Writing Excuses 17.43: Bodies. Why? (Depicting Disability)

Oct. 26th, 2022 07:00 pm
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Writing Excuses 17.43: Bodies. Why? (Depicting Disability)
 
 
Key Points: Depicting disability. Pitfalls? Characters represented by, trapped in, or confined to their mobility devices. Disabled characters sacrificed or martyred to help the protagonist grow. Baby strollers in front of runaway buses. Disabled characters as evil or a burden. Disabled characters who are only there to inspire the protagonist by their efforts to overcome. Disability superpower -- losing one sense makes others superhuman. How do you depict disability well? Don't make the basic story, premise, plot, or structure, be about the disability. Make the disability part of who they are. Show us an abled character realizing that disability isn't the problem, it's the world around us that's the problem. Think about the disability as it affects the character moving through the world, not as a plot point. Writing aliens can be a good warm up for writing about disabilities. 
 
[Season 17, Episode 43]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Howard] Bodies. Why? (Depicting Disability)
[Chelsea] 15 minutes long.
[Fran] Because you're in a hurry.
[Will] And we're not very smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Pause]
[Howard] I'm Howard. I'm late.
[Chelsea] I'm Chelsea, and on time.
[Fran] I'm Fran.
[Will] And I'm Will.
 
[Mary Robinette] Awesome. So today we're going to be talking about depicting disability. Fran, why don't you orient us a little bit about what we're going to be talking about this week?
[Fran] Sure. If you were with us last week, we were talking about writing disability for all different kinds of genres and different age groups. Will brought into the mix some really important aspects of writing disability, which is not to be pejorative, not to talk down to your audience, not to talk inaccurately about representation. So we're going to be diving into that a little bit more so that you can start to think about what the pros and cons are of disability representation in fiction, whether you're writing from your own experience which is important and we want to support and encourage that, or if you are looking to deepen your narratives and make sure that you have more good-quality representation on the page.
 
[Mary Robinette] So why don't we start off by talking about some of the pitfalls? Then we'll get into the nuts and bolts of how to avoid those pitfalls. But let's start out by warning of the dangers. How are some ways that depicting disability can go horribly, horribly wrong?
[Chelsea] Character is represented solely by their mobility device and no other way. Character is trapped in or confined to their mobility device and no other way. This goes for other types of disability as well. But that one is one that always jumps out at me.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Will?
[Will] Sacrificial characters? Characters sympathetically martyred for the journey of an able-bodied protagonist. Yeah. It happened like eight times in Star Wars: Rogue One. Which I very much enjoyed. But just over and over and over again, somebody with some sort of injury or robotic prosthesis would die horribly as a direct result of their immobility, so that our protagonist can feel things.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Howard] The trope… The classic trope is the stroller in front of the runway bus. Where the baby stroller only exists to depict the inability of the baby to get out of the way of the bus. It's not about… It's just there to create tension, to create drama, it's not… It's a trope. We see it way too often.
[Chelsea] Character without agency trapped in front of bus, briefly, is that little bit.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Chelsea] Representations of disabled characters as either evil or a burden are also ones that jump out.
[Will] Richard the Third.
[Chelsea] I'm thinking of Dr. Poison in Wonder Woman, which has been written extensively about by writers including John Wiswell and Elsa Sjunneson, and really, really worth paying attention to. We'll get back to that with body horror in a couple of weeks.
[Mary Robinette] The character who spends all of their time trying to get rid of their disability and exists for no other reason than to provide the protagonist with inspiration for how much they are overcoming.
 
[Chelsea] Can I sum up the disability superpower thing?
[Fran] Oh, yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Please do it.
[Chelsea] Okay. Okay. The thing where a person, usually their disability is about not being able to sense a certain thing, is like an acute super sensor in a different kind of way. I'm thinking of Hawkeye and I'm thinking Daredevil.
[Fran] Oh, my gosh, Daredevil.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah.
[Laughter]
[Will] There's a very Daredevilish character in Rogue One, too.
[I mean, I like them. We do. I like them.]
[Chelsea] We all are sort of making an oh my gosh gesture in our hands.
[Fran] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Chelsea] I just…
[Will] I'm curious. Chelsea, you just said I like them. I want to know what… Say more about that like… The like that combines with the cringe.
[Chelsea] I mean, the thing is that when you're talking about Daredevil, when you're talking about Hawkeye, one of the things that… Specifically, when I'm thinking about Hawkeye is that Clint Barton is really good at what he does, and he is a superhero, and he is deaf. Yeah, okay, that's great. You know what, because why wouldn't you be? Why couldn't you be a superhero with a disability? Like, let's do that. That sounds awesome. But, like, I kind of feel like particularly with blindness, this whole idea is like they can't see, so they hear super well or they smell super well or all of their senses are completely hyped up and it makes them superhuman, which actually makes them inhuman.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Whereas I felt like, with Hawkeye, at least in the latest series, it was he's deaf and…
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] And it has no impact on his superheroing. He just is deaf. The most is… Like, he takes the hearing aid out when he's tired of someone talking.
[Chuckles]
[Chelsea] It's a real bonus, I can tell you, that one.
[Laughter]
[Will] I also noted that he was kind of crap at ASL.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. Because an adult acquirer.
 
