Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

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

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 45.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Economics.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

 

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Mahtab] I have a really good definition.

[Brandon] Okay, go.

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

[Brandon] That's really good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Howard] You burn your house points! What?

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

[Brandon] It's brilliant.

[Howard] Pratchett at his best.

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

 

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

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

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mahtab] Very interesting article.

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Dan] So there is an economy of economies.

[Chuckles]

 

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

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

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/10/27/14-43-sequencing-your-career-genome/

 

Key points: What do you do after you sell the first book? Or what do you do when the series did well, but... then there's a slump? You can't predict exactly what will happen. Look for decision points. At least have a sense of if this happens, I'll do this. Good or bad things! Know when to change approaches. You can stop and take time to plan! Think about multiple exit routes. You may want to balance several things, not just do one thing full-time. Think about careers you might like to emulate. Take a look at self-publishing, freelancing, write-for-hire. There are many outlets. Think about income streams. Know your bandwidth! What are your limits, both up and down. Don't get locked into one genre. Think about production schedules, think about lifestyle. What is your creative throughput, and how do you want to use it?

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 43.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Sequencing Your Career Genome.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] And I'm Dongwon.

 

[Howard] We're going to talk about the sequence in which you do things to plan your career, based on the kind of career that you want your career to grow up to be. I shortened that into something that sounds all science-y, but we're not going to break out the CRISPR in order to… 

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Bacterially inject your career with pieces of my [immune?].

[Dan] Oh, man. I wish you would, though. That would help me so much.

[Mary Robinette] That would be so much easier than actually trying to think about what I wanted to do.

[Dan] Yeah, genetically engineering a career instead of raising one from birth.

[Howard] I think Dongwon's headband… We wear headbands to keep these microphones on our head. Dongwon's headband actually has some of Brandon's DNA in it.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, no. I'm wearing Brandon's.

[Howard] Oh, are you wearing Brandon's headband?

[Dan] Oh, okay.

[Dongwon] We're really just going to Frankenstein into one large monster by the end of this.

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] So, Dongwon, this is an episode you pitched to us. How does an author, new or established or even old, make these kinds of career plans? 

[Dongwon] Well, career planning is not a thing that we talk a lot… Talk about a lot in the industry. Especially, I don't hear it being discussed at writing conferences, and especially for new writers. In part, because you're so focused on how do I find an agent, how do I sell this first project? But the thing that I always see happen is once you sell that first book, then there's immediate pressure to have a second book. Since you spent the first 10 years of your life… Writing life, writing that first novel, now suddenly you have to produce a second book in a year. Everyone panics and runs into a very common problem, which is the second book in a series or sequel is not as good or is a much more painful process than writers really want it to be. So one thing I really like is if authors can start thinking about what they want their career to look like in the early stages. Then you can start planning for not only this book but what's next, and then what's going to come after that.

[Dan] Career planning is something that I wish I had known more about when I got started in this process. Because I feel like I did a pretty good job of the first one. I had a series. My second series actually hit the New York Times list. I thought I was doing pretty well, and then hit a slump. I had not planned ahead for it, I had not planned for it, creatively, emotionally, or financially. If I had had… If I had known then what I know now about how to plan ahead and look further into the future, it would have been so much easier to avoid that, to avoid kind of just relying on the publishing industry to stay consistent, which it never does. I know now that, okay, if I have more irons in more fires, and branching out into a… More forms, more mediums, more outlets for my fiction, then it would have been so much easier at that time to kind of navigate that when it happened.

 

[Dongwon] One thing I want to sort of reinforce as we talk about this is this isn't about having perfect predictive abilities, right? It's not about clarity about what exactly is going to happen when you publish your second book or your second series or your fifth series or whatever it is. It's the fact that the publishing industry, like many businesses, but especially media businesses, is extremely random. What happens from one book to the next book could be affected by anything from… I think Mary's talked about this in the past. Your book coming out the week of a disastrous election result, or there could be natural disasters, or I had a recent issue where one of the publishers ran out of paper, which I didn't know was a thing that could happen.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] What?

[Dongwon] These are apparently things that could happen. I mean, this has been resolved, it's fine.

[Howard] That's the last time he prints a book on the skins of small children, but… 

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] But that's how you summoned the demons, Howard, and the demons are how you make mon… Anyway, sorry.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Alex, we're [templating] this.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] So, keep in mind, career planning isn't necessarily about here's I'm going to do A, then I'm going to do B, then I'm going to do C. Career planning is looking at decision points. In two books, I'm going to have to make a decision. Do I stay with this publisher or do I go to a different publisher? Do I stay in this genre, do I go to a different genre? Do I write a sequel to this series or do I come up with something new? What you want to do is have some sense at least… You don't have to have a super concrete plan, but some sense of okay, if this happens, if the good outcome happens, here's what I'm going to do. If this book tanks and nobody ever buys it, here's what I'm going to do. In part, having a plan in place when you hit the wall, when the bottom falls out of something, means that you're not also going to collapse with it. You're going to have a plan in place, or at least an outline of a plan, and be able to recover and continue to build to something new. Or, on the flipside, when your thing blows up and there suddenly 10,000 people clamoring for your attention, you're not going to panic and die, because you'll have a plan. You'll have already started that next book in the series that suddenly has a huge demand and a huge audience for it.

[Howard] I have two examples here, both from my own life. One when we first started going full-time with Schlock Mercenary. We established a trigger point at which Howard was going to go look for a day job. The trigger point was when we have paid the bills for two months using credit cards. Because that is the point at which we are no longer realistically financially planning things. We are living on the blind hope that some payday is coming down the road, and we have failed to bring the money in the way we meant to, and we must now do something else. I can't… I cannot overemphasize that to you. Knowing when… Quit is the wrong word, but knowing when to get off this bus…

[Mary Robinette] To change gears.

[Howard] To change gears, to take a different route. That is… It saves lives. The second… When we did the Schlock Mercenary challenge coin Kickstarter. It funded in like a minute and a half, and overfunded through the first two stretch goals within 15 minutes. What I posted was, "Wow. Thank you for your enthusiasm. We are flummoxed and flabbergasted, and Sandra and I are now going to take 24 hours in which to reconsider our plans for the rest of this project, because you want it more than we expected you to. Forgive us for being silent during that time. We don't want to dampen your enthusiasm, but we also don't want to fail to deliver after having funded." That's the mistake that most commonly gets made. That thing that I said got quoted dozens of times through the Kickstarter marketplace as people realized, oh, my gosh, they ran up against something they didn't know how to plan for, and they told us that they were going to go plan. That is so smart.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] There's the old saying that when a door closes, a window opens, or something along those lines. It… In my experience, it really helps if you go and make sure that the window's unlocked and maybe put a stick under it so that it's propped open.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] So when that door slams shut, you have another exit route. Right? Like those… So, belt and suspenders is a really useful thing. If you start thinking about what are your exits from this room, then you won't end up trapped in it forever.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that a lot of writers think, "Oh, someday I want to write full-time." This is when we're talking about career planning. Is that something you want to do? Because writing full-time means being a freelancer. So that exit strategy thing… That's something that I've had to do for my entire adult career. My goal has been to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. That is… When I reach those cusp points, it's like, well, I can write this. But it's a project I don't want to do. Is that going to push me down a path where I'm going to have to keep doing that kind of project, because I am now reliant on that income stream? Or do I pick this other path which will allow me to find different income stream sources? So I feel like… That's when you're talking about not just the door shutting, but it's like, do you want to go out the window? What are the choices you want to be making to get closer to the career you want to have? Like, I don't actually want to write full-time. I want a career where I'm balancing puppetry and audiobooks and writing. Because I enjoy all three of those. But I want to do the audiobooks I want to do. I want to write the books I want to write. I don't want to have to go do ghostwriting just because I want to be a full-time writer.

[Dan] Well, we've actually had that conversation about Writing Excuses as well. The four core podcasters sitting down to say, "How big do we want to let this thing get?" We've actually made some decisions where we turned down opportunities because it would have taken up too much of our time, and therefore too much of our lives, and kind of locked us into a path that took away some of our freedom to do other things.

[Howard] I will make very, very different decisions if I'm trying to be a full-time podcaster versus if I'm willing to let Dongwon be the smart one. Not that that was a choice that I was making.

 

[Howard] On that subject, we're talking about, in part, scheduling and time. Dongwon, I think you have a book to pitch for us that has time right in the title?

[Dongwon] I would, and it does have time in the title. I would like to pitch This is How You Lose the Time War, which is a book that is co-written by Amal el Mohtar, which you guys know from the podcast, and Max Gladstone. They wrote this book together as a… As an epistolary novel, so it is letters exchanged from one character to the other character. The two characters are rival agents in a war that is fought through time as the title implies, and they both represent two possible futures. They are trying to affect things that happened down the threads to make sure that their future is the one that wins. It is slightly possible that these two characters, as they engage in this brutal, bloody battle that sets civilizations on fire and conducts massive battles in space, that they might start to have some feelings for one another, and maybe that will go somewhere. I'm just saying it's a possibility.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal el Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

 

[Howard] So. What are some careers that we've seen that we would like to emulate? I think… Well, one of the ones I think of is… I panned one of his books because it wasn't actually one of his books. James Patterson, who writes everything. But I haven't actually done any research to find out how he made that work. My kids love the Maximum Ride books. But that isn't all that he does. Are there authors whose careers you've looked at that you love?

[Dongwon] One of the first questions I ask, whenever I'm looking at signing a client… I like to have a phone call with that writer. The question that I asked them, and it stymies them about half of the time. But it's always an interesting conversation, is, if you could have the career of any author in the marketplace, whose career would you want? I'm not asking what do your books… What kind of books do you want to write, in terms of the craft or the style. But, in terms of the publishing cycle, how many series they do, who their books are bought by like who their audience is? That answer's going to be really different if that person is Neil Gaiman or Seanan McGuire, even though they write in some ways very similar things about magic in our contemporary world. But their careers look extremely different.

[Dan] I want whichever career means I don't have to work. But still get paid for it. Whose career is that?

[Dongwon] I mean, that's a really important question. Mary was talking… Mary Robinette was talking about this a little bit earlier, in terms of do you want to write so that you don't have to have a day job? If you're not going to have a day job, that usually means you're going to have to publish more frequently or publish… Or get bigger book deals than you would in another situation. So, the way you get bigger book deals involves a slightly different strategy that if you want to publish once a year in a sort of a series-oriented format. Right? There's different ways you can optimize. You take bigger bets. You take wider shots, or longer shots, than you would if you had a reliable income and you wanted to be doing something that had a reasonable readership, but not necessarily needing to shoot the moon on every book.

