[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alien Characters.

[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] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And…

[Howard] Everybody was expecting me to be an alien.

[Brandon] Yeah, we all thought you'd say, "I'm Howard," in Klingon.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Alien characters. So. One of the nice things about kind of having a science fiction/fantasy themed podcast, even if not all of our topics are specifically about that, is we can occasionally dig into something like this. How do you write from the viewpoint of a race who has never existed and is supposed to seem very, very strange to the person experiencing the narrative?

[Mary] So, first of all, let me suggest that you do not base them on a human civilization. Because human civilizations exist with context that is specific to the world around them. The aliens would have grown up in a completely different context. You can certainly take patterns that people go through, but just taking and saying, "These are my…" Like Dune. I mean, Dune are humans. But still, these are my pseudo-Arabic kind of desert people…

[Howard] Yeah, these are my bug people who are all like Roman Centurions.

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to say that's very natural for us to do, because human creativity is recombining things we haven't seen. We're going to suggest that you push a different direction and combine different things.

[Mary] Well, the problem is that if you aren't thinking about the context, you can go terribly sideways. So what I do say… Suggest is that you first look at… I mean, you can go a couple of different ways. I say first… You can either begin with the kind of landscape and geography, and create the characters from that, or, you can begin with the kind of character that you want and then backfill to the environment that created that.

[Brandon] Okay. So.

[Howard] Ultimately the question that needs to be asked first is how is this alien… What is the medium by which you are going to portray this alien to the person consuming your medium? I get to draw pictures. So I can do things that people who are writing prose can't do. If all you have is words, then one of the tools that you are going to have to look very closely at is, how does being this kind of alien affect the way their point of view would be described? How does it affect the way they speak, if they are able to speak in the language that your other characters speak? Because as a writer, words of the tool that you have to describe that.

[Dan] That's where I wanted to go, because that's how I always start, is with the form of communications specifically. How is this… Because that's what the character's going to be doing throughout the story, is communicating in some form. How are they going to do that? So as an example, in the Partials series, the Partials themselves, I gave them a pheromonal communications system. They can speak, but they can also communicate through scents and these other things. That changed absolutely everything about their society, the more I followed the ramifications of that. Of how they would interact with each other, of how the humans would perceive them, of how they would perceive the humans, of all of the problems that would arise when they try to talk to each other and are obviously missing obvious cues. So, starting with that form of communication, for me, is incredibly helpful.

 

[Brandon] So, let me ask you guys this. How do you write a character whose motivations are completely alien?

[Mary] There are, I think, some motivations that are consistent that you can actually pull into the aliens. That are consistent with humans. I think most creatures will have a priority on shelter, reproduction, and food. And, at a very base level, that is what drives all of us. So you can look at how that then affects the aliens. So I had… I wrote a story called The Bride Replete which was all aliens all the time. I did not have a human viewpoint character, humans just don't exist. For that, looking at, okay, so if reproduction is important, then how does the… What is this society reproductive structure look like? What does the family unit look like for this? Once you get that, then it becomes much easier to extrapolate based on… Or to convey it in a way that will make sense to a human reader.

[Brandon] Okay. So, but…

[Howard] That's…

[Brandon] My question. That's great. My question, though, is how would you write one that didn't have one of those motivations? Completely alien motivations?

[Howard] Coming up with the motivation is often difficult. Let me describe the motivation that we don't think of as alien, but which probably looks pretty alien if you pull away all of the indicators. That is, I want to be on the left-hand side on the freeway. So I can go faster. There is this tendency that we want to be on the left. Why? Because there's these rules of the road that have nothing to do with our biology. If you have an alien, who as part of their socialization, they want their eye line to be lower than yours. The way that this interaction is going to take place… Why do they keep getting on the ground? Why are they lying down? Why does… Why do these things keep happening? Why is the physical positioning changing in ways that… If there are human characters, they don't understand.

[Mary] But see… The wanting to be on the left side absolutely does have to do with our biology, because it's a holdover from that's the side that your sword was on. Because most people were right-handed.

[Howard] Well, except in England and South Africa, it's exactly reversed.

 

[Brandon] I'm going to cap this one. I think the point that perhaps is salient here is even in your description of that, you can find something to relate in our society that you can tie it to. Is that the idea? Take something that seems completely un-relatable at the beginning, but over time, kind of relate it to something that the reader's going to understand?

[Mary] I guess… What I… My point was… Is that if you're talking about an alien that has a completely alien motivation, that, for me, that motivation is still going to be rooted in one of those three things at some point going back to it. You can use that as the line with which to communicate it to the reader. So, if my alien motivation is needing to be on the… Needing to have the lower eye level, well, why does that exist? Is it… Is that a shelter strategy? Is that a reproduction strategy? Is that a food strategy? Where does that come from? Then, that informs a lot of the… Why they make those choices, even if it's a holdover.

[Brandon] I think that's very cool. Of course, it makes me, as a writer, want to say, I want to find something that's not related to…

[Garbled]

[Mary] Absolutely.

[Brandon] A challenge. When we hear that. All right. I think that's where I'm going. But I want to… But, yeah. I think that this is one way…

[Howard] I'm interested… Oh, go ahead, Dan.

[Dan] So, I'm thinking of two example specifically, and both of them hinge around the idea of how that motivation is presented. The first one is kind of a cheat. In the movie Arrival, because you're not actually getting a viewpoint from the aliens, the entire story really hinges around, "Well, what is their motivation in the first place?" So they can have something that is incredibly alien, and the humans are all just trying to figure it out. Are they benevolent? Well, why would aliens be benevolent? It's hard for some people to even conceive of that. One of the other examples I'm thinking of was actually a piece of War Machine fiction written from the point of view of an incredibly basically evil race of people. What made it so well done is that the entire story was written from within that moral framework. So, when all the viewpoints you were getting took as granted that these are the principles by which obviously we should all be living our lives, then it started to make an incredible kind of internal sense.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] One of the examples that I like to look at is from the second of James P. Hogan's Giants novels. There's a… The planetary ecology… They evolved in such a way that nothing could eat anything else except plants. All of the animals developed the we are toxic strategy to where evolutionarily, it becomes so expensive to try and be something that ate other animals that it was a planet full of vegetarians. The artwork that they created… I say the artwork. Actual pictures of the world made no sense to us because it looked like a children's book because it was so brightly colored. So this is one of those cases where something that we would expect as a given… I mean, whether or not that's actually practical. Something that we would expect as a given had been ripped out and all of these aliens were now suddenly very, very alien. War? Eating meat? Completely… Completely not part of their psychology.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dan, you're going to tell us about Blood Rose Rebellion?

[Dan] Blood Rose Rebellion. Which, for the most part, does not actually have any real alien characters in it. It's by Rosalind Eaves. It's historical fantasy. It starts in a version of 1800s London where magic is real, and is purely the domain of the upper class. Our main character is a teenage debutante who's ready to come out into society and can't because she does not have magic. So the parents are embarrassed and they end up shipping her off to Budapest to live with Grandma, where polite society won't know that they have this non-magical daughter. Then she gets involved with one of Hungary's many rebellions. It is one of the most beautifully written YA anythings that I have ever read.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Dan] Incredibly cool. For… To hit our topic a little bit, there are some weird magical creatures that keep kind of slipping into our world. Although we don't get to know them well, they're really just fascinating and gorgeously described.

[Brandon] Now we also… When we were brainstorming for this, we wanted to promote this book because we love it. Because we thought it was awesome. But we… Mary came up with a story that the rest of us hadn't heard of that…

[Mary] Yes.

[Brandon] If you want to read something really alien.

[Mary] This is Love Is Never Still by Rachel Swirsky. It's available at Uncanny Magazine. So if you just go there and type in Love Is Never Still, it'll pop right up. This is the Pygmalion story. So the sculptor who creates Galatea, the sculpture, and comes to life. It's told from like 20 different viewpoints, including Summer the season.

[Brandon] The season has a viewpoint?

[Mary] Yeah. The pedestal that she stands on has a viewpoint. She has a viewpoint while she's still a piece of marble. The hearth god's hammer has a viewpoint. It's just… It's amazingly complex and varied and just a great example of this alien viewpoint thing.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Dan] And where can people find that?

[Mary] Uncanny Magazine.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Mary] Dot com.

 

[Brandon] So, one of the things that I see happening when using alien characters is the writer's specifically choosing one aspect of their culture that is just going to confuse the reader intentionally. I kind of thought of this as using a sense of wonder as a bludgeon.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Something that you're not even going to make your story about or explain. It's just look at how bizarre this is. Have you ever done that? Is… Like what are the advantages of that? As a writer, I would think… Because everyone's just staring at me as they think… I think the danger would be when you put something like that in a story, you're going to assume that it's going to take like a Left Hand of Darkness turn or something like that. The thing that is at first confusing or different is eventually going to become a major story point or character motive or things like this.

[Howard] It's a promise. It's a promise to the reader when you open with that. You gotta have a reason for it. I don't know what promise necessarily you're making, but if your story's going to be a success, the reader at the end has to feel like you've fulfilled on that promise. I don't like doing it that way. I think I've done it before. Where I've just drawn something weird because I thought weird would be fun. Mostly it was annoying, and I realized I haven't justified this in a way that's entertaining me.

[Mary] I think it does depend on how it's positioned in the story. If it's positioned in a way that you're making the reader go, "Why is that?" And then you bring it up again, and they're still going, "Why is that?" They're going to feel like that's a promise. If you just bring it up once and it's a piece of tonal color and it's like in mid-paragraph, so in a position of non-importance, they're probably just going to accept it and move on. So I do think it depends on a little bit of that.

 

[Howard] One of my favorite alien cultures of my own is the Oafa, who are the hydrogen bag… That look like blimps. Their language, once they've learned Gal-Standard, their language is full of wind metaphors and flavor metaphors. Boy, did I have to go to the thesaurus to pull this stuff up. But, as I was writing dialogue between the cultural liaison and the multi-million-year-old librarian, at one point the Oafa librarian says to the liaison, "You've been breathing the air of the poets," because she has made a wind metaphor that works. That moment, when you have a character moment like that, where the alien and the human have come to an understanding, and the reader gets it, the reader feels awesome. That's what I was aiming for. Not sense of wonder, but just sense of being included, sense of being part of that relationship.

[Mary] I had a story in which my characters… The species was based on kind of like the lifecycle of a butterfly. So they spend an incredibly long time as a caterpillar, and then they transform, and then they're this beautiful, beautiful creature. So in this society, the young, the larva state, is the state that gets all the work done. Because when they go through the transformation, metamorphosis, when they come out on the other side, their memories are totally scrambled. So the adult state is your retirement. Because of that, they have built this whole system around memory and have hired documentarians to come in and document their life so when they come out of the cocoon, they can try to remember things. So one of the things that I was playing with in the beginning of the story is that question of why are you documenting things? Then realizing, "Oh, this is what's at stake." That you will come out and not know your own family.

[Brandon] Wow. Sounds cool. What's the name of this story?

[Mary] I can't remember the name of my own story.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's funny, because [garbled]

[Dan] So go out, readers…

[Mary]'s Well, I wrote down the name of the other one, The Bride Replete. But I forgot I had… I forgot about this one. Yeah, the Bride Replete was basically what happened… I know…

[Brandon] We'll put it in the liner notes.

[Mary] I'll put it in.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Amal] And we're not… That… Smart? Are we smart?

[Howard] We… Okay.

[Amal] We're pretty smart.

[Howard] We are rejoined for this episode by Amal El-Mohtar, who I personally believe is very much that smart.

[Hah!]

[Howard] But even at that level, if she takes time… Yes?

[Mary] We should actually introduce all of ourselves.

[Howard] Oh, damn.

[Dan] He's just demonstrating how not smart we are.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm just… 

[Laughter]

[Howard] I was so excited to be able to do something right.

[Laughter]

[Howard] And then Mary told me I didn't.

[Dan] You know, at some point, the opportunity might arise again.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm thinking 2020…

[Mary] What's er name?

[Howard] Amal El-Mohtar.

[Mary] What's your name?

[Howard] My name? Or her name?

[Mary] Your name.

[Howard] My name. I couldn't hear you. I said, "What's her name?" I was missing like a little piece of the syllable.

[Mary] He's Howard. I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan. 

[Howard] I was going to start again.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Hey, you know what, we're keeping it.

[Amal] We're keeping this?

[Howard] We're keeping it. I was going to pre-roll over the whole beginning again. Amal, thank you for joining us. I'm so sorry for how not smart we are. It's so nice to have you back.

[Dan] Because you are.

[Amal] It's a pleasure to be here.

 

[Howard] Thank you. One of the trickiest things to do in any of our writing is to write a character who comes up with a solution that is super clever, amazingly smart, in just seconds, and we try to write that in the same amount of time, or even in 10 times that amount of time. We try and write characters who are far cleverer than we are. What are the tricks that you use to make that happen?

[Mary] One of the things that I often use is actually gifting the character with my indecision. Because what I find is that there are two things that will make a character seem smart. One is watching them go through the process, and the other is watching the logical jump. Strangely, I often find that watching them go through the process, especially early in the piece, will make the character… Make the reader think, "Oh, this character's smart," because they can see all of the logical chains. So when I'm struggling, like how would you solve this problem? Having a character who is thinking, "Okay, I'm stuck in a room. How do I get out of the room? Do I try that door? No, that door has killer bees outside.

[Hah!]

[Mary] Do I try this door? There's someone with a drill outside it.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Whatever it… Okay. So, I know, I will open this third door, and there's a balcony, and I can hang glide from it. Whatever that process is, that gifting… Basically what's happening there is I am brainstorming on the page in the voice of my character. What the reader is receiving is a character is thinking logically through the problem. Then, later in the story, I don't have to do that. I can brainstorm off the page, and just have the character jump to that, and the reader will then assume the character has exhibited all of those smarts, because I've laid the groundwork earlier.

 

[Dan] Yeah. When you write that kind of brainstorming scene, and I do it a lot as well, I find that I almost always need to go back and clean it up a little bit, because you don't want to have the full brain vomit all over your screen. But keeping the key portions of it, do… They set it up so your audience trusts you that the character is figuring out all the rest of the things that you don't have to show.

[Amal] I think that… What you're describing there too is sort of a pacing issue more than anything else. There's a difference in demonstrating an intelligent character's intelligence in film and television which I think we're really used to seeing at this point with… Especially in genre with Dr. Who and with Sherlock and with all the iterations thereof, we're used to this kind of fast-paced banter stuffed with things that you the audience can't keep up with how smart the characters are. But on the page, I think that for that effect to be achieved, there's a certain degree of working the readers through the situation. So what you were describing, both of you there, is that giving the reader enough cues to understand the problem and get to solving it themselves as they're reading it is, I think, a big part of sharing in the intelligence of the character. I think part of the question here is not only how do we make our smart characters smarter than us, but how do we make our smart characters have smartness that the reader participates in in a degree that is enjoyable, and to what degree we want that joy to come in. There are… Like I think of… There are narrative level joys there where you have a kind of meta-experience of it, and there are character level joys where you're tense and nervous and wondering how you're going to get out of that locked room as well with this character, and a big part of that is seeing how impossible it is to do that. So it feels like… Like it's… The pacing of it is kind of the middle of the Venn diagram between the brainstorming it in the first place and then the cleaning up of it afterwards that you just described.

 

[Howard] There's also a piece that if you're… I'm going to go back to the escaping the room. Where you have something that many savvy readers will already know. A character says… Grabs one doorknob, "Oh, that doorknob's really hot. I'm going to need a towel. No, wait. Doorknob's really hot, I shouldn't open it, there might be a fire on the other side.

[Right]

[Howard] Because the reader might already know that thing, and the reader arriving at the conclusion before the character does is very satisfying for the reader. This is the… That's a quick thing that you can give them. You might not want to give them that for the whole book, because then, oh, they totally saw it coming.

[Amal] Exactly. Oh, the doorknob's really hot, I'm going to use it to burn the ropes that are holding my hands together before I do anything else, and so on.

 

[Dan] I love what Amal said about characters… Or the reader participating in the character's intelligence. That, I think, is really important. You can look at mysteries, which I think are a fantastic example of this. Because there's always… For me, the very disappointing mysteries are the ones where the key clues that solve it are stuff we hadn't heard before. Or something that the amazingly brilliant detective has pulled out of the air. We're like, "Well, I didn't know about that offshore account. I couldn't have solve this mystery." Conan Doyle does this really well with Sherlock. One of the reasons that Sherlock Holmes has become such an iconic character is because, for the most part, he does give us all the clues. We can look back and go, "Oh, it was all there, and I could have done this." One of my favorites is in The Redheaded League, where he has an entire interrogation of the character, and we think that that's important, and then, at the very end, as they're walking away, Watson says, "Well, what did you learn?" He says, "Oh, it doesn't matter what I learned. I was just there to look at his knees. They're dirty." We don't know why that's important, but we start to think about it… 

[Wow]

[Dan] And we realize his knees are dirty. He was kneeling in dirt. He was digging through into the next building.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's so cool. That makes us feel smart. Which makes us think the character is smart.

[Amal] Right.

[Mary] One of the things… I'm glad you brought up mysteries, because one of the things that I often go back to is that there is a difference between the thriller and mystery, which is that in mystery, you're one step behind the detective, in thrillers, you're one step ahead of the character. So when you're looking at whether or not you're making the character smart, part of that participatory aspect is whether you let the reader figure it out before the character, or if they figure it out after. I think if you want the reader to feel like this character is supersmart, you let them figure it out one step after the character. It doesn't have to be like pages and pages later, but if you let them figure it out just a little bit later. One of the tricks that I will do sometimes with that, I will gift them with my uncertainty, but with what Dan was talking about, about cleaning up afterwards, I'll sometimes pull steps out. Because that allows my character to figure it out a moment before my reader does.

