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Writing Excuses 15.06: Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/09/15-06-prose-and-cons-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: Delicious, tasty writing with flavorful words? Good word do! How do you write beautiful prose? Go over it again and again, tweak and tweak and tweak, like tumbling a rock in a tumbler. Watch for repetitions and ambiguities. Beware lazy writing. Focus on the sound of language. Listen to good word doers. Read good word do! Read your own work before writing more. How do you add density to your sentences without going purple? Don't add things to it, take out the unnecessary parts. Trim, and trim, and trim again. Ask yourself, what is the emotional output of this paragraph supposed to be, and what order of information is most effective in getting there? Words go through the brain, but sounds can strike you in the heart. Lyricism can put your hand around somebody's heart in a way that the best analogy in the world never could.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Six.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pat] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Pat] And I'm Pat.

[Dan] We have Patrick Rothfuss with us again. We're going to talk about prose. This is specifically about writing itself. Word for word, how do you make your prose delicious? How do you make your writing as wonderful as it can be?

[Howard] Tasty, tasty sentences with flavorful words and syllables and… And…

[Mary Robinette] Things.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You know, it's a lot easier to do when I write it.

[Pat] We all good word do. We make you do word good too.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Now I'm super excited to have Pat on for this episode. This is… You have such a reputation for fantastic word-for-word writing in your work.

[Pat] Do I actually?

[Mary Robinette] Yes, you do.

[Pat] Really?

[Dan] You absolutely do. That's always…

[Mary Robinette] You didn't know that?

[Pat] I mean, I know I work on it, but… Usually, that's not what people s… I mean, it's rarely what people say when they come up to me.

[Mary Robinette] Huh. That's what people talk about all the… I'm…

[Howard] It's what we say behind your back.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dan] But I know that people do ask you how do you get… How do you write beautiful prose? What do you say when people ask you that?

[Pat] What I said just today was, "Boy, I don't know how I would teach that." Because it comes very intuitively to me. So for it to get better and better, I just sort of go over it again and again. Each time, I tweak and I tweak and I tweak. It's like tumbling a rock in a tumbler. It gets smoother and smoother and smoother until it's done. But that's not advice that can be followed.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I have found, because it's… I come at it from theater, and similarly, I run into this issue when people ask me about dialogue.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, how do you do dialogue, which is… Dialogue is one of those places where the words are… Like, the words… You're telling a story, so the words are always important, but dialogue specifically, because it's often carrying even more, you have to be very concise with it. But similarly, it came super easy to me. It took me forever to figure out how to teach it. I wound up having to reverse engineer what I do as a narrator. Because my job as a narrator is to take the words that are on the page and make them into sounds. Writing developed to convey the spoken language. Right? So what I'm looking for with that, what it taught me, are the things that sound good, the things that play smoothly, the… It's a lot about repetitions. What I find is that if you use repetition with intention, it will draw attention to something and it will point it at the thing you want people to look at. But when you don't use it with intention, when it's an accidental repetition, the repetition is always going to catch the reader's attention, and it will drag them in the wrong direction. That's the thing where you… It's not quite having a piece of déjà vu with the thing, but it'll pop you out of the story just a little bit. Sometimes that repetition is a word, and those are easy to spot. Sometimes it's a collection of sounds. Sometimes it's a concept. But often that's the thing that I'm looking for. Making sure that those repetitions are where I want them to be. One of the other things that I look for our ambiguities. Words or phrases or concepts that could go either way and aren't doing so on purpose. Like, one of the examples that I use sometimes when I'm talking to people about it is this thing… There's a compilation video of… In movies, people saying, "You just don't get it, do you?"

[Pat] [snort] Oh, that.

[Mary Robinette] I know. There's a compilation video of person after person after person in completely different films saying, "You just don't get it, do you?" That's lazy writing. It's ambiguous, because what don't you get? Why don't you get it? But then you look at Blade Runner and Rutger Hauer's famous speech, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe." That is "You just don't get it, do you?" But it's getting… It's making it specific, it's removing the ambiguity, and the repetitions there are all very deliberate. This beautiful rhythmic flow.

[Pat] That's really interesting, because you're coming at this from a conceptual… As soon this topic got brought up, I immediately thought of the sound of language. Because I focus that way a lot. But what you're talking about is something that I also do. I love the term lazy writing. That's something that I find increasingly galling as I watch more TV. I actually hear it reflected in my son's speech, now that he gets to watch more TV, is he is emulating the lazy writing that he has heard.

[Dan] That is depressing.

[Pat] Oh, it's super depressing, which is one of the reasons I've tried to keep him away from bad media, is it homogenizes his beautifully original speech. That's what it does to everyone. So, I first off say, if you want to do good word do, then listen to good word doers. Like, absorb it in a meaningful way that like it sticks to you. Sometimes, that's just like… For me, I read Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Like… Or I read Shakespeare. Like, ooh, some Shakespeare. The problem is, I am so sticky, I'm such a mimic, that if I read a Shakespeare play, I will have to fight to not write and speak in iambic pentameter. Especially if I get a couple of drinks in me.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] So good word do sticks to you.

[Laughter]

[Pat] Sometimes, yes. So, like, that is a trick that I would recommend, is, like, if you read enough of something, it kind of gets in you.

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly the way I wrote The Glamorous Histories is that I would read a chapter of Jane Austen, and then I would write a chapter.

[Pat] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] Because that… Because I was using it as a conscious upload of her language.

[Pat] Actually, that's a trick that I use in my own stuff if I've been away a while, or even just to maintain consistency, is I read the previous chapter before I start writing or drafting a new chapter.

[Mary Robinette] You do that, don't you, Dan?

[Dan] Yes. I will always start each day's work by reading what I wrote yesterday to kind of get myself up to speed before I step out of the moving car, so I can…

[Chuckles]

[Pat] By the time you get to the end, I'm usually already tweaking and fiddling, so I'm already writing by the time I hit the end.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Pat] Then I've got momentum.

[Dan] That also makes the first draft a little cleaner, because it's kind of been cleaned up as you go.

[Pat] Exactly. And the tone is easier to match, because you've kind of… Or at least I tend to have my head in it.

[Dan] I would like to pause here if we can for our thing of the week. It is not a book this time. It is a podcast. What are you going to recommend for us?

[Pat] I would really love to recommend to you the One-Shot Podcast Network. Now, it's a group of podcasts, and they all deal with gaming in some way. But what I have really come to love over the last year is listening to a lot of comedians and actors and game players get together. Effectively, what they're doing is collaborative improvisational storytelling. They have an ongoing series called Campaign. There was 100 episodes of like a Star Trek theme podcast. The current one that they're doing, where I think they're about 30 episodes in, is unoriginal world called Sky Jacks that is inspired by the Decemberists' music. Oh, it's so good, guys, it's so good. But also, the One-Shop Podcast Network itself, they do a bunch of one-shot games. Like, I came in and I played a game called Kids on Bikes.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's…

[Dan] That's a good game.

[Pat] Oh, it's amazing. It's based off like the 80s, like ET and Goonies and The System. James D'Amato runs it, and he runs a lot of these games. You can go in and see like what they're doing. This year is especially interesting, because they… James has decided to feature only games designed by not-white dudes. He is an amazing guy, an incredible storyteller. I've learned a lot about gaming and narrative just by listening to the podcast.

[Dan] Cool. That is called One-Shot?

[Pat] The One-Shot Podcast Network. Which contains many shows, including Neo-Scum, One-Shot, Campaign, and some others that I'm embarrassed that I can't remember off the top of my head.

[Dan] Awesome. So go listen to that. We will link to it in the liner notes as well.

[Dan] Now, I've got a great listener question that I'm going to throw out, and then immediately provide my own answer for.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Because I've got a really good answer to this one. Someone asks, "How do you add density to your sentences without going purple?" Purple prose is something that we want to avoid that… If you've ever read an AP English essay, you've se… They're just trying to cram so much brilliance into their… My solution to this is actually you add density to something not by adding things to it, but by taking out the unnecessary things. Think of this as you are cooking your writing on low heat so that it reduces down, and what you're left with has just as much flavor as possible. Earlier, Pat was telling a story about how he revises by trimming something and then leaving it and coming back and then trimming it down until… What was it you said, that one day you'll be left with just 12 words that are so intense they can kill a person.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] What I loved about that story is that that's exactly what the poet, Ezra Pound, did. He had an experience where he was… He went into the Metro in Paris, and, just for whatever reason, had this profound experience looking at faces in there. He wrote this giant thing, it was this multipage essay, trying to re-create that emotion that he had. He was like, "No, this is too much." He kept cutting it down. He ended up with a poem called Faces in the Metro, which I'm going to tell you right now.

"The apparition of these faces in a crowd,

Petals on a wet, black bough."

[Pat] I remember that. [You said that before]

[Dan] Cutting out the extraneous stuff until he's left with just this one powerful emotion adds so much density to it because you don't have any filler.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that… I have a similar kind of a relationship with Ray Bradbury's writing. Because it's… What I love are his short stories, and the way he plays with language. There's a piece that I use when I'm teaching narration, which was again one of those things where I'm like, "I know this works. Why does this work?" So I'm just going to read a little bit to you. This is from The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl.

"William Acton rose to his feet. The clock on the mantel ticked midnight. He looked at his fingers and he looked at the large room around him and he looked at the man lying on the floor. William Acton, whose fingers had stroked typewriter keys and made love and fried ham and eggs for early breakfasts, had now accomplished a murder with the same ten whorled fingers."

It's like… It's just… It's so beautiful. But the thing about it, and we'll put this in the liner notes so you can look at it, there's… That repetition that I'm talking about. He uses "He looked at his fingers, he looked at the large room around him, and he looked at the man lying on the floor." It's like this is a normal thing, this is a normal thing, this is not a normal thing. One of the things that he's doing there, when you look at it, is he's adding modifiers, but he's adding modifiers just to the things he wants you to pay attention to. The… First, it's "he looks at his fingers," and he doesn't give you any modifiers, he doesn't give you any modifiers to feet, to the mantel, none of that. "He looked at his fingers, then he looked at the large room." Gives you a little bit more emphasis. "Then he looked at the man lying on the floor." Like, lying on the floor, it's not purple prose. It's just… Just adding that little bit and it's making it more specific and it's pointing you at it, just by lingering on it. Then he comes back to the fingers again. Because those actually… It's like these… This, I… These are the things that did that. Everything in that sentence, about stroking the typewriter keys and the ham… It's all about these were normal, and I've done this other thing with them. I think it's just beautiful, but it is… It's that layering and that deliberate choice about what things am I going to emphasize. It's not about let me add more adjectives, but it's about pointing.

[Pat] It's also… Bradbury is so good about this. He's extraordinarily lean.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Pat] It's just so clean. Robert Bly once said, he's an American poet, he was on stage, I saw a recording of it, and he said, "I think a person could be an amazing poet, even if they…" He goes, "You don't need more words. You don't need fancy words." He goes, "If you knew 25 words perfectly, you could be a poet." That was really interesting to me. It's the sort of… In some ways, this is kind of a wankery statement. But, I think, he's pointing towards a truth. That is, like, you don't need to get fancy. Now, I think there's a space for fancy. Sometimes a perfect word is perfect. But a lot of times, the perfect word is the less perfect word that everyone knows.

[Howard] My approach to this is… The Bradbury piece. What is the reader to be left with? Well, the reader is supposed to be left with the horror of having committed a murder and staring down at one's own hands and realizing that you are the murder weapon. Or at least that's what I got out of it. Other readers may get other things, but that's what I got. You can get that, sort of, by telling the reader exactly what they are supposed to feel. "He stared down at his hands, and was horrified that these were now murder weapons." Okay? That is really, really lean. But I've been very literal and told you exactly what to feel. Purple prose is when you have words in there that are not working towards giving us that emotion. They are working towards demonstrating to us that you…

[Dan] Own a thesaurus.

[Howard] Have memorized the thesaurus.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] So, a great many times, I will sit back and look at a paragraph and ask myself, what is the emotional output of this paragraph supposed to be? How do I get there? How do I get there fastest? Well, I get there fastest by being very literal, and that's actually not the most effective. How do I get there in an order in which it's the most effective? What are the pieces of information that I want to give? That's where I think the Bradbury piece becomes a tutorial.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Howard] Where we're looking at… We're identifying the murder weapons, but not yet. We're just looking at them. Then we're describing that there has been a murder. Then we are con… We are recontextualizing the hands. By describing it in that way, it suddenly sounds very non-poetic and very mechanical and very soup can. But when you sit down to do this, when you sit down with this recipe if you will. I'm headed for this emotion, and these are the beats I want to hit, that's the point at which, at least for me, I can no longer teach it, I can no longer describe it, because I have to have done it 200 times in order to have any sense of how this is going to work.

[Pat] It's a muscle memory thing, and I think… For some people, it's easier, for some people, it's harder. The same with plot and character and dialogue. I always come back to sound, as… Because, like, I love the plain… Rather, the simplicity of the concepts that Bradbury's talking about there are great. Because, like, who knows ham? Everybody knows ham. I can… It's good. Like, this isn't fancy, it's not elaborate. These are simple, solid, real things. He could get florid, he could get fancy, but… Honestly, I see that in a lot of like first-time books. Where they're describing the breakfast somebody sits down to. But authors like Bradbury, it's almost like everything he puts on the page is an icon with roots down to the heart of the world. Like, there's just nobody like Bradbury. Nobody did what he does, or does what he did. But, like Robert Frost, not to bring up another white guy, but Frost, like… Seuss doesn't get credit for his mastery of language. Because what most people know about Seuss is his kind of thumpy, heavy-handed, singsong-y kids' books. Which, by the way, are extremely hard to pull off, and you could not do it even though you feel like you could. But he wrote a book called The Tough Coughs As He Ploughs the Dough. Which, it's hard to understand how brilliant that title is, until you look at it in print, because all the words look the same, and they're all pronounced differently. Dude was like deep in the paint in his understanding of how words do. But, like, same thing with Frost. Frost wrote consistent beautiful iambic language and you would never know. He would do it in dialogue. Some of his longer unknown… Like, never cited, never read poems are pages and pages long of people having a conversation. You don't realize your reading iambic anything. It's because it's perfectly natural and perfectly flawless. Which means he sweat blood into it. I think Frost also wrote

"The old dog barks backwards without getting up.

I can remember when he was a pup."

It's amazing because what he's doing is playing with metrical feet. "The old dog barks backwards" is a series of words that you must say in stochee, in single metrical feet, because of just how… You can't make those flip trippingly off your tongue. Then, I think, the second line are all dactyls. They go dada dah, dada dah. One two three, one two three. "And I can remember when he was a pup." They're frolicking. They sound like a ferret running. It's things like that that I think of, and that I have a particular fondness for, because the words always have to go through the brain, but sounds will start… Will strike you straight in the heart. I get… I can get… If I can get past your brain to your heart, then I've won as a writer. It's like way easier to short cut around the brain because our brains are really messy and complicated.

[Mary Robinette] And often not very bright.

[Pat] Right! So, like, poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who would write things so beautiful that I could not understand them. Like

"I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon..." [The Windhover https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover]

You're like, "What are you even doing? What are you talking…" That is beautiful. I don't know what you just said.

[Laughter]

[Pat] See, that's… I don't know if that's purple? It's close to purple, but, like, if you can figure out how he did that and do a piece of it… You get 15% of that in your prose, and you can have a lyricism that will put your hand around somebody's heart in a way that the best analogy in the world never could.

[Dan] This is… Has been a wonderful discussion. I'm glad we ended on poetry, because that is our homework for you, is just to go out and read poetry. We've been reciting some of our favorites. We will put some of our recommendations in the liner notes, but go out and fi… Not just one poem, but multiples by several different people, and people of different backgrounds. Just read a lot of poetry, and see what they're doing, and how you can put that kind of fluidity and grace…

[Howard] Read it until your mouth starts trying to poet…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Actually, no, one of the things I'm going to suggest is that if you are having difficulty getting poetry, because it is a different language, it's a different form, if you've been reading prose your entire life and you're trying poetry. One of the things to try with it is to try to read it out loud as part of your homework assignment. Also, to listen to people. So I'm going to add a… We're going to put some poems in the liner notes that we have mentioned or that we're fond of. I'm going to give you one to start with. That is Gwendolyn Brooks We Real Cool.

[Pat] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] It's so good.

[Pat] Read her off the page, but then… I'm sorry, go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Because there is audio of her reading it. So, read it on the page, and then you can find the audio to listen to it. Then, also, if you're still like this is difficult for me, there is a video by Manual Cinema which is, strangely, is a public company that I am very fond of.

[Dan] Imagine.

[Mary Robinette] But they were commissioned by the Poetry Foundation to create a poem… A visual poem to go with and support the recording of Gwendolyn Brooks reading We Real Cool. It's a great way to kind of get a sense of oh, this is what it can do, if it is new to you as a form.

[Pat] I heard her do it live.

[Mary Robinette] [gasp] I'm a little bit jealous of you.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I'm a lot jealous of you.

[Dan] All right. So, go read some poetry. Read it to yourself, read it out loud. Just kind of see what you can do with it. That's your homework. You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/02/15-05-setting-goals-for-your-career/

Key Points: Set short-term and long-term goals. Think about who are you writing for. Do what you want to do. Write what you want to read. Watch out for the mortality rate in publishing, it can be demoralizing. Everyone's career is different. Set goals for yourself. Think about what you want to do this year, what you want to do with a series, what kind of space you want to be in, what genres you want to write in. Be aware of the wavelength in your genre, how big are the peaks, how long is the tail. Look for goals that you can control, such as daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. Word count versus time spent? Another career goal might be to have a plan for when this career ends and you move to the next. Careers take many shapes. Focus on the goals when you are writing a book, what is the next step in front of you. One word at a time. Sometimes your career plan is to write something wildly different. Write what you love vs. mass appeal? Think about author brand, think about writing that is always you. What is your through line, to keep readers following? The voyage, what kind of story do I want to tell, is being true to yourself. How am I going to tell it is marketing. Look for the common thread in your writing, the similarity that you want to hold onto.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Five.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Setting Goals for Your Career.

[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] I'm realizing that I should have set more goals.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, this is a really interesting question we've gotten here that I don't think we've ever covered on the podcast before. Which makes me excited whenever we get a question that spirals us in some new direction. What kind of goals…

[Howard] Especially one that depresses me.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] What kind of goalsetting do you do in your career?

[Dan] This is something we have talked about a little bit with Dongwon. But I am very interested to hear what Victoria has to say about it, because I feel like she is one of my models that I try to follow, because you do so much career planning for yourself.

[Victoria] I'm a Slytherin, right?

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] So I'm both very ambitious and very prone to…

[Brandon] I'm a Slytherin, too.

[Victoria] I love it. I love it. This side of the table, we like to plan our futures…

[Dan] Hufflepuff.

[Victoria] In very specific ways. Well, I also think I'll probably have some differing or interesting answers, only because I started when I was 21, I'm now 32. I have had many hills and valleys, and it has taught me to be very intentional about the way that I set goals, and that I try and create and shape this weird thing called a career.

[Dan] So, give us some examples.

[Victoria] Well, I think it's really important to set both short-term and long con. I'm a firm believer in both. But I had an upset early on in my career, three books in, where everything went terribly, terribly wrong. I was 25 years old and about to quit. I decided, before I quit, I was going to try and write one more book. I was going to throw out any notions that I had about audience. I was going to write specifically for a version of myself. I was writing a 25-year-old me book. So, because of that, I put in it exactly what I wanted to read. I began to cultivate this idea that when we are writing for an audience, specificity will always be better than breadth. I wrote it as weird, as dark, as strange as I wanted, and I had a lot of fun. The book that came out of that was Vicious. It would go on to restart my career. It would go on to open a lot of doors. But really, what it did was it taught me, from there on, every book that I wrote, I would write for an age of myself, whether I'm writing for 10-year-old me with my middle grades, 17-year-old me with my YA, current me with my adults, and made sure that that audience was so hyper specific. The more specific I got in my planning of my audience, the larger my actual audience grew.

[Howard] My career really didn't begin as a cartoonist until I was maybe 33, 34. I started Schlock Mercenary when I was 31. I'm fascinated that… Fascinated, and I'm saying this for the benefit of our listeners, that someone at age 25 can feel like their career is over. Because when I was… Wait, wait, let me finish. When I was 25, I had no career in anything yet. It's not about getting started early, it's about doing the thing that you discover you want to do. With Schlock Mercenary, I think I was about 32, 33 years old when I realized this comic is working for people because I'm writing the thing that I want to read. At the time, the idea that a science fiction comic strip could be funny without making fun of science fiction was a little weird. That was… Everything else in the space I was working in was making fun of science fiction. What I was writing, and it took eight years to figure it out, with the help of Brandon and Dan, what I was writing was social satire. I didn't know that that is what I loved. But it turned out that it was, and I'm happy I did it.

[Victoria] I do want to preface this with a… I'm going to throw out some what seem like very young ages. I did start in my teens. So I did put in years from before. I knew I wanted to be an author from age 16. I got my first literary agent at age 19. I was 22 when my first book sold. One of the reasons I say you can get to 25 and feel like you're ready to quit is because the mortality rate in publishing is very high, and five years in publishing… It's like dog years, where I felt like I had been in this for a very long time. Publishing can be kind of demoralizing in that way. I'm sure that you guys have covered it and I'm sure that we're going to cover it more.

[Dan] So, for me, I mean one of the mistakes that I made, looking back, is assuming that I was Brandon Sanderson.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Don't we all?

[Dan] We've been friends for decades.

[Brandon] Man, I have trouble with that as well.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, we shared an editor at the same time. All these kind of similarities. So, watching your career gave me… Not an unrealistic sense of my career, but just an assumption of oh, this is how a career works. Which is not true. Everyone's career is very different. So I was not setting goals for myself, I was just kind of like, "Oh, I got published a year behind Brandon. Everything's going to also be about a year behind Brandon." I was not setting goals for myself at all. This has nothing to do with relative levels of success, just that I was not proactively planning what my career was going to look like. I was kind of coasting on assumptions. Then I hit a point where I realized, "Oh, wait, I have to try so much harder than I'm trying right now." So I did set down and do some goal planning. This is what I'm going to do this year. This is my goal for this series. This is the kind of space that I want to be in next. In a few years from now, I want to expand into this other genre, or do these other things.

[Victoria] Well, I do want to also say I came at it through a bit of trial by fire, in that I started in YA. YA is potentially, of all the subgenres and all of the classifications, the most cutthroat in that they decide before your book is out…

[Dan] Oh, my word. Yes.

[Victoria] Whether you have succeeded or failed. It is not a mentally very healthy and sustainable way to do things. So I think YA has the highest mortality rate, as I call it, among authors. They are very, very flash-in-the-pan focused, very what is hot right now and it is not hot tomorrow. Whereas one of the best things that I did for myself mentally was to expand out into adult genre, into science fiction and fantasy. I remember going to my publisher about two weeks after Vicious came out and being like, "Am I a success or am I a failure?" He said, "Your book just came out two weeks ago." I said, "Yes. You've had plenty of time to know."

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Tor was like, "Check back in in a year or two. This isn't how we work." So I do think that there's a lot of these things which cause us to feel even lonelier in the process, even lacking in not only role models and ideals, but also simply in peer qualities, peer information. We don't share information very willingly. We're taught that everyone is an island unto themselves. It's a very isolation driven process.

[Brandon] Yeah. You talk about mortality rate. I've always discussed it as what I call wavelength. Certain genres have bigger peaks and bigger valleys. Just because of how many books are being released and the potential audiences and things like that. YA, I've noticed, man, if you get kind of a staple in adult science fiction and fantasy, it sells much longer, has a much longer tail, but that peak sometimes can be a lot lower than in YA. I like that you're all talking about this. I think people, when they hear or read the title for this episode, they're going to think, "Oh, goals are things like I want to hit the New York Times list, or I want to sell this many copies." None of us are talking about goals like that. We're talking about, if I… What are my goals? When I set goals, my goals are usually daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly word count goals. I actually have a spreadsheet, and every day, I have the spreadsheet showing me how much I've done, how much is left. The average I would have to write each working day if I want to finish by this date. That's a really useful word count for me, because I know if it gets too high, then I have to change my date. Because it becomes beyond what I can do in a given day sustainably.

[Howard] Isn't that more of a Ravenclaw thing?

[Laughter]

[garbled… You just… Howard… The other day…]

[Victoria] I think it's really interesting, and I do want to bring it up, because I think you and I, Brandon, have very opposite tactics, but we both measure. Which is that I used to measure word count, but some days, as everyone who listens to this and I'm sure all of you know, you can work for eight hours that day, you can do a huge amount of legwork on your story, and you can achieve very few words. So, earlier, about a year and a half ago, I switched from word count to time spent. It's not quite as reliable for hitting a very specific deadline, but I found that from a mental health perspective and from a productivity perspective, creating a lower threshold of what I need to accomplish in order to feel like I'm succeeding creates a much more diminished self loathing and then allows me to conversely be far more productive in any given day.

[Brandon] This is definitely something you have to do individual, because… Individually, because I don't have that worry. I don't have that… What is… If I'm recording every day and I hit a period where there's low word counts, that's important for me to know, because it means that I need to look at the story and something's wrong. Right? If I'm doing low word counts… If I'm doing low word counts once in a while, the average word count I need to hit in order to hit this goal doesn't change very much because it's over time. But I don't have this… Like, if I'm not productive, like the…

[Victoria] You don't have my self loathing existential crisis. [Garbled]

[laughter]

[Brandon] I don't end up having that. But a lot of people do, that's very, very common.

[Victoria] It is. It's very common. But I think this gets back to the point you were making before, which is when we are talking about goals, we are being very careful to confine it to goals that are in our control as creators, because we all know that there are so many facets of this industry and so many factors that will never be in your control. It is really fun to dwell on those instead of doing your work.

[Howard] I want to offer a goal here which may sound a little bit negative at first. When I was talking, years ago, with Jay Lake, who has since passed away. He is one of my favorite people, because he introduced me at WorldCon to other people by saying, "He's writing the best science fiction comic that exists." I was like, "Who is this guy? How did I end up on his friend's list?" But he told me that the average career length for people in this field… Not career length for the people whose names maybe you know from seeing them on bookshelves forever, but for people who get published, and then go on to do other things, was like 5 to 7 years.

[Victoria] Mortality.

[Howard] Yeah, the mortality rate. Then he told me, "Howard, you've been doing this for 12 years, you're a fixture." Except he began… He inserted an adjective before fixture.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It made me feel wonderful, but it was also a little terrifying. Because the career goal that I didn't have, and the one that I'm offering to all of you is, I want… When this career ends, I'm going to accept that it may end at some point, I want to know what I want to do next. I want to live my life in such a way, I want to do this career in such a way that when it draws to a close, it doesn't draw to a close in a panic, it draws to a close because I still have a plan.

[Victoria] This is fascinating to me. I just celebrated a decade in publishing, like I celebrated it, like I had hit… Like, my 100th birthday.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] I was so excited on it. Because… I think I did that because around six or seven years in, people started calling me an overnight success. I was amazed and insulted, because I think we have this idea, we love to fetishize the metrics of success, which are not in an author's control, and in so doing, erase a huge amount of the work that is going to create where you are at that point. So I think that's one of the reasons we'll always be focusing, or we try to re-center this on the minutia of the daily word count goals, or of the annual creativity goals, or of the hopes for the longevity or shape of our career, or the caveat plans that we make. Because, like you… The same way that you write a book, one word at a time, you get through and you make a career one word at a time, one year at a time. You finally get to say… And look, like five years in, right around the time that I sold Vicious, I also did a work-for-hire project for Scholastic. I found other ways to stay in the career, because a day job in writing was still going to give me an opportunity to be writing. I think sometimes we get to purity focused on like you're either a full-time writer, or you're not a real writer at all. The fact is like there are so many shapes that these careers take. There are so many hills and valleys, even on an escalation towards whatever we call success. You're still going to have years where you feel like you didn't do as much, where you feel like your position wasn't as high, regardless of where you are. I think that can be very un-grounding. So I think focusing on what are our individual… What are our goals when we're writing a book, what are our goals for the next step in front of us? Because really that's all we can really contain.

[Brandon] One of the best writers I know, flat out best writers I know, has never sold a book. This is partially because lots of health issues, some mental health issues, mean that for her, simply writing every week is a fight and a struggle, and writing something good… She keeps going and has kept going for 20 years, and writes amazing fantastic stuff, where the question for her is not, "Will I hit the bestseller list?" It is, "Do I get my writing done this week, through all the other things in my life that are so difficult?" She's really inspiring because of that.

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

[Dan] Ghost Station. So, this is mine. About four years ago, as I started to realize, oh, I have hit the end of a phase of my career, and I did not plan for a second phase, what am I going to do now? That's when I sat down and, like I said earlier, I started to look at genre. This is a weird thing for me to say, because I'm already in like four different ones, but I decided part of my career goal, my career plan, was I wanted to move into something wildly different. Reach an entirely separate audience that I had not yet been reaching. I love historical fictions, so I started writing historical fiction. It took me a couple of tries to get it right. But, last November, it came out as an Audible original called Ghost Station, which is my historical thriller. Cryptographers in Berlin in 1961 about two months after the Wall goes up. They're trying to figure out what's going on, and they're trying to reach their double agent on the other side. It's all just Cold War thriller. It's totally different from everything I've written before, but I loved it. I love everything about it. I'm hoping that this can build a new phase of career.

[Brandon] That's an Audible Original, so if you have an Audible subscription, it's one of the freebies that you can get every month, is that what that is, or is it…

[Dan] It's not… It's not necessarily going to be free. But you can get it dirt cheap, yeah.

[Brandon] Okay. Yeah, because I think with your subscription, they have some weird thing. So go look it up. It is Audio Original.

[Dan] Yeah. So, a year after it releases, so next November, we'll be able to bring out a print edition of it. But…

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Dan] For now, it is Audible exclusive, and they've done a fantastic job with it.

[Brandon] So, kind of coming out this topic from a different direction, we have two questions here asking basically the same thing. How do you balance writing what you love versus aiming for mass appeal? I like this question, because a lot of our listeners might be thinking, "Man, I wish I had Dan Wells's problem."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] "Of, man, I have to have four different careers going." They're like, "I'd like to have one." So, backing it up to aspiring writers…

[Victoria] Yeah. I have very complicated feelings on this, and I'll try and articulate them all. But I was actually thinking about what you were saying, Dan. I was thinking about the nature of your career, Brandon. I was thinking about the ways I fall somewhere very specifically in between them. Which is, I was thinking about author brand. Right? The thing is, like all of your books, Brandon, happen inside a universe that you have designed. So they all have a connective thread. Very few of my books have a connective thread, but I feel like we have… we both have an author brand. The idea that my readers can go from my middle grade, my YA, my adult, they can pick up any of the books, they're still going to feel like me. Damn, you were talking about the fact that you're entering into a genre that you haven't written in before, but I've now read your work in several genres, and I would say that your books always feel like you. So, like I know… I would be completely inauthentic to say, "Just write what you love. Never think about audience. Never think about brand." Because even when I'm thinking about audience, it's me. But I'm thinking about very specific versions of me, targeted to very specific audiences. I think one of the greatest things you can do as a creator is begin to think about what your through line is between your books. Is there something that kind of Pied Piper leads readers from one to the next? Is there a reason that readers should not, se… A series fandom should not stick with you for only one series, but should follow you from book to book. Because I think that's one of the great challenges that authors have, perhaps when they start with a series or a trilogy, and they finish that trilogy, and they go to write a new thing and they haven't cultivated an author brand. So they have a series brand, and people don't follow.

[Howard] Next week, we're going to be talking with Pat Rothfuss about prose. It just occurred to me that… This is harkening back to stuff that we said last month about the voyage, point A to point B. The story that you want to tell may well be that voyage, that point A to point B. What kind of person takes that trip in a sports car? What kind of reader takes it in a minivan? What kind of reader takes it in a four-wheel-drive truck? The prose that you use, the words that you use, the pacing that you used to tell your story, I think that is going to have more bearing on the market than the point A to point B. So being true to yourself may be what kind of story do I want to tell. Then, market chasing is how am I going to tell it?

[Dan] Let me give an example of this from my own work. This is not something that I had realized was my through line until a reader pointed it out. That in all of my books, there is a character who is obsessed with something and you get very deeply into it. Whether that is serial killer lore or virology in the Partials series or computer programming in the Mirador series. Even my middle grade is essentially a hard science fiction as a kid learns about space travel and microgravity. So what I have realized since then is, "Oh. My characters tend to get really excited about something. They delve super deep into it." That is what excites me as author. So I can write in anything. That's why I wrote a book about cryptographers, because they get super excited, enthused, and we learn all this stuff about cryptography. But then there's a totally different story around it.

