From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/10/14-10-magic-systems/

 

Key points: How do you go about designing magic for a book or story? With younger readers, you can get away with a softer magic system. I drew on Indian mythology, but then change or craft it to fit. Hard = rules, crunchy. Soft = more free-form, less description. Take something from mythology or folklore, and turn it into a system. Think about what the readers are looking for -- wish fulfillment, fun, aspirational geewhiz. They want escapism, a world of new experiences, but where they can still identify with the problems and conflicts. Don't forget the flipside, the speculative what if and social exploration. Why do we like favorite magic systems? Essentially giant puzzles. A visual component to the magic. The immediate combination of "it would be cool to do this" and "Oh, wow, the implications are really frightening." Surprising, yet inevitable fulfilling of promises. Collecting plot coupons! Knowing what it would be like to experience or confront the magic.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 10.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Magic Systems.

[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. Why are you laughing?

[Mahtab] And I'm Mahtab.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I'm laughing because she copied our vocal intonation.

[Laughter]

[Dan] It was really funny.

[Howard] Okay. You know what I do when I'm traveling in a foreign country? I start to sound like them. We are aliens and… Welcome, Mahtab.

[Laughter]

[Dan] [garbled cool aliens house]

[laughter]

 

[Howard] One of my alien powers is to invent magic systems.

[Dan] Ooo… Talk about that.

[Howard] Did that bring us back on topic, Brandon?

[Brandon] Yes, it did. Before we started this, Howard looked at me and said, "Brandon, you're not going to just talk this whole time, are you?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because you could.

[Brandon] We decided together…

[Dan] Probably what the listeners want. Tough.

[Brandon] No, it's… We… I have written a bunch of essays on magic systems. We're not going to touch on the things in those essays. Because we've covered them in episodes of Writing Excuses, I've talked about them at length. Instead, we're going to kind of talk to the side of them. So if you want to read those essays, Sanderson's Laws, you can go find them. You can read them. Instead, I want to ask… I'm going to start with Mahtab. How did you go about designing the magic in The Third Eye or in any of the stories you've worked on?

[Mahtab] Well, first of all, because I'm writing for middle grade, I do not need to have too many hard facts or go at extreme length in terms of describing the system. I think you can… With younger readers, you can get away with doing a softer magic system, where… So one of the influences that I had was the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That was one of my absolute favorite novels that I read. Things are not really explained. When Aslan sacrifices himself to save Edmund, and then he dies, and he's on this Stone Table which breaks, and that is some deep magic related to Christianity and sacrifice. I didn't know all of that. I totally didn't understand. But, I mean, I felt that wonder when he came back alive, and the kids went back with him. So, as far as mine, when I was writing The Third Eye, I drew a lot on Indian mythology. So one of the… Well, the main character's Tara, who is a young child, but the mean villain is Zarku, who is an evil character and he hypnotizes people with his third eye, which I borrowed directly from the god Shiva, who has a third eye. Except that Shiva uses it to burn evil things, whereas I actually gave that quality to my evil protagonist, who could hypnotize people and make them do things. I had a couple of really gruesome scenes which kids kind of love and the parents hated. Which is fine by me, as long as they picked up the book to read.

[Howard] But, you know what, that's the mark of a really good book for kids.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Kids love it, and their parents hate it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You've done society a great service.

[Mahtab] Thank you. That's actually the one book that won the Silver Birch, which is a reading program in Ontario, and it kind of kick started my career. I was really happy about that. So I drew a lot on Indian mythology. Even when Tara has to solve problems, she prays to Lord Ganesh and she has… Lord Ganesh is supposed to have a helper in the form of a little mouse. That is what comes to save her. So, my magic system was soft, but it was based a lot on drawing from Indian mythology, and then kind of changing or crafting it to suit the story.

 

[Howard] It's worth pointing out that next week we're going to talk about magic without rules. So…

[Dan] That's kind of what we mean by hard and soft.

[Brandon] Right.

[Dan] She was throwing those terms around. If it has a lot of rules and is very crunchy, that's a hard. If it's more free-form…

[Brandon] Yeah. There is sometimes this sense, like, when I start talking about these, people assume that I don't like soft magic systems. You'll be disabused of that next week.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I really like a good soft magic system. I like magic in all its different varieties, and what it does in stories.

 

[Brandon] So let's talk about building… You said you reached into Indian mythology to get a lot of your ideas. I do this too. A lot of my ideas for magic systems will come from something from mythology, or something that… Like, I love the idea of spontaneous genesis, right? That things get… They used to believe that frogs were born out of mud, because you always find frogs around mud. That idea is so cool…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And so interesting. A lot of my magic systems are born out of me looking back at some sort of folklore or myth, and then saying, "Well, can I make that into a system?"

 

[Dan] One of the things that I have started to value more and more, every time I try to write magic, is the idea of wish fulfillment. That what readers are really looking for, even though they don't always admit this, especially adults, is magic that is fun, that they would want to use. I think that's one of the major reasons that Harry Potter has been so successful, is because everybody wants to go to Hogwarts, everybody wants to be using those cool spells. So while there's certainly a place for magic that requires sacrifice or that causes pain or something like that, I think there's a lot of aspirational geewhiz in fantasy, where the reader wants to be able to go, "Oh, I want to write a dragon. I want to use all these metals and then fly through the sky. I want to be able to do that. That looks awesome."

[Brandon] That comes into something I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is the draw of fantasy. What is it? How is that maybe different from some other genres? I hadn't even really put this together, but if you look at like movies, some of the big ones, what is the difference between the superhero movies and Star Wars? Star Wars is a lot more fantasy, right? Even though it's got science-fiction trappings. You see with Star Wars, people… They don't necessarily just dress up as the characters in the movies. They go get their own Storm Troopers costume and become a Storm Trooper and things like this. I saw this a lot in The Wheel of Time fandom, that people didn't necessarily when they would do costumes, not necessarily want to be one of the characters. Sometimes they would, but often they would want to put themselves into the setting, and dress themselves like a character and come up with a persona from that world. That's a very kind of distinctive thing, I think, for fantasy.

[Dan] It really is.

[Mahtab] It's a lot to do with escapism. I mean, most people who read fantasy, they're just so bored with… Well, bored or whatever. They just want to go into a whole new world, be the characters, live with them, experience totally new things that they wouldn't, and then they kind of come back to their lives. For me, science fiction and fantasy is exactly that. Just getting out into a different world, yet being able to identify with the problems, with the conflicts that the characters face, so that there is something that I can feel, I mean, it should be something that I feel is relatable to me. But it's still… It's a whole new world.

 

[Howard] Well, there's a flipside to that, which is the speculative fiction aspect of fantasy and science fiction. At risk of calling the elephant in the room an elephant, Brandon's Steelheart takes the social concept of absolute power corrupts absolutely and wraps that… Or maps that onto a superhero universe, and asks us the question, and it's a socially important question, what happens if there are superpowers and absolute power corrupts absolutely? That question, whether or not there's escapism involved, it's a fascinating read for the social reasons. I think that's kind of the other half of magic systems. We talk about wish fulfillment, we talk about escapism, but we also talk about how the ability to obey a different set of rules, a set of rules that are not the laws of physics as we understand them, but are themselves rules, how will that change us as people? If it doesn't change us as people, how will it change our relationships with other people? That's… So that was really deep and maybe way to crunchy, but…

[Dan] No, that's something that a lot of urban fantasies in particular get into. The TV show called Lost Girl, The Dresden Files series, they both get very heavily into that idea. The Magicians, as well. If you have all of this power, and can get away with stuff, you're going to start getting away with stuff, which I think adds another really cool dimension to the magic system, is there are people who use it well and there are people who don't. People who use it for evil.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop, and our book of the week is actually The Third Eye. So, will you tell us about it?

[Mahtab] Absolutely. This is actually the very first novel that I wrote. I think I sweated blood and tears over it. It's about a young girl, Tara, who slowly… I mean, she is living in this village with her father and her stepmother, and slowly, as the story progresses… There's a new healer in town who has got three eyes and just about everyone's enamored with him, but she's the only one who can see behind that façade of his and realize that he's evil. The story is about her journey in trying to find her grandfather, who's the only other person who's kind of strong… You could call him a Dumbledore kind of thing. Who is strong enough to fight Zarku and defeat him. But throughout the journey, what I try and do is take away the entire support system, so that eventually, Tara is just relying on herself, and a little bit off the soft magic system based on Hindu mythology that I talked about earlier, to try and defeat Zarku.

[Brandon] It's a delightful book.

[Mahtab] Thank you.

[Brandon] I'm really enjoying it, although I will tell you, I did not expect it to be as much of a horror book as it is.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's not where I thought I was going.

[Howard] Brandon loves it, his parents do not.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It is genuinely creepy in a lot of places in a really delightful way.

[Mahtab] It's a different horror. I was just telling Dan on the way here, saying I'm delving back into horror, but, yeah, there are some very graphic, gruesome scenes which I really enjoyed writing. I often get teachers saying, "What were you thinking?" But then, it's like, the kids like it, and there isn't anything else that shouldn't be in there, so let them enjoy it.

 

[Brandon] All right. Let's ask you guys, favorite magic systems in books or films that you've experienced, and kind of why? What made this magic system work? What made you enjoy the story?

[Dan] Well, at the risk of over inflating Brandon's ego…

[Howard] It's now an inflatable elephant in the room.

[Laughter]

[Dan] The… I love the Mistborn magic system, but for two very specific reasons. First of all, they're essentially giant puzzle games. Where, here's all of the pieces. You know how these work. How are they going to solve the problem at the end of the book? For me, reading any of the Mistborn novels is essentially just a cool puzzle to solve. Okay, this guy can do… Here's, in the Alloy of Law series, here's the girl who only has the one weird power that she doesn't think is of any use, she likes slows time down or something. How is that going to be valuable, because you know it is? I love ciphering those puzzles.

[Brandon] They are slightly Asimov Laws of Robotics books, stories.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Brandon] Where you set up several laws, and then you show they're not working or that there's a hole in them somewhere, what are we not understanding? Then you kind of put it together at the end.

 

[Dan] That's not what every magic system has to do, and shouldn't. There needs to be variety. But I like those for that reason. One of the others, though, and this is another one of the rules that I've kind of set for myself as I develop my own, is that magic should have a visual component to it. I always used to try to make magic very mental, very cerebral. I think a lot of aspiring fantasy writers do the same. But adding that visual element… So again, back to Mistborn, you've got things as simple as being able to pull or push on metal, and you don't need a visual component, but you added the blue lines. The blue lines bear so much weight in these stories, and they serve such a powerful function, even though it's a very simple thing. Because that gives us a sense of what it looks like, and what it would feel like to do it, and it helps us understand what's going on. Just because of these dumb little blue lines.

 

[Brandon] I love magic systems where, when you start reading it, you both see why it would be so cool to have this magic and also, are instantly worried and frightened about the implications of it. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] A great example of that is our former professor, Dave Wolverton's Runelords series, in which you can take someone's strength and brand it onto yourself with a branding iron, and that person loses their strength and you have it. You're twice as strong. But now, you have this person that you need to take care of, because if someone can get to them and kill them, you lose your magic strength. The social implications of that are just staggering. The moment you read it, you realize, "Oh, man. This changes society in some really dark ways." He goes there.

[Dan] Yeah. He follows through on the ramifications. Like, every evil thing that you think as you're contemplating that, he comes… He deals with at some point or another. It's a really great example of how to show the effects of magic, and how to show a society shaped by magic.

[Brandon] How fantasy can, as Mahtab was saying, can take some our world element and in some ways by exaggerating it really kind of bore down into that issue. Like with the Runelords, the fact that the strong become stronger and the weak become more and more subject to the strong, is really well exemplified in that story, to ways that make, I think, you start to realize this is kind of how our society works, and that's an ugly underbelly to it.

[Howard] Deadbeat by Jim Butcher. The… I suppose I'll just spoil it, because…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Do it.

[Howard] That's what we're here for and it's an old book. The name of the book is both a reference to our detective, our wizard, Harry Dresden, who is kind of a deadbeat, and this idea that necromancy works best when you have a rhythm to which all of the dead are marching. I don't remember the exact details, but the older the bones are, the more powerful a thing you can raise. We end up with a guy dressed like a one-man band drummer riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton through town. It is surprising, yet inevitable. It fulfills all of the promises of necromancy as he set it forth. It was a lot of fun. I mean… Undead dinosaur, you can't go wrong with that.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Any other favorites?

[Mahtab] I have one which is… I read it a few years ago. But, The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. Where Will Stanton, on his 12th birthday, realizes he's one of the Old Ones, and he has to collect these six symbols of… I think they're called the Champions of Light, which is… Is to circles made of wood and bronze and iron, fire, water. Then that… He has to collect it, it makes a powerful object, then he repels the Dark with it. But it's just so beautifully written. It's kind of a coming-of-age, a fantasy, there's wild magic, high magic, but it's really, really good. The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper.

[Dan] I also wanted to mention, just to have like a really soft magic system in here, the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. I love the magic as he presents it there. Because there's maybe one or two rules, and I don't know anyone who could name them off the top of their heads, but it has a distinct flavor to it. Like, there's no… We don't know what the rules are governing it, but we absolutely know what it feels like. We absolutely know what it would be like to experience or confront the magic that we find in those books. I loved the way he pulled that off.

 

[Brandon] All right. So, I've also got our homework for this week. Now, next week we're going to be talking about soft magic systems. What I would like you to do is kind of… Make you take some sort of soft magic system that you've read about or you've loved. The example we came up with was… Is Gandalf. Gandalf's very soft. We never know what Gandalf can do, specifically, we just know he's awesome. Well, I want you to take a soft magic system, and apply rules to it. Give Gandalf rules. Take a soft magic system you have written and give it rules. Flip it on its head, and see how the magic works differently if you explain exactly how it works and have it work according to those rules. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/24/14-8-worldbuilding-qa-1/

 

Q&A Summary:

Q: What cultural stuff do you need to know throughout the writing process?

A; What are the axes of power in the world. Economic status, social hierarchies, which ones will your character intersect with in the story. What cultural stuff do I need to make the world feel real? What cultural stuff drives the conflict in my story? What cultural stuff impacts the characters to give them character arcs? Specificity! What practices are embodied in your story, where did they come from, why are they used? What is likely to come up, what do I need to think about to make it interesting and varied.

Q: When worldbuilding religion, I often find that portions of the fictional religions have overlapped with real world religions. How do you treat those overlaps with respect, especially when problems with the in-world religion are part of the story's conflict?

A: Being a real-world religious person with a deep and abiding respect for the multiple sides. Multiple viewpoints wherever possible. Tell somebody's specific story, not a story about a class of people. 

Q: For your worldbuilding, how much do you have figured out before you start your first draft, and how much do you discover later as you write?

A: It depends. Do it in layers, a broad overview, then dig in where needed, with research in the recesses of your imagination. Frontload where possible, but go back and patch and connect, too. 

Q: Much like how it can be bad if you introduce key characters too late in the narrative, such as the last one third, what would you say is the threshold where you should have introduced all major worldbuilding elements? Halfway or something else, and does it change based on genre or intended audience?

A: Tie the new worldbuilding elements to character conflict and development, and you can keep doing it. Introduce the new elements slightly before they matter. Introduce the element for a different reason.

Q: I was wondering how do you ensure the world comes through as a character of its own?

A: It doesn't always have to be a character, sometimes it's just an important setting. Name it, then give it a personality. How does the POV character interact with the environment? Is it an antagonist, or a sidekick? Give the world scene time of its own. Look at how the setting influences plot and character decisions. Pay attention to the language you use to describe the environment.

Q: When worldbuilding in science fiction or fantasy, how much change to terminology is too much? For example, a new calendar system, units of measurement, or currency?

A: Some worldbuilding elements are more easily grokked than others. Hemi-deca blerks! What do you want to say about the culture? 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Eight.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding, Questions and Answers.

[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] And you have questions. By you, I'm speaking to the you in the audience of WXR 2018 attendees before me.

[Whoo! Applause]

[Howard] This episode was recorded live on a ship in the Caribbean. We're pretty in love with this model. It's a lot of fun.

[Mary Robinette] This… I really like the way we have built our world, I have to say.

[Laughter]

[as…]

[Dan] Although technically, we're in the Gulf of Mexico, not the Caribbean. Just pointing out the errors in your worldbuilding. Consistency is key.

[Howard] We're on the water, and it's pretty.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That piece of the worldbuilding is all I actually need to know. Which is often the case with worldbuilding.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] But the nice thing about this is that we have a live audience, which means that we can go to them for questions. Shall we start with your first one, or do you have other things to do?

[Howard] Nononono. That's just great.

 

[Christopher] Hello, my name is Christopher Adkins. What cultural stuff do you need to know throughout the writing process?

[Dan] Cultural stuff?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I like to think about are what the axes of power are for the world? Because those are going to affect the way my character moves through the world. The economic status, social hierarchies, those are the things that I think about. I only think about the ones that are… My character's going to intersect with in the story. So in short fiction, I'm likely to kind of think about the axes of power. But probably only a couple of them are going to come into play in the story. So there's only going to be… Those are going to be the ones that I will really define.

[Howard] I… The things that I need to know about cultural stuff upfront is do I need cultural stuff in order for the world I am building to feel real? Do I need cultural stuff in order for there to be conflict that drives my story? And, do I need there to be cultural stuff that impacts my characters in ways that gives them character arcs? I approach it first from narrative. From there, there's a bazillion stuff I'll end up needing to know.

[Dongwon] I'll just say, specificity is really important in building culture. Often times, if you're modeling a real-world culture, what you want to do is make sure that you have specific practices that are embodied in your work. But also make sure you know where those come from and why they're used, right? Where I see this going off the rails a lot of times is they'll take a practice without understanding the role it plays in the society, and therefore undermine the purpose of that practice or end up saying something insulting about it by accident. So what you want to do is do your homework, pick something very specific, and then figure out how to transform it so that it fits your world without being in direct contradiction to the purpose and the point of that practice in the first place.

