Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 20.06: Lens 2 - Identity 1 - History & Community

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-06-lens-2-identity-1-history-and-community

 

Key points: The lens of who, by history and community. How much do you need to know about their background before the story to tell it effectively? I discover as I go, and then layer it in for continuity. Backfill! Beware the statement without narrative weight, without effect on the character. Consistency! History and identity and community are opportunities, not burdens. Make your identity verb-based. Where are they on axes of power? What stakes are driving the plot? What are their idioms? How does the character relate to their communities? Can anybody solve the plot problem, or does the character solve it because of who they are? Use pieces to imply a larger community or world. Make sure they have enough context. Build your net, drop something into it, and then tell us about the three or four threads that caught it. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 06]

 

[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Season 20, Episode 06]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] History and community.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] Today, we are going to continue our discussion of the lens of who by talking about what your character brings with them from who they are. Their identity, at its core, the communities that they come up in. Like, how much do you need to know… Question for the group… About who your character was before they entered the story in order to tell it effectively?

[Mary Robinette] I find that I often don't know the answer to that when I start writing, but sometimes, I will be writing and will discover a thing later as I go. But then I have to go back and layer into the early part of the story before I have made that discovery in order to have my character make sense and have them have continuity. In a beautiful, perfect world, I will have sat down and I will have figured out how old they are and how many siblings there are. But a lot of times, especially when I'm doing short fiction, I just… I just start writing.

[DongWon] You can backfill all that information in as you go. I think, in a lot of ways, like you're saying, it's not that you have to have prewritten the document ahead of time, though knowing that here's the town they grew up in or whatever. But be prepared that when something comes up, to find the answer in that moment, and give them that context that they're missing. Right?

 

[Erin] I actually think that layering and backfilling that you're talking about are actually the key things that I really want to talk about in this episode. Which is, how do the ident… Like, how does the lens of identity and community… How does that lay on the story? The reason I mentioned it that way is because sometimes I'll read people's work and they will have a fact about their character, they grew up in this neighborhood or they suffered through… They're an orphan and they grew up eating from a trashcan on the streets. As people do in fantasy worlds often. And it's like, I hear that. Then, when I read the story, if you had never told me that about the character…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I would never know it. It doesn't feel like it has any actual narrative weight. So how do we give the identity of our characters narrative weight in the story?

[Mary Robinette] I think it is a lot of the… It winds up affecting the choices that you make. For instance, if I am… If I have to walk down a dark street at night, I am going to make different choices than a six-foot white guy who lifts. I will be evaluating things extremely differently. So, for me, this gets into something that we'll be talking about later, it gets into some of the reactions that the character makes, and also the language that they use to describe things, the internal reactions that they have. All of those things are informed by their history, their experiences.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, as we're talking about this, I can't stop thinking about a meme that already feels dated, and by the time this comes out, will feel truly fossilized. But the whole, like, you didn't just fall out of a coconut tree yesterday. Right? You exist in the context of all that came before. Right? Like, the thing is, is when a character feels like they fell out of a tree yesterday, that's when it feels like a failure state. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon], like, you're saying, like, you can say the detail out loud of, like, oh they grew up on the street. But then they walk into a restaurant and, like, order all the food and, like, feel like so comfortable in that. It's like a diff… It's like is that really a character who just came off the street? Right? Or, like, what is the context that led to that? So, it's not that you have to prewrite all of the context before, but you do need the consistency of it. Like, when you introduce something, you need to make sure that that feels felt in the choices, in the wor… And how you're describing it, and how they speak and what they do.

 

[Howard] This is a microscale version of the game that I'm always playing with the macro of worldbuilding. Where I have to look at the implications of the thing that I've put in my world. If this character is someone who grew up during the Great Depression, or lived through the Great Depression, they have behaviors that don't make sense to me. Lot of hoarding of things that don't necessarily need to be hoarded is something that you'd find from that generation. So I'm always asking myself, are there implications that I need to examine of whatever this back story is. Sometimes I invert it. I have the character do a thing, and then I ask myself, this is an implication… This was implied by something in their back story that I don't know yet. What is that thing? Should I write that thing now, or should I just put a pin in it? Maybe have another character put a pin in it for me? Hey, why are you hoarding Mason jars? Why are you keeping Mason jars? And nobody answers the question. But now my readers aren't going to pester me about it. Because another character asked the question, and now we know that it's obviously justified, because someone else wondered why it was there.

[Mary Robinette] Can I offer a very specific example from something that I wrote where I had to backfill character? So, I have this whole Lady Astronaut series, and it started with a book… A novelette called The Lady Astronaut of Mars. In that, my character Elma, who in the novels is Jewish, is not Jewish. That's not a decision I had made for her. I'm not even certain that she's Southern. I think she probably is. But there's a line in that, in Lady Astronaut of Mars, in which she talks about eating crawfish as a child. Which is not something that most Jewish kids who are observant would do. So when I went back to write Calculating Stars, and I had made the decision to have Elma be Jewish for a number of different structural plot reasons, I had to come up with the back story that would have allowed her to have that experience as a child. That then informed every decision that she made going through the story. And then every subsequent thing. And it… So it is something that I have both discovered, but also that I had to shape the lens through which she was viewing the world in order to have that be a… Make sense and have a consistency for the character. That her family grew up secular, because her father was in the military and they were trying to mask the fact that they were Jewish to outsiders.

 

[DongWon] What I love about this story is… there's a little bit of a language we've been talking about this so far that almost makes it feel like a burden. Like, how do you keep track of it? How do you have this consistency? But what I love about it is the way in which history and identity and community are opportunities. Right? Like, you found a thing and that gave you an opportunity to make the character feel more interesting and nuanced and three-dimensional. Right? There… All of these elements of introducing aspects of the character's context, of their history, of their connection, are storytelling prompts for you to then fill out your role more, to find plot in it. Right? It's what I love about characters in role-playing games is that you don't just say a thing or introduce a thing, then it's suddenly, like, oh, the whole character's descending from this one prompt that… Or turn of phrase that he used or an attitude that they had. Erin, you and I were in a game together recently, and I introduced a character who was extremely cantankerous…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And fought with everybody. So then the question kind of became a little bit, why is she like this? Then we developed a whole relationship of, like, oh, she was sibling with your character, and, like, all of these other things. The joy for me is finding that opportunity and letting that be the seed for character, story, conflict, all the things that we want to make the story work.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that, to me, like, identity is such an important thing. It drives a lot of things.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Trying to figure out, like, why a character is the way they are, and all the things that they carry with them, is a huge part of writing for me. I think it's why I love voice so much. I think that one of the… A lot of times, we think of identity as noun based. It's about the things. Like, this person carries this item or eats this food or goes to this place of worship or what have you. But I think that, Mary Robinette, you sort of alluded to this earlier, to me, the interesting thing about identity is identity as a verb. The way you make choices, the way that you, like, take action in a situation is going to be… Hoarding is like, that's the verb. Do you know what I mean? Like, the Mason jar isn't the important thing. It is the collecting, the keeping, fear of things being taken away from you. I think that really thinking about how can we take identity from feeling like a noun, which I think can sometimes make things feel more shallow, like, I added all the right nouns, how come this person doesn't feel like they embody this identity? It's because their verbs haven't been changed.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Only the nouns have.

[Howard] There's a nineties sitcom… I can't remember the name, I don't think it ran past one season. But it had Jenna Elfman in it. At one point, she is very upset that she's going to this place and she's not going to identify with anybody, she comes from lower income or something, I don't remember. And her brother says, "You'll be fine. Y'all were raised by the same TV." I remember loving that line because in the nineties, we were kind of all raised by the same TV. But that's no longer a thing. That's… There's a different set of com… We weren't all raised by the same YouTube, the same cnn.com. The disparity of pop-culture background or the diversity of it is so significant now that you can't all be raised by the same TV. So I now ask myself often, rather than what are the implications, or what is this… How is this one character different in terms of background, I ask myself how is everyone the same on any point, and why? What is it that they would all have in common? How could they possibly have all that in common?

[Erin] Which is a great time to say that something that all of our episodes have in common is a break. And we'll be right back after it.

 

[Erin] All right. Thinking a little more about identity and community. So we've talked a little bit about what you do with it, but how do you, and I feel like I've said this in earlier episodes, how do you actually figure out, like, what your character's identity should be? You talked about making a character Jewish for specific story reasons. Is it, like, when we're picking the identity of the community of our characters, what are the things that we should be looking out for so that we can find those opportunities to make our stories richer?

[Mary Robinette] I have talked about this in previous episodes, the wonderful book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? This introduced me to the ax… The idea of axes of power. Which is why when I needed with Elma, I made her Jewish, was that I tried to think about where my character sits in axes of power. Where do they have power, where do they not have power? I try to make sure that all of my characters have at least two areas where they do not feel like they have power, where they feel subordinate in the larger society. Because that introduces vulnerability, but it also often introduces some of their strengths, some of the ways that they defined themselves. So that was one of the reasons that I did that with Elma, was that in Lady Astronaut of Mars, she's older, she's a caretaker. Both of those are sliders on that axes of power that are farther down. But when I move all of the way back to Calculating Stars, she's young, she's beautiful, she's smart. And I didn't have enough sliders that were lower on the power structure, and it was 1952. So I made that choice. But, for me, that's what I start looking for, is where do they feel like they are lacking in power and where do they have power that they are unaware of.

