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Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/28/14-30-eating-your-way-to-better-worldbuilding/

Key points: Food, immigrants, culture, and eating are an obsession for many of us. Immigrants bring their food and adapt, but they also lock it in time. Eating is a sense of home. Beware the tendency to either have enormous feasts or stew in epic fantasies. Food and eating are central metaphors, that you can use to share things about a character. Watch out for rabbit starvation! Food has history, food comes from places. To get it right, make sure the food matters to a character, with a memory, and why that's important. Avoid the soup stone and stew, that we just ate, scene. Make sure the descriptions of food are nourishing, that they have a purpose, not just intestine stuffing. Meals should have meaning. Meals should also tell us something about the world. Think about the production behind the food. Watch out for mush or pills in the future! Give us Klingon foods, but as a good experience, something to try. Make it palatable.

[Transcription note: My apologies, but I have almost certainly confused Piper and Amal at some points in this transcript. Also, some phrases, such as what Amal's father calls intestine stuffing, are rough guesses, since I couldn't figure out the actual phrase.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 30.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, and Eating Your Way to Better Worldbuilding.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Piper] I'm Piper J. Drake.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice Broaddus.

[Piper] You're laughing.

[Maurice] I'm already laughing. That is correct.

[Piper] This is going to be so much fun. Okay. So. Along the lines of our title, which is Eating Your Way to Better Worldbuilding. Dongwon, I'm going to totally put you on the spot.

[Dongwon] So I really like to talk about food. If you've ever met me, I do it pretty much incessantly.

[Piper] Me, too!

[Dongwon] It's an obsession. I think it's an obsession for pretty much all of us. One of the reasons I like to talk about that is, in particular, I come from an immigrant family. Both my parents are immigrants, and food is one of the main ways I relate to culture. Both the culture that my parents came from, the culture of the South where I was raised and went to school, and, I live in New York City, which is where I get to interface with so many different cultures, primarily through eating the many, many delicious things that they make. I love to see this reflected in fiction, and not just the world that we exist in in our own bodies.

[Amal] Fun fact. I decided that Dongwon should be my agent based on the fact that he talked about food in really specific ways. In addition to his many other very fine qualities, like, he is in fact a really good agent. I had been stalking him on Twitter for a while in part because he telegraphed all of these recipes that he was doing and stuff. But there was one moment in particular where we were having our first kind of tentative conversation of do we want to work together, and he gave me this really amazing, mind blowing insight into the ways in which like, immigrants bring their food to new places. Which, I mean, I can say it right now, I think it's germane to the conversation. So I'm used to thinking about immigrants moving around the world and bringing their food with them in the way that that food changes is dependent on the available ingredients, right? So you can't find the stuff that you used to make your food back home, so you adapt and use different things. What Dongwon pointed out was that's not the only variable in the food changing. The other variable is time. In that when immigrants come, their food becomes kind of time locked in the moment when they immigrated. So that different waves of immigration can have very different foods. That you might… For instance, my family emigrated from Lebanon. The food that I am used to thinking of as Lebanese food might be very different from the food that I now find in Lebanon, because cuisines are constantly changing and adapting and so on, but there's a kind of time lock that happens to it in place. I'd never thought of this before, and because Dongwon clearly was thinking along lines that were just revelatory to me in the way that I think about food and culture and the way I move through the world and inheritance and all sorts of stuff, I was like, "Yeah. This guy here. [Garbled, inaudible].

[Piper] My mind is currently blown right now, because my parents are from Thailand, and what I grew up thinking of as Thai cooking, or just home cooking, is very, very different from what you would find in Thailand now. For example, there's plenty of people who've been linking me on social media, like Facebook, on the rolled icecream dealio? I never encountered that is a child going… In Thailand, when I was there in the summers. So I was like, "I have no idea what this thing is." They're like, "You should. It's from Thailand." I'm like, "Huhuhu. I would love to try it. But it was never there when I was a kid."

[Dongwon] Koreans have recently discovered cheese, and they are so excited about it. It's on everything right now. I find it horrifying. I don't think it goes with Korean flavors at all. But you go to Korea and they're eating it on everything. Whereas for me, the food that I think of as Korean food is like New York Korean food. Which is a very specific region and time and all those things combined.

[Maurice] So, I have a kind of complicated family structure. So, I was born in London, my mother's born in Jamaica, my father's born here in the States. So we have these three sort of cultures that always sort of clashed every Sunday afternoon, because we would always have family dinners together. So we'd always have to have food that represented each culture as we came to sit down for family meals. Which is great if you ever came over to our house to eat, because all of a sudden you have this big smorgasbord of food to choose from. But for us, eating became this centering element. So eating for us was always a sense of home. Which then, as before, becomes really interesting in my personal family, since I'm married interracially. I'm also the main cook in the family, due to some of my own early mistakes in the relationship.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Again, me and my wife are fine.

[Maurice] But in our first year of marriage, she had it in her head, this is what an ideal marriage would look like. So she would… I'd come home, she'd make these meals, and the meals would be waiting for me. Then I decided to make a joke. This was a solid joke. I swear this was… I came… I said, "Hey, honey…"

[Dongwon] You're so stressed right now.

[Piper?] I know. We're making him plaintive.

[Maurice] I said, "Hey, your cooking could be considered a hate crime."

[Gasps!]

[Piper?] Why would you say that?

[Maurice] In my head, this sounded like such a solid joke.

[Why is it a joke?]

[Piper] Dongwon has fallen off the table.

[Amal?] [Garbled where was…]

[Maurice] [garbled] Should have provided better instruction and waved me off of this one. So, for the next 13 years, I became the main cook in the family.

[Dongwon] Sounds like just desserts.

[Ooooh!]

[Maurice] There we go.

[Yeah, that happens.]

[Piper] I think we should document this for posterity. Dongwon Song made a pun.

[Dongwon] Right. I'm very tired.

[Oooo. We forgive you.]

[Maurice] But it's actually worked out great across the board because I'm a foodie person. I love food. As demonstrated during the course of this trip. I love food. It has allowed me to just experiment with things, and to provide different tastes, even though I know my children aren't going to be on board with this, but it provides a touch point for me and my wife, it provides a touch point for when my family comes to visit. Learning all these different dishes in order to create a sense of home for whenever anyone comes to visit our house.

[Piper] Speaking of a sense of home, so, one of the things that reviewers have called out in some of my books obviously is the fact that I have a tendency to mention food, and that they should never read my books without having had a meal first, or they will immediately go out and eat. But one of the things that I brought up, and a reviewer really, really felt close to, was in Absolute Trust, Sophie tends to share her foods with her friends. She is Korean American. She's just saying, "You know what, this is an untraditional meal. This is just an amalgamation of all my comfort foods." She's sharing them. What it really started to click with, with the reviewer, was that growing up she didn't, or was hesitant to, share her foods with friends because friends thought it was weird, or it smelled weird, or it was pungent when you brought it into school or brought it into work. Is that something that you've seen, in books in particular, and you think it should be shared more often? Is that something good, bad? What do you think?

[Amal] I mean, I'm reminded of different podcasts… Is it okay to mention other podcasts on the podcast?

[Piper] Yeah, I think so.

[Amal] There was a podcast…

[Piper] We have the nod.

[Amal] Yeah. There was… Sadly, it's sort of on hiatus now, but there was a podcast called Rocket Talk on Tor.com that Justin Landon did and he would often interview people. I'm pretty sure it was Rocket Talk. There was a conversation about foods and epic novels, and how bored the… I can't remember who else was on the podcast now, but they were talking about how boring it was to have feasts described. Like, the registers of food and epic fantasies seemed to either be enormous feast or stew.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] It was just like this ubiquitous stew everywhere. I just feel like that's always a missed opportunity. Like all of the things that we're talking about, like, there are so many things that you do with food, with eating. Like feeding and eating are such central metaphors. So, why not use it to share everything about a character? Like, the fact that you couldn't when you worry growing up and now you want to, because it's where all of these deep tense anxieties of your soul are centered.

[Dongwon] Well, when I think about those feast scenes in fiction, I actually quite like scenes where people eat food, and I like these feast scenes because they're often an opportunity to see a lot of characters interact, and people love descriptions of food. Where I have a problem is, this is where my nerdiness gets away with me, because there'll be a very Western oriented fantasy, in a medieval setting, and everyone's eating potatoes. I'm like, "Those didn't exist in Europe at that point in time. Those are a New World ingredient." Or, they're on the road on some grand epic adventure hunting through the wilderness, and they stopped to make a stew which takes hours and hours to make when using resources that they probably have at the time. Or they're only eating rabbits. Here's an interesting fact that I really love is there's a thing called rabbit starvation that's what happened to trappers.

[What?]

[Dongwon] If you only eat rabbits, it takes more calories to burn the meat than it gives you.

[Piper] They're like celery?

[Amal?] Because they're lean.

[Dongwon] They're like celery.

[Piper] Like, rabbits are celery.

[Dongwon] Rabbits are so lean.

[Amal] But wait. Were they actually eating the eyes, because that is a really good calorie source?

[Dongwon] Maybe they should have been eating the rabbit eyes. This I don't actually know. But there's not enough of the proteins in there to have the enzymes for you to digest the meat properly. So you will actually starve to death if all you eat is rabbits. So every time Samwise Gamgee shows up with a brace of rabbits and potatoes, I get mad.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It's pedantic, but to me, it's really important because food has history. Food comes from places. Food reflects things about the way we move through the world. So until we explored the New World and brought potatoes to Europe, that was an ingredient that we didn't have. If your world has potatoes in it, that means there is sea exploration in a way. That implies a whole nother depth to your world that you may not have considered if it's not there initially.

[Maurice] All right. Hang on. One more time. What was the question? I do this a lot.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] So I was asking about whether or not… Or how you felt about including the sharing of food, especially if it's your character's home cooking, and what kind of thoughts or memories they evoke?

[Maurice] Well, there's a couple, 'cause like even on this trip, I've been reflecting on different sort of food memories that we have. So, like at one point, I felt the need, I have to have some beans and rice, and I had to have some plantains. These are foods that I took for granted when my mom fixed them every week. But now, I just was like, "Oh, no. I feel the need to have them." But on the flipside, there are foods I want no part of. Like, one of them was aki and salt fish, because my mom would make that every Saturday morning. It has this older that would fill the house. The whole idea of being embarrassed or having to share that, I'm like I can't have my friends over, spend the night, because my mom's going to fix aki and salt fish, and it's going to stink up the whole house. What are they going to think about me? The same thing with chitlins, 'cause…

[Laughter]

[Piper?] Chitlins? But they nomee. They so nomee…

[Maurice] Sure. Yeah. But see, I was also so scarred early on because there was one time when my grandmother was fixing chitlins and then…

[Amal?] What are chitlins?

[Maurice] What are chitlins?

[Amal?] I don't know what chitlins are.

[Piper] Let's just say they're innards.

[Amal] They're what?

[Dongwon] Or large intestines.

[Amal] Oh. Okay.

[Dongwon] Or small intestines? I get confused.

[Piper] They are part of the intestines and you will find out that Piper will eat very, very… Well, let's just say that there are very few things in this world that I won't eat.

[Maurice] Right. But when my grandmother was cleaning them… Because you have to clean them first. It produces a sort of… I don't know… There was a sheen to her hands and a stink to the process. Then she would be like, "Come give grandma a hug!"

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Put me off on entire… Yes. So things happened.

[Amal] Testicular sheen feels like a term now in my head, which I didn't ever…

[Piper] Intestinal?

[Amal] Intestinal, not testicular.

[Piper] Sorry. You said intestinal, and I heard testicular.

[Dongwon] Those are Rocky Mountain oysters. [Garbled]

[Piper] Rocky Mountain oysters, different food type.

[Amal] Sorry.

[Piper] But on that note, let's go to the book of the week.

[Laughter]

[Piper] So. The book of the week just happens to be a cookbook.

[Amal] Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Piper] We're trying to talk about…

[Laughter]

[Piper] If I could stop laughing. We're going to talk about A Feast of Ice and Fire, the official Game of Thrones companion cookbook. This is by… And I apologize, they're not here to correct me on name pronunciation, so I may mess this up. Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sarian Lehrer, I believe. The reason why I recommend this is because I really have a lot of great memories associated with this cookbook. I probably got this cookbook before I really watched Game of Thrones and really read the book. But the thing I loved about it was that it not only has recipes that are historically accurate or recipes from their historical research, but it has a contemporary adjustment, I guess you could say. A remake of the same recipe, so you have the two options. What was kind of funny as I was going through it was I actually preferred the historical preparation and presentation more than I like the modern. So it's just a really cool cookbook to go through. It does have a foreword by George RR Martin. But I think really I was more focused on the food, because the food looks fantastic, has pictures, etc. They talk about the historical research behind the recipes.

[Dongwon] So, when we think about food in fiction, what are the things that are hallmarks for you of when somebody gets it right, in terms of including food? A different dish, or a cultural dish, in presenting either an alien race or a fictional fantasy culture or something along those lines?

[Piper] How do they get it right?

[Dongwon] Or where they go off the rails?

[Piper] Oh, gosh, I gotta go first on this?

[Laughter]

[Piper] How they… Like, hallmarks of how they get it right is when it matters to a character. Because that's why you remember a particular dish. Whether it's a good memory or a bad memory, it matters to a character, and I want to know why. Not just what's in the dish, but what is it about the cooking of it, is it a communal cooking effort, is it for a particular purpose, does it bring together memories? I mean, Maurice shared that awesome memory of… About the preparation on Saturday nights for Sunday morning. Like, that kind of thing is a fantastic memory and it's character building and it's worldbuilding. It tells you about culture, it tells you about everything from the large to the detailed. I think that that's a fantastic way to do it. One of the things that I don't like is when somebody's like, "So, we got a soup stone and we got some wild onions and we threw some protein in there and it makes this delicious stew. Hooray." Then why did… Like, how did that do anything for character building or plot, except show that they ate?

[Amal] There's an expression that my dad uses for when food is just basically adequate and it's just… It's fine. He says [hash ris and thron?] Which is relevant to what we were just talking about, because it just translates literally to intestine stuffing.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So I feel like there's… Yeah, that's right.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I'm recovering from that moment. But I think it applies to this. Like, are the descriptions of food in your book [hash ris and thron?] or are they actually nourishing? Are they something that is providing something in the narrative that is going to serve a purpose? By purpose here, I don't mean plot mechanics, although that would be awesome. I would love to read a book where the plot hinged on food. Like, that would be great. But more just what you were describing there. But, like I remember this one seen in a book that I don't like very much. There's… It's An Ocean at the End of the Lane. I don't like that book very much. But there's a moment in that book where… The main character's a little boy, and he has been eating terrible food, like the kind of cold porridge grimy badness sort of thing. He's suddenly in this home where he's given warm toasted bread and butter and jam. The memory of the description of this book that lingers with me is going from cold gray darkness to warm golden light. Even though I don't like the book very much, that one thing about the book has totally stayed with me because it was this experience of food locked to all the other experiences that the character is having and the experience the character had, this joy, and this unbelievable almost painful simplicity, was enormous.

[Maurice] So there's a couple different things. One, I like the ritual of food. From the moment of preparation to how it's presented and how it's consumed. For me, there's a ritual about it. The more that there's a ritual, the more that the meal has meaning, I love when I read scenes like that. But the other thing, for me, in terms of worldbuilding is what does the food say about the world itself. So, like, for me, I have trouble dieting, for example, because whenever I diet, as soon my belly grumbles from trying to cut down on calories, what triggers is I have a lack of food, I don't know when I'll have my next meal. I have all of these… It's like a poverty throwback to when we lived much more food insecure, growing up wise. So it becomes… So it's almost like diets for me trigger that, so then it almost has the opposite effect, which is I must eat now, so I can feel like I'm secure in having a meal again. So I say all that because I love it when stories reflect upon that in the greater world. So we have these meals… All right. So if we have this huge rich banquet of food. All right, so we're obviously living in a wealthy culture. If we are having food of opportunity, that says something else about the culture. I love those little shadings, and when people bring that out in their work.

[Amal] [inaudible. Something?] I want to highlight too that we almost never think about in terms of food. So we're talking a lot about where food comes from, its provenance, and of reflecting that in worldbuilding. I don't think we tend to think about food production very much. This is a hole that I would love to help fill for everyone by recommending a Twitter account and a podcast. Dr. Sarah Taber on Twitter is someone who absolutely everyone should follow. She's magnificent. She has a podcast called Farm to Taber which is great, a great title.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] She works… I mean, she has worked on a farm, she's worked in the agricultural industry in the United States, but she has a wonderful sense of where food production and food standards intersect with worldbuilding. So, where… For instance, why is it that in some places you raise cattle instead of raising crops? Well, perhaps it's because in those places, all… It's too arid to actually grow crops that sustain human beings, and the only vegetation that is edible is edible by animals. So you get your cattle to eat the rough terrible things that you can't actually digest, and then you eat the cattle. There is a logic to it. There is a kind of food management aspect to it. But I have… Like, it blew my mind to start thinking about… I never had thought about it before. So it's, I think, part and parcel of thinking about things like empire and colonialism and all this stuff that we think about just on the regular… All of us obviously all think about that on a regular…

[Piper] We do.

[Dongwon] And class and power and privilege…

[Amal] And class and power and privilege. Thinking about food production can often be… Like, I just got… A missing link in the ways in which we talk about these things. So she's a great place to start.

[Dongwon] It's a truly brilliant podcast, I cannot recommend highly enough. It's one of my sort of top three right now.

[Maurice] One of the things… You mentioned going off the rails. I'm not excited for the future.

[Ooh. Ha ha ha.]

[Maurice] 'Cause people don't eat well in the future. I mean, all the food seems to be like this weird mush type thing that people are eating, or like we get pills, like that's what I have to look forward to?

[Dongwon] Well, I think about two things in terms of like food in science fiction. On the one end, you have Star Trek, right? Where you sort of have replicators, and they're just reproducing various sort of Western-style foods. Then you have the way that Klingon food is presented…

[Ha!]

[Dongwon] This is the thing that bothers me, because it's very one-dimensional. Klingons are presented as this violent species, and therefore they eat violent foods. So the food is living, it's bugs, it's worms, it moves. It's played for the sense of horror from the Federation officers who have to go to diplomatic dinners with Klingons or whatever it is. Except in this one really beautiful moment in Deep Space Nine that I really liked which is why Deep Space Nine is the only Star Trek I really like. You can all yell at me later.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Actually, I see fists being shaken in the audience.

[Dongwon] Exactly. Then, there's this beat where Dr. Bashir takes a date to this Klingon food stall, and it's just presented as this delightful moment that they share their love of Klingon food. He's just slurping up worms…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] And it's just like really… It's played for laughs in some ways, but it's also this really endearing sense of like, "Oh. This is a guy who's lived in a multicultural environment. He's lived in a place where Klingons lived, learn to eat their food, and can order in their language, and just loves doing it." It just, to me, I was like, "Oh. He's a New Yorker, right? This is what we do…"

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] We go down to the [garbled ballfields?] and order food or we go to the food courts or whatever it is and you order the thing that you're excited to try and the thing that you know how to order. I find that to be two different models of the way in which we can look at food from other cultures and food in the future. The Expanse also does this really well. They have done a great job of not only mingling languages, but then mingling cuisines and then giving them new names, right? So you get a sense that Martians eat a certain way, the Belters eat a certain way, and those things are… They often talk about how they're like, things that sound horrible in some ways. That they're like yeast products, or they're grown in space environments. But then you can feel the cultural roots of how they're using those products, those soy products and yeast products, whatever it is. So food in the future can be depressing, but I think if we apply our imagination a little bit more and make it rooted in the cultures of who's actually going to space, and if we make sure that the futures we envision aren't just white Americans going into space, then maybe the food will be a little bit more pilatable.

[Maurice] Palatable.

[Dongwon] Palatable.

[Piper] Yea, food.

[Amal] Street food? What will we call street food once it hits space?

[Piper] We'll have to have space streets.

[Amal] Space streets?

[Piper] Space street food. Space markets?

[Amal] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Space markets]

[Amal] I have two quick recs on food in space. Two things that came to mind were my favorite thing that Alan Moore ever wrote called The Ballad of Halo Jones. It's an amazing book, it's one of his very early things. There is a really cool food thing that I will get into later. But the other one is Max Gladstone has a book coming out next year called Empress of Forever. Is that the title now? Yes. Empress of Forever, and there's a lot of culture hopping there. In every one, it feels like there's an introduction based in food and rooted in hospitality and cultural exchange and stuff like that. It is the future, probably. It's space.

[Dongwon] It definitely is future.

[Amal] It's definitely the future. Yes. It's really great.

[Piper] Okay. So we've talked a lot… I'm very hungry now… About eating your way to a better worldbuilding. So, now, it's time to talk about homework. Dongwon?

[Dongwon] So, the homework is, I would like you all to imagine a fictional meal. Imagine a meal at your character's eating in a fantasy world, or in a science fictional world. Describe the history of that meal. What does it mean to the family who is eating it? Where do the ingredients come from? What are the cultures that led to it? Then write a sort of mini story that just tracks the way this particular meal came together, and what things came about because of certain cultures or certain ingredients or certain availability, certain restrictions, led to that particular meal happening for those particular characters at that moment.

[Piper] Okay. Then… Wait, there's a thought.

[Amal] No, no.

[Piper] You didn't have a thought.

[Amal] No, I didn't.

[Piper] I don't remember how to finish.

[Amal] This has been Writing Excuses… Sorry, I just…

[Laughter]

[garbled]

[Amal] You're the one doing it.

[Piper] I don't know…

[Amal] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. That was the thing. You can [inaudible]

[Piper] Now go write.

[Laughter]

[Piper] All right, we're done.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.28: Warfare and Weaponry

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/21/14-28-warfare-and-weaponry/

Key points: Combat, fight scenes, warfare, weapons? How do you write it when you aren't the expert that some of your readers are? First, if you think it may be wrong, let it be a character who can make a mistake. Super soldier takes more homework to get it right. Second, pay attention (reading or listening) to people who "have seen the elephant." Talk to somebody who has been there. Search the online community, including YouTube historicals and recreations. Make it personal. Why is the reader going to be invested in this? The more you know about human beings doing human things, when you write about them in a situation not too far different from things you have seen before, you will get a lot of it right. Use extrapolation, add elements of technology, magic, or combat that change the way the game is played. Add wildcards to make it your story. Keep the lens tight, and focus on a few characters, even if the landscape is very wide. Give us someone to care about.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 28.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Warfare and Weaponry.

[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] We are going to talk about weapons!

[Dan] Yay!

[Brandon] This is actually one of my favorite topics, because it lets me talk about a hobby horse of mine.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] One of the big dangers with dealing with fantasy and science fiction, particularly when it comes to warfare, I find, is that, well, I don't have the time to become as much an expert as some of my readers in how to go about conducting war. I've never been in a war. This was actually kind of a bit of an issue when I was working on the Wheel of Time books because Robert Jordan had been in a war. He was in Vietnam. So the way he wrote warfare was very different from the way I write warfare. So my first kind of question for you guys is how do you approach, specifically, with this sort of thing, combat, fight scenes, warfare, weapons? Doing this right when you know that many of the readers out there are going to be better at this than you are?

[Howard] Um… The crutch that I fall back on forgetting things wrong is… I try and make sure that when tactically something might not be a good idea, might not be the best way to do a thing, I'm okay with that character having gotten it wrong. If I'm trying to write somebody as a super soldier who tactically gets everything right, I have to do a whole lot more homework, because that's the character that the actual soldiers in my readership will take issue with first. The… The second thing is there's an aspect to soldiering that no one who has not soldiered can really understand. The… It's a blend of adrenaline and esprit de corps and fright and thrill and… Often they talk about it as seeing the elephant. But compensating for that, you have to make sure that you have read extensively and listened extensively to people who have had those experiences. So that when you describe things, you don't describe… Especially describing feelings, describing things from a point of view character, you're not doing so in a way that an actual soldier will say, "Nobody feels that. Why would they feel that? You wrote that wrong."

[Dan] We give this answer so much, but that's because it is incredibly true. Talk to someone who knows what they're talking about. I've got a handful of police and soldiers that I will send something to, to alpha or beta read for me, if I suspect that I've gotten it wrong, which is most of the time. It's the emotions in battle. It's, for me, where I often fall down, is the tactics. I'll have a scene and they'll come back and say, "These are the dumbest soldiers ever. Why didn't they do X, Y, and Z?" I realize, "Oh. There's a procedure that's already in place for this common combat situation that I didn't know anything about." So having good reference points and readers who can help out is really valuable.

[Brandon] One of the advantages that we have right now that writers didn't have even just 10 years ago is a large online community that talks about historical warfare and battlefields. For someone writing fantasy, like me, I can go to YouTube and there's a whole ring of them. Some of the ones I watch are… There's one called BazBattles which is just historical battles, kind of showing the tactics that each general is using and why they were using them. There are people like [Lindy Mage? Lindybeige] and Scholar Gladiatorius [Schola Gladitoria]… I'm very bad at saying his YouTube channel, but they talk about historical battles. There's people like Shadiversity that just will talk about here is how a weapon was used in these sorts of things. They can be really handy. I will sometimes just go to some of these…HEMA, historical martial arts things and say, "All right. Let me see some people fighting sword against knife." They will have 20 bouts of people…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Doing a recreation for you, where they are fighting…

[Dan] That's fantastic.

[Brandon] You can see directly 20 times in a row how that battle might play out. It lets you write it.

[Dan] There was a BBC series… I can't remember the name, and I'll try to get it for the liner notes… Where there was a historian and his father who was also a historian. They were British. They would just go around to famous sites of battles in… That had taken place somewhere in England and say, "Okay. This is the hill. That's where this guy's army was. That's where this one was." So you got a really great sense of the tactics and how the terrain affected them.

[Mahtab] Writing for young readers, you don't have to get that technical, you don't have to get all your facts so correct, because you're writing for younger readers, and they are not as experienced as the adult readers. But what I like to do is make it very, very personal. One of the stories that was set in World War I was War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. That is actually told from the perspective of the horse, but of course, you have the young protagonist who really loves this horse. It's recruited by the Army, and the entire journey is about the horse getting back. It's… The thing is, you could have something as big as war, but you can make it very, very personal to the character. The interaction with how it feels to lose something and want it back and then kind of work that in. So, you're more looking at how it is personal… How that warfare is personally affecting your main character, as opposed to just focusing on the tactics or the weaponry. At least for us, I think it's a little bit easier than writing…

[Brandon] It tends to actually work really well, right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Like, one of the questions I wanted to ask is how you might have a large-scale war happening, but keep it personal. But I think you just got to it. Making sure that you're keeping your eye on why is someone really going to get invested in this. Often times, the reader's investment is directly tied to how invested they are in one character, or a set of characters, life through this battle and how they are surviving and what their goals are other than just staying alive, or does their goal just become I want to live through this.

[Dan] My grandfather fought in World War II, and he was specifically a supply sergeant. So all the stories he would tell us were about… They were not about battles, they were not about who won and who lost and who got killed. There were about we didn't have enough socks so here's how I found some socks so that our unit could have some and things like that. Which really gave me a different sense of how personal it can be, and the kinds of concerns that soldiers actually have. It's like two minutes of fighting and then three weeks of waiting around wishing you had clean socks.

[Howard] My grandfather fought in the first World War. He was born in 18…

[How old are you?]

[Howard] He was born in 1899.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] He died in 1968. I never met the man. But he wrote, when he was… I think when he was in his 30s. One of his kids said, "Dad, you are always harping on these old guys who talk about their Civil War experiences, because obviously they've inflated them and whatever. Why don't you write a book about yours?" So he did. He wrote… In my family, we just call it PFC 1918. Because it is his journals from the year 1918 when he enlisted through his experiences in Europe. He did not see the horrors of World War I that we so often talk about. But he got there afterwards. His descriptions… Some of them are very emotional, and some of them are very clinical. Having never met the man, I… He doesn't write much in the way of emotion. But it's been an incredible resource for me because it's a point of view that I don't get from any of the history books.

[Brandon] Mahtab, you have a book of the week for us.

[Mahtab] Yes, I do. It's one that I really, really love, I read it quite recently, although the book is, I think, maybe three or four years old. It's called The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey. It's a dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. What I love about this is, it's basically a fungus has destroyed most of humanity. What it does, in terms of changing humans, is once it kind of infects the humans, they turn into cannibals and they just want to devour the other humans. This has basically destroyed most of civilization. But, just outside London, there is a small little place called Beacon. There is a lab that has been set up by a scientist who's rounded up these kids. They're called Hungries because the moment they smell humans, they just want to devour them. They're studying them to find out a cure to it. But, what I loved about it is this book needs a lot of expo. But it is… It gives you the bits and pieces just as needed. So it's a very, very close focus lens. It starts out with Melanie who is a Hungry. She is in this lab being tested. She just makes a joke, like. She's put in this wheelchair, strapped up, and then under the like a military watch with guns trained on her, this child who's probably about 11 years old is taken into the classroom. That just poses so many questions. It sets up the narrative, and you know you're in good hands. So the story is about finding the cure, being attacked by the remaining humans, and the conclusion is just so fabulous. I mean, it's unexpected yet satisfying, which is something you guys always talk about. This one really demonstrates it. So, The Girl with All the Gifts, M. R. Carey.

[Brandon] Excellent. Howard, I wanted to put you on the spot again. I know I've done this a couple times already in this episode, but you write military science fiction and you write about what it is like to live as part of a military group. But as far as I know, you've never been in the military.

[Howard] I never have.

[Brandon] So what… Are there things you know you've gotten wrong that our listeners might get wrong? That you have been corrected on, or that you've learned to do right? Or are there certain things, specifics, they have really helped you to get this right other than, of course, get some friends…

[Howard] The things that I got wrong… The things that I got wrongest, I got wrong early on, which was me poking fun at my ignorance by having ranks and forms of battle and whatever where it… I deliberately made it so it did not make sense. I stopped doing that. Because you can really only tell that joke once. It's a joke that I'm telling on myself. Those aren't funny for very long. Research, and a large part of what I get right, I got right because I spent 11 years in a dysfunctional corporate environment, and a top-down management structure that is dysfunctional is not unlike a military command structure under fire. Because a lot of those same hotheaded, emotional decisions, lieutenants that are kissing up, people who have more authority than they should and less knowledge than they should, all of those things existed in that environment. I got lucky when I extrapolated them out to the military setting that I had built. But ultimately, I come back to this idea that at least if we're writing about human beings, the more you know about human beings, the more you've seen human beings do human being things, when you write about them in a situation that is not entirely unlike something you've seen before, the odds are you're going to get a lot of it right.

[Brandon] One of the things I wanted to bring up in this podcast was talking about fantasy and Science Fiction extrapolation. Something you were talking about there reminded me of it. You mentioned you don't make a joke out of getting things wrong. One of the things I do intentionally is kind of along those lines, in that when I am building a situation in my fantasy books that… Even my science fiction book that just came out, Skyward, I am looking to have some elements of science fiction or fantasy technology or combat that will change the way the game plays out dramatically. To the point that it removes it far enough from the experience of a lot of the really historical readers, so that they can suspend their disbelief and say, "Well, maybe this sort of situation could never exist in our world, but we didn't have shard blades and shard plate and we were crossing these impossible chasms to try and reach this one goal." In that situation, taking what I know of warfare, applying it, and then adding some wildcards that make it completely into my control, really has been helpful for me. I know with Skyward, which is kind of based on starship fighter pilot stuff, that taking it a few steps away from the way that we fight by letting the starships have technology that we don't have allowed some of the fighter pilots that I gave it to to read to say, "You know what, this works for me, even though you're doing things we could never do. The fact that I haven't done this thing lets me just have fun with the story." Then, of course, they gave me the things that they had done that I was doing that I was doing wrong, so I could get those details right. But that mix is really handy for science fiction and fantasy in specific. Anything…

[Mahtab] There's just one thing I'd like to say, and I'm going to refer to a movie right here, which is the recent one, Crimes of Grindelwald, which there was a battle between good and evil, but when there is just too much happening, when there is no focus on a character, the readers or the audience do not know who to identify with, who to empathize with. I think that is a mistake, especially in war, because it's huge, there are many people in there. You may take the lens so far back that the audience is not left with anyone to care about. That makes it… For me, this did not work. So I would say that some of the things that you have to remember is although the landscape may be extremely wide, try and focus on at least a couple of characters. Make it personal so that readers can feel that, "Okay, this is something that I want, I care about this character, and hence, I want to go forward." Just coming back to the book that I had recommended, which is The Girl with All the Gifts. Melanie is a Hungry. At first, she's viewed with suspicion. You don't empathize with her. But, as the story goes on and the lens pulls back, you're still… It's very much still focused on Melanie and a person who was viewed with suspicion all of a sudden has to be viewed with trust. That little tip makes the story works so much better. So I would say even if you have a wide landscape, give us someone to care about.

[Dan] Another author that does this really well, particularly with warfare, is Django Wexler. He writes historical fantasy, very Napoleonic era, with cavalry and infantry forming a square and all these things. I remember one battle in particular where we were in one infantry person's head. When they all started firing, that kind of weapon reproduces so much smoke that all of a sudden, they couldn't see what was going on in the rest of the battle. He didn't change perspective, he didn't give us the Broadview, he stayed in the middle of that infantry square that was fully blind, just trying to listen. Are the horses getting close? It was really effective. Because it had that one single focus that we could stay with and empathize with.

