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Writing Excuses 20.34: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Who

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-34-deep-dive-into-all-the-birds-in-the-sky-using-the-lens-of-who

Key points: Who? What makes up a character, what makes up our experience of them? History and community, motivation and goals, stakes and fears. How do they react to things? What is our proximity to them?

[Season 20, Episode 34]

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

[Season 20, Episode 34]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Deep Dive on "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Who

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] So, what we wanted to do is take this… These things that we've been talking about, the who and the way there and why the when, and take one work and look at how a single work is deploying all of these things. Last season, we took different works to represent different concepts. This season, we're taking one work, because, in reality, when you're writing, you're doing it all in a single work. We're going to start with this lens of who, and I'm just going to briefly remind you of some of the tools that we were talking about. When we were talking about the lens of who, we were talking about, like, what makes up a character, what makes up our experience of them. There's the idea of history and community, motivation and goals, what their stakes and fears are, how they react to things, and then there's also our proximity to the character. Are we looking at them in first person or third person, third person omniscient? Those are the kinds of things that we're thinking about. There's the mechanics of it, the… Which voice we're using. But there's also the… Their… Our experience of them as a person. One of the reasons that I pitched this particular book to the group, All the Birds in the Sky, is because it takes a look at our two main characters, Patricia and Lawrence, at three different points in their life. There is their childhood, when they're like six years old. Then we see them in middle school, which, as we all know, is a brutal time. And then we get to see them… Actually, I guess it's four different times. We get to see a little bit of their teenage years. And then we get to see them as adults. So, one of the things that I liked about it is that there is this opportunity to talk about who and talk about… And we see the impact of their history as we move through the book. So I think one of the questions for me for you all is, when you are thinking about how these characters move through this book, I'm taking things kind of sequentially, when we think about history and community, how is Charlie Jane using those to shape our understanding of the characters through the book?

[DongWon] I love that we're starting with the lens of who, because to me that is the primary question of this book. Right? This book, more than anything else, is a character study about a relationship between two characters. And using the time jumps is such a beautiful way for us to get a sense of how things that happen to them in early childhood influenced the adults they became and the choices that they make. Right? So, seeing these lenses evolve over time is, to me, the joy of reading this, of this deep commitment to asking questions about who are these people and why are they the way they are. Which starts with… At home… It starts with their family lives. Who are their parents, who are their siblings? And the community that they're embedded in from the very, very start.

[Howard] There's a tendency for readers to… Just because this is the character who is my point-of-view character, and because these two characters have had a moment together, as a reader who is reading a thing that the author has just given me this moment, I will inflate the importance of that moment way beyond what in the real world that moment might be like. And that's one of the reasons why I so love a point later in this book where Lawrence and Patricia are talking, and they've kind of been… They've been apart and they realize they have a very different perspective on some of the things that happened as children. As a reader, I'm like, oh, that was hugely formative, that's critically important to the rest of the book. And one of the characters is like, ah, that was just this thing I did one time. And then someone else says that was the most important thing that you… You saved my life.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] And I love that, because it grounded me in my experiences of growing up. I have memories of things that were super important to me, and the other people are like, oh, that was just a Tuesday.

[Erin] Yeah. I also think, though, one thing that I find very interesting about this book is, like, picking… What you're talking about, Howard, is like picking the moments, also, as a writer, what are the moments in your characters' lives that you choose to dramatize. And there's a moment later in the book in which… I can't remember which one of them says something like I realize that may be, like, I recontextualized my entire life through the lens of this relationship. And this entire book is that. The book actually recontextualizes their lives through the lens of this relationship. There are whole periods of their life that are really important that either get told way later, or, like the schooling part, like all the interesting parts where they were growing their separate selves, and instead, it's the moments when they are together which tell you what's the arc of the story that we're trying to read. And so, there's so many things that happen in your characters' lives that you can focus on, but this book knows what it's about, and therefore picks the specific moments that make that point.

[DongWon] Yeah. 100 percent. And then this also plays into the unreliability later in the narrative. Right? When they're young adults out in the dating world trying to build relationships, there are a couple moments that I really loved where someone would break up with the character or the character would break up with somebody. I'm thinking about this with Patricia and Kevin, I think his name was, the guy that she was seeing. Where she was like, yeah, I don't know what this relationship is. Is it a relationship? We keep trying to talk about it and not talking about it. And then he breaks up with her, being like, hey, I tried to talk to you about this so many times. You wouldn't talk to me about it. And just seeing that inversion, and… Because we have all this context of where she comes from, we understand why her communication style is like this, we understand the trauma that she went through, this like rupture she had with her best friend who was the only person who saw her, and then ran away. And just her fear of commitment makes so much sense. And being able to put us in the moment of that inversion, of her having to step back and be like, oh, no, I see it now of what happened here. I think would have been a hard trick to pull off if we'd just been in this story about adults. But because we know what her relationship with Lawrence was like as kids, we can see the echoes of that reverberating throughout that. And Lawrence's relationship with his girlfriend, that he like puts on a pedestal, which is like a little bit how he related to Patricia when they were children. And, like, all of these different elements. And it just creates all this really rich, interesting context for us to understand relationship dynamics of young twentysomethings in San Francisco in whatever era this is. I don't know. That really, really works for me.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And there's something that Patricia says when they're in their middle school years. In narrative, this was a metaphor for how it was with Lawrence, Patricia realized. He would be supportive and friendly as long as something seemed like a grand adventure, but the moment you got stuck or things got weird, he would take off. And it is… I don't know that that is necessarily true of Lawrence all the time, but I think that that is how she has assigned him in her brain. We…

[DongWon] It makes the heartbreak later makes so much sense.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other thing that struck me as I was reading was that both… Because I had read the book initially, and then I was doing a reread to prep for this. And one of the things that I was struck by was that both kids have this incredibly special moment when they're little, when they're six, where they feel… Or not six. Patricia's is when she's six, Lawrence is a little bit older. But where they feel like they belong. And that they are seen and they're understood and that they have a gift and that they are special. And then they spend the rest of their life trying to get back to that place. And that is frustrating, like watching the frustration and how that manifests and they're both… They both are pushing against it in different ways because of the… Who they are, but they're both pushing against it… Pushing against the same kind of thing.

[Erin] I think that's a really interesting lesson to maybe take from this is that… We've talked before, I believe, on the podcast about sort of essence expression, like what something is at its core versus how it's being shown in the world right now. And I think sometimes it can be really easy as you're trying to make a story or a book go forward to get really focused on expression. What is the character's goal in this moment? What are they trying to achieve, did they achieve it? Did the thing blow up? But why they are doing it is really interesting and also, like, should be really consistent, I think, or have a real reason for changing. And so I think sometimes, like, the character arc can become an arc of action as opposed to an arc of reason for action, and what's interesting about this is this book really focuses on all the things they do are, like, watching a friend, like, make the same kind of mistake, but differently. It's like if you know a friend who has a specific, like, dating habit. They date different guys, but it's like the same thing. You're like, oh, you're doing this again, but in a slightly different way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, you learned this lesson, but not the underlying lesson.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And I think that is the thing that's really interesting to focus on, and to take away as a writer.

[Mary Robinette] There's another thing that Charlie Jane does that I thought was kind of subtle and interesting. And I will talk to you about that when we come back from the break.

[Mary Robinette] Welcome back. There's this thing that she does where there are multiple times where Lawrence and Patricia define, even though, like, one is fantasy and one is science-fiction, where they define the thing that they want is the way the other one moves through the world. So there is the example of this is I wish I could sleep for five years and wake up as a grown-up, except I would know all the stuff you're supposed to learn in high school by sleep learning. So that's a science-based solution for her problem. But then Lawrence has a magic based thing, I wish I could turn invisible and maybe become a shapeshifter. Life would be pretty cool if I was a shapeshifter. And it's the idea of, like, even though they are very different people, they are the other… They want what the other one has. And they both see the other one as you have it figured out. I wish I could have it figured out like that.

[Howard] I think one of the most powerful things that Charlie Jane accomplishes with these two characters, and it relates to what you just described, in the world building, these characters have to see the magic, see the science-fiction. And the way they are differently embedded in that universe is… I found it very, very immersive. From the first chapter, where Patricia is in the woods, I was there. And I think that's… That use of POV in order to communicate the world building was very, very well done.

[Mary Robinette] Let's actually talk about that a little bit more, because that's one of the other lenses that we use, is that proximity to the character. That's something that I think Charlie Jane plays with a fair bit through the thing, that there are places where we go omniscient and all the dialogue is reported. And then Patricia said… Not and then Patricia said. And then Patricia told him about everything that had happened. But there are other times where we do go deep into it, and we live it, and we have all the tactile experiences. What do you think about the ways that that's being manipulated?

