wetranscripts | Entries tagged with worldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.23: Governments Large and Small

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 23.

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

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

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

[Howard] We're in a meritocracy.

[Brandon] I wish.

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

[Brandon] Actually…

[Dan] It would just be our guest cohosts.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Government.

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

[Brandon] That's right.

[Dan] Okay.

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

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

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

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

[Dan] [garbled]

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

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That…

[Dan] That's a great word.

[Howard] That's terrible.

[Brandon] So…

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

[Laughter]

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

[Brandon] Yes.

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

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] [garbled That was autocracy]

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

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

[Dan] House of Cards.

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

[Brandon] Okay. So for…

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

[Brandon] About changes and power dynamics.

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

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

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

[Dan] We don't respect anybody.

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Brandon] A Memory Called Empire.

[Dan] Yes.

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

[Mahtab] Taxes.

[Brandon] Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/17/14-11-magic-without-rules/

Key Points: Magic without rules, soft magic, numinous magic -- what does it mean for the reader and the story? At least the characters don't know the rules. Mysterious, scary, we don't know what will happen! Sometimes it isn't important to understand the rules. The story is about something else besides the mechanics. Handwavium! Sometimes there is internal logic, but it is not explained. Other times, the magic does not appear to have internal logic. This creates wonder and awe. Also, a sense of dread. It also saves pages and explanations! Save your infodump equity. As yourself, does the reader really need to know how this works? Be aware, people and characters will try to find patterns or rules, but you as writer can show that they don't work consistently.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 11.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Magic without Rules.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are going to be talking about non-rule-based magic systems in this podcast. The title is actually a little bit contentious…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I wanted to call it soft magic. If you Google soft magic, you will mostly find me…

[Yeah]

[Brandon] Defining soft magic this way. It is a term… Lots of people like to use the term soft fantasy to mean different things. So we're just going to say magic without rules. This is the definition we're looking at.

[Howard] In terms… Talking about the term for a moment. Magic without rules gives us a nice level of specificity for why we are doing anything with magic, what it means to the reader, what it means for the story. Provided we understand what we mean by the words magic, without, and rules.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah. One of the other terms that you will hear for talking about this kind of concept is numinous magic. Which is, again, magic in which the rules are not delineated.

[Brandon] Now, this doesn't necessarily mean there are no rules. It can mean you're just writing a story and there are no rules. Basically, when we talk about rule-based magic system, non-rule-based magic system, the idea is that the characters don't know necessarily. Like, they are not… A rule-based magic system is often… The story is about or involves the characters coming to understand, manipulate, and use and control the world around them. That's…

[Howard] It's best understood, Brandon, through the example you use when you illustrate Sanderson's First Law. The One Ring is hard magic. We know what happens when you put it on, we know how to break it, we know that nobody is able to willfully throw it into the lava.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Howard] Gandalf is soft magic. Or Gandalf is a rule-less magic. There are no rules. We don't know what Gandalf can do. Wizards are mysterious and scary, we don't know what's going to happen with the Balrog, we don't know if he can wave his staff and make the bad guys go away. He's a wizard.

[Brandon] Yep. Of course, there are Tolkien fans out there listening right now who are like, "No, no. I can list off the powers of a wizard." That's fine. That's from appendix material, you've dug into it. We're just talking about the general effect on the characters, specifically hear the hobbits. Or the reader not really knowing and not needing to know.

[Mary Robinette] That is the thing that I was going to say, is that when we're talking about this, it's okay to not have rules unless it is important to the story for the character to under… For the reader to understand. But when we're talking about rule-ba… Magic in which there are no rules, we're talking about a story in which it's not important to understand the rules.

[Brandon] Yes. Exactly. In fact, the goal of the story is that you don't.

[Howard] Or where it is important to not have a full understanding of how this works.

[Mary Robinette] Or just that it's not important. You just don't need to know.

[Margaret] The story is about something other than the mechanics of how this works.

[Brandon] Exactly. Some of these… Sometimes, like, it's for ambiance reasons, but, Margaret, you just reminded me, there's lots of times that if you take one step into the explaining the magic realm, suddenly you are raising a whole host of questions, that if you don't address and answer can really make the story feel off. If you never take that first step, if you tell the reader from the get-go, "No, this is not relevant. Accept it." This is your bye as we talked about last month, and then go forward. Your story is free to focus on this other thing, without getting caught in the weeds of having to explain this level of magic and this level of magic and this magic stone and that sort of thing.

[Howard] The science fiction concept here is handwavium. This is not the… I'm waving my hand like these are not the droids you're looking for. Except it's this is not the physics you're looking for. Below a certain point, we're not going to go into the physics, we're not gonna talk about the neutrino output of this, we're just going to let this slide, because the moment we commit to math at that level, everything starts to unravel and we're no longer telling the story we want to tell.

[Mary Robinette] Well, like… One of the examples that I actually think of is King Arthur. Like, how exactly does that sword stay in the stone? Like, how does it know? Is there… Is it a DNA test? Like, what is the rule system for keeping the sword in the stone and identifying the one true king? We don't know, we don't care.

[Brandon] Right. The one…

[Margaret] I was thinking, as we were talking, of the water that falls on you from nowhere. Nobody knows where the water comes from, it just falls on you when you lie. It's never explained, and we never want to know how it's explained, because that's not what it's about.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Why does Pinocchio's nose grow? [I don't know]

[Margaret] it just does.

[Mary Robinette] He lied.

[Brandon] Now, I do also want us to say, when we're talking about this, there is a distinction, to me, between… There's several different ways to do this. One is to have internal logic and never explain it, which is where we're getting here. But there is another way, which is magic that doesn't seem to have internal logic. Which can be really cool. This is the magic that you not only don't understand how it works, you don't understand what the consequences will be if you use this magic. A classic example of this would be like the monkey's paw, where you are given some little bit of information. Hey, this thing will grant you wishes. But the wishes… you'll have no understanding of the consequences. Often, they will go far beyond your expectations. Where the story becomes less about the magic or even what the magic can do, it becomes about the terrible things that happen when you can use forces you can't comprehend.

[Howard] For me, the whole… The story… The point of the story of the monkey's paw is attempting to understand the rules by which this thing works is going to result in you being betrayed even worse by your use of this thing. The more conditions you try to place on it, the more disastrous this will be.

[Brandon] So, why would you write a story like this? What are some of the things you gain from it?

[Mary Robinette] Often, you gain a sense of wonder. A lot of times when we do start putting rules in, it makes something feel mundane and ordinary. Sometimes, what you want is something that is numinous, that there is a sense of wonder, a sense of awe to it. So one of the things that you can do is to take some of the explanation away, and just let this magical thing happen.

[Brandon] Okay. I would say a sense of wonder can also be replaced by a sense of dread.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] They can go very hand in hand. This is one of the things I see from really great rule-less magic systems sometimes is that the main character feels so small. They are presented with a world in which like… Howard, you were telling a story about a gun?

[Howard] The lazy gun. The… I quoted… Referenced Iain Banks last month. I'm going to do it again. Iain Banks, Against A Dark Background. The whole story is… It's a MacGuffin story. We're trying to find the lazy gun. The only things we know about the lazy gun are if you turn it upside down, it weighs about 3 pounds more, and, if you point it at something and pull the trigger, whatever you've pointed it at, will die. The method of death, at one point, it gets fired and a monster mouth appears out of nowhere and munches the guy in half and he's dead. The result, for me, I'm going to come back to Mary with the sense of wonder, the numinous magic concept. It's a MacGuffin whose rules we don't need to understand. What's important is that the fact that no one understands it and the fact that it is so magical and powerful, now everybody wants it. That's what drives the story. It's the wanting of the thing, it has nothing to do with how the thing works.

[Brandon] I love that example of… If you pull the trigger, you expect them to explode. But something comes out of another dimension and eats them… It leaves you with a sense of… Again, this is something beyond my comprehension currently. I have no idea how this thing is working. That's scary. This is… This whole kind of eldritch Lovecraftian idea that we are actually very small is a really interesting and frightening emotion that fiction can evoke.

[Margaret] I think the other thing that you get when you have magic without set rules, is, just in terms of resource allocation, which we were talking about last month, the page weight or the word count that you're not using for explaining how magic works or for having characters who are masters of it. You get to apply it to other things. If that's not what your story is about, even if you worked out the rules for how magic works, your story might not need it.

[Brandon] Right. That's a really good point, because one thing when newer writers are talking about info don't send things like this, one thing they don't seem to get, and it's been hard for me to explain sometimes, is that when a reader is really curious about something, you gain infodump equity. Right? That as soon as you start to infodump on something there really interested in, then that paragraph kind of blurs away and the world comes to them. That same paragraph describing something else might be really frustrating to them. That's often whether you've used your cues correctly, leading them to questions and curiosity, whether… I read a lot of books where I'm really interested in this world element they brought up, and instead I get an infodump on a different one.

[Oh, yeah]

[Brandon] Oh, I get so bored so quickly. Or I'm really interested in this character's conflict and we stopped for the worldbuilding infodump. You gotta put these in places…

[Margaret] You gotta prime the pump for us.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I say, and I think this gets to the heart of what Margaret was talking about with the focus, that you can buy time basically, is that unless this… That the… Unless the information… This is true for all exposition, but in less it affects why we care about something, unless it affects our understanding of what the character wants or if it affects… If it doesn't affect our understanding of how they will achieve their goal, we don't… The reader doesn't actually need to know it. A lot of times, people are like, "Well, let me explain my magic system." Like, do we actually need to know? Do I actually need to know how the spaceship works? That's kind of one of the other things that you can do when you're looking at this soft magic, is… It's like I know that when I pick up my phone, I can take pictures with it and occasionally make phone calls. I can tell you well, it works with a computer inside. That's about as far as I can go. I think that you can do that with magic, too.

[Howard] I'm reminded of the… I think it was a comedy clip about the airline attendant telling everybody to turn their devices off.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They're arguing with her about the devices. She finally collapses and says, "Okay, look, people. Airplanes are magic. We don't know how it works."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] "You guys just need to turn that stuff off, because if you break the magic, we fall out of the sky."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It's kind of beautiful, because honestly, that's sort of how all of us feel about airplanes.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I see a dichotomy here in the magic without rules, and it is that there is magic without rules that the reader can see, and there is magic that is explicitly… There is an absence of rules so that what the reader sees is an inconsistency, or an absence of any sorts of sense. The lazy gun is that inconsistency. I don't know… Well, there is one consistency. It's going to kill you. But beyond that, I don't see any rules to it.

[Brandon] Very, very infrequently do you write a magic with no rules. It can happen. But usually, if were talking about magic without rules, it's magic where the characters can't… Don't understand usually what will happen, or at least the consequences of what they're using.

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

[Margaret] It is. Bookburners is… It's going to sound like television when I talk about it, because we discuss it in terms of season and episodes, but it is a series of novelettes that are released in e-book and audio form. Written by Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Andrea Phillips, Brian Francis Slattery, and also by me. We chose Bookburners for this particular episode, because this is a series about a group that works for a black budget arm of the Vatican, charged with keeping encroaching magic, which seems to be coming more and more into our world, and it is their job to try to hold back the tide and keep it out. The justification that the organization that they work for has always given for this is the fact that we have no idea how this works. Anybody who has ever tried to use magic constructively or productively ends up being like a toddler with a machine gun. Things go wrong very, very quickly. It is Season Four is out now. Season Five will be released episodically at some point this summer. You get to see over the arc how well they do that job, and how they have to change their attitudes towards how magic is.