[Brandon] All right. I'm going to call it here and give you guys some homework. I would like you to invent a powerful weapon that is not based on technology. I want you to take this to the side of technology. In fact, make it more powerful than technology in your setting could exist… The technology people understand, this is something completely un-understand… Non-understandable. I want you to invent this weapon, and see how society adapts to it. Try to build a battlefield around the idea of a weapon that no one even really knows what it can do. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.29: Field Research

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/14/14-29-field-research/

Key points: Field research is mostly about the stuff you can't get from books, the tiny details. Do your research before you go. Identify an expert who can help you. Offer an honorarium. Then go and experience visceral sensory details. Use the framework, known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns (a.k.a. Howard's realm). Nothing replaces walking down a street thinking I'm going to have to describe this someday, what are the little details that can convince a reader of the large details. Try free writing everywhere you go, capturing sensory details. Do analog field research! Don't forget, sights, sounds, smells, get it all. Tell your readers what someone else is feeling, so they can also enjoy the experience.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 29.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Field Research.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And field research is going to take more than 15 minutes to do.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We're talking about field research. The fun, fun part of our job where we get to go places and write it off.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's… It is actually my favorite part of the job.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I remember talking to Jessica Day George, who we've had on the podcast before, who said… Basically, tweeted and said, "I'm going to Europe and I can't tell you where because it's all about my next book." She was going to look at castles and to look at historical stuff. That is not the field research that I get to do, but I remember looking at it and thinking, "Oh, that's actually a thing, isn't it?"

[Brandon] Yeah. It is great.

[Margaret] You get to embed with a space mercenary fleet, though, right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So, I guess my first question for us is, when we're talking specifically about field research, you're going to go someplace and do a thing or interview someone for a primary source, how do you approach it? What is your methodology? How do you take the notes, how do you decide where you are going to go, that sort of thing?

[Mary Robinette] So the… I've done this both as a writer and then also come at it from puppet theater. A lot of what you're looking at is the stuff that you can't get out of the books. Most of this is going to be tiny details. So, what I do first is, I do a ton of research before I go, so that I'm not asking the stupid 101 questions. Because that's a waste of everybody's time. The other thing that I do is, I, in the process of doing that research, I usually identify an expert that I can reach out to. For instance, we were working on a play about Mary Anning, who is the first widely recognized paleontologist, or fossilist, excuse me. Was born in 1799. So I found Dr. Hugh Torrins, wrote to him, said we're doing this, I'd love to… We're going to be coming to London to do research, I would love to connect with you. This is the honorarium that I can offer. It's not a big honorarium. It was like $150. For that $150, he went with us to Lyme Regis, he was delighted to talk about this thing that was his passion. He introduced us to the paleontologist that he knew, he introduced us to the fossilists that he knew. He told us which fossil… Fossilists were worth talking to, which fossil sites to go and look at, what details were relevant. So we went and did those things. Having an expert to give you kind of a targeted in about the stuff that you don't know about was incredibly useful. That… From that, we were able to bring back a lot of visceral sensory details. Similarly, when we did the NASA thing, I got to go into the NASA museums a lot, but the difference between doing that and being taken on a tour by an astronaut…

[Brandon] Right. Climbing through the replica of the ISS…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's a totally different thing. So you can go without an expert, but for me, if you can find someone who is an expert or knows the area, you're going to get a lot more out of it. Among other things, they're going to help you shift your lens, so that you're seeing things the way they see them.

[Howard] Circling back real quick on the honorarium, it's worth noting that what you are paying for with 150 or $200 is not their time. You are buying their belief that you are serious about this. It's a small sum, but by offering it… Experts often know to look for that. Oh, there's an honorarium. Oh, you want to learn things from me. Okay, cool. I'm happy to do this.

[Margaret] Depending on where you are in your career and what you're doing and who the expert is that you're approaching, the definition of small sum can become flexible.

[Mary Robinette] Very much so.

[Margaret] If you're going to a local university because you would like information from someone who is a professor there, or something like that, take them out, buy their coffee. That can be a perfectly appropriate honorarium for something like that. Especially if you're in the early stages of your career and you're doing something that's basically on spec for you.

[Mary Robinette] When I was getting information about meteor strikes, I thought I only had one question. So I took a person out for coffee, and then it turned out that I had more than one question.

[Laughter]

[Howard] There's a framework that I use for a lot of things knowledge-related. Which is this grid that says there are the things that we know that we know. There are the things that we know we don't know, the known unknowns. There are the things that we don't know that we know. We have information, but we don't know how to categorize it. Then there's the unknown unknowns. I don't know… I don't even know how to ask the question that will get me the information that I need. Acknowledging upfront to yourself that there are unknown unknowns… Mary, you said you don't want to ask the bonehead questions, you don't want to ask the stupid questions. Sometimes you have to acknowledge that I'm going to ask some stupid questions because I just don't know how this works. But you own that upfront, and then when you get thrown a curveball… You wanted to ask one question about meteor strikes and now suddenly you have 100. You're not surprised by that happening. You accept, "Oh. Oh, my goodness, the unknown unknowns' space was larger than I wanted it to be. Now I have a known unknowns space and a long list of questions, and I am prepared to forge ahead into that."

[Mary Robinette] When I say I don't want to ask the bonehead questions, again, working on Calculating Stars, there was no way I was going to learn the amount of orbital mechanics that I needed to know for those books. But I knew the area of information. Like, I knew this is the kind of thing, these are the effects I'm coming for. Whereas what happens to me a lot as a puppeteer is that I'll get people who will email me and say, "Can you tell me how to make a puppet?" I'm like, "Okay. So there's five different types, five different major branches of puppetry. Within each branch, there are subtypes. What is your budget? How… What is…" Like, that's a question I cannot answer. I mean, there are books and books and books about that.

[Howard] It's the same measure of complexity as can you teach me to build a bicycle.

[Margaret] Or the… I feel like the equivalent in my area of the biz. "So, how did you get started in the business?" Or, "How can I break into television?" Like there are a lot of blogs and a lot of books and a lot of information on that topic out there. If someone approaches me with that question, I'm sort of like, "Uh, Google is your friend." If you have… If someone has done their homework and they have a more specific question, that's when it's like, "Oh. Yeah. I can help you out with that."

[Mary Robinette] I just spent hours answering the "How do you build a wing?" Because they had watched a video and they came to me with a specific question. Then we did some follow-up stuff. Totally happy to do that.

[Brandon] This is 100% my experience as well, writing on books. Like, I just recently did a fighter jet book. I thought I had done my 101.

[Mary Robinette] Ha Ha. Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] Then I went to the fighter pilots and it turns out I was full of questions I didn't know that I didn't know, in Howard's realm. But at least approaching it, once my eyes were opened, I was able to kind of get it closer, send it to the fighter pilots, have them say, "No, you still got it wrong, but your closer. Here's this and this and this." Kind of just work towards getting it right.

[Howard] You just named the unknown unknowns space Howard's realm.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yeah, Howard's realm.

[Howard] Thank you. Thank you for that. When I sat down to draw the Munchkin Star Finder deck… I'm going to take this into a visual space for a moment. I needed lots of… I needed ways to do shorthand for a space pistol, shorthand for a helmet, shorthand for a Velcro pocket. Where with just a very few lines, I could do a thing. So I found myself googling a lot cartoon image noun. Then I would look at clipart, I would look at things so that I could get silhouettes of them. My favorite example of that was in the Star Finder book, there is this giant space creature that we just kind of acknowledge is a space whale. I wanted an iconic whale, that everyone would look at and just see whale. I ended up with the silhouette of the whale that eats Pinocchio and Geppetto. I used that as the silhouette. It looks incredibly simple when you look at it, but there's 2 1/2 hours of research that went into that card because there were so many options for things which, when I simplified them, started looking less like a whale and more like a shark.

[Brandon] All right. Let's stop for our book of the week. Which is actually not a book. It is... Howard.

[Howard] It's not a Howard, either. It's a podcast.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] PBS Spacetime. We'll post the link in the liner notes. The original host was Gabe Perez-Giz. He never actually says his last name. Gabe. The current host, Matthew O'Dowd. These are astrophysicists, who, for about 15 minutes, talk about astrophysics. They go into the math. It is hard-core stuff. But the very first episode, introductory episode, is Gabe talking about let's look at the Super Mario games and determine what the gravity is on the planet of Super Mario.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] What's funny, the answer is it's a lot heavier than Earth. Because he comes down so quickly.

[Oooo]

[Howard] Which means Mario's legs are like rocket engines. But there's another thing that I'll put in the liner notes is my playlist of chronological episodes. They been doing this, I think, since 2013 weekly. At the end of each episode, there's an astrophysics problem for you to look at and try to answer. If you get to the problem… I didn't do any of the problems. I don't do math, I draw pictures. But I would listen to the problem very carefully and ask myself, "What realm does the solution lie in? Am I going to have to do calculus? Am I going to have to do astronomy?" Then, at the end of the next episode, they give you the answers to the questions from the previous. It's super educational.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Yeah]

[Howard] Super educational.

[Brandon] So, we're talking technically about field research. We've kind of strayed a little bit. I knew that we would with this topic. Let's talk about going places. I find that nothing can replace just walking down the street with the mindset of I'm going to have to describe this someday. What are the little details that I'm going to notice? We've spoken many times on the podcast about how small details can convince a reader of a larger reality. If you get the little details right, they will actually assume the large details. So, for me, even if it's I'm going to put this specific café in my book, and it's a café down the street from me, it doesn't mean I'm having to go to Paris. Just saying I'm going to put this building in, what do I notice that's real about this building, has been super helpful for me.

[Mary Robinette] I usually try to do some free writing in whatever place that I go. I give this exercise to my students. It's one of the first exercises, formal writing exercises, I was taught. Which is that you go someplace and you write for half an hour. You don't let your fingers stop moving. You try to capture all of those sensory details. You're basically banking them for narration later. The thing that I would say, also, while were talking about this, is that not everyone can afford to go to NASA or go to Europe. So you can also look for analog field research. So, it's like, I can't go perhaps to Europe, but I can find a narrow street. I can find a narrow street and feel what that's like to walk down. I can't go to that cemetery, but I can go to this other cemetery and I can notice these details about it. I can't go into the NBL pool, but I can go into a pool.

[Margaret] I think, sort of what you're talking about, is getting those sensory details. Because as much as I love my camera, when I'm going out and I'm going to a place, or I'm documenting something for research that I'm doing… It's sort of like when you're going on a vacation and you're snapping so many pictures, you sort of forget to look at things outside the lens. What your camera captures is different than what your eyes capture. So making sure, even if you are photo documenting details, if that's helpful for you, that, sort of, taking a step back, breathing literally and figuratively in the place where you are.

[Howard] One of my favorite research moments… It wasn't really research. Going to Phoenix ComicCon. A bunch of us stepped out of the airport, and, boy, it was hot. We were in the shade, okay. We all commented, "Oh, wow, this is hot." Then we stepped into the sunlight.

[Laughter]

[Howard] David Willis, fellow cartoonist, said, in a very deadpan voice, "We've made a horrible mistake."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Everybody laughs. But that sensory experience, you look at the picture of the line between shade and sunlight, and it looks like that line anywhere that shade and sunlight might fall. But that was not what we experienced.

[Brandon] Along those lines, a reminder. Don't just write down what things look like. I have to re-emphasize this time and time again to my students. You will naturally focus on sight, at least most of us will. Try to get the sounds, try to get the smells. Try to get how it feels to step out of an air-conditioned area into the heat. Get those details as well.

[Margaret] I had an apartment fire in the first apartment I was living in after college. The fire was actually in the apartment immediately underneath ours.

[Whoof]

[Margaret] So, our apartment… Not so much. There was some fire, that had come up through the walls, but it was mostly smoke and the fire department coming in and wetting everything down. The most profound memories that I carried forward from cleaning out the apartment after that was the smell of smoky mildew.

[Oof]

[Margaret] Because it is summer in Boston, it is humid, there's no air circulation because all the windows got busted out and are covered in plywood. Whenever I… I was writing something else, I described a fire, and it's like, "The smell of smoke and mildew hung over the place in the following week." It's one of those things…

[Mary Robinette] Very, very evocative.

[Margaret] I never would have thought about it until I was there, trying to get stuff out of that apartment. So, smells are like hardwired to your memories.

[Howard] On the 2017 Writing Excuses Retreat, I got to tour a World War II era Russian submarine. One of the things that I noticed most was not how cramped the large spaces were, but it was when we peered into the cabins and I realized these one… I'm not a tall person, but these people must not have been very tall either, or they were curled up. There's just not much space. A physical description of what you see can convey the size of things, but there is an emotion related to cramped, there is an emotion related to open space. There is an emotion related to all of my things that smell like burnt cheese. That, as writers, is one of the things that is the most critical for us to try to convey. You don't want to tell your reader how to feel. You want to tell your reader how someone else is feeling, so that they can come along for that experience.

[Brandon] We are out of time. Hopefully, this has been helpful for you guys. Howard is going to give you some homework to kind of push it along.

[Howard] Yeah. Go someplace close to you, where you've never been. It can… A side street, a store, a restaurant, whatever. Bring your phone… Your phone. Your camera. Take a few pictures. Then go back, look at the pictures, and look for things in the pictures that your eyes didn't notice. Sit down and describe what is in this photograph as if you are writing that is a setting for a story. As if a character is noticing these things. Teach your eyes how to look at the camera and see the things that the camera saw that your eyes didn't see the first time around.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/07/14-27-natural-setting-as-conflict/

Key points: Person versus nature, setting, environment! Adventure based on survival, disaster, endemic. Start with research! You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. In person versus nature, nature serves the function of the antagonist, stopping the protagonist from achieving some goal. There are often plateaus of goals for the protagonist to achieve. Sometimes nature is a time bomb. You can also use person versus nature as one arc or subplot in a story. Person versus nature, especially in science fiction, often has a sense of wonder reveal as the resolution. So it's a mystery story, a puzzle box story. Setting is more interesting when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Person versus nature, in MICE terms, is a milieu story, with the goal of getting out of the milieu, or at least navigating and surviving it. So, what does the setting throw up as barriers that block that? Especially unanticipated consequences of decisions that the character makes. Often there are anthropomorphized elements, too. What does the character or the setting want, need, and get? Start with entry into the milieu, end with exit from the milieu, and add in lots of complications in the middle.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 27.

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And we're in conflict with our environment.

[Chuckles]

[garbled]

[Howard] I don't think you should do the joke.

[Dan] We are in Houston. It's so humid and hot.

[Brandon] Yeah, we are.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, sweetness. It's so cute that you think it's humid outside.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I'm just… Oh, poor bunny.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] We, on the podcast, have rarely done anything where we've dealt with person versus setting. In specific, setting as natural setting, natural… Meaning, these are adventure stories that are survival based, disaster based, or even endemic based. These sorts of things. We're going to talk about how to do that, how to approach making this type of story. You guys have any starting out pointers when you're going to create a person versus setting story?

[Dan] Yes. Do your research. Because, in my experience, the more research you do, the cooler your story is going to get. Because you… Even if you think you know how to survive in a particular environment or overcome a particular disaster, the more you learn about the things that could go wrong and the various solutions that already exist to solve them, will suggest a thousand cooler things you hadn't thought of yet.

[Howard] I… Years and years ago, I think I watched one episode early in the season of Survivor. I watched that for 10 minutes and thought, "Okay. It is taking them way too long to invent stuff that I learned how to make in Boy Scouts. There's got to be a reason why these people don't know how to do that." Because when I was 10 years old… Well, 13 years old, it made perfect sense. I only had to be shown half of this before I figured out, "Oh. Well, obviously, this is the other half." If you're doing person versus nature, you have to be smarter as a writer… You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. Because the Boy Scout is going to be pretty disappointed if the story starts and they feel like, "Oh. I've got this."

[Mary Robinette] I think, also, for me, one of the things about the person versus nature is that the nature is serving the function of your antagonist. So that means that your protagonist has to have a goal that the nature is stopping them from achieving.

[Brandon] That's a very good point.

[Mary Robinette] That's something that a lot of people leave out. That's why frequently they wind up being very flat. So, a lot of times, it is a character driven goal or some other aspect, but it's the nature that is keeping them from doing that.

[Dan] One thing I see a lot in nature survival stories is that the protagonist's goal is allowed to change more frequently and more completely than normal. Because they achieve plateaus of, "Well, now I've got the shelter built. Okay, I can move on to another goal now."

[Howard] I want to point out that it's… When we think of person versus nature, we very often default to survival. But you can absolutely have a person versus nature story where the big conflict is I am trying to go up the hillside, and come back down with the perfect Christmas tree. The mountain doesn't want to let me do that. The mountain isn't trying to kill me. The mountain's trying to ruin Christmas.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Would you call Calculating Stars, even though I know there are some villainous characters in it, would you call this a person versus nature story in some ways?

[Mary Robinette] Certainly part one is. I mean, I've… I'm killing the planet, so yes. But part one is very much we have to get out of nature. After that, it is… Most of the major conflicts are coming from societal problems. Where you're having trouble convincing people that in fact the climate is changing on the planet.

[Brandon] Right. But there's also this sense of we have to overcome this thing together as a species. I wonder if that could be put in that same category?

[Mary Robinette] I think it can. Because it… This is one of the things that when you're introducing it into your story… I said that it serves the function of as… Excuse me, of an antagonist, that it's preventing your character from achieving a goal. But the other thing that it can do, which is why I hesitated with Calculating Stars, is it's not so much serving the function of an antagonist. It's a time bomb.

[Brandon] Right. Yeah, that's true.

[Mary Robinette] That's what it's doing. It is providing goals. It's actually allowing people to break hurdles. So I don't know that in… That's in part two of the book, I don't know that it serves the function…

[Howard] Well, what you've raised is… I don't love a novel length pure person versus nature story because that's a long time to wrestle with nature. That said, I loved The Martian.

[Mary Robinette] I was going to cite Isle of the Blue Dolphins.

[Howard] Yeah. I haven't read that one, but I loved The Martian. But it is absolutely useful and beautiful to work person versus nature as one of your big arcs. Knowing how person versus nature works, and knowing how to do it correctly, means that if you're using some sort of formula for timing the delivery of emotional punches, you know how to time these things.

[Brandon] Can I put you on the spot and ask for any tips along those lines? What makes these stories tick? Why do we love them? What are some of those beats? Dan's already mentioned one, reassessing of goals, as you achieve smaller and smaller… Larger and larger goals, I should say. You start off saying, "I am helpless. I am going to die. Well, at least I'll do this thing. Well, since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing. Since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing." Then, it just escalates to the point that you believe that they can survive in this.

[Dan] Then they build a radio out of coconuts.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In a science fiction setting…

[Mary Robinette] Gilligan!

[Howard] Often the… Yeah. Was it Gilligan who built that, or was it the Professor?

[Mary Robinette] The Professor. It's always the Professor [garbled who's building things?]

[Howard] I was pretty sure I saw transistor tubes in there somewhere.

[Dan] Those are also made of coconuts.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Coconut glass.

[Mary Robinette] Everything that you need, you just pull out of that ship.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It was the most amazing… Anyway, your point being, Howard?

[Howard] Yeah. The point being, when you are doing person versus nature in science fiction, often the resolution is not oh, I learned how to make a structure out of sticks, the solution is some sort of sense of wonder reveal about how this alien environment really works. That moment… If you've planned that, what you've written isn't what we classically think of as a person versus nature story. What you've written is a mystery story, in which we're being a detective and we're solving a problem. Then you wrap that around a story in which characters are in conflict and the solving of the mystery… It could be a time bomb, it could be a puzzle box type story, but… I do think of these things as name dropping the formulas as I'm building them, because that allows me to very quickly picture what it is I want to do. Then, when I have that picture, I start mapping character names onto it and moving things around. I'm writing a longform serial where I already have a whole lot of established pieces. Coming up with a story and then very quickly mapping a bunch of characters on it… The mapping the characters onto it is often the easiest part. It's coming up with what is that fun reveal? One of the ones I'm working with right now in the Schlock Mercenary universe is Fermi's Paradox. Which is fascinating to think of as person versus nature, because nature here is, and the mystery as it stands, Galactic civilizations have been wiping themselves out every few million years and we do not know why. Is it an enemy? Is it something natur… It's a mystery. It is a reveal. It's fun. If I can stick the landing, I'm going to make so much money.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] That's really what person versus nature is all about. It's about the money that you're…

[Howard] I want to get out of these woods as a millionaire.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Dan, you have our book of the week this week.

[Dan] Our book of the week this week is what I consider one of the classic man versus nature survival stories. It's called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It's Newberry winning young adult novel. It's about a kid who gets for his birthday a hatchet and throws it in his suitcase and hops on the little Cessna that's going to take him to visit his dad on an oilfield in the Canadian wilderness. Part way there, the pilot has a heart attack and dies, and the kid has to do his best to land the plane in a lake and then survive as long as he can in the middle of nowhere. He's the only character. It's all about him doing his best to survive. It's really… Everything we've been talking about in its purest little young adult form. It's a fantastic book. Very short and easy to read, and awesome.

[Howard] Boy versus nature.

[Dan] I'm going to recommend one more, though.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] We're getting two book of the weeks for the price of one.

[Mary Robinette] Whoo!

[Dan] Ryan North, the guy who does dinosaur comics. He's got a brand-new book out called How to Invent Everything.

[Brandon] Oh, I really want to read that.

[Dan] He sells this, he promotes this as kind of like a cheat sheet for time travelers. If you end up stuck in the past for whatever reason, and have this book with you, you will be able to invent electricity and penicillin and everything you need to make a civilization work. So, as a resource for writers who want to be able to describe characters doing this stuff, it's a really good resource.

[Brandon] Yeah, I think it's… He has this poster that I've seen for years, that is… Hang this poster in your Time Machine, that has all the little tips you would need. It's done jokingly, and he's adapted that now into an entire book.

[Dan] Expanded it into a full book.

[Brandon] Let's… On the topic here, Mary talked about setting as antagonist. Let's dig into this idea a little bit more. How do you go about making your setting an interesting antagonist? How do you go about having a story that perhaps has no villain other than survival, or… Yeah?

[Dan] One of the principles that I teach in my How to Scare People class is that something familiar becomes unfamiliar. That's one of the basic premises of a horror story. It's also exactly what's going on in survival and disaster stories. Something like the Poseidon Adventure. It's a cruise ship, we know what a cruise ship is like. Now it's upside down. So we recognize everything, but it's also weird and new at the same time. That gives us that sense of horror, and that sense of unknown. Even though we still kind of understand what's going on.

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly why the upside down is disturbing in Stranger Things. Huh. Interesting.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, for me, one of the tricks on making it an effective antagonist goes back to the MICE quotient, which is… It is often a straight up milieu story. So, for me, the thing is, again, you got a character goal, there's the character goal of… Whatever their emotional character goal is, but then there's also the goal of I want to get out of this place. I need to navigate this place. So, finding the environmental setting things that can throw up barriers, that challenge your character's competence, and that are, often, I think, most effectively a result of a choice that they have made. So it's like, well, we've got fire ants coming at us. So, in order to stop them, we're going to flood this area to keep them from coming in. But now, having flooded it…

[Howard] Oh, no. Oh, no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Islands of swimming fire ants are a thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. This is a film. So it's this unanticipated consequence that makes things worse. I think that's often one of the ways that you can ratchet up the tension and something that a good antagonist does, is they react.

[Brandon] All right. And escalating. That's like… That's a very good point. Making it worse and worse and worse, even as our protagonist is leveling up in what they're able to accomplish.

[Dan] A lot of survival stories also have… Not, they don't have villains, but you can see anthropomorphized elements of the environment that function as a villain. You mentioned Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier. She's got this rivalry, so to speak, with an octopus. She knows, she's scared to death of this octopus, but she knows at some point she's going to have to dive down into that part of the reef, or she's not going to have enough to eat. So it's building this thing up as a villain over the course of the story until you get a showdown. You get a similar thing in the movie Castaway with his tooth. I'm going to do my best to survive here, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to confront that tooth. It's going to be a showdown.

[Brandon] Howard, earlier you mentioned something I thought was very interesting, which is using person versus nature as a subtheme in a story, which you pointed out, you like a little bit better sometimes. Any tips on keeping this as a subtheme or as a secondary plot cycle?

[Howard] The book, Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, the character of Dr. Malcolm is… He is the personification of chaos. Chaos is the person versus… Is nature in person versus nature. Malcolm tells us we have a complex system and things are going to go wrong in unexpected ways and they are going to amplify each other and things are going to get worse. By giving voice to that, when it happens, it doesn't feel like, oh, the author just picked the worst possible thing to happen and it happened. It feels like a natural consequence because now we can understand chaos theory. That is layered on top of a corporate espionage plot where it was corporate espionage that caused all these things… That we like to think caused all these things to go wrong at the beginning. But when you stand back and look at the book, you know, well, if it hadn't been corporate espionage, it would have been something else. So having a character who gives voice to the nature without actually being on nature's side can be useful.

[Mary Robinette] Something that you said made me actually think of Lord of the Flies, which definitely begins as person versus nature. One of the things that happens over the course of that, as the boys achieve goals… It's like, okay, we've created shelter, we've created fire, and all of those things, is that the antagonist shifts from being the island to being the boys… The society of the boys themselves. I think that that's something that you can actually do. Something that we see when we have human antagonists, that a lot of times on antagonist will shift. It's not the antagonist that you thought it was the entire time, it's something else. So I think that's something that you can play with with your worldbuilding and your… The setting as…

[Howard] It's an echoing of the principle… The story begins and there's a thing that our main character wants. There's a thing that our main character actually needs. And there is a thing that, in the course of the story, the main character's actually going to get. Often, these are three different things. If you treat nature, the antagonist, the same way, the want, need, get being different things, there's this twist as we discover it doesn't matter what nature wanted, this is what nature needed… And this is what actually happened.

[Brandon] Mary, you've got some homework for us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is, we're going to take the milieu MICE thread concept. Which is that a story begins when you enter a place in a milieu story, and it ends when you exit the place. All of the conflicts are things that stop from getting out, they stop you from navigating. They are things that get in your way of achieving that exit strategy. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick a milieu. Pick a setting. Just pick your starting point, this is a character entering. Pick your exit point, that's the character leaving. Then brainstorm about 20 things that are going to get in the way of your character exiting the place. Then, I want you to pick your five favorites and rank them in an escalating order of difficulty. So this is just a structure exercise. If you wind up with something that sounds fun, you can write it. But really, what I want you to do is think about a way to build that setting as antagonist, and that setting is getting in your way.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.26: Lessons from Aristotle, with Rob Kimbro

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/06/30/14-26-lessons-from-aristotle-with-rob-kimbro/

Key points: Aristotle's six elements of story, ordered by importance, are: plot, character, idea, dialogue, music, spectacle. E.g., fight scenes are often plot, character, spectacle, but if they are just spectacle, they may be boring. Different stories, different medium, different audience, may rearrange the order. Consider what you are trying to do as you write a scene. Beware of overdoing one element in your opening. Most openings are either character-driven, mostly plot and character, or voice-driven, mostly ideas, music, and spectacle. Aristotle also says there are three modes, lyric, epic, and dramatic. Lyric, the author telling their own experience. Epic, the author telling a story that happens to someone else. Dramatic, showing a story without an author's presence. All mediums can be mixed modes. Finally, you may use a kind of collective creation mode with the audience, "I need you to imagine this with me."

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 26.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Lessons from Aristotle, with Rob Kimbro.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Rob] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Rob] And I'm Rob.

[Brandon] Rob, introduce yourself to our audience.

[Rob] Sure. My name's Rob Kimbro. I'm a theater director and teacher, and also sometimes adapter and a sometime colleague and collaborator of Mary Robinette's.

[Mary Robinette] That is actually why he is here, because over the years, I have known Rob Kimbro for well over a decade at this point. He's one of my favorite people to talk structural theory with because he comes at it… He's a dramaturge among other things. Every time I talk to him, I'm like, "That's a really good thing." Then we'll come back and incorporate it into the writing. He's also one of us, because…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] He's a science-fiction fan, he listens to the podcast. But we were talking about various things from Aristotle, and you brought up the six elements of Aristotle. Please tell us…

[Rob] I should say at the beginning that one of the things I'm not is an Aristotle scholar. But I am somebody who's done a lot of theatrical adaptation, so taking stories from the page and putting them on stage. At one point, I did a graduate program in that. Aristotle's Poetics was something I found really useful. There are a few different tools you can pull out of that book. But one of them is his idea that story… He says tragedy, but really it's generalizable to story… Is made of six things. He puts them in an order. Those six things are, from the most important to the least, Plot. Character. Idea. Dialogue. Music. Spectacle. What I find is that's a… It's a taxonomy, it's a paradigm, that you can apply to stories and think about how is this working and how can it work better. The place that I think it's useful to depart from Aristotle is that he says… And he's fairly descriptive… He says that the best story he sees, they go in this order. But what I find is that every story has its own order.

[Brandon] When he says order, order of importance or orders of…

[Rob] Order of importance.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] Order of importance. I really… This is my first time encountering this idea, but it is explaining a lot of the things that I think rub people the wrong way about bad stories. A few episodes ago, I complained about how fight scenes are so boring. It's because, it's spectacle, and if you don't have good plot or good character embedded in that spectacle, then the spectacle itself, that's the least important one. That's not enough to keep you going.

[Rob] Right. Although, a fight scene doesn't have to be spectacle. But it often is. If the fight scene is character, if that's what it's doing, then you need to know that when you write it. Right? Or if the fight scene is plot. I think those are the three things it could be. If spectacle is what you need from your fight scene…

[Dan] It's worth mentioning that sometimes you just want to watch Jackie Chan do something amazing with a ladder. That is spectacle that is worth your time.

[Mary Robinette] But Jackie Chan is never just doing something with a ladder.

[Dan] True.

[Mary Robinette] That's the thing. He's also laying groundwork for plot and character at the same time. He's giving you geography. He's doing… I mean, geography was not one of the elements, but…

[Chuckles]

[Rob] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] But it is one of the reasons that you are willing to give him that. In addition to… No, actually, you're right, it's all about the spectacle.

[Laughter]

[Rob] It can be. Because Aristotle puts it sixth, but it's not always sixth. Like, I think… They're going to be different for any medium. So, like, in a written medium, music is often likely to be down at the bottom of the list. You're doing something fairly unusual. Spectacle you might think is also near the bottom in your novel, but I think of things like George RR Martin's castles. The way that every stronghold he does in those books… Like, that's written word spectacle. When he talks about the size of Winterfell, or the…

[Dan] I think it's worth considering audience as well. In one of the theater classes that I had in college, my professor would refer to things like Phantom of the Opera as tired businessman shows. They're all spectacle and music, but sometimes that's all your audience wants.

[Rob] Sure. Sure. There's an adaptation I worked on at McCarter Theatre of a book called Crowns. Which is… The source material is this coffee table book. It's photos of black women, southern African-American women in their church hats. Each one gets a little like paragraph of that woman telling something. That book is spectacle and character.

[Mary Robinette] It's nice.

[Rob] Through the hats, it's these snapshots of character. Then… The book's by Mayberry and… I can look it up if we want to put it in the liner notes. But Regina Taylor took it and made it into a play. One of the things about that process is at that point, you have to have some plot. Like, you don't have to have a plot in the coffee table book, but you have to have plot. The things she did that was brilliant is the show is laced with music. Incredible, often gospel, music throughout. So in that adaptation, the order of those six elements change. That's part of the success of the adaptation.

[Mary Robinette] So how about the two in the middle? Because we were talking about plot and character, and then music and spectacle. What are the two in the middle… Like, how do those map to literature in our…

[Rob] Sure. Well, I think… I mean, dialogue. Like, I think about Aaron Sorkin. Like, I… I believe television is primar… I would argue, primarily a character medium. I think. I think books tend to do plot and ideas really well. But you can shuffle. I mean, movies are big on spectacle, relatively speaking. TV, I think, tends to do character and plot. But when you watch an Aaron Sorkin TV show, sometimes what you're there for…

[Mary Robinette] Is the dialogue.

[Dan] Just the words.

[Mary Robinette] And David Mamet.

[Garbled]

[Dan]… Anderson mention as well.

[Rob] Tom Stoppard, sometimes, is that kind of…

[Dan] Well, off the top of my head, that's why I like Catcher in the Rye, is not so much the characters or anything that happens to them, but the way that it is written. That's also what I love about the Kingkiller Chronicles, is the language and the dialogue.

[Brandon] You could almost argue that that's music. Also, though.

[Mary Robinette] I was just having the same thought. I was like, where… Because I feel like the lyrical language falls into a different category than spoken language, the dialogue language. That's a really interesting thing, because I feel like with my own writing, the music of the language is not as important to me as the dialogue. Like, the way the characters interact in the way that's communicating to each other. I am less interested in writing a sentence that is a beautiful sentence for the sake of being a beautiful sentence. Which some of my Goodreads reviews talk about.

[Laughter]

[Rob] But then I think part of the usefulness of this is the what are we here for? What am I expecting my audience to be enjoying in this work? It's generally not all six at the same time. Or not all six at the same time. I think it's useful… I think it can be useful in the way that all of these writing tools are, just to help you think about what am I trying to do right now, as I write this fight scene.

[Dan] So another thing that I see a lot, especially as I am reading short story submissions from brand-new writers, is that they are trying to really knock our socks off on the first page or the first chapter. What they're actually doing, under the hood, now that I know this system, is that they've picked a different element to promote. They're going to give us gorgeous language in the first chapter, without realizing that they're making a promise and then not fulfilling it, because the rest of the book is not about language. They were just trying to impress us.