[Dan] So, one of the things that impressed me the most about this book was the way that she was able to immediately, in one or two sentences, tell me exactly who the side characters were.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Even though we never really get close proximity to any of them. This is so focused on Patricia and Lawrence, and to a lesser degree, Theodolphus. But I remember being so delighted early on, in like the first or second chapter, when she illustrates this beautifully that both kids are messed up by their parents, and have a terrible relationship with their parents, but into completely different ways. And if I remember correctly, it's Lawrence's parents are kind of distant and don't pay a lot of attention, whereas Patricia's parents demand perfection. And we just get that in, I think, one sentence each. And it's so powerful when you immediately know exactly who these characters are, and why they are problematic for our leads.

[Erin] Well, I also wonder… It's funny, thinking about POV, like how… Like, if you were an outsider, like, looking at these parents and kids, like… There's something very childlike in the way they perceive the punishment. Like, do they really send Patricia to her room for like 18 years and only passed sandwiches under the door? Maybe they did or maybe… But that also sounds like something like a kid would say. Like, and then for like a year, I had to like only eat sandwiches with one bread. And, like, how much of that is in the POV of a child…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And how…

[Howard] Lady, that was 15 minutes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Exactly. You had to go to your room for half an hour. It was not like… But I don't know. Because…

[Howard] Yeah.

[Erin] We're so in the POV that we so get the other characters through this specific lens. And I think that's why they come through so clearly. Because the characters, the main characters, have such a very specific point of view on their parents or on the adults in their life that it comes through super clearly whether or not it's objectively true.

[DongWon] Well in… This goes back to the thing I was talking about earlier, in terms of the inversion around understanding what their relationship was. Because that's a tool of proximity. Right? We're zoomed in so close on each of their experiences of this relationship that we're getting this, like, 20 something I don't know how to date kind of perspective.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And we're embedded in that until suddenly we get that revelation, and then we zoom out. Right? Everything just sort of snaps into focus in this relationship in a very cinematic way where we can look back on the relationship that's been described to us and then, like, oh, yeah, that is how she's been treating that guy, or oh, yeah, he's doing this thing to her, and her experiences of what the hell is happening the entire time. Right? And so I think that is such a masterful use of proximity and creates this feeling that I couldn't shake throughout the book where I wasn't, like, experiencing characters, but, like, I was like, oh, these are like my friends, was this feeling that I had throughout, which was, like, an interesting sensation, and they felt like people I was in community with rather than people I was learning about. And I think it is a little bit of that, trying to parse the thing that your friend is telling me, they were like complaining about their relationship, and you're like, but this is your fault, though? You know what I mean?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Like that little bit of a thing, of trying to be like figure out how to help your friend, and I'm doing that same math with like how to help Lawrence with this situation? How do I get him to chill out about this girl that he's dating so that he doesn't ruin it? And you're like, my gosh, he's going to ruin it. And the only way he's going to figure it out is by ruining it. So…

[Erin] And, it's funny, is I also see this about the entire world. So we'll probably talk about this more in one of the other lenses, but what I think is so… What I found really interesting and what I highlighted the most in this entire book were all of the horrible things that were happening in the world…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That were asides to the characters' lives. They're like, and then that thing in Haiti, and… I don't know, the thing and the heat and the… And they would just mention it among, like, things that were impacting… They're like, I can't go on a date here because, like, I have to remember to not flush the toilet because of that water crisis…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Back to my date. And so, it's so hyper focused in some ways on their own lives as we all are, that they let the broader parts of the world, which we mostly get in omniscient kind of asides go, until they cannot let it go anymore because it intrudes on their worlds.

[DongWon] The one that really stuck out to me was in the moment where Patricia and Lawrence are like, finally, like connected and they're in the middle of that sex scene… That's very intense and we're in their experience. There's a sideline about the, like, and on the television they're talking about how superstar whatever the name of the star was obliterates half of the East Coast. And I went, damn, that's a really broad way to phrase that. And then forgot about it, because of the intensity of this scene. And then she gets the call that her parents are, like, trapped and dying in this, like, thing. And it's like, oh! Obliterate was used literally and intentionally. They just weren't observing this catastrophe that was happening outside their window. And it's like you feel the heartbreak of experiencing joy while the world is falling apart around you.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And that is… Again, that use of coming in and back out again.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] With the proximity is so interesting. Before we wrap up, I did want to touch about the motivations and goals and the stakes and fears, because… And I realize that I am wrapping like three lenses all into one…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But it informs the way they are reacting through the whole book. How much do you think their motivations, goals, stakes, fears are set up in the beginning and consistent through the book, and how much do you think they change?

[Howard] Um… In the beginning of the book, these were kids who were trying to figure out how to interact with the world, how to survive the world, and they arrived at two completely different toolsets. By the middle of the book, I feel like they've both figured out the world is broken and there are things that they can be doing to help. And they have completely different toolsets. And the fact that they have different toolsets and blind spots… The inability to see what someone else's toolset might provide leads to the conflict at the end where these two characters, who are both the good guys, are each other's antagonists.

[Mary Robinette] All right. I think what you said about how they… One of the things for me was that they… It sets up that they are trying to survive N, and that that's something that they are constantly trying to do. But in the early part of the book, because they are children, their reactions are not how do I survive this thing that is happening to me. And that as we progress through, their reaction becomes how can I influence things so that those things don't happen to me or anyone else again?

[DongWon] I think my one critique of the book, or my major critique of the book, I think comes to some of the stakes questions. Right? Because we have these world stakes in terms of the world is getting worse, and we have this sort of tech bro attitude of, like, I can save the world, in which… The Sam Bankman-Fried kind of perspective…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Which we've seen the flaws of. And we have this other perspective from her coming from this more holistic magical thing. Sometimes that felt a little… Like, there's a version of this book that I would have really enjoyed which is a contemporary realist novel about these two kids growing up and then living in San Francisco and experiencing this tension that is really core of what's going on in this city and has been going on in this city, especially when this book was written. And so sometimes, I felt a little disconnected to me from the supernatural state. Right? Because we have this thing where the tree at the beginning of the book asks this question, and that it establishes as a major stake. We have the AI that he builds in the closet. That's established as a major stakes. And so by the time those two things come back in, I've been thinking about them this whole time, and kind of wondering where they are, and knowing in the back of my mind that those are the stakes that are going to matter at the end of the day. But there a little disconnected from the moment to moment action. Right? And, like… They are connected to the characters motivations in that they are central to the questions that they are interested in in terms of conductivity, community, helping people, in terms of Patricia, and these technological solutions and sort of abstract ideas in terms of Lawrence. But in the specificity of those two things which are important for the end, they disappear for a very long time. But because they're highlighted at the very beginning, I never forgot about them. So there was a little bit of friction around the stakes of the story in that way. Even though the emotional stakes were so well rendered and so established, the plot stakes felt… I felt a gap…

[Howard] I agree. I look at that problem and I think, dang it, Charlie Jane Anders wants me to read smarter than I want to read.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think that's true in so many ways. What I loved about the way the character interaction works in this book feels very queer to me in a specific way, because it is about holding empathy and understanding for the characters, while also holding them accountable for the things that they're doing. Which is a thing I think we strive for in the queer community. I think we strive for it in a lot of communities, but it's a thing that I observed, and something about the way the dy… Social dynamics work and the way the characters talk to each other felt so familiar to me in a certain way that I really appreciated about this book. Because I think she is asking a lot of us to hold in our heads, here's who this character was as a child, here's who this character is now, and keep that empathy, while also holding them accountable.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] So what's interesting, and I see that Dan has something…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] That he wants to say, but I'm just going to slip this in. One of the things that I particularly liked about the tree and the AI was that both of them were things that would be explained away as childhood make-believe. Because I remember Eliza, the computer, and the way ChangeMe is described at the beginning does not seem any different than Eliza. Right? But they are pretending that she's… That this is real and this is… And so I liked the tension.

[DongWon] For the context, Eliza's one of the first chatbots which was used… Claimed to be used as a therapeutic tool because it was responding in a humanistic way, but it is just canned responses.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, it's just… Yeah.

[DongWon] So… Wish [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, ChatGPT. That it gives the illusion of intelligence, but it isn't actually intelligent. The thing that happened to her as a child could have been a dream that she had.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And so I liked that… You describe it as stakes, but for me it falls back into the history thing. It's that there's an imaginary friend that they both had that is shaping a lot of the decisions that they make. But then it turns out maybe not so imaginary.

[Dan] Yeah. So, I'm glad you brought up critique. Full disclosure, I did not love this book. I'm kind of the dissenting voice here on the podcast to an extent. But specifically talking about what the stakes were, one of the realizations that I had partway through, and maybe this is a very different interpretation than some of the others had, is that what was going on in the world was really kind of beside the point. And a lot of the stuff with the tree and all of that, those stakes were there, but the real core of it was just who they were as people. And every time I would say this book is so boring, nothing is happening, I would have to stop and say, no, actually, there's a lot happening. It's just all internal to who they are. This is not a book where there are big action scenes. There are action scenes in it. But it is a book where… Like, the breakup with Kevin was a really big deal. And these kind of smaller moments were actually, for me, the real stakes of the book is who these people are, and what are the milestones of their progress on to becoming somebody different.