[Howard] By way of clarification, when you say this summer, summer of…

[Margaret] 2019. Thank you.

[Brandon] So let me ask you, specifically, Margaret, how did you go about writing a story where the magic doesn't have rules? Or, if it… How did you do this?

[Margaret] It started out… Because we are writing it collectively and we're sort of building on things and we're building the characters, it did start… There was a certain amount of okay, try weird things, and if it seemed to fit the right tone for the broad strokes of what we thought magic would do, all right, we'll go with it. In the first season, Mur did an episode where you have a restaurant kitchen that is made out of meat, where people are cutting pieces off the walls and frying it to their customers and everyone is obsessed with this one restaurant in Scotland. We have episodes where an entire apartment… This is one of Brian's episodes. It transforms into this strange mutant… Mutable magical landscape, and a guy opens the wrong book and gets kind of sucked into it, and becomes part of his apartment. As we went forward, we were like, "Okay. If this is what we have established…" Eventually, we reached the point where it's like, "Okay. Let's come up with some guidelines," as the story is progressing and our arc plot is going on. What is actually going on behind the scenes, and what do we think is the cause of what they call the rising tide?

[Brandon] Okay. So you kind of just like… You're discovery writing and kind of doing that classic discovery writing thing, where you're waiting to see what connections the kind of group hive mind comes up with that you will then push forward with.

[Margaret] There is a certain amount of building the bridge as you are crossing the river going on, yeah.

[Brandon] That's awesome. What about the rest of you? How do you write something… Now, I have a lot of trouble with this. I'll be perfectly frank. Writing something where I don't start explaining the rules… I just, ah… I don't do that very often. If I do, it doesn't go very well. So, how do you approach it?

[Howard] Well, I don't outline the rules, but I generate the rules.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] We're going to talk about constructed languages at some point. I created a language because I needed a code in which someone knew what the code meant and knew how to find a thing and it needed to feel like this is a thing that will actually work. It needed to feel as if there was a consistency behind it. But I absolutely didn't have time to explain all of the things that went into it. Pages and pages of numerology creation went into two lines of dialogue. That's what happens when I try to build magic without rules.

[Mary Robinette] So what I find is that… Like, I've got a story that's coming out in the last… Or that came out in the last issue of Shimmer. It is ruleless magic. Except there are a couple of things that we know. That you don't want to make Gramma say something three times. What I find with the ruleless magic, when I work with it, is that because people are pattern seeking creatures, that even if the magic, even if I just free write the magic and things are just weird and stuff just happens, that the characters within that world are still going to try to find patterns to it, and that there's usually one thing that they will still kind of hang onto. So, like we all know that if you walk away from a bus stop, the bus will come. If there is a chance of rain and you leave the house without your umbrella, it will definitely rain on you. Absolutely, 100%. We know this. Even though that is clearly not actually how this magic system on Earth works. Nora Jemisen's 100,000 Kingdoms, the magic is a written form of magic. So we know that, but the rest of it is clueless. So what I tend to do is say, "Well, people are going to try to apply stuff to this. They're just wrong, so it doesn't work consistently, because it is a rule that they have put on it in a desperate attempt to understand it.

[Brandon] I like that idea a lot. That's very helpful. In fact, I think I'm going to assign homework along those lines. Because I've been thinking, take a story that has… That you've worked on or that you been planning that has a very rule-based magic. Where you think you know the rules. Have the rules all go wrong intentionally. Like, you have control of the story, but have the characters realize they don't know the rules, and deal with the ramifications of that.

[Mary Robinette] While you're working on that, I'm going to tell you a secret. There are rules in the Glamorous Histories that Jane and Vincent are completely wrong about.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.9: Showing Off

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/03/14-9-showing-off/

Key Points: Showing off awesome worldbuilding and podcasting skills? No, just how to make infodumps interesting. As you may recall... How do you let characters explain the world without it being a boring infodump? Let the character interact with the information, give it emotional weight. Beware of "As you know, Bob," but an argument let's you slip in lots of information about characters and whatever they are arguing about. Use "Bob, you idiot!" Giving directions also can help. Humor makes the moments of worldbuilding go down easier, too. Sex positions, mixing sex scenes and exposition, might work for you. Convincing someone who has given up lets you summarize everything that has happened, and what we need to do. Ephemera! Establishing shot, relationship shot, insets, pictures! Worldbuilding that is important impacts the story, so the impact gets mentioned in the story. Maps and grand poems. People in a bar talking about what they watched or did last night can tell you what's important in this culture. Newspaper clippings, broadcast transcripts, a character overhearing a snippet of a news clip... all good ways to let the reader know "Today, the ocean is boiling." Consider when to deploy ephemera and what effect you want it to have on the reader. Watch for the gorilla in the phone booth.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Nine.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Showing Off.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] We are going to show off our awesome worldbuilding skills for you…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And our awesome podcasting skills.

[Howard] That is not what you told me we were going to do. Now I'm nervous.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Um…

[Mary Robinette] As you know, Brandon…

[Dan] He would've dressed totally differently.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] As I know, we're going to talk about infodumps, but we're going to make the infodumps interesting. Basically, this whole podcast is 14 seasons of infodumps.

[Laughter]

[Howard] As you may recall, we've been talking about worldbuilding all year.

[Brandon] Yes, we have, Howard, and did you know…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] All right. So. My first question for you guys is how do you make characters who know a lot about the world talk about the world without it being an infodump, or without it being boring?

[Mary Robinette] So, I had to deal with this a lot in Calculating Stars because I have this mathematician pilot astronaut, and there's oh, the amount of information that you need to… No, I didn't really think about it when I'm like, "I'm going to write hard science fiction." Huh.

[Brandon] You're going to not just write hard science fiction. You're going to mix it with alternate history.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Which are the two most research heavy sub genres of sci-fi fantasy.

[Mary Robinette] It was a good choice there. Also, I'm going to make my main character a mathematician, and Jewish. None of which I am. So… But what I did was very much what I talked about last month, which was the interacting and having emotional weight to the information that the character is conveying. So, if I need you to know how to fly an airplane, when I… And I want you to know this airplane is a really cool airplane, then I have her walk in and go, "Oh, who has the T35 and how do I become their best friend?" That immediately tells you that this is interesting. Then, she can start to list all the things about it. What I'm doing for the reader is I am completely infodumping all of this information, and I'm tying it to emotion. So it is using POV…

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] But it is very specifically about that interaction with the thing and masking it as an emotional state, rather than a "Please, here's my knowledge."

[Brandon] Well, and you say as an emotional state. A lot of the ways that this has been done historically, and it still works very well, but it's where the cliché "As you know, Bob," came from, is to have two characters have an argument or discussion about the thing. Saying, "I like this sort of gun," and the other character says, "Oh, those guns are crap. I like these sorts of guns." Suddenly, you've got an argument and you're getting information about both characters, their preferences, and the guns.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] It's a great way to go about it. How do you do it without it sounding like, "As you know, Bob," that sort of thing?

[Dan] Well, the reason that the argument works well is because it isn't "As you know, Bob," it's "Bob, you idiot."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Then they're not telling each other things they already know. That's when it really is awful.

[Howard] I did almost that exact… I mean, it wasn't guns, they were talking about the floating cities in the… One of the places. It ends with a joke. It's very much an introduction of characters. There's a ring of giant floating cities going all the way around the planet. "I grew up on Venus, I've seen floating cities before." "Okay, but the bartender… He makes these drinks inside other drinks." "Depth charges. I've had those before, too." Then they look out the window and everything is gone. "Where are all the cities?" "Where are we going to get drinks?" It's just a brief moment of insight. I now know that Jengisha is, one, from Venus, where there are floating cities, but I needed to introduce… This is the first time we've been to this place in the book, and I'm showing the reader what isn't there. So I have to describe what was there, in order to then have it be gone. [https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-07-29]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, giving directions is actually a great way to do that.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] It's like, "Oh, you drive down the road where the old school used to be…"

[Brandon] I just realized something. That is that we always joke that Howard cheats because he has pictures for his worldbuilding. But he cheats twice, because he also has jokes to make us laugh in between the moments of worldbuilding. You're just a cheaty cheater.

[Howard] I am a cheating cheater, and I could talk about how the humor lowers your defenses and allows me to slip information in there. But that's… That goes beyond cheating and into evil.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I'm not going to say that the number of sex scenes in Calculating Stars are there because I have a ton of exposition that I needed to get across, but…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Sex positions.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Call it what it is.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's exactly what it is.

[Howard] I am so glad I didn't try to make that joke.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Oh, wow. All right.

[Mary Robinette] There's multiple layers of that joke. We're just going to move on there.

[Brandon] How do you make your worldbuilding interesting?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Sex position. So, here's an example of something that you should not do. I read… As research, I read Mars, a Technical Tale by Wernher von Braun, which is labeled as a novel, and it is von Braun… He's the father of modern rocketry. It was him saying, "Let me tell you how we could do a Mars mission." It was his idea to get the American public… Or just get the public excited about the idea of Mars. There is a chapter in there in which we literally have the professor says, "Let me tell you about Mars, the professor began his exposition." That's an actual sentence.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Then, the next line is, "Mars is the fourth planet from the sun." It is a chapter of as-you-know fact dump. There is no… Oh, it's… There's charts and graphs. It is worth picking up just so you can go…

[Dan] To see how not to do it?

[Mary Robinette] It's really… Oh… It's very, very useful for reference, and it is really challenging as a novel.

[Brandon] One of the best plot recaps I've ever read is in A Night of Blacker Darkness.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Which is a lengthy plot recap so that we can get caught up to remem… Getting it straightened out what the characters need to do, what they have already done, and what their goals are. It is the facts conversation. Tell us about this, Dan.

[Dan] The facts… Well, A Night of Blacker Darkness was me trying to write a farce, which I learned is so much easier to do on stage, which is why I eventually went back and did it on stage. But one of the problems with farce is that it is very information dense at a very fast pace. So I got halfway through the book and realized that a lot of the writing group had either missed important details or had forgotten them because 900 other important details had happened. So let's take a minute and get on the same page and make sure we know what's going on, all done as a conversation between the characters. One of them has decided it's not worth carrying on and wants to give up, and the other two are trying to convince him, no, we can still win. That gives them an excuse to run down all of the plot points that have happened.

[Brandon] Now, what makes this scene really work is the fact that I came out of it understanding, but the facts are all really complex and funny. So how did you not lose us in the thing that was supposed to reorient us as you were making jokes about how convoluted the plot was?

[Dan] Um. I numbered all of the facts, and that's why it's called the facts conversation. If you talk to people who've read the book, almost everyone this is their favorite chapter. What I did was I knew that there were three, maybe four, very important facts. They were really driving all the action. But numbering, I think at final count it was 17 or 18 total facts, made you think that there was a lot more going on than there really was. So you're kind of in the middle of this whirlwind and they always refer to the facts by number rather than what they are, except for the four important ones.

