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mbarkerWriting Excuses 19.46: An Interview on Structure with N. K. Jemisin
Key points: What was your process? I wrote an outline that laid out the three plot line structure, the opening with an overview of the world, and that there would be a cliffhanger ending. Then I write test chapters. It started to flow. But about halfway, I decided it was trash. Devi talked me down. Structure and process are intertwined. Deep and close reading. I wrote the majority of Essun first, then started working on the other two. I fixed a lot in revision. I seeded in a lot from the beginning, then took out a lot in revisions. Starting with too much is an easier edit. Epic fantasy wants certain things. What if we have a complex magic that is indistinguishable from technology? The restoration tradition in epic fantasy is a manifestation of privilege. I wanted to explore oppression. I do write certain scenes while cackling deep in my chest.
[Season 19, Episode 46]
[Howard] I have three be a better writer tips. The first, write. The second, read. The third, get together with other writers. That third one can be tricky, but we've got you covered. At the Writing Excuses retreats, we offer classes, one-on-one sessions, and assorted activities to inspire, motivate, and recharge writers just like you. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats
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[Season 19, Episode 46]
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] An Interview on Structure with N. K. Jemisin
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[DongWon] We are incredibly excited to have a guest with us today. As the title implies, we have interview… We are interviewing N. K. Jemisin as we are finishing our section talking about The Fifth Season. Nora is truly one of my favorite authors working in the genre today…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] I think an absolute powerhouse when it comes to sort of redefining what fantasy is right now. Not to overstate it right at the head into us. But, we are incredibly excited to have you here and to start diving into some of the topics we've been talking about when it comes to The Fifth Season. So, welcome.
[Nora] Thank you very much. I'm N. K. Jemisin. Welcome. Thank you for welcoming me to this podcast.
[Chuckles]
[Nora] You are also the sweetest person in the world [garbled for having?] said that. Thank you.
[DongWon] Very, very happy to, and I promise it's only true things. But… Let's dive right into it. So, as we've been talking about Fifth Season, we really focused on the structure of this book, with sort of the three point of views that you eventually realize is all one character, just split across time. I was always entranced by how this book is put together. It feels like an intricate puzzle box. Yet, as we were chatting before we headed into this recording, this episode, you mentioned that you don't do a lot of planning ahead of time. So, what does the process look like for you to put together this thing that, as a reader, feels quite complex? But to you, was an organic process?
[Nora] Um. There is some structure involved. I wrote an outline that sort of basically laid out the three plot line structure, the sort of opening, which would be sort of an overview of the world, just to kind of introduce people to the planet as a character. And that there would be a cliffhanger ending. That… All of that, I knew up front. My initial thought was that the story was going to be third person, very traditional telling, present tense… I mean, sorry, past tense, third person. Nothing sort of experimental or unusual there. But I always write test chapters. The test chapters, I will just simply start writing. Like, I'm spitballing and, I'm trying to see what voice feels best, what makes it flow, what makes it have the right energy. So I will try it over and over again, in some cases, from the different POVs, different tones, different voices. For some reason, I found myself drawn to this bizarre part third person, part second person, present tense-y… Almost… It increasingly felt like I was trying to write poetry. And I suck at poetry. So, I attempted multiple times to write poetry, only to realize I'm entirely too literal a person to do that. But here I am, I'm pulling the hollow man, even though I'm only E. E. Cummings, I'm like… All of a sudden, all of the poetry I've ever read in my life is starting to speak to me and wants me to acknowledge that flow, that energy. It was a truly instinctive… Like, this just feels right. So I started writing. It started to flow well. I was like, this is ins… This is bizarre. I've never really written anything this… Just experimental, I guess. For lack of a better description. I've never written anything this off the beaten trail. I don't know if it's right. But it feels right, so I'm going to keep going. Then, of course, I hit a point about like halfway through the book, where I suddenly decided that this is the worst thing I've ever written, I can't believe I've written this much, I need to stop right now. Devi Pillai, my then editor, editor at Orbit books, had already given me… Had already offered me a three book contract, and I had happily signed it and happily gotten the advance. At that point, I was like, this… I've never written anything like this, I can't keep doing this. This is going to make people think that I'm the worst writer in the world. So I called up Devi, I was like, I want to stop doing this book, I'm going to change this back to a single book contract. I think I was crying. Devi was like the editorial equivalent of hey, Nora. Have a Snickers. You always want to quit your novels when you haven't eaten. So… Basically, she told me to sit down and relax. So, around the same time, a bunch of friends of mine dragged me out for a intervention.