[Dan] As you're thinking about what kind of career you want as well, almost everything we've been talking about in this episode is traditional publishing. There's so many more options than that outside of it. There's so much self-publishing stuff. There's so much… And we have talked about freelancing, and write for hire. There's so many outlets for you to find work in. Choosing which one of those you want to use, and if you are saying no to an income stream, can you afford to say no to it? Are you willing to put in the work to rely on the other income streams? Making these decisions ahead of time so that you know what you're getting yourself into and how to make it work.

[Howard] There's a…

[Mary Robinette] I was going to say, that's one of the reasons that I don't self publish. Because I don't want to be a publisher, which is me turning down a gig I don't want to do. That's not anything about whether or not it's a… That's a personal choice about where I want to be spending my time and energy.

[Howard] There's a writer, illustrator, teacher who I… Whose career I admire. Jim Zub. He studied animation, went into like project management and sales for a company that was selling art cycles to the big three comic publishers to say we can take over on this issue for this title so you don't slip your dates. Then they kind of became their own publisher. He went from that… He did a web comic for a while. He went goo goo over… Or gaga, I guess, over Neil Gaiman when he accidentally met him at a party and Neil said, "Hi. My name's Neil. I'm a writer." Jim was like, "Oh. That's what I want to be. That's… I want that level of humility that is absolutely not required because I'm that guy." He now writes, I think, half a dozen titles per month for Marvel plus some of his old work, and is regarded by many people as one of the hardest working writers in comics. When I met him as a web cartoonist, that is not the career plan I envisioned for him. That's not my job. I don't know how much of this he planned, but he kept his job as an instructor at Seneca University, because, like Mary, he wants to have more than just the one thing.

[Dongwon] One thing that's really important, though, is you need to have a really clear self-assessment of what your bandwidth is. Right? What I see so many times, and you're describing someone who is very hard-working, but he also has the capacity to do that. A lot of people simply don't. It's okay if you only write 30,000 words a year. Right? It's okay to write a novel every two years, three years. You can still build a career out of that. What you can't do is build a career of somebody who writes a book a year when that something you're not going to be able to do. The more you can be aware of what your limits are, in both directions. I've also seen writers take on writing 500-600,000 words a year, and really skirt that line of burnout and risk not being able to deliver on a number of deadlines, which would be disastrous for their career. So, what you need to do is have a really clear-eyed sense of what can I actually do, and then experiment within that to make sure that those are your limits, or maybe you actually can write more than you think you can. Or, oh, this feels like too much, the quality is starting to slip. I need to back off of that little bit. Those are all really important questions you need to ask yourself, and have a really clear sense of what your process is. Then you can build a career around it. There's no wrong answers to that question. Some might be easier than others, but the most important part is you are realistic about what your goals and what your bandwidth actually is.

[Mary Robinette] The time to do this is when you are early in your career. Like, a very deliberate choice that I did make with my career was that I wrote in a bunch of different genres. Because I had seen often enough a friend sell a book and then get locked into that genre. It just happened to be the first book that they sold. Like, the book that I wrote before Shades of Milk and Honey was a science-fiction murder mystery. The book that I wrote after Shades of Milk and Honey was an urban fantasy. But Shades is the one that sold. After that… We finished that series, the decision that Tor made was we wanted to have me try a bunch of standalone to see what hit. So when you're thinking about what kind of a career do you want to have and who do you want to emulate, you're not thinking about the genre that they're writing in. What you're thinking about is their production schedule, you're thinking about the lifestyle that they live. That's the kind of thing you're thinking about, not the genre.

[Dongwon] Often, how many careers are they maintaining at once? Are they a comics writer, a YA novelist, an adult novelist, and a screenwriter all at the same time? I know people who do that, and they do it very well. That may not be you, if you have a really demanding full-time job, or you just don't have that much creative throughput in any given day.

 

[Howard] That brings us around beautifully to the homework. Identify an author whose career you would like to emulate. Research their career timeline, including the release dates of their books. That's pretty easy. Possibly, the order in which these things were written, and maybe actually the things, the order in which these things were actually sold. Who were their editors? Who is their agent? Look at all of this, and try and give yourself an accurate picture of what goes into that thing that you want to be or have. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

Writing Excuses 14.41: History

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/10/13/14-41-history/

 

Key points: Let your characters talk about history. Consider whether the history is continuous (Chinese model) or rise and fall (Roman Empire model). Visit places that are similar to your fantasy world. Only give information that is pertinent, that has a reason, that adds to your story. Make sure the characters are interested, and that it is relevant to the story. Have characters disagree, and have opinions. Use little details to make your reader think there is an entire iceberg underneath. Consider verbal perspective, like the visual perspective of a chalk drawing of a cliff. Drill down deep on some details. Character history? A continuity spreadsheet for events in the universe. Writing YA means characters don't have a lot of history. Use a character worksheet as a starting point, but don't expect to really know your characters until the 2nd or 3rd draft. Differing opinions of the same event can make it feel real. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 41.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, History.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm… Mahtab. I was going to say I'm Mary Robinette, but I'm Mahtab.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Mary Robinette couldn't be with us this month… This week.

[Brandon] Well, we're doing the Utah cast. We like to shake things up. This week, we're going to talk about history. Actually, next week, we're going to do the genre of alternate history. We're going to talk a little bit about that. So we're going to try to veer away from that this time and focus on creating histories for your characters, for your secondary world fantasies or science fictions, or maybe extrapolating from our history right now to the future.

[Dan] I just realized that given Mary's known history as a voice actor, there's going to be a whole conspiracy fan theory that you really are Mary Robinette…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Doing an accent.

[Mahtab] Possibly.

[Howard] We'll post pictures.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But that won't help.

 

[Brandon] All right. So, let's talk about secondary world fantasy, building histories for places that didn't exist.

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] Are there any resources you use? How do you start? How do you give a sense that the place has been around a long time? As a new writer, I'll just preface this by saying, this was really hard for me in my first books. I always felt that this was a big hole in my worldbuilding, that a lot of the great epic fantasies I'd read… You travel through Tolkien's world, and you get a sense that there are thousands of years of history at every turn and quarter. Where my worlds, it felt like they sprang up… Got built for the set right before the story started, and then the characters act in them, and then they were being wiped away after.

[Dan] Well, one of the things that Tolkien does… I mean, yes, he spent decades of his life building the world before he started writing in it, but beyond that, I think the much more reproducible trick is that everywhere he goes, everyone talks about history. So he's kind of cheating in that sense. So if your book doesn't focus on that, then you aren't going to have that sense. But when they go to Rivendell, when they go to even Laketown, they will talk about how, oh, this used to be this, and then this other thing happened. So you are kind of learning the history as you go. So you can include those details without spending decades of your life building them in advance.

[Howard] There are aspects to our world history that are really fascinating to model yourself, to model your work on. If you compare European history with mainland Chinese history, there is a continuity to Chinese history that none of the architecture… The Chinese people never walked up to a piece of architecture and said, "Where'd this come from?" But in the Middle Ages, in Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, 200 years later, we had people looking at aqueducts, people who had no idea how to work stone in that way, looking at these things and saying, "Who built this?" So the European conceit, which I think may be a little closer to what Tolkien was writing, is this sense that civilizations fall and some of them were greater than ours. We had this thing we call the Renaissance, this rebirth. The Chinese didn't have a Renaissance. The Chinese had a much more linear experience through this. Knowing that, when you are creating secondary world history for your world, allows you to choose. Our my people going to have a continuous history, or is there going to have been a collapse and technology was lost? Simple technologies, stone working, metalworking, whatever. When it is rebuilt, there are ancient puzzles to be solved.

[Dan] That contiguous idea, the more Chinese model, if we're going to call it that, can be fascinating, and I don't think it's done a lot. If you've got 2000 years of unbroken history, then this isn't just the little farm town where you lived, this is the farm town where 20 generations of your family have lived.

 

[Mahtab] I think even going to certain places that would be similar to your fantasy world would help. For example, Diana Gabaldon, who's written the Outlander series, she was a great researcher. She started writing the world based on her research from books, but then she eventually did go to Scotland, and viewed the area before she actually wrote down the entire story. There is a time travel involved, but there is a lot of history. So I think she did have a bit of it, but then a lot could be extrapolated. The other one that I really love was done… A fabulous job, and I think you'll all know him, Patrick Rothfuss with Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear. I mean, it just the way we were given the history of… Is it Shandrian or Chandrian?

[Brandon] I'm not sure. I don't know that I've heard him pronounce it.

[Mahtab] Nor am I. But history, and how it relates to Kvothe and the revenge that he wanted to take for certain things. The way it is built… But we are given that information as needed, at the right time that we need it in the story. I mean, if he had given all the information that is in the second book in the first book, we would probably have been overwhelmed. But the fact is that he's tilted, and he metes it out as required. You get the feeling that it's there. I guess the way you do it is you probably allude to it. But if it is not pertinent to the point… To the plot at that point in time, let it go. Let the reader just go along for the ride, and explain it at the time when you need to.

[Brandon] Absolutely. I agree with that 100%. One of the themes I'm noticing here is having reasons, though, to explain it. It works in Name of the Wind because the character's a storyteller and a bard. His… Telling stories of the past is basically the foundation of his relationship with his parents. With Tolkien, of course, there's a lot of lore, and characters are very interested in the lore. If this is something you want to do, having a reason, having a character who is interested in architecture, having a character who wants to talk about these things, and then making it relevant to the story. Maybe not to the main plot, but to the story in some way is going to help a lot.

[Dan] One of the other things that Tolkien is doing is he has a big cast of characters from lots of different backgrounds. So you have a chance for the Numernorian Ranger and the man of Rohan to argue over which path they should take. The dwarf has an opinion all his own. They think the other opinion is dumb, and they will give historical reasons. So you get lots of perspectives, which allows you to explain more of what's going on.

