wetranscripts | Entries tagged with bias

Writing Excuses 16.51: Promises are a Structure

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/12/19/16-51-promises-are-a-structure/

Key points: Promises and expectations. A structural layer. A troubleshooting tool. Audience expectations are what they bring with them. Promises are what you make, which set the audience expectation for what is coming. Be aware that audiences have a head full of stuff that you have no control over. This interacts with audience bias and diversity. The bookshelf genre vs. the elemental genre. Set the expectation, deliver on it, and make it delightful. Deliver more than the reader expects!

[Transcriptionist note: I may have mislabeled one or more of the speakers.]

[Season 16, Episode 51]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Promises are a Structure.

[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 so excited to have three brand-new to you guests, guest hosts, here with us on Writing Excuses. We're going to go ahead and start by letting them introduce themselves. Kaela. Take it away.

[Kaela] Hi, everybody. I'm Kaela Rivera. I am the author of CeCe Rios and the Desert of Souls, a middle grade Latinx fantasy about a girl who becomes a bruja in order to rescue her kidnapped sister. It also just last month, or recently, has won the Charlotte Huck Award for 2022, so that was really exciting.

[Howard] Outstanding. Now, you say just last month and then you say recently. You realize this airs… This episode is going to do something that very few of our episodes ever do. It's going to air the day after we record it.

[Kaela] Well, then, I'll stick with a month ago.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fantastic. Congratulations. Sandra?

[Sandra] Hi. I'm Sandra Tayler. I'm a writer of speculative fiction, picture books, and blog entries. My most recently published books are Strength of Wild Horses and Hold onto Your Horses, which are a pair of picture books. But I also write short stories which I post to my Patreon, and you can find it over at patreon/Sandra Taylor. I'm also the Sandra of which Howard sometimes mentions at various times on Writing Excuses. Because we share a house and some children and a business.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And Sandra is understating a little bit her latest books. Every time a Schlock Mercenary book comes out, it has seen the editorial hand of Sandra in all of the content and the layout hand of Sandra Tayler in everything. And Sandra's done a bunch of writing for the new Extreme Dungeon Mastery book that's coming out.

[Sandra] This is true.

[Howard] So, lots of stuff. I sometimes have to remind Sandra how awesome she is.

[Sandra] I was trying to be brief.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Brief is fine. Brief is fine, but… Okay. Meg. Megan. Meg.

[Megan] Hi, everyone. I really just have one name, but it just sounds weird when you pair it with my last name, so… My name is Megan Lloyd. I am a storyboard artist and screenwriter working in the animation industry out in Los Angeles. I've storyboarded on a number of really cool shows. Some of my favorites that have released recently are Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous and Star Trek: Lower Decks. On top of my work as a board artist, I also write and also do development art for projects early on in the can, let's say.

[Howard] So… You… Early on… And on is one of those anywhere a cat can go prepositions. Another anywhere a cat can go prepositions is under is in under nondisclosure.

[Megan] Yes. That's the one.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I mention cat because for those of you not benefiting from the visual video feed, which is pretty much everybody except the four of us, Meg has a cat perched on the back of her chair, which is kind of amazing.

[Megan] Isn't he horrible?

[Howard] [garbled I didn't know you could] get cats to do that.

[Howard] All right.

[Very cute]

[Howard] Promises are a structure. For the next eight episodes, we are going to talk about promises and expectations as a structural layer, as a troubleshooting tool, is a way in which you can look at what you're working on and determine whether or not you're correctly setting expectations, whether you're making promises that you plan to keep, whether you're… What's the jargon? Writing checks that are going to bounce? I was tempted, because this is an eight episode intensive, I was tempted to call it (sunglasses) Eight Expectations.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Explosion.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But then I would have to enumerate this, break it into eight discrete parts. Because eight expectations is making a promise that I'm not actually prepared to keep.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] This is a little more fluid than that. I do want to layout something, though, that promises and expectations are not truly interchangeable terms. In marketing, audience expectations are things that you set, or that you need to be aware of when you are doing your marketing. They… An audience will bring their expectations with them, before anything has happened. When we talk about promises, usually that's because something you have said or done or written or put on the cover or whatever has made some sort of a promise to the reader, has set their expectations for something which is coming. I also want to point out that audience bias is huge here. Now, I've just done a lot of talking.

[Sandra] Well, I…

[Howard] I'm going to throw this one of to our… Sandra, go ahead.

[Sandra] Yeah. I was just going to say that last piece that you mentioned is a huge piece, because anytime you create a thing, audience is going to arrive at the thing with a head full of stuff that you have no control over. So one of the most important things to, as you are setting expectations, it is important to have a feel for kind of the Zeitgeist and kind of societal… If you placed your book as a fantasy novel, then the world at large is going to have a set of stuff in their head that they think fits fantasy novel and if yours doesn't fit, then you have to adjust their expectations for what you mean. So it becomes a… Expectations is always a conversation with audience. Sometimes it's a conversation that is like a message in space where you package it all up and then send it out and wait a minute and a half to get their response and you hope that you packaged it well. Other times, it's much more conversational, where you can actually adjust on the fly. But… Yeah.

[Kaela] I would agree with that. I'd also say that there's an interesting way that this interacts with, like, say, diversity in literature. When people come in, they don't have any expectations, or they have very unfortunate expectations, or they have such an unfamiliarity with the subject matter that they expect to be taught everything, versus, like, for example, writing Cece, which is… It's a complete alternate fantasy world, but it is set in… Inspired by the setting of Mexico in the 1920s to 30s, which is a very unfamiliar place and time for most people. So there was a lot of difficulties in getting… Initially, getting people to be willing to take that adventure on a fantasy in that kind of a space versus a medieval English sort of [sci?] fantasy. Because, again, you can't write everything for everybody's expectations, either…

[Sandra] No. I love that you bring up the diversity angle, because this is actually… And I'm sure you actually have more personal experience than I do, but a lot of times, publishing expectations for what we are looking for mean that some of the more diverse and alternate viewpoint novels get bounced because they don't meet publishing expectations. That is actually a lot of what the conversation about let's broaden what we're offering is making more space for people to read works in which they are not centered, and learn how to engage with works that ask them to stretch a little bit.

[Howard] Let me point out here that during the next eight episodes, we're going to talk about how genre, the genre you're working in… And that can be what we call the bookshelf genre, which is where the publisher has put your book, or the elemental genre, which is what you think you're really writing to. How those make promises and set audience expectations. As well as what kind of prose you use. What kind of cover art shows up? How weird it would be to have, say, a paranormal romance that doesn't have a magical looking female on the cover anywhere. That would just be odd. The promises made by foreshadowing. The promises made, and then broken, by red herrings. These are all things that we're going to cover.

[Howard] What I'd like to talk about now is are there some good examples of things that you've consumed, and it can be books, it can be media, it can be anything. Good examples of something that made a promise and then kept it for you in a way that was wonderful.

[Sandra] Oh. There's so many. It's like… But… You asked that question and, of course, my brain goes completely blank. Even though I've had time to study before. Right now, currently airing is Hawkeye on Disney Plus. They've got one episode left, and it feels like they're going to land it. Like, all the way through, it's been kind of predictable for me in a delightful way. It's like, "Oh, this is going to happen next," and then it does. It makes me happy every time, because they set an expectation and then they delivered it and they made me laugh a little bit. So right now for me, Hawkeye is living in this sweet spot of being exactly what I'm expecting and yet not being boring for it. So I'm really enjoying that one.

[Howard] What about you, Meg?

[Megan] I'm going to plug the Netflix animated series Arcane. Which, the expectation is, "Wow, this art style is beautiful. Will it look like this all the way through?" Yes, it does. Not only that, but they're telling a very compelling and emotional story, that, like Sandra said, sometimes you can see what's coming only because of how they've set it up, but it's a very satisfying show to watch. Especially from a character development standpoint. And also visually beautiful.

[Yep]

[Howard] I wanted to bring up, just very briefly, Star Trek: Lower Decks because that opening scene of the first episode where they're… He's trying to record a Captains Log and then we find out he's not actually a captain, he's… So this expectation has been set that were going to take Star Trek tropes and we're going to turn them on their head. Then she's pulling things out of a box, and you realize, "Oh, it's going to throw all the Star Trek nerdery at us as well. All the trivia." Then, she accidentally slices deep into his leg with the bat'leth and we roll credits. We realize, "Oh, this is going to do some ridiculous things." So, yeah, Lower Decks has been great.

[Howard] Before we move any further, though, I want to plug, or one of us should plug the book of the week. Who's got that?

[Kaela] I do. I'm excited. So I chose for the book of the week The Monster at the End of This Book. Which is an old… Back from my child, little golden book, Sesame Street book with Grover the monster. I love it for talking about expectations because it's right there in the title. You are promised, in the title, that there is going to be a monster at the end of this book. Then the entire book is about Grover being scared that there's going to be a monster coming at the end of the book. Then, when you turn to the last page, Grover discovers that the monster at the end of the book is him, because he is a monster.

[Chuckles]

[Kaela] It is all safe, and adorable. Throughout the whole book, it's very interactive with a child because, "Oh, don't turn the page! Don't turn the page, you'll get us closer to the monster." But I really love it because it totally sets up an expectation, and then walks you through. Then, right at the end, twists it to make the monster safe. It's a delightful, joy-filled romp. So, if you are unfamiliar with this book, I highly recommend you go check it out and pick it up. Because it is a true classic.

[Howard] I love the illustrations where Grover has built this barrier. Now you can't turn the page. I've bricked it up. You turn the page, and the next page is covered in brick rubble. Because you smashed through the wall that Grover made.

[Howard] I want to take a moment now to talk about some apexes. Exemplars and failures and the apex… What I've been told is apex middle ground. Have any of you seen Million Dollar Baby?

[No. Chuckles… I… Yeah, makes sense. Chuckles… I have not. I was young when it came out, and therefore not encouraged to go to the theater to see this movie. Mostly because of, I think what you're going to talk about, the unexpected twist in the middle that completely changes the expectation of I thought this was going to be a fun sports movie.]

[Howard] Yeah. It's… Here's what's fun about it, and why it's… It's an apex example of this middle ground. It has 90% positive critical reviews and 90% positive audience reviews across thousands of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Which is kind of weird, because when the movie came out, all I remember hearing was audience noise about "Hey, you promised me a sports movie and then you gave me something that was actually about euthanasia." That's not young people in the far east, that's euthanasia all one word. Very deep. Very, very dark. But. What it did, it did brilliantly. My… I'm sorry, Rumba, I don't know if you can hear the beep, but Rumba is behind me saying something about "I'm charged. I need attention."