[Mary Robinette] I took a class from Donald Maass where he talked about openings. It was just a class on openings. He broke it down into their being basically two major types of openings. Character-driven openings, and voice-driven openings. That they are not… You can have a voice-driven opening that is also a character opening. But that in a character opening, what you're trying to do is ground the reader in who we… Who the character is and where we are. So you try to hit them with basically plot and character. That a voice-driven opening is all about the language and the ideas that you're evoking in the reader. I'm like, "Oh. Oh. Yeah. It's all about the bottom three. Ideas, music, and spectacle." Which is probably why I tend… I mean, I personally tend to gravitate towards things as a reader that are driven by plot, character, and dialogue, more so than I do with things that are just… That are voicy.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is, very surprisingly, Aristotle's Poetics.

[Rob] Right. Which is the book where he lays all this out. You'll find, when you go to that, that the ideas I'm talking about today are modified by my experience in teaching and the people who taught me. But it's not that long. It's public domain, of course. You can find it on Project Gutenberg or any number of places like that.

[Dan] Cool.

[Mary Robinette] Cool. So. You… I feel like… I keep wanting to talk about this, but I also know that we have modes that we can talk about as well.

[Rob] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Which is… That was one of the other things, when you mentioned, I got really excited about.

[Rob] That's where we started this conversation, right? So that's a thing… Classification of story thing. So we talk about… Or at least when I teach and I hear you guys talk about medium. What's your interface between the author brain and the audience brain? Genre. Which I think are about audience expectations to some extent. Modes is a classification system that's about the relationship of the author to the story and to the audience. So Aristotle says there are three modes. Lyric, Epic, and Dramatic. In Lyric, an author is telling of their own experience. In Epic, an author is telling a story that happens to someone else. In Dramatic, you're shown a story without an author's presence. Okay? So some other people picked that up, and you'll hear it described sometimes as narrator talks… Only narrator talks, characters talk, narrators talk and characters talk. What gets tricky is that there's a lot of writing about it that assumes that plays are dramatic mode. That that's what they're doing, you're showing a thing. That written, that's epic… Like, Homer is epic mode. He is telling a story that is happening. But that's kind of a trap. Because to write effectively in any of these modes, it's useful to realize that your med… All mediums can be mixed modes. You can activate dramatic mode in written prose. For example, the phrase about Jane Austen's writing, clear and direct?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Rob] Am I getting that right? Is I think, an attempt to do dramatic mode… Or a method for doing dramatic mode in writing. The author is disappearing and you're just seeing a scene. You're being shown a scene. Whereas, in other places, you get narrative mode, where the author comes in and becomes more present.

[Mary Robinette] Jane Austen goes back and forth in that, as well. That was one of the things that, for me… I heard Rob do this talk at the Nebula conference. One of the things that, for me, got exciting was realizing that it was talking about the way I as the writer am relating to the audience. That I am relating to them through this medium of fiction. But that there were things that worked very well in fiction that didn't necessarily work as well on stage, or that worked well on stage that I would try to do in fiction that wouldn't work. But a lot of it had to do with shifting my thinking about what mode I was in. Where I was, and how that relationship was shifting.

[Rob] And figuring out how to activate the modes you want. So, what kicked off that talk that I did at the Nebulas is there's a passage from Tolkien where he says that fantasy can't work on the stage. It's in an essay in Leaf, Tree and Leaf, whatever that collection of essays is. He says fantasy doesn't work on stage. He goes so far as to say the witches in Macb don't work. When you read what he's saying, he's saying essentially that it's because the stages dramatic form. You have to show it, and we're not going to believe it, and suspicion of disbelief is shattered. Horace says something similar in his Ars Poetica, that basically you show me something I can't believe and I'm not going to go there. But what I find in practice, and what I think people who like those plays, like Midsummer Night's Dream, find in practice, is that if you can find ways to activate a narrative mode in the audience, which is sort of a collective creation mode. Like, I need you to imagine this with me.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Rob] Then it can work. You can do that with a narrator device, you can do that with puppetry.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Rob] Which is something Mary Robinette and I have done together. We did… We worked together on an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants a few years ago. There's a lot of fantastic in that. Part of the way you do that is, if you do it with a puppet, the audience knows that's not a frost giant, or, that's not a bear. It is us imagining a bear.

[Dan] Yeah. This concept of kind of collaborative fiction with the audience is something that Penn and Teller do. They do it overtly. One of the things that fascinates them, and when they said it in an interview, it fascinated me, is that once they have spent all the time laying out what this narrative is going to be, the audience will keep believing it, even when they know it's false. The example they gave was someone can, after the show, go up and have an entire conversation with Teller, and then talk to Penn and say, "It's so cool that Teller never talks."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Now, you've just talked to… You just had dinner with him. But no. In their head, Teller never talks.

[Rob] Right.

[Dan] Because that's part of what they've bought into in order to enjoy the story.

[Rob] There's something you have to be careful with on stage in this, is if you get too dramatic mode, if you get too fully in we're showing you the thing, then you've let the audience off the hook. The audience doesn't do the work. I think, television and film can be this even more so, because were not used to doing creative work when we're watching those. Then the fantastic becomes harder, if we're not primed to imagine with.

[Brandon] This has been fascinating. I really like when we have a chance to sit down and do episodes like this that are topics we would never have approached on our own. Thank you so much for being on.

[Rob] Thanks for having me. This was fun.

[Brandon] You have an exercise.

[Rob] I do. I do. So, let's go back to the elements. So what I'm going to suggest is the exercise is take something you've written. Then, rank what those six elements are for that. What's the most important, what's the least important? Again, those are plot, character, idea, dialogue, music, spectacle. Then go back, rearrange the order, and rewrite it to do that.

[Mary Robinette] Fun.

[Brandon] Awesome. This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you so much, Rob, for being on. You guys are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.25: Choosing Your Agent

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/06/23/14-25-choosing-your-agent/

Key points: Your agent works for you. You have a choice, make it a good one. Think about who you want to work with, who is going to be the right business partner in the long run. Someone who can help you run your business. Who do you want as part of your brand? Make sure they can do a good job. Look at online resources, talk to your network. Ask the agent to talk to their other authors. You may need to change agents as your career changes, or their career changes. Keep the lines of communication open, talk about goals, figure out what you both need. To find an agent, look for authors who have a similar communication style, and talk to them about their agents! Think about someone who can fill in your weak spots. Check which genres the agent works in, and what level of editorial involvement you want. What communications style, how frequent do you want contact? Remember, charisma is not a dump stat. Consider the Kowal relationship axes, mind, manners, money, morals… Murder! Or the Marx Brothers.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 25.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Choosing Your Agent.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] Dongwon is joining us again. This is his third episode with us. Dongwon, I understand that you have spent some time working as an agent.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I have. I actually started my career as an agent, and then wandered off for many years doing other tasks in the industry, and have come back to being an agent in the past 3 and a 1/2 years now.

[Howard] Well, this morning, we had the opportunity to hear you talk about the publishing business. One of the parts that was most interesting to me was that opening salvo of choosing your agent and what that relationship ends up looking like.

[Dongwon] One thing I like to talk about a lot is making it really clear to writers that your agent works for you. If you're in the query trenches right now, the power dynamic feels very weighted towards the agent's side. You're trying to get their attention, you're trying to get someone to pay attention to you and make an offer of representation. But one of the things I like to really drive home is once that offer of representation has been made, the power dynamic completely inverts. Now, what the agent wants is for you to choose them. One of the reasons that we chose this phrasing for the episode title is the idea that you have a choice in this relationship is a really important one. It's one that I think a lot of writers lose sight of, because they're just so focused on getting an agent, any agent. Instead, what I'd like people to do is start thinking very carefully about who they want to work with. Who's going to be the right business partner to them over the course of their career? Ideally, an author-agent relationship will go on for years, and hopefully decades. Optimally, it's the course of both of your careers. You need to think carefully about who you're going to be working with over that period of time, and who you want to be helping you run your business.

[Mary Robinette] This is… I want to say, something that I stumbled on, you've heard me talk about on previous episodes, where my first… My very first agent was not a good agent. We often people say, "A bad agent is worse than no agent." The concrete thing that I had happened was that my first agent… I was… I had warning flags that went off. But it was an agent, and they were excited about my work. I had heard so much about how difficult it was to get an agent. So, even though I had some warning flags that this person might be flaky, I went ahead and signed. What happened was they sat on my novel for a year without sending it out. That was a year in which it was ready. So this was a… actively holding me back. The other thing that can happen with a bad agent, or with an agent who's… This is… These are people who are just like not good at their job, is that if they try to sell your work incompetently to a publishing house, and then you leave them and you come back, it's going to be very difficult to sell that same title later.

[Howard] That's the… There's a principle here that… It's a broader business principle, harkening back to, Dongwon, what you said earlier about you're choosing a business partner. This business partner is carrying your authorial brand as the flag when they march into the office. If they misbehave, if they do a bad job with the pitch, if they happen to be somebody that's for whatever reason, that editorial team, publishing team, just really doesn't like having in the room…

[Mary Robinette] That one actually is less of an issue, because, as long as they've got good taste…

[Howard] As long as they've got good taste. But you just know that whoever you are picking, a portion of who they are ends up as part of your brand, at least to the editors and publishers.

[Dongwon] A lot of the industry's interaction with you will be filtered through your agent. So if your agent has a certain reputation, has a certain way of operating, that is going to influence how people see you. It's not entire. You will have your own brand, and, I know, many writers have the opposite reputation of their agents. But Howard is absolutely right, that in those initial contacts, those initial meetings, that would definitely color it. So, sort of… The first step in choosing an agent is don't choose someone who's bad at their job. This last year, there were… Have been a couple sort of highly publicized incidents of agents who turned out to be acting against their own writers' interests. That's been a very challenging moment. My heart goes out to all of those writers. It can be hard to spot that person. There's some online resources that you can use to check out, like query tracker or query shark, but really, your best defense is having a good network. Talking to your friends, making friends with other writers, and asking around about somebody's reputation before you make a decision to go forward with them.

[Dan] You're also well within your rights to ask that agent if you can talk to some of their other authors. I get a lot of requests from my agent, "Hey, could you talk to this person? I would like to acquire their book." I'm always happy to recommend my agent. If you get an agent whose authors are not happy to recommend her, maybe stay away.

[Howard] Are you still with the agent you were with a year ago?

[Dan] Yes. Sarah Crowe. She's amazing.

[Mary Robinette] So I just… I actually just changed agents in the last year. The reason I did that was not because I had a bad agent. My agent was very good. But my career trajectory was such that I needed a different type of agent than I did at the beginning of my career. So the thing that was happening with my career trajectory was… The reason that I felt like I needed someone who was a little more aggressive, was that I was in the downward spiral. This happens to a number of writers in the course of their career, that there's what they call the death… The series' death spiral. So I'd had that happen. Then I had a novel that came out, and my book tour began on election day in 2016, which was a fraud year regardless of where you were. Book sales generally were declining. But when people are looking at your numbers, they don't look at the current events that are going on around it. They just look at the numbers. So I needed someone who was more aggressive. It was a difficult choice, because it would have been easier if my agent was doing things that were actively wrong. That wasn't the case. It was just I needed a different style. This is one of the things that I think you have to… While it's ideal to have an agent that stays with you over the course of your career, it's also important to know kind of what you need going into it.

[Howard] That is… And again, coming back to the general principle of business partners, there is this point of diminishing returns between what I need out of a new agent, what I lose if I don't switch, and the cost of switching. It's easy for us… in crossing that chasm, it's easy for us to overestimate the size of the peril, and just, out of fear of changing, stay in the same place.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] It's difficult.

[Dongwon] Many, many writers will have multiple agents over the course of their careers. There's nothing… There's no inherent problem to that. Like any long-term relationship, what you need out of it will change over time. It's also important to remember that your agent is also not a fixed point. They're evolving in their career as well, and how they operate, what circumstances they're in, what agency they're at, all those things can shift and change over time. Those changes will impact, and impact how the business operates. So it's very important to keep that line of communication open, and be talking about your goals, and are they being met in this relationship or not, and then figure out what you need out of that.

[Mary Robinette] That was very much the case with my agent, my previous agent, was that they had had a promotion at work, and were suddenly handling more things than they had been. So the attention that they were able to give to individual authors was shifting. Like, none of us were being neglected, it was just the communication style had changed. The aggression, I think, had shifted, or at least my perception of it. So that was one thing that was also going on there, was that a change in my agent's life as well.

[Howard] Let's take a quick break and talk about a book. Dongwon?

[Dongwon] Yeah. This week, I want to talk about Sarah Gailey's Magic for Liars. This is Sarah Gailey's debut novel, coming out from Tor Books. It should have just come out on June Fourth. It is a murderer-mystery set at a magical school for teenagers. It is not a young adult novel. It is a very adult novel about a woman who is called in to investigate a murder of a faculty member at this school. The protagonist's twin sister also is a teacher at this school. As you would have it, that sister is magic and she is not. She needs to figure out what happened and unpack this really gruesome murder and figure out why teenagers are so goddamned terrifying.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Especially when they have magic powers.

[Howard] Okay. As the father of two current teenagers, I would love to know the answer to that question.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey. I'm a big fan of Sarah's. Their cowboy hippopotamus books.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Loved those so much.

[Howard] Okay. I want to talk about your toolbox as an author. I'm big on the toolbox metaphor. What are the tools that authors have at their disposal to start searching for agents who meet their criteria?

[Mary Robinette] We've talked about a couple of them on previous podcasts. The advice that I'm often given… Had been given and often give is to pay attention to what authors are happy with their agents. Specifically, looking for authors… There's… We always are told to look at the authors whose work is similar. But I actually think you should also try to look at the author… Authors whose process is similar. Because that's going to be people with whom you have a similar communication style. I'm going to continue using myself as a useful representative example. When I left my previous agent and moved on, because of where I am in my career and I am… I do have multiple Hugos. I am marketable. I had the good fortune of having a couple of choices. I was doing due diligence, and I went into it expecting that at the end of having done due diligence that I would be signing with Dongwon. I was just like, "But I'm going to check with some other people just in case."

[Howard] Oh, she went there.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I cleared it… I cleared this with him before, before we got into it. It was a really hard choice. Because, like the authors that he represents are people that I like, there people that I have a lot in common with. I think he's wicked smart, and there were all these different things. When it finally came down to, Dongwon and Seth Fishman, who is my agent now, was I realized that what I needed was someone who filled my weaknesses. The difference between their agenting styles, in a lot of ways, they're both very good with developmental stuff and things like that, but Dongwon is about building relationships, and Seth is a shark.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And…

[Dongwon] I'm a nice shar… No.

[Mary Robinette] I know. Well, that's the thing. It's like you're the nursemaid shark. He's… There is nothing…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But it was basically, I was, like I'm good at relationships. That's not the spot that I need bolstering. So both of them would have been a good choice, but it was really about learning what I needed. It's quite possible that that is what I needed early in my career as well, but I didn't know myself as well, as an author and what my process and how I was going to fit into the industry was. So when you're looking at the toolbox, it's important, yes, to be able to find the agent, but just knowing a list of agent's names is not as useful as knowing what it is you need out of the agents. So, Absolute Write is a good source for checking to make sure that the agent isn't shady. I also find that if you type in the agent's name and scam afterwards…

[Dan] And hope there's no hits.

[Mary Robinette] Hope there's no hits, yes. Harassment after that. These are… Scandal. These are good words to just kind of…

[Howard] Good things to not be attached to.

[Mary Robinette] Then, looking at Publisher's Weekly, Locus. Looking at who made sales, and…

[Howard] In 2006, I, we played with the idea of having Schlock Mercenary represented, agented, shipped out to a publisher, because self-pubbing actual paper books that weigh actual tons of actual mass is hard work. My friend Rodney had written a technical manual a few years earlier, and had an agent… His experience with the agent was funny. He said, "Yeah, I've already sold the book. I can't mess with… There's nothing you can do." She said, "I tell you what. Let me represent you. I know the contract's been signed, but let me represent you." She went in. She got him a 50% raise on the book. Her 15% came out of that, and Rodney was like, "Oh. Oh, I do need an agent." Rodney introduced me to that agency, which was the Barbara Bova agency, which does a lot of science fiction. So I came into this from outside the industry, through a contact to was just somebody I knew in the tech world. Part of the toolbox is talking to people and listening to their experiences. That experience of Rodney's… Like, I want that to happen to me. That agency… The results were the best possible results. Which were… Everybody we talked to said, "We love this, but it's not what we do." Or, "I mean, we already read it, but it's not what we do." And, "Wow, this sounds awesome, but it's not what we do." The agent went out and determined that the market I wanted at the time didn't exist. The relationship's over now, because the agent's not going to make any money. But that is… I consider that a success story.

[Dongwon] It really is.

[Howard] Because I found an agent who, in the space of six months, told me that the business plan that I already had was the right one.

[Dan] So, let's expand this toolbox a little bit more. When you're talking to people, when you're talking to other authors, what are some of the questions you can ask them to find out how they work with their agent? Two of the big ones for me. First of all, is what genres does your agent work in? Because I got the… I started with Sarah because I had written a horror novel, but I knew that I wanted to write more than that. One of the reasons that she and I work so well together is that she covers horror, but also science-fiction and also YA and middle grade, which kind of covers all of the playgrounds that I wanted to play in. Not every agent does. So finding someone who's willing to go with you when you start hopping genres is valuable, if that's what you want to do. One of the other ones is what level of editorial involvement do you want your agent to have. Because different agents do it differently, different authors want different things. So if you want an agent who will be very hands-on or very hands-off, ask their authors what that relationship is like.

[Dongwon] That's one that you should also ask the agent directly. Going back to Mary's example, we had a series of very long conversations. I mean, we probably spent upwards of seven or eight hours on the phone over the course of a few weeks talking a lot of this through. When… I get nervous when I'm signing a new client if they're not asking me questions, then I start to have a little bit of a hesitation in my mind, actually. Just because I'm worried that they're not putting the work in to make sure that this relationship is going to work out, and that I'm going to be right for them. Really, at the core of this, is communication style is really one of the most important things. Do you want someone who's very formal in their communications? Do you want a letter that's laid out? Do you want something that's very casual? Do you want to be… Talk to your agent once a week, once a month, once every six months? I have certain clients I talk to almost daily, and there certain clients I talk to about every three or four months. It depends on what it is. I am very informal in how I relate to a lot of my clients. I think, for certain people, that would drive them nuts, right? There's certain people who really appreciate that, and sort of need that ability to check in periodically and be like, "Hey, is everything okay? Am I on the right track? Is this going well? What's happening with this?"

[Howard] At risk of going over-general again, this is the… Your reminder that charisma is not a dump stat.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The ability to have a conversation with someone in which the two of you connect and determine what you expect out of this kind of relationship… You can build that skill set without talking to agents. Learning that skill set when your feet are in the fire is frightening.

[Mary Robinette] So you remember in a previous episode, I talked about the Kowal relationship axes, which my mother-in-law came up with as a way to describe someone that you're dating. That you want to be roughly aligned on intelligence, you want to be roughly aligned on where you feel money is important, morals… Actually, you want your… You want a moral agent. Towards you!

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But manners, similar communications style. These apply to your agent as well as to a character. There's a really good agent that is someone that I could have gotten because they are… They're the agent of a friend, they're very successful. I would have run a fire poker through them within two minutes of conversation. Because our communication styles are wildly out of alignment. At the same time, you're not looking for a best friend. Right? It is a business partner. It's good if you can be friends. But that's not… You need someone who is good at their job first, and then someone you can communicate with second.

[Howard] Mind, manners, money, morals, murder…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Marx Brothers. We try to be more positive about it.

[Howard] All right…

[Dongwon] I will say, I often try to avoid the romantic relationship analogy when talking about finding your agent, but it is inevitable that it comes up at some point, because I think there are a lot of similarities and parallels.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] There definitely are. On those notes, Dongwon, do you have homework you can assign to our listeners?

[Dongwon] Yeah. So, your homework assignment is going to be a little bit of self-examination. I want you to think about your career and what's important to you and how you like to operate. Think about times you've been in a business setting, at a job, in a meeting, and think about the things that you found very frustrating, and what you would find your dating to work with over a long period of time with somebody who is working with some of the most important work to you. Make a list of those attributes. What are you looking for in an agent? What kind of communication style? Do you want someone who edits you, do you want someone who doesn't? How would you like them to pursue a deal? Do you want them to go all out all the time, or do you want them to build relationships and be very targeted? Those are questions you should ask yourself, and start making that list of the attributes that are important to you.

[Howard] Make the list. You gotta write this down, because this is Writing Excuses, and you're out of excuses. Now, go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/06/16/14-24-political-intrigue/

Key points: Political intrigue? The fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust. Shifting the dynamics or balance of power. Am I looking for the answer (aka mystery) or am I trying to find out why this is happening (aka thriller)? A heist of information! Why are people doing things, what are their motivations? Who has informational advantage? Beware of boredom! Give us a reason to care, make sure we understand the stakes. Scheming leads to actions, and actions lead to complications and ramifications. There must be change, not just scheming. Build rooting interest and sympathy for a character before you dive into political string pulling. The machinations of your villain should be smart, not just insanely convoluted. Secrets and informational advantage are the keys to political intrigue.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 24.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Political Intrigue.

[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] Or are you? [Dum, duh, dummmm!]

[Margaret] Last I checked. I hope so.

[Brandon] Let's talk about political intrigue. So, can we define this? What do we mean by this? I'll give you a little starter, primer. When I was pitching books, back when I had no idea how to pitch books, right?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I was just wondering around the World Fantasy convention, trying to pitch my book to anybody who was standing by looking bored.

[This potted plant…]

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I pitched to somebody, I think it was an editor at Delray or something. I pitched my book as a political book about such and such. They listened and like, "Oh. You mean political intrigue. Not political book. Make sure you add that word intrigue on when you do this pitch in the future…"

[Howard] To somebody else. To somebody who is not me.

[Laughter]

[Margaret] But solid advice for a free sound rejection.

[Brandon] Yeah. I always thought, oh, I was presenting… Because what I really did mean was a political intrigue book. I was not writing a book about politics, it was about the fun of not knowing all the answers and having a character who doesn't know who they can trust.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think… I mean, the word intrigue, it is intriguing, it is engaging, the curiosity of it, the quest for answers. I sometimes joke that… And it's not really a joke… That the third book in the Glamorous Histories, Without a Summer, is a political intrigue disguised as a Regency romance. It is all about the way things are shaped in court, and although my characters wind up being somewhat peripheral to it, it is all about shifting those dynamics.

[Brandon] I can…

[Howard] It's worth pointing out that in Season 11, when we talked about the Elemental Genres, we drew a distinction between mystery and thriller. Re-listening to those episodes as we talk about political intrigue might be useful, because in some cases, the mystery is I want to answer the question. In thrillers, often it's I already kind of know what the answer to the question is, but I don't know why this is happening. There's looking for the answer, and then there's looking for a way out.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I sometimes think about political intrigues as a heist of information.

[Brandon] Yeah. I think that that's a…

[Howard] Info heist.

[Brandon] That's a great way to put it. When I'm looking at this, it's often you don't know other people's motivations. The main character is trying to figure out where does this person lie, where do their allegiances lie? What are their actual goals? And these sorts of things. As I was thinking about political intrigue, I realized a lot of what I write is political intrigue. Because, if you want to have fast-paced intense fantasy, one way is people always fighting, but that kind of gets boring to me very quickly. So the next step for that is trying to figure out people's motivations, and the plots they're pulling, and things like that.

[Mary Robinette] It is ultimately about trying… There is a character who's trying to shift a balance of power.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That is a key element to a political intrigue, is that shift of power.

[Margaret] I think… Because sometimes the political intrigue can definitely be the informational heist of trying to obtain information. But that doesn't mean that necessarily it's a quest for something, like that is a part of the guise of I am trying to accomplish my goal of X, and it is made difficult by the fact of the shifting sands that are all around me.

[Howard] It's worth looking at a couple of terms here. The term political. It's easy to get bogged down in current politics, or current events. Really, what's meant here is balances of power. Who has power over who else? How are these powers related? How is this power expressed? This group has power because they control the military. This group has power because they control the making of laws. Understanding that when you're thinking of the word political is critically important. As is just politics at like the university level or the family level. On the intrigue side of things, the term that I fall back on is informational advantage. Which is something that comes up all the time in sociology. The idea that one group has informational advantages over somebody else, and that gives them power that cannot be disrupted until, coming back to Mary's heist of information, until the information has flowed the other way and the advantage doesn't exist anymore.

[Margaret] What you were saying reminded me of the idea that power can take many different forms. One of the classes that I teach fairly frequently is one in adaptation. Where we ask students to take a piece of literature in the public domain and change it somehow. I had one student, he was adapting Macbeth. But he adapt… He set it in a junior high school classroom.

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] So you had all of the political machinations of Macbeth, but it was all revolving around, it's not the crown of Scotland, it's who's got social and political capital inside this group of tween's. So it doesn't necessarily have to deal with kings or presidents or government, if you're talking about political intrigue.

[Brandon] Absolutely. I mean, the number of times that a Shakespearean political intrigue story has been re-done as a teen high school drama… I think you would be shocked to see how many times they've done that and how well it translates.

[Margaret] Or as a motorcycle gang.

[Yeah. Yeah.]

[Mary Robinette] The thing is that… That's important about this is that when we're talking about this shift of power and capital, we're not talking about the shift of physical power. Which is why Avengers: Civil War is not a political intrigue at all. Even though it is very much about a shift of power.

[Brandon] Right. Whereas…

[Mary Robinette] Winter Soldier kind of is, though.

[Brandon] Winter Soldier kind of is. Yes. Exactly. That's a very good way to put it. So my question to you is, and this is coming from the professor mind where… I get a lot of students who obviously are trying to do this, and it is b o r i n g…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So boring. How do you keep this from being boring, and highlight what makes it interesting?

[Mary Robinette] The same way you do it with everything. Stakes. And giving us a reason to care. What happens if the character fails to accomplish this thing? Why do we care that they're going after this information? If we don't care, we're not… It doesn't matter how compelling you make breaking into some place, it doesn't matter, any of that, if we don't care. That means telling us about their motivations, that means telling us about the physical visceral sensations that they have when they're trying to hack into a database, or use their mystical powers, whatever it is. If we aren't getting those things, it doesn't matter what set piece you've got, it's going to be dull.

[Margaret] To me, it's that machinations have to result in actions, and actions have to result in complications and ramifications. Things that change… The shifting status quo has to actually be shifting. You don't want a bunch of people sitting around scheming, but nobody ever actually does anything.

[Brandon] I think that's part of the problem my students run into. I think part of the other problem is that they assume just like action, that political intrigue is naturally interesting. So you get these chapters where they forget they need to establish rooting interest and sympathy for a character, and then just immediately dump the political situation on us. They start, this is a young prince at court, and here's the politics of what this person's behind the throne and all that. You're like, I don't care yet. So since I don't care yet, I don't want to know who's trying to secretly pull the strings. I want to see this character and see the impact on their immediate life, and make sure that I'm interested, and then start layering this on.

[Howard] If I need to know who is motivated to kill the CEO, then it's useful for me to know a little bit about the lines of succession to being the CEO or what happens if there is no CEO. But relaying that information to me organically through the story versus narrating to me the constitution of the corporation of the book that you are writing…

[Mary Robinette] I'm getting bored…

[Howard] Are two completely different things.

[Mary Robinette] Just listening to you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yes…

[Margaret] I think there's an assumption sometimes that in order to understand or be interested in a chess game, you have to see the entire board.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Margaret] In terms… For chess, yes, that is literally true. But for metaphorical chess, often you want to, as you say, reveal things more organically. Stick to your point of view and let this get discovered…

[Howard] Position the camera right over the bishop's shoulder at what the bishop is aiming at diagonally, and suddenly we're invested in the direction that the bishop can go.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I'm going to make the argument that you have to see the entire board to play chess. You don't have to see it to watch chess.

[Margaret] Oooo!

[Brandon] Well, I also would make the point that playing chess when somebody else can see the entire board but you can't is part of what a lot of political intrigue stories are about.

[Mary Robinette] That's true.

[Margaret] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] Right. Somebody is moving all these pieces, but you can only move this little one.

[Margaret] Well, how long of a driver in Game of Thrones is it that… The Starks arrive in King's Landing and all of this stuff is going on, and it's Ned blundering around in the dark trying to figure out what's actually happening.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. I'm going to pitch at you The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki. This is a fantastic book. I love this book. You probably don't need me to tell you that. I mean, it was a finalist for the Locus Award and various other major awards. It is a really cool political intrigue story that starts in the political intrigue of a secondary fantastical world based on Indian history and mythologies, where the main character is part of a harem. She's grown up in the harem. She's the daughter of the king. We start to inch into political intrigue, until it turns about-face and turns into political intrigue in the world of Faerie from Indian mythology. That happens very naturally, but also very surprisingly in a very cool way very early in the story. From then on, you're like, "Oh. She was having to play 2D chess where she didn't know all the pieces, and now she's playing 7D chess and she doesn't even know what kinds of creatures are playing on the playing field with her." It is written beautifully. The language is beautiful. The intrigue is interesting. The mythology is fascinating. It is just a really well done book. So that is The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Choshki.

[Brandon] So let me bring it back to you guys. One of the questions that I have is when you're doing political intrigue, and when you're reading it, often times you will eventually find out the machinations of the villain, who was behind the scenes, and it is the most convoluted…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] They were… Their method of winning this chess game was to have like 17 different things that don't mean anything, and at the end, they're like, "Ha Ha! I've won this." It just… It really bothers me when the brilliant machinations come to fruition and they're kind of dumb.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of problems with that, where you're like, "There are really a lot easier ways to accomplish that. Why didn't you…"

[Howard] One of my favorite lines… It's from one of the Lois McMaster Bujold Miles Vorkosigan books is, from somebody who's doing this political chicanery, and she says, "I don't plan a path to victory. I plan so that all paths lead to victory."

[Mary Robinette] Interesting.

[Howard] As you unravel what this character is doing, you see, yes, it was convoluted, but it was convoluted because depending on the things other people do, you put me on a different path that leads to me winning. That's super interesting. But when it's super convoluted because all of these things need to work exactly right for me to cross the finish line, suspension of disbelief fails.

[Margaret] I will say for… I was going to comment, on the flipside, so I don't know if you want to duck in first?

[Howard] Go.

[Margaret] The first television show I ever worked on was called The Middleman, and the catchphrase of all of the villains on that show was, "My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity." The plan was never simple. Ever. I believe if we had had Season Two, it would have become, "My plan is sheer elegance in its draconian complexity."

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] You can use that to great comic effect. Phineas and Ferb does this really well. Dr. Doofenschmirtz has a very simple problem with a very simple solution, which he decides to solve in arcane ways that don't work.

[Howard] It's Pinky and the Brain.

[Margaret] Exactly.

[Howard] The Brain… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So a lot of times these plots are in fact a Rube Goldberg machine. The way I handle it is that I actually plot my villain like a hero story, so that they pick the simplest solution possible. All of the plot complications are them compensating for things going wrong.

[Howard] Well, when we come back to the idea of intrigue, and the term informational advantage, the complexities for political intrigue plots are often I have a very straightforward path and it remains straightforward if I have kept secrets from the following people. If I have informational advantage at all of these stages, then I will win. Now, once you as a writer have plotted that out, you switch sides to your heroes, and you now have a big list of obstacles that they need to clear in order to succeed, and they don't even know what the obstacles are.

[Mary Robinette] I think, again, highlighting the fact that secrets are really important in political intrigue.

[Brandon] All right. Well, let's go ahead and go to our homework.

[Margaret] Yes. The homework this week is to take a classic fairytale, something like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Little Mermaid, whatever floats your particular boat. Take that story. Now assume the story we know is only a cover. What was actually going on? Incorporate as many details from the original story as you would like. If baby bear had the smallest serving of porridge, why wasn't it the coldest? Why did they leave their breakfast on the table when they went out walking, anyway? Come up with the undercurrents that explains what we see on the surface.

[Howard] Goldilocks and Three Russian Bears.

[Margaret] Da.

[Brandon] This is my favorite one we've come up with, so I'm really looking forward to what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.23: Governments Large and Small

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/06/09/14-23-governments-large-and-small/

Key points: Bureaucracy, meritocracy, monarchy, Howardarchy, rabbits? How do you worldbuild governments? Look at the power structures in which you live, the expressions of power, the expressions of control. Autocratic, democratic, meritocratic? How do you make political intrigue interesting? Someone to hate, to vilify, a villain! How do you enforce things? Drama can be how do you navigate the system and overcome the constraints. Worldbuilding elements? How do you design and enforce laws? Taxes! The allocation of resources. Four estates: executive, judiciary, legislative, and the press. Where does power come from, who holds it? Communications. Succession.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 23.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Governments Large and Small.

[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] We are in a bureaucracy. No, we're really not. We have a lot of paper, though.

[Howard] We're in a meritocracy.

[Brandon] I wish.

[Dan] No. We wouldn't be on the show anymore.

[Brandon] Actually…

[Dan] It would just be our guest cohosts.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Government.

[Howard] That's… What kind of ocracy are we in? We're not here by merit. We're here because we got here first.

[Brandon] That's right.

[Dan] Okay.

[Brandon] There's a government for us. We started it, so… It's our thing.

[Howard] It is… What do you call it, inherited power?

[Dan] [garbled There's a white guy dipped in there somewhere]

[Howard] Besides monarchy, but that's not… It's not monarchy, it's…

[Dan] [garbled]

[Brandon] We're just going to call this a Howardarchy…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That…

[Dan] That's a great word.