[Laughter]
[Nora] A very drunk intervention. Over mimosas, they were like, Nora, this may hurt. So…
[DongWon] Stop reading Modern Miss poets and get back to reading your poets. But…
[Laughter]
[Nora] Anyway. So we're segueing over from talking about structure. I'm sorry. But that was basically how I wrote it.
[Howard] Yeah, but see, that's… Structure and process are so intimately intertwined. I mean, when we talk about structure with each other, when we talk to writers about structure, it is in part of a… It is as part of a discussion on process. You have a structure that you are originally working with, and then you realize… You get to the middle of the book, as I think almost all of us do, and decide that we're wrong, we've always been wrong, we hate writing, and we're done.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That is a structural moment. That is a moment where you go back and you look at what you're doing and you eat the Snickers and you have drinks with friends at the intervention, and then you go back, and, I assume, at some point realize…
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Howard] Oh, my goodness, the second person is actually teeing up a wonderful reveal. And… [Garbled] I don't know when that moment was…
[Nora] Yeah.
[Howard] But your reveal was brilliant.
[Nora] Well, the reveal… So I knew at the beginning that all three perspectives were the same person. That was a given. I knew that my primary perspective needed to be Essun. That Essun was the person whose story I was ultimately telling. They're all Essun, but that was…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] The focus that I wanted to keep. So I found myself seeding in hints into Essun's POV… I put hints into all three of them on purpose. Because I am an evil writer, and…
[Chuckles]
[Nora] I cackle while I throw in little hints. I'm like Did you notice this one?
[DongWon] Yep.
[Nora] But, uh...
[DongWon] Going back in a reread, it is such a delight to pick out all those little moments of, like, oh, diabolical.
[Nora] Isn't it?
[DongWon] That she was giving us this… I remember noticing stuff in the introduction of Essun that, like, leads to that understanding later. I was just like God damn.
[Nora] Yeah. Yeah. Those are my favorite kinds of books to read. The books where, when you are really… Where you enjoy the first read through enough that you're willing to go back and reread it and catch all the little stuff. So that is… I don't expect anybody necessarily to pick up on it the first time around. But, deep and close reading are… Deep and close reading is something that I want readers to do with me. It is what I love to do myself with good writing. So I want to reward that with here's a blanket which she mentions in one chapter that you're not going to see again tell like six chapters later. But, little things like that. So, um… But, yeah. I knew from the very beginning that it was going to be all three people in the same perspective. I did write Essun's part first. Because I felt like I needed to know where she was going and where she was going to end up in order to write the other two. But then the other two, I kind of flipped back and forth between Damaya and… Oh, God. Wow.
[DongWon] Syonite.
[Nora] Syonite. Wow. Wow. Okay. Coffee… I don't have enough in me. Sorry.
[DongWon] Always. Yeah, I was really curious about the order in which this was written. Because part of me was like, did she write just sequentially, chapter 1, Chapter 2, chapter 3, altering the perspectives? But hearing that you wrote one of the POVs first, and that then enabled you to write the other two… Which makes sense. Because Essun is like the spine of the novel in some… So many ways. Her story's like carries us through as we start to understand the other perspectives and the history that she's had up until this point.
[Nora] Yeah, I wrote the majority of Essun first. Because I needed to have her lodged in my head. Then I started kind of working on the other two, and inserted some earlier chapters. But I reached a point where I was basically alternating between the POVs as I wrote. It just felt better that way. In fact, in some cases, I was deliberately… Like, when I was writing about Damaya, I would have just written a segment in which Essun went through some terrible hell, and I wanted to seed in a parallel to that that Damaya has to go through. Or that Syonite has to go through. I had to actually kind of stop that, because it was a little too obvious. In the revisions, I fixed it, I think. But…
[DongWon] Interesting.
[Nora] Yeah. But that is how it got written.