[It just wants to be included]

[Howard] "The floor is dirty. Please let me eat." I don't know what Rumba wants.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] My best example of an apex failure is the Tropicana Pure Premium art. Where, in January of 09, they replaced the orange with a straw stuck in it with a glass with orange juice in it. They paid like $30 million to an ad agency, to a marketing firm, to create this. They… Their sales dropped 20%, they replaced the old artwork a month later, and the whole debacle cost them well over $50 million. Apex exemplars? Do we have another apex exemplar? We need to wrap this up and begin talking about some of the specifics that we can be doing for making promises in our next episode. So, who's got an apex exemplar for us?

[Kaela] I have an example. So, I think that the Lunar Chronicles actually does a great job of this. I know I've talked with people about when you're really excited about the kind of idea that someone's pitching you, but they don't really lead into it and the story kind of swerves off. That's really easy to do in a series as well, because you have multiple entries into this gargantuan story. But, the Lunar Chronicles, at least for me, did an excellent job of what it set out to do. I mean, it was like, "Hey, we're going to do fairytales. But it's in a futuristic sci-fi setting. How about that?" I was like, "I'm down. I want to hear more. Cinderella as a cyborg? Keep talking." With each story, it does that. Where you get a really strong first entry, and it's… It also creates… It culminates across the book into an overall very satisfying rebellion story where you can actually buy that the rebellion has happened and that it will work and how each main character does this. I love how it delivers even more than you expect. Like, you get… The second entry in the series, which is about… It's a retelling of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, right? But by the end of the series, they have done that story so it's also Beauty and the Beast. You're like, "Oh, my goodness! It's also Beauty and the Beast." [Garbled] Then, Rapunzel being… Rapunzel being… There's no tower that makes sense in a sci-fi setting. She's stuck in a satellite. You're like, "Oh, my goodness. That makes so much sense." You get all of the isolation, all of the same issues. But it makes so much sense in its setting. Each person adds up across the series to a really satisfying closure. The Snow White makes sense because, from the beginning, there's the evil queen already, that you know about from all books. Then you find out, like, near the end, you're like, "Oh, wait a second," before you get to that last book, you find out, she has a stepdaughter. You're like, "Oh. Is it going to be Snow White?" Then you open the last book and it is. It's just such a great delivery on…

[Howard] That's awesome.

[Kaela] Everything that you were hoping for.

[Howard] That's awesome. Okay. Well, we are out of time, and I have your homework. So. Consider your newest favorite thing. It can be a restaurant, a film, a TV series, a novel, web comic, computer game, whatever. Ask yourself what promises this thing made to you. What expectations were set for you for this thing? Now… Write this down. Then ask yourself why you believed these promises would be kept and how they were or were not kept. So there's your homework. We're going to have seven more episodes about promises and expectations. We hope you're here for all seven. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.44: World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/10/31/16-44-world-and-character-part-1-all-your-characters-are-biased/

Key Points: You only need to create the world your characters live in. Point of view is the great determiner of worldbuilding. Focus on what the character cares about. You may do it in layers, working out plot specific ones ahead of time, but decorative ones when a scene needs them.

[Season 16, Episode 44]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses. World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] I am… This is quite a bold statement in our title. All your characters are biased. Fonda, what do you mean by that?

[Fonda] Well, often times, writers have to do… When they're doing worldbuilding, they get asked the question, "How do you do it all, like, how do you create a whole 'nother world?" That just seems like such an overwhelming, daunting, gargantuan task. My answer to that question is it is less daunting than you think. Because you don't actually need to create the entire world. You only need to create the world that your characters live in. Because none of us have a complete view of the world. We all live in our different worlds, and those worlds are determined by everything from our family background, our class, race, gender, culture, occupation, our position in our family, all these different factors create the world that we live in. Someone else may be inhabiting a world that is entirely foreign to us. So I like to think of the world and your character's view of the world like the analogy of the blind men and the elephant. Probably everyone has heard of this analogy, but if you have not, it's the idea that there's blind men feeling an elephant, and the one who standing near the trunk is like, "The elephant is like a tree," and someone else near the… No, the person standing near the leg thinks the elephant is like a tree. The person holding the trunk is like, "The elephant is like a snake." Everyone has a different mental image of what the elephant is because they are only experiencing their section of the elephant. This applies to characters in a world as well. That is why point of view is truly the great determiner of worldbuilding. You first need to understand who your character is and what their place in the world is and what the story is around them. That determines your worldbuilding needs.

[Howard] I just realized that I want to retell that story from the point of view of the elephant who has now decided human beings are all ignorant.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And they grope me all the time.

[Howard] And stop touching me!

[Dan] I think this is a really fascinating way to look at worldbuilding. Honestly, one of the things that I really love about the Green Bone saga as a great example of worldbuilding is the way that you were able to show the different cultures. There are the people who live in Jade City, and then there are the other people, the Kekonese who live in Espenia who are the same but also fundamentally different at the same time, because they see the world in different ways. Knowing then that point of view is, as you said, the great determiner of worldbuilding, how do you bring that across in your writing?

[Fonda] Yeah. So, a good example of this is actually my debut novel, Zero Boxer. So it takes place in the future in which the inner solar system has been colonized. There is a political conflict that is occurring between Earth and Mars. There are issues involving genetic engineering and whether or not that should be legal or illegal. But that doesn't actually matter all that much to the protagonist, because he is an athlete, and he's competing in the sport of zero gravity prize fighting. So the world, for him, revolves around athletic competition. So as a worldbuilding, as a world builder, what I needed to focus on were all the details of his life as an athlete. That included things like his supplement routine, his exercise routine, is training, all the, like, details of how those fights happen in zero gravity. All the stuff involving like Earth and Mars and like the tech in the future and how spaceships work, like we didn't need to know how the drive of the spaceship worked. Because that is not something that he cared about, he just needed to get from one competition to the next. So, of course, he gets on a spaceship and he moves through time, but for him, what was most important to the story were those details of his day-to-day life. So a lot of the other stuff is kind of just sort of hinted at, or implied in the background. It is… Still feels like it supports and it exists, but I didn't need to go deep into all that stuff. Where I needed to go deep was in the areas the character cared about. One of the benefits… That was a single point of view story, but one of the benefits of having a multi point of view story, which I had in the Green Bone saga, was each of the different characters then has their own priorities and their own experiences and circumstances, so you get a more fully fleshed out and developed world because you are seeing characters who have different views of it. It's like putting all those blind men who are touching the elephant into a room and they're all drawing out their own little section and slowly the whole elephant comes into view.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The way I think of this is about the decisions that I'm making about the things that my character interacts with. Which are the things that you're talking about. The supplement routine… In Green Bone saga, we learn a lot when we go to the school. We learn a lot more things because we're in the POV of someone who inhabits that… That's a good way… Like, when you're trying to figure out, "Well, what do I have to do when I'm trying to…" How do I… When you're facing decision paralysis. It's like, "What is your character going to interact with?" So when I'm doing my worldbuilding, I'll do like… You've heard me talk about doing this in layers. Well, I'll think about the sort of broad layers that my… That I know that my character is going to interact with. But a lot of the specific details, like the supplement routine, I don't think about that until I get to… I mean, I don't have a character with a supplement routine, but were I writing it, I would not work that supplement routine out until I hit a scene where I was like, "Oh, my character absolutely is going to have supplements here and I need to know what they are." But otherwise, I don't sit down and work it out. I tend to think of it as sort of there are… The ones that I need to work out ahead of time are the plot specific ones, the ones that are going to shape the way the plot works. Then there are other ones that are kind of what I think of as the decorative ones that are the ones that affect the way maybe my character interacts with the plot. But doesn't necessarily shift the course of the plot.

[Dan] Let's pause here for our book of the week. Which is, actually, you, Mary Robinette. You were going to tell us about Craft in the Real World.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses is a craft book. Normally we're giving you fiction to read, but I actually think that every writer should read this book. It's looking at the biases that we bring to fiction based on the ways that we… The fiction that we have read and the societies that we move through. You think, "Really? Biases? Do we have them?" One of the examples that he gives in this book is how we've all been taught not to… When we do dialogue tags, to do like said or asked, and not to do things like inquired or queried. He says the problem is if someone grows up in another culture and they are taught to write… That queried is the invisible one. So they are always like, "my character queried, queried my character." If they come to a writing workshop in a culture that is an ask culture, and they write queried, everybody in that workshop is going to be like, "Why do you keep using this word? Go with the invisible word." One of the things he talks about is how ESL writers will often read something like written by a native English speaker and be like, "Why do they keep reusing the same word? Why do they keep reusing said? Don't they know any other words?" It's about the inherent worldview that they're approaching their writing with. So this is, I think, a great book to read in general, and specifically a good book to read when you're thinking about the biases that your character is carrying, because a lot of those biases are biases that they're inheriting from you as the writer.

[Dan] That's awesome. So that is Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses.

[Dan] A lot of what we've been talking about reminds me of a funny thing that a creative writing professor showed us one time where someone had taken a story set in the modern day, but written in the style of Isaac Asimov. Where he is explaining the technology behind everything that he encounters…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Including wooden doors and door knobs…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And automobiles and all of this stuff. Which, in a science fiction book, we kind of accept as well, yes, you need to explain to us how this door opened by itself, but putting it into the real world really gave it that context of, "Well, duh, we don't need to know this. Why does this character feel it important to tell us about how a car turns on when you turn the key?" That's a lot of what you're talking about here, where the point of view that we're getting the world through is going to change what details about the world we get. I find that a really valuable perspective.

[Fonda] Yeah. I think that if you think about the genre of dystopian fiction, dystopia is a point of view. So if you rewrote the Hunger Games from the point of view of a middle class to upper class person living in the capitol, it would be a completely different story. I mean, they would be, "Who are these district 12 rebels? Insurgents, insurrectionists, who are here to destroy society?" So if you take that perspective of, like, everyone is living in their own world and there are people in our world who are living in very dystopian situations, every… If you decide you're going to tell a story about a… let's say a fictional city that you have made up. Is that story being told from the point of view of someone who has power and is privileged or somebody who is living in the sewer system? Those lead you to completely different stories. Neither one is correct. There's no right or wrong in terms of which perspective that you decide to write about. But that choice is going to fundamentally drive your world building needs. There is a minor character in the Green Bone saga who's the most hated character in that trilogy. But he plays a really valuable role from the perspective of the narrative because he is outside of the system that all the other main characters inhabit. Now, 90% of the time, you are spending time with the characters in this one family that they are very entrenched in their world and their culture. There is this one minor character who is not. Every time you step out into his point of view, you get a very different view of the world.

[Dan] Is that Bero?

[Fonda] It is.