[Howard] That's terrible.

[Brandon] So…

[Dan] It sounds like a great name for a rabbit.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Okay. So we're talking about governments large and small.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Howard] And looking at if you're going to worldbuild governments, start by looking at power structures in which you live. Because… I mean, the very word government. Governing is an expression of power, an expression of control. What are the methods by which your family is governed? What are the methods by which you personally govern yourself? What are the methods by which your workplace is governed? Are these things… Does it feel autocratic, does it feel democratic? Does it feel meritocratic? People got here because they know how to do things well, so we all kind of agreed that they should be in charge because they do it better than anybody else? Looking at those things at the level where you live is probably the fastest way to learn how to make it interesting when you're trying to write about it in stories.

[Brandon] Well. That's… This has been Writing Excuses…

[Laughter]

[Howard] [garbled That was autocracy]

[Brandon] I'm going to… Let's play off of that idea right there. One of the things… Every time I kind of bring up politics is a story… A method of telling a story, people's eyes seem to glaze over. I remember back… Way back when Dan and I were going to conventions and pitching things to people, I pitched to an editor at Delray and I said, "Well, it's a political book with political intrigue and stuff." He's like, "Never lead by telling someone it's a book about political intrigue. They will get so bored so quickly." I'm like, "But lots of books are about political intrigue." That is the entire Game of Thrones series. So how… Obviously, it can be made to be interesting. How do you do that?

[Mahtab] You have one person who you can all hate. Which is why…

[Dan] House of Cards.

[Mahtab] I mean, that can… Yeah. Monarchy. That's why it works so well, is because… That's why I don't think democracies work so well unless you have one person who's the face of the democracy that you can identify as someone who is probably doing wrong, and then… I think you need one person to vilify, basically.

[Brandon] Okay. So for…

[Howard] George Orwell's 1984. You had to have the two minute hate, because we had to have something to center around to not like. I think that we often conflate politics with sociology and economics and ecology and all kinds of other things. Politics is fascinating because it is the way in which power is wielded over other people. You can have a belief that everybody should have free food. You can have a belief that everybody should starve unless they can win a sword fight. You can adopt these two social logical beliefs. How do you enforce that? Do you enforce that was sword fighting? Do you enforce that with money? Do you enforce that… How does that work? That is where it becomes political. For me, when you talk about political intrigue, what you're talking about is people wielding power over other people. Ripping the rug out from under them so that they no longer have the power they thought they had. It's less about political position and more about…

[Brandon] About changes and power dynamics.

[Howard] More about the musculature, more about the arm bar, the…

[Dan] Yeah. What fascinates me about political stories, political fiction, is the movement within the rules. So, earlier I mentioned House of Cards which was the Netflix series which I loved and tell Kevin Spacey imploded. Also, the British series, The Thick of It, which was then remade into the American series Veep. Those are fascinating and fantastic shows that show the inner workings of government. They're fascinating because every episode is more or less we need to accomplish X. How? We can't just go and do it because there's a bureaucracy in the way. So we need to get a favor from this guy. Then we need to get this woman on our side. Then we need to give them a quid pro quo, and do something for them, so that they'll do something for us. Watching all of the hoops that have to be jumped through and watching the political strategizing that goes on, that's what makes it fascinating. So I almost think… There are certain aspects of political fiction in which a single hateful figure, like a dictator are very valuable. I think that's one of the reasons we default to dictators so much, because it gives us a villain. But I think you can get just as much drama out of the constraints placed on how do we navigate this system. So it's not so much that there is a face that we can hate as just the red tape we have to cut through.

[Mahtab] But even though I said it's good to have a monarchy or a dictatorship or you have one person… Just thinking back to rural India, where you do not have one person, but you have a panchayat, which is basically five elders of the village who sit down and mediate. That is their political, or their government, basically. I mean, you do have a federal government, you do have a state government. But in the villages, it is the five people who control the fate of the rest of the villagers. So it could be anything from domestic violence to crime to rape to whatever, and it's these five people. Sometimes they come up with really good solutions, and sometimes they are just as corrupt. So, they could all collude and pass judgment. So, you have to see the framework in which your setting that government. To have a dictatorship in a rural Indian setting may not work. But having this kind… It's good to kind of explore what would work in a certain society based on their culture, their norms, what they believe in, who they look up to. Because elders are respected in India. I don't see that kind of respect in North America where people are questioned, even if they're…

[Dan] We don't respect anybody.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] Teachers and elders. I don't see the kind of respect that they get. That comes from the cultural aspect of India where you respect your elders, even if they're wrong, you respect them and you pretty much do what they say.

[Brandon] Let's do a book of the week, Dan.

[Dan] So, our book of the week is A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. This is a Tor book that I absolutely love. It gave me the same kind of political espionage science fiction vibe that Dune did. It's a very different book, but it still has that flavor. It's about a diplomat from a space station society who is traveling to the heart of this massive intergalactic Empire to be the new ambassador there in the midst of a huge crisis. It has some really cool technology, it has some incredible cultural stuff. There's kind of ritualized communication and poetry is the way that this big civilization talks to each other. But really, it's kind of a murder mystery that can only be solved by navigating the kind of underbelly of this government. It's just really good. I really love it. The language is beautiful and the culture is fascinating and the politics in it are just vicious.

[Brandon] A Memory Called Empire.

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] So, next week we're going to dive… Do a deep dive into political intrigue itself. So, for the remainder of this discussion, I want to back up just a little bit and talk about the actual worldbuilding elements. What are things that our listeners need to take into account and consideration when they are worldbuilding specifically a government? I'm talking about, for instance, one of the most important purposes for a government is to design the laws. What is legal, and what is not? Who decides that, how is it arrived upon, and how is it enforced? These sorts of things. What other things do people have to consider when they're building a government?

[Mahtab] Taxes.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mahtab] Taxes is a… I mean, most people hate taxes, they would question it. Why would people be taxed for certain things, and… If they didn't pay it, or what is the… What are the taxes paid for and how are they paid? That could be a very interesting story. There was a… We were just talking about it, there was a movie called Lagaan, which is taxes raised on villages during the British Empire. The only way to get out of it was for the villagers to play cricket. If they lost, they would have to pay three times the taxes. But because the villagers were so bowed under the weight of it, they took that risk and they went ahe… It's brilliant, but I think taxes is a huge point.

[Howard] Even… Take taxes and pull a step back from that. Ask yourself, what is the… How is the government managing the allocation of resources? Is it possible, in your fiction or science fiction thing, for a government to govern, to operate in a way where resources don't need to be allocated to it? Where it can allocate its own resources? It doesn't need taxes, because it has its own source of power, money, whatever. These are fun questions to ask. The… I guess… I come back around to the way in which power is expressed a lot. I like the model, the four estate model, we talk about a lot in the US, where you have an executive branch where power is expressed in terms of enforcing laws. The military, the police. The execution of judgment. You have a Judiciary branch in which power is expressed through interpretation of law. You have a legislative branch in which power is expressed through the creation of law. You have the fourth estate, where power is expressed through the dissemination of information to the people who vote for all of the people who make, execute, and interpret the laws. It's a really elegant sort of model, that says nothing about conservatism or liberalism or progressivism or green or whatever. It's all about the way in which power is expressed. I love looking at that model, and then finding ways to break it, in the same way that governments break in our world. Which is, when somebody crosses between two domains of expression of power, so they now have more power than they otherwise would.

[Dan] So, another way to look at power is, where does the power come from, and who holds it? I remember reading this really compelling essay about… Talking about the difference between United States government and the European governments that many of us came from. United States government was formed after the invention of the gun. Which means that people were able to defend themselves and did not need a government to protect them. So we have a completely different attitude about the power government should have, the amount of allegiance that we owe to our government, the amount of things we rely on our government for than the European governments that have existed since the feudal times when you needed a lord to protect you. So looking at… Well, when was this government created? How… Under what circumstances was this government created, and how has that affected the way they perceive it?

[Brandon] Two things we haven't talked about, also. Historically, one of the main reasons that governments collapsed is that they weren't able to rule a large enough area. They captured more land than they were able to communicate with quickly and maintain control of. So one of the things that I suggest, if you're creating a fantasy government, is look at how is the information getting around. How is this far-off piece of your Empire being governed? How realistic is that? Before you get to easy, quick communication, it's very hard to maintain a large government. It will collapse under its own weight. Or you'll have to do some of the things that they tried in some of the early Western governments, where they would have… There would be three kings, kind of, who all worked as one, and they each had this little part that they were king of. But together they were one government. Find ways to try and rule something bigger than one person can rule. The other thing we haven't talked about is succession. How does the power change hands in this government?

[Howard] Larry Niven's story called One Face, which I love for its expression of… Political intrigue is kind of the wrong way, wrong word, but the succession of power. A spaceship, hyperspace, gets knocked out of hyperspace, they don't know where they are. Their computer isn't working right. The computer is really smart though, but it's not quite working right. They figure out, oh, we actually made it back to Sol system, but the sun got bigger and ate Mercury and Earth now only has one face. All of… So Earth is a dead planet. We have no idea what to do. They ask the computer, "Do you have any suggestions? What should we do?" The computer is dying, and the computer says, "Promote the astrophysicist to Captain." Then it dies. I love that, because what it says is, the wrong person is in charge. You put this person in charge, he can solve the problem. Now I'm dead. The problem is… Well, we gotta find a way to spin Earth again. Because everything you guys need is frozen on the other side of it. You just crashed, and you can't see it yet. But the astrophysicist is going to figure that out. So, I love… Sure, I've spoiled the story for you. But that whole aspect of succession where God, if you will, has said, "Look, he needs to be king. I'm not telling you why. I'm out."

[Mahtab] I'll still read it. It sounds interesting.

[Dan] I love this idea of succession. One of my favorite movies is called The Lion in Winter. Which is about Eleanor of Aquitaine and her husband who is probably named Edward and then their children, Richard the Lion Hearted, Prince Lackland, and the third one no one remembers. The entire story takes place over one night in which the two parents are trying to decide which of their sons will inherit. We have this concept of royal primogeniture, which, yes, existed. But if the wrong son was going to inherit, you had ways of making sure he didn't. So they're trying to decide which one is going to take over when the king dies. It is constant political scheming, backbiting, stabbing, murdering, sleeping around… All in the course of one night. It's fantastic.

[Brandon] We are out of time. Howard, you've got some homework for us?

[Howard] Yes. I've been beating on this drum already. But I'm going to let you guys pound on it now. The four estate model. Executive, legislative, judiciary, and the press. Find expressions of power that are outside of that, or that are subdivisions of that. Create your own numbered model in which government, or society, because the four estate model is larger than just government, in which expression of power within your society is categorized and build your governments around that.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.22: Characters out of Their Depth

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/06/02/14-22-characters-out-of-their-depth/

Key Points: Watson (aka The Howard, cabbage head, gateway character, Bilbo, the apprentice) can help by getting things explained to them. It gives readers someone that they can ride along with and get introduced to the universe. Writers can use this to introduce a concept and drive it home. It gives the audience someone to identify with, who is getting oriented and figuring things out. Give them an arc of growth. Avoid using them for "As you know, Bob" explanations. Sometimes make them (and the audience) work to understand things. Buddy cops are a good example. Make sure your Watson has agency! Sometimes you want the reader to be confused, but ground them first, show that they can trust you, then... hit them (and your Watson) with confusion. Don't just bury the reader in confusion, pick the ones that are important. And remember, Watson, sometimes what's important is that the dog didn't bark.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 22.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Characters out of Their Depth.

[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 in over my head.

[Brandon] Yes. We're going to talk about characters who are in a little bit or a lot over their heads. Let's get right into this. I often really like the idea of a Watson character. This is a character who fills the role in the plot that they get things explained to them. Based, obviously, off of Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

[Dan] He's also sometimes referred to as the Howard.

[Brandon] The Howard. Yes, the Howard. The cabbage head.

[Howard] That has been my contribution to…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The body of world literature for the last decade.

[Mary Robinette] It's appreciated.

[Brandon] So. Why, number one, would we want characters to be out of their depth and…

[Howard] I need a job.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Why, then, put them in and then take such efforts to explain things to them?

[Howard] The simplest way to explain this to non-genre fiction readers is if you are picking up genre fiction for the first time, these things are not going to make sense to you unless there is a character to whom it can be explained. You get to ride along with that character and get introduced to this universe. For people who are familiar with genre fiction, for people who love hard sci-fi or deep magic secondary world fantasy, often, they expect just to be immersed and having a Watson, having a Howard in the book isn't all that important to them. But it's still useful if you are trying to introduce a concept and drive it home so that it doesn't get forgotten. Something with particular import.

[Mary Robinette] In children's theater, we call this the gateway character. It is the character with whom the audience identifies.

[Howard] That's much friendlier to me.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The idea is that the character is going through a similar experience to the audience, so the audience doesn't know what's going on, they're having trouble being oriented. So having a character who is doing that, who is actively proceeding through being oriented and figuring things out gives the audience a gateway into something that would otherwise be inaccessible. It's an important character to have in children's stage and fiction as well, because that's basically a child's experience of life.

[Howard] Everything is new to them.

[Brandon] This is why you see portal fantasies a lot in middle grade. Much more so than you see in science fiction and fantasy for older readers, just because the same thing, it lowers the learning curve. It also is shared experience.

[Dan] Well, that… I was going to mention fantasy, too. Because we're calling this the Watson character, but that's exactly the role that Bilbo plays as well. Hobbits in general. They have never left the Shire, they have never seen the cool stuff we're exploring. Countless apprentice figures in epic fantasy are filling this role.

[Howard] Lines like… Now I don't remember the line… Where Samwise is talking about he's only heard of these things in songs. These things are only heard of in legend. Then he meets them and they are different, they are relatable. It's incredibly powerful.

[Dan] Well, to get back to your question, why would you use this kind of character? One of the roles that it serves, if you're doing this kind of apprentice, the Bilbo version instead of the Watson version, is that the character's going to change. So suddenly we have an arc of growth. So we're giving… We're dropping someone in over their head, and then watching them learn how to swim.

[Mary Robinette] They also provide a really easy way to do exposition for your worldbuilding. So they serve a number of different functions. I've just been reading Becky Chambers The Long Way To a Small, Angry Planet. Rosemary, who is one of the major point of view characters, has never been on a long haul deep space ship. She grew up on Mars. She is in over her head. She's very competent in one area. All of the other areas, she's read, she's got book learning, but she doesn't know. Because a great deal of what this story is, is the long journey to the small, angry planet, what winds up happening is that as they get farther into the territory, more… It's interesting, because more and more of the characters wind up becoming Watson characters.

[Brandon] This is where I was going to go next. You two have both pre-answered my question.

[Dan] Aha!

[Brandon] Because you are so smart. But, my question is, a lot of times, these sorts of characters, particularly when done maybe shallowly, become audience favorites to hate. The opposite of an audience favorite. Whatever that is. They pile on this character, because this character is so often… Dan and I have a joke about a certain property that we will…

[Dan] Oh, I was totally going to mention it.

[Brandon] Leave unmentioned where the Watson character… You just get so tired of having to have things explained…

[Dan] This person not knowing anything.

[Brandon] That you just check out from that character. You're not interested in them at all. So. How do you avoid that? Dan pre-answered it by saying making them have an arc. Which automatically builds our interest in them. How else can you make one of these characters work without being…

[Mary Robinette] Avoid… A lot of times, the things that are being explained to the Watson character are really an As you know, Bob. They are things that the character should know, and sometimes there are things that the audience already knows. It's annoying. It's like, "But we know this."

[Brandon] Right.

[Howard] Force the Watson character… Don't give them as much information as you were planning on giving them, and give them the moment where they still don't understand, and then they put it together. That's… I wanted to bring up the… It's almost a workshop in Watson characters and exposition, and that is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In which Arthur Dent knows nothing, and every time he asks questions, Ford says, "Read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Then the narrator reads the book to us and gives us the exposition. I'm not saying that this is a brilliant and perfect way to have done it. I'm saying that in terms of story structure, you can look at this and you can see, these are when we needed to know these things, and it's very clearly telegraphed. If you look at it in terms of the outline of the story itself, there's a lot to be learned there.

[Dan] Okay. One way to do this is the buddy cop. A lot of people don't consider the buddy cop to be a kind of fish out of water character over their head thing, because really it's two. You've got Jackie Chan, who doesn't know anything about LA, and you've got Chris Tucker, who doesn't know anything about Chinese culture. The two of them have to work together. So they're each an expert, and in over their head at the same time, and are bouncing off of each other constantly.

[Mary Robinette] That is a really good example, because it equalizes the power dynamic.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] A lot of that is, when the Watson character can become annoying, is that they… Not only are they a fish out of water, but… In terms of knowledge base, but that also reduces their agency and hierarchy. It's fine in a short story, like the Holmes things, because you don't have to sustain it. But an entire novel of that can get draining.

[Brandon] You'll notice… At least I've noticed, in different adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, Watson is dumber in some of them than he is in others. You read the original stories, he's actually a very competent, smart person who is just not as smart as Holmes. So, you read this, and you're like, "Wow. Watson's smarter than me. Holmes is even smarter than him." Rather than being like, "Oh, Watson, you idiot."

[Howard] I dearly love the CBS Sherlock Holmes, the Elementary with Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu. Because Watson is so sharp. We get a character arc for Watson in which we are introduced to Holmes deductive methods very Watsonianly…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] For lack of a better term. But once you're embedded in the series, boy, she's smart.

[Dan] Well, what's really going on there is the thing that we talk about all the time, is the elements are doing more than one thing. Watson is not just there to be the cabbage head. She's there to do many other things as well. That makes for an interesting and cool character.

[Brandon] Let's pause to talk about a time when I was a cabbage head.

[Dan] Oooh!

[Brandon] Yes. This is very fun. I ran across, a little while ago, a video essay on YouTube by a creator called Super Eyepatch Wolf. This essay is called Why Pro Wrestling Is Fascinating. Why professional wrestling is fascinating. I am one of those people who always in the back of my mind smirked or even sneered a little bit about professional wrestling and all those people, all those fools, who would participate and partake in this media. I watched this essay. I saw someone who was deeply passionate and connected to something that was very outside my own experience. A lot of this essay is about Pro wrestling in Japan. The author's love of this just beamed, shone through to the point that I was so invested in these characters in the Japanese Pro Wrestling Federation I knew nothing about before this essay. It just knocked me off my high horse. Taught me how someone loves a narrative that I am not familiar with but I could totally see myself loving. It just taught me a whole bunch about life and understanding other people's passions about the world. So, if you, like me perhaps, have looked down your nose at some piece of media, perhaps Pro wrestling itself, go watch this essay. Because watching someone who is an expert in their field talk about something they love can really show you that we're all cabbage heads sometimes. It's part of life, and it's a good thing.

[Brandon] There's one more topic along these lines I really want to touch on in this particular podcast. That is talking about scenes where you want the reader to be a little confused. Because I've noticed, in a lot of new writers, when I'm reading their writing, they'll often put in things that are intended to be confusing. Worldbuilding elements that haven't been explained yet, and the readers, the feedback will be, "Well, I'm really confused." The author says, "Aha. You're supposed to be." That's a good instinct. You don't want to give readers everything upfront, you want to leave them questioning and wondering. But it goes wrong when you're reading it as a reader and you think, "I'm confused and I don't want to read anymore because it just keeps getting more confusing." As opposed to, "I'm confused, but the character's confused, and I'm excited to find out the answers." How do you distinguish between these two things?

[Mary Robinette] I think… The answer is actually somewhat embedded in the way you phrased the question. Which is I'm confused, and the character is confused. One of the things that does is it puts your reading experience in alignment with the character, which can give you a more intimate experience. The other thing is that it lets you know that it's a design state. It's like if the character is confused, then this isn't supposed to be something that is easy to understand. That's one of the functions that the cabbage head character can have for you, is that… To signpost that design state. For me, one of the other things is to… Is that you need to be selective about the things that you want the reader to be confused about. When I see this, a lot of times, the writer has delivered a bunch of different confusing things. So you have nothing to ground you. So, for me, what I do what I have something that I want… That is deliberately supposed to be confusing, is that I make sure that my reader is grounded on a couple of different things, so that there's some trust and a little bit of orientation before I hit them with something that is confusing. One of my favorite examples of this is actually in Buckaroo Banzai, which is… It's a throwaway line. But they're on a tour of the Banzai house, with the Jeff Goldblum character. They walk into the room, and they've clearly been talking about other things that they have been touring through, and there's a little bit of, "Oh, yeah. You did that thing with the flux capacitor, and that's fascinating…" Flux capacitor is wrong, but we'll just keep going. "Oscillation overdrive. You did that." And then, "Why is that watermelon in the vise?" "I'll tell you later." They keep going, and they never actually come back to it. But what it does for you is it says there are going to be some things in this world you understand, and there are going to be some things that you don't. But there are people here who will guide you through this. It is… It's such a simple throwaway line, but it is very much a trust building thing.

[Brandon] It's also a perfect example of something we talked about last month, which is using setting details to reinforce theme by having this setting detail that they promised to explain, but they don't. It actually leaves you saying, "Ah, there's just so much more to this world."

[Howard] I think another good example of it is the 2016, 2017 BBC adaptations of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. There are scenes in there where it is an avalanche of this doesn't make any sense. It's a huge amount of information. It's the sort of thing that you would put down the book, would turn off the TV, and then the Watson character says, "Wha… Dirk? What is going on? How is all of this related?" Dirk says, "I don't know. I just know that it's going to be." Suddenly we get it. Oh. This is what a holistic detective does. The point of this is that all of this information doesn't make sense now. You've just promised me that you're going to tie it together later. I loved that. I was absolutely onboard at that moment.

[Dan] Another example that comes to mind is Thor: Ragnarok. When Thor first arrives on the crazy, weird planet with no powers and has no idea what's going on, he's very much in over his head, and all the initial stuff with like the people picking through the junkyard is very confusing and never really gets explained. What makes it work is when the woman shows up, when Valkyrie shows up. The fact there are now suddenly two factions stabilizes that world, and we realize, "Oh, I don't necessarily have to understand all of this, because I know now that there are two different groups of people that can interact with it in different ways." That makes it seem much smoother without really telling you anything.

[Brandon] We're going to go ahead and break here. Howard, you have some homework for us.

[Howard] Yes. Pick something you haven't read, something you haven't watched, something that is new to you. If you got Netflix, you open up Netflix and turn to something maybe you just wouldn't watch otherwise. Watch the first five minutes with a note card or notebook or something in your hand. Then stop and write down all of the questions you have. Make a list of the stuff that didn't make sense. If it's a book, five pages, 10 pages, I don't know where the cutoff mark will be for you. But you consume a portion of the media, right at the beginning, write down all of your questions. Now, continue to consume. Continue to watch, continue to read. Look at your list of questions and see which ones got answered. See which ones turned out to not be important. See which questions you didn't even get around to asking that turned out to be important.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.21: Writing The Other – Yes, You Can

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/05/26/14-21-writing-the-other-yes-you-can/

Key points: Does #ownvoices mean you can't write inclusive, representational, diverse fiction? No! Yes, you can write the other! Do the work to get it right, don't be so afraid you don't try. Resist the default, and represent the world we live in, with all the richness and complexity it has. Write the best character of that identity. Do the research, read books, talk to people, listen to feedback. Do your due diligence, your homework, and do a good job. Bad representation often looks like bad writing, with a character acting as stand-in for an entire culture or identity. People are more complex than that! Give your characters specificity. Read magazines aimed at that group. Talk to people. Read 100 books, fiction, nonfiction, children's books. People don't pitch fits about books they love, but... criticism happens. Don't worry about taking up space by doing this, help lift the boat for everyone by promoting the great authors you find. Do your best, give it your best effort, and be ready to take your lumps.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 21.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. Writing The Other – Yes, You Can.

[Tempest] 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Dan] Awesome. We have been talking about Writing the Other a couple of times so far this year. There's one question that we get a lot. I would go so far as to say the single most common question we get on this podcast whenever we talk about diversity or decolonized writing or any kind of writing the other at all, which is, "But I'm not from that thing. What about #ownvoices? I'm not allowed to do this." Tempest, what do we do?

[Chuckles]

[Tempest] Well, first of all, like I wanted to talk about this in specific because, in addition to like that sort of general question, "Ah, what do I do?" But I also hear a lot of writers who come to me and they say, "I wrote a book and it has a character who is black and I'm white or is disabled and I'm abled or whatever. I took it to my editor, took it to my agent, and they said oh, you can't do that, because #ownvoices, like, you just can't." I'm like, "Uh, that's incorrect, oh, I'm so sorry." Because then they come to me and they're like, "Well, what do I do, because I want to write inclusive fiction, I want to write representational and diverse fiction, but my agent or my editor or a potential agent or a potential editor is saying I can't?" So, I was just like, no, I don't want people to think that this is a problem. Because I understand some of the impetus behind it, because yes, #ownvoices fiction is very important. But at the same time, I don't just want people to only write characters who are like them. I teach classes on Writing the Other, I'm very invested in the idea that you can. But I also want to talk through like some of the reasons why agents or editors might say this, and some of the things that you can come back to them with. Dongwon is here because I really wanted to ask him, like, "Do you know why… Have you heard this said, and do you know why it is that editors and agents might say this to an author?"

[Dongwon] I have a strong sense of why agents and editors are saying this, or why there's a perception that people will say this. I suspect it's happening less than it sounds like it is. Or people are misinterpreting what is being said in some ways. That said, one of the things we really need to do to fix this in the long term is get more diversity, more representation of different cultures, inside publishing houses, so that people who are actually informed about how this conversation should go are in decision-making positions. Right now, what's happening is you have two people who may not know the situation talking to each other and trying to figure out how to get it right. Right? So if you have a white editor and a white agent and a white author, all trying to figure out how do we publish this book with a black protagonist, it increases the odds of getting it wrong. I think the fear can kind of magnify as they are in that conversation. One thing I want to say is a lot of this is coming from fear, right? Is coming from fear that you're going to get in trouble, you're going to get yelled at, your book's going to get canceled, whatever it is. I think there is some value to that. I think the fear can be a good thing in some ways. Because it means you're going to put the extra work in to get it right. That said, I don't want you to be so afraid that you don't even try. Because the thing that we really need to resist is the power of the default. The default is this idea that if you are not writing characters who are from other cultures or have other marginalizations like disability or queerness or whatever it is, then we're not going to get that inclusive fiction that we all want and deserve. So what we need to do is resist the default, and the only way to do that is by representing the world that we live in, which often has people coming from all kinds of cultures, all kinds of marginalizations, that are intersectional and rich and complex.

[Tempest] Definitely. So, the biggest thing is, the first step you always have to do is just make sure you have done your due diligence in making sure that you have like written the best character of that identity, whatever they are. That means ensuring that you have done the research, that you have read the books, like the Writing the Other book or any other book, or any essay or whatnot, about like writing people from that culture. After you've done that and after you've finished your draft, making sure that people from that culture have read it. Have given you feedback on it. All the steps. Then, once you have done that, that's sort of like your foundation, your base. Then when you give that book to an agent, when you give that book to an editor, and you can say to them, "Hey. So I did this amount of work. I made sure that, like, I took this class, I read this book to get this right, to learn how to get this right. I talked to these people." Maybe you want to ask them, like, "Do you know a sensitivity reader that we could hire?" But just making sure that you can alleviate some of that fear. Because a lot of the fear, yes, comes from the fact that there have been many high-profile cases recently of a book's coming out, and the representation is really not on point, and everybody on the Internet is yelling. But the other fear that actually authors have is that somebody's going to yell at them for writing a character outside of their identity, and it's just because they wrote a character outside of their identity. Which is actually not what happens. What happens isn't just that, like, "Oh, you're a white author and you wrote a character who's black. You shouldn't be doing that. #ownvoices, #ownvoices!" It's that you did a bad job of it. That's when people start to get angry, when an author does a bad job of it, and they then don't apologize and it's clear that they didn't do the work, they didn't do their due diligence. So, you have to do all that first, because then you can sometimes alleviate the fears that agents may have or editors may have.

[Dan] Doing that diligence is so great, it is such a great feeling. I'm in the process right now of trying to sell a book that I've written where the main character is a foster child. That is not something I have any personal experience with. So I went out, I talked to foster kids, I talked to foster parents, I interviewed half the Utah care system for… The people who work with them. I made sure that I was doing this. Over this draft, I kept weeding out all of the clichés and all of the problems. Now that I'm taking this around and people are asking, I am able to say, "Well, actually, I have done this. I've done my homework. I've looked at this and I've looked at all this." It helps you to feel better about yourself. But it also, it made my book so much better to do that homework.

[Tempest] Yeah.

[Dongwon] The thing that I often find is when you have bad representation, it's often indistinguishable, for me, from bad writing. Right? Like, the way that comes into play so often is when writing those characters, they're acting as a stand-in for the entire culture, the entire identity, in some way. This is not how people operate, right? I'm the child of Korean immigrants. But… Being a Korean American is a really important part of my identity, but it's certainly not the only vector on which I operate. I have a complex relationship with that. The way you can get around this issue is by writing specificity into your character. Making sure that you're not writing a black character or a Latinx character or a queer character, but instead, you're writing a specific person, who comes from a place in a city in a neighborhood, and from a family that has a history, and all those things. If you invest it with all the detail that you would give… Hopefully, any good character that you're writing. That can really help make sure that you're not going to have the kind of generic stand-in that is then very easy to say, "Well, you're saying that all black people are like this, or all Asian people are like this." So you really want to make sure not only that you've done your homework, but that you then remember to apply it to writing a character that is nuanced and intersectional and really well-developed and has a rich, complex interior life.

[Dan] Which is something you're going to want to do regardless.

[Tempest] Yeah. Exactly.

[Dan] Tempest, what is our book of the week?

[Tempest] The book of the week is My Sister Rosa by Justine Larbalestier. The reason why this book is so relevant to this conversation is because Justine has infused this book with so many different types of people who are like main characters and secondary characters. I was like… I loved her books ever since she started writing novels. But this one, I was particularly impressed with because of this reason. The book centers on a young boy named Che who… He's actually 17. His sister, who is 10, is a psychopath. He has been trying to protect the world from his sister, and also his sister from the world for most of her life. But things come to a boiling point when their family moves to New York City. So, because their family has moved to New York City, there is now, like, the whole of New York City in front of them. New York City is a place that is full of people who come from all different kinds of identities. So we have the girl that Che falls in love with, and her roommate, and then the family that is friends with his parents, like, they have kids. Then the oldest daughter, her friend group. There are just all these people, all these different identities, and all handled really well. They're all identities that are not the identities of Justine, wrote the book. But because she is a person who, again, she does due diligence and she also, she has lived in New York City, she understands how the diversity works there. She brings that to her books always, and I just really loved this one, so I definitely suggest reading My Sister Rosa.

[Dan] My Sister Rosa by Justine Larbalestier.

[Dongwon] I really love that you chose this book. In part, because I think part of the problem with this conversation is we don't talk about the times where this goes well, right? The things that we talk about are where this goes badly, and everyone on Twitter is screaming.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] There's a little bit of schadenfreude fun to that, but it can also be very unpleasant. Then, we have #ownvoices, right? #ownvoices is a hashtag that is a really wonderful celebration that is a really wonderful celebration of people who are writing their own stories and their own identities. That is very powerful, and we should continue to celebrate that. Lord knows, I'm not saying take away from that. But, at the same time, it's also really great when you see this done really well. Justine is a great example and it's something she's been doing for a lot of her career, is writing people who are outside of her identity and doing a really good job on it. I think a lot about The Expanse, which is a thing that I was lucky enough to have worked on that has a lot of characters derived from Earth cultures that are not the cultures of the guys who wrote that book, who are both extremely white. They've given us some of the best women of color that we have in science fiction, but also on TV. Christjen Avasarela is a character that I adore. Getting to see this character on television and representing her culture and dressed in a beautiful sari and all these things is something that is, I think, really powerful and really wonderful that these guys have been able to bring to the table.

[Tempest] Thinking about like the kinds of homework that you can do, obviously reading as much about a culture as you can. If you're writing something that's set in contemporary times, one of the best ways to sort of like start your research about that culture is to read magazines that are intended for people from that group, and get as specific as you can. Like, you're like, "I want to write a black character." Okay, wait a minute. Is it a black woman? Is it a black man? What age are they? Are they from the Midwest, or are they from California? Because, like, all of that is going to produce a very different person, right? So, this is also the same with magazines. Magazines are sometimes laser focused on like one aspect of one kind of people, right? But this is also why they can be really good sources of like foundational research. Talking to people, which we have mentioned many times.

[Chuckles]

[Tempest] Just, like, having conversations with people from that group and asking them about some of the specific aspects of their culture in order to help you create a specific person. One piece of advice that I love. This came from an article. It's, like, you have to read a hundred books, if you're going to write a character from a culture. A hundred books seems like a lot of books. It seems like a very… A monumental task, but these books can be nonfiction books, as well as novels. Even children's books count, because sometimes, when you're like trying to dip your toe into an identity or a culture, it helps to get down to that level of "Okay, like what do kids who are this identity read?" I should read what they read because they are learning about their culture from these children's books, or they should. So, yeah, reading all the books is a great way. But, essentially, you just want to be able to come to anybody who has said to you, like, "I don't know if you should because #ownvoices," and say, "Well, actually…" Well, they'll say, "Well, actually."