[DongWon] I love axes of power as a framework here. I think kind of ties into how I think about it. Which is about stakes. Right? When you have a character… Plot derives from character in my mind, because of stakes, because of a character's… How they relate to other characters, how they feel about them, how they feel about themselves. Right? So when you're looking at what stakes do I want this character to have, what relationships are at risk by choices that they make, or what pressures are put on them by the world that puts these relationships at stake? That leads you to the point where you're now asking questions about history and community. Right? Who are they connected to, what history do they have with that person, and why is that relevant for the story I'm trying to tell? Right? You get to plot by developing these stakes. But as you're asking questions of what is this book about, why am I writing this book? I think that's when you get to that layering in these pieces of history and identity and a sense of self.

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that… When we were talking about community, one of the other things that I have begun using as a shorthand since we did the space economy camp is thinking about the idioms that they grew up with. Because those shape the opinions that we have. They are parts that we don't… We often don't interrogate because it's like, well, everybody says, no such thing as a free lunch. But that's extremely different if you grew up with that as your truism, that's extremely different than somebody who grows up with their core idiom, their core truism, as a rising tide raises all boats. Like, those are two different ways of interacting with community. So I will often think about how the community defines that. Where the community sits with that. Like, if my character embraces that or if they push against it.

[Erin] One thing I really like to think about axes of power is who's aware of them. So, one of the biggest things that, like… There are many definitions of privilege, but one of the definitions is the ability to ignore the axes of power, because you're really high on it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So why do you care. Because I always think about… I know the book you're talking about, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? I remember talking to friends, black friends, about it at the time, being, like, well, why isn't it called Why Do All the White Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria, because they do too. So, but it's, like, no one ever asks that question because there's a… An idea that that's a default.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, that… Why wouldn't they? That's… They're just… That's just Jimmy hanging out with Jen versus, like, if I'm hanging out with somebody, then that is… Something is wrong there, something is off. So being able to recognize the axes of power and what your relationship is to them. Do you understand where you are in the world? Like, do you understand the axes of power that you're on, or is it one that you either can ignore or that you're in denial about? Like, what is the relationship? I also think it's interesting to think about, like… I love relationships between individuals and structures.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Erin] You know what I mean? So it's, like, you and an axis of power, or you and community. Are you someone feeling, like, you're in the midst of your community? Well embraced by them? Do you feel on the outskirts of one community, but the in in another community that you think is very core to who you are is also one that you feel at odds with, that's a very different character than one who comes from the exact same community but who feels like they are the absolute, like… I am that community. We view things exactly the same way, we use the same idioms, we do the same things. So I think thinking about how your character relates, not just to other people, but two other structures, is a really fun way of looking at it.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] One piece that I want to come back to is the idea of these lenses as a way to examine… Or a way the audience experiences the story. We're talking about who these characters are, what their history, their tradition, their influences, so on and so forth. Sometimes I'll have to ask myself whether the plot, mcguffin, action, the whatever it is that needs to happen to resolve things, could that have been done by anyone? Or can it only be done by someone who comes from this tradition? Because those are actually two very different stories. I like the story where anybody could have solved the problem, if they brought tools to bear and tried to solve the problem. But this character solved the problem in this way because of who they were. And that… For me, those are the stories that feel the most real. Those are the stories when I read them, I feel like I could have been that person. I'm experiencing the story as if I were there.

 

[Mary Robinette] You're making me think of something, just tying it back to something that Erin was saying, which is that you're using the tools that you have available, because of the experiences that you have. One of the things that I enjoy doing is thinking about this community, this connection. When you're looking at how to bring that to life on… For the character on the page for the reader, I often think about the pieces of the community that imply larger pieces of the community. That if you say, oh, yeah, I had to do that on my Naming Day. It's like that suddenly implies this whole… That there's a whole thing about Naming Days. That then implies this bigger ripple, especially if your character's like, oh, oh, my God, I had to do that on my Naming Day, my parents made me. It's like, okay, so there's a difference. It's implying these levels of… That there's more than one way to view the thing, there's more… That then implies that there's multiple groups within a larger group. Which I think is fun. I love that, but I also think that only works… You can't do it with something that is existing in isolation. Like, you can't just say, "Oh, yes. Oh, Naming Day, we all do this." It's gotta be tied to the emotions of the character. It's the connections.

[DongWon] I mean, this to me is like the flaw of, like, a certain type of dystopian YA. Right? Like, that was way popular, was it was so focused on just, like, the one thing that was different and existed in isolation and just didn't feel like there was other connections to that. Right? There wasn't further context. So when a character came from a place or had an identity or any of those things, it felt very reductive in a certain way. Right? Like. So without the further context and complexity, it didn't feel rich enough. Right? I think the ones that succeed very well, something like Hunger Games, does a great job of pulling in those other details, pulling in those other contexts around the central thing, and then ones that, I think, did not do as well were ones that failed to ask the further questions, failed to look at intersecting axes of power, failed to look at the ways in which this event connects to all these other events that happened in a person's life. Right?

[Erin] I think that's what makes it work when somebody uses a tool in an unexpected way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] If there have been all these connections, you understand how they got there, and how something that character A sees as an oh, my gosh, an obvious tool I can use, character B would never recognize as a tool at all. Do you know what I mean? I love that type of thing where one character's like, yes, it is… The answer is so obvious, and another character is like, I don't even understand the question.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] And that is like such a beautiful moment of character, because even if we don't understand that culture, that identity, that context, we do understand that there are things that we know that others don't and things that we don't understand that others live in.

 

[Howard] When you look at these connections between characters and society and traditions and economies and po… There's this enormous network of things which as a writer, you can become very very oppressed by. Because drawing a matrix in which you have defined every point and drawn every line is nightmarishly difficult. The tool that I use… You treat that matrix as a net. Drop something onto the net. Where did it hit? You only need to define the threads where it landed. Those are what caught it. By defining those threads, those three or four threads, you have now implied the existence of the entire net, and the reader will believe in the entire net. Now you have to describe those three things well. You have to describe them in ways that make sense for the character, that imply the actual history of the character. But you only need three or four things to get us to believe that that whole web of your society, of your world, of your universe, from those three pounds of wet stuff between your ears, that whole universe you've created, we can believe it's real. You just gotta give us three threads.

[DongWon] I think about it as a GM, I think about it in terms of [paduke?] the game of go, where you are not defining all the connections between all the things. But what you will do when you're playing go is, as a strategic move, you'll put a piece out at a distant part of the board from which you are right now, and it's communicating I'm interested in that. I'm going to be making moves around that in the future. Hey, opponent, just so you know, we're going to be fighting about that in the future, so whatever's happening here, think about that, too. So, when it comes to worldbuilding a lot of times, I will just make a lot of stub documents with nothing in them, just a title of like this culture, food here, geography over there. I won't fill those in until they become relevant, and as things start becoming relevant, then I'll go and, like, okay, I need to think about this now because my characters are going over there now.

[Howard] Gotta tie this thread off.

[DongWon] Exactly. So, like the net you that you're talking about, you have this disparate web, but don't lose your mind trying to fill in all those details.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Take big swings when your character does interact with something. Define broad things. Reach for whatever their cultural contexts are and use those to keep building as they connect.

[Erin] To come back to something we talked about at the very beginning about weight, I think weight can often sound like a burden, but, to me, when you talk about building a net, it's making people feel like your worldbuilding has enough weight to catch the story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Erin] With that in mind, we're going to go to the homework. Which is to identify something from your character's life from before the story begins. Identify… Especially if it's something, a community, an identity, some way that they interact with the broader world. Write a scene in which that element of the character weighs heavily on the scene but is never explicitly mentioned.

 

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

 

from https://writingexcuses.com/2022/01/02/17-1-genre-and-media-are-promises/

 

Key points: Romance novels need a happily ever after, or a happy at least for now. Genres, both bookshelf genres and elemental genres, make promises. Cozy mystery needs a murder! Superheroes need an epic fight. Animation is not just for kids. Novels do third person limited really well. Animation uses visual cues to tell part of the story. Lore miners like visual shows, where they can mine the background visuals for added depth. The Kuleshov effect! Remember, use all the tools in your arsenal to set the mood and story.

 

[Season 17, Episode 1]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Genre and Media are Promises.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

 

[Howard] I'm here to tell you that if your romance novel doesn't have happily ever after or happy at least for now, it's not a romance novel. You're not actually writing to that genre. It's a bold stake in the ground, I know, but there are promises that the genres in which we write, the bookshelf genres in which our publishers place our books, the elemental genres in which we determine what's the thing that makes people turn pages, those make promises. Right from the outset. Let's talk about some examples. I've already spilled the easy one of romance. What are some other examples of genres and the promises those genres make?

[Kaela] Cozy mystery is extremely like… There are very, very strict beats to hit and moments to deliver that if you do not, you will have disappointed your audience. Because they…

[Howard] I don't know what those are. Can you enumerate a few?