 

[Howard] Let's pause for our book of the week. Dan?

[Dan] Yes. Our book of the week is a really fantastic nonfiction, called What If by Randall Munroe. This is the guy that does XKCD, which is a really cool science-based web comic. He did a book that I believe is subtitled Ridiculous Answers to Serious Scientific Questions. He will take… People will ask him things like, "What would happen if you had a mole of moles?" Then he will go through into exhaustive detail all of the actual science behind if you had literally millions of moles, the animal, just floating in space in a giant ball, and how would gravity affect them, and what would happen to them? And things like what would happen if a submarine went into outer space? All of these things. In the process of answering these questions, you learn so much about the science and you learn it in a very engaging way. It's something that I have continued to go back to as I write my fiction, because there's really good science in there, presented in a really intelligible, accessible way.

[Howard] There's good science in it. It's quite funny.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] What would happen if the pitcher threw the ball at the speed of light?

[Hah!]

[Howard] He begins by telling you, "Okay. Bad things are going to happen once we're moving at this speed. So, let's assume that a moment after he releases the ball, it accelerates to the speed of light. Because that way, the bad things are going to happen in a more interesting way."

[Laughter]

[Dan] He's got one where somebody asked if the planet in The Little Prince could actually exist, and have its own gravity, and people could live on it. In the process of exploring what would happen to a planet like that, what would it have to be like, how dense would it be, what would the gravity be like, I have gone back to that exclamation over and over as I write my outer space science fiction because of the way he explains gravity. So, What If, by Randall Munroe, is a really great resource. We recommend you look it up.

 

[Howard] Okay. Coming back around to our tricks for writing characters who come up with solutions that are bit more brilliant than we've come up with. Have there been moments where you've been stuck and the solution you've arrived at is one that you're particularly proud of and would like to share with the class?

[Dan] I do have one. In the first Mirador book, Bluescreen, I've got the characters caught in the middle of a drive-by gang war. Two rival gangs are shooting at each other, the main character needs to stop them, but she does not have combat powers. She is a gamer and a hacker, and I wanted to make sure to solve that problem with intelligence, rather than her just picking up a gun and going Rambo on everybody. I had to stop and think about it for a couple of days before I figured out, "Oh, okay. I think some of those seeds that I've earlier put in about how pop up… Everyone has a computer in their head, and pop up ads will come and kind of intrusively come into your vision." So she was able to use that advertising system to blind all of the gang members essentially, so they weren't able to attack each other. It took me a few days to figure that out. She does it in seconds. I'm very proud of it.

[Howard] DDoSed with pop-up ads.

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] That's horrifying. While you guys… While you all are thinking about the answer to the question, I want to clarify something. This episode actually airs just three and a half weeks from us recording it, because it's a replacement episode. So, Amal, you're not appearing a season later than you appeared before, you're appearing right in the middle of the season in which we're already enjoying episodes with you. The thing that feels weird is that Dan and I have not had the opportunity to record with you.

[Amal] This is true. This is a delight. I have now recorded… Well, when we are done recording, I will have recorded with all the core cast of Writing Excuses.

[Dan] Hooray!

[Amal] Which is really awesome.

 

[Howard] Any other boasting you'd like to do?

[Mary] So, with Calculating Stars, one of the challenges… And Fated Sky… One of the challenges that I had is that I have someone who can do math, who's a mathematician, and I am… I have dyscalcula. I like legit cannot do math. Not in the math is hard, but like I… Geometry? Fine. Absolutely. My spatial awareness, wonderful. Arithmetic and I are, wow, we are really not friends. We have not been on speaking terms for decades…

[Laughter]

[Mary] At this point. I have this character who is a computer, who is a calculator. What she does is she does math. So my problem was I don't. I'm not actually that interested in it. So what I did was I treated it like a magic system. Rather than having her do all of the math that I need her to do in these books, I laid the groundwork ready early that Elma can do math. Then I decided that Elma can do math in her head and that she visualized it. Which is the same thing that they do in the television Sherlock Holmes films, series, that the BBC series. Where you get to see… Things whipping around him, that's the visualization. Because that way, rather than having to explain the logical leaps, it's like, "Oh. Magic system happens. Math is magic."

[Hah!]

[Mary] So I am particularly proud of that, because it allows me to get around my own weakness in this area. While at the same time, because early on, I have every other character treating her as if she can do amazing calculations. Actually, through the entire book, everyone is like, "Oh, yeah. No one is faster at math than Elma. She can do amazing math in her head." Everyone reacts to her as if this is a truth in the world. Which means that I can just put the conclusions on the page. I don't, in that case, have to step through the process to get there.

 

[Amal] Similarly, so I have this novella, which… I've talked about it… No, I haven't talked about it yet. Oh, no. Sorry.

[Howard] You will have talked about it…

[Amal] I will have talked about it.

[Howard] In an episode previously recorded.

[Amal] That's exactly it. That's exactly it.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I wish I could… I wish I were smart enough to make that seem like something that I just know from understanding times…

[Howard] It's happened to us enough times, that I already have all those parts of speech.

[Mary] They are used to our time travel.

[Chuckles]

 

[Amal] So, Max Gladstone and I have co-written a novella that is coming out in probably… I think it's… Probably, I think it's July 2019. It's a book of two dueling time traveling super spies. One written by Max and one written by me. I have a number of insecurities in this regard because, first of all, I mean, they're time traveling super spies, they have all of time and space at their disposal, they are the best there… They are the best there are at what they do. But Wolverine quote, "And what they do is not very nice." Etc. So, they're brilliant, and they're constantly outsmarting each other and one upping each other. I am not a time traveling superspy.

[Howard] Probably.

[Mary] What!

[Amal] Probably not. But… The thing was, the insecurity I had around this, is I also haven't read a time of spy fiction. Like, there are, I think, a lot of protocols around this genre, that I only feel glancingly familiar with. So what I started to do, I realized, was writing this character… And especially because Max has a lot more of those protocols than I do. He is far more savvy with all of the kind of… Especially Cold War era stuff. He's literally writing a serial for Bookburners… Not for Bookburners. A serial for Serial Box, which is not Bookburners. Which is the spy… The witch that came in from the cold. Anyway, it's literally Soviet era spy stuff. So what I found myself doing was kind of the opposite of what you described at first, Mary Robinette, of the… Of giving… Gifting the character the uncertainty. I had my character strike constant confident poses. That confidence, like that maintaining of I know I'm a brilliant superspy. I know that I can outsmart you. And stuff. And to just kind of dwell in the affect of knowing that she is that brilliant helps to overcome those hurdles. So I feel like it was like a sustained thing across the whole project, to just find the confidence to display that confidence on the page was the [fall] for me in that situation.

 

[Mary] One of the other things, like that confidence and the I don't know this thing, that I also find that I use is expert knowledge from other people.

[Uhum.]  

[Amal] Ah. Yes.

[Mary] Which I have talked about in other places. That I am totally comfortable with going to someone and just leaving blanks in my manuscript, and going to someone who actually is an expert in this field, and then having them fill in my blanks, so that my character is literally smarter than I am, because they're talking about things that I know nothing about.

[Amal] Right.

[Mary] Whether or not that's one of my astronaut friends.

[Laughter]

[Amal] Wait, wait. Do you have astronaut friends, Mary?

[Mary] I do. I know, I know, it's shocking to everyone.

[Howard] You want to know something funny?

[What?]

[Howard] This episode airs immediately after Writing Excuses interviews an astronaut.

[Laughter]

[Amal] That's so great.

[Howard] We couldn't will have timed this better.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Well, that was exactly why we did this. Will have done this.

 

[Amal] There is one quick thing I wanted to say, too, just about things that we've been discussing. It occurs to me that some of the things that we've touched on are kind of generic distinctions between… In ways to talk about… To convey the smartness of characters who are smarter than we are. Because I think of… So we've talked about mystery, we've talked about other stuff, but I… If you're writing a heist novel, for instance. I have to assume that part of the way you display the smartness of the character is by revealing afterwards how a thing was done. What you're doing, instead of showing how smart they are, is showing how impeded they are throughout, in order to then kind of just reveal at the end the way that those things fell together. It feels like writing kind of backwards the things that we were initially talking about.

[Mary] I think that gets into that thing we were talking about earlier, about whether or not you want the reader to be ahead of or behind the character. You were going to say something, Dan?

 

[Dan] Yeah. The more that Amal is talking about this, I'm kind of coming to this epiphany, that a lot of this intelligence that we see in characters follows the same principles of a horror movie when you finally reveal the monster.

[Oooo]

[Dan] Right. It's the monster…

[Mary] I'm shocked that you refer to this as…

[Dan] I know. Isn't that weird that I would go there?

[Laughter]

[Dan] If you've been building up the monster as something horrible, and then you finally show it and it doesn't live up to our expectations, then it feels very disappointing. It feels so much worse than if we'd never seen the monster at all. If you're doing this, if you're building up your character's confidence or intelligence or capability, and then we finally get to the point where we see them, for example, do some math and it's like super simple math…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Then that's not going to impress us, and we're going to be like, "Really? That's the math that Elma's so good at?" So that's one of the things I thought, for example, that Elma did really well, that you did well with Elma, was when we finally saw the monster, so to speak, when we finally revealed that capability that we'd been hearing so much about, it lived up to, if not superseded, our expectations.

[Mary] And because… The reason it did that was because I was using someone else's math. The one scene in the novel where I actually have her talking at length about a formula is when she is at the Congressional hearing, and there is a formula, and she is explaining it to the Congressman. That formula comes out of Wernher von Braun's Mars, A Technical Project. Wernher von Braun was the father of modern rocketry.

[Dan] Modern rocketry.

[Mary] So… And that formula, by the way, is ridonkulous.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] It is so long. So she explains the first maybe 16th of the formula. It is that… Again, it's like I don't give the reader everything. But I give them… It is competence porn, is basically what we're dealing with.

[Dan] Well, one of the reasons, again, that that particular scene works well is that she is presenting it to a group of very smart, very capable, very competent people, and they can't follow it. So we're seeing not only her own intelligence, but her comparative intelligence.

 

[Howard] There is a… A test, a quiz, that's often administered to people who are hiring for programming jobs. It's called the fizz buzz test, which is write a program that prints the numbers one through 100, that if it's a multiple of three, you substitute the number with fizz, if it's a multiple of five, it's buzz, and if it's a multiple of both three and five, do fizz and buzz. Write a computer program that will do that. Elegant is good, writing it quickly is good, writing it so it is tight is good. Solve this problem for me, let me see what kind of a problem solver you are. My friend Dave had an interview in which the guy asked this question. Dave said, "Well, first thing I'd do is I'd write a program that says call FizzBuzz.lib from whatever this hub is because somebody else has already solved it."

[Laughter]

[Howard] The guy laughed and laughed and laughed. Then Dave provided his solution. Then, that night, Dave went home, wrote a very elegant, over the course of about four hours, fizz buzz program that he uploaded to the library, so that when his boss to be came in the next morning to look it up, he found it and saw who wrote it.

[Laughter]

[Mary] That is…

[Laughter]

[Mary] That is smart.

[Howard] That is brilliant and beautiful and kind of hilarious.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fixing Character Problems, Part II.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart. 

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

 

[Brandon] And we have broken characters. How do we fix'em?

[Eee!]

[Brandon] This is part II. We talked about this previously with the other podcasting team. I really want to get Amal and Maurice's thoughts on what they do when a character just isn't working. Have you ever had a character, when you get done with your piece, or even midway through it, that you know the character isn't working?

[Maurice] Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Okay. Podcast over.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It's happened a couple of different ways. I remember early on I had a story, it was a young woman, and I was very much in her head, story's going along just fine, and then I killed off her husband. Then the story stopped. I'm just like, "Yeah, but what do you do next? What…" Nothing. Nothing came after that. That was like the first time when a… I started filing away the whole idea of, you know what, I have to spend more time developing these characters before hand, because… Like I said, this was early in my career, so I hadn't quite reached that whole let's spend weeks with the character and really get to know them, because I hadn't done all that work, that back work yet. I didn't realize that back work still needed to be done. That's actually become my big hint is the work isn't done because the story stops. So either I haven't done enough character building at that point, or I haven't done enough world building. Because sometimes the story stops because I haven't developed the character… The world as a character enough, and the story stops.

[Brandon] Okay. So with you, when the story stops… Is this most of the time, if you've got a problem, it's a need to go back and I have not spent enough time with the characters?

[Maurice] Yeah. Usually that's the case. But there was a time when it was pointed out to me that a character wasn't working for me. That was, ironically, with The Usual Suspects, my middle grade novel. The editor wrote back, and among the editor notes, they were like, "You do know that… I love your main character. But he always has a hard edge to him. He's always hard. That works when he's in the school situation, but he becomes almost one note because he's always doing that." So, her suggestion was, why don't you add another character to bring out his softer side? So I ended up… 

[Mary] A foil? Ingenious.

[Maurice] Right. A foil.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] In this case, the foil was a little sister. Because he would act one way at school with his defenses up, but around his little sister, he can't help but lower his guards around her. That brought a whole new dimension to the character, and a whole new… Basically, a whole new arc to the story. I was just like… I was so pleased by the time it was done, going in and inserting those scenes of the two of them interacting. I was like, "All right, maybe editors aren't the enemy."

[Laughter]

 

[Amal] So, in my case, because I mostly write short fiction, I find that… The identifying the brokenness of a character almost always happens at the outlining stage. I say outlining, I don't act… I mean, my… The way that I tend to write is very slowly, but then my final draft… My first draft is usually very close to my final draft. So there's a lot of that time that spent kind of figuring out the story, before I start actually diving into prose. It's usually at that stage that I'll see a yeah, this character is just not… Like, I mean, if I don't have the sense of the character, I just can't write the scene. So it hasn't yet happened for me that I've written a whole draft of something and been like, "Mm, that character's actually not working. I need to do something." But the problems that I'll encounter as I'm trying to do it are usually dependent on whether or not the character has come out of the needs of the plot or whether the plot as come from the character, the idea of the character. So that a story I've mentioned before, Madeleine, where with the kind of like memory flashback hallucination thing, that was the idea that I wanted to play with. It actually came out with… I wanted to write… I thought to myself, I want to write a time travel story where the way that you time travel is through sense memory, is through like being triggered through your senses, and it's an involuntary thing, and you're literally traveling through time. It was as I was trying to work out the implications of what that meant, that I decided actually, I think what I want to do is tell a story more about someone experiencing this. So it's less a high concept thing, and more about the experience of memory. I had to sort of keep zooming in on that idea until I had a character, and even then, when I figured, okay, well, so this is the character, I know that her mother had Alzheimer's, but… But what else? Those blanks were where the story ended up living. The way that I ended up fixing that was basically just by… By putting the plot aside completely and thinking like, "Well, who is she? Why is it a problem that this is happening?" Like, all these other things came out. Like, she's really, really lonely in the wake of having tended to a parent in the last stages of a really terrible illness. She's… Her friends have more or less abandoned her, because they can't deal with how terrible that pain is… How sustained and terrible that pain is. Like, all of those things, they kind of just came together.

[Brandon] Okay.

 

[Mary] So, I'm curious. You both talked about like the story stops, or looking for the story and kind of the space and putting the plot aside. Are there symptoms that tend to… That you've now learned that oh, when the story is breaking in this particular way, this is the kind of fix that I usually end up applying to it?

[Maurice] One of them, one of the fixes happened with my urban fantasy series, because again, I had that big sprawling cast, and again, part of the issue was I had all these different storylines I was trying to track. Then I didn't realize until actually I was starting to map some of them out, there was like, "Okay, some of these just stop and go nowhere." I would introduce something that I would never pick up ever again. So what I ended up doing was, and it helped… It actually solved another problem in the book, which was I had so many characters in the book that what I ended up doing was combining characters, which (a) cut down the sum of the characters and (b) it allowed for some character growth and whole arcs at that point.

 

[Amal] For me, what I've realized I do, to the point where now I design workshops around this, is that I feel like the break or the problem happens because I'm trying too hard in one direction. What I end up doing is leaning into the prose. Like, this is going to sound weird and super inside baseball-y, I guess, but what I end up doing is because I also write poetry and I tell all my students that I feel like there's a day brain and a night brain for poetry, which is a concept that I first heard articulated by my friend [garbled]. But, similarly to the way that when you sing, you use different parts of your brain than when you speak, so that if you have speech impediments with your speech, you might not have them if you sing, I find that if I'm really, really focused on a lot of prose… Like, a lot of story issue stuff, structure or character or plot, if I let myself just lean into the prose that I'm writing and let my poetry brain take over, then I can sometimes just jump over the skip in the record or the scratch in the record rather, and just move into something else and keep going. So that definitely happened in this story. And I… It's weird. I can't definitely remember what the line was. I just remember very, very clearly that there was a line where I was like, "I have no idea where I'm going with this," and I just tried to follow the poetry logic of the line. It took me somewhere unexpected, and into a different metaphor, and then suddenly everything just kind of fell into place for the character.

[Mary] I will let you guys know a thing, because I do… I didn't have that language for it, lean into the prose, but like you can spot this in my fiction. If you see my character doing an activity, thinking about what it is that they are… How am I going to solve this problem, and Jane is like working with glamour and how is she going to solve this relationship thing? And then she's like, "Aha!" And she puts the glamour down and goes away. That is me freewriting…

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary] To try to figure out a plot problem with my character.

[Amal] Huh.

[Mary] That I'm like I can't get her from this point to this point. I can't get her over this decision hump. What is the thing that she needs to do? I'll usually go back and trim that sucker down, and sometimes I'll pull it out altogether, but one of the things that I have found is that I do like lean into the prose, that I will freewrite as my character and I will give her an activity that she's doing while she's trying to figure it out.

