancers. This is going to be the one about… This is going to be the personal one where he gets an apprentice, and stuff like that. So, I mean, I had the plan going from the get go. So, in a lot of ways, it doesn't seem like it's particularly fresh to me. I think the real thing that keeps the books being interesting and involving and longer and longer is that I keep trying to write the story that I'm not sure I'm skilled enough to write. When I plan the story, any time when I sit down and I get set to, where I'm here's how I'm going to do the dramatic action, here's how I'm going to do the personal tensions, and stuff like that, I always try and plan the story just a little bit more than I think I can readily do. So that when I'm going forward, I'm never sure I'm going to be able to get the story done the way I wanted to do. As a result, I think that makes you keep growing as a writer.

[Brandon] Forcing yourself to stretch.

[Jim] Sure. Sure. You keep trying to reach a little bit further than you've done before. As long as you can do that, you can keep improving. I think that's kind of the meta-strategy that sort of has the side effect of making the series more fresh and interesting as you go along.

[Howard] It's the self-contained version of the yes I can principle.

[You suffer like that, yeah]

[Howard] Mr. Taylor, can you draw an entire Munchkin deck in a month? Yes I can!

[Jim] Right, right.

[Howard] I'm going to have to figure out how to do that. I stretched from it, and I'm super glad I took on the project. But the correct answer was I don't think so, but I want to.

[Chuckles]

[Jim] Right. Yeah. Something like that.

 

[Brandon] Do you ever take a book… I ask this, because it's something that I do… And say, "You know, in this specific book, I'm going to work on this one thing. This is something that I don't know, that I want to learn to do better." Like, I'm going to work on my humor in this book. Or I'm going to work on my interpersonal relationships or things. Do you take it that specifically, or is it more just here's a style of story I've never done before?

[Jim] A lot of it is here's a style of story that I've never done before, because I'll change it around. But, on the other hand, the Dresden Files, I mean, the basic skeleton of every story is the same. Somebody's up to something, Harry Dresden starts poking around in it, and then things go crazy. I mean, that's how you write it. But as far as the… As far as focusing specifically on areas of my writing, not so much. I mean, I just sort of figure that as long as I'm trying to cover the entire range of human experience, or at least as much of it as I can within the books that have purple haired fairies and stuff like that. That as long as I'm trying to include all that experience, it's going to force me to grow in other ways and in ways I wasn't expecting. So I'll be writing along, and occasionally I write a scene and I'm like, "Man, the humor was really good in that scene. What did I do?" I'll have to stop and go back and think about this as I was producing it, how did I get that result. Other times, I'll just write a long, going, "Wow, I did not expect this to be this soul crushingly intense emotional scene." But it worked out there. Then I have to stop and figure out, "Well, why did it work out there?" Occasionally, I can't explain it. I do a lot of writing by instinct. Once I get going and I'm actually doing it, I'll trust my instincts pretty firmly. If they start taking me in a direction, it's like, "Yeah, I'll go that way. Let's see what happens." I mean, the worst thing that can happen is that you write something that wasn't quite right, and you delete it, and you do it again.

 

[Brandon] Dan, you kind of had… Not kind of, you had to do this with the John Cleaver books, right?

[Dan] Yeah. Six books in that series.

[Brandon] How did you keep those fresh? The second third from the first third, or how were you looking at each book and trying to do something different?

[Dan] The big problem for me that I kept tackling with each new book and with each new trilogy was this is an ongoing story about a character changing. How can I show that he is different than he was, while still being recognizably the same person that everyone loves from… If you read the first book, you love the character for certain reasons. I need to advance him, but I can't throw away all the things that people love about that. So, I kind of focused on character arcs. What is he going… How is he going to change in this one? What is going to be different at the end of this book than at the start? Then, kind of work backwards from there. I'm curious to know, I wanted to ask about Harry Dresden with the same thing. How do you… Because he does change, he does grow. But he is always intrinsically himself. Do you think about that consciously, or does that just come very natural to you?

[Jim] For the most part, it comes naturally. There's some things where I'll stop and look at and I'll go, "Now wait a minute." If I've just had Dresden take some given action and I'll think, "Well, that's not necessarily in character for him. So why is he doing something different?" A lot of times, I'll be writing along and the beta readers… The way I operate is I'll write a chapter and then the chapter goes off to my beta readers while I'm working on the next one. Then I start getting feedback from them, to hear about what they thought about the previous chapter. A lot of times, I'll come across something, the beta readers will be like, "This is really out of character for that character." They'll list specific reasons why. I mean, I've got beta readers who'll be like, "Well, in this book on this page in this paragraph…"

[Chuckles]

[Jim] Then I've gotta go, "Okay. They're right. That is out of character for what I've established." So why… Do I need to change it or do I need to explain why it's different? Depending on how much room is left in the book… I love exploring why is it different. Have Dresden show up later and talk to that character and be like, "What's up?" Try and find out what's going on in their life and so on. Characters change as they go along. But at the same time, the core stuff… I don't know, I think holding onto the core character is as much about craft as it is about psychology. By the time you're… By the time you've gotten your language established of which language it's used for which character, whether you're talking about tags and traits, or just their personal dialogue. By the time you've done that, it establishes a very very firm picture in the reader's mind if you keep it consistent. The longer you go, the more firm that picture is. So in that sense, the long series is really on my side. It's much easier to manipulate you guys when you let me do it for a long time.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I want to take a moment and call our listeners attention to a couple of things you just said. On the one hand, you said, "Oh, I do a lot of this by instinct." Which feels very pantsy, very discovery writery. But what you just said about craft, when you talk about the craft of the dialogue, of a character's language… We've done probably a dozen or more episodes where we've drilled down on that. How with one line of dialogue, the reader should be able to tell which character is speaking, without any other tags. How do you make that happen? What I want to illustrate here, just by calling this out, is that when you say instinct, I think part of what you mean is that you know that craft enough that you've stopped needing to think about it when you're writing Dresden's dialogue. It is just there.