[Sandra] Miss Marple or any… Murder, She Wrote is a cozy mystery. It is basically a very frie… There's going to be a murder. Somebody's going to die. But it's not somebody we…

[Oh, good]

[Sandra] Like… Yeah. So, like, it's… Murder, She Wrote. She's going about her cozy little life and then… Oh, no, there's a body. We now need to solve it without offending to many people's worlds. Then, at the end, it's all okay again. You can see this with a lot of BBC… They're like Father Brown…

[Father Brown]

[Sandra] Is one of them. Yeah, Father Brown is one of them. It is very contained and very safe, even though every single book or episode has a couple of murders in it. Yet the audience knows at the end of it, the bad guys are caught, they're put away, everybody's safe, it's all going to be fine. If there's a cat or a dog, the cat and dog are always going to be safe, and probably will help solve the mystery. So, like, seriously, this is the cozy mystery genre. The people who come to this genre, well, it's kind of like Meg was talking about in the last episode with Police Procedurals. You are expecting and wanting to get those beats exactly where you expect them. If you don't, you will actually make the audience anxious and upset with you.

[Megan] I have an example of when I was deeply betrayed by a cozy mystery series. I don't want to drop the title, because this is a huge spoiler. But there is a main detective character that the audience loves and cares about very much, and about three seasons in, decided he didn't want to do the show anymore. Instead of having him retire, they killed him. The next person to come in and solve his murder was the new main character. I was like [garbled] No!

[Howard] I'll go ahead and spoil it. Was that Death in Paradise?

[Megan] Yes.

[Howard] BBC? Yeah.

[Megan] I'm still not over it. Yet. [Garbled] But see, that's… There's an expectation that just shows up with the genre. I came to a cozy mystery because I wanted a mystery, and I wanted to be able to feel smart and solve the puzzle, but I never want to feel threatened and I never want my favorite characters to feel threatened. I just want to hang out with fun people while we solve puzzles.

 

[Howard] Yep. Okay. Let's pick another genre. Kaela, you got something for us?

[Kaela] Yes. Superheroes and how it means fights. Epic fights. Like, you can use all kinds of different structures in superhero movies and comics and things like that. As we have seen through Marvel's explorations. Everything from a heist through like more of a drama to the classic hero's journey. But we want epic fights that feel like they have weight. They're not just… I think that's one of the things that sets apart, that satisfies…

[Howard] It's not… We see this in the… Was it 2013 Avengers movie?

[I think it was 2012]

[Howard] It's not just fights. It's the fight bracket… The bracketing of we need to see what happens when it's Thor versus Hulk. We need to see Black Widow versus Hulk. We need to see… Through the series. We get Iron Man versus Hulk, eventually. We bracket so that everybody fights everybody else, even if they're on the same team. They have to have some sort of reason to fight. Black Widow fought Hawkeye. Hawkeye briefly fought Loki. So, yeah, you look at the superhero genre, and one of the expectations there is, "Man, I've got six superheroes here. Well, I want to know what happens if hero three and hero four fight, because that would be cool." If you solve this by giving villains mirrored powers, then it's just boring.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Then it's just Iron Man One, which is Iron Man versus a chunkier Iron Man, or the Hulk movie from the same year, which was Hulk versus a spikier, chunkier Hulk.

[Megan] Kind of broke the promise. 

[Howard] So, yeah, superheroes and the fighting. What else?

[Megan] Then you even build a whole movie around it with Civil War. Where… I mean, there is an eternal bad guy, of course, but the big scene, the big Act III scene, was everybody in the airport parking lot and how do these powers go against these powers, or these accessories interact with these magical things?

[Kaela] Can I just say that that is the, like, one of the perfect se… Like, ways that audience has helped cultivate or helped shape the genre, as well, the way the audience interacts with it. Because, like, I remember having fights with people about who would beat who, with your favorite superhero. I'm like, "Uhuh. Spider-Man would beat any of them, because of his Spidey sense."

[Laughter]

[Kaela] You end up fighting about it. That's like you want to see how your favorite superhero is going to fare. Kind of like wrestling, right? Like professional wrestling. You want to see what the matchups look like as well. So it's a part of the genre, because it's also part of what the audience wants to know. They want to see how it goes. So you're like, "Okay. Well, let's make this interesting. Let's… I'll just keep doing this. Let's keep adding it in."

 

[Howard] Hey, let's do a book of the week. Who's got that for us?

[Sandra] I believe that I… Yes, I do. The book I was super excited about right now is Mine by Delilah Dawson. We haven't actually talked about horror as a genre yet, and the implications there. But this is a middle grade horror novel. It does a beautiful job of using horror tropes, pitching them appropriately to a 12 to 13-year-old audience or even just a little bit younger than that, letting it be just scary enough for that age range, and delivering the beats and points. It's just… It's a delightful story. I highly recommend it. So, Mine by Delilah Dawson.

[Howard] Very cool.

[Sandra] Yes.

 

[Howard] Very cool. So we've talked about genre. Let's talk about mediums, media, a little bit. Because the kinds of stories you tell change dramatically based on what the tools are you're using to tell them, whether it's a novel or a comic or a film and TV…

[Sandra] What you got for us, Meg?

[Megan] Hi. My name is Meg, and I want to talk about animation. There is this deep set conviction, especially in American audiences, that if something is animated, it's just for children. Which can be a problem, because there are many animated projects that are not made for children that some unsuspecting parents may see in the video rental store and say, "Watership Down? Rabbits? Animated? That's for my four-year-old."

[Chuckles]

[Megan] It's not. What's been so exciting is in the last few years…

[Howard] Is that why you became an animator? Was to save all the rabbits?

[Megan] No. No. It was to kill all the rabbits and then show the grown-ups [garbled]. No, I became an animator because I think it is every single artform combined into one in the absolute coolest way. But until very recently, most animated productions in the US were either made for kids, kids serialized action adventure, or very raunchy comedy for grown-ups. Because to make sure we know it's for grown-ups, we have to turn all the grown up content to the extreme. But there's a lot of international work, particularly anime from Japan, which targets many different audiences. So we're seeing a lot of creators who grew up watching those kind of stories wanting to branch out and basically get as many different types of stories in animation as you get stories and books in traditional publishing. It's very fun to be part of that shift.

[Howard] So… Now, part of what you've said here is that there is an incorrect expectation in the United States that the animation… Animation as a medium means the story is for kids. Specifically, though, are there promises that animation makes about the way it's going to tell a story? For instance, like with a novel, there's a thing that novels can do that almost nobody else can do well. That's the third person limited point of view, which is that I am narrating the story from the point of view of the character who we are following around right now, and we're getting their thoughts, we're getting this internal stuff. You can't do that in film. Well, Dune, the David Lynch version, tried to do it…

[Laughter]

[Howard] With people who kept whispering these voiceovers. That almost worked. That's all I'm going to say about that.

[Almost]

[Howard] Almost worked. What is it that animation does that other things can't do that becomes an expectation of animation?

[Megan] How it looks. The actual design of the characters often indicates the type of story you're going to get. Usually, stuff for kids? Bigger heads, bigger eyes. Stuff for grown-ups. Smaller heads, smaller eyes. That's a very gross oversimplification. But you'll see a lot of adult comedies take a lot of design cues from shows like The Simpsons. With large eyes but tiny pupils. Which is, I think… Sandra?

[Sandra] I was going to say, I think it's on Netflix, Centaurworld.

[Gasp]

[Sandra] It actually does some very beautiful things visually to indicate character growth. The visual design of the main character actually changes as the story progresses. So you can actually see how far along their character arc they are by how they look on the screen. That is a beautiful thing that animation can do, and it's an expectation that I would love to see more animation shows taking advantage of. Obviously, they can't quite do it in the same way that Centaurworld is set up to do, but this is the kind of expectation, is that with a visual medium, some of the story has to be delivered visually. You see this with picture books as well. I'm doing a lot of learning and writing picture books, and over and over and over again, as a writer of short stories and prose, I'm told, "You're describing too much, you're describing too much. You have to let your…"

[Howard] Let the illustrator do their job now.

[Sandra] "Illustrator tell the story in the pictures. You have to trust them." So that's an expectation for picture books that the art and the words will interact to create a third thing which is the story.

 

[Howard] Kaela.

[Kaela] Yeah. So, I was just thinking about how one of my favorite things in TV shows… What I… Mostly animation, I'll be honest, because that's what I do, I like watching it. But that… In all shows, even, one of my favorite things to do… How to interact with that type of media, is lore mining. I love to mine the backgrounds, the little things, the visual cues in the background that aren't addressed by the story. I'm like, "Ooh. Wait. What does that mean? That nearly matches that one. In [garbled] that's missing half of this thing. I guess that does mean that they're long-lost connected. They have to be, right?" I will just like literally talk out loud by myself, putting all of that together, lore mining the background. That's my favorite thing. But you can't do that in books. Yes, Megan?

[Megan] I was going to say, are you a Gravity Falls fan?

[Kaela] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Megan] Zero Gravity Falls.