[Dan] Before I start to write, I will come up… I will think about the things that are most likely to come up that I will need to describe on-the-fly, and I will kind of prep them in advance. So when I wrote my cyberpunk series, I had a whole list of technologies and companies that made them. When I… In the fantasy that I'm currently writing, I figured out, well, in this country, these are the kinds of foods they eat and the kinds of jobs they have. Just because then… If I don't do that, I know that everyone is going to be a lumberjack eating stew.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So having something ready to go, so I can be more interesting and more varied, helps me a lot.

[Howard] Hearty stew.

[Dan] Yes. With crusty bread.

[Mary Robinette] By contrast, I don't do that at all. I will square bracket it when I get to it, and then invent it on the spot. But I am lazier than Dan is.

[Howard] I find that difficult to believe, but let's go to our next question.

[Laughter]

 

[Xander] Hi, my name is Zander Hacking. When worldbuilding religion, I often find that portions of the fictional religions have overlapped with real world religions. How do you treat those overlaps with respect, especially when problems with the in-world religion are part of the story's conflict?

[Mary Robinette] That's a good question.

[Dan] That's a really good question.

[Yeah]

[Howard] I have a question. Is Zander Hacking your real name, because if I tried to use that name in a book, no one would believe it.

[Xander] It's actually Alexander Hacking, but that's way too much effort.

[Howard] It's still too awesome to be real.

[Dan] I can say it, but Mary Robinette wouldn't.

[Howard] Honestly, one of the things that helps me…

[Dan] You just said you were lazier than me.

[Mary Robinette] [Tee-hee-hee]

[Howard] One of the things that helps me a lot with regard to writing fictional religions and paying respect to real-world religions is being a real-world religious person who has a deep and abiding respect for the varying epistemologies that exist in the world. I believe that I can learn things by faith, by scriptural study, by revelation, and I believe that I can learn things in no other way than through science. It's a weird fence to sit on. Not always comfortable. But it's one I'm on. So anytime I'm writing about a religion, I'm writing it from this inherent understanding that there are multiple sides to what is going on.

[Mary Robinette] I think the multiple sides is a really good point. I try to remember to represent multiple viewpoints where possible. Because we all… Even people within the same denomination, going to the same church and the same building, will have different relationships with faith. So I tried to make sure that that is represented in the page, that it is not a monolith. I also try to remember that things are interwoven, that nothing exists by itself. So making sure that I'm thinking about the way it stretches out into the other parts of the culture is, I think, one of the ways I can be respectful and also make it feel more organic.

[Dongwon] To build off of Mary's thing a little bit, when you have that fictionalized religion, it is probably… Has a real-world analog, but the thing to remember is you're not telling a story about that entire religion. You're telling a story about a person who intersects and lives within that culture or that experience. So don't think of it… Where you'll get in trouble is when you're trying to tell a story about the whole class of people as opposed to telling about somebody's specific story. That person has a place, they were raised a certain way, they have certain feelings about the religion in which they exist. Those are not going to be 100% representative of the monolith of the organization, right? So remember you're talking about an individual. Invest them with as much specificity and as much physicality as you can. Then that will help you make sure that you're articulating a perspective and an experience, rather than saying… Or rather than criticizing the whole group or criticizing a real-world religion in that way.

 

[Gail] My name is Gail. For your worldbuilding, how much do you have figured out before you start your first draft, and how much do you discover later as you write?

[Mary Robinette] I vary a lot, depending on what it is that I'm writing. I often treat worldbuilding when I'm doing something that's completely made up the same way I treat historical stuff. Which is that I think about it in layers. I kind of get a broad overview, and then will dig in. It's just that the research that I'm doing is in the recesses of my own imagination. But I… Sometimes I get very, very specific, and other times I write into it… I discovery write my way in, and then hit something that's an odd juxtaposition, and try and figure out why it's that way. For me, it depends on the story.

[Dan] I like to frontload things, as I said before. But, because I like to do that, I have noticed how often I go back, which is every single story, every single book. I'm still going back and patching holes and making things connect that didn't connect before. So it's really just kind of a half-and-half mix, almost, I would say, for me.

[Dongwon] I recently had a conversation with a client who was in the early stages of developing a project. I asked him about it, and he took a deep breath and paused and said, "Well, at the beginning of time…"

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] I was like, "Oh, this is going to be a long conversation." I think what Mary said is very valuable, that it varies a lot project to project, even for one writer. Sometimes, you will need to start at the beginning of time and build up your whole cosmology, and sometimes, you can just jump right in and figure out things on the fly. So I think it depends.

[Howard] With the early Schlock Mercenary books, I was making up the worldbuilding as I went on a weekly basis. With the one that I'm working on right now, book 18, the piece that I already know is that Galactic civilizations come and go  in cycles. There are lacuna during which there is no Galactic civilization for millions of years. What I don't know is exactly how many of those there have been, and what were the characteristics of each of those, and what was the trigger event that ended each of those. Those pieces I am definitely discovery writing as I go. So when you ask the question, well, at the beginning of time… I'm working my way backwards to that.

[Laughter]

 

[Cooper] Hey, my name's Cooper. Much like how it can be bad if you introduce key characters too late in the narrative, such as the last one third, what would you say is the threshold where you should have introduced all major worldbuilding elements? Halfway or something else, and does it change based on genre or intended audience?

[Dongwon] I would say I think this is more flexible than most people think it is. The best piece of worldbuilding I've seen in recent media is the TV show Stephen Universe, which, at every major turning point in the show, has completely upended my understanding of the world and the cosmology of that series. The reason it never feels like a problem is they always tie it to character conflict. Every time they introduce a new worldbuilding element, one of the major characters is having some personal crisis or some personal conflict that ties directly to the thing that they're introducing. So when you meet more of the Gems or when you meet the Diamonds or whatever it is, it always feels like a character development, and therefore you can add more to the world as you go without disrupting that, if you keep it really grounded in how the characters are experiencing that and how they feel about the world around them.

[Dan] I try to make sure to introduce new character elements or new worldbuilding elements, I mean, slightly before they matter. So that when they show up, they don't feel like, "Oh, Dan needed to explain this thing, so he changed the way horses work," or whatever. But I'll tell you a couple chapters earlier how horses are different, and then it will matter a couple chapters later. So if I'm always… The worldbuilding's always a couple steps ahead of the story itself. Then you could introduce something all the way at the end of the book, and it would still feel natural, because we'll know about it before it matters.

[Mary Robinette] I do that, but sometimes… Often, the way I'm doing that is that I will use it at the point that it matters, and then go back and find spots…

[Dan] And fill it in. Exactly.

[Howard] Doctor Who is kind of a delightful mix mash of doing it in many different ways, and sometimes a way in which they do it is exactly right, and sometimes the way in which they did it… I find it very dissatisfying. There have been episodes where there is a new reveal about world technology, world whatever, that happens after the Doctor has announced it is important. Often, I find that unsatisfying, but sometimes it's just beautiful, because it wasn't the point. The point was something else. The point of this is… Doctor Who is good lesson material for learning a lot of these things…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And also, there are reasons in which to do it in lots of different ways, and they can all work.

[Dan] That's a good point to bring up, is that in those instances where it works really well, it's often because it… That element was introduced for a different reason. So the reader is not saying, "Oh, look at this very telegraphed this-is-going-to-be-important." It's already important, but for something else. So you're serving two purposes at once.

 

[Howard] Let's pause for a book of the week.

[Amal] The book of the week is…

[Howard] Oh, go ahead and introduce yourself.

[Amal] Hello, my name is [Amal Massad?]. I am giving you the book of the week. So the book of the week is Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver. It is a development of a short story that she first wrote in an anthology called The Starlit Wood. It's a fantastic reclamation of the Rumpelstiltskin story from a Jewish perspective, because Rumpelstiltskin is a famously anti-Semitic folktale. So what she has instead is this absolutely fantastic reversal, where she has a Jewish money lender who is a woman who gains a reputation for being able to transform silver into gold through the practice of her skill. This attracts the attention of these really scary fairies called the Staryk Knights. They decide that they want to test her. So it's this fantastic reversal where the supernatural element is taking the role of the king in the original story, and it's in this really wonderful world that she develops with a… Draw… Inspired by a lot of Eastern European folklore and stuff. The worldbuilding in it is tremendous. It's got this fantastic rumination on capital and labor and transaction and that sort of thing. But it's also full of female friendships. If you read Uprooted and thought I really liked that book, but I wish there had been more women in it being even more friends, you should definitely read Spinning Silver. Because it's so great.

[Howard] Thank you, Amal. That was Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. Now we have our next question.

 

[Cory] Hello. My name is Cory. I was wondering how do you ensure the world comes through as a character of its own?

[Pause]

[Mary Robinette] Wow, that's such a good question that we're all sitting here going, "How do you do that?"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Well, I'm actually sitting here wondering if I do that. There's a lot of works that I can think of, books and movies, where yes, the setting is a character, to the point that New York is really a character in my story has become a cliché and a trope. I don't know if it needs to be every time though. Sometimes, the setting can just be important to the characters without being a character it self.

[Howard] At risk of telegraphing some of our episodes on marketing and career building, if your setting is an important marketing point… For instance, Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere. Being able to say, "This is a Cosmere book," is going to sell the book into an audience that would have been reluctant to pick it up if it hadn't been a Cosmere book. So having a name for it, so that it kind of becomes its own character, is useful. That's reverse engineering it. I've named it, therefore it must have a personality.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But I think that when you do have a book where you want the terr… Or a short story where you want the environment, the worldbuilding, to be a character… I mean, naming it helps, but giving it a personality is, I think, really hitting it on the nose there. It is, for me, the times that I do that, it is about the way the character, my POV character, is interacting with the environment. The environment will take on the role, somewhat, of an antagonist, sometimes. Or somewhat of a co-partner. A sidekick. Depending on what relationship my character has with the environment. So I will look at pla… Ways that the worldbuilding can be a barrier. I will look at places where the worldbuilding can be a help. More specifically, I look at my character's relationship with that, and how they feel and think about it. That's, for me, how I can make it, rather than just a place they inhabit, another… A character that's on the page, a personality. The other thing that I'll say is that I'm much more likely… When I do this myself or when I've… I notice it when I read other people's… To give space for the world without my character in it. So it's as if it gets its own scene time, own stage time.

[Dongwon] One way I think about it is, does your setting have agency? Right? That doesn't mean it's necessarily conscious, but is it influencing the plot decisions and the character decisions? Design spaces are incredibly important. We are all currently on a cruise ship, which is extremely deliberately designed space, designed to promote certain kinds of interaction, and certain kinds of movement. When you become aware of how you're being moved through the ship, and why you will walk across on certain decks and not on other decks, you can sort of start to see how the setting can shape the plot of your story. When… That's why cities often become this sort of character role in a story like that, especially in… Heist stories often have that as well. The Bellagio in Oceans 11 becomes a character, because the physical attributes of that building become very important in determining how the characters will move through it and accomplish their goals or won't accomplish their goals. So if your setting is influencing plot, if it's influencing character decisions, then it will itself start to feel like a character, in, I think, a really exciting way.

[Mary Robinette] Along those lines, I think one of the things is to pay attention to the language that you're using to describe it. So when we're talking about it, it having a personality, New York's a great ex… Is the example that everyone returns to, that it's gritty, it's stark. Those… The vocabulary that people use to describe those settings is very different than the vocabulary that one would use to describe Disneyland.

[Yep]

[Mary Robinette] So, paying attention to that…

[Dan] Not the way I do it.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] YES.

[Laughter]

[I have questions now. I have so many questions.]

[Howard] Well, there's this…

[Dan] We should all go to Disneyland together.

[Howard] There goes our Disney sponsorship.

[Dongwon] I would recommend you all start listening to the podcast 99% Invisible. I apologize for pushing another podcast. But if you want to really understand how design spaces influence character and plot decisions, than that is a great place to start.

 

[Andrew] Hello, my name is Andrew. When worldbuilding in science fiction or fantasy, how much change to terminology is too much? For example, a new calendar system, units of measurement, or currency?

[Howard] [Bwoosh! Oh, wow.]

[Mary Robinette] This is something I struggle with.

[Dan] Oh, yeah. Some of those…

[Howard] So very fraught.

[Dan] Some of those are easier to talk about than others. Units of measurement, for example… If I don't understand what a blerk is, then telling me that the city is five blerks away doesn't really tell me anything. Whereas I don't need to know how much money a blerk is worth if you say the bowl of soup is worth five blerks, then I kind of get a sense of it. So there's… different kinds of worldbuilding elements are much more easily grokkable than others.

[Howard] So the distance to the city is a soup?

[Dan] Yes. How far away is the city? Well, about the cost of a bowl of soup.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Or a hemi-deca blerk.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But actually… The thing is…

[Dan] Did you just well, actually us?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] No. I but actually'd you. Which seems more appropriate.

[Dan] Okay. There we go.

[Mary Robinette] The thing is that when we are talking about units of measurement… This is where I look at whether or not I need to shift it. I look at whether or not there is an underpinning that has shifted. So are units of measurement are things like… There's the… If we have an Imperial inch, that tells you that there's an empire. If you don't have an empire, then having something that weighs an Imperial inch is not a useful thing. So I will sometimes look at that, at whether or not there is something in the unit of measurement that doesn't fit with the world. The months, for instance. August, September, October. Those… That implies that there was a Rome. So I'm much more likely to shift something like that then I am worrying about whether or not I need to have something weigh… The five feet tall versus five blerks tall.

[Dan] I love how something can weigh an inch and also weigh five feet tall.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] I love this. And also the city is five blerks away.

[Howard] It's about soup height.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] About soup height.

[Dan] We're getting into so many like really… I almost wonder if we need to can of worms this, which we haven't even done in years. Because even the October, September thing, there's an entire school of thought in fantasy that the book was written in its own language, but it's been translated into English. So we just are calling it October, because then our readers can understand it. There's a lot of worldbuilding elements like that, that some portions of your audience are going to care about deeply, and others are just going to gloss right over and go, "Okay. That's fine."

[Dongwon] It's really a question about what are you trying to say about your culture. Because the choice of a foot versus a meter says something about the culture that you live in. Does it come from somebody who's trying to scientifically impose a unit of measurement, or is it, "Oh, my foot is roughly that large, right?" That tells you a lot about the history of that culture, what they prioritize and what's important to them. Names of the months are the same thing. Those come from specific places. So when you're making those choices of choosing to invent a new system, that better be a very relevant piece of worldbuilding and a really important concept for how this culture operates. You want to pick things that are very close to your central metaphor that drives the book that you are writing, and make sure that you're picking new invented terms that have histories and meaning for very good reasons. Be very… You can only change so many things before people start going, "I don't know what all these words are." So be very deliberate about which ones you invent new words for, is my advice.

[Mary Robinette] The thing that I'm just going to add on to that is that if you want to avoid using August… If you decide that that doesn't fit into your world, it's not that you have to invent a new month. You just need to not refer to the month. Like, oh, summer vacation is in August. It's like, no, summer vacation is in summer. That kind of thing is often an easier thing for your reader to grok than actually doing inventions.

 

[Howard] Our mastering engineer, Alex, has very carefully edited out all audible sounds of dismay as we had to cut off the questions because we're out of time. So my notes here say that your homework is toss something to Mary.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's right. So, we've had a number of different questions come up. I'm going to leave you with the most difficult one. Which is, what do you do about time in your universe? So what I want you to do is you're just going to think about calendars. You're going to think about in your world, what are the things that change, what are the markers? Is this a culture that marks things by the moon? What if there are two moons? How does that influence what their calendar system looks like? I'm not asking you to actually put this into your story, but I just wanted to take time and think about how the culture and your worldbuilding deals and measures time.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/10/14-6-fantasy-and-science-fiction-races/

 

Key points: Worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction races. [Avoid the pitfall of othering your alien races, coding them using characteristics of Earth races and people. See the May 26 episode coming up on Writing the Other.] Realize that to an alien, e.g. Sgt. Schlock, everyone else is an alien. Your aliens need to function as people that can tell the story. You may take shortcuts or compromises. Think about "How does this alien see the world differently than other people, and is that important to the story?" They need to feel alien, but not incomprehensible and not just some aspect of humanity. Remember, to aliens, humanity is all one race. How do you make your aliens relatable to the readers? Your protagonist can try to figure it out and react to it. Explain what is important to the alien, and then show them trying to achieve that goal or overcome that obstacle. That process is easy to relate to. When is a horse a horse, and when is it a zyloplick? (a.k.a. Don't call a rabbit a smeerp.) Treat your races as full cultures, and treat your not-a-horse the same way. Think about the consequences of the differences. Let us taste grass, and experience a sense of wonder with the wind in our nostrils. Force yourself to not let your races be one note. Beware of coming up with races to fill a role in your story, and then not putting in the work to fill out their culture. "How is this going to change the way they interact?" You need to know the rules and the reasons behind them, to make them feel like real people, but you don't need to dump all that information on the readers.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Six.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fantasy and Science Fiction Races.

[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] And I'm Mahtab.

 

[Brandon] We are going to be talking about worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction races. Before we dive into this episode, I wanted to bring up a potential pitfall in dealing with this. That is, very naturally, as you write, you are going to other your alien races. In so doing, by making them different from yourself, you are probably going to start to naturally code them by giving them characteristics that are very similar to Earth races and Earth people. You can see this famously in George Lucas's prequel trilogy about the Star Wars, where he takes the person who is the merchant and he codes this person by the way he speaks and the way he looks as Jewish. This is dangerous, and it is something you're going to naturally do. Because of the biases you have, because of the world we live in. We have an entire episode coming up in May, on May 26, where we talk about this. Dan and Tempest talk about Writing the Other and kind of a giving permission… Giving yourself permission to do this, even though you will probably get it wrong sometimes. We think it is important to be trying to reach and stretch.

[Dan] Exactly. It is more important… Obviously, you need to do it right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Put in the work, do your effort, we've got a huge slate of Writing the Other podcasts this season and we'll let those episodes cover this. Right now, we're going to move on and just talk about cool fantasy and science fiction races.

[Brandon] Yep. So, taking that huge can of worms and setting it to the side as a real issue that you should be thinking about and researching about, we're going to turn slightly the other direction and just talk about building fantasy and science fiction races. I kind of want to put you on the spot, Howard.