[Brandon] This is really interesting to me. It's going to be a slight tangent, but it kind of plays into a theory I have, where… When I was younger and when I was becoming a writer, I always imagined writing as more of a craft. It's like you are building something brick by brick by brick and whatnot, and the more I've been a writer, the more I realize it's more a performance art.

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] You go over something over and over, at least for me, I'm a planner, over and over in my head. I practice it, I practice certain skills, and then I sit down, and it's like, "Blam." This thing happens, and then I'm left with this thing. Now I'm going to cultivate it, but the actual creating of the story, it's like doing a play where this is performance night. Then I get to go back and revise it. It's this really weird shift that's happened in my brain, the more I've become a writer, which is an odd shift for someone who is kind of an outliner, like me. That always kind of saw it brick by brick.

[Mary] I mean, this is a thing that I think I talked about in my very first episode with Writing Excuses, before I was a full-time cast member. That my training as a puppeteer was to break techniques apart so that when you got into the art of it, you worked thinking about the technique anymore, you could just do the performance. I think that that's a thing that early career writers, we're still thinking about all of the technique. So when you're trying to figure out a character problem, it's… Like a character problem can lie in so many different aspects of character. It can be a motivation issue, it can be a back story issue, it can be a goal issue, it can be the personality issue, that the character's personality doesn't fit with the thing you need them to do. Learning to identify where these problems lie is difficult. Once you figure that out, a lot of it does become very intuitive.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. Book of the week is actually The Only Harmless Great Thing.

[Amal] Oh. Yes. Oh, my gosh, I love this so much. The Only Harmless Great Thing is a Tor.com novella by Brooke Bolander. It's amazing. It's about… Oh, it's about… Ostensibly, it's about the fact that during wartime on Coney Island, they started teaching elephants to use paintbrushes so that they could paint, I think, what was it, clocks with radium or something like that. So they basically offloaded the extremely dangerous and terrible task of interacting with radium onto elephants, because they could survive longer than the underprivileged women who had been doing it until that point. So it's about this woman who is teaching this elephant how to do this at first. But it's a narrative. It's also broken up by a kind of… It's an alternate future sort of where those events took place. So imagine an alternate future from that same actual real thing that happened, but it's intercut with elephant folklore, like folklore that elephants have with mythologies that elephants have, so it imagines that elephants have this storytelling tradition that reaches back to the mammoths, and that they have incorporated this incident into their own mythology. So it's this beautiful, beautiful defamiliarization of a bunch… It's doing so much stuff that I could go on and on about, but the thing that struck me was that because Tor.com also put out novellas about other megafauna and alternate histories, which are Sarah Gailey's River of Teeth and The Taste of Marrow. Those are like rollicking heist novels, novellas. So because Brooke Bolander's stuff that I've read up until this point has been very fast-paced, very… Like, just like… I think it's like… Whiskey is the way I talk about it, it's like knocking whiskey back, is like what Bolander's stuff…

[Mary] Why would you do that?

[Amal] I know. Well, when it's hard and you're angry and you want the burn, like there's… Right. So. But, so that's what I was expecting from this. I knew it would be difficult and full of unhappy things, but I still expected it to be what I think of as a Bolander story. Instead, it's slow. It's like… It's like sipping that whiskey. It's like a slow, long pour of something. The voices are so distinct and so sustained and it's just beautiful. Like the… Being in the mammoth space and that kind of like elephant mythology voice, just forces you to slow down, and really appreciate everything beautiful that's going on in the prose. It's absolutely wonderful. It comes… Yeah. It came out in January. So…

 

[Brandon] Awesome. So let me throw a question at you guys that I threw at the other podcasters, which is, is there a time where you pushed yourself on a character that maybe was giving you trouble, or that when you were outlining, you were like, "This is going to be a little bit tough," that was rewarding? That you're glad you did?

[Mm… Hum.]

[Amal] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Mary] This is exactly how we all answered it.

[Laughter]

[Amal] I'm trying to think of an exclusively character instance. Because the one that I want to use is the character in The Truth about Owls, who is a girl named Annise. Anisa, rather. I made that mistake. Anyways, she… Like initially when I… This kind of plays into some of the things that we were talking about in other episodes. Initially, I was going to have her be Indian, and I had wanted the story to be about gender, and I was going to explore those things through the Blodeuwedd story, which is a Welsh story about a woman made of flowers who gets turned into an owl. I had like all these important structural things I wanted to do. Then I realized I couldn't do any of them, because I had no idea who this character was if she was Indian. Like, I had no access to the things that I wanted to talk about. I had like some thought processes for why I had wanted that, but it was insufficient. This discouraged me to the point where I just didn't want to write the story. I literally wrote to the editors and went, "You know what, I just don't think I can do this. I'm sorry. I'm going to back out early while it doesn't have a problem." The editors, Julia Rios in particular, went, "But, we really want a story from you. Can you not just tell this story, like through backgrounds that you're more familiar with?" I ended up making this character Middle Eastern instead. I ended up making her of Lebanese extraction, and everything fell into place. Every single thing that fell into place, I fought. Basically. Because I did not... I was like, "Okay. She's going to be… Her family is from Lebanon, but I really don't want to write a story about war, so I'm… I'm… No. I'm just not going to do that part." Then I realized that the time constraints that I had chosen set it squarely in the time when Lebanon was being bombarded by Israel in 2006. I was like, "Crap." Okay. So. Well, I'm going to put her in this other part of Lebanon, where she won't have experienced any of that, because most of the bombing was on Beirut. I put her in Rayak, which is my mom's village, which is a place that I spent time in. Then did a tiny bit of research and realized the only other airfield in Lebanon is in Rayak…

[Laughter]

[Amal] It also got bombed. I was like, "Oh, God. There's just no escaping this. I'm going to write this stupid war into this story, and I didn't want it to be about any of this." But as soon as I made those decisions, then the writing came out, and it all sort of happened. Every difficulty, everything that was like, "No, like I just, I didn't want to do this." As soon as I decided to like, "Fuck it. Fine, I will do it." It ended up working out.

 

[Maurice] So, I already talked a little bit about the process of writing a middle grade. That would have been one example. I can give two examples that all revolve around the same issue. The issue was agency. So one… I'll give one example where I fixed the problem in one example where it kind of slipped by all of us. Which was an interesting experience. So my… The story that I have with Uncanny Magazine, Ache of Home. I'd sent the story in, they loved the story. They were just like, "Yeah, but that ending. You know, your main character, she doesn't seem to have enough agency in solving the problem. Is there a way that…" We need to fix that, basically. So they gave me some notes. So it basically involved going back and… Actually, whenever I think about fixing character problems, I have this visual view, like when you're, I know, [garbled]

[laughter]

[Mary] You're looking very frightened right now.

[Maurice] But, like you were crocheting the other day or something, and just the whole idea of just… You sat there, and you'd be like, "And now we're going to unravel."

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Amal] Oh. Yeah.

[Maurice] That's what the process was like. I was like, "Okay, now I'm going to unravel the last third of my story."

[Mary] I'm so glad that you said that, because that was… That's a thing that as an early career writer, when you're fixing character problems, one of the most liberating things for me was realizing that I could just pull a giant chunk of text out and write a different chunk of text and it cost nothing.

[Maurice] Not a thing.

[Mary] It's like the thing I enjoy personally about writing is writing, so… It was like… My husband said this. He was watching me pull a bunch of crochet out, and he's like, "But… But… You did all of that work." I'm like, "Yeah. But I get to crochet again."

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right. Right.

[Mary] Like, I'm still getting to crochet.

[Maurice] Yep. So, when I unraveled, and then I got to re-knit it back together. The re-knitting, for me, it just looked like… In a lot of ways, it was just a matter of reordering and reprioritizing, just doing a series of just little shifts here and there. Ultimately, that's all it took, was just some little shifts here and there. I'm like, "The story was already there. I just had to bring it out a little bit more." Now, the one that slipped by a lot of us was with Buffalo Soldier of all things. It isn't a major critique or anything, it was just one review that said, "Loved Buffalo Soldier. Loved the world building. Loved all these aspects of it. It's just that the child that the main character's protecting has no agency, and is little more than a damsel in distress." That's one of those things that just kind of haunted me. Well, it's just like… Hum, that one slipped by me. I get where… Because the whole story started with the whole image of… My nephew's on the autism spectrum, and is like the worst hide-and-seek player ever. Because like we'll play in teams, and like me and him will go hide. Like, as soon as someone goes, "Hey! Where's Orion?" He doesn't want you to be worried about him, so he'll jump out of the bushes. "Here I am!" You are awful at this game.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] So, the whole premise of this story revolved around the idea of like trying to play… It was basically a chase novel with a child whose like, "Hey. You know what, why are we hiding?" But it was one of those things where it was like, Mm... He doesn't… While he drives the story, I missed the fact that he doesn't really have a lot of agency in the story. So it's one of those things where it's like lesson learned. I will keep that in mind for… If I come back to write more of this, that problem will be fixed.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are recording live at Salt Lake Comic Con.

[Yelling]

[Dan] We also have a special guest, Wendy Tolliver, with us.

[Mary] Wendy, tell us a little bit about yourself.

[Wendy] Well, hi. First off, I'm really happy to be here. My name's Wendy Tolliver, as you just said. I live in Eden, Utah, so that let you know right away that yes, I do ski and snowboard. I try to go about 4 times a week. I'm looking forward to this season this year. I'm also a young adult author, and the last 2 books that I've written are these beautiful Once-upon-a-time books Regina Rising and Red's Untold Tale. I also am a mother of 3 crazy boys, ages 17, 14, and 11. My oldest has some mental illness issues that I think we're going to be talking about today.

 

[Mary] That's right. So one of the reasons that we're starting off by having you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself is to remind everyone that people are not a monolith. So this is going to be about Wendy's own specific experience, living with a family that has mental illness.

[Wendy] That's right.

[Mary] You said that your oldest son has some mental illness issues. Can you tell us a little bit about those?

[Wendy] Yes. So my oldest son, he's 17 right now. When he was in the 4th grade, we were noticing some behaviors that were impacting what we kind of considered a normal little boy's life. He had nice clothes, but he would choose to wear old clothes that didn't fit him very well to school. He had a nice backpack, but he would choose to take a grocery sack, one of those recyclable plastic ones for his books to school. We were noticing that his hands were very red and they were dry and they started to get blisters on them.

[Mary] How did that make you feel? Like, what was your emotional reaction before you knew what was going on?

[Wendy] We were really nervous about it, because we were thinking that he would have something that had to do with cleanliness, a mental issue that would have to do with cleanliness. At the very peak of this, I remember, one of his buddies was over, and we were having pizza for dinner. My son stood up in the middle of eating pizza and went upstairs to take a shower. We started kind of counting how many showers our son took, and it went from, "Oh, yay, we have a clean boy. Whoever heard of that?" To him taking up to 7 showers a day.

[Mary] Wow.

[Wendy] So that was definitely impacting his life.

[Dan] And with like scalding hot water, which is what was causing the blisters.

[Wendy] Exactly. I tried to put in the bathrooms as gentle soap as I could find, but still he was walking around and you could see it, like his skin was bright red, and he was even bleeding sometimes from scalding water.

 

[Mary] So, how long did it take before you were able to get a diagnosis on that?

[Wendy] So… It was approx… We were watching him for probably about a month or 2, if I remember correctly. Then we ended up taking him to a local psychologist who was really good working with children, and he started working with our son.

[Mary] And diagnosed him as having…

[Wendy] OCD tendencies.

[Mary] OCD is shorthand for obsessive compulsive disorder. Now, by random coincidence, the first story I ever sold was a story about OCD.

[Wendy] Oh, wow.

[Mary] One of the things that I didn't know before I started researching this was that it comes in a bunch of different flavors.

[Brandon] I would say that's one of the things the media… The media presents OCD in a certain very strong sort of way. I have a friend who's been diagnosed with OCD. There's not the handwashing, there's not… None of the stuff that you associate with the TV OCD does my friend have. But there is severe anxiety if things aren't lined up in certain ways, that if you know about it… Like, my friend lives a perfectly normal life except for these little triggers that will really make him anxious. It's a very interesting thing for me to realize… It was one of those things that started me down the path of understanding that all mental illness is a spectrum, and some of it… We don't… It's… The illness part is where it impacts our lives and how it changes our lives in ways we don't want, as opposed to it always being just one person with this really, really crazy disease that sometimes makes good television, but it may not be accurate.

 

[Mary] This is the reason that we're doing this series, is because one of the things that I'm going to point out is that you are aware that cleanliness disorders were thing. Probably because of media you had consumed. This is one of the reasons that representation is so important. With that first sale that I made, I took it to my voice teacher, who was in a 45 year marriage. I was so proud because it was my first sale, and I gave it to her. She read it, and then she called me and she said, "Oh, my God. You have described my husband, and we are in divorce proceedings right now." Neither of them had realized what was wrong with him, because they had never seen his brand of OCD described. They went, he got medication, and the things that were causing problems in the marriage went away. It was because of a single story I wrote in a small press magazine. So this is why it's so important, and so important to represent it accurately and well. So what are some of the things that you see now that you're familiar with it that kind of make you want to flip the table when you're seeing representations of families like yours?

[Wendy] So, one of the things is, and I kind of get it, because the symptoms do look kind of silly, but it's… OCD specifically is used for humor and quirkiness. So you'll see a character, they wake up and they have to tap their alarm clock 8 times. Then they have to shuffle over and put their shoes on a certain way and things like that. You're kind of watching it on a movie or reading about it in a book, and you're just kind of like, "Oh, that's a quirky little character." Or, another thing that's really prevalent with especially OCD is people will say, "Oh, my gosh, I'm so OSD… Or, yeah, OCD, because I need to have my towels in the closet facing a certain way." It makes me want to scream, because I'm like, "Don't you understand that it's more than just wanting your towels tidy?" It's a mental thing where these very destructive thoughts are coming into their minds over and over, and they do their compulsions in a way to make themselves feel safer with these horrible, sometimes very scary thoughts that are repeating and repeating and repeating.

[Mary] That's why a lot of people will have excessive compulsive tendency, but the D, disorder, is because it disrupts your life.

[Howard] My 15-year-old suffers from OCD, and one of the things that… I mean, I used to joke about OCD all the time, because I like to be very organized. I'm an artist, I've got pencils everywhere, and I obsess over getting them in the right place. If they're not in the right place, I am not compelled to cut myself. That is the difference between OCD and oh, I am obsessed about being neat. One of the things that I see writers get wrong all the time is this sense that there is an obsession, but the compulsion is never pictured. The compulsion… In my home, the thought that my daughter might be cutting herself is terrifying. We do everything we can to make sure that the obsession is correctly fed and managed, and it's so nice to have medications to help that, so that it's easier.

[Dan] My brother, who has OCD, he uses a metaphor that I think is really great to help you understand what these compulsions are like. He… One of his compulsions is self-harm, similar to Howard's daughter. He wants to make his head bleed. One night, he was sitting watching TV with his wife, and a commercial came on for ice cream. She said, "Oh, man, that would really hit the spot right now. I really want that ice cream." He said, "That's how I feel about making my head bleed. Like, I don't need it, but it would just really hit the spot. Right now, it would be so delicious if I could just hit my head against the wall and make it bleed." That's the kind of compulsions. So, yeah, when people use OCD for humor… Or the one that bothers me is CDO, it's OCD, but the letters are in the right order. Like, you're really making fun of a really harmful thing.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week. The book of the week is Life Inside My Mind.

[Wendy] Yes. So, that's an anthology that's coming out this spring. It's called Life Inside My Mind. It is a… It is the personal accounts from 31 of your favorite young adult authors, and they're talking about how mental illness has impacted their lives. Most of them are personal stories. I was told that mine's one of the only ones that not only was talking about someone in the… A family member, rather than myself, but also, I did it from my son's point of view. It's an interview that I did over pizza one day. It has some lines in it that, even though I was interviewing him as a writer and trying to keep it very even emotion, I almost broke down and cried. Because, like some… Like Dan was saying, or… When you're talking about OCD, it's so like major sometimes that the only way they can think to get out of it is to cut themselves or to commit suicide.

[Dan] Now the… Blah. I'm sorry. Lost my train of thought. We are recording this early. So that by the time this actually airs, that will already be available.

[Wendy] Oh, that's fantastic. You'll be able to get it everywhere.

[Dan] Tell us the title again.

[Wendy] Okay. It's called Life Inside My Mind. It's edited by Jessica Burkhart, and it's being published by Simon Pulse.

 

[Mary] Great. So, one of the things that you just mentioned was that some of the things that your son said made you want to cry. What sort of surprises… Because one of the things about OCD and a lot of other mental illnesses is that people will mask it very hard to try to keep their family and anyone else from knowing what's going on, because of the stigma of being crazy. What are some of the things that surprised you as… That you learned about your son through this interview?

[Wendy] I… What surprised me the most was I didn't realize it was as bad as it was. I thought that once he was on his medication and once he didn't look like his life was being impacted as much, that it was actually being impacted, he just was not sharing what was going on in his mind.

[Mary] Wow.

[Wendy] He was bottling it up. To this day, he takes really long baths. That's one of the things that helps him. One of the things that helps us is I try to open up that communication with him, and I try to let him tell me everything that's in his mind, because I feel like that helps him, and it helps me understand him better as well.

[Mary] What are some of the other ways that it has impacted your life? Because, and this is one of the things about being in a family with someone who has… Any kind of illness is that it's not affecting just them, it's affecting the community around them.

[Wendy] Right. I think that all in all, our family has been very fortunate, because my son does have a very bubbly, unique, interesting personality, and they just kind of assume that that's just part of his personality, so that's actually kind of a good thing. It makes it a little bit easier, so we're not having to explain to everybody. One of the things that impacted it the most was when he was in the 4th grade, his… One of his teachers would call him out on his behaviors. For example, when his… If his bag of books would touch the ground, he would be really scared about that and he'd pick it up really fast, and he'd be watching out the hall to make sure it didn't go on the ground. She moved his seat away from the hall, because she didn't want him looking up into the hall. Another thing that she did was he would click his pen, like this, [click] when he got done with a test and just waiting. I think that was to help the thoughts from not going in his mind or whatever. He would do this. She punished him for it.