[DongWon] I mean, we spent a whole episode talking about parallelism in this book. Right? Your use of parallelism in the different character arcs, but also over time. Right? Starting with the child death and ending with a child death. Starting… You'll have one beat that then is replicated across all three stories at different points in time. Which, like, set up so many sort of like thematic resonances. It was almost like… Like the magic system, you were setting up these different resonances that were coming at us from different angles, which, like, built to something, but felt quite powerful. When you're setting up those parallels… I mean, you were saying that once you started alternating, you saw them coming in, and then you sort of shifted them around or cut back on them in edits. When you're seeding like, these clues, in as well that you kind of mentioned, was that planned at the beginning or did you find yourself layering that kind of stuff in later? Because I think… I love that we're talking about process so much, because I think these are the questions people have when they see something beautifully structured, they're like, how in hell do you do that? Because you can't think of all these things when you're outlining or when you're doing your first drafts sometimes.
[Nora] Right. Right. The majority of the parallels and the hints and things like that, I seeded in from the beginning. I took out a lot. I am not a subtle person. I am a… I am a person that throws bricks at the heads of my readers. I have to stop sometimes, because I need to be more subtle than I naturally am. So revisions are my favorite. Revisions are when I'm like, oh. Oh, that's way too… Let's turn that brushstroke into a dab. Let's turn that brick to the head into a pebble to the head. Or whatever. So I removed a lot of really obvious stuff. Honestly, it still felt too obvious to me. But then I ran it through some beta readers and that helped a lot. Because things that scream obviousness to me are far more subtle in other people's eyes, I think. So…
[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. It's a little bit like… I don't know if you've ever performed stage magic, but it's a little bit like being the magician and knowing which hand you palmed the coin into. Being able to see from your angle, yes, I have a fake fingertip on this finger. It's often very difficult to step out of that point of view… Like, man, everybody's going to see this. I can see it. It's obvious.
[Nora] Yeah.
[Howard] No. Nobody's going to see it. You're moving your hands fast, and you've written this well. I feel like there's an instinctive element here, that sometimes we have to go back and remember. When I wrote this the first time, my instinct was to do this. I've cleaned it up in revisions, and I haven't broken it. That's the thing I think we're always afraid of, is that we'll break something in revising.
[Nora] No, I have always loved revisions. Revisions are my favorite part of writing. Writing raw is actually my least favorite part. I am good at that part. Like, the flow… Once I really kind of get into the zone, I… If I'm listening to my characters the right way, then they are speaking and the story is writing itself. At least at a certain point. But there are two huge problems. One, I have a terrible memory. So I will write the same scenes, or the same kinds of scenes, beats, over and over and over again. Because I don't… especially when I'm on deadline, I don't have time to go back and reread the entire book, and I forget that I put in some particular beat, and then I do it again, and I do it again. So that sucks. Because each writing session is about anywhere from like 1500 to 3000 words a day, and by the time I get to the point where I am doing page 100, I will have forgotten what's on page 25. So that's one problem. But the other problem is that the urge to be subtle feels coy to me. I've always preferred just being straightforward. I've always preferred just saying what I mean. The problem is that it's a good idea to be subtle sometimes. It's a good idea to kind of let the story speak for itself, the action or the setting or whatever speak for itself. I've got to get myself out of the way of that. I have sort of a… I'm told that this is a typical neuro-diverse person behavior. I don't know if that's true. I'm still adjusting to realizing that I have been ADHD my whole life, and had no idea until relatively recently. Yet, when I look back, I'm like, "How did I not know?" So… Anyway.
[Chuckles]
[Nora] But, um… So I'm…
[DongWon] We've all been there.
[Nora] Yeah. So I'm told that is sort of common for folks with ADHD to just repeat themselves over and over again trying to be more clear each time in the hopes that they can get across what they're trying to say if they're just clear enough. If they just say it slowly or carefully enough. As a writer, I'm especially prone to that. Because I'm like if I just write it exactly the right way, they'll all get it, and it'll be obvious, and then I won't need to do it again. And, no, that's not how anybody works. So…
[Chuckles]
[Nora] That's not how I work. I don't even know why I expect that of other people. So I have to kind of get myself out of the way. I have to stop my urge to explain and explain and explain. That is what revisions let me fix.