[Mary Robinette] So let's go ahead and pause for the book of the week, and after we come back, we're going to talk about how to do some good representation. So, Will, I think you've got our book.
[Will] Yes. This book is a realist middle grade novel, recently published, Air by Monica Roe. It is fantastic. I loved it. It's about a kid in a wheelchair who is saving up for a stunt wheelchair in a community of well-meaning… That includes a lot of well-meaning adults who have no idea that stunt wheelchairs exist and think it's a terrible idea. But she builds a ramp in her backyard. What brings her tremendous joy is catching air on that ramp. That flies in the face of how disability and the use of a wheelchair is constructed around her. Which is endlessly frustrating. But, of course it's… It just beautifully scratches all of the misunderstood kid of tremendous talent that no one recognizes and that everyone is trying to [overpower?] with very good intentions. So there is overcoming in it, there is protagonist overcoming difficulty, but the difficulty is not that she uses a chair, that's just fact. The difficulty is what that chair means to everyone around her versus what it means for her. So the construction of meaning and a mobility device as symbol or not, as harmful symbol or not. I really, really loved it. Monica is also a former student. Graduated from Vermont College of Fine Arts where I teach and Fran also teaches.
[Mary Robinette] So that is Air by Monica Roe. Sounds amazing.
 
[Mary Robinette] It also sounds like it is a great example, from what you were saying, about how to do depict disability well. It's because, as you say, the chair is just fact. It's everything around her that is the problem. So let's get into some of the nuts and bolts of how do you do depict disability well. So, for me, one of the things that I've found is very much along the lines of what Will is talking about, is that it's in the… It begins in the story construction, that your basic story, premise, plot, structure, is not about the disability. It's not about overcoming it necessarily, but it is about there is a person who has a disability and they are adventuring the same way everyone else adventures.
[Chelsea] I was kind of thinking about that positive depiction of disability. Mostly what I want, particularly, is a person who is [garbled arguing?] is I don't want… I don't want to be a brave little toaster about it, I just… I want a story in which like I get to read a character who is hard of hearing, and that it's just part of who they are. Like, it might be that they want to be like basically run any part of their life where they have to hear or do substitutions for hearing the way they want to do it and it works. I'm writing a story in which I have a character who is hard of hearing who prefers not to speak and uses sign language, and that is okay because a sign language is an official language of the country that they're in.
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Howard] One of the thoughts that I've had is we see so many ablest attitudes in the world we live in. It's just everywhere. It's the water that we swim in. In a story where we are depicting disability, having a character, an abled character undergo the journey where they recognize the disability isn't the problem, the broken world around us is the problem. That doesn't need to be the whole arc of the story, but that's the sort of beautiful thing that I feel like ablest people need to read more of.
[Chelsea] Yeah. It's more… I think it's more like please don't think of us as an inspiration. Please, just get your act together and build some ramps. Come on.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I… There's an experience that I had when I was living… Or not living. I was traveling and I was in Brisbane and I thought, "Oh, I must be sharing the hotel with a medical conference, because there's so many people in mobility devices." When I went out for lunch around the hotel, it was just everywhere. I was like, "Well, it must be a bigger conference than I thought. They must be in multiple hotels." Then I realized when I was talking to a friend who lives there, who's a double amputee, and he's like, "No, no. It's just that Brisbane is a modern city." It wasn't built until the 80s, most of it. So it was built with ramps. There are older historic buildings that don't, but most of it has ramps. The reason that I was seeing more people with mobility devices wasn't because it was a larger population, it wasn't because there was a medical conference, it's just because they could get around the city.
[Howard] They've always been there. You just happened to be in a place where you can see them, because now they get to go everywhere.
 
[Mary Robinette] Right. So this is the thing that I think about with my own fiction. It's like, "Okay. Well, which of my characters has a disability, and which of them are invisible disabilities that they don't share with other people, and which of them are ones that they… That are visible, that they have to deal with other people's reactions?" Then, also thinking about how that affects how they move through the world. For me, that is the piece, the nut and bolt, is thinking about how it affects the way the character moves through the world, but not thinking of it as a plot point.
 