[Dan] I actually love that character.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I do too.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] This is, I think, a super important thing to bring up. Because I worry that some of our listeners are hearing us talk about this perspective driven world building, and finding it limiting. Really, this is an opportunity for you to expand your world in whatever direction you need it to go. One of the problems world builders have, we call this world building disease, where fantasy writers and science fiction writers, we just craft this enormous gargantuan world, and most of it, we don't actually need to put into the book. This is how you can put some of that into the book. If there's a part of your world building you find especially compelling or interesting, but your main plot doesn't necessarily focus on it, you can add in a side character who does or a subplot of some kind that will interact with it. That is how you can get that cool thing you're excited about into the book.

[Mary Robinette] Or you can write a short story that is set in the same world if you don't want to have story bloat.

[Dan] Yeah. [Garbled]

[Howard] One of the things that I fall back on all the time is the unreliable narrator. This is not the unreliable narrator of literary fiction where do I believe what this person is… No. This is the person who just says something in order to fill us in about some world details and I, the author, do not know whether they are right or wrong. I only know that they think they're right, and I might be wrong when I first wrote that dialogue for them. I'll find out later. This principle, the unreliable narrator, the… Oh, I forget his name, he was the story bible guy for Elder Scrolls Online from 2014 through I think almost 2020. He looked at the old Elder Scrolls games and was like, "Oh, no. Your stories are so inconsistent. You contradict your… Well, I have a solution. The solution is nobody says anything about the world except through the eyes of a character who might be wrong, might be right. Tada! Everything has now resolved itself. How old is the city? Eh, the city's about 500 years old. No, the city is 750 years old. No, the city is 2000 years old. It's built on another city that was built on another city that was… They're all right or they're all wrong." It doesn't matter, and it makes the world building so much easier when I let go of that and just allow myself to make mistakes, but my characters take the blame.

[Dan] Well, that is going to lead us right into our homework. Fonda, what homework do we have today?

[Fonda] I would like your listeners to take a favorite story of yours and reimagine it from a different point of view. Take a side character, a non-POV character, and imagine how your world building needs would be different if it was told from someone else's point of view. So, as an example, let's say you wanted to tell the story of Harry Potter from the point of view of the Minister of Magic. So what different world building needs would you need, would you have as a result of that story being told from a completely different perspective?

[Dan] Sounds great. Well, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.24: Worldbuilding for Games

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/06/13/16-24-worldbuilding-for-games/

Key points: Your number one goal is to inspire curiosity, to create a place that people want to come back to, to explore, to wonder about, to invent stories over. You're giving them a springboard to tell their own stories. Use the power of allusion, drop interesting details in without fully explaining them. Ask more questions than you answer. Think about adventure hooks, details or questions that people can use to tell their own stories. Work on narrative resonance, build motifs and themes into every component of the game. Ask questions, drop in allusions, adventure hooks, and random details. Then explain and expand later, justifying and exploring those details. Fill the well, then grab one of those old ideas and queue it up. Start by inverting things or pairing things that do not go together, then follow the logical causal chains. Why, how, and with what effect. Focus on the worldbuilding that your players will interact with. Watch out for your personal biases and norms. Make sure all kinds of people can say, "They're like me."

[Season 16, Episode 24]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[James] Worldbuilding for Games.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[James] I'm James.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are so excited to be talking about worldbuilding. This is something that we all do in our normal kind of fiction novel short story writing. But how is it different for games? Cass? What do we need to know?

[Cassandra] It's actually very similar, I think, in that your number one goal with worldbuilding and games, like in novels and prose, is to inspire curiosity. You want to create a place that people want to keep coming back to. Not necessarily to stay, because some of these places can be absolutely terrible. But to explore, to wonder about, to invent stories over. I think this is especially true for tabletop role-playing games, isn't it, James?

[James] Yeah. Because in tabletop, you're often giving people the tools to tell stories, rather than telling them the stories. So the setting that you give them in something like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons or whatever is really a springboard for people to tell their own stories. One of the things I love, as a writer for games like that, is I'll have somebody come up to me at a convention and be like, "Oh, that lost city you wrote about. We've been playing a game there for a year. Let me tell you all about it." They'll get to the end of their story, and I'm thinking, "I wrote two sentences about that city."

[Laughter]

[James] They put all that detail in, it was them imagining it, and they think I'm a genius because they created all this stuff. So you're really getting the audience to do your work for you. Which is why one of my favorite things when doing game design is what I think of as the power of allusion with an a. Where I will, just like drop interesting sounding details in there and not fully explain them. Let them, let the audience sort of wonder about it or decide for themselves what that could be. That's fodder for them to tell their own stories. The same way as in like a videogame maybe you show some cool art off the edge of the map in the background.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is actually very similar to the way puppetry works. Hey, we've gotten six episodes in without me bringing up puppetry until now.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But what you want to do is you want to create certain specific aspects of the character and then trust that the audience is going to fill in the rest. Like, we've all seen Miss Piggy bat her eyes at Kermit the frog, and she does not have working eyelashes. You, the viewer, puts that into your head… In… You build that mechanic from the world.

[Cassandra] Fantastic.

[Howard] The humor classes that I teach, I use a theater principle called noises off. Which is that the pie fight you imagine is way more interesting than the pie fight I can draw. James, what you said here about allusion, dropping a reference for something and getting you, the player, you the reader, to imagine whatever that was, whatever it is, that's incredibly useful because I didn't have to draw it. I didn't have to build it. You did all the heavy lifting.

[Cassandra] I think that one really good example of that, if you want something to research, is the Bloodborne game from FromSoftware. One of the things that I remember most distinctly about it was there was this whole journey to a boss. You're kind of going up this completely red river, there are just mountains of corpses everywhere, there's no explanation, there's no one giving you exposition. At one point, you see a gate. This guy, who has been completely skinned, he's just red muscle and tissue, he's holding onto the bars of that gate and just very gently banging his head against the door. Again, there's no explanation and it never comes up again in the rest of the game. But I remember just standing there, like, "Oh, my God. What happened here?" My brain just went wild on that.

[Dan] I love that. I do want to give the counterpoint that as absolutely correct is all of this is, sometimes you do need to provide a lot of those details and fill in a lot of that allusion, which is kind of the big main job of worldbuilding.

[James] But, actually, I would… We're going to turn this into a debate show.

[Chuckles]

[James] I think that that's true, but you always need to ask more questions than you answer. You always want to make sure that if you give somebody the answer to a big mystery, you better make sure that you asked another one. Because the answers are rarely as satisfying as the questions, in terms of keeping somebody up at night thinking about stuff. Especially in tabletop. Which is why, when I'm writing for a tabletop book, I'm always thinking about adventure hooks. I'm trying to think, every paragraph, I want to be putting in a detail or a question that could lead a game master to go, "Oh. I can write a campaign about that." I'm trying to give people tools that they can use to tell their own stories. So, if you give somebody an inn, you can have whatever details you want, but make sure that there's something there they can work with. Because that's what they're paying you for. So even if all you need for your story is an ordinary basic tavern, make the tavern keeper have a criminal past so that at a moment, she's worried her old colleagues could find her and kick in the door. That's dropping something in that the game master doesn't have to use, but they could use to start a game.

[Dan] Yeah. Absolutely, and I'm… I didn't mean to imply that we shouldn't be doing that. Phrasing it the way you did, ask more questions than you answer, I think, is a really good way to put it. But, as a game master, when I come to a supplement, if it's putting all the work on me, well, then, I didn't need to buy that supplement, because I'm the one doing all the work anyway.

[James] Right.

[Dan] So, I really like it when a game offers me enough tools to work with, rather than being so free-form that there's nothing there.

[Cassandra] I think that's one thing that is possibly, like, definitely necessary on the topic of worldbuilding. You can go as light as you want, you can be detailed, depending on the property, but narrative resonance, I feel, is vital. You should build your motifs and your themes into everything you do, including the mechanics themselves, like, every component of the game should carry its weight, doing double duty where possible. I think the Persona series is a really good example of that. They have something called the Social Links mechanics, which makes use of the tarot arcana and builds on the idea that each of the cards has different meanings. Each of these cards are associated with an NPC. You can be friends or romance or whatever. They're fascinating, because mechanically, the Social Links are just a way of leveling up the personas that you get in the game. Even if you're not necessarily into the idea of doing the side quests, you're going to move towards them. Because you want to discover more, because you want to interrogate your understanding. There is this one character that I think of that is a really good example of this. Kanji Tatsumi in the Persona 4 game. His arcana is the Emperor. He begins as this really stereotypically rude, thuggish guy who yells at everything, who is very contrary. But he's also hiding the fact that he's an absolute sweetheart on the inside, and he is trying to compensate for the knowledge that he isn't a typical guy's guy by over exaggerating those traits. His journey becomes confronting his fears. That kind of ties to the Emperor, that sense of patriarchy and control. What happens when you have too much of it holding onto you? Even though vaguely wandering through this game, you know it's related to terror. You know it's related to the Emperor. So you sort of know what you should be doing. That is because of narrative resonance.

[James] We should pause there for the game of the week, which is Dan with the Dune RPG.

[Dan] Yeah. Dune is my favorite book of all time. It just got a brand-new RPG. By the time this heirs, it will be just a month old, maybe. It's from Modiphius, it uses their 2D20 system, which is the same basic game system that we use on Typecast for Star Trek: Horizon. But what they've done here that ties into the world building is Dune is a… Has a really wide range of power sets. You've got very weak, physically weak, characters set up against characters with incredible magic powers versus characters who have incredible technology, who can see the future and do all these things. How could you possibly balance all of that worldbuilding together so the game is still fun? What they've done is a really brilliant mechanic where your motivations and your drives as a person directly affect how good you are at doing something. So it's less about the powers that you have and more about why you're doing the things that you're doing. It's a really clever twist on the system and they do a really good job with it. So, the Dune RPG from Modiphius.

[James] All right. So with all these things we've been talking about, with dropping… Asking questions, dropping in allusions, and adventure hooks and stuff. This is something that gives game masters something to build on. But it also gives you job security. If you can get the audience excited about something, then you can come back later and continue to write more about it. This explanation and expansion way of working, forcing myself to justify and explore the random details that I dropped before, is something that I really enjoy. A lot of my best work has come out of… I drop a couple of lines… Early on in my career, I wrote about a city called Kaer Maga, and just like through in a line about, like, "Oh, yeah, and it's full of worm folk and bloat majors and sweet talkers who sew their own lips shut so that… Because they're not worthy of speaking the name of God." Like, I just sort of dropped these details in, and a bunch of fans went, "Wait! Whoa! What? Like, I want to know more about that." That led to setting books and adventures and novels. That's really my favorite way to work, is to just kind of throw out random ideas and test the waters. But I want to know, how do you all come up with interesting setting ideas? Setting details, specifically.

[Howard] At this point, I stopped coming up with them. I have… The well is too deep. I just reach in and grab something that I thought of 15 years ago and queue it up. I don't have time for new ideas. I'm going to die before 90% of these hit the page. Wasting time thinking of new ones is awful.