[Jim] Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, yeah. That's the whole point of craft. The whole point of craft is the wood worker at his bench who knows his tools so well he doesn't need to think about using them, he doesn't need to think about how they're going to be employed or even where they are. He just reaches out and picks up his T-square and goes to work. That's the foundation of what you've got to be if you want to be a professional writer. You've got to have your craft down well enough that your brain is free to do these other things. Like, to be able to suggest to you, hey, maybe this character needs to have this sort of revelatory scene right here, so that we know more about who they are. Then, when you go back later, once you're going back and you're brushing up the stuff after you've gotten it written, then you can go back later and go, "Well, you know what, I really need to establish this character a little bit better, more firmly, if he's going to have that big a role late in the book. I need to have him hit harder early on." Stuff like that. Which is why I've got to do that right now. I got Marcone doing big stuff at the end of this story, but his introduction is a little bit soft. Even though he's got a much larger presence in the overall series, there's going to be some people that pick up this book and it'll be the first book they've read in the series. So that means, just from… Purely from the craft standpoint, I got to go back and make sure he's got a good entrance that is going to be commensurate with his role in the story.

[Howard] He's gotta be in the establishing shot…

[Jim] Yeah.

[Howard] And he's gotta be front and center.

[Jim] Exactly. He's gotta be there. So that's one of the things I'm working on. That I've got all that to do before the manuscript goes off to the editor, but… But, yeah, the craft is indispensable. I can't think of anything… I mean, when I first started learning about writing craft, I hated the whole idea. I hated the entire concept. My teachers told me so many things that I just didn't like, and I sat there, all huffy about it. Because my teacher would say things like, "The business of writing is the business of manipulating people's emotions." It's like, "That sounds awful." But she's right.

[Chuckles]

[Jim] When you're a writer and you can write characters and you can make people laugh when you want them to laugh and you can make them cry when you want them to cry and support who you want them to support and hate who you want them to hate, that's a good story. That's the story everybody wants to read. Oh, I hate this guy. What's he doing next?

[Laughter]

[Jim] That's… To do that, that's the entire point of writing craft. That is why it exists, to help me manipulate your emotions.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop and do a promo, and talk about our book of the week, which is The Aeronaut's Windlass.

[Jim] Okay.

[Brandon] Can you tell us a little bit about it?

[Jim] The Aeronaut's Windlass is a steam punk series. I told my editor I wanted to make it a… I wanted the genre name on it to be steam opera. She's like, "Well, you can't make up your own genres." I'm like, "Watch me!"

[Laughter]

[Jim] But essentially, it's a story that's set in a world that's very hostile to human life. So humanity exists inside these enormous towers called spires. The only way the spires are connected is by airships. So all trade, all military stuff, all travel, it all happens by airships because the surface is just… It's a green hell, and you don't want to go there, so we'll be there next book.

[Laughter]

[Jim] But… So, it's a really… It's a fun series, because you've got all these spires, so you've got all these human cultures that are evolving entirely separate from one another, so you can get in… You can get just all kinds of crazy nonsense, which is so much fun. I mean, it's… In a way, I'm just riffing off the Odyssey here, going from island to island, adventure to adventure. But that's what we're doing in the Cinder Spires. So the characters are… There's an air ship captain, there's a privateer so we've got a pirate, and there's an heir of one of the wealthier and more influential houses, so we've got a princess. There's a girl who can talk to cats, so… That's her big thing is she talks to cats. The cats are smart. The cats can… The cats understand, I mean, they understand humans, except when they don't want to.

[Chuckles]

[Jim] I mean…

[Howard] So, cats.

[Jim] Cats, yeah. So then we've got a cat who's a prince of his people and he's just such a jerk and everybody loves him. I don't get that. But [garbled]

[Howard] What's the series? What's the series name?

[Jim] The series is the Cinder Spires.

[Howard] The Cinder Spires.

[Jim] The spires are all made of these giant… This ancient black stone that is all but indestructible and nobody knows where it came from.

[Howard] And the genre is steam opera.

[Jim] Steam H-opera. Yeah.

[Brandon] I've read the first book and it was one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had in a while. They're just… It's a wonderful book. So you guys should all read it.

[Jim] Yes, you should. Everyone.

[Laughter, applause]

 

[Brandon] We went really long on the front of the podcast, so we are almost out of time. But I do want to touch on one other concept, which will tie into this idea of what we just talked about. You are mostly known for writing urban fantasy, even though I know that that's not where you started in your pre-writing career, your prepublication career. You've since published your epic fantasy, and you've now got steam opera.

[Jim] Right.

[Brandon] Like, how do you approach different genres in keeping your own career fresh?

[Jim] Going to the different genres is a lot of fun, because, I mean, really, you get to play with different toys, and you get to arrange them very differently, and you get to tell slightly different stories based on which… What is strong in the various genres. I just took out… I've got like half of my first science fiction done, that's been done. I did that like 10 years ago. I stopped writing that book with my poor science-fiction character… He had just ejected from his ship whose core was about to explode in a decaying orbit over the moon with a solar flare coming on. He's been there for like 10 years.

[Laughter]

[Jim] I'll have to get back to that one someday. That was sort of Men in Black meets X-Men on the moon. So that was a lot of fun, too. But, yeah, when you get to go to the different genres and you get to make the different characters and you get to build the wild new stuff that you… It's like, wow, I really wish I could do this in the Dresden Files, but really, laser beams are not really a thing there. Laser pistols are not really a thing there. Oooh, but in science fiction, I can totally do this. But the different genres, they just offer you different opportunities. I mean, at the end of the day, you're still working with humans, and humans are always the same thing. I mean, it doesn't matter at what point in history you go to, human nature remains the same. So… It's just fun to take humans and plop them into weird situations and see how they react. That… just erase this part, okay. I'm starting to sound like a psychopath at this point.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I know, drop people in, poke them with a stick, see what happens.

[Jim] Sure, sure.

[Brandon] That's storytelling, right there.

[Jim] Sticks. Yes.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to thank our audience, Spikecon.

[Applause]

[Brandon] I want to thank Jim for being on the podcast. Do you by chance have a writing prompt you can throw at our audience?

[Jim] A writing prompt?

[Brandon] Yes.

[Jim] Let me think here. [Pause] Yeah. Something we didn't know was intelligent has been intelligent all along. Go.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Dan] Nice.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/31/15-22-writing-for-children-with-shannon-and-dean-hale/

 

Key Points: Children like formulas, the same thing again and again. Often this is the same beats, just like any genre. Sometimes it takes them a long time to make the connection, to figure out what is happening. They need to realize it themselves. Write what you wish you had as a kid. The thing a child loves may not be what you would have guessed. Don't try to simplify an adult story for children, put yourself in the child's place and write the story that way. Don't try to streamline or simplify. Do make sure context is clear, and repeat things three times. Focus on what matters to a person at that age. Humor, comedy is hard. It's surprise, unexpected twists. Non sequiturs are hilarious for kids. Physical humor. Callbacks and echoing. Kids want you to tell them the truth. Middle grade, especially, lacks adult figures. Kids don't have a lot of control of their lives, so giving them control scares them. Having adults in the story changes the dynamic, makes it hard for the kids to be the protagonists. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 22.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing For Children.