[DongWon] That said, if you're going to err on the side, I think erring on being straightforward over being coy is so powerful. Right? There's so many times I read a book that is just with holding so much back that I'm like there's nothing keeping me here. You've kept so much back that I am just straight up bored. Right? So I think the instinct of just telling the reader stuff up front, I think, does so much to keep us engaged. And then, I love this idea that in edits, you're like, oh, I gotta pull back a little bit. I gotta hold a few things back, I'm telling them too much. Right? I think starting with too much and pulling back is always an easier edit than starting with… Like, underwriting is harder to edit for then overwriting. Right?
[Nora] [garbled]
[DongWon] Not to say that you're overwriting.
[Chuckles]
[Nora] Yeah. I'm not sure. I've never underwritten. I've always overwritten.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] But the overwriting is a problem in and of itself, though.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] Because past a certain point, I find underwriting coy. Overwriting is condescending. It is patronizing to your audience. It is assuming that your audience lacks the intelligence to figure out simple stuff.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] [garbled] subtle stuff. So… That's not what's in my head, but that's how it feels when it comes across. So I have to keep that in mind too.
[DongWon] It's all trust.
[Nora] So there is a sweet spot. Yeah. There is a sweet spot.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] And there is a trust factor, and you have to remember that your trust factor changes as you proceed through the book.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] You start out at the very beginning, your audience does not necessarily trust you at all, especially when you're hitting them with second person and a bunch of other weirdness. Then, past a certain point, though, you can start to be very, very delicate with your brushstrokes. I tend to still slap on the paint. But I… Revisions are where I thin it all. To beat a metaphor to death.
[DongWon] Well.
[Laughter]
[Nora] I'm sorry.
[DongWon] No, you're doing it, that's great. Speaking of overwriting, we are running a little bit long here. So, let's go ahead and take a quick break.
[Nora] Sure.
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[Nora] So, yeah. My thing of the week right now is the videogame Alan Wake II. I have gotten very into the Remedy connected universe, I think is what they're calling it. Alan Wake is the sequel to the game Alan Wake. It is companion to a game called Control which one lots of awards last year. Alan Wake II one lots of awards. These are writers games, I think. Because they are games that are heavy into sort of exploring the artistic mindset, among other things. But, also, the paranoia that revisions are to writers. Are you making the story better or are you dragging the story to hell? And is the story driving you to hell? So are you actually putting in… Breadcrumbing your ideas early or is an eldritch abomination slowly dragging your story into a terrible place? So, Alan Wake II is a game about a writer who is literally trapped in his own novel. There are other characters involved. There are other plot elements to it. But, as a writer, writing this… Playing this incredibly meta-fictional game, it has been absolutely fascinating for me to realize (A) how writing looks to other people. How writers look to other people. That's been a little actually intimidating. Because you realize Alan's coming across to pretty much everyone that meets him as just being absolutely bat shit. And there's something wrong with the guy and everybody can see it. I'm like, oh, is that how… Is that how we seem?
[Chuckles]
[Nora] Oh, good to know. But then you also see things like the author's characters getting revenge on him. [Garbled lot in common] But it's been a delight to play. And I'm actually super excited because next week sometime, the latest DLC, The Red Caps, drops. So I cannot wait for a chance to play that. So…
[DongWon] We've been talking about doing a bonus episode talking about Alan Wake and…
[Nora] Oh, really.
[DongWon] I think now we have to do that, and we have to have you back to do a deep dive with us.
[Nora] Sure. I would be… Absolutely.
[DongWon] On why this game is so brilliant. So. But thank you so much.
[Nora] Yeah. Absolutely.
[DongWon] Welcome back. So, so far we've done a wonderful dive into your process and how you think about the structure of these books, what that looks like as you develop it. I want to take a zoom out a little bit and take a little bit of a step back, because one thing I was thinking about is… This might be my publisher perspective coming in. Right? Of this book is very much marketed and sold as epic fantasy. Right? It's very much fitting in that category. One of the things that I think is so interesting about it is it feels very fresh and contemporary. It's not surprising to me that you were like thinking about modernists as you were writing. There's so much about it like the rupture of technology is sort of modernity coming into this book in a certain way. It feels very contemporary, it feels of non-genre fiction in terms of the structure. But when you look at all the elements, it's literally wizards going to a magical school with magic crystals and things like that. Right? Like, especially the first book has so many of the trappings of classic fantasy brought into it. So, epic fantasy can have a really rigid structural drive. Right? It wants third person omniscient. It wants prophecy. It wants multi POV, like all of this stuff. Were you actually thinking about the category as you were conceiving and drafting this novel, or were you just like I'm going to do my own thing? And did you feel a tension with that tradition at all?