[Mary Robinette] So, with that helpful piece of advice…

[Explosive laughter]

[James] Kill Howard and take his ideas.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Some of the things that I'll do is inverting things or pairing things that are unexpected. So a lot of times this'll be… Like, I'll take a single starting point… Like milliner assassins was something that we used in an earlier season. I'm like, "These two words do not go together." Then chasing the logical causal chains out from that point. So I think about like, why do we have milliner assassins? How? So, for me, it's why, how, and with what effect, and chasing these in the logical. The how is kind of how it exists in that moment, and the with what effect are the effects to the future and kind of to the sides. So that's one of the ways that I will come up with interesting worldbuilding details. A lot of times, I mean, it really is that I will just fart words onto a page and be like, "Well, that looks interesting," and then carry on.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[James] I love that.

[Howard] I love the causal chain idea. For Planet Mercenary, one of the worlds has too many metals in it, and I conjured up genetically engineered pigs whose metabolisms push the metals out of the meat so they're actually safe to make bacon from. When we came up with an adventure in which someone is stealing the pigs, my daughter asked me, "Where do they push the metal?" I said, "Well, probably all the way out to the edges of their skin." She said, "So they glitter?" I realized, "Oh, my gosh. Not only do they glitter, they shed glitter." If you've stolen the pigs, you are now trying to steal animals that shed glitter everywhere.

[Laughter]

[Why would you steal that?]

[Howard] It is now a game mechanic, and it grows out of the idea of causality. You had a cool idea. Make that idea causal for something interesting.

[Cassandra] I feel like causality is definitely a very good way of developing worlds. All of this sounds very much like how I do it. I tend to start with the idea of a primary food source in a world, and build from there. Like, why is it this way, is it a migratory let's say protein? If so, do people… Are people largely nomadic? Do people settle down? What kind of world would have flying pigs wandering around? What kind of cities would come through? What kind of economies? How do you build a luxury item of it? What would pair with bacon on an alien landscape? Then I start building the flora and fauna and cultures just around that single idea to begin with. I also really like food. I don't know if that's obvious.

[Laughter]

[James] I also love approaching things from that evolutionary standpoint, of always asking yourself why things are the way they are. Also, what are the evolutionary pressures, and where are they pushing things? I think it's important when you're doing all of this stuff, like, it can be very big picture. But focus on the worldbuilding your players will actually interact with. Also, it's okay to do it patchwork. It's actually, in some ways, better. You don't have to just sit down and write the whole setting in a day. If you try to, you're probably going to end up spreading your ideas a little too thin. So by zooming in and saying, well, I'm going to develop the city today, then, next week, I'm going to develop this nation over here that's different, you'll have a different flavor just because you're different from day to day. You've taken in different stuff.

[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say the same thing about focusing on the worldbuilding aspects that players will interact with. I had to recently, for a science-fiction RPG that I was writing a scenario for, they really, for some reason, wanted it to have a diner. It's kind of a noir style adventure, and there like, "Well, we need to meet the cop in a diner." So, if I was going to put a diner into this science-fiction world, I wanted to make sure that it had an appropriate science-fictional sense of wonder to it, despite just being a diner. This particular world had brain… Everyone has a computer in their brain, and you can download memories. So I thought, well, obviously what that means then is the chef can make absolutely anything. Because he's going to just be able to download your grandma's recipe and then reproduce it for you because he can do the memories that way. Which then spun out, well, he needs access to an incredible amount of ingredients if he can make anything that a customer asks for. That started creating all these things. Then we had to think, well, how are the players going to interact with this? Not just they can get their favorite food, but are they going to be able to mess with the little drones that can deliver these ingredients? Are they going to be able to request specific different things? Keeping the players at the forefront of the worldbuilding changed how that whole scene played out.

[Cassandra] I think we're slowly running… Well, we're very quickly running out of time.

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] One thing I want to throw in there is when we're building worlds, it's important, I think, to consider our own personal biases. A very large budget game that I will not name because I do not want its fans to go after me is absolutely brilliant it is a wonderful thing. Great quests. It's also been rightly lambasted for only having white people, an entirely white cast. The developers pushed back, going, like, "Well, this is our country. The ethnic majority is X." Everyone else is like, "No. Historically speaking, this is not true." I understand everyone's arguments here, weirdly enough. If you do not think about things, you just expect your norm to be other people's norm, that can be incredibly alienating. So, when you're worldbuilding, think about your own privileges and biases, and how it will interact with your players' needs.

[Mary Robinette] This is true for prose as well. You've heard us talk about this.

[Howard] I've shared this before on Writing Excuses. My son, adult son, he's autistic. We were watching Elementary and Sherlock is interacting with an autistic woman. My son, who rarely is interested in what I'm watching, stood behind the couch and watched that and said, "They're both like me." I almost wept. Because that is the only time I've heard him say that. Everything that we build… Everything that we build can easily be built to have room for people to have that experience. Where they can look at a character, an NPC, or whatever, and say, "They're like me."

[James] I don't think were going to get a more powerful point to go out on. So we should probably wrap it there.

[James] Your homework for this week is to take a story or a game that you've written and drop in several casual allusions to names that you've just made up. So, places, people, objects. Don't try to figure out what they are. Just make the names as cool sounding as you can. So you throw in soultrees, and the Babbling Throne, Kobishar the Unmoored. Just write those in there. Then come back a week later and write a page of background on each of those names to sort of justify what it is and explain why it makes sense.

[Dan] Cool. That sounds great. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.40: Researching for Writing the Other

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/10/04/15-40-researching-for-writing-the-other/

Key Points: Start with your community library. Triangulate between texts and sensory experiences like ethnic festivals. Look for seminal textbooks, and at the bibliographies. Watch for biases! Sit down and talk to people, talk to scholars, too! Universities, art galleries, etc. have events. Go, listen, and talk to people. First read the books, then talk to a specialist. Be aware of when and who wrote the books. Sometimes you can compare sources.

[Transcriptionist apology. I am almost certain that I have gotten some of the labeling mixed up between Piper, Tempest, Sylvia, and Nisi. My apologies for any mistaken attribution.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 40.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Researching for Writing the Other.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.

[Tempest] And we're not that smart.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Sylvia] I'm Sylvia.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Nisi] I'm Nisi.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And we're super excited to have you all on our show today.

[Yes! Hooray!]

[Piper] So, today, for our special guests, we have author Sylvia Moreno-Garcia and we also have Nisi Shawl, fabulous author and editor and the person who wrote, cowrote the book Writing the Other, which is why we wanted to have her, but I wanted to have you both here because we are talking about research and writing the other. Both of you have written several works that require some research and in which you have written people who are not exactly like you. But first, I would like you both to sort of introduce yourselves. Tell us a little bit about you, and about what you write. So let's start with Sylvia.

[Sylvia] Hello. I am Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. I am a writer and an editor. I actually won a World Fantasy Award for working on a all woman Lovecraftian anthology called She Walks in Shadows a few years ago. Most recently, I wrote a book called Gods of Jade and Shadow, which is set in the 1920s, in the Jazz age, but has elements of Mayan mythology. So pre-Hispanic, mesoamerican elements set in the 1920s in Mexico.

[Dan] Cool.

[Wow. Yeah.]

[Nisi] I'm Nisi Shawl, and also a writer and editor, and had the extreme pleasure of editing and anthology in which I was so honored to get a story by Sylvia. The research that I engaged in was for a novel called Everfair. Set in the Congo, in an alternate past in which King Leopold was defeated…

[Tempest] That's always an alternate past.

[Laughter]

[Tempest] Any alternate past where King Leopold was defeated is an excellent one. So the [garbled]

[Tempest] Sylvia, you're actually the one who suggested this topic. So, I also want to say, like, why was it that you were thinking specifically about research when it comes to thinking about writing the other?

[Sylvia] Well, I think it's an integral part of any writing process. But, of course, an integral part of writing about somebody that you don't know or a culture that you don't know would involve a lot of research. I think people are sometimes overwhelmed and they don't realize the resources that they have available in their community. There are many. We will probably go through some of them. But, libraries, your community library, is a really good resource. I don't think it gets mined enough the way it should. So some of that. But there are other sources of information, and also how to evaluate how good this source of information is going to be for you, because not every source of information is going to be useful for your research, and not all of them are exactly on the same level of accuracy. We talk a lot about fake news. But this is not necessarily a new phenomenon.

[No]

[Sylvia] Where things are colored in a certain way. You have to know that, and think about that a little bit ahead of hand, I think, when you're engaged in this kind of research.

[Nisi] Absolutely. You have to triangulate a lot. My contribution would be that while you're doing research with texts, with writing, that you should back that up with other sensory experiences in your researching, and that my favorite way to do this is through an ethnic festival. When you're not like invading other people's spaces. You're actually being invited to experience a cultural phenomenon.

[Piper] That's very good. A very good note. Yeah.

[Piper] When you are first starting out on research, like you just said, like a lot of people can get overwhelmed. I also think that there are a lot of people who just like literally do not know how to do it. Like, they know how to Google…

[Exactly]

[Piper] But they don't necessarily know how to Google well.

[Exactly]

[Piper] And they may know that, like, they can go to a library, but they don't know that they can say, like, actually go up to a research librarian and say, "This is what I'm researching, can you please help me?" So… But what are some of the other, like, things you would tell someone who's, like, literally does not know, like, where to begin or, like, who they can tap to even, like, begin that research process?

[Sylvia] I mean, books are always a good entry point, but you should look at a good textbook. For example, if you're doing something like I did, like, say, Mayan mythology, you should look at a good solid seminal textbook. Something that students are studying. Then, look back at the bibliography. Look at all… Is going to be like a long list of texts. Kind of go through them, and see which ones are available to your uni… Sometimes, it might be your university library. Some of these might be available if you have a university library nearby. But also, just your regular library could get library loan. But, just make a list of the ones… First, what's easily off-the-shelf, you could go and grab and check it out. Really, quickly, just kind of like open it. Take a quick look, look at a few pages, see what it is, might this be something that I might want to read later on. If no, just cross it out, so you don't go back and like, "Did I see that book already?" Just, with this, construct just an initial pile of things. Every book will have another bibliography at the back, which will lead you down kind of like a rabbit hole, a treasure hunt, more and more. But this is just like initially to get kind of like a lay of the land. Like, what is there available? Like, are there even enough books about the art or the time? Sometimes they might be about some specific aspect of the culture, but not of the other. So maybe there's a lot of stuff about visual arts, but there's almost nothing about culinary arts. With that initial hunt, I think you'll get maybe an idea of, like, kind of, like, how many books are out there on this topic, and that kind of thing. Keep really good track, yeah, crossing the ones out you don't need or that you're not going to have access to. But you probably have more access to than you don't. Because with electronic databases, there are many expensive books that, like, I wouldn't be able to buy, but they'll lend them to me through [garbled F scholar, Cisco papers?] and things like that. These books are like $100 books if I went and bought it from the University press. But you can normally get like an electronic part, and just like, really like I say, quickly peruse it. Just flip through if you can. Be like, "Is this something really interesting or not?" And then kind of move on.