[Howard] Gravity Falls. Here's the way I described… And I came to Gravity Falls late. Gravity Falls is X-Files for kids and for grown-ups who were righteously disappointed in X-Files.

[Laughter]

[I love it. Yeah.]

[Howard] So, well done in that way. One of the things that I want to point out about the differences between some of these genres is… There are things that are pointed up by the recent and now canceled live-action version of Cowboy Bebop, is that in the animation, the Cowboy Bebop anime, the characters are having feelings, but there's really only so much you can do with an animated face to show us a complex series of emotions without tipping into the uncanny valley or doing something weird. So, often what they do is they'll cut away from the face in the anime and show us pouring a glass of whiskey. Show us the hand doing something. Show us something else in order to tell the story behind what's happening on the face. But in live-action, dang it. Cho is a fantastic actor. Just give him his back story, aim the camera at his face, let him say two lines of dialogue and then act, and we'll have it. That's not what they did. Meg, you were flailing about. What?

[Megan] Sandra's had her hand up for such a long time.

[Sandra] That's fine. That's fine.

[Megan] So, there is something in film making called the Kuleshov effect. Which is the shot…

[Howard] Kuleshov? Say that again.

[Megan] Sorry. The Kuleshov effect.

[Howard] Okay. Kuleshov.

[Megan] It's the idea that even if you are presented with a neutral face, the shot that comes after… What the camera looks at exactly after will inform the audience of how the person is feeling.

[Cool]

[Megan] Something that the animated series did, that I felt the live-action did not, was use all of the tools in their arsenal to set their mood and story. Because actor's face is an incredible tool, actor's body language, but that's only one very small part of what you have to consider in any sort of film sequence. You have where the camera's set, how quickly you cut, what the background noise is, but the background music is, what your lighting cues are. There's so many different pieces that the original Cowboy Bebop absolutely mastered. That's one of the best and most solidly animated series that have ever existed. You can't just take certain pieces of that, certain hallmarks of that, and get the same effect. Because a visual only tribute isn't a real reproduction.

[Right. Yup. Yeah.]

[Howard] We could clearly keep talking about this and talking about this and talking about this, because genre and media, as things that make promises to the audience… I mean, there's a million of these.

 

[Howard] So, I think we need to cut from here straight to the homework. Meg, I think that might be you?

[Megan] All right. That is me. All right. For the homework this week, what do you plan on having your work in progress deliver? Does the genre or medium you're working in support the promise of that deliverable? If not, write out a one-page outline in which you change the genre or medium to support the promise you're making.

[Howard] Ooo, I like it. I like it. Hey, this has been Writing Excuses. You have your homework. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

Writing Excuses 14.41: History

 

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

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 41.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, History.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Dan] Doing an accent.

[Mahtab] Possibly.

[Howard] We'll post pictures.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But that won't help.

 

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

[Dan] Yes.

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

[Dan] Yes.

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

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

[Mahtab] Exactly.

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

 

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

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

[Brandon] Excellent.

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

[Howard] Mahtab.

[Dan] Mahtab.

[Howard] This is totally Mahtab.

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] They're much younger.

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Dan] They refuse to tell you anything.

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

 

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

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

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

 

Writing Excuses 14.32: Worldbuilding Gender Roles

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/11/worldbuilding-gender-roles/

 

Key points: How do you worldbuild different gender roles for science fiction and fantasy stories? Start by recognizing that most fiction has a clearly defined binary, male and female. But... Until you have words and categories, you may have trouble perceiving things. Blue, or nonbinary genders. Try reading some things written by different genders. Listen to conversations. Avoid simply reversing roles. Beware exoticizing, objectifying, or fetishizing the unfamiliar. First, do no harm. Don't use changes in gender roles or identity as sprinkles on your sundae. Have you built a society, have you considered the effects, the ramifications? Remember story purpose, and ask yourself if removing this piece will break your purpose for writing the story. Sometimes background affects how we perceive foreground elements, too. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 32.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Gender Roles.

[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] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] We're talking about how to worldbuild gender roles. How to approach this topic, which can be a little tricky. You can veer into some problematic areas in this direction. So we want to touch this very carefully, but very sincerely, and talk about how you might go about worldbuilding different gender roles for your science fiction and fantasy stories.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the first things that I think we should acknowledge is that most of us have grown up reading fiction with a very clearly defined binary, male and female. There's some fiction, like Sheri Tepper's Gate to Women's Country or The Left Hand of Darkness where there are things that are being played with. But as we become more aware in the 21st century, we realize that gender is a spectrum. I'm going to use an analogy here that is a visually-based analogy. So bear with me. There's… I listen to Radio Lab and they had this episode on color.

[Margaret] I remember the show.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. This is amazing. The question was why doesn't the word blue appear in Homer's… In the Odyssey, or the Iliad? It's the wine dark sea. The answer is because the word blue doesn't exist yet. At all. There's just no word for blue. It's such a basic color that it's difficult for us to imagine a world in which the word blue doesn't exist. What becomes more difficult to grasp is that the reason it doesn't exist yet is because people weren't perceiving that color as blue. It turns out that when you start analyzing all of the languages, that the order in which words come into the language for color relates to when we begin to be able to reproduce them. So everybody starts off with kind of red and black and white and kind of…

[Margaret] Brown.

[Mary Robinette] And kind of a brownish-green and a greenish-brown. So, anyway. So, they reference this video which I then went and tracked down, where they talked to a tribal people who still do not have the word for blue. Show them this color wheel. To my eye, it's like all of these greens that are exactly the same green and one blue that is very, very clearly blue. They're like, "Which square is different?" Everyone sits down and goes, "Um, that one?" and points to the bottom right or "This one?" And points to the upper left. "That one?" It's like getting the one that is totally blue is totally by chance. Then they show them another wheel which, to my eye, is all this kind of olive green all the way around. They say, "Which one is different?" They all go, "That one." With no hesitation at all, to a square that, to me, looks identical to the others. What they have discovered through all of this is that once you have a word for something, that you're able to define that and put things in that category. Until then, you don't see it. What I've realized is that gender is basically the same thing. We've got… We talk about a spectrum. But it's really kind of an umbrella. It's sort of messy. But there's no… The delineations are delineations that we have created because of language. So what's happening now is that because language has expanded, we have more things we can talk about. Which means that when you are approaching that in your fiction, that starting with a binary is very limiting, and not necessarily as interesting and representative as you can be with your fiction.

 

[Brandon] Well, where would you go… Where someone's starting off with this, what would you suggest? They're just like, "All right, I don't want to represent a binary, I want to do something that is exploring this direction." Where do you go?

[Howard] The simplest path for me was reading things that are written by genders that are not me and that perceive and describe genders differently. My first experience with this not gender who isn't me was David Brin's Glory Season in which he reverses the gender roles that I was familiar with, and does so for biological reasons. I look at that now and I'm able to say oh, he is… He's still making assumptions about the biological determination of gender roles, which is in and of itself inherently problematic in our culture, but by reversing things, he allowed me to see… He helped me to see things completely differently. That was my first step. Are there things that you guys have read that do this well?

[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I found was pronoun.is. This actually came up very recently for me, 'cause I was helping… There's a game that I very much enjoy, and they had set up a binary and then realized that they shouldn't have and were trying to figure out… To course correct. So they wanted some non-binary pronouns. Pronoun.is deals with non-binary pronouns. That's a very useful thing to look at. The other things that I find are looking at Tumblr's and watching people talk about their own lived experience. Own voices? #ownvoices is also very useful. So if you do #ownvoices and #nonbinary, those two things will bring up conversations that you can listen to. It is important, I want to say, that you're listening and not inserting yourself into conversations when you're first trying to kind of understand stuff. But those are places where you can kind of watch people interact. Most of the information that I know has come from people who have been very patient with me to explain things. Which is not the best way to learn things, because it involves emotional labor on someone else's part. Which is why I suggest doing some listening before you sit down and start asking questions.

[Margaret] Doing your basic research to get the 101 questions.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Margaret] Before you do your more advanced field research, in a way. I think it's… It's one of those things where if you're setting out to tell a story, and you deliberately don't want to replicate gender roles as they are found in whatever your home culture is. For everyone at this table, gender roles in…

[Mary Robinette] 21st-century America.

[Margaret] 21st-century America.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, 21st-century white America.

[Margaret] White America, yeah. If you're trying to break away from whatever feels home, normal to you, I think the point that Mary has really made, and what Brandon started us out with is, the temptation is like, "Well, I'll take what we have and I'll flop it. Men will stay home and raise children, and women won't." But right there, you've just replicated the binary and turned it on its head. Taking the opportunity to step into… To put yourself… As we were saying in the earlier episode, into sort of our unknown unknowns. It's not just the opposite of what we have. It's probably closer to your normal then you might want to think it is. What's 90° different from your normal?

[Howard] You have to start somewhere. As I said, talking about the Brin novel, which was thankfully a little more complex than simply reversing it. It was pretty cool what he did. But you acknowledge that there is a first step. Then you want to do more research, and as Mary has said and as I would reiterate over and over and over again, listen to people and listen nonjudgmentally.