[Laughter]

[Tempest] Say, "I have done this research, I have done this work. I have made sure that I have done the best that I can. I am also willing to have a sensitivity reader and learn from them." That's the other thing, is that if you are projecting to your potential agent or a potential editor that you are willing to do more work to get it right, that's probably going to make them less fearful. Because they're going to say, "Okay, like, I'm not going to like have to fight this author to make this book right if I want to buy it."

[Dan] I want to get back to something that Dongwon was talking about earlier. Just good characterization. Since so much of this is driven by fear, when you think about it, no one is going to pitch a huge fit about a really wonderful book that everyone loves. People are going to love that kind of thing. If we look and we see our own culture represented really well, then it doesn't matter who it came from, we're still going to love it. So we don't need to be as afraid of that kind of thing.

[Dongwon] Well, I also want to point out criticism is going to happen, right? I don't care what you're writing about, I don't care if you're writing about only white characters, white cis het characters, or what it is, somebody's going to come for you. You're going to get a one star review. Sometimes a review is "I ordered a toaster and I got this book instead," right? I mean…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] But the thing is, there's no protection from criticism, right? I recognize that when that criticism says you wrote my culture badly or you got this wrong or I think you're racist, or whatever it is, that's incredibly hurtful, right? But there's a wide range of criticism out there, there's a wide range of sort of receptions. I think a lot about Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park, and I'm probably going to get in trouble here talking about this. But, for me, that character had a Korean American character as a love interest, and… He's hapa, he's half Korean, half white, and it was the first time I'd really seen that on the page. That book meant a lot to me, to see that. All of my Asian American friends are currently screaming into their telephones while they listen to this about a lot of people think that was a really bad representation. A lot of people have a lot of problems with how Park was represented in that book. It's been a long time since I read it. I should probably go back and check and see if I still have issues with it, or if I have new issues with it. But it's… The book is beloved. There are ways in which she got it wrong, and there are ways in which she got it right. Ultimately, what I'm going to say is, I think that that's okay. Right? I think it's okay that many of my friends and my peers have problems with that book, and I think it's okay that a lot of people love that book. The thing that I would love to have is more nuance in this conversation going forward. At the same time that we should also be ready to call out things that are actively harmful and hurtful. It's a difficult part of the conversation, but it's an important part.

[Tempest] One last thing is, sort of the end of this worry that a lot of authors have when they come to me and talk about this is, "Am I taking up space by doing this, then?" Sometimes you are, and that's actually a good question to ask yourself, like, are you actually taking up space that's for somebody else? But at the same time, there are things that you can do as an author to make sure that it's not just you who is putting out the representation from this group. Like, as you are doing your reading, your researching, and asking people, you're going to come across other authors who are from that identity that you're trying to represent, right? So then it is on you to say, "Hey, everybody, have you heard about this wonderful author? Like, I've just read this great book. I read it for research, or I read it because I loved it. Do you know about this? You should read it." If you have people who you know who are writers who are from that identity, introduce them to your agent, introduce them to your editor. Make sure that like other folks on twitter no. Like if they're participating in [pit…] be sure to retweet so that more people see their thing. Just constantly do that, constantly make sure that you are lifting up the voices of the people that you are trying to represent. Because then, that hopefully raises the boat for everybody. So then, it's not as if you're taking up the only space, because now more people know about this author or this issue or whatever. So you can use your privilege to help people who don't have as much privilege to be able to come into this space more. Like, it's never just a we can only have this many things. Like, right now, if we only have this many things, you can expand the number of things that we can have with your voice. So always make that part of your process, too.

[Dongwon] I think Rick Riordan is like the gold standard here, right? He took the Percy Jackson series, and not only Trojan horse having a white character as the protagonist, and then brought in all these other cultures, all these other perspectives, but he's now putting his time and energy into launching the Rick Riordan Presents in print to really celebrate stories from other cultures and writers from other cultures. And doing it… He's using his power and privilege to make sure he's lifting the voices of other people, and not just profiting off of their experiences and their stories. It's a really beautiful thing to see. I'm very happy to see that this is where the industry is headed.

[Dan] That's great. So, we're going to talk about homework. I want to make clear one thing. When we talk about doing your due diligence, doing your homework, before doing this. All of the homework you do, all of the sensitivity readers that you hire, is not the magical rubberstamp of immunity…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] To complaint.

[Tempest] Exactly.

[Dan] So I don't want people to come back to us and say, "Hey, I did everything and people still yelled at me and now I'm mad at you." You gotta be ready to take your lumps. But we do want you to try. We do want you to do your best. Give it your best effort.

[Dan] So, in light of that, Tempest, what is our homework today?

[Tempest] The homework is to make a list of the things that you did or are going to do to ensure that you have done that due diligence. So, I will always say, when people come to me and are like, "Oh, can I write…?" Yes. Yes you can. Read the book Writing the Other. I'll never stop saying this in my life…

[Chuckles]

[Tempest] Read the book Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward. Go to writingtheother.com where there are, like, other free resources for doing this. If you, like, still feel like, "Oh, I need stuff," like, you could take a class, whatever. But make sure that you have the foundation, the knowledge, going forward to be like, "Okay, these are the things I need to do." Then do those things. Like, make a list of the kind of stuff that you have read, the kind of research you have done, and the people that you've talked to. If you want to go ahead and go so far as to get a sensitivity reader before you actually present the project to the agent, to the editor, whatever, do that. Then, make sure they know. So it's like have that list and have that ready for when somebody, whether it's the agent, the editor, or even somebody else says, "But, you're not this type of person." It's like, "No. I'm not. But these are the things that I did to be sure that, like, I did the best that I could to represent this person in a way that is true to, like, who this person is and their identity." It's not going to be 100%, and that's okay. But what you gotta do is just make sure that everybody knows, I didn't just sort of show up on Monday, and I was like, "I did this."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's great. Dongwon described this earlier as your homework is to show that you've done your homework. So that's what it is. Preparing this list in advance is also going to help make sure that your homework is right.

[Tempest] Exactly.

[Dan] You might get halfway through this process and realize, "Oh, you know what. This argument's really super weak, isn't it?"

[Laughter]

[Tempest] [garbled]

[Dan] "I haven't done enough. I need to do more." So, anyway, this is wonderful. We really hope that you feel inspired by this episode, rather than afraid. We want you to try new things. We want you to represent more people and write outside of your own experience. It takes work, but it's worth it. So. This is Writing Excuses, you are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.20: Allegory in Fiction

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/05/19/14-20-allegory-in-fiction/

Key Points: What is an allegory? Animal Farm, Aesop's Fables, 1984. Stories that convey a message through fiction? Especially where the reader might not accept the message directly, but will accept the allegorical version. Parables, fables. Stories that are trying to teach something. Allegories have inserted intentional symbols. How do you teach something in a story? Specific symbols representing something inserted intentionally, that align thematically. Allegory and satire both give us messages that we wouldn't normally accept. Ask yourself, "Am I writing an allegory because I have a mission, or because I feel like my writing should have a deeper purpose than just being a good story?" Be careful, some readers don't want to know, they don't want to be taught. So your allegory may need to be subtle. Shorter allegories may be more obvious. If you hit someone over the head with something for 300 pages, they might get a headache. Make sure there is more going on than just the allegory. It should work at multiple levels, as story, as well as metaphorical representation. Avoid accidental allegories.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 20.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Allegory in Fiction.

[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 standing in for every bald guy ever.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So this is going to be a fun episode because we realized as we were doing preparations that we have no idea how to define an allegory.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] We're writers. We just… Definitions are hard.

[Brandon] What do you guys think? What is an allegory?

[Mary Robinette] So when I think of allegories… I mean, there's the classic things like Animal Farm, but I'll have to be honest that the first thing that jumps into my mind is Aesop's Fables, which are a little bit more on-the-nose than something like Animal Farm, 1984. But for me, they're stories in which we have a message and we would like to convey it to you through fiction.

[Brandon] Yes. I think that underlying idea is going to be the core here.

[Howard] I think one of the best examples of that comes to us from the story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan comes to David and tells the allegory of the ewe lamb. There was this man who had a precious lamb and another man came and took it and claimed it and slaughtered it. What should we do? David says, "Well, the guy who slaughtered the lamb should clearly be killed." Nathan said, "Hah! You're the guy who killed the lamb."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "Because you took… Was it Uriah?… You took his wife and you sent him off to battle to die. This is on you." That is classic allegory format. Where the reader won't accept the true version of the story, but they will accept the version of the allegory, and then you've got them.

[Margaret] It's interesting, because I don't know if it's part of the dictionary definition of allegory, but just the word connotes in my head the religious allegory is very strong there. Specifically, frankly, the Christian allegory. They may not have invented the form, but I do feel like it has been embraced.

[Mary Robinette] It's funny, because I'm like, I'm sure that there's some literature professor listening to us right now going, "No, that's a parable, you fool."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] "But that's not an allegory, that's a…"

[Brandon] We're just going to use lowercase allegory. Stories that are trying to teach something. For me, the line between a story that just kind of develops its own theme and an allegory would be inserted intentional symbols. At least for me. You're writing and say, "This is a symbol for something. I'm going to now tell a story using that symbol." In my mind as author. But of course, I've often brought up the story where Tolkien insisted that Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for anything, particularly not World War I.

[Laughter]

[Margaret] Certainly not.

[Brandon] At some point, I think there's a great argument between reader interpretation and author intent in all this stuff you can have. But we'll shove that to the side for now. We're just going to talk about, let's say you want to do this. You want to use your story to teach something or to be a symbol for something. How do you do it?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that you mentioned is specific symbols inserted intentionally. That's one of the things that you would be doing, is making decisions. So examples that people give of Lord of the Flies that the conch represents power. So once you know that, then you have to think about every time that is being used, is it supporting the notion of power? When you're picking your symbols, you want them to in some way align thematically with whatever thing it is that you are trying to lay the groundwork for. So that's one aspect.

[Howard] I can't think of allegory without also thinking of satire. Allegory is a way to make us think about a thing differently so that ordinarily the writer is able to give us a message that we wouldn't otherwise accept, or wouldn't as readily accept. Satire is doing exactly the same thing.

[Brandon] I would say they are… They fall under the same definition. Which definition that is, I don't know, whether satire is an allegory or allegory's…

[Howard] This allegory is satirical. This satire is allegorical. I… There are lots of examples of both. The reason I bring it up is that the first question I would ask and answer for myself is, "Do I want this story to be allegorical, because I have a mission to change hearts and minds, or do I want this story to be allegorical because I feel like my writing should have a deeper purpose than me just telling a good story?"

[Brandon] Okay. That's a great place to start.

[Howard] That question right there, I feel like too many new writers will trip over this need to communicate something deeper and try and do it deliberately, when, as you already established with Tolkien, um, boy, even if you… A lot of these things are going to come out unconsciously, and you're going to say things that are true that you didn't know you were saying.

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to say that I think that Tolkien actually has a real point, that it's not an allegory. Because he's not trying to convey a message. That is one of the definitions of an allegory, is that it is trying to convey a message or a moral.

[Brandon] Well, if you will read what Tolkien says about it, he's like, "I don't want anything specific to be a symbol. I do want to communicate themes and ideas, but I don't like symbolism as one-to-one correlations." So for him, that was a big part of it.

[Howard] So it's fairer to say that it's not an allegory of World War I, but it is allegorically related to the destruction of warfare, abuses of power and industry, or whatever.

[Mary Robinette] Whereas Animal Farm is very clearly an allegory about US-Russian relations and the accumulation of power. There was a specific… There are specific messages being conveyed in that.

[Margaret] This horse is this person and this pig is…

[Brandon] So let me ask the question then, there have been some… In sci-fi fantasy, this is very commonly done. Both terms. The I just want to tell a theme, but also the this is specifically meant to teach you something and represent something. You can find multiple examples of this throughout recent science fiction and fantasy, whether you're picking the Golden Compass or whether you're picking the Sword of Truth. These are major fantasy series that have been written with the intent to teach, and it's interesting to read reactions to these. Readers, in my experience, don't want to know about the behind the scenes. They don't want to know about this. Why is that? Why do they immediately kind of turn against that idea? Is that a good thing, is that a bad thing, is that just how it is?

[Howard] I think it's illustrative of the purpose of allegory. If telling you what the allegory is turned you off to the story, then the message is one that you likely wouldn't have received. So the allegory is important. And it is doubly important that you are as opaque as possible in the way this is related, so that they can get the story and they can enjoy it and they can internalize it, and at some point, years in the future, they realize, "Oh. That story really was exactly like political situation XYZ, and now I have conflicting opinions about both of those. Now I have to reconcile those as a human being."

[Brandon] I certainly think that's a valid interpretation, although I'm going to point out, like, I believe it won a Hugo, Ponies, a Hugo short story, which was very blatant about its metaphor and was very, in some ways, divisive because of that. But that divisiveness was what made the story work, and is why it was so widely regarded. I actually love the story. So in that case, the allegory… Maybe it's because it was a short story. So it didn't overstay its welcome. But the allegory punched me in the face, made me sit down and think. I'm glad that it punched me in the face.

[Margaret] I do wonder if there is a tie to length and obviousness of your allegory. It's easier to get away with setting… your David and Bathsheba example from the beginning, this is a very short story, it doesn't have to be that subtle and it probably can't be. If you were telling an extended allegory over an entire novel or a series of novels, does that lend itself to veering more into this is an extended metaphor that's exploring themes. Because, I mean, I know as a reader, if you're going to hit me over the head with something, you better do it fast. If you're going to keep doing it for 300 pages, I might get a headache.

[Mary Robinette] I also think that it… There has to be something else going on there. Like Animal Farm, you can read that without having any idea of the allegory, and the story holds. I think that if there's something… Because… Part of it is we like the personality of the animals. But I think that if you're going to do an allegory and there's nothing else going on, that, yeah, then it has to be supershort.

[Brandon] Yeah, I would agree.

[Mary Robinette] That's the reason that a lot of the things that are allegories are, in novel length, are masked under layers and layers and layers of stuff. But it is, again, I think the thing is that in an allegory where the writer is setting out to do it deliberately, they have a point that they're trying to make. Elizabeth Bear says that the difference between a story and a polemic is that in a story, you raise questions, and in a polemic, you answer them. I think that one of the things that happens with an allegory, this is why people get angry about it when they notice it, is that they don't like being told what to think, which is what is often happening in an allegory, especially if it's the only thing that's going on.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and pause here for the book of the week. Mary, you have the book of the week.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's Head On by John Scalzi.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So, Head On is, on its surface, a fun romp. It is just dealing with… There's a murder and the main character's an FBI agent and they're trying to solve the murder. Then it's also dealing with the whole gaming sports franchise political intrigue thing. But it's also, underneath that, an allegory for disability. The main character has something called Haden or Haden's disease and is locked in because of that. Everybody who has Haden's disease has Threeps, which are these robots that go around. So it's dealing with this fun romp, but at the same time, it is having a very serious conversation about disability rights in the United States that is very contemporary and very much an allegory for a lot of stuff that's going on.

[Brandon] Yeah. That's actually… Let's jump into that idea. Because the further you go on this, it's like the allegory is becoming something else, maybe a different term. Maybe it's just allegory where it's not a specific symbol allegory, it's more of a concept. But, let's say you want to write a story. You ask yourself Howard's question earlier. What do I want to do, do I want to tell a great story, do I want to go deep into a topic? What if the answer is, "Yes, I want to do both." How can you take something and teach or get across an idea you want to get across to make the world a better place, but you don't want your story to be consumed by it to the point that it becomes a fable?

[Margaret] I think Mary really was hitting on it earlier, is that it has to work at multiple levels. Whether or not someone is getting the allegory or the connections you're trying to make, if it still works as a story, then you've still got something there. We were discussing earlier about reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I read it when I was a kid. I was a nice Jewish girl. The Christian metaphor flew right over my head. I had no idea. But it's like, "This is a cool story," and there was the magic and the lion, it was a really touching moment when he dies. I'm like, "Oh, wow." And… But just like…

[Mary Robinette] You didn't see the rising again coming at all.

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] No. It was a total surprise.

[Laughter]

[Margaret] So it's sort of like when you throw in what we call a joke that's a 2 percenter, that only 2% of your audience is going to get. You can get away with that if the 98% of your audience that doesn't get it can just read right over it and they don't feel like they're missing anything. I think this is similar.

[Mary Robinette] We did that all the time going into elementary schools with children's theater. Because we had to write for multiple age groups. The rule was that it was okay if everybody didn't get it, but no one could feel like they were being excluded because they didn't get something.

[Howard] The Elder Scrolls online, there was a content plug-in dropped in 2018 called Summerset which opens with a story about immigration. The Summerset Isle has been locked off to everybody except High Elves. Now the Queen has said other people can come in. People are angry about it and bad things are happening to immigrants. If that doesn't sound immediately political, I don't know where you've been. But the way they handled it was whoever your character is, you are missed treated the moment you arrive. Everyone talks down to you. You, as a player, if you're invested in the game, you're invested in your character, you want to be liked, you want to accomplish things, you want to be able to have quests and adventures. Everyone is talking down to you and you feel wronged. I think that if you want to have an allegory, if you want to tell a story that invites people to take the other side of an issue that they are already taking, you need to invest them in a point of view that is likable and that is… That they want to invest in that has… That's being oppressed in that way, or that's being chased down in that way.

[Mary Robinette] I think… Actually, this is another thing that I feel like it's really important to bring up. Even if you don't want to write an allegory, it's really important as a science fiction or fantasy writer to understand how allegories work, so that you do not have accidental allegories that are really deeply problematic.

[Brandon] That's, I'll just say, you're probably going to have them at some point. Because of your own unconscious biases. We have an entire podcast on that last year. Learning… The more you learn, the more you learn to accept and then deal with, the better your writing will get.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. But you want to think about, when you're inventing a fictional thing, like, does this… Will this work as a stand-in for something in the real world? How does it map to the real world? Are you bringing in some of these things, and make sure that you're thinking about the thematic elements as if you were going to construct an allegory. If you don't intend to do that, pull that thread out and re-map it.

[Brandon] I would agree that that is excellent advice.

[Brandon] I'm going to give us our homework. Which is, we've talked about this kind of blurry line between allegory and fable, and we're not even sure if there is one.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] But what I want you to do is, I want you to take a famous like, Aesop's fable or something like this and I want you to try and tell it as an allegory. Meaning it you're backing off on the didactic drill in on the lesson and coming forward on the characterization and the themes of these characters, so that it steps one step towards story and one step away from simple metaphor. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.19: Religion and Ritual

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/05/12/14-19-religion-and-ritual/

Key points: Worldbuilding religions in fantasy and science fiction? Why? Most people are religious, and we can reflect and explore that in our fiction. Religion is a strong source of conflict, and lets you explore actions and motivations. How do people know things, why do they believe things? When you build a religion, how do you do it? Start with random generators online to get a set of bare-bones dots, then connect those, like an improv game. How does your own belief affect your writing about fantastical religions? Start with existing religions, and jump off from there. Treat the beliefs that influence behavior with respect. Be aware that your own experience of cultural participation in a church may not be how everyone goes to church.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 19.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Religion and Ritual.

[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] We're going to be exploring how to write religion in fantasy and science fiction. Specifically, worldbuilding religions. So, my kind of first question for you is why? Why do you approach using religion or not in your science fiction and fantasy stories? What's your motive?

[Dan] I always go back to Contact by Carl Sagan where he makes the point that the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of human beings are religious to some degree. Science fiction as a genre was started in large part by atheists, and it tends to be very areligious. But most people are not. I like to kind of reflect that aspect of who we are. Whether that's science fiction or fantasy, that's just how the human brain works. We look for patterns and we have those things. I think it's really interesting to explore new takes on it.

[Mahtab] I don't have to look farther than my own country, or used to be, India as far as why religion is so important, because it is a very strong source of conflict. If you have that in your story, I mean, you definitely have the conflict, but it also helps you address a character's actions and motivations, because you have the two major religions, which is Hinduism and Islam in India. These, through the ages, have caused many riots. But it has also brought out the best in people and the worst in people. I remember in the 1980s, when I was just getting married, we couldn't even get someone to come to a civil marriage because of the riots in India. That was because [Ahmedabad?] had been attacked and the whole city had pretty much shut down. So, for me, just having grown up with that kind of experience, I know that religion could be something… People do identify themselves with it, but it can also be a fabulous source of conflict in your story. The way you can show your character, whether they're good or bad or… And make sure that they are shades of gray, not white or black.

[Howard] I think that the trick for me in terms of building a religion that is not just mapped onto an existing religion is to back all the way out of the word religion and talk about epistemology. How do we know things? When you look at religions, when you look at spirituality, when you look at superstitions, when you look at suspicion, when you look at all of these things, we believe a huge number of things absent personal evidence. We're taking other people's word for it. We're taking the word of people who we trust because of falsifiability and reproducibility in science. Or people we trust because they are religious leaders whose faith has borne them up as examples in our lives. But these are epistemologies. These are ways in which we know things, or ways in which we think we know things. So when I start at that level and I ask myself, "What is it that these people believe? Why do they believe it? What are the evidences that they accept?" James Sutter, on an episode we did at GenCon seven years ago, said that religion in D&D was fascinating to him, because you gotta ask the question how is religion different when you can see your God? When the gods can make an appearance, can power your spells? Are there atheists in the D&D universe? The answer is yes. But it's fascinating to look at it from the epistemological… Did I pronounce that correctly?… Standpoint. Because when I start there, I end up in far more interesting places than if I try and map… Well, my aliens, these are going to be my Catholic aliens and these are going to be my Protestants.

[Brandon] Robert Jordan said, when people were asking him about religion in his stories… He kind of took an interesting tactic, because in the Wheel of Time, he… It's kind of one of these things. You can directly see that evil is real and you can directly see that there is a power and a force religiously opposing it. He actually thought that would in some ways destroy religion. Meaning there are no religions in there. Because there's… You don't need to be told what God wants because God is there and around. You just… You can figure it out. You do… So there's actually no religion, there's just lots of spirituality where people are choosing their side, or things like that, but there's no organized religion. He thought that the presence of magic might lead people that direction. I've always thought that was an interesting take on it.

[Brandon] When you are building religions, how do you then specifically do it, as opposed to… You said don't… If you didn't want to map it on to a religion. Now, I'll take an aside here while you guys are thinking about that and say, one of my favorite religious fantasies, or fantasies that deal with religion are the Deryni books by Katherine Kurtz. She has basically Catholicism, and she's Catholic. So she's created a fantastical version of Catholicism. It is 100% Catholicism. It works really well. So once in a while, mapping on like that, that's not a problem. Right? I think the distinguishing factor there is the fact that she herself, being Catholic, was able to create a religion and do it very realistically and treating it well that worked like Catholicism in a fantasy world. But let's assume you don't want to do that, you want to create wholesale a fantastical religion. What tips do you have?

[Dan] I actually love to use random generators online to give me just enough bare-bones to think that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. How can I connect all those dots in a way that is really cool and makes sense?

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] So whenever I set out to do this for a fantasy or for a new science fiction society or whatever, I will find one of these random generators and go, okay, birthdays are really important, but they hate holidays, and they think birds are a symbol of virtue. Okay. Now how can I connect all those dots? I find that it produces something that doesn't look like anything we have on Earth.

[Brandon] Kind of like playing Scenes from a Hat.

[Dan] Yeah. Exactly. Kind of like the improv games where you're like, "Okay, audience, gimme three things, and I will create a religion out of them."

[Howard] I did, for the four armed, 12 fingered race of aliens in the Schlock Mercenary universe. I decided to write out their numbering system based on how they would count on their hands, and what the names for their numbers would be. What I ended up with from 1 to 12 was finger, feet, hand, arms, head, self, crest, thing, strike, secret, magic, power were the names of their numbers. Then from there, I looked at, well, when we name those things, finger, when you have the number one, what does it represent? Well, it represents touching things. Feet represents motion. So I ended up with this numerology if you will for what numbers meant that's independent from a religion. But now, if I want to say something that sounds spiritual for them, I can use number words and numbers and immediately come up with crest grasp movement, some sort of word that means my soul and the embrace and the walking. It has meaning that grew kind of organically out of me building a numbering system. It feels real. It just feels real now when I look at the spreadsheet…

[Laughter]

[Howard] When I write some of these names down, I'm like, "That's Apetemococo." That's a real name. I know what those numbers mean. It grew out of a thing. I mean, this kind of crosses into [conline?] a lot, but when you look at the way our religions have affected our languages, working at it from a linguistic standpoint is not wrong.

[Brandon] Mahtab, you've got a book for us this week.

[Mahtab] Yes, I do. I would love to recommend The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. It's set in the Republic of Gilead, which is basically a theocratic government. It starts out with women being denied all kinds of rights. They are subject to… I mean, it's entirely a male-dominated society. The reproduction rates in that day and age are very low. So all the women who are of childbearing age are basically attached to each household. They are just the vessels of reproduction. So it's basically a ritual rape. Time and time again. But the most terrifying part of that is the husband and the wife and the handmaid, who is basically a slave, just a reproductive organ, are all there in the same room, and they have to go through this. The woman has absolutely no rights. It's a terrifying look at what society could get to if something like that happened. Again, I will not give away the ending, but you had… This entire story follows Offred, which is the handmaid. It's actually interesting, it's Of Fred. You read it as Offred, but it is because she belongs to the command of Fred, so she is his possession. It's just amazing. Of course, there is a rebellion and how… So it's brilliant. It's chilling. It's terrifying. And it's thought-provoking. So, Handmaid's Tale.

[Howard] It has sold very, very well. You should probably read it rather than watching the Netflix series.

[Mahtab] Yes. I agree. Read it.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] Read it.

[Brandon] So, one of the questions I get asked most which I find very interesting, is, people are fascinated by my own, the fact that I am religious and writing about fantastical religions. So people ask me a lot, how does my faith or things I believe or don't believe, how does that influence how I approach my writing? So I'm actually going to turn that to all of you. How do your own beliefs or lack of belief system or the way you interface with religion, how has that affected the way you have created religions, the way you have written about them?

[Mahtab] I haven't really had the opportunity to create a religion in a book yet. I'm just thinking about how I would approach it. My own religion, which is Zoroastrianism, is quite unique in the sense that you've got some pretty unusual customs. I'll tell you one of them is when we die, we don't believe in the body being burnt or cremated, because it means that you're polluting the Earth. So we are actually, the dead bodies are taken up to a tower of silence and fed to the vultures. Because that's also an act of generosity. There is another one, a coming-of-age ceremony, which happens like an initiation into the faith which happens in a lot of religions. But the unusual thing that happens in Zoroastrianism, and at least it used to happen in India, I went through that, is, as part of the ceremony you have to drink the urine of a consecrated bull. Which is the… I'm sure none of you have ever heard of something like that. It's just a sip, but you have to. Then, of course, you have sugar right after that, so you don't end up sobbing at…

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] Seven years old, that's when you go through this. So for me, if I had to build it, there are… What I would do is I'd just research the existing religions, the most weird and unusual practices, then build on that. Change it around, but do it in a way that's… Where you can't identify where it came from, because, of course, you've got to be respectful. You can't end up offending anyone, but there is so much weirdness already there. I take that as a jumping point kind of thing to go into. That's what I would do.

[Howard] If my own religion, and this is a point where the lack of diversity in the Brandon Dan Howard trifecta…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Rears its ugly Mormon head.

[Brandon] Hey, I come from the Nebraska Mormons. We're completely different. Absolutely.

[Howard] The Florida Mormons are actually more like the Nebraska Mormons then we are the Utah Mormons like Dan. If I've learned anything, if my membership in my church, if my belief systems have colored my fiction at all, it's been that I try and treat the epistemologies that are absent tangible evidence, belief systems that have nonfalsifiable elements in them, you can't prove it with science, I try and treat those respectfully. Because we all have those. There are day traders who can look at the numbers and prove or disprove however they want, but they will still wear the lucky socks. Okay, yes, I'm conflating superstition and religion, and for some people that might look wrong. But it is still a belief that influences our behavior, and I have respect for those things. The one place in my fiction where I will make people the butt of jokes, where I will call it out, is when someone is inconsistent enough that you can tell that they are lying to themselves in order to forward some sort of an agenda. That's the point at which I will draw the line. But it's not because they're religious, it's because there's a measure of dishonesty that transcends it. I used a lot of big words there.

[Brandon] That's great.

[Dan] That's awesome. The way that I find my own kind of personal religious belief and customs bleeding into my writing is, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, it is very difficult to be Mormon without this constant cultural participation. That's true of many religions, but it is also true of mine. So when I am defining what a religion is, it really is kind of based around what they do, what they interact. It's not the you only go to church on Christmas and Easter kind of church that I end up creating when I create a church for a book. It's this is how I live my life, and this is how I am different than other people. Because that's my own experience with religion.

[Brandon] Excellent. We are out of time. Dan, you have some homework for us, which is an unusual homework.

[Dan] Yes, it is. We've been talking about a lot of religions. What we would like you to do is take this opportunity to go learn about a real-world religion. Whether or not you are yourself a religious person, go find a religious service or worship service or something like that, from a church or a religion that is not yours. Whether that is a different kind of Christianity or a different kind of whatever or wildly different, that you're Muslim and you're going to go to a Jewish temple. Whatever it is, just go. See what it is, see how it's different, see what's the same. Have this experience of just seeing how people other than you carry out their religion.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.18: Setting As Theme

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/05/05/14-18-setting-as-theme/

Key Points: Theme may sound pretentious, even high-falutin' and bitter, but every story has theme, whether it is put in on purpose or something going on that the reader finds. It's easier to work with theme in the early stages of planning, perhaps as a cell in your outline spreadsheet. You can use small setting details woven through different scenes to subtly reinforce theme. E.g., bullet holes in a window to show that a room is in a tough neighborhood. The presence or absence of stars. Story beats, missing things, reinforced things, can give you these subtle moments and chills. Tie a repeated image to a character moment. Look for subtle ways to reflect the theme in each scene, with elements that serve a dual purpose. You can also use worldbuilding and attention to reinforce theme. Do worldbuilding triage, pick the most important elements of your story and spend your time there. Short fiction reinforces making sure everything serves multiple purposes. Check what is already on the table that you can reuse. Think about the evil robot monkey, and the rotating clay. Take one idea, approach it from different directions. Use different viewpoints to explore the same thing from different sides.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 18.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Setting As Theme.

[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] All right. So. Theme. This is one of those things that I love, but I know is kind of a little bit pretentious.

[laughter]

[Brandon] The more I write, the more I notice theme in books, particularly the things that authors have inserted intentionally, or in films.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] It just gives me shivers.

[Dan] Well, I don't think it's p… I think we see it as pretentious because we all had to sit through high school English classes reading the Scarlet Letter or whatever. So we have this very kind of high-falutin' almost bitter view of theme. But every story has theme. Even if you didn't put it in on purpose. There's always something going on that you can find. I, too, have started thinking more strongly about theme and what a story is saying, almost, than I am looking at the plot in the early stages of planning.

[Howard] Theme is a lot easier to work with now that I've started putting it in my outline spreadsheet…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] In its own cell.

[Brandon] We kind of… Looking worldbuilding-wise, there's two major divisions I want to talk about on this podcast. First is using small setting details running through different scenes to reinforce subtly your theme. The second, which we'll cover in the back half, is using your worldbuilding and what you spend your worldbuilding time on as a reinforcement of your theme. But let's talk about the first one. How… What do I mean by this? This idea of little details in your setting as creating theme?

[Mary Robinette] I don't know, Brandon. What do you mean by this?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Well… I'm talking about the way that often times… You'll see this in filmmakers and in writers, where they will insert objects of description. Often times in the podcasts, we've talked about how… I use Dan's great example. He said long ago on the podcast if you want to show maybe that a room is in a tough neighborhood, you show bullet holes in the window. By narrowing in on a small object that you describe in detail, you can often evoke a larger setting feel. Now, the more I write, the more I look for those little things to be something that is thematically connected to a lot of other sort of ideas that I'm having run through the story.

[Mary Robinette] I wound up doing that in Calculating Stars with the presence or absence of the stars.

[Brandon] Explain more.

[Mary Robinette] So, this begins with a meteor strike. I open, and I say that my characters are in the Poconos doing stargazing. If she had known how long the stars would be hidden, she would have spent a lot more time outside with a telescope. Through the course of the rest of the book, I talk about how the stars are not there. The different times that she should have been able to see stars, or people who were now going to grow up without clear memories of stars. Then, towards the end of the book…

[Brandon] Spoiler!

[Mary Robinette] Spoilers. She does see them again. It is a representation… It's a thematic representation of having achieved goals that were taken away at the beginning.

[Brandon] It gives you chills when you read it. You don't have to have noticed actively what Mary was doing by mentioning the absence of something, because we are keyed to pick up on these things. To pick up on story beats, to pick up on things that are missing, things that are reinforced in a story. Even if we don't say, "Oh, I see what she's doing. She's making absence of stars a theme until we get the stars at the end." You don't have to notice any of that. But as a reader, it gives you those subtle moments.

[Mary Robinette] There was a book that I read… I narrated years ago that… It's not a book that I can recommend, unfortunately. It's… Should not have been an audiobook, but what that writer did with theme was amazing. Thematic residences and one of the images that she used was the light through a window onto snow. It would appear in different places. It always was in these transitional moments. By tying that image with this transitional emotional character moment, you started to have these things happen where you would see that light in the window and you're like, "Oh, no. Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no."

[Brandon] Someone who is very good at this in film is M. Night Shyamalan. I love in Unbreakable how if you watch this, one of the characters is almost always presented for the first time in their scenes as a reflection. A door opening and in the window if it, you see the reflection, or seeing them in a mirror, and things like this. It just gives a slightly skewed view of this character that makes you think something is off here, because I always have my perspective flipped. It ends up really working in the movie. It just… Punches you in the face without you realizing that it's doing so.