 

[Brandon] I think this is a very natural thing that human beings do. We like to talk about the past, we like to talk about our heritage. I remember just visiting Charlston for the first time when I was out there to work on the Wheel of Time books, and how multiple people told me we have houses that still have musket balls in them. From the Civil War. Right? Like, you can go and see there's a whole, there's a musket ball in there that was fired during the Civil War. That's like a very big mark of pride. I found it fascinating, right? Being from the West, where everything is a little more new, I love that aspect. I think, like I said, it's very natural. Those little details… We often talk about how the little details evoke a large picture and a larger story. I tell my students there's this philosophy that in writing you want to only show the tip of the iceberg, and then have all of this worldbuilding and stuff you've done that's underneath the water that's supporting it. I tell them that really what you want to do is you want to be able to fool the reader into thinking there's an entire iceberg down there.

[Howard] I'm going to build a little pile of ice on an ocean colored rubber raft, and I'm going to float it, and I'm going to use smoke and mirrors to make you not look at the raft.

[Brandon] Yup. And see an iceberg instead in the deep.

[Dan] If you want to compare this to visual art, if someone wants to suggest depth, you've all seen the pictures of like chalk drawings on the sidewalk that look like you're standing over a giant cliff. They're just using little tricks of perspective. So it's the same amount of total chalk, but it looks like it goes down for hundreds and hundreds of feet. So you can do that same kind of verbal perspective, I guess, and add little tricks into your book like mentioning the ancient king that used to run this or when you give the name of the city, explain where that name came from. Without having to build these hundreds of feet underneath it. You're just giving the sense of it.

 

[Mahtab] What I also like, which George R. R. Martin also did, was he was so specific about certain things. I mean, almost going to a depth that I didn't need. That somehow gave me the impression that he knows so much. He could have… like just maybe the Lannister's flag, and what they believe, and the Lannisters pay their debts. On certain aspects, he drilled down… Like, on the houses, so deep that it just gave me the impression that he knows a lot.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mahtab] Which without… He may not know a lot, but that is… I'm like, "How on Earth has he done this?" Because my impression in my mind is he knows everything. If he knows so much about one house, he probably knows so much about everyone.

[Dan] One of the reasons that that works so well is because it's a house. So it's not as… It doesn't sound as important as… If he were to give the entire history of the geography or whatever, this is how this land was formed, volcanically. So giving details, tons and tons of detail on something that isn't necessarily as important… Then we go, "Oh, he knows all this stuff about this one…"

[Mahtab] Exactly.

[Dan] "Little thing, I bet he knows everything."

 

[Brandon] Our book of the week this week is Airborn.

[Mahtab] So, this is one of my favorite books by a very well-loved Canadian author. His name is Kenneth Oppel. There are three books in the series. The first one is Airborn which was the Governor General's winner for 2004. The other books are Starclimber and Skybreaker. So, this is a book that set in an alternate history, of course, Victorian era, where a lot of airships were used for transportation. The story starts with a cabin boy called Matt Cruse, who has lost his father, but he's really dying to be a pilot, but he comes from the poor classes who… Chances of becoming a pilot are hard. But it's got a lot of fantasy elements in it. It starts out with him rescuing this person in a balloon. The person actually dies. But he leaves a notebook behind, which is handed over to his family. Three years later, he's on this trans-oceanic cruiseship, which is called the Aurora. One of the passengers is Kate de Vries, which is basically his love interest, who has that same notebook of the person that he had rescued which talks about cloud cats. Now, this is in the Victorian era, which was mainly a very.male-dominated society. Kate is very forward thinking, she wants to go find them. So there is this adventure going on where they're attacked by pirates, they crash land on an island, they do see the cloud cats… Spoiler alert, sorry about that. Then it ends on a fabulously dramatic note of them rescuing the ship and he being promoted. This is Matt Cruse. Of course, his adventures continue, with him falling in and out of love with Kate de Vries, who I love, but… It's the language, it's the pacing. Kenneth Oppel is just amazing with his plotting, his pacing. He's done a lot of middle grade and YA, but this is one of his finest. So, Airborn, Kenneth Oppel.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Dan] Thank you, Mary Robinette, for that… Oh, I mean… Let's cut that out.

[Howard] Mahtab.

[Dan] Mahtab.

[Howard] This is totally Mahtab.

 

[Brandon] So. For the second half of this podcast, or the few minutes of the second half we have left, let's talk about character histories. How do you develop what the history of a given character is before they walk on screen for their first scene? How do you keep track of those notes? How much do you pants, how much do you plan?

[Howard] These days, I have a continuity spreadsheet. Which pins events in my universe and who is affected by those events. When somebody is walking on screen, the first thing I do is I look at the spreadsheet and ask myself, "Where were they when these things are happening? Do I need to worry about it?" If the answer is no, awesome!

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They walk on screen with whatever information I needed to motivate them for that scene. But if their paths crossed any of those points in the spreadsheet, I have to do more work. Usually that just means I'm not going to put them in the book.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Writing so much YA has been nice because the characters don't have a lot of history.

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] They're much younger.

[Dan] She's 16 years old, and maybe there's one or two formative experiences that I have to deal with. But in writing for adults, when I actually have to do this, I often will just make it up. I mean, I tend to be very pantsery anyway. But if there is… If there's something that relates directly to the plot, then I'll already know it. If it doesn't, then it can be whatever I want it to be.

[Mahtab] I actually like to fill up a character worksheet. Depending on whether it's middle grade or YA, I'll have a slightly longer worksheet. Some of it is just dealing with the physical appearance, but a lot deals with the character's motivations, what do they want, what do they need, any secrets that they have, just build upon that. That's just a starting point, I honestly do not get to know my characters till probably the second or third draft. This is just me putting some stuff down on paper. But it's a starting point. Just so that I can visualize the character. As I'm writing the story, stuff occurs to me. So the character worksheet is a starting point. Probably the second or third draft is when I really get to know the character. But I have to say, honestly, they've never talked back to me or they've never taken over the story. It's like sometimes… Most times, it's like talking to a teen. Pulling words out of their mouths.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] How do you feel today? Yeah, okay.

[Dan] They refuse to tell you anything.

[Mahtab] So, yeah. It's a work in progress. But as you do more drafts, you get to know them, and then start building on the areas that you think the story needs the history on.

[Howard] As I've gotten older and learned more, one of the things that I've learned is that it's not just that history is written by the victors, it's that history is read and interpreted differently depending on who's teaching it, depending on who's reading it. Nothing makes history in a secondary world feel more real than people having different opinions of the same event. Maybe they are both right. Especially if the event impacted one or more of these characters. Some of my favorite moments in tracking characters through these spreadsheets are when I realized both Alexia Murtaugh and Karl Tagon fought in the same war. Briefly, on opposite sides. At one point, they probably both knew the same person. Out of that grew the bonus story that I put into Schlock Mercenary book 14, which is the two of them talking about this guy who died during the war. Capt. Murtaugh talks about how he's the reason she was able to switch sides. So it was this intersection of my spreadsheet of history and personal backstories that the story almost told itself. It was a lot of fun. My part told itself.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Ben McSweeney had to do all the art.

 

[Brandon] Dan, you have our homework this week.

[Dan] Yes, I do. What we want you to do is come up with the history of a place. Take like a thousand years worth of history. What wars were fought there, what people lived there? All of these things that happened in this one location. But then, tell that story from the point of view of a tree that has lived that whole time and watched this all happen.

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

 

 

Writing Excuses 14.39: Positioning Your Book in the Marketplace

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/29/14-39-positioning-your-book-in-the-marketplace/

 

Key points: Positioning your book for agents, editors, publishers, bookstores, and, oh yes, readers. Who is this book for, and how do you reach that audience? Positioning answers those questions, looking at title, jacket, release price, release format, release method… Target readership is often defined as fans of this series or that author. The right genre, the right look, the right copy, and the right promotion to the right audience. Comp titles construct a Venn diagram of target readers. Often you are positioning for two or more audiences at the same time! Content must align with packaging and positioning.You need to know the merits of your book, what's exciting about it, what will people like about it. Meet reader expectations, and if you shift the positioning in a series, make sure you signal the change to your readers.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 39.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses. Positioning Your Book in the Marketplace.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] We are recording live on the WXR Retreat in front of a studio audience of our attendees and students and awesome writers…

[Whoo! Applause.]

 

[Howard] When you heard from them much earlier this year, they had questions. Some of them still have those questions, but this is not an episode where they get to ask them. We're talking about how you as an author go about positioning your book for the editors who will edit it, the publishers who will publish it, the bookstores who will shelve it and bookstore it, and ultimately the readers who will read it. Because the marketplace is a large and complex thing. Dongwon pitched this idea to us, so I'll just let him start.

[Dongwon] Positioning is one of my favorite things to talk about. In part, because it feels like the most essential question in all of publishing. It took a long time for me to really understand this concept. I was lucky enough to work with a very brilliant publisher, helped me work through what publishing as a separate activity is, which is independent from editing or releasing the book or whatever it is. For me, it really clicked in when I started to understand this concept of positioning. So, when we talk about publishing, the thing that's always really important to me, and what feels like, to me, the more I do this, is really the only question is who is this book for. All the other questions that we ask along the way sort of derive from this question of if we're going to publish this book, who are we trying to publish this book for, and, how do we reach that audience? Right? So, positioning is sort of the summation of a lot of the efforts that we do to try and reach a certain audience. Positioning encompasses title,, what the jacket looks like, how we're releasing it, so what price point is it released at, what format does it release in. So, all of those things are how we're positioning it in the market to reach the target readership, which is usually something we're defining by are they fans of this other series, are they fans of this other author? So when we position something, we really want to make sure it's in the right genre, it has the right look, the copy is doing everything it needs to do, and we're promoting it to the right audience.

[Howard] We touched on this little bit in the comp titles episode, and how, when you pick comp titles, part of what you are doing is constructing a Venn diagram for your target readers. But there's a lot more to it than just comp titling it in terms of defining this.

[Dan] This process is more complicated than simply saying, "Well, I want everyone to read my book." You don't get to say that. You need to actually pick a group and figure out how you are going to reach them.

[Mary Robinette] This is one of those things that I wound up learning through the puppetry, which I'm sure surprises everybody. The thing for us was that because we were taking puppetry into elementary schools, we had a show and we needed to appeal to an audience of kids. We needed to convince people that an audience of kids were going to be interested in this. But we also needed to convince people that it would fulfill certain requirements. So, for that, we had to position it as being an educational thing, while at the same time, I'm like, "We're doing Pinocchio." So we would have to find the educational things and bring those to the forefront in the way we were presenting it. Knowing that once they cracked the covers, so to speak, once we were there, it would do the job it was setting out to do. At the same time, we couldn't position it as a scientific inquiry if that was not the experience that we were going to deliver. That, I think, is one of the things that is challenging a lot of times when we're thinking about books is that we… The positioning actually has to be for two different audiences at the same time. We forget that a lot of times.