[Howard] That's just fine.

[Brandon] Because I love…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Your science fiction races. This is something you are really, really good at.

[Howard] I am…

[Brandon] How?

[Howard] Flattered and terrified. A large part of this grows out of the realization early on that calling… For anybody to call Sgt. Schlock, the amorphous… The carbosilicate amorph… Anybody calling him an alien is… Well, they are alien to him. There are other aliens. At one point, I made the joke where some… "Schlock, don't you have any alien superpowers?" He's like, "You guys are all aliens. Do you have any alien superpowers?" That's the easy version of that joke, and I never get to tell it again. What I had to wrap my head around is that I need all these aliens to function as people that can tell the story in a way that I don't have to use a lot of words, because I'm a cartoonist.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I have to take some shortcuts. I have to give them all eyebrows. The Uniocs, the guys with the great big one eye, have two eyebrows. Why? Because I need two eyebrows.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They don't need two eyebrows. I do. So there are compromises that I have made. But fundamentally what I am trying to do every time I introduce an alien… My first thought is not, "What cool superpowers does this alien have?" It is, "How does this alien see the world differently than other people, and is that important to the story?" As I've been working on prose, Dragons of Damaxuri, which is… It was my nano project in 2018, and I didn't finish it, because it needs more than 50,000 words…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I didn't get to 50,000. It needs more than 28,000 words. But that book, every time I mentioned an alien, I realized I don't have any pictures to work with. I have to give the reader enough so that when we mention that this is an alien, when they do something, they feel alien without feeling incomprehensible and without feeling like I've just mapped them onto some aspect of humanity. Fundamentally, with the alien races, from that standpoint, humanity is all one race.

[Brandon] Right.

[Howard] People of color, people of… Whatever. We're all one race.

 

[Mahtab] Howard, that's something very interesting that you mentioned, because you said you need the two eyebrows, especially because you have to show them. Now, that just makes me think about what if I just wanted to make an alien a blob of… An amoebic substance? But then, how would I make them relatable to the readers? Like, it's kind of a… Two sides of the coin. You want to make an alien not like a human being. He could have three or four arms, they could have five legs, but you have a head, you have a body, so that the readers can relate to it. But if you did not, and if you just had it made into a blob, then how do you show expression or… Well, it won't be illustrated, but… That's what I always wonder. What if I wanted to make something so weird that no one's ever seen it before, but then how do they relate to it?

[Howard] The trick that I'm using in Dragons of Damaxuri… And it's comedy. So I can freewheel a little bit. My point of view character is an artificial intelligence who has a physical avatar body, and who wants to fit in and wants to understand people and recognizes that everybody has a body language. So periodically an alien will do something with its ears, or it will take the two eyes on stalks and look at each other. Which I took from Larry Niven. But any alien with eyes on stalks is going to do that. Lou, the protagonist, she either knows what it means or she doesn't know what it means or she's guessing. She knows that it's important. So as I'm describing these things, these are becoming people who feel things and who do things that mean things. Our protagonist is trying to figure it out and trying to react to it.

 

[Dan] An author who did very alien aliens very well was Ursula K Le Guin. One of the things that she did in several of her stories and books was… She would present these incredibly bizarre things that we almost don't know how to relate to them, but she would explain what was important to them, and then we would watch them try to achieve that goal or overcome that obstacle. That process is incredibly relatable. So even though we don't necessarily understand who they are or where they're coming from, we know what it's like to try to get something that you want. We know what it's like to lose something that you love. So those aspects can still come out.

[Mahtab] Yeah. I think that's a good point.

 

[Brandon] Next week, we'll delve into this a little bit more…

[Howard] How weird is too weird.

[Brandon] Because our topic is how weird is too weird. But I did want to talk about this idea a little bit, about… Like, for instance, one thing in my writing group that a friend of mine always will point out is he hates it in books when they use something that's not a horse to be a horse.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Now, personally, I kind of like that, right? But where do you guys fall on this? When do you just call a horse a horse, when do you call a horse a zyloplick, which is what they ride on this planet, and in all ways it is a horse, except it's got scales.

[Dan] Well, see, for me, that comes down to a lot of the same issues of… Not just animals, but the races themselves. I remember, in our old writing class with Dave Wolverton, one of the things he said about kind of the standard Tolkien-esque fantasy is that what we said at the beginning, elves and dwarves and orcs and stuff, are really just kind of Earth cultures super-otherized. How much more interesting is it to just treat them as full cultures? So they're not just every dwarf is Gimli and has a Scottish accent and an axe, but maybe they like really spicy food. Maybe they have all these other massive facets to their culture that real cultures have that fantasy cultures sometimes don't because they're based on stereotypes. So with the horse, it's the same thing. If the horse doesn't do anything different than a normal horse, just call it a horse. But if it has scales, does that mean it's also a lizard? Does that mean that it's cold-blooded and you have to have a completely different kind of stable? Like, there's a lot of interesting roads you can go down if you want to look at that kind of stuff.

[Howard] The movie Avatar…

[Mahtab] That's just… Yes.

[Howard] Had…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The horses…

[Mahtab] Direhorse.

[Howard] Except it wasn't a horse because… Because…

[Dan] You plugged yourself into it.

[Howard] You plugged yourself into it. The place where, for me, that fell short was I wanted him to be experiencing some of what the horse is experiencing, because now it's not a horse. Now, he's got the wind in his nostrils, and I'm going to taste grass. This is so… Now, there's a reason for that connection to… Now it's got sense of wonder for me.

 

[Brandon] Book of the week this week is Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen. Grand Master of SFWA, Jane Yolen, one of my favorite writers of all time. I recently reread this book to do a piece on it for Tor.com. I love this book. It was one of the very first fantasy books I ever read as a kid, and a lot of the stuff in this book went completely over my head.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But it was my first boy and his dragon story. Which, there are a lot of classic kid and dragon stories, but this one is wonderful. It's about a young man who is a slave, who works for a wealthy man who owns dragons that fight in pits. They're basically cockfights with dragons. As a kid, this was just awesome. Reading it as an adult, I'm like, "Wow, this is… This is really uncomfortable."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] In ways she obviously wanted it to be. Because these are inten… Intelligent creatures that they are raising to fight, and the young man, his way to get freedom is he's going to steal an egg, which in this culture, you're kind of allowed to do. They won't really talk about it, but if someone is… Like, grabs an egg and raises it themselves, they all kind of think that's a cool thing, and you can get away with it if you can actually make it happen. Which very rarely would it ever happen. He has the dream of doing this, and he actually gets an egg, a young dragon, and starts raising it. But the story is about how he's going to have to raise it to go fight to the death for him to have a chance at freedom, and his growing bond with it as he realizes it really is intelligent. A beautiful story. Kind of a brutal story. Both whimsical and realistic at the same time. Which is really an interesting mix, but Jane is very good at that. So I recommend Dragon's Blood to you. If you've never read it, it's a wonderful book.

 

[Brandon] I want to bring us back to this concept that Dan was talking about. Because I find one of the things that is most difficult, but most satisfying, about worldbuilding races is forcing myself to not let my races be one note. This is really… It takes a lot of work. Because very naturally, and I think this is partially for shorthand reasons, it's also for bias reasons, but it's also… It's very natural for us to go and watch a movie and the movie has only an hour and a half to show us something, so it shows us this fantasy race, and it's like, "These are humans, but they have no emotions." Or, "These are humans, but they don't get metaphor." That works really well as a cool shorthand in a film. But as we are writing and we have more time to spend on these races and cultures, I think it's really important to make them more than one note. How do you do this? It is really, I think, very difficult.

[Mahtab] I think Ursula Guin did that in The Left Hand of Darkness when she did the andro… Yuck, I can't even figure that word, but androgynous races. I think that was a really cool way to deal with… Not making them male or female or… Just exploring that entirely different way of doing it and the relationship between Estravan and Genly Ai, who came in… I thought that was very cool. So, just to take away the gender and do it in that way, I thought that was pretty well done.

[Brandon] Yeah. Left Hand of Darkness is a masterwork in how to do this right.

[Dan] I suspect that some of the problems that we have in kind of making our fantasy and science fiction races feel rounded, is because we come up with them to fill a role in our story first. Then we realize it's too much work to also give them all of this cultural baggage that is very different and very nonhuman. So we're just like, "Well, they're… It's just a Wookie. He's just like the quiet mechanic who never talks and is very hairy." So if you force yourself to do it, to actually go in and say, "Well, how is this going to change the way they interact?" This is something Howard has recently done with the… I can't remember the names of any of the aliens. But there's the ones with four arms.

[Howard] The Fobottr.

[Dan] Yes. You kind of recently… I don't know if ret-conned is the right word, but you defined more solidly how they interact and the way that they require groups… I just thought that was really interesting, because all of a sudden, they were more interesting and they were distinctly different from the humans.

[Howard] Part of what I did…

[Dan] In a measurable way.

[Howard] Part of what I did when I designed them and when I designed their culture, I gave them a history that involved a diaspora… Diaspora? I don't know how to say that word. I know how to read that word. They were scattered. They have traveling merchant clans, warrior clans, whatever. Their culture is not monoculture. Sometimes when they connect with people of their own kind who have done a better job of preserving their original culture, there is conflict. Your naming conventions are all wrong. Why… None of that made it into the story, but all of that made it into my notes. What it let me do, and it's a silly thing… What it let me do was have characters whose names didn't fit the pattern of everybody else. I knew that there was a rule behind it. I knew it fit.

[Dan] Well, I think maybe the big lesson for the rea… For our listeners, then, is reading the comic, it's not a treatise on Fobottr… How do you say it? Culture.

[Howard] Fobottr.

[Dan] But I could tell very clearly the strip at which oh, Howard's changed the way this… He's defined this culture all of a sudden. They feel like real people. Even though you're not going out of your way to dump all the information on us.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and wrap it up here. Mahtab, you were going to give us some homework?

[Mahtab] Yes. Take one major historical incident that occurred on Earth and set it in space, with an alien race or races.

[Dan] Cool.

[Brandon] Awesome. I'm very curious to hear what you guys… Or read what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/01/27/wx14-03-writing-the-other-bisexual-characters/

 

Key points: Writing the Other is aimed at encouraging writers to write characters who aren't like you, and giving you the tools and examples to do it right. Starting with bisexual representation. First, bisexual is someone who has an attraction to two or more genders. Beware bisexual erasure! Bisexuality is not a phase, nor is it a transition on the way to gay. Bisexual, pansexual, queer... the language is evolving. The power of the default often reinforces bi invisibility. Think about how to resist the default. Watch for treating one kind of relationship as a joke, while the other is serious. Remember that people are not just one thing, make them intersectional and real. Make sure you emphasize the positive! Remember that bisexual people are normal people. Be wary of making one kind of relationship real and meaningful, while the other kind are just sad pale smears on a bagel. Use sensitivity readers, too.

 

[Mary] Season 14, Episode Four.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing the Other – Bisexual Characters.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Tempest] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[T. J.] And I'm T. J.

[Dan] Yeah. We have our wonderful guest with us today, T. J. Berry. What are we going to talk about today, T. J.? Actually, before we do that, why don't you introduce yourself?

[T. J.] Hi. I'm T. J. Berry. I'm an author of science fiction/fantasy mash ups. I… This is my second time joining Writing Excuses on the Writing Excuses Cruise, and I'm a long time listener.

 

[Dan] Well, that's awesome. We are excited to have you here with us. This is the first of a series that we are going to be doing. In previous years, you've heard a lot of the what writers get wrong podcasts. Those are awesome and informative. We wanted to do another series that was a little more constructive, where we give you great advice about how you can write these other things. This is the brainchild of Tempest Bradford. What can you tell us about the Writing the Other series, Tempest?

[Tempest] Well, basically, it's all about getting writers to understand that it is okay to write characters who aren't like you, and, yes, there are many ways to get it wrong, and to fall into the fail hole, but there are also a lot of ways to get it right. It's actually much better if you learn how to get it right from constructive examples. So that's what were going to be talking about in this series. We're going to be giving you tools to learn how to write these characters well, so that everyone is happy.

 

[Dan] Awesome. Cool. So what are we talking about today?

[Tempest] We're going to talk about bisexual representation. I wanted T. J. to come on because I know that T. J. is a bisexual person, and T. J. writes fiction that has bisexual people in it. And especially since T. J. is in a relationship with a person who is not her gender. So, from the outside, it may look a lot like T. J.'s in a heterosexual relationship. That's one of the many sort of nuances of writing bisexual characters that I thought you would be a great person to talk about that.

[T. J.] Awesome. So, yeah, backing up just a little bit, and making sure that people understand what the definition of bisexual is. A person who is bisexual is someone who has an attraction to two or more genders. You can also use the language that it is yours and another gender. Outdated language uses binaries like attracted to the two genders. We don't really use that much anymore, because we've recognized that gender is a spectrum, so we don't use that. We don't use that binary language much anymore. Tempest, as you said, I am married to a cisgender man, and I have been for 21 years. But that doesn't make me any less bi. So one of… That segues really neatly into, one of the things that if you are writing a bisexual character you need to keep in mind is that there is a phenomenon called bi-erasure, by which, if specifically a person is in a relationship with somebody who is not of their gender, it can read as a straight relationship. Just because you're in a relationship with somebody who is not of your gender, does not make you necessarily straight. I am no less bi, because I am married to a man. So, as a writer, when you are creating bi characters, you should be aware of bi-erasure as a concept, and how to avoid it. Some of the things… Like the tropes that have been used in the past that contribute to bi-erasure that you should avoid. Treating bisexuality like a phase. Like, oh, this is just something you're exploring and then you're actually a straight person. Also, the reverse of that is… I've heard the phrase, and this was on Sex In The City, which I quite enjoy. They call bisexuality a layover to Gay Town.

[Wow]

[laughter]

[Dongwon] That show has not aged well.

[T. J.] No, it has not. Bisexuality is not a layover to Gay Town. Nor is it a stop on the cruise to Gay Town.

[Chuckles]

[T. J.] Bisexual people are queer people. So, for an example of the layover to Gay Town in television and film, think of Buffy's Willow. Buffy's Willow, for four seasons, dated guys. Then, all of a sudden, in season four, she declares, "I'm gay now." Which can be a thing that happens. But it also can lead to bisexual erasure. She dated men, and was clearly happy dating men, and then all of a sudden was like, "Click. I'm gay." So, yes, those things can happen, but because bisexual people are so infrequently represented, when that changeover occurs, it erases her bisexuality. So be aware of that when you're writing, and have bisexual characters who are visible and who are seen and who are treated as bisexual and queer people. Now, I kind of use those terms a little interchangeably. A lot of that is personal preference. Somebody may use the term bisexual, someone may use the term pansexual, which is similar, but not exactly the same. Pansexual, generally, is someone who's attracted to all genders. But some bisexual people are also attracted to all genders. The language on this is evolving constantly.

[Tempest] It's very just layered and nuanced, right? Like there's…

[T. J.] Absolutely.

[Tempest] There are a lot of people who like adamantly, are like, "I'm pansexual because bi means this." Bi doesn't actually mean that, but like, for them, bi meant that, and they're like very much like "No! I want to be sure that I am inclusive of everything."

[T. J.] Exactly. A lot of this is what word feels right to you. Some people will just simply use the word queer as an umbrella term. That's fine too. Yeah. Some people have started reclaiming bi even though it has that bi in it. People get really thrown by the two prefix, by it. People are really reclaiming it to mean two or more genders.

 

[Dongwon] If I can jump in for a second.

[T. J.] Sure.

[Dongwon] One thing I want to talk about a little bit is sort of the mechanics of how bi invisibility gets reinforced in fiction. It's a thing that we see happening a lot when dealing with any kind of marginalization is there is the power of the default, right? Whenever you're not explicitly stating somebody's sexual orientation, their gender identity, their racial identity, there's going to be a lot of pressure for your reader to automatically assume that they are whatever the default is for the culture that they come from. Here in the US and in the West generally, it's often cisgendered white heterosexuality. So when you have a bi character dating someone of the… A different gender or of the opposite gender of them, then there's going to be that default assumption that they're hetero. So, what are some of the ways that we can flag that in an explicit way to sort of resist the default being assigned to those characters?

[T. J.] Absolutely. An example of something that happens… I know we all love The Good Place…

[Chuckles]

[T. J.] But along your line of tagging, Eleanor often makes jokes about how attractive she finds Tahini in The Good Place, and that is great, but the creators have explicitly said that she is not bisexual. So it is treated as a joke, and she's not tagged as bisexual. So that's a way that bi-erasure can be enacted in our popular culture. Because it's played… Sometimes relationships between two people of the same gender are played as a joke, whereas the opposite gender relationship or the different gender relationship is played as serious. That's a way to erase it. So if you are having a bisexual character in a work that you're creating, make sure that you're treating with the same seriousness the relationships of all genders.

[Dan] Right. This is actually a whole that is very easy to fall into. The third Pitch Perfect movie did exactly the same thing. Or, no, it was the second Pitch Perfect movie. Where there was, similar to Tahini, a female character who was very tall, very attractive, and very dominant in personality, and the main character was constantly making these kind of joking references to attraction, that were never actually taken seriously. So it does show up a lot, that people do that thing.

[T. J.] Sure.

[Dongwon] We see it between male characters as well. I was thinking of anytime we see The Rock and Kevin Hart on-screen together…

[Oh, my goodness.]

[Dongwon] There's always that sort of like little bit of attraction tension. That's part of what makes their comedy duo work. But it always is played for sort of this queer panic laughs. That's very frustrating.

[T. J.] The laugh is, exactly as you say, it's just a nervous laugh. Like, "Oh, we wouldn't really want that to happen." But yes, we kind of do.

 

[Dan] All right. Let's pause for our book of the week which is Space Unicorn Blues by T. J. Berry.

[T. J.] Yeah. So, Space Unicorn Blues came out July from Angry Robot Books. The pitch is a disaster gay in space cooperates with a talking unicorn in order to deliver a time-sensitive magical cargo to save humanity from a coming apocalypse.