[Nora] I definitely felt tension with the… I always feel tension with the epic fantasy tradition. I take very much to heart your statement that epic fantasy wants certain things. I find myself hearing those calls for certain things and saying, "No. Fuck you, epic fantasy. I'm not giving you what you want."
[Chuckles]
[Nora] I have spent probably the bulk of my career fighting with epic fantasy. Because I see such potential in that subgenre. It is… Like, why are we fixated on middle European epics, on that as epic? Why aren't we looking at Gilgamesh? Why aren't we writing about [San Diego?] Why aren't we writing about all these different cultural traditions instead of just a few? Why aren't we exploring science fictional landscapes? There's no reason why you can't have magic in space? And things like that. So I do not like the rigidity of any genre. I react badly when I'm told that the way to a particular kind of genre is only X, Y, Z. I'm like, well, what about X, Y, A? So that is how my head works. So, yes, I very much was like I'm going to put a lot of science fiction in this. Then, somewhere in… I think the two… This is a little spoiler. But, somewhere in the two, I gave a name to the force that is being used, and it is not orogeny, it is magic. And I'm just… I just did that to [garbled fool with the audience]
[chuckles]
[Nora] [garbled] because I am an evil writer as I said.
[DongWon] Because at that point, the book was becoming more science fictional, was becoming more science fiction in terms of its logics and technologies, and then that you're throwing out us, like, no. This is magic. It's such a lovely little tension there, yeah.
[Nora] Well, I mean, there's a particular thing that I was doing which is that… I believe it's Clarke's Law, is any sufficiently complex magic is indistinguishable from science fiction… No. The other way around. Any…
[Howard] Any sufficiently complex technology is indistinguishable from magic.
[Nora] Thank you.
[DongWon] There we go.
[Nora] The inverse of that, I think, is the Girl Genius law, which is the same thing. Any sufficiently complex magic is indistinguishable from technology. And I really wanted to play with that. What if we have magic so complex, so structured, still incomprehensible, still at its core something that you cannot fully grasp or at least not easily, and not necessarily reproducible, not necessarily all of the things that are science. But what if it's magic, it looks and sounds and tastes like science. At what point do you start to treat it as a science? At what point is it just science, it's just got a weird name. I really just wanted to play with that. I did not want it to become a clear answer, I wanted it to be ambiguous to the end. Because… Again, this is a bit of a spoiler for later in the series, but the initial stage of the story, where you realize how structured orogeny is, much, much later in the story you find that another civilization went even further with the structure. They got into literally the ability to do some miraculous things with it. They scienced it to death and then drag the world with them. So I really just wanted to explore that aspect of it. It's magic, but can you science it too much? Is there a point where you have dragged it so far that it has a different core?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] It's different in its nature, ultimately.
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Nora] Yeah. That was the idea.
[DongWon] Well, like, one thing I think about a lot is… I think about Tolkein a lot. I love those books, I love the story. It's very meaningful to me. But the thing that always strikes me when I go back to Tolkien is how mournful it is. It's very sad. Everyone's always just singing songs about how the world used to be better. Right? I think so much of epic fantasy derives from that origin point of this… What is ultimately a restoration fantasy. Right? It's we need to bring the old ways back…
[Nora] Right.
[DongWon] And the world was better before and we live in this fallen time. So, so much of what we think of as classic epic fantasy… Obviously there are departures, this is not the whole genre. But much of the core of the genre, much of its most successful elements tend to be this urge to bring something back that once was. Right?
[Nora] Yeah.
[DongWon] If I'm… Had a couple cocktails and you catch me at the right moment in an expansive mode, what I will say is that I think the dominant mood of epic fantasy is nostalgia. Right? I think nostalgia is the thing that drives a lot of it. That is not The Fifth Season. Fifth Season explicitly starts with this statement of Fuck restoration.
[Nora] Yeah.
[DongWon] Restoration doesn't work.
[Nora] Yeah.
[DongWon] We can't do that. It starts with the breaking of the world. I mean, I just wandered off into a whole thesis statement about where fantasy is, but I'm curious, like, was that something that resonates with how you think about this book or were… Was that not even in your mind as you're trying to distinguish yourself from that tension between the what epic fantasy wants versus what you wanted to do?