[Oooh!]

[Dan] So you know, "Oh, okay. Running away to Rome, so that we don't get murdered by a vampire…" That's fact whatever it was. That one they will say both the number and the title. The rest of them are all just numbers.

[Mary Robinette] That's very clever. I mean, that's a really common stage technique which you are transposing directly to the page.

[Brandon] And then back to the stage.

[Mary Robinette] Very nice.

[Dan] That's why it was so much better on stage.

[Brandon] It occurs to me that you probably repeated the four important facts a number of times?

[Dan] A lot of times.

[Brandon] Where the other ones were only one-offs.

[Dan] Yeah. There's a lot of times in the conversation where they'll say, "Which brings us back to fact four, blah blah blah. There is a vampire trying to kill us," whatever it is. So that hammers home the important stuff and lets you have the joy of being confused by the unimportant stuff.

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

[Howard] It's not a book. It is not a YouTube University, but he calls it Shadiversity, s_h_a_d_i_versity. This is a guy who, Shad is his name, vidcast… Deconstructs scenes, ideas, technologies, things from fantasy and science fiction pop culture, and talks about the historical underpinnings, why they're getting it wrong, why they're getting it right. I mean, one of them is this thing that we keep calling a tabard. It's actually a monastic scapular. Tabards didn't look anything like this. He's got an episode called Best Medieval Weapons to Use against Elves.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Then a follow-up episode, An Even Better Way to Fight Elves. What he's doing is digging into actual historical combat, warfare, construction, whatever, and layering the pop culture we consume over that. It is fascinating and educational. You can find it on YouTube. Shadiversity, or you just Google Shadiversity and you'll be there.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Brandon] So we're getting back to how to show off your worldbuilding in ways other than viewpoint. Because we covered viewpoint really well last month. For the last part of the podcast, let's dig into ephemera. Nonnarrative parts of the story. How do you use this, Howard? Let's talk about pictures.

[Howard] Um. Okay. The… There's several kinds of pictures categorically in Schlock Mercenary. One of them is the establishing shot, where I tell you… The narrator will tell you where we are. You know what the name of this spaceship is, but we will have… Often have an external shot that shows you what this spaceship looks like. Or it's a city. Or it's a landscape, whatever. There are then relationship shots where I'm showing you where the characters are standing in relationship to each other and what is in the room with them. Are there props? Are there things that are going to be important? Then there are the panels that I call insets where I'm just zooming in on faces and showing reactions. I've talked about comic syntax in other podcasts. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, that's going to give you more information than I can ever give you. When there is a critical story piece, I always make sure that it is showing up in an establishing shot, and then within the same page, within the same week of scripts, it's going to show up in one of the relationship pictures. It's going to be mentioned in the dialogue, so that we know that this is a thing that we are going to come back to.

[Brandon] Are there ever things that you rely exclusively on the pictures for with the worldbuilding? Or do you always use a footnote… Always is probably too strong a term, but…

[Howard] [sigh]

[Brandon] Is it a rule of thumb that you're going to… You said you mention it in dialogue?

[Howard] Mentioning it in dialogue… If it's a piece of worldbuilding that is important, it's probably impacting the story in some way. So what is going to get mentioned in story is the impact. There are places where I can do things with pictures that… Obviously, you can do this with prose. There's a scene in which… It is a scene between person A and person B, Kevin and Jengisha. Ellen, whose husband is the other Kevin, the time clone, who is dead, is in the very background. She is being pulled out of the room by two of her friends. She has an expression on her face that looks bewildered and sad. It is one shot. I knew when I was putting it in there that I needed it because I'm going to show her having a conversation with the cloning tank where her husband is going to be coming back. But I have to have people know that there's this relationship. I got mail from people who were like, "Oh, my gosh. That thing you did, that little tiny half a square inch of panel, I got the feels from that." These are the sorts of places where a comic, I can put things in. It's not explicitly worded, it's easy to miss. With prose, I feel like it's harder to hide those things because the words are all usually read in order. Does that make sense?

[Brandon] Yeah. This is kind of hard for me, because I know my books are going to end up in audio books, but I love ephemera, and worldbuilding through them.

[Howard] Sticking them in the middle of paragraphs?

[Brandon] Yeah. Well, usually it's on an opposite page. I'm talking like the maps.

[Howard] Oh, them. Okay.

[Brandon] The maps from [garbled lights].

[Dan] Like the grand poems.

[Brandon] Yeah, the poems. The poems will get read.

[Dan] Things like that.

[Brandon] But the maps, for instance. There's like seven, eight maps in Way of Kings. What we do is have a big, gorgeous painted map, and then we have the survey map that says at the bottom, created by His Majesty's Royal Surveyors. Then we have a map scrawled on the back of a turtle shell sort of thing that somebody has been using to get around the camp. We have like all of these different maps that I put into the book to kind of show different ways that people are orienting themselves.

[Howard] So the Planet Mercenary sourcebook is a 250,000 word ephemera.

[Laughter]

[Howard] With an unreliable narrator.

[Dan] Sold separately.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Exactly.

[Dan] In the Mirador series, I… One of the basic worldbuilding premises was this is a world where e-sports have replaced regular sports. I never wanted to, and never did in the series, come out and say, "E-sports have replaced regular sports." But instead, we just have… They fill the same role. People in a bar all talking about the videogame they all watched on TV last night. Things like that. When the second book came out, I had a chance to do a bunch of ephemera. I had logo drawn up for the main team, I had a bracket of the tournament of all the players that we posted online, and things like that. Which all helped everyone to get into this mindset of oh, this game is important, and everyone's excited about it.

[Mary Robinette] I used newspaper clippings at the head of the chapters in Calculating Stars. That is a… That's a very useful thing. Because…

[Howard] Chapter headings?

[Mary Robinette] Chapter headings, the ephemera that shows up at the top, which is a newspaper article or a transcript from a radio play. But I'm going to say that you can actually use that technique without having to go to that… Of the newspaper clipping or the television or something else. You can use that to get your worldbuilding across without actually having to have chapter headings. Because you can do that same thing by having it be something that a character overhears. Having a little bit of a news clip playing in the background can allow you to just have an announcer literally tell you, "And right now, the ocean is boiling." You can do that. It's effective. You don't want to… Like any technique, you don't want it to be one note and that's the only thing that you use, but it's really useful.

[Brandon] Can I say, I really like your news reporter voice?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] For when you read those books? There are different ones. But you got that sort of…

[Mary Robinette] Ladies and gentlemen…

[Brandon] Yes. It's that. You know… It's that.

[Dan] Yes. Ladies and gentlemen. These marshmallows…

[Laughter]

[Dan] Are delicious.

[Howard] Not actually her voice, but…

[Mary Robinette] But it does tell you things. That's… That is actually a thing that we do have to navigate when I'm doing audiobooks, is if I just do a straight read of that and have that in the same voice as Elma, as the rest of the narration. You have to come up with something that's going to distinguish the two.

[Brandon] Right. It just… It sounds like it's coming from the old radio broadcasts that people would do. It is very distinct. You know exactly what it is right away.

[Mary Robinette] March third, 1952.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Pertinent to this conversation, I just sold a historical thriller. A Cold War book that I talked about a couple of times. I just sold that to Audible. It's going to be an Audible Original. I had created essentially as ephemera a bunch of codes. It's about a photographer in 1961. So there are number codes and there are replacement codes and there are ciphers and there are all these things all over the book. After we sold it, the editor and I looked at it and realized most of these aren't even going to function properly in audio. So we had to really rethink. We're still figuring out exactly how we're going to convey all that stuff that was invented as ephemera and ended up being important to the plot, and now we're… Now we're in a hole.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… We can… You and I can talk about that later, because there are in fact ways to handle that, because I've had to deal with that. I actually had that problem in Fated Sky, because there's big chunks of code.

[Brandon] Right. Yeah. I'm… This is off on a tangent, but I have, at the beginning of a chapter in one of my books, something that just looks nice on the page, that is just a bunch of… A random string of letters because it's… A character who went through a period of pseudo-madness, and this is their scrawlings, right? The reader just read all those letters, and the audiobook listeners came to me and said, "That chapter. It was just going on and on and on…"

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] "With the letters." So these are things to be aware of.

[Howard] Oh, man.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Often… This is actually getting into something that I… That is completely pertinent to the kind of infodumping that you do and the kind of ephemera that you create. That's when you deploy it and what effect are you trying to have on the reader? So with something like that, what you're trying to convey to the reader is that there was something not right going on with this character's head. That there were all of these things. So there are other ways to do that vocally, but you do have to shift when you go to the different medium. One of the things that I will see early career writers do, and sometimes in published work, is that the infodump just comes in the wrong place. They aren't thinking about the effect of the information on the reader.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] There only thinking about this is information.

[Brandon] Yeah. I often use the phrase gorilla in a phone booth… Which… There are times in your story where something's going to be really interesting to the character. You often in the podcast use the puppet metaphor. What the puppet is looking at, the character looks at. You have the puppet look at something cool, but then you start giving us an infodump on something else. We're going to say, "Nononono. You turned our attention toward something cool. You can't infodump me right then." But you could infodump me a little bit later on, once our mind can come back to this sort of thing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.

[Howard] Years ago, David Kellett did… I think this was for the podcast that he did with Scott Kurtz… And impersonation of a New York taxi driver doing the audiobook version of Garfield. Saying, "Oh, you guys. This last panel, he's sitting in the pan of lasagna. Sitting in a pan of lasagna." I was rolling, because I know that the Schlock Mercenary audiobook is really just never going to get made, but that problem, bouncing off of that problem, at that level when you've got the ephemera which are… on one level, what you would call ephemera is 90% of my product. The translation into audio means it would have to be completely rewritten.

[Brandon] We're going to have to stop here. Mary Robinette, you have our homework.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So for your homework, I actually want you to write some ephemera for your world. Write a transcript of a news program or a newspaper article… Some ephemera that fits into your world. Have it be about a fact that you've been struggling to get in there that you want people to know. Then try, because it's ephemera, see how concise you can make it. So you're only allowed one paragraph. No more than 75 words.

[Brandon] And, like, we are only allowed 15 minutes that became 22…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You are out of excuses. Go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1

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

Q&A Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Eight.

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

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

[Whoo! Applause]

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

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

[Laughter]

[as…]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Howard] Okay.

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

[Howard] Nononono. That's just great.

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

[Dan] Cultural stuff?

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Howard] Hearty stew.

[Dan] Yes. With crusty bread.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Mary Robinette] That's a good question.

[Dan] That's a really good question.

[Yeah]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] [Tee-hee-hee]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

[Dan] And fill it in. Exactly.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Amal] The book of the week is…

[Howard] Oh, go ahead and introduce yourself.

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

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

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

[Pause]

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Yep]

[Mary Robinette] So, paying attention to that…

[Dan] Not the way I do it.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] YES.

[Laughter]

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

[Howard] Well, there's this…

[Dan] We should all go to Disneyland together.

[Howard] There goes our Disney sponsorship.

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

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

[Howard] [Bwoosh! Oh, wow.]

[Mary Robinette] This is something I struggle with.

[Dan] Oh, yeah. Some of those…

[Howard] So very fraught.