[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] And we once again have Dean and Shannon Hale here as our guests. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

[Yay! Wow! Garbled I love you]

[chuckles]

 

[Brandon] So we talked about writing about children. Let's talk about writing for children. One of the things I've noticed that kind of blew my mind and having children was how much they wanted to hear the same thing again and again and again.

[Oh, yeah.]

[Brandon] This is kind of antithetical to what I enjoy in storytelling and fiction. Yet some of the great children's series, I've noticed, will often just keep to a strict format on purpose. Is this something that informs when you're writing for children, particularly the younger age?

[Shannon] We…

[Dean] To some degree, I think it does, yeah.

[Shannon] To some degree.

[Dean] I mean, you know, there was… Like, with The Princess in Black, that's the one that I feel like…

[Shannon] That's the one the most where…

[Dean] Is formulaic, but I feel like part of the formula is subverting expectations.

[Shannon] Yes.

[Dean] So that allows you to work within… Work some sort of… It doesn't become…

[Shannon] Every book we're trying to think, "Okay, what are the expectations for this book, and how can we kind of flip it?" But we do have, like, the same kind of repeat…

[Dean] Yeah.

[Shannon] Where there's going to be a superhero moment.

[Dean] The same kind of beats.

[Shannon] Yeah.

[Dean] Well, just like any genre, really. I mean, you go to see a science fiction movie or a horror movie or a movie at all, and you kind of have certain… Like, there's this kind of social contract between you and the filmmakers that you're expecting…

[Shannon] Right.

[Brandon] Right. Well, you get to cheer for certain moments. Being able to anticipate what's going to happen in a story is really fun. It's, I think, deeply ingrained into us as adults. As children, it's not there yet. So when you start to be able to make that connection, when you can say, "Oh, this is happening." Like with my children, I distinctly tell the age where they figured out that people always get in trouble in movies, but then it turns out all right in the end.

[Yes. Oooh.]

[Brandon] That took way longer than I would expect it. Like, I think, oh, you watch two or three movies, you get this. But it's usually right around 10 or something. 8 to 10 where they're like, "Oh, wait. Things go wrong and then they get better. Things are going wrong. The story's going to get better by the end, and they'll be okay." That was really revelatory to me that it took that long, but it's just because they hadn't seen as much media.

 

[Shannon] It means more to them that they came up to that conclusion on their own rather than… It wouldn't have been the same if you told them that that's what's going to happen. They have to just have that experience. I talked to a psychologist once about that very thing you are talking about. Kids want to… For example, wanting to reread the same book over and over again. They said that they're going through something, that that book is giving them comfort or understanding. As soon as their brains have developed in that one little part where they need to, they click, and then they move on. They go to something else. So in terms of being a writer, I wouldn't worry too much about what do kids need to hear over and over again. I would say just write the story that's calling to you, write what you wish you had when you were a kid.

[Dean] Yeah.

[Shannon] And don't worry about what formula do I need to design for a child.

[Dan] Yeah. Definitely. Often the thing that the child loves is not what you would have guessed, anyway.

[Shannon] Exactly.

[Dan] With Zero G, I was talking to an adult just last week, like, who had listened to the audiobook, loved it. What was your favorite part? Oh, it was when he goes outside of the ship and I was so tense and so scared and I thought something awful was going to happen. There was a five-year-old. I said, "What was your favorite part?" "He ate a cheeseburger in zero gravity." I'm like, "Oh. Okay. There we go."

[Dean] But don't leave out either of those. I just remember… Because so often when you're writing for children, they're actually not reading it. The parent is reading it to them. As a parent, I feel your pain reading some of those books over and over and over again…

[Chuckles]

[Dean] That just aren't that good. But are great for the kid. But as a writer, you're like, "How can I make this not terrible for the parents?"

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] So you mean like picture books and the younger stuff?

[Dean] Yes, yes yes yes.

[Shannon] Yeah, absolutely. I think the bigger mistake that writers make when writing for children, though, is writing for children. Because they think what that means is child means less or less intelligent adult. Therefore, I will take this adult story and simplify it so the child may understand. That's not how it works. That's not the math that works. You have to actually just put yourself into the position of the child, and write the story that way. You can't start from the position of the adult trying to write down to a child. You have to be inside the shoes and then write forward.

[Dean] I always think of those books, like those old… Those Renaissance paintings of babies…

[Shannon] Right.

[Dean] That are just like… They have adult man faces.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] So this is something that comes up a lot, and I think it's very important to talk about, because it is kind of the central element of writing about children… Or writing for children, is not writing down to them. But how… You do, to some extent, also have to simplify your language depending on the age that you're targeting, and you have to be more streamlined in your story. So where's the balance between writing down to them and streamlining, simplifying, or writing age-appropriate?

[Shannon] I totally don't even think about it that way. So, for example, we write Princess in Black, which is for like four through four… Yeah…

[Dean] Nine?

[Shannon] 4 to 8-year-olds. We don't simplify the language. We are aware that if this is a big chunkier word that might be new to them, we make sure the context around it is clear and we will do the rule of three. We repeat it three times. For our middle grade and young adult books, we never simplify the language. We never… The whole lexicon is open to you. We know they'll keep reading past it if they don't know. Maybe it's an opportunity to learn something new, which is great. What I focus on instead, and I don't think about simplifying the story, either. I focus on what matters to the person at this age. What matters to them is going to be different than what matters to an adult. It's going to be different than what matters to a different person of that same age. So it's all about character. Where they are in their life, what matters to them, what's interesting to them. Then write that story. Then, likely other people that age who are going through similar experiences and have similar life perspectives are going to be interested in it.

 

[Brandon] So, one of the hardest things when I wrote my middle grade series, and the place where I misfired the most, which I think has been the biggest holdback of that series is I got the humor wrong. The feedback I've gotten consistently is that younger kids love the plot but are not interested in the humor. Older kids like the humor, but feel that the plot is too kiddy. So the books did not land. Basically, the conclusion we came to is they're YA humor in a middle grade book. Which tends to grab a very narrow select audience of middle grade readers whose sense of humors has matured. Do you have any advice on writing humor for younger children? Kind of to preface this, like, I put a lot of sarcasm in, and it was too subtle. They just thought people were being mean to each other. Rather than thinking… Getting the joke. The older kids got the joke. Oh, this is sarcasm. Ha, ha, ha. But the younger kids, like, it turned them off. They're like, "Oo, they're all just so mean to each other."