[Will] I think what's a very important way of practicing this that I'm almost reluctant to bring up, because it can go so horribly wrong, but so can everything. But, I mean, especially in genre, especially in science fiction and fantasy, especially… There are opportunities to work with metaphor, if only in practice. A lot of the ways that I worked up to addressing disability in my own work, I sort of like gradually acquired the courage to do it. Initially, indirectly, in side ways and metaphors. Writing about bodies and writing about different bodies moving through space. Like, okay, I'm going to write about aliens. Wildly different aliens. Just different bodies means different relationships to setting and surroundings. If one of your characters is 20 feet tall, that changes a fair bit about the scene. None of these differences were coded as disability. But they all significantly affect the way the characters move through space and interact with their surroundings. It's just… I don't know what the experience was as a reader, but just as a writer, I found it as a first step, I found it very freeing towards a destigmatizing and sapping the pejorative meaning out of certain kinds of embodied differences by making up new ones. As a warm up towards writing about differences and bodies moving through space. Often, literally outerspace. Because it's great, because, I mean, weight matters differently, and sometimes sign language is really important when no one can hear you because there's no air. So that was… Yeah, that was a warm up.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's great. What are some other ways that people can depict disability in ways that are good representation, but also good storytelling? I mean, I would argue that good representation is good storytelling, so I should probably rephrase that question, but…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The challenge, for me, is that… And I'm going to come… I'm a cartoonist. One of the things that my people, the cartoonists, hate above all things is the crowd scene. If I'm drawing a crowd scene, the fastest way to do it is uniform little head ovals and some silhouette lines that indicate that there is a crowd. If I nudge some of the ovals up and some of the ovals down, I can show that there is a height difference. What I have not done is depicted the parting of the crowd that will occur if there's someone with a mobility device. Or if there's someone holding children. Because I'm a lazy cartoonist. Sorry, that's an oxymoron. No, that's redundant.
[Laughter]
[Howard] It's… We hate drawing crowd scenes for this exact reason. If you want to populate it and have it be realistic, you have to populate it with a realistic diversity of people. It's hard to draw. So doing it right means, for artists, looking at photographs of places where it is done right. Where everybody is out. Looking at photographs of Brisbane, and looking at what a crowd looks like there, and rewiring my mental map so that I have a scribble-y shorthand that says, "This crowd includes people in mobility devices. It includes tall people and short people. And whatever." It's a broad crowd. In prose, I don't know what that looks like. Because the moment you wrap words around a description of who is in the crowd, you call our attention to them in ways that the background scribbles don't. So I'm answering the question with another question. I want to be diverse in the population that I put in the book. But I don't want to inappropriately call attention to something… I say inappropriately. I don't want to accidentally make a promise to the reader that this story is going to be about the fact that there's a person in the wheelchair in the background.
[Mary Robinette] I think that a lot of times those promises are implicit, and promises that the reader brings with them. You can just like not worry about it.
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. I have a story that I will tell about an editorial note. I'll tell that in a later episode. Right now, I think we should probably go ahead and wrap up. For those of you who are paying attention, you may have noticed that Fran has not been with us for the back part of this episode. The computer kicked her out, and she hasn't been able to get back in at all. So the Internet is its own environment, and presenting its own challenges. So we're going to go ahead and go on to our homework assignment, which Chelsea has for us.
[Chelsea] Hello, I have homework for you. What I want you to do is I want you to write a scene with two characters. One person has a disability, and the other person does not. What I want you to do is I want you to write that scene from each character's POV, paying particular attention to the setting.
[Mary Robinette] That sounds great. So, you are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

Feb. 13th, 2019 10:10 am
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.44: Alien Characters

Nov. 7th, 2018 11:26 am
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Writing Excuses 13.44: Alien Characters
 
 
Key points: Don't just model your aliens on a human civilization, because context matters! Start with landscape and geography, and create characters from that, or start with characters and figure out what kind of environment would create them. How does the medium you use to portray your alien portray this? How does being alien affect their point of view, their communications? How does their communications affect their lives? Completely alien motivations? Shelter, reproduction, and food drive humans and aliens. But which side of the road do you drive on? Often, even very alien things can be related to something in our society, to make it understandable. What is their motivation? Don't use the sense of wonder as a bludgeon! If you throw in something confusing, that is a promise to the reader that you will use it, and fulfill the promise. Look for the moment when the alien and the human reach understanding, and let the reader get it, too. After your metamorphosis, you may not even remember your own name!
 
( In the liner notes... )
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alien Characters.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] I'm Mary.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Brandon] And…
[Howard] Everybody was expecting me to be an alien.
[Brandon] Yeah, we all thought you'd say, "I'm Howard," in Klingon.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Alien characters. So. One of the nice things about kind of having a science fiction/fantasy themed podcast, even if not all of our topics are specifically about that, is we can occasionally dig into something like this. How do you write from the viewpoint of a race who has never existed and is supposed to seem very, very strange to the person experiencing the narrative?
[Mary] So, first of all, let me suggest that you do not base them on a human civilization. Because human civilizations exist with context that is specific to the world around them. The aliens would have grown up in a completely different context. You can certainly take patterns that people go through, but just taking and saying, "These are my…" Like Dune. I mean, Dune are humans. But still, these are my pseudo-Arabic kind of desert people…
[Howard] Yeah, these are my bug people who are all like Roman Centurions.
[Brandon] Well, I'm going to say that's very natural for us to do, because human creativity is recombining things we haven't seen. We're going to suggest that you push a different direction and combine different things.
[Mary] Well, the problem is that if you aren't thinking about the context, you can go terribly sideways. So what I do say… Suggest is that you first look at… I mean, you can go a couple of different ways. I say first… You can either begin with the kind of landscape and geography, and create the characters from that, or, you can begin with the kind of character that you want and then backfill to the environment that created that.
[Brandon] Okay. So.
[Howard] Ultimately the question that needs to be asked first is how is this alien… What is the medium by which you are going to portray this alien to the person consuming your medium? I get to draw pictures. So I can do things that people who are writing prose can't do. If all you have is words, then one of the tools that you are going to have to look very closely at is, how does being this kind of alien affect the way their point of view would be described? How does it affect the way they speak, if they are able to speak in the language that your other characters speak? Because as a writer, words of the tool that you have to describe that.
[Dan] That's where I wanted to go, because that's how I always start, is with the form of communications specifically. How is this… Because that's what the character's going to be doing throughout the story, is communicating in some form. How are they going to do that? So as an example, in the Partials series, the Partials themselves, I gave them a pheromonal communications system. They can speak, but they can also communicate through scents and these other things. That changed absolutely everything about their society, the more I followed the ramifications of that. Of how they would interact with each other, of how the humans would perceive them, of how they would perceive the humans, of all of the problems that would arise when they try to talk to each other and are obviously missing obvious cues. So, starting with that form of communication, for me, is incredibly helpful.
 