[Piper] I think that you bring up an interesting point when it comes to flipping to the back of a book or to the bottom of an article, whether it's online, for example.

[Sylvia] Exactly.

[Piper] Because seeing the references… That can also tell you a little bit about how much research went into the writing of the current article you're reading. That can also sometimes inform you as to how much has gone behind this article, or whether this article is more of a personal perspective. Right?

[Tempest] Actually, since you were researching Mayan stuff, I know that Nisi researched a lot of different West African stuff when it came to researching the Congo for your book. I'm currently writing a book that's set in ancient Egypt. So I know that I have come across this problem a lot, where I've discovered that a resource that I have been using is super biased in a really terrible way. It has a lot to do with, like, the way that for Egyptology, the discipline that we have now, that's the academic discipline, was started by a bunch of men who were from Europe or America who were Christian. Bringing those views into interpreting what was going on in ancient Egypt, and how then what they said the ancient Egyptians did or what they thought or whatever was influenced by that. But, like, may not be actually what the ancient Egyptians did, thought, or whatever. So… And I know Nisi had a hard time finding some unbiased, like, from the perspective of the Africans who lived in the Congo at the time…

[Chuckles]

[Tempest] Sources. For your book, did you also encounter that? I assume that for the Mayans, also, it's a very similar sort of situation.

[Sylvia] I think it is, in the sense that most of the Mayan codices were destroyed. We have only a handful left. So we only have… So the actual pre-Hispanic material that we have in codex form is very limited. We do have post-conquest accounts, which are written many times by priests, who went there and wrote down some stuff. So there's a limited amount of that stuff. When you read the post-conquest documents, yes, sometimes there is that kind of bias of, like, they were doing really bad things, these were really bad people. So you have to… Yeah, kind of, like, make your pile of primary and secondary sources, and also be careful of when they were published. Because… Like, when… I did say that it was good to get an important textbook. Sometimes those textbooks can be quite old. They can be… It can be a seminal textbook from the 1950s. Right? It's the one we still use, maybe, today for Egyptology or any other material. So you have to also think about, well, yes, but it comes from the 1950s. So what does that mean now that we are not in the 1950s, and maybe our understanding of Egyptian cultures or cultures from the Congo or from the Americas has maybe changed, and maybe it's because simply we have more information or maybe there was like a really bad bias. In this case, there might be a really bad racial bias.

[Nisi] Or there might be someone who made their reputation, their career, based on a certain bias.

[Sylvia] Exactly.

[Nisi] I'm thinking of E. Wallis Budge. I'm thinking of Evans-Prichard, who wrote a book that I used, but at arms' length, called Witchcraft among the Azande.

[Sylvia] I read that. I read that.

[Nisi] There's really not too much hiding the bias there. I'm wondering…

[Piper] Let me just pause you for just a second for the book of the week. But hold that question. Don't forget it. Okay? So. Would you please tell us about the book of the week?

[Sylvia] Oh. The book of the week is the one that I was talking about, about Mayan mythology that I wrote, set in the Jazz age. It's called Gods of Jade and Shadow. It takes place in the 1920s. But it does have Mayan gods interacting with my character who is a young woman, gets sent on a sort of a quest, she opened the box, a chest, and a splinter of bone goes into her finger which restores to life the Death God, the Mayan Death God, Hun Kame, who needs then to find some pieces of himself that are missing and reclaim his throne. So that's the book of the week.

[Dan] Sounds awesome.

[Garbled]

[Piper] All right. Thank you. Let me see. That question?

[Nisi] So the question that I was thinking of asking is as you go through bibliography after bibliography, are certain titles repeated…

[Sylvia] I think so.

[Nisi] And what do you do with… When you find that they're basically talking about the same five books, say?

[Sylvia] That tends to happen. If you've ever done any kind of academic research, you also find… That can be quite true. The other thing that happens, and why it's good to go back… Try to find the source, the original source of something, is that many times they are paraphrased or quoted, only certain segments are quoted. If you go back and you read the first book on that, you realize sometimes that it's not exactly what the others… The other people said it was and interpreted it. So I think trying to go back to the first time that that was said in that book, because we do tend to… As Jane Jones said, in her seminal text, whatever whatever. Some academics don't read everything either.

[Laughter]

[Sylvia] But sometimes they think they know what Jane Jones said. You go back and you find a different picture. But if you do have, I think, a text that keeps coming up over and over, which is the reason that looking at the bibliographies is so good, it should be marked as something to look at. Because if five people are quoting this, maybe it's something to look at. You may find out it's like not very good, but…

[Chuckles]

[Sylvia] Then, at least, you know. Well, not very good, and five people quoted it.

[Thank you]

[Sylvia] One of the other things that we also talk about we tell our students about research is the value of actually sitting down and having conversations with people.

[Exactly]

[Sylvia] And sometimes it's... I'm writing a character who is a black American, so I'm going to sit down and talk to some black Americans about their experience, to sort of, like, make sure that I understand certain elements of whatever. This is what sensitivity readers are for good for. But I've also found it really invaluable finding scholars in that particular discipline that I'm actually writing in to talk to as well, because then they can… I can ask those questions, like why does everybody always quote Jane Jones.

[Yeah]

[Sylvia] From the thing. So is that something that you would also just suggest to sort of like every writer, or is that something that maybe should happen after a certain amount of research, or…

[Nisi] Yeah. I think once you've done a certain amount of research, there may be some natural questions that will start forming in your mind. It may include like why is so-and-so such a scholar on this kind of monument or that kind of stuff. When you have that, if you can, talking to a specialist can be very good. Also, sometimes, universities will naturally put some type of programming that may be useful for you to explore. Not all of them. But the history department of a local institution, you can check what events they're having. If they're having something that is slightly related to something that you might be interested in, Egyptology in this sense, it might be a good idea to just kind of go, sit, listen to a lecture, and then when it's done, maybe talk to the professor. They're always really glad. Not a lot of people kind of show up for these things. So if you show up and you're interested and you're like, "Oh, I know today you were really only talking about this aspect, but I'm interested in this other aspect. Could we maybe have a chat later on?"

[That's brilliant]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Nisi] I think a lot of them will be very willing to have it. If you live in a large city, I would say, take advantage of that. Art galleries, also, tend to have sometimes things that are open to the public where you can interact sometimes with curators and things like that. It's a good point to be like, "I love it. And, by the way, could we talk more about this kind of thing?"

[Dan] I do think it's a really good point to bring up, that going to a primary source, talking to a specialist, is maybe the second step rather than the first, because they don't want to hear the same 15 obvious questions over and over and over again. You can kind of get those out of the way by reading the books and doing the articles and all of that, and then, when you need to know more, that's when you go to the specialist.

[Sylvia] I think that's very true across the board when you're doing any kind of learning or researching. How often have we, as authors, also said to people who are aspiring authors, like, "Hey, do your research first?" If I can send you a "let me Google that link" to you…

[Laughter]

[Sylvia] That answers your question, perhaps you shouldn't have wasted that time, both yours and mine, on that question asking it directly from me. But rather show me that you've done this foundation of research, and you're taking a question and asking me a question that's interesting and stimulating for me, because it's a question for the next level. And it also gives you deeper insight that you wouldn't have gotten if you had spent all of your time on that foundational 101 set of questions that you could have googled anyway.

[Exactly]

[Piper] My last question for the both of you is, we talk a lot about own voices fiction, and how important it is. But I've also found that own voices is really important in scholarship as well. You're going to get a different view of say women in ancient Egypt from a woman Egyptologist. It doesn't necessarily mean that she's going to, like, always be the best, and she doesn't have her own biases. But like women writing about women in ancient Egypt are going to say different things, or are going to notice different things, then, like, man writing about women in ancient Egypt. Do you find that that is true, like, in terms of any of the stuff that you all have researched, like, the people who are closer to it, who actually come from that culture or are descendents of the people who are from that culture tend to bring something different, that are deeper, to their scholarship, and that may be something that a writer should seek out?

[Sylvia] Want to go first, Nisi?

[Nisi] Okay. Well, I actually have been thinking about that book, Witchcraft among the Azande, because while I was really skeptical of what this anthropologist had written, I was able to compare it to practices, contemporary modern practices, by people who were doing these so-called witchcraft themselves. So that was how I was able to triangulate it. So it wasn't that I was necessarily buying what they said wholeheartedly, either, especially because they were 100 years removed from the time I was writing about. But it did help, it did, I think, provide some depth, and, yes, a very valuable different take on what was going on.

[Sylvia] So I read… I had already read the Popol Vuh in high school, and then I read it again. I ended up reading three different translations of the Popol Vuh. The last one that I read, I think the translator worked with an indigenous author or a member of the indigenous K'iche' community. It came with footnotes, I think, that one. It was very interesting to see how the translations were different, one from the other. But also, in this case, what the footnotes, what these footnotes… And each one of those versions had different footnotes… What these footnotes were like, because he was tying it to the local community and to contemporary practices and things like that. So it was a different experience. So I'm glad that I read all three versions. It was kind of like reading the extended… Seeing the extended cut of a movie and the directors talking in a certain part. So that was very, very useful, I think. If I hadn't done that, I might have missed out on some stuff that I ended up feeling and thinking about during my writing process.

[Dan] That's really cool. I know that we're over time, but I just wanted to add onto that one point that I wanted to make. We are accustomed, in research, especially in sciences, that the most recent work is the best. When we're researching culture, that's not always true. It may be that the translator that worked with the indigenous communities and really did this really detailed study of this one particular aspect, might be a very old book compared to some of the others. So, making sure that you are looking for the unbiased sources, or as unbiased as they can be, it may be that the book that has the right information that you're looking for might be very old. So don't discount something just because it's old.

[Good point]

[Piper] At this point, we're going to ask you to recommend to us the homework.

[Sylvia] The homework. I want you to find a news story, news clipping, from before 1980 about a topic that you're interested in researching or learning more about. So if you're interested in learning about feminist discourse, find something before 1980 in a newspaper and take a look. See what it's like.