[Tempest] I love it.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Every single piece of that sounds amazing.

[Laughter]

[T. J.] I'm not sure when we'll actually air this, but if by then the sequel is coming out in May of 2019. It is called Five Unicorn Flush. Our disaster gay is back with all of her friends. Now she has to protect a planet full of magical fairytale beings from humans who want to colonize and exploit them.

[Dan] Fantastic.

[Tempest] [inaudible] go wow!

[Laughter]

[Dan] That is Space Unicorn Blues by T. J. Berry. Where can people find that?

[T. J.] People can find it online, Amazon, bookstores. It's really delightful to go into bookstores and find your own book.

[Tempest] Isn't it, though?

[Dan] It's a great experience.

[T. J.] As a new author, that is my greatest joy.

[Dan] It's wonderful.

 

[Dan] All right. Well, let's get back into this. One of the things we really want to focus on is that what we're here to do is to give you, as an author, you can use to port… If you choose to use bisexual characters, here's some great ways that you can do it well. So what are some things that they can keep in mind or include in their fiction or in their descriptions so that they can do this right, and do it well?

[T. J.] Sure. So one of the things that I highly recommend is that you make your characters intersectional so that… People are never just one thing. So you may have a bisexual character, but keep in mind this character may also be disabled. They also may be Latino. They may come from a marginalized… A background that hasn't been explored fully. Make sure your characters are intersectional and real. One of the things I'd like to talk about is there's a book by C. B. Lee called Not Your Sidekick, which is a YA book. Really fantastic. The heroine is Asian, she is Vietnamese Chinese-American, and she's a bisexual teenage girl. So you've got a lot of different things going on. That is what happens in people's lives. People are never just one thing. She is the daughter of superheroes, but she has no superpowers. So she gets an internship with a local super-villain. So we're basically looking at sky high but queer, which is amazing. One of the things that's done really well in this book is not just the inclusivity, but the intersectionality. So you have someone who is Vietnamese Chinese-American and is dealing with be… The cultural implications of being second-generation and her bisexuality. So intersectionality is something that writers should definitely take a look at. Another thing is positivity. Make sure that if you have bisexual characters, that they are not just… This goes for marginalized characters in general. Make sure they're not just receiving the brunt of homophobia, racism. Make sure you are showing the positive sides of their lives. A book that really does this quite well is Passing Strange by Ellen Klages. It's a novella from Tor.com. It is of 1940s San Francisco and it has magic in it. So it's really delightful. The LGBTQIA representation is fantastic. The characters are very well-rounded, and they… She is able to touch on the realities of queer life without making it a tragic gay story. This is a positive, uplifting love story where we see some of the discrimination and hardships that come with this life, but also things go well in the end. So, make sure that you're not doing the usual trope of burying your gays, which means that your gay characters are disproportionately killed off in your narrative. Make sure that queer people have happy endings, and that they also find love. Those are some things that you can definitely look at to make sure you're doing the right thing. Also, make sure your bisexual people are just normal people. There is a stereotype that bisexual people… This was more in the past, but still it kind of pops its ugly head up now and then is that bisexual people are promiscuous. This is… Just because bisexual people have a larger dating pool doesn't necessarily mean that is true. Bisexual people are soccer moms, you know?

[Chuckles]

[T. J.] Just write that into your narrative as daily life. People are married, they have domestic lives. Not everything is necessarily clubs all the time.

[Tempest] Right. It isn't always about like their sexuality.

[T. J.] Right. Exactly.

 

[Tempest] Another thing I want to mention is if you are going to have a bisexual character that is going to have relationships with people from multiple genders, it's really important to not privilege some relationships over others. This is a mistake that I found in Torchwood, which was supposed to be a very bisexual program. I wrote a whole essay about this, so I won't go into like all the things about Torchwood that made me mad. But, like, one of the core things was how even though Capt. Jack Harkness was bisexual, omnisexual, or whatever they were calling it at the time, it was very clear that the relationships that he had with men were like real impactful relationships on him as a character, and the relationships he had with women were like sad pale like smears on a bagel in comparison.

[Chuckles]

[T. J.] Exactly.

[Tempest] It was… That's like a problem that Russell T Davies has in general when he's writing bisexual characters. That may be in part because he, as a gay man, is like pulling more from his… Like his relationships that are deep and whatever are with men, because he is gay. So like he sort of transferred that to his character that was supposed to be omnisexual. So, I would say, like… You don't have to have your bisexual character having relationships with multiple people to prove that they're bisexual in your work. But, if you do decide to have that, if you do decide to have multiple relationships, make sure that like it's clear that all those relationships are meaningful. Not just some of them.

[T. J.] Absolutely. Absolutely. One of the last things… I cannot enough stress the importance of sensitivity readers. On this last book, Space Unicorn Blues, I had the services of five sensitivity readers because it is a fairly diverse book with a lot of intersecting marginalizations that are not mine. I'm going to quote [me sea schall?] here, who I love very much, who says, "There is a difference between writing a diverse set of characters and telling someone else's story." So what is helpful is if you can get a sensitivity reader who can come in and say, "No, you are telling someone else's story that maybe you should not be telling." I know Mary Robinette has told the story many times about she had a book where she was telling someone else's story and decided to pull back on it. I cannot stress enough how important it is, because even certain turns of phrase that you will not recognize as problematic, someone who is own voices will look at this and say, "No, you should not use this particular word." It may not be a very problematic word, but the phrase itself may be something that indicates something that you would not know as a member… As not a member of that community. So hire sensitivity readers, and pay them.

[Dan] Absolutely. We want to stress the whole purpose of this series of episodes is to tell you that you can write these kinds of characters. We want you to write these kinds of characters. It benefits the entire industry, the more of this that we have. But there are those lines that are easy to cross and hard to notice if you're not part of that community.

[Exactly]

[Dan] That's why sensitivity readers are so valuable.

[Definitely. Definitely.]

 

[Dan] I wish that we had more time. We really need to end, though. T. J., you've got some homework to give us.

[T. J.] Yeah, this is an easy homework. You don't have to write, but what I would love for people to do is find the 100th episode of Brooklyn 99. They have a canonically bisexual character, Rosa Diaz. On the 100th episode… Which, by the way, a 100th episode of a show is a big deal. So to dedicate the hundredth episode to the coming out of your bisexual character is a really fantastic thing. This is her coming out episode, and she talks to her family members. Not only is it difficult, and she has a really tough time getting through it, it has to happen multiple times. This is something that people who are not queer may not understand is that coming out is not a one time thing. It's multiple conversations in multiple spaces, and sometimes with the same people over time. So Brooklyn 99 handles this beautifully, and I would love for people to take a look at how they did it.

[Dan] Well, that's awesome. Thank you very much. This is been a fantastic episode. Thank you very much to T. J. for being here.

[T. J.] Thank you.

[Dan] And, of course, Dongwon and Tempest for joining me here. This is Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/01/13/14-02-geography-and-biomes/

 

Key points: Where do you start when you are worldbuilding geography or a world? What do I need the geography to do? Sense of wonder is different than mystery. Start with the familiar, with components that you know really well. That gives you authenticity. The familiar can be immersive for the reader. What kind of geography suits the story? Then dig into the ramifications of that. Biomes can help you build a world. Biomes are kind of packaged ecosystems. Pay attention to transitions, too! Be aware, the map is not the territory. Go out and look at the actual landscape if you can!

 

[Mary] Season 14, Episode Two.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Geography and Biomes.

[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] Mahtab, thank you so much for coming and being on the podcast with us.

[Mahtab] Thank you for having me.

[Brandon] Will you tell us a little bit about yourself?

[Mahtab] All right. Well, first of all, let me start with my name. It means moon… In Persian, it means moon light, and I was named by my grandmother. I have done everything from hotel management to credit card sales to IT sales and writing is actually my fourth career. I think I'm going to stick with this one. I absolutely love writing. Science fiction, fantasy… Though I have written fantasy before, in my Tara trilogy, trying to work on science fiction. I'm just looking forward to continuing writing for as long as I live.

[Brandon] We're super excited to have you. Mahtab is going to be helping us on the second week of the month episodes…

[Dan] All year long.

[Brandon] This year. So you'll be able to hear a lot from her.

 

[Brandon] We're talking geography and biomes this year. I figured starting off worldbuilding, we would start right at the fundamental, the actual geography of the worlds that we create.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So I want to ask you guys, where do you start when you're building geography, when you're building a world, what's your start point?

[Howard] I ask myself… And I'm going to go back to elemental genres… I ask myself what I need the geography to do.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] If I need sense of wonder, that is a very different geography than if I need… Then if I'm writing a mystery and the geography is factoring into the mystery. In large measure, that is because if I want sense of wonder, I have to break out the wordsmithing, and I have to talk about the colors in the sights and the smells and the feeling of the air and all of these things in a way that's very different than if I want it to be puzzling.

[Brandon] Yeah. I've seen a lot of sense of wonder in your writing. Give me an example of geography you might use if you were doing the mystery, instead?

[Howard] [breath] Uh.

[Brandon] Put you on the spot?

[Howard] No, no no no. That's fine. I'm writing, right now, a novel set on a desert planet which has a thriving atmosphere, even though there is nothing growing on the surface.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] Part of that mystery is… Everybody's afraid to go outside, and you don't go outside because it's radioactive. There's not enough… There's not enough electromagnetic field. The science behind this says if you go outside, you will eventually die of cancer. Why is there an atmosphere? So you have this fear of being outside, and this puzzle about what is it underground that keeps pumping fresh oxygen to us, that keeps drawing carbon dioxide in? That puzzle is central to the whole book.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Howard] But there's also going to be sense of wonder in there, because [garbled they all does]

 

[Dan] I do a very similar thing, actually. I will look at what I need the world, what I need the geography to accomplish. In the middle grade that I'm writing right now, I was trying to figure out… They have… It's science fiction and they've arrived at a brand-new planet. So I looked at the outline and realized that the actual function… Like, the size of the continents, what their land around it is like, wasn't as important as like the physics of the world. I wanted to have very low gravity, I wanted to have very high density in the atmosphere… Things like that, in order to make certain things work.

[Brandon] Can you tell us what any of those are without giving spoilers, or… Just curious.

[Dan] Yeah, well. This is actually the sequel to Zero G, which is my big middle grade audiobook. In that one, they are going to a planet and it all takes place in zero or microgravity. You can fly, basically. I wanted to have a similar feeling in the second book. So I actually talked to a bunch of physicists. We came up with a combination of gravity and atmospheric pressure and things that would basically allow you to fly on muscle power. Then, looking at that, realized, "Oh, well, okay, if the atmosphere is dense enough to provide buoyancy, it's also going to be narcotic." So how can we work around that? Basically, producing an environment in which the little middle grade protagonists could have a lot of fun and do a lot of cool things. Making sure that I had the atmosphere chemically composed so that it would be narcotic rather than poisonous. So that it would make you kind of loopy and giggly, rather than kill you, was very important for the middle grade, as well. Whereas if I'm doing the fantasy series that I'm trying to write, that isn't as important. What I need is different kingdoms that can be at war with each other. Why are they at war with each other? Well, there's a geographical answer to that, as well.

 

[Mahtab] When I started writing, I wanted something that was more familiar to me, so at least my first four novels are set in India. I just feel that because every component of a story, whether it's setting or character or plot or pacing, everything has to work together. It would be easy if new writers, at least especially for me, to start with one component that I knew really, really well. So, which is why… I mean, I don't have to spend too much time, all I have to do is close my eyes and I can imagine myself in India, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the touch, tastes, everything. That is why… That is one component that's kind of taken care of. As you progress towards getting better at writing, at making sure that everything works, then, I think, you can start working on fantasy lands where you do need to do a bit of research, go to experts that could probably tell you a little bit more about that. I mean, you could probably put some more effort into the geography. So, for me, I like to start with the familiar. In fact, the next novel that I'm going to be working on is set on Mars. Now, that's a little bit difficult to try and figure out what the place is going to be like.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] You have to rely on lots of stuff. So I like to start with the familiar, and then moved to something that's made up.

[Howard] There's so much to be said for the familiar as something that is immersive for the reader. The sugar sand beaches in Sarasota, Florida, where I grew up. Some details. One, when you walk barefoot in that sand, it's hard. It pushes out of the way. You end up taking different kinds of steps. You sort of do this shuffle step. The humidity is cloying. Every time I've stepped off a plane in Florida, I've taken one breath and realized [sniff] "Oh, that's right. Oh, that." Then… And this is something that people often don't think of. We get on those beautiful white beaches, you can have a snow blindness from the glare. These are all things that I've experienced, and I know well enough that I can write about them when I am talking about a desert. Because they all fit just well enough that I can leverage that.

 

[Brandon] When you were writing about India, were you picking a specific city that you knew or were you creating a made up one?

[Mahtab] It was made up. I mean, the little town of Morni in northern India was made up. But everything else, it's like the foods or the smells or the cultures and the customs of the people, that was… I mean, I've lived in India. So I know. Then, of course, you could tweak a little bit, but it started out with a familiar base of what it is like, and then I kind of changed it around. I put a lot of Indian mythology in it. Which kind of added a bit more texture and flavor to the story. So, yeah, I mean… Of course, India is vast. It's got lots of languages, cultures, so what happens in North India doesn't happen in South India, but the fact is that you… Because it was a made up little town, I could add bits and pieces and still get that authenticity in the narrative.

[Howard] I recently watched a documentary about the monsoon season in southern India and the way it shapes whether all over the globe. It was utterly fascinating. The documentary… You look at the towns, the villages, the communities in that area, and how… Yeah, they really have two times of the year. Which is monsoon, and everything else.

 

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

[Howard] Oh. Yes. I have a history book for you, written by my friend, Myke Cole. It's called Legion versus Phalanx. It's his first history book, and I am absolutely in love with the voice that he uses for teaching us history. Specifically, teaching us about the Roman Legion and the Greek, the Hellenistic, Phalanx, and how those two related. The fundamental question is well, who would win? We all think we know the answer. Well, the Romans would win because…

[Dan] They did.

[Howard] That's who would win because they did. But the why behind that is kind of the meat of the book. Myke takes all kinds of angles in discussing this, including… And that's why I want to do that one this week… Including geography. One of the fascinating facts is that the Roman Legion can turn more quickly than a Phalanx can. So if you're fighting on the flat, maybe it's a level… Pardon the pun… Playing field. But the moment there are hills, or trees or whatever, the Legion has an advantage. That's just scratching the surface. The book is awesome, I think you'll love it. Myke Cole, Legion Versus Phalanx.

 

[Brandon] Dan, you said something earlier that relates to this idea, with Legion versus Phalanx. Where you said if you're designing a fantasy world, you would take the geography into account for developing the politics, the governments, the systems. Talk a little bit more about that. How would you do that?

[Dan] Well. Um. In this particular instance… This is the book I've been working on for a long time, and it still is not out, and may never be. But I needed… the premise is that the fantasy world is also a reality show that people from other planets watch. One of the main shows that got everyone's attention was this kind of ongoing War of the Roses style thing. Where there was the constantly moving border. You look historically at the War of the Roses between the French and the English, and the definition of what is French and what is English changed constantly, and who was who and who was in charge. So I wanted to create the kind of geography that would (A) give you something to fight over. Some kind of resource or power that made that land worth a multi-generational war. But that also allowed for that kind of fluid border and fluid national identity. So that the people could… We used to belong to this, but now we belong to this, because that King won the last war. Which is different than just I want to have two kingdoms fighting. In my case, I ended up giving them a religious component. There was a religious lake that was central to the religion shared by both of these kingdoms. So they were kind of fighting over that, Dome of the Rock style. We want to make sure that this belongs to us, because it is very important, and not to those other terrible people on the other side of the border. Then figuring out, well, okay, this is therefore the kind of place that has a lake. What does that signify about the surrounding area? I love thinking about it in these terms because then, once I have a premise, I can spin that out. What are the ramifications of that? What is this lake used for? If it's religious, do they fish it or is it off-limits? How is that going to affect the culture? Are they going to be a fishing culture or not? All of those questions can be answered as you follow yourself down the rabbit hole.

 

[Brandon] I want to touch briefly on the idea of biomes. Next week, we will come back and talk about a fun concept called world of hats. This is where…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Sometimes a planet will express only one idea. We'll talk about that next week. But I want to talk about the idea of different biomes in your stories. Because specifically, when I started to really get into worldbuilding geography, there was so much to learn. In any of these topics we'll be talking about this year, we could spend an entire year's podcasts just on geography. As a newbie coming into it, I often felt as a fantasy author, I needed to have working knowledge of so many different things, it sometimes felt overwhelming. When I started to learn about the idea of how biomes interact and why they are where they are, that helped me to start to be able to build some of these fantasy worlds and kind of make some sort of short hands. So, what are biomes? What do I mean by that? How does that shorthand help?

[Dan] A biome is kind of like… This is a generalization that a bio scientist would be upset with. But it's kind of like the ecosystem. It's kind of like, say, well, this is a desert biome versus a tundra versus a jungle versus a forest, whatever. It's a really good thing to think about, especially if you're writing fantasy. Because we come from such a strong kind of overpowering tradition of medieval European fantasy that everyone tends to have the rolling hills and forest biome, with maybe some snowy mountain peaks where the barbarians live.

[Howard] I've got a great example of that. I've recently been reading up on the Judean wilderness. There is a word that they have in Arabic, wadi, which is a dry riverbed. Our word for it in English is dry riverbed. In English, you say this because it's something that… Your river broke. It's not… The river doesn't exist anymore. Something went wrong. In Arabic, it is a word for a feature of the landscape. So you have the geography directly impacting the language. What's interesting is Guadalcanal and Guadalajara get their names from Arabic, wādī al-qanāl and wādī al-ḥijārah are the original names of those places. So in reading this, I quickly realized that Arabic geography, Arabic peninsula geography was influencing language and place names where there really weren't that many dry riverbeds. Really cool stuff.

