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Writing Excuses 15.13: Using Elections in Stories

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/29/15-13-using-elections-in-stories/

Key Points: Don't make the outcome of the election the climax of the story! Election day is anti-climactic, just waiting for the votes to roll in. Do use elections as a background that affects your characters' lives. Do use the fun, quirky people in the campaign. The candidate, with or without spouse, is arrogant and emotionally fragile. The campaign manager is counselor, manager, has plenty of experience, and is willing to put some spin on it. They also have a deputy. Next is the communications director, a people person who interacts with the press and social media. They have to balance responses and how does this make the candidate look, will it persuade people to vote for the candidate. Again, they may have a deputy to help. The finance director tells the candidate who to call and how to ask them for money. They're accountants who know how to schmooze. Finally, the field director knows the statistics and how to manage volunteers. Volunteers have time but no money, and go out to knock on doors, call phones, or whatever you do for this selection. Donors have money but no time. Volunteers and donors can be kooky and eclectic and strange. Know what the stakes of the election are for your characters, on a personal and societal level. Think about how elections are run, across history and across geography. Think about what your characters have to do to schmooze, and what are the consequences of schmoozing and the election.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 13.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Using Elections in Stories.

[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 have special guest Daniel Friend. Thank you for coming on.

[Daniel] Thank you for having me.

[Brandon] You have been running or part of some political campaigns…

[Daniel] That's right. So the reason I want to talk about elections in stories is because I've been involved in a lot of them. Normally, I'm a science fiction and fantasy editor, and I don't see nearly enough elections in stories considering how often and how important they are to our own lives. So, in 2012, I actually worked in the Utah County elections office during the Presidential campaign between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. In 2017, I was the communications director for a US congressional campaign in Utah. In 2018, I ran for the Utah House of Representatives as a candidate. Lost, but that's okay.

[Dan] Well, then you have nothing important to say.

[Laughter]

[Daniel] We'll see.

[Laughter]

[Daniel] This year, I am reprising the communications director role for a third-party US congressional campaign. So I've been around elections a lot, and they're a very strange little world that not enough people know about. There's some really cool things that we can do in stories with them.

[Brandon] All right. Well. Take us on that trip. You pitched this episode to us. It sounds really interesting. You actually have an outline. You're way more prepared than…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We have ever been.

[Brandon] Yes. So let's go through it.

[Dan] Well. Mahtab.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Mahtab.

[Dan] We've got to give her props.

[Mary Robinette] Fair.

[Daniel] Well, I'm glad I can be second in something. Besides just a vote.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled... reminder]

[Daniel] So, the first thing… I want to start out with how not to use elections in stories. Because there's a really big pitfall in thinking that the outcome of the election is the climax of my story. That's the most important thing that's going to happen. But, don't do that.

[Brandon] Why not?

[Daniel] Because elections are inherently anti-climactic. It's a very strange thing. Because if you're working in an election, you're going out every day and you are meeting strangers and you're working so hard. You're putting your heart and soul into this thing that is really important to you. At least presumably. Then, at the end of the day, all that work you did boils down to hundreds or thousands of other people making a decision about you. So when election day comes, that's actually the most laid-back yet high strung day of an entire campaign.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Daniel] Because there is nothing left for you to do. You're sitting there, biting your nails about what's going to happen, and you are completely powerless. Now, you don't want to have a character be inactive as your protagonist. On election day, despite all the activity that they've done up to that point, they're just really sitting around, watching TV, waiting for those results to come in. So, make sure that there is something going on in your climax other than just what's the results of the vote.

[Brandon] Right. I didn't really grasp this until you said it. But now I can totally see that the last day is the most boring day, with a really nice exciting moment at the end of it.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm trying to think.

[Daniel] Or a soul crushing disappointment [garbled]

[Dan] I'm trying to think of stories about elections. I remember there was a movie with Chris Rock and Bernie Mack years and years ago. They got to that point where there is nothing left to do, and they showed that moment where he was sitting around bored. He's like, "You know what, I'm going to go drive people to work." So he got a bus and he went… They had him doing something during that period.

[Daniel] Another example is I just finished watching the season of Parks and Rec where Leslie Knope runs for city council. Now, that isn't exactly a great example because they treated it like a U.S. Senate campaign.

[Choked chuckles]

[Daniel] There was way too much money going on in that race for a small town city council. But…

[Brandon] That's the joke, right?

[Daniel] That is the joke.

[Howard] It's Parks and Rec.

[Daniel] So do use it for… As a good example of what people do to each other in campaigns. Don't think that a city council race looks anything like it. That's U.S. Senate and above.

[Mary Robinette] You're making me think about Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly, which is all about this political campaign that is going on in the background. It is… None of the characters are directly involved in the campaign, but their lives are being influenced by everything that's going on around them. It's… You're right, it's fantastic in that way.

[Daniel] That's an excellent way to use elections in a story, is to have this thing that is really going to affect your characters' lives happening in the background, and to what extent do they pay attention to it, to what extent do they understand that this is actually going to matter to them? Do they get involved or not? So, to use elections as a vehicle for telling interesting stories, doing it within an election campaign is actually a great idea, because there are so many fun, quirky people in a campaign. Everybody in a campaign is automatically a little bit weird. Because they are willing to take a job that's going to last for a few months, and it does pay decently for those few months, but then after that, you're out of work, and you either have to move to another place to get a new job, or you have to do a completely different kind of job, which is what I'm lucky enough to be able to do. They're really just a little bit kooky because they're not just getting involved like, "Oh, I'm going to donate." "Oh, I'm going to have a yard sale." They're actually putting their 40 hours a week or more into this. So I want to just run down the cast of characters within an election campaign and tell you a little bit about why they are going to be fun. So, the most obvious person is, of course, the candidate, the person who is running for office. Whether or not they have a spouse is also going to be a big deal, because candidates' spouses make a huge influence. But the candidate is going to be arrogant. Arrogant enough to think that they can win. And yet also emotionally fragile. Candidates are always needing reassurance from somebody that they're doing okay, that they can actually win, that this is worth all of the time and effort they are putting into it, because everyone is so invested.

[Howard] It sounds like writers.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I was going to say, the TV show Veep, in the season where she was running for President, they did that beautifully. That combination of just absolute bullheaded arrogance and complete fragility. So that's a good example to look up.

[Daniel] Yes, it is. Now, the person who is most often going to be helping the candidate feel better about these things is the campaign manager. Besides being the psychological counselor for the candidate, their main job is to manage. Now, campaign managers tend to have lots of experience under their belts. They tend to not really… Like, they want to make sure that they're supporting someone that they like, but, there also very willing to spin things, to color the truth a little bit. That's part of the job. So, campaign managers tend to be interesting that way. Under… They also usually have a deputy to help them when they're not around. The next job is the communications director, which is what I know the most about because I did it. Communication directors are usually a people person, because they have to interact with the press. They have to figure out social media. Beyond them, you have the finance director.

[Brandon] Wait, wait wait wait. What makes communication directors weird?

[Dan] Yeah, you skipped over that.

[Daniel] Oh, now I have to tell you something weird about me. Communication directors are the people who have to think about how we are going to persuade people to vote for you. What's the message? So they kind of have to get into other people's heads. They like this. They think of it as really, really fun when somebody drops something, like some insult on Twitter, and they get to respond to it and really burn the other guy. Yet, they've also got to balance this with how is it going to make my candidate look. They're always the ones who want to get the zinger, the "Oh, yeah, gotcha!" But they've also got to be really careful. How well your communication director balances those things or how well they don't, makes a really interesting character. Now, when I tell you these things that the person should be good at, a really interesting thing to do in a story is make them not so good at one of these things. Now, in the real world, your deputy should cover for you. I'm not the best at social media. My deputies do that really well. But what if in your story, they don't have that deputy for whatever reason, and they have to fail really hard at something that's really important.

[Howard] It's interesting to note that when you describe the communications director… I mean, I have years of corporate experience as a marketing guy. I realized, oh, that is squarely in the middle of the marketing wheelhouse. Squarely in the middle. All of the skill set of marketing, whether or not you think marketing is evil, that is where it fits. It's just that the product you are marketing, the message that you are marketing, is… It's this weird sort of flexible undulating brand that is a person whose brand will necessarily change during the course of the campaign.

[Daniel] Yes. That is all very true. Just to give you a real life example in me, I was told the other day that I'm really good at writing fundraising emails. Which is something I have never aspired to be.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just making a note of that for my own [garbled]

[laughter]

[Brandon] Let's pause here for book of the week, then we'll come back to the rest of the roles. So. Our book of the week, you were going to pitch at us…

[Daniel] So, every year, there is the Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium in Provo, Utah, that is a wonderful conference. I'm sure it has been talked about multiple times. Now, last year, they started having a benefit anthology that keeps prices low for students going to this. I'm in that first benefit anthology. My story is called Launch, and the benefit anthology is called Trace the Stars. So, it's available on Amazon. All of the stories in there are fantastic, I've read every one. The reason I want to bring this up is because the next benefit anthology is already opening up their call for submissions. The topic is A Parliament of Wizards. If you don't think elections go into that, well, I'll just tell you, I'm going to write something for it. We'll see if it gets in.

[Brandon] Now, this is for charity, right. So there's no payment for the stories once they been picked up.

[Daniel] That's correct. It is a benefit anthology to benefit students who are attending this writing symposium.

[Brandon] Excellent. All right, let's get back to our roles.

[Daniel] All right. The next one is the finance director. This is the person who sits next to the candidate while the candidate is calling up people like Brandon and saying, "Brandon, can you give me $2700, please?" The finance director is the person saying, "This is how you ask. This is what you need to do." The thing is, they're usually only paid on commission. So their job is to bring in money so that they can actually get paid.

[Brandon] Wow. So they're getting paid on commission to raise money for the political campaign. So a percentage of what you're giving is going…

[Daniel] To the finance director.

[Brandon] Interesting.

[Daniel] For their services and figuring out who to call, figuring out how to ask them for money. Because if I just walk up to Brandon and say, "Hey, please write me a check." I'm probably not going to get anywhere. The financial director is the person who goes, "I know that Brandon has enough money to give you a max donation, and this is the best way to ask him for it." Whereas they'll say, "Daniel doesn't have enough money to give you a max donation. You probably want to get him to volunteer for you instead." So the financial director is a very strange numbers punching kind of person. They have to have a weird mix of an accountant and someone who can really schmooze people.

[Dan] Well, someone who can read people, it sounds like.

[Mary Robinette] This is something that's common in all fundraising. Most fundraising, except at some nonprofits… But most fundraising, you do get a commission for the amount of money…

[Brandon] I had no idea.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. My mom was a fundraiser for years. She is where I learned all of my schmoozing from.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it is this constant interplay of a political and financial conversation that you're having.

[Dan] When I was raising funds to put together a scholarship locally… I built an endowment at one of the local universities. We would 100%, every person that we targeted, we research them and we figured out what's the best way to approach this person specifically.

[Brandon] What did you determine about me?

[Dan] We said, "Hey. Brandon."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] "I've known you forever. Give me some money." It worked.

[Daniel] Sometimes that works. Finally, the last person in charge is the field director. This guy has to be really good with numbers, because he's looking at statistics. This is the guy who actually figures out how many voters do we need to win this election? Where do they live? How do we contact them? Then he leads a team of volunteers to go out and knock on doors, call phones, do whatever you need to do. Go on the Galactic Inter-Webz and give them a holo-projection, whatever it is that works in your election. That person's got to have both the numbers aspect and a managing aspect. Those don't always come in the same package. Finally, you'll have volunteers who are always kooky and eclectic and have more time than they have money.

[Laughter]

[Daniel] You also have donors, who are exactly the same as volunteers, except that they have more money than they have time. So you can make them just as strange as you want them to be, and it will not be different than real life.

[Howard] That feels so incredibly safe right now…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I have insufficient quantities of both money and time.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] We're almost out of time on this episode. Is there a last point that you want to hit?

[Daniel] Yes. Just really quick. Make sure you understand what the stakes of the election results are for your characters, both on a personal level, because either they'll lose and nothing will change, or they win and everything in their life changes, and also on the societal level. What are the impacts to the society, based on who wins this election? Also, make sure that you take some time to look at not just how American elections are run, but also how elections across history and across geography have been run. You've got parliamentary elections where it's based on what party gets a percentage of the vote. That's how the seats are allocated. You have ranked choice voting, like you have in the Hugo awards, which we've all done. You also have very small electoral colleges, like in the Holy Roman Empire, where seven princes would choose the next Emperor. Each of those elections plays out differently. If you only have to schmooze seven people, that's a very different election than if you're trying to schmooze a Galactic community of several billion. So, know what your race is, if it's local, if it's provincial, if it's national, if it's Galactic or what have you. Then follow the consequences of that.

[Brandon] All right. What's our homework?

[Daniel] So, your homework is to go out and volunteer for a political campaign that you support. It doesn't matter if it's local or national or what have you. Then go out and do whatever they have you do, whether it's knocking on doors or calling phones or whatever. Then, when you get home, start writing down what you did. When your imagination takes off in a different direction, start writing that story.

[Brandon] So, this was a really awesome episode. I learned a ton. I can imagine that there might be people out there who are writing books about elections who might need a really good editor, and you freelance.

[Daniel] Yes, I do.

[Brandon] How could they get ahold of you?

[Daniel] You can email me at dcfeditor@gmail.com. Daniel Craig Friend initials editor at gmail.

[Brandon] Awesome. Well, you guys, get out there and knock on some doors. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.12: Writing the Other – Being an Ally

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/22/15-12-writing-the-other-being-an-ally/

Key points: What demonstrates being a good ally? Don't just promote your book, but also boost the work of others. Make them the center of the conversation. Build a relationship with a whole person, not just the identity. What's an ally? Someone who will ride or die for you on your terms. Empathy writ large. Think raid group makeups, the tank, the person who makes safe spaces for others, lots of different roles. Beware Leeroy Jenkins! What about the ally who overshot and missed the mark? People who step up and speak for me, taking away my agency. You don't get cookies, credit, a prize for being an ally. When was someone a good ally without blocking your voice? White people shaming a woman who used the N-word in karaoke rapping. The support of a micro-community when you need it. People in a large conference who smiled, made room, and invited participation. When writing the other, listen to your sensitivity readers, and do no harm. If you can't write the other, maybe you can challenge inequity, and the systems that create it. Be aware that there are lots of different marginalizations, and lots of different kinds of ally-ship needed.

[transcriptionist note: I may have confused Piper, Tempest, and Erin in the transcript. I have very little hearing in the high tones, which makes it easy to confuse female voices. My apologies for any mistaken attribution.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 12.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Writing the Other – Being an Ally.

[Tempest] 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Piper] We've been joined by our special guest, Erin Roberts. Erin, could you please give us some background on yourself?

[Erin] Sure. I'm a black speculative fiction writer. I mostly write short fiction. I do a little bit of fantasy, a little bit of science fiction, a little horror. I think the thing that I'm proudest of in my career so far is that my story, Sour Milk Girls, was in both The Year's Best Science Fiction and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror.

[Whoohoo!]

[Erin] So [garbled – we'll have to get] around that.

[Piper] Yeah. All right. So I'm excited because I love these takeovers. Particularly this topic is about being an ally. So I'm going to kick it off and ask all of you, what are some things that people have done that you view as having demonstrated that they are good, positive allies?