[Dan] One of my favorite examples… That I use when I teach theme is actually just Star Wars. Episode Four, a New Hope. One of, I think there are several themes. One theme is sometimes you have to rely on something bigger than yourself. The movie, from the very first shot of here's the tiny little spaceship and there's the big giant spaceship they can't possibly hope to defeat is filled with all of those moments of overpowering evil, or we have tried this and screwed it up. Just… The thing that makes it such a great example is that those things are going to be there anyway. Because it is a quest story. Then, just using that, turning it into the theme, makes the final thing where they blow up the Death Star… Spoiler warning…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] What!

[Dan] Makes it very satisfying. Much more so than any other given explosion in a movie because you've been thematically prepared for we can't do this, we can't do this, oh, now we're going to use the Force and we can!

[Brandon] I'm sure…

[Howard] At the end of the movie, they can't see the star anymore.

[Mary Robinette] Ooh.

[Brandon] I'm sure there are no more Death Stars. I'm glad that they took care of that.

[Mary Robinette] Whew. Boy, yeah. Me too.

[Dan] Dodged a bullet on that one.

[Brandon] How do you do this without it standing out too much? I can see some of my early efforts at creating theme in my books feeling too obvious.

[Howard] I… Putting it in a spreadsheet helps me. Because, by explicitly stating it openly in the spreadsheet, I've gotten that explicit author's message, author's message, out of my system, and now I can look at, in other cells, as I'm looking at other parts of the outline, I can look at what are the subtle ways in which this can be reflected? What are ways in which these two themes can work together in this character's arc? Because I got the explicit stuff out in the open, where I can stare at it and I can be thinking about the subtleties.

[Dan] In my historical thriller, which at time of recording is called Ghost Station and for all I know will be out under a different title by the time we release this episode. I have no idea. One of the themes I was playing with was the idea, because it's 1961 in the middle of the Cold War, so I was playing with this theme of how once the superpowers get moving, you can't stop them. All I did… Rather than try to be overt about that is I just filled the book with trains and music boxes and clocks and gears and this concept of you're just a little cog and the machine is going to keep going whether you want it to or not. It never beats you over the head with that idea, but it's always there in the background.

[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a really good example because it demonstrates the dual-purpose. For me, the thing that… Is that making sure that there is a dual-purpose, that you don't just have a window over snow…

[Dan] let us now pause and consider this important window.

[Mary Robinette] Right. That all of these trains and things are doing a function in that world. That's where the worldbuilding aspect of theme comes in. It's not just being by itself… David Lynch does this. He's one of my favorite examples of making the setting be the theme. One of the things, in Twin Peaks especially, although he explores this in a lot of his stuff, is there's always a flickering light bulb. Because one of the things he's fascinated with is being in between spaces. That you're neither in the light or in the dark, that you're in this spot in between. So this flickering bulb is a very Lynchian thing that you see. It's very much part of the atmosphere, it's very much part of the world, but it also carries this thematic core to it as well.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which is, again, not a book this time.

[Dan] Not a thing. So, we're going to talk about Babylon 5 really quickly. That's big old…

[Snort]

[Dan] What are you laughing about?

[Howard] Real quick.

[Dan] The idea that we can talk about it real quick. I somehow missed Babylon 5 the first time around. Which… I don't know why or how. But… It's… They've just barely this year… Or last year, started streaming it. So I've been going through… I actually keep a blog where I analyze each episode the first time I watch it. I am learning so much about storytelling, about show don't tell, about setting, and about use of theme. One of the great things Babylon 5 does is set you up to make false assumptions on purpose because it's going to reverse them later, and the way that it does the design of the alien species and all of these other things are all built around the central themes of vision and redemption and things like that. It's really very clever.

[Brandon] One of my favorite things about it was the worldbuilding of the aliens and how… I do feel they did a really good job. The very different species reinforcing the different themes of that show.

[Brandon] For the second part of the podcast, let's talk about that. Where you as a writer spend your time, therein will lie the reader's attention, heart, and interest. So, what takes the bulk of the time in your pages and where do you spend your worldbuilding time? I've said many times before, you can't do everything in every book, it's so you are going to have to by necessity do worldbuilding triage. Where you're going to pick the most important elements of your story and spend your time there. This leads to theme, I think. I think where you spend your worldbuilding time will lead to theme. How can we do this intentionally, and not accidentally, or should we even care?

[Mary Robinette] I actually think this is a place where it… Honing your skills as a short story writer is a really good thing. Because we have to have, when you're doing short fiction, you have to have everything doing multiple purposes. That's one of the things that can really make theme pop and kind of sing, is that… It's not doing that single thing. So, for me, one of the kind of nuts and bolts things that I will do when I'm trying intentionally add theme and make sure that it's doing multiple things… In short fiction, versus when I'm writing novels, I'm always looking at what is already on the table that I can reuse. Whereas novels, I'm always like, "What new thing can I bring in?" So, for me, if I'm looking for a thematic element, like an evil robot monkey, it's all about the clay, and it's about clay and turning. So I try and make sure that my language reflects that, and that if he picks up a piece of clay, that he spins it or he rotates it. It's not just that he picks up the clay. So that I'm trying to make sure that everything is doing dual purposes. So I think that that's one thing that you can do, is not just look at, "Oh, I have to get on a train." But also, can you hit multiple aspects of this thematic question and reuse…

[Brandon] What I like about that also is it often forces you to take one idea and approach it from a couple different directions.

[Mary Robinette] Exactly.

[Brandon] As opposed to introducing multiple different ideas. Which usually leads to a stronger interpretation of theme. What else do you guys have? Any suggestions on how to use… How to divide your worldbuilding time and your attention so it will reinforce the theme?

[Howard] I'm always worldbuilding first and foremost in the interest of is this going to be something that there was a reason to draw it. There was… I want some of the sense of wonder, I want it to be fascinating, I want it to be science fiction. The Oafan race, the balloon people, those have been a lot of fun for me. In terms of those characters, that race of sophonts and theme, they're hydrogen balloons. Fire, instant death. Getting popped hurts a lot. So violence, for them, they're… Even syllables, K sounds, to them aren't even in their language. Violence is really, really dangerous. Yet, they have a huge fleet of warships. They know how to be violent. They know when to be violent. The way in which they justify their huge fragility with their military might is itself a fascinating theme. It was not what I intended to do when I created them. But when I got to the current point in the story, I thought, "Well, there's this one… Ooh. That's what they're for." That is exactly what they're for.

[Brandon] You know, I hadn't thought about that, but of course where it's really working is to them, any little small amount of violence has large ramifications, so they embody… I'm not sure which maxim this is, but it's the one that's like if you're going to shoot, make sure you're shooting… There is no overkill.

[Howard] There was a line in there that I loved when I wrote it, and I got a lot of good feedback from it. Where someone said, or one of them said, "Attention. We have a firing solution on you. Please surrender immediately." "How did you find me?" "Surrender and we can tell you." "No, I'll…" Then they fire. Then she says, "Why am I still alive?" "We use the word firing solution when firing is actually an acceptable solution." They have fired and they haven't killed her. They've just taken her prisoner and disabled her weapons. I loved that a lot. Because they've got her life in their hands. But they have a very precise shot that is going to disable. That is a firing solution. Turning that phrase was fun.

[Dan] So, this one is kind of similar to what Mary said about having something serve multiple purposes. I've talked before about how in Partials, one of the themes that I was dealing with there was the generation gap after the apocalypse. The adults see the world as fallen, and the kids see the world is beautiful. I found that just ruins were a chance to explore that. Because seen from one angle, this destroyed, dilapidated house used to be a house, look at how great it used to be and now it's all fallen apart and overgrown with weeds. Seen from another angle, look, nature's coming back. Nature is reclaiming this and it is beautiful. There's a tree growing in the middle of the floor. So you can use different viewpoints to explore the same thing from different sides.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and break it here. Mary Robinette, you have some homework for us?

[Mary Robinette] So, what I want you folks to do is I want you to pick a thematic element. You're going to weave this into a work in progress. Look at the five senses. Pick an element from those five senses that's going to be a recurring theme through the thing. It can be a flickering David Lynchian lightbulb, it can be the sound of a whirring fan, it can be a scent of roses. Whatever it is. Pick something. Figure out a reason. Don't just put it in a scene. Figure out a reason that it is in each scene. See if you can weave that through.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/28/14-17-its-like-car-talk-meets-welcome-to-nightvale/

Key points: Comp titles, or comparative titles, are titles that a book reminds you of. Who is this book for? E.g., a pitch like X in space. Or traditionally two books, with your book in the overlap. Not the sum or combination, but the intersection. Comp titles early in the writing process can help you refine your book. Comp titles can define genre and category. Think about the elemental genres. Comp titles can help identify your audience and target a market. Consider the set dressing and structure when picking your comp titles. Comp titles is not just A meets B, you can say which elements you are referring to. You can also throw in a wrench with a third element to give it a twist. Be aware that readers may not understand the shorthand of comp titles. Use comp titles as the base of longer explanations. Comp titles are a clarifying exercise, to help identify the core elements of your story. Beware the comp titles that have been overused, like Harry Potter.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 17.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale."

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] We are talking about comp-titles. Those things that you cite when you are trying to describe the thing that you've created in terms of other people's stuff. Dongwon is back with us this week. Dongwon, in your line of work, agenting, you use comp-titles kind of a lot.

[Dongwon] Comp titles is how we think about the universe. So, comp titles are, just for clarification, it means comparative title. So any time you're talking about any given book, what you're usually doing in the back of your head, if you're a publishing professional, is automatically coming up with the one to two to three titles that this book reminds you of. Part of the reason you're doing that is, in publishing, one of the main questions is who is this book for. The way we talk about that is we use other books as a proxy. So if your book is like Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, then that tells you something about who this book is for and, hopefully, how many copies it's going to sell.

[Dan] Yeah. I just sold... at time of recording, I have just sold a middle grade to Audible, based almost entirely on the pitch, Home Alone in Space.

[Dongwon] Hell, yes.

[Dan] That is working everywhere. The editor's taking that around the company and says, "Hey, can I get some resources?" "For what?" "Home Alone in Space." "Yes. Here's all the money that you need." So a really good comp title can have incredible value.

[Mary Robinette] That is basically how I sold my first novel. It was Jane Austen with magic. Then I also have Thin Man in Space.

[Dan] Which I've wanted to read for so long.

[Dongwon] I will point out that every example of a comp title that we've given so far has been one book with an extra element. That is one way to do a comp title. But most traditionally, what you really want to do is have two different books. In the Venn diagram, the overlap between book A and book B is where your book lives. Right? So, the ones that we've been giving so far can be really useful just to give a feel for what the book's going to read like, but it's not telling enough yet about who this book is for in terms of the audience. That's sort of an interesting gradation that you'll see [garbled]

[Howard] The first time I ever had to come up with a comp title for my work, I was making a pitch to a media guy who, of course, never got back to me because that's the way a lot of these things work at Comic Cons. I described Schlock Mercenary as it's like Babylon 5 meets Bloom County. Babylon 5, science fiction that pays attention to story, science fiction that remains consistent. Bloom County, comic strip with short serial elements.

[Mary Robinette] So in that, is Schlock Bill the cat?

[Laughter]

[Howard] If you pay close attention, both Schlock and Bill the cat have mismatched eyeball sizes.

[Ooo!]

[Howard] So the answer to your question is not no.

[Laughter]

[Howard] My work is not just highly derivative...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It is markedly and easily identifiably derivative.

[Dongwon] We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of the things that I think is interesting about comp titles is that... I find that when I come up with the comp titles early in my process that it also helps me sort of refine what it is that I'm working on. That sometimes it's like, "Oh, yeah. This is an element out of that Venn diagram." So as we're going through this, I kind of want to talk about what we mean by the Venn diagram of where the two books overlap. You're the one who introduced me to this idea, Dongwon, so I'm going to put you on the spot and make you explain it.

[Dongwon] So the Venn diagram is really useful. I think the way people think a lot about A plus B is they tend to think that it's the combination, it's the full territory defined by book A plus book B. That's the wrong way to think about it. What you're doing is, you're looking at the narrow overlap between those two books. One of the reasons this is really useful in pitching, for example, is it does a lot of the work to define genre and what category your book is before you start telling people the details of your book. So if you start saying that it's Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, then you already know that this is for someone who likes dinosaurs and laser swords, right? It's not... The combination of those two things, it's you're putting the laser swords into a park full of dinosaurs or something to that effect.

[Howard] It's also worth calling back to our... Oh, was it Season 11, Elemental Genres? Calling back to the Elemental Genres. Let's talk about Star Wars and Jurassic Park. It will not always reverse engineer this way, but if you are talking about Jurassic Park because there are cool monsters and it is a horror story in which there is a sense of wonder, and you're talking about Star Wars because Campbellian monomyth and swords. Then, if those are the elements in your story, Star Wars meets Jurassic Park is a great way to say which elemental genres you are using. But it could also be dogfighting spaceships meets biological technology that hasn't actually gone wrong...

[Dongwon] I'm now picturing raptors learning how to use X-wings. It's a really delightful image.

[Mary Robinette] I would totally agree the heck out of that.

[Dongwon] There you go.

[Dan] Now Mary mentioned, Mary Robinette mentioned earlier the... That it's often a very good idea to come up with this comp title, this comparison early in your process. One of the reasons that that can help is it can help you identify your audience and it can help you target your market a little better. I sold my YA cyberpunk to the editor, to the publisher, using "This is Veronica Mars meets Bladerunner." Which is great, but he's my age. It very quickly became obvious as we started figuring out how to market this in the YA market that when we sold this six years ago, there were no good well-known cyberpunk properties for teenagers. We tried everything we could think of. Today it would be easy. Because we have... There's a new Bladerunner movie that's been very recent, there's all these other cyberpunk things that are popping up. We've... I use it now, I usually pitch it as Overwatch. But six years ago, if I'd taken the time to think about it, I could have identified maybe... Maybe there isn't a slot in the market for this. Which is what turned out to be. It was a very poor seller because the market... I was maybe two or three years before the market was ready.

[Dongwon] And yet… Sorry.

[Howard] I just… I wanted to pause for a moment for a book of the week, because that sounded like a nice point to transition. Except Dongwon had a thought and I didn't want to step on it.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] I'll say my thought really quick. Dan has stumbled on, I think, one of the reasons why publishing can be a very conservative business sometimes. It's one of the flaws in the system. It's how we think about things, but it's one of the issues is if there isn't a prior example that's been successful, it's very hard to do something that is very new and very different from what has come before. Now there will be breakout moments when that thing happens, and you get to do this big new thing. But often times, there are a number of books that preceded it that didn't get traction. Often, when somebody says, "Oh, this is a brand-new genre," that's not actually true. That work has been happening, it just hasn't been selling particularly well.

[Howard] Well, that's kind of a down note to talk about a book that we want to [inaudible]

[laughter, yeah]

[Dan] A positive spin on that particular thought is that my kind of tepid reaction to cyberpunk actually paved the way for the new Blade Runner movie to be a big success.

[Chuckles exactly]

[Dan] That's where I'm going to go with this.

[Dongwon] You provided a lovely steppingstone.

[Howard] Who's talking about Arkady Martine's book?

[Dongwon] I believe that is me. So, our book of the week is Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. It's a brand-new space opera that's just out from Tor Books. The comp titles that I'm using for this book would be that it is John McQuarrrie meets Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It is a political murder mystery set in the heart of a future massive galaxy-spanning empire. A young diplomat is sent to the heart of this empire because her predecessor, she discovers, has been murdered. She needs to prevent her tiny nation from being annexed by this empire. It's a really wonderful fraught political thriller full of massive world building and a very sort of complex view of how people interact and how empires work which is where the Ann Leckie part comes in. It's a wonderful read, and I hope you all enjoy it very much.

[Howard] Outstanding. That was A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine?

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Howard] Available now?

[Dongwon] It should be available now.

[Howard] Should be. Because we record these things in advance…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And our listeners never get tired of us talking about this weird time travel thing that we do.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, according to some of our listeners, they really do get tired of it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Will cut all this out.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It is absolutely available now.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So one thing that I wanted to kind of circle back to about when we're talking about the comp titles and how to pick one is that there's kind of two things that you're looking at. One is the set dressing of the thing. The other is the structure of the thing. So the set dressing are things like Jurassic Park, if we think of Jurassic Park and the set dressing of that, we think of dinosaurs, we think of a park. But the structure of Jurassic Park is thriller and horror. So when you're picking your comp titles, I think it's imp… I think that it's worthwhile making sure that you're trying to find a comp title that has both axes in alignment with what you're picking. Otherwise, if you're like, it's like Jurassic Park, but it's all gentle and soft. Unless your other comp title brings the gentle and soft into it, you're going to wind up sending a false message [garbled]

[Howard] It's like Jurassic Park meets Gummi Bears.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Then I think people… But see…

[Dan] Ooo, yeah.

[Dongwon] Then your raptors are just bouncing around the park. That's [unsettling, upsetting]

[Dan] I'm digging that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but that…

[Howard] That sounds just delicious.

[Mary Robinette] That could be like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man version of…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] rampaging Gummi bears.

[Dongwon] One thing to point out when talking about comp titles is you don't have to just say it's like A Meets B, right? You can say different things about it, right? So you can say it's the voice of A and the world building of B. Or you can say it's the plot of this meets this set dressing element. An example I just gave for the Arkady Martine, John McQuarrie is providing the elemental genre, it's a thriller, it's a political thriller. Then Ancillary Justice is providing voice and setting, more than anything else. One I talk about a lot is Marina Lostetter's Noumenon, which is… I talk about it as an Arthur C. Clarke big idea story as told by Octavia Butler. So it gives you this is old school big idea science-fiction, but told with this contemporary voice that has a cultural focus.

[Dan] Yeah. Another thing you can do is add a third element to throw in a twist. My Partials series, we marketed that as this is The Stand meets Battlestar Galactica, starring Hermione Granger. That third element can kind of be the wrench that helps the other two twist around.

[Dongwon] Dan is very good at this game. I'll point that out.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'd like to take a moment and leash this just a little bit. Because in my experience, I'm excited to hear if it's at all universal, the comp title tool does not work well with large bodies of readers. If I go to the customer and tell them this is like Star Wars meets Jurassic Park, they do not have necessarily the vocabulary, the syntax, to know that I'm not saying the nostalgia you have from Star Wars and the nostalgia you have from Jurassic Park, you're going to get both of those in this book. When I've seen people try and pitch their books in that way, often hand selling, it feels fraught. Whereas if you're having a conversation with an agent or a publisher or an editor or a bookseller, they speak that language and they know exactly what you're doing.

[Mary Robinette] I think that you're right that if you do a shorthand, if you just toss it out just as those two comp titles to the average reader, they don't have the insider shorthand. But I also think that if you use those as the basis of a longer sentence, that it is very, very useful. It's one of the things that… With the… The way I talk about Calculating Stars to readers is I say, "So, it's 1952. Slam an asteroid into the Earth, kicking off the space race very early when women are still computers. So it's kind of like Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact." They're like, "Oh! Oh, sign me up for that."

[Howard] See, that is a… For me, that is a perfect pitch. Except not… Perfect pitch has a different…

[Laughter]

[Howard] It is an outstanding elevator pitch for a book because it goes very, very quickly, and at the end, you have planted a hook. That, for me, is one of the most important parts about these comp titles is that it's supposed to give you a bunch of information, but also invite you to ask a question. Which is, Hidden Figures meets Deep Impact, how bad does it get?

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing is that I'm also focusing… Using that initial sentence, I am telling the reader which parts of the comp titles to focus on. So I do… It's like you have to decide what is important and why you picked that comp title, and then set it up when you're talking to a reader.

[Dongwon] Also, the comp titles are really a clarifying exercise. It helps you to focus on what are the core elements of your story that you want to be telling to other people about the book that you've written. So, once you have your comp titles in mind, all of your copy, your longer pitch, that can descend from that. So even if you don't end up using the actual comparative titles when you're talking to a reader, if you meet them on the street or in a bookshop or whatever it is, you still have in your head the target audience in mind that is shaped by those overlapping properties.

[Howard] Dongwon, I think that's a great place to phase into our homework, except Dan's telling me he wants to say something.

[Dan] There's one important thing I want to point out before we leave comp titles.

[Howard] Go.

[Dan] Which is in line with thinking about your audience. Especially when you are pitching this, when you are presenting this to an agent or an editor, keep in mind that they have already heard four bazillion of these. So don't use the really obvious ones. Don't use Star Wars, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones. Because they've seen those so many times.

[Dongwon] Well, the thing I want to add to that, just a little bit of clarification about why those are bad, is because the comp title's a proxy for the audience. So if you say Harry Potter, what you're saying is my book is for every human who's ever existed on the planet.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] That's not useful information. It made plot wise be correct or it may have elements that are correct. So you can cherry pick an element, you can say starring Hermoine Granger just because that's good shorthand for a character. But you can't use Harry Potter as a comp because it doesn't tell me anything useful. You're only… Your Venn diagram is a circle of the human population.

[Howard] I think that that's probably the places in which I've seen the hand selling fail. Because if you tell me it's Harry Potter meets Jurassic Park, I don't believe you.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's not the result that you wanted.

[Howard] We have homework.

[Mary Robinette] Your homework is to come up with six comp titles. Now, what I'm going to recommend is that you take some work in progress and you come up with three comp titles that are from works in progress, and that you come up with three additional ones that are for work that you have not written but you just think would be a cool combination. Literally, the Thin Man in Space, which we have just sold to Tor at the time of this recording, that began as a comp title. I had the comp title before I had anything else. So, six comp titles. Three for existing works to help you clarify what you're working on, and three as an initial brainstorming for something that you might want to write.

[Howard] Once you've got those three that you might want to write… [Garbled may be planted]

[Dongwon] [garbled]

[Howard] It may be time to write it.

[Mary Robinette] In fact, you may be out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.16: Your Setting is a Telegraph

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/21/14-16-your-setting-is-a-telegraph/

Key points: Setting can be used to quickly telegraph the kind of story they are reading, the tone and mood. E.g., a prologue can establish the tone of the entire story. Specific, concrete details can help. Don't forget the Stooges' Law, a coconut cream pie on the mantle in the first act means by the end of the third act, someone will get hit in the face with it. Screenwriting has the opening shot, with a visual setting. Where a meeting is happening, what they're doing, where the events are happening can do a lot to indicate the type of story. If you have a tonal shift, before telegraphing it, consider whether the surprise of the unexpected shift is part of your point or not. When you finish a book, you may need to revise the first chapter and fine-tune the setting to get the tone right.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 16.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Your Setting is a Telegraph.

[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] Howard, when we were preparing this, you gave us the title. So why don't you explain what you mean by Your Setting is a Telegraph.

[Howard] it comes from the term telegraphing the punch, telegraphing the punchline, telegraphing the joke, whatever. Which is often used negatively. But here we mean your setting is going to telegraph to the reader very, very quickly… You're going to communicate to the reader very, very quickly what kind of a story they're reading. Are they reading a comedy, are they reading military sci-fi, are they reading a puzzle story about alien archaeology, all of those sorts of mood things can be established by your setting, and can actually be established very, very quickly when you introduce them to your setting.

[Brandon] Yeah. You can always, of course, establish these other ways, as well. Through word choice, through what your character is doing, through situation, but this… We're talking about world building this year, and we want to really talk about how to use your descriptions, your settings, or where people are, or things like this to give an immediate and powerful indication of the tone of your story. A lot of times, one of the big questions I get from students is, "Should I use a prologue or should I not?" Which is one of those loaded questions, which is… What kind of juice do you want? Right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Should I have a drink of juice or not? Do you like juice? Is it breakfast? Do you want a prologue? Well, one of the reasons you might want a prologue is if you are having trouble with your first chapter establishing the tone of the entire story, then you can use your prologue to do this. Now that's of course dangerous because maybe you need to look at that first chapter and learn how to maybe make that one, but it is one of the things you can do, is… I often use the Wheel of Time as an example of this. In the beginning of the Wheel of Time, in chapter 1, the first few pages take place with the young man on a farm with his father. It's a little bit creepy because he keeps seeing shadows, but that's not a real indication of tone. If you were taking those opening scenes as a promise, it might be, "Oh, this is going to be a pastoral, perhaps horror." So Robert Jordan has a prologue where a madman is wandering through a burning castle, screaming for his dead wife and children, who are at his feet and he can't see them. Things are on fire, and there's been a big war, and it's like, "All right. We're in the middle of a giant war drama with some psychological elements." So that early introduction of tone is very important to set the tone for the entire series. How can we do this? What suggestions do you have to our listeners?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that if you are specific and concrete with your choices in the beginning, that this does a lot. So, like if I am writing military SF, then having a hand cannon says we're going to be shooting some things. If I'm doing a comedy, then in very broad terms, if there's a coconut cream pie there, we know that at some point… It's the Stooges' law, that if there is a coconut cream pie on the mantle, then by the end of the third act, someone is going to get hit in the face with it. These are the things that happen that can communicate tone to the reader, because we latch onto these concrete details.

[Howard] Well, it's important to recognize that the version of Chekhov's law that Chekhov actually said, which is if you want to fire a gun in act three, you need to show it on the mantle in act one. If you want to hit somebody with a coconut cream pie, you have to show us a coconut cream pie on the mantle in act one, so that we know that this is a story in which there can be a pie fight.

[Margaret] I think it's interesting in the difference between fiction and what I'm thinking in terms of screenwriting, because it's your opening shot. Right? It's very hard to avoid establishing setting, because the visual is right there. In screenplay format, the first thing you say is this an interior or an exterior? What is our setting? Is it day or is it night? That's the first thing somebody reading after fade in is going to encounter in a script. In fiction, you have a little more freedom in there. Like, if you're starting with a character, but it's remembering to put the character in a place, because you can get so much lifting done, as you say, in terms of tone by where you're meeting somebody, what they're doing, where these events are happening. A conversation that happens in a diner is different than a conversation that happens in a car that's speeding towards a cliff or in a prison visiting area. All of those start you on three very different types of stories.

[Howard] If I have a science fiction… An opening science-fiction shot that is in the science-fiction equivalent of a mausoleum with data-encoded corpsicles or whatever, and that is what I am describing, the reader has a pretty clear indication that life and the ending thereof is going to be one of the thematic focuses of this story.

[Brandon] One of my favorite episodes of Firefly is the one that starts with Mal in the desert naked. Opening shot.

[Mary Robinette] That's one of my favorites, too.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That shot indicates wacky hijinks are going to occur. Not just him, desert, naked, but his pose, the way he's talking. He's not, like, lying there, dying of thirst, crawling through the desert. He's like, "Huh." Just one shot. He says something, but you wouldn't even need to. You know that you are going to chuckle and wacky hijinks ensue. I really like this.

[Margaret] Things have gone rapidly out of his control over the course of this episode.

[Brandon] I love when stories can do that.

[Mary Robinette] I think, actually, one of the things about that is that you've got the specific concrete detail, but you also have the character's relationship to that detail. So, one of the examples that I think of is the difference between Star Wars and Space Balls. Both of them say this is science-fiction and they both have the same opening shot, which is ginormous ships scrolling through. But Space Balls, it goes on so long that it becomes comical. That tells you, "Oh, no no no. This…"

[Brandon] You're going to laugh.

[Mary Robinette] You're going to laugh all the way through this.

[Howard] Then there's a bumper sticker on…

[Mary Robinette] There's a bumper sticker.

[Howard] On the back of the spaceship.

[Mary Robinette] Just in case you missed how long it was going on.

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

[Howard] Yes. Terminal Alliance by Jim Hines. My family, we bought this book twice. I was on my way back from Cedar City, with Kellianna and I put on the audiobook of Terminal Alliance so we could listen to it. We got home and she said, "Are you going to listen to this in your office while you draw?" I said, "Maybe. But I'm not working yet." She said, "Well, I want to keep going, and the reader is too slow. So do we have a copy of this book in print?" So we bought it in print. No regrets. No regrets. It's a comedy about space janitors and zombie apocalypse. You know, that's kind of all you need to know. If I say space janitors and zombie apocalypse, you have enough setting that I've telegraphed to you the tone of this thing from my friend Jim that you're really going to enjoy.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to second that I enjoyed the heck out of this book, too.

[Howard] I think the cover was a Dan Dos Santos. I'm not sure. I love the cover. I love the cover.

[Brandon] So, kind of riffing off that, Howard, how do you indicate that there are comedic elements in your stories, and how do you indicate sometimes… Sometimes, Schlock Mercenary gets very serious. I feel like you use setting to distinguish these two quite well.

[Howard] There's… Well, first of all, I need to establish that if you're reading Schlock Mercenary and have been reading it for a while, if there isn't a punchline or if things happen and there are no repercussions, there is no serious side of it, you'll feel like I've broken some rules. That's… We've talked in previous episodes about budget. So I have this currency that I have spent to get you to this point. That said, I try to begin every book with some sort of establishing shot, that will tell us this is science-fiction. I'm going to end the strip with a punchline, which, because of the beat, beat, punchline format of things will tell you very quickly we're going to tell a lot of jokes. But I like to establish the scope of the story. In the most recent… I say most recent. When book 19 launched, I did a joke about prologues. We had a prologue in which an alien spaceship is flying and they're saying, "There's a star system ahead, do we need to change course?" "No, we're going to fly through their cloud… Comet cloud, we should be fine." "But anything…" "We're big. Anything we nudge, those inner planets are going to have to deal with." "Sure, they're going to have to deal with it, but it just means millions of years." 8 million years later, we have a little velociraptor with a telescope who looks kind of like Leonardo da Vinci, if he were a feathered velociraptor talking to another velociraptor who also has a similar sort of da Vinci-ish look who is building something. He's saying, "Huh. How soon can your flying machine be ready?" That has told us this is going to be a tragic story about the ends of civilization, but you're going to laugh.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Howard] That was a very long-winded…

[Brandon] No, that's great.

[Howard] Approach to it, but... I also made so much fun of prologues, and I was thinking of you the whole time.

[Brandon] Thank you very much. I'll have you know that…

[Margaret] I wanted to giggle at your description, but I didn't want to mess up the audio.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I've restrained myself, and most of my books only have two now.

[Wha!]

[Brandon] Way of Kings has four prologues.

[Mary Robinette] I know. I know. I'm just… I'm amazed at your restraint.

[Brandon] Yes. All right. So. Building off of that, let's say you want to shift tones in your story, you know you're going to do it. You're going to be writing a comedic story that is going to get serious, or you're going at it the other way, you're going to write a serious story but you know you're going to have some comedic elements. How do you indicate that from the beginning? Do you need to indicate that from the beginning?

[Howard] I think the second part of that question is the more important bit. If the surprise that people experience with a tonal shift that they weren't expecting is your point, then you don't need to telegraph it. If, however, you don't want to alienate them… You know there's a tonal shift, and you don't want to alienate them, then you do need to telegraph it.

[Brandon] Okay. I would absolutely agree with that. Though, we're talking specifically about using setting. Right? The methods of using setting. So, let's in our last few minutes here, let's give a few tips. What are things you've done using your setting to indicate your tone?

[Mary Robinette] So, I did this in Calculating Stars. Calculating Stars opens with a couple in the Poconos, and they're having sexy fun times. Then I slam a meteor into the earth.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So… What I did with that, and I made very, very deliberate choices in that first page. The opening line is "Do you remember where you were when the meteor struck?" That tells you this is going to be a disaster story. Then, the

is "I was in the mountains with Nathaniel, and we were stargazing, by which I mean sex."

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Which gets a laugh. It tells you… Having those two things back to back tells you about the setting that we're in… And, granted, I'm doing this in narration. It is a first-person character. But I'm using the setting there to tell you what this is going to be about. That you can expect a story in which we're dealing with relationships, we're dealing with disaster, and that there's going to be some comedy. It's not going to be disaster all the way down.

[Brandon] I often have trouble with first chapters. Not starting them. I've talked about this before in the podcast, though, that when I get done with the book, I feel like my first chapter no longer belongs with the book that I ended up writing. This is coming from someone who architects and outlines a ton. That first chapter, getting that tone right, can be a big deal for just kind of establishing how the whole story's going to play out. I had to do this just with my most recent book, that will have just come out at this point about six months ago. Skyward. Where I wrote the first chapter, I even did readings from it. At the end, it was just not right. Even though when I rewrote it, it was basically the same events happening. I needed to make… They live in a cavern system underground, I needed to make the caverns a little more claustrophobic. I needed to make the stepping on the surface for the first time more full of wonder, because the idea of we as a people are escaping the caverns and getting into the skies, that's the point of the story. It just… I find finishing my book and then going back and saying, "What was my book's tone really about?" And "How can I hit this metaphorically in the first chapter?"

[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a really good point, that… For me, a lot of times, it's about going back in and finessing the specific physical details of the space. I have a story called Cerbo in Vitra ujo which is one of the true horror stories that I've written. When I wrote it initially, it read like it was going to be a teen drama. What I had to go back in and do was bring out… Even though I didn't move the location, I shifted the… They're in a conservatory on a space station, so there's all of these plants around. But I made sure that there is like a broken rose, that there is a diseased rose. That there are elements there that are unsettling in order to indicate that that's where we were going. It was about going back and adjusting the setting to match the tone.

[Brandon] So, our homework plays right into this idea. Which you have for us, Mary?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is I want you to write an opening. It can be taking an opening of something that you're already working on or just starting from scratch. But I want you to write the first half page. In that first half page, I want you to hit three specific concrete details. I'm picking three as an arbitrary number, because I want you to actually really dig into this. But I watch to pick three specific concrete details that telegraph setting… That telegraph the tone. That telegraph what the mood is. These details are obviously your setting. So I want you to do that. Then I want you to write it again and telegraph a different mood.