[Mahtab] The other thing one also has to remember is that you… When you're also thinking of biomes, you just do not have hills, and then you have a desert, and then… There's a lot of gradual transition from one to the other, so think of the hybrids as well. Like, the mountains rolling into foothills into some kind of a desert land and then into the river or the seashore or something like that. So don't just think when you're building a biome or when you're thinking of your geography or landscape that, okay, it's just gotta have mountains, it's gotta have this. Try and do a gradual transition. That's why sometimes it's necessary to know a lot of stuff and then combine it together to see what is necessary and where your city or your town or your protagonists are located.

[Dan] Yeah. That's a really good point to make, especially because, not only are we very heavily influenced by old European fantasy, but also by Star Wars. So we do tend to have this concept of, "Oh, well, this is the snow planet, and this is the desert planet." Those transitional areas are not only more common, but they're much more interesting. Utah is a desert, and we have a big, nasty Salt Lake. But what that Salt Lake also provides is an incredible saltmarsh wetland that's one of the coolest bird preserves in the country. That often gets forgotten, because we're just kind of broad brushed is a desert. So when you do your research and figure out what all these transitional states are, there's a lot of cool stuff in them.

[Mahtab] That could actually inform your story or your character or could be a point of… Plot point, conflict, what have you. So you gotta research that.

[Howard] There's a quote from Robert De Niro… Actually, I had to look this up. The movie, Ronin, 1998. They're doing this tactical map on a whiteboard and talking about this plan. De Niro says, "The map is not the territory." They all go out and look at it, and everything changes as they realize that these sightlines are not two dimensional, this is… For me, having the whiteboard translate to an actual landscape, I realized, "Oh. All these fantasy maps that I love drawing, which was a thing that I loved drawing in 1998, are not the territory. I'm going to have to go outside to get a feel for this."

 

[Brandon] Let's wrap it up here. Mahtab, you have homework for us.

[Mahtab] Yes, I do. Normally, when we start describing geography or describing a setting, we tend to rely mostly on our sense of sight. So the homework for you today is when you… Take your setting, your fantasy world, whatever it is. Take out the sight. Out of it. Just describe it using sounds, smells, tastes, and feels. No sight. So, for example, if it was a blind person who was describing a setting, how would you do that? That's… Yeah, that's your homework.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/12/30/13-52-working-dad-is-a-spaceman/

 

Key points: How does being a dad and an astronaut change your relationship with your family? Take the time, or the expense, to keep in touch. Even as a disembodied head on a screen. “Spaceflight gives you opportunities to fail that you wouldn’t have otherwise.” Standing at the bottom of the rocket you are going to launch on, a certain reality hits you. Getting ready for your first spacewalk, when all the sound goes away with the air, you feel very alone. It’s not a spectacular star view, stars don’t twinkle. But the blackness of space is “a three-dimensional kind of almost palpable dark blackness.” Does the schedule include five minutes for sense of wonder? No, just translational adaptation time. The Soyuz landing, the parachute release, is the wildest ride in space. It’s type II fun, fun after you have done it. Advice? Value every second, it’s incredibly precious.

 

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 46.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Working Dad is… A Spaceman.

[Mary] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And we are joined by Tom Marshburn. Tom, this is your second episode recording with us. I think that's the order these will air in, but we can't promise that.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But a couple of words about yourself.

[Tom] I am an astronaut, selected in 2004. I was a flight surgeon part of that time. I was an ER doc and ended up working… Taking care of astronauts at NASA. Then had a chance to become an astronaut. Had a chance to fly in space a couple of times.

[Howard] And, if I understand this correctly, you're also a parent.

[Tom] That's right. I've now… Now a 14-year-old daughter. Hard to believe. And… Yeah. That's been the most amazing adventure, I would say, of all by far.

[Mary] How old was she when you went into space?

[Tom] The first time, she was eight years old.

[Mary] Oh, wow.

[Tom] Which she barely remembers. The rocket launch from that time. Partly because we had six scrubs of our launch before climbing into the space shuttle. On the morning of the launch, I think, she might even have asked, "What time is the scrub today?"

[Laughter]

[Tom] Then, just minutes before the main engines were to start, both she and my wife went, "Oh, this is really going to happen now." They ran outside onto the balcony.

[Dan] It's like a Philip K. Dick story, where it's like, "Yeah, sure, dad's in space. You've told me this before."

[Tom] Exactly.

 

[Mary] One of the things that I was excited about when we were talking about possible topics was the idea of talking about how being a dad in this job has changed your relationship with your family. I'm going to briefly tell a funny story that I think will highlight kind of some of the things. A friend of mine's a runner. One of the people in his running group that he'd, she was trying to date something, and she's like, "Yeah. That was right after my dad came back from the moon." He just stopped. He's like… Which they never do when they're running. He's like, "Wait, wait. Wha… Wha… What?" She realized that she had never told him that her dad was one of the Apollo astronauts. Because she was so used to masking it. She just said, "My dad's a pilot." Because she got tired of the fact that the moment she said her dad was an astronaut, and in Apollo astronaut, that was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] What has being on astronaut done for… Like, as that put additional pressures on your daughter?

[Tom] I think so, but I think she has embraced it. It's difficult being away from the family, but there are a lot of benefits that come to the family being away. At least in our experience. So, similar thing in school, today even, my daughter's in high school. If it's space day, they're talking about space, the teacher will ask a question, and my daughter usually just has the answer right away in much greater detail than the teacher ever intended.

[Laughter]

[Tom] So, often times, "How do you know that?" So she would say, "My father's an astronaut."

[Chuckles]

[Tom] I think she kind of enjoys that, a little bit.

[Dan] She loves it.

[Tom] She'll get tired of it later.

[Howard] Miss So-and-so, you're asking the question wrong.

[Tom] Exactly.

[Howard] Because, technically,…

[Dan] No. I can understand that, coming from a different kind of celebrity. My children… I've got six, and they have this strange relationship with a father who is an author. My daughter, my oldest, she's 16, and I don't think she will ever read a Brandon Sanderson book, because she loves being able to say, "Oh, yeah, I've been to Brandon's house, I know him really well, but I've never read his books," because it drives her friends nuts. That kind of oh, just casual relationship with this famous person.

[Tom] Oh, yeah. She loves doing that.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, your daughter kind of drops that whenever she can? "Oh, yeah, my dad is the astronaut."

 

[Tom] So we… When I was training for my long-duration spaceflight, so that was two and a half years about, about half the time spent away from the family, I said, "All right, break the bank. I'm just going to bring my family with me." NASA didn't pay for it. But I brought the family with me, a lot of my training trips. We pulled her out of school, withdrew her. So we sort of homeschooled, but the places we did it were very unique, and she loves to talk about it still. She… In the basement of a little cottage in Star City, which is where we train outside of Moscow for the Russian flights to fly in the Soyuz, is where she learned to play piano.

[Mary] Oh, wow.

[Tom] She was bored, she downloaded it on her iPad, and she learned to play piano. She learned long division in a Japanese restaurant. She actually… We all wrote down little problems for her while we were eating dinner, and she solved them and brought them back. But we wrote them on beer coasters. So she turned in this big stack of beer coasters to her teacher with all of the problems…

[Laughter]

[Tom] Solved on there. That's one thing maybe we shouldn't have done. But she's done fine in school, but so we have all these great stories of the family traveling with me during training.

[Mary] So you said two and a half years of training. Is that… And that you took them with you for much of it? But there were times that you couldn't take them?

[Tom] Yeah. I wouldn't even say much of it. For each country, one trip there. Most of the time, I was away. Just gone.

 

[Mary] How did you manage staying in touch with the family? Like, was that… Now we have email and Skype and things like that. Were you doing lots of that, or…

[Tom] Yeah. That was still available then, so we had iPads and we would Skype. I think the lesson learned from that is how often do you have a set time where your family members… Where you're sitting across the table, staring in their face, and just talking? You don't do that very often. That could even be kind of painful. So, we figured, number one, it was important to do it. So every single day, maybe twice a day, we would either talk from Russia and back, back and forth, or even do a video. And sometimes, they would set up the iPad and I would just watch them as they made breakfast or make dinner or just did their normal daily thing, and I was just… My daughter remembers me as being this disembodied head on a screen.

[Chuckles]

[Tom] For much of the time. But that was important, because then we got into the habits, so when I was in space, it became much easier to have this regular conversation. It wasn't tedious or difficult, but I kind of knew what was going on, so I wouldn't come back from space having to catch up.

 

[Howard] There is a parenting principle there that can be generalized well outside of traveling. That is, if you get in the habit of communicating, openly and honestly and regularly with your young children, when they are teenagers and they have teenager problems, they want to talk to you about it. Which is… Was completely alien to me, because as a teenager, I did not want to talk to my parents, because we didn't have the right kind of relationship. But my teenagers have talked to me, and, well, mostly talked to Sandra, because she's better at this than I am…

[Chuckles]

[Tom] Same here.

[Howard] But it is because we developed good habits early on.

[Dan] Be careful with that, though, because I found that now I spend a lot of time talking to teenagers, and that's just kind of driving me nuts.

[Laughter] No. I love what you're talking about with the Skype. Two years ago, I was at a book festival in Washington, DC, when my wife went into early labor with kid number six. So all the pictures from the hospital are the wonderful mother with the brand-new baby, and then someone holding an iPhone with my face.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Because I participated via FaceTime with that particular birth.

[Howard] Working dad is a deadbeat author.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Not quite as sexy.

 

[Tom] But, spaceflight gives you opportunities to fail that you wouldn't have otherwise. In space, you're floating, so if you're really tired… while you're sitting down talking with someone, you can always just stand up and wake your brain up. In space, you can't do that. You can't use gravity to help you stay alert. We would have sometimes... an hour and a half family conference happens every two weeks in space. End of a hard work week, and I'm tired, sitting there looking at my wife, and she said, "Are you falling asleep on me?"

[Chuckles]

[Tom] Because my eyes would start to droop. Because I'm just… You're floating, it's like you're resting and I would just get really tired sometimes. So those kinds of things can happen. Or my daughter's on the other end, and I'm trying to entertain her with a floating object or something, and she gets distracted and just walks away.

[Laughter]

[Tom] That would happen. There's a bowl of candy somewhere, and she went, "Oh!" And walked off screen.

[Howard] You actually don't have to be an astronaut to have that experience.

[Laughter]

[Mary] It is good to know that… I think it's kind of reassuring that anything can become old hat. It's like it does not actually matter how cool your job is, you're still dad, you're still mom. In my case, I'm still aunt. So it doesn't matter, to some degree… Which is reassuring and dismaying, all at the same time.

 

[Howard] Let's take a break for a book. Mary? I think you were going to pitch one to us.

[Mary] Yeah. This is one that I am completely fascinated by. It's called A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. It's by Andrew Chaikin. Tom, you're actually the one who turned me on to this book. So, you can do a better summary of it than I will.

[Tom] Well, it's a step-by-step history of all of the Apollo flights, not just… Apollo 11 or 13 obviously get a lot of attention. In my mind, spaceflight… I think it's certainly true, spaceflight is not easy, there's a lot that happens behind the scene. This tells you what happened behind the scenes to the crew and what mission control had to solve. So you get an appreciation for just how dangerous and difficult it is all of the time. That's what I like about it.

[Mary] It sounds amazing. So, it's A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin.

 

[Mary] Speaking of dangerous, was that a concern when you were deciding to sign up for this? It's like, "Hum, I'm gonna… And I have family… Am I really going to let them strap me to this bomb and ship me into airless space?"

[Tom] For a lot of astronauts, it's a life dream. So, no.

[Laughter]

[Tom] Having said that, when you're standing at the bottom of your rocket that you're going to launch on, there's a certain reality that hits you that has never hit you in any simulator before. Because the rocket… It might have condensation laying outside, if they are hypergolic fluids. So ice sheets falling off, there's a kind of creaking and rumbling, before… So it seems like a living animal the size of a building that you're getting in. The thrill of the launch wipes all of that away. For me. Also, in the airlock, getting ready to do my first spacewalk, when the realization that this is a dangerous real thing hits you because you're in the airlock with your buddy, you're in your spacesuit, you've got these tools that weigh… Metal tools, that weigh 5 to 15 pounds, they're banging around, you can hear them all clanging around with you. Then you… My job was to turn on the valve that pumps all the air out. When the air goes away, also the sound goes away.

[Mary] Ooo…

[Tom] So all you hear is your fan inside your spacesuit, and your own voice talking. So you feel very alone. It's very eerie. All this other noise going away. Other than that, just some dull thumps as your suit is moving around. In my mind, I… The biggest fear is I don't want to mess up. But then you realize I'm getting ready to put my little pink body out there in the vacuum of space, and there's only 250 miles between me and the Earth or… What is actually more riveting is the infinite space around you, and you could just let go and go flying off, if you wanted to. All those things kind of all come in a way. Very quickly, you get to work, though, and your training takes over, and you kind of forget all that. The training is really good in that regard.

 

[Howard] I have to ask, because… Well, because I have to ask. Our eyes are able to compensate for rapid changes in light. Cameras aren't. So many of the pictures we see of Earth's limb taken from the space station don't have any stars in it. When you are doing that, and turning, and you see the earth, and you are seeing space, do you get to see the stars? Do your eyes adjust quickly enough that all that blackness and all those millions of little pinpoints of light are there?

[Tom] So, you can see the stars, you can see planets, but it's not a spectacular star view. Like, the whole Milky Way, for the very reason you just mentioned, your eyes haven't adjusted. You only get about 45 or less than 45 minutes of dark for every orbit, you're going around the world every 90 minutes. So bright blazing sunlight, then boom… Into darkness. What's striking about the… About space is stars don't twinkle. Planets look like little disks. But even on the bright side… Since you can't see the stars or planets on the bright side, the sun is just flattening out… All out. The blackness of space, it's not a two-dimensional blackness, it's not like a painted wall or something. It's a three dimensional kind of almost liquid palpable dark blackness that I've… I still am downloading that view and trying to figure it out. I dreamed about it a lot during my flight and after my flight.

[Mary] So I'm sitting here… I am taking notes. I'm like, "All of the palpable…"

[Howard] This is one of those questions that, as I'm asking it, I'm thinking, "This might be a dumb question." Nope!

[Nope!]

[Laughter]

[Dan] No, it's an awesome one.

 

[Mary] Do they… Does mission control… Because I know that the schedules are really… Do they actually build in time for… You've stepped out of the airlock. We know that they're going to need a couple of seconds to just go, "Oh! Holy…"

[Tom] Yeah, they do. Actually. Mostly, it's to allow you to get used to how to move your body. Because that's something we have not been able to do in training. We train underwater. The viscosity of the water makes it hard to get moving and easy to slow down. Space is just the opposite. A little flick of your wrist and you could start to turn. Then you have to stop yourself in space. So it's considered translational adaptation. We're given a few minutes to do that every time.

[Mary] Translational adaptation.

[Laughter]

[Dan] There's nothing in the schedule that says five minutes of sense of wonder...

[Laughter]

[Tom] No. There's not.

[Dan] Then move on.

[Tom] There is not.

[Dan] Come to terms with the smallness of our…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Human existence...

[Tom] As a matter of fact, that's…

[Dan] 5:05 to 5:08?

[Tom] I've done three spacewalks on the Shuttle flight. Coming in on my last one, I was the last one in the hatch on that third one. I didn't want to come inside. Capcom, the voice of NASA from the ground, said, "All right, Tom. Time to come in." I just kept looking at the view between my feet. They said, "Tom. Time to come in." I wanted a career afterwards, so I…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Came…

[Tom] Came inside, yeah.

[Mary] I had forgotten that you have done both the Shuttle and Soyuz.

[Tom] Yes. Launches. Yeah.

[Mary] And landing.

[Tom] Yes. Yes. Highly recommend the Soyuz landing.

[Mary] It has been described to me is like driving off a cliff in a Volvo that's on fire?

[Tom] Yeah. Or two explosions followed by a car crash.

[Chuckles]

[Tom] I've heard that as well.

[Mary] That's fairly accurate?

[Tom] For the Soyuz, yeah. Not the Shuttle. The Shuttle is a very soft landing. I wasn't even sure when we had touched ground.

[Mary] While.

[Tom] Because we came… It's a glider. You glide in on this long stripe in Florida, whereas the Soyuz is very literally a 20 mile-per-hour car crash, when the Earth rises up to hit you. You’re under the parachute. But it's the parachutes, when they release, coming out from the atmosphere, that is the wildest right in space I've ever had. Because they come out… You're twisting, you're spending, the impact of the shoot opening, you're feeling a lot of G's all at the same time. It's just a riot.

[Howard] I get uncomfortable during turbulence on an airplane. I suspect that that… The Soyuz parachute deployment moment would just end me.

[Tom] It's what we call type II fun.

[Laughter]

[Tom] You've heard the…

[Mary] No, I don't know.

[Howard] I'm writing that down.

[Mary] Type II fun means what?

[Tom] Type I fun, it's fun while you're doing it. Type II is find after you've done it.

[Howard] Oh. Oh, dear.

[Tom] Type III is fun when it's happening to someone else.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Yeah. Okay, I can see that.

[Howard] I have experienced all of those.

[Mary] Yes. I'm like… Type II is much of my theater career, actually.

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] Are there… Back to the topic, technically, of the episode. We could talk about astronaut stuff all day…

[Mary] Oh, right. I'm sorry.

[Howard] As far as I'm concerned. Are there things that you have learned to do as a parent that you think you probably only learned by virtue of being an astronaut?

[Tom] Value every second. With my child. And with my wife, too. I mean, it's incredibly precious. It seems to go by faster, obviously, when you're gone and come back after having just even trained with it a little. You've been training for two months, and come back home, and it seems like almost another new person.

[Howard] I had that happen. I traveled a bit for work when I was in the IT industry, and I would come home and realize my children have changed. I couldn't tell what… But I could tell that I was missing things. I think that was one of the best things about quitting the day job and working from home all the time is that I didn't miss any more. But you missed huge chunks.

[Tom] Yup. The… One of my colleagues, who's a single guy, interestingly, made one of the best comments for me, when I started training as an astronaut. My whole class and I would go into the simulators, they'd go out somewhere to celebrate a little bit, and I would get called out of… My wife… My daughter was in daycare at the space center, and I get called out of the simulator to come get diapers, for instance. Because they were out at the daycare. NASA supports families, and they were like, "Yeah, Tom, you gotta go do it. So take off." So I felt like I'm not spending all the time in the simulators that I want to, I'm not going out with my classmates after work, I'm going straight home. This colleague of mine, he doesn't have any children, he said, "Who cares? What you're doing is… You're going to value that so much more." He was absolutely right. For me.