 

[Dongwon] It's also really important that what's actually in the book, the content of the book, which is something it feels like we don't really talk about sometimes where we're on the business side. But the content of the book has to be in alignment with the packaging and the positioning. Right? If you're saying that this book is for fans of Naomi Novik, for example, but really it's going to read like a big military thriller, then that's not going to really align very well. You're going to have a lot of frustrated readers. No matter how good your positioning is, if it's fundamentally a lie or if it's fundamentally not honest to the reading experience, your whole project's going to fall apart. So, one of the things… We've been making this joke about the homework for this particular series of talks I've been giving on the podcast that it's about soul-searching, in part, because you really need to have a very clear idea of what your book actually is. Craft is often about writing the thing and letting your subconscious write it for you and not thinking aggressively about it. Once you are done with that, however, once it comes to the publishing part, you need to take a step back and have a very clear eyed view of what are the merits of your book. What's exciting about it? What do people like about it? That will tell you a lot about how you can position it, how you can frame it, so that publishers, agents, and then ultimately, readers, will be very excited about the thing that you're trying to present to them.

[Howard] One of the challenges I've had recently with Schlock Mercenary is that I've gotten to a point in the story where it is totally story appropriate and extremely science-fictiony fun to explore the relationship between people who are grieving the death of a loved one and the cloned replacement of that loved one. I could noodle on that and tell jokes on that for weeks. I will never forget, it was several years ago, somebody in one of the forums… I don't remember which one… Said, "I'm liking the story, but it's been a while since anything exploded." Oh, that's right. Oh, I'm telling a science-fiction comic in which things are supposed to explode. So, positioning my book in the marketplace… That's been done. While there are nuances I am adding that might cause it to shift its position a little bit, there are still readers who are counting the number of weeks between explosions. I need to keep their numbers below about four.

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] A lot of this is very much about meeting reader expectations. So, you can shift your positioning in the middle of a series. We see a lot of people do this. But, if you're going to do that, you need to find other ways to signal to them that you're making a shift in positioning. So your cover's aisle might change a little bit. If you've used a very rigid title format, which we see in a lot of series, you may want to switch that up, invert it. What you need to do is have a lot of signposts and signals that this is for a slightly different readership than what it's been before. That way, people can make an informed decision about whether or not this book is for them.

 

[Howard] Let's have a non-book of the week of the week.

[Mary Robinette] I am so excited about this web series. It's called Black Girl in a Big Dress. This hits all of my nerdy buttons. So, the main character is a black girl in a big dress, strangely. Truth in advertising. But she is a cosplayer, and she is specifically a cosplayer who loves Victoriana. So the entire web series is dealing with the idea of what people… Of expectations. She has a cousin who's like, "Black girls don't say that." She's like, "Excuse me. I am a black girl, and I say these things." There's all of this stuff that's interrogating race and expectations and society and also some of these steaming love scenes where two people are sitting quietly by a fireplace, not speaking to each other, in exquisite clothing. One of them will say, "This is the most romantic thing I have ever experienced."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The other one will say something like, "Yes, my dear. I do believe we are in love." Then they'll go back to reading. It's amazing. I love this. Then, he kissed her glove. [Gasp] It's great. It's funny. There's beautiful costumes. It's short. You can binge it. She is just getting ready to do season two. So go to YouTube and Black Girl in a Big Dress. I am a huge, huge fan of this.

 

[Howard] Okay. Back to marketplace, marketplace positioning. What are some mistakes that we've seen authors make, that we've seen publishers make? If we're not afraid to name names, then that's fine.

[Laughter]

[Howard] If we're afraid to name names, then anonymize it.

[Mary Robinette] Well, I'll actually talk about something… It was a deliberate choice that we made with the Glamorous Histories series. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had made a different choice. The first book is straight up a romantic… It's a straight up romance, Austen pastiche. So we have come up with a… I say we. Every time they showed me a cover, I'm like, "That's beautiful." But the covers are all very, very romance heavy. The fourth book is a heist novel. Like, it's not a romance. I have wondered what would have happened if we had shifted the positioning on that when it came out. Whether I would have lost audience because of doing that, because it no longer looked like the rest of the books in the series, or whether I would have picked up new audience because anyone who is interested in a heist would recognize it as such? So it's not so much a mistake as it's like this was a choice that we made. What would have happened if we had made a different choice?

[Dongwon] One thing that can be really interesting is if you go to the bookstore or you go into the market and look for books that have been recovered over the course of that book's life cycle, right? So, I think Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy… I think it's on its third or fourth set of covers at this point. They've established many different looks for that book. Each one of them has worked in its own way, and continued to build his career. I think it's really fascinating to see how they've chosen to position that book over time to sort of update where the trends in the marketplace are and get a sense of who his audience is, and continued to evolve that and grow that and refine that positioning. That can be a really useful thing for you guys as consumers to take a look at. You can start to unpack some of the logic of what they're doing. If this book has a very maps oriented look, a very Lord of the Rings-y kind of vibe, versus this, which has a very cinematic vibe, versus the new style, which has a more abstract art vibe. Get a sense of why are they making those choices. One thing that we hear a lot in the industry is a lot of readers love to complain about covers. I completely understand why. Because you have a very powerful attachment to the cover design often. But those are very deliberate choices that are being made by the publisher. You may not always agree with them. But what you can do is start to unpack the logic of why they're doing this thing. Even if it's a thing that doesn't work out, or if it's a thing that you think is completely wrong for the book. It can be a really interesting thought exercise to try and reverse engineer what was the process the publisher was going through when they were revising the positioning of this thing that's already been released and usually already successful.

[Dan] I've learned a lot about this particular topic doing hand selling at conventions. Because it is incredible to talk with readers and see which lines work on them and which lines don't. One of the things that stands out to me, and I've got a couple stories. One that stands out, and I cannot remember the author's name. But he's an epic fantasy author who…

[Dongwon] Brandon Sanderson?

[Dan] No. But he uses Brandon as his thing. He shares a booth with me sometimes. We'll all be in there, all these authors kind of shilling our books to people, we all have our own pitches. He just sits in the corner, he doesn't have a big billboard, he doesn't have anything. He just has like a big 3 inch thick fantasy book. People walk by, and he'll just be sitting on his stool with his arms folded and say, "You guys like epic fantasy? Kind of sort of like Brandon Sanderson or George Martin?" He sells out every single time. So knowing who your audience is and having the product that they want is kind of step one, right? Making sure you know who they are. If you are this audience, you will buy his book. It's really kind of amazing to watch him do nothing and work just because he knows who his audience is so clearly. One of the other people… I'm going to mention Claudia Gray, who among her many fantastic books, she has a Star Wars book called Lost Stars. Which is a YA romance. It is so clearly a YA romance, but is also a Star Wars book about an Imperial officer and a rebel pirate who are in love with each other. She has found, over the years, that she needs to present that book entirely differently depending on who comes. She can 100% sell that YA romance to a 50-year-old man every single time. But she doesn't pitch it as a YA romance. She pitches it as a Star Wars book, and sets up kind of all of the background information about what's going on with the Empire and the pilots and things and how it connects to the movies. So knowing who the audience is, and in that situation, we can adapt on-the-fly. In other situations, you have to plan ahead. With my book, Extreme Makeover, it's standalone science fiction. I sat down and I was trying to figure out how to position that book and who the audience was. Exactly what Dongwon was talking about at the beginning. Realized that one of the audiences I had not considered is… How to say this? It's a book about the beauty industry. It's a book about a beauty company destroying the world. I used to work in the beauty industry. I worked there for eight years. So for me, this was just a book. But once I identified how much more easily it was to sell a book about the beauty industry to women than to men, that entirely change the way that I started positioning my book.

[Howard] I've pointed out in the past when we've talked about the challenges between self-publishing and publishing through the agented model. It's the difference between can you sell your book to anybody out on the street, can you sell your book 1000 times, or can you sell your book once. Increasingly, I've come to realize that if you think you have the skill set to sell your book 1000 times, if you can make this pitch, if you can recognize your audience, if you can go, "Huh? You like big fat fantasy books? Well, there's one." And sell it. Then you probably have the skill set to take it to an agent, to take it to an editor, because you have already identified the audience for them. If you can convince them that you have already identified the audience… Correct me if I'm wrong, Dongwon, but I think they're really happy when that walks into the room.

[Dongwon] Absolutely. One thing I really want to get across, thank you for bringing this up, Howard, is that it's the same skill set. It's the same challenge, right? If you're self-publishing, if you're working with a small press or even with a big five press, positioning is still the same fundamental question. Who is this book for? How do we reach that audience? The only difference is how many people are working to solve that problem with you. If you're on your own, self-publishing, it's on you to figure it out. If you're good at that kind of stuff, you're going to do great in that market. If you don't know where to start with that, then what you're really going to have to do is find a bigger team who can help support you and help you answer some of those questions.

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to mention a podcast that we did in a previous season, which was with Michael Underwood, and that was Hand Selling Your Book. Which talks a lot about… That's a good one to go back and listen to, because it does talk a lot about the tools that you can use once you've identified the audience to kind of adjust your presentation for them. Then, the other thing that I just want to draw a line under is that when we're talking about audience, we are talking about being specific with who it is. It's not everybody, it's being super specific. Sometimes, the easiest way to do that is rather than think, "Ah, it's for women," think about a specific woman. Or a specific set of women that you know. Sometimes even bring them in as your early readers in the development process while you are… So that you are positioning in some ways from the get go.

 

[Howard] That brings us around quite nicely to the homework which Dongwon has for us.

[Dongwon] So, like I said, the central question in publishing is who is the book for. So what I'd like you guys to do is start figuring out a way to answer that question for yourself. This answer will evolve over time as you continue to write this book, as it enters the publishing process. But if you start now and you start early and decide who your reader is, that'll help you define all the other parts of your process. Including the writing process and the creative process. So what I'd like you to do is make a list of attributes of your target readership. Who is the demographic that this book is for? The best way to do that is using the comp titles. So you can use that as a proxy and help you start identifying who's the fan base for this book, how do I reach them, how do I identify them?