[Victoria] I definitely think if I'm looking at similarity, I have 16 books. The thing is that they're all about all kinds of different things. The two things they all have in common is that they're weird. Like, they're not realism. They have some kind of thing that's left of center. But also, I try to balance the accessibility of the prose with the poetry of the prose that I like. I am really interested in writing books that convince people that they don't like a genre that they do like the genre. So I'm very much about finding that central space that doesn't alienate, but opens the door and says, "Come in." Like, I know that you don't know if you like the space. I know you find this space daunting. But I love being an entry point into a deeper space of the genre. For me, a lot of that comes down to, as Howard was saying, to the way I tell my stories. I specifically gear them toward a central audience that is perhaps a little bit wider, a little less niche. I do that because I know once I can get them in the room, I can tell whatever story I want. But I want to get them in the room first.

[Brandon] We are a little overtime…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So we're going to wrap it here. We could probably keep talking about this forever. But, Victoria, you have some homework for us.

[Victoria] I do have some homework. We've been talking in this episode about making sure you not only have goals, but those goals are delineated between things in your control and things out of your control. An exercise that I actually go through with my agent every year, and that I did before I was agent did as well, is called the 1-5-10. I sit down, because I love lists. I feel like most of us really like making lists, because it gives us a false sense of control over the universe. I make goals of what do I want to achieve in one year, in five years, and in 10 years. Where do I want to be? Thinking of it that way allows me to look at my most immediate goals, finishing a project that I'm working on, maybe the five year allows me to shift my place in what kind of stories I'm writing or take on something that's a bit of a daring challenge, and the 10 year starts being about career, starts being about the shape of the imprint that you're making and the goals that you hope to do. I think it's really important. I want you to try and make three lists, a one, a five, and a ten. I want you to be ambitious, but I really want you to try and keep those goals to things that you can actively influence and control. If you need to make a second list of 1-5-10 for hopes and dreams, that is absolutely fine, but I think it's really important that we don't conflate the metrics of success, like hitting a bestseller list or selling X number of copies that the industry controls so much of with the things that we can actually control as creators.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.04: Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/26/15-04-revision-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: How do you know what needs to be changed? Trust your own reader reactions. Mark it up, Awesome, Bored, Confused, Disbelief. Walk away from it, then come back and ask yourself do things need to change? Or write something else, read something else, then ask yourself. Also, try breaking your story down to scenes, or even French scenes, and identify the purposes for each scene. If you are using a structure, make sure it doesn't feel like canned beans, that all the pieces are there, and that it is what you wanted to do. Think about MICE, and check the threads. Do you have extra threads that aren't needed, or that are never resolved? You may want to pull them out. Consider moments of tension and resolution. What do you do if a secondary character is taking over? Don't worry about it. You can have multiple interesting characters in your stories.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Four.

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pat] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Pat] And I'm Pat.

[Dan] We are super excited to have a special guest for you today, Pat Rothfuss. Pat, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[Pat] I write fantasy novels sometimes and I do charity sometimes and I'm a dad sometimes.

[Dan] Awesome. Your main book that most people know you for is…

[Pat] The Name of the Wind.

[Dan] The Name of the Wind. One of the best-selling fantasies and best written fantasies…

[Pat] Oooh.

[Dan] In my opinion.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's why we've got you on to talk about revision.

[Dan] Revision. So let's… We're going to talk about, and the first thing that I want to ask the… You guys is, how do you know what needs to be changed? When you look… You've finished your first draft, you're ready to start revision, and it is time to cut something out or make something better. How do you know which parts need to be cut out or made better?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I do is I actually trust my reader reactions. I… I'm talking about before I hand it to a beta reader, that… Or sometimes even after I hand it to a beta reader. One of the things that I look at are the ways that I respond to it. When I get a piece of media that I love… Like, I cannot tell you how many times I've seen the Princess Bride. I still have an emotional response to it. So I can trust that if there's something that I really love, I will continue to have an emotional response to it, even though I know exactly what's going to happen. Therefore, I should still be having an emotional response to my own work, even though I know what's going to happen to it. So what I do is I pay attention to places where I'm bored, or when I'm reading it and I'm like, "What? What? What does that mean?" Like, when I don't know…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What I meant with my own stuff, like, that's a problem.

[Dan] That never happens to me.

[Laughter]

[go ahead]

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes… So, I have awesome, where I'm like, "Hey, that's good!" Which you do have, you know. Bored, confused, and disbelief, where I'm like, "What?" Sometimes the disbelief is it's just like an itch. It's like that doesn't quite… It feels off. So I pay attention to those. Generally speaking, what I found is that most of the awesome things, I can leave alone. Not all of them, but most of them, I can leave alone. The bored ones are usually an indication of a pacing issue, which means I need to tighten it or I need to unpack it to give the reader a reason to care. The confused ones are always an order of information thing, where I just haven't passed it to them in the right order. Sometimes it's still in my head. The disbelief is something where I've violated their sense of the world. Either the natural world, the physical world, or the metaphysical world, which is the character's life. So I address those based on my own reactions. But I have to like pay attention and trust it. The thing that I do is I mark it, but I don't make the changes, because that flips me out of my reader brain.

[Pat] Hum. That's cool.

[Dan] Now, I couldn't help but notice though that that's A, B, C, D.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] That's awesome. I'm going to add to that Evil. If you want to go all the way to E. Because writing horror, if my readers write back and say, "How dare you do this? Why are you such a monster?" That's something I know I probably want to keep in.

[Guffaw]

[Mary Robinette] I would call that awesome.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Might have been a [scream]

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When you do that.

[Howard] That also begins with A. For my own part, I don't get to begin with what needs to change. I have to begin with do things need to change? Because when I'm scripting the comic, I will sit down, I will script a week of scripts, and I want to sit down and I want to start drawing. I want to move to the next stage. If I put art on a bad script…

[Groan]

[Howard] I've wasted a whole bunch of time. So my rule is I write it. Then I walk away from it. I come back to it, and I look at it, and rarely, rarely do I allow myself to put art on something I wrote that day. Because the answer to if… Does it really need to be edited, is always yes. The answer is always yes. But it's not the Howard who woke up this morning and wrote it who will say that. It is the Howard who went to bed having written it and woke up the next day and realized that yesterday's Howard is just not as smart as he thought he was.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] I actually… I love that, because I always talk to like my students, or if I'm talking to people about writing, like, how do you get distance? That's what you always need from your writing is distance, and it's so hard to get objective space away from something you made yourself. Sometimes it's time, but honestly, time is magnified by a good night's sleep. Or, like physical distance, or change of venue, in addition to other things. But, yeah, a good night's sleep, especially if you didn't… I would say, the night's sleep is almost… The benefit of that is eradicated if you do what I do, which is you write until you're exhausted, and then you immediately fall into bed.

[Howard] Collapse.

[Pat] Then, like you wake up, and it might as well have been five minutes ago that you wrote it. Even though you might have been asleep for eight hours.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I think about… Like, I do the things that you're talking about. But the other one that I find useful to speed up, like when you're on deadline and you don't have time to take time, to like set it down and let it breathe for six months or year or what have you. I found that narrative distance will often help me. That if I write something else or I read something else, that it resets my brain. So that I'm coming back to it as a new story. It resets my reader expectations.

[Howard] Going back to the well is not going back to the well because I need water, it's going back to the well because I need to throw myself into the well…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And climb back out, new.

[Mary Robinette] I will say that this for me is a revision thing. It doesn't work for me as a drafting thing. Drafting thing, I have to be careful about holding the right story in my head…

[Yes]

[Pat] I always think of that is effectively like loading up into active memory the world. Although, honestly, if I'm revising plot or structure, I need to hold all of the world and the structure and the tension and the pacing. So that still needs to be in active memory, which is why that's dangerous for me to like really get engaged in a compelling piece of TV or… But especially print stuff.

[Dan] So… When the time comes, then… We've talked about getting distance from the work. We've talked about using readers and trusting in their feedback. What other methods do you have for knowing what needs to be changed?

[Pat] I've got a good one structurally that I didn't mention today, that I kind of wish I would have remembered. This was way back in the early days of Name of the Wind. I was trying to get the beginning to work. I struggled with the beginning more than any other part of Name of the Wind. Even so, I got it to the point where it's passable. I honestly still don't think it's good. But I broke down… I… Every chapter into scenes, and every scene, by which I mean every… Where I broke it with asterisks. Then I subdivided it even further into French scenes. Which I don't know if that's a common term, other than in like the study of Shakespearean drama. Because you have like Hamlet, Act II, scene four. But every time somebody enters or leaves the stage, it is a new French scene. Even if there's not a scene break. One of my drama professors pointed out that every time someone entered or left, it was a different scene, and there was a new purpose to the scene that Shakespeare was fulfilling. Because Shakespeare was a really amazingly tight writer. So I broke down every single French scene in the first huge chunk of the book, and I talked about what I was… What the purpose of them was. Some of them had like three purposes. That was great. But some of them only had one purpose. Then, stacked up against each other, it said it was like Kvothe is smart and cool. Shows Kvothe is smart and cool. Shows Kvothe is smart and cool. I'm like, "Oh. That's why this is draggy and dumb. I'm doing the same thing again and again." These all also kind of talk about the world, or they build character, but their central element is all the same. That's why this seems boring and it's not compelling and it's not tracking along like it should. So that helped me spot the problem that I then needed to like figure out how to fix.

[Dan] Was… If I can ask, just to dig a little deeper here, was there something specific that you're like, you know, if all of these are just showing Kvothe is smart and cool, what did you decide to add? Like, I'm going to have a scene that shows he's fallible. Or were you thinking more tonal, or…

[Pat] That was actually back in… I can't remember where I was writing up this document. That was in 2001. So it was still six years before I was published. So this was really in the early days of me getting a good grasp on how I thought about tension and pacing and reader curiosity and all the things that now I consider myself quite good at, although I think of them… I think I conceptualize them a lot differently than a lot of people who like have studied them or worked in writers groups. Just because I was sort of like foraging in the wilderness, and I came up with my own weird things. So now, like I look at the old Star Trek, and I'm like, "Oh. A plot, B plot. That's what they're doing." This is a story shape. So I was like if I have a short arc, then I just need to make sure you start something, and then eventually you have tension until it resolves and you need to support it and tell it resolves. But you also don't want to have… You don't want to started in one chapter and end it in the next, because then you haven't given any room for tension to grow and your reader to be curious and engaged. So, I just wanted… I always now make sure that there's space and difference. But I don't do A plot, B plot. It's a mess.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] I mean, mine is… It's all held together with like bailing twine and barbed wire.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, barbed wire holds things together pretty darn well.

[Pat] Yeah, but it's painful. Like, don't follow those footsteps. It's… It works, but it's not a system that I think can be necessarily emulated or recommended.

[Howard] Funny you should say that, because in terms of defining a structure using A plot, B plot as an example, if I can look at something I've written and, after the fact, tell myself, "Ah, I'm doing A plot, B plot." That's awesome, because it's something that I know the reader knows how to resonate with. If I'm working… If I can't tell what the form is, what sort of structure I'm working in, unless I have done something to tell the reader that their expectations are going to be subverted, unless I've warned them, they're going to run into that and perhaps have problems. So I love finding that I'm working in a given structure, because then I can say, "Ah. Okay, I'm doing A plot, B plot. How do I do it so that it doesn't feel like canned beans?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "How do I… What are the pieces that are missing, what are the pieces I'm doing right?" And, the question that I always have to ask the moment I discover I'm doing something structurally or trope-wise or whatever is, "Wait. Is that what I meant?"

[Pat] Yeah.

[Howard] Is that what I wanted to do? But I love finding it because I know that if I speak using a structure… Three act format, hero's journey, A plot B plot, whatever, the reader will know how to respond.

[Dan] Okay. I've got another really cool question I want to ask you guys, but first… Let's break for our book of the week. Well, it's actually… Oh, it is a book this time. Yes. Tell us about it.

[Pat] I have to gush about The Murderbot Diaries, which I'm guessing a lot of you already know about. They won a ton of awards last year. They're a series of four novellas by Martha Wells. I… No offense, Mary, but…

[Mary Robinette] They're really…

[Pat] They're my favorite things that I read…

[Mary Robinette] They're really good.

[Pat] In, like, these last couple of years. They're so good. I have not empathized with a character, with a murderbot, with a character more than murderbot maybe ever in my life. I cried. They're amazing. So good I actually hugely geeked out on Martha Wells at the Hugos…

[Laughter]

[Pat] It was so embarrassing, because I was just like… I was just like, "Oh, I want to mention that I like her books." But I was just, "Bwah..." I'm just like, oh, I did that. That's so embarrassing. I can do it, too.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] They're so good. Make sure you read them in order, though. Read the first one, because there's a continuous storyline. I can't recommend them highly enough.

[Dan] Awesome. That is The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Who has an excellent last name.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Now, before I get into my other question, you… Mary Robinette, you looked like you were going to say something?

[Mary Robinette] So, we were talking about tension. One of the things that can happen when you're looking at revisions and you're trying to decide, you're like, "Oh, this doesn't have tension. This doesn't have a thread." Like, deciding which thing to keep and which thing to get rid of can be tricky sometimes. So, I talk about the MICE quotient in terms of frame a lot. But it's also really good for defining which pieces of conflict to keep in a story. What I find is, like, if I have an inquiry story, what I know is that the story ends when my character answers a question. So all of the conflicts in the story need to be preventing the character from asking a question. So, if that's one of those 14 plot threads that are going through the story, then I can't let the character actually get to that question. So if I have a thread in there that is… If this scene is like… Is about an inquiry, and it's about a different inquiry than the main one that I've been asking, then that may be a thread that I don't need. Or, if it's something that I never resolve later, it's like get rid of that. I just went through, I… I blame Brandon, but I just finished writing the Relentless Moon. My finished draft was 180,000 words. The previous novel in the series was 99,000 words.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like… I completely blame Brandon, but I wanted to cut it down significantly.

[Howard] Now you have two more books.

[Mary Robinette] Now I have two more books. Exactly. So one of the things that I looked at… Looked for were threads that I never really used. A lot of times, you use something and it raises tension in a scene. It's great in the scene, but you don't pay it off later. So those things when you pull them out can dramatically reduce the length of your work, but also tighten it and make it structurally a lot more solid. It's not that everything needs to wrap up at the end, because life is messy. Sometimes, it is nice to have something that's still a little fuzzy at the end. But that's… Those are things that you look for. It's like, is this serving the story? Does this have a payoff at the end? That's the kind of thing I look for.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to absolutely second that. We'll make sure to put this in the liner notes, but I recommend you all go and find the YouTube videos by Lindsey Ellis. She's a film critic and she has one on three act structure where she re-contextualizes three act structure entirely around moments of tension and resolution. Which redefined it for me in a way that I had never understood it before. It really has changed the way that I revise, because now I'm not looking at, well, is this thing done, but what is the tension of this scene or this act or this whatever and when is that going to get resolved. So it's really great.

[Dan] So, anyway, I want to ask another question that I'm excited about. Which is, let's say that you are looking at your work, you've finished one or more drafts and you realize that a secondary character has become far more interesting than your primary character. How do you fix that problem? How do you approach that? Do you just make that character more boring, do you make the main character more interesting, like, what do you do?

[Pat] My… Because this happened to me, and I struggled with it a lot early on, because it is scary. You're working hard to make your main character compelling. Then, suddenly, you create like sort of a charming fairy who steals every scene in the opening, when what you need is for everyone to be interested in your mysterious innkeeper. And…

[Mary Robinette] What are you talking about?

[Laughter]

[Pat] Just in theory. These are archetypes.

[Howard] They are now.

[Pat] In the tarot. Mysterious innkeeper. I should do my own… Oh, sorry. But the big solution, I feel, is don't worry about it. Because you certainly don't want to say, "Oh, this part is too cool. I better take it out." That's always a losing proposition. Okay? Come at me, later…

[Chuckles]

[Pat] Because what I just said isn't true.

[Laughter]

[Pat] But the vast majority of the time, what is lovable about Bast is that Bast is simple. Bast is… He is not actually one note, but he seems very one note, and simple things are easy to digest and sort of… Some of these, like Han Solo, like lovable rogue type characters, are sort of compelling in themselves. Whereas more complex characters… It's the difference between your high school crush and the person that you marry for 10 years. You marry that person and you stay with them for 10 years because you have a rich important relationship with them, but that doesn't mean that like, that week you went to Morocco, you didn't have something really amazing and tempestuous with a dark-eyed woman there. Both of those are good, and honestly, in the same way that I think having both of those leads to like a rich and satisfying life, you want both of those things in a book. It's just they both satisfy different needs, even if one of them is a little shinier on the surface.

[Mary Robinette] I completely agree with you. I'm going to say that I got distracted by the analogy, and I would love for you to do a different analogy that's slightly less sexist.

[Pat] Yeah. Well, I mean I… Mary, which part is sexist? Like…

[Howard] Morocco?

[Pat] Morocco?

[Mary Robinette] No, the… If… Comparing… Sorry. I've seen you use this analogy before, and it bothers me every time. Comparing moments of writing with women.

[Pat] I see. I think of it as I have relationships with characters, and I have relationships with women. So I'm mostly thinking of my own experience, but I see what you're saying because what you're kind of coming at is I'm presenting this as a universal as opposed to my personal experience.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Pat] That does seem sexist. Yeah. So…

[Dan] Do we want to… I mean, we'll keep rolling. But do we want to go back and cut that out?

[Mary Robinette] That's up to Pat.

[Pat] I could do it either way. I mean, I think it's valuable to see a misstep and correction for some people. It kind of depends on the tone that you want to achieve here. It sort of eats up some airtime.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean we are talking about revision. So this is actually a good revision.

[Laughter]

[Pat] Yeah.

[Dan] Well, actually…

[Mary Robinette] Like, when you get called on something in a critique and you have a pushback, you have a no, I don't think this is right. But then you think about it, and you're like, "Okay, well, what is my area of intention with this, and how do I get this across without triggering that again?"

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Pat] That actually is great, because like… I was like, "Oh. I was trying to achieve this." You're like, "You might have been trying for that, but here's actually the effect of what you said." I'm like, "Oh. Right. I probably, for some of my audience, I hit that effect with this, because I was coming at this from my own experience. I wasn't anticipating the effect on other people." So, now, an attempt to revise, like… That's the tricky bit of revision for me, is thinking… This one came out of me very naturally and it seems compelling because of its organic nature. But now I've got to stop and sort of disentangle myself from the affection of the original. Because it came out of sort of an honest emotional place in my personal experience. Then I've got to think how does that work? Than that, in my opinion, is the real work of writing. Because when it comes naturally and it's good, you're golden. That's not work. The work is looking at it and saying, "Uck. I've got to lay some bricks." Honestly, I don't know what I would do. I don't know how I would revise that analogy.

[Howard] Can I take a stab at it?

[Pat] Yeah, yeah. Help me.

[Howard] Can I take a stab at it? There is the music that I write to, and there is karaoke night.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] Karaoke night is a thing that… It is music. It is performative. It is songs that we are familiar with, but karaoke night is not what I want to listen to when I am trying to write. I have thousands of hours logged on the same 200, 300 songs in a playlist that I use for writing. Those are my go to, those are my main character. But without karaoke night, that's kind of lifeless. Without singing in the shower, without these other pieces. So coming back to the original question, which was, what do you do when a character is… When a secondary character is overshadowing your main character. What do you do when karaoke night… Everybody is loving that way more than the main musical theme of your book.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, what is it that there loving about karaoke night more? Why is it… Oh, well, it's because the characters are interacting here in a way that is energetic and fun. Why is that missing from my main character?

[Mary Robinette] This is why I don't play D&D more than a one shot, because that narrative…

[Pat] Becomes…

[Mary Robinette] is often… Is that becomes more compelling to me. That's a side quest in my quest for writing. It is the secondary character that has become more interesting. But I did like what you are talking about the relationship that you have with the thing. You were going to say something.

[Pat] That's what I want to ask. Because what you did… When you were talking about that, I'm like, that makes sense. But it also gave me a moment to sort of stop, and to back away from it, and think about the primary issue you had with it. Was it the fact that I was talking about relationships, or the fact that they were gendered female?

[Mary Robinette] It was that they were gendered female, but specifically, that they were gendered female and based on appearance.

[Pat] Well, the first one wasn't. I said the marriage of 10 years…

[Mary Robinette] Yup. Oh, that's true.

[Pat] The other one was…

[Mary Robinette] But the second one…

[Pat] No, the other one was a week in Morocco. It was a vacation. I said a beautiful dark-eyed woman. What if I said a dark-eyed beauty and a marriage of 10 years? Does that resolve the sexism?

[Mary Robinette] Oh. That…

[Pat] Because that might be a simpler fix than changing my entire analogy.

[Mary Robinette] That is an interesting idea. I'm not…

[Pat] This is revision. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That may in fact have solved it for me. Although I think because beauty is still a gendered word in modern…

[Pat] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That I would still probably read it the same way. Also, because… There's also than the Morocco and dark-eyed and what are you [implying] there…

[Pat] There's some racism stuff there potentially. This is why we revise.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I really wish we could say that we had planned this, because I think it worked out perfectly to tell you all these points of revision and then to demonstrate them all in order…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Like trusting reader feedback, then work shopping, and all these different things that we did, to getting distance from it. But that is all the time we have. I'm really glad that this worked out the way it did. This is been a fantastic episode about revision. We have… We want to leave you with some homework to do, which Mary Robinette has.

[Mary Robinette] No, I think Pat actually had this.

[Dan] Was it Pat? I don't remember who it was.

[Mary Robinette] I think we both had the same one.

[Dan] Okay. Well, we're going to have Pat say it, then.

[Pat] Mine actually might have been the one that I already mentioned, where, go through your chapters and list your purpose. Because if you have never done that, it is incredibly informative. Also, it helped me realize that I want the scene to have at least three purposes, so that if two of them don't land, there's still something in it for the reader. But what was your's?

[Dan] You get to homeworks this time.

[Mary Robinette] That's right. It was the 10% solution.

[Pat] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which was… Which I think we've done on the podcast before, and it is still worth revisiting. Which is to examine your work and look at cutting it by 10%. You can go through and say, "Okay, I'm going to cut this paragraph by 10% or this page by 10%." But this process forces you to examine it and think about why is this word here? What is it supporting? A lot of times, you cut that 10% from your thing by saying, you know what, I'm going to pull this entire subplot out.

[Pat] Yeah. This is something I did repeatedly to Name of the Wind. I would always think, well, that's it. I cut everything that could be cut. But then another couple of months later, I would go through it again, and I'm like, "Actually, now that it's cleaner and tighter, I can see other things that weren't as clean and tight." And I do… I aim for every page 10%. So if I'm not cutting a line or a sentence or a phrase… It really forces me to consider what is essential on a page.

[Mary Robinette] If you're someone who writes short, which happens too sometimes, it is also worth, as an experiment, adding 10%.

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] To decide where things need to be fleshed out.

[Dan] Cool. Well, that's great. This has been our episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/19/15-03-self-publishing/

Key points: There's money in self publishing! But it takes marketing to get it. Try Kindle Unlimited and get your page reads up! Pay attention to visibility. Your craft needs to hold people's attention, and keep them reading. Romance has a lot of voracious readers, but there are niches for horror, fantasy, mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, all kinds of stories. Look at what readers want to read! Take advice from people who know what they are doing. Interact with your readers. Make sure that when readers start to read your book, they keep reading it! You can write to the market, and still write from your heart and write well. Have fun!

[Transcriptionist note: I tried to sort out who is talking, but I may have mislabeled some parts. Apologies in advance for any mistakes in attribution.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Three.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Self Publishing.

[Nandi] 15 minutes long.

[Victorine] Because you're in a hurry.

[Tamie] And we're not that smart.

[Bridget] But we are all self published.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Nandi] I'm Nandi. [Nandi Taylor]

[Victorine] I'm Victorine. [Victorine Lieske]

[Tamie] I'm Tamie. [Tamie Dearen]

[Bridget] And I'm Bridget. [Bridget E. Baker]

[Howard] We are all, in point of fact, self published. We are also all on stage at WXR 19 on Liberty of the Seas in the Gulf of Mexico. Give it up for us, live audience.

[Whoo! Applause!]

[Howard] Thank you so much. This is been great fun for me, and it's been a huge learning experience for me. As longtime listeners of Writing Excuses are probably aware, I make my living by giving away the comic strip for free online, and then selling books, selling ad space, doing Patreon subscriptions, whatever else. Yes, that is a full-time living. When I say I make a living, that's… Sandra making it into money. I just hide in the studio and draw pictures and write. It's a joint project. It is not independent, it is very codependent. It is a very two-person project. It is a model which I'm very familiar with. But a couple of days ago, in the Olive or Twist Lounge up on deck 15 in the rear, I was talking to Bridget about Kindle Unlimited and self-publishing. As part of this episode, we're going to drop some numbers. Bridget, drop some numbers on us. How are you doing with self-publishing?

[Bridget] So I published my first book last September, right before the Writing Excuses cruise that I went on. So I started, put my book out, and shortly after that, came on this cruise and had very few numbers to share. In one year, I put out seven other books, so I have a total of eight books out. I only made about $5,000 in the first four months. Then I've made about 89,000 since then. So, slow start, but as you start to get your books out and you learn marketing and you understand how to make the book that you had more visible, then you can earn a significantly higher amount of money.

[Howard] 89 plus 5 is… 94.

[Bridget] Yeah, 94 grand. That's my total author income so far.

[Howard] That's a solid number.

[Bridget] For my first year.

[Howard] That's a very solid number for a first year. Victorine, how are you doing?

[Victorine] Well, I hit the jackpot with my first book. Because it hit the New York Times bestseller list. I would say the first probably three years of self-publishing, I made about $40,000 a year. Just with one or two books. Then I took a little time off, so I made some less money for a couple of years. Then I started really studying the market, and publishing books directly to a certain market. So, since then, I've been able to make about $50-$80,000 a year. I'm really close to hitting that over six-figure thing now. So, I'm hoping to do that soon.

[Howard] Tamie?

[Tamie] I've been publishing since 2013. But it was really just a lark when I started. Actually, my kids published my book for me as a surprise for Christmas. So I really wasn't serious about it, other than I just kept publishing them. Wasn't really writing to market until I actually encountered Victorine and the Writing Gals. Got some good advice. Since I've been following that, I went from… I was probably making 30, $35,000 a year, and I just had my first $10,000 net month. So I'm pretty excited about that.

[Howard] That is amazing. Nandi? How are things going for you? Because I… Think you… When we talked a little bit in the preshow, you're counting things a little differently?

[Nandi] Yes. The way I self publish is a little bit different. I'm actually published on Wattpad, which is a story sharing website. So the jury's kind of out on how much money I'm going to make through this. Right now, it's a nice goose egg, but that is going to change. Because my story did pretty well on Wattpad, and it was actually picked by Wattpad books. So while it was on there, it gained me about a million reads and 25,000 followers. So it's being published through Wattpad books in January of 2020. It'll also go… The Wattpad version will go behind a paywall once the story is published.

[Howard] The distinction there between reads and follows seems like it might be an important one. Because one of those numbers is way larger than the other one.

[Nandi] Yes.

[Howard] Make sure I understand this right. Reads is the number of times the book was accessed and read?

[Nandi] Yes.

[Howard] Follows is the people who have… What? Subscribed to you?

[Nandi] Exactly. Yes. Wattpad works a lot like a social media site. I almost like to call it like a YouTube for books.

[Howard] Cool. Is there a similar sort of metric for Amazon, for what you're doing? Victorine? Tamie?

[Victorine] When you're published on Amazon, you sign up for their Kindle Select, which means you agree to only publish on Amazon platform, they put your book in what's called Kindle Unlimited. Then, people can read your book… It's kind of like Netflix for books. They can sign up for this program and they can read it for free, if they pay the program the monthly fee. So we get paid per page read through that program. So if you have a lot of pages read, it can really add up to quite a bit of money.

[Howard] Bridget, I think you were doing the same thing, weren't you?

[Bridget] Yeah, I did the same thing. What happened is when I first started, all my friends that I had met had told me, "Oh, we make most of our money off of page reads." I think the only people who bought my first book were like my friends. So I had a lot of sales, but no page reads, because I didn't have visibility. So I had to start learning techniques for gaining visibility. Then, my page reads went up dramatically. Now, I probably get about two thirds of my revenue is from page reads. The thing I think that's interesting about page reads is that you can slap up a book that's lousy, and you will get no page reads. Because people can check it out, read the first couple of pages, say, "Oh, this book is junk," and check it back in. So your book needs to be in there, but it also needs to be good enough that it holds people's attention and that they want to read your other books. Then, depending on the length of the book, you can make $0.20 you can make 2.50. If it's really long, you'll get paid more because they're reading more pages.

[Howard] Victorine? Oh, sorry. Tamie. I'm… [vuogh] so many people at this table that it's terrifying me.

[Tamie] Yeah. One difference with me is because I have… Some of my books are not exclusive to Amazon. So they are not in the Kindle Unlimited program. So I have one series that is five books, and the first book is actually Permafree, which means that I have made it free on Barnes & Noble, iBooks, and those platforms. Then Amazon has price matched as free. Because you cannot set your price free on Amazon. So Amazon has price matched it as free. So that one is out there. Anyone can read it. Usually stays… I think right now it's in the 700s in free books on Amazon. It usually stays up above 1000. Then, people hopefully will buy the rest of the books in the series and read them. If they actually read the book. A lot of people just download free books and don't even read them. But you get a certain percentage of readthrough on there. Then the rest of my… Probably most of my money still comes from page reads.

[Howard] Okay. A couple of terms that I want to make sure we're understanding. Wide means?

[Tamie] Means published in other places besides Amazon.

[Howard] Okay.

[Tamie] So, wide means that I'm published on those other channels. By the way, if… When Victorine made the New York Times bestseller list, her books were wide. You can't make a bestseller list without publishing on all those channels

[Howard] Let's pause for a moment for the book of the week. Somebody was going to pitch a book to us.

[Tamie] Okay. Yes. I'll just recommend the last good book that I read by an indie author named Emma St. Claire. It's called The Billionaire's Secret Heir. It's a really fun book. I don't know if you like billionaire romance stories, but this one is a clean, or what we call a sweet romance, meaning that there isn't any sex in it. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have any heat. It's a… They really are attracted to each other, but it's a book that people who object to reading sex and their books would enjoy this book. It's a cute idea, but the man and his wife were unable to have children and had used a surrogate mother to have a child. Then, many years later, I think his wife had passed away and the child is like seven years old, and he ends up meeting the girl who was the surrogate mother. She becomes the nanny, and you can just guess what happens. But it's a really sweet book.

[Howard] I want to address the potential… Elephant in the room might not be the right term. I get the feeling that there's a lot of romance in the genres that you guys are working within.

[Victorine] Yep. Yup.

[Bridget] I think in part that's because you're dealing… The three of us are all, at least to some extent, in Kindle Unlimited, and…

[Howard] When you say three of us…

[Bridget] I'm sorry, I'm…

[Howard] Bridget, Victorine, and Tamie.

[Bridget] Correct. That's right. So, Kindle Unlimited specifically has a lot of people who subscribe who like romance. I think in part that's because a lot of people who read romance tend to be voracious readers. So, paying 10 or $12 a book, if you're reading two books a day, gets cost prohibitive. Cost prohibitive in a hurry. So they tend to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. That means that you get a lot of immediate audience who are interested in reading your books if you're in that genre. So I write about half romance and half young adult. My romance is a much easier sell on Kindle Unlimited. I mean, obviously, it's not technically a sale, because they're just downloading it and reading it. But those get way more page reads for way lower ads spent. Whereas I get a lot more sales in paperback and in e-book on my young adult than on my romances. I almost sell no paperbacks in romance, but I sell a lot in YA.

[Nandi] I'll piggyback on that. The trend is the same on Wattpad as well. You will see a lot of romance. You'll see a lot of books titled things like The Bad Boy and the Nerd, or The Billionaire, or the Gangster's Girlfriend and things like that. They tend to do really well. Kind of for the same reason, voracious readers like to read things at low cost. In this case, free. But, that said, I would encourage anyone who is looking for feedback or who wants to share their story to post on Wattpad regardless of what you write because, as long as you put it up there, there are niches for horror, fantasy, things like this. If you look, you can find them.

[Howard] I want to pose that question to all of you for our listeners. If they want to make a living on Kindle Unlimited or if they want to make a living e-books going wide, does it have to be a romance? Do you have to write seven books a year?