[Mary] Well, I mean, I don't have… As I say, I have no children. I just have nieces and a nephew. The… When they asked me to do something, I'm like, "I don't want to do that thing." But I will often do that thing. Although one of them at least is listening to it and saying, "You didn't play that game with me." But it is… One of the things I find interesting is the snapshots that you wind up getting, the big jumps in growth. Because I only see them a couple of times a year. I remember when my niece went from… My niece, who's a teenager, a young adult, to "Oh. She's an adult now." It was just, for me, just like that. I suspect that her family may not have actually recognized that that transition has happened yet, because they see her all the time.

 

[Mary] So, I think, we should probably…

[Howard] We are, again, low on time. Gosh, I just want to keep…

[Mary] I know. I thought of like five different questions I wanted to ask.

[Dan] Yet another episode of we don't have enough time to talk to this astronaut.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Writing prompt? We have had some really fun descriptions from Tom, and I want you to take a couple of those and come up with something. The two things I want you to take our this 3D sense of space, and the three types of fun. I don't know where you're going to go with it. But I hope that it ends up being type I fun for you. All right.

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/12/16/13-50-what-writers-get-wrong-with-zoraida-cordova/

 

Key points: We don't need just one of something, we need multitudes. Seeing yourself as a caricature all the time hurts at a very basic level. Don't just throw in random Spanish words, like Abuela. Different Latin countries, different families, have different nicknames for things. Subvert stereotypes, think about how you are going to make your character different. Read 100 books about a culture. Be aware that Hispanic and Latino has a lot of variations and range. The Dominican Republic and Ecuador are very different. Representation in what we create is important, both for the people who have stories about them, and the rest of us to have empathy with them. "Good representation is good craft."

 

[Brandon] Hey, guys. Just breaking in here before we start the podcast. This is Brandon, and I have a new story out that I think you might like. Little while ago, Wizards of the Coast came to me and said, "Will you write us something? You can write anything you want in any world that we've ever designed." So I was excited. I sat down and wrote a story called Children of the Nameless which is kind of a horror story-esque thing. It starts off with a blind young woman in a town listening as everyone in her town is murdered by something she can't see. So, you can find links to that on my website. It's called Children of the Nameless. Or you can go to Wizards of the Coast.com, wizards.com.

 

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 50.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What Writers Get Wrong, with Zoraida Córdova.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary. 

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm usually getting it wrong.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] We are live at ComicCon Salt Lake City.

[Whoo! Applause.]

[Brandon] We have special guest star, Zoraida Córdova.

[Zoraida] Hi, guys. 

[laughter]

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

[Zoraida] Thank you for inviting me. I'm really excited.

[Mary] So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Because one of the things were trying to do is make sure that people know that culture is not a monolith. So what's your background?

[Zoraida] So I am originally from Ecuador. I was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador. I came here, I came to the United… Not here. We moved to New York when I was five. So I'm… I consider myself a… New York made. I am a writer, I write urban fantasy. I love painting, I love Star Wars, I love food. I do speak Spanish, but I don't… I no longer think in Spanish. That's a little bit about me.

 

[Mary] So, out of that stuff, are we gonna talk about Star Wars, are we going to talk about writing? What are we going to talk about?

[Zoraida] A little bit of everything, I guess. Whatever you want.

[Laughter]

[Mary] We're going to talk about being Latina in America?

[Zoraida] Yeah, let's talk about being Latina in America. I think that, especially right now, it's a little complicated because I grew up in a very, very diverse neighborhood in Queens, New York. I'm from Hollis. You recognize the song, It's Christmas Time in Hollis, Queens. I never felt like an outsider really. Because I… Everyone around me was a person of color or… Even if we had like white kids in school, they were like neighborhood kids, right? So I didn't… I was never aware of my otherness until I got into publishing. Because publishing liked to segregate books and genres for a little while. Like, my first novel went out on submission when I was 18…

[Mary] Oh, wow.

[Zoraida] Actually, 19. It was a quinceañera story, which… quinceañera are 16s, but with more pink and more cake and more family…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] And heels. But we got… It was the same time that Jennifer Lopez was published, like, had published a quinceañera collection, and there were a couple of other quinceañera novels. So our rejections were, "This is really funny, but we already have a Latina book for the season." I feel like… Nobody says that anymore. They say it… They use more coded language, but it's almost like… It's like the Highlander, right? There can only be one of something. Because I as the Latina, in publishing, represent all other Latinos in publishing. That's wrong. It shouldn't be that way. We should have multitudes. So that's… Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I never… I mean, I get some rejections, and they're never, "We've already taken books from bald dudes."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Right.

[Howard] Never comes up.

[Dan] We filled our white guy quota for the season.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] Yes. Yeah. So I don't… I think that things are changing a little bit, and I think that that has to do a lot with We Need Diverse Books, the organization that came out in 2014, I believe, May 2014. It started out as a hashtag. I feel like it's not to say let's replace white authors with people of color. It's just let's make the table bigger so that we can all have a seat. I think that that inclusive… Like that inclusive mentality is what's desperately missing from publishing. My book, Labyrinth Lost, is about a girl who is… She doesn't want power, so she casts a curse to get rid of it. Instead, she gets rid of her family, and sends them to another dimension. Oops.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] Now she has to go in get them back. But, above that, it's also about a Latina family, and how witchcraft is different from this culture. Right? Because they're brujas, which is the Spanish word for witch. At the end of the day, it's still a universal story, it's about family and sisters and having something bigger than yourself. But, it's still one Latina character.

 

[Dan] So, one of the things that… One of the side effects of this is that often when you see Latino characters being presented in media, they're not being written by people who actually are Latino. I'm guilty of this. I don't know if guilty is the right word. I've got an entire series where the main character is Latina. But. What do you see when you watch TV or you read books, and you're like, "Oh. That guy's never met a Mexican in his whole life." Like… What do people get wrong?

[Zoraida] People get the accents… In TV, people get the accents wrong, right? Like what is an accent… Ecuadorian speaking Spanish sound like? You've probably never heard it. But you've heard like Mexican accents or Colombian accents. If you watch Narcos, some Colombian people are upset because all the accents are wrong. But then again, you have a show, like Narcos, where like… They're drug dealers. Yay.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] So that portrayal, the drug dealer, the… A book recently came out where a girl goes to Ecuador, and I'm like, "Yes! Ecuador's in a book. Finally. That I didn't write." She gets kidnapped, right? By these drug lords. I was like… It makes me… Like, it hurts. Right? On a very basic level. Because, like, seeing yourself as a caricature all the time… Latinos… Like, every time you watch a TV show, here comes the maid, and her name is Maria, and she gives you some wisdom. So it's the same problem with African-American people who have like the magical Negro who all of a sudden gives you a bunch of wisdom. Now you know, like, "Oh, I can finish my quest." That goes for all different cultures, right? We have these stereotypes. For me, and YA, it's always like the sassy best friend, or the super like curvaceous Sophia Vergara look-alike. Like, I'm sorry, I don't look like Sophia Vergara, like… If anyone's disappointed, like when you meet a Latina author. So, those are some stereotypes. I think that other ones that really bother me are when you can't establish a character… Your character's ethnicity, so you just throw in random Spanish words, right?

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] I recently read this sci-fi book, and the only way that you know that this character is Latina is because she randomly says the word Abuela. I have never used the word Abuela in my book. Because I don't call my grandmother that. I call her mommy. Because she's like my second mother. So that just shows like not doing research. Because different Latin countries use different nicknames for things. Like, different families use different nicknames for things. So that's really frustrating.

[Dan] My Latina character totally calls her grandma Abuela.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's the one she was talking about.

[Howard] That's a Puerto Rican or a Cubano…

[Zoraida] It just means grandmother.

[Dan] It's different in every culture.

[Howard] I know, but if there's a cultural thing… I saw this in a comic book recently. I wish I could reference it directly. Where a Latino writer put a very, very Latino Abuela in the book, and it is a beautiful, beautiful moment. I think it might actually be in a Hulk comic.

[Zoraida] Really? Well, the new Groot… Groot's grandmother is Puerto Rican. He comes from like the Ceiba trees, and… You know…

[Howard] I think that might be it.

[Zoraida] Are you thinking that?

[Howard] I think Hulk was in the book.

[Zoraida] Oh, okay.

[Dan] Oh, that's super cool.

[Zoraida] Yeah. I think that's really beautiful. There are ways to do it. But that's just craft, right? Like, as writers, we want to subvert stereotypes and we want to be like, "yes, maybe I do want to write about a sexy Latina and… But how am I gonna make her different?" One of my favorite stories is Selma Hayek, when she was in Dogma, she almost didn't get cast because Kevin Smith just saw her as like, "Oh, she's just like a pretty body and face." Then he actually talked to her and was like, "Oh, maybe there's more to you than this outer shell of what you're supposed to be in Hollywood."

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, although you've already kind of pitched it to us. Do it again. Labyrinth Lost.

[Zoraida] Labyrinth Lost is about a girl who sends her family to another dimension and then has to go and get them back.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Excellent. And… Um…

 

[Mary] So I had a question that I wanted to ask. As you were talking about some of these things that… They hurt and… I was wondering if you wouldn't mind… And the Selma Hayek story made me think of this. Can we dig into some of your own personal pain there a little bit? So you've… I'm going to extrapolate from a friend of mine who had grown up in San Francisco… Actually, no. She had grown up in Texas, as a Japanese-American in Texas. She had friends from San Francisco who were Japanese-Americans. They all went to Seattle to this very small island. The San Francisco women were going, "Why do these people keep staring at us?" She's like, "What? Are they staring?" Because she was so used to being stared at that she had just stopped noticing. So, growing up in a very diverse community, when you leave New York, what are the things that you experience that you think are probably media-based? That the… Experiences where it's like, "Oh. Oh, you've just explored…"

[Zoraida] So, I think… I haven't… I've been traveling for… I haven't been home in two months. I went home for a day last week, and then I came here. So traveling in different cities has been strange. I was in Atlanta, and I think that… Like, I don't know the Latino communities in Atlanta, but it's… People do look at you. Most of the time, I'm on my phone talking to… On my headset, so maybe that's one of the reasons. This girl's talking to herself.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] But sometimes it's just like maybe somebody has never seen somebody that looks like me walking in their neighborhood. I won't really go to Arizona, because I'm afraid of like somebody asking… Racially profiling me or something like that. Like, I just won't go there. So when I leave New York, I… I don't always feel unsafe, I don't… It's not that I'm afraid of being around other people. Like, I'm literally surrounded by you guys right now…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] But you're great. So I think that the problem is the language in our media right now about Latinos and about Mexicans and about like Puerto Rico and things like that. I think that has caused me to feel more guarded than I would have two years ago, right? Like, I'm always on the edge, and sort of like standing near somebody, like, "Are they going to say something inappropriate? Are they going to like…" If I'm on the phone with my mom, should I talk to her in English or should I talk to her in Spanish? Because like, if I'm talking in Spanish… You see these videos that go viral where somebody's like, "It's America. Speak English." I'm like, "Well, go back to England and speak English."

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] So like, it's just being afraid to do things that were normal to me two years ago.

[Mary] Right.

[Zoraida] That are a little frightening. If you look at the things from the earthquake right now in Mexico, there are these people… There's a photo of a 90-year-old man carrying boxes to help his neighbors. So, like, these are the people that our leader calls like rapists and murderers? Meanwhile, there are some of the most helpful people like coming together for a tragedy. Where do I fit in that? Because I'm not Mexican, but if you… I don't know what people see when they look at me. Because I only know what I see when I look at me. Hopefully, it's like good things right now.

[Mary] Your hair is fantastic.

[Zoraida] Thank you.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Sorry we had to put the bandanna on it.

[Mary] Yeah.

[Zoraida] I like it. I feel like I'm at Woodstock.

 

[Brandon] So, say we've got a listener who says, "I really wanted to add some Latino/Latina characters to my book." Where would you say they begin? How do they go about that, doing it the right way?

[Zoraida] So… Just with writing, there is no one right way to do things. Right? I think that Cynthia Leitich Smith, who… She's a native American author. She says if you want to write about somebody, read 100 books about that person, about that person's culture. If you can't find 100 books, then are you the person to add to this? Right? That's one way. I think that with Latinos, you have to figure out… Don't say… Like, I'm not telling you how to write, how to say Latino, how to say Hispanic, but there are very, very different connotations. Like, I am Hispanic and Latina, because part of me is from Spain. But there are some Latinos who have no Spanish blood, they're still indigenous, or they're Afro-Latino. So, like, figure out what those things mean. Figure out what country they're from. Because even though we speak a similar language, although our accents are completely different, we have completely different histories. The history of the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean is going to be different than the history of Ecuador in South America. So figuring out that there is no way to look Latino… That's one of the things that really bothers me, because when people think Latino, they think light skin or tan or… They don't think Afro-Latino. They don't think of somebody like Rosario Dawson or Zoe Saldana. They think of Sophia Vergara. I'm sorry for using her over and over again, but I'm blanking out.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] On my Latina actresses. So, I think it's doing a research that doesn't feel like anthropology, because anthropology also is about studying a culture to then destroy it, right?

[Mary] Yeah, we can… If you're not clear on that, go back and listen to our colonialism episode, and that'll help clear that up a little bit.

[Zoraida] Colonization, yay!

 

[Howard] One of the things that is… Doesn't get said enough is the importance of representation in the things that we create. My oldest son is autistic. We were watching an episode of Elementary in which Sherlock Holmes is talking to the woman who becomes his girlfriend, who is portrayed as autistic. It's different from how my son's autism manifests. He stood behind the couch watching the episode for about 15 minutes. For the first time ever… Ever! Watching TV, he said, "They're kind of like me." That moment! There are kids who are Latino, who are black, who are female, who are all kinds of ways, who never get to say that. We need to hear… We need to hear your voice. We need to hear diverse voices so that these people have stories about them.

[Mary] Well, it… Just to use a… Not… A non-loaded example, the… Oh, shoot. I've just forgotten her name. Astronaut. Um. She just did…

[Howard] Mae Jemi…

[Mary] No. No, no, no. She's white. Which is why it's a non-loaded example, because white is the American default. Sorry. But she just got the record for the most number of days in space. And said that being an astronaut had never been on her radar at all, until NASA picked… When she was in late high school, NASA picked the first class of female astronauts. She was like, "Oh, I want to do that." If she had not seen that role model, she wouldn't have pursued that. For a lot of people, the role model comes from fiction. Learning through fiction that, "Oh, that could be me," or "I could do that." Or just "I am not alone. This experience that I'm having is not alone." There's… While you were surrounded, there are also… When I was going to elementary schools, I would go into elementary schools in Idaho and it would be a sea of white kids and one little brown kid. One child. So that child was getting everything through books.

[Zoraida] Right. I think it's a… It's not just important for us, for like diverse people to see themselves in books, it's also important for like white kids to see other people in books.

[Dan] Absolutely.

[Zoraida] Because that creates empathy. Like, as writers, our biggest thing is to create empathy through our works. When I lived in Montana for a brief period of time when I was in college, I'd never seen so many blonde people in my life.

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] So, I would… But the people who would come up to me were native people who were like, "What tribe are you from?" Because I was confusing to them. I'm like, "I'm from the Ecuadorian tribe."

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] So…

[Laughter]

[Zoraida] So, it's… We confound each other as people, but I think that as long as we create inclusive stories… You don't have to make it a point to say like… You don't have to make a checklist of I have a disabled character and I have a character who's queer and Latino. You… It has to be organic to your story, too, right? You don't want to create two-dimensional characters. But that's just craft. So good representation is good craft.

 

[Mary] Can you give some examples of some good craft? Some books or media where you've been like, "Ah, yes. Thank you. Thank you for using your craft to do this well?"

[Zoraida] I'm a really big fan of Leigh Bardugo and Six of Crows. I think that that is an example of a really diverse cast of con artists…

[Chuckles]

[Zoraida] I'm trying to think of lately… Benjamin Alire Saenz, who writes queer Latino boys. And Adam Silvera, who also writes queer Latino boys. But they're completely different from each other. Part of that has to do with one is in the Southwest and one is from the Bronx.

 

[Brandon] Well, we are out of time. I want to thank our audience at ComicCon.

[Whoo! Whistles!]

[Brandon] And I want to thank Zoraida for coming on the podcast with us. Thank you very much.

[Zoraida] Thank you.

 

[Brandon] Mary? You've got a writing prompt for us.

[Mary] Yeah. What I want you to do is I want you to go and… This echoes something that you've done previously, which is reading outside of the box. I want you to go and find books written by authors in, let's say… See if you can find a couple of Ecuadorian authors. Read them. Then… You've got a suggestion?

[Zoraida] No, I was going to say, challenge accepted.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Try and find a couple of Ecuadorian authors. Then, make one of your secondary characters… Not your main character. Make one of your secondary characters from Ecuador.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/12/02/13-48-character-death-and-plot-armor/

 

Key points: When and why do you kill off characters? First, ask yourself what is the worst thing that could happen to your character. It may not be death. Character death should be the best move for the story, not just an easy way to make the reader feel loss. What are the consequences of the death? Do writers look at character death differently than readers and fans? Everybody hates it when you can predict a character's death. Make them care, but don't telegraph a death. "Most people don't die for real at a point where the story is geared for maximum impact." A death, like any event in a story, should be surprising yet inevitable. Set up a longer arc for the character, follow through on consequences, and make it pay off. Beware of fridging! Killing a character as inciting incident, as backstory… Make sure the dead character has a purpose beyond simply acting as motivation for the protagonist. When do you decide to give a character plot armor, because they are too important to the story to die? Consider ablative plot armor!

 

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 48.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Plot Armor and Character Death.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] [squeal]

[Dan] I'm okay. Don't worry.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] Well. That line… I'm okay. To kill off this season of Writing Excuses, we're going to be talking about character death. So. First question. When do you kill off characters and why?