[Nora] That is always a tension in my mind. I, like I said, one of the things that I… I have been fighting against that tradition within epic fantasy and other traditions within epic fantasy in my whole career. Epic fantasy has so much farther that it can go. And it is… The adherence of so many writers to that nostalgic theme limits it. I think that that's not necessarily a thing that they can help. I think that that is a manifestation of privilege. You want to get back to the world as it was if the world as it was is good for you. If the world as it was was a shithole, you have no need to go back to what used to be. You would not want to go back to what… In fact, you're going to fight the quote unquote heroes of the story, you're going to be an antihero and try and move on to something different, instead of returning to what was. So a lot of my fiction tends to explore these themes. Because some of it… It's pretty obvious, I think, in The Fifth Season that I'm channeling slavery. And I wanted to explore a lot of different kinds of oppression within it. I was exploring closetedness among queer people, I was exploring disabled people who had been treated as useless at varying points, I was exploring a lot of different stuff. I wanted to kind of teach one sort of unified theory of all these folks for whom the old world was bad, are going to see the potential in change. They may or may not pursue that potential. But they see it. And there's no reason for me to pretend that tension isn't there. So, yeah, in the case of… For example, in the case of Essun, I deliberately contrasted her against Alibaster. Alibaster is the reformist. Essun, for the bulk of the book, is the centrist. Who is the status quo defender, survivor, etc. one of these people… Both of them see the potential for change. One of them is just simply not willing to put in the effort that is necessary to make that happen and the stuff for it that would be necessary to make that happen. And the other is further along on his particular path towards reform, basically. I deliberately contrasted them, because I wanted to show… I don't believe that there is… I mentioned earlier that I think that that nostalgic exploration tends to be associated with privilege. For people who are coming from marginalized identities, there's different ways of reacting to that same thing. I don't believe that there's any one way of doing it in a privileged way, and I don't believe there's one way of doing… Of reacting to oppression as a marginalized person. But I wanted to show different perspectives on… Excuse me. If you are seeing the world as it is and you see that it could be better, what do you do? So, yeah, I guess it's the centrist versus the progressive, if you want to look at it that way.
[DongWon] Yeah. It's really interesting. I was just having a conversation with a cis white male author about epic fantasy. I kind of said something similar to what I said here about, like, me, even as a kid, reading epic fantasy, feeling a sense of golden nostalgia, of a thing I would never have access to. His response was initially [garbled] he didn't quite have that experience when he read it. He felt more of the potential of adventure. I was like, oh, is this just the experience of reading this while marginalized? Right? Like, as a person of color, as a queer person, of, like, oh. These adventures aren't for me. I will never get to be Taron. I will never get to be whoever a major epic fantasy hero is. It's really interesting… And I think part of why Fifth Season did speak to me so much was I was like, oh. This is from the perspective of deeply marginalized people who are being subjected to active, awful oppression. Right? It's why the scene of the Guardian breaking Damaya's hand will just, like, live in my brain forever in the worst and best ways. So… But I would love to shift away from sort of looking back a little bit at the traditions and talk about how you move forward. You've written a whole nother series since then, and… What lessons did you take away from the experience of writing these books. Obviously, they came out to great acclaim. You've won Hugos for every single entry in the series. What did you… How did this shift how you approach writing fantasy going forward and what… How you think about structure going forward? To return to the original topic, like, what were the lessons that you took away from this experience?
[Nora] Um.
[DongWon] That's a very easy to answer question.
[Ha ha ha ha]
[Nora] I think I have relaxed a little. I'm not as angry at the genre, because I said my piece. I… I… Like I said, I spent a long period of time kind of railing against the traditions of epic fantasy, frustrated by the potential that I saw that just seemed to be being squandered. I would read… I'm not going to name any particular books, but I would read an epic fantasy series and see how much more interesting it could have been if they'd decided not to restore the king to power. If they decided why don't we try democracy. I know that, like Game of Thrones, kind of went and nudged about ha, ha, ha, democracy? We're not going for that silly idea. Why would we try that? I know that there have been others engagements with that idea, and, epic fantasy as a general thing has mostly kind of laughed at the concept of applying all these modernists… All these modern ways of thinking to the story. But you aren't bound by the ways that medieval people actually thought. You are writing to a modern audience, you are a modern person yourself. You cannot think like a true medieval person. So why pretend? Why let your biases about the medieval era impact how you actually write about the medieval Europe versus how people in the medieval era might have themselves actually thought. There's a lot of potential within the genre, and I spent a long time just kind of pushing at it and trying to say, look, we can do more. We can go here, we can go there. Let's try it. Why isn't anybody else trying this? There were people… There are people who are. I don't want to pretend that I am the only writer that is doing something weird.