[Erin] And I think when it comes to stakes, one of the things that I took away from it was the idea that, like, you want to think that your life is so important and maybe it isn't. Even though these characters are in fact important to the world in some way, they felt like they were being… It felt, for me, for a lot of the book, that they were tools of greater movements they didn't understand. They were tools of people who had big plans that they would never tell them, and so they were just trying to, like, do the best they could to get from moment to moment of happiness, because everything they were doing was at somebody else's behest. Like, both of them were working for organizations they didn't fully understand, doing things that they didn't fully get, until it was happening. And so, I felt like in some ways maybe it's like… And there's all that thing about aggrandizement and, like, whether or not you're supposed to think you are the driver of the story or not in a story that's so focused on two characters. It's like this interesting contrast between how much does one person change the world and how much are they just trying to remain in the world as it changes around them.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that one of the things that worked for me was that I did come in reading it as a character story. And so, because there were so many other things in the world that were happening in the background, the fact that other… That action that I was interested in was also happening in the background, just kind of felt like part of the texture. That, for me, this was two characters who both just wanted to belong, and they also wanted to stop feeling insignificant.

[DongWon] One thing that… And I think Dan and I are sort of coming at the same critique from different directions. I think we had different eventual emotional responses to it. But one simple rubric I have, and this is very reductive, so don't yell at me, but, like, is the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction is often around this idea of literary fiction being primarily about portraiture, and genre fiction being primarily about building out a model. Right? It's about asking a question and answering it. Right? And this novel is, I think, attempting to do both. In that it is writing the literary and genre line in a certain way, and I appreciated its instincts to try and do both, but I think there's a little bit of friction between those, in terms of the overall question of how do we solve world problems. It's about connection, it's about integration, it is about, like, organic [garbled] network kind of things, which is the eventual… hybridizing community approach and technological approaches. Right? That is sort of the thing that she's arguing for at the end of the book. But then the substance of the book is primarily about character portrait and relationship portrait of two people feeling and bonding and coming together in this thing. And that becomes the metaphor, that becomes like the synthesis in this dialectical approach of these two different things. That relationship encompasses those two things. But what I loved about the book was primarily the literary project of portraiture.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to say that I wonder now how much of that is intentional. Because what you just described is actually what's happening in the book.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] The conflict between fantasy and science fiction, the conflict between two genres of understanding, the technical and the touchy-feely.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And with that, I think it is time for us to give you your homework.

[Mary Robinette] So, for your homework, since we are focusing on the lens of who, and one of the things that I found most compelling about these two is how they are shaped by the other person. Who does your character envy? And why? And what action can they take to act on that desire?

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

mbarker

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

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

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

[Season 20, Episode 06]

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

[Season 20, Episode 06]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] History and community.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Only the nouns have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yep.

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

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

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

[Howard] Gotta tie this thread off.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.52: End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-52-end-of-year-reflections-navigating-speedbumps

Key Points: Life's speedbumps! Career, body, circumstances... Slow down, and rattle and shake over it? Rent a backhoe and scrape it off before driving? Break everything into smaller pieces and celebrate any progress. Sometimes you do it to yourself! Choose to move, and... disruptive, cascading issues. Depression and panic disorder? Brain shingles! In a grocery store without a cart, just picking up items and juggling! Strategies! Self-medicating with sugar? No, talk to everyone about it and talk about how to do something more healthy. Don't go too far with ergonomics, but if something is causing you pain, is there a quick and easy way to fix it? Identify obstacles. Beware, your brain confuses happy off-balance and frustrated or sad off-balance. Having trouble with decisions? Lists! Two hand choices. Eliminate repeated options that aren't working. Pie slices! How big is it, and how many do you want? Think of yourself! Move from triage dealing with fires to sustainable, balanced approaches. Replace "you can't have it all" with "you don't actually want it all!" Focus on what you want most, and ignore the rest. Be honest with people about what you need, and can do, before you hit a crisis. Count, and give yourself time before you answer. Say not to the projects that you don't want to do, because sometimes you'll have to say not to the ones you want to do. Give yourself a restorative.

[Season 19, Episode 52]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] As the year comes to a close, we've been talking about a lot of things, but one of the things we haven't really been talking about is kind of how you keep going when life has thrown you speedbumps. This can be a lot of different things. It can be a career speedbump, it can be your body, it can be circumstances around you. So we're all going to just kind of talk about some of the speedbumps that we've been encountering and some of the strategies that we've used to navigate around them.

[Howard] You know what, I… The speedbump metaphor I think may have been mine when we originally set this up, because as a younger, healthier man, speedbumps were things that I would just maybe slow down for a little and then just rattle and shake on my way over them. I'll just plow through it. I'll just muscle through this. I will just… I'll put in the extra hours. I'll put in the less sleep, whatever. Over the last couple of years, I've realized that that approach is no longer the option. The vehicle I am driving over the speedbumps is now a 72 station wagon…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] That does not have… Well, 68 station wagon, if we're actually talking my model year, so it does have wood panels on the sides, with a bad suspension, and the back of the station wagon is full of poorly packed glassware.

[Laughter]

[Howard] If I decide to hit the speedbump at 30 miles an hour, I am going to break things, and it's a mess. So, my life over the last couple of years has been built around activities that look a lot like, metaphorically speaking, pulling up to the speedbump, stepping out of the car, renting somebody's backhoe, scraping the speedbump off the street, getting back in the car, and then driving forward. If it sounds like I move more slowly than I used to… Yes. Yes I do.

[Mary Robinette] I have been dealing with an emotional speedbump. Last year, 2023, is what my family has taken to calling the year of five deaths. Which… I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about that, because as you can tell, it's a little bit of a downer. But I kept… It was… My life is badly paced and badly plotted and maybe that… The author kept reaching for the same trick. It's like, come on. But we couldn't wait two months. My mom was one of the people who I lost last year. Each time, I kept thinking, okay, I just have to get through this, and then after that I'm going to be able… And there was never an after. So what I had to do was come up with ways to be able to keep moving while things were falling apart around me. I turned in Martian Contingency a week before mom died. I had to have my cat put down on my birthday. I mean, it was like… But it sucked. And I had deadlines. So it was… I… The renting of the backhoe, it's like that is a strategy to get around the thing. For me, because it mostly messed with my executive function, making decisions, any of that was just incredibly difficult. And I had competing priorities. I wound up having to break everything down into smaller and smaller pieces in order to make any progress at all, and learning to celebrate making any progress was hugely important. This year, which I thought, ha ha, has been a different set of things. We had an unexpected move this year because of different family health things. And the coping skills that I learned last year have been very, very useful with these speedbumps. It's been… Yeah. So, there you go. I could keep talking…

[Laughter] [garbled]

[Howard] Breaking things down into smaller and smaller pieces… Would you like to peer through the boxes of glassware…

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Howard] In the back of my station wagon?

[Laughter]

[DongWon] It's funny, because speedbumps, in these cases that we're talking about so far, can be very hard things, very difficult things, and sometimes they can be something that you do to yourself. So, in my case, I made the bright choice to move across the country this year. I packed up my life in New York and I moved to Southern California. And it's been a really wonderful decision for me. It's been the right choice, and I'm really, really delighted by where my life is at in a lot of ways. But also, talk about a god damned speedbump.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] It was so much more disruptive than I anticipated, and it definitely caused a cascade of issues in my life, some of them professional and some of them personal. There's a way in which all of this has been really joyful to do, but also, that doesn't mean it wasn't a speedbump. It doesn't mean that I didn't need to make space for myself, make space for the people around me, and adjust to certain realities of what it was going to be to go through that level of disruption. Right? So, how you plan for, and how you respond to speedbumps is, like, hugely important and I maybe learned a small lesson of I'm not in my twenties anymore, or even in my thirties anymore, and I need to maybe make more space for certain disruptions that I needed to even five years ago. So, it's been an interesting moment of reflection as I'm looking at building a new life here, building a new community here, things like that. But also, how to keep plates spinning, keep balls in the air, while doing multiple things at once.

[Dan] My major speedbump this year, and last year, has been a recent diagnosis of depression and panic disorder. Both of which recently upgraded… We'll use that word… To severe depression and severe panic disorder. Which is just delightful. That's… Like DongWon was saying about planning for disruptions, that's the reason you haven't really heard from me throughout the year. I was on a few episodes that we recorded very early on, but I did hit a point, actually and 22, where I realized that my choices were to either back away temporarily from this podcast or quit it all together. Which I did… Absolutely did not want to do. But that's the state that my brain was in and to some extent, continues to be in. I hope to be on, and will be on, many, many more episodes next year. But… Yeah. We call this the brain shingles. I got the brain shingles.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled]

[Howard] And it's not the good kind of shingles that keep rain off of things.