[Piper] All right. Thank you. Well, listeners, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.33: Writing Imperfect Worlds

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/18/14-33-writing-imperfect-worlds/

Key points: Writing a setting where underlying ideas aren't what you believe? Imperfect, flawed worlds, with cultural ideas or norms that you don't agree with? We write these to help understand the imperfections of our world and how to solve them. Popular genre, with a flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair as the big bad guy. Take an imperfection in our world and push it. If you are writing historicals, beware of telling the reader that "this is okay." You might try to lampshade it, to have the protagonist stand against the prevailing attitudes. But they need to have spots where they are ignorant or unaware, which they confront. Fiction about imperfect worlds can give us a script, a lens, that we can use in the real world. When writing stories in a historical period or fantasy world, don't just pretend that problems weren't there, don't rewrite history by ignoring the issues. Instead, be aware of the unjust imbalances, the ramifications, the external costs. To write a character who is a realistic product of a society with biases we would consider reprehensible, make sure to include someone who can call them on their bullshit. Give the reprehensible traits real consequences. Think through why they have these beliefs or opinions. Don't give the protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they are the protagonist.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 33.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Imperfect Worlds.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Brandon] I'm going to ask you, how do you write a setting in which the pervasive ideas, cultural ideas or cultural norms, are not ones that you think should be?

[Mary Robinette] That's basically my entire existence with every piece of fiction I write because I am a woman in modern-day America.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You said imperfect. Any piece of nonfiction is inherently going to be the writing of an imperfect world. I would say that the question you're asking is more along the lines of writing deeply flawed worlds.

[Brandon] Yes.

[Howard] In order to help us… And I guess this isn't part of your question, it'd be part of my answer… You write these in order to help us better understand the imperfections of our own world and how we might go about solving them.

[Margaret] Well, I think we've seen a lot of popularity of this genre in recent world… In recent years. I mean, what else is something like The Hunger Games? They've created this deeply flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair. It exists to give Katniss something that's worth fighting against. It's… There's that… You're setting up a big bad guy and there's no bigger bad guy than society.

[Mary Robinette] Handmaid's Tale is another good example. A lot of times what you're looking at here is taking an imperfection in our world and pushing it, when you're creating a science fictional society. I write a lot of historical stuff, which is going into areas where… Like the 1950s, Jim Crow is still very much a thing. The Glamorous Histories. Regency England, which we all love, is built on a base of slavery. So these are things that… One of the challenges is writing it in such a way that it doesn't tell the reader this is okay and valorizes it.

[Brandon] Right.

[Margaret] I know one time when Madman was coming out, I think it was like season one or season two, and I watched a couple of episodes. I'm like, "Hey, mom, have you ever watched Madman?" Her response was, "No, thank you. I lived it." I had… It's not necessarily the imperfect world. Eh, it is not relevant. I need not cite this example.

[Brandon] Right. Okay. So, I would say the first thing that I have tried when I did this is kind of lampshade it. It can be difficult because I think your first instinct is to have your protagonist be the person who is not as sexist or racist or ist as the culture around them. Which, to be perfectly honest, I'm okay with picking up a story and then reading it and being like, "Oh." Because there were people, even back in Regency times, who were like, "This is not okay."

[Mary Robinette] The anti-… The whole abolitionist movement there.

[Brandon] That is certainly one approach to it, and I actually kind of appreciate, like, Mary, that you walk that line. I would say a lot of times your protagonists are several steps further along than the average person, but they are… They still have blind spots that they end up usually getting confronted by in the story. So it's not this perfect character who has no problems, but at the same time, it makes me sympathetic towards the character because at least they have the blinders a little bit further open. It kind of makes me think, "You know, I probably still have my blinders on to an extent."

[Mary Robinette] In fact, you're doing that right now, with blinder and blind as a pejorative term.

[Brandon] Okay. Yeah. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of those things that I have worked very hard to train out of my own vocabulary, and talk about spots where I'm ignorant. Spots where I have lack of knowledge or lack of awareness. But it is… It's very easy when you're writing these to trip up on stuff that society has imprinted you with. So one of the fun things about doing this, one of the reasons to do that, is to interrogate these things and to look at them and sort of hold them up to the lens and use science fiction and fantasy to tip them to the side.

[Margaret] For me, where I hit the line is where I'm reading a book… Because sometimes it's fun to read books that take place in worlds that are not like ours. That's why we read fantasy and science fiction. Sometimes it's even fun to read stories in a pseudo-medieval setting where gender equity is stepped back from where it is today, shall we say? For me, where I reach the line is where I start to feel as if I've started to read a Prussian porn. It's like this was just written to talk about oh, how terrible it was to be X in X time, or in this scenario. I love Bujold's The Curse of Chalion books. It's like there is a lot of sexism and allusion to sexual violence in those. It's not explicit, but there is this kind of threat of your main character being a woman, there's stuff that she is worried about. For me, that doesn't cross the line. Everyone places their lines in different places where there comfortable reading, but it's not a story that's about like, "Oh, no, I'm going out into the world. What's going to happen to me now?"

[Howard] In the… Around 2015, the Schlock Mercenary installments, our cast finds a giant, abandoned station if you will, world-sized, that makes them incredibly wealthy. In the 2018-2019 installments, the original inhabitants turn out to never have left and they want their stuff back. Yes, you can take a step back and look at this and say, "Oh, my gosh, this is exactly like what would happen if the indigenous peoples of the Americas or Australia or wherever rose up and demanded all of their land back. What would we do?" Well, it's not exactly like that. But having the protagonist deal with it in a way that says, "You know what, they're right. This isn't my stuff. It's their stuff. Not a whole lot I can do about that." We now have an enormous debt, which is part of our plot problem. The story is not about returning things to indigenous peoples. The story is about we made an enormous budgeting mistake and now we have problems to solve. It's fun to write and having a protagonist who recognizes, "Oh. Somebody lives here. Actually still does live here." And immediately said, "Well, okay. That's…"

[Mary Robinette] A lot of times what I think fiction is doing, and especially when we're dealing with imperfect worlds, is it's giving us a script that we can use and take into the real world. One of the things that I do that is actually the opposite of writing imperfect world is that I tend to write happily committed married couples. I do that because I so rarely see it in fiction. I see a lot of people who have taken their social cues from these narratives about men who are stalkers and men who are abusive. It's like that's not the relationship that you should be aiming for. So when you deal with an imperfect world and you have a character who is coming to grips with their own imperfections, it gives the reader a script and a lens with which to interrogate their own stuff. I know that I… That's certainly one of the things, the side effects, that happens when I read. It is one of the things that I think fiction and science fiction and fantasy particularly do very well.

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

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I've been talking a lot, but I'll talk some more. So, The Fated Sky is the second book in my Lady Astronaut series. The reason I suggested this book for the book of the week is because it is set in the 1950s. It is set in the heart of the civil rights era. It is dealing with a lot of the problems that are inherent in the world at that time. My main character, Elma, is not actually a completely reliable narrator. It's first person narration. There's another character who has been her antagonist for the entire book. As this book unfolds, we find that as she is interrogating her assumptions, that… And he is interrogating his, that there is… There's actually more common ground than either of them thought. But the big thing for me with this is the idea of the narratives that we bring into relationships. That when we are describing our relationships to someone else, it's like, "Oh. I hate him, he hates me." That's the narrative. That's part of what happens with an imperfect world is that it's built by people who come with their own narratives that they're applying to just stuff that happens.

[Brandon] I haven't read the second one yet, but I've read the first one. The first one deals with the same sort of thing, and I loved it.

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Brandon] It is one of those… It was just really, really interesting and fun to read, and eye-opening at the same time.

[Mary Robinette] I suppose I should mention that this is a book about going to Mars in the 1950s when women are the computers because we don't… Haven't miniaturized computers yet.

[Margaret] But with punchcards.

[Mary Robinette] With punchcards.

[Brandon] It's an alternate history.

[Mary Robinette] An alternate history. And imperfect… There is an entire chapter that is nothing but clean… Zero G toilet repair.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Selling point.

[Howard] Do you use the word milk dud?

[Mary Robinette] No, but we do talk about satellites in orbit.

[Howard] Okay.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So. Veering back…

[Laughter]

[Margaret] I'm just remembering all of the rocketry euphemisms in the first book. I'm like, what euphemism?

[Brandon] What do you guys… Do you have an opinion on stories that are set in a historical period or in a fantasy world that just tries to pretend the problem was never there? Meaning people who want to write a steampunk story and just say, "You know what, we're going to write an alternate history version where this isn't an issue." Or people who write a fantasy novel, where they say, "You know what, in my world, racism just isn't an issue. We're not going to deal with it."

[Mary Robinette] The thing is… There are parts of me that love these optimistic visions of the world. I think when you're doing steampunk and doing that, you actually have to move it to a different world. You can't just erase history. That is deeply problematic. It's taking a lot of people's pain and going, "Ah, I just don't want to deal with your pain, so I'm not going to. I'm not going to acknowledge that you've been hurt. I'm just going to… Goggles, dresses, and overalls! Whee!"

[Brandon] Right. Can I… I don't want to… But this is… This is something that is very natural to start doing, and is a place where you might end up having to confront some of your biases because natural human instinct is, "Oh, I'll make it better. Isn't it just better…"

[Margaret] If that never happened?

[Brandon] If that never happened?

[Mary Robinette] While, yes, that would be… It did happen. The other thing that I would say has just slipped out of my head, so, Margaret, you talk, since you had a thing you wanted to say.

[Margaret] I was saying that I don't want to say that you can… It's like, "Oh." I think a trap that one can fall into in, say, steampunk or historical period, and you know that racism was a problem or sexism was a problem, but you don't want to deal with that. The way to not deal with not dealing with that is to not have, say, any characters of color in your book, so that lets you ignore racism.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret] That's a bad way of dealing with that.

[Mary Robinette] Don't do that.

[Margaret] I mean, clearly, if you're doing steampunk, you're creating an alternate history. There were not giant rail lines of flying zeppelins. I don't even know why you'd have a rail line if you were flying, but…

[Mary Robinette] But still…

[Margaret] Whatever, it wasn't there. But if that's the only thing you've changed, and everybody is also still white and upper-class and… Who is shoveling coal and how are we thinking about this?

[Mary Robinette] That, for me, is the thing that… Unfortunately, as a species, we tend to just always other people. If we're not going to do it along race lines or gender lines, we're going to find something else. There is always, unfortunately, going to be oppression. I wish that that were not the case, but I find it difficult to believe that there wouldn't be some form of oppression. So when you decide that it's like, "You know what, I'm not going to have racism." But there will still be some other… It's like there's something, unfortunately, is going to fill that gap. There's going to be…

[Howard] There needs to be an unjust imbalance somewhere.

[Mary Robinette] There's going to be ramifications of that choice.

[Margaret] It's ignoring the fact that this lifestyle was made possible because of an oppressed underclass.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Honestly, folks, and this is uncomfortable truth to hear, it's still the case.

[Margaret] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Like, the majority of the wealth in the world is in the United States, and even if you are poor, there are people in the world who are supporting your lifestyle who have it worse than you.