[DongWon] No. But I do think you kicked the door in. You know what I mean? Like, I think people were doing that, but I think you opened a door in a way… Forcefully in a way that made it easier for people to follow.
[Nora] Good.
[Howard] Using the door metaphor, when Tolkien published Lord of the Rings, he threw open a door into something that at the time was being called romantic fantasy or fantasy romance or something. They didn't even have a word for it.
[DongWon] Right.
[Howard] He had a goal which was to create a sort of fictional mythos for Great Britain, and we all walked through that door.
[Nora] Yeah.
[Howard] We all walked through that door and ended up with that POV, ended up with that point of view, ended up with that perspective. And now when I think about worldbuilding, I have to kick myself a little bit and say, no. You're worldbuilding. You're building a secondary world thing. You do not have to adhere to the rules of feudalism or medievalism or Roman or bronzed technol… Just do what speculative fiction does best and speculate!
[Nora] That's… You raise a really good point. What Tolkien did, in creating that mythos, I think bunches of readers read the Lord of the Rings, saw what he did, and were to… And their take away was we can do medieval Europe better. Their take away was not we can do a mythos in whatever thing that we want to do. We can make up our own mythos in any direction that we want to spent. I think that there's a number of reasons why that sort of lockstep thinking kicked in. I mean, obviously, you wanted to make imitations for commercial reasons. Because when you look at Lord of the Rings, and you think, what makes it worthy of all this money and all these movies and all this other stuff, you're going to go for the most obvious imitations. I grew up in the eighties, where there were Tolkien imitators every fricking where…
[Chuckles]
[Nora] And literally called the genre or the subgenre of Tolkien clones.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] And…
[DongWon] I grew up on those. They were candy to me. I loved them [garbled]
[Nora] They were candy to me. I was like 10 years old. Then I hit 15 and I was like I am so sick of medieval…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] Europe once again. And I would have reached a point… I did reach a point where it was just sort of like, oh, my God. How many times can they do the same shift over and over and over again? And I think that that is probably what informs my writing…
[Chuckles]
[Nora] As an artist, is my 15-year-old, no, I am tired of this. So, yeah, I think that that's really what it kind of boils down to. But what Tolkien did was take something that he cared about…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] And take it in and create a riff on it. I wanted to take something I cared about and riff on it. And I don't care about the same things that a British professor who's born in South Africa and went through World War I… One? Two?
[DongWon] Two.
[Howard] One.
[DongWon] One.
[Nora] One. I don't think about the same things, I don't have the same interests, I'm not going there. Among other things, what interested me was American history, Black history. I inserted a theme from an actual thing that happened, the Margaret Garner incident at the end of the book. You people have read the book, the first book, so Syonite killing her child at the end rather than letting her child return to slavery is based on a true event for those that did not know. Based on the actual real life of a woman named Margaret Garner who escaped slavery with her children. Something went wrong, slave catchers were closing in, she began to kill her children rather than let them go to… Go back into slavery. It was one of the incidents that galvanized the abolitionist movement, because people were beginning to… People were basically like slavery is so bad that a mother would kill her own children rather than let them suffer it. Because at the time, the marketing for slavery on the part of the slaveholders was, oh, it's fine. We treat them beautifully. Because they're an investment. We would never mistreat them. It doesn't make any sense for us to mistreat them… Didididi… All of that. So that was one of the prime… Not primary, but that was one of the thematic ways that people pushed back. I wanted to insert all of that. I wanted to riff on American history. We are a country with so many sins to our name. We are a country that cannot really function without putting someone in a position of suffering. I wanted to think more about that, basically.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] So I did the same thing that an old British guy did, but I did it from the perspective of a younger black woman. Black American.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, to me, it felt like his reference point was postwar Britain, and you moved the reference point to being 21st century America. Right?