[Yeah]

[Howard] Listen to their experience and try to understand how their experiences different from yours, and why their experiences different than yours. Not whether their experiences good or bad in relation to yours.

[Margaret] Yeah. I do want to stress, when I say your normal, I'm using your normal… Because it is subjective, whatever normal is to you.

 

[Brandon] I'm not sure if I have the language to even ask this question correctly, but is there a danger in exoticizing the unfamiliar and then going that direction and falling into clichés and tropes?

[Chorus yes]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. Which is why it's important to do the research and to understand why you're making the choices and also to know… This is why I recommend listening in on Tumblr or Twitter conversations, because this is where people are going to complain about times that they have been objectified or fetishized or exoticized. Where people are, just like doing things that are harmful. That's where people will be complaining about it. Where your least likely to see some of the complaining in a published work, partly just because it's gonna necessarily be behind the times. It's not ideal, but it is useful.

[Margaret] I think that… going into recording this episode, that we were a little sort of all kind of sidling up to this topic a bit. In part, some of that probably comes from the fact that the four of us at this table, we have what, from a classical standpoint, is, we have a good gender balance at this table. But we do all identified as either male or female, as far as I'm aware.

[Howard] We recognize that the entire topic is inherently fraught.

[Yes]

[Howard] Because of how deeply it affects everyone, and how, to borrow a phrase from Mary, how if we write things incorrectly, it's not just that we offend, it's that by reinforcing a stereotype, we can do harm.

[Yeah]

[Howard] I like that. I like the stated goal that as we write things, we want to represent things well, I want to tell a story that is interesting, but above all, I don't want to hurt anyone by telling it wrong.

[Margaret] I think, you don't want to use changes in gender roles or changes in gender identity… You don't want to use that as the sprinkles on top of your sundae.

[Brandon] I was just about to kind of ask that question. Actually, because…

[Margaret] I'll make this exciting, by having five genders! It's like…

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Then I'll have hopefully an interesting question along those lines.

[Mary Robinette] So, the book of the week is Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. This is really… So, first of all, it's a good book and you should just read it. But the main character is a robot… Is a cyborg. In the net… No, it's a robot. The character has a brain, a human brain, that does some visual processing. That's the only thing that the brain does. There are no memories attached to it, there's nothing. The character gets to choose what pronoun is being used. Most people, because it's this in normal battle robot, use he at the beginning. Someone asks, "Is that what you want?" The robot realizes, "Oh. Actually, I can choose that." By choosing she part way through the novel, it changes the relationship that she has with the other main character. It's very interesting and an interesting exploration of the fact that as humans, we desperately want to put things into boxes. Like, a robot has no need of a gender at all. A robot is a robot. But our need to do that, and then the perceptions that we have about the role that that robot then fulfills based on the gender assignment… Or assigning the gender based on roles. It's very interesting what that does, the things that happen to your brain, especially when the gender switch happens. Or the pronoun switch happens. Because… Robot, there is no gender.

[Margaret] Robots.

[Mary Robinette] When the pronoun switch happens. So, it's a wonderful book. It's also just… Let's say there's a lot of ecological terrorism and stuff going on. There's lots of rollicking adventure and explosions. So it's not just hello, gender studies.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mary Robinette] It's really good.

[Brandon] That sounds fascinating.

[Margaret] It reminds me a little bit of… There's a thread in some of the later books in the Parasitology trilogy by Mira Grant where… Spoilers if anybody hasn't read these… Intelligent tapeworms are basically taking over their human hosts. They're tapeworms. Tapeworms do not have a binary gender. There is one of these characters who does not identify with the gender of their current human host. There's another tapeworm who's like, "What is your problem with this? You are a tapeworm. You shouldn't be identifying as male or female and being bothered by whether or not that matches the human body you are in."

 

[Brandon] So I have a question for you. We're going to try this out, we'll see if this works. I am writing a science fiction book which has alien races who don't reproduce or view reproduction in the way that humans do. So I'm going to say what I'm doing here, and I'm going to ask you to point out directions I could go that would be bad or directions I could go that would be good.

[Mary Robinette] It's only 15 minutes long, Brandon.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yes, I know.

[Mary Robinette] People are in a hurry.

[Brandon] We'll see if this works. If it doesn't work…

[Howard] I'm definitely not that smart.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You guys won't even hear this.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, umm… All right. So what I'm writing right now is an alien species where their sexes are Lefts and Rights. They are Left and they are Right. A Left and a Right will combine together and create a new trial personality, that, if they end up liking, and their family ends up liking, they will give birth to that person who will have the memories of those, of that event of being this person for a while. If it is not, they will break the coupling, and it will not. So, for a period of several months, they are one individual together as one. Walking around and interacting, accessing some of the memory and knowledge of the two parents. I have humans interacting with this and really struggling to wrap their brains around it. Where could I go wrong? How would you approach something like this? Any suggestions for me?

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean, the obvious question is what happens when two Lefts are compatible?

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Like…

[Howard] No. Two Lefts are compatible. Right?

[Brandon] Was that two… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] No. 

[Howard] Who's on first. Sorry.

[Margaret] It's… In a weird way, when you describe it to me, it almost doesn't feel like a stand-in for gender or the biological sexes. It's… You have two halves that are coming together and potentially creating a third being, but it seems like it's not necessarily reading as reproduction, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

[Garbled]

[Brandon] I intended it to be their reproductive cycle. This is how they… This is how new individuals are born. [Garbled]

[Howard] So the two of them combine, and if they decide that they like what has been created here… 

[Brandon] They will split and a baby will be born.

[Howard] Okay. That… The newborn… How do we determine if it's Left or Right? Is that random, is that…

[Brandon] I think that is random.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Which… Does the newborn come out of the Left or the Right?

[Brandon] I think they both have… 

[Mary Robinette] They have to connect…

[Brandon] Yes.

[Margaret] Is it… Just like what… I don't want to ask biologic sort of plumbing related questions here, but why is there a difference between Lefts and Rights?

[Brandon] Lefts and Rights… Hum. Um. Maybe because I'm just going with a binary because I'm used to it?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] Would be my guess. I did want, when this individual is made, you can tell that there's… They are larger than a normal individual and they have… 

[Howard] There's a seam.

[Brandon] There's a seam. I'm probably shading… the only sexual dimorphism, if that's the right term you would have, as kind of a red shade and a blue shade, so that we have kind of this alien different skin color that is kind of a trope in science fiction that I'm trying to play with.

[Margaret] But, I mean, why not have it be being and being, like Mary said, two beings are designated as Right, but why shouldn't they be compatible, or why not have red, blue, yellow, green, aqua? Sort of like, oh, an orange and an aqua have gotten together.

[Brandon] I would say my reasoning for that, and it's totally possible I could have bad reasoning in this. My reasoning for that is it's a lot to take in in a YA novel, and I need to build on some foundations of quick conversation. I'm introducing like eight alien species in this book, so it felt simpler to say they have two sexes that are not anything like the two sexes you are used to.

[Mary Robinette] I guess the thing is as you're talking about it, I'm like, "But why did they have sexes? At all?" Like, why isn't it just these things combine and… 

[Howard] The term you may want is the term that we use in chemistry. You have left-handed and right-handed sugars. They're isomers.

 

[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. Is it wrong for me to want that? Just because, in the worldbuilding, that is what I like?

[Mary Robinette] It's not wrong, but it feels like you're defaulting it. That there are more interesting options. That's really… Like, I don't hear anything, as you're talking, going, oh, there's a real problem there. What I hear is that it's not as interesting as I think you could be, and I don't think it would take that many more words.

[Howard] I think the interest is going to stem from how the humans react to what they're seeing. Because the humans are going to be our stand-ins for our interaction with this. If there are difficult questions that you want to ask, about how humans… About this, about our understanding about how this alien culture works, about how their rules may be different whether they're a Left or a Right isomer… I'm already writing your book for you by giving you the word. The way the humans react, I think, is where you can get into the most trouble, because if you have somebody, and you almost certainly will, who is passing judgment, the way in which the narrative treats that person is going to tell the reader how they should feel about non-binary genders. About genders that are different from them.

[Margaret] Well, also, if you have two categories, and in order to have reproduction, two dissimilar categories, individuals of two dissimilar categories get together and create a third, it's going to… I mean, if I were reading that cold, that to me would read as an allegory or an analogy of a gender binary. It's sort of the… It's the thing that eats grass and has long ears and a fluffy tail, goes around and hops. Even if it's on an alien planet, it's kind of a rabbit.

Mary Robinette] I feel like that's kind of what is happening for me is that it still feels like you have a gender binary.

[Brandon] Is it okay, though? Like… I guess okay is the wrong term. If that's the direction I want to explore…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just… I think where I would… What I would say, and this is why I asked what happens if there are two Lefts that want to get together, is the assumption that everyone is comfortable in the body that they are born into?