[Bridget] No, definitely not. I know authors who are writing in many different genres. They probably need to be genre fiction rather than literary fiction or middle grade. Those are the two that really struggle with self-publishing. But I know authors who write mysteries, who write thrillers, who write science fiction, who write fantasy. All of them six-figure plus authors. Doing really, really well in that field. My suggestion would be to go on Amazon and look at the top selling indie books in whatever genre you write in and you're passionate in. Pick up those books. Pick up five of them, and read them. Look at the commonalities between… This is what the reader wants to read. So, if you can look at what readers want to read and you can write in that space, you can do very well as an indie author.

[Howard] We often caution our listeners against writing to the market. But with Kindle Unlimited, I have this sense that the market changes daily. A new book can come out and spike the list and you can pick it up and read it and understand what the market is consuming right now. Which is… You could be pretty agile in your production. Bridget, you said that you did some research about marketing and positioning your books and things like that. We don't have a whole lot of time. Do you have some secrets you can share with us?

[Bridget] So, I don't know if this is a secret per se, but my number one advice is even when it's hard to take, take advice from the people who know what they're doing. So, Victorine is sitting right here with me, and I'll tell you that when I put out my very first romance, I said, "I don't care what everybody's telling me, I just follow my heart." I got a photo shoot of a normal-looking couple because I said, "All these romances have models on the cover. I want normal-looking people on mine." I put it out, and nobody bought it. I had like 10 friends reach out and say, "Your cover's horrible." I'm like, "What do you know? People want regular people." It turns out they don't.

[Chuckles]

[Bridget] So I had to change my cover, which meant I paid for a cover twice, and I paid for a photographer that I didn't need, because I ended up using stock photos. So that's just one example. But there are people in the indie community who, if you go find some groups, they are very willing to help you. Victorine is one of them, who is like, "Bridget, this cover's not good. I know, because I'm a cover designer, and also I make a lot of money on my books. You need to change it." It wasn't until I listened to that advice that I did not want to listen to that I started to get progress and traction with the marketing end. You've got to have your book branded right. You've got to have something that hits the market, because even though it's always changing, there are things that you can look at and say, "Oo, this is working," or "this isn't." The great thing about indie is you can change it. So I had that cover that did crappy for a month, and I changed it. My book went whoosh! Straight up! After I got a better cover on it. So there is… The neat thing about indie is you don't just put it out there and your publisher bought 50,000 copies. Too bad. You can put it out there and say, "Ho, this didn't work. Let's try changing my title." If you own the ISBN, you go change your title, you give it to Amazon, Bam. You've got a new title, a new cover, it's rebranded, and all of a sudden it can do dramatically better. So listen to the advice, even if you think you're smart, you're probably not at the beginning.

[Victorine] Find a group of authors that know what they're doing, right? I'm part of a Facebook group called The Writing Gals. We give tons of advice. Just… When people ask questions, we tell them what to do in order to be successful. Because we want to give back, because we have been very successful at doing this.

[Howard] I'm looking right at Nandi. What've you got for us?

[Nandi] Well, in terms of… I'd like to give kind of advice on not necessarily secrets or tips, but one thing that was really useful to me on Wattpad specifically is that you can interact with your readers directly. I will do things like actually ask them questions, chapter by chapter. Whose side are you on? What do you think about this? I actually took that information and incorporated it into my edits. So it's kind of a unique and amazing thing, is that I'm literally in my readers' heads as I'm writing. It can be a benefit and a downfall. I mean, you don't want to tailor your book too much to what readers think, but it can be a really cool thing that most readers don't have access to.

[Howard] At risk of plugging the Writing Excuses retreat again, this morning… Was it this morning? I can't even remember what day it is. Dongwon taught a class on the first two pages and the hooks. How important is that kind of thing for you in this market?

[Bridget] Fantastically important. You have to be as good or better than any other choices they have out there. On Amazon, there's billions of books they can choose from, so your craft has to be on point. Definitely, people will look… Pick up a book and look at the first couple of pages. They have to be excellent.

[Victorine] In fact, I good friend who told me straight up when I asked her to join my street team that she doesn't have time to read. So I said, "That's fine, no problem." A couple of days later, she contacted me and said, "I saw your book on Amazon, and I just read the sample pages," that they let you read for free. I had already offered her a free book, guys. "I just read the sample pages and I could not put them down. So can I have that free book?" Then she plugged me on her group, which is like a deals page. I sold like 580 copies of my book that day. It was just because my sample pages were good enough that they drew her in, and she wanted to read it. Someone who doesn't read. If your sample pages… If your first two pages are crap, you're not going to sell your book. You're not going to get page reads.

[Tamie] I want to say something about writing to market. I think when Victorine first was talking about it, I was a little bit put off by the idea, because I'm an author and I have things in my heart and I don't want to compromise myself for money. Right? But you can write from your heart and write well. You don't have to put down your standards, you can still get your message out there. Like, I have a billionaire romance series, which, you think is pretty corny, but my particular series is based on a group of men who met when they were teenagers at a camp for kids with disabilities. So each one of my heroes, even though they are billionaires and they do happen to have six packs and are really good looking, they also happen to have disabilities. Which I felt like was just underrepresented in romance books. So you can still do that and still make money and reach out to people while writing to market.

[Nandi] Absolutely. I would cosign that. My book deals with a character who is… Has a similar background to mine, which is Caribbean and kind of West African culture. I wasn't sure how it would do on Wattpad. To my surprise and delight, it's done really well. A lot of people have connected with my character. I think self-publishing and online publishing are great ways to kind of prove certain conceptions about what sells wrong and get your story out there.

[Howard] Last question. We've talked a lot about business, we've talked a lot about agility and market and whatever else. Are you all still having fun?

[Nandi?] Absolutely.

[Howard] They're nodding. For those of you lacking the video feed, everybody's nodding.

[Victorine] When I first decided to go indie, there was a lady named Elaina Johnson, who sat down and spent her entire lunch talking to me because I had an agent and was insistent that I needed to go traditional. She basically said, "Why haven't you ever considered indie? You've been pursuing traditional for a long time, through a variety of frustrating obstacles." I said, "Well, I write YA and people that are indie don't do well with YA." She's like, "Well, they may not do quite as well as romance, but why don't you try both? You might actually like writing romance." I said, "Phtp. Like writing romance?" Well, all of my YA has a romantic subplot, so I don't know why I was so obtrusive that I didn't see that, but I now write both. I do a YA series during the course of the year and a romance series. So I put out several of each. I like the romance as much as I like the YA. So I am still having a lot of… I mean, I'm writing what I want to write, and I don't have to argue with my agent about whether or not it's something that someone will buy. Because I can put it up, and then people buy it. So…

[Nandi] I'm having a blast. I'm on a writing cruise, and I get to write the whole thing off.

[Garble]

[Tamie] I would say, on my day job… I'm a dentist. I've said before, but honestly, if I just wanted to make money, I would just work a lot of hours at the office and make money. So, I write because I love to write. If it wasn't fun, I'd quit.

[Nandi] Yep. Absolutely. Actually, I started listening to this podcast in 2014, and I told myself, "Okay. One day I'm going to be on this podcast."

[Cheers]

[Nandi] Thank you. Thanks to the… Taking the chance of putting myself up online, now here I am today plugging my first debut book on the Writing Excuses podcast in this, the year of our Lord 2019. So…

[Howard] Nandi, you're doing a great job, and I promise you right now, I'm actually more nervous than you are.

[Howard] Who's got our homework?

[Bridget] That's me. That's Bridget. So, Tamie just explained that she's a dentist. I'm actually a lawyer as my day job, I guess. Although I'm not doing as much. But I did a couple of podcasts for the Writing Gals, you can look them up on author taxes. Your homework is this, no matter where you are in your writing journey, you need to start thinking about how to be smart about the business of writing. That involves teaching yourself through the podcasts that I did that are way too long and way too detailed, or go out and do the research yourself. Talk to a CPA and start finding out what things you can deduct. There are two main ways you can deduct them, but I think that is beyond the scope of this. Start keeping track of those expenses. Whether you're going to deduct them annually or whether you're going to roll them altogether as startup costs when you first start making money, either way, you need to start getting your ducks in a row, so that when it becomes money for you, like $94,000 in a year, you know how to get it down so that you don't pay the IRS a third of that.

[Howard] Okay. Before I say that we're out of excuses, I would like to acknowledge the presence of the Writing Excuses cruise audience.

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Howard] We've had a great time out here. I haven't done very much writing. But I know that some of us have written like 40,000 words while on a ship. We're not going to name drop anybody. I'm just going to say, fair listener, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.02: Writing between the Lines

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/12/15-02-writing-between-the-lines/

Key Points: Theme? First, forget about your English class essays. Theme is an exploration of an idea. Theme begins at the beginning of the story, and coalesces throughout. Theme is not the moral of the story. Theme grows out of what your characters are passionate about and where the story goes. Motif! How do you learn the theme of your story, and how do you strengthen it? Revision. What do your readers tell you? You can start with a theme in mind (e.g. Hollywood formula), but you do learn as you write. Instead of theme, think meaning. Why are you telling this story, what is the point of the story? What questions are you asking in your story? How do promises at the beginning of the story tie to theme? Build promises, mantras, ideas, instead of looking back at the theme. The promises at the beginning are the base of the arc that the characters experience. What the story is about makes it a story instead of just a collection of events. Think of the way the message in a commercial is not explicitly stated, and yet... we know what it is. That's theme. Can you overdo it, too much subtext, too blatant a theme? Of course. Avoid the soapbox, unless that is what you really want to do. Revision is when you pull back, or hit the theme harder. If theme is too hard to practice, try working on foreshadowing.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Two.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing between the Lines.

[Victoria] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Victoria] I'm Victoria.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We have special guest this year Victoria.

[Dan] Yay!

[Brandon] Tell us about yourself.

[Victoria] I'm so happy to be here. I'm both Victoria and V. E. I write as two people, but I'm only one person. I make things up for living like everybody here today, I feel like. I'm the author of Shades of Magic, Vicious, and Vengeful. Basically, a lot of books that are about heroes and monsters and villains.

[Brandon] And all the stuff we love.

[Victoria] All the stuff in between.

[Brandon] Victoria's going to be joining us all year. So, hopefully, we will be able to make good use of you.

[Brandon] This week, we are doing listener questions, like a lot of what we're going to be doing this year, and we've lumped them into groups. This group is about theme and subtext. Which is kind of a heady thing to be starting off with…

[Laughter]

[Victoria] Yeah.

[Brandon] With Victoria. So, tell us, Victoria… No.

[Laughter]

[Victoria] I was going to say, don't put that on me.

[Brandon] The first question is, is there a way to use character introduction to help frame the story's theme? Maybe we should talk just a little bit about our thoughts on theme first, and then kind of get into these questions. Do you guys have thoughts?

[Howard] You know what, if you're… First of all, the answer to the question is yes. The useful answer has tools that describe how to do this. Theme, for me, is a mixture of what type of story it is, like, is this a mystery story or is this a thriller? Technically, that's not theme, but if it is a thriller and one of the themes is trust, then having a character where during the introduction we feel mistrust and we feel tension immediately telegraphs to the reader that, "Oh. That is…" We just stated the theme right there. You don't want it to… I use this metaphor a lot. You want it to taste like fresh green beans, not something that came out of a can. So you use words that do not explicitly say trust and tension.

[Brandon] Today we're talking about trust.

[Dan] Theme is tricky and theme freaks people out because we've all been through English classes where we had to write essays on it. The thing that crystallizes it for me is somebody said that theme is an exploration of an idea. So, for example, love is subject matter. But love makes fools of us all, that's a theme. So, in Star Wars, the theme of episode four, A New Hope, is sometimes we need to trust in something bigger than ourselves. You see that question explored throughout. People are on both sides. Han says, "No, we don't." Obi-Wan says, "Yes, we do." Everything that Luke goes through is connecting with that theme in some way.

[Victoria] I actually think it's really important that theme begins at the beginning of the story. Because it's not something like a moral that happens at the end of the story, it's something that coalesces over the course of the story. The introduction is your opportunity to create a baseline for your character. So whether that's... The theme is trust, and so we see distrust as Howard is saying or whether that's belonging, outsider/insider culture is a theme in many of my books. But I don't want you to ever be able to pinpoint it to one scene in which we're like, "Yes. Now I grasp the theme." So I think understanding where our characters start, both in a physical space and an emotional space and a psychological space. These are important in order for us to build the theme over the book.

[Brandon] Yeah. I think that is really astute. Pointing out the difference between theme and moral. Because I think that a lot of newer writers might think that moral equals theme. They don't. They aren't the same thing at all. For me, a lot of my themes, and most authors I've talked to, it's something that grows naturally out of what your characters are really passionate about and where the story goes, where you start saying, naturally, as a writer, "Hey, I've got a character who's like this. If I put in a contrasting character who's got a different opinion, they play off of each other so well." That just, well, immediately starts establishing a theme.

[Victoria] I always think of motif. Because, like motif is kind of the physical, actuarial, for theme. It's the thing that we engage with on a material level over the course of the book. So I think… I always shudder away from these more amorphous things like theme, and I try and ground them in the physical of something like motif. So I think you have to imagine it not as something that happens in one place, but as something that begins at the beginning and continues with you in one form or another throughout the entire story.

[Brandon] So, another question we get asked along the same lines is, how do I learn what theme my story has, and how do I strengthen it?

[Laughter]

[Dan] This is why revision is so important.

[Victoria] Exactly.

[Howard] I've got homework that will cover that. But, a large part of how you determine your theme is what your beta readers, what your alpha readers are telling you they are coming away from your book with.

[Dan] Or even just you yourself. Having finished it and like, "Oh, I didn't realize that this was so much about X, but it totally is."

[Victoria] Talk about one of the absolute necessities of first drafts is not only to get from point A to B in your story, not only to get down something that you can make better, but really, you learn what your story's about by writing your story. It's very hard, even if you think you know what the story is about before you start writing it, a majority of the time, you discover that that's a bare impression of what the story is actually about by the time you get to the end of the first draft.

[Howard] Let me use a car metaphor briefly here because… The point A to point B thing. When you are driving from point A to point B, the route that you take, maybe you're on the freeway, maybe you're on surface streets, those might define where your theme is going to come from, but theme may be things like I can feel the quality of the road through the stick shift when I'm driving. The shoulder of the road is rough. The other cars are very annoying. All of these things, when you are on a trip, it is not just the destination and the path you took to get there, it's… It's the friends we made along the way.

[Victoria] [garbled]

[Howard] Sorry. I knew that was going to happen.

[Dan] That's okay. I just wanted to say, I do think that you can preload things. You can absolutely learn more about it after the fact, and especially if you're just starting out, this is a very heady concept, and maybe you need to get a few books under your belt, but theme is something that I always use in the outline stage to help me figure it out. When we talk about Hollywood formula, that's one of the three things you know before you start plotting. So, you can have it in there first, you'll just… You have to kind of learn your way through it.

[Victoria] I want to pick a less aggressive term for it. I think theme… Because you're talking about the fact we've all come through secondary education, most of us in this case of learning that in the… I have to write an essay. What is the theme of the thing I read? I think we have almost a negative built-in connotation of what is theme. So I wish that we had some terms that felt a little bit less terrifying when you're approaching a story, as though you have to know everything about it. I think more like… I ha… I don't like the word moral, even though I used it in a negative way already. But I think about meaning. Like, what is the reason I'm telling this story? What is the point of the story? Because I don't necessarily sit down and think, "What is the theme of the story?" But I do absolutely sit down and think, "What is the point of the story I'm trying to tell? What am I hoping to achieve?"

[Dan] Well, in line with that, I will often ask myself what are the questions I am asking.

[Victoria] Absolutely.

[Dan] With this piece.

[Brandon] For me, it's often, those friction points between characters… When I have two characters approaching an idea from different directions, theme just grows very naturally out of that for me.

[Brandon] One of the other questions we have here is can we talk more about how promises at the beginning of a story and theme tie together, with specific examples. I'll talk about one to give you guys some time to think, because early in my career, before I was published, when I was writing books, I wasn't thinking about theme at all. It's something I started to think about during one of those level up moments. As I had done more and more books, I said, well, the books should be about something. Not necessarily a moral, but the characters are passionate about things. The first Mistborn novel, I wanted to write a story about a character who joins a thieving crew and goes on this big mission. When I was first writing her first chapter, and I often write my way into characters, the first experience I had her being very competent, Artful Dodger style, that was going to be very fun to write, and it just did not work at all. Looking back, it's because that personality didn't match the theme I was actually exploring with the other characters, which is, is it worth continuing to love and to trust even though it might be painful later on. Because I had a very important character whose loved one had betrayed him, and he had been hurt by that, but then had continued on letting people into his circle, into his heart. She had had the same experience and she does not… Like, her response is to close that off. So I built the theme around this. A lot of the ideas that I used were things such as her standing in the foyer looking in at everybody having fun at dinner where the light is on and bright and she's in the dark and she's like, "I can't go in there because that is pain that is being hidden by the light." These sorts of themes really grew out of these two characters talking to each other.

[Victoria] So I love this... Because the word promises was in this question. I was thinking about, again, how much I hate the word theme. But what I…

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Was thinking about is the idea of where theme meets promise. I do something similar with my characters in that I build for them a mantra out of what we think they want, what they think they want. Then, one of my goals over the course of the story, in actualizing the theme, is to make my character break their mantra. So it's the difference between what a character wants their mantra to be, what they want their theme to be, and what the story actually needs their theme to be. So I think that this idea of promises, we fulfill the promises of the theme by figuring out the discomfort for our characters, how do we go from distrust to trust, how do we get from solitary to communal, how do we get from one thing to the other. So, while theme feels retrospective, the building of promises and of mantras and of ideas is very much… Is essential to the process of the characters in the story.

[Dan] Yeah. I think the… The promise that you set up at the beginning really is the foundation of the arc that they're going to go through. So, in my middle grade series, the second book, Dragon Planet, I sat down and I outlined that whole thing and I had this fun adventure story in space for little kids. I'm like, "This is going to be great." Then realized, "No. I need to figure out what this is about. What's actually going on? What is the story really about?" And decided, well, it's going to be about this little kid proving himself to his father. All of a sudden, it's a story instead of just a connection of things. That means that the promise at the beginning is I need to show him not really… His father treats him like a little kid, his father doesn't treat him like the scientist he thinks himself to be. That's the promise that the book is going to eventually tie that arc off.

[Howard] The word theme… Yeah, it's problem… We're terrified of it. Because it was used to bludgeon us into submission…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In English classes. I've done this marketing presentation before, and I think it may be something that's coming in a sense later this year. In marketing, there is the concept of message. I want to go to the theme that Dan stated for us earlier, love makes fools of us all. Love makes fools of us all is a message which you can express by saying, "Love makes fools of us all." You can then, if you're writing an essay about it, to back that up, tell us a story about love making fools of multiple people. If you then remove the statement from the top, the story still explains that. But now you haven't overtly stated the message. In marketing, there are messages… If you watch commercials, the message from a soda pop company is if you drink this, you will be more attractive to members of the opposite sex. That is a statement, that is a message that would be patently absurd to put in the commercial. But when you look at the story of the commercial, that is absolutely the message. I like to think about theme in this way. Because I have a marketing background and I'm evil.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Victoria] All right.

[Brandon] Which is actually Victoria's.

[Victoria] Yeah. So, my book of the week is my book, A Darker Shade of Magic, which is the beginning of the Shades of Magic series. In effect, it's a fantasy story about a young magician with the ability to travel between alternate worlds. Officially, as a messenger, unofficially, as a smuggler. He comes into possession of something he absolutely should not have, and before he can get rid of it, he gets his pocket picked by a cross-dressing thief named Delilah Bard. Everything goes terribly, terribly wrong from there.

[Howard] This is A Darker Shade of Magic by…

[Victoria] V. E. Schwab.

[Howard] V. E. Schwab.

[Victoria] The professional name.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Howard] Well, Victoria Schwab is also a professional name.

[Victoria] Yeah. Victoria Schwab is my…

[Howard] Just different markets.

[Victoria] Professional name for children and teens. If you're looking for me in any of the adult sections of the store, you're going to want to use the initials.

[Brandon] So, we are… We have been asked, after talking about all of this, is there a way to do to much of this? To insert too much subtext, to overdo our themes? You're all nodding.

[Victoria] I mean, let's come back to Howard's example of the commercial and the soda pop. I'm not sure that themes should be things that beat you over the head even if you take away the statements and you finish the book. I'm not sure… Like, I don't know, maybe it's a personal preference, but I think it's something which requires a little bit of introspection, something which should not be… Should not be completely obvious. I found out recently that Into the Spider-Verse movie was meant as a coming out narrative. Was meant as a young boy trying to explain to his father that he was gay. Now that is a subtext. That is a theme that you do not have to get in order to enjoy the story, but that adds a richer layer to it when you do. I think of theme the same way. I'm not sure I should be able to put down a book and immediately tell you in pat sentence what the theme was.

[Dan] Yeah. You can tell when you've read something that beats you over the head, because you're like, "Oh, this author was on a soapbox." Right? You see this a lot with… I'm not going to name any names, although like for just leapt into mind. So let me rephrase. When you read something and you're like, "Oh, this was making a clear political statement or a clear religious statement or this author was clearly trying to convince me that X and Y thing," that's because you have hit the theme way too hard. You weren't telling a story, you were just banging a gong the whole time.

[Brandon] Now, I'm going to say there is room for that type of storytelling.

[Dan] There is, and there's an audience for it.

[Brandon] It's not necessarily flawed, if this is what the author wants to do. Some writers…

[Howard] Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is not a comfortable read, and the theme is a little heavy-handed, but that was a pretty important book that we needed when it came out.

[Brandon] There are a lot of stories that do that. Most writers that I know, that's not the type of story they want to tell. If that's the type of story you want to tell, great. You can hit it a little harder and do what you want to do. For most of us, we want the theme to develop naturally out of what we're building, the story we're telling. We want you to get done with the book and say, "Huh. That was really interesting. Let me think about what that means to me." People can pull different themes out of them.

[Victoria] I also do want to add the caveat that that is a revision thing as well. That if… You should not be scared if you feel like you're hitting themes too hard in a first draft. One of the things that we do is both cull and refine as we revise a story.

[Brandon] Absolutely.

[Howard] I have a spreadsheet of Schlock Mercenary plot maps and org charts so that I can tell who the characters are and what the plots are. One of the columns for book 19 is themes. There's one, two, three, four, five… Six… Six or seven things in here under theme. The question, is it possible to do too much, we've already said yes. How do you know? Where do you draw the line? For me, as I was filling these cells in, one of the cells, which is the one that led to the title of the book… The cell is titled "rank is a function of firepower." Then I describe, this is shown with characters who are in power over other characters, it's shown through the fighting, it's shown through a whole lot of things. Applies to every plot line in the book. That one was easy. But then I scrolled back up through the others and realized these aren't themes. These are maybe turning points, these are smaller messages, I don't need to hit these as hard. What's funny is I discovered as I was searching through this spreadsheet while we're here recording, I looked at all these entries and thought, "Wow. I did not try to get all that in there, did I?" Because it would've been too much. I guess, subconsciously, I figured it out, or maybe I just looked at it and got lazy.

[Brandon] As we're talking about this… We're almost out of time. One thing I wanted to mention is if this intimidates you, if you're really frightened by this idea, I do think a parallel or similar skill is foreshadowing. We don't have time to talk about it this podcast. We've talked about it in a bunch of others. If you practice foreshadowing and learn to get subtle with your foreshadowing about coming events, and learn to get a feel for how readers are picking up on your foreshadowing, I think that's a similar skill that you can practice. Maybe it's a little less intimidating.

[Brandon] We are out of time. Howard, you have some homework for us.

[Howard] I do. Take something that you've written which is complete but still in draft form. It can be a short story. It can be a novella, novelette, full novel, whatever. Write down three… Like a multiple-choice question. What are the three possible themes for this thing that you've written? All three answers can be right, two of the answers can be obviously wrong, whatever. You're making a multiple-choice test. Now go to your friend and don't give them that test. Have them… I say friend. Beta reader. Those aren't friends.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Those are frenemies. Have them read what you've… Read the thing that you've written, and tell you what they think the theme is. That's the first part of the exercise. Second part, give them the multiple-choice test and see if they're willing to circle any of the things that you said the theme are. When you are done, you will have sufficient information to go back and revise based on information you now have.

[Brandon] Thank you very much. That's good homework. You guys are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/01/05/15-01-evolution-of-a-career/

Key Points: This season is going to be organized around topics taken from questions from the audience. So this is what you wanted to know! Starting off with the evolution of a career, goal setting for a career as a writer. How do you choose a book for early in your career versus saving it for later? Work on what you're most excited about. Start with something simple, tell it well, tell it clearly, and tell it straight. Sometimes you want to push yourself, set a challenge for yourself. When you look back on first projects, you are sure to think you could do it better now. But that opportunity cost comes with everything you write. Pick an area to improve, but focus on the things that give you joy. If you have an idea, you're excited about it, it's ambitious… Go for it! Even if it doesn't work, you will learn. Don't worry about using your best idea too early, you will have more and better ideas later. The path you expect, the path you plan, is probably not the path you will follow. Grieve for the untaken path, but rejoice in where you are walking now. You always learn from experience. How do you plan for the next stage? Have a plan, but be ready to toss it. Look for options. Avoid closing doors. Don't brand yourself by your first project. Do a couple of books to prove you can do it, then do something else. Leave breadcrumbs for your readers to follow. Pay attention to what your readers like. Think about who is this book for. Brands evolve. As you plan your career, make sure you have a plan, and make sure it's something you love.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode One.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Evolution of a Career.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Awesome. We are very excited to have Dongwon with us for this, the very first episode of 2020. We are doing something a little different than we've done in the past with this new season of our show. Mary Robinette, this was your idea. Can you tell us what we're doing?

[Mary Robinette] Well, we realized that the podcast is 15 minutes long, this is 15 years long at this point, and we're not that smart, but you all are. So we decided that rather than trying to come up with a topic, what we would do is go to you and see what things you wanted to know about. So we've collected a bunch of questions, and we're using them to guide the season this year. So you will not, in most cases, hear a specific question from an audience, but the topics and the questions that we're trying to answer for you have all been generated by you.

[Dan] One of the things that we saw a lot of, and this shouldn't have surprised us as much as it did… Maybe a third of the questions we got in were all based around career. What does a career look like as a writer, and how does it change over time, and how do you decide what you're going to do? So, since we've got Dongwon with us, we wanted to talk about the evolution of a career. How do you set goals for your career? So let's… Let me actually start with this question that I think is really interesting, and I'll throw it to Dongwon first. When you're starting to look at your writing as a career rather than just a thing that you do, how do you choose a book that is very good for early career versus one that you might want to save for later on when you're better or more established?

[Dongwon] It's kind of a tricky question. Because… The thing that I always, always, always tell people is when it comes to you picking the project that you want to work on, work on the one you're most excited about. That said, I do talk to a lot of writers who at some point will say, "I tried to do this thing and it was too big for me at this stage. I didn't know how to do this, I didn't know how to do that." So sometimes, when it comes to that first novel, and a lot of debuts… Often times, you can read a book and know that this was a first novel, that this was a debut, that this was the first thing you did. Because it has sort of a clear, sort of straightforward through line. It tends to be A to B to C. It tends to be much more straightforward, in terms of how we naturally as people tell a story. Right? So sometimes what you want to think about for that first book is keep it a little simpler, right? Don't try to do the 15 POV's with complicated tense things, complicated structure. Focus on telling the story that you already know how to tell. Tell it well, tell it clearly, and tell it straight.

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes talk about this with my students as setting things on the easy setting. There's nothing wrong with an easy setting. Like, you can do beautiful, beautiful work if you are dealing with things that you are confident in. So sometimes I think about that, like, waiting until you have the writing chops, or picking one aspect of the novel that you're going to put on the difficult setting and everything else is well within your comfort zone. I also want to say that having a practice novel as your first novel is… There's nothing like wrong with saying I'm going to write this without the intention of publishing it. If you finish it, and you're like, "This is publishable." Potentially. Sure. But we don't say, "I have picked up the violin. I'm going to go to Carnegie Hall…"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] "With the first thing that I've learned to play."

[Dan] Yeah. Well, I do want to emphasize that there is absolutely nothing wrong with setting yourself a challenge that is kind of beyond your level. That's how we push ourselves. That's how we learn. But I do agree that when you're sitting down and saying, "Okay, I've got a few books under my belt. I think it's time to do one that I'm going to really try to get published." Maybe back off on that difficulty level, like Mary Robinette was saying, and do something that you know you can really hit out of the park.

[Howard] Sorry. At risk of overthinking things, there is nothing in the first five years of Schlock Mercenary that I couldn't go back now and do an infinitely better job at. There are no first projects that later you is going to look at and say, "Boy, that… I really only could have written that as an early career thing. I'm not ready to write that anymore." No. You're always going to be leveling up, you're always going to be improving. There's a story in the second year of Schlock Mercenary where I start telling the story from the point of view of the bad guys, and Schlock is the monster. I decided to use marker art for it. It was all hand-lettered. I… This is me… This is in 2001, 2002, I think, that I'm telling this story. I remember thinking at the time, "Yeah. There's no way I could have told this story or illustrated this story when I was first starting out." I looked back at that now and I think I was not ready to tell that story then.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I could do such a good job with it now. But now it's done. Now I've told it. Now I can't tell that story again. There is an opportunity cost associated with that for me. But that opportunity cost is associated with everything you write. You don't get a do over. You know what? Life is grief.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Just own that. Own the fact that your first project is always forever… It's going to be your first thing. We all had to do that.

[Mary Robinette] My… So, the first novel I published, Shades of Milk and Honey, is the fourth novel that I wrote. When the UK edition came out and they asked me if I wanted to do anything different, I'm like, "Well, yes, in fact." So that novel, the UK edition is two chapters longer than the US edition because I had a better idea of how to do endings. But every novel I do is an iteration of like, learning where my weakness was. So I think that's the thing… Like, when I say do the easy setting, I don't mean for the entire novel and don't… But what I mean is pick something… Pick one area. Just one area to improve, when you're thinking. Like one area to stretch in, and focus on the things that make you… That give you joy. Chase that. Rather than doing the thing that I see a lot of writers do in their early career, they put so much effort… Focus on "I gotta have an original idea. It's gotta be original, it's gotta be new and exciting." So, as a result, the emotion that they're trying to evoke in the reader is that writer is clever. Which is… That's like wanting someone to say, "That person is funny." Instead of trying to…

[Dan] Instead of trying to make them laugh.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.

[Dongwon] One last point I want to make on this, and to contradict myself a little bit. I do really want to encourage people, though, that when it comes to writing that first book, if you have an idea and you're excited about it, and it's an ambitious project, swing for those fences, right? Like, go for the big thing. Don't go half measures. Kind of talking about Howard's point a little bit, resolve to not have a regret about it. Just do the thing! If it doesn't work out, you still learn so much in that process. Then it's on to the next book. Right?

[Dan] Yeah. Given that we've raised the specter of the opportunity cost, I do want to point out, the more you practice this, the more you do it, you're going to have better and better ideas every time. So don't worry that you're burning your best idea too early. Because 10, 20 years from now, you're going to have such better ideas than that one, and so many other cool things to do.

[Dan] Anyway, we are going to stop now for our book of the week. Which is actually a musical theater production of the week. We were… Mary Robinette and I were absolutely just geeking out about what turns out to be one of our shared favorite musicals of all time. Mary Robinette, what is it?

[Mary Robinette] Follies, by Stephen Sondheim. I love this musical so much. The idea is it's an old vaudeville house… Like a Ziegfeld follies kind of thing. It's shutting down, and all of the old performers are coming back for a reunion. So the whole thing is told in present day and flashbacks. You get to… They have cast present day elderly actors and their younger selves. It's a fascinat… It's like beautiful and heartbreaking. Some of the singers can't hit the high notes that they used to be able to hit anymore. But the depth of their performance is so much more. So it's… When we're talking about the evolution of a career, this thing that we had just been geeking about is a beautiful portrait of that.

[Dan] Yeah. One of my favorite songs in the show is called The Story of Lucy and Jessie. Where it is a woman singing about how now she is older and more experienced and much more interesting, but she doesn't have her youth and energy, whereas the youth and energy person was such a bland, boring person that nobody wanted to talk to, and how she can never be happy because she can never combine those two parts of herself. The way that it looks at age and youth and early career and late career is stunningly cool.

[Mary Robinette] So that's Follies by Stephen Sondheim. You can find it on many different forms of media. I am a big fan of the original cast. Dan is a fan of the new cast.

[Dan] I do prefer the original cast, although the new cast does have Bernadette Peters on it. She really hits it out of the park. So. Awesome.