[Mary] Chapter 6. No.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I've come back to…

[Oh, he's serious…]

[Howard] Any time I'm thinking about killing a character or threatening the reader with that as an option, I always come back to what I think Pat Rothfuss said on one of our casts years ago, which was there are so many things that are worse than death that can happen to your characters. I ask myself that question first, because I want to know that I am choosing character death because it is the best failure mode or the best success mode that this particular story can have. I can't just default to it, because I think that's the only way to move the story forward or to make the reader feel loss.

[Mary] I look at the consequences of the death, for exactly the same reason. Because the death itself, sad that that character's dead and all, but people who survive, those are the ones that I'm going to be traveling with. The consequences of that death on the plot, that… If it's just, "Oh, and then everybody's going to be really sad…" That's not a consequence. I mean, yes, that is a consequence, but that's not a unique consequence that's going to drive things, usually.

 

[Brandon] Let me ask you a follow-up on that, because it prompts something in my thoughts. Do you think we look at this differently because we're writers than readers and fans do?

[Mary] I started doing this because deaths in books as a reader annoyed me so much. It wasn't a structural thing. Because I didn't know why they annoyed me. I just… I hate reading things where I'm like, "Oh, that character's going to die." Or where they die…

[Howard] I hate reading things right can do that…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Where I can say, "Oh, they're dead."

[Dan] Where you can tell.

[Mary] I hated it when characters would die and I didn't feel anything. Because I just didn't care.

[Brandon] I would say that annoys me a lot in cinema. They do that sometimes.

[Dan] My brother and I came up with the phrase, "That character wants to live in Wyoming." Which comes straight from Hunt for Red October, where there is the one Russian officer who's like, "I would like to live in Wyoming." He's gone. You know he's dead as soon as he says that.

[Howard] Was that Sam Neill? Was that Sam Neill's character?

[Dan] Yeah. So as soon as somebody starts talking about how they're going to retire soon or they're going to go to this place, all their plans for the future… They want to live in Wyoming. It's hard, because the space that you're aiming for is in between those. You don't want to telegraph it, but you also want to make them care. Those were the two problems that you had. Finding that middle ground… This is a character I love and don't see their death coming. That's what I shoot for, basically, with most of my characters.

[Howard] But I don't want that death to feel like a cheap shot. This is one of the places where the argument for narrative-driven fiction versus fiction that feels real is often centered around that. Most people don't die for real at a point where the story is geared for maximum impact. That's probably not how I'm going to go. That's probably not how any of us are going to go. But when you look at deaths in stories, we always have… Always is the wrong word. But we very often have the narrative is shaped around that death. When it isn't, often I'm annoyed. When it is, sometimes I feel like it was too convenient. There's no pleasing me. Just stop killing your characters.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] See, I asked this question as a writer just because the thing that it prompted in my mind is how I will have people come through my line, and just really be torn up by a character death. Which, for me, this is kind of maybe seeing in my brain, I'm like, "But that was a really good death." Right? I'm like, "Why are you torn up about that?" It was… They fulfill their character arc, it came to a good conclusion, it… They sacrificed for something they believed in. This was a really good death."

[Howard] I respond… in that exact situation, my response has nothing to do with my work and everything to do with the person at the table in front of me. The person at the table in front of me is grieving, and what they need me to do is grieve with them. My response is, "I loved that character too. In fact, I may even have loved them more than you did."

[Mary] Now, see, I'm evil because my response to that is, "I am so delighted I made you cry. Thank you for telling me. I worked really hard on that."

[Dan] My usual response is, "That's why I killed the character, is because I knew you would react that way. If you wouldn't react that strongly, what's the point?"

 

[Brandon] Though, I will say… This is something that's maybe just a little pet peeve of mine. I remember… This is going to date me, it's a long time ago, but there was this TV show called 24. This had a really big cultural impact on myself and my friends when the first season came out. We watched it, riveted. In that scene… Spoilers for a 20-year-old show or whatever… The main character's wife dies. The whole plot is set up for we need to save her. He's going to save her. He's the action star. He gets there a little too late, and she's dead. I was… totally thought it was great, until I listened to the commentary, which was the wrong thing. Where they said, "Yeah, we weren't sure if we were going to kill her or not. Then we decided, well, what would the reader… Or the viewer, not expect." For me, hearing that, that is not what I wanted to hear. I did not want to hear you just said, "Well, what's going to… What's the most unexpected?" This may just be a thing for me, because that's good storytelling in some ways. But I don't want it to just be what's unexpected. I wanted to be what the story's pushing for.

[Howard] I don't want it to be unexpected. I want it to be surprising, yet inevitable. It's startling, but when you look at it in retrospect, you're like, "Nope, that's…"

[Mary] I'm really sympathetic to the, "Well, what would the readers not expect?" Especially when you are trying to decide in the moment. Because sometimes… Like, I mean, I have done things where I have plotted, planning for the character to live, and thought, "Well, maybe I will kill them. I'm not sure." It's not until I get there that I really… The story itself kind of… The shape of everything that's come up to that point makes it clear to me which choice I'm going to need to make. I have a… This is going to involve spoilers.

[Brandon] Okay. For?

[Mary] For one of my own stories.

[Brandon] Which one?

[Mary] The Worshipful Society of Glove Makers. Which is on Uncanny. I kill a character in that. I can avoid… I'll just tell you which one. I did not plan to kill that character. At all. I had planned for them to have the… We're going to try to work this out. There's… Trying to deal with the situation. The simplest solution for this problem character was to just… If they were just dead. So another character just kills them. I wrote it, and I was like [gasp]. Because sometimes you just… Sometimes you do just right things and discover it. I looked at it and I was like, "Oh. That… Huh."

[Howard] Surprising, yet inevitable.

[Mary] Because it's the simplest choice. But, because I had set up this longer arc for the character, people consistently tell me that they actually gasp out loud when they get to that death. So… That's why I'm like… I'm a little sympathetic to that.

[Dan] Well, I think the way to make that work is to follow that up. You kill a character on a whim like that, which I've totally done. But then, like you were saying in the beginning, you need to follow…

[Mary] Consequences.

[Dan] The people who survive, and follow through on the consequences, and you can totally make that pay off, even if it isn't inevitable.

[Brandon] I think it is good storytelling. It just didn't work for me, because I wanted to believe they were doing what was best for the story, not what would surprise me.

[Mary] But it worked for you until you knew their motivation.

[Brandon] It did. That's what I'm saying.

[Mary] Never asked the author why they did something!

 

[Brandon] Let's go to our book of the week.

[Howard] Ah, yes. Schlock Mercenary book 13, Random Access Memorabilia. I did two things in this book that I totally loved, and I'm totally going to spoil for you, because there's so much more going on in the book that's fun. One of them is that I killed Sgt. Schlock and brought him back from a completely… Like, from a backup. From a clone. He'd lost five days. At one point, he's watching the video of his death, and somebody says, "Are you… How do you feel about this?" He looks at her and says, "It's kind of cool." It was significant to me because one, it pulled plot armor off of everybody. I demonstrated that anybody can be killed, and can lose something. Yes, I may bring them back. Second was if this is the only consequence for death, if the reader doesn't have to mourn, how can I possibly threaten characters with death in the future? The second thing that I did was part one, part two, and part three were called Read, Write, and Execute. When part three aired, all of the computer nerds in the audience were like [choke] surprising, yet inevitable. Just by the naming of the chapters.

 

[Brandon] All right. So. Question for you. Can you kill off a character, as… Like a side character and have it provide motivation for other characters, but not simply fridge the character? Do you know what I mean by fridging?

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary] But why don't you define it? Or shall I define it?

[Brandon] I'll define fridging. Fridging comes from an old Green Lantern comic book, where Green Lantern arrives home to his house and finds his girlfriend stuffed in a fridge. Famously, without any kind of warning that this would happen. Simply to add more character to Green Lantern himself, to give him something to mourn over, to provide motivation. It's become a cliché of the comic book, and just at large, media industry, that if you want to provide motivation, for often a guy, you will then kill off a female love interest or friend, to give them something to mourn over. Yet, at the same time, we've just been talking about killing a character when it's completely unexpected, and the effect it has on the people around them. What is the difference between these two things?

[Mary] So, for me, this was the thing that I had to reverse engineer, because I was planning to kill off a character. For me, it's making sure that the character has a longer plot arc that is clear and obvious, and they're going to be fulfilling this all the way through the story. It usually involves something with the main character. Like not, "Oh, we're going to go be happy together," but "I am disagreeing with you about this thing." That there's a conflict they have with the main character. So that when you kill them off, that is left unresolved. Which is the way things happen in real life. That there's a lot of unfinished business that you have with the people who are gone. There's a whole that they leave. I think that that's one of the things that happens when a lot of these characters are fridged, is that they don't leave a hole in the plot.

[Howard] It's very, very difficult… Very difficult for… If you kill a character as your inciting incident, and that character has a close relationship with your protagonist, you're going to have to have done some miraculous writing to not be accused of having fridged that character. Because that piece as a motivation to start the story is very, very hackneyed.

[Brandon] Well, let's… 

[Howard] It's super hard to do right. I wouldn't try it. That's just the way I feel about it. At this point. And I work in comics. So.

[Brandon] You're extra sensitive to it.

[Howard] I just gotta steer away from it.

 

[Brandon] I mean, I'm going to push us on this one, just because… I do think this is totally a thing. I'm not trying to discount fridging as a cultural thing we should avoid, but at the same time, some of the best stories are told about people who wear loss as a motivation. If we look at… Just even Batman. Batman is a guy who lost his parents, and it changed him into this thing. That's like this archetypal story that has been retold and retold and we are fascinated by it. What's the difference between that and fridging? Is there a difference?

[Mary] Well, Batman, it's backstory. Which is, I think, a little different.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary] The… I mean, honestly, you can fridge someone mid book. I think when… I mean… I keep feeling like I'm saying the same thing over and over again.

[Howard] That character needs to feel like they had a purpose beyond simply dying as a motivation point, as an arm bar for the protagonist, for the plot.

 

[Brandon] Okay. So, spoiler for the first Avengers film. When Agent Coulson dies and it brings the whole team together and that's like the pivotal moment of the whole thing. Agent Coulson? Not a fridge? Because he had had all these interactions with them before, or is he a fridge because he…

[Dan] Well, Coulson specifically sacrifices himself. So it's a very different situation. It's not an inert character being acted upon. It is someone making a choice.

[Brandon] So you think… That one you would say… That was a [big point]

[Howard] Well, Nick Fury even… Nick Fury knows that he needed something to pull these characters together, and so… To pull the heroes together. So he dials up the emotional impact by throwing the bloody trading cards at Capt. America. Coulson never did get you to sign these, did he? He staged that. He went and got them out of Coulson's locker, and made them bloody. So, yes, you can argue that this is fridging, but you could also argue that it wasn't because Fury… Fury didn't want this to happen. He used it. He used whatever he had to turn the team into a team.

[Mary] But Coulson is also an example of how you can give a character a sense of a life outside. I've pointed to this in previous podcasts. The scene when he's getting off the elevator with Pepper and he's… And she's like, "Are you still dating that cellist?" That's just… It's like, "Oh. There is this whole other life to this character." Whereas most of the time, you're like, "What can I tell… What can you tell me about the character who's been fridged? They really, really loved the main character so much. They just loved them."

[Howard] One of the reasons that Coulson works so well is that Stark really just does see him as… "Why are you calling him Phil? His first name is Agent." Then we come around to Ironman facing off against Loki and saying, "And there's one more person you upset. His name was Phil." We realize that yes, he liked… He had come to recognize that Agent Coulson, Phil Coulson, had a life that Tony Stark was now wishing had continued.

[Mary] This is an example… Thank you for bringing that up. This is an example of that thing I was talking about, about making sure that the… There is a conflict point that the dying character has with the main character. Because it looks like the arc that they're setting up is Ironman learning to recognize the puny ordinary people. Which is actually an arc that Ironman goes on. It's just Phil is not there at the end of it.

 

[Brandon] I appreciate you guys letting me push you on this one. It is something that I'm really interested in. So thanks for putting up with me on it. I do want to ask just a different question. We have very little time left. I want to ask when do you decide to do the opposite and give plot armor? This is the phrase where we say a character is too important to die in the story right now. They haven't fulfilled their plot arc. I'm going to prevent them from dying. I'm going to rescue them in some narrative way from the consequences of their choices. When do you do this? Why do you do this? Mary's wincing, so maybe she does…

[Mary] I haven't done that. I haven't done that yet.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Well, I did that in book 15. Lieut. Sorlie, who I had kind of planned for her to sacrifice herself heroically. I got to the end of the story and realized nothing she can do at this point will seem more heroic than what she has already done. The death would be a downer, and it doesn't need to be a downer. That's… I don't need that sacrifice in this story. So… She lived.

[Brandon] I've done it before. I have a character that their story isn't done and I feel it will be less sat… More satisfying to rescue them and continue their story than it would be to let them die there with unresolved major plot things. But I don't always make that choice. It's always a really hard one.

[Dan] Well, Howard touched on this earlier, but there is so many things that are worse than death. So if I find myself in this situation, I'm not going to kill that character, but I'm going to hurt them. I'm going to make them live through something, or experience something, or maybe even they get off scot free and all their friends are dead because they are the only one that lived through whatever it was. So that there are still consequences for the scene. They don't get off scot free.

[Howard] That's ablative plot armor.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Something hits them, it explodes outward…

 

[Brandon] All right. I'm going to give you a writing prompt instead of some homework this time. A good old classic Writing Excuses writing prompt. I've been thinking a lot about the story Mary talked about last month, where she had the people… The alien race where they went through a kind of butterfly-like transformation at the end of their lives and lost all of their memories and had to be reminded of them. I thought this is an interesting take on death. That a story where the characters die, but don't die. So your writing prompt is that. Do something where, perhaps fantastical, perhaps not, one of your main characters is going to go through a major transformation that is going to feel like death to those around them, but they're not actually dying. Write that story. See how it goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/11/18/13-46-the-unsexy-side-of-space-with-bart-smith-and-ben-hewett/

 

Key points: NASA is more than just astronauts and rocket scientists. Someone has to deal with money and the logistics of making things happen. Procurement and budget and legal are there to help the technical people get the job done, quickly and as painlessly as possible. One thing that is frustrating is seeing NASA portrayed as inefficient just because it is a government organization. NASA innovation? Consider wearing a ThinkPad on your head as a hat for VR. Or how about doing water aerobics in the neutral buoyancy lab?

 

[Transcription note: I may have mixed up Bart and Ben here and there in the transcript. My apologies if I got the two of you confused.]

 

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 46.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, The Unsexy Side of Space, with Bart Smith and Ben Hewett.

[Mary] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] Joining us, we have NASA employees extraordinaire Bart Smith and Ben Hewett. Bart, would you introduce yourself for us?

[Bart] Sure. I'm Bart Smith. It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me today. I've been with NASA for almost 10 years. I'm a budget analyst. So I help with numbers and funding and financing and all sorts of fun stuff. Just to make sure that we can keep the program going.

[Ben] My name is Benjamin Hewett, and I've been with NASA for about 28 days longer than Bart.

[Laughter]

[Ben] Which means I know more than he does.

[Laughter]

[Ben] I started in the same organization, and the chief financial officer's office. That's redundant, I know. I now work in flight ops, in their business office.

 

[Mary] Which is really exciting. So, for me, one of the reasons that we wanted to have you guys on is that… When we're talking about space, everybody thinks about the astronauts and the people who… And the rocket scientists. But. NASA's supported by a huge organization, and a big part of it is dealing with money and the logistics of making things happen. So why don't we start off by having you guys tell us a little bit about what it is you do? Which is the unsexy side of space, but the absolutely necessary side of space.

[Bart] Sure. I'll start. So as I mentioned, I do budget. So we just make sure we work with a lot of our technical counterparts, our scientists, our engineers, and yes, even astronauts, to make sure that we are funding our operations appropriately. Some of those operations are exciting, right? Are rocket ships and science experiments. Then, some of them are not so exciting. We gotta make sure that the bathrooms work, that the roads are good, and that we pay for security at the front gate. So my specific role is to just work at Johnson Space Center to make sure that all of our funding sources are going to the right places and making sure that we're spending dollars appropriately. So if we spend them appropriately, then the mission goes forward. If we're not spending them appropriately, then we're doing something wrong. So my main role is to make sure that we're not doing anything wrong.

[Mary] So, Ben has said that you do things wrong frequently. So, Ben, what does…

[Laughter]

[Ben] So there is an inherent conflict, obviously, between the technical side of the house, who wants the best of everything… We call that gold plating… And the budget and procurement side of the house, whose job it is to keep those people in check so that we have affordable programs. And how well the procurement side of the house actually does that… You hear jokes about that frequently, and the cost of a hammer. So, case in point, we've been working on a procurement where we're trying to get stuff done, and the procurement guys or budget guys are coming in and saying, "Well, you should try this contract mechanism." I'm in the middle because I'm in the business office. The technical guys are like, "No, no. We know this contract. We can get it done. We can get it done fast. We like these people." So that conflict is kind of where you get that friendly frenemy interplay.

[Mary] I was talking with someone from a different branch of NASA who I will not name because they were talking some smack…

[Laughter]

[Mary] They were talking about ordering business cards. That just the process of ordering business cards was incredibly complicated because, as a government agency, you have to have everything bid on. Is it that kind of thing, kind of all the way down the line?

[Ben] So one of my favorite contracts that we've just done is a multi-award. Which basically means we've gone through, we've found acceptable vendors in several different work category types. So rather than having like a two year long RFI/RFP process, you can streamline that a little bit.

[Mary] Sorry. You are from NASA, and you've just used acronyms.

[Ben] Request for Information, Request for Proposal.

[Mary] Thank you.