[Howard] There's a concept that super useful for trying to understand the unjust imbalances. Marginalizations. That is the concept of an external cost. If you want to write a flawed society, think about what the external cost is. A good example of external cost is secondhand smoke. I want to smoke. Yes, it cost me something, and it also makes everyone around me uncomfortable, and it changes the smell of the room, and that one's kind of obvious. What if the cigarette smoker couldn't get cancer, and there is no primary cost for them? Suddenly, we have an unjust imbalance that's really unjust. So look at external costs, and as you are creating your society, your secondary world fantasy, your far-flung future, ask yourself who benefits from the external cost and who is paying the external cost unjustly.

[Brandon] So, last question along this topic. You want to write a protagonist who is a product of their society, and therefore has certain biases that we would consider reprehensible. You don't want to… Say you're writing a historical novel. You want to be realistic, although sometimes realism is used as an excuse for things, as we've talked about before. But you want to… You want to be realistic. You don't want this character to be villainous, but you also want them to be a product of their society. Any tips?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I do is to always have someone that can comment or call them on their bullshit.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Because that's one of the ways that you can let the reader know that this character is reprehensible, but that you are not giving approval to that. Because there's a difference between the character being reprehensible and the text saying that that reprehensible trait is a good and positive thing. So having someone who can call them on it, having there be consequences for the reprehensible traits, these are things that I think can help when you're doing that. The other aspect of that is trying to understand why the character has those opinions. Sometimes it's just the way they were raised and imprinted and they have no idea that those things are false or bad or problematic. Sometimes it's… More frequently, when you're dealing with forms of oppression, there is a sense of safety that has been challenged in some way, and that they think, by maintaining this particular status quo, that they will maintain their own security. Or that they will lose something if the status quo shifts. So if you think about the why's of their choices and their opinions, that's going to help you have a character that isn't just "I have this terr… I'm evil." Yeah, evilness is evil.

[Margaret] I'm thinking also if you have a protagonist who is a product of an imperfect society, and being a product, you want to be able to say, "Well, yes, they probably hold some of these imperfect views." What I would be careful of is making sure, since I'll probably have other characters of the society who probably have similar views who are villains, making sure I'm not giving my protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they happen to be the protagonist.

[Brandon] That's a very good point. Yeah.

[Margaret] It's like, "He's a great guy, so it's okay that…" That's where I think it can get really sticky.

[Brandon] Yeah. I'm going to give us our homework today. Your homework's actually to take a character who is either in some media form or someone you have written who is a wish fulfillment character. This is a character for whom things have gone really well. Things might be easy. They're at the top of their power structure. Even though they might be facing very hard external problems in the form of slaying a dragon or rising to the head of their company or something like this, there are certainly obstacles to them, they are in a position where they're able to command a lot of weight of authority and privilege. Take that character, and move them to the bottom of a different power structure or put them in a place where suddenly those things no longer exist for them. See where that story goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.36: Confronting the Default

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/09/09/13-36-confronting-the-default/

Key Points: What do you think is normal, what are the ways that you think things should be? Seasons in LA, or Australia? Matters of faith? Gender, race, and all that? What about writing a strong female protagonist, except she's the only female in the book? Be aware of your biases! Think about where they came from, why do you have them? Fail better the next time.

( Mirror, mirror, on the wall... )

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Brandon] We are confronting the default. What does this even mean? Mary, you titled this podcast. What do you mean by that?

[Chuckles]

[Mary] So, this is all the things that you think are normal, that you just don't even see in your real life, the ways that you have been programmed to think things should be. So one of the examples that Amal used when we were getting ready to start was that you might think that seasons are normal. But if you live in LA, seasons are…

[Amal] Something that happens to other people.

[Mary] Yes. You have the mudslide season, and you have the California is on fire season.

[Brandon] I've had so much trouble with this recently, just because my books do very well worldwide, and I always post, "This fall, my book is coming out."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And someone will say, "Your fall or my fall?"

[Ha! Ha, ha, ha!]

[Brandon] They live in Australia. I'm like, "Oh, right." The word fall is a default term for me that means a certain thing. It's really crazy.

[Amal] No one even calls it fall in the UK. It's always autumn. But I had an experience with that where I used to… I still do, but it's on hiatus… Edit this poetry journal called Goblin Fruit. Our art director, Oliver Hunter, for a while was living in Australia. We were very seasonally focused, very four seasons. Like literally, the seasons got woven into the themes of the poetry, and we'd always be asking Ollie to illustrate it accordingly. Which we didn't realize until literally three years into the project…

[Laughter]

[Amal] That this meant that he was always drawing the autumn stuff in his spring and so on. At some point, he pointed that out, kind of bemusedly, and we felt terrible. I mean, just never thought about it.

[Maurice] I'm really just struggling here. I'm just like, "Man, do I have sort of a default that I'm just blind to?" Then I go, "You know what, I… For me, it's actually a matter of faith." Because, and I didn't realize it until recently, I'll always write characters with a certain faith. And they're always questioning their faith perspective. But their faith perspective, for a long time, was always default Christianity. I was just like, I'm going to go out on a limb, and believe that people don't necessarily worship in Christianity.

[Mary] Well, and even within that, there's multiple…

[Maurice] And there's multiple… Right. So I've been very conscious about the faith perspectives that I'm portraying and that I'm examining in the stories, because there are obviously other default… Other faith perspectives. I'm like, "Isn't this great for me to start to explore those in my characters?"

[Amal] I love that example, because it is so useful, especially when talking in genre. Because I think that it's equally possible and happens a lot that geeky nerds who come from science backgrounds will assume a default of atheism for everyone. Because it's what… it's their belief. It's like, "Well, how can you be rational and believe in God?" And stuff… Like, we talked about in the conflicts episode before. But in doing that, they miss out on like, "Well, but wait… But people are religious. People do in fact believe things. How are you going to get at that and represent that and do so specifically in a way that doesn't cater to your biases?" Like, are you going to, if you're an atheist, put religious people in your books who are sympathetic and who aren't just deluded?

[Brandon] Nothing… I've mentioned before, nothing bothers me more as a religious person then reading a book and finding the one religious person is the idiot who needs to be taught the right way of things. One thing I really like about this concept, confronting the default. While we're bring… Why we bring it up is number one, if you do this, you'll become a better writer. You'll become a more excited writer, because you'll find things to explore that you haven't thought about. Plus, you can play in really fun ways with the reader biases. The book is out now, and so I can talk about this, but Stormlight Archive, my big epic fantasy series, a little bit of a spoiler. Humankind is not native to the planet that they're on. So, from the first book, I've been able to really play with this, by, for instance, they referen… The linguistics has shifted, and they call all birds chickens. Because chickens is the word… The loan word that made it through to their language. Seasons to them… They're on a planet with no axial tilt. So a season is just when the weather gets cold for a while, they're like, "It's winter now."

[Huh!]

[Brandon] Readers are like, "Why… They use seasons so weird in this book. They said it's winter last week, and now it feels like summer. What does that even mean? What's going on with the weather?" When they start to put together that all these people have come from another world, brought all of their language for describing the world around them to a planet where a lot of this is different, and have misapplied it, you get really fun things that you can play with in the book.

[Amal] That is awesome. That reminds me of Ursula Vernon's Digger comic. Where the main character is a wombat. It's amazing. Everyone should read this book. The main character is a wombat, and… Like an anthropomorphized wombat. It takes several pages before there are any pronouns applied to this wombat. But this wombat is also from an atheist engineering Society, and something about the fact that they're being portrayed as an engineer, and as someone who's working with a pickax and stuff absolutely cued me to assume that the wombat's male. But no, the wombat is in fact a woman. A woman? A female wombat. It was just like, "What? Oh, I guess those bumps were supposed to be mammary on this character." I totally didn't realize that.

[Maurice] So, I have an interesting experience about that whole reader expectation thing. So I talked a while back about my novelette that's coming out from Beneath Ceaseless Skies… Or out from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, called El is a Spaceship Melody. It's an Afro future story, and I'd let one of my pre-readers… I gave it to one of my prereaders, and so he's giving me the feedback, and he's like, "Oh, man, I just love how you did the interplay between the two different races on the starship." I'm like, "There is only one race…

[Hah!]

[Maurice] On the starship." He's like, "No, I meant the white characters on your starship." I'm like, "There are no white people in this entire novelette."

[Laughter]

[Maurice] He's like, "What do you mean?" I'm like… So I had to explain in this Afro future universe, people are free to define themselves as themselves. They're not defined in terms of an other. There's like no… African-Americans defined just by being African-American. So what you've actually just witnessed is black people talking to each other.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Right. It just blew his head. It was interesting that he had defaulted, because I don't name the race of some… Of any of the characters really, because it's not like I sit around at a family dinner going, "Hey, by my blackness, pass me the salt."

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It's not something we do.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] So it's just a non-consideration.

[Amal] That's a beautiful turn of phrase, though. I love that.

[Maurice] By my blackness…

[Amal] By my blackness, give me the salt. It's amazing.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for the book of the week. We're going to talk about The Murders of Molly Southbourne.

[Maurice] The Murders of Molly Southbourne. So that is a novella from Tade Thompson. It's from Tor… I believe it is from Tor.com, from their novella series. This is an absolutely thrilling book that at first had me completely… I mean, it just caught me completely off guard. Because it's about this woman, Molly, who… I mean, the opening scene is her encountering herself and she has to kill herself. I'm like, "What is going on, right now in this book?" It's a really dark book, but it's also so thrilling. So, Tade has a way of just… And it's really, this really tight POV so you're just really immersed in this one character's head. Which means you really have no clue what's going on. The masterful way he manages to tell the story of this woman encountering versions of herself and having to confront and kill herself, and why she has to do this… It's like this mystery unfolding that he is just… It's elegant. I'm sorry.

[Brandon] That's awesome.

[Amal] That sounds so great.

[Brandon] So we're talking about kind of biases, and some of these, that you will have is a listener, are narrative. Because certain types of narrative have been told to use so many times, you have internalized them and you will use them. You will just use them. It will happen. I've got a good example from my books. I'm… Mistborn. My second novel. I love this book. It's a great book. But it has one, now that I've seen it, very glaring flaw. This is that, as a writer, I was trying to… I said, "I'm going to write a really strong female protagonist." That term is loaded, in and of itself, but I'm going to write a female protagonist, teenage girl, and this is a story of her moving in this realm of magic and things like this. I feel like I did a pretty good job. Got a lot of early readers, used my sisters as a model. It really just kind of treated her like a character, right? It works. A lot of people really like it. But, people have also pointed out, she's the only girl in basically the whole book.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Right? This is… Well, this is just a thing that we do. We default to male a lot of times. We default to male when describing characters. When coming up with a team of thieves, I just defaulted to a bunch of guys, and then, and then, kind of the Smurfette principle, right? The one girl. Fortunately, I was good enough not to define her only by her femininity. But at the same time, I still fell into this kind of trap of I defaulted all of my characters to male. Because that's the thieving team that I imagined in my head.