[Howard] I arranged music for an a cappella group, when I was [hhhhh] 25 years younger than I am now. They did a song called Don't It Make You Wanna Go Home. Nine guys. At the end of the song… One of the guys was a contra tenor, who just killed it. Squeaking up there in the stratosphere. Another guy who was a… one of the sons of the university's music faculty. Amazing voice. End of that song, they are scatting and noodling around. The two of them duel very briefly with notes that most of us can only admire from a great distance. It was an amazing and beautiful thing. I caught up with the other singer a few years ago, and found out that… Boy, not five years after singing that, he developed vocal nodes and could no longer perform at all. But now works as music faculty. I have the recording that I was present for, where he was… I almost have guilt, because I wonder if the things that he was doing to his voice to hit those notes that the other guy was just born to hit might have been part of the problem. But that thing that he was able to do in that portion of his career will always be with me, will always be with him. It always exists. But he had to take a different path. When we talk about the evolution of careers, we have to recognize that the path that we think that we are on, the path that we have laid out for ourselves, is not the path that we will be on 20 years from now. It is going to change. We can't hit it regret free. There will always be… I said, life is grief.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You get to grieve for the path untaken. You get to grieve the expenditure of what you thought was the best idea when you couldn't write it as well as you could now. But you also get to rejoice in where your feet are right now. You've got to be agile and keep them moving.

[Dongwon] The thing I want to say about that, though, is also there's no wasted time. You always learn from that experience. You can take so many lessons from a moment that… I'm a big believer that the only way, literally the only way we learn new things is through failure, right? You hit that wall and you learn lessons from how you hit that wall. You pick yourself back up, and then you keep moving forward. Right? So. Even if it doesn't work out, take the lessons from it, right? Examine it to see what other things you could have done, how you could have pivoted from there, and do that next time.

[Dan] We… I don't want to spend too much time on this specific topic, because we're going to dedicate an entire episode to it later in the year, called Rebooting Your Career. But for now, we've talked about the early stage of your career, let's talk a little then about career planning. So another question I'm going to pitch right at Dongwon. Once you've got that first book, maybe you've made your first sale you've done some self-publishing and found some success. How do you plan for the next stage?

[Dongwon] This really is one of my very favorite topics. It's one of the things I love most about my job is working with writers to help them strategize about how do we want their career to look. What are we planning for this first book, for the book after that, for the contract after that, for the contract after that? Right? So, roughly, generally with most of my clients, not necessarily everybody, with most of them, we have a sense of here's what we're doing now, here's what we're doing in five years, here's what we're doing in 10 years. Right? Now, the thing is, publishing is a system that is designed to be extremely random. Right? What makes a book work is highly unpredictable. What makes a book tank, also highly unpredictable, right? So when you're thinking about this… There's two things you need to keep in mind, is, always have a plan. Always know where you're trying to get to. But also be ready to throw that plan out the window at the drop of a hat. Often, what we're doing is, when we're planning for those decision points, right? You're looking at… We have contract one, contract two, contract three. Then, what you're doing is, at each of those junctures of when we're deciding what are we going to write next, the thing we're solving for is having options. Right? We're not solving for we will do A to B to C. What we're doing is solving for, okay, once we do this, what are the three moves we can make at that point? How do we make sure that the first move we make doesn't close doors for the next move we want to make? Right? If we get that movie deal, then we can do this. If the book sells five copies, then we can also do that. Right? So you're keeping all those things in your mind, and trying to build out a little bit of a decision tree. But you will go completely mad if you try to map the whole thing. So you pick your path, but then you're ready to know, we can pivot wherever we need to. Right?

[Mary Robinette] This is a really important point that you… Having those options open. One of the things that I see writers do at the beginning of their career is that they pin their identity and their… They brand themselves around their first project. That is, let me just say, a mistake. Because the first project is unlikely to be the first one that takes off. If George RR Martin had done that, we would all be looking… His entire brand would be vampires on a steamboat.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Because that was… Fever dream.

[Dongwon] It's a very good book.

[Mary Robinette] It's a very good book. It's not what he became known for. I did a lot of Regency stuff, but one of the things that I did, very consciously, when I was… This is, speaking of closing doors. We sat down and talked about book 2. It was a sequel. But the classic sequel in a romance is that the sister of… Or the best friend of the main character now becomes the POV character in the next book and does… It's another romance structure. We made the conscious decision not to do that, because had I done that, I would have… That would have put me on the romance path very, very firmly. I like romance, but I didn't want that to be the only thing I did. So we made the conscious decision to not do that. That's the kind of thing that you're looking for.

[Dongwon] My general rule of thumb, strategy, is you have book 1. You do book 2 in a way that's similar to book 1, either same category, similar voice, similar topic, to prove you can do it, you can do it again, and then in book 3, prove you can do something else. Right? That's generally how I think about it. It's not always that pattern, but it's why… If we're going to do a series, I like duologies, I like linked standalones, I don't like a seven book series. Right? Because if you have a seven book series, then you're trapped in that for seven years of your career at a minimum. Right? So if you're doing track… So, what you want to keep is maneuverability. You want to keep the ability to jump to something else if things go wrong. Or even if they go right, sometimes the right move is to jump to something else.

[Dan] Yeah. I want to… Excuse me. I want to jump in on this because I very specifically went maybe much farther over the line then I should have with my second project. My first thing was first person, modern day, contemporary horror. Then the second project was third person, post-apocalyptic science fiction. Multiple viewpoints instead of one, female protagonist instead of male. Like, I made it as different as I conceivably could because I wanted to not be pigeonholed. I wanted to present myself as the person who can do anything. Which has had both pros and cons. It is very difficult for a giant audience to follow me book to book. Because not everyone's interested in the same things that I am. On the other hand, I've got a historical fiction that came out last year. Everyone was like, "Oh, okay. That makes sense. Of course he's going to jump out of the other four genres he does into a brand-new one, because that's the brand he's established for himself."

[Mary Robinette] I looked… So, when I was… When we were first talking, it was like, "Do I want to do a Tad Williams career, where every single book is different, or do I want to do a series, genre, where you are doing a series?" I write all over the map in my short fiction. So the thing that I have been doing is I've been doing the same, but different, path. So like book 1, straight up Re… Austen pastiche, book 2 is a courtroom thriller… Or is a wartime novel, spy novel, disguised as a Regency romance. Like, the same is the set dressing and the characters. That is my same. My plot structure shifts. When I got to Ghost Talkers, I kept a plot structure that was similar to one that I had already done, and I stayed in historical, but I jumped forward by 100 years. I also knew by that point that what people liked in my books was that I had happily committed couples. So I stuck with that. With the Lady Astronaut books, it's science fiction, but it's still historical. That, again, it's like that is a very conscious choice. The book that I have coming out this year is another Lady Astronaut book, but the one that I am working on for next year is… It's straight up science fiction, but I am deliberately giving it a 1920s noir feel, in terms of the aesthetic, to retain that sense of familiarity, to make it easier. So, I think of it as leaving breadcrumbs for my readers to follow me. Which has…

[Dongwon] I mean, really what this is is having a brand.

[Dan] One of the things we talk about a lot, and that new writers hear all the time, is don't chase market trends. Don't try to write what you think people want. This advice sounds like it's the opposite of that. Because you're saying, I know what my readers like. But it's because they're your readers. You're not trying to chase an entire market. You have found your people and you are giving them what they want. Which is a very different thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I am looking at expanding out of that, because I'm like, I don't want to stay just with the historical Regency. Which, obviously, I love my Regencies. But I… Like, how do I bring science fiction in? How do I bring mainstream people in? Like, I'm trying to add each time without losing my core.

[Dongwon] I talk a lot about how all of publishing is reducible to one question. That question is, who is this book for? Right? So what you're doing isn't writing to the market. It is being very intentional about who this book is for. You know this is my current audience. I want to grow my audience. I want to push my audience to also follow me to these other places. So, sometimes when you make the big jumps, as Dan was talking about earlier, it can be hard to hang onto that audience even though you know who the audience of the new stuff is, right? So in terms of transitioning and growing, I think there are two very different strategies that can work really, really well.

[Mary Robinette] I did lose people when I didn't do the traditional romance structure for the second book.

[Dongwon] I mean, you always will, right? Because you take risks when you write a new book, otherwise, why are you writing a new book? So, there are chances you will lose people, but you will also gain people, hopefully.

[Howard] When this episode airs, I'm six months away from ending the 20 year Schlock Mercenary mega-arc. In terms of career decisions, that is a conscious decision built around… Big surprise, making money. The two words…

[Dan] That's a good career goal.

[Howard] Schlock and mercenary…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Either of those words should suggest that I'm all about the art. When you reach the… When you get to the bookshelves and you are holding something and you see that it is the first book of three, or the third book of 10, and book 4 isn't out yet… There is a group of people who won't spend money yet. Well, I'm right now, in print is book 15 out of 20. I need to be able to say, "The end." And have everything in print, because there is a group of people whose money I don't have yet.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That is…

[Dongwon] There's 10 of them. You're going to get them.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm coming after all of them at once.

[Mary Robinette] I've never bought one of your books.

[Howard] That's just fine.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, you keep giving them to me, so…

[Howard] But this… So, this decision, I need to be able to say the end. There are people who are asking me, "So, what comes next?" No matter what the answer is, there's a group of people who won't be satisfied with that. The most important person for me to satisfy right now, and Sandra and I have had this conversation several times, is me. What do I want to do next? Part of what I want to do, and this is the sort of thing that's dangerous to put on the Internet in a recorded permanent sort of format. One of the things that I would love to do is no longer be putting out a daily comic strip. Because there are things that I can't do while I have that deadline pushing down on me. But the thing that has set me apart from almost every other comic strip out there is that it has been daily and has updated without fail. So, am I sacrificing my brand in order to do the thing that I want? Or am I making the right career decision? As of this recording, I don't have a good answer to that.

[Dongwon] I mean, but this brings up a really important point, that the thing about strategy is that brands evolve. Right? They have to evolve. If you remain static over time, you don't have a strategy, you have a pattern. Right?

[Mary Robinette] My brand when I began was the puppeteer who was also Regency. Right now, it is the writer who can talk about tea in space.

[Dan] Yeah. Which, there's a huge market for that. Who knew? We… Excuse me. We have let this episode run a little long because it is the very first one and we wanted to introduce the whole year. I do want to end on the point that Howard hit on. Which is, first of all, as you're planning your career, a) make sure you have a plan, but b) make sure it's something that you love. Because otherwise, why are you doing this? Goodness knows, there's not enough money in it to make it worthwhile. But if it's something that you genuinely love to do, that is what is going to see you through everything else that happens to you.

[Dan] So, we want to leave you with some homework. Let's get that from Dongwon.

[Dongwon] I think the homework is, a lot of times when I talked to a writer I'm considering working with, I'll ask them this question of whose career do you wish you could have if you look out in the market today. When I asked that question, I'm not asking who do you want your books to read like. It's not about the style of the books, it's not about the voice of the books, or even the subject matter. It's look at their career. Look at how fast they publish, what kinds of book they publish, kind of who they're publishing for, are they doing YA and adult, are they doing like all different genres, categories, and things like that? So, take a look around at the market and really pick one or two authors. Really examine how have they published. What years… What was the pace of that, when did they start taking off, and those kinds of things. Consider, is that the life that I want, or do I want something else? Then that will help start helping you inform a decision about the career choices you're looking over the next year, five years, 10 years.

[Dan] I would add to that, look at the other ways they spend their time. Are they the kind of person that does a lot of news stuff, a lot of convention appearances, do they make most of their money speaking rather than on their sales? Kind of look at all of that peripheral stuff as well.

[Dongwon] Are they doing a lot of school visits? Yeah, exactly. What's their lifestyle like, too? Do you want to live that life? Right? Do they have a day job? Or, all they are, are chained to a desk, putting out books every six months?

[Dan] Awesome. Well, great. This is been a cool episode and we're excited for the rest of the year. Please join us next week when we're going to have Brandon Sanderson and our 2020 special guest, Victoria Schwab. We're going to talk about theme and subtext. It's going to be awesome. So, for now, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.52: Game Mastering and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/29/14-52-game-mastering-and-collaborative-storytelling-with-natasha-ence/

Key points: How do you design a story knowing that your audience is going to have direct control over what happens? Like a landscape architect, set up little areas with lots of seeds. Go in knowing the beginning story, the big arc, where you want to end up, and the big markers on the way. Then let the players add characters. How do you keep the story going? Remember your story seeds, and your notes on what they liked before. Collaborative storytelling let’s you come up with things that you wouldn't have thought of yourself. Take what someone else throws out there and roll with it. As GM, steer the story by asking them to make choices, then telling them what they find on that fork of the road. Good GMs make sure everyone has a fun experience. You have to let go, and let the other people tell their own story. Beware the recurring villain who cannot be caught. Also beware the main characters always succeeding! Make sure that every player gets to be special in their own way.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 52.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, GMing and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are live at LTUE again.

[Cheering. Applause.]

[Brandon] We are super excited to have Natasha Ence on the podcast with us. Tell us just a little bit about yourself.

[Natasha] All right. So I'm actually a professional game master, which means I have the amazing opportunity of learning an amazing life where every day I get to wake up and play tabletop RPGs with really cool people who have hired me to create stories through them.

[Brandon] All right. I know the first question everyone is going to ask when they hear this is how in the world did you end up being a professional GM and how can they do it?

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] I decided that pretty much any time you have to spend time doing something that takes in the amount of talent, creativity, and skill, there is a market for it. So you can sell that.

[Brandon] All right, so I'm… I'm going to… Howard's like, "Wait… What?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's very wise.

[Brandon] Yeah. Very wise. So I just want to throw the first question out. How do you design a story knowing that your audience is going to have direct control over what happens? Right? I'm… As a novelist, I… My characters never surprise me. Some novelists talk about this, right? Oh, I didn't expect my character to go do this. No. I know what my character's going to do, and if they aren't doing what I want them to, I either rebuild the outline for them or I force them. I find a way to make it work. But you can't really do either of those things. So how do you tell a story, not knowing where it's going to go?

[Natasha] So, my background is… My background and education is in creative writing. I like to consider myself like a landscape architect. I go in and I set up my little plots, my little areas where I plant my seeds. Then I let them grow. But I have to go in and trim that back every once in a while. I go in with my beginning story in mind and a plot that's big arc. I know where the beginning is, I know kind of where I want it to end up. Along that way, I can plot the big markers. Then I get the characters, right? I don't get to pick those characters. I get someone else who comes in and says, "Hey, I really want to play this half-orc barbarian with a crush on cats."

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] Or "I really want to play a bard puppeteer who is a fallen angel."

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] No. This is legit. This is legit with multiple personalities.

[Laughter]

[Natasha] It's amazing. It's amazing. I love it, though. Okay. Then I get to sit down and plot out, okay, what are these persons' flaws that they have given me? What are the good things about them? What is this person's arc going to look like? Very basically.

[Dan] I love that metaphor of being a gardener and planting all of those seeds. Because when you're doing collaborative storytelling like this, it really is kind of a matter of planting as many seeds as you can, and then seeing which one the audience… The players or the readers or whoever it is… Grabs hold of. There are certain story seeds that they're going to love. They're going to be fascinated by that one character, they want to go back and talk to her all the time, or that one kind of magic or that one weird monster. As long as you got lots of those, and a lot of them tied into who the characters are in what kind of person they are, then no matter what direction the players or the readers want to go, you're ready because you've planted enough seats.

[Howard] My friends and I used to joke that our definition of the problem player was when the GM says, "Okay, we're going to be playing a 16th-century age of sail game, no magic. Let's talk about our characters." He's the guy who says, "I wanna play a ninja."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Reflecting on that now, I think, "Hum, you know what, the GM's job is to now roll a ninja into a 16th-century, age of sail game. That's going to make a story that none of us have ever heard before."

[Natasha] Very much so.

[Howard] Or hadn't heard before Pirates of the Caribbean.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, you're designing a story, you're coming up with these sort of prompts, these hooks and things like this. When you're designing this story, do you design everything, every place they could go? I'm going to assume not. So when you're doing it in the moment, any tips, tricks, suggestions on keeping the story going when it goes a direction you're not expecting?

[Natasha] So we just talked about story seeds, right? You fall back on those. You keep your notes of things. Okay, they really like this, like two towns back, or three sessions ago, or however many… However long ago that was. Right? You say, "Oh, they ran into Hogar, the bartender, who has a three-year-old who's kind of sick and need some medicine, and this one character really connected with that." So maybe I'll riff off of that and how they run into a medicine woman. Right? You can tie that back in and allow them to take off with those tiny plot hooks when they have nothing else to do.

[Brandon] Dan, I know a lot of the role-playing games you're a part of kind of go off the rails a little bit. Because I've been in many of them.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] What do you do? You really like collaborative storytelling. Like I've played some card games with you that are collaborative storytelling card games that really are about just building a story. What draws you to this? Because this always scares me. I don't want to be out of control as an author. But you obviously really enjoy it. What can writers learn from collaborative storytelling?

[Dan] Yes, Brandon and I have been in a lot of role-playing groups together for about 20 years now. One of the things we learned very early on is that one of us had to be the GM.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Because if both of us were players at the same time, the game would go so far into the weeds that it was unrecoverable. I know Natasha's thinking, "I could've fixed it," and she probably could have.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I love collaborative storytelling because of your ability to come up, like Howard was just saying, with things that you wouldn't have thought of yourself. I know I've talked about this on the show before, that if I create a scenario that is exactly what I need to be, it runs the risk of feeling very artificial. If I didn't know that that story was going to have a ninja in it, or a shepherdess, or a whatever it is, then it runs that risk of feeling flat. So I am drawn towards role-playing games, collaborative storytelling, in general, because taking what somebody else throws out there and rolling with it, saying, "Oh, I was not expecting that twist, but I've got such a great follow-up to it." It ends up being much more than the sum of its parts.

[Mary Robinette] So, much of my background was in improv, which seems like it has a lot of parallels to what you're doing. One of the things that my coach told me very early on, because I was coming in from being a writer… He's like, "Don't let the narrative brain come into this." Because as soon as you let the narrative brain come in, what it does is that you're making decisions for the other actors in the thing. We would always talk about this idea of yes-and, that you would say whatever… Like, ninja on the sailing ship? Yes, and… You also have… That you would fold it in. But you are actually… You are the narrator. So I'm curious kind of when you're doing this, how much… How much do you steer them? Like… Okay. Apparently this question was not as well formed as I thought it was…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Going to be. Because now I want to talk about puppet theater.

[Natasha] Keep going.

[Mary Robinette] Because one of the things that we brought from puppet theater was when we're doing an interactive story thing with the audience, where they are participating, is that there are ways to actually steer the choices that the audience made. That's kind of the thing that I'm curious about, if you can do that in this interactive storytelling?

[Natasha] Oh, absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] You're nodding.

[Natasha] Oh, absolutely. Because you don't… So, when you put a fork in the road, you don't have to tell them which fork castle that you want them to go to is that. You just have to say, "Which fork would you like to go down?" Then they pick one, or they pick to go down the middle and go into the field that is between the two forks. But the castle is in there, too.

[Chuckles]

[Natasha] So it doesn't really matter, they're still making the same decision because ultimately you know where that castle is going to be.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which is not a book. It's actually a Patreon. Tasha, tell us about your Patreon.

[Natasha] So, I just launched a Patreon, which is actually encounters that you can plop right into your tabletop games. I wanted to do this because so many times in games, we see repeats of themes. So the first one that I put out was a gamblers' alley. We've seen this in shows like The Road to El Dorado. It's one of the opening scenes where there playing that dice game behind whatever place, right? You see this multiple times, over and over and over again. It gives characters the chance to be characters. Whereas in so many games, with random encounters, it's often a fight. I wanted to have some story in there.

[Brandon] Awesome. So, everyone can check it out, just patreon.com/

[Natasha] Natasha Ence.

[Brandon] That's slash Natasha Ence.

[Brandon] So one of the things I've noticed, a big dividing line between good GMs and bad GMs, and I've been in groups with both, and I've been both in my life… Is that the good GM focuses on making sure the experience is fun for everyone. It's that sense of fun you're looking for. That collaboration, but you make sure that every player is satisfied and enjoys what they're doing. So I guess my question for the whole panel is how do you… What is not fun? What are the pitfalls? What are the things that you've done, that you've done in a role-playing session, or you maybe even found you wrote it in your books, and you thought everyone was going to enjoy this. Then they ran into it, and people just did not have any fun at all.

[Howard] When we were developing the Planet Mercenary role-playing game, I was… We ran some tests, some play tests, and people wanted to play with me as the GM. That is my very definition of not fun. At first, I thought it would be awesome. But then I realized… I actually realized this very quickly, I'm carrying that whole universe in my head, and I have a firm set of rules for what a story needs to be and needs to not be. The product we were creating needed to not being that. I needed to let those people tell their stories. So what was fun for me was when we did a GenCon playtest, and I was one of the players. People kept turning to me… I was the medic. They kept turning to me, like, "What do we do now?" I'm like, "I'm counting Band-Aids."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Then they ran with the story. That was wonderful for me, because I let go.

[Dan] One thing that I find that can be done well, but that is very often done wrong, is the recurring villain in a role-playing game. That sounds like such an easy thing to do, because everyone loves recurring villains. The person we love to hate. Oh, good, it's them again, I can't wait to punch them in the face after the insult they gave me last time, whatever it is. But the way that often plays out in practice is this person gets away no matter what you do. Because I need them to come back again in the future. So… That's not fun. The characters have spent the whole adventure, maybe several sessions in a row, trying to catch this person or trying to stop this person. Then they get away because the GM has thus decreed that they shall be a recurring villain and will come back later. That really kind of deflates a lot of the energy.

[Natasha] On the other side of that is always succeeding. You also want the main characters to fail, so getting bye-bye the skin of their team sometimes is what they need to feel successful, or so that in future battles or in future scenes, they can still feel successful.

[Mary Robinette] So, I very much enjoy the ones there were doing problem-solving. Like, puzzles, escape stuff, that's super fun for me. I find it so frustrating when I'm playing with someone like Sam Sykes who just enjoys breaking the rules.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's his fun spot. So, for me, when I'm in a situation like playing with Sam Sykes [cough]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] What I…

[Dan] Don't worry, he doesn't listen to our show.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm sure that none of our listeners are tweeting at him right now saying how annoyed I am with him.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Sam.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So what I have to do then is very much what Howard was talking about, it's like I just kind of have to let go and go okay, this is not one where I'm going to get to solve things, unless it is the thing that I solve is drugging Sam's character and strapping him to the back of a horse, which I may or may not have done.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] This plays into kind of my answer to my question, that one of my big moments is a GM, where I feel like I made great strides in being better is when I realized I could… My job was to construct a story where every player got to be special in the way that they wanted to be. This was a struggle because early on, I would be very, "no, you can't have this special thing. It breaks the rules, and everyone will get jealous of you." Because we were all focused on who had the best stats. As we matured as people and as players, we started to realize what Gordo wanted was just to have a secret past. He didn't… It didn't have to actually… He didn't have to have special powers related to it, he just had to have this secret past. What Earl wanted was Earl just wanted to be unkillable. Because it was stressful for him if his character could die. If he just knew that his character could never die… This is a thing that I didn't want to give him, because I'm like, "Well, if you can never die, there's no stress and tension." He did not want stress and tension.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] He wanted to enjoy the story. The moment where we realized we could make Earl indestructible and that was a feature… That the rest of the party could throw him into a room of traps, and it would like… They would all go off, he would start on fire, get chopped to pieces, and then come back to life. They could get through… They could use his superpower to problem solve. The whole team loved this. We had a much better experience than when we had been trying to be like, "Who has the best stats? Who's going to die, who's not going to die?"

[Dan] We accomplished that, by the way, by making Earl a half-dragon troll, who was therefore fireproof in addition to everything else. I think acid was the only thing that could harm him. Which was, in itself, this beautiful little holy Grail thing that could show up as a MacGuffin in the middle of a story. There'd be the one drop of acid on the floor, and Earl's like, "I'm out."

[Laughter]

[Dan] "I'm not in there, I'm not going anywhere near this dungeon." It's like you said, everybody loved it.

[Brandon] We are out of time. This has been a very different episode. I'm glad we got to do this. Thank you so much, Natasha for making this possible.

[Natasha] Thank you.

[Brandon] Thank you to our live audience.

[Cheers. Applause.]

[Brandon] Natasha, I'm going to ask you, do you have a writing prompt you can give us?

[Natasha] I do. All right. Since we just talked about games going a little badly, I'd like you guys to write about a game that's gone badly. We've seen this in the past, like The Hunger Games. Or, let's see… We've seen this in Ready Player One and some other things.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.51: A Farewell to Worldbuilding

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/22/14-51-a-farewell-to-worldbuilding/

Key Points: Wrapping up the year of worldbuilding, what are some good examples? Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Annihilation. Amberlough. The One Ring role-playing game. Larry Niven's Known Space. Elder Scrolls Online Lore Master, Lawrence Schick, and lore from an unreliable narrator. What about pet peeves? Star Trek: Discovery breaking the worldbuilding with new technology without thinking about ramifications. People who have pet peeves about worldbuilding about the wrong things. Let the worldbuilding flow from the story, don't hit us over the head with it. People who don't think about interconnectedness and ramifications. Big mistakes in worldbuilding? Forgetting bicycles! Seven lady astronauts, but only six names.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 51.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, A Farewell to Worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] It is the end of another year. You are all done worldbuilding, and never have to do it again.

[Yay!]

[Ha ha ha]

[Dan] It's about time.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] No, this is the episode… we're just kind of wrap things up with a bow on it and talk about anything we think we might have missed. My first question, though, to you will be, "What are your favorite examples of worldbuilding through all pieces of media?" Is there just anything that you really love? Something you saw or read recently that you thought had fantastic worldbuilding? I'll go ahead and start. We're about a year out from it now, but when we were recording, we were recording this quite ahead of time. A few months ago, I saw the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I loved it. It is one of my favorite movies of all time already. Part of it was the just fantastic use of worldbuilding. You would think a cross-dimension plot where you have to deal with the fact that there are alternate realities… I've tried to write these, they're very hard… Would be difficult. You would think that introducing multiple brand-new characters would be difficult. They just knocked it out of the park. They used the things that visual mediums can use that really make me annoyed and mad, because I can't do it.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] To have a really distinctive… Yeah, I'm looking at Howard. A really distinctive visual style that accentuates your worldbuilding in interesting ways. If you haven't seen the movie…

[Howard] Having the opportunity to say this where I can actually go on the record and say this… To this point, pre-Spider-Verse, Marvel and many other companies have shown us what a super hero movie could be. Marvel finally came around and showed us what a comic book movie could be.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Howard] They used tools that we've seen them touch on before.

[Brandon] The old Ang Lee Hulk tried to do it.

[Howard] Ang Lee Hulk tried to do it. The… 24 actually flirted with it a little bit. The fact that the gradients around a flashlight used halftone beads to suggest that the flashlight was itself shining on a cob…

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Howard] I got chills all the way through.

[Brandon] It was amazing.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] The way they used sound effects with the visual… Writing out the words, which you would think would be cheesy. You would think it would be like the old Batman TV show. It wasn't at any moment cheesy. It accentuated the story in really fascinating ways. Great worldbuilding.

[Dan] That's awesome. One of my favorites from this year was the movie Annihilation. I've not read the VanderMeer book that it's based on. But what really struck for me, what really hit home and clicked, was the way that the worldbuilding of the Shimmer… The premise is that there is this weird alien effect called the Shimmer. People go into it and they get lost. So this group of women scientists go in, and they… The world they encounter is so unique and complete unto itself, yet also perfectly engineered to expose and challenge all of the problems that they have as characters. I have never seen such a brilliant marriage of character arc and world as in the movie Annihilation. It's really just so well done.

[Mary Robinette] I talk about this book a fair bit, which is Lara Elena Donnelly's Amberlough. The worldbuilding that she's done in that, it just… It feels like a real historical place. It's small details. Like, the stuff that she does with gender, there are young women who dress in suits and they're called Razors. They're called Razors because they shave their heads. The cigarettes are… They're not called fags, they're called straights. Just small touches. It's so good. She swears she didn't do that one on purpose. I'm like, "You're lying to me."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's just small things all the way through. A marriage of three people is called an old marriage. Because it's in an older style. It… These lovely things. Because it also normalizes it in a different way. It's just… Oh, it's such graceful details kind of all the way through. Multiple cultures with… She uses language and sentence structure to communicate that. It's so good.

[Dan] I'm actually going to mention another one on a totally different angle here. This year, I encountered a role-playing game called The One Ring. Which is obviously based on Lord of the Rings. So it's not that it created its world, but it translated Tolkien's world, Tolkien's Middle Earth into the mechanics of the game beautifully. Like, the way that Tolkien's book… Your ability to have or instill hope is even more important than your ability to kill a monster. I've never seen that done in a game. The One Ring captures it just flawlessly.

[Howard] I've got two examples. One of them is Larry Niven's Known Space. Which was my introduction to multi-book sci-fi worldbuilding. I'd read Lord of the Rings prior to that. But this was the first time I'd seen it in science fiction and the reason I love it is that it was used for short story after short story. It started to feel like home. Then, as an adult, I picked up a collection from Niven, and one of the things that was in there was an outline for a novel that totally destroys Known Space and says, "I'm done with it." Because he, and I think, Jerry Pournelle had talked about how many holes there were in his worldbuilding, and he just wanted to burn the whole thing down. He had this outline and then came up with the idea for Ringworld and put Ringworld in Known Space. His publisher said, "Ringworld's doing really well. You're not allowed to burn anything down, my friend."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I love that. Because he took a thing which, yeah, the more I look at it, the more broken it is. It's broken in a lot of ways. And yet… For telling the stories that he wanted to tell, it continues to work. The other example, Elder Scrolls Online has a… Had a lore master, Lawrence Schick, whose job it was to take all of the Bethesda games, all of the Bethesda Elder Scrolls games and have a consistent lore within this MMO. The first thing he discovered is you guys have not been consistent. So he made one ironclad rule, which is, every single piece of lore we present to players is presented from the perspective of someone in-world who is an unreliable narrator. That is the only possible out that we have for this mess. What's fun is that as a writer, I can see this, as I consume the in-game lore and I love it. He just retired from doing Elder Scrolls Online. Which I assume means they have somebody waiting in the wings to do their lore. That is the sort of job which, if I were not currently making a living on my own IP, I would love.

[Brandon] Let's stop and do a book of the week. Dan, you're going to tell us about…

[Dan] Yeah. I want to tell you about Sakura: Intellectual Property. This… I'm going to talk a little bit more about the story behind this. I'm going to do it very quickly, don't worry. A very good friend of mine named Zach Hill passed away a couple years ago. Out of the blue, he was about 35 years old. Had a heart attack at work, no one saw it coming. He's a very good author. He was about halfway through this cyberpunk book called Sakura about a heavy metal rockstar android who gets hacked and turned into an assassin. So a couple of other local authors who are also good friends of his picked up the banner, finished that book, and it's out now. You can read it. 100% of the proceeds go to Zack's widow. None of it goes to the other people that helped finish the project and publish the book. It is a really cool cyberpunk. She is a heavy metal singer, and every chapter begins with a playlist where they will list three, four, five heavy metal songs that pertain in some emotional way to the chapter. It's really fun and very cool, and like I said, for a good cause and a good guy.

[Brandon] All right. So, back side of this podcast. Any worldbuilding pet peeves you have? That we haven't had a chance… Oh, Dan's…

[Dan] [laughter] Let's talk about Star Trek.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] No.

[Mary Robinette] [laughter] And the angry letters begin immediately.

[Dan] Yeah. So. I mean, I don't want to turn this into a gigantic rant about Star Trek: Discovery, but I'm going to turn it into a small rant about Star Trek: Discovery.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I don't want to, but…

[Dan] But I also very much want to.

[Mary Robinette] [chuckles]

[Dan] One of the issues that Star Trek started running into as soon as it was kind of resurrected by the Abrams movies and then again for Star Trek: Discovery is the current creators, the current bearers of the flag, are so obsessed with the idea of Star Trek's past, and yet they continue to put in technologies that break the worldbuilding into a thousand billion pieces. There's no way to fix those. Someone like JJ Abrams, that is not what he is concerned about. He is trying to tell a very cool story. Continuity is a secondary, if not tertiary, concern. But things like in Star Trek: Discovery, which is not Abrams at all, it's CBS, they have a drive that will basically let a starship teleport across the galaxy. That breaks the world so hard. It's very hard… I, even if you ignore the rest of the series and you're looking only at Star Trek: Discovery by itself, that technology breaks everything. They do not consider it, and they do not deal with the ramifications. I would be fascinated by a story that took the I can teleport anywhere in the universe technology and actually treated it like a real thing. They just use it as an excuse to go wherever they want to go. So… [Aaargh!]

[Brandon] So, my pet peeve is kind of along similar lines in that I feel like people who have pet peeves about worldbuilding have pet peeves about the wrong things.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] You have a pet peeve about the right sort of thing.