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Dan] No. Not at all.

[Erin] It's interesting, listening to all of this, because I feel like I… Knock on wood… I, in 2024, like, had not had as a huge, like, speedbump of that kind. Whether unanticipated, whether…

[DongWon] Self-Inflicted?

[Erin] Self-inflicted.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I… Like, so is somebody who does not drive…

[Laughter]

[Erin] I like to think about something that I do in my life where I create my own sort of speedbumps or cracks in the sidewalk to be tripped over. Like, somebody in a grocery store who doesn't get a cart and starts getting items off the shelf. Right?

[Laughter]

[Erin] It works a bit. Like, you're like, okay, I can hold this can, I can hold this soda, okay, what's… Okay, if I just rearrange this, I can put this thing on top. And you never know what will be the either item, obstacle in your path where it's a very small obstacle, but you're holding a lot of things, and it's a very delicate balance, and if something can throw it off, and now, all of a sudden, things are going everywhere and you're trying to hold on to everything and not drop any of the items and create a spill on aisle five.

[DongWon] I feel personally attacked and called out right now.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I don't think you even… [Garbled]

[Howard] It's not so much that you are your own worst enemy as it is that we are all our own that exact same worst enemy.

[Mary Robinette] Erin is, I will say, an extreme example of it.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Having been in a bar with her, watching her continuing to work…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] While on a cruise ship. I'm like, no, no. Erin has a bigger capacity for stacking things and believing that she can continue to carry them then I… Than anyone I've ever met.

[Erin] Yay?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Like, on the plus side, there are things that you can do to, like, learn yourself. You know what I mean? Like, I know this about myself. So, thinking about what are the strategies… Like, to figure out… Like, what are the things that we need to do? I know that we are coming up on a break, so maybe the time to talk about the strategies is on the other side of it? Question mark?

[Mary Robinette] That is exactly what I was thinking. So, let's take a quick break.

[DongWon] So, my thing this week is I want to talk about the movie Furiosa. Which I really love. I sort of feel like there aren't enough people talking about it. I feel like it didn't get quite the love that I hoped it would. Mad Max: Fury Road, one of my favorite films, I think we can all agree that it's an absolute masterpiece of action cinema, and finally, they released the follow-up to that which is actually a prequel, but tells the story of Furiosa's childhood and early life as she sort of becomes the imperator that we meet in Fury Road. One thing that's really interesting is this movie is structured so differently from Fury Road. I think a lot of people went into it with the expectation of getting that same hit, getting that same high, and instead, it's a slower, quieter, more traditional drama in certain ways as we watch this person grow up and develop into this… Into the sort of force of nature we meet in the future. And Chris Hemsworth is also in it, playing opposite Anya Taylor Joy. Chris Hemsworth plays the villain, a character named Dementus. It's some of the best performances I've ever seen from him, that he brings a weirdness and a humor to it, but also a deep unsettling menace by the end of it. So, I highly recommend Furiosa. Remind yourself that this isn't Fury Road, it's its own thing. Manage your expectations around that. But just some absolute killer action sequences that I really love, some great character work, and great performances. George Miller is like nobody else out there and anything he does, I will show up for.

[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise... Friend?] As you can probably hear, my cat says we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Mary Robinette] Strategies are one of the things that actually keep us going. I think all of us have strategies that are probably overlapping and some things that are wildly different. I would love to hear about some of the strategies that you've found that have kept you functional while you have been trying not to drop things in a grocery store.

[Laughter]

[Dan] One of the strategies that I learned accidentally was, the beginning of this year, I decided, as a New Year's resolution, that I was going to stop eating sugar. Because I was snacking on sugar constantly, especially at work. And the depression skyrocketed over the course of about two or three weeks. I realized that without knowing it, I had been self-medicating with sugar as a way of getting through the day. I'm still kind of sort of trying to do that, but sweeter. The lesson to learn from this, the way this turns from an accidental thing into an actual coping strategy, is, once I realized that that had become an important part of my process, then that became a thing to discuss more directly with my family, with my employer, with my psychiatrist, and say, well, this is what I have been doing. What can I do instead that is healthier than that? Well, what are ways that I can manage this depression without just sugaring up and muscling through it?

[Howard] Years ago, we, on this very podcast, we would joke about the… It may have been an April Fools episode… The excuses we make instead of writing. I think one of them was, oh, gosh, I sure need to vacuum my keyboard. I've looked at, this last couple of years, I've spent a lot of time rebuilding literally where my keyboard sits. Where my monitors sit. Where I sit. I didn't get very much writing or much work done, because I was spending so much time paying attention to a very small pain point. Oh, I have to reach for this thing, and I'm reaching further than I think I should. How do I fix that? I'm going to take the time right now to fix it. And I ended up building an entire 2C stand, two big… Three boom rig surrounding a zero gravity chair where I don't have to turn my head much, I don't have to stretch my arms much, but I can do everything I need to do from that chair. It took a long time to build, and the strategy really amounted to, Howard, if you don't make time to move that piece of speedbump now, then you're going to wear a hole in yourself reaching a little extra far or having to get up and do a thing. It's sort of like ergonomics, and I don't counsel everybody, yeah, look at your workspace and go fully ergonomic contextual inquiry. But, at the same time, if something is causing you a little bit of pain, there might be a very easy way to make it stop doing that so you can get more work done later.

[Mary Robinette] That's been one of the strategies that has worked well for me, is identifying the obstacle. What is the thing that is causing me problems? I also want to say that, while we're talking about speedbumps, I just want to quickly put a flag in this, that the speedbump can be a happy thing, as DongWon referred to. That sometimes, like, if you just won an award or had a short story accepted for the first time, that can become an obstacle, because your brain is very bad, it will just say, you're off-balance. But it cannot always tell the difference between happy off-balance and frustrated sad off-balance. So I identify obstacles, and one of the obstacles for me, the biggest one, was executive function. That I was just having a hard time making decisions and holding things in my brain. So because of that, I started doing lists. When the lists got to be too much, I backed off of that, and started doing something that I called two hand choice. Which is actually a trick that I learned from… Through animal stuff. When you've got a nonverbal animal, you can offer them two hands, each hand represents a choice. Do you want to go inside or do you want to go outside? I learned that with my mom during her last weeks, when she became nonverbal but still quite present. I could offer her a two hand choice and she could still respond, even when she got to the point where she was only looking at the thing. But if I offered her… Like, if I said, what do you want to wear and I showed her a closet full of things, she couldn't… She had no way of letting me know. But if I held up two things, she could let me know blue dress, then, just looking at the left-hand. With that, the other piece that I learned was that if she never chose the gray dress, I stopped offering it to her. So what I started doing with myself was when I came up on a thing and I'm… I was tempted into procrastinating or having difficulty making a decision, I'm like, which of those two choices has served me before? That would be the choice that I would go with, and I would stop offering myself the choice that wasn't serving me. That got me through some times where things were very hard.

[Erin] Yeah, I think… I love that. I think… I'm thinking about pie, all of a sudden, and…

[Dan] That happens to me a lot.

[Laughter] [Yeah]

[Erin] And it's always…

[Howard] The food or the infinitely repeating irrational number?

[Erin] Both. No, just kidding. The food. The food pie. Because I'm thinking…

[Howard] Now I'm sad.

[Erin] Sorry. I think about a lot as like… Thinking back to the past, like, what have you been able to handle also. So, what has served you, and also, like, where… What was the one slice of pie [committed?] Like, when the pie's delicious, you want to eat all the slices. Sometimes, it takes time to figure out. Like, okay, two, and I really wish I'd had more. Like, I actually did have enough room for a third piece of pie.

[Mary Robinette] The dessert pointer.

[Erin] But, like, 10, it turns out, was not good. Was not a good idea. So, somewhere between 10 and three is, like, the right thing. I do that with projects. It's, especially, when you repeat projects, I know, like, sort of how big a slice it is. Like, this thing, if I do this one thing, I'm only going to have room for one or two other things. When I'm teaching a college class, like, that is something that takes a lot of time to prep the lessons and talk to students. So, early on when I started teaching, I was like, oh, teaching. It'll just take a minute. Then, later, I learned, no. That's big. I can only do, like, maybe one or two side projects and teach and still get sleep and still…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Drink water and still work at other things that make me happy. I think… For me, that's a second lesson, which is, like, think of yourself. Like, you are an important part of the equation. If you are not here, you cannot carry the same… True story, you cannot eat the pie. So I think that it can be easy to neglect the you in the equation, and think, like, I will just outwork it, I will out do it, I will under sleep it, I will figure it out. But ultimately, like, when you take the time for yourself, I think it gives you the strength sometimes to be able to do more by taking a pause and putting yourself first. So when I bring work to a bar, while that sounds wild, part of that is me saying if I finish this amount of work, I really like socializing with my friends, and I'm going to get to do that after I finish this. As opposed to doing it in my room and then just working and working and working and never leaving the house.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So it's a way for me to keep myself in mind if only by moving my location.