[Howard] Thank you, Dongwon. Thank you to our audience here on the Liberty of the Seas.

[Whoo! Applause]

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

 

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/01/14-35-what-you-leave-out/ 

 

Key Points: Worldbuilding an iceberg? Just build the tip of the iceberg, and make readers think the rest of it is there, too. Build what's needed for verisimilitude. Figure out where your scenes are set, then figure out what that looks like and how it works. What are you going to be using the most? What will my characters be directly interacting with? Give the reader information in ways that asks questions, instead of answers them. Use relationships to other events, rather than exact times. Leave it out, if it doesn't help the story. Think about what the book is, then do the research. Do you need to show the event happening or can you just tell the reader that the event happened and had an outcome? Sometimes, you don't want to go there. Postpone that decision until you need it! Be aware of the uncanny valley of worldbuilding -- far off, skip the details, it's okay, we got the broad strokes. Too close, too many details, and suddenly readers start asking questions. Don't fall into that valley! Watch out for the super-detailed realistic piece that makes everything else look fake. Focus on what you actually need to keep the story from falling apart. Avoid worldbuilding details that would ruin the story.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 35.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What You Leave Out.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pause]

[Howard] That probably wasn't what I was supposed to leave out, but go ahead.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] We all just sat there, going, "What is he? Oh!"

[Mary Robinette] And you are?

[Dan] I'm Dan, I guess.

[Howard] And I'm Howard. And unapologetic.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] All right. What you leave out.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled not amused]

[Brandon] So when I teach my students about this topic, one of the things I mention is when I was a newer writer, one of the things I got told frequently is that you want to, in worldbuilding, worldbuild a ton. But not put all of it in. Put enough of it in that the reader… You're indicating to the reader that it's like an iceberg, right? You can see the tip and you can see that there is so much more beneath. The more I became a published writer, the more I worked in it, the more I realized that that was… not a fantasy, but perhaps people in the business making it sound a little more grandiose than it is. Because most people I know do not worldbuild the entire iceberg and then show you the tip. What they do is they worldbuild the tip, and then they find a way to worldbuild a hollow iceberg that makes you think that there is the rest…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Underneath there. The goal in worldbuilding is not to do everything, just to do as little as you can and still look like you've done everything.

[Howard] Two nights ago, I was watching the special features for the movie Deepwater Horizon, for that film. They built an 85% scale oil rig over a little 3 foot deep pond. The reason they did it was so that when the actors were outside up high, shooting scenes, the actors are reacting as if they are outside and up high. They could have done the whole thing green screen, but they didn't. They needed that level of verisimilitude. Then there was this point where the VFX guy said, "So, we didn't actually build the whole oil rig. We only built the front." You see this scene where the helicopter is coming in and the camera has panned around the oil rig and it is just… Like 25%, 20% of the oil rig. Then the VFX says, "This is what we had to build," and throws all the other stuff in. After hearing how much time they spent building 20% of the oil rig for verisimilitude, the peace that they needed, this iceberg thing totally makes sense. Build the piece that's required for verisimilitude. Drill all the way down on that. Then fix the rest in post.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] So, how do we apply this to our worldbuilding? What do you guys do when you are worldbuilding? How do you give this indication that there's more underneath there? How do you decide what to leave out of your story? How do you decide what not to worldbuild?

[Dan] So, following along with this set building metaphor here, I remember reading an early interview with Gene Roddenberry when they were doing the original Star Trek series. He said that he wanted to have an engine room, and they weren't going to build him one, until he put that scene into the pilot episode. He's like, "Look, well, we have to have a scene here. I'm sorry, there's no way around it." So they gave him an engineering. What I do when I'm building my worlds and planning my books is I figure out, "Well, where are my scenes set? Where do I want those scenes to be set?" Am I going to be talking enough about main engineering, for example, that I need to figure out what it looks like and where it is and how it works, or is my story going to focus on some other thing? So they didn't build the entire, or even 20%, of the Starship Enterprise. They built a bridge and an engineering room and a transporter room, and that's kind of it. Maybe some hallways. Because that's where they knew their story was going to take place. So I try to figure out what am I focusing on, what am I going to be using the most, and that's what I focus on.

[Mary Robinette] I'm very much the same way. I really only worry about the things that my characters are going to be directly interacting with. I want to make sure that I understand enough of how they interact, of how it works, so that the interaction makes sense. But, like, when we move through our daily life, we interact with a lot of stuff that… There's a number of houses that you passed on the street and you have no idea what's in those houses. But they're still houses. You go to Disneyland. You don't actually know what it takes to make Disneyland work. It's just the front facing stuff. So one of the things that I do is that I think about the pieces that my character is going to have that direct interaction with, like you were talking about. One of the ones that I find works really well our past events. Referring to things… Usually these are things that I have no idea of what they actually are. But instead of saying, "Well, this happened in 1457." Like, I don't actually want to figure out how long ago a thing happened. I don't know. So I'll say, "Well, it happened during the… Right after the battle of the seven red armies." Everyone's like, "Oh, well, the battle of the seven red armies."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Clearly, she spent all of this time thinking about that. What that's done is it saved me from actually working out a timeline. Because I've… Now I can place the battle of the seven red armies anywhere I need to be.

[Dan] One of the things that that suggests to me is that you have given them the information in a way that asks more questions rather than answers them. That gives a gre… I mean, we know when it took place, but we know it based on a relation to an event rather than an exact number of years. In the audience's mind, it's not answering the question so much as it's saying, "Don't worry, I've got this. Also, here's something else to worry about."

 

[Brandon] Have you ever spent a lot of time in your worldbuilding before writing or during writing a story and then decided to leave that out of the story?

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.

[Brandon] When, why, and what made you make that decision?

[Mary Robinette] In the Glamorous Histories, for Without a Summer, I spent a great deal of time figuring out how Parliament worked in relationship to glamour, and what laws were being passed and not passed, and got into the novel and realized that that entire plot structure was completely irrelevant. I like knew… I had spent all of this research on this one particular historical figure who never appears in the novel now. It was basically, it just didn't help the book. Chucked it. It was one of the things that made me realize that I really need to think about what the book is and then do the research. I will say that I approach my research now the same way that I… I mean, I approach my worldbuilding the same way that I approach my research, which is that all do like these broad strokes, but I only really drill down on the stuff that I actually need to.

[Brandon] I spent a lot of time in the Stormlight Archive before I was writing it, working on the writing systems. The glyphs that they were going to draw and things like this. I left that all out because once I actually wrote the book and I looked back at the stuff I'd done, I realized I'm not an artist.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Beyond that, I'm not an expert in languages and… I just hired that out. So I took all the stuff I did… I didn't even give it to them. Because I'm like, "You know what, I'm going to use the text that I've written in the book." I'm going to give this to the artist and I'm going to say, "What would you imagine this to be?" Isaac came up with stuff that was waaay better than any of the stuff that I had come up with. It kind of taught me, also, that maybe I should spend my effort where I know I'm going to be using it in the story, and then I can, after the fact, I can hire some of these things out.

[Dan] Brandon, you and I just did this yesterday, actually, on the project we're collaborating on. The Apocalypse Guard. We've been wrestling with this book for months now, and yesterday made the decision that kind of the main thing we need to do to fix it is to axe one of the magic systems.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] It was something very cool that we considered foundational to the story, but now that we're looking at the book in its current form, it's kind of beside the point.

[Brandon] It's also the thing that is causing the biggest problem with the story, because where the story is spiraling out of control are all these scenes where I spent lengthy amounts of time talking about the worldbuilding and the history. Scenes that Dan cut out a lot of when he did his revision.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But the effect of it's still there. It's leading to this big confusing ending where I have… Do what I do, tie all these worldbuilding elements together. But in ways that were cool for those worldbuilding elements and don't really work for the story.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] It's a point where we have to cut out… One of the things that is my signature is a magic system. Granted, we have multiples. So it's still going to be cool. But it's going to be a way better book if we just streamline.

[Howard] My approach here is often to ask where the line is between show versus tell. There are times in the story where it's absolutely required for the reader, because it's fun, because there's emotional content, whatever, to show an event happening. Then there are times when all the reader needs is to know that the event happened and there was an outcome. So entire scenes will vanish from the writing, because what I needed to do, with the story needed, was for somebody to say, "Battle was fought. So-and-so won." "Oh, really, that sounds terrible." And off we go with the core story.

 

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

[Mary Robinette] All right. So our book of the week is Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder. I got to read this, an arc of it. It is fantastic. This is near future. It's an Internet of Things. A young woman discovers that her father has been murdered. She thinks. Everyone else thinks that it was a… Just an accident. Then people start coming after her. How do you disappear when everything is connected? So it's really, really cool. It feels like he has thought of everything. But the stuff that we're actually seeing is just the stuff that she interacts with directly. It's great worldbuilding, great characterization. I mean, it's a really good book. It also happens to illustrate some of these points.

[Brandon] Excellent. That was Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder.

 

[Brandon] So, we've talked about worldbuilding elements that we cut out. Are there ever things that you have decided even before you launch into the book, you're like, "I'm just not going to touch that. I'm not going to go that direction with the worldbuilding." Things that you just… Why have you done this?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, like in the Lady Astronaut books, I very carefully do not talk about what the rocket engine is that is driving this ship to Mars. I like really carefully do not talk about that. Because of the amount of research that I was going to have to do. But also, my character is not a rocket engineer. Right? She pilots things. She needs to know how to pilot things, and she does math. So, she needs to do those things. But I did not need to know how the rocket engine worked. And as soon as I worked on figuring that out, that was going to lock me into certain decisions. Like, if I decide that it is atomic oxygen, that locks me into one line of technology. If I decide that it is nuclear, that locks me into another line of technology. Because I don't know what subsequent books are going to need, I decided to not make that decision and to leave room for it to be any of those things, and just… I establish some trust with the reader early on, so that I can just… Like, just get in there and…

[Brandon] You know…

[Mary Robinette] It's like, they're going to Mars. Obviously, they've solved how they get there.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I had a conversation with this… About this same topic with a writer that I know… That we were kind of brainstorming on some worldbuilding and things. The way I presented it as there's like an uncanny valley of worldbuilding where at a certain point, it's far off, and you're leaving out the right details from what we're doing so that nobody starts to question really how it works. Like, if you don't do enough, people are confused and you start to lose them. You do the right amount, and people are willing to take your word on it. They suspend their disbelief, they accept the worldbuilding, it feels really logical to them, you've got the couple of corner cases that they would assume. Then there's a stage where you start explaining it so much that the rational part of their brain kicks in and says, "Well, wait a minute. This and this and this and this," and you start to hit this sort of uncanny valley where suddenly you lose them. They aren't willing to suspend their disbelief anymore. That can be a really fine balance to walk.