[Dan] Oh, thank you. Thank you for that caveat.

[Brandon] When people complain about worldbuilding that was done intentionally and is in service of the story. My big example from this season is World of Hats. It is a legit complaint that taking a planet and making it a monoculture is, in some ways, bad worldbuilding. But it was good worldbuilding for the stories they wanted to tell in the given episodes of Star Trek that that trope came from. Obviously, there are things to consider about this and stuff like that. But when someone complains about Star Wars and says, "Oh, it has a nice planet in the desert planet and a this planet… That's obviously just terrible worldbuilding." I say, "That is really good worldbuilding for Star Wars. That is what they're trying to do."

[Dan] It fulfilled the purpose that they are trying to get across.

[Brandon] It's not lazy, it's not bad, it is simply the type of storytelling that they want to do. Anytime we start saying… Giving a value judgment that this type of worldbuilding is great, and this type of worldbuilding should never be used… I mean, all you're doing is locking cool tools in a closet and saying, "No, you can't touch these. You can't use that circular saw anymore. Because we've decided that that one is good for no project whatsoever." So, that's my pet peeve.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] That circular saw is in the closet because of the number of fingers it's maimed. It has nothing to do with its use. Well. It has everything to do with how people use it…

[Laughter]

[Howard] It has nothing to do with how useful it is.

[Howard] Boy, pet peeves?

[Brandon] You aren't required to have one. You can just be…

[Dan] I can just keep talking about Star Trek if you want.

[Howard] We've gathered that.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Fundamentally, for me, I want the worldbuilding to flow from the story. A movie trailer that begins with, "In a world…" That's okay. Because you've got two minutes to tell me… Movie trailer. But when your movie begins, "In a world…" I'm sad. I just let it… Let me discover it. Let me discover it. I think part of this is that Hollywood hadn't figured it out yet. They've got better. They've realized that people who come to these movies want to have that experience. But it's still… Every time it happens, it just makes me so sad.

[Brandon] You know what I think it is? This is just me guessing, but I think a lot of the stories that start with these things in the movies, it's because some studio exec got the movie and said, "I don't understand this," or "The audience will not understand this. Add a voiceover at the beginning that explains the entire story and maybe a little animatic or something like this in order to explain what our movie is, because everyone's going to be lost." Almost always those ruin it.

[Howard] So, in translating my pet peeve… You're mapping my pet peeve onto rich dude missing clues ruins things for other people. You're not wrong.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. No, that is a… I have a pet peeve about that just outside of stories. So, for me, it's when people don't think about the interconnectedness of stuff. I get so annoyed when there is a piece of technology that shows up in one place and has no ramifications on anything else. Or when a character has knowledge… Like Hunger Games. This is not technology, but it was… I just couldn't get past it. The… So, first of all, there's the economics of Hunger Games which makes no sense at all. But the other thing was that she has all of this knowledge of botanical things and plants and things. Then she gets transported across the country, and all of it applies to this entirely new ecosystem. I'm like, "No, that's not how that works. That's not how that works, and also, blackberries don't grow on bushes, they grow on brambles." But I'm fine…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I totally have no problems.

[Brandon] There's an old cover from the silver age of comic books where it's a young Batman and young Superman as kids…

[Oh, my gosh. Laughter.]

[Brandon] Looking at Batman's… Superman's Time Machine thing, where he's showing and saying, "Hey, look in the future, I'll become Superman and you'll become Batman and we'll be best friends." Every person who looks at that cover says, "You know what would be a good use for being able to look in the future at your friend's future is to tell him his parents get murdered in a little while in an alleyway. Maybe you could use it to solve crimes, Superman. Instead of saying look, we're going to be best buddies."

[Brandon] All right. We have ranted enough. Last question. Any big mistakes you've made in worldbuilding in a story that you would do differently now if you could change it.

[Dan] Okay. So. In the Partials universe, I wrote the entire thing and I did all this stuff. How are they going to get electricity to power their stuff? Are they going to be able to use cars? What are they going to have to do? The… one time that I really need them to get a generator started after the gas has already gelled… After the book was published, and I'd come up with all these different transportation workarounds, somebody said, "Why don't they ever ride bikes?"

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, yeah, I kind of forgot the really easy, ever present transportation system that does not require animal power or electricity or gas.

[Brandon] I told you before that I put bikes into the last Steelheart book specifically because you had had that frustration when you had published. I'm like, "Oh, I could put them in."

[Dan] I can do it now. [Garbled]

[Howard] This bike rider's for you, Dan.

[Brandon] There's a scene where they ride bicycles specifically because I heard you complaining that you hadn't managed to do that. I'm like, "Wow, thanks for failing, Dan, so that I won't." Anything else you guys got?

[Mary Robinette I can tell you a continuity error.

[Brandon] Oh, let's hear it.

[Mary Robinette] I told you about this before.

[Brandon] Oh, yeah. It's great.

[Mary Robinette] This is… So, this is one of those things where you do all of the re… You think it through and still you manage to make a mistake. It gets past your editor, your proofreaders, your beta readers. It gets past apparently all of my fans up to this point. Welcome to my world.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] In the Lady Astronaut book, I talk about the seven original astronauts. The Artemis Seven. I thought about that. There's seven men, and then we have the seven women astronauts to match the seven men. So I'm working on the new book, and I needed to have all seven women there. I'm writing down the names, and I can only come up with six of them.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] There are only six women.

[Brandon] Somehow we all missed it. I hadn't…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] completely.

[Dan] Oh, wow.

[Brandon] They're called… You mentioned seven women in the room, but you only named six of them. Repeatedly.

[Mary Robinette] Yup.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] Oh, that's so great.

[Brandon] Someone…

[Dan] It's because they left an extra plate at the table for when Isaiah shows up.

[Howard] Someone's bad at math, which is unfortunate.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right. They're saying that they're all being hired as computers, but my main character's forte is math. She's like, "There are four American women, and three…" I'm like, "Nope. There's three American women."

[Dan [Well, clearly, there's another one who's just very quiet.

[Mary Robinette] And she has the same name as one of the other characters. That's why sometimes one of them… Sometimes it's Betty, and sometimes it's Renée. It's two different people they're talking about the entire time.

[Dan] That makes perfect sense.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I sat there and I stared at it. I can't… There's no fix.

[Brandon] That's the best one I've…

[Mary Robinette] There's no fix at all.

[Brandon] Ever heard of. I… We all do this…

[Dan] That's so great.

[Brandon] But that's the most amazing one.

[Dan] What you do now is you run like a campaign. "Who is the seventh Lady astronaut?"

[Howard] Actually, the Artemis Sven.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's a typo!

[Laughter]

[Brandon] All right.

[Dan] This is clearly six lady astronauts are worth seven male astronauts.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes, exactly.

[Brandon] I'm going to wrap this up. Thank you, everyone, for listening. There will be an episode next week. It will be a wildcard. So we are done with the topic of worldbuilding. Next year, we're actually going to come back with a new… Slightly new format that we're going to do for a few years. Because we've done a good job these last five years of really kind of tackling our kind of master class on writing.

[Howard] We all think we've done a good job, anyway.

[Brandon] We like to think we've done a good job. Starting with Write a Novel, then the Elemental Genres, then we've done Plot, Setting, and Character. So we're going to take a different approach on it next year, so… Show up in two weeks and we will tell you how were going to do that. For now, we're giving you no homework. Because, enjoy the holidays, and enjoy the end of the year. Get some writing done, or just relax.

[Mary Robinette] Or, if you want to buy a gift for someone, I'll just point out that the Writing Excuses Cruise is open for registration.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go have a nice holiday.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.50: Write What You… No.

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/15/14-50-write-what-you-no/

Key points: An old writing adage, Write What You Know. But what does it mean? Tap into what you know from your own experience! Extrapolate from what you know. Write what you know is true. Know your genre... or not? Write what you love. Mix the familiar and the strange. Write what you know, but add what you don't know, too. Write what you know may be boring to you, but your experience is individual. As a writer, you filter everything through your own experience. What you are passionate about may be a better story. Use your own emotional touchstones to make a richer story. Expand your knowledge, know more. When you tackle something difficult, put the other parts on an easy setting.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 50.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Write What You… No.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] This is an age-old adage in writing circles. Write what you know. You may have been taught…

[Howard] Can I just say write what you nope?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Yes. You may have been taught it before. It's kind of confusing. The first time I heard it, I'm like, "Wait. So I can't write fantasy or…" What do you guys think of this adage?

[Mary Robinette] So, I agree that this is one of the things that is often wildly misunderstood. The idea behind the original is that there are things that you know, that you can tap into. You know what it's like to be afraid. You've had these different experiences in your life. If you tap into those and write from your own personal experience, you're going to have a story that's rich in texture. The thing that I often say for fantasy people is extrapolate from what you know.

[Brandon] Yeah, that's a good suggestion.

[Margaret] A phrasing I heard of it once from Alice Chadwick at a conference on narrative and nonfiction. He said, "Write what you know is true." There's some unpacking around that, but I think that really it speaks that same grain of truth, of you don't have to write your own literal experience… I'm not necessarily giving advice to journalists with this, but as a fiction writer, you can write from your own experience. If that is grounded, then that will ground your story, no matter how fantastical you get from there.

[Howard] For journalists, it's write what you've verified with an additional source.

[Laughter]

[Howard] The… Early in Schlock Mercenary, I hadn't done a whole lot of research with military folk yet. But I was fresh out of a very unhealthy corporate environment where… I've talked about this principle before… Position power was being substituted for personal power. I am your boss, therefore you must like me. All the time, all over. It was very top-down. I was familiar with how that worked and how it was broken. I just sort of built the personalities of my mercenaries in that manner. I got email from people saying, "Were you and I in the same unit? Because I swear you've described my lieutenant or my captain." I found that very flattering, because what it said to me is I know enough about broken people to have correctly described one that I've never met.

[Brandon] One of the things that… When I think about write what you know, I get actually really conflicted. Because I like some of the sentiment that this phrase is telling you. But then I go the rounds. If I kind of look at fantasy novels, there is a big part of me that thinks, if you're going to write in a genre, you should familiarize yourself with this genre. You should know the conventions of the genre and you should become part of the discussion. There's another smaller part of me that says, "Yeah, but people who have none of that baggage sometimes create things that are just wildly new and completely off the beaten path and doing something very interesting with the genre." So you can see, I kind of… The two different sides of me fight about this pretty often.

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the questions there is, like, where is the line between what you know and what you love? So I think that when people are writing something that… And they're coming to science fiction and fantasy from outside the genre, there still chasing the thing that they love and they're still writing the thing that they know. They're just adding this unfamiliar to it. Which is the same thing that we do in genre. We're writing something that we love. We're always trying… We talk about this all the time on the podcast, the familiar and the strange. It's just that for us, the genre is the familiar. That is us writing what we know. Then we add other things that we don't know onto it. So I feel like it's two sides of the same coin.

[Margaret] Yeah.

[Brandon] How do you guys incorporate who you are into the settings that you're building?

[Uh…]

[Howard] You know what, that's a question that…

[Margaret] I try not to, honestly.

[Howard] That is a question that will be very specifically answered in great detail when I'm no longer around to defend myself.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I remain unaware of an unknown number of my biases that creep into my work in ways that I cannot see, hear, smell, taste, touch, whatever. I like to think that I'm aware of how I'm influencing these things, but there is a voice up in the nosebleed seats that says, "Expect to be wrong. But don't worry, because you'll be dead before anybody really points it out in detail."

[Margaret] When… At a slightly more literal level, I know my first published short story, Jane, was in Shimmer magazine. This is a story about a paramedic who winds up at the center of a zombie apocalypse. Really, it's about her relationship with her foster mother. I have her walking in the streets of Los Angeles. She absolutely lived in the first apartment that I lived in in LA. Even… It's like… It was boring to me, but I'm like, "Only one other person has ever lived in that apartment with me." So, it's like… Walking up the street, if you were familiar with the street when I lived there, the empty lot that's there was absolutely there. She is fictional, the dog is fictional. Like, I don't know much about zombies, but I can root it in a Los Angeles that I've walked the streets of, and I've heard the traffic, and I understand it.

[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that you said in there that I really want to underline for the readers about why write what you know actually works. It's boring to me. But the experience that you have as a person is individual. It's not an experience that other people have. It's why you all get so excited every time I break out the puppetry stuff. When I'm in puppetry communities, it's like… They're like, "Oh, that thing went wrong? Let me one up you with this." It's like this is… It's all old hat to us. But when I come over to writing, to prose, it's a novel and fresh way to look at things. So, one of the things that… To get back to your question about how to put yourself in there, is that you act as a filter for everything that you're writing. We get asked all the time where do the ideas come from. We also always say they're all around you. But what you're doing as a writer is that you're filtering it through your own experience. So I think, for me, one of the things with the… Parts of the way write what you know that is true is to trust your taste, and to trust your own experience, and to trust that it is interesting to other people.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So this is Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly. I was the audiobook narrator for this. It's the sequel to Amberlough, which I raved about previously. This is such a strong book. It follows on the heels of Amberlough, which it basically feels like it's the Weimer Republic. Here we have three of the… Or two of the viewpoint characters that we had in the previous book plus a new one. So we've got to people that we are familiar with and they've moved… They are refugees now in another country. So what you're getting there is a lot of the outsider "OMG, what's going on?" But you can still see Lara's voice coming through, even though this is in a totally new place. Also, the characters and their interactions are all informed by where they have been… By their past. I think that honestly you could read this book without having read the first one, but the emotional resonance between the two books is so powerful if you read them sequentially that I… I'm recommending Armistice, but if you have not read Amberlough, pick up Amberlough, then read Armistice.

[Brandon] All right. So, kind of, I want to push on this theme a little bit further, because I think this is really interesting. A lot of times, when I'm talking to my students and working with them at the university course, this is something that they completely miss. This idea that something that they are really passionate about can make a much better story than trying to in some ways write something patterned after what you've seen before.

[Howard] Certainly, write something bigger than they could ever be is…

[Brandon] Or just more bland. Really.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's the thing. People don't trust themselves that what they're passionate about is going to translate into stories. I really do think if you are really excited and passionate about something, that's going to help you make a better story.

[Absolutely]

[Brandon] Now there is a danger there in the kind of waxing too long about a topic or going too deep into jargon or things like this. Kind of losing track of a story because you're too busy writing about the ins and outs of breeding rabbits which is really interesting to you. How can you balance this?

[Howard] For me, it's emotional touchstones.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm going to share a very personal example. In 2006, I separated my shoulder and was prescribed Lortab and ended up addicted to it. The addiction was not one where I was stealing in order to illegally obtain pills. It was one in which I now had a dependency that was controlling me, instead of me controlling it. We went off of Lortab, and when I say we, it was Sandra removing it from the house and shepherding me through the process of living without this stuff. For two years after that, if you said the word Lortab, I wanted to cry. Because I knew that this was a thing that would relax me, that would make me kind of happy, and I absolutely could not have it. That experience was incredibly alien to everything else about me. You could say a word and it would hurt me. That knowledge… I can use that as a writer. In 2018, I injured my arm in a different way. The doctor said, "Well, we don't know what's wrong yet, but maybe ibuprofen, or we can get you some hydrocodone." I know what hydrocodone means. That 12-year-old addiction came back all at once. I almost broke down in the doctor's office. Now I have this understanding of how when an addict says, "I'm not no longer an addict, I'm just not using. No, I'm always an addict." I have an understanding of that. I don't need to write a story about someone who separates his shoulder and then has a blood pressure problem. I can write a story about somebody who has lost a loved one and thinks they're over it, and 15 years later stumbles across a photograph and discovers that they're not. When I think write what you know, that's a thing that I know.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Yeah. The… Less personal example, but all puppets, all the time, which is what I do, is… We talk about voice and things like this. I've talked about this when we were talking about the voice podcast, that there's three things when we're talking about puppetry, style of puppet. It's mechanical style, the aesthetic style, or the personal style. The mechanical style is what kind of puppet is it? The aesthetic style is what does it look like? Does it look like a Muppet? Does it look like it's handcarved? The personal style is you can hand the same puppet to two puppeteers and it will look like a different character. It's because of the individual taste of the performer. Jim Henson, if you look at anything else that he did that is not Muppets, like, was much more in a Dada, surreal, experimental land of filmmaking. Steve Whitmire, who initially took over Kermit, was much more of a linear storyteller. So they're going to just make different choices. This is the kind of thing that were talking about with write what you know. It's like when we're saying trust yourself, trust your own instincts, it's… These things will allow you to create something that is special and unique. When you're taking something that's deeply personal, like what Howard experienced, you're going to explore that in ways that are different from someone else who has that. It's going to allow you to bring an honesty to your work when you're reaching for things that you know. This is why also when we, in the larger picture, when we're talking about the hashtag #ownvoices, which is the importance of reading fiction and supporting fiction written by people from a lived experience writing about their lived experience, the reason is because that lived experience is going to inform that fiction. When you sit there and say, "Oh, but my world is boring. My world is normal." What you're also doing is you're setting yourself… First of all, you're devaluing yourself.

[Margaret] Right.

[Mary Robinette] But you're also kind of setting yourself up as the default, as the dominant, and exoticizing everybody else. That's… That is also a problem. This is not to say that you're not allowed to write other people. That's not… It's not that you're never… It's like I am totally allowed to write people who are not a… Let's see when this podcast airs… Not a 50-year-old white woman. But… Oh…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Sorry.

[Howard] I'm already a 50-year-old white man as of this recording, so… Have fun with it.

[Mary Robinette] Thanks. I'm actually really looking forward to it. To be honest. But the point being that I am allowed to write other characters. I'm allowed to do these other things. But when we talk about write what you know, there's two aspects of that. One is that my work should be influenced by what I know. The other thing is that my work will be influenced by what I know, whether I want it to or not, and I have to be aware of that when I go into stuff.

[Margaret] I think the other thing that strikes me about… I think probably the first time I heard write what you know, I was maybe a second grader, it was like one of those came across in elementary school…

[Howard] I have bad news for you, kid.

[Margaret] Well, that's the thing, because it sort of… You get told that as a child, and it's like, "What do I know?" What you know is not set in stone. One of, I think the charge inherent in write what you know is expand your knowledge. Know more.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I'm going to say is, especially if you are tackling something that is very difficult, it is totally okay to put everything else to the easy setting. If you are… Especially if you are an early career writer, and you're like, "I am trying to get a handle on plot." Don't try to get a handle on writing the other at the same time that you're trying to get a handle on writing plot. With Calculating Stars, I knew that I was going to have to be handling mathematics and orbital mechanics and all of these other things. Judaism! Which, I don't know if you noticed, been raised Southern Baptist and Methodist. Really, this is not… I was handling all of these things. So I set Elma to a Southern woman, I gave her a mother that's very much like my mother, that relationship, I gave her a marriage that's very much like my marriage. I sent everything I could to what I really know, to give myself room to work on and concentrate on the things that I don't know. Even there, I was extrapolating from what I know.

[Howard] And you decided to tackle this project when you are already pretty comfortable with what goes into writing a novel.

[Mary Robinette] That's true. That's the other aspect.

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to have to wrap us up here. It's kind of a sad moment, because this is us saying goodbye to Margaret. Not forever. But this is our last podcast with Margaret, so we're going to let her give the homework this week.

[Margaret] All right. So, the homework assignment this week. We want you to take an area that you are super familiar with and turn that into a superpower. The same way Mary talked about how we all think her puppet stuff is completely cool, the way that my background as a screenwriter has made me a structural god among novelists…

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] This is…

[Mary Robinette] Quite true. Accurate. Accurate.

[Margaret] Find something in your life that you maybe don't think is all that interesting and make it the coolest thing on the planet.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you, Margaret.

[Margaret] Thank you.

[Brandon] For hosting with us this year. You all are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.49: Customs and Mores

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/08/14-49-customs-and-mores/

Key Points: Truth is stranger than fiction, consider child widows on the banks of the river Ganges, Thimithi firewalking, vulgar rhythms in Mexico, gourds for clothing, and open containers and paper bags for alcohol. In stories, how y'all use y'all can get you in trouble. Don't overdo it, one or two wonky details are enough to make a society feel alien. Give us the norm, then show us how it is broken. Showing characters breaking customs and reactions of other characters is good. What we do is normal, but others do is weird. Why do we shake hands? For most characters, why is just that's the way we do it. Use obviously different things to make readers think about it. Using a different point of view allows you to explore or showcase the culture, and use it for conflict and fun. Consider a cat and you walking through your house in the dark. Flavoring a war story that takes decades with cultural details makes it interesting.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 49.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Customs and Mores.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] Customs and mores.

[Dan] Yay!

[Brandon] Dan. You were an anthropology major in college.

[Dan] I was.

[Brandon] Tell us what I… What the word mores means.

[Dan] A mores is essentially… It's a manner of interacting in a culture. It is a specific thing that a… The way a culture does something. So one of the ones that Brandon mentioned before we started was shaking hands. There are some cultures that greet each other by shaking hands, and there are some cultures that don't. That's just the way in which we, as a society, have decided to say hello to each other, and often goodbye. It's different from society to society. That can apply to essentially every form of interaction that we have, there's some kind of mores that governs how we do it.

[Brandon] Let's start with some of our favorite kind of real-world mores or customs that seems stranger…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Than fiction. Just to kind of put ourselves on the right foot here.

[Dan] Okay. Go for it.

[Mahtab] I can start. I do not have to look further than India…

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] For some of the most weirdest stuff I've seen.

[Howard] That's really far for us, but go on.

[Mahtab] Okay. Well, let me share it with you. One of them. This one I do not like, but it's the way things are done. Widows, no matter what age, they are… First of all, there used to be a lot of child marriage. If for… And the kids used to be married to older men. If the men died, the child was a widow. There was no remarriage. There is a beautiful movie called Water, which was made… Produced by Deepa Mehta, which just talks about a child widow who has to live on the banks of the river Ganges. Love is forbidden. Any kind of comfortable amenities… They just have to live a really harsh life. So that, I found, is really weird, to kind of give up your life. Whereas here, I mean, if a spouse passes on, you are allowed to find happiness. That is not allowed in our customs. The other thing which I just recently found out. It's called Thimithi, which… It's actually Timothy, which is a firewalking festival, which happens just before the Hindi New Year of Deepavali. It has its origins in the Mahabharata, which was the war which was fought between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. But basically, one of the groups insulted the wife of the other group, and to prove her innocence, she walked on coals. She emerged unscathed. Men, not women… Men, in a little village in India, walk on coals to prove their purity. They have to walk really, really slowly. I found that really strange. It still happens.

[That's great]

[Mahtab] That's just two. There are a lot more, but I will…

[Dan] So here's one of my very favorite ones. In Mexico, there is… Every culture has their curse words, and their swearwords. In Mexico, there is a rhythm that is considered incredibly vulgar. It's the rhythm of shave and a haircut. I know, now that I've said this, people are going to come up to me at events and signings and whatever, and knockout shave and a haircut on the table. It's incredibly offensive. Just the rhythm by itself. I've never encountered that anywhere else before. It's fascinating to me.

[Brandon] My favorite one, since we're going on these, is penis gourds.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] If you're not aware of this, in some South American indigenous tribes, men will wear a gourd on the tip of their penis to be clothed. To us, they just look naked. But to them, that is fully clothed. If the gourd is off, then they are naked and it is taboo. But if the gourd is on, then they are not considered naked. That… I love this one, because what it really says is a lot of our taboos in cultures, which are related to mores, are really social constructs. Right? What we consider vulgar, obscene, or honorable or pure or whatever is a social construct. Playing with these things in fantasy and science fiction books is one of my favorite things to do.

[Howard] We have the same gourd here. It's in a different place. It's the open container law for drunk driving.

[Brandon] Right. Yeah.

[Howard] Is the top on the bottle? The top's not on the bottle, you're going to get a ticket. Because the bottle's naked.

[Dan] Well, a lot of states still have the paper bag law with alcohol as well. That if you are walking down the street with a bottle of alcohol that everyone can see, then you get arrested. But if it's in a paper bag, even if we can see you drinking it and we know what's happening, it doesn't count.

[Brandon] So, how do we go about creating these in our stories? How do we use them? Truth is stranger than fiction, how do you convince people that these things are real? One of the most difficult places I've gotten myself in the most trouble with social mores was use of the word y'all in one of my books.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because I found that there is regional variation in how y'all is used. I used it a way that is the less widely used method. I have heard many, many times about how I got that wrong. It kicks people out of the story, even though it was right for that character. How do you use these?

[Dan] I don't know.

[Laughter]

[Howard] The hardest thing to do is to, in your own life, distinguish between the things that you have to do and the things that you don't have to do. The… Finding serial killers, finding patterns and what they do. What are the things that that they did that didn't have to be done? Why did they do those things? Well, those are incredibly significant. Does the killer think about it? Well, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. What are the things in my life that I do that I don't have to but I'm going to do it anyway? I hadn't asked myself that question before right now, so I don't have an answer.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But it's a great question.

[Dan] I would say, for the most part, unless you are writing a story that is very specifically sociological or anthropological, don't overdo this. Pick one or two things. For example, in the Stormlight Archives, the women have the safe hand that they always keep covered, and the women aren't… They don't eat spicy foods. That's… Those are the only two I can remember. I'm sure there might be a couple others. But you throw those in, and then the rest of the society is surprisingly familiar. But it feels very alien, because the setting is different, and because there's those two details that stand out as wonky.

[Mahtab] The way I like to see it is customs are important because it shows you how that particular race or culture behaves. It's but a great way to use this is give us the norm and then show us how it is broken. This… The example I want to share is not really a fantasy example, but it's done really well, which is Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Which is where a group of boys crashland on an island. All customs, social mores, just basically breaks down, where the boys just forget about all laws of how to behave. They're all kids. There is complete lawlessness. There are two leaders that kind of try and draw the boys to each other, so there are two groups. Their weapon of power on that island is one of the boy's glasses, because that's the only way they can create a fire. It completely breaks down, where one of the boys is killed, and everyone comes to their senses when a patrol ship comes looking for them and they're rescued. Everyone kind of comes back down to earth. But it's a fabulous example of when there is no… When social customs and mores breaks down, you could have a fabulous story. Lord of the Flies by William Golding. He's expressed it really well. So, the point I was trying to make is find one or two customs. Show us what the norm is. Then break it completely. That'll give you so much of your story.

[Dan] Showing characters break it, and then the reactions of other characters, can lend it a lot of gravity. So, like, we don't necessarily understand why they have to do this one particular thing in their society. But as soon as we see the horror in everyone else's eyes… Oh. Now I don't necessarily feel that that's important, but I can tell that it is.

[Brandon] You bring up the safe hand in the Stormlight books. One of the more common questions I get asked is what's the deal with that safe hand? Why do they have that safe hand? Which, as a writer and having studied anthropology myself and things, that question always seems really weird to me. As a writer. Because it is expressed by the outsider looking at a culture, saying, "Why are they so weird?" It displays a shocking lack of self-awareness about the way that human beings work. Now, I understand why they do it. Obviously. I'm not saying that the readers are weird. But this is how we are as human beings. What other people do is strange, and what we do is normal. We don't ask ourselves, "Why do we shake hands?" Maybe someone does. Maybe somebody… I'm sure someone has traced back where it came from.

[Dan] I can tell you.

[Brandon] Yeah?

[Laughter]

[Dan] Look. We shake hands because it is a way of signifying whether we do manual labor or not.

[Brandon] Oh.

[Dan] So it is a direct enforcement of the caste system. That's subconscious, but that's kind of what we're doing is "Hey, look how smooth my hand is. I'm rich."

[Brandon] Yeah. Um... That's awesome.

[Dan] But it's not important.

[Howard] I'm not even going to let you touch my hand. I draw with it.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It is, but it isn't. Right? Because I do want to talk about creating these things and having purpose behind them, but one of the things to understand is, to the characters in your stories, to the vast majority of them, there's not a why.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Brandon] The why is because it's the way it should be done. This is what's appropriate. Why do you wear this and someone else wears this? Well, in most cases, it's just this is what's familiar. This is what we wear. This is what's right to wear.

[Brandon] Let's stop and do a book of the week.

[Mahtab] I'd like to recommend The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge. She is a British writer. This particular novel actually won the Costa book award in 2015. The premise is very intriguing. It's… In her… In… So the protagonist is a female. Her name is Faith Sunderly. She's a 14-year-old girl. What… The premise of the novel is that in trying to discover who murdered her father, she discovers that he was trying to shield a fossil. A tree that feeds off lies. Then the fruit that it bears actually gives the person the truth. So she… So it's basically [fertilizes], those laws are spread throughout a certain community, and the tree bears certain fruit. The language of this story… Her language is just absolutely exquisite. So, it's kind of a part horror, part detective, part historical novel. You should all go read it.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Howard] I like the conceit, and I want one.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, going back to this idea of customs and mores. Stormlight Archive. Why do I do what I do? As a writer, I can say why I do what I do. Why did I come up with the safe hand? I wanted to indicate this is a stratified society, a deeply sexist society, and I wanted to have social constraints that readers from our world reading it would be like, "Wow, that is too constraining." The flipside of that is men aren't allowed to read. Right? Men don't read. There are these… Like, these restrictions that I knew my readers would read and just bash their heads against. The purpose of that is to indicate it's a different culture. It's also a very constrained culture in a lot of ways. I wanted the reader to feel those things.

[Dan] Well, one of the values of doing that in a weird way is that it forces readers who live in patriarchal or sexist societies to confront it, without it just… Without being comfortable with it. There's a lot of the sexist things that we do in our society that get carried over accidentally into fantasy, and a lot of people don't think about them when they read them. So, a custom like the safe hand is weird and it is shocking. It forces us to go, "Oh. Okay. That's different. Now I see what I wasn't seeing otherwise."

[Brandon] Why else do you use these in your stories? What purposes do you have for them? How do they enhance your stories?

[Howard] The piece I'm working on now, the protagonist is an AI who desperately wants to be able to understand everything that's going on around her. She manifests as female. There are aliens everywhere. When she is talking with aliens, when she is communicating with them, she is observing everything, the body language, she's listening to what they're saying. Some of it she can interpret and some of it she can't. Some of it she will get wrong. There's a fight scene that I've written and somebody comes down and breaks up the fight. The fight started because she didn't want the bird with the long tongue to lick her. The person who breaks up the fight says, "If you want the licky birds to not lick you, ask them. Don't touch their tongue." I loved that moment because it inverts our idea of personal space. Well, of course, you're not going to lick me, and if you're going to lick me, I'm going to slap your tongue out of… No. You have to ask in order to not be licked by the licky birds. Also, the word licky bird is just inherently funny.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Having it delivered in that way told a nice joke. But it allowed me to explore the inverse of this concept of personal space in a culture that has lots of aliens in it who are struggling to figure out each other's cultures in order to live together comfortably.

[Brandon] Mahtab, you wrote an entire book about the cultural differences between India and America. Why were you doing it the way you did? What did you gain from it in the story you were telling?

[Mahtab] Well. For one, I wanted to showcase India, but from a totally different point of view. So the point of view for this particular book, Mission Mumbai, is from the American's point of view. For him, it is a huge cultural shock, because he's never been there before. Now had I made that point of view from the Indian boy, half the jokes would not have worked, half the plot points would not have worked. Just basically showcasing it from someone else's point of view who's never been exposed to it, it helped me set up a lot of, as I said, humor, a lot of plot points, a lot of… Showcasing the Indian culture as well, and an appreciation by a person who was non-Indian. Because there's also a lot of stereotyping as far as a certain place is concerned. That's perpetuated by movies. You see certain movies on India and you just think, "Okay, there's a lot of poverty. People don't speak English out there." When I first came to Canada, often I was asked the question, "How is it that you speak so… English so well?" I just wanted to give them the Matrix answer. When I came in, at Immigration, they asked me, "English or French?" I responded with "English."

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] So… But, so one of the reasons of using this as a setting and having a totally different viewpoint talk about the culture was to not only showcase it, show the weirdness of it, but also use it as a good place of conflict and fun.

[Howard] If you look at the difference between you walking through the house in the dark and your cat walking through the house in the dark. The cat knows where everything is. A lot of things are taller than the cat. The cat has a completely different perspective of that room. Your experience with that room is going to be banging your shins, and tripping over the cat. Both examples… Both points of view can tell you about the room. The one that involves pain is often the more interesting one. It's also, to my mind, more quickly going to tell me where all the furniture is.

[Dan] My very favorite book series is the Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. I talk about it all the time. One of the things he's doing in there is he's telling essentially a war story that takes place over decades and decades. The middle Saxon period. This portion is generational warfare. But by setting it up… I mean, it's historical, but setting it up so that it is Saxons versus the Danes, we get a distinct sense of who the cultures are. So the way the two armies fight is defined by their background and their culture. The way that they maintain the territory that they win changes from culture to culture. So you get… Bringing out all those cultural details add so much flavor to what is otherwise just a war story that takes a really long time.