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Which is not the case. It's not the case with humans. It's often… I don't understand why it would be the case with an alien species. We know that… 

[Margaret] Not to mention it assumes everyone is… Wishes to be compatible with somebody of the opposite handedness.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Then I'm like, the other parts of my worldbuilding stuff are going, well, obviously… I assume that you are able to do more when you are coupled because there must be an additional advantage there. So therefore is there an advantage to being coupled, and do you have difficulty getting work when you are uncoupled? So these are the questions that I'm like… What happens, and what is the incentive to uncouple? If everybody likes this, this individual? Is it that you can only have the child if you uncouple? Like, what are the… There's a lot of societal ramifications that are inherent in this that I'm…

[Howard] No, it's… A concept that gets explored in science fiction a lot is the alien race that shows up and the idea of war or the idea of lying is completely alien to them. A society, a race in which gender… I don't know what the word would be… Where you're not happy with the body you've been born into or created into. A society in which that never happens would be very alien to us. Our interactions with those people, especially the interaction of someone who isn't happy with the body they have, and is interacting with these folks, that could be interesting to explore. That path is fraught because you don't want to say, "See, these aliens are better than us, because they're just happy the way they're born." That's not the message you want to send at all.

[Mary Robinette] Also, I don't think that that would actually be… Like, I find that implausible. Anyway.

[Margaret] That's a planet of hats.

[Mary Robinette] It's a planet of hats. I mean, just because it's… When you look at the behavior of… Granted, these are fictional creatures, but when you look at… Margaret already said it better, it's a planet of hats if everybody's comfortable.

 

[Brandon] Like, when it's… One of the difficulties… I'll say difficulties you run into when doing this is you can do anything. The question… Like, when you say why can't it just be to individuals of any sort couple, I could totally do that. Absolutely. So I have to ask myself why am I not, or why do I want to do it this other way. This is the question when… we come into like is it sprinkles. Right? Is it sprinkles on your cake? When are you just adding these things to add flavor and is that… Can simply be reductive of the way that people see the world and using them to exoticize your story. Which is a dangerous path to go down. But at the same time, science fiction's job, in my opinion, is to start asking some of these questions and say, "Reader, what if we encountered something like this? How do we respond to it?" And this sort of thing. So it's really an interesting sort of tangled problem that is important to approach. Asking yourself where is it a sprinkle, where is it actually part of your story. Where would you say that line is and… Probably not a line, but that continuum. How do you go one way rather than the other?

[Margaret] To me, I feel like… And not to swerve away from the question here, but I think it is a question that's difficult to answer in the abstract. Because it depends on the story you're telling. There's one thing when you're constructing a story specifically to explore or make a statement about the role of gender in our society or potentially in alien society. But that's also… It doesn't mean that any story that has humans or aliens with other than binary gender has to be a story about that. Every story with a queer person doesn't have to be about the struggles and agonies of being queer. Sometimes it's just happening and you're saving the world and it doesn't really matter.

[Mary Robinette] For me, the line… When I see it done badly, it's that they've added this thing and it has absolutely no impact on the society at all. Where the world maps exactly the same. It's like, "No, of course. Women are in charge. This is totally a matriarchy." And yet, our great leaders are all men. All of the courtship rituals are still the man coming to the woman and proposing. It's like, no, if the women are in charge…

[Margaret] All the female characters are really obsessed with the men.

[Mary Robinette] These are… So if there's no effect, that's when I feel like it's just a sprinkle. When I say effect, what I mean is not that it becomes a major plot point, as Margaret was saying. But that it affects the way the character moves through the world. The example that I've used in previous podcasts is I'm 5 foot seven, my husband is 5' 11. So that very small difference between us affects the way we move through the world, in that when we go to get cereal down, he can just reach out and get it. I sometimes have to get a footstool or stand on my toes. It's a small detail. But it does affect the way you move through the world. As someone who is white and a cis woman, I don't ever have to do any defense about when I go to the store, about where I'm shopping. I don't have to do any thinking about what bathroom I use. Never will I have to think about those things. So that affects the way I move through the world. I think that if you have… If you've introduced genders, that there will be people who have opinions about these genders. The gender roles. It's going to affect the way the character moves through the world, if you have actually constructed a society around it. If you haven't, again, it doesn't have to be the plot point, but if you haven't done that, then it is just sprinkles.

[Howard] There is story purpose, where your purpose in writing the story is broken if this piece is removed. I come back to that a lot. Is there a story purpose for this thing that I'm including? There's the concept of the way a background color affects how you perceive the foreground color. You can put things in your story that exist so that we perceive the actual elements differently. Then it's not just background. It's background that influences our perception. That's a… It's complicated to think about, it's easier to picture with one of those optical illusion things with the grays or whatever. But that model works well for me, because sometimes I will say a thing and realize, oh, it's just a background. It doesn't matter to the story. Except its existence makes the story tell differently. Does that make sense?

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Yeah. When Mary was talking, sort of going back to the effect that it has, and I think that also ties to people… Whatever the gender spectrum looks like in the world you're creating, people will have opinions about it. That said, if everybody's opinions aligned to the opinions that you would expect to run into in our 21st century American white society, you probably haven't thought through the ramifications so much. If this is what everyone has grown up with, why is everybody acting like men are in charge… Men are real men, women are real women, people who are neither real men or real women are kind of the auxiliary floating off in the background someplace. That's the place… That's something to be worried about, I think.

 

[Brandon] All right. This has been really interesting. I hope this has been helpful to our listeners. Mary, you're going to give us some homework.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, I'm going to send you to a spreadsheet we have used before. Which is a spreadsheet about axes of power. We'll link to this in the liner notes. Basically, what I want you to do is take a look at your characters, taking a look at their gender, and think about the axes of power. Like, which is the dominant gender, which is the subordinate gender, where do things line up on that spectrum? So, for instance, in 21st century America, a cis man, which is a man who was born into a male body or with male genitalia. So, a cis man is at the top. He's the dominant. Cis women are farther down. When you get down to the lower end of the spectrum, we have non-binary, trans men, trans women, in terms of the power that they're able to exert in society and the dangers that they encounter just living in the world. So what I want you to do is I want you to take this idea and look at the characters that you have in your story and decide whether or not you are sticking with the default or if you are shifting it. Whichever choice you make, just do it deliberately. Don't do it by accident. That's all I ask. But, as an exercise, break out of your defaults.

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/24/14-12-writing-the-other-latinx-representation/

 

Key points: Latinx, a catchall term for people with Latin American heritage. You will make mistakes, that's part of the process. Latinx is not just one thing. To write a Latinx character, think about where they live, how they got there, what's their family story, how did they grow up, what kind of foods do they eat and when. Remember they are people. Think about immigrant mashup foods and traditional foods. Comfort foods! Consider intersectionality, the mixture and crossing of various aspects in identity. Broad portrayals of a culture or group are likely to be misleading, while being specific about a culture or family can be very relatable.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 12.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing the Other – Latinx Representation.

[Tempest] 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Julia] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Julia] And I'm Julia.

 

[Dan] Awesome. This is the second in our awesome Writing the Other series, where we give you the tools that you need as an author to write about other cultures and other people that are different than yourself. We today have the wonderful Julia Rios with us. Can you tell us about yourself?

[Julia] Yes. My father is… Was from Mexico. He is no longer with us. He grew up in Yucatán and he immigrated to the United States and married my mother, who is a white woman from California. So I am half Mexican, Mexican-American, choose your choice. I am a writer, I'm an editor, I'm a podcaster, I'm a narrator. Primarily, I edit fiction for Fireside magazine and I write short stories and flash fiction in the form of text messages for an app called Flash Read under the name Julie Rivera.

[Oooo] 

[Dan] Cool. 

[Tempest] Fancy.

 

[Dan] Well, awesome. We are excited to have you here. Please tell us what we're going to be talking about today, and let's start with the word Latinx, because that's actually the first time I've ever heard it pronounced out loud and I haven't known exactly how to say it. I know a lot of our listeners might not know what it means.

[Julia] Okay. It's really funny, because once I was on a panel about it, and we spent most of the panel, all of the Latinx people participating, trying to decide how to pronounce it.

[Laughter]

[Julia] We all… The four of us settled on Latinx, but it's unclear to us that that is correct, so… 100% correct. There are probably other opinions available. But, roughly, Latinx we think is a good choice. I and four other people at least. No one has challenged me on that yet. It is a catchall term for people who have Latin American heritage. There are very many different labels, and we could have a really long conversation about that, so I don't really want to get into it. But that means people from North America, Central, and South America, places where Spain came and conquered and colonized. Then you have a lot of mixed race people, which definitely, I fit in with that. My heritage is going to be some European and some of the indigenous Mayan ancestry.

[Dan] The word itself comes from, if I'm not mistaken, in Spanish we have Latino and Latina, which is gendered because of the way Spanish functions.

[Julia] So, because Spanish is a gendered language, to try to not default to male, which is the sort of old-fashioned way of saying… Like, "if one enters a room, he must pick up his glass of water," and we don't really use that anymore. So, instead of saying he or she, we move to they often in English. Latinx is the inclusive word that includes everyone, across the gender spectrum.

 

[Dan] Awesome. Cool. So… Well, the… Like I said, the purpose of this series is to give people tools of how they can do this right. So what are some things that people can do when they're writing about Latinx people that they can… To do it right, to do it well.