[Shannon] Sarcasm's really hard in middle grade.

[Dean] Yeah, it definitely is.

[Shannon] For sure. We've done a lot of comedies. We've probably done at least half of our… Let's see, I've done 30+ books, and I would say at least half of them are comedies.

[Dean] Squirrel Girl was a comedy.

[Shannon] Yeah. For sure.

[Dean] So is Princess in Black.

[Shannon] Princess in Black, I would consider a comedy. So, first of all, just about comedy in general, it's the hardest thing to write. Nothing's harder than comedy. Everything would be funny if we were all good enough to write comedy all the time.

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] It would be funny, because why wouldn't we want to laugh all the time. It's really, really hard to write. Part of the… One reason why it's harder, hard to write comedy, is everybody has a different sense of humor. So it's just not going to hit on everybody. I think there's a natural… I think there's an instinct to it. I think that the people I know who write comedy for younger readers are just that way naturally. That's just where their brains are.

[Dean] That's where their headspace is. I think one of the things that works… I feel like comedy, at its root, is like fear. I mean, it's like being surprised by something. It's like, "Oh!" Like that.

[Shannon] Unexpected.

[Dean] It's an unexpected kind of bam. Whether it's… sometimes it's a little more cerebral, or sometimes it can be slapstick, but I think when you approach it as doing something that is unexpected… I think we get… It's easier, sometimes, in Princess in Black, because were coming to it with what would be surprising here. If everybody thinks it's going to be a bunny and it's a frog. It's just that kind of…

[Shannon] I mean, I think the bunnies are going to be cute, and actually they're…

[Dean] They're evil. Right, right.

 

[Dan] In a lot of kids… Go ahead. I'll just say a lot of kids think that non sequiturs are humor. They think that's what humor is, because you tell them a joke that has some kind of wordplay in it, and they won't get that, but they'll think it's hilarious that the ending makes no sense.

[Dean] Yes. Absurd, yeah.

[Dan] When a four-year-old or a six-year-old tells you a joke, the humor is usually look how much this is ridiculous. There's no connection between the setup and the punchline. Isn't that funny?

[Mary Robinette] What I found when we were… Because we had to write shows that had layers. We had to have humor that was for adults, and humor for kids. The nice thing about doing a live show is that you know where the joke is landing because you can tell who's laughing. So what we found was the kids would respond to physical humor and the sound of words. Like, the word petunia was hilarious…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] To them. Tube. I don't… oo sounds were very funny for unknown reasons. But the other thing is humor is contextual. This is true for adults, as well. The problem is that kids don't have as much context. So doing verbal humor is much, much harder for them than… Because they don't have the experiential thing to understand why that juxtaposition is off. Whereas physical humor, they do understand the juxtaposition. It's very easy to see. This isn't the thing. They've got a lot more experience with that. So we found that like… That's one of the reasons fart jokes work really well with kids. Toilet humor…

[Dean] Relatable.

[Mary Robinette] It's a context… Relatable…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's a context that they understand.

[Shannon] But it's also constantly changing. So the humor that we would use in Princess in Black for these younger readers is different than what we use in middle grade is different than what we use in young adults. Sadly, there's not a lot of humor in young adults.

[Dean] Yeah.

[Shannon] People think that the teens aren't allowed to laugh [garbled]

[chuckles]

[Dean] They probably didn't think they're allowed, either.

[Shannon] But in addition to surprise, so unexpected twisting it, also callbacks are really, really great. So actually, they're waiting for that moment when they know that person's going to say that line.

[Dean] Yes.

[Shannon] Then, when they do, that's funny too. So there's a lot of echoing. Hum… Comedy just takes so much revision.

[Dean] Yeah.

[Shannon] You go through it… I mean, dozens of times just to make sure that you're… Every key moment, if I say this here, how can I make it funny later if I echo it in a slightly different way?

[Dean] Then, after the 100th revision, you're like, "Is this funny?"

[Laughter]

[Dean] "Was this ever funny?"

[Shannon] [garbled If we're not?] still laughing, then we cut it. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's a puppeteer who did a show that he called The Hello Show. He got tired of… There's a phenomenon, you walk a puppet on stage and some child in the audience is going to go, "Hello, puppet." Just like every show. He got… He snapped.

[Laughter] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] So he had his own small theater. So he just brought every puppet he owned and said, "It's the Hello Show." He was like, "I'm going to do this show one time and it'll tank, but it'll just get it out of my system." He just walked puppets out on the stage one at a time, sometimes to a time. "Hello!" "Hello!" "Hello." That was the only word in the show. Kids said hello back. The puppets said hello to each other. The big laugh of the show was when a puppet came out and said, "Hey!"

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I've been actually…

[Shannon] I laughed.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Brandon] Writing a book with my 10-year-old.

[Oh!]

[Brandon] More because his brother, 12-year-old, had to write a story for class and I helped him with it, and the 10-year-old saw that. He was like, "I wanna write a book. But I want you to type it because that's the hard part."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] "If I could type, then I'd be totally able…"

[Shannon] Oh, that's all it takes.

[Brandon] So, it's been teaching me a lot about his humor as a 10-year-old. His individual humor. Because he'll sit down and be like, "All right. We're going to do this." Anything… A mistake happens, like we type it… Something accidentally or something, he laughs, leaves it in, and does it four more times. Right? Any time he's like… We're like, "All right, what's the name of this chapter, chapter 12?" His brother's like, "You want a banana?" He's like, "Chapter You Want a Banana."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And then laughs. Then, the next one's like, "Chapter You Want an Apple." Like, he wants to keep the joke running, like the callbacks that you said. Any time he's gotten even a chuckle from himself, it ends up going over and over again. I will reinforce the whole non sequitur thing, because…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] Any time, it's like… He wants to tell a joke, he's like, "All right. What weird thing can they find in here that's not…" Yeah.

[Shannon] [garbled It gets all surreal really weird?] This is why books for children are not written by children. Because they can… It just gets really weird.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Real weird real fast. But he also uses… I've noticed, he uses a structure. So he's telling a story about kids who get sucked into a videogame. The videogame is basically Minecraft, except you have to do weird things to do all the Minecraft stuff. Having that structure of I know how you play a game of Minecraft, I know what you do in Minecraft. But in this one, instead of building things out of metal, you build it out of dirt, because dirt is a silly thing to build your pickaxe out of.