[Dan] So, I have a question for you. When you were introducing yourself at the beginning, you said you had 3 crazy boys. Which, to someone outside of the situation, would be like, "How could you possibly call your son crazy?" But, from living inside of that, and living with it, there's often a perception that's very different, and it's treated sometimes irreverently or jokingly because you kind of have to in order to deal with it. So, what are some of the coping strategies your family uses that people might be surprised by?

[Wendy] Well, one of the things is whenever… This is a strategy that his fifth-grade teacher actually taught us, which is whenever he starts feeling anx… Here's some more things that go along with OCD, depression, anxiety, and the panic attacks. Whenever he was feeling like that during school, his fifth-grade teacher gave him a free pass out into the hall and he could sit out and achieve a… And just be alone. That was really helpful. So we know that when things are getting stressful for him, or when he kind of has like a more rigid body positioning, he can kind of feel it coming on, and we don't ask questions when he leaves the room.

[Howard] This… The… You've… You talk about the teacher. I can't stress enough how critical it is that we be able to talk to people outside our families about this. My own kids… It's more than just my daughter who suffers from things, and they're not all the same thing, which is really exciting in my house.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I am not immune to these things, I have my own issues. But they have what they call individual education plans, IEPs, here in Utah, and my kids who have them, in all of these cases, their teachers know, "Oh, if there's an episode, if there's an issue, if there's a thing, we have a release valve." Maybe it is you go to the resource center, and maybe it is you sit with the nurse. I don't know what all the strategies are. I love that I don't need to. I love that we have talked about it enough that somebody else is in place to help my children when I can't.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Aliette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Aliette] I'm Aliette.

[Howard] And I'm going to get it wrong again.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's okay, we rely on you for that service. We have with us special guest, JY Yang. JY, tell us about yourself.

[JY] Hello. My name is JY Yang, and I am a writer of short fiction and slightly not so short fiction. So I have two novellas from tor.com publishing that are out in September, The Red Threads of Fortune and The Black Tides of Heaven, which are secondary world science fantasy. I tend to write a lot of epic fantasy now, but I actually really love science fiction. I used to write a lot of like cyberpunky-ish stuff.

 

[Dan] Awesome. Well, that's cool. Okay, so this is one of our what do writers get wrong episodes, which we love to do. Mary? Tell us about this. What are we doing?

[Mary] So, with these episodes, again, what we're trying to do is present you with people who have different life experiences than the core podcasters do, as a way of helping you begin to think about different characters that you can start to incorporate. So instead of telling you stuff and showing you stuff, we're getting an expert in to kind of talk about their life experience. But we want to be clear that these people that we bring on are not speaking for the entire culture. They're not… culture is not a monolith, and everybody has multiple facets. For instance, JY has multiple facets. What are some of yours?

[JY] Okay, I have… I'm going to say that I love learning languages. But the only language I've kind of successfully managed to get like a [garbled] level of reading language is Swedish. I like whales. And I am a non-binary queer person.

[Mary] So, with all of these facets, which one are we going to focus on?

[JY] I'm going to talk about, I think, being non-binary and generally some [what] gender nonconforming.

[Mary] Okay. So that means what do people get wrong about non-binary and gender nonconforming?

[JY] Okay. I have to start off with a caveat emptor in that I have not actually identified or even thought of myself as non-binary for a very long time. I'm 34, I think. Yes. I am 34 years old, and until I was 33, I basically thought I was a cis woman. Interestingly enough, I think it was the process of writing my novellas in which I kind of realized that these non-binary characters that I'm creating, they're kind of actually me, in the sense that that's the way I sort of relate or don't relate to gender. So, that's my caveat. That… Don't take my words for gospel. Particularly because I hang out with a lot of like non-binary friends, and we all have very different pathways to discovering that we're non-binary. A lot of us are still questioning. We don't have one way to sort of relate to our gender. So I think that you can't really say, "Oh, no, this is exactly what people get wrong about things." Because there's no one way to be non-binary or gender nonconforming. One thing that I think that I can say that actually bothers me when I read about non-binary characters is that people who write characters who use non-binary pronouns, like they/them, em, and… It's kind of just dropped into the story, and people are like, "Oh, look, I have a non-binary character and they use they/them pronouns." But I don't really get a sense of how El's gender plays out in those societies. It just feels like, oh, the only thing about being non-binary is that you use different pronouns, which… It's a lot more than that. It's something that goes to… Well, the way I feel is that it's something that relates very strongly to… Your self, like core identity. I think gender is something that is very, very cultural. It's pretty much embedded very deeply in every culture there is. No matter how this is expressed, you don't have a culture in which gender doesn't matter at all. Not on this planet. Likely, if you have halfway humanoid characters, it's not… It's going to be a thing. So. Yeah, I think that the sense… What bothers me about these characters is that they're sort of dropped into a world, but I don't see… I don't get a sense from the world that gender is something that the author kind of thought about in great depth.

 

[Dan] So, is there a counterexample that you could give of maybe an author who did their research, who does portray it accurately? What are those differences? What are the signs that, "Oh, yeah, this person knows what they're talking about?"

[JY] Okay. So I'm going to… I think that… In a way I think… The best thing I think can probably do is to sort of read sort of like non-binary writers who write like non-binary characters with sort of like different gender things. Okay. I think like, for example, Ann Leckie, who is not non-binary, and who, as far as I know, is a woman, but she… Like, her Ancillary Justice novels. I'm pretty sure that was the name for the series, which I'm completely forgetting right now, but you know what I'm talking about.

[Laughter]

[JY] I think it's interesting because she basically embedded gender very deeply in her books, in her system. That's something that sort of like permeates every aspect of the book if you know what I'm talking about. That is, I think, that is the kind of depth of thought, I think, that if you really sort of like wanted to do justice to gender. That sounds really strange when I say it out loud.

[Chuckles]

[JY] But, like, it's not just something that's sort of a gloss put on top of a world.

 

[Mary] One of the things about being people is that we have socialized to put people into boxes. There's a very interesting study that… I'm going to circle back to gender, I promise… About color. That shows that the words that we have for color come into the language at the point when we can create that color. They come in a very predictable pattern, except for Egypt, which gets the word blue way before everybody else does because of lapis lazuli. So this is why in Homer's The Odyssey, there is no… The ocean is the wine-dark sea. The word blue never occurs. So this study shows that if you do not have the word for a color, you actually lumped the color into a different color category. They did… They showed this video of some people in a society that… A tribal society that… Here on earth, this is not secondary world, this is real world stuff. That has a very simplified color structure, compared to what we think of as a color structure. So things are all in the kind of greens and browns and reds and blacks. They show them a wheel, and they don't have the word for blue, specifically. They show them a wheel of swatches, and they're all green except for one that is blue. They're like, "Which one is different?" They look at the wheel and they guess and they point at different ones. To me, it's very obvious which one is blue. Then they show them a wheel of this gray green thing and like, "Which one is different?" They all, unerringly, without hesitating, point to the same square. To me it looks completely the same. It's because they're using different boxes. So I think, and this is where we circle back to gender, so I think that one of the things that has happened to us is that we have been trained in 2017 to put people into only one of two boxes. So we're at this generational shift where we are learning that there are other boxes, and that really, we shouldn't actually be looking up boxes, because, just like color, there is a spectrum. But that these are all artificial distinctions that we are making.

 

[Dan] I'm… Okay. I'm going to… Before we carry on, we need to pause for our book of the week. So, tell us about the book of the week.

[JY] Okay, the book of the week is actually… I'm going to cheat, because it's actually two books. But they're short books. So, like, if you combined them, they're kind of like one book.

[No no no no no]

[Howard] Our readers, our listeners, have never complained when we've given them more than one thing to read.

[Laughter]

[JY] Okay. So… The books of the week are my Tensorate novellas, the first two of the series, which comes out from Tor.com publishing in September. They're called The Red… Oh, God, I always get the… The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune. They're basically set in a secondary world setting, which is sort of heavily influenced by Asian culture. I have like them swearing in like [Hokien] which is kind of my parents language. It is a world where there is magic that is based on stuff like the five elements which I've kind of like sneakily used as five different sorts of like energy in terms of physics. But everyone has the potential to use magic, but learning how to use it is very difficult and it is very much restricted to people in power, people with privilege. So the two novellas are each centered on one of a pair of twins who are born to the supreme ruler of the dominant empire. Their names are Mokoya and Akeha, and the two novellas kind of like sort of tell the story of how they rebel against their mother, and break away from their family and sort of join the resistance to their mother's terrible rule.

[Dan] Awesome. That is The Black Tides…

[Garbled]

[Dan] Oh. Sorry, go ahead.

[Aliette] I want it this week.

[Laughter]

[Aliette] I read them and they're really, really excellent books, and like, they've got this really, really awesome world building. And like the gender and the whole coming to your own gender… Like, oh my God.

[Garbled]

[Howard] JY said these are coming out in September, and you're using the future tense. But, by the time this episode is aired, fair listener, they are already available to you. If… they're going to be up on Tor.com, is that?

[JY] Yeah. You can… Tor.com publishing. You can probably get them on Amazon and Barnes & Noble…

[Howard] We will provide links to them, so you can just go get'em.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Howard] No waiting.

[Dan] The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune.

[JY] Yes. Yes yes yes.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Awesome. By JY Yang.

[JY] I wrote these. I should know… But sometimes, I'm like, "Mmmm…"

 

[Dan] Okay. Cool. So. This is a question we've asked a lot of our what do people get wrong guests that I would love to ask. What are some of the clichés of an incorrectly expressed nonconforming gender identity that you see? When people do it wrong, what stands out is obviously wrong?

[JY] Okay, so this is not, I think, specific to just non-binary, but a gender nonconforming, in which I do see every now and then, like cis authors kind of equating gender to sort of very specific markers of desire like sexuality or like liking skirts makes you more feminine and liking pants like makes you more masculine. I think it's a lot more complicated than that. As… I think I have my non-binary friends who are very, very feminine, they present themselves very femininely, but they don't identify as being a woman. A woman. Wow. [Laughter] And… Yeah, I think that's one of the things where I think you really have to sort of consider like gender is a social construct. And feeling that you're of a certain gender may not necessarily correlate to how you break out of the boxes that society wants to put you in. Like, you're a particular gender, you have to present yourself in this, this, this, and this way. I think gender is a lot more than likes surface gloss that says… Presentation in a sense is very much superficial. I think… I feel like gender is an… It's an identity. It's something that you can't really define, you can't really put into words why you feel this way, but… You just know that it's right for you. I think that's a reason also why a lot of likely non-binary people I know are still trying to sort of like figure themselves out and how they relate to society in terms of their gender presentation, and they have some days in which they want to present more femininely and some days in which they want to present more non-femininely… Masculinely [chuckles] I'm a writer, I'm good at words. I'm sure.

 

[Mary] Let me ask a… Use myself as a useful representative example, and ask a really specific question. So, I have a book that set in 1952, and I have a character in it that my intention is that they are non-binary. But it's 1952, and that language doesn't exist yet. What markers would you put in that book that would make you recognize the character as representing you?

[JY] Hum. That's a very good question. I think that there has to be a certain, I think… Well, it depends on whether… Okay, I think it depends on a number of things, because you can be sort of like internally I know that I'm not one of these, but you don't actually ever say it in public. So I don't know if they're closeted non-binary or it's actually addressed in the book, because I haven't read it, I'm sorry.

[Mary] That's okay, the book isn't out yet, you couldn't have read it.

[JY] Oh, that's good. I didn't know that. But… So in a sense that I think you have to be very clear on what the character themselves, how they relate to the world. I think like specifically because like I think in the 1950s, like gender was a very… I think that the strictures of gender were… Especially in America, were a lot more constricted than they are now. So in order to sort of like say, "Hey, I don't fit into these boxes," you have to have an active sort of rebelling against that. It's like, well, I know that these boxes are here, but I think that these boxes suck. Even if they can't sort of articulate that, it's because I don't belong to either gender. The boxes that exist right now… They have to be like, "No, these boxes make me feel uncomfortable." And even if they don't understand why, it's just like, "I don't like them. And I refuse… Or don't refuse." But, yeah, that sort of discomfort with the binary has to be there.

[Howard] The challenge that Mary has is merely a slightly exacerbated version of the one that English writers have in general, which is that our language does not offer you good ways to describe yourself in a way that is clear to everyone else. It's one thing to say, "I don't fit in the boxes you've created." It's another thing entirely to say, "This is how I represent," and to be able to do that with one set of pronouns and one set of adjectives and whatever. We just don't have those tools.

[Aliette] I mean, we do have languages that have… Finnish, right, for instance…

[Garbled]

[Aliette] Has no pronouns. At the opposite end of the spectrum, French genders everything, so, like, the non-binary community in France is like, "We need to do like all the word endings," and like it's how do we do this? We need to create this third like nonspecific non-masculine non-feminine gender for everything.

[JY] Yeah. I think in Swedish, they actually sort of… They actively did that. They introduced a third gender-neutral pronoun that some people I know… I don't want this in our language, but I like that they actively… The people who are… More or less in charge of the language are actively saying, "Yes, we are going to do this." Which I wish like there was something similar in English, because, yeah, I still get blowback on like using they/them pronouns in English. They're like, "No, it's not grammatical." I'm like, "Mrrr…"

[Mary] Well, actually…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Yeah, I was going to say.

[JY] It's been going on for like four or five centuries at the very least. Right?

[Mary] Jane Austen could do this. You can too.

[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] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] We're going to be talking about archetypes as tools. Tropes as tools. Now, specifically, this week the idea is that we are approaching these as tools that every writer uses, consciously or unconsciously, and we're going to talk about how to use archetypes, how to use tropes, or at what points you want to back away or subvert that trope. Let me start off by saying you can't avoid tropes. Tropes are the way by which we communicate in a lot of ways. It's the way by which stories work. Also, tropes are not bad in and of themselves. The fact… They are simply something that exists, that are pieces and building blocks that stories come from.

[Howard] Let me open with a metaphor that has always worked well for me. If you have ever had fresh green beans, they are pretty delicious. Boiled, however… If you've ever had canned green beans, they are less delicious. When you do a clich… When you use a trope, an archetype, or a cliché and you get it wrong, we can taste the can. When you get it right, it's fresh green beans, and even if we've had it before, we like it. Also, add butter.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] A friend of mine uses a slightly different metaphor, which is very similar also in the "Well, this tastes like poo."

[Choking]

[Mary] Which is that books are building blocks, but that sometimes building blocks are made of poo and that's not architecturally sound.

[Dan] Well, I suppose…

[Brandon] Let's dig into this. Let me ask you…

[Dan] You and I build things very differently.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Don't use that archetype. It's canned poo!

 

[Brandon] So how do you make the poo not canned, Howard? How do you make it fresh… I don't know. No.

[Laughter]

[Mary] No, there's a reason this… That Howard's canned metaphor's really, really good. It's that there are a lot of things that when they are fresh, when they are new, they are not a cliché yet. This is why you… There's that joke about "Oh, Shakespeare. Everything he wrote was a cliché." Because he wrote it first, and people started using it. There's a thing that will happen over the lifecycle of an idea, which is that someone will have the rare original idea. It's like, "Oh, that's so fresh and new." Like Dracula. Although Dracula was not…

[Brandon] See, here's where I'm going to argue with you. Because I think that during Shakespeare's time, those things were already all tropes.

[Mary] Yeah… Well, that's… Yes. What I'm saying is that to go from trope to cliché… That cliché is the canned thing.

[Brandon] Right. So what is…

[Mary] Trope is the building block.

[Brandon] How do you make this happen? How do you… Like I'm worried that our listeners are going to be like, "All right, so I need to find the original idea. I need to do things no one else has done." Without understanding that's just not humanly possible. Now what you can do is you can take something, and you can say, "All right, I'm going to recontextualize this." I'm going to use it in an interesting way, or I'm going to be well aware that this is a trope and dig down as we talked about a couple years ago, the difference between a cook and a chef… Right? The cook uses the trope as it is, just because it is a trope, where the chef says, "All right, what does this trope do to the reader? What… Why is this trope interesting? How can I properly incorporate this into my story?" If you want to take an example of this, Firefly, the television show. It is a series of very, very time-worn tropes. You've got the prostitute with a heart of gold, you've got the preacher, you've got the mysterious stranger, you've got… I mean, everyone…

[Mary] You've got the cowboy.

[Brandon] On that ship is a very… They're cliché. They're straight up cliché. That, in the context of that story, they are all delightful, interesting, fun, and feel very fresh and original characters. Despite the fact that he's changed them only a little bit from the cliché.

 

[Howard] Several years ago, we recorded and it was just the three of us. The three dudes. We recorded What Did the Dark Knight Get Right? One of the things we said is that the dialogue was always unpredictable. It didn't have comic book dialogue. You didn't have somebody say, "I'm going to get you for this." You didn't have Batman in a gravelly voice, but even when he was doing that, you didn't know what he was going to say. You contrast that with, I think it was Hellboy 2, which had cliché throwaway line after throwaway line. For me, that is the flavor of the can, and that is one of the easiest things to pluck out of your work. You look at something that someone has just said. For instance, "What did you do?" Well, "What did you do?" has been uttered by actors thousands and thousands of times. It's not something that's technically cliché, but if you're trying to throw it as something that's really strong, you might have trouble. Is there another way for that character to ask that question?