[Brandon] Mahtab, we have loved having you on the podcast. This is your last week with us. So, thank you so much.

[Mahtab] Thank you so much for having me. I've always loved Writing Excuses, so it's a pleasure to have shared this.

[Howard] Wait, you've listened to us before? Ordinarily we don't let fans into the room.

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] I have not taken anything. But anyways, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

[Brandon] We are going to end with some homework from Howard.

[Howard] Yes. Um. That pause was me remembering what the homework is. Take a culture… Take a cultural quirk, a mores… Something that is weird and preferably really annoying to you. Take that thing and extrapolate upon it. Build a whole set of culturalisms, of mores, of behaviors that just bug you. But that are logically connected in a way that this culture makes sense. Your goal is to create a culture that is very different from anything you'd want to live in, without creating a strawman.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.48: How to Practice Worldbuilding

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

Key points: What insights have you had about writing related to worldbuilding? Your brain isn't big enough to keep your worldbuilding in your head. Use a tool, and give yourself permission to forget. You don't have to preplan everything, just use find and a while-writing research document. Randomizers make it feel more real. What you are writing is a snapshot of your life and the way you respond to things in a story Don't try to fix your snapshots. It's not about finding the right way, or the best way, to tell this story. If dinosaurs are birds without their feathers, think about the fat on a penguin's skeleton. What if dinosaurs had that much fat? Practice worldbuilding by turning the knob to 11 and to zero and see what you get. How can you use hobbies or other parts of life as practice for writing? Try using role-playing games to try out scenarios, to see what kind of story comes out of a premise. Consider the dominant pedal and music composition is a metaphor for writing. Recast characters as family members to see how they might react. Look at the politics of game players see how nations might interact. Figure out how human beings work.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 48.

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Howard] Your brain isn't big enough.

[Brandon] Hmmm.

[Howard] You cannot…

[Dan] Speak for yourself.

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[I want to read that!]

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Dan] Yeah.

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

[Laughter]

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Howard] So it was a Brandomizer.

[Mary Robinette] It was a randomizer.

[Howard] A Brandon…

[Mary Robinette] A Brandomizer!

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Brandon] The Incomplete Art of Running.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Ooooh!

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Dan] To multiplayer Magic.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.47: Writing Characters With Physical Disabilities

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/11/24/14-47-writing-characters-with-physical-disabilities/

Key Points: Should the otherness be the focus of the book or not? Which way is richer? It depends. Most people don't really know disabled people. The world is not accessible. How do you write about this? Use your imagination, feel the embodied sensations. Consider different kinds of disability and mobility aids. Compare it to things you know, such as getting over the flu is like the fatigue of using crutches or pushing a stroller is like using a wheelchair. Pay attention to the physical environment and embodiment. How do you include full, rounded characters, including sensuality, in your books? Think simple, practical things. Mechanics. When a wheelchair user goes to a club, they are talking to people's belt buckles. So sympathetic characters will sit down, to talk to them on the level. Go to primary sources, but be circumspect and polite. Books about becoming disabled versus I have always been disabled? The real question is are they integrated with it now, are they comfortable with it as it is now, not when they changed. Small kids, a wheelchair, crutches... take them into that restaurant.

[Transcriptionist note: I suspect I have mislabeled Piper and Tempest at times in this transcript. My apologies, but I could not tell by listening who was talking.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 47.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Characters With Physical Disabilities.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Nicola] Because you're in a hurry.

[Tempest] And we're not that smart.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Nicola] I'm Nicola.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Tempest] Today we have a special guest joining us for our special episode on writing the other, author Nicola Griffith. Who is one of my favorite authors, and I'm so glad that she had the chance to join us today. I'm going to give you a chance to just tell us a little bit about yourself as an author.

[Nicola] I write novels, mostly. Occasionally short stories, but they're rare for me. I prefer to focus at length, because I get a bee in my bonnet about something, I'd like to explore it.

[Tempest] What do you get a bee in your bonnet about mostly?

[Nicola] Norming the other.

[Tempest] Okay.

[Nicola] That's kind of what I do, and it's in fact what I wrote my PhD thesis on, too.

[Tempest] Oh, sweet. So, in your work, have you tackled writing characters with physical disabilities that are the same or similar to the physical challenges that you have experienced in your life?

[Nicola] The only novel I've actually written from the perspective of a woman with disabilities is my most recent book, So Lucky. It's the only novel where I have written a character where I ignore her difference. All my other books, the main characters are queer, but that's not the focus of the book. But So Lucky, my most recent novel, it's about becoming disabled, and how that changes one's view of life.

[Interesting]

[Tempest] Do you feel as though, in your work and the work of people that you admire, it's more of a richness to just have a character who has an otherness and that's not the focus of the book, or is it, I guess I want to say, richer if that is the focus? Because I know that that's a lot the conversation around like whether or not when writing characters who are the other in mainstream society, or the other to you, whether it should be about that or whether they should just be that, and the book be about something else.

[Nicola] I think it really depends. For me, in terms of queerness, I always wanted to just have a world with queer people in it, and to just… I don't walk around thinking, "[gasp] My name's Nicola. I'm a woman. I'm queer."

[Chuckles]

[Nicola] I just go through life. I just assume the world is how it is. To me, that's what I want a character to do. But the difference for me was that I really, really wanted to talk about becoming disabled. So I had to address disability very specifically.

[Tempest] That makes sense. So when others… Other people, other writers are writing characters who have physical disabilities, what are the things that you see when it's done well that you wish you saw more of, and the kind of stuff that you put in your work that you want to model for other writers writing these types of characters?

[Nicola] I have to say, I'm a bit stumped at that, because I think there is very, very, very little good fiction with characters with physical disabilities. Because disability fiction is at the stage where queer fiction was I think about 60 years ago, honestly. It's still at the stage of a lot of kind of coming out fiction.

[Tempest] Okay. That makes sense.

[Nicola] People are very used to queer people now. It's much more acceptable. Still, not that many people really know disabled people. I mean, we literally don't get out much. It's… The world is not an accessible place. So it used to be that five years ago, you couldn't really get to conventions very easily. Now, science fiction conventions are brilliantly organized, mostly. So people know more disabled people, so you don't have to educate people to quite the degree that you do about queerness.

[Okay]

[Nicola] But, so for someone who uses a wheelchair, it is… A lot of people don't really understand. They'll say, "Oh, yeah, my house is completely accessible. Well, it's just a small step."

[Laughter]

[Nicola] They don't get it. So I felt the need to write my most recent book with a lot of this stuff in it, to say, "No, here's what accessible actually means in fictional terms."

[Dan] Yeah. That's so important. I grew up… My mom's in a wheelchair. I thought I knew these things. I'd grown up with them. Then, recently became lactose intolerant, and went to a Mexican restaurant without my Lactaid. That redefined accessibility for me in a way that I thought I already had internalized, and I hadn't. Suddenly, I was confronted with this entire restaurant that I couldn't access, that I couldn't use. It was very eye-opening.

[Dan] So, one of the things we like to do in this series is talk to people about how to write something from an experience that is not their own. We love own voices, we want people to write about their own experiences, but also, we would love people who may be don't have a physical disability to include more of that in their fiction. What is… What are some things that they can do to do that research and to do that homework and to get that right?

[Nicola] The best way is to actually use your imagination. By that, I mean actually feel the embodied sensations. So imagine you are walking into a restaurant… Imagine you just had the flu, and you're recovering from flu. So I'm trying to imagine… For example, if you're using crutches, because there are a huge spectrum of disabilities and mobility aids. So imagine someone on crutches. Their problem is not so much steps, although that is a problem. It's fatigue. So a way to imagine that is to think, "Okay, how do I feel when I just had flu? I'm weak as a kitten!" You need to think about spaces. Then, if you think, for a wheelchair user, I don't know how many people listening have kids, but imagine what it was like you had a small person in a stroller. What's accessible? What's not? I can only imagine if you are someone who has epilepsy. Again, to use the exercise of going into a restaurant, if you are the kind of person who has grand mal seizures, perhaps what you look at is the floor. Most people with physical disabilities will think of the floor. Is it shiny? Is it slippy? Does it have steps? Is it steep? Is it… Does it tilt? If you fall down, when you have a seizure, will you hurt your head? So it's very much about the physical environment and embodiment. So, yeah, think about bodies.

[Thank you]

[Dan] That's great.

[Piper] I think I'm going to stop us for the book of the week. I believe you have the book of the week for us, which is So Lucky. Could you tell us a bit about it?

[Nicola] So Lucky is a short novel about a woman called Mara, who is one of those type A, angry people who's on top of her world. She's married, she's got a fantastic job, she loves her work. Then, in the space of a week, she is divorced by her wife, diagnosed with MS, and loses her job. As you can imagine, that makes her a little unhappy. So the whole novel is about that, and it is about how she deals with monsters, human and otherwise.

[Piper] That sounds impactful. Thank you.

[Piper] So, for the next question, I would like to give you one of my own. It's referring back to something you had said earlier in our discussion. When it comes to living their lives, I was wondering what advice you would give authors who want to include people with disabilities, especially particularly mobility disabilities, who are not only living their best lives, their experiencing happiness, sadness, they're taking challenging lives and they're going after their goals? But also, they're living very full lives relationship-wise and perhaps even exploring sensuality. I think that sometimes that's erased, or people don't want to think about that. But that is a part of life sometimes. Could you talk a little bit about that for authors who want to include characters like that in their books?

[Nicola] Sure. Just imagine an ordinary person and how they might want to have sex sitting down or on a bed. You don't… If you're a wheelchair user, you can't have sex standing against a wall, for example. There are some very, very simple practical things. But that's all it is, is simple practical things. Just think about… Again, think about the body. Think about the mechanics of the thing. Then there's things like, well, if you are the kind of person who picks people up in clubs, you go to a club and you're going to be talking to people's belt buckles.

[Chuckles]

[Nicola] Which alters the conversation a little. So, if you want to write a sympathetic character who's nondisabled, you can have them immediately see someone in a wheelchair and think, "Okay. I'm going to sit down, so that I can speak to them on a level." So, I suppose, it depends if you want your other characters to be good guys or bad guys. How sensitive are they to this stuff? Am I making sense?

[Tempest] Absolutely. I think that that's really helpful. Not only because there are things that people can do to kind of see eye-to-eye, shall we say? But also considerations from a physical perspective and the mechanics of… Are there any resources that you could recommend for researching the mechanics, or… Because I know that that would be another popular question.

[Nicola] Actually, no, I can't think of anything. But I will think about it. Then, if I find something, I'll post it on my website. But right now, offhand, no, I can't. I'm sorry.

[Piper] No, no. Posting it on your website would be wonderful, because then your website would be the reference.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah. One resource that is always valuable, although you need to be very circumspect and very polite, obviously, when asking, is just going to primary sources. Talking to people who have disabilities, and saying, "Well, are you willing to answer a few questions? Can I ask you what your life is like?" Maybe don't jump straight into the sex question with a stranger, obviously.

[Chuckles]

[Hi. You don't know me…]

[I was not the one who said that.]

[Laughter]

[I specifically said at the right moment.]

[Laughter]

[Dan] But, yes. Like I said, my mom grew up… My mom's in a wheelchair, and she is always happy to describe her experiences to people that she is comfortable with. So, making friends and asking them questions is a great way to do a lot of this research.

[Nicola] Yes. And, like everything else, it's a question of degree. So, certainly queer people, people of color, people in wheelchairs, get a little tired of being information dispensing machines. But if you are going to ask us to dispense information, perhaps you could do something for us.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Tempest] Always pay your [substitute?] readers.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] For those of you who can't see us in the room, because this is a podcast, there's a whole lot of nodding going on around here.

[Laughter]

[Tempest] It's always a big thing.

[Piper] One very quick question before we end. So, you said that with So Lucky, you wanted to write a novel about someone who becomes disabled. But I know that also there are some activists, author activists, who talk about how a lot of narratives about people who become physically disabled, it's about them becoming it. Like, they weren't before, they were able-bodied before, and then somewhere during the course of the story, they become disabled. But there's not a lot of fiction about people who were born with a disability that meant they would always have to be in a wheelchair. How do you feel about sort of the balance of those types of stories? Do you think that basically, like, any representation is good, or do you agree that, like, there should be more stories about people who were born with a disability and have always lived with it?

[Nicola] I personally long for stories about disabled people the way I write stories about queer people. Which is just a thing. I actually don't mind one way or the other. I don't have a preference about whether or not someone's always been disabled. It's more a question of are they integrated with it now? That's what I would like. Moving forward, that's what I'll be writing. The book I'm working on now, which is a sequel to Hild, it has disabled people in it. It's very interesting trying to figure out what the world would be like in the seventh century for people with disabilities.

[Tempest] Awesome. Well, thank you very much for joining us. We very much appreciate it.

[Nicola] It was my pleasure.

[Dan] Thank you.

[Piper] At this point, thank you. We do have the homework to give our listeners. So, would you mind please giving us our homework?

[Nicola] Sure. I want to go back to various points in today's interview where I talked about the Italian restaurant. I use this a lot with my students. You can use it for almost any situation. It's all about what it means to be the character in their own body. So. Someone is going into an Italian restaurant. What do they see? What do they notice? How do they feel, and why? I'm going to give you an example. So, for example, a guy who's just been queer bashed, he would go in there and he would be really nervous around men with loud voices. For example. Or a woman with a small child might be looking for sharp objects. A lot of fancy Italian restaurants, they have those big open flames. Big open kitchens. A woman with small kids would be like, "Oh, I don't think this is the right place for us." So, someone in a wheelchair will see different things. Someone on crutches will see different things. So that would be your prompt. Put yourself in your character's body. Take them into that restaurant. See what happens.

[Piper] Thank you.

[Tempest] Awesome.

[Piper] Well, there you have it, everyone. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.46: Unusual Resources

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/11/17/14-46-unusual-resources/

Key Points: How do you take a fantastical resource and use it to power magic or technology, or somehow interact and change the world? What are the ramifications, how does it affect the economy, the social conventions? Pay attention to scarcity. Consider seed corn, and how do we bootstrap things. How do you assign value to a fantastical resource? Pattern it on real-world things, relative scarcity. How much labor is need to produce it? Relate it to food. Use orders of magnitude. Do you worry about a fantastical resource breaking supply and demand or economy? Yes, but... ignore it, and tell the story! Do think about supply and demand, but tell the story first. Don't forget Realism vs. the Rule-of-Cool!

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 46.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Unusual Resources.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm out of air.

[Brandon] Howard, you're our unusual resource.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Peculiar resource, at any rate.

[Brandon] This is a very common trope of science fiction and fantasy, where you make a fantastical resource of some sort, that can either be a MacGuffin to power your magic or your technology, or in other ways interact and change the world. So we're going to talk about worldbuilding these. How we have come up with them when we've used them, what we think works and what we think doesn't work? Obviously, my favorite, which I've talked about a lot, is the spice from Dune which kind of when I read that as a teenager changed my whole perspective on economics in science fiction and fantasy. You can see that reverberating through a lot of the books I write. Where I really, really like it when my magic has some sort of connection to an economic resource in some way. Most obviously, in Mistborn where people use rare metals to do magic. So… But even in Stormlight… This comes directly from Dune, this idea that magic has… Or the resource has an effect on the world other than just the magic. If you haven't read the Stormlight books, people collect magical power in little pieces of gemstone inside of glass, and then use that to light their houses or to power their magic. What have you guys done? Why have you made the choices you have, and how has it worked?

[Mary Robinette] So I did this in a science fiction short story that I have on a colony world. It's called Salt of the Earth. It's a planet that is very low in salt. Which is something that people actually need. So it becomes… There's entire industries around reclaiming salt. When you go to a funeral, one of the things that you do is you've got tissues and you catch the tears under your eyes and put them in an offering thing, so the family can reclaim the salt that you have shed on their behalf.

[Brandon] Why did I not write this story?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I love salt, for those who don't know. I salt everything. Man, that is really [garbled]

[Howard] Probably because it just would have depressed you. That level of shortage.

[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I was thinking about like what are the ramifications of having this thing that's absolutely necessary for survival, but is incredibly rare on this planet. How does that affect all of the social conventions, how does that affect the economy? The main character's family is from a salt-rich family. So these are the things that you kind of look at. It's in some ways not that different from the economics of Dune, because that's how scarcity works.

[Brandon] How did… What inspired that? Where… What made you start this story?

[Mary Robinette] Honestly, I was taking Orson Scott Card's Literary Boot Camp. Which was a great camp, all other things aside. He had us do five story seeds, one of which was a story seed based on research. I went in… He told us to go into the bookstore and find a nonfiction book. There was a book called Salt.

[Brandon] It's quite actually a famous one, if it's the same one.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So one of the things that then happens to me in the real world is I start noticing all of the things from when salt was a precious resource. Like Salzburg. It's like, "Oh, right. Salzburg is Salt City. Oh, yeah."

[Margaret] A project that I worked on recently is the new Netflix series coming in 2019. Or perhaps already arrived in 2019. Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, which of course ties to the original, Dark Crystal, the film made by the Jim Henson company and Jim Henson. Where really that entire story ends up revolving around the resource of essence, which is the life force of Gelflings, which the Skeksis decide they want, they need, it's what's keeping them young…

[Brandon] It makes them young.

[Margaret] And alive and it's like, "Aha! We've already destroyed our planet, but we can pretend we didn't if we suck the life out of Gelflings or Podlings." That just traumatized an entire generation of young people who went to see that film not knowing what they were in for.

[Brandon] Traumatized some of us, the rest of us, it turned into fantasy or science fiction novelists who think it's cool.

[Mary Robinette] And then some of us became puppeteers.

[Margaret] Traumatized and inspired are not mutually exclusive conditions. But yeah, that was a really interesting thing to look at, because there is definitely that ecological side. As we're told, the Skeksis have really done a number on Thra.

[Brandon] By the time this comes out, this episode, hopefully your series will have released.

[Margaret] Yes.

[Brandon] So we're going to make that our book of the week, is go watch Dark Crystal: Age of…

[Margaret] Age of Resistance.

[Brandon] If it's not out for some reason by now, then go watch the original, because it's fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] It is fantastic.

[Margaret] It's very exciting.

[Howard] In multiple definitions of the word.

[Brandon] Definitions of fantastic.

[Brandon] Howard, fantastical resources?

[Howard] The one that leaps to mind is the post-transuranics in the Schlock Mercenary universe. I took the concept of islands of stability, and, as other science fiction writers have done, postulated islands of super stability with massive nucleus elements, and then said that if you want to build a power plant that converts neutronium into energy in a way that gives you artificial gravity cheaply, you really have to build the whole powerplant out of post-transuranics. The best way to create post-transuranics is to have a really high density power source, like one built out of post-transuranics. So I built a system whereby the corn and the seed corn are incredibly… Well, I mean, they're obviously related, but there is very much a resource divide here. A lot of the story, especially here in the final couple of years of the story, asks the question, "Where did we bootstrap this stuff? If it's so difficult to make, unless you already have it, who made it the first time?" It's a fun question to ask, it's a fun question to answer… No, I'm not going to tell you the answer here. But it's tied into the Fermi paradox. Why haven't we seen aliens yet? Why, in the science-fiction universe that I've created, aren't people asking, "Why wasn't the galaxy already colonized a billion years ago? 2 billion years ago?" All of it came down to looking at the economics of this resource and what happens when it's fought for.

[Brandon] One of my favorite other things you've done with fantastical resources is kind of a different take on it. You have a person who got cloned several hundred thousand times, and made… You basically…

[Howard] 900 million times.

[Brandon] 900 million times.

[Howard] 900 million Gavs.

[Brandon] So, suddenly, a very unique and scarce resource, maybe not super valuable, but still… Is suddenly… You have 900 million of them. Which is a really interesting change in a little subtle way… Of course, in a very large way.

[Howard] The economic impact… The real life person upon whom Gav was originally based, Darren Bleuel, loves Guinness. You cannot feed the existing supply… You cannot make 900 million Guinness lovers happy…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] With the existing supply of Guinness. Some'pins gotta give.

[Brandon] So let me ask this question of you guys. How do you value a fantastical resource? How do you decide what its value in the economics of your story is going to be? You've made it up wholesale…

[Mary Robinette] I tend to pattern it based on real-world things. So I look at the relative scarcity of the thing. When we're talking about a resource… So far, we've been talking about things where it's the item itself is scarce, but there's also the labor involved. So sometimes, something is a scarce resource because it is difficult to produce or refine. Sometimes it's because there's just not… It doesn't exist very much. But either way, what that tells me begins to tell me is how difficult it is and how expensive it is. So aluminum is a good example.

[Brandon] Yeah. It's a great example.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Because aluminum used to be super, super expensive to refine.

[Brandon] I think we've mentioned it on the podcast before, like, Napoleon had his gold plates, his platinum plates, and then his aluminum plates.

[Garbled]

[Margaret] Which were oh, super fancy.

[Mary Robinette] The top of the Washington Monument has an aluminum cap on it that the ladies of Washington DC fund raised for to put this amazingly precious thing up. Now it's like I wrap my leftovers in aluminum. Because we've solved that problem. So… But what that shows me is the way something is treated when it is precious. It goes… It's something that we layer on things to say this is special. We reserve it for special occasions.

[Brandon] Right. Aluminum's a really interesting one, because aluminum is a way more useful metal in most cases than gold. You might say, "Oh, well. Something is valuable because it's really useful." But gold, a lot of times in a lot of cultures, wasn't that useful. It was pretty, but it was not a useful metal. So different cultures have treated it differently based on who wants it and how badly they want it.

[Mary Robinette] And whether they have it in their ground.

[Brandon] Yeah. Go ahead.

[Margaret] I was about to say, another interesting variant on that is you look at a resource like diamonds. Which are not actually that rare, but they have value, because value has been attributed to them, and because there's a monopoly on the global supply.

[Howard] Well, there's a monopoly on the global supply of natural diamonds.

[Margaret] That's true.

[Howard] We now have the technology to very, very easily make really, really useful and pretty… If you stick impurities in them… Diamonds. But the money generated by the original landowning diamond folk has been used to influence…

[Margaret] The market itself.

[Howard] Influence the market so that you can't make a diamond ring out of something that came out of a press.

[Margaret] But I feel like I occasionally do see that in fantasy stories, where you'll have the very precious resource or magic is very tightly controlled because it is very valuable. The Trill symbionts kind of fall into this mode, as well. Then you discover it is more common than we thought.

[Brandon] One of the things…

[Margaret] What happens to the people in power then?

[Brandon] That I did which was kind of a little bit of… I wouldn't call it a cheat, but when I was looking at how to value things in the Stormlight Archive, I made it so that you could use this magic, the light that you collect in the crystals, to make food. Then I was able to price how much the food was. Of course, not everyone can do this, so there are other market supply things. But in an economy that can one-to-one translate this stuff to food, I can then value or price how much the gemstones and things go for, because of the amount of grain it creates.

[Howard] I look at orders of magnitude. The model I use is sock, shoe, bicycle, car, airplane. Where… Whatever my universe needs that are analogs for those, how much of this resource is required for each of those things. I use orders of magnitude because I don't need to hit it on the nose, I just need to be in the right neighborhood, so… There should be something between airplane and car, I know, but…

[Margaret] As valuable as it needs to be for the story.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing about this also is the narrative that attaches to the thing. So if we attach a narrative, like a shoe… You say shoe, bicycle? Okay. I have seen shoes that are priced more than any bicycle.

[Howard] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] That is because of the narrative that is attached to them. Because of the… And because of the scarcity. The Dutch tulip craze is a fine example of a resource that exists because of narrative. Because people have this love of tulips, and they venerate the tulip, and all of this. Then…

[Howard] There are automobiles that cost more than private planes.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And there are automobiles that cost less than bicycles.

[Margaret] Thank goodness a commodity bubble like that could never happen again!

[Chuckles] [Whew!]

[Brandon] So how about this? What do you do in your story… Have you ever worried about breaking things like basic supply-demand or breaking your economy of your story with a fantastical resource, just completely in half?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes, I do worry about that.

[Howard] I live in terror of that.

[Margaret] I don't know if this applies, but it's a funny anecdote that I would like to share. I was… In my D&D campaign, at one point, the characters had undergone a five-year gap. So we're all coming back together. It's like, characters are bringing each other gifts. My character had had two kids since anyone had seen her. So one of the magic using characters is like, "Okay." Magic is new in this world. People are just figuring out how to make magic items. She's like, "Prestidigitation is a very low-level spell. I could put this on a diaper. Oh, like, we have self-prestidigitating diapers!" Then we started thinking, like, "Why are we adventuring? Why aren't we just billionaires making self-prestidigitating diapers? And chamber pots? Why are there sewers in our world anymore, because clearly, this is just what everyone could do?"

[Howard] No matter how expensive the spell Continual Light is, if the spell exists, the candle makers are out of business forever.

[Mary Robinette] This was ex… I had this problem in Glamorous Histories. It's why the glamour does not cast actual light. Because then it stops being an alternate history and starts being… Or a historical fantasy and starts being something completely different… Because why candles? Why fireplaces? Why any of those? None of those things would ever exist.

[Brandon] Perpetual energy. Yeah.

[Margaret] We were all there around the table, and one guy looks like, "Yep. No, that's true, and we're going to totally ignore it and move on with our adventure now."

[Brandon] Let's add the suggestion that using game mechanics… If you played a lot of video games or pen-and-paper role-playing games, they are built to be fun. Not economically sound. So just keep in mind the different goals of the medium.

[Mary Robinette] It does depend on the game, but by and large, you cannot… You do have to think about supply and demand.

[Brandon] At some point, you do have to, with your story, do what Howard said last month, which is at some point I'm just I want to tell a story rather than be right. Rather than writing an economic simulation in book form, I want to tell a story. So that is a line to walk.

[Howard] In the Planet Mercenary book, in the sidebar comments, someone says almost exactly that.

[Brandon] Yeah. Well, we will have talked…

[Howard] "There's the abstraction of economics. You abstracted this to the point that the economics aren't even real." Somebody else said, "That's because we wanted them to play a game, not figure out that they're not being paid enough."

[Margaret] it's… I think Star Trek does this with the idea that the Federation… Nobody uses money, nobody gets paid, and yet we have this gold pressed latinum economy going on, and why can't you replicate it? Everyone's like, "Yeah. No." We can technobabble around it. For the most part, we just kind of hand wave past, as if we know what we're about.

[Brandon] I'm going to have to wrap us up. If you're really interested in more of this, two weeks ago we did a podcast, Realism Versus Rule-Of-Cool. Which I'm sure was really, really a great podcast.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It will have been amazing.

[Mary Robinette] It will have been amazing.

[Brandon] Let's do our homework. Howard, you have our homework.

[Howard] Yes. Take something common. Super common. Maybe you've got a lot of it, maybe lots of people have a lot of it. Something that is super common. Now, make it super valuable. Maybe it's super rare. Maybe it's superpowered. But now, whatever it is, it's like the gold standard. It's like currency. Then, write about how your life, the lives of the people around you, change as a result of this common thing now being either incredibly rare or incredibly valuable. Or both.

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

[Brandon] I'm sorry if you dislike the fact that I used wholesale instead of whole cloth. If you've already written your comment in the comments section before finishing the podcast, I still love you.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.45: Economics

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/11/10/14-45-economics/

Key points: Economics in worldbuilding? The science of human behavior between ends and scarce means with alternate uses. Not just money! Time, trade... Incentives and motivation. Remember, everyone doesn't have all the information! Don't spend too much time on value, worry about what people do for a living and why. Fantastic scarce resources make good fantasy books! As writers, ask what makes an interesting extrapolation by changing our culture in some way. Don't just think of currency. Most of the economics of science fiction and fantasy don't work if you look too close. So... handwave, and give the reader a chance to suspend their disbelief. You get one bye, one freebie, and you can earn more by explaining something in detail, by showing you are trustworthy.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 45.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Economics.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] This is a really hard one to not be that smart on…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Because there are a lot of very smart economists out there. We have touched on economics a lot in various podcasts in the past. We want to talk about how, as a writer, you consider economics in your worldbuilding, specifically. So, can we… Let's get a kind of a foundation here. What do we mean by this, what do we mean by economics? The more I study economics, the more I realize that economists see everything as economies, which is basically how every discipline is when you really drill into it. I was talking to a friend who studies math. He's like, "Oh, math is really philosophy, which is really the existence of everything, so math is everything." Well, economics is everything.

[Dan] When all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like economics.

[Mahtab] I have a really good definition.

[Brandon] Okay, go.

[Mahtab] By Lionel Charles Robbins, who is a British economist, and this was in the 1930s. But he said… He defined economics as the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternate uses.

[Brandon] That's really good.

[Mahtab] I found that was really good, because if you have alternate uses, that's where the economics comes in.

[Howard] I like that, because when you talk about economy, most people think money. When you say the word money, somebody in the room is going to remember that time is money. Well, time is a scarce resource. The economy of I am going to spend time on a thing so you don't have to spend time on a thing, so you're going to spend time on a thing so I don't have to spend time on it. Then the two of us are going to trade things. Now somehow, we've each gotten more than if we tried to spend all of our time on one thing. That is the whole market of buying things with real money that only exist in video games. Somebody spent 20 hours playing for it, and now they sell it to you. Now you have it without having spent the time.

[Brandon] Because you spent your time doing something at which you are really good, and therefore got paid for that, and spent a fraction of that on someone else's time doing something at which they are very good.

[Dan] I love in your definition, it talks about…

[Mahtab] Not mine, but it's the good one.

[Dan] Whoever. I remember your name and not his. I love that it talks about different resources with alternate uses. Because wood, for example, if the only thing we used wood for was to build a house, then it wouldn't be wood, it would just be house points. You have to accrue enough house points, and then you have a house. But wood can also be used for weapons. Wood can also be lit on fire, make fires and things. So…

[Howard] You burn your house points! What?

[Brandon] It can also be a beautiful thing as a tree that we enjoy.

[Dan] Yeah. [Garbled] preserve the forest. So when you start thinking about not just that I need to accrue enough points to make this thing, but how am I going to spend these points because there's so many different things to spend them on.

[Brandon] I really like, in economics, the study of incentives. Specifically, how human beings are motivated by different things. These points, how different points motivate people in different ways and how we can be motivated by different levels of points in different areas. That is all really interesting to me. I think it plays into storytelling really well, because the economics of how a character value something versus how someone else in the team or an antagonist values that thing is great, ripe for storytelling opportunities.

[Howard] The place where I think worldbuilding falls flat on economics is if you try and make it all logical in ways that all of the players are acting as if they have all of the information. Fundamentally… A great example is the Pentagon paying $1200 for a hammer. Where does a $1200 hammer come from? Well, in part, it can come from the guy who's building the spreadsheet, and he's told, "Look, we're charging $1 million for this thing. Add up all the stuff." He gets to the end, and he's like, "Ugh. I'm $1200 short. But they require everything to be line item. I'm just going to raise the price of a hammer." Okay? It's not a $1200 hammer. It's $1200 of the guy building the spreadsheet not caring and knowing that nobody's going to read this until it's too late. Then they'll be making fun of the Pentagon, instead of the subcontractor.

[Brandon] So, as you're building a fantasy or science fiction culture, do you spend time on the economics? Like, the raw economics, the monetary system? How do you decide how much things are worth in your cultures that you are worldbuilding?

[Dan] I don't spend a ton of time on value, so much as figuring out what people do and why. So, like, what do you do for a living? Is it important that this is a community of farmers or of ranchers or of fishermen or of whatever it's going to be. Because then that tells me something economically about the society and about their standard of living and so on. It doesn't matter to me as much how much a meal costs as knowing where their money comes from.

[Brandon] I really like fantastical resources in fantasy books. We're going to do an entire podcast on that in a couple of weeks. I like tying my economics to something that is scarce in a fantasy world that we just don't even have in our world. Because then it lets me start asking these questions about well, how would they value this thing? How would we value this thing if we had it? If someone could actually cast a spell and make something materialize, what does that do to the value of the thing, or the value of the person who can make that thing? Those things, in fantasy, are part of what draws me to fantasy, is that we can ask these questions that can't really be asked in the real world because it's just impossible.

[Howard] A classic example is the Dungeons & Dragons spell, Continual Light, which I think had a thousand gold piece material cost. But… Guys… It's continual light. For a thousand gold pieces, you could make a light that will never go out. We're going to find enough thousand gold pieces that in five or six generations, nobody needs candles. So, by the time we've gotten to this point, yeah, your economy… Your economy is not centering around how do we find light. There may be other things that are scarce, but light isn't one of them.