[Tempest] Well, around this topic in particular, the writing the other, being an ally, one of the most important things that I have seen is when people who are… Say they've written a book, in which there's marginalized characters that are not that writer's identity, they not only talk about their book in the promotion of it, but they also say, like, "I have read so much great fiction by people who actually do come from this identity. These are the people that I went to." Or "These are the books that I read for research." As many people would tell you, one of the most important things for writers is to have people like boosting your work, right? Like, to have people saying, "Yay, I love this," and just like letting their audience know. So, if you're, just for example, say a white person who is writing a book in which you have a black protagonist, you're going to have a whole bunch of people looking upon you, all of a sudden, on your twitter or whatever, and for you to then boost up black authors writing black protagonists is a really good thing to do.

[Dongwon] Yeah, I think being a good ally is so much about centering the voices that you're trying to support, right? The mistake that I see so often, not to talk about the negative sides of this too much, but the mistake I see is that somebody's trying to be an ally, and what they're doing is, "Hey, look at me, I'm doing a great job at promoting this other person." But if you're doing that, then you're really talking about yourself. It really is about taking the other person and making sure the spotlight is on them, they're the center of the conversation. Not to flatter our group too much, but I think the Writing Excuses group is doing a great job. They put the four of us on this podcast to talk about these issues. They're not looking for us to give them accolades, even though that's what I'm doing right now. It's really about promoting voices from people who come from other communities, who can speak on the topics that they want us to speak on.

[Erin] I also think that what's… What I really love is when people care about you beyond how you can inform their story. So something that you sometimes see is somebody will come up to you and say, "Well, I am writing this book with a black protagonist. Tell me about the black things." You're like, "Okay. That's lovely." But I like if that person has a relationship with you, that somebody cares about the parts of you that don't just inform your identity, but you as a whole person. Because identity is just a part of who you are. It shapes who you are, but isn't all of who you are.

[Piper] Awesome. I guess this may be a little belated, but for people who might be unfamiliar with the topic or the point of discussion, what's your quick, clearest pitch or definition for what is an ally? If someone were to just come up and ask you, "No, really, what's an ally?"

[Chuckles]

[Tempest] Well, an ally is a person who not only wants to… Who not only likes says, "I really want to support you and make it so that like the spaces that you come into and the communities that I belong to are safe for you or safer for you," but actually like does that work, and actually is, like… I get in our communities, say, will you ride or die for me? Like, allies will ride or die for you, but they will ride or die for you on your terms. Not on their terms, but they're like, "What do you need? Do you need me to step forward or to step back? Do you need me to be the loud voice talking about these things or do you just need me to be the quiet voice stepping up and going yes." Because it's going to change, it's going to be different, depending on the situation. But allies, real allies, always look for their cues from the people they're being allies to.

[Erin] Yeah. I always believe that empathy is at the core of ally-ship. It's empathy writ large. So, looking to the other person, and how they're feeling and what they want from you and realizing the power that you have, the power that they do or don't, and then, trying to do what's best for the other person. I think sometimes where ally-ship can go a little bit awry is when you make it about yourself and your reaction. I want to show I'm a good person by being an ally as opposed to I want to make the person I'm allying with their life better or make the situation better for them.

[Dongwon] I think about it sometimes in terms of like online gaming, like raid group makeups, right, like…

[Yeah]

[Dongwon] Sometimes you need an ally who's the tank, right? They're going to draw [agro?] from whatever's happening out there. They're going to get in front of the issue and say, "Hey, pay attention to me right now." So that other people have time to figure out how they want to respond and what they want to do. Especially in a dangerous situation, or in an online dog pile kind of situation, right? Then there's other people who are out there trying to make safe space for people. Make sure that there is a place to have a conversation, a place to sit and recharge, a place to kind of do the work behind the scenes that needs to be done sometimes to sort of figure out, okay, how are we going to move this conversation forward, how are we going to make improvements in the communities that we're part of, right? So there's lots of different roles that allies can play out there, and thinking about how you get into it, what kind of skill sets you have, and what kind of presence you have can be a really great way to figure out how to be a great ally, and how to support the communities and the marginalized identities that you're trying to work with.

[Piper] So I guess one of the things is that occasionally someone who really wants to be an ally pulls a Leeroy Jenkins…

[Laughter]

[Piper] And all of us are just standing there like, "Don't…"

[Dongwon] But come back… Oh boy.

[Tempest] For those of you who aren't aware of this… I wasn't aware until like criminally recently, this is a reference to a video of like a group of people, like, they're getting ready to go raid something, and then one guy just breaks off, and he's like, "Leeroy Jenkins!" He runs into the fray. They're all like, "No! We have a plan…"

[Piper] They all had to go in after him and they all died.

[Tempest] They all perished.

[Laughter] [horribly]

[Dongwon] Somebody add…

[Piper] A quick line on fried chicken. But anyway. So, in any case, yeah. Say Leeroy Jenkins as you…

[Tempest] Let's be real.

[Piper] What's one of the most… The experience that stands out most in your mind of someone who tried to be an ally and just overshot? Missed the mark? Anybody?

[Dongwon] So there was this event that was for people of color in publishing. It wasn't officially with the group, POC In Publishing, but it was an event that was intended for POC in a certain community to come together and sort of celebrate and talk about the issues that we're facing and an ally decided to take the mic and talk about what a great job that they had done to support everybody while… And were literally taking upstage time and presence away from the actual POC in the room who might have had something to say. That was a frustrating moment.

[Tempest] Yeah. I would say, for me, I've had quite a few instances where someone tried to demonstrate being an ally by stepping up and speaking for me. I have to say, one of the things that I really appreciate about my partner, about some friends who've known me for a long time is I don't need help being loud. But I am usually the tank that needs to heal. Right? So having someone stand at my shoulder and give me agency has often been what I prefer personally. So, the times when it's missed the mark for me is when someone literally has stepped in front of me to say words that would not necessarily have come out of me and took away my agency for how to handle the situation.

[Dongwon] To generalize a little bit, the place I see that most… We kind of hit this note a couple of times, but when I see that happening in a variety of circumstances, it's usually because an ally is saying, "I want credit for what I did." But there's no cookies for being a good ally. You don't get a prize at the end. The prize is you do the work, because the work needs to be done. It's important, and it's hard, and it's uncomfortable, but no one's going to say, "Good job," and give you a trophy at the end of it, right? So if that's why you're doing it, I need you to sit back and reconsider. What is my role in this community? How is that being an ally to somebody, if I'm trying to get a benefit out of it? Right?

[Definitely]

[Dongwon] Those are things I need people to think about as they're approaching these communities and as they're trying to be helpful. But sometimes somebody trying to help, as we're kind of hinting at here, can do more harm than good.

[Piper] I'm going to pause us for the book of the week. I think, Dongwon, you have that.

[Dongwon] I do have that, yes. Thank you for reminding me that I have that. The book I want to talk about is Paul Krueger's Steel Crow Saga. It is a secondary world fantasy that takes a lot from East Asian cultures. It has sort of analogues for a bunch of Southeast Asian and East Asian cultures. It takes place in the aftermath of a period of colonization and empire, where three of the nations have come together to throw off the fourth imperial power. So, it takes… It follows four characters, one from each of the different countries, who are all trying to figure out what to do in the aftermath of this big war. How do you make peace? How do you rebuild a world that's more equitable? How do you keep other powers from swallowing your country when maybe your country is smaller and has less military might than some of the others. Just because you won the war doesn't mean peace is easy to achieve and that people's desire for empire and control and power stop. This is also a book that I talk about as postcolonial Pokémon. So it's got a great magic system, there's lots of anime nonsense. If you like Fullmetal Alchemist, if you like those kinds of things, you're going to love this book.

[Piper] Awesome. All right, so I'm going to slightly switch gears for us in the fact that I'm going to ask for real experiences again, or memories that stand out to you, but instead, I'm going to ask for an example of a moment when someone steps to your side and really was an ally without blocking your own voice. Thoughts?

[Erin] I have an example that has nothing to do with writing whatsoever, but it was a very sort of real moment for me. So, I am a big karaoke enthusiast, as my friends and family all know. One of the issues that you sometimes have an karaoke is that you'll have a white person go up to the stage, they'll sing a rap song, the N-word comes up, and they decide that this is the moment to say it out loud. It's not, for the record, ever. So, I was at a karaoke bar and that happened. I was in a bar where I think I was like one of the only black people there. All of the white people in the room when the woman did it like gasped and like sham… They like sent shame stares at her. The woman stopped doing it. I loved it because this is something that really bothers me, but it has nothing to do with their lives. But their like visceral reaction really made me feel like, "Okay. Other people care about the things that are part of my identity experience, even though it's not part of their's."

[Piper] Awesome.

[Tempest] Yeah, I… I've been talking a lot recently about the value of community, and the value of, like, small, teeny-tiny communities as well as big ones, and just, like, encouraging especially my artist friends, and like artists include writers, to not only like find their place in large communities but their fun micro communities, groups of like five, six people maybe, that you can have like a group chat with, whether… Whatever you use to have group chats. So that you can get the support you need without necessarily having to expose all of your stuff to everybody in the group, and everybody in the group is just like, "We don't know how to help." But, like, you expose some sensitive stuff to like five really close friends, it's a different experience. So I have… I'm very lucky to have a lot of these little micro communities, micro groups. That is where I find most of the expressions of awesome ally-ship. Because I will come in and I will be like, "Oh, my God, this is happening." Or, "Did you see?" Or, "Let me tell you…" The best thing that they can do is they can just say like, "What is it you need me to do?" I'm like, "I just need you to sit here and just listen to me go off about those white people over there who did that thing that made me sad, right?" They're like, "Cool." Then they do. Or, I'm like, "I really need you to like boost this thing that's going on on Twitter." And like…

Or very publicly be like, "Shut up, people. Like, Tempest is awesome." Or whatever it is. They're like, "Okay. I can do that." I do that for them, too. Not all the people in these group chats are necessarily people who are outside of my identity group. Like, some of them are and some of them aren't. But, like, regardless of what they are, what I am, what the situation is, these are people that have my back. I just think it's really important to have people that have your back, in general. But then, like, that is where sometimes some people begin to understand what good ally-ship is. You don't necessarily have to have a close relationship with a person to be able to do that. To ask those questions, to be like, "Is there anything that you need me to do, like, what do you need me to do in this moment to be a good ally?" Sometimes, it's to run out on Twitter and start like yelling. Or sometimes it's just to listen. But, yeah, like that's the biggest thing with ally-ship is that you have to learn how to listen to what people need you to do and need you to not do.

[Piper] I can say I attend a lot of different conferences, both having to do with writing and the writing sphere and also having to do with my day job and my career in a corporate world. Especially, in my corporate position, I am often the only Asian American in the room. Sometimes it's really hard to walk into a really big place. For example, before I came to the Writing Excuses Cruise and Retreat 2019, I was at a summit of 1700 people. Often times, I was one of maybe two or three Asian American people in the room of 1700. One of the biggest things that really helped me be able to walk in and be confident and be a part of everything was the fact that a couple of my colleagues recognized me with a smile, made room for me at a table, were like, "Hey, we're going out." Acknowledged me, acknowledged my existence. Even if you don't know someone, the openness and welcome you can give by giving them a smile and seeing them… Or, if they're sitting by themselves, saying, "Hey. Are you eating alone? Do you want to be alone, or would you like to join us?" Just being open to that, and not being upset if your kindness is not taken well. Because they could be under stress. But just having it there, leaving it out there, and then stepping back, is an amazingly valuable thing in any kind of conferencing situation, any kind of public situation. I would say those are some of my best memories.

[Erin] Yeah. Another thing, specific to writing the other, one way that one can be a good ally is to do all the things that we have said on this podcast, I have said in other places, etc. That… To make sure that you're going to your sensitivity readers and listening to your sensitivity readers when it comes to the stuff that you're writing. To make sure that, like, the stuff that you're going to be putting out isn't going to be doing harm to the community. Do no harm is sort of like the philosophy that I try to instill in people with this. That is like one of the best ways to be a good ally as a person who is like trying to write other identities, is to make sure you listen to the people from those groups that you are trying to represent when they say, "This is harmful, let's change it."

[Tempest] Yeah. Don't just look for permission. Oh, I'm sorry.

[Piper] No, that's okay. I also really think that a lot of times… I think diversity is very important, but I also think equity is really important, and that in writing… So you don't necessarily… It's always good to have a diverse cast, but also, thinking about the systems that have created inequity and challenging those in your writing I think is also a great way to be an ally. Maybe you're not at a point where you're like, "I can actually successfully write the other." Like, "I tried it. It was a bad idea." Like, "I'm not there in my craft." But maybe I can challenge the way that justice works in my system. Maybe I can challenge the way that's sort of racial essentialism works in my world. By doing that, you put new ideas out into the world that I think also help to promote equity and change the way that we think about the world.

[Tempest] Yeah. One of the best examples of this that I've seen, and I'm pretty sure that we've talked about this on the podcast before is Justine Larbalestier. She's a YA writer, and the first several novels that she wrote, she always had a protagonist who was mixed race, POC in some way, they were all different. She did that at first, just with her first book, she just did it because that's what fit the character. Then she realized, like, how important it was for kids to be able to see themselves more. So she's like, "Oh, okay. It's cool. Now I'll just make this happen." But then, at some point, she realized that actually, because she was doing this, then the publishers are like, "We already have a book with a black protagonist, we don't need to buy one from a black person." She's like, "Wait. Oh, no. That is not what I wanted. That's not why I was doing this." So then she shifted, and she decided that like in any book that she wrote where she had one protagonist, like one POV character, that that protagonist would be white. But that didn't mean that she wasn't going to include people of color and people of other marginalized identities in the work. It's just that they wouldn't be the protagonist. Because the protagonist is the one that like publishers tend to focus on, people tend to focus on. Right? But she did that so that she could… That was her way of being a good ally, it was her way of making a space, and saying, "I am no longer going to be the one taking up this space. They can't use me as an excuse not to buy your book."

[Dongwon] One thing I want to point out is we've been talking about a lot of sort of POC oriented issues. We're talking about race and those kinds of elements, but there's a lot of different kinds of ally-ship out there, right? Disability, queer, there's a lot of marginalizations that people experience, and even within POC communities, there can be a lot of tension between different racial groups, right? So, one thing is just because you're marginalized in one way… This kind of plays into the conversation about intersectionality… You have to remember that just because you're marginalized here doesn't mean you get to be a bad ally over here. Right? We all need to be looking out for each other, and looking out for other people's communities and paying attention to different vectors of marginalization and trying to make sure you're supporting voices and respecting other people's identities. Because, even if you have an own voices project, you're only one or maybe two of those identities represented in the book. Ideally, you've got a bigger range of that in your project, right? So you have to make sure, even if you are a marginalized person and coming from that background, that there are other things you need to be really attentive to and make sure you're not stepping on those things. The work isn't done just because you're own voices, is really what I'm saying.

[Piper] All right. So we're going to have to wrap this up with homework.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] Did anyone think of homework?

[Erin] Oh, yeah. I have the homework.

[Piper] Oh, you have the homework. Whoo!