[Ben] It's a method of getting bids back. With the multi-award, because the vendors are preapproved, we can turn around some of that stuff in three or four days. We had… For our aircraft for our guppy, we had… We have these shipping fixtures so that we can fly the crew module two different areas of the United States where different pieces of work are being done. They have these… What's called the chain block, which is basically a tiedown for the crew module. We were able to turn that around in just a couple of days, and get it… Get heavy aluminum drilled to precision and get it done. So yes, procuring is difficult. There are mechanisms that we have. But that's actually the importance of having a good support staff, and having people who are tenacious enough to talk to the technical team and say, "No, no. You really want to look at this particular procurement strategy, because it can save you money and time."

[Mary] And then you can spend that money someplace else.

 

[Bart] Right. I think that's a great… One of the greatest secrets of our organization is that we are there to actually help our technical people. A lot of our technical folks look at us and say, "Oh, procurement and budget and legal. They're all impediments to me getting my job done." But at the end of the day, if you have that great support staff, folks who are trying to help our technical folks get the job done, then they can… Then we can get it done really quickly. Our goal is to help them get the job done as quickly and as painlessly as possible, while following those regulations.

[Howard] The way budgeting was described to me is that the inconvenience of not immediately being able to buy something today is the price you pay for being able to buy things at all a year from now.

[Ben] Agreed. Agreed. Because there's so many processes in place to track where all those dollars go. Because every dollar that we spend is taxpayer dollars. So it's important that we're accountable not only to our technical management, but also to the taxpayers who fund us. If we aren't good stewards of our funds, then we'll see those drop in the future.

[Howard] This episode… Getting us to NASA to record things involved some due diligence and making sure that tax money was not being spent on things that it shouldn't be spent on.

[Ben] Precisely.

[Bart] We sent…

[Mary] To be clear, we did fund ourselves coming here, but tax money is being spent to give us a tour and to provide the facility.

[Bart] But that's the same… We would do for schools and…

[Mary] Exactly.

[Bart] Visitors and Justin Bieber and One Direction and all the other people who have… Who are stakeholders, who are tax…

[Howard] They cover their hotel and their meals, and you take care of them while they are on the campus.

[Bart] Because that's good for space and science. If people from the community are involved and participating.

 

[Mary] So, I am curious about… This is one of my favorite questions to ask people when they have an area of expertise that I do not, because it's very useful as a writer. What are the things that make you want to flip the table?

[Dan] When you see them depicted in media wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Oh]

[Bart] Ben asked me this question a couple weeks ago…

[Dan] [garbled]

[Bart] And I sent… It actually took me a week to write this email, because I wanted to get it right. Because there are some things that are challenging. I mean, that maybe aren't realistic. Maybe things that the popular culture believes that aren't necessarily true. I think the biggest thing is that, yes, is a support organization, we are trying to move the mission forward, that we aren't just impediments, but we are here to help as well.

[Ben] You can actually say the part about… Well.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I keep waiting for something where my table is being thrown. Throw my table, Bart.

[Bart] So one of my biggest things is that NASA, as a government organization, is just really inefficient, right? Like, NASA can't get anything done. I read a book several months ago that actually made light of this, where an artifact came out of space and some private citizens wanted to investigate it. So NASA commissioned a study to do a study to review a study to review some proposals to think about visiting… Or procuring some engines to visit this artifact, right? It was… Yes, it was very funny, and I did chuckle. But a little part of me was a little bit frustrated, because it does feel like sometimes the public… Sometimes authors view NASA as inefficient, and other organizations out there can maybe do it better. As a part of NASA, I feel like we do things pretty good.

[Howard] Realistically, if there's an artifact from aliens that is in space, and the procurement office knows about it, all of the little hurdles involved in getting your business cards printed…

[Bart] That's correct.

[Howard] Are just going to go away until you've got the artifact.

[Ben] You wouldn't believe how fast you can get a procurement through if the Center Director or the head of NASA wants it done.

 

[Howard] Let's break a moment for our book of the week. Dan, do you have that for us?

[Dan] I do have that. So, one of the things that I've been thinking… Because we just went through a tour of NASA, and we saw all these things.

[Mary] All these really cool space things.

[Dan] Amazing things. We passed a door that we didn't even get to go in that said, "Wearable Robotics Laboratory." I'm like, "That's the greatest door I've ever seen in my life." But anyway, at every point in the tour, I was reminded that NASA is a group of people using science to solve problems and working together. Which is what I loved so much about the Apollo 13 movie. It's what I love about Star Trek. And it's what I love about The Martian by Andy Weir. That is a group of people using… Coming together to solve a problem with science.

[Bart] So, yeah…

[Ben] You've talked… The name of the episode, The Unsexy Side of Space, that's something that I really enjoyed about The Martian, and I think a lot of people in the industry did, because he doesn't just talk about Mark Watney. There's a part in the book where I'm starting to get bored with the whole potato farmer thing, and he switches… He must've had a good editor or something. He switches to talking about what's going on back at the Johnson Space Center. You get this sense here are all these people. Legal is involved. HR is involved. Public Affairs is involved. There's a lady who's looking at the satellite images that's involved. Not only is it just NASA, at the Johnson Space Center, but they pull in real characters, real people who real… They feel like this is a person I know. In fact, the joke was for a long time, "Hey, did he talk to you before he wrote this book?"

[Laughter]

[Ben] "Who does this character look like to you?" Hands down, there were a number of characters in that book where people would identify somebody currently in the… In a role. That's what I liked about that book is he's done due diligence to the unsexy side of space. He's talked about people in a way that makes them come alive.

[Bart] You see the full picture. I think that's the brilliance of it, is you see the full picture. It's not just a one or two dimensional book, but you see from beginning to end how everything has to work together to bring Mark Watney home.

[Ben] It doesn't… It talks about the length of time for procuring a rocket, right? You can't just go and build a rocket. So he talks about, well, they get one from the Chinese. That doesn't work out. Then the astronauts themselves come up with a solution to solve the problem. But it's a very… Very lucid in terms of how things actually operate.

[Howard] I've said before that The Martian… And I'm standing by this stake I've pounded into the ground. The Martian is the finest hard science fiction novel ever written. Because it does great hard science fiction in a way that I am willing to sit and listen… Read about how to make oxygen out of hydrazine, and I care.

[Ben] And not just blow yourself up.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That was amazing to me.

[Bart] I did want to say, so, Andy Weir was here and did a presentation. One of the most… I got to ask him a question, right? I asked him, "What came first, the characters or the problems, the technical problems?" He kind of grinned. He's like, "Oh, the technical problems." This is why it's the greatest… According to you. Because he figured out what can break. Here's the mission architecture. Here are all the pieces that I've put in place. What can break? Now I'm going to break…

[Howard] And he knocked dominoes down in increasing order of disaster. Oh, yeah.

[Ben] Then he comes back and says, "Oh, I need a character who can handle this." Then he feels in the character so that the character works with the technical breakages. That… So I liked that book as well. It's fun to read

[Dan] As a total side note, I have to say that at a convention, I don't know which one, I assume San Diego Comic Con, Andy Weir was in the green room with the two writers behind The Expanse series. They are both fans of each other's work, and decided that canonically, they exist in the same universe.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Yeah.

[Howard] I would read that book. I would read that book.

 

[Dan] So, anyway.

[Garbled] 

[Mary] So. So while we're talking about the unsexy side of space, I mean, there's nothing… So there's a lot of stuff about procurement and things that are going to be consistent from organization to organization. We're talking about space, though. Are there things about your jobs that you feel like are unique to NASA culture and NASA situations? To the fact that you are shooting people into space on giant bombs?

[Ben] I have… So we did a procurement recently where… You have to test for ammonia, for example. So you have this device called a Dräger chipset measurement system. Basically, what it does is it sniffs the air to see if there's ammonia or other chemicals present. You can put a chip in it and it will come up with readings. So you can actually do training on the ground. We have that on the stations, right? I don't think a lot of people understand this, but you… There are scenarios that come up that you wouldn't expect or that the little chips that have ammonia in them don't represent. So what are technical community said was, "Hey, we want to train our astronauts on these different scenarios, but they need to train on a unit that feels and looks and acts like a normal unit." So one of the coolest things that we did is we basically paid a company to hack into the back of this thing, add a chip and add a wireless interface so that our instructors can goof the system, so one astronaut gets a reading that's like, "Oh, my gosh. All right. Facemasks, everybody dive for the airlock." Kind of thing. It's not that dramatic, but…

[Howard] Let me take apart this piece of hardware and make it lie to the user via Bluetooth.

[Ben] And then switch it back, so it's not lying, halfway through the process.

[Howard] Wow.

[Ben] And it reverts to… But that's incredibly useful for somebody who's going to have the training here on Earth, and if they just do one or two run-throughs, it's not going to stick with them. So what you want is you do the training here on Earth, and then six months later, there up and they gotta handle this thing and it has to look and feel exactly like it did on Earth and behave in very functional ways.

 

[Howard] What is… Bart, what does a workday look like?

[Bart] Probably a little bit less exciting than you would think. You get indoors…

[Howard] I'm already thinking it's not very exciting.

[Laughter]

[Bart] So you might be right.

[Laughter]

[Bart] The fact of the matter is we don't come in and play with cool toys or get to mess around with the robots every day. You come in and…

[Howard] Not as a budget analyst.

[Bart] Not as a budget. Maybe the robotics do, but not as a budget analyst. You come in, you have a boss, so you have a set of tasks for… A set of responsibilities that you do, you have your email that you check and that you respond to, you answer lots of questions. So a lot of what I view as my role is… Quite frankly, I do a lot of customer service, right? We get calls from engineers, we get calls from scientists who are like, "I need to purchase this," or "I need to spend some money."

[Ben] Or why am I $400,000 over this month?

[Bart] Correct.

[Ben] Oh, because all your people from last month billed this month and didn't bill last month.

[Bart] Right. So there's an element of you come in and you help people. Again, like I said, it's about helping the mission move forward. The best way we can do that is to make sure that our technical folks aren't too bogged down in the minutia of financial tracking and how to purchase something. When they do start to get bogged down in those areas, to make sure that we're there as a resource.

[Howard] So, when your phone rings, it is, "Procurement, I have a problem."

[Laughter]

[Bart] Right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I should rename my office Houston, right? To make it work. But, yes. Quite frankly… Or, "I have a question." Sometimes it's not quite to the problem stage, it's the "I'm about to do something. How do I avoid it a problem?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] How do I create a problem?

 

[Ben] So, early in my career, when I was still working for the OCSO. This is a little bit embarrassing, but I'm going to share it, because I like embarrassing myself. But I'd been on the job for probably six months, and I got put in a program office. Which is a place you never put a rookie budget analyst. But they were having trouble hiring people, and I was a sharp up-and-comer. Top of my class kind of thing.

[Bart] Is that what they told you?

[Laughter]

[Ben] That's what they told me, Bart.

[Mary] So you just didn't back away when they ask for volunteers fast enough?

[Ben] Yeah. Yeah, I know. So I was in charge of looking over two budgets. Both about $25 million. We had a program manager who was always giving away money. It was like… Yeah, fund that research, fund that research, fund that research. My boss was like, "Ben, you gotta hide some money from this guy."

[Laughter]

[Ben] So we… Because something's going to break, and then he's not going to have the money to solve it. So we did that, very judiciously. We get into a budget meeting. It's this program manager and all of his direct reports, right? He's like, "Ben, what's this line right here?" I was like, "Oh, we use that to fund research." Pretty soon… He just kept digging. "But what research? What are we doing with that?" Pretty soon, all of his direct reports are just laughing, because they know what's going on. They know that that's his slush fund, that he supposed to hide from everybody else and keep in case there's an emergency. He totally blew his own cover.

[Laughter]

[Ben] My boss is kicking me under the table. He's like, "You… You… Really blew it." Then afterwards, he laughed and he was like, "No. It was fine. He had that coming to him." But… 

[Laughter]

[Ben] That's a little bit of a story of kind of the unsexy side of space.

[Howard] It's a heist novel now.

 

[Mary] But actually, that circles back to something that we were talking about when we were talking about with The Martian, about lining up the dominoes and just knocking them down. Are there things that you can spot when you're doing budget analyst… Analysis or when you're doing procurement, are there things that you can… Problems that you can spot before they happen? Just by the way things line up?

[Bart] Absolutely. So one of the biggest things we do is we, as Ben mentioned, we track things. People put a plan in, and then we status to that plan. If you're blowing your budget, if you're 50% over budget, early on we can, of course, flag our technical people and say, "You're going to blow your budget if you don't slow down, or if you don't find an additional funding source."

[Ben] Why are these costs coming in right now? What, what… Oh, we just… We needed some extra support for X, Y, and Z. Then you can take that and say, "Well. Okay, here's the long term ramifications of taking that outside instead of handling it in-house." Because we have vendors, we have contractors that do work for us. In fact, NASA's 85% private sector, and only 15% civil service. Or you can take somebody that's already paid for. If they can do that work, then technically they're not sitting around. So those are some things that Bart would look at in a month-to-month budget analysis.

[Bart] We also get policies from the government that come in, and they say, "Hey, you have to conform to X, Y, and Z." Quite frankly, sometimes Congress passes these regulations and they don't see the real world impact. So we take a lot of those and we translate into what that means for our engineers.

[Ben] Or the real world impact isn't as important to them as the policy that they're enacting.

[Bart] So it's figuring out those as early as possible. If you can figure those out before it's implemented, than that of course can save you a lot of pain and innocent heartache.

[Howard] These are things that show up in… For want of a better term… A spreadsheet? You push the graph function and you can see very clearly, "Oh. You've made yourself go faster, and now you don't have enough fuel to decelerate and land."

[Ben] And you're explaining in a way that people… One thing. Spotting issues. So, in the business office, one of my jobs is evaluating the responses that we get from bidders, and kind of performing the translation from what the technical staff wants to… Like I'm a words and communications guy… To what the budget analysts and the procurement people need. When you have a skilled procurement official on your source board, and you're getting these bids in, they will save you years of time. I've had experiences where we've had a less experienced procurement official who has to go to someone higher than them to ask questions and to kind of keep things moving. Unfortunately, sometimes mistakes are made that then cost a lot of time. Then you maybe have to slip the mission, because this contract isn't awarded when it needs to be awarded.

[Mary] When you say slip the mission, just because it's jargon, I want to make sure that people know what it means.

[Ben] So your schedule… In other words, we were going to fly this flight in September, now we have to fly it in December, because we didn't get the landing gear hinges that you needed.

[Howard] Well, in some cases, when you slip the window, for things like the Juno mission, your window doesn't happen again… Doesn't open again for years, because of the positions of things.

[Ben] Two, 10, 15 years down the road. Yeah.

 

[Dan] All right. I've got a different question for you. Actually, Ben and I, in college we both worked on the Leading Edge magazine. Very briefly we were there together. Which was a small press science fiction magazine run by students that… One of the reasons that that was such a valuable experience for me is because we didn't have any money. So it taught us the business side of publishing in addition to the creative side. So, I want to ask, is there a similar analog for you, where the lack of resources or the inability to get exactly what you want actually improves your innovation or the creativity of the space center?

[Bart] I think so. Absolutely. NASA gets $19 billion a year, which sounds like a lot of money, but it's less than half of a percent of the federal budget. So in the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot. So that's one of the functions I do is that we take these very limited resources, and we work with our engineers and scientists to determine the best ways to spend those resources. Sometimes that means you invent this brand-new technology to be able to accomplish something. Sometimes it means you buy something right off the shelf and modify it. So…

[Ben] And don't pay $30,000 for an engineer to go design it. If you've already got something that works. It meets the minimum criteria, rather than…

[Howard] That thing we saw in the virtual reality lab today, which is… 

[Mary] So cool. 

[Howard] Well, we turned a laptop upside down. We strapped a pair of goggles to it. Then we wrote software that would let you do VR while wearing a ThinkPad on your head. As a hat.

[Laughter]

[Mary] In space, so you didn't have to deal with the gravity.

[Howard] In space.

[Mary] Because that was the way they needed to solve VR when VR goggles were not a thing you could just get.

[Ben] One other piece of innovation that my office has been a little bit involved in that's been interesting is what unique capacity do we have where we do not compete with the private sector, but… So, we have a big pool. The neutral buoyancy lab. It is a unique facility. Well, is it used 100% capacity? Well, yes, we use it efficiently. We're always training. But there are sections of that pool that aren't being used. So we have had commercial partners come in and say we will pay some of the rent for this facility and we will… We'll give you money for that. That makes NASA's dollars go farther because they're offsetting our costs.

[Howard] So, on Tuesday mornings, there's water aerobics.

[Laughter]

[Ben] I will bring that up at our next staff meeting.

[Howard] I have done enough damage to NASA already. We are out of time. I hate to cut it short.

 

[Howard] Ben, do you have a writing prompt for us? 

[Ben] Absolutely. My writing prompt for you is write a story about when a budget analyst and a procurement intern actually helped.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, fantasy. 

[Laughter]

[Ben] You clearly weren't listening.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/11/11/13-45-next-level-narration/

 

Key points: Leveling UP your narrative. Get the standard narrator, a character much like yourself, with similar experiences, solid first. Then try things like unreliable narrators. Study writers who have done something similar before you experiment with narration and form. Try breaking the fourth wall, making your reader aware that they are reading something, suspicious of the person who is talking. With unreliable narrators, at some point, the story reveals that they are unreliable. Figure out how the character sees the world, what their defaults are, and how that affects what they tell the reader. Try multiple witnesses, narrators who have their own angle on what is happening. Older, younger, different life experience. Brains wired differently. Try to understand and represent their reactions. Make them rounded, with one aspect that is different. Use forums, YouTube, listening to people to help you. Be cautious of carrying defaults from one work to the next. 

 

 

[Brandon] Now, you had also some homework for us?

[Mary] I do. So we're going to harken back to some homework that you have already done, which is in April, when in character voice, we had you do three different points of view. 80 years old, 12, and from a different country. At the time, we were having you think about character. So this time, you're going to do next level narration. Which is that each of these characters are experiencing the same scene differently. So this is the Rashomon effect, that some of them are telling you information that the others are not telling you because they're lying. So at this point, you're dealing with two different aspects of narration. One is that these characters are different from each other, so we need to be able to tell that. The other is with their default settings and what is important to them, some of them are lying. Figure out which pieces they're lying about and why.

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