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] Or a hemi-deca blerk.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But actually… The thing is…

[Dan] Did you just well, actually us?

[Laughter]

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

[Dan] Okay. There we go.

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

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

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Howard] It's about soup height.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] About soup height.

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.7: How Weird Is Too Weird?

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/17/14-7-how-weird-is-too-weird/

Key Points: How do you balance the familiar and the strange in your storytelling? Typically, you get one bye, you can ask the audience to believe on big thing. Everything else has to follow from that. Beware of "Oh, it's magic" so anything goes. This depends on the expectations of the audience, and the genre you are writing. But even serial urban fantasy has one major shift, not anything and everything. Make sure the audience knows where they are and what they are doing. Sometimes the worldbuilding is too weird the first time, but re-reading is okay, because now you know something about what is going on. Sometimes you can do more weird things by connecting them to the first bye. Think of a budget -- weirdness, boring, anything that challenges the reader, they all draw on your budget. Too much, and you lose the reader. Learning curve... add weirdness slowly, building off other weirdness.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Seven.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How Weird Is Too Weird?

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] My friends used to call me How Weird.

[Ooh! Garbled… Starting this podcast]

[Howard] Yeah. How Weird is too weird. Just…

[Brandon] Oh, no. Sorry. No.

[Howard] That was like fourth grade.

[Margaret] [garbled]

[Howard] And junior high.

[Brandon] Well, let's… We're going to theme this again. This is our year of worldbuilding. So we're talking about how weird is too weird, specifically in our worldbuilding. Let me just ask, how do you, and I kind of want to bounce this off Margaret first, because she's the one we've heard the least from regarding these topics. How do you balance the familiar and the strange in your storytelling?

[Margaret] Well, it depends to a certain extent on the media that I'm working on for that particular project. But in television, one of the rules of thumb that I sort of inherited from my training in my experience is the idea that you get one bye. Like early on, you're setting up, the beginning of your film or the pilot episode of your show, and you get to ask the audience to believe one big thing. Everything else has to sort of follow on from that. A show that… I mean, an exciting example of a show that no one has seen because it never actually turned into a TV show, but I was working on a show called Day One for NBC. The bye for that was these giant alien monoliths suddenly erupt out of population centers all over the Earth. This is the vanguard of an alien invasion. It would have been a really cool show. But that's the one thing we get. We don't get that and armies of flying elephants and dolphins can now talk. Like, you get the one thing. Past that, everything either has to come from those monoliths and the alien invasion, or it's got to be rooted in the familiar world that the audience is already going to be familiar with.

[Brandon] That's very interesting.

[Howard] There's a flipside to that coin that gets cited a lot by apologists and whiners of all flavors. That's, "Oh, you can believe in a universe that has dragons, but you can't believe in a sword that cuts through a horseshoe?" Well, you didn't say it was a magic sword. A sword can't cut through a horseshoe. I will totally believe in dragons, because they gave me… That was their one bye. If they want to tell me that dragons cut through horseshoes, that's fine, I can probably absorb that, and say that their one bye is magic exists and that includes creatures. But you have to pay attention to this. You don't just get… You don't just get to throw these things down because, oh, hey, it's magic.

[Brandon] So let me ask you, Margaret, do you take that same perspective on fiction? The one bye? Or would you kind of say that's a short form, television thing?

[Margaret] I think it depends a lot on the expectations of your audience, and the genre that you're writing in. When I'm working on Bookburners, this is very much designed to be in the vein of something like X-Files or Warehouse 13. It's that urban fantasy sort of set up. So the assumption is that the world works basically the way that we assume that it does, but also there is this encroaching magical force that is coming into the world that causes this. We don't get that and the major power… And the Vatican doesn't exist. You can only shift around so many things before it starts to feel arbitrary. What you want to do is make sure that you're setting your audience up in a way that they know where they're standing and what they're doing.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a really good point. As you were talking, I was thinking about China Mieville. Like, with the new weird movement, the basic bye is stuff is going to be weird. We're going to have women whose heads are bugs. Not the head of a bug, but their head is a bug. But gravity works the way gravity works. Electricity works the way electricity works. So if China were attempting to do stuff is going to be weird, I'm not going to explain the physiognomy of any of these creatures. But and also gravity doesn't work the way you think it does. That would be two byes. So I think that you can do kind of a blanket bye in terms of this is sort of a genre expectation thing.

[Brandon] Right. Say, I'm thinking of like Hitchhiker's, right? Where the… There is not one bye. The bye is nothing will make sense, but it will be funny. But I do think genre expectations are a big deal here, right? When you write… You pick up an epic fantasy that's a 1000 pages long, it's secondary world, you are going on board for I'm going to get a lot of worldbuilding. When you sit down to watch a new show that's been pitched to you as a science-fiction thriller with a singular hook premise, you want that premise to be the focus of the show, not and then this other thing.

[Howard] You brought up Hitchhiker's… I assume you're talking about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes. So much weird. The reason they get away with it is that the narrative voice would take some of the weirdest… Hey, boy, this came at you from left field. I'm going to now use this… Use the opportunity to explain it, as an opportunity to be funny and to satirize something you didn't see coming. So as that extreme weirdness happens, the voice sells it in service of something else. I think that's where I draw the line.

[Brandon] The voice is the familiar.

[Howard] You want to make it weird…

[Brandon] In the Hitchhiker's Guide.

[Howard] The voice is the familiar.

[Margaret] You, as the reader, have a literal guidebook to all of the strange stuff that is going on in those books.

[Mary Robinette] Plus, the point of Hitchhiker's is that you are Arthur Dent. So the expectation that has been thrown down is everything is just going to seem strange.

[Brandon] Everybody else gets this but you. That's kind of the joke.

[Brandon] Let me ask this, then. Have you guys experienced media or read books or stuff where the worldbuilding was too outlandish for you? That it was hard for you to get into?

[Howard] Yes. I'm going to apologize for it, because I loved it anyway. Iain Banks, Look to Windward. The opening sequence is a war, battle thing, in which we are just immersed in the POV of an alien who is essentially a six-legged giant ferret. He never says, "These are six-legged giant ferrets." I never get all at once a description to tell me where I am. I read the first chapter and was lost as to who I was until I got to the end and thought… Oh, I was actually kind of disappointed. Oh, these aren't people. This had felt very human. Then I read it again. Reading it again, I was fine. I felt like I was the target audience for this. I was absolutely the target audience for any Iain Banks' novel. But that first chapter was too weird on first reading. Iain Banks… His one bye for me is if you have to read it again, read it again, this is going to be fine. You're going to love this. It's going to be okay.

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Which, Mary, you're going to give to us.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, this is The Nine by Tracy Townsend. Which is, for me, right on the edge of too weird, but in ways that are… I, like, finished the book and have been recommending it quite a bit. It's… It feels like London, and it feels like a steam punk London, but there are these other creatures that are going through. It's a… It's taking advantage of the many worlds theory, so it's a version of our London, but definitely on a different world, and there are these creatures that have their eyes in their feet.

[Brandon] That's different.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And, so there's all of this very solid worldbuilding that goes from that single premise. But my brain is like, "Why would that evolve?" Like, and then trying to picture it, and trying to understand how it all works. So they tend to be arboreal, they do a lot of moving through trees. They have ferocious teeth, but they have no eyes in their head. Their eyes are in their feet. It is… It's… For me, like, I think one of the lines for me on the weird factor is how much time I spend trying to picture it in my head and if that's going to throw me out of the story. Now I pitch this is a book of the week because I think it's a gre… Terrific heist novel. It's got great character building. The steam punk makes sense. Frequently, when I read steam punk, it's like, this does not… Why… None of this makes sense. There's so much to love about this book. But if you are looking for something that is like, "All right, things are going to get weird," the nonhuman races in this world are weird. There's also tree people who are… Will shave their bodies, plane their bodies to take on specific shapes in order to cater to humans. It's like… There's so much stuff in this book. It's just filled with "Whaaat?" There's a ton of that. But mostly the reason you read it is because great characterization. And just a thrilling heist novel.

[Brandon] Awesome. That was The Nine.

[Mary Robinette] By Tracy Townsend.

[Brandon] So tell me this. Mary, when you're working on short fiction, how do you budget your weirdness?

[Mary Robinette] So. The… It's actually surprisingly like television in that you do pretty much get the one bye, you get the one thing that is this is weird. Mostly because everything that you put on the page, you have to spend words on to explain to the reader. So when I'm trying to get the reader to understand something, I know that it's going to throw them out of the story. Proportionally, that's going to take more of the narrative than it would in a novel. Even the same number of words. So I tend to also do one bye for short fiction. Usually, the short story is something that is exploring that one idea.

[Brandon] Something Margaret said earlier really kind of hit with me. We will have a podcast later in the year about how to make a story have worldbuilding depth rather than just breadth, which is the idea of taking a concept and digging deep into it. You said earlier this monolith story that you were working on. The idea being that you get your one bye as the monolith, but that doesn't mean that has to be the only weird thing. You are just going to connect any other interesting science fiction/fantasy elements through the monoliths.

[Margaret] Right, right. The idea in this series, and I think I can safely talk about what we might have done had this been a thing. My apologies, Jesse Alexander, if I'm spilling anything here. But in the pilot episode, there are these giant monoliths. Everybody is dealing with the fact that these things have erupted out of the ground. After that, other strange things start to happen. But it kind of comes at you one at a time. I think that speaks to what Mary was talking about on the short story. The idea of that subjective line of how weird is too weird… When you lose your audience, it's too weird. Anything up to that point, not too weird. When I started in film school, one of the things they told us was that the only firm rule of screenwriting is that you can't be too boring for too long.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Try to cut the boring stuff.

[Howard] That's a really good rule for everything.

[Margaret] Yeah.

[Brandon] I thought about this a lot when I've been teaching my class. I've said to my students, worldbuilding is the place where you generally are given more leeway. If you can keep your characters relatable, it doesn't matter how weird it gets as long as that character remains familiar. Now, sometimes, that character you want to be part of the weird, and then you're going to do other things to ground us. I really like what we've come up with with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thing, where the guy is the normal, and everything else can be a little weird, or a lot weird.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I… I'm thinking about this in terms of budget. Let me give you an analog… Or analogy. The concept of social capital. People will often ask me, "Oh, will you plug my Kickstarter?" Well, I have a limited amount of social capital. If I plug your Kickstarter, then I'm digging myself into a hole when the time comes to plug mine. As you are writing, as you are introducing weird things, as you are spending time on exposition, but it really needs to be exposed. As you are spending time on navelgazing, but you really want to dig into this emotion. All of these things are coming out of a budget. I don't know how exactly readers quantify the budget as they are reading, or television viewers quantify that budget, but if you think about it as a budget, you are doing a thing that is challenging the reader, and if you go too far, you lose them. Boring is challenging. Because a slog is challenging. How weird is too weird? When you've gone over budget, it's too weird.

[Brandon] Yeah. I would rely a lot on your beta readers, on early looks at things. Also, I think learning curve… We haven't even touched on in this, but I do think if you add your weirdness on slowly, building off of other weirdness, then you have things that feel perfectly normal by the end, that if you would have thrown it at the reader in the first chapter, you would have been in trouble.