[Erin] I'm ready with the homework. Here is your homework. I want you to find the most recent short story's, book, any piece of literature, novella, whatever that you have consumed recently that you liked. Then, I want you to do two of the following five things at least. But you can do all five. You can… I want you to leave a review on Amazon and on Goodreads. Even though they're kind of the same thing, they're kind of not. Leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. Tweet about it and say why did you love this book. Facebook about it, because Twitter's not Facebook and Facebook has a longer reach sometimes. Tell other writers. Explicitly be like, "Do you need my copy? Let me just put this in your hands. Please read this, please look at this." The fifth thing has gone out of my head, so I'm going to say… Instagram?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Pull a Instagram, take a picture, take a selfie with the book. Everybody loves a selfie. Take a picture with the book, and be like, "Read this book, it's great." But do that. Because that's a way of being an ally. Just putting out your love for that author and their story or their book or whatever it is.

[Dongwon] Can I suggest a number five?

[Erin] Yes.

[Dongwon] Tell a bookseller or a librarian.

[Erin] Yes! That was what flew out of my head. This is why we have Dongwon. Yes. Tell them. Because then they can be like, "Oh, really. We'll get more of that in."

[Piper] Awesome.

[Erin] That's your homework.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.11: Digital Is Different, with Cory Doctorow

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/15/15-11-digital-is-different-with-cory-doctorow/

Key points: How can you network in the digital era? Start with the role of a publisher -- to make a work public, to get the author, the work, and the audience connected. Have a reason to network, something you want to accomplish. Make sure you enjoy what you're doing. Build genuine relationships. Balance building a presence online with I oughta be writing. Think about the marketing message you need to make. Why should people buy your book? Online, you need content and you need a personality. Right now, you need to be charming online. Pay attention to the audiences, you may want different messages for each of them. Pen names? This is complicated. Professional parallel careers may push you to use a pen name. Is one name associated with a message? Watch for systemic gender issues, non-binary... and different genres. Crossing genres, you may need a pen name. It's complicated, and it changes over time. Pen names, and online life, are complicated.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 11.

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Digital Is Different, with Cory Doctorow.

[Piper] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Cory] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Cory] And I'm Cory.

[Mary Robinette] We're joined today by our special guest, Cory Doctorow. Cory, would you tell our listeners a little about yourself.

[Cory] Sure. I'm a science fiction novelist and an activist. I work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a nonprofit in San Francisco. I live in Los Angeles. I'm Canadian by birth and British by naturalization. I'm a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University, a visiting professor of library science at the University of North Carolina, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab, and I'm one of the owners of the website Boing Boing.

[Mary Robinette] So, you have some experience with the digital world there.

[Cory] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that our listeners have been wondering about, and this is a thing that I think face… Affects a lot of early career writers is the idea of getting out there and making yourself known. It's expensive to go places, especially if you're someplace remote, like Australia. Or, if you just have social anxiety and don't want to be around people. What are some of the ways that we can network without actually going into meatspace? Just being in the digital world.

[Cory] So, let me start with a general disclaimer. Which is that there is a certain futility in asking writers who broke in 20 years ago what you should do to break in.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Fair.

[Cory] I always remember going to science-fiction cons as a kid and hearing like crusty old people say, like, "Look, if you want to sell a story to John W. Campbell, you gotta throw a manuscript over his transom at two in the morning, and then you buy him a nickel cup of coffee as he's coming in the door." It's like, first of all, he was a Nazi, and second of all, he doesn't edit anymore. He's been dead for years. So, I can't claim to know how you would break in, right? If you didn't have the common sense, gumption, and stick-to-itiveness to be born in 1971 and on the Internet in the early 80s, you know, you've only got yourself to blame.

[Laughter]

[Cory] That said, publishers' role has changed over the years. It's called into question what the like foundational role of a publisher is. I favor the definition that says that a publisher's job is to make a work public. That is to say, you identify a work, you identify an audience for it, you take such steps as are necessary to make the work and the author and the audience connect with one another. So one of the things publishers do for writers, in that capacity, is that stuff. Obviously, if you're not published, you need a new thing to do to bring yourself into contact with audiences. I'm also skeptical of the enterprise of networking per se. Right? You have to have a reason to be networking. I mean, that reason might be that it makes you feel nice, and that when you feel nice, you write well. But you should know what it is you're hoping to accomplish. If that's to make people interested in your work because it's published, or because you hope that having a following will entice a publisher to bring you around, then the one thing I can tell you for sure is that if you're not enjoying yourself, no one is going to enjoy what you're doing. This is the golden age of grifty, multi-level marketing schemes, and we all know how creepy it feels to have someone make our personal relationships transactional by asking us if we'll come to a half hour seminar on sex toys or Tupperware or whatever it is. Or leggings. So you really have to be there for a non-instrumental reason first. If you're not, then it's the wrong thing for you. Right?

[Mary Robinette] I'm really glad that you mentioned relationships. Piper, it looked like you had something?

[Piper] I did, actually. So, even though I think I'm in a comparable age to you, I came to publishing at a later stage.

[Cory] Sure.

[Piper] So, again, I'm not breaking in at this time and potentially about a decade ago. But what I have to offer to that is that social media was invaluable to me breaking into my career in two different ways. In one aspect, it was learning to be part of the writing community online, which was my major goal first as opposed to promoting a book. Because I was genuinely just trying to get to know people, interacting with people, and kind of get the lingo of the industry, the relationships that I built were more genuine. They were on Twitter and they were on Facebook. The idea behind that is as people knew I was genuine, they were much more open when they found out that I had something to promote or market at that stage. They were like, "Oh, hey, I'd love to give you a shout out because I know who you are." Or "I'd love to invite you into this collaboration." Or "I'd love to invite you into this thing." So, I built kind of a social network before I had something to market. That said, I would also caution people not to focus so hard on building that network online before you have something, because ultimately what we're there for is to write. We don't want to feed too much time into the effort to be online, and to develop a presence online, when really, we're supposed to be writing. So there's this weird balance that comes with that.

[Howard] If I can approach the non-genuine elephant in the room of the messaging at the core of author marketing. The messaging at the core is "My book is the thing that you want more than anything else in the world. When you read it, it's the most fun you're ever going to have." But if I say that as my message, no one will believe me. What are the things that I say or due to transmit that message? The message that you want to send for your book… I mean, what I said was almost soda commercial levels of marketing speak. But by saying it that way, hopefully, dear listener, I've opened your mind to the way you need to be thinking about that purchasing decision. You want people to buy your book. Why do they want to buy your book? Because they're going to love it, because they're super interested in it. How do you convince them of that? Saying that message in other words comes back to being genuine. That's why it seems so… That's when marketing seems so evil. It's why it seems like a lie. If I want people to buy my book as a result of my presence on Twitter, I need to seem like someone they would like to spend time with. I need to seem interesting. I need to feel like a friend. When I appear on panels with other authors, I don't need to shout out the name of my book, I need to look like someone that they are friends with so that whatever good reputation they have reflects well on me. I know this sounds like evil horrible marketing speak, but as we're recording this, I'm wearing a necktie.

[Snort]

[Mary Robinette] It's true. He is.

[Howard] This is one of the lives that I came from and it applied so clearly to what I was doing as an early web cartoonist, I realized that the persona I had online was not read my comic. The persona was I'm fun.

[Mary Robinette] This is a thing that… I come out of it from the theater. My mom was an arts administrator. So when we were doing things in meatspace all the time, one of the things that she taught me was that the other person was always more interesting than you. That what you're doing is that you are listening to people and you are engaging with them by listening. That works really, really well in person. Online, it plays out differently. There, you have to think about two things. One thing is that I'm glad we're all talking about relationships, because, like, when you go to your favorite coffee shop, you don't go because they have the best coffee, you go because of the relationship with the barista, because of the mood, the feel of the place. If any of that shifts, it doesn't matter how good the coffee is. Similarly, place can be fantastic and have beautiful atmosphere, and if the coffee is not good, maybe you don't go. So you have to have both things. You have to have content and you have to have personality.

[Cory] I think that there's a potential that if you're an introvert or someone who doesn't want to do this stuff, this can feel like a counsel of despair. There is a kind of hard truth at the center of that. Which is that different technological moments favor different modes of creator. You talked about live entertainment. Well, obviously before there was live recording at all, the like most dispositive factor in the success of a performer was not virtuosity as much as it was stage presence. Right? When the phonogram comes along and the radio comes along, it becomes a completely different market for the arts. Suddenly, it's… In the absence of seeing the performer, how good does the performance sound becomes much more important than that like numinous difficult to pin down thing that happens when you see a riveting performer. We've all had that experience of being at a show and being completely taken away by it, and then watching a YouTube video of that same show and having… Being, like, oh, I hear where he missed those notes and whatever. But it was that feeling of being there that that performer was able to create. This moment really is a moment that is very good to people who are good at being charming online. So my favorite example of this is Jo Walton, who's a wonderful, wonderful writer. She's not just a wonderful writer, she's just a spectacularly interesting person. Especially in print online. Her career started with her writing really interesting message board posts in rec.arts.sf on USENET that were interspersed with really good poetry in rec.arts.sf.poetry. That led Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who is now the vice president at Tor, but was then an editor at Tor to ask her if she had a book. Now she's won a Hugo award for best novel. He solicited a novel from her on the strength of the voice in her prose. There are people who, I'm sure, would write wonderful novels who couldn't pull that off. It's actually a pity that they're going begging, but it is what it is. Right? We live in this moment.

[Howard] That story illustrates another marketing principle that I stress when I'm doing my Marketing 101 presentation. Which is that your message goes out to different audiences. My message to the person who's going to buy my book and read it as a consumer is this is the funniest use of $15 you'll ever whatever. My message to a publisher is this book will be easy to edit, and I will be easy to work with, and we will make lots of money together.

[Cory] Yeah. I actually think that the third one actually isn't even as important as the other two.

[Howard] Well, and…

[Cory] I think there's a lot of editors… I mean, every editor wants to book a best seller, but they also just don't want to have their lives made miserable by those terrible writers.

[Howard] But those first two are key. When you have relationships online, when you have relationships at conventions and you are talking to fellow professionals, when you are talking to agents and editors, yeah, pitching them your book is different than pitching them the fact that you are personable and professional and easy to work with. I've had people come up to me… I'm always sad that the answer is no. I've had people come up to me and say, "Do you have a book yet?" Because they're ready to work.

[Mary Robinette] So, I think this is a good spot to pause and do some online promotion. Let's…

[Cory] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Talk about our book of the week.

[Cory] Yeah. Let me pull it up on my phone here, so I get all the details right. So, the book that I've chosen is Naomi Kritzer's forthcoming debut novel, which I think may have been published by the time we do this episode. It's coming out in November. Naomi won the Hugo award in 2016 for a short story that was absolutely brilliant called Cat Pictures, Please. That was about an AI that wanted cat pictures. Her new book, her first book, is called Catfishing on the Catnet. It's kind of a novelization of this. It's about these close knit online communities that are… Where many of the participants turn out to be all the one AI. About the adventures that they get to in the AI defending them and they defending each other and the AI, and ultimately what happens when the world discovers there's a general-purpose AI, and it really likes cute pictures of cats. It sounds like a madcap comic novel, and there's a lot of racing around it, there's a lot of chase scenes, but what makes it so endearing and lovely is the relationships that she draws. It's about these tightknit online communities where, on the Internet, no one knows you're an AI who likes cats, but they do know that you are someone that they trust and even come to love, and about the depth and feeling of communities of intent online. It's written with all of her style and verve. It is a first novel, in the best sense of the word. It feels like a novel that someone spent their whole life thinking about. It's full of so many grace notes, so much sly humor. It's really a wonderful book. I can't recommend it enough.

[Piper] Awesome.

[Mary Robinette] That's Catfishing on the Catnet by Naomi Kritzer.

[Cory] By Naomi Kritzer.

[Mary Robinette] That's… She is a fantastic writer. I'm very excited to see this novel.

[Mary Robinette] So, let's actually talk about the idea of community online. But specifically, the personalities that we create. One of the things some people wonder about, especially women going into writing, is whether or not they should have a pen name. Often, people who are in a professional setting, do they need to create a persona for themselves as a shield? What are some of the pros and cons of that? I'm going to keep riffing until someone else jumps in.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] I'll jump in. So, for those of you who may or may not know, Piper J. Drake is a pen name. In fact, it is my second pen name. I originally started publishing as P. J. Schnyder in science-fiction steam punk paranormal romances.

[Cory] Thank goodness you didn't say I was originally John Norman.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] All the nope.

[Howard] So many wrong answers.

[Piper] Actually, P. J. was derived because of my handle on Prodigy. Way back. So that was always fun. So the reason why I chose a pen name, because I had a lot of people say, "Hey, why aren't you proud of your work?" In particular, there's also a question for Asian Diaspora, as to why you pick a pen name that sounds… Please excuse the phrasing, but rather white bread. There's a whole lot of complexity that you can dive into that. But from a professional standpoint, the reason why I picked a pen name was because I do maintain a parallel career in a corporate environment. While most of my coworkers and colleagues all know that I write as a parallel career, my clients do not. My clients could potentially feel that there is a conflict of interest or a conflict of focus, if they perceive that I'm working on stuff other than their project or their particular objectives and goals. So I opted to use a pen name, so that I continue to have this parallel career. Also, I was already published with whitepapers and speaking publicly under my real name. I wanted to keep that content separate.

[Howard] That's… At risk of trying to bucket things in a way that makes it look like it all fits, that… The idea of message. If your name has become associated with one message, using that name to send a different message can be difficult.

[Piper] Yes.

[Howard] If your name gets associated with a message as an author, and the message is, "I write fun hanky-panky…"

[Piper] Which I do.

[Howard] Which you do. That message may not fit well with your tech customers in your day job.

[Cory] It's the spicy Cajun Visine problem.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Visine? You know what, that would be a bad idea. [AAAH!]

[Mary Robinette] I just hurt thinking about that.

[Howard] Spicy. Cajun. Visine.

[Laughter]

[Cory] Yeah. Now, all that said, I have to say that, for me, being someone who's 1 inch deep and 10 miles wide and is known for having a lot of things going on has been a real strength. It… For one thing, it makes people think of me and lots of different contexts, right? People think of me as having something to say beyond just the narrowness of the field. It, I think, rebounds to my favor in terms of getting invited to forums that are not necessarily just science-fiction forums. There is, in terms of like market differentiation, market planning, you can try and get a bigger piece of the science-fiction pie, but the science-fiction pie is not very big. When you look at kind of runaway bestsellers, they're all books that appeal to people who just don't buy books. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Cory] J. K. Rowling did not capture 100% of the book reading public, she captured 5% of the non-book reading public. That's what made her one of the best-selling novelists of all time. Right? So having… Being known for lots of other stuff is kind of interesting. I did want to say that the… I can't speak to one's experience as a writer, but I recently read a book called The Future Is Female by Lisa Yaszek from Library of America Press. It's a book about women pioneers in science-fiction. My mentor was Judith Merrill who moved to Toronto after the 1968 police riots because she didn't want to raise her kids in the States. So we benefited in Canada from her presence there, and Judy plays a big role in it. One of the editor's theses, from having talk to these writers and their editors and their children and so on, is that a lot of the women who wrote under pen names did so, not because they didn't want to be known as women, but because they all had high-powered careers. A bunch of them were spooks. So, they were working in the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA. They just didn't want to be associated with… Like, they had to keep a separate identity because it's sensitive military industrial roles, which I was really fascinated by. One of my other mentors was Tanya Huff, who began her career writing under T. S. Huff, but switched to Tanya Huff, I think in part because it became an asset to be known as a woman who wrote military SF. That was like, that was not so much a curiosity as a benefit, that we all know what dudes write like when they're writing military SF. Women writing military SF are interesting and have a… Are a break from the fare as usual.