[Brandon] So, let me ask you guys this. How do you write a character whose motivations are completely alien?
[Mary] There are, I think, some motivations that are consistent that you can actually pull into the aliens. That are consistent with humans. I think most creatures will have a priority on shelter, reproduction, and food. And, at a very base level, that is what drives all of us. So you can look at how that then affects the aliens. So I had… I wrote a story called The Bride Replete which was all aliens all the time. I did not have a human viewpoint character, humans just don't exist. For that, looking at, okay, so if reproduction is important, then how does the… What is this society reproductive structure look like? What does the family unit look like for this? Once you get that, then it becomes much easier to extrapolate based on… Or to convey it in a way that will make sense to a human reader.
[Brandon] Okay. So, but…
[Howard] That's…
[Brandon] My question. That's great. My question, though, is how would you write one that didn't have one of those motivations? Completely alien motivations?
[Howard] Coming up with the motivation is often difficult. Let me describe the motivation that we don't think of as alien, but which probably looks pretty alien if you pull away all of the indicators. That is, I want to be on the left-hand side on the freeway. So I can go faster. There is this tendency that we want to be on the left. Why? Because there's these rules of the road that have nothing to do with our biology. If you have an alien, who as part of their socialization, they want their eye line to be lower than yours. The way that this interaction is going to take place… Why do they keep getting on the ground? Why are they lying down? Why does… Why do these things keep happening? Why is the physical positioning changing in ways that… If there are human characters, they don't understand.
[Mary] But see… The wanting to be on the left side absolutely does have to do with our biology, because it's a holdover from that's the side that your sword was on. Because most people were right-handed.
[Howard] Well, except in England and South Africa, it's exactly reversed.
 
[Brandon] I'm going to cap this one. I think the point that perhaps is salient here is even in your description of that, you can find something to relate in our society that you can tie it to. Is that the idea? Take something that seems completely un-relatable at the beginning, but over time, kind of relate it to something that the reader's going to understand?
[Mary] I guess… What I… My point was… Is that if you're talking about an alien that has a completely alien motivation, that, for me, that motivation is still going to be rooted in one of those three things at some point going back to it. You can use that as the line with which to communicate it to the reader. So, if my alien motivation is needing to be on the… Needing to have the lower eye level, well, why does that exist? Is it… Is that a shelter strategy? Is that a reproduction strategy? Is that a food strategy? Where does that come from? Then, that informs a lot of the… Why they make those choices, even if it's a holdover.
[Brandon] I think that's very cool. Of course, it makes me, as a writer, want to say, I want to find something that's not related to…
[Garbled]
[Mary] Absolutely.
[Brandon] A challenge. When we hear that. All right. I think that's where I'm going. But I want to… But, yeah. I think that this is one way…
[Howard] I'm interested… Oh, go ahead, Dan.
[Dan] So, I'm thinking of two example specifically, and both of them hinge around the idea of how that motivation is presented. The first one is kind of a cheat. In the movie Arrival, because you're not actually getting a viewpoint from the aliens, the entire story really hinges around, "Well, what is their motivation in the first place?" So they can have something that is incredibly alien, and the humans are all just trying to figure it out. Are they benevolent? Well, why would aliens be benevolent? It's hard for some people to even conceive of that. One of the other examples I'm thinking of was actually a piece of War Machine fiction written from the point of view of an incredibly basically evil race of people. What made it so well done is that the entire story was written from within that moral framework. So, when all the viewpoints you were getting took as granted that these are the principles by which obviously we should all be living our lives, then it started to make an incredible kind of internal sense.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] One of the examples that I like to look at is from the second of James P. Hogan's Giants novels. There's a… The planetary ecology… They evolved in such a way that nothing could eat anything else except plants. All of the animals developed the we are toxic strategy to where evolutionarily, it becomes so expensive to try and be something that ate other animals that it was a planet full of vegetarians. The artwork that they created… I say the artwork. Actual pictures of the world made no sense to us because it looked like a children's book because it was so brightly colored. So this is one of those cases where something that we would expect as a given… I mean, whether or not that's actually practical. Something that we would expect as a given had been ripped out and all of these aliens were now suddenly very, very alien. War? Eating meat? Completely… Completely not part of their psychology.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dan, you're going to tell us about Blood Rose Rebellion?
[Dan] Blood Rose Rebellion. Which, for the most part, does not actually have any real alien characters in it. It's by Rosalind Eaves. It's historical fantasy. It starts in a version of 1800s London where magic is real, and is purely the domain of the upper class. Our main character is a teenage debutante who's ready to come out into society and can't because she does not have magic. So the parents are embarrassed and they end up shipping her off to Budapest to live with Grandma, where polite society won't know that they have this non-magical daughter. Then she gets involved with one of Hungary's many rebellions. It is one of the most beautifully written YA anythings that I have ever read.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Dan] Incredibly cool. For… To hit our topic a little bit, there are some weird magical creatures that keep kind of slipping into our world. Although we don't get to know them well, they're really just fascinating and gorgeously described.
[Brandon] Now we also… When we were brainstorming for this, we wanted to promote this book because we love it. Because we thought it was awesome. But we… Mary came up with a story that the rest of us hadn't heard of that…
[Mary] Yes.
[Brandon] If you want to read something really alien.
[Mary] This is Love Is Never Still by Rachel Swirsky. It's available at Uncanny Magazine. So if you just go there and type in Love Is Never Still, it'll pop right up. This is the Pygmalion story. So the sculptor who creates Galatea, the sculpture, and comes to life. It's told from like 20 different viewpoints, including Summer the season.
[Brandon] The season has a viewpoint?
[Mary] Yeah. The pedestal that she stands on has a viewpoint. She has a viewpoint while she's still a piece of marble. The hearth god's hammer has a viewpoint. It's just… It's amazingly complex and varied and just a great example of this alien viewpoint thing.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Dan] And where can people find that?
[Mary] Uncanny Magazine.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Mary] Dot com.
 