[DongWon] I'm completely in agreement with everything you've just said, and I've been going through a similar process, probably starting in… I'm thinking of the last two years, as whenever I think of as the triage years. Like, starting in 2020, kind of up until sometime this year, has been a real era of, like, me realizing how overbalanced I was in terms of the worklife balance, and how much I needed to keep up with the current treadmill I put myself on. Right? So a lot of it was… That's why I've been closed to submissions for a long time and things like that, of figuring out, okay, how do I rebalance in some way that moves from this triage mode of taking care of what's on fire in front of me to being able to approach my life in a more sustainable and a more balanced way. Right? So the kind of thing which is a little similar to what you're talking about in terms of like now what slices of pie can I actually handle, and how do I make space for the things in my life that are restorative to me that aren't just work focused. Right? How do I have friends who aren't just publishing people, how do I have hobbies outside of the space that I work in, and how do I have other kinds of creative projects that sustain me? Right? So, balancing all of those things has been really important. And, maybe even more importantly than all of that, being patient with myself even as I know that this has been a multiple year process, and that I can say now, coming up on the end of this year, of, like, oh, I moved out of triage, I'm doing this. That's probably not true, there's probably still going to be moments when that comes up, where that may extend further. As I build towards sustainability, that's going to require all of these different kinds of shifts in myself and checking in with myself. How do I feel about this? How does my body feel when I'm working at this level? How, emotionally, in my balancing the needs of my clients versus my own needs versus the needs of the people I care about in my life? Right? So, juggling all of these things has required a lot of therapy, no small amount of medication, and a lot of just work on myself to figure out how to approach that in a healthier way.

[Howard] In many cases, for me, I think it comes down to the graduation from the early wisdom, which is you can't have it all, to the later wisdom of dude, you don't actually want it all.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] That second piece of wisdom is incredibly liberating. The realization that, hey, you know what, I… A lot of these things that I've been reaching for, if I stop reaching for them and just reach for the things that I want the very most, I will be happier. Because I didn't really want those things. Maybe other people told me I wanted those things. Maybe TV told me… I don't know what the psychology is behind it. I just know that by narrowing my focus a little bit and saying the thing that I want most is the thing that I'm going to keep in front of me, and the thing that I'm going to keep aiming myself at, and everything else, I'm going to let myself ignore if I need to.

[Erin] I think, as you do that… It can be really difficult.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Erin] Because I think we're taught that anything we let go of, A) will never come again, B) was the best thing ever, C) that our lives will never be the same without it. But I think a lot of times, like, once that decision moment is past, you move on with the life you have. That is something that's really important, and also, to remember that other people are often much kinder to you than you are to yourself. It can be hard to say, like, I need to step back from this, I can't do that. I think a lot of times you think people will judge you. But, people are kind of, like, if you tell people, hey, I need X. Like, 99 out of 100 times, they'll be like okay, great. Like, let me know what I can do to be a part of that. Let me know how I can help. The one out of 100 is somebody who you don't need in your life anyway.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think telling people that before you hit a crisis point also helps you not need more. Because you are in a healthier place. And it also places less emotional burden on them.

[Howard] The shopping cart teaches us that we are our own worst enemy.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Writing teaches us that we are our own worst critic.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I learned also over the past year because… That I've been applying from last year. My mom… Parkinson's slows the brain down. So it just takes longer to answer something. The temptation when you ask a question is to fill the gap, to feel that… We're so trained in conversation that there shouldn't be a silence or… So you want to help. What I realized was that I did ask mom a question, and I would have to count in order to give her time… In my head, count… To give her time to respond. I realized that I actually needed to do that with myself so that other people… My anticipation of what they wanted didn't fill the voids. So I set a rule for myself that I've been deploying for 2024 which has made things much healthier for me, that when an exciting opportunity comes up or when I'm getting… Actually, I set the… I do what Erin's talking about, is, I tell people what I need right at the beginning. I sit down to have a conversation with someone about, like, this new project, and it's very interesting, and I tell them at the front, I'm like, you're going to hear me talk about it in ways that make it sound like I want to get involved, and I do, in the moment, but I'm not allowed to give you an answer for 24 hours. Because if I do, my sense of FOMO, my sense of excitement, is going to override my sense of what I actually need. I have been doing that this year, and I have felt like, as were coming up on the end of the year, have felt much, much better.

[Erin] I would say, just the last thing on this, is like… It is, in project terms also, I have been shocked like that a lot of times, people would rather you be honest than it turn out you can't do it.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, people would rather you say…

[Mary Robinette] So true.

[Erin] Somebody comes to me, they're like, come on, write 10,000 words of this game. I'm like, actually, I think I've got like 1000 words in me. So many times, they will be like, okay, that's fine. We'll find somebody else...

[Howard] Half of them are bad words right now.

[Erin] For the other 9000. Then, like… Then the next year, they'll come back and be like, oh, can you do 1000 again? Or, hey, maybe you can do more? Versus if I tried to take the 10,000, it's 10 years late, and then they are feeling like they are in a worse situation. So if you can, always be honest. But, yeah, before a crisis point, and really knowing yourself is… You said something once a long time ago, I think it was Dan, at a… On a cruise. You said, say no to the projects that you don't want to do because at some point, you'll have to say no to the ones you want to do. I love that wisdom.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with that, let me take you to your homework. I want you to use this time, the end of the calendar year, the end of the season, to think about what would be the restorative for you. Don't think about what other people think are restorative. Like, if you don't like the beach, beaches are not restorative. Think about something that would be restorative for you. And then take a step to actually doing that. Yes, I am in fact giving you a writing excuses.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Now go rest.

[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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.34: Grants and Fellowships

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-34-grants-and-fellowships

Key points: Grants, fellowships, residencies. 3 types. Fellowship, Money to support your work. Project fellowship, money for a specific project. Residencies, go somewhere and write. Alone or in a community. Who's paying? Governments, foundations, individuals. 4th type, prizes! What do you have to apply? It depends, but the core is usually a writing sample (25 pages). Also a personal artistic statement. How do you research these opportunities? Check Creative Capitol and Philanthropy News Digest. It's a long timeline! Impact. Who are you as an artist?

[Season 19, Episode 34]

[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Season 19, Episode 34]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Grants and Fellowships.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] And I'm DongWon.

[DongWon] So we wanted to do an episode talking about how to get grants and how to get fellowships. We've been getting a lot of questions on our Patreon about this over time. Erin has mentioned this on the podcast a couple times. And it's a thing that I think about a lot. Unfortunately, not as informed about it as I would like to be. So this is a little bit of us grilling Erin about how to do this. But because of what I do and the friendships I have, I know a lot of people in the literary world as well. Right? Who do more literary fiction. I've noticed that many of them seem to sustain themselves going from residency to residency, going from fellowship to fellowship. They're being able to fund their creative work through a lot of money that's coming through arts organizations, from the government, from a variety of sources. So... I've never seen science fiction writers applying for these fellowships, even though clearly they would be able to get them. Until I met Erin, who's very good at this. Every time I talk to Erin, she's off in Alaska or some other beautiful location writing in a cabin, because somebody is sponsoring her to be there and to do that work. So, I was hoping you'd tell us a little bit more about the grants and fellowships ecosystem and how to do your research and how to start applying for some of these.

[Erin] Sure. Well, let me start by sort of d… Grants and fellowships is like a kind of broad term for this whole ecosystem of get money from people for being art…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Doing art. Whatever. I think… I tend to think of them as having sort of three… There's three main types. One is where people give you money, a fellowship, that's just about supporting the work you've done so far. So, this is the type of thing where they're like, "Send us your writing. You're a great writer. We just want to give you money to continue to produce art." There is no… You don't have to give it to us. You don't have to, like, turn it over. You could, literally, like sit and stare at the wall. We just want to make sure that you don't have to spend time working or doing other things. We will just give you that money generally. That is honestly, the best kind…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] There are people who do that. Then, you've got your project fellowship, project grant. That's where you go to somebody and say, "I'm going to write this book," or "I'm going to do this short story collection. Please give me money for this specific purpose." They usually then expect you to then deliver that thing. They want you to have the book or the short story collection or some explanation of what you did with the time, if you don't give it back to them. Then, the third is residencies, which is when you go stay somewhere. Sometimes, usually, ideally on somebody else's dime or for free. There are residencies that you can pay for, and it's like you get a discounted rate. So, it's like you can go stay in the south of France for like 300 dollars a week which is much less than you would normally spend to stay there. Basically, residencies are a wide variety. Sometimes, it's like you alone in the Mojave Desert. I literally just saw an application for that yesterday. Just in a hut. I hope you like yourself. You just…

[DongWon] I'm gonna get that one. That sounds like my dream, to sit in the desert by myself. No one bothers me.