[Brandon] It's easy to kind of make fun of games, sometimes. Because they're building their system to play a game. But you are writers, listeners. So, you… Your job is not to ask what makes a good game. Your job is to ask what's going to make an interesting extrapolation by changing our culture in some interesting way.

[Dan] I was working on a fantasy setting several years ago in which I wanted to have magic essentially just be energy. Like, wizards could channel energy. I realized, as I got deeper and deeper into it, that there was no use for a wizard that outweighed the value of just plugging them into a power station somewhere. Which is a cool story idea on its own, and if that's the direction you want to go, that's awesome. But taking the time to think about these things helps you get a sense of what… Like Howard was saying, what the scarcity really is, what the economy really looks like with this thing you've invented.

[Brandon] There's a famous SMBC [Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal], the web comic, that postulates that the greatest good Superman could do if he really exists would be just to run really fast on a treadmill or push a thing to generate boundless electricity for the world. It takes that to ridiculous lengths. But it does make you think. "Huh. You know, rather than saving people, if Superman were pushing a turbine, it actually would do greater good for the world."

[Howard] I think it was Terry Pratchett who… There was a dwarven artifact which is a pair of rectangular blocks which one of them rotates in relation to the other and you cannot stop them from doing that. So what you do is you fix one end of the block into the mountain and then start building gear step-down systems attached to the other end of the block because you haven't… It's not turning very fast, but nothing can stop it. So all of the dwarven industry around this artifact was centered around how can we build enough gears so that everything is driven by this one miraculous thing. I loved the economy of that. It's… You only have one Superman. Well, how do we build the turbine the most efficiently so one Superman can do enough running?

[Brandon] Speaking of Pratchett, you have our book?

[Howard] The book of the week. Making Money by Terry Pratchett. This is the second Moist von Lipshwitz [Lipwig] book. In Going Postal, Lord Vetinari takes our hero, Moist, and puts him in charge of the postal system. Moist manages to turn stamps into a currency. In Making Money, Lord Vetinari approaches Moist and says, "Good job creating a currency. Now I need you to create a currency." And puts him in charge of the Ankh-Morpork mint. It really is a delightful… Pratchett writes social satire. It is not just a satirization of banks and commerce and economy. But it's a satirization of humanity. It's Pratchett at his…

[Brandon] It's brilliant.

[Howard] Pratchett at his best.

[Brandon] My favorite books in the entirety of Discworld are Making Money and Going Postal, so… Can't recommend it enough. They are wonderful.

[Brandon] Mahtab, you had something you wanted to add.

[Mahtab] Economics, most people don't… Even in science fiction and fantasy, they don't concentrate too much on it. One, because it's… The jargon that is used for it can be a little bit boring and sometimes intimidating. So most people tend not to. One is because of the fact that it is… in the fantasy genre, people are willing to suspend their disbelief, rather than if it was a nonfiction where you have to get all your rules right. But I found this really interesting essay or article on Medium.com which was between Jo Lindsay Walton, who's the editor of the Economic Science Fiction and Fantasy Database. He had... He's mentioned that as far as economics go, sometimes we only think of hard currency or something that's monetary. But there can be so many other economies that are based on a non-currency medium. So, that's something to think about. And that's a really interesting essay. If anyone wants to read about it and just get some more ideas, it's on Medium.com, The Economics of Science Fiction.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mahtab] Very interesting article.

[Brandon] That kind of segues into the next question I wanted to ask, which is, sometimes the economics of science fiction and fantasy just don't make any sense. They really just don't. The one that Howard and I were chatting about before the podcast is the economics of space invasions. A lot of times, if you look at the cost-to-benefit ratio for moving the ships through the galaxy, which is a really big place, the amount of energy expended that it doesn't make any sense. A lot of shipping, intergalactic shipping, just wouldn't make any sense. Most science fiction books and movies just wouldn't work. Fantasy is even worse at this, right? We like to have great vast enormous battles that are very awesome and epic. Yet, the economic system that would have to be in place to feed these forces and make this actually work just… Everything collapses if you start asking the hard questions. So my question for you is how do you approach this in your stories? Where do you handwave, where do you not handwave? How do you do this right so it won't kick people out? How do you maybe do it wrong that you've seen?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So in my cyberpunk series, Mirador series, I was trying to create the story that I wanted to tell. That had the certain elements that I wanted to tell. That included the conceit that everybody has a computer installed in their head, and that there are drones that can do essentially everything for us. That, economically, falls apart so fast. Especially because I wanted to make sure that this world also included poverty. So how can all of these poor people have this incredible technology unless it is incredibly cheap, at which point then why is anyone poor? Like, there's a lot of things that start to fall apart. I kind of had to do the handwaving, and get to the point where I was able to come up with a couple of excuses. For example, well, people are poor because drones do all the thing, so nobody has jobs anymore, but, on the other hand, energy is essentially free because we have all this incredible solar technology and… Constructing as much of a house of cards as I could. Then saying, "What's that over there? Don't look any closer, because this will fall apart." But I needed to be this way in order to tell the story that is exciting to me to tell.

[Brandon] By its nature, science fiction and fantasy is going to fall apart. Almost all of it. Because we are doing things that can't be done. By definition, that is what leads us to sci-fi fantasy. Barring some of the really intense hard science fictions where they are postulating a few years into the future, things that they think we will do, and then we do. Every fantasy book breaks the laws of thermodynamics, just tosses them out the window. As a writer, my job is to make it so that you don't feel like you have to toss everything out the window when you read the book, that I give you that opportunity to suspend your disbelief. But that also varies very much on genre. A lot of the middle grade books that I'll read… They don't care about that and they don't need to. They shouldn't have to, because the story is not about that.

[Mahtab] The thing is if you got really bogged down with making the economics work, the story would not work. For us as storytellers, the main thing is I have to make the story work. But I have to make sure that the reader believes what I'm saying. Which basically means making sure that they have confidence in me and my writing. So I would do that with some other techniques, and then rely on making sure that they trust me enough to kind of skim past if my economics is not solid. Because…

[Howard] Previously this season, we've talked about the concept of you get one bye. You get one freebie that the audience is just going to let you have. Boy, economics is a great place to spend that.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] One of the tricks for me is the concept of scarcity, which was mentioned in the quote that you gave us earlier, Mahtab. In the Schlock Mercenary universe, it really would be regarded by most people as a post-scarcity economy. Yet, even in post-scarcity, there are things that are scarce. Time is scarce. Locations can only exist once. A unique location is, by definition, scarce. There's only one of it. So in your fantasy setting, in your science fiction setting, no matter what you have being provided for people, if time and real estate are things that still function the way they function for us, you can have poverty, you can have wealth you can have economics. Because those things are going to trade… Change hands in some way.

[Dan] Now, to extend that metaphor a little further of you get one bye, you can earn yourself more byes. By doing what Mahtab was talking about last month, of I'm going to explain this one thing in detail, and then you're going to trust me. Then, that's going to allow me to fudge two or three extra things that I wouldn't have been able to get away with otherwise.

[Brandon] Good writing can earn you a ton of byes. I would agree with that.

[Dan] So there is an economy of economies.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and end this here. Mahtab, you were going to give us a writing prompt?

[Mahtab] Yes. So, just kind of going further on what I mentioned earlier, develop a moneyless economy, where something is paid for without hard currency. It could be gift-based, honor-based, barter-based, but describe how that economy would work and what are the advantages and disadvantages of that economy would be.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.44: Realism vs. Rule-of-Cool

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/11/03/14-44-realism-vs-rule-of-cool/

Key Points: What would really happen or something really cool? How do you decide which one to use in your story? Start with the cool things, then justify them for the reader? Fight scenes need to be awesome, not realistic and dull. Jackie Chan's rule -- establish geography first, then fight. For Rule-of-Cool, establish trust with the reader first, then go awesome. Mechanics usually aren't interesting unless they reveal character. Rule-of-Cool means you expect the reader to say, "Oh, that's cool." Should characterization and dialogue be true to the period, or can they be modern? Whatever choice you make, someone will say it is wrong. So, make it interesting for you. In dialogue, pick the moments you want to stick, and make them stand out. Know what the purpose of your scene is, and use what works to support that, cut what works against that, and put in what you need for other purposes.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 44.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Realism vs. Rule-of-Cool.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And you're very cool.

[Howard] Well, thank you. I'd like to think I'm realistic.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But not. I mean… Carry on.

[Brandon] I've been waiting to do this podcast ever since I created this outline. This was my favorite one in the outline, because I love talking about this topic. Realism vs. Rule-of-Cool, the simple question of where do you decide to throw out what would really happen to do something more awesome?

[Mary Robinette] Like have giant crabs, say?

[Brandon] Yes. Like have giant crabs, say.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Just as an example. Pulled out of nowhere.

[Howard] I was at a convention where we had a discussion about this. One of the things that came up was the use of Chinese profanity in Firefly. There was a linguist on the panel who said, "I hate this because they are speaking the Chinese tonally, and they're speaking everything else the way Westerners speak it. As a linguist, I know that those two things would drift together. I just can't buy it." My response was, "You're wrong."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because all the rest of us loved it because of how cool it was. If we'd done it right, what we would have heard is people mocking Chinese. So thank you for not being realistic, Firefly.

[Mary Robinette] Although I will just put a note in there that using that as an example is tricky because there's also a lot of people who are unhappy with it because of the amount of cultural appropriation and the dearth of people who are actually Chinese on Firefly.

[Dan] Who appear in the series. My favorite story about Rule-of-Cool was a World Fantasy panel years and years ago that was talking about action. They got into the concept of fencing. A woman in the audience stood up and said, "I am a fencer. I fence for my college team. There is not a single fencer I've ever met who thinks that the fencing in the Princess Bride is accurate. But. There is not a single fencer I've ever met who didn't get into it because of the fencing in the Princess Bride." That kind of sums it up for me. That it can be wrong and still be awesome at the same time, if you do it right.

[Brandon] Mary brought up… Mary Robinette brought up that I… I very much like this…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Concept. In fact, we talk a lot about worldbuilding, how we naturally evolve our stories out of our research, and things like this. This does happen. But really, that's not how it happens for me. Most of the time, I start with the cool things that I want to have in my books, and I work backward, trying to find every way I can to justify making it feel real enough for you as the reader so that you can suspend your disbelief and just enjoy the story being awesome.

[Howard] Speaking on behalf of Western civilization, we are glad that you are a writer and not a defense attorney.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Yeah, well. I feel like defense attorneys must work the same way. So. But, yes. Like, giant crabs. I start with I want giant crabs. Not with I have this world where maybe I could have giant crabs. I start with giant crabs and say, "How can I make a setting in a worldbuilding where the square cube law doesn't apply to these creatures because of the magic system?" I start with I want to write knights in power armor. Right? Fantasy knights in magical power armor with giant cool swords. What can I come up with to justify the fact that these exist in my story?

[Brandon] Let me ask you this. Let's drill in on a few of these areas. One of them is fight scenes. When you write fight scenes in your stories, how much effort are you taking to be real? When are you taking effort to be real? When are you ignoring that, and why?

[Mary Robinette] So, here's an interesting example of it. There's… I don't enjoy riding fight scenes. Like, I really… I discovered this because Brandon and I were working on a project together. He's like, "Really cool fight scene goes here." I am like, "I hate you, Brandon."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, I went to someone who is in the military, and I said… And a writer, and I said, "Can you just bullet point this for me?" He bullet pointed the fight scene for me. Step-by-step through exactly what would happen. I'm like, "Okay." So I wrote it. I put in all of the character stuff that went around it. I handed it to Brandon, and he's like it's, "This is not written nearly as cool as this other scene." The other scene I had just kind of seat of my pants'ed my way through. It's like, "Well, maybe this thing happens. They're rolling in this magic dust, smoking here thing, and sparkle. Then fighty more." I mean, that is more or less a transcript of it.

[Dan] That is now my favorite fight scene.

[Howard] Sparkle and then fighting more.

[Mary Robinette] Fighty more.

[Howard] Oh, and then fighty more. Okay.

[Dan] You better get it right, or the power doesn't work.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, exactly. The point is that one of them was very realistic and dull. The other was… I just went Rule-of-Cool. I'm like… There is no… There's no specificity in s… I put in like one or two specific details in order to have the sparkly magic stuff happening, but, man, my attempt at realism just bombed. Because it was dull.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You're like…

[Brandon] The revision works really well. What did you do to revise those scenes to make them in the up really working?

[Mary Robinette] So… Honestly, I looked at the parts that you were like, "Neat!" Then, also the other thing that I did with that scene was that I looked really at the stuff that I was excited about. I was very excited about… There's a tent that is a self-erecting tent that she throws at someone. I was super excited about that. So I was like, "I want to keep that." Then revised the scene so that I was basically cutting a lot of the other stuff. It was mostly just a lot of cutting the interstitial stuff, and moving from set piece to set piece. And keeping my…

[Howard] Like a Jackie Chan movie.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jackie Chan's an interesting example because one of the things that he talks about is that you establish geography first and what the pieces are. Then, when you're actually in the fight, you don't have to do it. I think that a lot of times that is the same thing that we're doing with the Rule-of-Cool is we establish trust with the reader early on. Then we can get away with a lot of stuff.

[Howard] [Mostly though so I can figure out] how a Jackie Chan movie moves from cool fight to cool fight to cool fight with linking material that is less important.

[Dan] Depends on the Jackie Chan movie.

[Howard] It depends on the Jackie Chan movie.

[Dan] Yes. No. I think Jackie Chan is a great one to bring up because… I hate most fight scenes. I think a fight scene in a movie is just a five-minute way of saying, "And then Jim took the thing away because Bob was lying on the floor." Like, you don't need to take five minutes to say that, unless the actual process reveals something important about their characters or you're so interesting to watch that I'll just watch you flip a ladder around for a while. Right? So, coming up with a way to do that… Most often, I will just default to Rule-of-Cool, because the actual mechanics of it aren't as interesting to me, unless I'm going to use them to reveal character in some way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Wes Chou said that fight scenes are a conversation. Which I thought… I was like, "Oh, that makes so much sense." I… In some ways, I feel like that is also what's going on with the realism vs. Rule-of-Cool, is that with realism, the conversation that we're having with the reader is look at the research that I've done. With Rule-of-Cool, the conversation that we're having with the reader is look at this, it's so exciting.

[Dan] Well, it can be done… I remember there was a really good fight scene in the Jack Ryan show on Amazon in the first episode. The reason it was cool is because you could watch step-by-step this is how the people are attacking this army base in Afghanistan and I can see every stage of oh, they've made it to this point, which means that now the stakes have been raised. Part of it is because I understood the geography beforehand, like you were saying. So it was all, okay, I know what's going on, and I know what it means to this character specifically, and I know how this character's going to react to each progression of that battle.

[Brandon] Before we move on from fight scenes, there is one good example that I wanted to mention that is very interesting to me. This is actually the Matrix films. Because the Matrix films are all about Rule-of-Cool in fight scenes. One of the things they earn by doing that, that I think I want to highlight here, is there is a fight scene in I think the third movie where they're not in the Matrix suddenly and two people are having a fistfight. It is one of the most brutal and shocking fight scenes I've ever seen in a film. Granted, I know there are worse, but it was the contrast. Right? The contrast of we know that we are using Rule-of-Cool in these other fight scenes. Now, when we take away their powers, and we have two people just beating each other bloody, it is way more interesting and shocking. So that contrast is also something. We're not saying always use Rule-of-Cool. We're saying that you're allowed to, and we like to in certain instances. But there are certain times where just trying to be as realistic as you can will play to your story a lot better.

[Howard] Sometimes, Rule-of-Cool… I say sometimes. Rule-of-Cool applies to anything to which the response for the reader will be, "Oh, that's cool." A stand-up-and-cheer moment, a big emotional beat for one of the characters. Often, realism is the character would have figured this out and isn't going to have been surprised. So it's not realistic for that moment to be as emotional. So, in order to have Rule-of-Cool, in order to have that moment, I have to go back and do some things to undercut the reader's belief in the other possible versions of the story. Because, as Dan said, I don't actually love writing fight scenes. I hate drawing fight scenes. Good grief, you have to show every limb.

[Laughter]

[Howard] It's like…

[Dan] Well, that depends on how far into the fight scene you are. There might not be very many…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] the POW bubble is for.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Brandon] Howard, why don't you tell us about Terminal Uprising?

[Howard] Ah. Yes. Terminal Uprising by Jim C. Hines. It's the second book in the Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse series. Just the phrase Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse should tell you that he's focusing on cool perhaps a little more than realism, but in reading these books… They're funny, they're emotional, they're upbeat, they're space opera with pirates and zombies and janitors and aliens…

[Mary Robinette] I loved the first one.

[Howard] Yeah. They're wonderful. To my mind, Jim makes all the right calls in how much of the science fiction am I going to give you, how much of the science am I going to give you, about the zombie plague, about the aliens, about whatever versus how many cool things am I going to do. So, Terminal Uprising by Jim C. Hines.

[Brandon] So, let's take a different path here and talk about characterization. One of the things that people struggle with sometimes with fantasy is deciding how much they're going to make their characters act like real characters from the period, and how much they're going to let them have modern sensibilities. This strays into dialogue as well. How often are you going to let people talk like people really talk or make them talk like people really talk and how often are you going to Joss Whedon them and make sure that everybody's saying something that's very interesting at any given moment? How do you make this decision? Where have you done it in your stories, and where do you find the balance for your own writing?

[Mary Robinette] I think one thing to know going into this is that whatever choice you make, someone will tell you that you got it wrong. So, this is one reason to, I think, err on your own personal… The side of your own personal Rule-of-Cool. If you aren't finding it interesting, whatever choice you're making, it is in fact the wrong choice. So, for me, what I try to do is I try to remember that my readers are modern readers. Whatever it is that I write, they are going to view it through a modern lens. So, there are often things that would be completely realistic that are the total opposite of the Rule-of-Cool. Like, there's language that if I were writing something realistically set in the 1800s, is just horrific. Not just unpalatable for a modern reader, but actually offensive. So I don't go realistic that way. There are other times when I do go realistic and people are like, "Well, I don't believe anyone would ever say that." I'm like, "Well, yes. That's actually a line straight from Jane Austen. That's fine, thank you."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So it is a balance. It is, I think, a balance that you have to find tune for your own sensibilities.

[Dan] Yeah. I do think, and this is a broad generalization, but at least in my experience, the kinds of people who complain about whatever aspect of your historicity you've gotten wrong… Typically it's because they have an ax to grind, and they were going to complain anyway.

[Brandon] I have found that, for me, I have the big loophole in that I'm writing secondary world fantasy with a lot of my things. People have asked me that. They say, "Your people act like people from modern or early America rather than people from the 1400s or the 1200s." I'm like, "Well, it's not the 1200s."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It is Roshar. This is the sensibilities that they have in their kingdom. I am not really that interested in trying to create an accurate portrayal of how someone might have thought at a different time period. I am interested in creating an accurate portrayal of how someone might think in the culture that I'm creating. But I tend to create cultures where the ideas I want to discuss are discussable.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is people tend to think that concern about human rights is a modern invention. It's really not. Like… I mean, just on feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women is a book that came out in the 1700s. This is not… Like, most of the time, as Dan said, when someone complains about it, they have an ax to grind and… Oh, I have a lot of thoughts about this that can take us way off topic. I'm going to can of worms myself.

[Dan] It's wise.

[Howard] The decision about who gets the clever lines, who gets the pithy lines, do they all get to be clever and pithy? For me, often because I have to prune so many words on my second and third pass for it to look like a comic strip instead of a wall of text with pictures hidden under the wall of text, everybody has to be pithy. Because I have to condense every… Everything. So that it gives that meaning. When I'm writing prose, and I want it to read less like a comic strip and more like prose, even if the dialogue doesn't have a punchline, I will pick the moments in the dialogue that I want to stick. I pick the moments where someone is making a point, and if there were a… If C-SPAN was watching this, that's the part that would get turned into a meme gif. That's the part that would be a soundbite. So I will pick those moments. That's where I refine the dialogue. Then I go back to the other dialogue and ask myself, "Are there syllables, words, whatever that would function as send ups for this? Are the things that would undercut that?" But mostly, I can leave the other text is is.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things for me, speaking of it hitting, that I look at is whether or not this moment of cool is going to make the reader pop out of the story in a way that will hurt the story. So, one of the things that I do in all of the novels is I insert a Doctor Who cameo. I'm very careful about when the Doctor appears on stage, or when I do the plant of This Is the Doctor. Because I know that, for the readers who recognize that character, they're going to pop out of the story. It's cool, but is that going to harm their emotional moment in the scene? I also tend to slide in Princess Bride references. In one of the stories, there was a perfect setup for "I am not left-handed," but it was at a point that I didn't need a laugh. A laugh would be actually harmful to the scene. So that was a moment where I'm like, "Okay, my character doesn't get to do that." I err on the realism side rather than the Rule-of-Cool side because it's going to harm forward… There was… But in another point, I needed the laugh anyway, and I could get this line doing double duty. So I put it… It's not I am not left-handed, but, this word does not mean what you think it does.

[Howard] What you think it does. That's the… The whole idea there is that you have to know the purpose of the scene at that moment, and then ask yourself, what works in support of that, what works against that, and what is information that's neither in support or working against, but that the scene has to do for other purposes. Making those decisions… I mean, at this point, I think for me and probably most of us, a lot of that is instinctive, and we just go through and do it automatically, but I fall back on craft all the time with this when I realize that a scene isn't firing. I look for the piece that is undercutting what it's supposed to support.

[Brandon] All right. So, I have our homework today. Our homework is for you to write out a quick pitch of two things. We want you to practice your pitches. But we want you to give a pitch of something very fantastical. The example we came up with is Star Wars. Try to write it as a very realistic pitch. A very grounded pitch. Then, we want you to take something that is very… A type of story that is generally very grounded, very… Like a procedural or something like this, and Rule-of-Cool it, and make it sound really outlandish.

[Dan] This is like taking a cooking show and turning it into the anime Food Wars, which has all of the visual flair of a Dragon Ball Z fight scene just when they're tasting food.

[Mary Robinette] I love Kitchen Wars…

[Chuckles]

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/10/27/14-43-sequencing-your-career-genome/

Key points: What do you do after you sell the first book? Or what do you do when the series did well, but... then there's a slump? You can't predict exactly what will happen. Look for decision points. At least have a sense of if this happens, I'll do this. Good or bad things! Know when to change approaches. You can stop and take time to plan! Think about multiple exit routes. You may want to balance several things, not just do one thing full-time. Think about careers you might like to emulate. Take a look at self-publishing, freelancing, write-for-hire. There are many outlets. Think about income streams. Know your bandwidth! What are your limits, both up and down. Don't get locked into one genre. Think about production schedules, think about lifestyle. What is your creative throughput, and how do you want to use it?

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 43.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Sequencing Your Career Genome.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] We're going to talk about the sequence in which you do things to plan your career, based on the kind of career that you want your career to grow up to be. I shortened that into something that sounds all science-y, but we're not going to break out the CRISPR in order to…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Bacterially inject your career with pieces of my [immune?].

[Dan] Oh, man. I wish you would, though. That would help me so much.

[Mary Robinette] That would be so much easier than actually trying to think about what I wanted to do.

[Dan] Yeah, genetically engineering a career instead of raising one from birth.

[Howard] I think Dongwon's headband… We wear headbands to keep these microphones on our head. Dongwon's headband actually has some of Brandon's DNA in it.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, no. I'm wearing Brandon's.

[Howard] Oh, are you wearing Brandon's headband?

[Dan] Oh, okay.

[Dongwon] We're really just going to Frankenstein into one large monster by the end of this.

[Laughter]

[Howard] So, Dongwon, this is an episode you pitched to us. How does an author, new or established or even old, make these kinds of career plans?

[Dongwon] Well, career planning is not a thing that we talk a lot… Talk about a lot in the industry. Especially, I don't hear it being discussed at writing conferences, and especially for new writers. In part, because you're so focused on how do I find an agent, how do I sell this first project? But the thing that I always see happen is once you sell that first book, then there's immediate pressure to have a second book. Since you spent the first 10 years of your life… Writing life, writing that first novel, now suddenly you have to produce a second book in a year. Everyone panics and runs into a very common problem, which is the second book in a series or sequel is not as good or is a much more painful process than writers really want it to be. So one thing I really like is if authors can start thinking about what they want their career to look like in the early stages. Then you can start planning for not only this book but what's next, and then what's going to come after that.

[Dan] Career planning is something that I wish I had known more about when I got started in this process. Because I feel like I did a pretty good job of the first one. I had a series. My second series actually hit the New York Times list. I thought I was doing pretty well, and then hit a slump. I had not planned ahead for it, I had not planned for it, creatively, emotionally, or financially. If I had had… If I had known then what I know now about how to plan ahead and look further into the future, it would have been so much easier to avoid that, to avoid kind of just relying on the publishing industry to stay consistent, which it never does. I know now that, okay, if I have more irons in more fires, and branching out into a… More forms, more mediums, more outlets for my fiction, then it would have been so much easier at that time to kind of navigate that when it happened.

[Dongwon] One thing I want to sort of reinforce as we talk about this is this isn't about having perfect predictive abilities, right? It's not about clarity about what exactly is going to happen when you publish your second book or your second series or your fifth series or whatever it is. It's the fact that the publishing industry, like many businesses, but especially media businesses, is extremely random. What happens from one book to the next book could be affected by anything from… I think Mary's talked about this in the past. Your book coming out the week of a disastrous election result, or there could be natural disasters, or I had a recent issue where one of the publishers ran out of paper, which I didn't know was a thing that could happen.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What?

[Dongwon] These are apparently things that could happen. I mean, this has been resolved, it's fine.

[Howard] That's the last time he prints a book on the skins of small children, but…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] But that's how you summoned the demons, Howard, and the demons are how you make mon… Anyway, sorry.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Alex, we're [templating] this.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] So, keep in mind, career planning isn't necessarily about here's I'm going to do A, then I'm going to do B, then I'm going to do C. Career planning is looking at decision points. In two books, I'm going to have to make a decision. Do I stay with this publisher or do I go to a different publisher? Do I stay in this genre, do I go to a different genre? Do I write a sequel to this series or do I come up with something new? What you want to do is have some sense at least… You don't have to have a super concrete plan, but some sense of okay, if this happens, if the good outcome happens, here's what I'm going to do. If this book tanks and nobody ever buys it, here's what I'm going to do. In part, having a plan in place when you hit the wall, when the bottom falls out of something, means that you're not also going to collapse with it. You're going to have a plan in place, or at least an outline of a plan, and be able to recover and continue to build to something new. Or, on the flipside, when your thing blows up and there suddenly 10,000 people clamoring for your attention, you're not going to panic and die, because you'll have a plan. You'll have already started that next book in the series that suddenly has a huge demand and a huge audience for it.

[Howard] I have two examples here, both from my own life. One when we first started going full-time with Schlock Mercenary. We established a trigger point at which Howard was going to go look for a day job. The trigger point was when we have paid the bills for two months using credit cards. Because that is the point at which we are no longer realistically financially planning things. We are living on the blind hope that some payday is coming down the road, and we have failed to bring the money in the way we meant to, and we must now do something else. I can't… I cannot overemphasize that to you. Knowing when… Quit is the wrong word, but knowing when to get off this bus…

[Mary Robinette] To change gears.

[Howard] To change gears, to take a different route. That is… It saves lives. The second… When we did the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter. It funded in like a minute and a half, and overfunded through the first two stretch goals within 15 minutes. What I posted was, "Wow. Thank you for your enthusiasm. We are flummoxed and flabbergasted, and Sandra and I are now going to take 24 hours in which to reconsider our plans for the rest of this project, because you want it more than we expected you to. Forgive us for being silent during that time. We don't want to dampen your enthusiasm, but we also don't want to fail to deliver after having funded." That's the mistake that most commonly gets made. That thing that I said got quoted dozens of times through the Kickstarter marketplace as people realized, oh, my gosh, they ran up against something they didn't know how to plan for, and they told us that they were going to go plan. That is so smart.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] There's the old saying that when a door closes, a window opens, or something along those lines. It… In my experience, it really helps if you go and make sure that the window's unlocked and maybe put a stick under it so that it's propped open.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] So when that door slams shut, you have another exit route. Right? Like those… So, belt and suspenders is a really useful thing. If you start thinking about what are your exits from this room, then you won't end up trapped in it forever.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that a lot of writers think, "Oh, someday I want to write full-time." This is when we're talking about career planning. Is that something you want to do? Because writing full-time means being a freelancer. So that exit strategy thing… That's something that I've had to do for my entire adult career. My goal has been to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. That is… When I reach those cusp points, it's like, well, I can write this. But it's a project I don't want to do. Is that going to push me down a path where I'm going to have to keep doing that kind of project, because I am now reliant on that income stream? Or do I pick this other path which will allow me to find different income stream sources? So I feel like… That's when you're talking about not just the door shutting, but it's like, do you want to go out the window? What are the choices you want to be making to get closer to the career you want to have? Like, I don't actually want to write full-time. I want a career where I'm balancing puppetry and audiobooks and writing. Because I enjoy all three of those. But I want to do the audiobooks I want to do. I want to write the books I want to write. I don't want to have to go do ghostwriting just because I want to be a full-time writer.

[Dan] Well, we've actually had that conversation about Writing Excuses as well. The four core podcasters sitting down to say, "How big do we want to let this thing get?" We've actually made some decisions where we turned down opportunities because it would have taken up too much of our time, and therefore too much of our lives, and kind of locked us into a path that took away some of our freedom to do other things.

[Howard] I will make very, very different decisions if I'm trying to be a full-time podcaster versus if I'm willing to let Dongwon be the smart one. Not that that was a choice that I was making.

[Howard] On that subject, we're talking about, in part, scheduling and time. Dongwon, I think you have a book to pitch for us that has time right in the title?

[Dongwon] I would, and it does have time in the title. I would like to pitch This is How You Lose the Time War, which is a book that is co-written by Amal el Mohtar, which you guys know from the podcast, and Max Gladstone. They wrote this book together as a… As an epistolary novel, so it is letters exchanged from one character to the other character. The two characters are rival agents in a war that is fought through time as the title implies, and they both represent two possible futures. They are trying to affect things that happened down the threads to make sure that their future is the one that wins. It is slightly possible that these two characters, as they engage in this brutal, bloody battle that sets civilizations on fire and conducts massive battles in space, that they might start to have some feelings for one another, and maybe that will go somewhere. I'm just saying it's a possibility.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

[Howard] So. What are some careers that we've seen that we would like to emulate? I think… Well, one of the ones I think of is… I panned one of his books because it wasn't actually one of his books. James Patterson, who writes everything. But I haven't actually done any research to find out how he made that work. My kids love the Maximum Ride books. But that isn't all that he does. Are there authors whose careers you've looked at that you love?

[Dongwon] One of the first questions I ask, whenever I'm looking at signing a client… I like to have a phone call with that writer. The question that I asked them, and it stymies them about half of the time. But it's always an interesting conversation, is, if you could have the career of any author in the marketplace, whose career would you want? I'm not asking what do your books… What kind of books do you want to write, in terms of the craft or the style. But, in terms of the publishing cycle, how many series they do, who their books are bought by like who their audience is? That answer's going to be really different if that person is Neil Gaiman or Seanan McGuire, even though they write in some ways very similar things about magic in our contemporary world. But their careers look extremely different.

[Dan] I want whichever career means I don't have to work. But still get paid for it. Whose career is that?

[Dongwon] I mean, that's a really important question. Mary was talking… Mary Robinette was talking about this a little bit earlier, in terms of do you want to write so that you don't have to have a day job? If you're not going to have a day job, that usually means you're going to have to publish more frequently or publish… Or get bigger book deals than you would in another situation. So, the way you get bigger book deals involves a slightly different strategy that if you want to publish once a year in a sort of a series-oriented format. Right? There's different ways you can optimize. You take bigger bets. You take wider shots, or longer shots, than you would if you had a reliable income and you wanted to be doing something that had a reasonable readership, but not necessarily needing to shoot the moon on every book.

[Dan] As you're thinking about what kind of career you want as well, almost everything we've been talking about in this episode is traditional publishing. There's so many more options than that outside of it. There's so much self-publishing stuff. There's so much… And we have talked about freelancing, and write for hire. There's so many outlets for you to find work in. Choosing which one of those you want to use, and if you are saying no to an income stream, can you afford to say no to it? Are you willing to put in the work to rely on the other income streams? Making these decisions ahead of time so that you know what you're getting yourself into and how to make it work.

[Howard] There's a…

[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, that's one of the reasons that I don't self publish. Because I don't want to be a publisher, which is me turning down a gig I don't want to do. That's not anything about whether or not it's a… That's a personal choice about where I want to be spending my time and energy.