[Piper] I write…

[Mary Robinette] But one of the things about this is that we are dealing with systemic issues, right?

[Cory] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] We can go down this rabbit a pretty long way, but one of the things that happens is that publishers actually print more copies of books by men or a male sounding name because bookstores buy more of them, because reviewers review more of them. So book… The publishers them, recognizing the higher demand, print more books by men, so the bookstores… So there's a cycle that happens.

[Cory] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] In the United States, 48% of the books of science fiction and fantasy is written by women and 52% is written by men. But when you look on the shelves, only 18% is…

[Cory] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] That's an average. I have been into stores where it's… The only person on, the only woman that they had shelved was Ursula K. Le Guin.

[Cory] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] Literally. Not…

[Piper] I use to follow your tweets about being in the airport and counting how many female authors there were in the science-fiction/fantasy section versus men. It was just very… It was a clear demonstration.

[Cory] How does that break down indie versus B&N?

[Mary Robinette] So, that's a great question. It… That is something that is… The… What I have found is that it is slightly better on the indie side, but not universally. Yeah. One part of that is that a lot of indie bookstores are owned by women.

[Piper] Also…

[Mary Robinette] But the best ratio I've ever found was 34%.

[Piper] Also, we want to take into account the fact that we're acknowledging and we are respecting now that there is a non-binary factor…

[Cory] Of course.

[Piper] To this consideration as well. So, pen names don't necessarily have to indicate gender. But systemically, people will default towards what they think the name should be.

[Cory] Sure.

[Piper] Case Alexander, for example, is a great… Great, great author. Amazing. She used to be Karina Cooper. That's when I met her. She wrote seamy, steamy steam punk. Then she changed to T. C. Alexander, and then… Actually, is it she there or is that they? I apologize, Case, I forgot. That's terrible. I will fix it in the notes. But, Case also writes as Case Alexander. Really, really kick ass sci-fi. Case is non-binary. There are a lot of people who are queer or non-binary.

[Cory] Yeah, that's a good point.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's something that is difficult to track in a bookstore. So, basically, what we're saying here is that when you are choosing your pen name, you're thinking about the relationships, but you're also… There's not an easy answer there. It's also an answer that is going to shift over time.

[Piper] And across genres.

[Mary Robinette] And across genres. Like, if you're in YA or romance, it's… It… You are… That was another thing, when you look at the… Where women who write science-fiction and fantasy get shelved, a lot of times they get shelved in YA even if they are actually writing something that is adult.

[Cory] Wow.

[Piper] Sarah J. Maas comes to mind.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Piper] But also, if you cross genres… I was asked to switch from P. J. Schnyder to a new pen name because I wrote paranormal romance and sci-fi and steam punk, and I was switching to romantic suspense. So they asked for a new pen name to give me a fresh start with readers who would not normally be open to my previous genres. So that's a thought, too.

[Mary Robinette] So, dear listeners, what we're saying is it's complicated and it changes all the time. There's… It's a moving target.

[Piper] It depends.

[Cory] Nancy Kress was one of my writing teachers at Clarion, and one of the pieces of advice she had for women writers was that you're probably going to divorce your husband, statistically. So think long and hard about whether or not his name is going to go on your spine because she hasn't been married to Mr. Kress in a very long time.

[Mary Robinette] That is a fascinating and… Terrifying POV. Also, something…

[Piper] I'm just giggling here, like, I can't comment on that one.

[Mary Robinette] No, I'm just like… I'm like, wow. That's… I mean, that's a state… Yes. That's a statement.

[Cory] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] That's a claim.

[Piper] That is a point.

[Howard] That is a thing that someone said that I cannot now unremember.

[Cory] It's not terrible advice. I think that picking a pen name… If you've just taken a married name, picking a pen name that isn't your married name or not isn't the worst idea in the world. Kind of hedges your bets.

[Piper] [garbled] names complicated. [Picking pen names is complicated?]

[Mary Robinette] The name's complicated. Online life, complicated.

[Mary Robinette] This was a very helpful episode, I think, because we've left you with as many questions as you started with. We're going to wrap up by giving you a homework assignment. The homework assignment that I'm going to give you is I want you to think about what your pen name would be. It's very easy for women to think about this because we've seen a lot of examples of it, but I want to make sure that everybody thinks about this. I want you to think of a name, and name, that is decidedly female. I want you to think of a name that is nonbinary, that you can't tell anywhere… Could be anywhere on the spectrum. And, I want you to pick a pen name that is decidedly male. See what those things feel like as names. But, here's the catch, I want them to all feel like you.

[Piper] Added bonus challenge. Practice the signature.

[Mary Robinette] For… That's a good one.

[Cory] Ooooh. Did anyone else… Was anyone else smart enough to not use the signature that they use on their checks to sign books?

[Piper] That's me.

[Cory] I still… I'm dumb.

[Mary Robinette] Bonus content at the end. Make sure that your legal signature and your autograph do not match.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Also, get Cory to sign a book for you.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/08/15-10-evaluating-ideas/

Key Points: How do you decide which ideas to keep and which to drop? One story cooking, others simmering with ingredients added as they come up. Know how the story ends! Interact with your ideas, explore, write them, and you develop the skill to evaluate them. Passion and excitement! What are you most excited about? It's a different skill, but you need to learn how to force yourself to write. Take the core of the idea and find something you are passionate about. Add your exciting ideas to the pot. Don't throw everything into one book. Find flavors that work together. Keep track of your ideas, write them down. When you're struggling with a story, when do you push through and when do you abandon it? Understand why you are struggling. Have the ending, or at least points that you are excited about writing, in mind. Try to make this chapter or this scene someone's favorite in the whole book. Force yourself to finish books. Make a checklist, what kind of problem is this? Avoid shiny new idea syndrome. Think about your goals. Finishing teaches you how to write.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 10.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Evaluating Ideas.

[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 out of ideas. Help?

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Help?

[Brandon] So, we often talk on this podcast about how ideas are kind of cheap. But, let's shelve that. Like, we've covered that idea. That a lot of great… Writers generally can use any number of different ideas. Bad ideas make good books sometimes. So let's just shelve that. Let's actually talk about ideas, because I have had, once in a while, an idea that I was really attached to. I'm like, "You know what, I know ideas are cheap, but I want to write this one just because I want to write it." We have a lot of questions here, because we're doing questions from listeners this entire year, about how we evaluate our ideas and how do you figure out which ones to keep and which ones to drop?

[Victoria] So I am… I look human shaped to those of you sitting here, but I am actually a six burner stove. This is how my entire mind functions.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] Six burners on the stove, only one of those at any given time on high heat with the project that I'm actually cooking with. The other five are all simmering on very low heat as I add ingredients to my ideas. So I actually have a very long cook time before I decide if an idea has legs. By the time it's time to assess what next goes on high heat, I know enough about the story to be able to tell whether it's worth pursuing. Now, for different people, these things are different, but for me, I don't pursue a story unless I know how it ends. I do this because one, I'm very prone to quitting and if I have an ending with my story, instead of looking out at the desert, I'm looking across a field and I know it's a finite amount of space. I also am convinced, to go back to the food metaphor, that the end of the story is the taste left in your mouth, and that we will retroactively reassess an entire book based on how strong or weak the ending is. I need my endings to be strong so that I don't lose hope and I want to work with them. So, that is one of the main ingredients that I have to have. When you add that to the fact that a lot of my ideas steep for anywhere from six months to three or four years, then I've never actually trunked a story once I've started it. Because once I've started it, I've known enough about it to know that it has the potential to be a book.

[Howard] As someone who, as of this recording, needs to lose at least 30 pounds…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The taste left in my mouth was the only thing that remained at the end of the meal… That would be heaven. With regard to evaluating ideas, I… You know that character in the police procedural whose skill set is they're really good at judging other people? You, dear listener, and me, we sometimes like to think that we're good judges of people. Or maybe that's a skill that we want. I have come to grips with the fact that I'm still not very good at it. There are people who I have made the right call on, but there are people who I haven't. Evaluating ideas is the same way. It's not going to happen overnight. You have to meet a lot of people and interact with them. You have to meet a lot of your ideas and interact with them. You have to explore them. You have to try to write them. Then, you develop this sense for, "Oh, this idea is a three book idea. This idea is a plot twist." Where… But both ideas could be expressed in seven words and look the same until you've worked at it a lot.

[Brandon] I work very similarly to Victoria with this whole burner thing. Whatever I'm writing on, I often can't say what the next thing is going to be, with the caveat that when deadlines are tight, it's going to be the one that I have a contract coming due on. But when I hit that point, and I try to build my schedule… A here is a free slot. You have six months you're going to be able to do anything. I can't often say which of the other five projects on the other burners it's going to be. I get there, and then I decide. While I'm working on my book, sometimes I'll be like, "Oh, I'm sure I'm going to do this thing next." Then it'll change to another one. If I had finished that book right then, we would have gotten a different novel next. Which can be, I know, frustrating for fans, because I'll tell them sometimes, here are the many things I'm planning to do next. I'm going to do one of these. Some of the ones that they really are waiting for just never come up because I'm not, when I'm trying to turn all the burners up, I look at them all and decide which one I'm most passionate about.

[Victoria] Well, there's a commonality coming into play here as well, which is the gut feeling. Which is, of course, very frustrating, because it is of course unquantifiable. It is the fact that we consume enough narrative to begin to feel in our own work when something is ready and when something is not. I just finished a book that I sat on for six years because, even though I had the pieces of it, I knew I wasn't ready, I wasn't a strong enough writer. That's a really hard conversation to have with yourself, because we get excited about ideas. So, I think having this six burner stove or a four burner stove or a two burner stove, giving yourself options, really helps you because you don't know where you're going to be at when you're ready to write that next book.

[Dan] The fact that, for all of us, what it eventually comes down to is passion and excitement, what are you most excited about? You will notice, nobody in talking about how they choose projects says, "Oh, this is what sells." Right? We always talk about don't chase the market. Don't chase the market! Like, there is not a market for any particular genre or style. What there's a market for is stuff that's awesome. You will be able to write better the idea that you just can't wait to start writing. You'll be able to write that better than anything else.

[Brandon] I will add the caveat there that when a contract is coming due, in a lot of ways, you also have to learn how to force yourself to write… Be passionate about something that you've committed to writing. That's a different skill.

[Howard] That's a different… Skill set.

[Dan] But you presumably committed to that because you were excited about it.

[Victoria] I was going to say, this is the thing. This is why it comes back to things we've talked about already, but it's why it's so important that you let passion and what you actually want to write and not what you think people want to read be a guiding force for your entire career, because that's the only way that you guarantee that when those deadlines come up, you want to write this thing. You're not writing something that you had no interest in writing because you thought it would sell. Like, you have to make sure that in some way, you have that emotional connection with everything on your burner stove, so that even if you have to move something into that forward spot, you're not dreading it. Maybe it's… Maybe you're really excited about something else, but it's really important that you have that core fire for everything that you're writing.

[Howard] Last night, my daughters made me sit down and watch several episodes of a YouTube, Teen Fortress 2 commentary gamer. At one point in the episode, he was doing something funny and they were playing a song… I think it was a love song or something. It was a song I was familiar with, but because of copyright, they couldn't actually play the song or the YouTube video would get pulled. So he had a cheesy karaoke version of the music playing in the background, and the Teen Fortress 2 computer voice reading the lyrics. This is the difference between execution on a brilliant idea which is going to sell millions of copies and execution on a brilliant idea which never would have gotten out of the recording studio. The song, as read by the computer voice… It worked in the episode, obviously, because we had context. But if you set these two things side-by-side, that is the difference between an author who doesn't yet know how to really execute on an idea, and an author who does. When people look at the things that I've done and say, "Oh, man. That idea was so brilliant." I shrug and I'm like, "You know what, guys, the idea was not brilliant." What was brilliant, and I say this patting myself on the back, is that I managed to stretch it out across an entire book, and I drew some really fun pictures, and I made some cool reveals. It wasn't the idea, at the end of it.

[Dan] Yeah. I, a few months ago, published a novella with Magic: The Gathering. Which, to our earlier point, I was not necessarily in love with that setting, right? Because I didn't know what it was when I signed the contract. Then I got into their offices, and they're like, "Well, this character and this setting. Go." So what I had to do was take that core of an idea and find something that I was passionate about in it. What am I going to be able to do? So, first thing, I made it into a heist story. It was not intended to be one, but they were cool with it, they rolled with it, because that's what I was excited about. Being able to take those kind of… Victoria talked about adding ingredients to the pots. I had this big pile of ingredients that hadn't gone in any pots yet, and I was able to throw those exciting ideas into the other job, and then get really excited about it.

[Victoria] Also, talking about one of the most difficult and important things to cultivate in yourself, is the understanding of the kitchen sink, right? That you do not need to take every idea that excites you and put it into one book. It's about… And I know I come back to the cooking metaphor a lot, but it's about finding, like, flavors that work together. You don't need to don't every seasoning and every spice and every ingredient in. It's about learning to withhold and say, "This would actually be better on its own as a starlight… The star thing of a different meal."

[Howard] On the second night we were in our house, we ran the dishwasher. You said kitchen sink. The dishwasher drains into the sink. There was this gargling which woke me up because it sounded like a voice. This idea came to me that, "Oh, my gosh, you have a family who's in a house and they think that the house is possessed because the sink is talking to them, and the exorcist can't do anything and the priest can't do anything, and the plumber fixes it." That was the end of the idea. That was as far as it went. This was 1999. Before Schlock Mercenary. Two years into Schlock Mercenary, I realized, you know what, I bet I can tell a ghost story in Schlock Mercenary where it gets fixed by the plumber and everybody is quite upset at that. So, yeah, these ideas, they come from weird places and some of them may seem completely stupid, but… I mean, to the kitchen sink point, I keep track of them. I write them down. You don't write it down, it's lost forever and you don't get to use it.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our awesome thing of the week, because it's not a book.

[Howard] Whoo hoo! It's awesome.

[Dan] It is awesome. So, Howard and I and some other local fantasy authors do a Twitch show. We play D&D online every week so that you guys can watch us. It is called TypeCast RPG. We're using… Right now, we're doing a campaign called The Gods of Vaeron in Fifth Edition D&D rules. That is me as the GM, Howard Tayler, Charlie Holmberg, Brian McClellan, Mari Murdock, and Ethan Sproat, all science fiction/fantasy professionals. All authors except Ethan, who's a professor of science fiction. It's super cool.

[Howard] There's a thing that happens in TypeCast which speaks well to the topic. I will sometimes illustrate moments from the game. There are moments which are beyond my skill, and I'm just not going to try. But, every so often, I will have an idea, and I need to execute on it in literally a minute and a half. Because if I wait too long, if I draw too slowly, it's gone. The practice that this has given me in evaluating ideas has been frighteningly effective. Because I have to make the decision quickly. I have to execute to the best of my admittedly limited cartooning ability. Yes, I've been doing this for 20 years. But I know what my skill set is and what my skill set isn't. That's the sort of thing that I think authors can learn from, in that you have an idea, you don't need to spend a novel fleshing it out. See how quickly you can flesh it out to determine what it leads to.