[Erin] Exactly. Then there are the ones that you do where you're in a community. Like, I was in Alaska for a few months ago for Storyknife, which is one where you go up to Homer, Alaska. It's for women and women identified writers. Each person is in a cabin, and there's six of you at a time. You get fed, which is lovely. So that you just focus on the writing. Often, residencies don't ask you to produce something specific. Occasionally, they want to see your work. But a lot of times, they just want to put you in a location where you're away from your life and your normal responsibilities and you can just go and write. So those are the kinds of things that you can get.

[DongWon] Who is giving you money to do these things? Who's paying for this?

[Erin] It really depends. So's sometimes it's the government. As we like to say. The government has money for creativity because a country, city, state, province without art is not as cool, and people want their jurisdiction to be cool. So they put some money into arts funding. So what they will do is they will say you have to have lived in this state. So, like, there is usually a residency requirement. You can't get in a van and just drive from state to state taking their arts money. I mean, that would be great, but you can't. Instead, usually, you have to live there for anywhere from a year to five years, depending on the place. Then, you say, "I have been doing so much to enrich the artistic life of insert your location here. Please give me money so that I may continue to do so." So, sometimes it's the government of wherever you are. Then, sometimes, it's foundations of people who just love the arts. People who have made it in the arts and want to like pay it forward to the next generation. And they will want to give you all the money.

[Mary Robinette] My mom was an arts administrator. That was one of the big things that she did was fundraising. Mostly for grants, but also in order to be able to give fellowships to people. So they were getting money from the government, from things like the National Endowment for the Arts. But also from a lot of individual donors as well. Individual donors will sometimes then also set up their own little programs. Because either they are genuinely philanthropic or they need a tax break. Giving to the arts is one of the ways you can do that.

[DongWon] If you watch a lot of PBS programming, you'll see a lot of names that will come up in these spheres over and over again. Certain foundations, certain arts organizations, and certain private donors give a lot to support the arts in this country. If it sounds crazy that the government will give you money to make art, please know that this is a recent change in that that has become less common now than it used to be. The NEA used to be a really amazing sponsor of a lot of artists, both visual arts and written arts in the country for decades and decades. Right? It was an important part of how our government operated and how we made great art in the country. Many, many countries overseas… I know if you're in the UK, if you're in other parts of Western Europe, there's just an enormous amount of funding available for creatives who are trying to make art, and that the government will sponsor you to do that. So, that still exists in this country. It is not as robust as it once was, but that doesn't mean it's gone away. Getting any money has become a little bit more difficult over the past few administrations, but it's still out there.

[Mary Robinette] Well, these organizations, the ones that give you the fellowships or the grants, kind of exist to serve as a bridge between people who are creating the arts and the fancy people who have the money. Because, like, I can't go to a fancy person and say, "Hello. You need to do this." But I can go to an organization, and that organization has a fundraiser whose job is to go to places to get money from fancy people.

[Erin] Also, whose job it is to, like, evaluate. Because maybe you're like, "I want to give money to great writers," but you're like, "I don't really have time."

[DongWon] Yup.

[Erin] "To determine which… Who those great writers are, and I don't want to just give to the three people I know. So, I'm going to give money to an organization that has, like, a panel of people who will judge the writing," and that actually is probably a good segue into, like, what do you even have to do?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] What are these people asking for?

[DongWon] Well, before we make that [jump] though, I wanted to point out there's a fourth category, which is prizes. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[DongWon] These organizations also run awards, usually annually, of who are the best writers? Who's making the best work in this area, in this category, in this identity group? Whatever it is. There's plenty of organizations, and those often have money attached to those prizes as well. So, that's another thing you can look out for to submit your name for certain prizes, either locally or nationally, whatever it is.

[Erin] That is very true. It's funny, because I've gotten prizes, but in my mind I still think of them as [garbled chips] so I always forget that it's an actual thing.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Poetry is also a field that has a lot of prizes, so including speculative poetry, so, for my spec poetry people out there, there are a lot of poetry prizes where they actually publish your poetry, and then they also often give you money.

[DongWon] It is, unfortunately, the primary way to get a collection published these days is to win a prize. It is very hard to publish a collection of poetry through a press directly. Most poetry presses are funded in some way, and are picking what their publishing through these prizes.

[Erin] The funny thing is, I know that a little bit because of going to residencies. Which is… This could run plug for sort of group residencies which are lovely, is that a lot of times they go across genres. So there's not really like many like speculative fiction only residencies. But I was in residency with poets and then with literary fiction and with people who write essays and do academic writing. So you learn a lot about other kinds of writing. Then you can use it to kind of inform your own creative life. Which is one reason that I absolutely love it. And… Is it time for the book?

[DongWon] It's a little early, but we could do it

[Erin] No. We will not break. Instead, we will talk… Just take a second to talk a little bit about what do people actually ask you for when you're going for a fellowship? It really depends. I actually keep shockingly no one a whole table that has all of, like, what each person needs. But… A lot of times, a writing sample is going to be the core of what you have to give. So you're going to have to give your best 20 pages, 25 pages is usually the limit of what you're going to have to do. Which, luckily, is about the length maybe of a short story. Or, if you used to submitting your novel, you're used to sending… It's like, here, this is my great work, that's the same type of thing that you can actually send on to a grant or to a fellowship to let them know this is who I am, this is what I like.

[DongWon] So, when you're submitting a query, we always say first 10 pages. Right? When you're doing a grant application, does it have to be the first 10 pages, or should it be a selection somewhere else that you think is particularly… Like, what are they looking for in that case? Do you know?

[Erin] They're looking for something that's going to make them go, "Wow, this is great writing." So I think that it can be a section from anywhere in your novel. You can even, like, give a little bit of an explanation of where it comes from. But if it's really contextual, if you have, like, a piece where it's like you really have to have read the first 50 pages to truly understand the genius of this moment, I would not send that…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because they're not going to do it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] So you really want something that's going to grab people, almost the same way that when you pick something for a reading, you really want to pick something that kind of starts strong, brings people in, and ends at a really great point where people are thinking, "Oh, I'm really wondering what happens next," or "I feel like I've had a really satisfying experience." So that they're like, "Oh, I got this great bite-size sample of this person's work, and I just want them to produce a thousand more bites, and I will pay them for that."

[Mary Robinette] All right. Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk about some of the more nuts and bolts of this process.

[Erin] Let's do it.

[Shawn] Hey, it's Shawn Nelson, founder and CEO of Love Sack and host of the Let Me Save You 25 Years podcast. Curious how successful people really made it? Tune in to hear from guests like Travis Mills, a true American hero, and Nate Chexits, cofounder of Rone. We dive deep into their stories and lessons that shape them, so you can skip the trial and error and get straight to the good stuff. You can find me wherever you get your podcasts. That's Let Me Save You 25 Years with Shawn Nelson. Listen now.

[Mary Robinette] This week, I want to tell you about a nonfiction book called Extreme Economies by Richard Davies. This book looks at what happens to economies at the margins of the modern world due to circumstances ranging from tsunamis to incarceration to the world's first digital state. Davies challenges conventional economic thinking, offering a glimpse into how extreme circumstances molds societies. For writers seeking inspiration, but who are scared of economics, this is an easy and engaging read. I highly recommend extreme Income Economies by Richard Davies.

[DongWon] Okay. Now that we're coming back from the break, I have a question for you, Erin, which is how do you begin to research these organizations? How do you know what's out there and what's your process look like to build your incredible spreadsheet that I know you have?

[Erin] I will tell you that, but before I do, I just wanted to note that the… Sadly, the writing sample alone is not the only thing that you may have to do if you are applying. The other thing is a personal statement. Now this is… Can be terrifying for people. This is where you try to sum up you are as a writer, as an artist, in a page that will really go along with your writing sample, ideally two things that complement each other. Like, in your personal statement, you don't want to be, like, "I use comedy to really like_the hilarity of life." Then it's like a story about eight ducks dying.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] That's… In a not funny way. So there's like… You want the two things to sort of complement each other.

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Erin] And create like a really nice picture of who you are. We can talk a little bit about techniques about that later. But, how I research them is I believe in really cheating off of other people's work. Not when I write, but when I apply for things. There are some great organizations. We're going to make a resource heavy liner notes for this, so that you can have all the links and apply to all the things. But, Creative Capitol is a place that gives money to experimental artists. But something they also do is they actually publish every two months here are opportunities coming up for artists and writers to get money from people who are not us. So they do that. Philanthropy News Digest sends out RFP lists, like, these are places you can send proposals to, and under arts, they have a lot of the big residencies and arts places that you can get money from.

[DongWon] An RFP is a request for proposal.