[Julia] Yes. Okay…

[Dan] I should say well, instead of right.

[Laughter]

[Julia] Okay. The first thing I'm going to say is there are many ways to be Latinx and there's no one right way and there's no umbrella term. Also, there are always going to be mistakes. No one's ever going to be 100% perfect. So, understand that you will make mistakes, and that's okay, that's part of the process. But one of the things that I think can be hard to realize when you're looking at a culture and you say, "Oh, Latinx people, we need more Latinx rep," is it's easy to think of that as one thing. I am Mexican. That's one country. I am Mexican-American, so I have a different experience than people who are living in Mexico. Like, in Mexico, there are thousands of micro-cultures depending on where you live. Which state you live in, which city you live in, are you in a rural area, are you in a city? All of these things inform your experience and your cultural heritage. That's just within Mexico. In the United States, we have a big diaspora of people from all kinds of countries and places, like Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Central and South America, Mexico, Cuba, and, depending on where you are in the States, you are more likely to have a high population of one kind of person. Like in South Florida, you have a lot of Cubans, because Cuba is right there. In New York, there are a lot of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. In California, there are a lot of Mexicans. So it kind of… Those things can inform some of your Latinx population in the United States. But also, it includes everyone in Canada, South America, North America… Anyone who is coming from those countries and then settled in those areas. So there are a lot of different people. That's the first thing to realize. When you're going to set out to write a Latinx character, ask yourself, where do they live? How did they get there? What's their family story? How did they grow up? Did they grow up as a fully assimilated American, because that can be a very different experience than growing up as a first generation immigrant whose first language was Spanish and they didn't start learning English until they were nine and they crossed the border. Then also, who's their family? What kinds of traditional foods do they eat and when do they eat them? What kinds of relationships do they have with their families? Remember that all of these people are people just like you. You have a lot of complex experiences in your life. Your ways of operating at school would be different from your ways of operating when you're at your grandmother's house for a formal dinner.

[Dongwon] I think we call that term code switching.

[Julia] Code switching. Exactly. That's exactly what I was getting at. So when you think about all of these things and you realize that people from all over the place have different things informing who they are. So your traditional foods for Thanksgiving might be very different from your neighbor across the street, depending on how they've grown up, and where they've grown up, and what their family story is. So that would be the first thing that I think is important to…

 

[Dongwon] I have a particular fascination with immigrant mashup foods, where, like, weird American and then whatever immigrant culture they're coming from get all crossed over together. Like, not Latinx obviously, but my family would eat pickles with spaghetti, just because it was like looking for a little bit of like kimchi like thing. Anyways.

[Julia] No. This is totally a thing. So, we had a foreign exchange student… For a while, my mother was taking a lot of foreign exchange students. We had one from Thailand. She got to the United States and didn't know what to do with our food at all. She was, "This is just completely foreign to me." Then she discovered ketchup. She was like, "This is a sauce that you put on things." So she just put it on everything. It became like the thing. We were all like, "What are you doing?" She's like, "Well, I have to have something that gives the flavor. This is the American flavor. I will now put it on all my food."

[Laughter]

[Tempest] Oh, the American flavor.

[Dongwon] What's great about that is she's not… Wrong…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It's how she's trained to eat her food.

[Julia] Exactly. Exactly.

[Dan] Different immigrant cultures and immigrant families all have their own style of changing the way that they act while also kind of staying true to where they came from.

[Dongwon] But there are so many Latin American cultures where there's that iconic sauce, whether it's chimichurri, whether it's… Whatever it is. But… 

[Julia] What your family's traditional foods are will make a big difference. So, for me, right now we are on the Writing Excuses cruise and we just spent a day in Cozumel, which is very close to where my family lives in Yucatán. So the food here is very similar to what I grew up eating. That was very exciting because I got to go and have some of the foods that remind me of my childhood. Like ceviche and fish that's grilled in achiote, which is a Spanish, or a Mexican spice.

[Chuckles]

[Julia] I get kind of confused about my languages, because I've been speaking both of them today.

[Laughter]

[Julia] These things are traditional to me. They make me very happy, they feel like home. Also here, pretty much all throughout Latin America, which is a really weird term, but that means anywhere that Spanish people came and did conquests. There… You'll find dishes with rice and beans. But everybody presents it slightly differently. So the kind of rice and beans that you get in Yucatán are similar in some ways to the rice and beans that you get in places like Cuba. And different from the rice and beans that you get in northern Mexico, which is what most United States Americans will associate with Mexican food. Here, the beans are black beans that are in a sort of paste. It sort of looks like chocolate pudding. When I was six and I visited, I thought that was chocolate pudding, and I was very disappointed the first time I tried it.

[Chuckles]

[Julia] Then I realized it was super yummy and I stopped being disappointed. But the first time, I was like, "This is not chocolate pudding."

[Laughter]

[Julia] "Somebody tricked me, it's beans." But that was something that I got to eat, and it was very comforting. Someone who is from a different culture will have a very different style of beans that they consider comforting. That's one of those details that if you decide where your character's from and what they grew up eating, you can think about like what's comforting to them. In the same way that you'll have your own comfort foods. For me, as growing up in California, is a very assimilated American, and also with Mexican heritage, I have these Mexican comfort foods and I love mashed potatoes. They're my favorite. I have eaten mashed potatoes every day on this ship.

[Laughter]

[Julia] I go to the Wind Jammer before dinner to get mashed potatoes.

[Dan] That is great.

[Tempest] That makes sense to me. I feel that that is a correct choice. I'm wondering though, in terms of thinking about making your character very specific when it comes to their culture… Like, what kind of Latinx person are they? How does intersectionality play into this?

[Julia] [Ooo] Intersectionality plays a big role. Intersectionality is the idea that everyone has more than one thing that informs their identity. So, often we talk about these in terms of marginalization. So you could be Latinx and disabled, or Latinx and queer… I am both of those things. So that's exciting. But there are also just a lot of different things that you can be. I had a conversation with a woman in a shop today when I was buying something. She was surprised that I knew something about what I was buying. I said, "Well, it was because my father was from Yucatán." We made a connection, and she said she was from Yucatán. She told me some of her heritage. Then she wanted to exchange the kind of mixtures that we were. So she was a mixed race person from Yucatán, and she wanted to explain exactly how. Then she was asking me like who I was, and wanted to know who my parents were, and what kind of people had formed me. This is the kind of thing that was important to her, and is important to a lot of people here because they want to make that connection with you, and they want to see where we can be together. Because we recognize that we are also very different. So she has other identity things that don't match up with mine. We're both mixed race, but we have different things. The intersection of those things makes us who we are.

 

[Dan] That's awesome. Let's pause here a little late for our book of the week. No, that's okay, because this was super cool. What is our book of the week, Julia?

[Julia] Our book of the week is Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez. It's a wonderful middle grade novel. It's through the Rick Riordin Presents from Disney Hyperion. It is about a boy named Sal, and he breaks the universe.

[Laughter]

[Julia] I don't want to ruin it.

[Dan] Very descriptive title.

[Julia] I want you to go and read this book. Also, it will make you very, very hungry for Cuban food.

[Dongwon] Oh, yes, it really does.

[Julia] Specifically Cuban food. I brought this book because I got to be to read it and I know it's deliciously wonderful. I keep waiting for the whole world to get it so I can make everyone read it and squee about it with them. But also, specifically because Carlos has written a character that is Cuban-American, and it's a very specific culture that he's dug into, that's also his own cultural identity. But you get a lot of the details of how he interacts with the world. Some of them overlap with my experience, and some of them are very different, because Cuban-Americans have a different experience than Mexican Americans. So I recommend it for those specific details.

[Dan] Well, awesome. That is Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez. It is available now, so go out and look for it.

[Julia] [garbled I will tell you it] will make you laugh really hard.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Maybe cry just a little bit.

[Julia] Oh, and cry.

[Dan] Laugh, and cry, and be hungry… 

[Julia] It will be really good though.

[Dan] The entire gamut of human emotions contained in this middle grade novel.

 

[Dan] I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of specificity. Because it's very important. That's one of the things that we hear a lot is that if you try to portray a culture or a group very broadly, you'll end up getting a lot of things wrong and offending a lot of people. When you zero in on one very specific culture or even one very specific family, then it's actually even more relatable in a lot of ways. But… I want to tell this story because this is one that I did wrong.

[Chuckles] [Uh-oh]

[Dan] I've got… My Mirador series is about… It's a cyberpunk trilogy, YA, from Harper. The main character is Mexican-American. I've lived in Mexico for a few years. I thought, I can do this. I've got this. I'm going to do this right. The Mexican-American community has not really picked up the book. I was wondering why. Then I came to Mexico, where the book is huge. What I realized is that I was portraying a very Mexican family, and doing it in a way where they felt seen and they felt this is us. You have portrayed us in your book. The Mexican-American community didn't feel that, because I was not doing them, I was portraying Mexican people. So, being specific is very important. What can people do to portray these kinds of cultures and people very specifically?