[Brandon] So, we have further questions along this line. One person asks, "How can you tell the story that you're struggling with has potential and that you should push through or if you should leave it and start working on something you like more?"

[Howard] Someone please answer this.

[Dan] Yes.

[Victoria] Ha ha ha. I mean, that's a difficult thing. I always say it's the same kind of thing along the lines of writer's block. You need to understand why you're struggling. There's a difference between struggling because you're afraid of not doing it justice, struggling because you're bored which you're guaranteed readers are going to be bored then, and kind of like, you need to assess where your mentally at in the process. I will say that some days one of the only things that keeps me going on a story is the fact that I do have an ending in mind. So, coming back to my definitely not prescriptive wisdom, but if you are somebody who struggles to finish things or finds yourself getting lost on the way, I do find that having an ending or at least having mile markers, having things and scenes and moments that you're excited about in the story, having them not all be in the first act, these are things that help me get from A to B to C to D and so on.

[Brandon] That's great advice. Having things you're writing toward, you're excited about. Another thing, kind of on the flipside, you can do is I try to set down… If I'm feeling bored, I try to step back and say, "How can I make this chapter someone's favorite chapter in the whole book?" I find that almost always I can find a way to change up what's going on just a little bit to make that specific chapter a real showpiece for the book. If you can do that for every chapter, suddenly you don't… You're not worried about the idea anymore, you're excited about how this is going. I often say that for newer writers, my experience has been that most of the time, you should use one of those options rather than abandoning the story. There are times to abandon stories, but I think it should be the exception, not the rule. It should happen very rarely. Particularly if you're new, you just need to learn to finish things. So, learn to make every chapter the most exciting or the most interesting chapter in the book.

[Dan] Definitely, if this is your first book or even your second, just finish it. Because forcing yourself to finish a book that you are maybe not in love with anymore is going to teach you how to stay in love with books. It's going to teach you so much more about evaluating their validity than we can just tell you over the computer here.

[Howard] I did an unblocking session, a small group session, at the Writing Excuses Retreat in 2019. It was a delightful session. One of the things that I talked about is that… I've been doing this for long enough that I have a checklist. The checklist is there to determine is this an overarching story problem? Is this a scene problem? Is this a chapter problem? Then, is this a me problem? Am I sick? Have I eaten yet today? Do I need to hydrate? Do I need to go get some exercise? Do I need to go back to the well? Have I forgotten to take my medication today? There's all kinds of things. Until I have… Until I actually acknowledged that there was a checklist and that there were criteria, I was really bad at figuring this out. I've gotten much better at it because I get stuck all the time. I think we all, to some level, get stuck all the time. If the only question you know how to ask is, "Does this mean it's time to abandon the story?" it means, boy, you need a checklist, because there's a whole bunch of other things that come first.

[Victoria] You need more questions before that last resort.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Brandon] I… Even in my professional career, I've rarely abandoned stories. The one thing that I've abandoned most recently was done after revisions determined that revising the book to be as good as I wanted it to be would be as much work as writing a new book. That revision wasn't guaranteed to succeed. So I shelved that book.

[Howard] And the new book would be better.

[Brandon] And the new book would be better. I shelved that book, but I still finished the book. Right? Finishing things… We have another question here, "How do you find energy to keep a story going after that first spark of inspiration fades?"

[Victoria] I feel so strongly about this. This is shiny new idea syndrome. It is a medical syndrome. I think we have all felt it. There's a thing that happens either 50 pages, 100, 150 pages in, where suddenly you are like, "Um. This is familiar. I have…" That's exactly when you get a new idea. Something pops into your head. It's shiny, you don't understand it, it's mysterious and alluring, and you think I should follow that instead. So many writers, especially aspiring writers and authors, dropped the thing that they're working on to go follow the shiny new idea. It is a trick that your brain is pulling because in order to finish a story, in order to write a story, not only its beginning, but its middle and end, you have to become familiar with the material. As you become familiar with the material, that inherent shine of mystery and elusiveness wears off, potential energy becomes kinetic energy in which something is always lost. So we think, surely if I follow the shiny new idea, that one won't disappoint me.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] It is a way toward madness. It is a way to never finish anything. I think that comes back to finish it. Even if it's not fabulous, even if you don't want to revise it, you will learn so much in the process of hitting that finish line.

[Howard] I was a music composition major, and I did not learn this lesson as a musician. I think it may be the reason why I'm a cartoonist and not a musician. Because by the time I started cartooning, I had figured it out. As a musician, I came up with wonderful themes and textures and arrangements and everything was a couple of minutes long. My instructors kept saying, "Give us some theme and variation. Explore this, dig into this. Expand it." But it's perfect the way it is! It wasn't perfect the way it was. I had another shiny idea I wanted to chase instead. Yeah, you listen to an orchestral suite, you listen to the symphonic greats from whenever, there's a core theme in there that they explored and explored and explored and explored and explored before they moved on to the shiny.

[Dan] I think when you're in this situation and you're kind of bored with a story and you want to pursue a new one, you're trying to decide if you should drop it or not, take a look at what your goals are for that. What are you hoping to accomplish with this short story or with this book that you are writing? Because, first of all, as we've discussed, if you're early career, the purpose of that book is not to sell, right? If you think, "Oh, this is impossible. I'm not going to be able to sell this." Well, you're not going to be able to sell it anyway, it's your first book. Its goal is to teach you how to write your second book.

[Howard] We're saying that very kindly.

[Dan] Very kindly and lovingly. I had five garbage truck novels before I finally wrote my first published novel. So, think about it. So really what you're doing, if you're early career, is you're learning how to write books. You don't have to think, "Oh, this book won't sell." Or "This book isn't perfect." It doesn't matter, because your goal is to learn how to write. Finishing it is going to teach you how to write.

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

[Howard] I have some truly terrifying homework for you. I want you to get a writing implement and something to write on. Pencil, maybe a notebook. Set it next to your bed. Or whatever the thing is you sleep on. When you wake up in the morning, write down everything you can remember about your dreams from the night before. If you can't remember anything, write the words, "I didn't remember my dreams this morning." Okay? Do this for a week. At the end of the week, review the journal, and see if there is an idea there that perhaps you want to explore in your fiction.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.09: Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/01/15-09-choose-your-own-adventurous-publishing-path/

Key Points: Self-pub? Traditional pub? Hybrid? How do you decide what's the best outlet for your work? Right now, trad and indie are two parallel but separate markets. Which one is best for your book? Who else is doing similar work, are there successful titles like it in the market? Don't try to go indie just because your work isn't very good! Look where your audience is. But there is no easy mode of publishing. Don't get taken in by "Here's the simple path to success." Fundamental strategies or principles are the same, but you have to keep up with the changes, too. You can make self pub and trad work together. Your goal should not be "making a stunning debut." Your goal should be cranking out good books. Be a 10-year overnight success! Similarly, awards are a consequence, not a goal. Turn your words into money.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Nine.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path.

[Pause]

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And Dongwon didn't know he was supposed to turn to page 3.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I was too busy marveling at the beauty of that very smooth episode title.

[Howard] Isn't it great?

[Piper] I was panicked because I'm in… Like, a different spot.

[Dan] These are the kind of titles that we get when there's no adults in the room.

[Dongwon] Choices have been made.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] Who are the people who…

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] Awesome. Okay. Despite the very unprofessional nature of this episode intro, this is a very great and important topic to discuss. One of… Like… As we've been covering throughout the entire year, there's a lot of career questions that we know you listeners have. This is one of the big ones that we hear at conventions and all the time, is, should I go self-pub? Should I go traditional pub? Should I do some kind of hybrid of that in the middle? So we wanted to make sure that we had both Dongwon as an agent and Piper as a very successful hybrid author on this cast to talk about this. So, I'm going to ask be really dangerous question first that's going to get us all in trouble. When you're looking at a particular work, how can you decide what the best outlet for that is, self pub, indie, trad? How do you know?

[Piper] I have a thought, but I think Dongwon has a thought, too.

[Dongwon] Let's see if our thoughts are in alignment. So, I think, is my thinking about this has evolved and as I've sort of taken a close look at both markets and sort of the state of where traditional publishing is, I have become more and more convinced that they're two parallel but separate markets happening in book publishing right now. I think the indie readership and the indie authorship and publishing is often a discrete set of people from the people buying traditional books in bookstores. So I think the question is whenever you have a specific book is, is this particular type of book working in the indie bookstore or… Well, indie bookstores or independent publishing, right? So I think you need to be looking carefully at who else is doing this and are there other successful titles like your book in this market, right? So if you're writing a 200,000 word literary beautifully written epic fantasy story, I think that's going to be a really tough sell in the indie market, right? On the other hand, if you're writing a 60,000 word compulsive urban fantasy that's part of a 10 book series, you're going to have a really hard time finding a traditional publisher, right? So I think a lot of this is being driven by certain market trends, certain audience expectations and demands.

[Howard] I'd like to take just a moment to address the third possibility, which is that the thing that you are writing, depending on who you are and what it is that you are writing, might not fit in either place because it's not very good.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I hate to phrase it in that way, but if you've been turned down for representation by agent after agent, if you've gotten rejection from editor after editor, and what they been saying is, "This isn't ready yet, thank you for playing." That's very different from what my agent told me in 2006, which was, "I have tried to sell this…" We were talking about Schlock Mercenary. "I have tried to sell this, and everybody I've talked to has either said I'm already reading Schlock Mercenary, I love it. We don't have any place for it at our publishing house. Or, I don't know what that is, but I can tell you right now, we don't have room for it at our publishing house." In every case, the answer was, "Howard, you need to be self-publishing." Now, I'm self published differently than the Kindle Unlimited or whatever market, but the decision point is the same. I was told by the gatekeepers, if you will, that my thing fit in a different space. If I'd been told, "Oh, we would love to pick that up, something like that up, we've been looking for just such a thing, but this one is really crappy…"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Going to the indie space with it might not be a great career move. So… That's… I bring that up because I don't want people to go to Indy because… I don't want them to go to Indy without good critiques, without understanding…

[Dan] Yeah. I'm glad that you brought that up, because even 10 years ago, that was the whole stigma of the entire indie market, which is, these are the people who couldn't hack it in the real publishing, and so they went indie. Which is not… It wasn't true then, and it's very, very not true now. It is absolutely a respected and viable publishing path, but it wasn't before. Now, Piper, you keep trying to talk, and we keep stepping on you. What do you want to jump in here with?

[Piper] You're not stepping on me. I'm dodging, I'm waiting, I'm dodging. But, the moment is here. So, I do agree that there needs to be a certain quality, that you have to have faith in, in your book, and be sensitive to… Open to critique so that you know this is the right quality. There are, I agree, certain market trends that will help you to realize that perhaps your book could find your readership better via self pub or indie. So, for example, science-fiction romance right now, at this time in 2019, is very niche. It has a very specific readership, and that readership often looks for things online in certain ways. So it's so niche, it's not necessarily picked up by trad pub. But there are readers out there hungry for it. So it can still be very, very successful if you take the leap of faith to go indie with this series. You can have a really small, tight, but super loyal readership out of that. That can be very, very profitable. I would say paranormal romance is something that people have been waiting for it to come back for years and years and years, but I've got news. There's readers. They're out there. They love paranormal romance, they would eat it up. The audience is out there for indie work and self pub work.

[Dan] Yeah. I agree with that. I… My first self published book is now eight or nine years old. I've been hybrid for a while. It was for that exact reason. Here's a book that is clearly good and there clearly is an audience for it, but that audience is small enough that a big publisher is not necessarily interested. So we put it out in that space, and it found its audience and that's great.

[Piper] Yeah, and you can make money that way. It's not that trad pub is the way to go to make bank. Right? Indie pubs can definitely make, if your goals are focused on the financial return. Any pub can be very profitable done strategically. There are advantages to trad. But indie can also have strategies that allow it to be profitable.

[Dongwon] You keep such a higher percentage of every sale you make, if you go indie, that it takes so many fewer copies sold to really be very profitable. If you know what you're doing, and if you're successful, you can make significantly more money by going indie than you will traditional.

[Howard] Six weeks ago, we had several authors on the show. It was one of the ones that we recorded live at the Writing Excuses Retreat. That episode is probably resonating with you right now, dear listener, as you are recalling some of the numbers that they spouted.

[Dongwon] The thing I really want to caution you, though, is for every one person who is making those kind of numbers, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are selling under 10 copies a week, right? Those who have under 20 copies sold total of their book, right? All I'm pointing out… That's true on the traditional side, too. There's plenty of books that are published traditionally that vanish without a trace, that you've never heard of, right? I'm only pointing out that there's no easy mode of publishing, right? Sometimes where I get very nervous about the conversation around self-publishing and indie is there's a certain industry of people who are invested in making it look easy and invested in saying that here's a simple path to success, right? Here's the 10 tricks you can do. From my experience, that just doesn't exist.

[Howard] They're invested in it, because they have built a business around selling shovels to the prospectors.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They are the ones who are selling editor services, selling cover services, selling whatever. Part of their pitch is telling you…

[Dan] Well, it's not entirely these people, though. I do think that there is kind of a…

[Howard] Oh, there's absolutely…

[Dan] A group of old-school people that've kind of been burned by the market and their primary investment is biting the hand that used to feed them and doesn't anymore.

[Piper] Well, I would like to say that I have some recs because sometimes it's really frustrating to listen to these episodes and just have somebody tell you to go out and find somebody who knows what they're doing. So, dear listeners, I have some people who know what they're doing.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] So, Zoe York is getting a shout out. I don't know her personally. I have not ever spoken to her, but I do stalk her… I mean, follow her on social media. Zoe York has a book coming out. She also has two really great podcast episodes on the Sistercast about building your marketing brand. Now, it's applicable if you're a trad author, but particularly if you're going to go indie, if you're going to go with self pub, those two episodes really, really break down what it's like to think strategically about your approach to the market, and how you're not only going to market your first book, but your series if you're going to have a series, and then how do you keep that going over time so that you can build that trickle income up to something that really feels good. Skye Warren also did a marketing class for expert marketing advice through the RWA forum to celebrate the opening of their RWA marketing forum in January 2019. So those are two people who really know what they're doing and have made that information and knowledge available to you publicly.

[Dan] Perfect. As it happens, Zoe York is our book of the week.

[Piper] It is.

[Dan] Romance Your Brand. What can you tell us about that?

[Piper] So, Romance Your Brand came out in December 2019. It's, actually, the full title is Romance Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series. So, friends, don't think that this is limited to romance. It is applicable across, I would say, all spec-fic genres. It is really, really focused on helping you build a marketable brand with an eye towards all the things that you need to be able to keep in mind, the moving parts of promotion and marketing and ads and also planning out your series.

[Howard] Because some of these things just work so much better in print than they do in audio, what we're going to do is were going to get a list of Piper's recommendations for people you can trust. I want to throw Writer Beware in there. And we're going to get them into the liner notes, so that you've got links. I bring up Writer Beware because I figured out how to articulate my concern. My concern is that the un-agented author, the author who has… Who hasn't found their footing, hasn't found their connections within the industry, and is looking for somebody to help out, is a prime target for predatory publishing schemes. We don't want any of you to end up there. We want all of you to never end up there. The way to avoid that is to listen to the reputable voices and do some homework. We will have pre-done some of that homework for you.