[Brandon] So, one of the things that I see happening when using alien characters is the writer's specifically choosing one aspect of their culture that is just going to confuse the reader intentionally. I kind of thought of this as using a sense of wonder as a bludgeon.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Something that you're not even going to make your story about or explain. It's just look at how bizarre this is. Have you ever done that? Is… Like what are the advantages of that? As a writer, I would think… Because everyone's just staring at me as they think… I think the danger would be when you put something like that in a story, you're going to assume that it's going to take like a Left Hand of Darkness turn or something like that. The thing that is at first confusing or different is eventually going to become a major story point or character motive or things like this.
[Howard] It's a promise. It's a promise to the reader when you open with that. You gotta have a reason for it. I don't know what promise necessarily you're making, but if your story's going to be a success, the reader at the end has to feel like you've fulfilled on that promise. I don't like doing it that way. I think I've done it before. Where I've just drawn something weird because I thought weird would be fun. Mostly it was annoying, and I realized I haven't justified this in a way that's entertaining me.
[Mary] I think it does depend on how it's positioned in the story. If it's positioned in a way that you're making the reader go, "Why is that?" And then you bring it up again, and they're still going, "Why is that?" They're going to feel like that's a promise. If you just bring it up once and it's a piece of tonal color and it's like in mid-paragraph, so in a position of non-importance, they're probably just going to accept it and move on. So I do think it depends on a little bit of that.
 
[Howard] One of my favorite alien cultures of my own is the Oafa, who are the hydrogen bag… That look like blimps. Their language, once they've learned Gal-Standard, their language is full of wind metaphors and flavor metaphors. Boy, did I have to go to the thesaurus to pull this stuff up. But, as I was writing dialogue between the cultural liaison and the multi-million-year-old librarian, at one point the Oafa librarian says to the liaison, "You've been breathing the air of the poets," because she has made a wind metaphor that works. That moment, when you have a character moment like that, where the alien and the human have come to an understanding, and the reader gets it, the reader feels awesome. That's what I was aiming for. Not sense of wonder, but just sense of being included, sense of being part of that relationship.
[Mary] I had a story in which my characters… The species was based on kind of like the lifecycle of a butterfly. So they spend an incredibly long time as a caterpillar, and then they transform, and then they're this beautiful, beautiful creature. So in this society, the young, the larva state, is the state that gets all the work done. Because when they go through the transformation, metamorphosis, when they come out on the other side, their memories are totally scrambled. So the adult state is your retirement. Because of that, they have built this whole system around memory and have hired documentarians to come in and document their life so when they come out of the cocoon, they can try to remember things. So one of the things that I was playing with in the beginning of the story is that question of why are you documenting things? Then realizing, "Oh, this is what's at stake." That you will come out and not know your own family.
[Brandon] Wow. Sounds cool. What's the name of this story?
[Mary] I can't remember the name of my own story.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] That's funny, because [garbled]
[Dan] So go out, readers…
[Mary]'s Well, I wrote down the name of the other one, The Bride Replete. But I forgot I had… I forgot about this one. Yeah, the Bride Replete was basically what happened… I know…
[Brandon] We'll put it in the liner notes.
[Mary] I'll put it in.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do our homework. Howard, you had homework for us?
[Howard] Yes. As I said at the beginning of the episode, the tool that you have is a writer in order to convey alienness is words. Most frequently, that is going to come up in the way someone speaks. If you are familiar with doge-speak, which is the Shiba Inu meme…
[Dan] Which you might know as doggy speak…
[Howard] Doggy speak.
[Dan] Because there are competing pronunciations.
[Howard] Take that language. You can look up grammar rules for that language. It's recognizable, even without a picture of a dog under it. Take the rules of that language, and take dialogue from one of your characters and turn it into that. An example here, and I'm just going to read two lines of it, of someone having done this to Shakespeare. What light? So breaks. Such East! Very sun. Wow, Juliet.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.B1: Bonus Episode – Elephants and Death, with Lawrence Schoen

Aug. 27th, 2018 12:20 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
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Writing Excuses 13.B1: Bonus Episode – Elephants and Death, with Lawrence Schoen
 