[Erin] Yes. Sorry, I used to work in funding…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So, this is how I found out about a lot of this stuff. So, yeah, Philanthropy News Digest has stuff. There is a person, a lovely person named Felicia, I can't remember her last name, who sends out every other week opportunities for people, both jobs and fellowships, for something which I cannot remember the name of. But she's a lovely person, and we'll put her newsletter in the notes as well. There's a lot of people who are out there compiling these lists for you and just sending them out to you. The main thing is just keeping track of what you want to do, what can you do, and when are the deadlines. I will say that a lot of… For some reason, especially on the residency side of things, there's a big deadline usually in March and October. These tend to be the seasons, like, September October, and like February March, when a lot of people want stuff at the same time, so it's good to sort of think about that and try to be as ready for it as you can be.

[DongWon] That's pegged to the reporting schedules that they have to give back to the NEA because they're… If they're getting money from the federal government, they need to tell the government, "Hey, we fulfilled our grants." Right? So, generally, they're taking those applications so that they can report back, "Yes, we've given out X dollars." Right? So when you're looking at applying for these things, keep in mind that they want you to apply. They need you to apply. Otherwise, they have to give that money back to the government, and they don't want to do that. Right? Because that's also a part of their operating expenses. So they are very eager for you to apply. They want you to do that. So, I'm really encouraging you to take this very seriously and throw your hat in the ring.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things to also recognize about this is that there's an extremely long… There's a long timeline.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So this is also one of the things when I was applying for grants when we were doing theater… Puppet theater, that you're applying for a grant now for a show that you're going to do in two years often, there was this really long cycle. Frequently people… I will see people in science fiction and fantasy who are just trying to get a grant for, like a convention. They're like, "We're going to do something next week." I'm like, "No. There's no window there."

[Erin] Even with project proposals, for the ones that will say, like, "I want to get money to, like, write my short story collection," I wouldn't say, "and I've got 10 of the 12 stories done today." Because by the time they give you the grant, they figure you're done. A lot of times, what you're pitching them is the project after the one you're currently working on. But you can pitch it like a dream, like they're not actually going to hold you to it, and be like, "You didn't put this specific element in." It's really about painting a picture of what it is that you do think that you would like to write. What could you do if you had unlimited resources, what could you do if you had time to do it? Then, just put that dream on paper. Because a lot of what you're trying to do… Like, I know, guys… I know you all like grants and fellowships can sound really dry. But what you're doing is you are building a dream of what you wish your creative life could be and then giving that dream to somebody else, selling it to someone else, and saying invested in my dream. Dream this with me. So what you want to be doing when you're writing up these things is saying, like, "It's not just I want to write a story about a robot. It's that I want to explore the way that robots really make us understand our humanity in a different way." That's something that moves me and it's something that should move you. So that even if I wrote a different story, you know that it's coming out of this place that's really exciting and really makes you think differently about the world.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that grant givers will often be looking for is what I call impact. Which is, what are the ripple effects from giving this grant to someone? So, if it's like we can give this grant to this person and it's going to make their life better. That's great. But if there's someone who's writing caliber is the same and you can see, oh, this is going to have these ripple effects where it's going to affect these different communities, that person is going to weight higher, because they have more impact. That… Because they do have a limited amount of money, so they want the most impact for the dollar.

[Erin] It can be a little scary. Because I think we're used to thinking about the next story and the next book and not thinking about you as like a product and you as an artist. I actually think whether or not you apply to a grant or fellowship, it's really nice to think about what are you doing? Like, look at the stories that you've written, the things that interest you, the media you're looking at. What is it about storytelling, the way that you tell stories, that's different than everybody else? What is it that draws your eye?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Or that would draw other people to you? I think that's a beautiful thing that you get a chance to do in an artistic is to think about self that way.

[DongWon]. Totally. It's really interesting, because for publishing, we don't ask for an artist statement, we don't ask for that kind of personal statement. But it's what I'm looking for, it's what I'm trying to figure out when I'm reading your query, when I'm reading your work, is what your whole deal? Why are you doing this? Right? That's an important question for me is understanding what is your impact? Why are you trying to do this? Right? So, learning to articulate that in an explicit way will help you communicate that when you are approaching the publishing process. Because that's a big part of your story. So much of publishing well is being good at telling your story in addition to here's what the book is. Right? So, learning to pitch pitch yourself for the grants process is very similar to learning to pitch yourself for the publishing process.

[Erin] And for the convention process. I was thinking, like, the other time that your asked to write a paragraph of who you are and what you can talk about is a lot of times if you're trying to be part of a convention. They'll ask you for, like, what could you speak about, like, where should we put you on panels? Being able to do that in a compelling way can help you get selected for panels and for things. [DongWon] Absolutely.

[Erin] Which is just a great part, if that's something that your into in your career.

[DongWon] So what are some red flags to look for when you're looking at considering applying for a grant, or especially applying for a residence what are things that make you go, "Oh. Maybe not this one." Right? Or maybe they've all gone well? Right? Maybe this isn't a big concern as much as it can be when you're trying to find an agent or a publisher. Right? But I have to imagine not all arts organizations are created equal. Right?

[Erin] See, I would say… First of all, just like know yourself a little bit. Like, I don't know that I want to spend three months in the Mojave Desert alone. And applying for things just because they're there is, like, not the best. You can always challenge yourself, but if you're like, "I don't know how I would do with solitude in a residency." Maybe apply for a one week alone residency and see how it goes. Or spend a week in your house alone without talking to anybody, and say, "Did that work for me?"

[Chuckles]

[Erin] There's one residency that I'm afraid of called Back to Basics in Finland where for two months, you just hang out and you're not allowed to use your phone or Wi-Fi at all. I know many people…

[DongWon] I'll see you guys in two months.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Who are like, "Yes." I'm like, "Nah. I think I'd want to check my email."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm like… I can't even imagine you without constant access.

[Erin] Exactly. So part of it's like know the type of experiences that you want to have. I think one of the things that can happen, same thing with publishing, is you're so used to asking. You want to ask, that when somebody says yes, you think I've got to go. But sometimes it's like, no, you don't.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette chorus] Yeah.

[Erin] So, I also Google it, I try to look at, like, other people who have gone. Do they seem depressed after? [Garbled]

[chuckles]

[Erin] Afterwards, other Instagram pictures, are through a sad filter? But what does it look like to be there? Is it something that seems reputable? Is it… Are you going to be alone or with other people? What are they asking you for? Is there money involved that you have to turn over? Then, also trying to find them through reputable places. I'll also list in the liner notes, there's like an alliance of residential programs that kind of is like an overshooting body of a lot of these organizations. So they sometimes know, like… Somebody writes you an email, like, "I've got a cabin, come stay for free." Check, maybe, if they're on that…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Ax murderer? Or philanthropist?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Hard to tell sometimes.

[Erin] [garbled] same coin. So, check to see if they're on the list, or if anybody else has ever done it that you know. That's also a way to tell, by the way… Sorry for the slight ramble… If you qualify. Because sometimes they use confusing language. For example, early career artist. There's a fellowship out of Princeton and one out of Radcliffe where they basically give you 90,000 dollars and a year to just be an artist. Sounds great. It's for early career. But, if you look at who's gotten it, it's like so and so, who's on their third book. Which is still early, but, like, maybe not as early as you might have thought.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] When you went to apply. So it's nice to see who's gotten it, what kind of writing they're doing to see are you falling into sort of the realm of what the other people are doing. You can throw as many applications as you'd like in, and a lot of them are now waiving their application fees if you don't have money for. But I think it's always good to like line up your application with the general idea of what they're looking for, which I think is really a good thing to do.

[Mary Robinette] I do actually want to mention application fees, because that can be another red flag. If you look at their funding model and they're not getting any funding from outside sources and it's all coming from application fees that's a scam and do not apply for it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] An application fee, in and of itself, is not a red flag. Because there is administrative expenses, and, honestly, sometimes people have application fees just to keep people from applying. It's a form of gatekeeping so that they are not inundated. It's like, oh, are you serious about this or are you just filling it out because it's a form on the Internet? So… But, if their funding model has no donors, if there's no… Like, they don't have any other income source, uh uh. Or if the amount of prize that they're going to award is like… Look at the ratio between how big the fee is… It's like you have to pay 100 dollars to apply for this prize, and we're going to give out a 500 dollar prize.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Scam.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] What is your best experience with this process? Right? Whether it was a grant or a prize or a residency. What was the thing that when you think about it, you're like, yeah, this was worth it, I loved doing this?

[Erin]It's hard, because… Honestly, in all truth, they're all great. I love money from everyone. Thank you.