[Dongwon] For me, I'm very focused on educating writers about how the business works, and I think it's really important. It's one of the reasons I do this podcast, not just to hang out with your beautiful faces. But what I want to do is make sure that people understand what they're getting into. So I hope I'm not coming off as negative about the indie market, I'm not at all. I think it's a really wonderful opportunity. It just breaks my heart when I see people going out there being sold a false bill of goods and not understanding how things work. In my experience, kind of going into what Piper was talking about a little bit, is publishing is kind of publishing no matter how you're doing it. The fundamental strategies, whether you're doing literary fiction, contemporary realistic, women's fiction, or indie romance, or whatever it is, the fundamental principles are all still the same. Selling books is just selling books. There are different tactics that can apply in very limited ways, right? I think indie has a certain set of tactics that are working. Those change seemingly every six months or so. So a lot of it is keeping up on, like, what's working right now, what strategies are we using, how's the algorithm working, and those kinds of things. But we're doing the same thing on the traditional side. On a slightly slower cycle, but what's going on with the booksellers, what's going on with the libraries, what's going on with the school markets? So, a lot of it is similar factors, but the underlying principles are all the same, no matter where you are.

[Piper] As a hybrid author, I just want to say that you can harness those marketing strategies so that your indie and your trad can work together and actually build each other up.

[Dan] That… Let's talk about that. Because we talk about being a hybrid author all the time, and yet there still are people who are wondering, "Can I self pub and still have an agent? Is it possible to self pub one book and then get picked up by a trad publisher for your second one?" What can you tell us about that?

[Piper] Well, I can tell you that it is totally possible. There are some concerns sometimes with it. You want to look at the genres of what works you're going to self pub and what works you're going to try to put out there for submission for trad. In some ways, it may be easier for you mentally to think about I'm going to self pub in this genre first while I submit for trad in another genre. That doesn't necessarily have to be the way you go, but sometimes it's easier. Because the risk is if you put a book out indie and it doesn't perform well, and then you try to take that same book or a book in that series to trad, there's a track record that the publishing houses going to look at to determine whether they think there's a market for that book. That can impact you. Right, sometimes if your book went gangbusters and awesome, then, yes, the trad pub is going to want to eat that up and take it and publish out further with their extended distribution capabilities for you. But in other cases, when the book does not do as well or does not find its audience, the trad pub may unfortunately decide that that's not a good investment, and therefore it can hurt your chances. You want to think critically about that.

[Dongwon] You almost never can take a book that you've self published and resell that to some publisher. The cases where that happens is people are coming to you because you are selling so many copies, right? So if you are Andy Weir and you're just selling a billion copies every 30 seconds, then, yeah, publishers are going to come knocking, yelling, "Hey. We want in on this." Right?

[Dan] We want some of your money.

[Dongwon] If that's happening, then that is when that works. If you self publish something, you're not getting the numbers, you're not getting a lot of excitement, then my advice is to move on to something else that's in a different category, a new series, and that's what you want to be pitching to some publishers. The hybrid authors I work with, we really view the self-publishing side and the traditional side as two parallel careers. There's crossover in terms of the marketing and brand. In my experience, there's almost no crossover in terms of audience. The people who buy one are not buying the other one. Right? So you can't expect that if you sold 100,000 copies indie, that suddenly you're going to sell 100,000 hardcovers, right? So I think learning to think of them as two separate channels that you're developing in parallel. It's really more about market and career diversification, then it is about transferring audience from one to the other.

[Piper] I'm going to slightly disagree with you on the fact that I do, as a Venn diagram, think there's a small amount of overlap, because I don't want to disregard the readers that are buying both. But that's because there are readers that have become loyal to the author and decide that the author, regardless of how it was published, is a one-click buy. But they are a smaller selection.

[Howard] We also need to take into account that 10 years ago, this conversation would have been completely different, and that these markets change. For me, the decision points about choosing your own adventurous publishing path hinge on some of the same things, which are, on these two different paths, which market is my book going to sell better into? That's going to change over the years. The big one for me is do I want to make the sale once and let somebody else sell it a million times, or do I want to beat down 10,000 doors myself? I chose the beat 10,000 doors down myself path because I'm an idiot.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Or you really like knocking on doors, Howard.

[Piper] Yeah, maybe.

[Howard] I really… I would much rather have somebody else doing that work for me. But what we found is that my primary product, as of this episode airing, is something that plays to a market where I can't let one person sell it for me.

[Dan] It's worth pointing out, you said that these markets change over time. They're still changing. We're in the middle of a massive technological flux in this industry. I genuinely don't know what either the trad or indie market is going to look like a year from now. We don't know. So it is worth your time not just to figure out what to do with your own books, but to keep your thumb on the pulse and keep track of what is going on. Who is big, and where they're big, and why they're big. Because it's going to keep shifting throughout your career. I have one more question before we end. We're going to go a little bit long, because somebody asked a question that I think needs more of a disabusement than an answer. He says, "Does self-publishing count as a debut, and hence ruin your chance of emerging with a big bang?" In a lot of ways, I think that if you're publishing plan is I want to emerge with a big bang, I want "a stunning debut" written on the cover of my book, your publishing plan at that point is to win the lottery. What you need to be focused on more so than these questions "of am I going to hit big? Am I going to have a massive debut?" You just need to be cranking out good books.

[Howard] For every big debut we can think of, we can quickly put our fingers on, there are 100 ten-year overnight successes. Where people have been grinding away at this, and they've had books hit the market, and they've perhaps rebooted their career a couple of times… That would be a great topic for later this year.

[Dan] Hey!

[Piper] Hey-o!

[Howard] And yet, we don't really notice them until this thing happens. Well, that's not a debut author. That is a ten-year overnight success.

[Dan] One of the examples I love to use is Hilary Mantel. She started small, she got big, and then with Wolf Hall, she got huge. She got massive. She had a BBC miniseries. All of these things. That was the first time most of her readers had ever heard of her. So, in a sense, that was emerging with the Big Bang. She just had to write 20 other books 1st.

[Piper] Right. Patricia Briggs is my favorite, favorite author in the urban fantasy space. But I read her before she hit big with the Mercy Thompson series. She had the Sianim series, she had Hurog series, she had a really, really fun adorable book, The Hob's Bargain that I was in love with and have read 50 bajillion times and had to buy three new copies of that book. So she was out there already for quite a few years before she ever wrote urban fantasy. People are like, "Oh. She hit big." But she was already out there, friends. She was already out there, she had written quite a few books already before the Mercy Thompson series came out, and that hit.

[Dongwon] To sort of go back, though, and answer the actual question, if you all don't mind?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Oh, fine.

[Dongwon] What we do do is we say it is a traditional debut, or a traditionally published debut. You put parentheses around traditionally published and you make the font really little, so it looks like it's just a debut. That's the actual answer.

[Dan] I'm glad that you hit that. Okay, so there is one aspect of this that I do want to touch on a little bit, which is awards. Again, I don't think that your goal should be to win awards. Your goal should be to write good books in a long-term career. But, for example, the Astounding Award for Best New Author, which is connected to the Hugo, that one, I… You can only win that in the first two years of publishing. But they look… They do, for that one, look at specific markets. So they don't count self pub for that. To my knowledge. That could change any day. Because as we said these things are still in flux. So. There is that. But I don't want anyone listening to this episode to say, "Oh, I've got a fantastic book. I'm going to wait three years to publish it because I want to make sure I have a shot at the Astounding Award." That's not your goal.

[Howard] "I don't want to spoil my Astounding eligibility." No, what you don't want to spoil is you're not getting paid for writing these words.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Howard] Let's go turn these words into money.

[Piper] Awards, actually, don't often boost your sales. Like, there's a spike. Don't get me wrong, there is a spike. But they don't skyrocket your career in the big picture and the long tail.

[Dongwon] The thing I always say is that awards are a sign that other things are going well. Awards are a consequence, not a goal.

[Piper] Agreed.

[Dan] Excellent way of putting it. We are going to end our episode right here, and we are all kind of on egg shells because Howard told us he has a secret homework planned and he wouldn't tell us what it was.

[Howard] Okay. The secret homework plan is I want you to write the Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path thing. What you're going to do, you're going to build yourself a flowchart with little decision points about your manuscript. Is this going to sell into a wider market? Is this a niche market? Do I want to hand sell a bunch of copies? Do I want to sell it to one person? Do I have test readers in mind? How do I feel about this manuscript? You're going to write this thing, and in writing this thing, start fleshing out the flowchart. Start fleshing out the flowchart, and write a fun fiction about your Adventurous Publishing Path. Fill every one of those pages. I promise you, when you are done with this, you will be the first person ever to have written this.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because it's ridiculous. But also, I promise you, you'll be way more excited about choosing these things, because you will have begun imagining yourself making the difficult decisions.

[Dongwon] Please work hard to keep it from becoming GrimDark.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Oh, I want to read the GrimDark one.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That's going to be great.

[Piper] Make it light! And fun.

[Howard] He didn't win the Astounding Award. Something got hit by a meteor. All right. Dan, take us home. Please.

[Laughter]

[Dan] From where?

[Howard] The ruins of civilization.

[Dan] Okay. Unlike Howard, you have no excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.08: Q&A on a Ship

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/23/15-08-qa-on-a-ship/

Q&A Points:

Q: What have any of you learned in the past year that has improved your craft?

A: Talk to your editor early in the process. Use an outboard brain. Do the hard thing. Take a chance, make mistakes, and do something because it might be fun. Go watch Lindsay Ellis Three Act Structure. (Maybe this one? https://youtu.be/o0QO7YuKKdI)

Q: My question is when you're having trouble, how do you know if it's a "I don't feel like writing today" problem or there's a structural problem that your mind is trying to ignore because it would be difficult to deal with?

A: Look at the problem, what is the barrier to moving the story forward? Make yourself a checklist, an inventory of things that can go wrong. Trust your instincts.

Q: As published professional authors, how far ahead do you plan the futures of your careers? Do you know what genres, series, or even specific books that you'll be working on in five years or in 15 years?

A: Committed idiot. Plan ahead, but publishing is volatile. Strategy, planning, but be ready to drop it. Be ready to jump in a different direction. Have a roadmap, and build a new one if you need to. Diversified income. Make plans for multiple scenarios, for whatever happens at cost points.

Q: How do you tell when a fight or a battle or a climactic final showdown is going on for too long?

A: When you wonder if it's gone on too long.

Q: How do you continue to learn and improve on your writing craft, now that you're further in your career? Have there been any times that you felt like you've plateaued and what do you do about it?

A: Learn by teaching. Externalize and explain, talk through the process.

Q: When you're working on multiple projects, how do you manage or prioritize yourself such that you don't get too disconnected from one project while you're working on another?

A: Identify different phases, and avoid doubling up on phases.

Q: If you've got multiple characters with very strong voices, how do you feel about having multiple first-person perspectives? Horribly bad idea or just really difficult?

A: Try it. See how it reads.

Q: What are the most important elements to include on the last page of your book?

A: The end is a frame, matching your beginning. Show who the character is now, how things have changed, and give the reader the emotional punch you've been aiming at.

Q: What are some things we can do to work on developing and strengthening voice when writing in the third person?

A: Rhythms that are linked to the character's personality, idioms, metaphors. Make the character feel specific and vivid.

Q: How do you decide who works best as an alpha reader and who works better as a beta reader?

A: Experience and personal preference. What are you looking for in readers, how are you using them?

Q: My question is in secondary world fiction, can you talk about how to decide between calling a horse just a horse or something unique to the world?

A: Does it connect to your story? If a horse is just a horse, call it a horse.

Q: How much leeway will an agent generally give a new writer if they like the idea or concept of a story or see promise in it, but it isn't quite there yet?

A: Agents work with people, not projects. If they believe in the person, they get lots of leeway.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Eight.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on a Ship.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] I've been on this ship for several days now.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Which is a lot longer than 15 minutes. We are here at the 2019 Writing Excuses Retreat on a cruise ship in the Caribbean Sea. Actually, right now we're in the Gulf of Mexico. We have a live audience in front of us. Say hello, live audience.

[Whoo!]

[Dan] Awesome. We have asked them to ask us some questions. Our theme this whole year is the questions of the audience. We've been trying to answer them, we'll continue doing that throughout. Now, we have some live ones. So, our first question. Tell us your name and your question.

[Caleb] This is Caleb. I'm wondering what any of you have learned in the past year that has improved your craft?

[Mary Robinette] What any of us have learned in the past year that has improved our craft? I actually learned the value of talking to my editor really early in the process. One of the things that happened to me this year was that I had a number of events that derailed me from writing. I was working on a novel, and my usual process did not work. So… When I say editor, what I guess I mean is using an outboard brain. My usual process was not working, because I kept having life things go wrong. There were some family members at hospitals, then we were moving, and it was just a lot of things. Going to someone else and saying, "I cannot hold this story in my head. Please help me focus." was immensely valuable and actually got me back on track.

[Dongwon] That's convenient, because the lesson I learned this year was to talk to my clients early in the process.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] To make sure that everything's on track. I think one of the things that I learned that kind of lined up with that is to not be afraid to push people to do the thing that is hard. Right? In that sometimes when you're giving editorial feedback, because you're working with somebody who puts their heart and soul into a manuscript, into a book, you want to be… You want to be nice, right? You want to go easy on them in certain ways because you like this person, you work with this person. For me, one of the things I had to really learn in this past year is to get involved early and don't be afraid of saying, "Is this really the right choice? Is this the best way to get where you're going?" Sometimes, breaking it down and doing the hard work is the most important thing. Whether or not that's going to make someone upset.

[Howard] For me, it was when I joined the TypeCastRPG role-playing game and decided that, you know what, for fun, I think I'm going to try to live sketch things that happen during the game. The pressure there being I need to turn out a… What is ultimately a single panel comic strip that depends on the context of the game in a minute and a half. Then we did a live show at [FanEx] and they set up an Elmo and I… To borrow the metaphor, screwed the courage to the wall and said, "I'm going to make terrible, terrible mistakes and I'm going to do it when my arms are 10 feet long on this screen behind me…"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "But I'm going to do it anyway because it might be fun." It unlocked a piece of my brain that allowed me to visualize more quickly and draw faster and draw things I've never drawn before.

[Dan] Fantastic. Just, really quick for me, I talked about this in one of the classes that I taught here on the retreat, the Lindsay Ellis's episode about three act structure and the way that she explained it made three act structure work for me in a way that it never has before. So everyone go watch that. It's brilliant.

[Dan] All right. We have another question.

[Allison] Hi. My name is Allison. My question is when you're having trouble, how do you know if it's a "I don't feel like writing today" problem or there's a structural problem that your mind is trying to ignore because it would be difficult to deal with?

[Mary Robinette] I wish I knew the answer to that one.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's a really super common problem. The way I evaluate it is whether or not… Is to interrogate the quest… The problem that I'm having. I look at the problem and I'm like, "Okay. What is the barrier between me and moving this story forward?" If it's… If I can't identify a barrier, that means that it's probably me, it is not actually the story. If it is… Sometimes it is… There is actually a problem with the story that is really difficult to diagnose. That's when handing it to someone else to look at becomes useful. But most of the time, if I ask just what is the barrier that is between me and moving forward, or the character and moving forward, that will unlock what the problem is.