[Mary] Jane Espenson says that new writers will often write things and go, "Oh, this is right," and it's right because it's familiar. I think that that's one of the things that happens to us a lot. You are absolutely right that there is not an original… That going out and finding original idea is not the answer. It's the combining of…

[Brandon] There are… It does happen. You're right. But I worry about writers feeling like they have to find that rather than learning to do what we're talking about.

[Dan] So, the example that keeps coming to mind while we're talking about this is the TV show Atlanta by Donald Glover, which I've started watching, belatedly. What is fascinating to me is that it feels incredibly fresh… Everything in it. Like, my jaw's on the floor a lot of it, because I've never seen this before and I think they found something new. They found something I've never seen before. What's going on is that they are using a lot of these well-worn tropes. A lot of the events and situations and the relationships are the same as in every other sitcom. But they are combined with a very specific life experience and an incredible sense of place that I'm not personally familiar with. That gives these tropes a freshness that really shines through.

[Brandon] I think that's a really salient way to put it, Dan. I'm glad you mentioned that.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for the book of the week, which is actually my book, The Apocalypse Guard.

[Howard] You sound so worried.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yeah, well, I'm worried because I don't know if it's out yet. Because we're recording this a year ahead and the publisher has not exactly committed to a release date. It might be September, it might be October.

[Howard] That's so cliché.

[Brandon] Yeah. But I'm going to just run with it and assume it's out or is coming out very soon.

[Mary] You can preorder it, if it's not out, which also helps.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Howard] By the way, preorders are very good for authors.

[Brandon] They are very good. And I did just submit it to my editor, so we're hoping that they'll like it.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Well, what's your book about, Brandon?

[Dan] At this stage in its revision, the book is about…

[Brandon] The book is about… It's the story of… I wanted to tell the story of the person who fetches Superman's coffee. It's a story of an intern from Iona, Idaho, where my father is from, who gets a job being the clerical intern/coffee girl for the Apocalypse Guard, who are basically a version of the Justice League. They save planets in the Multiverse when they are threatened with destruction. That's their job, that's why they were formed. Well, at the beginning of the book, the Apocalypse Guard gets attacked by a shadowy force, and Emma, our main character, ends up getting teleported to a planet they were planning to rescue but hadn't gotten around to yet. She gets there three weeks before a flood is going to destroy the entire planet. She has no resources, no powers, and is an intern. It's her story of trying to survive on this planet while everyone else is off fighting a greater evil and has forgotten about her.

[Howard] That is going to take a lot of coffee.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] It is a delightful, very fun…

[Howard] Sounds like a lot of fun.

[Brandon] Action adventure book.

[Mary] I can get that book now, right?

[Brandon] Yes. You… You can get it now. You…

[Howard] You, Mary Robinette Kowal.

[Brandon] Can maybe get it now.

[Dan] We're just rubbing this in your faces at this point.

[Brandon] We are…

 

[Brandon] All right. So let's get back to…

[Mary] Move on to cliché-ism.

[Brandon] That podcast that we do.

[Howard] Let me talk tools in another specific way. The line, "What did you do?" I just used that, and it will have been months ago for readers of Schlock Mercenary, just used that where Karl Tagon walks into the room, because a thing has happened, and he thinks it's Schlock's fault. We've seen this before. Schlock is saying, "It wasn't me. I didn't do that." Some sort of clever thing. Tagon says, "What did you do?" And schlock is talking to the person who did it, and is saying, "See! Angry face." Playing up the fact that Schlock knows this is a cliché. I doubled down on it by using the… I call this the common tone transition where the opening panel of the next strip, we've switched scenes, and a captain is yelling at a crewmember, saying, "What did you do?" So, yeah, it's a cliché line, it's a throwaway line, but the way in which I'm using it, I sure hope I'm going to get away with it.

[Brandon] You're stepping toward what we call subversion. Which is where you take the trope, you're aware of it, and you do something to play off the fact that the reader might know about this trope. So my question for you guys is when do you subvert and when do you play it straight? For instance, it was called Atlanta? The show that you're watching?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] They're playing it straight, it seems like. They're recontextualizing the tropes, but they're still using them. Whereas something like Deadpool is built around subverting tropes. You… We all share a context, I'm going to make a joke about it, that's the subversion of the trope. It doesn't always have to be a joke, by the way.

[Mary] I was going to say…

[Brandon] The character you don't expect…

[Howard] Good subversion… One of my favorite subversion's is the crossing of the threshold in the Hero's Journey in How to Train Your Dragon. Where instead of killing the dragon, he frees the dragon. It's a literal 180 degree inversion of what we expect in the Hero's Journey. When I watched it, because I'm familiar with some of it, I watched and I got chills when it happened. Like, "Oh, my gosh. That's a huge subversion. Can they stick this?" Throughout that film, there was subversion after subversion where moments that you expected from the Hero's Journey were handled in ways that were different.

[Mary] So, the Hero's Journey and archetypes… One of the… My favorite subversion's… Flipping of an archetype is the wise old man…

[Howard] The mentor?

[Mary] The mentor figure, which is always a Gandalf kind of… It's a tall old man, it's a Dumbledore, tall old man, white man with a long gray beard of some variety. Yoda is that archetype, but he's a little green toad guy. That's, I think, one of the reasons that we love him. He's still occupying the old, he still occupying the wise and filled with power, but he is small and green and very crotchety. And a Muppet. But I think that if you look at one of these things and you… If you go back to our casting exercise, and you flip an axis, flip one of the pieces… The hour… The power dynamics that they live in, that sometimes you can end up with a character who's still fulfilling the archetypical roles, but is way more interesting.

[Brandon] You mentioned the Hero's Journey. We should really do a podcast on that, someday.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] Yeah.

[Howard] We've tried a couple times.

[Dan] Oh, snap.

[Laughter]

[Dan] In-your-face, loyal listeners.

[Brandon] I'm sorry if you're not part of the in-joke. Go listen to many, many seasons ago on that one. All right. So how do you decide? We never answered this. When do you write straight and when do you subvert?

[Dan] I don't know.

 

[Mary] so, I think one of the things is, it is useful to be aware of what these archetypes are and what these tropes are, and understand that these are already in your brain. So, for me, one of the things that I will do is I will kind of glance, because I'm a planner. I will look at my plan to make sure that I have not accidentally deployed one of the tropes that I didn't want to, or an archetype. It's like, "Oh, look, this character's living in that role." Sometimes I'll use it as a diagnostic tool in the planning stage or in the editing stage. I kind of… I look at the… Go back to voice. The area of intention. Like, what function is this serving? If I actually need the archetype to serve a function, then I look at ways that I can subvert it in some ways... Or double down on it.

[Brandon] This is a really difficult one to talk about. You can hear us kind of talking around it because everything's a trope. So you can't be aware, even, of all the ones you're doing. In fact, if you go to the websites that collect these things, it can be a really eye-opening or a really disastrous experience when you read and see all the things you're doing. Because as a writer, you think, "Wow, this is so fresh and new," when it's really not. That can be very dangerous. At the same time, we should go back to the fact that some of these tropes, these clichés, are just steaming piles of poo.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Knowing which ones are and that you should just not use because… Next week we'll talk about our own internal biases as writers, so we'll dig into this quite a bit, but there's awareness you need to have. If you don't, people will call you on it.

[Mary] There's a lot of things… There are tropes in our cul... Tropes and clichés that are damaging because they reinforce harmful stereotypes about people who have to live with the consequences of those stereotypes being in the world. So you'll hear people talk about… Some examples are the magical Negro, the model minority,…

[Howard] Great white Savior.

[Mary] The great white Savior. These are examples that are rooted in colonialist background, and will… Are really very damaging. So the idea that with the magical Negro is that a black character exists only to support a white character's journey and to dispense advice. So you may sit there and go, "Well, I put this character in because I want to make sure that black people are represented well." But what you've done is you've put a character in that has no arc of their own and is reinforcing the idea that… From colonialism, that black people were there just to support white people, which is damaging. It's difficult, because it is in so much media. Again, we'll talk about this more next week. That you've internalized it. So it's really important to be aware of these things, and it's difficult to be aware of them at the same time.

 

[Dan] I want to talk about some other clichés. I want to preface this by saying I'm speaking of clichés that are not harmful, but just are very tired. When we get into those, I think it's worth pointing out that who you're writing for will move that line of which clichés work and which don't. I remember having a conversation with Brandon years and years ago about different levels of originality in the fantasy market. There are people who will read China Miéville, and anything less weird and while than him is considered old and tired. Then, almost every level has someone who's like this, I am all about this author and everyone who is less creative than this one or less original than this one…

[Howard] Another example…

[Dan] Is too boring for me.

[Howard] Another example of this is one that, we talked about this here, which is the cliché from the superheroes genre, which is that all of these superheroes at some point are going to fight each other. The plot is going to build… Be built so that that is going to happen. Well, here's the thing. People who love superheroes stories want that. That's a cliché that you are allowed to deploy. If it's going to taste like canned green beans, it means you've done it wrong. If it's going to taste fresh, it's because when it happened, it surprised us.

[Dan] Well, the point that I want to make is that for the audience that wants that, it will taste fresh, and for an audience that doesn't, they might not like it no matter how well you do it.

 

[Mary] Season 13.

[Howard] Our patrons, over at patreon.com/writing excuses, have made it possible for us to record more than just 52 episodes in a single calendar year. This episode is one of those bonus episodes. Thank you, patrons, for making this possible. Thank you, listeners, for joining us, and if you'd like to become a patron, I already gave you the URL.

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses. Elephants and Death, with Lawrence Schoen.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] And with us, we have my beloved roommate for this convention...

[Oooo]

[Dan] At GenCon, Lawrence Schoen. Lawrence, tell us about yourself.

[Lawrence] Oh, wow. I wear lots of different hats. And that… I never wear hats. I am a cognitive psychologist. I'm a hypnotherapist specializing in authors' issues. I'm the founder and director of the Klingon Language Institute. A small press publisher, and oh, yeah, when there's time, I write novels.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you for coming.

 

[Dan] We are not going to talk about any of those things.

[Sweet]

[Dan] We're going to talk about elephants and death. The reason that we have this is because when we were discussing topics, I was really excited about uplift, and they were really excited to talk about death, because I'm the one who writes about death, and they're the two that write about uplift. So…

[Chuckling in the distance]

[Dan] Both of you have uplifted elephants featured prominently in your science fiction.

[Lawrence] That's true.

[Dan] Why?

[Lawrence] The fact that you ask that question means that no answer I give you would be satisfactory.

[Chuckles]

[Lawrence] Because elephants are just cool, and they are fun to write, and they were the protagonists of the novel, so… I ran with that. But the novel's all about death, as well, so it's… I am the bridge between the two of you.

[Howard] He's very much… The Barsk novel. I loved it. Is… It's a great exploration of the psychology of death. The elephants… The Phant, as you called them...

[Lawrence] Fant.

[Howard] Fant.

[Lawrence] Because they have their own writing system, which I did a typeface of. It's the Fant font.

[Howard] Oh.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Okay. You get one of those, and that was it.

[Lawrence] It's a live show. I figured…

[Dan] Now you guys know exactly what it's like to be his roommate.

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] But the exploration of that through what is essentially an alien is… That is at the core of all that is science fiction. We are able to explore the human condition through things that are not human in ways that we probably couldn't if we were writing about humans.

[Lawrence] This is the fun thing about writing about anthropomorphic animals, because you get all the great things you get when you write about aliens, but we already know them. So I get to draw in various things that an ethologist would have… Does research on like elephant societal structures and then just… Oh, and they're intelligent, so instead of… In regular elephant… In regular? The kind we have, females and children all wander around together in like large family units, and when male elephants reach maturity, they go off on their own, as like wild bachelors. We have this in Barsk. So if you're a realtor on Barsk, there are these enormous family homes, and all these little tiny one-bedroom apartments.

[Howard] Bachelor pads.

[Lawrence] Bachelor pads. And the men keep moving around, they never stay in one place very, very long, because they have to keep moving. They will travel to other islands, and on and on like this. The womenfolk are there, raising… So it's… I always think of it as that line from Gilbert and Sullivan, "And we are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts." Obviously, your listeners need to listen to HMS Pinafore more.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] It just changes the whole way you approach society.

 

[Howard] I recently watched Zootopia, and in the special features on Zootopia, the guys talked about going out to Africa and watching animals. Their design for the characters in the film completely changed after seeing this, because they were doing exactly what you're describing. They would take the groups… Instead of, "Oh, here's a giraffe and here's an elephant and here's a lion… Giraffe, elephant, lion, antelope, whatever," they started grouping them the way they would group in the wild. It was kind of brilliant and beautiful. And it informed… I love watching the special features. It informed the story from there. My elephants… Dan asked why'd you guys put elephants in… Was a terrible, terrible mistake.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I told a joke... I've been to Africa. On the safari, they warned us the most dangerous animal out here is not man, because none of you have guns. The most dangerous animal out here is the bull African elephant. Do not make it angry because that's the only thing here that can kill us while we're in the car. They have terrible tempers. I mean, you piss them off and they're all over you. So I told a joke about uplift. We've uplifted this, and this, and this. And the one thing everyone could agree on was that uplifting the African elephant was a mistake. My readers… I did not realize at the time, my readers felt like I'd made a promise to them that there were going to be elephants in the comic. Heh.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Drawing… The scale between a human being and elephant is pretty dramatic.

[Yes]

[Howard] Putting them all in the same panel took a lot of really annoying work.

[Lawrence] I've always appreciated that extra of effort you've put into them. I've noticed those strips seem far and few between. But I always appreciated that.

[Howard] I haven't gone to the lengths that you've gone to in order to incorporate elephant culture, because if there's anything worse than drawing one elephant, it's drawing 10.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] Well, let me give you another example of the same…

[Dan] Fighting in a circus.

[Howard] Fighting in a circus.

[Laughter] Fighting in a circus.

[Howard] What a terrible idea that was.

 

[Lawrence] And then the gravity shuts off. But… Barsk is… I mean, Barsk is the name of the planet where the elephants live, but it's the galaxy full of over 100 uplifted races. Species. It's another example of drawing on real animal behavior. There's a scene where one of our villains goes to meet a bunch of prairie dogs, who happened to be precognitive. They're all in a…

[Precognitive]

[Lawrence] As they are.

[Laughter]

[Howard] That's why whack-a-mole is so hard.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] He goes to see them and he enters the antechamber and one is waiting. He says, "Oh. You're waiting for me because you knew I was coming because you're precognitive." He says, "No. One of us is always here." Because prairie dogs always leave a sentry at every opening to a prairie dog colony. If you know that about prairie dogs, you go, "Oh, I get it. That's…" If you don't, you just say, "Oh, well. Schoen's too clever for his own good," and then you move on.

[Howard] And away you go. The animal behavior stuff, the alien behavior stuff, exploring human attributes through this, I think, is where, for me, stories in general really… That's where they get traction. When I see a piece of myself…

[Lawrence] The thing I like best when people tell me about their experience of Barsk is when they tell me they reached the point where they… The characters, the protagonists and so forth, stopped being elephants, that they became people for them. That's Yes! Because the humanity behind a character doesn't care what flesh it's wearing, doesn't care what the DNA looks like. That's where I was going with all of this, and that's why one of the themes about the book is things like intolerance and so forth. But we haven't gotten to death.

 

[Dan] Well, that's okay, because we're going to pause right now and you're going to tell us about Barsk. Not that we haven't been hearing about it for seven minutes, but… Give us the quick pitch. It is Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard. Tell us about the book.

[Lawrence] I will give you the quick pitch, because my wife wrote this… Helped me write this. She insists I do this every time. So. Prophecy. Intolerance. Loyalty. Conspiracy. Friendship. A drug for speaking to the dead. Also, elephants in space.

[Dan] Awesome.

[Howard] I'm in. Well, I mean, I already read it, but I'm in again.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] I will sell you another copy.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, that is Barsk, by Lawrence Schoen.

[Howard] Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard by Lawrence Schoen.

[Dan] By Lawrence Schoen. Go pick it up.

[Howard] Is it available on Audible yet?

[Lawrence] It is. The Audible… There is… If I can sneak in a quick thing about the Audible.

[Sure]

[Lawrence] So I mentioned… I know there's no rule…

[Dan] You got an actual elephant to read the…

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] Even better. Even better. You said we weren't going to talk about some of the other [garbled... hassleware?], but I have all of these people who follow me because of my work with Klingon, but they don't want to read my fiction. Because it's not Klingon fiction. So I reached out to an actor I knew, J. G. Hertzler, who portrayed Martok, Admiral Martok on Deep Space Nine.

[Dan] He's got the best frigging voice in the show.

[Lawrence] He's got the best… But he's never done audiobooks before. He recorded the audio for Barsk. It is beyond brilliant. I'm thinking this is going to be a whole new future career for John. I want my percentage.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] Or at least I want him to do the next book.

 

[Dan] All right. So let's get back into this. It is not just Barsk, it is Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard.

[Lawrence] There's a colon in there.

[Dan] So death is a key part of this. How so?

[Lawrence] The MacGuffin there is that there is this drug that only… That is derived from a plant that only grows on Barsk, and certain people, under the influence of this drug, discover they can perceive a new subatomic particle. A subatomic particle of memory and personality. We all give these particles off every day we live. When we die, they disperse. If you use this drug, you can pull them back. When you have enough of them, that person materializes in front of you, and you can converse with him or her. This is the latest instantiation of this in my fiction. I just don't like death. I don't like the idea that death is the end of us. So in Barsk, the idea is we are all complex patterns of organized information. That information doesn't… Shouldn't vanish just because the meat we're wearing has gone bad. The parallel I like to give is you look up in the night sky and you're seeing the light from stars that don't exist anymore. But that information is still coming toward us. We happen to have eyes that allow us to perceive that. What we lack at the moment, arguably, is either sensory apparatus or hardware that lets us perceive the information each of us… That is each of our lives. So, the premise behind this drug is that it gives us that ability. Then we're off and running.