[Right]

[Brandon] It's been a lot of fun.

[Mary Robinette] It's almost as if he's doing worldbuilding. I don't know where he would have gotten that from, Brandon.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Shannon, you're going to tell us about Best Friends.

[Shannon] Speaking of writing books for kids…

[Dean] I love this book.

[Shannon] So I decided to write a memoir of my childhood friendships. It seemed like a really terrible idea…

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] Because I… A memoir? Who writes a memoir? People who do big important things. I didn't have that unusual of a childhood. But I… I really… My goal was to do… It's a graphic novel, and I wanted to just tell the truth of how it felt to me to be 10, 11, and 12. So I wrote it, it was called Real Friends, illustrated by LeUyen Pham. It… I've never had a book become so instantly beloved. It blew my mind. I mean… You put out a book and you like wait a week or two and you're like, "Has anybody read it? Does anybody care?" Within 24 hours, I was getting emails from people who'd read it 24 times already. I mean, it was just insane. What I discovered from that was kids want you to tell them the truth. So many adults and parents are trying to protect them. A story can be a safe place where we can tell kids the truth and they can see there how they're feeling mirrored back to them. It's such a relief. Adults often read this book and they're like, "This is too painful." Kids read it and they're like laughing and enjoying it, and like, "Oh, it's so great."

[Laughter]

[Shannon] Because it's just like, oh, someone showed me how I'm feeling. Even if what happened with me and my childhood is not exactly what's happening with them, the emotions are the same. I'm telling them a story so they feel a certain way and they have felt that way and then they can see it, not only read it with words, but see it on the page and they feel validated. It's an amazing experience. So, anyway, that one was called Real Friends and Best Friends is the sequel. Best Friends takes exactly just sixth… My sixth grade experience.

[Dan] I want to put in an extra plug for this. My daughter read Real Friends like 4000 times. So this Christmas, we got her Best Friends and she had finished reading it before we were done opening presents that morning.

[Shannon] Yes. It's insane. The thing is that I've learned… Some parents have told me that as a way of saying, "Well, that was a waste of $12," because they read it so fast. They reread it. Over and over again. What's so wonderful about graphic novels, too, is that… And the beautiful illustrations that LeUyen did, is they can examine each page carefully and they can see… They read it first just for words, then they go back and examine the pictures. They see the nuances and the interactions between characters and expressions. What I like… My hope for it was that kids who are going through certain hard times and haven't had the words yet to explain how they feel can take this book and show an adult and point to this panel and say, "This is how I feel." You're giving them words, like… Writing for kids, I mean, there's nothing better in the world than to think I was able to give this child a way to communicate to someone else how they're feeling and to validate how they're feeling.

[Mary Robinette] That was also one of the things… The literature for kids, whether it's print or graphic novel or stage, one of the things that I find so exciting about it is the voice that it gives to kids. We had multiple times… Like, we would go and we would do, like, Sleeping Beauty. More than once, we would have a child… We had a child stand up and say a variation of "my dog died, and I miss him," during the Q&A. It's not that there was a dog in the show.

[Right!]

[Mary Robinette] It was just that…

[Shannon] We get that every time we do a school visit.

[Mary Robinette] That there was an opening. I think that's one of the things, for me, about writing for children is that you're inviting them. You're creating a space that is for them that is safe, and you're inviting them in. That invitation allows them to open up, and feel like they can share too.

[Shannon] Yes. The most common, like, fan mail that I would get for Real Friends and Best Friends is not "I like this part when…," it's "Here's what happened to me." You told me your story, now I want to tell you mine. That's incredibly empowering.

 

[Brandon] So, one of the things I've noticed about particularly middle grade. YA as well, but particularly middle grade, is that there is, in the stories, an absence of adult figures, or at least adult figures who are controlling the story. Right? I was wondering, you had mentioned in a previous episode that Princess in Black, there are just no adults, right? A lot of the great middle grades, there just are no adults. Or if they are adults, it's the adults like Dumbledore who for some reason, can't be involved.

[Shannon] Yeah. Every time, there's some reason.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, I guess the question is, why is this? What do you feel about this? Is this an important part of the genre, has this become too much of a cliché in the case of things like Dumbledore, or how's it going? Dan?

[Dan] So, as I was studying horror, when I accidentally became a horror author…

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] I hate it when that happens.

[Dan] One of the principles of horror that somebody explain to me was that adults have control over their lives. So what scares us is when we lose that control. For kids, I think it's the opposite. They don't have a lot of control over their lives. So suddenly giving them control, that's what scares them, and that's what forces them into conflict and adventure.

[Mary Robinette] That's great.

[Shannon] I think as soon as you have a mom in the story, it just changes the whole dynamic. There someone there to protect you, there's someone there to make decisions for you. I mean, fairytales, what they are is an excuse to get kids away from parents. Like, almost every fairytale, that's what they're doing. They kill the parents, they lock them away somewhere, they do something so the kid is on their own. So, basically, yeah. It just… It's a story device so that the kid can be the protagonist, the one driving the action. There have been times in books, like, I wrote a book called Dangerous where I was like I want the teenager to have a good relationship with her parents and have them be present. Can I pull this off? I managed, but she… There were times where I was like, "She's gotta go on her own now. That she's got to, or this story's not going to go anywhere." So, I… You don't want it to be tiring.

[Dean] No, no. I enjoyed writing the parent…

[Shannon] Oh, we did the same thing with Squirrel Girl.

[Dean] In Squirrel Girl. Yeah.

[Shannon] We wanted her to have a good relationship with her parents.

[Dean] Right. It's tricky too. Because, I mean, you don't want them to remove the tension that exists by just simply being there.

[Shannon] And solving all her problems for her.

[Dean] But you don't want them to be jerks or like just sort of flat nothing people. So it's tricky to get somebody that you like, like a supporting character that you like that doesn't derail the tension of the…

[Shannon] In that circumstance, I think what we did is just say, "They think she's cool."

[Dean] No matter what.

[Shannon] And they trust her. They think she's awesome. They know she's as awesome as she is. There are certain things that she can do that they cannot. They're like, "We're worried about you, but be careful. We love you. We'll make some cake for you when you get back. From defeating Hydra."

[Dean] That's right. How awesome would that be?

[Shannon] They have cake.

[Dean] So they are a big part of why she is as awesome as she is. Because…

[Shannon] Just like Ma and Pa Kent were a big part of why Superman is so awesome.

[Dean] Exactly.

 

[Brandon] We are out of time.