 
Key Points: (no tusks). Elephants and death? In particular, uplifted elephants and death. Exploring the human condition through things that are not human is at the core of science fiction. With anthropomorphic animals, you get aliens plus we are already familiar with them. Then add in animal society. Why does Schlock Mercenary have elephants? Because everyone agrees uplifting the African elephant was a mistake. Whack-a-mole is hard because prairie dogs are precognitive. Animal behavior and alien behavior gives stories traction for exploring human attributes. When characters stop being animals and become people, that's great. Because humanity doesn't care what flesh it's wearing or what the DNA looks like. We are complex patterns of organized information, and that information shouldn't vanish just because the meat we are wearing has gone bad. What if you had foreknowledge that this is the last thing I will make? What if you knew this was your last day, your last week? Remember the saying, "Live today like it was your last." What does that mean? "Wait. I haven't..."
( Don't make the animals hungry... )
[Mary] Season 13.
[Howard] Our patrons, over at patreon.com/writing excuses, have made it possible for us to record more than just 52 episodes in a single calendar year. This episode is one of those bonus episodes. Thank you, patrons, for making this possible. Thank you, listeners, for joining us, and if you'd like to become a patron, I already gave you the URL.
 
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses. Elephants and Death, with Lawrence Schoen.
[Dan] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Dan] And with us, we have my beloved roommate for this convention...
[Oooo]
[Dan] At GenCon, Lawrence Schoen. Lawrence, tell us about yourself.
[Lawrence] Oh, wow. I wear lots of different hats. And that… I never wear hats. I am a cognitive psychologist. I'm a hypnotherapist specializing in authors' issues. I'm the founder and director of the Klingon Language Institute. A small press publisher, and oh, yeah, when there's time, I write novels.
[Dan] Awesome. Thank you for coming.
 
[Dan] We are not going to talk about any of those things.
[Sweet]
[Dan] We're going to talk about elephants and death. The reason that we have this is because when we were discussing topics, I was really excited about uplift, and they were really excited to talk about death, because I'm the one who writes about death, and they're the two that write about uplift. So…
[Chuckling in the distance]
[Dan] Both of you have uplifted elephants featured prominently in your science fiction.
[Lawrence] That's true.
[Dan] Why?
[Lawrence] The fact that you ask that question means that no answer I give you would be satisfactory.
[Chuckles]
[Lawrence] Because elephants are just cool, and they are fun to write, and they were the protagonists of the novel, so… I ran with that. But the novel's all about death, as well, so it's… I am the bridge between the two of you.
[Howard] He's very much… The Barsk novel. I loved it. Is… It's a great exploration of the psychology of death. The elephants… The Phant, as you called them...
[Lawrence] Fant.
[Howard] Fant.
[Lawrence] Because they have their own writing system, which I did a typeface of. It's the Fant font.
[Howard] Oh.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Okay. You get one of those, and that was it.
[Lawrence] It's a live show. I figured…
[Dan] Now you guys know exactly what it's like to be his roommate.
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] But the exploration of that through what is essentially an alien is… That is at the core of all that is science fiction. We are able to explore the human condition through things that are not human in ways that we probably couldn't if we were writing about humans.
[Lawrence] This is the fun thing about writing about anthropomorphic animals, because you get all the great things you get when you write about aliens, but we already know them. So I get to draw in various things that an ethologist would have… Does research on like elephant societal structures and then just… Oh, and they're intelligent, so instead of… In regular elephant… In regular? The kind we have, females and children all wander around together in like large family units, and when male elephants reach maturity, they go off on their own, as like wild bachelors. We have this in Barsk. So if you're a realtor on Barsk, there are these enormous family homes, and all these little tiny one-bedroom apartments.
[Howard] Bachelor pads.
[Lawrence] Bachelor pads. And the men keep moving around, they never stay in one place very, very long, because they have to keep moving. They will travel to other islands, and on and on like this. The womenfolk are there, raising… So it's… I always think of it as that line from Gilbert and Sullivan, "And we are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts." Obviously, your listeners need to listen to HMS Pinafore more.
[Laughter]
[Lawrence] It just changes the whole way you approach society.
 
[Howard] I recently watched Zootopia, and in the special features on Zootopia, the guys talked about going out to Africa and watching animals. Their design for the characters in the film completely changed after seeing this, because they were doing exactly what you're describing. They would take the groups… Instead of, "Oh, here's a giraffe and here's an elephant and here's a lion… Giraffe, elephant, lion, antelope, whatever," they started grouping them the way they would group in the wild. It was kind of brilliant and beautiful. And it informed… I love watching the special features. It informed the story from there. My elephants… Dan asked why'd you guys put elephants in… Was a terrible, terrible mistake.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I told a joke... I've been to Africa. On the safari, they warned us the most dangerous animal out here is not man, because none of you have guns. The most dangerous animal out here is the bull African elephant. Do not make it angry because that's the only thing here that can kill us while we're in the car. They have terrible tempers. I mean, you piss them off and they're all over you. So I told a joke about uplift. We've uplifted this, and this, and this. And the one thing everyone could agree on was that uplifting the African elephant was a mistake. My readers… I did not realize at the time, my readers felt like I'd made a promise to them that there were going to be elephants in the comic. Heh.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Drawing… The scale between a human being and elephant is pretty dramatic.
[Yes]
[Howard] Putting them all in the same panel took a lot of really annoying work.
[Lawrence] I've always appreciated that extra of effort you've put into them. I've noticed those strips seem far and few between. But I always appreciated that.
[Howard] I haven't gone to the lengths that you've gone to in order to incorporate elephant culture, because if there's anything worse than drawing one elephant, it's drawing 10.
[Laughter]
[Lawrence] Well, let me give you another example of the same…
[Dan] Fighting in a circus.
[Howard] Fighting in a circus.
[Laughter] Fighting in a circus.
[Howard] What a terrible idea that was.
 