[Mary Robinette] We have this problem in theater, with… All the time. Where you've got a set, and if you go very minimalist with it, you're asking the audience to be engaged. You go too minimalist with some shows, and everything falls apart. But if you've got like a set where everything looks really nice, and then there's this one piece that is hyper realistic, everything else in the story feels just awful. Beauty and the Beast, the animation… When they had… That was the first stuff of the computer animation…

[Dan] They introduced CG in the ballroom scene.

[Mary Robinette] The ballroom scene looks… It looks wrong, because it is more rendered than everything else. Then everything else starts to look false.

[Dan] I did a black box production of Assassins in college. It was all just super minimal sets, but we had a super realistic like rolltop desk, and it just… It looked terrible. Because it made the rest of the show looked terrible.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite pieces of set design that I ever did… This is a side tangent, but a good example. A friend of mine called me on a… On Monday and said, "We had a reading this weekend and are set designer did not show up with the set. I have just found out that she has skipped town with all of the money which she has spent on drugs. We open on Friday. Help me. I have $75."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I'm like, "Okay." We sat down and we talked about what are the things that have to be on stage or the show will fall apart. It was a tree, the moon, and a wall. That was basically it. So I bought some foamcore, and I got some paint, and I did this dry brush minimalist New Yorker style thing of a tree, a moon, and the wall. I think I gave him a chair, too. As a bonus.

[Dan] 'Cause you're a benevolent god.

[Howard] You had eight dollars left.

[Mary Robinette] I still had eight dollars. I had to get paid out of that $75, you know. So I… But we stripped it down to what you actually need or the show will fall apart. When the review came out, it raved about the minimalist design and delicate ethereal touches of the set. Meanwhile, in the program, I am listed as scene proctologist, because I pulled that set out of my ass.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, point being, just look at the worldbuilding details that you need to keep the show from falling apart.

[Dan] Well, it can also be helpful to look at the worldbuilding details that would ruin things. When I did my cyberpunk series, I specifically avoided artificial intelligence. There's algorithms, there's swarm intelligence, but there is no self-aware thing because that is a singularity that I was not prepared to deal with. So, that's not in the story, it's not a possible technology in that world.

 

[Brandon] This story of Mary Robinette's actually leads us really well into our homework. Which Howard is going to give us.

[Howard] Yup. I want you to take your worldbuilding slider and I want you to pull it all the way to zero for one of your chapters. Take a chapter that's got some worldbuilding exposition in it, that's got some cues about what's going on in your world that are deepening things, and pull all those out. Leave yourself with zero worldbuilding. Have a look at that chapter and see which elements of the story fail and which elements of the story still work. This is not so that you can tell yourself that you don't need to worldbuild. This is so you can tell yourself… What the…

[Dan] I need a tree and a moon and a wall…

[Howard] I need a tree and a moon and a wall, and I will give myself a chair.

[Mary Robinette] As a bonus, in the liner notes, I'm going to give you a copy of the first scene of Shades of Milk and Honey in which I have done this exercise. So I have stripped out everything that I identified as exposition. I have to say, that scene is a mess.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/18/14-33-writing-imperfect-worlds/

 

Key points: Writing a setting where underlying ideas aren't what you believe? Imperfect, flawed worlds, with cultural ideas or norms that you don't agree with? We write these to help understand the imperfections of our world and how to solve them. Popular genre, with a flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair as the big bad guy. Take an imperfection in our world and push it. If you are writing historicals, beware of telling the reader that "this is okay." You might try to lampshade it, to have the protagonist stand against the prevailing attitudes. But they need to have spots where they are ignorant or unaware, which they confront. Fiction about imperfect worlds can give us a script, a lens, that we can use in the real world. When writing stories in a historical period or fantasy world, don't just pretend that problems weren't there, don't rewrite history by ignoring the issues. Instead, be aware of the unjust imbalances, the ramifications, the external costs. To write a character who is a realistic product of a society with biases we would consider reprehensible, make sure to include someone who can call them on their bullshit. Give the reprehensible traits real consequences. Think through why they have these beliefs or opinions. Don't give the protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they are the protagonist.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 33.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Imperfect Worlds.

[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] I'm going to ask you, how do you write a setting in which the pervasive ideas, cultural ideas or cultural norms, are not ones that you think should be?

[Mary Robinette] That's basically my entire existence with every piece of fiction I write because I am a woman in modern-day America.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You said imperfect. Any piece of nonfiction is inherently going to be the writing of an imperfect world. I would say that the question you're asking is more along the lines of writing deeply flawed worlds.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Howard] In order to help us… And I guess this isn't part of your question, it'd be part of my answer… You write these in order to help us better understand the imperfections of our own world and how we might go about solving them.

[Margaret] Well, I think we've seen a lot of popularity of this genre in recent world… In recent years. I mean, what else is something like The Hunger Games? They've created this deeply flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair. It exists to give Katniss something that's worth fighting against. It's… There's that… You're setting up a big bad guy and there's no bigger bad guy than society.

[Mary Robinette] Handmaid's Tale is another good example. A lot of times what you're looking at here is taking an imperfection in our world and pushing it, when you're creating a science fictional society. I write a lot of historical stuff, which is going into areas where… Like the 1950s, Jim Crow is still very much a thing. The Glamorous Histories. Regency England, which we all love, is built on a base of slavery. So these are things that… One of the challenges is writing it in such a way that it doesn't tell the reader this is okay and valorizes it.

[Brandon] Right.

[Margaret] I know one time when Madman was coming out, I think it was like season one or season two, and I watched a couple of episodes. I'm like, "Hey, mom, have you ever watched Madman?" Her response was, "No, thank you. I lived it." I had… It's not necessarily the imperfect world. Eh, it is not relevant. I need not cite this example.

 

[Brandon] Right. Okay. So, I would say the first thing that I have tried when I did this is kind of lampshade it. It can be difficult because I think your first instinct is to have your protagonist be the person who is not as sexist or racist or ist as the culture around them. Which, to be perfectly honest, I'm okay with picking up a story and then reading it and being like, "Oh." Because there were people, even back in Regency times, who were like, "This is not okay."

[Mary Robinette] The anti-… The whole abolitionist movement there.

[Brandon] That is certainly one approach to it, and I actually kind of appreciate, like, Mary, that you walk that line. I would say a lot of times your protagonists are several steps further along than the average person, but they are… They still have blind spots that they end up usually getting confronted by in the story. So it's not this perfect character who has no problems, but at the same time, it makes me sympathetic towards the character because at least they have the blinders a little bit further open. It kind of makes me think, "You know, I probably still have my blinders on to an extent."

[Mary Robinette] In fact, you're doing that right now, with blinder and blind as a pejorative term.

[Brandon] Okay. Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of those things that I have worked very hard to train out of my own vocabulary, and talk about spots where I'm ignorant. Spots where I have lack of knowledge or lack of awareness. But it is… It's very easy when you're writing these to trip up on stuff that society has imprinted you with. So one of the fun things about doing this, one of the reasons to do that, is to interrogate these things and to look at them and sort of hold them up to the lens and use science fiction and fantasy to tip them to the side.

[Margaret] For me, where I hit the line is where I'm reading a book… Because sometimes it's fun to read books that take place in worlds that are not like ours. That's why we read fantasy and science fiction. Sometimes it's even fun to read stories in a pseudo-medieval setting where gender equity is stepped back from where it is today, shall we say? For me, where I reach the line is where I start to feel as if I've started to read a Prussian porn. It's like this was just written to talk about oh, how terrible it was to be X in X time, or in this scenario. I love Bujold's The Curse of Chalion books. It's like there is a lot of sexism and allusion to sexual violence in those. It's not explicit, but there is this kind of threat of your main character being a woman, there's stuff that she is worried about. For me, that doesn't cross the line. Everyone places their lines in different places where there comfortable reading, but it's not a story that's about like, "Oh, no, I'm going out into the world. What's going to happen to me now?"

 

[Howard] In the… Around 2015, the Schlock Mercenary installments, our cast finds a giant, abandoned station if you will, world-sized, that makes them incredibly wealthy. In the 2018-2019 installments, the original inhabitants turn out to never have left and they want their stuff back. Yes, you can take a step back and look at this and say, "Oh, my gosh, this is exactly like what would happen if the indigenous peoples of the Americas or Australia or wherever rose up and demanded all of their land back. What would we do?" Well, it's not exactly like that. But having the protagonist deal with it in a way that says, "You know what, they're right. This isn't my stuff. It's their stuff. Not a whole lot I can do about that." We now have an enormous debt, which is part of our plot problem. The story is not about returning things to indigenous peoples. The story is about we made an enormous budgeting mistake and now we have problems to solve. It's fun to write and having a protagonist who recognizes, "Oh. Somebody lives here. Actually still does live here." And immediately said, "Well, okay. That's…"

 

[Mary Robinette] A lot of times what I think fiction is doing, and especially when we're dealing with imperfect worlds, is it's giving us a script that we can use and take into the real world. One of the things that I do that is actually the opposite of writing imperfect world is that I tend to write happily committed married couples. I do that because I so rarely see it in fiction. I see a lot of people who have taken their social cues from these narratives about men who are stalkers and men who are abusive. It's like that's not the relationship that you should be aiming for. So when you deal with an imperfect world and you have a character who is coming to grips with their own imperfections, it gives the reader a script and a lens with which to interrogate their own stuff. I know that I… That's certainly one of the things, the side effects, that happens when I read. It is one of the things that I think fiction and science fiction and fantasy particularly do very well.

 

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

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I've been talking a lot, but I'll talk some more. So, The Fated Sky is the second book in my Lady Astronaut series. The reason I suggested this book for the book of the week is because it is set in the 1950s. It is set in the heart of the civil rights era. It is dealing with a lot of the problems that are inherent in the world at that time. My main character, Elma, is not actually a completely reliable narrator. It's first person narration. There's another character who has been her antagonist for the entire book. As this book unfolds, we find that as she is interrogating her assumptions, that… And he is interrogating his, that there is… There's actually more common ground than either of them thought. But the big thing for me with this is the idea of the narratives that we bring into relationships. That when we are describing our relationships to someone else, it's like, "Oh. I hate him, he hates me." That's the narrative. That's part of what happens with an imperfect world is that it's built by people who come with their own narratives that they're applying to just stuff that happens.