[Shannon] Oh, there's so many things we could say.

[Brandon] I'm going to give us the homework. You guys the homework this time. I'm going to suggest you do what I've been doing with my 10-year-old, is, find a younger relative or a friend and type out what they tell you for a story for a little while. We talked about how there's a reason kids don't write stories for kids, but I think I've learned way more about the way my son's humor works and the way he sees story and what excites him by just letting him tell me a story and me typing it out. He loves the idea that he can now take this and share with people because my 10-year-old's dyslexic. So writing is really hard for him. But now he has a story that he has written. So give this a try. See if it teaches you anything about writing for children by having a child write for you. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/17/15-20-mental-wellness-and-writing/

 

Key Points: Mental wellness, a.k.a. self-care, not mental-health, writing with depression, and so forth. Physical and mental wellness go together. Remember it's work, no matter how much you enjoy it. When you set your own hours, you need to carve out time for other things. Set aside time for family and friends! Create, sustainable practices. How can you write with physical or mental ailments? Don't equate word count, quantity, with self worth. What is the smallest bite? Do 20 minute sprints. Crack the seal! Try different ways and accommodations to see what works for you. Listen to healthcare professionals and other people. Make yourself accountable to somebody else, and let them warn you when you are overdoing. How can you use writing as therapy? Write out your anger, then let it flutter away in the wind. When you are writing for your own mental health, you are writing so you can have written, not to be read. Outlining lets you write emotional beats that fit where you are when you are ready for them. Writing during bad times? Don't equate self-worth with word count. Sometimes you can't. Remember, writing is writing, thinking, deleting, walking, musing, and so many other things. Replenish the creative well. Try writing with pen and paper to get rid of the extra distractions. If you can't write, maybe you can plot, brainstorm, try variations on scenes.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 20.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Mental Wellness and Writing.

[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're going to talk about mental wellness and how you apply it to your writing. We have a bunch of questions from listeners about this, but let's start off… Dan, you have something you want to…

[Dan] I just wanted to make sure that our listeners know upfront that we are talking about mental wellness, which is different from mental health. This is not… We've done episodes before about writing with depression and things like that. We'll probably touch on that a little bit, but more than anything else, this is an episode about self-care. About making sure that you can handle the process of writing, or using the process of writing to help with other things.

 

[Brandon] Okay. Well, let me ask then, what do you guys do in order to take care of yourself while writing?

[Victoria] It's interesting. For me, physical wellness and mental wellness go hand in hand. So, it's hard when I'm on the road most of the year, but I always try and carve out a good 30 minutes a day for either yoga or stretching or watching a really nice television show or putting on a facemask or like taking a long shower. Doing something, it doesn't have to be fancy, but something where the onus is off of me to have measurements of productivity and success. To have something that is pass-fail, right? And you can only pass. Because I feel like so often, especially those of us for whom writing is a part or a whole career, we put so much pressure on, and you can put so much pressure on if you're carving out time to write at 11 o'clock at night or 5 AM in the morning, to just almost consider everything a metric. That just leads to a lot of self-loathing, to a lot of you're not doing enough, you're not doing what you should be doing. So I think taking a chance to reset, to put away all of the metrics, and just take time and remember to human, in addition to… So that your self-worth doesn't become directly correlated with what you're making.

[Howard] I have so very, very many thoughts on this. Let me start by saying that I love my job. It's wonderful. I really do love it. It's fun. But if it's the only thing I do all day, I feel empty. So, if you're looking at a career in writing or in drawing comics or in whatever because you think that will be fun and you think you will be able to work much, much longer hours than you could work wherever you're working now? Be advised that that may be a false paradigm. It's gonna end up as work, no matter how much you enjoy it. I got to draw a munchkin deck a couple of years ago. It wasn't accelerated, fast-tracked project, and I worked… Literally, I'm not making these numbers up. I worked from 6 AM to midnight, every day for a month, except Sundays. My sleep schedule was such that that was actually survivable. Superpower. Only actually needed five and a half hours of sleep per night. It was wonderful. At the end of that month, I learned two things. One, I can do this. Two, I need to stop.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because I was empty and I was burnt out and I knew that I had reached a physical limitation that I did not want to push up against again any time soon forever.

 

[Victoria] You also bring up a point that I want to expand upon, which is this idea of the hours. There's this idea that when you set your own hours, you can do anything. The fact of the matter is that the freedom of writing and of creative professions where you get to set your hours is also the downside, because writing is a 365 days a year process, in that you can take a physical vacation I'm sure, but turning off, unplugging, these are things which are both very difficult and you end up feeling very guilty about that time that you take. So I think that the less structure you have in this job or in this hobby or in this aspiring profession or this actual like current profession, the more important it is to find ways to carve out time in which you affect those boundaries.

[Brandon] I'm very focused on time management. I'm a very structured person. We've talked about my spreadsheets and things like that. One of the problems I had with this early in my career is I know… I got married a year after I published my first book, right? After I sold my first book. Suddenly, having a wife and family meant that I was unaccustomed to taking my attention away from the stories. Because even though I wasn't writing, they were in the back of my head. I've heard lots of rider friends have this conflict with spouses and with family, that you're always too focused… You're not there with me when you're there with me. I had to learn, for me, what worked was to pick specific times. At 5:30, I can't write. It doesn't matter if my family's home or not, I have a requirement that 5:30 to 9:30 is not work time. I've got to be doing something else. By giving myself that kind of… I turn the clock off, and even training my brain to be like, "We're not going to focus on that. We're not going to think about that. We need these four hours to refresh, we need these four hours to spend with my family, with my kids," whatever it is, that was liberating to me. To train my… It was hard at first, but it was liberating to train myself to turn it off for four hours a day.

[Victoria] It's about creating sustainability. The fact is, you can do anything, as you were saying, Howard, for a short period of time, but most people don't want to have a single project. They want to have a long-standing career, and in order to have a long-standing career, you have to find a way to create healthy, sustainable practices.

[Howard] At the time of this recording, I'm feeling huge like despair-worthy amounts of stress, because there's a whole bunch of cartooning that needs to be done before Monday, and it's not done yet. Last night, one of the kids had a severe medical emotional stuff. I was told that I had to sit next to her on the couch and watch YouTube videos. In fact, I was told that I wasn't allowed to get up and run errands, because my part of the medical process was to be the service emotional comfort Dad or something. I look at that, and I recognize that for my own part, yeah, it was kind of a huge sacrifice to help this other human being instead of doing the thing that I wanted to do for me. But ultimately, those other human beings are more important to me than I am. If they are not happy, I really despair. Me not getting my work done? That makes me sad. But them being unhappy, that is huge. As Brandon said, being willing to carve out time, I have to do it. My schedule isn't as rigid. But when something happens, my moral compass says I will drop what I'm doing in order to be with them.