[Brandon] We're going to do our homework. Margaret, you've got our homework this time.

[Margaret] Yes. The homework today is to… Well, your homework today, if you choose to accept it. Take a project that you are working on. Figure out what your one bye is. Can you narrow it down to one science fictional or fantastical element that is the core to the story you are telling, and have everything flow from that?

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Six.

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

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] And I'm Mahtab.

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

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

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

[Howard] That's just fine.

[Brandon] Because I love…

[Chuckles]

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

[Howard] I am…

[Brandon] How?

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Brandon] Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Howard] How weird is too weird.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Howard] The movie Avatar…

[Mahtab] That's just… Yes.

[Howard] Had…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The horses…

[Mahtab] Direhorse.

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

[Dan] You plugged yourself into it.

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

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

[Howard] The Fobottr.

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

[Howard] Part of what I did…

[Dan] In a measurable way.

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

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

[Howard] Fobottr.

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

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

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

[Dan] Cool.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/03/14-5-viewpoint-as-worldbuilding/

Key Points: Worldbuilding using character viewpoint? How do you integrate setting into your characters? Start with the way the character interacts with the world, both physically and emotionally. Use actions and dialogue to show us assumptions and attitudes, how things work, without lengthy info dumps. Use two or more characters with different backgrounds or opinions, different viewpoints, to give the reader information about the thing, about the characters, and about the unreliable viewpoint. One way to use viewpoint to intersect with worldbuilding is in the way characters describe other characters. The same character seen through the eyes of two different characters can be very different. Think about how the character's voice directs the narrative versus keeping the narrative safe and trustworthy. First person, the character runs everything. Third person, you need to balance. Some voice, some straight narration. To make your worldbuilding richer, think about what people swear by, who makes what jokes, and how your character interacts with the environment. A room with marble floors comes to life when heels clack across it.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Five.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Viewpoint As Worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] One of my personal favorite topics… Perhaps even hobby horses, is to talk about how to worldbuild by using character viewpoint. I love it when books do this. In fact, it is one of the things that when I pick up a book, if the first chapter does, the first page does, I know I'm going to have a good time, at least with that character. I really like it. I want to talk about how we do it. So, how do you make setting an integrated part of your characters?

[Mary Robinette] I think a lot of it is the way the character interacts with it, not just physically, but also emotionally. That... the weight that things carry. So, using Jane Austen as an example, someone can… Like, two characters can look at each other, and that's no big deal. But when Austen handles it, she gives you that emotional weight. It's like she… And I'm thinking specifically in Persuasion, there's this scene when Capt. Wentworth pulls a small child off of Anne Elliott's back, and there's a moment where he's touching her. The emotional weight of that tells you, as a modern reader, that oh, there is no touching. This is… There is a lot going on between these two. It is… It gives you all of these layers of detail, while just being a physical interaction in the world. So that's the kind of thing that I find very interesting.

[Dan] One, very similar to that, is in Age of Innocence, when he takes her glove off. It is so steamy, and it's just a glove. But it tells you so much about the world and what it's like and the rules they have to follow.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, you do that. It's actually one of the things I enjoy in the Stormlight, is the safe hand.

[Brandon] Right. Right. The safe hand came from… So, for those who aren't familiar. Society has eroticized the bare left hand of women. This has all kinds of social implications, and all kinds of… People always want to ask me, they want to say, "Why?" They often come to me, "Why, why is this?" I can answer. From, like, I… In the worldbuilding, the past, well, there were these events and these influential writings that happened, and then there was some institutionalized sexism that insp… But really, the answer is, "Why? Because that's how their culture is."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] That's how they see things. It's not why because they are like, "Well, when my great…" No. They're just like, "This is how my culture is." Then that culture becoming a big part of how people see the world is the sort of thing that I just love.

[Dan] You just look at all the different cultures on Earth today and the cultural assumptions that we carry and assume are common to the entire human race. Then you go to another country, and it's… They've never even heard of it before. You realize that we do this all the time.

[Howard] Last season, we had an episode on confronting the default, in which we talked about exactly that. When I wrote, I think it was Scrap Ante for Privateer Press, they wanted me to develop a character for them… Develop an existing character. They wanted me to give a POV to a character who was a mechanic… And this, they've got game fic… They've got game stuff surrounding this guy already. Who is a mechanic, and he needed to sound like a mechanic, and they wanted to talk a little bit about how these things work. Then it needed to not be boring. So I created a mystery in which someone is sabotaging a Warjack, and in as lean writing as I could, I have this mechanic digging in and finding out that somebody has swapped a part that looks like another part, and he has names for all of these, and he's rattling them off the way a mechanic would. In the course of writing this, I started lifting names and altering them a little bit from actual steam engines and diesel engines and whatever else. When I sent it into the Privateer Press guys, Doug, who's the chief worldbuilder, read it and said, "you have done something that I have been terrified to do forever." Which is explain how these things work.

[Laughter]

[Howard] They loved it. It read like a fun story, and it was all POV. It was not, "Oh, this is how the magic flows through the whatever." It's just a guy fixing a thing and looking for a problem, and then determining that somebody had sabotaged this to kill him.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Dan] So. An example from one of my books. In the Partials series, one of the things that I wanted to play with for the worldbuilding was the generational divide. People who remember life before the apocalypse and the kids who have grown up in a post-apocalyptic world. So I had the chance then to start with two or three chapters entirely from this teenage point of view, just describing a normal world. She didn't think it was scary, she wasn't constantly concerned with the things that they had lost. Then, we finally get to a meeting with adults, and they spend their whole time bemoaning how rustic everything is. Just the difference between their attitudes immediately tells you a lot about the world and the society.

[Brandon] Yeah. That's one of the things I like the most is when you can take two different characters and describe the same thing, the same event, or the same cultural mores, and then, with those two contrasting opinions, the reader is given a bunch of information. They are, number one, told about the thing. Right? You're getting the worldbuilding. But you're, number two, told about the characters. You're told what they find important and valuable, or what they notice. But, number three, you're also told viewpoint is untrustworthy.

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] Which is a really important thing with these sorts of stories.

[Dan] That can make it very difficult. If you want to do that, that's something that you might need to refine and polish quite a bit, because your readers of the first or second draft might say, "Oh, you've got an inconsistency here." No, I don't. You need to look at who is saying it, and maybe I need to finesse this a little bit so that that is more clear.

[Howard] The number of times I have taken an inconvenient fact about the Schlock Mercenary universe and backtracked it to determine who said it…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And then ascertained, "Oh. That person is actually allowed to be wrong about this." Did the narrator ever… Nope! Narrator didn't… Did a footnote ever… Nope! Oh, this is awesome.

[Laughter]

[Howard] This is awesome. I am off the hook.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have… There's a timeline problem in the Lady Astronaut universe. Because when I wrote the novelette, I was just like, "Eh, it's a one-off." I wrote it. I didn't do a lot of worldbuilding. Basically, when I got into doing the actual hard-core how long does it take to get people into space when you're kickstarting a space program… I'm like, "Oh. Elma's just wrong."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] About some of her memories. She's just conflating them.

[Dan] Just misremembering.

[Mary Robinette] Just misremembering.

[Brandon] I run into this a lot. But it is nice to establish viewpoints that are untrustworthy for this sort of reason.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So a book that I'm reading right now that's doing a really interesting job of this shifting viewpoint is Semiosis by Sue Burke. It's a multigenerational novel. So you will move forward like an entire generation, and it's a colony world. So the first generation are the first people on the planet. Then the next generation are kids who've grown up there. The way they view their parents versus… The worldbuilding is fascinating, because… They're… You see how they're shifting and how the culture is shifting to adapt to the place that they're living. It's really, really interesting. It's all POV that's doing it.

[Brandon] Now, that is not our book of the week, but it would be a good book for people to read.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] Dan actually has our book of the week.

[Dan] Yeah. The book of the week actually hits this topic perfectly. It is Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Which is a YA fantasy. Big secondary world fantasy set in a world inspired by Africa. What's fascinating about it… Many things are fascinating about it. But pertinent to this discussion, there are three viewpoint characters. It's a world where magic has been stolen. No one can do it anymore. The people who used to be able to do it are an oppressed class. So one of our viewpoints is one of these kind of former mage people. Then we have a princess who has been sheltered her entire life and runs away from home. Then we have her brother who is struggling with the King's policies. So they all have completely different ideas about what the world should look like and what it does look like and how they want to change it. It's really fascinating to see the interplay of those viewpoints as you go through.

[Brandon] Excellent. That is Children of Blood and Bone. I was on a panel with her, and she was really interesting. Had some really cool things to say about magic. So I anticipate it being a great book. Emily really liked it.

[Dan] Yes. She describes the book as Black Panther but with magic.

[Brandon] She does.

[Brandon] Now, one of my favorite ways to use viewpoint in worldbuilding, to intersect them, is by the way the characters describe other characters.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Uhuh.

[Brandon] I first picked up on this as a young person reading The Wheel of Time, where… And I'm not going to be able to quote these exactly. I'm sorry, Wheel of Time fans, but you have one character who would describe someone and say, "Wow. They look like they spend most of their day at the forge." Then another character describes the same person and says something along the lines of "Wow. If you beat that person at cards, leave early. Because otherwise, they'll jump you in the back alley." Those two descriptions are both "This is a tough, intimidating person." But seen through the eyes of two very different characters. I love this sort of thing. Description. Now, my question for you guys is, do you ever worry about the blend of… When you're in narrative, how much you're going to let the character's voice direct the narrative and how much you're not?

[Mary Robinette] It does depend on whether… Which voice you're using. Are you using first person, or are you using tight third? Because first person, all over the place. It's no problem. But with tight third… With third person, it is a tricky line. Because what I find is that the… Unless it is very obviously voice-y, that the reader will interpret that as being safe and trustworthy. So I tend to try to be fairly honest when I'm doing narration that is less flavored than when I'm doing something that… If I'm doing free indirect speech, I try to… That's… I try to reserve the perceptions for those.

[Brandon] Yeah. I always kind of go back and forth on this, because, of course, Robert Jordan did very much a lot of tight thirds. There would be these moments where it felt like it was right in their head, and other times when the narrator was speaking. He balanced it really well. I'm always a little scared about that. Because you do want the narrator, the non-present narrative, to be trustworthy. But you want the viewpoint of the character to maybe not be.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes it's a thing that you can do… I was just reading The Killing of Kings by Howard Andrew Jones. It's not… At the time of recording, it is not yet out. But one of the things that he does is there is this character who's constantly… Male character who's constantly looking at women with a very male gaze. Like, constantly looking at boobs and ass. Just all the time. Then will say things like, "I don't understand why this woman doesn't like me."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right. Right.

[Howard] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] "It's like she's always so cold and distant. There's always a piece of furniture between us." I'm like, "Yep. Yes, there is. Absolutely, yes, there is." But it is… It's deftly handled, because he is staying absolutely true to the character's point of view. But by giving us very obvious physicality and recognizable body language from the other character, he's telling us how this behavior is actually perceived in the world.