[Lawrence] And then the gravity shuts off. But… Barsk is… I mean, Barsk is the name of the planet where the elephants live, but it's the galaxy full of over 100 uplifted races. Species. It's another example of drawing on real animal behavior. There's a scene where one of our villains goes to meet a bunch of prairie dogs, who happened to be precognitive. They're all in a…
[Precognitive]
[Lawrence] As they are.
[Laughter]
[Howard] That's why whack-a-mole is so hard.
[Laughter]
[Lawrence] He goes to see them and he enters the antechamber and one is waiting. He says, "Oh. You're waiting for me because you knew I was coming because you're precognitive." He says, "No. One of us is always here." Because prairie dogs always leave a sentry at every opening to a prairie dog colony. If you know that about prairie dogs, you go, "Oh, I get it. That's…" If you don't, you just say, "Oh, well. Schoen's too clever for his own good," and then you move on.
[Howard] And away you go. The animal behavior stuff, the alien behavior stuff, exploring human attributes through this, I think, is where, for me, stories in general really… That's where they get traction. When I see a piece of myself…
[Lawrence] The thing I like best when people tell me about their experience of Barsk is when they tell me they reached the point where they… The characters, the protagonists and so forth, stopped being elephants, that they became people for them. That's Yes! Because the humanity behind a character doesn't care what flesh it's wearing, doesn't care what the DNA looks like. That's where I was going with all of this, and that's why one of the themes about the book is things like intolerance and so forth. But we haven't gotten to death.
 
[Dan] Well, that's okay, because we're going to pause right now and you're going to tell us about Barsk. Not that we haven't been hearing about it for seven minutes, but… Give us the quick pitch. It is Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard. Tell us about the book.
[Lawrence] I will give you the quick pitch, because my wife wrote this… Helped me write this. She insists I do this every time. So. Prophecy. Intolerance. Loyalty. Conspiracy. Friendship. A drug for speaking to the dead. Also, elephants in space.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Howard] I'm in. Well, I mean, I already read it, but I'm in again.
[Laughter]
[Lawrence] I will sell you another copy.
[Laughter]
[Dan] So, that is Barsk, by Lawrence Schoen.
[Howard] Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard by Lawrence Schoen.
[Dan] By Lawrence Schoen. Go pick it up.
[Howard] Is it available on Audible yet?
[Lawrence] It is. The Audible… There is… If I can sneak in a quick thing about the Audible.
[Sure]
[Lawrence] So I mentioned… I know there's no rule…
[Dan] You got an actual elephant to read the…
[Laughter]
[Lawrence] Even better. Even better. You said we weren't going to talk about some of the other [garbled... hassleware?], but I have all of these people who follow me because of my work with Klingon, but they don't want to read my fiction. Because it's not Klingon fiction. So I reached out to an actor I knew, J. G. Hertzler, who portrayed Martok, Admiral Martok on Deep Space Nine.
[Dan] He's got the best frigging voice in the show.
[Lawrence] He's got the best… But he's never done audiobooks before. He recorded the audio for Barsk. It is beyond brilliant. I'm thinking this is going to be a whole new future career for John. I want my percentage.
[Laughter]
[Lawrence] Or at least I want him to do the next book.
 