[Howard] I've found that, for a lot of people, by the time you reach a point in your writing career where you're comfortable answering this question, you may have moved beyond actually writing down the equivalent of a preflight checklist. But having a preflight checklist, having a way to take inventory of the things that can be wrong… They might be diagnostic tools like pacing, three act structure, character arc, conflict, seven point whatever… The sorts of things that we talk about here on Writing Excuses all the time. When I'm writing jokes, I have this sort of checklist. I've internalized it. But what I found is that when I'm stuck, I have to take inventory. A lot of the times, it's me. I haven't had enough sleep. I haven't eaten correctly. I'm exhausted because of an emotional thing. The temperature in the room is wrong and it's making me grouchy. This character is at the wrong point in their character arc for me to write the scene that I want to write, therefore, I don't feel justified in writing it. By the time I'm able to articulate these things, the unlocking starts moving really quickly. I can see where the problems are, and where the problems aren't.

[Dongwon] I think it's probably the most frustrating advice I give, and also the most important advice that I like to give, is that you need to learn to trust your instincts. Right? But this is a case where it's very hard to tell where the line between your conscious thought and your instinct is. So, the thing I think about a lot is what Howard was just talking about is the ways in which your conscious and subconscious mind are connected to your embodiment, right? So, a lot of things that can help you are really core mental health and mindfulness techniques, right? Meditation, yoga, go for a run, go take a shower, go take a break. Find something that uses up part of your brain so that your subconscious can chew on it. Then come back to it when you're feeling calm and relaxed and centered, and try and get in touch with what is your core emotion here? What is your instinct telling you, versus what is your fear telling you? Right? If that instinct is saying, "Actually, it's a structural problem here," then focus on that, and do that hard work. On average, if you're having that question, you're probably right, that the problem is bigger than I don't feel like writing right now. On average.

[Mary Robinette] I forgot that I have an entire blog post on this that we'll put in the liner notes. Which is… For those people who never go to look at the liner notes, you can search for it. It's called Sometimes Writer's Block Is Really Depression. I talk about how to diagnose the kind of delays that you are having and the kind of… Like, if your drowsy, it's probably that your story is boring. If you are restless, it's probably that you don't actually know the next thing that's going to happen or you don't believe it actually, I think. But, anyway, Sometimes Writer's Block Is Really Depression. It includes how to diagnose it, and then a long list of tools for when it is… The problem is not with the manuscript, but external to the manuscript, to your own life. Some things to help you move forward.

[Dan] Awesome. Cool. Next question.

[Matt] Hello, my name is Matt Chambers. My question is as published professional authors, how far ahead do you plan the futures of your careers? Do you know what genres, series, or even specific books that you'll be working on in five years or in 15 years?

[Howard] 10 years ago…

[Dan] Now I'm just depressed.

[Laughter]

[Howard] 10 years ago, I could have told you that 10 years from now, I would definitely still be doing Schlock Mercenary. Five years ago, I could have told you when the major Schlock Mercenary mega arc was going to end. Two years ago, I could have, but wouldn't have, told you how it was going to end and what all the book plans and plot plans were around that. This year, I am re-thinking all of that, because I was probably an idiot, but I'm committed, so I'm sticking to it in a blind panic.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Committed idiot is actually a great thing to put on my business cards. Six years ago, I had the very best year of my career up to that point, and since.

[Howard] Oh, dear.

[Dan] I thought at the time that I knew I would be doing six years later, and had no idea that one of my publishers was going to dry up completely, that one of my series was going to tank abysmally. So, kind of my answer to this is that it is very smart to plan ahead, but that this industry is very volatile. A lesson I did not learn early enough is how to plan around that volatility. The good news is we're going to have one, and possibly two, episodes on this exact topic later in the year with Dongwon about how to plan out your career and how that career can change and how to reboot it when it falls apart.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I love talking to my clients about strategy. A lot of times, what most of them are planning three, four… Not even books, like 3 to 4 contracts out, right? And a contract can be 2 to 3 books. So it's what are we doing here, what's coming after that, what's coming after that? The important thing, as Dan kind of touched on, is that you have to be sort of ready to throw all of that out at the drop of a hat, right? Publishing is extremely volatile, you have no idea what's going to happen when that book hits the market. So you have to be kind of ready to jump in a different direction. Sometimes you have backup plans, and sometimes you don't. But always have something… Some roadmap of where you want to go. Then be ready to build a new one when you need to.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I… Much like everyone else, my plans change. The things that… For me, the metrics that have been working is that I have… I have kept my income stream diversified, so that's why I have three different careers running simultaneously. So that when one of them is not doing well, I can fill in the gaps with one of the others. I also think about the shape that I want my career to take. That, generally, is that I want to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. Which means that if a really lucrative contract comes in, and I'm like, "That looks… I mean, the money looks really great, but I don't want to be pigeonholed into doing that kind of work," that's not… That is something that I can think about turning down, and that I can decide in the moment. I have a giant list of novels that I want to write. I won't get to write them all, probably. But I keep them. Then, I think, the last piece of advice that I was just given this past year… I was in an enviable position, which is that I had just won the Nebula and the Locus, and we were looking at the Hugo. I was like… People kept saying, "Well, you're going to win it." I'm like, "You can't think that. That's not healthy. Certainly not healthy for me." Then my agent, Seth Fishman, said I should think about it like applying to college. That you don't know whether or not you're going to get into college, but you make plans for both scenarios. You make plans for well, if I get into college, I'm going to need to be able to put these things into place. If I don't get into college, then these are the backup plans that I have and this is how I'm going to occupy my life. So I think that that's one of the things that is very useful, is to think about the possible cusp points in your career, and to think about positive outcomes for either cusp point. So that's… That has been very helpful for me. Fortunately, I did get into college, in this particular scenario.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it was also… Even the positive things can rock you if you are not prepared for them.

[Dan] Awesome. I want to pause right now for our book of the week, which is also Mary Robinette.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I want to talk about a book called Jade War, which is the sequel to Fonda Lee's… Wait. Yes. The sequel to Fonda Lee's Jade City. I just had this moment of thinking that I had them backwards. So, I blurbed the first book, and the second book is every bit as fantastic. It is the Godfather meets like a Kung Fu wire film. It's secondary world fantasy, but it feels like 1960s or 70s Earth. But there are people who can use jade and they can do magic, except they don't think of it as magic, it's just part of an… It's just completely woven into the world. It feels so real that I am surprised that it is not. The relationships are compelling. If you are someone who likes a well-written sex scene, it is not the entirety of the book, but there are a couple in there that are some of the hottest and… Like, really beautifully drawn consensual sex scenes. The consensual parts is the part that I find appealing. But the…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Just the entire thing, it's great. It's Jade War by Fonda Lee.

[Dan] Cool. Thank you very much.

[Dan] Now, we still have several questions to get… Left. We want to try to get to them all. We're going to let this episode run a little long. But we're going to call this the lightning round, okay? So ask your question, and then one of us will answer it instead of all four. So, go.

[Cameron] Okay. Hey, guys, my name is Cameron. I was wondering how do you tell when a fight or a battle or a climactic final showdown is going on for too long?

[Dongwon] When you wonder if it's gone on too long.

[Laughter]

[Dan] [Haha!] Excellent answer. Next?

[Chuckles]

[Caitlin] Hi, I'm Caitlin. How do you continue to learn and improve on your writing craft, now that you're further in your career? Have there been any times that you felt like you've plateaued and what do you do about it?

[Mary Robinette] I learn by teaching. When I was a pup… Getting trained in puppetry, what my instructor had me do is he would have me learn everything with my right hand, he would teach me with my right hand, then he would have me teach my left hand how to do it. What he said was any time you have to externalize and explain what you're doing, even if it's to yourself, that it causes you to hone your craft and to get rid of the parts that aren't important. I find that when I am teaching students, even if it's someone that is a peer and just saying, "Hey, this is the thing that I've learned today." Even if they don't necessarily need to know it, but I'm talking through the process, that it makes me better at my craft.

[Jessica] Hi, I'm Jessica. When you're working on multiple projects, how do you manage or prioritize yourself such that you don't get too disconnected from one project while you're working on another?

[Dan] My answer to that has always been that I will identify the different phases that each project has to go through, and then make sure that I'm not doubling them up. So I'm never writing two things at a time, but I could be writing one while revising another or outlining another or editing or proofing or whatever it is. That way, it makes it much easier for me to keep them in my brain, because they're all in different parts of my brain.

[Kevin] Hi. I'm Kevin. If you've got multiple characters with very strong voices, how do you feel about having multiple first-person perspectives? Horribly bad idea or just really difficult?

[Howard] I love the way POV use changes in our culture over time. I think that that could work. I don't know that I've seen it done, but I've thought about doing it myself. I think that 20 years from now, that could end up being the rule rather than an exception, because these sorts of things are cultural. If it's what you want to do, go for it.

[Dongwon] I just want to jump in with one little note, is the thing I run into a lot from writers and in the writing community, is people think about POV really, really rigidly. So, like, if I start in third person limited, I have to stay that way all throughout. Whereas, I think, we're seeing a lot of things that are really pushing back against that. N. K. Jemisin's Fifth Season is a really great example. Even Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside, you'll see POV jump around from first person to third person, you'll see tense shifts, things like that. So feel free to really sort of experiment with the different perspectives and the different POV's that you have. You can drop into one just for a chapter or a scene, and then they can never reappear again. So, feel free to try different things and experiment and see how it reads. I think writers and crit groups are very focused on consistent POV. I don't think readers even notice.

[Emma] Hi. I'm Emma. What are the most important elements to include on the last page of your book?

[Oooo]

[Howard] Your Patreon.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So, what I think about when I get to the end is it is a frame. I am framing something that I set up at the beginning. At the beginning, I made promises to the reader. One of the things that I promised them is that they would feel a certain way when they get to the end. So when I look at that last paragraph, I think about it as the beginning in reverse, the inverse of that. I try to make sure that I'm showing who my character is now, where they are now, and the ways in which things have shifted. Doing that in a way that makes the reader have that emotional punch that I had been going for through the whole thing. Like, if I had been wanting them to have a sense of dread all the way through, and then the catharsis of relief, then that last thing needs to contain relief. If I want them to still feel dread, then that last thing still needs to have dread in it. So it's a… For me, it's the frame, it's the button, and that's what I look for at the end.

[Jess] Hi. I'm Jess. What are some things we can do to work on developing and strengthening voice when writing in the third person?

[Mary Robinette] I can take that one.

[Dan] Do it.

[Mary Robinette] So. Coming from theater and audiobook, the thing about third person and the way… Is that it is actually still very much first-person in this real simple way. The narrator is telling a story to the audience. The narrator is sometimes very closely linked to a third person character, but even so, there is a storyteller who is speaking to the audience. What you're looking for with the voice are rhythms that are linked to the character's personality. If it is a tight limited third person, you want to use everything… You want to make sure that the idioms that you're using, the metaphors that they're using, that these are all linked to how they self define themselves. All of that is going to make the character feel specific and vivid in ways that aiming for the so-called transparent prose will not.

[Morgan] Hi, I'm Morgan. How do you decide who works best as an alpha reader and who works better as a beta reader?

[Howard] Sad, sorry experience.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah. I mean, that really is the answer. I know Mary Robinette and I, for example, have very different criteria as to who we count as an alpha and who we count as a beta reader. That… It all comes down to experience and personal preference, I think.

[Howard] For my own part, an alpha reader… When I've handed it to an alpha reader and gotten it back, I want to feel energized about doing the things that need to be done to fix it. I want my offer readers to energize me. My beta readers I want to be a little more critical and help me fine-tune things. But I'm fragile that way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I'm… Just to demonstrate that we are sometimes counter. The thing that I'm looking for in a beta… In an alpha reader is someone who is asking me the right questions to help me unpack it a little bit further so that the beta readers are getting something that is closer to the story that I'm trying to tell. The beta readers, I am using them as a general, but the alpha reader… For me, the alpha reader in this case is Alessandra Meechum [sp?], most of the time, and she is… She's what is sometimes called the ideal reader, which is that she represents the core audience that I am writing for. So when I'm writing, I am specifically writing to see whether or not I make her go, "Oh, I love this," or "I hate this so much."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That often pleases me a great deal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] So it depends how you're using them. I'm using her to shape the story. I've spotted… Sometimes I'll spot someone in beta and go, "Oh. You also sit in that ideal reader category." There are some stories that I'm going to write at some point that she will not be the ideal reader for, and I'll switch out alphas for that story. But that's what I look for.

[Dan] It's worth pointing out that Alessandra is in the room, and beaming like the sun to be referred to as an ideal reader. So.

[Nick] Hello. I'm Nick. My question is in secondary world fiction, can you talk about how to decide between calling a horse just a horse or something unique to the world?

[Oooo]

[Dongwon] I would say only rename things if there's a big sort of… If it connects to the core of your story, right? If the question you're asking is about, I don't know, national identity, for example, then it can be very complicated to use an existing country or an existing sort of language structure. So… If… Unless you're asking the question of what is the meaning of horse, then I wouldn't rename it, right? But if you're trying to disrupt ideas of like what do we consider animals, what do we consider our relationship to them, what are beasts of burden, then that's a case where maybe playing with it would give you an opportunity to really do a lot more there. But, in general, if it's a horse, call it a horse.

[Matthew] Hello, my name is Matthew. How much leeway will an agent generally give a new writer if they like the idea or concept of a story or see promise in it, but it isn't quite there yet?

[Dongwon] I wonder who's going to answer this one?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I don't know. Well, I'll take… No.

[Dongwon] The thing that I talk about a lot is that I work with people, not projects. Right? I sign a client, I don't sign a single book. So, the answer is if I believe in the person, then all the leeway in the world, right? That's something that we'll work together to make it right. What goes into that decision is hard to articulate in a lot of ways. But I have to be excited about this person's potential to do something really interesting… Even if they're not quite there yet. So there are clients I've worked with for years and years and years, and we haven't gotten out with anything. But we're still working together, we're still honing in on what the right project is… Or how to do X, Y, or Z. So, the answer is, it depends a lot on the person. The right circumstances, it's okay if that book isn't quite there, so long as I can see you're doing something interesting and I can see that you are someone who has all the chops, all the drive, all the ambition to get to where you need to get to.

[Dan] Great. So, that is all our questions that we have. I'm sure that there are many more burning in your hearts right now, but… Thank you for listening. We have a piece of homework for you. So, once again, we're throwing this to Dongwon.

[Dongwon] So, I think that the openings of novels are really, really important. It's a great opportunity to hook your reader. More than that, it's an opportunity to get someone to say, "Yes, I'm going to spend $20 or whatever it is to buy this book." So what I would like each of you to do is take the first line of your work in progress or something that you've finished and rewrite it three separate times. Make sure that when you write each one, it's not three variations on the same sentence. Try and shake those up as much as possible, right? Try a different voice. Try a different style. Try different… Even like points to start the scene and see what jumps out at you. What is the most exciting, what grabs you, what are you excited about to keep going with. I think that will tell you a lot about how your opening scenes should work so that your pulling the reader into your story as forcefully as possible.