[Brandon] Later in the year, we're going to do an entire week on writing imperfect worlds. Or imperfect characters. With… Using topics like this, not validating but acknowledging that some people are like this. We will cover that. It's going to be in a few months, but we are going to get to that. That is one of the… That's like Using Viewpoint and Character Level 501.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Being able to pull off some of this stuff.

[Brandon] Before we go out, any tips for writers on making their sentences, particularly their worldbuilding sentences, do more than one thing at once?

[Howard] What do these people swear by? I love that. My favorite examples of this currently are from the various different NPCs in the ESO world, where they swear by different gods. They are consistent in the way this works. It adds a measure of depth. Because some of them will swear by those gods, and somebody who is from the same culture will never utter those words. You can now tell that those two people are actually different. That's not the sort of thing that you expect to see… Well, if you grew up with video games. It's not the sort of thing that you expect to see in a videogame. But videogame writing has progressed to the point that we are expecting that level of worldbuilding, especially in dialogue that has to be read by an actor in a way that sounds conversational and believable.

[Dan] Very similar to that, and I'm starting to notice this more as I read… In the current science fiction that I'm reading, is what our people allowed to make jokes about. Which jokes can come from which species in the space station? And things like that.

[Mary Robinette] I would say, for me, the tip that I would hand to our listeners is to make sure that your character is interacting with their environment. Which is where I started us, but I'm going to give a really concrete example. Like, I can describe a room and say, "The room had marble floors, tall vaulted ceilings, and green velvet curtains." That tells you what the room looks like. But if I say, "My character's heels clacked across the marble floor as she strode to the window. The velvet was soft against her skin as she pushed the curtains back." You know so much more about the character and the world. So you're getting both things at the same time. I think that's going to make it feel richer to the reader, as well.

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

[Howard] I do. This is the from-within, from-without episode, the Buck Rogers, Wilma Deering, the Twoflower, Rincewind. Take a character who is alien to the culture or the setting that you are writing within. But obviously has a reason to be there. Describe things from their point of view. Now describe those same things from the point of view of a native. Somebody who's grown up there, who's been there, who is familiar with it.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.02: Geography and Biomes

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

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

[Mary] Season 14, Episode Two.

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

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

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

[Mahtab] Thank you for having me.

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

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

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

[Dan] All year long.

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Brandon] Okay.

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

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

[Howard] [breath] Uh.

[Brandon] Put you on the spot?

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

[Brandon] Okay.

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

[Brandon] Awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Dan] They did.

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.01: Worldbuilding Begins! Up Front or On the Fly!

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/01/06/14-01-worldbuilding-begins-up-front-or-on-the-fly/

Key points: Season 14 is about setting, a.k.a. worldbuilding. Broad pictures, and refine as needed while writing? Worldbuild until you reach an interesting question, something that will sustain interest for a book, then outline and research. Upfront to find points of conflict and friction. Ramifications and ripples often cause revisions. Sometimes you hang a flag on it, and justify why it has never been noticed before. Sometimes you just put a note in brackets and keep going, sometimes you go back and revise. Sometimes you make it up as you go, until you just have to stop and define it. Frequently, when you are in the middle, you just make a note to revise later, then keep going. Two categories, questions that can be bracketed and keep going, and those that must be checked before further writing. Sometimes you start with worldbuilding in hand, then realize partway in the implications, and have to patch those holes. Restrictions breed creativity. Learn to roll with the holes!

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode One.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Up Front or On the Fly!

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're starting Season 14.

[Brandon] We are. I am Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I am Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] Welcome to Season 14. This is the last in our kind of five-year arc, which we started with Season 10. We have done How to Write a Novel. We have done Elemental Genres. Then we did Plots and Character and now we're doing Setting. It occurs to me, maybe we should have done that in reverse order.

[Mary Robinette] I think, you know, I feel like everything is happening for a reason. It's like we planned it…

[Dan] We're discovery writing our podcasts.

[Howard] It's not really all that uncommon to get to the end of the novel and start your worldbuilding.

[Brandon] That is true.

[Mary Robinette] That is true.

[Brandon] And this year…

[Dan] What we're talking about today…

[Brandon] We will be studying worldbuilding. We will have some guests which we'll introduce to you as their weeks,. This first week, we're generally going to take some writing topic, general topic, and attack it from worldbuilding directions. So we're going back to a kind of familiar how much do you do upfront, how much do you do as your writing, and how do you work those two different styles together. But we're talking specifically about worldbuilding this time. So let me ask you guys. How much worldbuilding do you do upfront before you start writing a given story?

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, it varies. I will either… Like, I usually have some idea of sort of a general shape of things. Then it's not until I get deeper into it that I start to go, "Oh. Maybe I should really know about…" Which I find is actually very similar to the way that I do research for historical stuff, that I sort of have broad picture ideas, and then I refine my research. It's just that when I'm doing worldbuilding, the reference library is my own brain.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Howard] I do enough worldbuilding… I worldbuild… I mean, with Schlock Mercenary, I am often appending to the worldbuilding, adding politics or whatever. I worldbuild until I have reached an interesting question.

[Brandon] This is for a given story arc [garbled]

[Howard] For a given story arc. An interesting question, an interesting character twist, something that I feel like I could explore for an entire book. Then I begin outlining the story. Usually within the outline process, I'll realize, "Oh. I need to answer some more questions, I need to keep worldbuilding." But that first point, I worldbuild until I found something that is a really fascinating question. When I say question, like a moral question. Like what if or why or…

[Brandon] You can't… Could you name any of those off on the fly, so to speak? I don't want to put you on the spot. I know when people asked me questions like this for a specific example in my lines, I always him like, "Oh…"

[Dan] You're like, "Yes, I do this all the time, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head."

[Howard] [chuckles] Sure. If immortality technology is freely available, where is the pain in death?

[Brandon] Okay. That's a good science-fiction question.

[Howard] I mean, as soon as I ran into that, I realized, "Oh. The stories are going to tell themselves. This is awesome."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] As the stories, as I write, people are answering that question, characters are answering that question for themselves. They are finding their pain points. I'm discovering that. As I discover them, there are related pieces elsewhere in the worldbuilding that I know I'm going to need to lock down.

[Brandon] For me, a lot of my worldbuilding upfront that I'm doing is searching for those points of friction and conflict. I'll often be looking for what's going to make a problem for the characters, what's going to make a problem in the world. An example of this being Stormlight Archives, it's pretty obvious. I started with the storms. This is going to change all life around it. That's the sort of thing I spend a lot of time worldbuilding upfront.

[Mary Robinette] I find that… It's similar for me. There's often ramifications and ripples. So I've talked before about in Ghost Talkers that Mrs. Richardson was not… She's not in my outline it all. Anywhere. But as soon as I have… I just had her knitting because I needed something for her to do with her hands. Then I learned about knitted codes. That gave me all of these ripples that went through the world. This is a thing that all say often happens that you'll… Sometimes you'll discover something deeper in and then you have to go back and do revisions. I'm actually going to flag one that you all may have noticed which is that I introduced myself as Mary Robinette. This is an example of worldbuilding, that when we set up to do the podcast initially, I introduced… I had to make the choice, do I introduce myself as Mary Robinette, which in the South is a double-barreled name, or do I introduce myself as Mary, which is easier. I made that choice because I'd given up decades ago. But the ramification of that is that no one… Everyone thinks that Mary is the correct thing. So I was like, "Uh… Let me adjust my worldbuilding." But it has this ripple effect on everything else. That's one of the things that I think is really interesting when you're looking at… When you're looking at your novel, you'll discover something about a character or about the world, and then you have to go back and make it consistent.

[Dan] Fix it all. So we're retconning the podcast now.

[Mary Robinette] We're retconning the podcast.

[Dan] So that you've been Mary Robinette for…

[Mary Robinette] The whole time.

[Dan] Like 12 years.

[Howard] Except we're not… I mean, you're making a joke, and it's funny, and I like that, but we're not [garbled]

[Dan] Thank you, Howard.

[Howard] Most deadpan…

[Laughter]

[Howard] That was actually a very good joke, Dan, you should write that down.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] We're not retconning it, though. What we're doing by now naming the person who used to be Mary, Mary Robinette, is exploring an aspect of Mary's character which has always been present, but which, for various reasons, Mary has not floated up into the foreground of the story. Now she is, and the audience learns new and exciting things.

[Dan] There we go.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's also… It's a hanging a flag on it technique which we use a lot, too, when we have those moments where we're like, "Ah…" Because sometimes I will do this, too. I've discovered a thing, and rather than going back and fix it, I will justify why no one has noticed it up until this point.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I have never done that before.

[Dan] Never.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Let me ask you, Mary Robinette, then… When you discovered the knitting thing. At what point did you go and study that, and at what point did you put it into the story? So when you were creating this character, you're adding knitting to their character… Did you write the whole book? Did you stop? Did you worldbuild and then go back to the book?

[Mary Robinette] So what I did was I made a note to self in brackets and then kept going. Then… A couple of different points where I'm kind of waffling on something anyway, I'm procrastinating a little bit. I remember very specifically going back and adding her bringing a sweater. That someone in the circle was now wearing a sweater that she had made for them. I remember going back and adding that to highlight the importance of the knitting and bring it to the foreground. So that was… But the… She'd already knit wrist warmers for everybody.

[Brandon] Okay. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because… I think that was actually… So that was actually why I made her knit, was because I wanted to… It was a worldbuilding detail that I put in to talk about how cold it was, because of the spirits. So that worldbuilding… So that's one of those…

[Brandon] Oh. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Details that, like, totally ripples down. It's like they all have wrist warmers…

[Brandon] Right. You need to show that it's cold, not just tell us it's cold.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Brandon] You need a character, therefore, who is doing this thing. You hit on that… I love it when that comes together in a story.

[Dan] Yeah. All these other things pop up. One of the worldbuilding details that I completely made up late is how the monsters work in the John Cleaver series. I did not actually codify it until book four.

[Mary Robinette] Nice.

[Dan] Like, I personally didn't even know how it worked until book four. We started, and I turned the first one in. My editor, Moshe, he said, "Well, you need to make sure for the rest of the series that there's some kind of consistent element." So on his recommendation… That's when I had all the monsters dissolve into tar, basically. Eventually, in book four, I realized I have to know how they work. I have to know how they function. So that is something that I had to make up throughout the series. I kept throwing in more details, and finally had to sit down and go, "Okay, let's define this."

[Howard] One of the reasons that that was so effective… Because what you were writing is horror. If, as a writer, you've already determined how the demons work and fallen in love with it, you are more likely to reveal that detail early rather than late. By saving… We don't know through the entire first trilogy, and that keeps the first trilogy scary in a way that the second… The second trilogy, you had to do different things because we now had an understanding of how the demons work.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Although… With the caution, dear listener, that withholding of information from the reader is usually not as interesting as giving them information.

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

[Mary Robinette] So, our book of the week is The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi. In this book, there is a big Galactic Empire, and people travel from point A to point B through the Flow. What is happening is that the Flow is suddenly shutting down. They don't actually know how it works. It existed before they got there. So this Empire, that's basically built on these… Well, we'll call them wormholes although they're not… That's built on being able to travel these vast intergalactic distances is collapsing. It's wonderful storytelling about what it's like to be on a world where you know that you are not going to be able to leave that planet.

[Brandon] You're used to the idea.