[Howard] There's a writer, illustrator, teacher who I… Whose career I admire. Jim Zub. He studied animation, went into like project management and sales for a company that was selling art cycles to the big three comic publishers to say we can take over on this issue for this title so you don't slip your dates. Then they kind of became their own publisher. He went from that… He did a web comic for a while. He went goo goo over… Or gaga, I guess, over Neil Gaiman when he accidentally met him at a party and Neil said, "Hi. My name's Neil. I'm a writer." Jim was like, "Oh. That's what I want to be. That's… I want that level of humility that is absolutely not required because I'm that guy." He now writes, I think, half a dozen titles per month for Marvel plus some of his old work, and is regarded by many people as one of the hardest working writers in comics. When I met him as a web cartoonist, that is not the career plan I envisioned for him. That's not my job. I don't know how much of this he planned, but he kept his job as an instructor at Seneca University, because, like Mary, he wants to have more than just the one thing.

[Dongwon] One thing that's really important, though, is you need to have a really clear self-assessment of what your bandwidth is. Right? What I see so many times, and you're describing someone who is very hard-working, but he also has the capacity to do that. A lot of people simply don't. It's okay if you only write 30,000 words a year. Right? It's okay to write a novel every two years, three years. You can still build a career out of that. What you can't do is build a career of somebody who writes a book a year when that something you're not going to be able to do. The more you can be aware of what your limits are, in both directions. I've also seen writers take on writing 500-600,000 words a year, and really skirt that line of burnout and risk not being able to deliver on a number of deadlines, which would be disastrous for their career. So, what you need to do is have a really clear-eyed sense of what can I actually do, and then experiment within that to make sure that those are your limits, or maybe you actually can write more than you think you can. Or, oh, this feels like too much, the quality is starting to slip. I need to back off of that little bit. Those are all really important questions you need to ask yourself, and have a really clear sense of what your process is. Then you can build a career around it. There's no wrong answers to that question. Some might be easier than others, but the most important part is you are realistic about what your goals and what your bandwidth actually is.

[Mary Robinette] The time to do this is when you are early in your career. Like, a very deliberate choice that I did make with my career was that I wrote in a bunch of different genres. Because I had seen often enough a friend sell a book and then get locked into that genre. It just happened to be the first book that they sold. Like, the book that I wrote before Shades of Milk and Honey was a science-fiction murder mystery. The book that I wrote after Shades of Milk and Honey was an urban fantasy. But Shades is the one that sold. After that… We finished that series, the decision that Tor made was we wanted to have me try a bunch of standalone to see what hit. So when you're thinking about what kind of a career do you want to have and who do you want to emulate, you're not thinking about the genre that they're writing in. What you're thinking about is their production schedule, you're thinking about the lifestyle that they live. That's the kind of thing you're thinking about, not the genre.

[Dongwon] Often, how many careers are they maintaining at once? Are they a comics writer, a YA novelist, an adult novelist, and a screenwriter all at the same time? I know people who do that, and they do it very well. That may not be you, if you have a really demanding full-time job, or you just don't have that much creative throughput in any given day.

[Howard] That brings us around beautifully to the homework. Identify an author whose career you would like to emulate. Research their career timeline, including the release dates of their books. That's pretty easy. Possibly, the order in which these things were written, and maybe actually the things, the order in which these things were actually sold. Who were their editors? Who is their agent? Look at all of this, and try and give yourself an accurate picture of what goes into that thing that you want to be or have. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.42: Alternate History

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 42.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alternate History.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Like Naomi Novik's…

[Brandon] Yeah. His Majesty's Dragon.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Like the Glamorous Histories.

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

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

[Brandon] Okay.

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

[Brandon] Right.

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

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

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

[Brandon] Okay.

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

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In the Glamorous Histories.

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

[Brandon] Okay.

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

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

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

[Brandon] Okay.

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Brandon] Right.

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Huh!

[Margaret] Because like TV…

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes. It won basically everything.

[Brandon] Everything that it could win.

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

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

[Brandon] Right.

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

[Brandon] That's awesome.

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

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

[Margaret] They should have crappier Chinese accents?

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

[Margaret] Or laziness on the part of…

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

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.41: History

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/10/13/14-41-history/

Key points: Let your characters talk about history. Consider whether the history is continuous (Chinese model) or rise and fall (Roman Empire model). Visit places that are similar to your fantasy world. Only give information that is pertinent, that has a reason, that adds to your story. Make sure the characters are interested, and that it is relevant to the story. Have characters disagree, and have opinions. Use little details to make your reader think there is an entire iceberg underneath. Consider verbal perspective, like the visual perspective of a chalk drawing of a cliff. Drill down deep on some details. Character history? A continuity spreadsheet for events in the universe. Writing YA means characters don't have a lot of history. Use a character worksheet as a starting point, but don't expect to really know your characters until the 2nd or 3rd draft. Differing opinions of the same event can make it feel real.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 41.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, History.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm… Mahtab. I was going to say I'm Mary Robinette, but I'm Mahtab.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Mary Robinette couldn't be with us this month… This week.

[Brandon] Well, we're doing the Utah cast. We like to shake things up. This week, we're going to talk about history. Actually, next week, we're going to do the genre of alternate history. We're going to talk a little bit about that. So we're going to try to veer away from that this time and focus on creating histories for your characters, for your secondary world fantasies or science fictions, or maybe extrapolating from our history right now to the future.

[Dan] I just realized that given Mary's known history as a voice actor, there's going to be a whole conspiracy fan theory that you really are Mary Robinette…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Doing an accent.

[Mahtab] Possibly.

[Howard] We'll post pictures.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But that won't help.

[Brandon] All right. So, let's talk about secondary world fantasy, building histories for places that didn't exist.

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] Are there any resources you use? How do you start? How do you give a sense that the place has been around a long time? As a new writer, I'll just preface this by saying, this was really hard for me in my first books. I always felt that this was a big hole in my worldbuilding, that a lot of the great epic fantasies I'd read… You travel through Tolkien's world, and you get a sense that there are thousands of years of history at every turn and quarter. Where my worlds, it felt like they sprang up… Got built for the set right before the story started, and then the characters act in them, and then they were being wiped away after.

[Dan] Well, one of the things that Tolkien does… I mean, yes, he spent decades of his life building the world before he started writing in it, but beyond that, I think the much more reproducible trick is that everywhere he goes, everyone talks about history. So he's kind of cheating in that sense. So if your book doesn't focus on that, then you aren't going to have that sense. But when they go to Rivendell, when they go to even Laketown, they will talk about how, oh, this used to be this, and then this other thing happened. So you are kind of learning the history as you go. So you can include those details without spending decades of your life building them in advance.

[Howard] There are aspects to our world history that are really fascinating to model yourself, to model your work on. If you compare European history with mainland Chinese history, there is a continuity to Chinese history that none of the architecture… The Chinese people never walked up to a piece of architecture and said, "Where'd this come from?" But in the Middle Ages, in Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, 200 years later, we had people looking at aqueducts, people who had no idea how to work stone in that way, looking at these things and saying, "Who built this?" So the European conceit, which I think may be a little closer to what Tolkien was writing, is this sense that civilizations fall and some of them were greater than ours. We had this thing we call the Renaissance, this rebirth. The Chinese didn't have a Renaissance. The Chinese had a much more linear experience through this. Knowing that, when you are creating secondary world history for your world, allows you to choose. Our my people going to have a continuous history, or is there going to have been a collapse and technology was lost? Simple technologies, stone working, metalworking, whatever. When it is rebuilt, there are ancient puzzles to be solved.

[Dan] That contiguous idea, the more Chinese model, if we're going to call it that, can be fascinating, and I don't think it's done a lot. If you've got 2000 years of unbroken history, then this isn't just the little farm town where you lived, this is the farm town where 20 generations of your family have lived.

[Mahtab] I think even going to certain places that would be similar to your fantasy world would help. For example, Diana Gabaldon, who's written the Outlander series, she was a great researcher. She started writing the world based on her research from books, but then she eventually did go to Scotland, and viewed the area before she actually wrote down the entire story. There is a time travel involved, but there is a lot of history. So I think she did have a bit of it, but then a lot could be extrapolated. The other one that I really love was done… A fabulous job, and I think you'll all know him, Patrick Rothfuss with Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear. I mean, it just the way we were given the history of… Is it Shandrian or Chandrian?

[Brandon] I'm not sure. I don't know that I've heard him pronounce it.

[Mahtab] Nor am I. But history, and how it relates to Kvothe and the revenge that he wanted to take for certain things. The way it is built… But we are given that information as needed, at the right time that we need it in the story. I mean, if he had given all the information that is in the second book in the first book, we would probably have been overwhelmed. But the fact is that he's tilted, and he metes it out as required. You get the feeling that it's there. I guess the way you do it is you probably allude to it. But if it is not pertinent to the point… To the plot at that point in time, let it go. Let the reader just go along for the ride, and explain it at the time when you need to.

[Brandon] Absolutely. I agree with that 100%. One of the themes I'm noticing here is having reasons, though, to explain it. It works in Name of the Wind because the character's a storyteller and a bard. His… Telling stories of the past is basically the foundation of his relationship with his parents. With Tolkien, of course, there's a lot of lore, and characters are very interested in the lore. If this is something you want to do, having a reason, having a character who is interested in architecture, having a character who wants to talk about these things, and then making it relevant to the story. Maybe not to the main plot, but to the story in some way is going to help a lot.

[Dan] One of the other things that Tolkien is doing is he has a big cast of characters from lots of different backgrounds. So you have a chance for the Numernorian Ranger and the man of Rohan to argue over which path they should take. The dwarf has an opinion all his own. They think the other opinion is dumb, and they will give historical reasons. So you get lots of perspectives, which allows you to explain more of what's going on.

[Brandon] I think this is a very natural thing that human beings do. We like to talk about the past, we like to talk about our heritage. I remember just visiting Charlston for the first time when I was out there to work on the Wheel of Time books, and how multiple people told me we have houses that still have musket balls in them. From the Civil War. Right? Like, you can go and see there's a whole, there's a musket ball in there that was fired during the Civil War. That's like a very big mark of pride. I found it fascinating, right? Being from the West, where everything is a little more new, I love that aspect. I think, like I said, it's very natural. Those little details… We often talk about how the little details evoke a large picture and a larger story. I tell my students there's this philosophy that in writing you want to only show the tip of the iceberg, and then have all of this worldbuilding and stuff you've done that's underneath the water that's supporting it. I tell them that really what you want to do is you want to be able to fool the reader into thinking there's an entire iceberg down there.

[Howard] I'm going to build a little pile of ice on an ocean colored rubber raft, and I'm going to float it, and I'm going to use smoke and mirrors to make you not look at the raft.

[Brandon] Yup. And see an iceberg instead in the deep.

[Dan] If you want to compare this to visual art, if someone wants to suggest depth, you've all seen the pictures of like chalk drawings on the sidewalk that look like you're standing over a giant cliff. They're just using little tricks of perspective. So it's the same amount of total chalk, but it looks like it goes down for hundreds and hundreds of feet. So you can do that same kind of verbal perspective, I guess, and add little tricks into your book like mentioning the ancient king that used to run this or when you give the name of the city, explain where that name came from. Without having to build these hundreds of feet underneath it. You're just giving the sense of it.

[Mahtab] What I also like, which George R. R. Martin also did, was he was so specific about certain things. I mean, almost going to a depth that I didn't need. That somehow gave me the impression that he knows so much. He could have… like just maybe the Lannister's flag, and what they believe, and the Lannisters pay their debts. On certain aspects, he drilled down… Like, on the houses, so deep that it just gave me the impression that he knows a lot.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mahtab] Which without… He may not know a lot, but that is… I'm like, "How on Earth has he done this?" Because my impression in my mind is he knows everything. If he knows so much about one house, he probably knows so much about everyone.

[Dan] One of the reasons that that works so well is because it's a house. So it's not as… It doesn't sound as important as… If he were to give the entire history of the geography or whatever, this is how this land was formed, volcanically. So giving details, tons and tons of detail on something that isn't necessarily as important… Then we go, "Oh, he knows all this stuff about this one…"

[Mahtab] Exactly.

[Dan] "Little thing, I bet he knows everything."

[Brandon] Our book of the week this week is Airborn.

[Mahtab] So, this is one of my favorite books by a very well-loved Canadian author. His name is Kenneth Oppel. There are three books in the series. The first one is Airborn which was the Governor General's winner for 2004. The other books are Starclimber and Skybreaker. So, this is a book that set in an alternate history, of course, Victorian era, where a lot of airships were used for transportation. The story starts with a cabin boy called Matt Cruse, who has lost his father, but he's really dying to be a pilot, but he comes from the poor classes who… Chances of becoming a pilot are hard. But it's got a lot of fantasy elements in it. It starts out with him rescuing this person in a balloon. The person actually dies. But he leaves a notebook behind, which is handed over to his family. Three years later, he's on this trans-oceanic cruiseship, which is called the Aurora. One of the passengers is Kate de Vries, which is basically his love interest, who has that same notebook of the person that he had rescued which talks about cloud cats. Now, this is in the Victorian era, which was mainly a very.male-dominated society. Kate is very forward thinking, she wants to go find them. So there is this adventure going on where they're attacked by pirates, they crash land on an island, they do see the cloud cats… Spoiler alert, sorry about that. Then it ends on a fabulously dramatic note of them rescuing the ship and he being promoted. This is Matt Cruse. Of course, his adventures continue, with him falling in and out of love with Kate de Vries, who I love, but… It's the language, it's the pacing. Kenneth Oppel is just amazing with his plotting, his pacing. He's done a lot of middle grade and YA, but this is one of his finest. So, Airborn, Kenneth Oppel.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Dan] Thank you, Mary Robinette, for that… Oh, I mean… Let's cut that out.

[Howard] Mahtab.

[Dan] Mahtab.

[Howard] This is totally Mahtab.

[Brandon] So. For the second half of this podcast, or the few minutes of the second half we have left, let's talk about character histories. How do you develop what the history of a given character is before they walk on screen for their first scene? How do you keep track of those notes? How much do you pants, how much do you plan?

[Howard] These days, I have a continuity spreadsheet. Which pins events in my universe and who is affected by those events. When somebody is walking on screen, the first thing I do is I look at the spreadsheet and ask myself, "Where were they when these things are happening? Do I need to worry about it?" If the answer is no, awesome!

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They walk on screen with whatever information I needed to motivate them for that scene. But if their paths crossed any of those points in the spreadsheet, I have to do more work. Usually that just means I'm not going to put them in the book.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Writing so much YA has been nice because the characters don't have a lot of history.

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] They're much younger.

[Dan] She's 16 years old, and maybe there's one or two formative experiences that I have to deal with. But in writing for adults, when I actually have to do this, I often will just make it up. I mean, I tend to be very pantsery anyway. But if there is… If there's something that relates directly to the plot, then I'll already know it. If it doesn't, then it can be whatever I want it to be.

[Mahtab] I actually like to fill up a character worksheet. Depending on whether it's middle grade or YA, I'll have a slightly longer worksheet. Some of it is just dealing with the physical appearance, but a lot deals with the character's motivations, what do they want, what do they need, any secrets that they have, just build upon that. That's just a starting point, I honestly do not get to know my characters till probably the second or third draft. This is just me putting some stuff down on paper. But it's a starting point. Just so that I can visualize the character. As I'm writing the story, stuff occurs to me. So the character worksheet is a starting point. Probably the second or third draft is when I really get to know the character. But I have to say, honestly, they've never talked back to me or they've never taken over the story. It's like sometimes… Most times, it's like talking to a teen. Pulling words out of their mouths.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] How do you feel today? Yeah, okay.

[Dan] They refuse to tell you anything.

[Mahtab] So, yeah. It's a work in progress. But as you do more drafts, you get to know them, and then start building on the areas that you think the story needs the history on.

[Howard] As I've gotten older and learned more, one of the things that I've learned is that it's not just that history is written by the victors, it's that history is read and interpreted differently depending on who's teaching it, depending on who's reading it. Nothing makes history in a secondary world feel more real than people having different opinions of the same event. Maybe they are both right. Especially if the event impacted one or more of these characters. Some of my favorite moments in tracking characters through these spreadsheets are when I realized both Alexia Murtaugh and Karl Tagon fought in the same war. Briefly, on opposite sides. At one point, they probably both knew the same person. Out of that grew the bonus story that I put into Schlock Mercenary book 14, which is the two of them talking about this guy who died during the war. Capt. Murtaugh talks about how he's the reason she was able to switch sides. So it was this intersection of my spreadsheet of history and personal backstories that the story almost told itself. It was a lot of fun. My part told itself.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Ben McSweeney had to do all the art.

[Brandon] Dan, you have our homework this week.

[Dan] Yes, I do. What we want you to do is come up with the history of a place. Take like a thousand years worth of history. What wars were fought there, what people lived there? All of these things that happened in this one location. But then, tell that story from the point of view of a tree that has lived that whole time and watched this all happen.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.40: Deep Vs. Wide

From https://www.writingexcuses.com/2019/10/06/14-40-deep-vs-wide/

Key points: An ocean that's an inch deep? 4000 dungeons, all the same? Do you worldbuild with depth, or width? Depth comes from causal chains, how things are linked together. History, consequences, ripples in the rest of the world. Pick a few, and dig deep on those, consider the ramifications. Watch for the one that gives you surprising yet inevitable, that makes the story unfold the right way. You can't go deep on everything. If a character uses something, science, technology, magic, to solve a problem, you need to know how it works. How do you make characters with the same background express something different? As a writer, stretch to make characters with similar backgrounds who are also distinctive individuals, who offer something different to the story. Audition characters! Choices and actions make characterization. Think about how the axes of power reflects self-identity, and what each person's primary driver is.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 40.

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Now that's familiar.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Irradiation…

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Dan] Yes.

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

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

[Brandon] Awesome. That was Squid Empire.

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

[Brandon] Awesome.

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.39: Positioning Your Book in the Marketplace

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/29/14-39-positioning-your-book-in-the-marketplace/

Key points: Positioning your book for agents, editors, publishers, bookstores, and, oh yes, readers. Who is this book for, and how do you reach that audience? Positioning answers those questions, looking at title, jacket, release price, release format, release method… Target readership is often defined as fans of this series or that author. The right genre, the right look, the right copy, and the right promotion to the right audience. Comp titles construct a Venn diagram of target readers. Often you are positioning for two or more audiences at the same time! Content must align with packaging and positioning.You need to know the merits of your book, what's exciting about it, what will people like about it. Meet reader expectations, and if you shift the positioning in a series, make sure you signal the change to your readers.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 39.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses. Positioning Your Book in the Marketplace.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] We are recording live on the WXR Retreat in front of a studio audience of our attendees and students and awesome writers…

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Howard] When you heard from them much earlier this year, they had questions. Some of them still have those questions, but this is not an episode where they get to ask them. We're talking about how you as an author go about positioning your book for the editors who will edit it, the publishers who will publish it, the bookstores who will shelve it and bookstore it, and ultimately the readers who will read it. Because the marketplace is a large and complex thing. Dongwon pitched this idea to us, so I'll just let him start.

[Dongwon] Positioning is one of my favorite things to talk about. In part, because it feels like the most essential question in all of publishing. It took a long time for me to really understand this concept. I was lucky enough to work with a very brilliant publisher, helped me work through what publishing as a separate activity is, which is independent from editing or releasing the book or whatever it is. For me, it really clicked in when I started to understand this concept of positioning. So, when we talk about publishing, the thing that's always really important to me, and what feels like, to me, the more I do this, is really the only question is who is this book for. All the other questions that we ask along the way sort of derive from this question of if we're going to publish this book, who are we trying to publish this book for, and, how do we reach that audience? Right? So, positioning is sort of the summation of a lot of the efforts that we do to try and reach a certain audience. Positioning encompasses title,, what the jacket looks like, how we're releasing it, so what price point is it released at, what format does it release in. So, all of those things are how we're positioning it in the market to reach the target readership, which is usually something we're defining by are they fans of this other series, are they fans of this other author? So when we position something, we really want to make sure it's in the right genre, it has the right look, the copy is doing everything it needs to do, and we're promoting it to the right audience.

[Howard] We touched on this little bit in the comp titles episode, and how, when you pick comp titles, part of what you are doing is constructing a Venn diagram for your target readers. But there's a lot more to it than just comp titling it in terms of defining this.

[Dan] This process is more complicated than simply saying, "Well, I want everyone to read my book." You don't get to say that. You need to actually pick a group and figure out how you are going to reach them.

[Mary Robinette] This is one of those things that I wound up learning through the puppetry, which I'm sure surprises everybody. The thing for us was that because we were taking puppetry into elementary schools, we had a show and we needed to appeal to an audience of kids. We needed to convince people that an audience of kids were going to be interested in this. But we also needed to convince people that it would fulfill certain requirements. So, for that, we had to position it as being an educational thing, while at the same time, I'm like, "We're doing Pinocchio." So we would have to find the educational things and bring those to the forefront in the way we were presenting it. Knowing that once they cracked the covers, so to speak, once we were there, it would do the job it was setting out to do. At the same time, we couldn't position it as a scientific inquiry if that was not the experience that we were going to deliver. That, I think, is one of the things that is challenging a lot of times when we're thinking about books is that we… The positioning actually has to be for two different audiences at the same time. We forget that a lot of times.

[Dongwon] It's also really important that what's actually in the book, the content of the book, which is something it feels like we don't really talk about sometimes where we're on the business side. But the content of the book has to be in alignment with the packaging and the positioning. Right? If you're saying that this book is for fans of Naomi Novik, for example, but really it's going to read like a big military thriller, then that's not going to really align very well. You're going to have a lot of frustrated readers. No matter how good your positioning is, if it's fundamentally a lie or if it's fundamentally not honest to the reading experience, your whole project's going to fall apart. So, one of the things… We've been making this joke about the homework for this particular series of talks I've been giving on the podcast that it's about soul-searching, in part, because you really need to have a very clear idea of what your book actually is. Craft is often about writing the thing and letting your subconscious write it for you and not thinking aggressively about it. Once you are done with that, however, once it comes to the publishing part, you need to take a step back and have a very clear eyed view of what are the merits of your book. What's exciting about it? What do people like about it? That will tell you a lot about how you can position it, how you can frame it, so that publishers, agents, and then ultimately, readers, will be very excited about the thing that you're trying to present to them.

[Howard] One of the challenges I've had recently with Schlock Mercenary is that I've gotten to a point in the story where it is totally story appropriate and extremely science-fictiony fun to explore the relationship between people who are grieving the death of a loved one and the cloned replacement of that loved one. I could noodle on that and tell jokes on that for weeks. I will never forget, it was several years ago, somebody in one of the forums… I don't remember which one… Said, "I'm liking the story, but it's been a while since anything exploded." Oh, that's right. Oh, I'm telling a science-fiction comic in which things are supposed to explode. So, positioning my book in the marketplace… That's been done. While there are nuances I am adding that might cause it to shift its position a little bit, there are still readers who are counting the number of weeks between explosions. I need to keep their numbers below about four.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] A lot of this is very much about meeting reader expectations. So, you can shift your positioning in the middle of a series. We see a lot of people do this. But, if you're going to do that, you need to find other ways to signal to them that you're making a shift in positioning. So your cover's aisle might change a little bit. If you've used a very rigid title format, which we see in a lot of series, you may want to switch that up, invert it. What you need to do is have a lot of signposts and signals that this is for a slightly different readership than what it's been before. That way, people can make an informed decision about whether or not this book is for them.

[Howard] Let's have a non-book of the week of the week.

[Mary Robinette] I am so excited about this web series. It's called Black Girl in a Big Dress. This hits all of my nerdy buttons. So, the main character is a black girl in a big dress, strangely. Truth in advertising. But she is a cosplayer, and she is specifically a cosplayer who loves Victoriana. So the entire web series is dealing with the idea of what people… Of expectations. She has a cousin who's like, "Black girls don't say that." She's like, "Excuse me. I am a black girl, and I say these things." There's all of this stuff that's interrogating race and expectations and society and also some of these steaming love scenes where two people are sitting quietly by a fireplace, not speaking to each other, in exquisite clothing. One of them will say, "This is the most romantic thing I have ever experienced."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The other one will say something like, "Yes, my dear. I do believe we are in love." Then they'll go back to reading. It's amazing. I love this. Then, he kissed her glove. [Gasp] It's great. It's funny. There's beautiful costumes. It's short. You can binge it. She is just getting ready to do season two. So go to YouTube and Black Girl in a Big Dress. I am a huge, huge fan of this.

[Howard] Okay. Back to marketplace, marketplace positioning. What are some mistakes that we've seen authors make, that we've seen publishers make? If we're not afraid to name names, then that's fine.

[Laughter]

[Howard] If we're afraid to name names, then anonymize it.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I'll actually talk about something… It was a deliberate choice that we made with the Glamorous Histories series. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had made a different choice. The first book is straight up a romantic… It's a straight up romance, Austen pastiche. So we have come up with a… I say we. Every time they showed me a cover, I'm like, "That's beautiful." But the covers are all very, very romance heavy. The fourth book is a heist novel. Like, it's not a romance. I have wondered what would have happened if we had shifted the positioning on that when it came out. Whether I would have lost audience because of doing that, because it no longer looked like the rest of the books in the series, or whether I would have picked up new audience because anyone who is interested in a heist would recognize it as such? So it's not so much a mistake as it's like this was a choice that we made. What would have happened if we had made a different choice?

[Dongwon] One thing that can be really interesting is if you go to the bookstore or you go into the market and look for books that have been recovered over the course of that book's life cycle, right? So, I think Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy… I think it's on its third or fourth set of covers at this point. They've established many different looks for that book. Each one of them has worked in its own way, and continued to build his career. I think it's really fascinating to see how they've chosen to position that book over time to sort of update where the trends in the marketplace are and get a sense of who his audience is, and continued to evolve that and grow that and refine that positioning. That can be a really useful thing for you guys as consumers to take a look at. You can start to unpack some of the logic of what they're doing. If this book has a very maps oriented look, a very Lord of the Rings-y kind of vibe, versus this, which has a very cinematic vibe, versus the new style, which has a more abstract art vibe. Get a sense of why are they making those choices. One thing that we hear a lot in the industry is a lot of readers love to complain about covers. I completely understand why. Because you have a very powerful attachment to the cover design often. But those are very deliberate choices that are being made by the publisher. You may not always agree with them. But what you can do is start to unpack the logic of why they're doing this thing. Even if it's a thing that doesn't work out, or if it's a thing that you think is completely wrong for the book. It can be a really interesting thought exercise to try and reverse engineer what was the process the publisher was going through when they were revising the positioning of this thing that's already been released and usually already successful.

[Dan] I've learned a lot about this particular topic doing hand selling at conventions. Because it is incredible to talk with readers and see which lines work on them and which lines don't. One of the things that stands out to me, and I've got a couple stories. One that stands out, and I cannot remember the author's name. But he's an epic fantasy author who…

[Dongwon] Brandon Sanderson?

[Dan] No. But he uses Brandon as his thing. He shares a booth with me sometimes. We'll all be in there, all these authors kind of shilling our books to people, we all have our own pitches. He just sits in the corner, he doesn't have a big billboard, he doesn't have anything. He just has like a big 3 inch thick fantasy book. People walk by, and he'll just be sitting on his stool with his arms folded and say, "You guys like epic fantasy? Kind of sort of like Brandon Sanderson or George Martin?" He sells out every single time. So knowing who your audience is and having the product that they want is kind of step one, right? Making sure you know who they are. If you are this audience, you will buy his book. It's really kind of amazing to watch him do nothing and work just because he knows who his audience is so clearly. One of the other people… I'm going to mention Claudia Gray, who among her many fantastic books, she has a Star Wars book called Lost Stars. Which is a YA romance. It is so clearly a YA romance, but is also a Star Wars book about an Imperial officer and a rebel pirate who are in love with each other. She has found, over the years, that she needs to present that book entirely differently depending on who comes. She can 100% sell that YA romance to a 50-year-old man every single time. But she doesn't pitch it as a YA romance. She pitches it as a Star Wars book, and sets up kind of all of the background information about what's going on with the Empire and the pilots and things and how it connects to the movies. So knowing who the audience is, and in that situation, we can adapt on-the-fly. In other situations, you have to plan ahead. With my book, Extreme Makeover, it's standalone science fiction. I sat down and I was trying to figure out how to position that book and who the audience was. Exactly what Dongwon was talking about at the beginning. Realized that one of the audiences I had not considered is… How to say this? It's a book about the beauty industry. It's a book about a beauty company destroying the world. I used to work in the beauty industry. I worked there for eight years. So for me, this was just a book. But once I identified how much more easily it was to sell a book about the beauty industry to women than to men, that entirely change the way that I started positioning my book.

[Howard] I've pointed out in the past when we've talked about the challenges between self-publishing and publishing through the agented model. It's the difference between can you sell your book to anybody out on the street, can you sell your book 1000 times, or can you sell your book once. Increasingly, I've come to realize that if you think you have the skill set to sell your book 1000 times, if you can make this pitch, if you can recognize your audience, if you can go, "Huh? You like big fat fantasy books? Well, there's one." And sell it. Then you probably have the skill set to take it to an agent, to take it to an editor, because you have already identified the audience for them. If you can convince them that you have already identified the audience… Correct me if I'm wrong, Dongwon, but I think they're really happy when that walks into the room.

[Dongwon] Absolutely. One thing I really want to get across, thank you for bringing this up, Howard, is that it's the same skill set. It's the same challenge, right? If you're self-publishing, if you're working with a small press or even with a big five press, positioning is still the same fundamental question. Who is this book for? How do we reach that audience? The only difference is how many people are working to solve that problem with you. If you're on your own, self-publishing, it's on you to figure it out. If you're good at that kind of stuff, you're going to do great in that market. If you don't know where to start with that, then what you're really going to have to do is find a bigger team who can help support you and help you answer some of those questions.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to mention a podcast that we did in a previous season, which was with Michael Underwood, and that was Hand Selling Your Book. Which talks a lot about… That's a good one to go back and listen to, because it does talk a lot about the tools that you can use once you've identified the audience to kind of adjust your presentation for them. Then, the other thing that I just want to draw a line under is that when we're talking about audience, we are talking about being specific with who it is. It's not everybody, it's being super specific. Sometimes, the easiest way to do that is rather than think, "Ah, it's for women," think about a specific woman. Or a specific set of women that you know. Sometimes even bring them in as your early readers in the development process while you are… So that you are positioning in some ways from the get go.

[Howard] That brings us around quite nicely to the homework which Dongwon has for us.

[Dongwon] So, like I said, the central question in publishing is who is the book for. So what I'd like you guys to do is start figuring out a way to answer that question for yourself. This answer will evolve over time as you continue to write this book, as it enters the publishing process. But if you start now and you start early and decide who your reader is, that'll help you define all the other parts of your process. Including the writing process and the creative process. So what I'd like you to do is make a list of attributes of your target readership. Who is the demographic that this book is for? The best way to do that is using the comp titles. So you can use that as a proxy and help you start identifying who's the fan base for this book, how do I reach them, how do I identify them?

[Howard] Thank you, Dongwon. Thank you to our audience here on the Liberty of the Seas.

[Whoo! Applause]

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

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June 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.06: Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.04: Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.02: Writing between the Lines
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.52: Game Mastering and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.51: A Farewell to Worldbuilding
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.50: Write What You… No.
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.49: Customs and Mores
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.48: How to Practice Worldbuilding
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.47: Writing Characters With Physical Disabilities
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.46: Unusual Resources
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.45: Economics
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.44: Realism vs. Rule-of-Cool
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.42: Alternate History
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.41: History
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.40: Deep Vs. Wide
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.39: Positioning Your Book in the Marketplace

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 15.06: Prose and Cons, with Patrick Rothfuss

Writing Excuses 15.05: Setting Goals for Your Career

Writing Excuses 15.04: Revision, with Patrick Rothfuss

Writing Excuses 15.03: Self Publishing

Writing Excuses 15.02: Writing between the Lines

Writing Excuses 15.01: Evolution of a Career

Writing Excuses 14.52: Game Mastering and Collaborative Storytelling, with Natasha Ence

Writing Excuses 14.51: A Farewell to Worldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.50: Write What You… No.

Writing Excuses 14.49: Customs and Mores

Writing Excuses 14.48: How to Practice Worldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.47: Writing Characters With Physical Disabilities

Writing Excuses 14.46: Unusual Resources

Writing Excuses 14.45: Economics

Writing Excuses 14.44: Realism vs. Rule-of-Cool

Writing Excuses 14.43: Sequencing Your Career Genome

Writing Excuses 14.42: Alternate History

Writing Excuses 14.41: History

Writing Excuses 14.40: Deep Vs. Wide

Writing Excuses 14.39: Positioning Your Book in the Marketplace

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June 2025

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