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Howard] The exploration of death from the eyes of someone who is uncomfortable with it, as most of us should be, I don't know how much of you saw when I was reading the book, but I saw a whole lot of me. There's a character in the very beginning… The point at which I knew you'd written a wonderful book was the scene where someone is carving. He knows it's the last work of art he's going to perform and it's not for him. It's for… I don't know what it's for. As an artist, the idea that at some point I'm going to make the last thing I make is a little terrifying. The idea that you might be given foreknowledge, you might know this is the last thing that I am going to make, and it is only for me. I wept during that. Because as an artist, and as writers, we want our works to outlive us, and I think we want to be read after we're gone.

[Lawrence] Part of the conceit of the title is on Barsk, when your death is approaching, you wake up one morning and go, "Oh!" And you have a destination in your mind. There is an island that you set sail to. Nobody knows where it is until it is time to go. If you… You won't tell anybody, because it's… They don't need to know yet.

[Howard] You're not dying.

[Lawrence] You're not dying. You don't tell anybody you're going, you just pack up and go. This is in the very first chapter. I think it begins with Rüsul. Rüsul went to meet his death. So he's in this weird state of his life is over, and he hasn't gotten to the island yet.

[Howard] He's not dead.

[Lawrence] He's not dead. But he is dead in that his life is past, his life is behind him. He's not physically dead. In his mind, he's filled out all the forms, he's said his goodbyes to the people he needs to say goodbye to, he took the things he wanted to take with him on his voyage, he's packed for the trip, and he knows where he has to go. Minor, minor spoiler is that the bad guys, who are basically everybody else in the galaxy because they want the drug that grows on Barsk, and they don't want to have to deal with the elephants anymore…

[Howard] They don't want to pay for it.

[Lawrence] They show up and they abduct him because no one's going to come looking for him, because he's dead. And we're off and running.

 

[Howard] The thought there, and I want to extrapolate this a little bit broader, because this appears through fiction all the time, how do you behave if you know that this is your last day? How do you behave if you know that this is your last week? I was in my 20s and somebody said, "Live today like it was your last." What's that really mean?

[Dan] That's when I just start breaking things.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] It's no accountability. Well, it's… No. I mean, that's the first reaction. I'm going to get drunk, I'm going to get laid, maybe at the same time, and all these things. Black tar heroin, and whatever you want.

[Dan] Whatever I want?

[Lawrence] Whatever you want.

[Dan] StarCraft landing party.

[Laughter]

[Lawrence] Okay.

[Howard] This is your roommate, Dan.

[Lawrence] There you go. He's been sleeping with one eye open. But then you look at your life and you say, "But that's not me." I've actually had this conversation with other people. They said, "No. If I know it's my last day, I'm… Maybe I won't go to work. But I'll spend the day with my wife, and I'll take the kids to the zoo…" Ironically enough.

[Chuckles]

[Lawrence] Or "I'll go walk on the beach," or I'll make peace with myself. What are the things that I never got to do that I meant to do? And I'm okay with that.

[Howard] I remember a line in one of the VorKosigan novels where Miles gets shot in the chest and dies.

[Lawrence] He does.

[Howard] The last thoughts are, "Wait. I haven't…" And then it's done.

[Lawrence] Absolutely.

[Howard] That terrified me because I do not want that to be my last thought. Wait, I haven't…

[Lawrence] This goes back to… What's the poem? "When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain…" They burned that into me in high school, and it's like, "No. That can't be a thing. I have books to write, and I'm of questionable health." I'm thinking, "Man, this sucks. I gotta quit the day jobs so I can write more books. But then I'll die, because I don't have food or a house or… 

[Giggling]

[Lawrence] So, there is this compromise we play. But no, I have things to do, I have stories to tell. I just had my birthday last week, so it's like my mortality has been brought to my awareness again. It's like Whahahaha!

[Howard] That's what birthdays are for.

[Lawrence] That's what birthdays are for.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How to Handle Weighty Topics.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] [pause] Oh. And we're not that smart.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Don't mind me. Don't mind me.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm laughing. I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

 

[Brandon] We are going to talk about dealing with very weighty topics.

[Amal] We are off to a great start.

[Brandon] We got off to a fantastic start.

[Mary] This is called nervous laughter. That's what this is.

[Brandon] So I wanted to make sure we did a podcast about this this year when we're talking about character because it's going to come up in your writing, and you're going to think about it, and we want to deal with, on the podcast, how and if you should and these sorts of things, tackle characters who are suffering from difficult things like racism or sexism or people who are very different from yourself suffering from prejudice or whatnot or even just kind of approaching someone very, very different from yourself in your fiction and doing it in an appropriate way. I wanted to actually pitch this at Maurice, first, because I know you've done weighty topics a lot in your stories. How do you make the decision to do this, and how do you approach it?

[Maurice] Well, part of it is just a function of who I am. Honestly, I mean, it's part of my worldview, it's part of what I consider my writer voice, so it's a matter of… I don't know, when I sit down to write something, it's like what am I feeling at the time? Where is my heart space? Where is my head space at? Then I just sort of dive in from there, because that's obviously what I'm thinking about, it's obviously on my heart, and that's the space I try to write from. That, I think, is what plays out as authentic to people when they read it. Well, there are two examples I have that's actually not for my writing, that are two stories I read earlier this year that just stuck with me. One is up on tor.com. It's by Kai Ashante Wilson. It's called The Lamentation of Their Women. It is a powerful, absolutely raw story. It tackles racism, being marginalized, and police brutality. All in one novelette. It is kind of a tour de force of rage in a lot of ways. But it is one of those things where it's like we're now past writing, we're actually… You can actually like see Kai's heart at this point. I mean, it's just all over the page. The second story is by Chesya Burke, and it's called Say, She Toy. It's a story that's up on Apex Magazine. It's about a robot that's black. Basically, it's an advanced black sex doll and the abuse that's heaped upon this sex doll by its users. It's just this… Almost like this monologue of this is what I am experiencing. Is this all to my existence? That sort of thing. It's just… It's a heavy story. Like I said, it's tackled so brilliantly and Chesya has such a deft hand with this sort of writing. It's like… We are… From the opening on… I can't even tell you the opening line. It's… You will know when you encounter this story, from the very first line of this story, and it hits you right in the face, and it grabs you right there. This is what we're talking about. You're going to go with me for this ride.

 

[Brandon] So, let me kind of expand on that and ask the why. This is for any of you. Or the how, I mean. What are these authors doing that is making these stories work? You say deft, words like that, and handled so carefully. What are they doing? What can our listeners learn from them?

[Amal] So what you were describing, Maurice, seems to be like… These are two instances of people… I mean, so Kai and Chesya are both black and they're writing about experiences that are… Like the black people experience. But I think that when it comes to writing people who are different from you, I always, always think of something that Nalo Hopkinson said on a panel at ReaderCon a few years ago, which was that, "Yeah, people are different from each other, but most everyone knows what it's like to bite into a piece of fruit." From that example, and from that… She goes on to say, "Most people, we have more in common than we have not in common." If you try to ground… At this point, I'm just extrapolating. I'm no longer paraphrasing what Nalo said. But if you are approaching writing a character who is different from you by focusing exclusively on the differences, it's just going to happen let that character is not going to be fully rounded. That character is only going to be whatever marginalization you've given them. As opposed to if you try to ground your character in the things that you have in common, in the things that you can imagine, in the fact that, yeah, you both know how to bite into a piece of fruit, you both know what it's like to have to wait for the bus, you both know what it's like… All sorts of different things, and to maybe try to whenever you're building a character and trying to get out their experiences, build out from the things that you feel you have in common. Then, from that point, think about how the differences inform those same experiences. I mean, if you're at a bus stop and you're white, you're probably going to have a different experience than if you're at a bus stop and you're black and something… Some inciting incident based on race takes place all of a sudden, right? But you're still… You can still know what it's like to be tired and annoyed and frustrated and aggressed and all sorts of things like that. So it's… I mean, writing is so entirely about empathy. I think that when you're talking, Maurice, about the writing from your heart space, as well as your head space, and things like that, it sounds to me like what you're saying is, you're also writing from a place of empathy, you're writing from a place of… I almost want to say love, honestly. Like, write from a place of love for these things that are different. If you approach writing a different character from a place of humility, as well, a recognition that… That you don't know everything, and that you almost want a character to teach you something. This maybe sounds too facile and didactic, but that when you're approaching a character with a background that differs from yours, approach that difference with humility and care as opposed to as a science project. I mean, sure, some people approach their science projects with humility and care, but… Look at my humanities background here.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But just to have that care is so important, I think.

[Mary] One of the things that I'll see people going wrong, and I say this as someone who has done this in my earlier writing, and I'm sure it's something I will do again unwittingly, where there's a topic that is current or something that I'm thinking about, but not necessarily I have a personal connection to, so I will want to write something that comments upon that. But it's impossible for me to talk about it with the same… With any degree of nuance, because I haven't experienced it. That's not to say that, oh my goodness, you must experience everything. Because Lord knows, I've never experienced spaceflight, either. But… But when you're dealing with a really weighty topic, one of the things that is going to happen is you will be expressing your opinion about it. If you're not in the group that you are expressing opinion about, the chances of that opinion being damaging increases disproportionately. So when I am looking at something, about whether or not I should tackle something, the thing that I look at is not whether I'm going to get something wrong, but is whether or not getting it wrong will damage people. Like, getting something wrong about spaceflight, that's not actually probably going to damage anyone. Getting something wrong about someone else's lived experience, the chances of damage increase disproportionately, especially if it is a piece… If the wrongness that I am delivering is something that I have inherited from media that I have consumed that is already reinforcing issues that that community has to deal with on a daily basis.

[Amal] I completely agree. I think that maybe one way of thinking about that problem is that maybe when you're approaching a new character, a character with a different background, be aware of the fact that you're not writing in a vacuum. That as much as you feel like you're alone with the page and with this character, part of the reason I think we called them weighty topics is because there is a disproportionate amount of pressure in the world surrounding these things. Like, I'm literally imagining the world as a body with pressure points, and the pressure points are these weighty topics. So if you touch very lightly even on one of those pressure points, the pain or the shock of it is going to be, as you say, disproportionate. Whereas on places where that pressure isn't, it isn't already there... I often talk about it as sometimes friends want me to see a movie that is popular, and I see the trailer and I'm like, "No, I'm good. I don't want to see that movie." They're like, "But why? It's so great." I say, "Well, it… I'm pretty sure that it's going to punch me where I'm already bruised." It's like that thing that there are a lot of people who walk around carrying a lot of bruises, and that even a light touch on a place where you're bruised is going to really, really hurt. You want to try and recognize that.

 

[Brandon] So, this sounds to me a little bit… I think somebody could listen to this and say, "So you're saying just don't do it?"

[Amal] Noooo!

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So, what's the difference between what you're saying and just don't do it?

[Amal] The flipside of this is… I'm going to recommend this really, really amazing article by Kamila Shamsie called The Storytellers of Empire. In it, she is doing a whole bunch of things. It's a brilliant, brilliant essay. She starts out by talking about how… Her background is Pakistani, but she writes novels by like one image coming to her mind and she really… Like, the image kind of guides her into the book she's going to write. The image that kind of burned itself onto her brain was about Hiroshima and how when the bomb went off, patterns from people's kimonos were burned onto their skin. She suddenly got this really vivid image of someone with a kind of kimono pattern on their back and stuff. She wanted to write from that. So she dove into teaching herself about the history and the culture and everything, but in the rest of this article, what she points out is that for North America, for the West if you will, she has this amazing line that says, "Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won't." It's so, so striking. Like, it seems like she's actually saying the flipside, she's saying, "well, yeah, why aren't you writing people who are different from you?" Whenever I see another horrible hot take on the idea of cultural appropriation, people are often saying things like, "Oh, cultural appropriation doesn't exist because everyone is always appropriating, and also, we should try to understand each other." Those are two different topics as well. What I want to say here is, yes, do the thing. But ask yourself a lot of questions, and recognize that the thing is hard. Recognize that there are pressure points, and that sometimes you are going to do damage, but that you should try to decrease that pressure. If there is pressure all over the world, then ask yourself how can you siphon some of that off? Because I do think, we all have a responsibility to be as empathic as possible with each other. So, not trying is not ever going to solve that problem, it's just going to reduce the space in which you can operate. When instead, we want to try and expand that.

[Maurice] so, I actually felt like reading… Like, when I was writing Buffalo Soldier. That was my novella from Tor… tor.com. I was really nervous, because like the last half of the novel takes place in Native American territory. So I have Native American characters, I have reimagined Native American culture, the technology, their cityscapes, everything. It's a complete reimagining. I was nervous. Because I did not want to get this wrong. In fact, actually, it kept me… Actually, that nervousness actually attributes a writer's block in me, so I actually set the project down for I think like three months, because I was ahead… I was already picturing the social media backlash on me. So that alone kept me from writing. I was like, "Oh, man." But then I had to like trust myself as a writer. Like, I'm doing the job of a writer, I'm being empathic and I'm doing my research and I'm being careful in what I'm doing. Then, I'm going to turn it over to a beta reader who's Native American and go, "All right, if I got that wrong, let me know where and why and how." Because my job is… I don't want to add to that hurt. I want to… Well, I want to set the story here. So that's what I ended up doing. I have a friend whose Lakotan. She agreed to read it for me and she gave it her blessing. Actually, she really liked what I did in terms of dialogue and the reimagining, because she was just like, "You see us as people." That's all I wanted. I was like, "I wanted to… That's what I… That was my end goal." I wanted to see them as people.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for a book of the week. That's actually one of your books, Maurice? Tell us about The Voices of Martyrs.

[Maurice] So, The Voices of Martyrs is my short story collection. In a lot of ways, it mirrors my career. So there are stories set in the past, stories set in the present, stories set in the future. Basically, it is… It's almost like a collection of weighty stories. But part of it is… I realized, you know what, as part of my writing process, I realized I am a black nerdy male. Unless I'm going to write all of my stories about being a black nerdy male, I'm going to have to write the other. But I even appro… Because of my background, coming from being born in London, my mother being Jamaican, and raised in a predominantly white culture in a lot of ways, I treat everything as me writing the other, even if it's writing about other black people. That's how I approach all of these stories. So even the stories set in the past. Like, the first story opens up in ancient Africa. But then we moved to stories of someone being in a slave ship, or on a plantation, or in the 20s, going through a boxer battling… Basically battling his own demons at this point. Then moving into stories of the present, with urban fantasy stories. But then ending with Afro future tales. So basically, I'm going from dealing with these sort of issues of culture identity and just hard history to a time of hope. Not… The past is there. The past is what it is. The present is where I am. Now, I get to dream about the future. That's the way I approach all of that.

[Brandon] Awesome.

 

[Mary] So, one of the things that I was thinking about before we took the break, when you were talking about doing the history and getting beta readers, is… And I've talked about it on the podcast before, that I had a novel that I chose to pull because I, at the very end, I had a beta reader who had a very negative reaction to it. But you actually have read this book. One of the things that I remember when I was making the decision was… And coming back to you and saying I'm getting this reaction was that you said that you felt like you had done me a disservice because you hadn't flagged things. So I think one of the things that I want readers to be… Or listeners to be aware of is that even when you try to do all of these things, you may still have a project that is fundamentally flawed.

[Maurice] That is a fear. So one of my mottos has always been, you know what, I will learn my lessons, and then fail better the next time. Because when I think about doing you a disservice, I was like, you know what, there was stuff that I flagged and stuff that I didn't flag. I was like, "Ooo, I wonder…" It kind of goes like, "Is it my place to flag certain things?" That was actually what… It became a wrestling exercise on my end of things, too. Which is like I'm having different reactions. But I'm going to have certain reactions as a black male versus if you have passed a reader through a black female, for example. I'm going to have a certain set of biases, and there are certain things I'm not going to see, for example.

[Mary] Even within that, like I… One of… Because I had about 20 beta readers on that, and tried to get people that I didn't know, to eliminate that… The sympathy aspect of it. One of them, when I went back and said I just wanted to let you know that I pulled the book because damage, she was upset because the book spoke to parts of her life. But her life experience was very different from the life experience of some of the other people who had read it. That's one of the things… Recognizing that your readers are not a… Your readers are not a monolith anymore than characters are. Which is why I've begun using the metric of what is the damage. That's… That is… It's a tricky, tricky thing. Like, there's… I don't think that there is actually an amount of research that you can do to make a book that will be flawless and harm no one.

[Amal] This is a thing, too. It's so difficult to control for what will harm or what will help people. I think about this a lot. Because partly, because I'm a critic as well. So, a lot of the time, the way that I have seen discussions in publishing shift as to whether or not a book should be published, a lot of the time, I look at that and go, "But surely there is a… There is room here, or there is a role, for discourse to play?" For people to actually have a public conversation about the elements of a book that are harmful or helpful in how. I… But… So my instinct is, I would rather, in the abstract, see books published and talk about them than not. At the same time though, to make a hypocrite of myself, I have read books or started to read books that were so terrible… Like so hateful in what they were portraying or so damaging in what they were portraying that if I could make a recommendation... like it's not just a matter of panning it. Like there was one time that I read something that was early enough in its production that I made the publisher aware that this is like horrifically racist and maybe you weren't aware of that, but I would like to make you aware. They actually did the work of consulting other people on that and deciding, "No, you know what, it is actually really, really awful, and we'll just pull it."

[Maurice] I…

[Mary] I had that happen as well with a book that I blurbed. The author was like, "Oh. Ha. You're right." I actually didn't blurb it, but they asked me to blurb it. I was like, "I can't, because of these things." The author… They actually told the author… They didn't tell the author who, but the author went back and corrected things. Sorry, you were going to say something?

 

[Maurice] Oh, yeah. I was wondering like, what you were saying, Amal, where do you draw that line between what is my story to write versus my need to write the other?