[Mary] I find that I am often guilty of that with characters. That there is a default setting that I'll forget about. In an earlier episode, I offered a worksheet that I use where I have all of the different kinds of axes that people exist on, like ability and age and orientation and all of that. When I filled that out, I will… I look at it, and the default that I kept coming back to is that I tended to have straight characters. Like… And by tended to, I mean that I would look at it and go, "Oh, look, all of my characters are straight. Huh. Interesting. Look at me not even noticing that I did that." The reason that I'll fill the sheet out is because it allows me to spot that. But there's just so many things that even when you think you're thinking about it, because it's programmed in so hard… Like with the Glamorous History books, the first two I was like, "Well, I'm writing Jane Austen with magic. And this is set in Regency England. It's in a small town, the first one, so, of course, there are no people of color there. Then, next is in Brussels, and of course, there are no people of color there. Then I actually researched, and realized that I was completely wrong in both cases. Pieter Bruegel is painting… Etching black peasants in Brussels. So, anyway, point being that in book 3, I addressed that. Set in London, I had this nice diverse cast. Then, book 4, I finished the book and looked at it and was like, "Mary. You have just done another book that is all white people all the time, and it's in Venice.

[Laughter]

[Mary] Which would not be… What have you done?" I had to go back in to correct that. But it's much harder to correct something like that when you are examining your default setting at the end, rather than attempting to examine it before you begin writing.

[Amal] It's a little bit like using the hand that… Using your nondominant hand.

[Mary] Oh, yeah.

[Amal] Like, if you're really focusing on it, you will be able to do something with almost as much dexterity as your right hand, but you're just so used to using… I said right hand, right now, right? That is mine, but that is not the case… Someone's left-handed listening to this podcast, going, "Hang on. But I'm… That's my dominant hand." It is something that…

[Mary] And this is actually assuming that someone has a dominant hand.

[Amal] Has a hand, for that matter. A dominant hand, has a hand. Like, these are all the things that are baked into us because… Especially, when it's your body, using your body to navigate the world. Your body is thoroughly informing all of your thoughts and experiences. I mean, actually, when you're talking about all the straight characters in your books, one thing I love about your writing, and I basically cannot stop talking about this on the Internet, is that I love the fact that you write straight women lusting after men.

[Laughter]

[Amal] Because… Like this is genuinely… I love it. I love it so much for so many reasons. But one of the reasons is that… Besides the fact that I don't see it often and don't see it done in a compelling way. I see… There are so many reasons. One of the reasons is there is this default expectation that women and men are just going to end up together, and you don't actually need to show that desire or that lust, because it's expected. It's just what's going to happen within the parameters of a relationship. But the other reason is, like, I'm bisexual. And I just sort of expect that… I have the opposite sort of bias, where I do just kind of write bisexual characters by default. It's sort of doesn't make sense to me that people don't experience sexual desire for like… For just… That they have the capacity to experience it for everyone. I have to remind myself that that is a thing. But I just… So when you write that, when you write your women who like exclusively want men, I love it. I actually find that like just… It's like it reveals a part of the world for me that I don't experience on a regular basis.

[Brandon] Well, one of the things that I think is important, that came out here, that came up again, is being aware of this. Right? Like, where did my biases come from, why do I have them? If we go back to Mistborn again, I'm looking at my models, right? Ocean's 11, the Sting. Sneakers. These are all-male casts. It isn't that I sat down and said, "I want to do a story with an all-male cast." I just did it. There is a separate argument of, "Is it okay to just sometimes write an all-male cast or whatnot?" That's not what we're getting into. We're getting into the things you're doing unconsciously, on accident, that if you examine them, you might say, "Wow I didn't mean to do that. It would be better, it would be more interesting, make a better story, make me more interested in the story if I confronted it and looked at it and tried to do it a different way."

[Mary] Absolutely. That is the thing… Like, as a writer, you want is you want things that you're putting down on the page to be there because you put them with intention. What we're saying is look for the stuff… That it's like, "Whoops!"

[Brandon] Or just Wow.

[Yeah. Yeah.]

[Amal] I'm thinking about this a lot lately with… There are just so many assumptions that… I think it's also good to think about the fact that everyone has these. That having these doesn't make you a bad person. But being aware of them can in fact make you a better person, just because you have become that much more aware of others, and therefore you have like a new channel open for empathy about things. But… Yeah.

[Brandon] I think I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but one of the very eye-opening moments for me happened way back for a lot of the kind of things that have happened in science fiction recently happened. It was one of the first ones. It was something they called Race Fail. I'm not going to dig into this right now. It's not the appropriate place. But I remember reading a really great essay, and I can't even remember who it was, who looked at this really open eyes, and they were a person of color. They were like, "Look. We need to change the discourse in our society from the word "That was racist" being like the worst thing that you can say to someone. Instead, we need to shifted toward being able to say, "That was racist," and you saying, "Hey, yeah. That was a little racist. Thanks for pointing that out. My eyes are a little bit more open now. I realize something that I' ve internalized." It's… What we would love for you to do as listeners is be able to say it's okay that I have had a bias pointed out to me. It is… I am better now. Not just… We get so defensive. We get so defensive.

[Maurice] That's why I… my credo has always been, "Fail better the next time." Because I'm not going to get everything right the first time. I'm not going to get everything right the second time. But I want to learn, I want to improve. I want these biases pointed out to me so that I can fail better the next time.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do some homework. Amal, you have some homework for us.

[Amal] So, on the subject of biases and norms and defaults, I want you all to think about a bird. Think about what makes a bird a bird. I want you to write down a set of characteristics, say five characteristics that are… That, to you, define what a bird is. I could… I'm not going to give you examples. You can do this on your own. Then, once you have those five things, find real-world examples of birds that in fact don't share those characteristics. Just kind of examine why is it that the bird you came up with is the bird that you came up with, as opposed to some other bird.

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

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Writing Excuses 11.37: Casting Your Book, with Gama Martinez

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/09/11/11-37-casting-your-book-with-gama-martinez/

Key points: If you don't think about casting before writing, you become subject to your unconscious biases, making lazy casting choices and using things that you have already seen or done before. Make a list of the roles you think will be in your book, and where they lie on various axes. Then flip some of the axes and see how that affects your plot. Cast all your people, then switch their roles. See what this does to your story. Who will be in the most pain? Who will experience this in a way that let's you tell a new story? Once you know what the story will be about, write job interviews with different kinds of characters. Go through magazines and cut out pictures of people. Think about your characters existing on multiple axes!
( What's my motivation? )

[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to thank our audience at Phoenix ComicCon.
[Whoo!]
[Brandon] Long-suffering audience, who at this point has done a lot of episodes with us. Mary, you have some… homework?
[Mary] I have homework. So in the liner notes, we're going to be giving you a link to a casting sheet. This is a grid that I said that I used. What I want you to do is I want you to go through… It'll come with instructions, I promise. I want you to go through and I want you to cast the next thing that you're working on or the thing that you have previously… That you already have in progress. Go through and fill it out. Look at the axes that your character exists on. Then flip it so that you make sure that your character has at least two axes in which they are not dominant. Then flip them so that they have two different things that they are not dominant in. When you look at this sheet, I'm also going to say that if you're doing secondary world fantasy, that this is a really good spot to start thinking about how your culture handles prejudice and which gender is dominant, and if it is in fact a binary culture, that you want to make sure… Feel free to tweak that worksheet. But this is the place that you need to start thinking about that, is before you start writing. So, that'll be… That's your homework. I want you to do that.
[Brandon] Gama, thank you so much for coming in and podcasting with us.
[Gama] Thank you for having me.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: ketchup

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Writing Excuses 11.22: Examining Unconscious Biases, with Shannon Hale

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/05/29/11-22-examining-unconscious-biases-with-shannon-hale/

Key Points: Everybody has unconscious biases, which will get into your writing. Start looking at them, seeing what you are doing, and examining them to make yourself a better writer. For example, let's look at how we write female characters. Who are the main characters, the named characters? Writing and reading are not gendered topics. Watch out for the one token awesome female -- better than no females at all, but lacking in variety and diversity. Ask yourself "Why?" and "Is there a bias at play?" Start with a person, then decide traits. Try the two rules -- every crowd is full of men and women, and every other speaker is a woman. Then start fleshing it out from there, with interesting characters. Keep trying! You will make mistakes, but learn from them, don't just repeat them.( And for more details, keep reading! )

[Brandon] All right. Shannon, you have some homework for us.
[Shannon] Yes. Take something you've written and gender swap it. Every character that's a male, make him female. Every character that's female, make her male. See how that changes the story. Often what will happen if you have a story with a lot of male characters, not many female characters, suddenly your now newly male characters, you're going to say, "Why aren't they doing anything? Why are they just sitting around and only the female characters are doing everything?" It's going to open your eyes to how you treat the different genders. Then the challenge after that is see if you can actually make your named speaking characters half female and half male, just like they are in the real world.
[Brandon] All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: fiddlededee

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Writing Excuses 9.3: Character Perception vs. Narrative Perception with Nancy Fulda

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2014/01/19/writing-excuses-9-3-character-perception-vs-narrative-perception-with-nancy-fulda/

Key points: Characters and the narrative do not always agree. For example, historical characters may have biases that modern readers and narrators disagree with. Be careful about sliding into didactic storytelling. One approach is to make sure the story is not about the bias. Sometimes it's just that characters have pieces of information that are wrong. You can use this to indicate what the characters don't know, but often you need to hang a flag on this. Author's notes, footnotes, and afterwords do not mean you don't need to be careful in the writing. Listen to feedback.
( Do you really believe that? )
[Brandon] Exactly. We are out of time. This is a very useful podcast. But I'm going to require... Howard! You're grimacing. Give us a writing prompt.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Okay. Take something that you believe to be false. That you completely understand to be false. Write a character who has the absolute opposite belief. Do it in such a way that you take actual umbrage at the idiocy of your character. Now find ways to hang flags on that so that you're not mad at yourself as an author.
[Brandon] All right.
[Nancy] Also, make it so that at the end of the book, you almost understand why your character believes that.
[Howard] So Nancy wants you to actually write a whole book with this prompt. It's on. She has thrown it down.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with bias

Writing Excuses 16.51: Promises are a Structure

Writing Excuses 16.44: World and Character Part One: All Your Characters Are Biased

Writing Excuses 16.24: Worldbuilding for Games

Writing Excuses 15.40: Researching for Writing the Other

Writing Excuses 14.33: Writing Imperfect Worlds

Writing Excuses 13.36: Confronting the Default

Writing Excuses 11.37: Casting Your Book, with Gama Martinez

Writing Excuses 11.22: Examining Unconscious Biases, with Shannon Hale

Writing Excuses 9.3: Character Perception vs. Narrative Perception with Nancy Fulda

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