 

[Brandon] So, there's a question here about writing under the stresses of physical or mental ailments. How can you long-term do this? What measures and steps do you take?

[Victoria] Well, so I have chronic pain, but I'm going to talk less about that because I use physical activity to try and mitigate some of the effects of that. But I will talk about writing as somebody who has anxiety and depression, and are obviously hills and valleys that come with having anxiety and depression. Look, there are some times when you can't write. We'll talk at the end of this about some homework that might help with that during those times. But in the immediate, what I do is I, one, do not equate word count and worth. In the interest of that, I carve down my goals to the smallest possible metric. There are some days when that metric is can I open up the document and sit with my story and think about it for half an hour, because that is going to create… Keep the creative door propped open in my head. Because I think the more time you spend away from the project, the harder it is to come back. Some days that's can I write a couple sentences? Let's not look at this as 2000 words or a chapter. What is the smallest bite? So I am somebody who is extremely structured in my writing, but I also only write for 20 minutes at a time. I probably, even on my most productive days, write for three hours total. That's nine sprints. Really. So I don't think that it's time equals quality, but I do think that by cutting it down to 20 minutes, I can stare at a Word document for 20 minutes. I can think about a story for 20 minutes. Even on a bad day, I can spend 20 minutes not doing anything else. Neil Gaiman has a process where he says, "When I sit down to write, my two options are do nothing or write. It's simply about removing the other distractions. You can either write or do nothing. Those are your two options." For me, I want to make the smallest bite possible. Just the same way that I never sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to write a book." I don't even sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to write a chapter." I sit down and think, "Today, I'm going to spend some time in this scene, in this moment." There are some days when I make a paragraph out of that, and I'm so happy. Usually, if I can cracked the seal on the overwhelming feeling, the overwhelmedness of that day, I can get something down on paper. Getting something down, even a small quantity, is better than nothing, and will help me feel better and make things feel a little bit more manageable.

[Howard] I like the idea of cracking the seal, because it makes it sound like the doom of the world is going to spill forth…

[Victoria] It is.

[Howard] Once I've gotten it open.

 

[Brandon] Dan, I know you've had some chronic pain issues before. You had your tailbone. You were trying to record, while your tailbone was hurting. You also had carpal tunnel. How did you write during these times, with these chronic pains? What did you do?

[Dan] For me, those were chronic issues, but they were not long-term issues. They were a few months at a time. So, for me, it came down to being willing to change my routine. I am a creature of routine. I like to write in the same room every day during the same hours. So, forcing myself to say, "Well, actually, you know what, for the next year, I'm going to use a standing desk instead of a normal desk." Or "I'm going to try a different keyboard layout." I had one that was split up… I am using gestures that you can't see the thing because this is audio only. But trying to find different ways and different accommodations. But, at the core of it, it comes down to, am I willing to do this in a different way than I've ever done this before? Which is kind of how I do my whole career. That's why I jump genres. That's why I find new programs to be a part of. I'm always trying to find the new thing, because I don't know until I try if that's going to be a thing that works really well for me. Some of these accommodations that I have used in the past, like a standing desk, I keep coming back to over and over because I genuinely have come to love it.

[Howard] I'd like to go on record real quick to say there are healthcare professionals out there. Some of them may be related to you. They might be part of your circle of friends. People you can listen to who are going to tell you, "Oh, wow, that thing you're doing? Maybe don't do that." I've failed to listen in a couple of key places. I can't take much ibuprofen anymore because I took a whole bunch of it in order to be able to draw a lot, and now one or two of those will give me IBS in all the best let's not talk about this on air sorts of ways.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There are things that you may be doing to push through and get it done that make you feel like a superhero that are actually not good for you. Being willing to listen to other people and step back into the mortal realm a little bit might be good.

[Dan] I recognize that not everybody is in a position to have someone else to listen to, but if you do, whether it's someone who lives in your home with you or just a friend that you can text, making yourself accountable to somebody else is a huge part of self-care. Because we can't always be the best judge of have I spent too much time on this? Am I fixating too much on this? Am I burning myself out on this? So having someone who can check in every now and then and say, "You know what, it's three in the afternoon and you haven't eaten anything today." "Okay, yes. Then I need to put this down and I need to go eat."

 

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

[Victoria] Yeah. Lab Girl. It's interesting. It came out a couple years ago. It's by an author named Hope Jahren. J A H R E N. It is a book that is very hard for me to quantify. But it's something that I recommend to anybody who is… Once an exploration of mental wellness and mental health issues, especially, as they intersect with creativity and with writing and identity. Hope Jahren is a brilliant botanist and biologist who was sensibly is writing a memoir through an examination of her relationship with the natural world. Underneath that is an examination of her mental state as it shifts and she processes it through this motif. I found it at the time when I needed it. I think it is a beautiful book, regardless of when you find it. But I hope that it will just find some of your listeners at maybe the right time, and just make them see themselves a little bit and understand that you can find beauty and that you can have some really incredible experiences. And, that really, like, sometimes if you struggle with mental health, because that's something that I do struggle with, even though this is a self-care podcast, I think sometimes it can feel like a deteriorating condition, where you can feel like, especially if you're in one of the hills… Or one of the valleys, that you're never going to have a hill again. I think it can be really grounding, the same way that you need people in your life that can kind of call you back to yourself, it can be grounding to see yourself, especially your mental self, through other works as well. I found it just an incredibly powerful book.

[Brandon] So, that is Lab Girl?

[Victoria] Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren.

 

[Brandon] So, as we move into the last few minutes of this podcast, there's a question here about tips for writing as therapy. Including, how to draw on personal grievances in a tasteful way, and help you make both more powerful writing and work through, perhaps, some issues. Anyone done this? What are your thoughts on this?

[Howard] Let me begin by saying that there are… If you are furious, if there is rage, and you just want to get it out of your system and put it on the page, write it using a tool where it does not immediately go online.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Write it in a way where it is disconnected from the Internet. Maybe write it and print it and then delete the file. Because we say things when we are in these frames of mind that are valuable for us to have said. But their value decreases dramatically as they get read by other people. I can't remember what the story was that I was listening to… I think it actually might have been Amal El-Mohtar when she was doing her oracle of buses thing, and somebody was saying, "How do I make this one emotion I'm having go away?" She said, "You write down the full description of this emotion, and then put it on a piece of paper and then tear up the paper and let it flutter away into the wind," or something. It was a beautiful thing that she said, and I haven't done it justice. But there's this idea that when we are writing, we are writing so that we can be read. When you are writing for your own mental health, you're writing so that you can have written. Those are two different things.