[Amal] I guess that's a really good question that gets to the core of it. Most… I mean… Here's the thing, too, I think we're covering a lot of ground and sometimes I'm wondering if our listeners, some of these things will sound so contradictory, but the reason they'll sound contradictory is because this is really complicated territory, and there are so many different situations and so many different scenarios, and sometimes something is an exception, sometimes it's a rule. Like, for me, personally, I can think of a lot of different controversies that happened around whether or not a book should be published, especially in the last few years. I've had different opinions on every one of them, given the context around them. Maybe not every one of them, but certainly on several of them, given the circumstances surrounding them. A lot of that will hinge on that question of why did you feel like you had to write this? What did you think you were doing with this? A lot of the time, when I see these things done… I'm going to pick an example which… I'm going to just name it, because I really, really hated this book. Which did get published, and it got published to great acclaim, which made me feel a lot less bad about how vocally I hate this book. It's called Your Face in Mine by Jess Row. I mean, here I am, giving it publicity. It's just… It's basically… It's a book that is tackling a premise which is… Feels weighty, feels like, okay, this is a complicated issue and will engage a lot of intense feelings and it's because it's got this core of racial reassignment surgery, basically. That you can just… You can change your race with surgery. It's a very, very near future thing. But what pissed me off about it was that it was entirely… Entirely about a white middle-class man's kind of complicated feelings of guilt about race and stuff. This was just a device… Just a device that wanted to demonstrate ultimately how much res… But there's literally… There was a bibliography at the back demonstrating how much research this man had done on all of these things. But reading it, I just kept wanting to throw up. I just kept wanting to be like… I… This is… You've done so much work to so little purpose. Or to such a… Just a terrible purpose, a purpose that uses trans discourse to terrible ends, to ends of basically equating trans peoples' difficulties and the things that they live with with something that is speculative and… Anyways, I'm sorry, I'm going to get on my… I should get off this soapbox. But the point is that all of this work was done, and I kept going, "But why did you do that? Why did you feel this burning need to write this book about… Like… Ultimately, to kind of exonerate your white guilt?" It just made me so angry when I read it that I resent it.

[Mary] There was something that I was talking with Mary Anne Mohanraj who was one of our guest hosts last year, and she said, "You know, Mary, I never see you write Southern characters." It suddenly made me go, "Huh! You're..." I mean, I do, sometimes. But I think that there is a thing that we do what we tend to assume that… That we… We always talk about how you will assume that your own life experience is normal. But I think that there's a thing that white writers are particularly prone to which is that they will want to write the other because it is exotic, and that they will forget that to other people, their own experience is the exotic thing. So I actually think between that and something that Desiree Burch said on the podcast a couple of years ago, I actually feel like a lot of the things that people could do is simply be more specific about writing their own specific experience and writing about the topics that affect them specifically instead of wanting to go and play with someone else's life because it is set dressing that seems new and exciting to them.

[Amal] That's a really good point. I think, to come back to the question that Brandon was asking before about this sounds like you should just not do it, I found myself going, what is to stop you from writing a character that's just in your books? Like, totally determined by your plot, your setting, and so on, but make them a different ethnicity or make them a different gender or make them… This is, I guess, you could call it the aliens version of doing… All right, so you've written a character as a dude, and now you just make that dude a woman. There's criticism about this, about that kind of approach, but I think that one of the reasons that people react so strongly to the absence of diversity in books is that a lot of the time, people just want to see not their pain or their marginalization represented, but people who look like them and talk like them and experience the world like them getting to have adventures or getting to be the protagonist of a novel that isn't about pain or getting… Because there's a sort of ancillary thing to all of this, which is that one of the unfortunate results of these conversations when people don't… Are too afraid to do the work of representing whoever is other to them, it falls on those people, those who are of underrepresented ethnicities, backgrounds, and groups, and so on, to only be able to tell the story of their pain, and to only… Like it's to have their pain be the only currency they have in the marketplace of ideas. That really disturbs me. I could go on and on about. I won't. But it just… That's something that I would like to see lifted as a burden as well, to just be able to have characters of all different backgrounds going on the kinds of adventures and interesting things that we love in science fiction and fantasy.

[Mary] You don't have to equate representation with…

[Amal] Trauma.

[Mary] Trauma.

 

[Brandon] All right. We could go on forever. This has been a 30 minute podcast already.

[Whoops]

[Mary] Sorry, guys.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Project in Depth, The Calculating Stars.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart. I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm wondering what evil plague you have in your lungs…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Over there, Brandon.

[Brandon] I don't know how many of these have aired yet, but I haven't been on the NASA episodes yet. You can tell why. I've been on book tour for a week and also caught a head cold.

[Dan] He was sick, so we had to quarantine him from the mission so the rest of us could carry it out.

[Brandon] But I'm stepping in for this one because we're going to talk about Mary's book and we have a special guest star, Kjell Lindgren. Say hi to the audience.

[Kjell] Hello, audience. I'm excited to be here.

[Dan] Welcome back.

[Kjell] Thank you.

 

[Mary] So I am especially excited about this specific Project in Depth, because it has two unique circumstances for you listeners. So, first of all, this is a reminder that in the Project in Depth's, we go full on spoilers. The Calculating Stars is not a heavy book to be spoiled, but if you're one of those people don't want to know anything ahead of time, read the book first, come back and listen. But the reason I'm excited about it is that we are doing this at an interesting point in the process. I have not yet finished… My editor has done all of the structural stuff on it, but we haven't done the line edits, which means that I'm actually going to be able to incorporate any changes that come up during this conversation.

[Ooo]

[Mary] And because this book is set during Mercury and Apollo era space, and it's involving my Lady Astronaut universe, and we have an actual astronaut here, this is also an opportunity for you to kind of hear sort of what it's like to have a sensitivity reader or a specific expert in to talk about a book. This is kind of what this process is like, although obviously usually it's not done in a podcast format.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] So, let's address, at least for me, what the elephant in the room is for this. This is a stor… A novel based on a novella that you wrote. Why did you decide to do it? How did you approach it? Like, just that concept? What's going on here?

[Mary] Okay. So what started with this… For most people. Most people first became aware of this through the Lady Astronaut of Mars. Which is not actually the first book in this series… In this universe that I wrote. I call this my punchcard punk universe. The first story I wrote in this was from a writing prompt. It's called We Interrupt This Broadcast. It was about slamming a meteor into the Chesapeake Bay in the 1950s. That one was… That idea I had was it would be really cool if there was a mad scientist and things went slightly wrong because he had forgotten to account for leap year. That was how that started. Then, Lady Astronaut began when I was asked to write something for an anthology called Ripoff in which we had to begin our story with a famous first line. So I began with the first line of Wizard of Oz, which is why I have the International Aerospace Coalition launching rockets from Kansas…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Because I got locked into that.

[Brandon] Did that ever feel like… I don't know…

[Mary] A giant mistake?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] [inaudible restriction?]

[Mary] Yes. Because it doesn't make any sense at all to launch rockets from Kansas. You want to be as close to the equator as you can be. It's nice to have a big body of water in case something goes wrong. I've got none of that in Kansas. So what happened with the novel is that it's set 40 years before the novella with the same character… Same main character. So there was a lot of stuff that I had to justify in the world that I was locked into. There's also stuff that I just… I looked at and like, "Oh, boy, that timeline was wrong." So Elma in Lady Astronaut of Mars just misremembered the dates on that. 'Cause…

[Chuckles]

[Mary] It doesn't make any sense.

[Brandon] Locked into some character things, right? You've got the relationship which... we know what happens in 40 years. So we know that they're going to be in a loving relationship for another 40 years and things like this. Like, there are certain things... Did that ma… Was this the sort of restrictions breed creativity sort of thing or was this a man, I wish I could just toss this continuity?

[Mary] There were times when I… Mostly timeline issues with continuity. The timeline does not actually make sense. But we just, as I say, handwaved past that. The character stuff, there were things about it… I was committed to having a loving relationship. That's… I liked…

[Brandon] That's one of my favorite parts about the book.

[Mary] Thank you. I feel like it's not depicted often enough. So I… One of the things that I knew going into it was that their commitment to each other was never going to be a conflict point. But that all of the stuff that was going on around them would cause stress… Would put strain on the relationship, but not in the OMG, are they going to break up? I never wanted that to be a plot point.

 

[Dan] So, before we get too far into this, I feel like we may have missed a link in this chain earlier. Where was the point where you decided, "Okay, I've written these two shorts. Now I'm going to go back and write a novel." How was that decision made?

[Mary] I don't actually remember completely.

[Laughter]

[Mary] I suspect that it was something along the lines of, "Hey. That just won a Hugo award."

[Laughter]

[Mary] "Can I market that?"

[Dan] Let's capitalize on this thing.

[Mary] Which is really crass. But it was… To a certain degree, it was looking at some of my favorite works. Like Anne McCaffrey's Dragonrider… The Ship Who Sang, which was a short story that got expanded and some other things.

[Brandon] Even Dragonflight won the Hugo before it was finished as a novel.

[Mary] Yeah. So I was interested in what that process was like. The other thing was that I have these characters and they've got this really interesting backstory that I haven't explored. Like, I talk about in the novella that Elma was one of the first women… The first people on Mars. How does that come about in the 1950s? How do you get to a point where you have women in space since it took a long time in the real world for that to happen? So how do I make it happen faster? So there was a lot of it that there were just pieces of it that I was interested in, but I don't actually remember what it was that made me go, "This is a good idea."

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] So, let's get the astronaut, first thing.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Thank you. Because I've been looking at Kjell. I'm like, so… Yes. Tell… So…

[Kjell] I'm coming at this from a completely blank slate. So, not having read the sequel that was first written, I get to kind of follow this chronologically from when Elma first becomes an astronaut. So… I have to say that the relationship between Elma and Nathaniel is one that… There's clearly a very loving relationship, and frankly, Nathaniel sets a very high bar…

[Laughter]

[Kjell] For husbands everywhere. But it's clear there that that is kind of the emotional core from which Elma draws her strength. I think that that really resonates for those of us that undertake these sometimes… Well, not sometimes. These very risky missions. That we, I think, largely recognize that we could not do this, we could not go through selection and go through training and do all that travel and do the mission as a single entity. It requires support at home from the family. Your spouse has to be on board with this. Your kids have to be on board and understand what all this entails. So, for me, personally, and I see that in Elma also, is that it is an adventure for the team, for the family. The other part of it is that you clearly are showing behind the scenes, that it's not just the astronaut that is going up there and getting to do…

[Mary] Really cool astronauty things.

[Kjell] Yeah, cool astronaut things. In fact, that is a very, very small part of…

[Brandon] Well, that's the book, right?

[Kjell] That's real life.

[Brandon] [inaudible]

[Kjell] That's true, that's true. I mean… So, that is real, also. In a typical astronaut career of… I don't know if you can call 20 years typical, that's maybe six months, maybe a year in space. So most of that time is spent on the ground, with this larger team that makes that possible. That is reflected in these… You know, the calculators that are doing the work and mission control and the engineers and all that. So that is, I thought, really well depicted and reflected in the book.

[Mary] Whew!

[Brandon] I'm going to build off this and ask you a question, because this is one of the most interesting things about this book to me. When you first started talking about it, I remember brainstorming with you. What is now two books was one book. A lot of the things you talked about were going to be… All ended up in the second book, right? The quote unquote exciting parts. Right? The actual flying, the rocketship, and [inaudible]

[Mary] Right!

[Brandon] Yet, this book is very compelling. You made an extremely compelling book out of quote unquote the boring parts. It's not boring at all. In fact, it feels breakneck to me throughout the entire story. So, how did you structure this, knowing that what everyone expected to be the book wasn't going to come until the second book, and how did you keep it paced and exciting?

[Mary] So, this was… when we were talking about it was… My plan was that I was going to structure it like three novellas. That novella one was dealing with the asteroid strike, novella two was the push to the moon, and novella three was the push to Mars. As I got into it and started… Was working on it, there were sections that… Because I knew I was going to be doing them in novella three with the Mars, that I was needing to skip in novella two, the push to the moon, because they felt… It felt… It was going to be repetitive. But it also meant skipping things that were really emotionally important. So I talked with my editor and said I feel like I have made a structural mistake and that this is actually two different books. As soon as we did that, and moved Mars to being its own book, that freed me up to deal with a lot of the unsexy stuff. But the things about… That I had been reading about in all of these different autobiographies by astronauts, talking about the selection process and getting the call and the first time that you do… The first training flights that you do and all of these different things that are these emotional points. So what I was trying to work with was… With this was not so much the question of… It's never a question of is she going to the moon? Is she going into space? That's never… But how and when and what is she going to have to push against? So what I wound up doing was trying to focus more on her emotional reactions to stuff, and also the societal pressures, rather than the technical pressures. The technical pressures, I felt like, well, this is our job, this is what we're doing, this is the thing we do. Then, the societal pressures were kind of more my major plot points. Because it's set in the 1950s, which is in the middle of the civil rights era.

 

[Dan] So, one of those kind of emotional arcs that you do in this book is her overcoming this kind of very intense anxiety disorder that she has. I am wondering how much of that was presaged by the previous books, or is that just you felt like it was important for her character and you created it for this one?

[Mary] It was something that I created for this. By 40 years later, she's got that pretty much under control. In part, because the specific anxiety that she has is a social anxiety disorder. You have things… You strap her on a rocket, she's fine. But you ask her to speak to a large room, she's like, "I'm not okay with that." That is true for a lot of people. Also, oddly, people with things like social anxiety disorder tend to be really good in a crisis situation because they're used to managing low level… Or high-level anxiety all the time. So they're actually quite levelheaded when things are going wrong. I added that because I had a character who was hyper competent. That was this canon thing. She's a pilot, she's this computer… Mathematician. I needed to give her a breaking point, a weakness. That one was a very obvious one for a number of reasons. One of which is that it also allowed me to highlight some of, again, those societal pressures. Because she's bucking against what it is that she's supposed to be doing, the hole that people keep trying to fit her in. So that was one of the reasons I added that to her character.

[Brandon] Oh, go ahead.

[Kjell] I have to say that that societal part was something that it was hard to read. The reactions to… The introduction of the female astronauts, and photos of them powdering their nose in the cockpit, or as they're doing a dunker test, putting them in bikinis. So from today's perspective, I have a really hard time with that. But when I think back to the 50s, and you've just introduced a new astronaut class and you ask this group about cooking in space and this cook about what they're going to accomplish during a mission. I mean, of course, that is very foreign to the experience… I hope is very foreign to our experience now, but it really brings you into the era that we're talking about.

[Mary] It was… That was based on two things, which are both unfortunately real world. One is the way the WASPs were treated in World War II, and a lot of the early women airline pilots… Just even becoming airline pilots. But there was… One of the things that they would have to do… I read about… I think this is in Jerry Cobb's book… But in one of the books about early women pilots, they would talk about how they would fly, and they would own their own company, or they would be… The captain. They would get in the craft, they would fly it to wherever they were going, and then they would have to slide their trousers off and slide a skirt on before they got out, because the people wanted to see them in skirts and heels. That they would have to powder their nose in the craft and put on the lipstick before they got out because that's what the client expected to see. Some of the first women astronauts talked about the different questions that they got from the press. You can read them and you're like, "Yup." I mean, I've pushed it a little, but not very far.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for the book of the week. You were going to tell us about Riding Rockets?

[Mary] Yes. So this is one of the books that Eileen known very heavily when I was writing this. There were a number of them which we've talked about on other podcasts. But Riding The Rocket… Riding Rockets by Mike Mullane, who is a shuttle era astronaut. It is a fantastic autobiography. One of the things that's great about it is that he came into the program when a lot of the Mercury and Apollo people were still there. So he's got this perspective, where he's looking at the way the program is changing, and also he's a really compelling storyteller and very good with sensory details. I pulled a lot of stuff from that.

[Kjell] I really enjoyed that book as well. It's a great shuttle era book.

 

[Brandon] Let me ask you, Kjell, did you get freezing water squirted in your ear?

[Kjell] I did not get freezing water squirted in my ear. I spent three days and two nights in a freezing Russian forest. But I did not get surprised with a…

[Mary] Yeah. That was… I so wanted… That was one of the things that I wanted to fit into the book and just there wasn't a structural spot for it, was the wilderness survival stuff.

[Kjell] You bet.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] Ah, I wanted that in there. So I'm going to do…

[Brandon] What do you mean by that? Like, you actually… They make you do wilderness survival?

[Kjell] Absolutely. So they did it back in the Apollo days. In fact, there's a great photo of… Actually, I think it's the Mercury 7 out in a desert. They've cut up a parachute and tied it on their heads, they're in various states of undress, because they're out doing essentially desert survival.

[Mary] They weren't sure where they were going to come down.

[Kjell] Right.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Kjell] So, as a part of our training, we do water survival and winter survival to prepare us for the possibility of one, landing in water. The Soyuz spacecraft is designed to land on land. So a water landing requires some additional procedures and training. Then winter survival, because… I did in fact at the end of my mission land in the middle of the night in a blizzard. So had the team not been able to track us, then we would have to have been able to fend for ourselves for a little while. That technology's improved since the days that we really kind of started this training. We have GPS, we have satellite phones. So the fact that we would… The team wouldn't be able to find us is fairly remote at this point. But the winter survival training is a little bit of a… A little bit of a haze.

[Chuckles]

[Kjell] Just to kind… It's that Type II fun that I think in a previous podcast…

[Laughter]

[Kjell] That Tom Washburn was talking about. Type I fun being the fun that you're having in the moment, and the Type II fun the experience that you think back at and you're like, "It's fun, that that is done. That is over."

[Mary] Well, it's also… My father-in-law was Air Force, Vietnam-era fighter pilot, and they did survival training with them as well as a teambuilding…

[Kjell] Sure.