[Brandon] I haven't read the second one yet, but I've read the first one. The first one deals with the same sort of thing, and I loved it.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Brandon] It is one of those… It was just really, really interesting and fun to read, and eye-opening at the same time.

[Mary Robinette] I suppose I should mention that this is a book about going to Mars in the 1950s when women are the computers because we don't… Haven't miniaturized computers yet.

[Margaret] But with punchcards.

[Mary Robinette] With punchcards.

[Brandon] It's an alternate history.

[Mary Robinette] An alternate history. And imperfect… There is an entire chapter that is nothing but clean… Zero G toilet repair.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Selling point.

[Howard] Do you use the word milk dud?

[Mary Robinette] No, but we do talk about satellites in orbit.

[Howard] Okay.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So. Veering back…

[Laughter]

[Margaret] I'm just remembering all of the rocketry euphemisms in the first book. I'm like, what euphemism?

 

[Brandon] What do you guys… Do you have an opinion on stories that are set in a historical period or in a fantasy world that just tries to pretend the problem was never there? Meaning people who want to write a steampunk story and just say, "You know what, we're going to write an alternate history version where this isn't an issue." Or people who write a fantasy novel, where they say, "You know what, in my world, racism just isn't an issue. We're not going to deal with it."

[Mary Robinette] The thing is… There are parts of me that love these optimistic visions of the world. I think when you're doing steampunk and doing that, you actually have to move it to a different world. You can't just erase history. That is deeply problematic. It's taking a lot of people's pain and going, "Ah, I just don't want to deal with your pain, so I'm not going to. I'm not going to acknowledge that you've been hurt. I'm just going to… Goggles, dresses, and overalls! Whee!"

[Brandon] Right. Can I… I don't want to… But this is… This is something that is very natural to start doing, and is a place where you might end up having to confront some of your biases because natural human instinct is, "Oh, I'll make it better. Isn't it just better…"

[Margaret] If that never happened?

[Brandon] If that never happened?

[Mary Robinette] While, yes, that would be… It did happen. The other thing that I would say has just slipped out of my head, so, Margaret, you talk, since you had a thing you wanted to say.

[Margaret] I was saying that I don't want to say that you can… It's like, "Oh." I think a trap that one can fall into in, say, steampunk or historical period, and you know that racism was a problem or sexism was a problem, but you don't want to deal with that. The way to not deal with not dealing with that is to not have, say, any characters of color in your book, so that lets you ignore racism.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] That's a bad way of dealing with that.

[Mary Robinette] Don't do that.

[Margaret] I mean, clearly, if you're doing steampunk, you're creating an alternate history. There were not giant rail lines of flying zeppelins. I don't even know why you'd have a rail line if you were flying, but… 

[Mary Robinette] But still… 

[Margaret] Whatever, it wasn't there. But if that's the only thing you've changed, and everybody is also still white and upper-class and… Who is shoveling coal and how are we thinking about this?

[Mary Robinette] That, for me, is the thing that… Unfortunately, as a species, we tend to just always other people. If we're not going to do it along race lines or gender lines, we're going to find something else. There is always, unfortunately, going to be oppression. I wish that that were not the case, but I find it difficult to believe that there wouldn't be some form of oppression. So when you decide that it's like, "You know what, I'm not going to have racism." But there will still be some other… It's like there's something, unfortunately, is going to fill that gap. There's going to be…

[Howard] There needs to be an unjust imbalance somewhere.

[Mary Robinette] There's going to be ramifications of that choice.

[Margaret] It's ignoring the fact that this lifestyle was made possible because of an oppressed underclass.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Honestly, folks, and this is uncomfortable truth to hear, it's still the case.

[Margaret] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Like, the majority of the wealth in the world is in the United States, and even if you are poor, there are people in the world who are supporting your lifestyle who have it worse than you.

[Howard] There's a concept that super useful for trying to understand the unjust imbalances. Marginalizations. That is the concept of an external cost. If you want to write a flawed society, think about what the external cost is. A good example of external cost is secondhand smoke. I want to smoke. Yes, it cost me something, and it also makes everyone around me uncomfortable, and it changes the smell of the room, and that one's kind of obvious. What if the cigarette smoker couldn't get cancer, and there is no primary cost for them? Suddenly, we have an unjust imbalance that's really unjust. So look at external costs, and as you are creating your society, your secondary world fantasy, your far-flung future, ask yourself who benefits from the external cost and who is paying the external cost unjustly.

 

[Brandon] So, last question along this topic. You want to write a protagonist who is a product of their society, and therefore has certain biases that we would consider reprehensible. You don't want to… Say you're writing a historical novel. You want to be realistic, although sometimes realism is used as an excuse for things, as we've talked about before. But you want to… You want to be realistic. You don't want this character to be villainous, but you also want them to be a product of their society. Any tips?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I do is to always have someone that can comment or call them on their bullshit.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Because that's one of the ways that you can let the reader know that this character is reprehensible, but that you are not giving approval to that. Because there's a difference between the character being reprehensible and the text saying that that reprehensible trait is a good and positive thing. So having someone who can call them on it, having there be consequences for the reprehensible traits, these are things that I think can help when you're doing that. The other aspect of that is trying to understand why the character has those opinions. Sometimes it's just the way they were raised and imprinted and they have no idea that those things are false or bad or problematic. Sometimes it's… More frequently, when you're dealing with forms of oppression, there is a sense of safety that has been challenged in some way, and that they think, by maintaining this particular status quo, that they will maintain their own security. Or that they will lose something if the status quo shifts. So if you think about the why's of their choices and their opinions, that's going to help you have a character that isn't just "I have this terr… I'm evil." Yeah, evilness is evil.

[Margaret] I'm thinking also if you have a protagonist who is a product of an imperfect society, and being a product, you want to be able to say, "Well, yes, they probably hold some of these imperfect views." What I would be careful of is making sure, since I'll probably have other characters of the society who probably have similar views who are villains, making sure I'm not giving my protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they happen to be the protagonist.

[Brandon] That's a very good point. Yeah.

[Margaret] It's like, "He's a great guy, so it's okay that…" That's where I think it can get really sticky.

 

[Brandon] Yeah. I'm going to give us our homework today. Your homework's actually to take a character who is either in some media form or someone you have written who is a wish fulfillment character. This is a character for whom things have gone really well. Things might be easy. They're at the top of their power structure. Even though they might be facing very hard external problems in the form of slaying a dragon or rising to the head of their company or something like this, there are certainly obstacles to them, they are in a position where they're able to command a lot of weight of authority and privilege. Take that character, and move them to the bottom of a different power structure or put them in a place where suddenly those things no longer exist for them. See where that story goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/06/14-31-cultural-setting-as-conflict/

 

Key Points: To some extent, every story has some aspect of characters in conflict with their setting. Consider conflict as either a desire to move or resistance to being moved. Also, I don't like the way this is built, and I want to change it. A.k.a, ideals in conflict with reality. Immigrants are automatically in cultural conflict. Children of immigrants, growing up, face a challenge between what their parents want and what the culture around them teaches. Nobody represents 100% of their culture, we are all slightly in conflict. But don't use this as the main conflict, use it to make the characters more well-rounded. Start with a character in friction with their society, then let the main plot smash into them. Cultural conflict may not drive a story, but it often grounds us in the character. One story archetype is the person who doesn't fit saves society. Consider sensory writing -- what senses show the conflict of character and culture? What are the standard conversational moves that the character doesn't know? Casual or respect? Use conflict with your culture to add layers to the plot and enrich your story.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 31.

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

[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] Cultural setting as conflict. A little preface here. This is using my definitions for worldbuilding. I define physical worldbuilding as all this stuff that exists if human beings or sapient races weren't around, and cultural setting is all the stuff that they create. I think I announced that last month, too. But just so you know, when I say cultural setting for this particular podcast, we're talking about all of this. Religion, linguistics, economics, all of this stuff. We want to talk about how to put your characters in conflict with their setting, and with their culture. Obviously, this is one of the great ways to tell a story. In fact, I think every story that I write has some aspect of a character in conflict with their setting.

[Howard] I think the easiest place to start with this is to look at the conflict as either a desire to move or a resistance against being moved. For instance, if you are a member of the wealthy class, you do not want wealth to be redistributed, because that is moving you into a different place. If you are impoverished, perhaps you want to move into a different class. Those two work within whatever framework of the culture may exist. I mean, whether it's economic or gender or racial or multi-species or whatever. I want to move or someone is trying to move me, is one of the easiest ways to define the conflict. The other big one is I don't like the way this is built. I want to change it so that everybody can move. Or nobody has to move. Or something.

[Brandon] Right. Putting your ideals in conflict with the actual reality of the system.

[Mahtab] You know what, the very fact… Just from personal experience, the very fact that I'm an immigrant in Canada is straightaway a cultural conflict. Because there are certain things that I'm used to doing in India, there are certain traditions that we follow, certain norms. But take that out and put me in a North American setting or a Canadian setting, and all of a sudden, I want to follow certain things, but I cannot. So, I mean, just… For example, I love cooking Indian food. When I first came to Canada and the winters were cold, I would cook with the doors closed. I would be smelling like a day-old samosa. Maybe a week-old samosa. Then you'd go out into the world and you would have people just kind of… I was nose blind, but people would wonder, "Does she not know what she smells like?"

[Howard] What is that smell?

[Mahtab] It took me a while. I mean, I had to get onto an elevator with someone who was a lot more fragrant than I was till it hit me. So, the fact is, I can still cook Indian food, but even in the midst of an Ontario winter, I have to have all the doors and all the windows open… Not the doors. All the windows open, proper ventilation, and then… So it's just like… The fact is that you can have conflict if you just take someone who's used to following a certain cultural norm, put them in a different setting, and that's it. Also, with kids growing up. When, especially, the kids are young, the parents are not very well educated or not very well integrated into a certain culture. They are still holding to the old norms, whereas the kids who are growing up are now influenced by the culture they are growing up in. They are treading a very fine line between what should I follow, because this is what my parents want, and this is what my friends and teachers and everyone are doing. It can be huge. I mean, I've seen a lot of teens go through a lot of anguish because of that.