[Victoria] I definitely use writing as a form of catharsis. I've done it since the very beginning, since far before I was published. It felt like… A lot of circuitous thinking, a lot of spiral thinking, and it can feel very tangled up in my mind, and I feel like focusing on a story and putting things into word can be a way for me to make straight lines out of a lot of the clutter in my head, to kind of channel my energy. But I also… I write as catharsis for very specific emotional beats. One of the reasons that I outline my stories so rigidly before I write them is so that I can write them out of order. So that I can pick the scenes perhaps that have emotional beats that I want to write that day. Some days you wake up and you want to write a murder. Some days you wake up and you want to write a love scene. Some days you wake up and you want to write… Or you're prepared to write some of those really difficult emotional scenes. Those very difficult emotional scenes, you're probably not prepared to write every day. So then rather than sit around and wait for the day that I'm ready to write the next scene, I basically have it prepped and have it blocked out in my story and then set it aside until I have a moment or a day in my life where I feel either very stable and thus ready to explore this darkness or feel very unstable and very ready to explore this darkness. But I definitely earmark different emotional beats that I know I can't write every day. I wait for something to happen or for some state to come along for me to be ready to do those moments justice.

[Brandon] Dan was smiling over there when you said…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Some days you don't want to write a murder…

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Brandon] Or whatever it was.

[Victoria] Some days you do want to write a murder.

[Dan] I don't know what that's like, to wake up and not want to write a murder.

[Victoria] I know.

 

[Brandon] Last question here. How do you manage to keep writing during bad times in your life?

[Victoria] You try. I mean, I think this goes back to what I was saying earlier about you don't equate self-worth with word count. I mean, like, you try. You try when it helps you. You understand that if for some reason you can't, or if the world just feels too big, it's okay to go into a creative fallow period. I've said online many times that writing is writing, but so is thinking. So is deleting. So is walking, and musing, and doing lots of things. So is reading. So is consuming. There are times when you just… You're not ready to put work out of yourself onto paper, but that's a really great time to take work in. That's a really good time to find shows or comics or movies or books and try and replenish that creative well for when you are feeling ready.

[Howard] I need to tear the question into a couple of different elements here. Bad times. That is such an enormous bucket. How do you keep writing during bad times? It is entirely possible that the very best thing for you during a particular bad time is to not write, is to not think about writing, and to do something completely different, and I can't answer how to categorize that. I just gotta come out and say that time might exist. Then there are bad times. I remember at one point my daughter talking about how she had a whole lot of trials and everything was really hard. What she was describing was I'm a teenager. I'm here to tell you that, yes, that is terrible and it is really hard. But when you are a teenager and you are experiencing that, many of the adults are looking at you and saying, "Oh, sweetie. I do not want to tell you about my 30s."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I do not want to tell you this. Because the lessons you are going to learn right now are going to allow you to function when you're in your 30s. It is possible that the bad times you are having are things that… The lesson that you learn from them is, oh, I need to change my schedule. I need to change my diet. I need to get some exercise. I need to do something in order to mitigate the bad time and carve out time to write. I don't know… To the person that is asking the question, I don't know what kind of a bad time you're having.

[Victoria] That's true.

[Howard] So I don't have the answer.

[Victoria] I also just want to say, last note, because I think this is getting into a question that we don't get to answer, really, is that often times we become very distractible especially in these days. Like, your computer is a great tool of distraction. Sometimes it can also feel like a very precious thing. You look at a Word document or a blank screen and it feels very official, because everything that you write becomes a typed thing. When I am feeling… Like, specifically susceptible to these moments, I switch to pen and paper. I scribble along the top of the page so it's already not blank anymore. I might just doodle or do something. I find that it helps me turn off some of those extra voices, some of those extra distractions. It's not to say that what I put down on paper will be great. Often times I don't use it. But it's a great thinking tool to re-open that door. Or maybe I'm not in a good enough place to write, but maybe I can plot. Maybe I can brainstorm. Maybe I can play a choose-your-own-adventure with those scenes, where I'm how can I make this scene worse or stronger?

[Howard] I would love to have a three hour session with me and Victoria and Dan and Brandon and half a dozen other people where we just talk about unlocking.

[Victoria] Yes.

[Howard] Because all of our strategies are going to be different, so my suggestion… I did unlocking session at WXR on the cruise ship. It was one of the most beautiful discussions we've had because we were able to look at this question and talk about our respective bad times and come up with strategies. It may be, listener, that the answer for you is to talk about it with someone.

 

[Brandon] All right. Victoria, you have some homework.

[Victoria] I do have a homework. I like this homework because it involves getting a piece of paper and some colored pencils. I feel like that just…

[Oooo]

[Victoria] it taps back into like that elementary school or that young, like, joy of, like, creating something. I want you to create a lifestyle tracker. This is a very simple grid where you essentially make like an x-axis and a y-axis and down one side you put different things. I want you to put at least three things which are craft oriented, reading, writing, planning or plotting. I want you to put three things which have nothing to do with your chosen craft. Is it eating healthy, is it taking a half an hour walk, is it stretching, is it self-care? Then, across the top, I want you to put the dates. You can start with a track that just goes for 30 days. I tend to get overwhelmed by that, so I do a 10 day tracker. The point of this tracker is I want you to track each of these things every single day and color in the squares if you do them. The reason is because when you get overwhelmed, it can be very easy to lose track of time. If you struggle with anxiety and depression, a day becomes a week becomes a month. Suddenly you haven't written in a month, and you don't understand why. I am very good about that thing of if I start something at the beginning of a month, and then I mess up on the third day of the month, I'm like, "Oh, well, try again next month." The goal with the lifestyle tracker is the most that you can lose is a single day. Every single day a fresh start. I find that even if you get to 4 PM and you think this day is lost, again, you're not losing a week. You're not losing a month, you're not losing a year. You've lost a few hours. Go and nail something else on the lifestyle list, if you feel like I can't make today, I bet you can do 30 minutes of self-care. I bet you can take a bath or put on a facemask or like, do something nice for yourself. Then color in that square and see every single day as a fresh start.

[Brandon] Awesome. So this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go take care of yourself.