[Mary Robinette] Used to the idea of being able to… Specifically, the way it's collapsing in on itself, you can go to the planet, but you cannot get off of it again. During this period. So it's a really interesting thing. Part of the reason that I thought this would be a good example for our listeners for this particular episode is that I know that John had those big ideas about the Flow and the idea of it collapsing. But I also know that he is very far on the pantser end of the spectrum, and that most of the other details, a lot of those other things, he figured out as he was writing it. You cannot tell which is which.

[Brandon] Excellent. So that is The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi.

[Brandon] So I'm really interested in this specific idea. I think on the podcast in previous years, we've talked a lot about how to research and do your worldbuilding, but I'm really interested in this idea of times when you're in the middle, in the thick of it, and then you stop and realize you need something, and how you actually go about doing that. For me, it is almost exclusively coming from character, because character's the thing I do the least upfront work on. When I'm writing the book, often the passions of a given character and their interests and how religious they are or whatever on whatever axis we're looking at suddenly drives me into saying, "Well, I need to have these steps." A lot of times, even though I'm an outliner, I will just keep going and say, "Make sure you know more about this when you come back to the story." Even as an outliner, I do a lot of that. A lot of the asterisks, a lot of the make sure you add this in here sort of thing. Do you guys do that?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, no. Never!

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There are two categories of questions for me. Category one is I don't remember how many ships they actually had in that one fleet or I haven't determined how many ships they have in that fleet. Anything I write now needs to be in brackets [Howard figure out what this number is] or it needs to be a strip that allows it to continue to be nebulous. Then there are places where… There's a recent strip that was a good example of this. If I don't have the fact exactly right, the punchline doesn't work. I cannot write this scene until I have that piece of information. In which case, I will stop writing in order to go research a thing or figure out a thing. In this case, I had to email Myke Cole and ask if an executive officer… The joke was the captain goes down with the ship, the executive officer musters the dead. Because the XO… They're in a place where the dead are recovering in a virtual space, and the XO is taking roll. The XO musters the dead. Myke's response was, "That is something that an XO would say. I've never heard it before." I was like, "Oh. Oh, Myke, thank you so much. That is perfect."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That is exactly the ground I want to be on. I could not have written the joke, though, without somebody telling me that.

[Brandon] Any other examples? Specific ones from your books or stories?

[Dan] Well, in the Mirador series, my cyberpunk, I did a lot of upfront worldbuilding on the kinds of technology that I wanted to have and… Drones that did everything and everyone has a computer in their head, and started writing and realized that I had inadvertently created what was either a post scarcity or an incredibly wealthy society in order to have that level of ubiquitous technology. So, kind of the off-the-cuff worldbuilding that I had to do was to figure out, well, I don't want that, how can I still have all the toys without… While also having economic pressure? That is where the idea that robots have taken all our jobs and that there's nothing left for humans to really do. That's where that came from, was me trying to patch the hole and make the rest of the worldbuilding work.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I'm familiar with those holes. One of the things that I've got in the Glamorous Histories is that I have… I decided that… And I've talked about this on the podcast before, that the glamour does not actually cast light. Because if it does, then why would you have candles and all of that? But astute readers will notice that I also refer to a warming charm, and that… The problem is that if you can actually generate heat with this, that a lot of different things start to unravel.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] By the time I realized that, the book was already published. So then I had to justify it. I'm like, "Well, okay. So why… Maybe it's really dangerous." But if you can do this heat transfer… That was what, more or less, like that was what caused the cold mongers to happen. Was having to justify this decision that I had already made.

[Brandon] There's a… There's an adage that the game designer, the head designer of [garbled Magic: the Gathering… Magic uses?] Which is restrictions breed creativity.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] Which I've always heard, and I'm sure he got somewhere. I think a lot of times people are afraid that their worldbuilding is going to have holes. But you're going to inevitably have holes in your worldbuilding. Learning how to take that and kind of roll with it can often lead to stronger and more interesting storytelling later on.

[Mary Robinette] There's a saying in puppetry, "If you can't fix it, feature it."

[Brandon] Yeah. That's a great saying.

[Mary Robinette] At the same time, there are times when you're like, "This makes complete and total sense." People will still see it as a problem. Like, in Calculating Stars, I have an email that you can write to me and say anachronism that. I genuinely want to know. But the number of people who have written to me to complain about the transistor radio… I am like, "I've launched satellites…"

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We've got three satellites in 1952 already in orbit. Part of the reason that we did that was because actually transistors come in a little sooner, and the reason a transistor radio is there is to let you know that. But it reads as a mistake.

[Brandon] Right, right. Yeah. I would say one of the most interesting aspects of this for me was… I've spoken about this a lot. With The Way of Kings, there was a main character in the final product who was not a main character in the original draft. His name is Adolin. What happened is I needed to split off a bunch of chapters from a different main character because they were feeling to at conflict with themselves. I needed two strong characters who had strong opinions, rather than one character who was vacillating between two opinions. That's the easy way of putting it. So I said, "Well, I'm going to make his son a viewpoint character and give his son the other perspective." It ended up working really well. But then the son, who's a duelist and very interested in high-fashion and things like this, made me say, "Well, I need the stuff that he's passionate about. I need to know this." He's become a very big part of the books, because of this thing I changed in the first book. I think that a lot of times, writers are scared of this, when they don't need to be. Certainly you do want to try to not have holes, but you're going to anyway. So learning to roll with them is the way to go.

[Mary Robinette] Sometimes even when you don't, people will think you do.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Dan] Well, something we've talked about before and you can see a lot in writing is when the characters are driving the story and when the story is driving the character. I think characters like Adilon… One of the reasons that he is so interesting is because you built the rest of the characters first, and he came out of the world. He was developed more organically, because he had to be, because the world already existed.

[Howard] So he's native. Everybody else moved in.

[Dan] The world drove him in a way that he didn't… That it didn't drive the creation of the other characters. I think that that… You can tell.

[Brandon] Right. It creates, in some ways, a much stronger… Well, strong in a different way…

[Brandon] We are out of time. But Dan has some homework.

[Dan] All right. So, we decided we were going to gamify this for ourselves to keep this fun. So, because we've been talking about kind of improving your worldbuilding, we are going to give you three worldbuilding elements. Then you need to write a scene incorporating them. So these are set for you in advance. The rest of the worldbuilding you have to make up on the fly to patch all the holes.

[Brandon] Dan doesn't know what these are.

[Dan] I don't know what they are. The three of them have written something down on these little cards, and I'm going to read them. Here are your three worldbuilding elements. Red food is taboo. Hairstyles are important. Different species or races of sophont who cannot interbreed or share food. All existing in the same space. So there you go. We have two food related ones. That's kind of cool. So there are your three elements. Write a scene using those. Fill in the rest of the holes as you go as they appear.

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

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Writing Excuses 11.Bonus-04: Fantasy Food, with Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/11/29/11-bonus-04-fantasy-food-with-elizabeth-bear-and-scott-lynch/

Key points: Food engages readers. It contains worldbuilding, economics, trade routes, and many other interesting points. Potatoes! Don't forget the peasants. Who eats beef? Think about the logistics. How long does it take to cook, what are the ingredients, who eats it? Think about the health consequences. Oysters and lobsters. Characters' reactions are more interesting than what they are actually putting in their faces. Don't forget the potatoes!

( What's cooking in your pot? )

[Dan] I'm kind of thinking… And, actually, our time is up, so it's time for us to go and get dinner. But first, we get homework.
[Scott] Homework. All right, well, your homework is to go out and cook something. Actually, that's useful homework. But my actual writing homework, since I have to give you a prompt. I want you all… All of you! Yes, you. I want you to take a character of your own who is beloved of you, and I want you to make them the antagonist, plausibly, in somebody else's story.
[Elizabeth] And does this involve food?
[Scott] It can involve food. I want you to cook while doing this.
[Howard] Oh, way to throw down the gauntlet.
[Dan] Awesome. Cool. All right. So. Thank you very much, Scott and Elizabeth. You're wonderful.
[Elizabeth] Thank you.
[Dan] Listeners, go out and read Karen Memory and all of their books. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
[Elizabeth] Now go write.

Current Mood: thirsty

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Writing Excuses 11.46: Colonialism with Steven Barnes, Tempest Bradford, Dongwon Song, and Shveta Thakrar

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/11/13/11-46-colonialism-with-steven-barnes-tempest-bradford-dongwon-song-and-shveta-thakrar/

Key Points: Colonialism? Contextualizing conversations about race and culture in history. Manifest destiny. What gets appropriated, how it's told, and who gets to tell. Justifying taking things from other people. Colonialism is two-directional, first the impact on those who were colonized, but then reflection when those people internalize it. De-colonize, don't diversify. Colonizing erase culture, but it also creates cultures. Navigating that intersection of cultures is our challenge. Colonialist narratives make colonizers feel better about themselves, and those who are colonized or marginalized feel worse about themselves. The meaning of a communication is the response you get, and repeating an offensive communication is not respect. Repeating a trope again and again, the impact accumulates, and leaves a mark, a wound over time. Doing this is a craft problem -- why are you repeating what 10,000 people have done? Do something new, exciting, interesting, and specific instead. There are resources out there. Sit down, talk to someone, and do your research.

( Lots and lots of good stuff! )

[Mary] That is great advice to end on. So we are going to end by giving our listeners some homework, or a writing prompt. Which I…
[Tempest] That's me.
[Mary] You got that?
[Tempest] I got the writing prompt. All right. So. What I want you to do is I want you to take a character that you know very well. You want to start… Do this exercise the first time with a character that's not yours. With some character from a book, TV show, movie series, whatever…
[Mary] Fanfiction!
[Tempest] Yeah. That you know all about that character. Or you feel like you know all about that character. Write a character sketch of them. Like one page, two pages. Then change that character's… Something about that character's identity that has to do with their race, their ethnicity, their culture, their… Where they come from. Make that change. Think about it. Then sit down and write the character sketch again. Really think about what would be different about that person, about their history, about their life, about the way they interact with people that they're on the superhero team with or their friends or whatever it is. How those things might be different? How they might be impacted by that major change?
[Mary] That's a great prompt. So I'd like to thank our panelists. I would like to thank our listeners on the Writing Excuses cruise.
[Whoo! Applause.]
[Mary] You guys are out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: overloaded

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Writing Excuses 11.Bonus-03: Some Books Have Maps in the Front, with Maurice Broaddus, Mur Lafferty, and James Sutter

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/11/03/11-bonus-03-some-books-have-maps-in-the-front-with-maurice-broaddus-mur-lafferty-and-james-sutter/

Key Points: A map is often the first step in worldbuilding. Maps help with blocking a story, because you know how to get from A to B. Borders, resources, maps help you understand the setting. How do you make a map? Cheat! Use an existing map (research), or even parts of maps. Take a look at Google Maps/Earth, and the pattern of things, then mash several parts together. Make coastlines shaky, rivers flow downhill, and so forth. Different cultures put cities together differently! Technology like a rotary sprinkler can shape farms. Small towns and mountainsides have a different shape, too. Cities grow for a reason, and roads. Now, put a map in the front of your book!