[Julia] So, the first thing that I would recommend that you do is think about who specifically is your character and what their family is like. Because I don't think it's coming from one specific culture will give you enough. Like, I'm Mexican, but I know a lot of other Mexican people who have very different experiences. Part of that is my family, going back to intersectionality, I have within my family people who are Muslim, people from Afghanistan, people who have come from a lot of different places. So when we have Thanksgiving dinner… I always love to ask people what they eat at Thanksgiving dinner, because families bring out their favorite foods. When we would have Thanksgiving dinner growing up, we would often have turkey and mashed potatoes, but also like Afghan rice with raisins in it. That's something that we would have because I had people from Afghanistan in my family. So your character is going to have a very specific family. That's not something that you would associate necessarily with a Mexican experience. But it was my experience, and I'm a Mexican-American. Your character is going to have a lot of specific things like that. They're going to have specific things that are Mexican-American. One thing you can do is go to a Mexican restaurant, and asked the people who work there where they're actually from. Sometimes they're from Mexico, and sometimes they're not. Because they know that selling Mexican food, if they look Latinx, is the best way to make a restaurant successful in the United States. But if you ask them and they say they're from Mexico, ask them what part of Mexico. Find out a little bit more about that. I don't want you to bother the restaurant people too much.

[Laughter]

[Julia] But usually they'll be happy to tell you what region or what town. If they do, go home and like look that up. Find out what makes the food taste like what it is. Think about like, "Oh, okay. That's an interesting thing." Can you think about what those things that they might have carried with them, what comforting memories they might have brought? How those things would mesh with where you live now? If you live in the middle of Indiana and your Mexican restaurant is run by people from Guadalajara, they might really like corn in very different ways at the same time.

[Dan] That's very cool.

[Tempest] This is all been very food based. I feel like… 

[Julia] Well, this is because food is a really big part of culture… 

[Laughter]

[Julia] Especially…

[Tempest] That's very true. Yeah. But also like, I love the emphasis that you have on family, because I feel that… I mean, especially when it comes to YA novels. I know that with YA that the whole thing is to like get the parents out of the way, so the kids can go out and have a dangerous adventure. But it just never seemed to be like my experience, that I would be able to like escape my parents at that point. Not necessarily even wanting to escape my parents or my family or my cousins or whatever. I really love Guadalupe Garcia McCall's books. One of the things I love about it is that it's about like families together dealing with issues. I feel like that's another thing that in some cultures, that kind of family togetherness is not necessarily emphasized. But in Guadalupe's, it is.

[Julia] I believe she is… Guadalupe is Mexican-American. She lives in Texas. She wrote a book called Summer of the Mariposas. It's wonderful. It's a YA retelling of the Odyssey by Homer. But starring four sisters who have to go rescue their father. They go on a quest, the same way Odysseus does. They run into some of Odysseus's kinds of monsters, but in Mexico. So they cross the border and go into Mexico to rescue their father from someone. It uses Loteria cards, which are a very specific Mexican game that I grew up with, and a lot of Mexican Americans will have grown up with. It's a very specific to this family and their experience of living in a border town, and of having their parents come from Mexico and having that specificity that they have within the home. So I think that's a really rate example of using specific culture.

[Dan] It is such a great book, too. So you get two books of the week this time.

[Laughter]

[Dan] One of the ways to get this level of specificity and to do it well is, like you said, to talk to people. Be polite about it. But talk to people and find out where they're from, and who they are, and what they like and what they don't like. What they brought with them? What they miss?

 

[Dan] I believe that's kind of the homework that you're going to be giving us, right?

[Julia] Yeah. I think so. My homework originally was to write a scene about someone from a very specific culture, and to think about the things that inform who they are and what they like. I think if I had had like an hour, I would have gotten into other things that weren't food, but since I primarily talked about food… 

[Laughter]

[Julia] I want you to write a scene where people are eating a meal. It could be any meal. It could be a holiday meal, or it could be just a regular meal. It could be a fast food meal. But I want you to think about your character and who they are and where they're from. How they feel about this food and why they feel that way? How does that inform the conversation that they're having over the meal, or their thoughts that they're having if they're alone, or whatever. This could be anywhere. It could be in your fantasy world, it could be on a space station, whatever. But it will definitely inform who they are, and I want you to think about that and write that eating a meal scene for me.

[Dan] That sounds fantastic. Make us hungry as well while you're doing it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Julia. And, obviously, Dongwon and Tempest as well. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

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

 

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

 

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 46.

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

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

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] But a couple of words about yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary] Oh, wow.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Tom] Exactly.

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Dan] She loves it.

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

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

[Tom] Exactly.

[Howard] Because, technically,…

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

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

[Laughter]

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

 

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

[Mary] Oh, wow.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

 

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

[Chuckles]

[Tom] Same here.

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Howard] Working dad is a deadbeat author.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Not quite as sexy.

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Mary] Ooo…

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

 

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

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

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

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

[Nope!]

[Laughter]

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

 

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

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

[Mary] Translational adaptation.

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

[Tom] No. There's not.

[Dan] Then move on.

[Tom] There is not.

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

[Laughter]

[Dan] Human existence...

[Tom] As a matter of fact, that's…

[Dan] 5:05 to 5:08?

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

[Laughter]

[Mary] Came…

[Tom] Came inside, yeah.

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

[Tom] Yes. Launches. Yeah.

[Mary] And landing.

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

[Tom] I've heard that as well.

[Mary] That's fairly accurate?

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

[Mary] While.

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

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

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

[Laughter]

[Tom] You've heard the…

[Mary] No, I don't know.

[Howard] I'm writing that down.

[Mary] Type II fun means what?

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

[Howard] Oh. Oh, dear.

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

[Laughter]

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

[Howard] I have experienced all of those.

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

[Laughter]

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

[Mary] Season 13, Episode 48.

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

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] [squeal]

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

[Laughter]

 

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

[Mary] Chapter 6. No.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I've come back to…

[Oh, he's serious…]

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

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

 

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Dan] Where you can tell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

[Brandon] Okay. For?

[Mary] For one of my own stories.

[Brandon] Which one?

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

[Howard] Surprising, yet inevitable.

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

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

[Mary] Consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

[Dan] Yes.

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

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

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

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

[Brandon] Well, let's… 

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

[Brandon] You're extra sensitive to it.

[Howard] I just gotta steer away from it.

 

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

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

[Brandon] Okay.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Howard] That's ablative plot armor.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Something hits them, it explodes outward…

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/07/29/13-30-project-in-depth-the-calculating-stars-with-kjell-lindgren/

 

Key points: (Beware of Spoilers) The Calculating Stars. Set During Mercury/Apollo era space travel. Start with We Interrupt This Broadcast, an alternate history about slamming a meteor into Chesapeake Bay in the 1950s. Add Lady Astronaut of Mars, an anthology piece that starts with the first line of Wizard of Oz. Then drop back to write the prequel, 40 years before! And you have The Calculating Stars. Decide that the loving relationship, the commitment, is not going to be a conflict point, although stuff going on around them can strain the relationship. Going up there and doing cool astronaut things is actually a very small part of the adventure for the whole team and the family. Put the focus on emotional reactions and societal pressures more than technical pressures. Survival training. Terminology. The emotional reactions to events, the visceral reactions. The vividness of your first launch. Get experts to fill in the jargon.  

 

 

[Brandon] We are out of time, though. We've already gone about 30 minutes. So, Dan, you've got a writing prompt for us?

[Dan] Yes. Okay. So, what we want you to do is re-create for yourself a little of what Mary did with this. Take something you've already written. It doesn't matter what it is. Something you've already finished. Then write a prequel of that that takes place 40 years earlier.

[Brandon] All right. We want to thank Kjell for being on with us.

[Kjell] Thank you for having me.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/05/13/13-19-backstories/

Key points: Backstory affects everything a character does, so it is one of the most important aspects of a character, but you also don't need to map out everything and try to fit it all in. A broad overview, similar to what you have of your friend's backstory, is probably enough. Then, when you are writing  a character, you may find yourself inventing back story in the moment to explain their reaction. When you find you need more backstory, stop, make notes, and then later go back and weave it in. Sometimes you may want to build lots of backstory, but be very conscious of what the reader needs to know versus what you may need to know. Where can you fit in backstory? At the end of every action scene, as a pause or rest. Or when a character is interacting with something that triggers it. In conversation! Flashbacks are not just to give information. They should be presented at the right time to shape the interaction the reader is having with the story, to propel a story forward. Flashbacks that break the forward momentum of the story fail, while flashbacks that add to the momentum work well. You can use flashbacks to build a mystery and answer it, or to deepen it. Put your flashbacks in when the reader wants it. Avoid tangential zoom flashbacks. Think about what your character inherited, where they are now, where they want to be, and where they think they are. Those four parts are your character's cultural backbone. Then discover the rest as you write.

 

 

[Brandon] All right. Let's go ahead and go to our homework.

[Mary] All right. So your homework is I want you to explore what these different tools do. So I want you to write a scene where a character has a flashback that exposes some aspects of their backstory. Then I want you to reset that scene again. And this time, in that same scene, they are going to talk to another character about their backstory, so that they're having to deal with the ramifications of it in real time.

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