[Brandon] Use, maybe, even the same dialogue, but use the setting to indicate a different tone. All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.15: Technology

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/14/14-15-technology/

Key points: How do you develop technology for stories? It's an ongoing process. Look at the implications of the technology, but try to avoid being the person who thinks the war will end in a week because we've shot so many bullets. Consider the speed of change in technology and the speed of change in understanding how to use the technology. How do you adapt current technology when looking forward and guessing about the future? Take the technology, but make it accessible and palatable. Keep an eye on the technology, change it for your audience, and make a story. Look for fun stories to write that grow naturally out of something we are already doing. How do you write technology for young people? Look for real science and use it in cool ways, combine science and fun. Focus on the character, how does the technology relate to what they want. Use the technology as a point of conflict. Not too many details, but how can the technology help the character? How do you use technology as metaphor, MacGuffin, or conflict? Look at who created it and what biases or limitations did they build into it. What did they accidentally put into it? What could go wrong?

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 15.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Technology.

[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] We are talking tech today on Writing Excuses.

[Howard] After a fashion.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] We did a whole month on magic systems, so let's talk about technology this time around. How do you go about… Howard, you write the most science fiction. Dan does a lot, too. But how do you go about developing technology for your stories?

[Howard] It's… Honestly, this is one of those questions that has become a little bit like where do you get your ideas? Because I've been doing it for so long, it's just an ongoing part of everything I do. Everything I read… I mean, I read a lot of tech stuff. I watch documentaries. I listen to audiobooks about history and war and whatever else. All of that goes into the hopper. So that when I'm asking a question like… Well, in World War I, when the machine gun first saw the battlefield, there were people who thought the war would be over in 20 minutes, because that is how long it will take us to fire enough bullets to have killed everybody on the other side at the rate of one bullet per person. We look at that now, and we say, "Well, that's patently ridiculous. Nobody could possibly think like that." Except there were people who did. We look back at the second World War… Or the first World War and the way technology changed those things. That is the sort of discussion I'm having in my head all the time. I want to look at the implications of the technology, but I don't want to be the guy who thinks that the war is going to end in a week, because that's how long it will take us to shoot enough bullets.

[Brandon] That is really a smart way of putting it. I really like the history of warfare paralleling the history of technology. World War I is one of those really interesting moments where the technology changed faster than our ability to understand how to use that technology changed. I remember listening to a podcast about how they were just dumbfounded by how much the war had changed, and nobody knew what they were doing.

[Howard] Nobody knew what they were doing. On a more pleasant note. Today, we look at greenhouse gases and carbon emissions and there's a lot of people writing peak oil sorts of apocalypse stories. I have $0.99 solar powered lights in my yard. I say $0.99. I replaced some of them, got them at Walmart. $0.69. I have solar powered lighting for $0.69. I realized any post-apocalyptic fiction that set after oh, about 2020… If you don't have the lights on all the time, you probably haven't thought ahead far enough, because of what solar is doing. So these kinds of implications, I'm always, always spinning them. Because it's so cool.

[Brandon] So, how about you guys? When you're looking at writing a science fiction story, guessing about the future, how do you adapt current technology when you're looking forward?

[Mahtab] Well, trying to write for younger adults, I try and take the technology, but make it more accessible and more palatable. One of the things that really excited me was the Mars One project. That was started about two or three years ago, and the whole concept of this was this is a one-way trip. I think it caught the world's interest as well, because you had so many applicants, and then they had to go through these interviews. I used to look at YouTube videos of people posting what they had to learn. Then it was individual, and then it was a group, and stuff like that. So I… For me, I actually took that as the starting point. I wrote a science fiction novel called Bionic, because I wanted to… If it was a one-way trip, but then they needed the technology on Mars itself to be able to survive. Because of the economics of getting stuff there would have been tough. So then I paired it with 3D printing. In fact, just recently I read an article where a company's sending a 3D printer to the International Space Station. So there… The only thing that you really have to do is keep an eye out to all the technology. Wired, DARPA, just keep your eyes open. Read. Then just change it to your audience, and make a story.

[Howard] Three or four years ago, I was on a panel at a convention where we were talking about colonizing Mars. Everybody pointed out, not obvious, we are the civilization that throws robots at other planets and lands them there successfully. It's only a matter of time before we're throwing robots at other planets, and they are robots who are able to make other robots. By the time humans get to Mars, the sorts of stories we may be telling are human cowboys who are robot wranglers riding wild robots trying to rope them up. Okay, on the one hand that's kind of ridiculous…

[Dan] There's your writing prompt.

[Howard] On the other hand, that would be a fun story to write. And it grows very naturally out of this idea that it's something we're already doing.

[Brandon] So let me put Dan and Mahtab on the spot here. One thing we I don't think talk enough about on the podcast is specifically writing for young people. Because our kind of bias is toward the adult market, I think. Specifically, taking science fiction or technology. Any hints on how to approach writing these things in a way that works for the age group? How do you… You say you try to write the technology for the young people in a way that works in the story? How are you specifically doing this? Any suggestions?

[Dan] So, with Zero G, in the series there, I started off by trying to write hard SF. The first book is, but none of the rest of the series will be. But as I went through, what I was trying to do was use real science in a way that looked cool. What can I do with zero gravity that will make kids go, "Wow, that's fun, I want to do that?" What can I do with spacewalks? What can I do with freeze-dried astronaut food? All of these aspects of space travel and all of these scientific principles, how can I use them in a way that looks fun, like they're playing. That's how I structured the entire series, was, okay, now they're on a planet, what can I do with a planet that looks fun but is still grounded in real science? The combination of those two things, science and fun, is what drives the whole series for me.

[Mahtab] Well, I always focus on the character. Whatever the technology does has to relate to what the character wants. So my main character in this… Actually, there are two main characters, one's an alien, or a Martian, and one of them is a human. Alex, who is one of the points of view, he hates technology. But it is the only way he's going to be able to survive in space and look for his parents who are missing. So I adapt the technology to the story, to the character, to what he needs. Also, using it as a key point of conflict. Now, I think I was just trying to see who else did that, and Andy Weir in Martian, I mean, there is a lot of science and technology involved there, but it all relates to how Mark Watney has to survive, get to the… What is that… Shuttle that's going to help him launch into space and then get picked up. But, I mean, when I was reading the book, I really was getting kind of bogged down with all of the details that Andy had put in there, which I didn't get completely, but then what I did get… It's like if you just step back, it's like everything serves to help this character escape from where he is, or escape that difficult situation. I think the movie did that pretty well. I really enjoyed that because everything was about everything breaking down, but the character is resolving the issue. It also helps to show the character's motivations and the will to survive. So I thought that was done pretty well. That's why, when I write for middle grade, it's not too many details but however the technology can help the character.

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

[Mahtab] Yes. My absolute… One of my favorites is Feed by M. T. Anderson. It was actually written in 2002, but it was way ahead of its time. It focuses on issues like corporate power, consumerism, information technology, data mining, pretty much what Google does these days. He predicted this way back in 2002. So the story revolves around this one character called Titus. The novel starts with, "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to suck." Which is one of the most brilliant opening lines I have ever heard, which is why I've memorized it. But they go there and all of these… About 73% of the Americans have got a chip in their brain, which is called feed, and it basically helps these corporations to profile the candidates and basically give them experiences that would help with profiling them and helping them shop and living a certain lifestyle and giving the data back to the corporations. But at one point, when they go to the moon, the feed gets corrupted, Titus and his friends managed to get the feed working again, but one of the friends that he meets, a girl Violet, is a kind of rebel. She tries to fight the feed. The stories about their relationship and what happens in the end. It's a… I don't want to give out the spoilers, because you just have to read it. Whoever's listening, you have to read it.

[Brandon] Excellent. That's by M. T. Anderson?

[Mahtab] Anderson. Feed.

[Brandon] So, one of the things that technology… We've kind of been focusing on presaging the future. But I don't think that's the only way technology can work in science fiction and fantasy stories. I think of some of my favorite science fiction stories from the first part of the 20th century, and none of those got very much right. My favorite science fiction story of all time is Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, and that imagines a world that did not come to pass, right? But you don't read that story and say, "Oh, he got it wrong." You read that story as a sort of metaphor for the life he was looking at, the world as he was looking at. So we've already talked on the podcast a little bit about metaphor in science fiction. But let me ask you about this. Using technology as a metaphor, using technology as a MacGuffin, using technology as conflict. How do you do this in your stories?

[Dan] One of the things that fascinates me about technology is taking a look at who created it and what biases or what kind of flavor they are adding to it, whether consciously or subconsciously. So, for example, look at Facebook. Facebook has come to completely define our society in a lot of ways. But, Facebook was created by a college sophomore. It defines itself, and by extension, our society in the things that were important to a college sophomore. How many friends do you have, what do they like, what are their favorite movies? Like, those are really kind of unimportant things in terms of broader adult social interaction. But, that's how the technology was subconsciously created, and now it's changing the way we all interact with each other.

[Brandon] That is fascinating and a little scary to think about.

[Dan] It is a little scary. Along those same lines, if you look at… This is actually an idea that Ted Chang posited, which is that everyone who writes about artificial intelligence and the singularity is kind of exposing not only their own fears, but their own kind of dark side. If you look at the way that tech people in Silicon Valley talk about the perils of artificial intelligence, it's because they're imagining an artificial intelligence that will do all of the things people are afraid that giant tech companies are going to do. Right? That if a program becomes sentient, it's going to start profiling us and controlling what we buy. Well, that's kind of what they're all doing anyway. So we tend to see ourselves reflected in our technology and in our fears about technology. So looking at who created this, and what were they trying to go accomplish, and what did they accidentally put into it without realizing, I think really helps draw that metaphor out.

[Mahtab] I don't know if you all remember seeing the Black Mirror episode number one, which was Nosedive. That is entirely exactly what you said. Which is people are so concerned with social media, so you have the society where everyone has to be nice to everyone else so that they can get likes or credits, and if you go below a certain level of credits, you're not allowed to associate with certain people, you don't get certain privileges. There's a girl who wanted to attend her best friend's wedding, and she was supposed to be the bridesmaid or the maid of honor, and she couldn't because her credits fell. She just kept trying to… So it's called Nosedive. But this, it hit home so well, when you talk about people being so clued in… Like, you put up something on social media and that's… You just want the likes, you want… It's just changing the perceptions of people and how they interact. Like, if you ever go to a… If you're ever on public transport, no one is looking at each other these days. Everyone is glued to their smart phones or whatever. It's…

[Brandon] It's a different world.

[Mahtab] It's a completely different world. I don't know if they know how to talk.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] That's what scares me. I may be dating myself, but it scares me that makeups and breakups are all done on the phone.

[Howard] Another interesting implication. I've been watching a lot of episodes… Well, listening to while I draw a lot of episodes of Forensic Files. Which has completely destroyed my enjoyment of any of the shows like CSI or Bones or anything like that, because this is the real science, this is the real thing. They will talk about historical cases. This was the first time that a death penalty was adjudicated based on DNA evidence. This is the first time that a conviction was overturned based on DNA evidence. One of the things that came up that was fascinating, and it happened several times in the show, someone will say, "Yeah. I was trying to figure out where this guy had been, then I remembered watching this episode of Forensic Files where they determined where he had been based on bugs in the radiator. So I went and looked at his motorcycle, and looked for bugs." The meta is pretty deep when a TV show about crime science has somebody referencing that show in finding a different criminal, but, the show's been running for 30 years. It has influenced itself not only to the point that it is helping people open their minds to the way they solve cases, but it's also hurting prosecutors who don't happen to have DNA evidence. The jury is like, "Well, where's your DNA? Everybody's got DNA now." No, there's… Actually, DNA doesn't get stuck to everything. You can't get DNA from a fingerprint. I mean, maybe if you licked it…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] What's fun about that is that that is… Forensic science, in general, is this intersection of all of the sciences. Material sciences, spectroscopy… You heat something up and shine lights through it and see what the spectrum is. Okay, great, that's how we know what things are made of. Now we do spectroscopy on a piece of lint we found on you, and a piece of lint we found on the murder victim, and find out that both of them were exact same batches of carpet. Well, that means that you and the murder victim were on the same patch of carpet at some point, doesn't it? Watching that stuff, for me, is great for homework. Because there are all of these disciplines. Forensic geology. There are forensic geologists. They just study sand in tires.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Speaking of homework. Dan, you have our homework.

[Dan] Hey, that's right. Okay, so we've been talking about all these really cool technologies. What we would like you to do today is go out and find one. This is less of a writing thing than it is research. Go read an issue of Wired. Go… Mahtab mentioned DARPA. Go study what they're doing. Go read a bunch of stuff, find a new technology, or a new use of a technology. Then imagine how it could go wrong. Start jotting down potential conflicts that that could create, or extremes that that could be taken to, and just really let your imagination run wild with it.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.14: When To Tell

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/07/when-to-tell/

Key Points: Show, don't tell? That's the adage, but really you should show most of the time, but know when to tell. Reader engagement needs sensory details, so show. But if you don't need deep investment, tell! In TV, flashbacks or voiceovers often are telling. Opening monologues. Think title cards. Watch for show, then tell or vice-versa, and pick one. Showing takes more words, time, and investment than telling, so think about what you want to emphasize. Telling can be a kind of transition, summarizing and passing time. What is the purpose of this scene? Extraneous, cut or tell. Work on transitions between telling and showing. When you shift to telling, it may feel like a POV error. Write it, then figure out how to make it smooth. Consider signposts and emphasis. Use the transition to get the reader off-balance, then hit them with a punchline. Use telling, like "she filled him in," to avoid repeating. Focus on important parts of a scene, and use telling to get right to that moment. Telling can de-emphasize, and help control pacing. Telling is fast, low emphasis, while showing is usually slower and more emphatic.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 14.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, When To Tell.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you’re in a hurry.

[Howard] And we’re not that smart.

[Brandon] I’m Brandon.

[Marie Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I’m Dan.

[Howard] And let me tell you.

[Brandon] Let me tell you a thing.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So this is kind of a different podcast. We normally talk about showing and not telling. It’s an age old adage in writing and screenwriting that you want to show things to the audience, you don’t want to tell them about the things. But the more I become a professional writer and the longer I write, the more I realize that adage is like not true.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Like the adage is mostly true. The adage really should be show most of the time, but know when to tell.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that’s interesting about it is that it’s actually an adage that comes from television and stage, where they were trying to get people to move away from a narrator or title cards. It’s like… Because what would happen a lot of times in silent film is that people would put a bunch of title cards up rather than having the action convey the story. So where it carried over into fiction is that you do want… If you want the reader to feel kind of a closer engagement to the moment, you do want to try to put more sensory details in and things like that. There’s a lot of places where the reader doesn’t need to be deeply invested in the sensory details of what’s going on in the moment. So there you switch to that telling…

[Howard] I feel like the salient point here is, like a great many ironclad writing rules, it’s not only not ironclad, it’s…

[Brandon] It’s full of holes.

[Howard] It’s really squishy. This episode, we’re going to talk about the squishy side of it. We’re going to talk about the telling as opposed to the showing.

[Dan] In TV, you can see this a lot. If you’re watching TV and the episode suddenly starts leaning very heavily on flashback or voiceover to get its point across, that’s kind of a sign that they’re telling rather than showing. So what I’ve started to think is, well, this is absolutely a time when voiceover would be appropriate. Therefore, I know, OK, I can tell now.

[Brandon] It’s really not a hard and fast rule, even in some of the cases… Like some of the most egregious tells are when you see a movie open with an opening monologue by a character. This is usually a sign that something has gone wrong in production, and they need to cover a bunch of information very quickly, so they add an opening monologue. But I felt like the Lord of the Rings don’t have the exact sort of opening monologue you’re not supposed to have to info dump on the readers, and it was absolutely essential, covered the right amount of time and information to bring us up to speed. Those tended to do work really well.

[Dan Dan] Well, part of the reason in that case is that it felt like it was ephemera, like we talked about before. Here is a poem or legend from within the world of the story, and we’re going to kick you off with that.

[Howard] One of the places where I super often tell as opposed to showing is the earliest… In a book, the earliest of the little orange narrator boxes on establishing shot panels. Where instead of saying, or of writing, “Breath Weapon it is...” “The mercenary flagship warship Breath Weapon under command of so-and-so...” That is a title card as if from a silent movie, and then we duck straight into the action because I do not want to waste art cycles on having those characters reintroduce you to the set. That’s telling the setting is...

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the... the title card is a thing that I was starting to think about as a good metric for figuring out when you should be showing versus telling because... Like we’ve seen the film where it says Paris, and there’s a shot of the Eiffel Tower. Like, “Thanks. Gosh. I didn’t know we were in Paris. What are the clues?”

[chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So if you’ve got... if the telling is redundant and you’re immediately going to start showing us something, that’s maybe a place that you don’t need to tell, or maybe you can skip that showing and move straight on to another meaty thing.

[Brandon] I've said this before on the podcast, but one thing I've noticed a lot in my students and in my own writing when I'm doing revisions is that I'll often do the show, then tell, or the tell, then show. Where you don't trust the audience as much as you should.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, she said, nodding.

[Brandon] Yeah. Exactly.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's a very succinct way of putting it. One thing to keep in mind is that showing almost always takes more words than telling. This is why sometimes you don't want to show. Mary hinted at it earlier, sometimes you don't need all the sensory information, you don't need a moment-by-moment, and you want to lapse into summary. How do we know when to make that choice?

[Mary Robinette] I use it a lot... And again, this is my theater background showing. I tend to use it when I want to do... Like travel scenes. I need to demonstrate that my characters are hitting a lot of different places, or if I have a detective that is doing a lot of detective work, but I don't actually want to make the reader sit through all of it because most detective work is really, really dull. Then I'll tell you about... I visited a little old lady and visited the man in the straw hat, and now I find myself at... And then go back into the scene. So a lot of times I will use it... I will use telling as kind of a transition.

[Brandon] I've noticed one person I think uses their telling really effectively is JK Rowling. One of the reasons that telling is so important in the Harry Potter books is she has set up a format where the book takes the school year. You need to feel like a school year is passing through the course of this book, so you can't do what most of us do in a similar sort of type of narrative, which is really if you look at it, it's happening across a couple days or a couple weeks. We do that so we don't have to do very much telling. We don't have to make large swaths of time pass. It makes a book feel more immediate. But I love the format of the Harry Potter books, because that form really reinforces the type of story you're doing. We're at school, time is going to pass. So you'll see her going in and out of narrative to pass large chunks of time where not much important is happening but the characters are growing and learning things.

[Dan] Well, that's one of the things that I do when I write is pay attention to the purpose of the scene. Like, does this scene have a goal beyond simply showing what happens after the last scene ends? If I'm only writing it because I'm describing them walking or eating or something, then I know it's extraneous and I can cut it out.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which is not actually a book.

[Dan] Yes. Speaking of long scenes of walking. So, the Hobbit movies, I think even the people who love them recognize that they are riddled with errors... Or not errors, but problems, let's call it that. So what I want to recommend to you right now are some of the fan edits. In particular, one that's called the 2 Hour Fan Edit by a woman named Fiona van Doll. We'll make sure to put the link for that into the liner notes on the website. But you can look it up, the 2 Hour Fan Edit. She has taken all nine something hours of the extended edition Hobbit movies and condensed them to about two hours and four minutes.

[Wow!]

[Dan] It is incredible what she's been able to do by cutting out the unnecessary stuff and just getting right to the point. When necessary, there's just not a lot of tell so much as just trimming the fat and getting right down to the bones of this is what we need in order for the story to work.

[Brandon] So along those lines, I find that for telling and showing, one of the key skills to learn is transitions. Moving between them. Any tips for listeners about how they might transition between these kind of narrative blocks and these more in-scene blocks?

[Howard] The first skill to recognize is that if you are strictly writing third person limited, the first time you sit down to write that block, you may be asking yourself, "Wait. Whose point of view is this? Am I... Do I have a POV error here?" It's possible that the first step is to let go and allow yourself to write it as a POV error, and then to write the bit that is not POV error, and then ask yourself, "Where's the scene? How does this break and why does it break?" It may be which pronouns you're using, it may be the voice that is used in describing the things. But for me, in order to get over that hurdle, the first thing I have to do is write both pieces so that I can see them.

[Brandon] I do that a lot too. I often find that I manage to get all that information into the narrative, and then go back and look at those first few paragraphs that are very, very much over-the-top tell, and trim them down really, really sparsely.

[Mary Robinette] I find that I'll do that kind of thing sometimes, but the other thing that I find for the transitions is to really think about signposting. Specifically, what it is that I am trying to... Going back to what Dan said about thinking about the purpose of the scene, what am I trying to emphasize in this? Am I trying to emphasize that it's something that took a long time? Am I trying to emphasize that it's... They've covered a lot of ground? Am I trying to emphasize that they've talked to a lot of people? Am I trying to emphasize weariness? But what is the one thing that I want readers to know in this telling and then I will signpost that going in. So if I'm trying to emphasize that it took a long time, then I would actually just kind of say, "And then I began the incredibly lengthy process..." Or just, "She began the incredibly lengthy process." Then, "And the process involved five baked potatoes, a French horn, and Julia Child. At thre end of that incredible five hours, I found myself holding a bottle of reduced corn syrup and..."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I have no idea what this scene is. I don't know what's happening.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I was so excited to see where that was going.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, well. I'm a little tired.

[Howard] The French horn was a jello mold.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It was a jello mold.

[Howard] Well, no, I love what you're describing there, then we laughed at it. The... Those of us who write humor have a distinct advantage because that transition is sometimes weird, and juxtaposing things as a way to exploit the weirdness, to set the reader off balance so that you can deliver a punchline is my bread and narrative butter. There's a... The strips that I will be inking while we are at sea on the... We're recording this just prior to WXR 2018. Are strips in which Kevin is being decanted from the cloning tank. For six panels, the narrator is talking about how this is a rebirth. This is a sacred moment. This is something where it takes hours. You spend time draining things and body cavities are emptied and the nanobots are allowed to clean up after themselves and... Unless somebody's in a hurry. Then we have Kevin dropping out of the tank and blowing things out of holes. It is Kevin talking and yelling. I've spent six panels describing to people what the resurrection process in my universe is supposed to look like, because I never want to actually take all the time to draw all that stuff over that huge length of whatever. I just want to go straight to the joke.

[Brandon] That's... Thinking about that, I've been trying to pinpoint other reasons that I tell. I think the not repeating myself is another one of those. Like, you have a lot of people getting resurrected in your stories. If you went through that process every time, we would get really bored. You see this very frequently with the, "And she filled him in on the events of the recent days." That's a really handy method of telling.

[Dan] I find myself increasingly disinterested, for example, in fight scenes. Because the purpose of most fight scenes is "And then they punched each other and this guy won." You know? I don't necessarily need to watch all ten minutes of the punching, just to get to the one important narrative part of the scene. So that's something else that I've started thinking about when I'm writing a scene, is is there an important character moment? Is there a decision or a mystery or something we have to see, or am I just putting this in there because it's cool?

[Brandon] Wow. Yeah. Thinking about that, another big reason to tell is to de-emphasize, also. Because, as I mentioned earlier, showing takes more time, it therefore invests the reader in what you are showing. It is... That is often a really good thing to do when you're writing. You want more reader investment. But, once in a while, you've got something that you'll find, even in your draft, that you've spent a lot of time on that's not important, that the readers, your beta readers, are over-emphasizing. They're looking at it and saying, "This must be important, he spent three paragraphs on it." Where you realize, "Oh, I was just showing off that I can show." When that needed to be one line so that they wouldn't emphasize it so much.

[Mary Robinette] I find that... Because of that, I often use telling as a form of controlling my pacing. That if I wanna... If I want to get to the next thing, if I find that I am taking too long on something, something's dragging, that I'll shift to telling it just to get through it a little faster.

[Brandon] Well, we are out of time. I'm going to give you some homework today, which is, I want you to pick a scene in something you're working on. Make this a fairly important scene. I want you to cut it out. I want you to skip it. Now, you may not actually leave it skipped. This is okay. This is just an exercise. Because what we want you to do, we want you to practice your transition out of something being skipped. We want you to cut out this scene. Have a character, when you come back in, kind of transition into not narrative, and then make sure you bring all the characters up to speed on what's been skipped, and the reader up to speed, in a way that is not boring...

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And does not cause you to hit a big speed bump. This is hard, but this is why we assign you practice things to do. Give this a try and hopefully you'll be able to apply that skill to future scenes you're writing in your stories. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/31/wx-14-13-obstacles-vs-complications/

Key points: obstacles versus complications. People, things, or circumstances that impede the progress of the character or the story. Obstacles can simply be overcome, but complications cause ramifications that make the story take a turn. In terms of MICE threads, obstacles keep you on the same path, but complications take you to another thread. Obstacles are linear, complications change the direction or goals. Obstacles often are within scenes, while complications strengthen act breaks and make the audience come back. A story that is all complications may be too twisty, while a story that is just obstacles may be too linear and frustratingly slow. Try mixing yes-but, no-and with complications and obstacles. A couple of major complications may be plenty.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 13.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Obstacles vs. Complications.

[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 in the way.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[Mary Robinette] All right. So, I wanted to do this because a couple of times on Writing Excuses, you've heard me say, talking about obstacles versus complications and how I learned about it from Margaret Dunlap, and it occurred to me that we actually have Margaret here, so instead of having to listen to my fumbling attempt to distill this theory that she has come up with, we could just have her explain it to you. So, Margaret, tell us, please, about obstacles versus complications.

[Margaret] Okay. So, obstacles versus complications is, I think… I was trying to think back to the origin of this. For me, it goes back to learning how to write to act breaks. Because you… Classically, you write to the act break, you're going to stop, have commercials, and you want something that's going to drive the audience to come back. The problem of writing television today is the television audiences have watched hundreds of hours of television, and they kind of know how television works. So if you put in a classic kind of cliffhanger of like, "Oh, no. Is Mulder going to die?" on the X-Files, well, probably not. Most of your audience is pretty well aware that at the end of act one, it's likely Mulder's probably still going to be with us for the rest of this episode. So, TV writers had to get better at making stories twistier. So, obstacles versus complications, both of these are people, things, or circumstances that are somehow impeding the progress of the character or the story. The difference is, while an obstacle is something that your character can overcome and then keep moving, a complication is something that they have to deal with and then causes ramifications that causes the story to take a turn.

[Mary Robinette] If I can jump in here, one of the… Because we spent a delightful period of time talking about this, and for me, one of… It clarified something that I've talked to my students about, which is when I talk about the MICE quotient and talk about how you can have multiple threads and they can be braided together, I intellectually like… Not intellectually. I had an intuitive sense of what it meant, but I had a difficult time articulating it. So an obstacle keep you on the same path. It's like a straightahead thing. If you're on a milieu line, you stay on a milieu line. Whereas, a complication will kick you off over into a character line.

[Brandon] That is really fascinating.

[Mary Robinette] Isn't it!

[Brandon] Yeah. That's really helpful.

[Howard] Obstacle is the speedbump, complication is the detour sign which you're not actually sure which side road it's pointing to.

[Margaret] Right. Or the detour sign that someone has taken away, or… I have an example of if I am a renowned thief and I am trying to break into Mary's home, the locked door is an obstacle. The fact that Mary is home, and I thought that she wasn't, that is a complication. Potentially. If I knock her out because I am awesome, because I'm an internationally renowned thief, then she is effectively an obstacle. But if she provides information that the thing I have come to steal, I'm not stealing it back, I'm just stealing it, that creates a complication.

[Brandon] Yeah, this is really interesting, because a lot of plot formats, particularly some of the ones rooted in screenwriting, talk about this idea of at some point during the story, you're… The characters are going to realize their goals are larger or different than they wanted them to be. Knowing the difference between obstacle versus that complication that can open their eyes to a greater plot could be really helpful.

[Margaret] Yeah. It's also a way to take a story that has a very linear progression, and think about… Because often we know where we want a story to end. It's like, "All right. Well, the character starts and they had that way." If you think in terms of complications, maybe they start out going in this direction… Yeah, as you can tell from watching me moving my hands on the podcast…

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] They start moving to the right. A series of complications might bend them around 180° and get… Or, more likely, 90°, speaking narratively. We rarely have a character start out seeking the exact opposite of what they wind up getting. But those are the complications that can create those twists that aren't… A shocking twist that you'll never see coming. But just those little shifts in the narrative.

[Howard] There is a classic twist in the… Elementary, CBS's Sherlock Holmes thing, that I've described to my kids as the act two corpse. Which is the point at which we are moving along, and then someone is dead who we are not expecting to be dead. Maybe it's an obstacle, because we can no longer ask that person questions. But we discovered that it's more complex. What's fun is that even though my kids will now watch TV with me and lean forward and say, "Act two corpse? Is it… Yay! Act two corpse!" The episode still works, because we don't know what the complication is going… We don't know what's going to happen. We just know there's been a complication, and we are on board for where our heroes take it.

[Margaret] It's the murder mystery where your prime suspect is the second victim.

[Brandon] I've done that before. It's very handy.

[Margaret] And classic for a reason.

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

[Mary Robinette] Great. So our book of the week is Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse. This is a fantastic book. On one level, you can read it as just monster hunters going after monsters. But it's so much more than that. So this is after the world has basically drowned under the big water. It's set on what used to be a Navajo reservation. It has been reborn as Dinetah. All of the gods and heroes of the land are kind of there again. So, like, there's Coyote. It's wonderful. It's relevant to this because it has a great series of obstacles in complications. There are obstacles that are just getting in the way of her tracking down the monster, and then there are complications which are completely affecting the way… A relationship with herself, her relationship with other people. It's wonderful, wonderful storytelling.

[Brandon] So tell us one more time.

[Mary Robinette] It is the Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Since we are talking about obstacles in complications, one of the things that I wanted to also talk to our listeners about, we've talked a little bit about how to use them. I also want to talk about the dangers of them. Like the dangers of a story that is only complications.

[Margaret] Only complications. The danger of a story that is just piling complication on top of complication on top of complication is that it can be easy to lose track of the stakes. If we are constantly shifting what's going on, what are we after, how is it happening, it's tough for the audience to… It can be difficult for the audience to remain invested. Because it's who's on first. They're losing track of what is our ultimate goal, what are we actually pushing towards, are we making progress towards it, or do we keep just getting derailed into detours? It is possible to make a story too twisty.

[Mary Robinette] Is it possible to go the other direction, and just have just obstacles?

[Margaret] Yeah. I think the danger of a story that is only obstacles is that, one, it can feel like your character isn't getting anywhere because anytime they're building up a head of steam, they're hitting another wall. The other risk that we sort of talked about earlier is that the story can feel very linear. It's like I am headed to grandma's house. The road goes out. So I've got to get a boat. The boat blows over. It just keeps going. One thing to another thing to another thing, but we never shift years. You can do it. But there is a risk that it just feels like a straight shot down a hallway, and why is it taking you so long to walk?

[Brandon] I've worried about both of those things, with the yes-but, no-and methodology that we've talked about, that Mary introduced me to, which is great. I use it in my class for those discovery writers who don't know how to outline, and don't really want to outline. I say, here's a method. But I worry about if they do this the wrong way, you're going to end up with only complications, because it's so easy to say, yes, they do accomplish this, but weird wacky things happens that sends us off in another direction.

[Mary Robinette] So that brings up the question of progress in pacing. One of the things that I talk about sometimes with the yes-but, no-in is, since in Western storytelling, we have the rule of three. Which is three times are funny, third times a charm, three times are unlucky. We just… We're geared to think in terms of threes. That you can use that in hack with it. If you want something to feel easy, then you have it happen with less than three trial error cycles. If you want it to feel hard, then you do more than three try-fail cycles. So with a yes-but, it's like yes, but complication. Then with no-and, it's like no, and obstacle. To a certain degree. So you can… I feel like you can control pacing to a certain degree that way. How do you con… Do you use these as tools to control pacing?

[Margaret] Um…

[Mary Robinette] I mean, it's hard… It feels like it when you're talking about act breaks.

[Margaret] Yeah. I mean, it is a way to control pacing. I think when writing in television format, it's such a set structure. Even now, as we're seeing more TV being written without commercial breaks. If you're writing for a Netflix or one of the other premium services, you don't necessarily have commercials that are coming in between, but I like to try to write on that 4 to 5 act structure anyway, just because it ensures that things are happening. That you're not getting the episode that feels like, "Okay, this is just an installment, but nothing's really happening. It's a lot of kind of dithering around and nothing is really changing, nothing's really progressing." Having those sorts of stops along the wheel of setting up the problem of the week, making our first attempt at it, a big turn at the midpoint that shifts things around, having to recover and prepare for that, and our final confrontation act five, having that is a kind of baseline structure sets up that… One, the idea that we're accomplishing something in a single episode, even if it's a piece of a much larger story. But also, again with a television audience that watched a lot of television, there are certain rhythms that you get use to. You can shift those rhythms. I watched a lot of Law & Order in high school and college. Then I started watching Homicide: Life on the Streets. I realized that I would start getting really antsy around the half-hour point in Homicide, because subliminally I was waiting for the cops to hand it over to the lawyers to handle the second half of the show.