[Dan] All right. So let's get back into this. It is not just Barsk, it is Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard.
[Lawrence] There's a colon in there.
[Dan] So death is a key part of this. How so?
[Lawrence] The MacGuffin there is that there is this drug that only… That is derived from a plant that only grows on Barsk, and certain people, under the influence of this drug, discover they can perceive a new subatomic particle. A subatomic particle of memory and personality. We all give these particles off every day we live. When we die, they disperse. If you use this drug, you can pull them back. When you have enough of them, that person materializes in front of you, and you can converse with him or her. This is the latest instantiation of this in my fiction. I just don't like death. I don't like the idea that death is the end of us. So in Barsk, the idea is we are all complex patterns of organized information. That information doesn't… Shouldn't vanish just because the meat we're wearing has gone bad. The parallel I like to give is you look up in the night sky and you're seeing the light from stars that don't exist anymore. But that information is still coming toward us. We happen to have eyes that allow us to perceive that. What we lack at the moment, arguably, is either sensory apparatus or hardware that lets us perceive the information each of us… That is each of our lives. So, the premise behind this drug is that it gives us that ability. Then we're off and running.
[Dan] That's awesome.
[Howard] The exploration of death from the eyes of someone who is uncomfortable with it, as most of us should be, I don't know how much of you saw when I was reading the book, but I saw a whole lot of me. There's a character in the very beginning… The point at which I knew you'd written a wonderful book was the scene where someone is carving. He knows it's the last work of art he's going to perform and it's not for him. It's for… I don't know what it's for. As an artist, the idea that at some point I'm going to make the last thing I make is a little terrifying. The idea that you might be given foreknowledge, you might know this is the last thing that I am going to make, and it is only for me. I wept during that. Because as an artist, and as writers, we want our works to outlive us, and I think we want to be read after we're gone.
[Lawrence] Part of the conceit of the title is on Barsk, when your death is approaching, you wake up one morning and go, "Oh!" And you have a destination in your mind. There is an island that you set sail to. Nobody knows where it is until it is time to go. If you… You won't tell anybody, because it's… They don't need to know yet.
[Howard] You're not dying.
[Lawrence] You're not dying. You don't tell anybody you're going, you just pack up and go. This is in the very first chapter. I think it begins with Rüsul. Rüsul went to meet his death. So he's in this weird state of his life is over, and he hasn't gotten to the island yet.
[Howard] He's not dead.
[Lawrence] He's not dead. But he is dead in that his life is past, his life is behind him. He's not physically dead. In his mind, he's filled out all the forms, he's said his goodbyes to the people he needs to say goodbye to, he took the things he wanted to take with him on his voyage, he's packed for the trip, and he knows where he has to go. Minor, minor spoiler is that the bad guys, who are basically everybody else in the galaxy because they want the drug that grows on Barsk, and they don't want to have to deal with the elephants anymore…
[Howard] They don't want to pay for it.
[Lawrence] They show up and they abduct him because no one's going to come looking for him, because he's dead. And we're off and running.
 
[Howard] The thought there, and I want to extrapolate this a little bit broader, because this appears through fiction all the time, how do you behave if you know that this is your last day? How do you behave if you know that this is your last week? I was in my 20s and somebody said, "Live today like it was your last." What's that really mean?
[Dan] That's when I just start breaking things.
[Laughter]
[Lawrence] It's no accountability. Well, it's… No. I mean, that's the first reaction. I'm going to get drunk, I'm going to get laid, maybe at the same time, and all these things. Black tar heroin, and whatever you want.
[Dan] Whatever I want?
[Lawrence] Whatever you want.
[Dan] StarCraft landing party.
[Laughter]
[Lawrence] Okay.
[Howard] This is your roommate, Dan.
[Lawrence] There you go. He's been sleeping with one eye open. But then you look at your life and you say, "But that's not me." I've actually had this conversation with other people. They said, "No. If I know it's my last day, I'm… Maybe I won't go to work. But I'll spend the day with my wife, and I'll take the kids to the zoo…" Ironically enough.
[Chuckles]
[Lawrence] Or "I'll go walk on the beach," or I'll make peace with myself. What are the things that I never got to do that I meant to do? And I'm okay with that.
[Howard] I remember a line in one of the VorKosigan novels where Miles gets shot in the chest and dies.
[Lawrence] He does.
[Howard] The last thoughts are, "Wait. I haven't…" And then it's done.
[Lawrence] Absolutely.
[Howard] That terrified me because I do not want that to be my last thought. Wait, I haven't…
[Lawrence] This goes back to… What's the poem? "When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain…" They burned that into me in high school, and it's like, "No. That can't be a thing. I have books to write, and I'm of questionable health." I'm thinking, "Man, this sucks. I gotta quit the day jobs so I can write more books. But then I'll die, because I don't have food or a house or… 
[Giggling]
[Lawrence] So, there is this compromise we play. But no, I have things to do, I have stories to tell. I just had my birthday last week, so it's like my mortality has been brought to my awareness again. It's like Whahahaha!
[Howard] That's what birthdays are for.
[Lawrence] That's what birthdays are for.
 
[Howard] Dan, are we morbid enough yet? I…
[Dan] Well, I think we need to take this cheerful tone and end the podcast on it. Because our time is up. Ironically.
[Howard] Oh, my.
[Laughter]
[Lawrence] Well, when you're out of time…
[Howard] You get one, and that was it. 
[Laughter]
[Dan] So. Give us a really quick writing prompt.
[Lawrence] Okay. Come up with a method for immortality, and then convince your protagonist not to use it.
[Dan] Very cool. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go…
[Write.]
[Laughter]
[Lawrence] I'm glad they didn't say die.
[Laughter]
 
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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode Three: Q&A, Also Stump Howard, At CONduit

Feb. 15th, 2011 09:58 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Three Episode Three: Q&A, Also Stump Howard, At CONduit

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/06/21/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-3-stumping-howard-at-conduit/

Key points: Laughter, consistency, and admiration make different beliefs easier to swallow. Eyebrows help aliens emote like people. Similarities can help us identify with aliens so that the differences can hit us in the face. Scenes that are hard to write may be the best scenes you ever write. Write your novel, submit it, and repeat -- 3 or 4 novels later, take another look at that oldie and see if you can't fix it up. To write about megalomania, read about it! Make sure the Evil Overlord's plans are believable and smart.
( All the little stumps )
[Howard] Writing prompt. We're going to go to the supervillain here. You've got a device that vaporizes water using microwaves a la Batman Begins. Now turn it into a believable superweapon that's not being used to destroy the world.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you for listening. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
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