[Dan] Perfect. Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/02/16/15-07-creating-chapters/

Key Points: How do you make chapters? Feeling! Some people create them, others chop things into chapters. Chapters have a beginning, middle, and an end, like a short story. Chapters have a miniature arc of action. Chapters are like episodes, climbing towards a finale. Chapters interlock, forming a part of a book. Take your outline, which describes scenes, and think about what scenes can be combined into a single chapter, thematically or emotionally. Pay attention to the page turn! The chapter break forces a new beginning. How do you begin and end chapters? Do you do cliffhangers or not? Chapter titles, first lines, first paragraphs may signal what a chapter is going to be about. The beginning of a chapter is like the first line of a book, a place to grab the reader and pull them into reading more. Use cliffhangers sparingly. Try to use cliffhangers with a promise of what you are going to get, rather than just question marks. Pay attention to genre, thrillers need tension. Make your chapters rewarding, but keep your readers wanting more, too.

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode Seven.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Creating Chapters.

[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 are, again, taking questions that we have been given and creating episodes around them. This one is a common question we get asked, which is, how do you make chapters? How do you decide where to break your stories up, and how to divide them up? I get this a lot, like in Q&A sessions that I'll do and things like that. It's always kind of hard to answer, because it's not a thing I studied. It's not a thing I ever looked at in anyone else's books. It's just a thing that I just started doing, and it just felt natural. I talk to a lot of writers, and that's how it goes. Right?

[Victoria] Yeah, it's hard to sit here and think about what are the mechanics or what are the rules. I feel like we're going to be able to talk about a lot of our personal guiding principles, but not necessarily any codified guidelines for something like this.

[Dan] Yeah. Although the good news is, based on what we're saying, listeners, you can take away that, at the very least, this isn't something that matters is much as you think it does. Right? You can kind of fake your way through it until you get a feel for it, and it will turn out better than you expect it to.

[Howard] We had a difficult time naming this episode. I think… I just realized the disconnect for me is that I don't create chapters, I chop things into chapters. I had a thing that is… I have a thing that exists, and I am deciding where the breakpoints are. Rather than saying, "Wow, I need a chapter here." As we prepared for the recording sessions today, we have a craft services table with food for us. I got to unwrap a block of cheese. That block of cheese is probably way less interesting than the novel, but it needed to be cut into chapters, it needed to be cut into pieces so that Howard didn't just walk away with a fistful of cheese. That's the way I think about it. These are…

[Dan] I mean, he still did, but…

[Howard] Well, that's because cranberry wensleydale is crack.

[Brandon] See, it's interesting because I do create chapters. I'm not taking the whole and just chopping it up. When I'm creating an outline, one of the things I'm doing is I'm… I'm just getting it all on there. But when I sit down for the day's work, I say, "All right, what do I need to achieve today? How can I form a chapter out of that? How can I have a rising action, how can I have questions be answered, how can I actually create something that feels like it has a beginning, middle, and an end?" Basically, I'm going to create a short story set in the world that is a continuation of other short stories.

[Howard] So, your chapters take shape after the initial outlines. I don't want to suggest that I do chapters when the final prose is done. Yeah, I'm the same way. In that I outline, but I don't outline to the chapters. They take shape later.

[Victoria] I think I'm in Brandon's camp here in that I don't like thinking about how hard it is to write a book.

[Chuckles]

[Victoria] A book is a very long, very daunting thing. What my plots do is essentially function like a series of escalating episodes. I treat each chapter as a short story, as a short story of kind of interlocking stories. Almost like a season of television than a movie. So when I'm approaching a chapter, whether it's a short chapter for middle grade or a longer chapter for a fantasy, I make sure that I have a miniature arc of action happening within that chapter. I want to fulfill certain promises. I want to not only move my characters from A to B physically and emotionally, but I almost wanted to feel like an exciting little episode that does something in the interest of climbing the steps toward my finale.

[Brandon] Yeah, the great thing about this also is once you learn this with chapters, like… I don't want to imply this isn't important to learn. That's not what I was meaning at the beginning, because I think it is. But it's something you can pick up on your own. The great thing is, once you start to learn it… People ask, "How do you create a thousand page fantasy novel? How do you create…" I've got Stormlight Archive which is two arcs of five in a 10 book series, and each… It gets, like, that is way easier than learning to create chapters, which you do over time, practicing, at least I did. Once I got able to interlock these scenes, basically episodes, I could be like, all right, these 10 episodes make a part of the book. Three of those make an entire novel. Three of those make a super arc through a series. Then you start to do this, and the chapter is where that all begins for me.

[Victoria] I do the same thing, I think. Shades of Magic is broken into something like 10 parts, each part has maybe 5 to 6 chapters in it. Each part is functioning as almost a season arc. The entire book is like a TV show. Each chapter within the arc is like an episode of the season. I know that I want to create a certain pace. But also, I do this from a complete self-preservation standpoint of I would get completely overwhelmed if I couldn't break it down into a substantial… Like substantially a smaller piece. On top of that, I like the satisfaction of a chapter that feels like we go through all of the emotional beats that I want you to. I wanted to feel… I have books where I have had a one-page chapter. I'm not saying you can't do that, to a different effect. But in something like… The longer the format, the more daunting it is, the more I recommend that writers begin to think of them as many, many bricks in a wall.

[Dan] When I started, my chapters were basically just how much can I write in one day. Which is why in Serial Killer, every chapter is about 2500 words. Because that's what I was doing back then. That's still my most successful book, so maybe that's a good way to do it. But, like, by the time I got to Makeover, which was like my 16th published book, I had… I'd become much more of an outliner. So when I create an outline, it's this big massive thing that tells me scene by scene everything that's going to happen. Then I will look at that and go, okay, which of these scenes need to be combined into a single chapter? Which is a little different than what you're talking about, at least narratively. Because there's not a single thread of storyline that goes from the beginning of this chapter to the end, because it will have two or three different scenes and possibly different viewpoints in it. But I try to do that in a way where they're all thematically linked together, or where there is an emotional through-line through it. So we're going to talk about this aspect of the story or the world or the technology or the magic. We're going to see one character deal with it, and then a different character deal with it in a different way. They will inform each other. That will form a chapter.

[Howard] Chapters and prose really are the one place where prose and comics share a structure, and that is the guarantee to page turn. With comics, you're always writing to the page turn. Because there is a visual reveal that is huge when you turn the page. With prose, you never think about that because you don't know where the pagination is going to be yet. With electronic publishing, you know even less. Except for the chapter break. You are… I have yet to read an e-book where I was forced to see the beginning of the next chapter while I could still see the end of the previous chapter. For me, that's huge. Because it means there is this psychological shift tween that thing I just read and not being able to read anything… I'm making the gesture, turning the page with my hands… And now there is all new information all at once. That is… I think that's important to think about, because even if they're just pushing a button to do it, you, the writer, now have a moment of physical puppetry control over the reader. You know they're doing anything. What can you do with words in order to make that more effective? I probably just made it a lot more difficult for everybody, didn't I?

[Dan] No. That's actually brilliant. I've never thought of it in those terms, but I can look back… Even that first one, at Serial Killer, and see places where I did that. Where, hey, you need to be… "I'll see you in the morning." Then the chapter break is, "By the time I got there, they were already dead." You can do tricks like that. That's… Now I'm going to have to think about that and try and do it on purpose.

[Chuckles]

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

[Victoria] Yeah. So, the book of the week is Docile by K. M. Sparza. It's a debut novel, coming out in April. It's a really, really fascinating examination of consent under capitalism. It is a slight near future alternate history in which our debt crisis has reached a point in which people are selling themselves into kind of an indentured servitude for a variety of functions. In order to forget this part of their lives when they do choose to sell it… In order to erase their family's debt, they take a drug called Dociline. It's about two young men in the story. One who has decided to sell his family's debt off, and with it, himself, and has decided to refuse Dociline because of what it did to his mother. The other one is the one who buys his contract and is the heir to the Dociline Empire. It is about an examination of consent, of really, really interesting gender and sexuality, a lot of fascinating themes, and also, just a delightful read.

[Brandon] Excellent. Docile by K. M. Sparza.

]Transcriptionist note; Google Books says Content warning: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.]

[Brandon] Coming back to this, let's talk about… One of the other questions asks about how we begin chapters. I want to talk both about beginnings and endings. Because, thinking about it, where I break a chapter is often based on where I began a chapter. Because chapters work very well for me if I have some sort of note I can hit again near the end to signal, hey, we've completed this arc, or a character's looking for something, the character finds something. It's this MICE quotient thing Mary Robinette likes to talk about, I'm using very instinctively in creating chapters. So, how do you begin and end chapters, and then, kind of a question of this, if you want to talk about… Sometimes you want to end a chapter on a cliffhanger, sometimes you don't. What's the difference there?

[Victoria] Um… Go ahead.

[Dan] So, when I wrote Zero G and started my middle grade series, I wanted to give chapter titles. Because that's kind of a very good middle grade thing, I always loved chapter titles when I was a kid. That enabled me to set things up… This chapter is about X. Like, you know that right off the bat because there's a title that tells you. I realized, in the process of doing that, that that's kind of what I had previously been using first lines or first paragraphs to do. As a way of signaling a little more subtly this chapter is going to be about this character trying to do X. Some way of setting up, here's what you're in for, this is my promise, this is my establishing shot.

[Howard] Chapters, for me, are… The first line of a chapter is an opportunity for me to revisit the experience of the first line of the book, because often the first line of the book gets so much attention that, for me, anyway, the pros ins up far more refined. Not purple necessarily, but every word is exactly in place. I try to give that consideration to the beginnings of chapters because I see those as decision points for the reader. The… A lot of times, when I'm reading a book, I will turn the page to a chapter and realize, "Oh. Oh, this character. I'm not all this interested in this point of view." But, if there is some turn of phrase or some something right there at the beginning, to reward me for having turned the page… I'll muscle through it. But I'm a bad reader.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Don't write for me.

[Victoria] Yeah, because I write my chapters like short stories, I do put the same amount of emphasis into the beginning and end of each chapter as I would the beginning and end of the novel. I also really… I love it, like I come out of a poetry background, I love the challenge of trying to distill, not necessarily a premonition of what that chapter's going to be, but I write multiple perspectives. For me, that opening line of each chapter is a way to instantly ground you in the voice. Because I don't mark it. I don't start the chapter by telling you whose perspective it's in. So I'm relying on the moment of perception. I write it from third person, so it's just a close third. But the moment of perception at the beginning of the chapter can tell you so much about the person that you're following, about the things that they notice, not only what they're going to be going through in kind of a hinting way, but just where their emotions are at, where their mind is that, all those things. Then, yes, like Brandon, I am somebody who because I write them like short stories, and one of my favorite things in short stories is the full circle moment, I love finding a way to echo by the end of the chapter where we are at. Then, every now and then, I try really hard not to overuse the cliffhanger ending because I think it gets tired. I think you have to use it sparingly. I think there's a difference between having enough tension to make you turn the page and having a dum dum dum moment.

[Brandon] Right. I've… We've talked about this before on the podcast. I've… The further I've come in my career, the more I've disliked the cliffhanger that says, "And he went to open the door and…" dum dum dum. I've liked the cliffhanger that says, "And he opened the door and his ex-wife was there." Right? Like, the cliffhanger that promises you something rather what you're going to get rather than promising you a question mark. When you can make those work, I like them. I do like to use chapters occasionally to force the page turn. I think you do have to use those, particularly in epic fantasy, you have to use it wisely. The longer your book, the fewer of these, I think, you can actually use. Which is counterintuitive. But if it's a short book, it's… You feel less guilty making them read it all in one or two sittings. If it's a long book, that will get exhausting.

[Dan] Well, that's what I was going to say, too, is, in addition to book length, consider the book genre. Writing in thrillers, you want every chapter to end on something tense. Maybe a cliffhanger, maybe not, but if you ever get to a point of rest where your reader can say, "Oh, okay, everything's cool. No one's in danger right now, I can go to sleep." You're writing your thriller weirdly.

[Victoria] Yeah. So, I have a big fantasy series that I feel like behaves more in these epic ways, where you have to use them sparingly, where every chapter really functions like an episode. Then, I have a series wherein I wanted to feel like a comic book without pictures. In that case, it is the chop, chop, chop of the turn. It is treating every chapter like a moment. In that case, there is more grouping of chapters into a smaller arc. But it's about… You can use brevity to the same effect that you can use length. You can use any element, like we're obviously talking a lot about the opening line and the ending line, but every aspect of a chapter is the utility that you have, from the voice to the length to the paragraph formatting, everything that you choose to do. To how many scenes you want, whether you want to have scene breaks within the chapter or not. I think it's about setting rules and expectations for your reader. It's really weird if every chapter of your book is like 30 pages long, except for two, unless those two moments are affecting something that is extremely dramatic.

[Howard] Episode five of season two of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, one of my favorite episodes, and it structures for me, it outlines what I kind of feel like a perfect chapter is, because, all of the threads come together in this moment of triumph, and then we get a POV and realize, oh, wait, that wasn't all the threads. Oh, a bad thing happened. End of episode. Page turn. So it's enormously rewarding, and then there's this piece at the end. It's not that it's super short, there's this piece at the end which absolutely draws me further in. Yeah, my philosophy on chapters is that I want every one of them to be rewarding. I want people to be excited that they read that, but I want to leave them wanting more, so that the next chapter is something they'll turn to.

[Victoria] Well, I just want to say, I think rewarding is a key word here, because rewarding is different from dramatic. Right? Like, I think there's a cheat code sense that if you want the chapter to be the most exciting version of itself, for the most rewarding version of itself, you have to end in this like dum dum dum, whether implied dum dum dum or actual dum dum dum. Sometimes, the most rewarding thing that a chapter can do is give you the equivalent of a full meal, and then the promise of something new. I think it's about also… It's about balance. It's about varying it between those things.

[Dan] So, just last week, I read Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, which is part of the Tiffany Aching series, one of my favorite ones. There was a chapter in there with a funeral. It ends with the funeral. There's no cliffhanger whatsoever. There's absolutely nothing to drive you forward. It is completely final. But. The way that the ending was written was so beautiful. It was this perfect capstone to the dead person's life, to the survivors moving on and still going forward, that I couldn't wait to read the next chapter. Because I'm like, "This is so beautiful. How can I not be reading this?"

[Brandon] Curiously, the Terry Pratchett young adult novels use chapters and his adult novels don't. There's no chapters, they just are scene, scene, scene, no numbers. I've always found that very interesting. Why he chose to do one way or another, I'm sure he answered at some point.

[Brandon] We are out of time for this episode. Although I have some homework for you. I would like you to take something you've written, and try moving the chapter breaks around. See how it feels to you to force yourself to end in the middle of what you thought was a scene. How to add more onto your chapter and end there. I bet you will find that you're doing this pretty naturally, that you're already creating these arcs. But maybe you'll learn something interesting about your writing and be a little more intentional about it. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

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.

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May 2026

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.13: Using Elections in Stories
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.12: Writing the Other – Being an Ally
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.11: Digital Is Different, with Cory Doctorow
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.09: Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.08: Q&A on a Ship
mbarker - Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters
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

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 15.13: Using Elections in Stories

Writing Excuses 15.12: Writing the Other – Being an Ally

Writing Excuses 15.11: Digital Is Different, with Cory Doctorow

Writing Excuses 15.10: Evaluating Ideas

Writing Excuses 15.09: Choose Your Own Adventurous Publishing Path

Writing Excuses 15.08: Q&A on a Ship

Writing Excuses 15.07: Creating Chapters

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

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