[Mary Robinette] [Ooooo]

[Margaret] But Homicide is all cops. It took a while to get used to the different pacing and the different rhythm. But having that television falling into those… Saying familiar patterns feels like it's cliché, but just that sort of the storytelling rhythms that at a certain level feel comfortable that you can use or shift up in order to really unsettle your audience.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, I realized that when I earlier said yes, but complication, no, and obstacle, that made it sound like those are the pairings that you have to do. Which is not actually true at all. Yes his progress towards the goal, no is progress away from the goal. Then, complications and obstacles are additional tools that you can use in terms of shifting. I find that I am more likely to use obstacles as a… Within a, roughly put, within a scene, and then use the complications kind of as I approach a scene end.

[Margaret] I think, complications, you do have to be judicious with them, at least in terms of major complications. If you look at… If you look at the Leverage pilot, which I'm guessing many listeners and people here on this podcast are familiar with, you get a couple of really big complications in that, but only a couple. We've been hired to steal airplane plans. It turns out those airplane plans, we didn't steal them back from the person who stole them. We just stole them from the people that created them. Then they have obstacles in trying to get revenge from the person who set them up. With… There are some additional complications buried in there, but they aren't all necessarily… A complication doesn't have to be earthshaking. It can be you have to take your little sister with you on this heist job, and how are we going to handle that?

[Howard] The nice thing about the Leverage show format with regard to complications is that when the heist is one in which we are going to be shown, after the fact, that there was a piece they were actually prepared for this. The final complication looks to us like the nail in the coffin that, nope, they're not going to survive this twist. Oh, wait, this is the one they were ready for. That bit of formulaic TV writing… Yes, if formulaic, and yes, if you watch an entire… You binge watch Leverage, you can start to see the seams, but… It's beautiful. I love the way it's done.

[Margaret] I would just like to say, John, Howard said it was formulaic, I didn't.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] All right. Let's… This has been really fascinating. It's really helped kind of frame this in my head. Something that… Like Mary said, I've always kind of known, but never been able to put words to.

[Brandon] You also have a piece of homework for us, right, Margaret?

[Margaret] What I'd like you to try to do is take a story, either something you've written or another story, and either find or insert an obstacle into it. Then, brainstorm what might happen if that obstacle were actually a complication. It's something that forces the narrative to take a turn. See what happens.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.12: Writing the Other – Latinx Representation

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/24/14-12-writing-the-other-latinx-representation/

Key points: Latinx, a catchall term for people with Latin American heritage. You will make mistakes, that's part of the process. Latinx is not just one thing. To write a Latinx character, think about where they live, how they got there, what's their family story, how did they grow up, what kind of foods do they eat and when. Remember they are people. Think about immigrant mashup foods and traditional foods. Comfort foods! Consider intersectionality, the mixture and crossing of various aspects in identity. Broad portrayals of a culture or group are likely to be misleading, while being specific about a culture or family can be very relatable.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 12.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing the Other – Latinx Representation.

[Tempest] 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Julia] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Julia] And I'm Julia.

[Dan] Awesome. This is the second in our awesome Writing the Other series, where we give you the tools that you need as an author to write about other cultures and other people that are different than yourself. We today have the wonderful Julia Rios with us. Can you tell us about yourself?

[Julia] Yes. My father is… Was from Mexico. He is no longer with us. He grew up in Yucatán and he immigrated to the United States and married my mother, who is a white woman from California. So I am half Mexican, Mexican-American, choose your choice. I am a writer, I'm an editor, I'm a podcaster, I'm a narrator. Primarily, I edit fiction for Fireside magazine and I write short stories and flash fiction in the form of text messages for an app called Flash Read under the name Julie Rivera.

[Oooo]

[Dan] Cool.

[Tempest] Fancy.

[Dan] Well, awesome. We are excited to have you here. Please tell us what we're going to be talking about today, and let's start with the word Latinx, because that's actually the first time I've ever heard it pronounced out loud and I haven't known exactly how to say it. I know a lot of our listeners might not know what it means.

[Julia] Okay. It's really funny, because once I was on a panel about it, and we spent most of the panel, all of the Latinx people participating, trying to decide how to pronounce it.

[Laughter]

[Julia] We all… The four of us settled on Latinx, but it's unclear to us that that is correct, so… 100% correct. There are probably other opinions available. But, roughly, Latinx we think is a good choice. I and four other people at least. No one has challenged me on that yet. It is a catchall term for people who have Latin American heritage. There are very many different labels, and we could have a really long conversation about that, so I don't really want to get into it. But that means people from North America, Central, and South America, places where Spain came and conquered and colonized. Then you have a lot of mixed race people, which definitely, I fit in with that. My heritage is going to be some European and some of the indigenous Mayan ancestry.

[Dan] The word itself comes from, if I'm not mistaken, in Spanish we have Latino and Latina, which is gendered because of the way Spanish functions.

[Julia] So, because Spanish is a gendered language, to try to not default to male, which is the sort of old-fashioned way of saying… Like, "if one enters a room, he must pick up his glass of water," and we don't really use that anymore. So, instead of saying he or she, we move to they often in English. Latinx is the inclusive word that includes everyone, across the gender spectrum.

[Dan] Awesome. Cool. So… Well, the… Like I said, the purpose of this series is to give people tools of how they can do this right. So what are some things that people can do when they're writing about Latinx people that they can… To do it right, to do it well.

[Julia] Yes. Okay…

[Dan] I should say well, instead of right.

[Laughter]

[Julia] Okay. The first thing I'm going to say is there are many ways to be Latinx and there's no one right way and there's no umbrella term. Also, there are always going to be mistakes. No one's ever going to be 100% perfect. So, understand that you will make mistakes, and that's okay, that's part of the process. But one of the things that I think can be hard to realize when you're looking at a culture and you say, "Oh, Latinx people, we need more Latinx rep," is it's easy to think of that as one thing. I am Mexican. That's one country. I am Mexican-American, so I have a different experience than people who are living in Mexico. Like, in Mexico, there are thousands of micro-cultures depending on where you live. Which state you live in, which city you live in, are you in a rural area, are you in a city? All of these things inform your experience and your cultural heritage. That's just within Mexico. In the United States, we have a big diaspora of people from all kinds of countries and places, like Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Central and South America, Mexico, Cuba, and, depending on where you are in the States, you are more likely to have a high population of one kind of person. Like in South Florida, you have a lot of Cubans, because Cuba is right there. In New York, there are a lot of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. In California, there are a lot of Mexicans. So it kind of… Those things can inform some of your Latinx population in the United States. But also, it includes everyone in Canada, South America, North America… Anyone who is coming from those countries and then settled in those areas. So there are a lot of different people. That's the first thing to realize. When you're going to set out to write a Latinx character, ask yourself, where do they live? How did they get there? What's their family story? How did they grow up? Did they grow up as a fully assimilated American, because that can be a very different experience than growing up as a first generation immigrant whose first language was Spanish and they didn't start learning English until they were nine and they crossed the border. Then also, who's their family? What kinds of traditional foods do they eat and when do they eat them? What kinds of relationships do they have with their families? Remember that all of these people are people just like you. You have a lot of complex experiences in your life. Your ways of operating at school would be different from your ways of operating when you're at your grandmother's house for a formal dinner.

[Dongwon] I think we call that term code switching.

[Julia] Code switching. Exactly. That's exactly what I was getting at. So when you think about all of these things and you realize that people from all over the place have different things informing who they are. So your traditional foods for Thanksgiving might be very different from your neighbor across the street, depending on how they've grown up, and where they've grown up, and what their family story is. So that would be the first thing that I think is important to…

[Dongwon] I have a particular fascination with immigrant mashup foods, where, like, weird American and then whatever immigrant culture they're coming from get all crossed over together. Like, not Latinx obviously, but my family would eat pickles with spaghetti, just because it was like looking for a little bit of like kimchi like thing. Anyways.

[Julia] No. This is totally a thing. So, we had a foreign exchange student… For a while, my mother was taking a lot of foreign exchange students. We had one from Thailand. She got to the United States and didn't know what to do with our food at all. She was, "This is just completely foreign to me." Then she discovered ketchup. She was like, "This is a sauce that you put on things." So she just put it on everything. It became like the thing. We were all like, "What are you doing?" She's like, "Well, I have to have something that gives the flavor. This is the American flavor. I will now put it on all my food."

[Laughter]

[Tempest] Oh, the American flavor.

[Dongwon] What's great about that is she's not… Wrong…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It's how she's trained to eat her food.

[Julia] Exactly. Exactly.

[Dan] Different immigrant cultures and immigrant families all have their own style of changing the way that they act while also kind of staying true to where they came from.

[Dongwon] But there are so many Latin American cultures where there's that iconic sauce, whether it's chimichurri, whether it's… Whatever it is. But…

[Julia] What your family's traditional foods are will make a big difference. So, for me, right now we are on the Writing Excuses cruise and we just spent a day in Cozumel, which is very close to where my family lives in Yucatán. So the food here is very similar to what I grew up eating. That was very exciting because I got to go and have some of the foods that remind me of my childhood. Like ceviche and fish that's grilled in achiote, which is a Spanish, or a Mexican spice.

[Chuckles]

[Julia] I get kind of confused about my languages, because I've been speaking both of them today.

[Laughter]

[Julia] These things are traditional to me. They make me very happy, they feel like home. Also here, pretty much all throughout Latin America, which is a really weird term, but that means anywhere that Spanish people came and did conquests. There… You'll find dishes with rice and beans. But everybody presents it slightly differently. So the kind of rice and beans that you get in Yucatán are similar in some ways to the rice and beans that you get in places like Cuba. And different from the rice and beans that you get in northern Mexico, which is what most United States Americans will associate with Mexican food. Here, the beans are black beans that are in a sort of paste. It sort of looks like chocolate pudding. When I was six and I visited, I thought that was chocolate pudding, and I was very disappointed the first time I tried it.

[Chuckles]

[Julia] Then I realized it was super yummy and I stopped being disappointed. But the first time, I was like, "This is not chocolate pudding."

[Laughter]

[Julia] "Somebody tricked me, it's beans." But that was something that I got to eat, and it was very comforting. Someone who is from a different culture will have a very different style of beans that they consider comforting. That's one of those details that if you decide where your character's from and what they grew up eating, you can think about like what's comforting to them. In the same way that you'll have your own comfort foods. For me, as growing up in California, is a very assimilated American, and also with Mexican heritage, I have these Mexican comfort foods and I love mashed potatoes. They're my favorite. I have eaten mashed potatoes every day on this ship.

[Laughter]

[Julia] I go to the Wind Jammer before dinner to get mashed potatoes.

[Dan] That is great.

[Tempest] That makes sense to me. I feel that that is a correct choice. I'm wondering though, in terms of thinking about making your character very specific when it comes to their culture… Like, what kind of Latinx person are they? How does intersectionality play into this?

[Julia] [Ooo] Intersectionality plays a big role. Intersectionality is the idea that everyone has more than one thing that informs their identity. So, often we talk about these in terms of marginalization. So you could be Latinx and disabled, or Latinx and queer… I am both of those things. So that's exciting. But there are also just a lot of different things that you can be. I had a conversation with a woman in a shop today when I was buying something. She was surprised that I knew something about what I was buying. I said, "Well, it was because my father was from Yucatán." We made a connection, and she said she was from Yucatán. She told me some of her heritage. Then she wanted to exchange the kind of mixtures that we were. So she was a mixed race person from Yucatán, and she wanted to explain exactly how. Then she was asking me like who I was, and wanted to know who my parents were, and what kind of people had formed me. This is the kind of thing that was important to her, and is important to a lot of people here because they want to make that connection with you, and they want to see where we can be together. Because we recognize that we are also very different. So she has other identity things that don't match up with mine. We're both mixed race, but we have different things. The intersection of those things makes us who we are.

[Dan] That's awesome. Let's pause here a little late for our book of the week. No, that's okay, because this was super cool. What is our book of the week, Julia?

[Julia] Our book of the week is Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez. It's a wonderful middle grade novel. It's through the Rick Riordin Presents from Disney Hyperion. It is about a boy named Sal, and he breaks the universe.

[Laughter]

[Julia] I don't want to ruin it.

[Dan] Very descriptive title.

[Julia] I want you to go and read this book. Also, it will make you very, very hungry for Cuban food.

[Dongwon] Oh, yes, it really does.

[Julia] Specifically Cuban food. I brought this book because I got to be to read it and I know it's deliciously wonderful. I keep waiting for the whole world to get it so I can make everyone read it and squee about it with them. But also, specifically because Carlos has written a character that is Cuban-American, and it's a very specific culture that he's dug into, that's also his own cultural identity. But you get a lot of the details of how he interacts with the world. Some of them overlap with my experience, and some of them are very different, because Cuban-Americans have a different experience than Mexican Americans. So I recommend it for those specific details.

[Dan] Well, awesome. That is Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez. It is available now, so go out and look for it.

[Julia] [garbled I will tell you it] will make you laugh really hard.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Maybe cry just a little bit.

[Julia] Oh, and cry.

[Dan] Laugh, and cry, and be hungry…

[Julia] It will be really good though.

[Dan] The entire gamut of human emotions contained in this middle grade novel.

[Dan] I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of specificity. Because it's very important. That's one of the things that we hear a lot is that if you try to portray a culture or a group very broadly, you'll end up getting a lot of things wrong and offending a lot of people. When you zero in on one very specific culture or even one very specific family, then it's actually even more relatable in a lot of ways. But… I want to tell this story because this is one that I did wrong.

[Chuckles] [Uh-oh]

[Dan] I've got… My Mirador series is about… It's a cyberpunk trilogy, YA, from Harper. The main character is Mexican-American. I've lived in Mexico for a few years. I thought, I can do this. I've got this. I'm going to do this right. The Mexican-American community has not really picked up the book. I was wondering why. Then I came to Mexico, where the book is huge. What I realized is that I was portraying a very Mexican family, and doing it in a way where they felt seen and they felt this is us. You have portrayed us in your book. The Mexican-American community didn't feel that, because I was not doing them, I was portraying Mexican people. So, being specific is very important. What can people do to portray these kinds of cultures and people very specifically?

[Julia] So, the first thing that I would recommend that you do is think about who specifically is your character and what their family is like. Because I don't think it's coming from one specific culture will give you enough. Like, I'm Mexican, but I know a lot of other Mexican people who have very different experiences. Part of that is my family, going back to intersectionality, I have within my family people who are Muslim, people from Afghanistan, people who have come from a lot of different places. So when we have Thanksgiving dinner… I always love to ask people what they eat at Thanksgiving dinner, because families bring out their favorite foods. When we would have Thanksgiving dinner growing up, we would often have turkey and mashed potatoes, but also like Afghan rice with raisins in it. That's something that we would have because I had people from Afghanistan in my family. So your character is going to have a very specific family. That's not something that you would associate necessarily with a Mexican experience. But it was my experience, and I'm a Mexican-American. Your character is going to have a lot of specific things like that. They're going to have specific things that are Mexican-American. One thing you can do is go to a Mexican restaurant, and asked the people who work there where they're actually from. Sometimes they're from Mexico, and sometimes they're not. Because they know that selling Mexican food, if they look Latinx, is the best way to make a restaurant successful in the United States. But if you ask them and they say they're from Mexico, ask them what part of Mexico. Find out a little bit more about that. I don't want you to bother the restaurant people too much.

[Laughter]

[Julia] But usually they'll be happy to tell you what region or what town. If they do, go home and like look that up. Find out what makes the food taste like what it is. Think about like, "Oh, okay. That's an interesting thing." Can you think about what those things that they might have carried with them, what comforting memories they might have brought? How those things would mesh with where you live now? If you live in the middle of Indiana and your Mexican restaurant is run by people from Guadalajara, they might really like corn in very different ways at the same time.

[Dan] That's very cool.

[Tempest] This is all been very food based. I feel like…

[Julia] Well, this is because food is a really big part of culture…

[Laughter]

[Julia] Especially…

[Tempest] That's very true. Yeah. But also like, I love the emphasis that you have on family, because I feel that… I mean, especially when it comes to YA novels. I know that with YA that the whole thing is to like get the parents out of the way, so the kids can go out and have a dangerous adventure. But it just never seemed to be like my experience, that I would be able to like escape my parents at that point. Not necessarily even wanting to escape my parents or my family or my cousins or whatever. I really love Guadalupe Garcia McCall's books. One of the things I love about it is that it's about like families together dealing with issues. I feel like that's another thing that in some cultures, that kind of family togetherness is not necessarily emphasized. But in Guadalupe's, it is.

[Julia] I believe she is… Guadalupe is Mexican-American. She lives in Texas. She wrote a book called Summer of the Mariposas. It's wonderful. It's a YA retelling of the Odyssey by Homer. But starring four sisters who have to go rescue their father. They go on a quest, the same way Odysseus does. They run into some of Odysseus's kinds of monsters, but in Mexico. So they cross the border and go into Mexico to rescue their father from someone. It uses Loteria cards, which are a very specific Mexican game that I grew up with, and a lot of Mexican Americans will have grown up with. It's a very specific to this family and their experience of living in a border town, and of having their parents come from Mexico and having that specificity that they have within the home. So I think that's a really rate example of using specific culture.

[Dan] It is such a great book, too. So you get two books of the week this time.

[Laughter]

[Dan] One of the ways to get this level of specificity and to do it well is, like you said, to talk to people. Be polite about it. But talk to people and find out where they're from, and who they are, and what they like and what they don't like. What they brought with them? What they miss?

[Dan] I believe that's kind of the homework that you're going to be giving us, right?

[Julia] Yeah. I think so. My homework originally was to write a scene about someone from a very specific culture, and to think about the things that inform who they are and what they like. I think if I had had like an hour, I would have gotten into other things that weren't food, but since I primarily talked about food…

[Laughter]

[Julia] I want you to write a scene where people are eating a meal. It could be any meal. It could be a holiday meal, or it could be just a regular meal. It could be a fast food meal. But I want you to think about your character and who they are and where they're from. How they feel about this food and why they feel that way? How does that inform the conversation that they're having over the meal, or their thoughts that they're having if they're alone, or whatever. This could be anywhere. It could be in your fantasy world, it could be on a space station, whatever. But it will definitely inform who they are, and I want you to think about that and write that eating a meal scene for me.

[Dan] That sounds fantastic. Make us hungry as well while you're doing it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Julia. And, obviously, Dongwon and Tempest as well. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/17/14-11-magic-without-rules/

Key Points: Magic without rules, soft magic, numinous magic -- what does it mean for the reader and the story? At least the characters don't know the rules. Mysterious, scary, we don't know what will happen! Sometimes it isn't important to understand the rules. The story is about something else besides the mechanics. Handwavium! Sometimes there is internal logic, but it is not explained. Other times, the magic does not appear to have internal logic. This creates wonder and awe. Also, a sense of dread. It also saves pages and explanations! Save your infodump equity. As yourself, does the reader really need to know how this works? Be aware, people and characters will try to find patterns or rules, but you as writer can show that they don't work consistently.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 11.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Magic without Rules.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are going to be talking about non-rule-based magic systems in this podcast. The title is actually a little bit contentious…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I wanted to call it soft magic. If you Google soft magic, you will mostly find me…

[Yeah]

[Brandon] Defining soft magic this way. It is a term… Lots of people like to use the term soft fantasy to mean different things. So we're just going to say magic without rules. This is the definition we're looking at.

[Howard] In terms… Talking about the term for a moment. Magic without rules gives us a nice level of specificity for why we are doing anything with magic, what it means to the reader, what it means for the story. Provided we understand what we mean by the words magic, without, and rules.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah. One of the other terms that you will hear for talking about this kind of concept is numinous magic. Which is, again, magic in which the rules are not delineated.

[Brandon] Now, this doesn't necessarily mean there are no rules. It can mean you're just writing a story and there are no rules. Basically, when we talk about rule-based magic system, non-rule-based magic system, the idea is that the characters don't know necessarily. Like, they are not… A rule-based magic system is often… The story is about or involves the characters coming to understand, manipulate, and use and control the world around them. That's…

[Howard] It's best understood, Brandon, through the example you use when you illustrate Sanderson's First Law. The One Ring is hard magic. We know what happens when you put it on, we know how to break it, we know that nobody is able to willfully throw it into the lava.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Howard] Gandalf is soft magic. Or Gandalf is a rule-less magic. There are no rules. We don't know what Gandalf can do. Wizards are mysterious and scary, we don't know what's going to happen with the Balrog, we don't know if he can wave his staff and make the bad guys go away. He's a wizard.

[Brandon] Yep. Of course, there are Tolkien fans out there listening right now who are like, "No, no. I can list off the powers of a wizard." That's fine. That's from appendix material, you've dug into it. We're just talking about the general effect on the characters, specifically hear the hobbits. Or the reader not really knowing and not needing to know.

[Mary Robinette] That is the thing that I was going to say, is that when we're talking about this, it's okay to not have rules unless it is important to the story for the character to under… For the reader to understand. But when we're talking about rule-ba… Magic in which there are no rules, we're talking about a story in which it's not important to understand the rules.

[Brandon] Yes. Exactly. In fact, the goal of the story is that you don't.

[Howard] Or where it is important to not have a full understanding of how this works.

[Mary Robinette] Or just that it's not important. You just don't need to know.

[Margaret] The story is about something other than the mechanics of how this works.

[Brandon] Exactly. Some of these… Sometimes, like, it's for ambiance reasons, but, Margaret, you just reminded me, there's lots of times that if you take one step into the explaining the magic realm, suddenly you are raising a whole host of questions, that if you don't address and answer can really make the story feel off. If you never take that first step, if you tell the reader from the get-go, "No, this is not relevant. Accept it." This is your bye as we talked about last month, and then go forward. Your story is free to focus on this other thing, without getting caught in the weeds of having to explain this level of magic and this level of magic and this magic stone and that sort of thing.

[Howard] The science fiction concept here is handwavium. This is not the… I'm waving my hand like these are not the droids you're looking for. Except it's this is not the physics you're looking for. Below a certain point, we're not going to go into the physics, we're not gonna talk about the neutrino output of this, we're just going to let this slide, because the moment we commit to math at that level, everything starts to unravel and we're no longer telling the story we want to tell.

[Mary Robinette] Well, like… One of the examples that I actually think of is King Arthur. Like, how exactly does that sword stay in the stone? Like, how does it know? Is there… Is it a DNA test? Like, what is the rule system for keeping the sword in the stone and identifying the one true king? We don't know, we don't care.

[Brandon] Right. The one…

[Margaret] I was thinking, as we were talking, of the water that falls on you from nowhere. Nobody knows where the water comes from, it just falls on you when you lie. It's never explained, and we never want to know how it's explained, because that's not what it's about.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Why does Pinocchio's nose grow? [I don't know]

[Margaret] it just does.

[Mary Robinette] He lied.

[Brandon] Now, I do also want us to say, when we're talking about this, there is a distinction, to me, between… There's several different ways to do this. One is to have internal logic and never explain it, which is where we're getting here. But there is another way, which is magic that doesn't seem to have internal logic. Which can be really cool. This is the magic that you not only don't understand how it works, you don't understand what the consequences will be if you use this magic. A classic example of this would be like the monkey's paw, where you are given some little bit of information. Hey, this thing will grant you wishes. But the wishes… you'll have no understanding of the consequences. Often, they will go far beyond your expectations. Where the story becomes less about the magic or even what the magic can do, it becomes about the terrible things that happen when you can use forces you can't comprehend.

[Howard] For me, the whole… The story… The point of the story of the monkey's paw is attempting to understand the rules by which this thing works is going to result in you being betrayed even worse by your use of this thing. The more conditions you try to place on it, the more disastrous this will be.

[Brandon] So, why would you write a story like this? What are some of the things you gain from it?

[Mary Robinette] Often, you gain a sense of wonder. A lot of times when we do start putting rules in, it makes something feel mundane and ordinary. Sometimes, what you want is something that is numinous, that there is a sense of wonder, a sense of awe to it. So one of the things that you can do is to take some of the explanation away, and just let this magical thing happen.

[Brandon] Okay. I would say a sense of wonder can also be replaced by a sense of dread.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] They can go very hand in hand. This is one of the things I see from really great rule-less magic systems sometimes is that the main character feels so small. They are presented with a world in which like… Howard, you were telling a story about a gun?

[Howard] The lazy gun. The… I quoted… Referenced Iain Banks last month. I'm going to do it again. Iain Banks, Against A Dark Background. The whole story is… It's a MacGuffin story. We're trying to find the lazy gun. The only things we know about the lazy gun are if you turn it upside down, it weighs about 3 pounds more, and, if you point it at something and pull the trigger, whatever you've pointed it at, will die. The method of death, at one point, it gets fired and a monster mouth appears out of nowhere and munches the guy in half and he's dead. The result, for me, I'm going to come back to Mary with the sense of wonder, the numinous magic concept. It's a MacGuffin whose rules we don't need to understand. What's important is that the fact that no one understands it and the fact that it is so magical and powerful, now everybody wants it. That's what drives the story. It's the wanting of the thing, it has nothing to do with how the thing works.

[Brandon] I love that example of… If you pull the trigger, you expect them to explode. But something comes out of another dimension and eats them… It leaves you with a sense of… Again, this is something beyond my comprehension currently. I have no idea how this thing is working. That's scary. This is… This whole kind of eldritch Lovecraftian idea that we are actually very small is a really interesting and frightening emotion that fiction can evoke.

[Margaret] I think the other thing that you get when you have magic without set rules, is, just in terms of resource allocation, which we were talking about last month, the page weight or the word count that you're not using for explaining how magic works or for having characters who are masters of it. You get to apply it to other things. If that's not what your story is about, even if you worked out the rules for how magic works, your story might not need it.

[Brandon] Right. That's a really good point, because one thing when newer writers are talking about info don't send things like this, one thing they don't seem to get, and it's been hard for me to explain sometimes, is that when a reader is really curious about something, you gain infodump equity. Right? That as soon as you start to infodump on something there really interested in, then that paragraph kind of blurs away and the world comes to them. That same paragraph describing something else might be really frustrating to them. That's often whether you've used your cues correctly, leading them to questions and curiosity, whether… I read a lot of books where I'm really interested in this world element they brought up, and instead I get an infodump on a different one.

[Oh, yeah]

[Brandon] Oh, I get so bored so quickly. Or I'm really interested in this character's conflict and we stopped for the worldbuilding infodump. You gotta put these in places…

[Margaret] You gotta prime the pump for us.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I say, and I think this gets to the heart of what Margaret was talking about with the focus, that you can buy time basically, is that unless this… That the… Unless the information… This is true for all exposition, but in less it affects why we care about something, unless it affects our understanding of what the character wants or if it affects… If it doesn't affect our understanding of how they will achieve their goal, we don't… The reader doesn't actually need to know it. A lot of times, people are like, "Well, let me explain my magic system." Like, do we actually need to know? Do I actually need to know how the spaceship works? That's kind of one of the other things that you can do when you're looking at this soft magic, is… It's like I know that when I pick up my phone, I can take pictures with it and occasionally make phone calls. I can tell you well, it works with a computer inside. That's about as far as I can go. I think that you can do that with magic, too.

[Howard] I'm reminded of the… I think it was a comedy clip about the airline attendant telling everybody to turn their devices off.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They're arguing with her about the devices. She finally collapses and says, "Okay, look, people. Airplanes are magic. We don't know how it works."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "You guys just need to turn that stuff off, because if you break the magic, we fall out of the sky."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It's kind of beautiful, because honestly, that's sort of how all of us feel about airplanes.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I see a dichotomy here in the magic without rules, and it is that there is magic without rules that the reader can see, and there is magic that is explicitly… There is an absence of rules so that what the reader sees is an inconsistency, or an absence of any sorts of sense. The lazy gun is that inconsistency. I don't know… Well, there is one consistency. It's going to kill you. But beyond that, I don't see any rules to it.

[Brandon] Very, very infrequently do you write a magic with no rules. It can happen. But usually, if were talking about magic without rules, it's magic where the characters can't… Don't understand usually what will happen, or at least the consequences of what they're using.

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

[Margaret] It is. Bookburners is… It's going to sound like television when I talk about it, because we discuss it in terms of season and episodes, but it is a series of novelettes that are released in e-book and audio form. Written by Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Andrea Phillips, Brian Francis Slattery, and also by me. We chose Bookburners for this particular episode, because this is a series about a group that works for a black budget arm of the Vatican, charged with keeping encroaching magic, which seems to be coming more and more into our world, and it is their job to try to hold back the tide and keep it out. The justification that the organization that they work for has always given for this is the fact that we have no idea how this works. Anybody who has ever tried to use magic constructively or productively ends up being like a toddler with a machine gun. Things go wrong very, very quickly. It is Season Four is out now. Season Five will be released episodically at some point this summer. You get to see over the arc how well they do that job, and how they have to change their attitudes towards how magic is.

[Howard] By way of clarification, when you say this summer, summer of…

[Margaret] 2019. Thank you.

[Brandon] So let me ask you, specifically, Margaret, how did you go about writing a story where the magic doesn't have rules? Or, if it… How did you do this?

[Margaret] It started out… Because we are writing it collectively and we're sort of building on things and we're building the characters, it did start… There was a certain amount of okay, try weird things, and if it seemed to fit the right tone for the broad strokes of what we thought magic would do, all right, we'll go with it. In the first season, Mur did an episode where you have a restaurant kitchen that is made out of meat, where people are cutting pieces off the walls and frying it to their customers and everyone is obsessed with this one restaurant in Scotland. We have episodes where an entire apartment… This is one of Brian's episodes. It transforms into this strange mutant… Mutable magical landscape, and a guy opens the wrong book and gets kind of sucked into it, and becomes part of his apartment. As we went forward, we were like, "Okay. If this is what we have established…" Eventually, we reached the point where it's like, "Okay. Let's come up with some guidelines," as the story is progressing and our arc plot is going on. What is actually going on behind the scenes, and what do we think is the cause of what they call the rising tide?

[Brandon] Okay. So you kind of just like… You're discovery writing and kind of doing that classic discovery writing thing, where you're waiting to see what connections the kind of group hive mind comes up with that you will then push forward with.

[Margaret] There is a certain amount of building the bridge as you are crossing the river going on, yeah.

[Brandon] That's awesome. What about the rest of you? How do you write something… Now, I have a lot of trouble with this. I'll be perfectly frank. Writing something where I don't start explaining the rules… I just, ah… I don't do that very often. If I do, it doesn't go very well. So, how do you approach it?

[Howard] Well, I don't outline the rules, but I generate the rules.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] We're going to talk about constructed languages at some point. I created a language because I needed a code in which someone knew what the code meant and knew how to find a thing and it needed to feel like this is a thing that will actually work. It needed to feel as if there was a consistency behind it. But I absolutely didn't have time to explain all of the things that went into it. Pages and pages of numerology creation went into two lines of dialogue. That's what happens when I try to build magic without rules.

[Mary Robinette] So what I find is that… Like, I've got a story that's coming out in the last… Or that came out in the last issue of Shimmer. It is ruleless magic. Except there are a couple of things that we know. That you don't want to make Gramma say something three times. What I find with the ruleless magic, when I work with it, is that because people are pattern seeking creatures, that even if the magic, even if I just free write the magic and things are just weird and stuff just happens, that the characters within that world are still going to try to find patterns to it, and that there's usually one thing that they will still kind of hang onto. So, like we all know that if you walk away from a bus stop, the bus will come. If there is a chance of rain and you leave the house without your umbrella, it will definitely rain on you. Absolutely, 100%. We know this. Even though that is clearly not actually how this magic system on Earth works. Nora Jemisen's 100,000 Kingdoms, the magic is a written form of magic. So we know that, but the rest of it is clueless. So what I tend to do is say, "Well, people are going to try to apply stuff to this. They're just wrong, so it doesn't work consistently, because it is a rule that they have put on it in a desperate attempt to understand it.

[Brandon] I like that idea a lot. That's very helpful. In fact, I think I'm going to assign homework along those lines. Because I've been thinking, take a story that has… That you've worked on or that you been planning that has a very rule-based magic. Where you think you know the rules. Have the rules all go wrong intentionally. Like, you have control of the story, but have the characters realize they don't know the rules, and deal with the ramifications of that.

[Mary Robinette] While you're working on that, I'm going to tell you a secret. There are rules in the Glamorous Histories that Jane and Vincent are completely wrong about.

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

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

February 2026

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.28: Warfare and Weaponry
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.29: Field Research
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.26: Lessons from Aristotle, with Rob Kimbro
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.25: Choosing Your Agent
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.23: Governments Large and Small
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.22: Characters out of Their Depth
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.21: Writing The Other – Yes, You Can
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.20: Allegory in Fiction
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.19: Religion and Ritual
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.18: Setting As Theme
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.16: Your Setting is a Telegraph
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.15: Technology
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.14: When To Tell
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.12: Writing the Other – Latinx Representation
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.28: Warfare and Weaponry

Writing Excuses 14.29: Field Research

Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict

Writing Excuses 14.26: Lessons from Aristotle, with Rob Kimbro

Writing Excuses 14.25: Choosing Your Agent

Writing Excuses 14.24: Political Intrigue

Writing Excuses 14.23: Governments Large and Small

Writing Excuses 14.22: Characters out of Their Depth

Writing Excuses 14.21: Writing The Other – Yes, You Can

Writing Excuses 14.20: Allegory in Fiction

Writing Excuses 14.19: Religion and Ritual

Writing Excuses 14.18: Setting As Theme

Writing Excuses 14.17: It's Like "Car Talk" meets "Welcome To Nightvale"

Writing Excuses 14.16: Your Setting is a Telegraph

Writing Excuses 14.15: Technology

Writing Excuses 14.14: When To Tell

Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications

Writing Excuses 14.12: Writing the Other – Latinx Representation

Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules

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