[Nora] Yeah. Yeah.
[DongWon] One of the things I love about Fifth Season was, to me, it felt… When reading it, I felt so clearly to be to be… If not entirely about it, at least in conversation with the experience of being black in America. Right? But, nothing was mapping allegorically one-to-one. It wasn't like, oh. These are the black people, these are the white people, these are blah blah blah blah blah. It wasn't, like, mapping to specific things, but it all felt so densely and richly of the experience. Right? But a part I didn't know about the individual event that you mentioned that you were referring at the end, which is very powerful and very upsetting. But, yeah…
[Nora] What I wanted to explore was oppression. Not specifically…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] Racism, not specifically sexism, not specifically… I was not exploring a specific oppression. I was not exploring a specific manifestation of oppression. I read about suffragism in the UK and Australia. I read about the aboriginal resistance to Australian colonization. I read about Mallory resistance. I mean, I was reading as much as I could about how people in the world pushed back against colonizers and what happens to societies that are colonized, and how it warps those societies, how it warps the people in them. And I wanted to explore the themes and not dry history. So that's why it doesn't map. I didn't want it to map.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] I didn't want it to be… This was not me trying to work through the specifics of my own life or the specifics of American history. This was me working through what is it to be oppressed. Period.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] Um… And I tried to do it in a way that paid respect to all of the marginalized people whose histories and stories I read. I don't know that I succeeded.
[DongWon] I… From my experience, you did succeed very well. I found a lot to personally identify with from where I come from. For someone who is afraid of being too obvious or… Worried about a kind of didactivism, I think you succeeded in creating something very specific and very subtle and very universal all at the same time.
[Howard] I am fond of saying that there are books that are factual and there are books that are true. And you wrote a true book.
[Nora] Well, thank you. Wow.
[Howard] I come from… It's middle-aged white dude. I do not come from any of the marginalized spaces, and I read a true story about what it meant to be marginalized, what it meant to be oppressed, what it meant to try to reshape the world when a marginalized person finds themselves with the power to do some reshaping. It was a true story for me and I loved every minute of it. Except for the parts where I was mad at you, and crying.
[Chuckles]
[Nora] Yes. Okay. Um… Yeah, okay, I mean I… Writers are evil.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Nora] I am an especially evil writer. I admit it. I accept it. This is a thing that I have learned to own about myself.
[Chuckles]
[Nora] I do write certain scenes while cackling deep in my chest. Like, I'm killing a character and I'm like people are going to hate this. Hehehehe.
[DongWon] Make them suffer.
[Nora] Yes… Your tears. I am sometimes like that. I try not to be like that, but… In real life, I am very much… I try very hard to be a nice person. I… Everybody's got their own inner bitchiness, of course, but… And sometimes outer. But I try to be a nice person. I am very much a people pleaser and so forth. But in my deepest soul, I am a sadist. [Garbled] writers are.
[DongWon] And we are deeply grateful for it.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] So… Nora, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation was truly wonderful. It was a real delight to be able to dig into some of the thematic elements and structural elements of this book with you. Thank you for writing it.
[Nora] [garbled] I thought so too.
[DongWon] Thank you for joining us here.
[Howard] Do we have some homework?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Nora] Yes. In keeping with me being interested in video games lately, I've also been replaying Mass Effect, the Mass Effect series.
[DongWon] For your sins.
[Nora] Sorry?
[DongWon] For your sins.
[Nora] Always. So, what I would like to ask people to do is to imagine that they are in a game like Mass Effect where they are presented with three different attitude-oriented choices. Let's call them paragon, and the renegade, and neutral. So, take your current work in progress, take your protagonist to date, assuming that you have one, and flog them through those attitudinal flavored choices. What happens if you continue the story with your character having done the diplomatic and polite and nice thing? What happens if you have your character snap and just be super done with everything and say the stuff that they probably shouldn't say, but it's effective? What happens if your character tries to punt on either of these choices, when they really needed to be giving a more strong response? Just run it in your head and see how that affects your plot structure. I don't know if that…
[DongWon] That's fantastic. Thank you so much. That sounds like a really delightful exercise.
[Nora] Okay.
[DongWon] Nora, thank you so much again for joining us. We… It was such a delight to have you here.
[Nora] Thank you very much. It was a delight to be here.
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help? There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
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