( Turn right at the first street after the church that burned last year... )

[Dan] This is a dual-purpose podcast. Awesome. So. We need to stop. We… But we do have one last little bit, that James is going to give us some homework to do.
[James] Yeah. I'd say, take two of your favorite books, and take a big idea from each of them, whether that's part of the setting or a character or whatever, and mash them up so you get something new.
[Dan] Awesome. Well, thank you very much. Thank you to Mur and James and Maurice. We loved having you on the show. Everyone else, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: foggy

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Writing Excuses 11.19: Fashion for Writers, with Rebecca McKinney

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/05/08/11-19-fashion-for-writers-with-rebecca-mckinney/

Key Points: Mistakes writers make about clothing? Jokes are only funny if they are right, so get the words right! Know what you are talking about. Make sure that different people describe clothing different ways. Think about the economy of clothing in your books! How does clothing link to the economy, environment, technology, even labor. Describing clothing should move the story forward, by describing something important about the person. To learn about clothing, try books about sewing or costumes. Try Pinterest. To worldbuild clothing, think about materials, technology, and adoption. What is fancy? What do people do at home, and what is expensive?

( Get out your scissors, needle and thread... )

[Brandon] We are out of time.
[Rebecca] Sorry.
[Mary] No, this was great.
[Brandon] No, this has been fantastic. This has been a really useful episode. We really appreciate you coming on, Rebecca.
[Rebecca] Oh, stop, I'm blushing.
[Brandon] And, Rebecca, you're going to give us some homework.
[Rebecca] Yes. I think that you should describe the same outfit from two different points of view, and how does that person see them, and why?
[Brandon] Excellent. Thank you to our studio audience.
[Whoo! Applause.]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

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Writing Excuses 7.14: Writing Excuses

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/04/01/writing-excuses-7-14-writing-excuses/

Good Reasons Not to be Writing: Writing is Hard! Relax first. You're not as good as Tolkien, and he spent 20 years worldbuilding. Don't forget cat vacuuming! Clean your keyboard. If you start, be willing to throw it away after writing a page of crap, and write it again. Many times. Give yourself a reward for rewriting that page! Consider taking a Walden Pond break. Or hide everything you write in a drawer (aka The Emily Dickinson Ploy). Set up a pulley and bucket! Or try the George RR Martin approach to fame, don't give the fans what they want, postpone! The thesaurus, notecards, and cats can help you explore the many arrangements of your first page. Try to catch sydlexia. Grow a beard! Research valid character voice by listening to all the audible.com samples of books read by famous actors. Don't forget to organize the results. Then choose which actors should play the characters in the book you aren't writing. Keep in touch with pop culture -- watch plenty of TV, keep up with the memes, definitely track YouTube. Consider hosting YouTube parties! Write your own rejection letters, give your internal editor some exercise. Collect Magic cards and other rewards to motivate yourself. Sort your books (and cards) by color. Invent some new letters, or a whole new alphabet. Try writing in second person omnipotent. Practice bomb threats.

( Apropos April Fools... )
[Brandon] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. We've given you lots of excuses. You have no excuse to not write, now. I think.
[Mary] If not, come back to us and we can give you some more.
[Brandon] Thanks for listening.
[Howard] Please don't make a bomb.

Current Mood: popped

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Writing Excuses 7.13: Man-Versus-Nature

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/03/25/writing-excuses-7-13-man-vs-nature/

Key Points: With man-versus-nature, you don't need a stereotropical evil overlord to threaten the whole world, you can just blow the sun up! Conflict highlights aspects of characters, and man-versus-nature, especially disasters, often highlights heroism. Often man-versus-nature forms the large scale plot, with smaller scale man-versus-man conflicts set against that. There are several types, such as mop-up after the catastrophe, let's prevent the catastrophe, and struggle to survive. For man-versus-nature, you need good worldbuilding, but you also need a compelling main character, someone that readers want to survive. To embellish the simple external plot arc of survival, give the character something to accomplish, something to care about outside themselves.

( Behind the flaming curtains... )
[Brandon] Okay. We're going to go ahead and give you your writing prompt. Your writing prompt is Jack Black is stranded on an alien planet, alone. We can blame Howard for this. And write a story about it.
[Howard] The challenge is, you need to write a story where we like Jack Black and want him to live.
[Brandon] Of course, don't actually use Jack Black. Use a gregarious type of character like him.
[Howard] Zach Galifianakis.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You might have a few excuses following that, but go write anyway.

Current Mood: surviving

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Writing Excuses 5.34: Story Bibles

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/04/24/writing-excuses-5-34-story-bibles/

Key points: Use the tool that works for you and your project. Consider the scale, who needs to use it, what works for you. Story bibles can help you get the ending correct. They can help you avoid continuity errors. They can help you remember and keep track of all the details. Worldbuilding, and your story bible, need to match the story you are writing. Story bibles are where you infodump for yourself, to inform your writing. And keep the infodumps out of your books.

( the long, long, long paragraphs )
[Brandon] Dan. Writing prompt?
[Dan] Yes. Writing prompt.
[Brandon] Save us from long boring paragraphs.
[Dan] Okay.
[Brandon] Come on. Do it fast.
[Dan] Well, I had one until you threw me off. Okay. What I want you to do is write a story in which there is a...
[Brandon] A character doing something?
[Dan] A character that's doing something. No. Someone is a were-animal that is the kind of animal you would never be a were-anything.
[Brandon] Oh? Good.
[Dan] We have werewolves and werebears and all that stuff. I want to see like a were-banana-slug, some ridiculous thing.
[Brandon] Okay. Well. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, kind of. Now go write.

Current Mood: linked

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Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld

from http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/12/05/writing-excuses-5-15-steampunk-with-scott-westerfeld/

Key points: Steampunk is Victorian science fiction, extrapolated without restriction to current notions of possibility. It's also very tactile. Fashions and manners and brass and chrome and leather. Plus flamethrowers. Not just a literary genre. To write Steampunk, start with alternate history world building, and add other technologies -- crazy weird stuff. The familiar and the strange. Do your research, but don't bury the characters and the story under the world. "If it's not fun, you're doing it wrong." Cherie Priest.

( Under the steam robot clanking... )
[Howard] Final piece of advice for us, Scott? For writers who want to embrace the steamy punkiness of the Victorian era?
[Brandon] Or just any writing advice?
[Scott] Well, I'll quote Cherie Priest. "If it's not fun, you're doing it wrong."
[Brandon] Writing prompt is Tesla is President. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: clank

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Writing Season Four Episode 30: World Building the Future

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/08/01/writing-excuses-4-30-worldbuilding-the-future/

Key Points: A guiding decision -- is the future of your story comprehensible or not? Post-singularity? Consider consequences. Strategies: worst-case scenario, best-case scenario, consider the human element, what's cool. Are you telling character-driven stories or idea stories? Can you work backward -- what story do you want to tell, now what framework does that imply?

( Unrolling the future... )
[Brandon] We have a writing prompt. I think we have a writing prompt that will come magically to us from the ether. You are instructed to write your story based on this concept, and here it is.
[Unearthly voice] Oh, no, it's the were-cuttlefish! [strange chomping noises] You are out of excuses and time. Now go write quickly before it gets you. [more strange chomping noises] [Pop! Pop!]

Current Mood: transformed

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 17: More Q&A at WorldCon

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/09/20/writing-excuses-episode-3-season-17-characters-worldbuilding-qa-with-mary-robinette-kowal/

Key points: What do you do when characters revolt? Check -- is this the right character? Are you bored with the story? Are you forcing yourself to follow an outline, and you are a discovery writer? Or go ahead and write it out, then decide whether or not it is better. What's surprisingly hard about writing? Starting something new, doing revisions, doing all the parts -- beginnings, middles, ends. How do you build a world and history for your story? Study history. Reuse fiddly bits. Plan and take advantage of serendipitous happenstance. For new magic or technology, consider -- how does it affect the poorest class, the richest class, and how can it be abused?

( Details, details... )
[Brandon] That's very good advice. All right. We'll go ahead and end with the writing prompt which is you're going to write about a band called the Predestined Monkeys...
[Howard] I thought you'd just make them write about a predestined monkey...
[Dan and Brandon] [garbled]
[Howard] It can be a band of predestined monkeys.
[Brandon] Something like that is your writing prompt. This has been Writing Excuses. Special thanks to Mary for sitting in on three of these. Thank you all, audience, for giving us questions. Keep on listening.
[Dan] You have no more excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: scrivening

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Writing Excuses 5.23: Life Day!

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/02/06/writing-excuses-5-23-life-day/

YouTube Video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly7ji_-qaI8

Key points: holidays come from the environment, commemorative days, deaths, etc. Characters should have a wide range of reactions to holidays. Watch for different cultures. Individual holidays. Don't overexplain. Do use holidays to make the setting richer, real, and to add depth to characters.

( no video, no audio, just text... )
[Dan] Now we need to break, so we are going to have a writing prompt, and we are going to throw that at Dave. Close us out, here.
[Dave] Your writing prompt for today is to make up a holiday that nobody else has come up with before. Something you've never seen, that's not based upon a holiday that you celebrate, I guess is the way to say it.
[Dan] OK. That sounds good. It can be bone puppet day, if you want.
[Dave] Bone puppet day is really good.
[Howard] If you're going to use bone puppet day, mix it with something else. There has to be something interesting happening with the bone puppets.
[Dave] Change the name, otherwise we're going to have bone puppets everywhere.
[Dan] All right.
[Howard] You're out of excuses, folks. Now go write.

Current Mood: awful

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

September 2025

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mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.23: Governments Large and Small
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.9: Showing Off
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.7: How Weird Is Too Weird?
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.02: Geography and Biomes
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.01: Worldbuilding Begins! Up Front or On the Fly!
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.Bonus-04: Fantasy Food, with Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.46: Colonialism with Steven Barnes, Tempest Bradford, Dongwon Song, and Shveta Th
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.Bonus-03: Some Books Have Maps in the Front, with Maurice Broaddus, Mur Lafferty,
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.19: Fashion for Writers, with Rebecca McKinney
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.14: Writing Excuses
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.13: Man-Versus-Nature
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.34: Story Bibles
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Season Four Episode 30: World Building the Future
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 17: More Q&A at WorldCon
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.23: Life Day!

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with worldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.23: Governments Large and Small

Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules

Writing Excuses 14.9: Showing Off

Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1

Writing Excuses 14.7: How Weird Is Too Weird?

Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.02: Geography and Biomes

Writing Excuses 14.01: Worldbuilding Begins! Up Front or On the Fly!

Writing Excuses 11.Bonus-04: Fantasy Food, with Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch

Writing Excuses 11.46: Colonialism with Steven Barnes, Tempest Bradford, Dongwon Song, and Shveta Th

Writing Excuses 11.Bonus-03: Some Books Have Maps in the Front, with Maurice Broaddus, Mur Lafferty,

Writing Excuses 11.19: Fashion for Writers, with Rebecca McKinney

Writing Excuses 7.14: Writing Excuses

Writing Excuses 7.13: Man-Versus-Nature

Writing Excuses 5.34: Story Bibles

Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld

Writing Season Four Episode 30: World Building the Future

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 17: More Q&A at WorldCon

Writing Excuses 5.23: Life Day!

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September 2025

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