[Mary] And ways to test how you react under pressure situations without the safety net of well, I'm in a simulation. Like, no you're actually…

[Dan] No, you're not…

[Mary] You could actually die out here.

 

[Brandon] So, let's talk about the climax, because we're running… We only have a few minutes left. This book pushes toward lift off quite effectively. I wanted to ask, Kjell, this is your chance. What did she get right, what did she get wrong?

[Kjell] Well, let me tell you, it's clear that you've done your research, because the terminology that you use, even the tempo of the use of that terminology, is really good. The acronyms, people railing against acronyms…

[Chuckles]

[Kjell] That's all… That is all very common to the experience. So in the biographies that you've read, the pieces that you've borrowed, that feels very familiar and sounds very familiar. But you don't dwell on that. That is background. I really appreciate that. What you do… I thought you did a great job of is really focusing on the emotional reaction to various events. Talking… The description of taking off in a T-38 and the ground falling away below, and the same with her other flights, that sensation of taking off. Then the launch. It's not so much a description of necessarily what's happening. You certainly let the reader know what's going on. But it is that visceral reaction, it is the explanation of how she's feeling as she experiences these various milestones as they climb into orbit. That is really what rang true to me, is the description of the person that's going through it, and not so much the technical description of okay, now this is where the rocket is. So not just the launch, and not just taking off. Sitting in Mission Control. How you feel when you see a rocket explode. All these things rang very emotionally true to me.

[Mary] Oh, good. So, here are the hacks that I used to get that.

[Laughter]

[Mary] One is that I noticed in a number of the autobiographies when the astronaut began talking about their launch, their first launch, they switched to present tense. Chris Hadfield's… In his Astronauts' Guide to Life on Earth, says that he's switching to present tense because it is that vivid, that it feels like something that he has just done, because it is unlike… It doesn't fit… It doesn't get blended into other memories.

[Kjell] It's interesting that description of it. I see it in your book as well, is that it is not a narrative of… Like this is my launch narrative, this is what happened when I took off. It is snapshots of memories and emotions that you had at a particular time. So I remember the whole launch sequence, when the engines started, and that there are various specific times, when the launch shroud pulled away so we were able to see out the window for the first time. My first glimpse of the Earth, the arc of the Earth and the blues and whites contrasted against the sky. When… The first time I opened the hatch to get ready to do a spacewalk. Just various specific snapshots. It does feel very present and it's not… You can string those things together as a story, but… Yeah, these are very brief glimpses in time that you remember and just are able to relive.

[Mary] So, let me tell one other hack that I used… Or two other hacks. Because these will be useful for readers. Or for writers. One is that I basically grabbed the Mercury… Because NASA has these online. The transcripts of the Mercury launches and the Apollo launches. And used them as the outline for the scene, and wrote on top of it. Pulling up some stuff to… I'm like, "And we're going to skip past this very long thing." Then the other thing is that… Which Kjell is well aware of… I would write sections and be like, "Then the captain turned and said jargon."

[Laughter]

[Mary] "And he handled his jargon." Then I sent them off to experts. So I would email Kjell and I had a rocket scientist and for Fated Sky, I also had the person who does the algorithms to figure out where the landers should land. I would send it off to them and say, "Can you just play MadLibs with this?"

[Laughter]

[Mary] Katie Coleman also, who's a shuttle era astronaut. So, technically speaking, sections of this book were written by an astronaut.

[Brandon] Or multiple astronauts.

[Mary] Or multiple astronauts.

 

[Dan] The version of this that you sent to me was early enough that it still had a lot of that in there. I remember in particular, I'm fairly certain it's the sequence early on where she is flying the plane into Kansas, and it just broke, and there was about a half page all in brackets that said, "Okay, I haven't written this scene yet, but here's a bunch of jargon I've already collected." Then you just had some sentences that could be used to fit in as she talks to the tower to make the landing. Which is not something I've ever done. I thought that was a really cool trick too.

[Mary] I found a… Without one, I'm not sure if that's the one. There was one of them where I found a training video of how to… It's an Air Force training video from like the 70s or 80s of how to start a T-38. So there's an instructor talking through it, and it's real-time, and… So I'm just like, "Wait. Gonna pause that. What did they just say?"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Write all this down.

[Mary] Because it's exactly the thing that I have, where I have a trainer, and I have a… The pilot in the back, and these are the back-and-forth between them. I'm like, "Okay. Noting that." My father-in-law had a number of things that were wrong with the… Which I think were all fixed by the time you guys read it. With some of the piloting stuff. Because he had flown all of the planes that I talked about. He was a test pilot, too. So…

 

[Kjell] So there is one piece, though…

[Mary] Yes.

[Kjell] In chapter 34…

[Dan] Oh. I'm excited.

[Mary] Yes.

[Kjell] Where you talk about… So it looks like a grab from shuttle era description of the TALs, the Transatlantic Abort. Talking about the OMS engine systems. So that is very, very shuttle specific…

[Mary] Ooooo...

[Kjell] So for anyone that knows kind of the shuttle lingo, they will see this as a… This is a shuttle lingo grab. So there may be pieces of that that are applicable. It's kind of the Mercury Gemini Apollo era vehicle. But this is probably some of that terminology. You'd have to really make sure that that fits. Because they didn't have an OMS… The shuttle had an OMS engine, but the…

[Mary] Right.

[Kjell] Apollo era did not.

[Mary] Of course they didn't.

[Kjell] We planned aborts for the shuttle, so that they would actually… Could land, so there's a Transatlantic Abort, there's a Return to Launch Site Abort. If you're aborting off of the capsule, you're basically just going into the drink somewhere.

[Mary] Random.

[Kjell] Along the flight path.

[Mary] Okay. Yeah. So that is… 

[Kjell] So we want to reconcile that with this era of spaceflight.

[Mary] Yeah. Thank you. I will totally go… Readers, you will not see that in there because I'm going to go fix that… And get more details on it.

[Dan] But the original version…

[Mary] The original…

[Dan] Will be available somewhere?

[Mary] We're putting the original version up on the… Of anything that I… Chapter 34, up on the Patreon, so you can see after I… See the Transatlantic Abort… No, that's… Of course. Right. I think I probably grabbed that because I couldn't find any stuff about aborting from Apollo and Mercury because of exactly that. Interesting. Huh. Anything else that I got wrong? Please tell me things.

[Kjell] Oh, boy. So, I just want to say, I really enjoyed this alternate history. Because there were brief glimpses… 

[Mary] That's not a thing I got wrong.

[Kjell] No, that's not.

[Laughter]

[Kjell] No, I'm… I don't have a whole lot…

[Dan] Yes, you did. Dewey loves [inaudible]

[laughter]

[Kjell] That's right. Dewey's in charge, and we hear… We see Aldrin and Armstrong and Collins name in the next… The new class of 35 astronauts. So there are pieces of our history that have been borrowed into this, and I really enjoyed that. I love that it started with a cabin in an earthquake, and that her description of the launch was shaking like a cabin in an earthquake.

[Mary] Yay. Circular stuff.

[Brandon] It is a really good book.

[Mary] Thanks.

[Brandon] You guys all have obviously read it, because we told you you had to, but if for some reason you haven't, you need to read this book, so that you can read the sequel.

[Mary] Right.

[Brandon] Which is…

[Mary] The sequel is all space, all the time. I mean, they have to get to space.

[Dan] Most of the time.

[Mary] Most of the time. Yes, and the sequel has a section that I changed because I was talking to Kjell at a convention and he talked about watching in The Martian movie someone changed direction in midair. I remember that he was continuing to talk, and I'm like, "I am rewriting a scene in my head, while this man is speaking to me."

[Laughter]

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

[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] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star Wildstyle. Thank you so much.

[Wildstyle] How y'all doing?

[Brandon] We're doing all right. We are live at GenCon.

[Woo hoo! Applause!]

[Mary] Awesome. So we're so excited to have you on. Just to give the readers a… The readers? Hah. Just to give our listeners a little bit of a grounding in who you are, and so that they know you don't exist along just a single axis, tell them a little bit about yourself.

[Wildstyle] Okay. So I'm a lifelong musician… I actually started out as a violist.

[Mary] Ooo...

[Wildstyle] When I was 11. I also spent 15 years working on cars and equipment and such, and I'm also a community organizer, as well. I'm also a hip-hop producer and manager.

[Mary] So, of these various identities and professions, which are we going to focus on today?

[Wildstyle] We're going to focus on the hip-hop production, producer and managing.

[Mary] Awesome. So…

[Dan] I'm so excited about this.

 

[Mary] What do writers get wrong about hip-hop production?

[Wildstyle] I would say writers normally forget that there is even an artist-producer relationship.

[Mary] Yeah.

[Wildstyle] That's like one of the most important things, even in the music that you hear on the radio. Like, I don't know if y'all listen to Drake, but he has a producer/engineer called 40. That guy's responsible for his sound. He is the one that picks a lot of the beats, and mixes it, and makes Drake sound like you're used to hearing him. Without that guy… Drake wouldn't sound like the person that you've ever heard.

[Howard] You've already… I majored in music composition and sound recording technology. A long time ago.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Back before anything was digital.

[Laughter]

[Howard] There we go. When I was doing this, there was the artist, there was the engineer, and there was the producer. The idea of there being a producer/engineer, at least where I was doing this, was not a thing. So you've already… You've already broken one of my rules in my head. Tell me how that works? How do you be a producer and an engineer?

[Wildstyle] Well, I mean, in hip-hop, in the early days, people were doing it, and I think still now, because we all don't make that much money…

[Laughter]

[Mary] Just like writing.

[Wildstyle] Drake… Yeah. Exactly. I see a lot of parallels. But there's not a lot of money to be had, especially at the aspiring level. Which most people are. Therefore, if you only compose music and make beats for artists, you're going to have a hard time. So most… Not most people, but a good portion of producers actually learn to record and engineer the artists. In fact, a lot of artists engineer themselves, or they can if necessary. Little Wayne was one of those who actually mixed himself as a rough mix, and then give it to one of four engineers in the world and let them play around with the concepts that he had come up with. So this is really common for artists and producers to dabble in several different areas in the music, so that they get the sound that they want, or just because they want to experiment. So…

[Mary] So, for me, because I come from classical music violin, the… What it sounds like, to translate for my own brain, when you're talking about people adding beats and things, it sounds like they're actually participating in the composition process as well?

[Wildstyle] A lot of times… And that's another thing. I think on… When you see it in the movies and stuff, sometimes they overdo the artist participating in that process. I think with modern hip-hop, and I don't think it's a good thing, but that doesn't happen as much. It definitely… When it does happen, it doesn't happen the way it happens in movies. There's… If their artist is participating and great things are happening with the composition as it's happening, it is because they have a relationship and they have built that over time and they… The producer knows what the artist is capable of, not always what they like…

[Chuckles]

[Wildstyle] But what they're capable of, and what they're going to be good at, and that's how that happens. That… It's just not… People don't see that.

 

[Howard] You're using some shorthand here that may be going right past our listeners. When you say the artist's participating, the artist, in a hip-hop album, they are responsible for the lyrical work, the rhyming, the part that our linguistic processors get. The producer/engineer is the one doing the beat composition. If there are melodic elements, that's them.

[Wildstyle] See, but often times… In modern hip-hop, the artist will go… Not have as great a relationship, like the… Especially aspiring ones, they will find just like random instrumentals on YouTube or something, and start, and write a song to it. But when you… Most successful artist have good relationships with their producers, so that… They're not going on YouTube and picking a random instrumental, they're absolutely sitting down with one person, and they will either be in the studio with them, or they will have been in the studio and tell them, "Hey, send me this, send me that, I want something that's dark, I want something that's vibrant, I want something that's tempo." That's… The stuff you hear on the radio, even the successful underground artists, they typically work with fewer producers and they all have personal relationships with them.

[Mary] So why don't you… Because I think this will be useful for our listeners. Why don't you walk us through the process of starting a new work? How does that go?

[Wildstyle] Well, depending on the artist… I have a handful of artists that I work with, and not much more than that. So I record… I engineer the music and I compose a lot of the music, so often times they may come to me and say, "Hey, I'm looking for this. A dark sound." Or "I want this type of feel." Or they'll reference me other songs. Either I'll come up with that or I will find something that I have already composed and I will send it to them or play it for them in the studio. Also, how this works is that I can be doodling and come up with this amazing composition, and I'm like, "I think this would be perfect for so-and-so." Either I'll wait until they get in the studio, which I prefer to do so I can see their real reaction…

[Laughter]

[Wildstyle] Or I'll take a chance and email it to them and hope that they're not emailing it to everybody else to see what they think and check out what I'm doing. But often times, that's how things get started.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop. You're going to pitch an album to us, right?

[Wildstyle] Yes. This is an album that I executive produced for an artist named Pope Adrian Blessed, and you can find him on the web, popeadrianblessed.com. It's only three tracks along, but I engineered and produced all of that along with my friend, Ares. He produced… He composed one of the instrumentals on their, and I actually mixed and recorded all of it. It's probably different than what y'all have heard. It combines lyricism with a lot of sonic… A sonic sound that's not common with lyrical rap. So it's…

[Howard] What's the album called?

[Wildstyle] Eastern Conference. You can find out on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, [tidal?], whatever you have. Apple Music.

[Dan] Awesome.

 

[Howard] So what… Earlier, when I said you'd crossed the producer/engineer boundary that I thought was a sacrosanct thing…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And then you're describing your process and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, you also crossed the composer-engineer boundary…"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "And the performer-composer boundary…"

[Mary] And the orchestrator boundary...

[Laughter]

[Howard] The amount… When you… When I hear the word producer, I think of the guy who sits in the back of the studio and just basically is grouchy.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Do you do that too?

[Wildstyle] I'm notorious for being that person, actually.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But what you've described really is 90% of what people hear. It's just… It's like the whole process, and the artist happens to be standing out front and making meat noises with the face hole.

[Laughter]

[Wildstyle] You know… That is…

[Howard] Doing it really well.

[Wildstyle] But I agree with you. Sometimes, in the past, not so much with my current artists, I have to remind them that this is all more like a NASCAR race, where I'm your crew chief and you're in the car. You need me as much as I need you.

[Howard] You're the crew chief and the pit crew and the tires and the car…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And a large portion of the track.

[Laughter]

[Wildstyle] Sometimes it feels that way.

[Mary] [garbled] running over you.

[Howard] I'm having a great time. I could… This is fun.

 

[Dan] Well, I… So I've been thinking about this, this exact topic as you're describing this and realizing that it sounds like this is much more collaborative than the kind of author-editor relationship, which is what I assumed that it was. So I'm wondering, and maybe this is a weird subject to bring up, but I'm wondering a little bit about the issue of credit. Like, because you mentioned earlier, Drake, and I know Drake and I've listened to Drake. I had no idea who his producer was. Is that just me being an idiot, or…?

[Wildstyle] I think… Well, I…

[Dan] You can say yes.

[Laughter]

[Wildstyle] I'm not going to say that, but I think like most hip-hop aficionados and people that are really deep into hip-hop would automatically know that his producer is 40.

[Dan] Okay.

[Wildstyle] The sound they've crafted over the years… He's been there almost from the very beginning.

[Dan] Wow. Well, okay.

 

[Mary] We have been schooled there. So, when you are… We've talked a little bit about the things that are annoying. What are some things that our readers could do… I keep saying readers. Our listeners could do for their readers to make it seem more real, to make it seem more grounded?

[Wildstyle] I would say, focus on the relationship, because the relationship is up and down. At the same time, especially if the artist is a big time artist, or they're making a little bit of money, or they've got a growing fan base, there's going to be plenty of other producers that want to come in and wreck that relationship, or get in so that they can take advantage and then they'll have their work out there, they can possibly make money, or they can get bigger opportunities. That often can be a bigger issue. You often see, in the hip-hop scene, that the artists and producers will end up twitter beefing off of just the weirdest stuff. I don't know how many of y'all listen to Future, but Future and Young Thug had a beef over their producer, Metro Boomin. They were all on Twitter, just acting crazy over this, and it was because of a little bit probably jealousy over they both have the same producer, and some felt that they had more, better hits with them than the other one.

[Howard] Glad that never happens with writers.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Well, they write for a living, so they know how to go on Twitter and always…

[Laughter]

[Mary] [garbled]

 

[Dan] [garbled] with a straight face. So can you point us towards some depictions? The media depictions in books or TV or movies of hip-hop production and that producer relationship that you think are accurate? That you think have done a good job? Or can you point us toward some that are terrible?

[Wildstyle] I would say, and this isn't really hip-hop as you would think of it, but the James Brown movie about his… The bio-pic, Get On Up, was a… I don't think they quite got it right, but Bobby Byrd was like a big key to James Brown's sound, and he stayed with him, and when they finally fell out for the last time, James Brown's career went down. It was very, very quick. For his late 70s, James Brown never did have another hit.

[Mary] So this producer-artist relationship is much older than I was realizing it was. Fascinating. So with… As we're kind of wrapping up, since I do love watching people rant, pick anything that makes you kind of just flip the table.

[Howard] You're asking him to go twitter beefing live.

[Laughter]

[Wildstyle] Right. Which I do too much of.

[Mary] Not… He can pick a fictional example. He can pick out the pet peeve. Because one of the things that I think is very telling in fiction is when someone is doing a process that is so annoying. Like, what is it that is so annoying to you when you are doing your job that you just kind of want to flip the table sometimes?

[Wildstyle] Oh, as being a producer? Oh, I think it's artists that think they know everything.

[Laughter]

[Wildstyle] Often times, you will… People that you know, sometimes they get a little ahead of themselves and they want to tell you how to do your job as the composer, and as the engineer. They have all these ideas. Some of them have good ideas, and some of them have really bad ideas. Sometimes you're expected to try to piece together really bad ideas. When it doesn't work, it's your fault.

[Laughter]