[Dan] There was a really cool movie a couple years ago, and I can never remember the title of anything. Sorry. That was about a group of Korean American teenagers, all of them first-generation Americans, who went to like a cultural summer camp. Their Korean families are like, "You need to know about our culture from back in the old country, so you're all going to go to this thing." It was just fascinating to watch that whole dynamic play out as they were trying to embrace their roots while also staying true to who they had become. There is a lot of cool compelling stuff that can be pulled out of this.

[Brandon] Is it called Seoul Searching?

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] I just googled it for you.

[Dan] Seoul Searching, Seoul being the pun. Ha ha ha.

 

[Brandon] I… It's interesting to think about this, because nobody 100% represents all aspects of their culture. None of us do. Which is this weird thing to think about, in that there is this nebulous sort of culture, right? Whichever set of culture… Religious culture or whatever. Society. There's nobody that is that thing. We are all not aligned exactly to everything in that culture. So we're all going to be slightly in conflict with our culture. There's not a person who isn't. We're just going to be in conflict with it in different ways. I think as writers, sometimes, we want to make this the main conflict of the story. Sometimes it's appropriate to do so. Sometimes this is what our story is about. But I think in every story, these sorts of things are what's… Are the sorts of things that are going to make your characters become well-rounded and feel real. People often ask me, "How do I make well-rounded characters?" Our kind of cliché but true response is don't write them to a role in a story, write them as they are and make the story kind of come along and make things messy for them. I think this is one of the ways you indicate this is these characters are going to be having friction with their society and culture, even before whatever the main plot of your story is comes along and smashes into them.

[Howard] It's not uncommon… I say it's not uncommon. I can't actually think of any examples off the top of my head. But you have a protagonist whose motivation is I want to fit in with my family. Or I want to get a promotion. It's very cultural, but then they are thrown into an adventure that has nothing to do with fitting in with their family or getting a promotion. At the end of the adventure, they have changed or their family have changed or the corporation has changed, and they have the thing that they need. So the cultural conflict there is not necessarily what's driving the story, but it's what's grounding us in the character.

[Dan] One of the books that I talked about last month, A Memory Called Empire. Like I said, it's a political story and it's a murder mystery, but the main character is an ambassador from one tiny nation who has gone to this massive Empire. What's fascinating about her attempt to fit in is that she loves their culture. So it's specifically kind of has this subplot in there of you're the big evil empire that's trying to consume my little nation, but I love your art, I love your stories that you tell, and I watch your TV shows all the time. It added a really interesting dimension of that cultural conflict.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do our book of the week.

[Mahtab] Right. So, the book of the week that I'd like to recommend is one that has been written by yours truly. It's called Mission Mumbai. This is a story of a friendship between two boys. One of them is an Indian, Rohit Lal, one of them is an American, Dylan Moore. They have a friendship that is based on their love of reading fantasy novels. But it's a very fragile friendship. When they take a trip to India, that is when they realize that there is a certain amount of jealousy involved. Their friendship is not as strong as they expected it to be. But one of the reasons that I love having written this story is that I take someone from a North American culture and put him into the Indian culture. Which is just as alien as having gone to a totally different place. I give both the boys certain problems. It's only when… Their friendship is stretched really, really thin, and it's only when both the boys decide to put aside their own issues and help one another is when their friendship becomes a lot stronger. So it's a coming-of-age, it's a friendship, it's a loyalty story. But it's also a fun way of exploring India from your own room.

[Howard] Less expensive than plane tickets.

[Mahtab] Absolutely.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Howard] That's Mission Mumbai.

 

[Brandon] For this podcast's second half, let's kind of try to drill into the why… Or the hows. The nitty-gritty details of how to use conflict with culture as plots in your stories. I'll give an example. Oftentimes, I notice that in films and in books, one of the things you do at the beginning is show the character not fitting in as a method of showing what their kind of arc is going to be. They're the person that doesn't fit into their society. Taking classic Disney movies, if we look at Mulan. Mulan doesn't start with her out sword fighting. It starts with her not fitting into the society of gender roles and the marriage rituals and things that she's expected to participate in as a way to reinforce that she's kind of outside her culture. So that when she leaves to go do something very different from what someone in her situation would do, you believe that she would do this. Because she obviously doesn't quite fit in. Then, the whole story is about this idea of the person who doesn't fit in being the one who saves the society. You see this used a ton. It's a really great story archetype. It's used in Dragonlance, it's used in a lot of different stories. It's one of those ways you use someone in conflict with their setting in a small way to inform your entire story.

 

[Howard] We talk about sensory writing quite a bit. Mahtab, you described the way you smell when you've been cooking. The smells of things, the colors of things. When you're uncomfortable with a culture, if you've been dropped someplace where you are not comfortable, which of your senses are uncomfortable? Which… Where are you feeling the conflict? Is it because it's too loud? Is it because it's too quiet? Is it because it doesn't smell like you want it to smell? Is it because the flavor of the food that makes you comfortable just isn't available anywhere? Is it because you're one of those people who is genetically unable to appreciate cilantro? Because there's a group of people for whom cilantro is just terrible. These sorts of… And Indian food, which I love, and I love cilantro too, has lots of cilantro in it. So you got this whole class of people who are genetically unable to appreciate the thing that you cook, Mahtab. Those senses are a great way to ground us in a character's fitting in or not fitting in. How much you love the smell? How much you love the color? How it feels like being embraced to all your senses?

[Mahtab] One of the things that I also felt or experienced when I came here is that there is a whole unspoken language which is just by looks and gestures, and some things that are… I mean, just to give an example. Whenever you start a conversation, now, I'm not saying that it's not done in India, but over here you discuss the weather a lot. In India, all you have is rain and heat.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] So you really do not open a conversation with, "Oh, we're having a really nice day today." So when I was doing sales and I was on calls, I would be like, "Hello. I'm calling from so-and-so and just wanted to talk to you about XYZ." I was told, "Nonono. You're supposed to talk about the weather," and this and a TV series going on or something. Or a little bit of the news. So, the thing is that in terms of making the story or the character a little bit more layered, it's not just the sensory, which is very, very important. But it's also the unspoken stuff that the… The norms that the culture that you're in follows, which is not quite what you do. So there are lots of clues that you have to pick up which are not… Sometimes, may be told to you, but sometimes you just have to observe. It took me at least a few years of observing, or being corrected or being told that this is what you're supposed to be doing. Again, I had no idea about time zones. I remember calling someone at 6 o'clock in the morning from the East Coast to the West Coast…

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] I'm like, "Hi." He says, "Do you know it's 6 o'clock?" I'm like, "Why did you pick up the phone, then?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] When I went to Korea for the first time, the thing I kept getting in trouble with is, Americans can be very casual with how they give things to one another. Which is nothing… Something I hadn't ever thought about. But, in Korea, a lot of people expect you… If you're going to give something… Just, like, if you say, "Hey, pass me a roll," that you're going to hand it and present it to them as a gift, with two hands.

[Mahtab] Two hands, yes.

[Dan] Two?

[Brandon] Two hands, and kind of respectfully. Whereas Americans, we'd be like, "Hey. Roll!" I did that to someone. They're like… I'm like, "Hey. Roll!" And threw it. They were like hugely offended. This was a teenager my age, but that is just not something you do in that culture. It was one of those things I had to really get used to. The kind of casualness versus respectfulness.

[Howard] I have to remember not to ask anybody to pass me the bread in Nebraska.

[Garbled] [without having my eyes open. Boom!]

 

[Dan] Just throw it at you. The Asian market where I shop, even the receipt. They will pull it out. They'll rip it off the thing. Fold it, and hand it to you with two hands. Because that is how you're supposed to do it. One of my very favorite cultural stories is a TV show called The Americans. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. It's Soviet spies, sleeper agents, living in the United States in the 1980s. So every episode has like an espionage story, but the overall story it's telling is how do these people who are like trained, practically brainwashed to hate America, how do they live and fit in and look and act like Americans.

[Howard] I grew up during the 80s. I would not want the job…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Of fitting in in the 80s. Oh, man.

[Dan] It's just a really compelling thing. They're doing a lot of the stuff that we're talking about. Where they will confront situations where they would do something the way it would be normal to them. Obviously, they have been trained in American culture, but it comes off wrong. Or they react the wrong way to something and they have to remember, "Oh, no. I'm American. I have to treat this like an American, not like a Russian." It's just really, really interesting, and really well done.

[Howard] There are a lot of cultural dialect sorts of things, whether it's jargon or just dialect things. In the UK, just now means immediately prior. What was that noise? A bookcase fell over just now. In South Africa, just now means really soon, about to happen. Yes… Not really soon, but kind of soon. I'll be there just now. I'm on my way, I'll be there just now. Are you in a hurry? Okay, fine, I'll be there now now. Okay, I like now now as a construct. When I first heard it, I thought, "Well, that's brilliant. That's a great way to say ASAP." But these sorts of things, if you don't… I don't want to crossover too much into the language discussion we'll be having later. But there have been a lot of times, especially online, where all participate in an online chat about a game and realize, "There is a jargon here." Somebody just threw a string of characters, and they are very clearly making a request, and I do not know how to respond, because there's like six acronyms in there.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And I don't know what any of them stand for.

[Mahtab] I would just like to say here that conflict with your culture is important, but don't make that the focal point of your story. Just use that to flavor it, to add layers to the plot which would make it richer. But don't make that the focus of the story. Because that would be too kind of clichéd or stereotyped, and you're just going to end up going a very predictable path. But use that to just enrich the narrative.

 

[Brandon] So, we're out of time on this, but we will come back later in the year and do an episode on worldbuilding culture and mores, so you can look forward to that. I have our homework this week. I'm quite tickled with this one. I want you to clone yourself and make an entire planet of clones of you. I want you to decide what the culture would be like if everyone on the planet were you. Then, I want you to create a trading post with this planet where people off world who are not you have to trade with you and what they have to go through in order to make trade deals with an entire planet of you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There's going to be a war, and my planet's going to get wiped clean…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Very, very quickly.

[Dan] The galaxy will decide we can't let this planet hang around any longer.

[Howard] Nope.

[Mahtab] I am going to try that prompt.

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

 

 

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.

 

 

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.