[chuckles]

[Erin] Don't hate me, people who aren't mentioned. But I think that the residential experiences that I've had, one at Hedgebrook and one at Storyknife, have been amazing. Hedgebrook is just off Whidbey Island near Seattle. Storyknife is in Alaska. I think for me, there's something amazing about being in a community with other writers in a really… I mean, there's no expectations and they also feed you. Like, the food alone is a good reason to go.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But I think it's also a way to get away from your life and also say to yourself, "I a writer," in a very concrete way. I think you can get a grant, or fellowship, or a prize, and it's amazing. But there's something about living the I am a writer life with other people and saying, like, "Oh, we're all creatives living together," and talking about the things that you're interested in. I mean, it's the same reason I love Writing Excuses, getting a chance to talk about writing with other people who are knowledgeable and smart and amazing, and also for food.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So that is… I mean, those have been standouts for me. I will say, like, I'm going to just acknowledge right now that there's a lot of privilege in being able to take that time away from your life and participate in a residency. Some of them are a week or two weeks, a month. There are some that are whole years long, if you really want to get away from your life. So it's not for everyone and everyone can't do it. But, for me, it's been really beneficial and I would say that if you get money from someone and you might be able to create your own residency, like, for yourself, maybe you could get a grant or a fellowship, and then say, what I'm going to do is rent a cheap AirB&B…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In my town or… And then get away and, like, use that to get a babysitter so that I can write at this period of time. So I do think there's something nice about taking those types of opportunities and using them to, say, "I am a writer and I write."

[DongWon] Thank you so much for explaining all this to us, walking us through the process. That has been really helpful for me, just understanding a little bit more. But… Before we go, I believe you have a little bit of homework for our listeners?

[Erin] I do have some homework. It's not going to be a shock. I want you to write a personal artistic statement. Just a paragraph of who you are as an artist. Actually, I'm just going to throw this out there without getting permission from anyone like our producer. But, I would love to see some of these. Like, if you all want to share with us on social media or through our Patreon, like, share who you are as an artist and let us celebrate you and celebrate the artist that you are and the artist that you will continue to be.

[DongWon] I would love to see those. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Me, too. I'm like, "Oh, let's put some of those in the newsletter."

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] All right. Thank you so much.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 19.09: LIVE Recording - Rituals, Rites, and Traditions

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-09-live-recording-rituals-rites-and-traditions

Key Points: Rituals, rites, and traditions: making beliefs tangible as practices. Building the rites helps you discover a little about your characters, about what they believe, and helps make them more real. Incorporating them into our fiction makes characters more believable, realistic, vibrant, and tangible. Births, weddings, and funerals are what make a culture work. Do you work from culture to tradition or ritual, or start with the ritual, and then work out the culture? Start with an existing culture, but add elements and tweak it. Start with the premise of the story world, and then think about the implications of that. When you're working from a real culture, what can you take or not? Be respectful. Don't dip your quill in somebody's blood. Use characters, individuals, who are resistant, lack understanding, or are trying to understand as buffers for the culture. Rituals, rites, and traditions can do so much heavy lifting for you. One takeaway? Show how communities come together. Remember that rituals, rites, and traditions reflect how people relate to the world, community, and each other. During revision, go for depth, and work out the rituals. Remember that rituals and traditions are not just something that other cultures have, we have them too!

[Season 19, Episode 09]

[Erin] This is Writing Excuses. Rituals, rites, and traditions.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Fonda] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Erin] We are going to talk today about tradition. We're going to be talking about what happens when you take beliefs in a world and make them tangible by turning them into practices. This happens in our real world, and it often happens in our fiction. I'm wondering how do you all do that? Have you done it, are you interested in doing it, how do you tackle it?

[Mahtab] It would absolutely… I think it is definitely a very important, I would say, a part for worldbuilding, because that is how people… Like, first of all, when you develop rites or any kind of rituals, which is… And I'm talking my experience when… Which is what I did for my novel Valley of the Rats. I built up these traditions and these rites that the people in the village go through. That was actually how I discovered a little bit more about my people. It's what they believe. It makes them a little bit more real. And, it was an aspect of worldbuilding, which made it really interesting.

[Fonda] Same. I love incorporating rituals, rites, and traditions into my worldbuilding. If you think about our own daily lives, we go through the world performing a whole series of rituals, rites, and traditions, many of which we're somewhat unconscious of. Right? Everything from our day-to-day practices of holding the door open for another person to the order in which your family members talk when they're gathered together to big scale traditions like our holidays and our societal values and principles, like, those all feed so much into our day-to-day lives that, to the extent that we can incorporate them into our fiction, it will make our fictional worlds that much more believable, that much more realistic, and that much more vibrant and tangible.

[DongWon] Yeah. One of my clients once told me, Kate [Ballahide] said that the 3 things you need to define a culture are births, weddings, and funerals. If you have those 3 parts of a person's life, you have a strong understanding of what makes that culture work. Because, when I think about worldbuilding, I think less about material physical things that make up that world and more about what are the rules that define this society. Right? That's important to people, what are the taboos that you can't break. So those 3 points of how do we treat a new life, how do we celebrate 2 people coming together, and then how do we honor a loss, I think are the things that we really communicate to the audience this is what our characters value, this is what they aspire to, and this is what they're afraid of.

[Erin] I'm curious, does it come that way for all of you? Like, is it something where you decide here's the value, here's the culture, I'm going to create this tradition or ritual? Or are you like, I want to make this really cool ritual, I will figure out the culture that would make it happen? Is it always the same way for you, or one or the other?

[Mahtab] I'm always… Because a lot of my stories have been set in India, I take that… The culture that's currently exists as the starting point, but then I will try and add a few fantasy elements, or I'll try and switch it around a little bit, and go against people's norms of beliefs and just try and make it a little bit more interesting. And, because I love scary stories and horror, I will add a horror element to it as well, which is… Most people are not going to, but the main thing is that I want some kind of a reaction from the reader. So I will take something that's existing, and then I try and tweak it. I think sometimes, you know what, when you take something existing and tweak it, not only are you showing differences between what people believe, but sometimes you can even show similarities between different cultures or different beliefs and different people. So it's a good way to play with things and play with the character and the world, and I love doing that.

[Fonda] I start with the premise of my story world. Which, for me, involves some speculative element. Then I go through the thought exercise of what are the implications that that entails for the society and for the individuals that navigate that world. So, the example of the Green Bone saga, I have a coded East Asian society, but there's a speculative element that doesn't exist in our world. Which is this magic jade that confers powers. So an entire society has been developed around this one resource and there's a whole culture that is grounded around the practices and traditions and beliefs surrounding this speculative element that I've introduced into the world. So I couldn't just go and wholesale take an East Asian culture and then transplant it into my story world, I had to create this hybridized world where I was cueing certain rites and rituals and traditions that readers would pick up on as being East Asian in origin, but then just weaving it together with my own imagination based around what kind of world I wanted to create around the speculative element. The more that you can get down to that microlevel of even the things like the idioms, the sayings that people have, the day-to-day interactions that they have around the speculative element and the rich… Religious aspects, the spiritual aspects, social aspects… Hopefully, if I've done my job right, it will feel like a very grounded place that's been built from the starting principles.

[Erin] I feel like you've hit on two really, really exciting things. One is, I think, a question people often have when they're working from something that's real. They're working from a real culture, is, what can you take and when can you not take? This is something that I've thought about. I've used rituals that come from basically conjure, like, folk magic, that come from, like, a black American folk magic tradition, and I don't want to depict closed practices, which are basically practices only meant, rituals and rites that are only meant to be done by the group themselves. If you're not in the group, like, don't do it, and you'll know if you are. I think, number one, I don't want to be disrespectful. Number 2, I actually don't want a bunch of folk magic practitioners mad at me. They were like… That's not a good group to have on your bad side. So I think that is something that I thought about, is, what is the essence of what's going through? I think that's what you're talking about. What is the core value that is underlying that tradition, which is the thing that that tradition is meant to do. Or what was it originally developed to do. Then, how can I develop it in a different way? What if this same objective was expressed differently? What if it had a different practice, but the same underlying goal? So I think a lot about that in, like, trying to avoid doing things that just seem like I'm kind of using somebody else's closed practices or, as I like to say it sometimes, dipping my quill in somebody's blood. Which is not a good thing unless that's what your story is about.

[DongWon] That is such an evocative image. I love that.

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

[Mahtab] I think one thing that we must remember whenever you do… Whenever you're writing something like this, is be respectful. Like, make sure that if, one, there is no misappropriation of someone else's traditions or practices. Use your own, something that you have, but whatever you change it into, whatever you tweak it into, make sure that it's respectful. If there is a fantasy element or a speculative element to it, that's fine, but try to make sure that you're not offending anyone by just making it so egregious that it's like it's wow, but it's really, really bad. So, just respect. Keep that in mind.

[DongWon] I think one of the things that can really help there is, especially in fiction, we're seeing these rites and rituals and traditions through an individual's perspective. Individuals have an imperfect understanding of the traditions that they're embedded in. Right? Nobody fully understands why it is that we do this ritual on this day, or why we honor this tradition in this way. So, having a character that is resistant to it, or doesn't quite understand it, or is trying to understand, I think are great ways to build a little bit of a buffer between the culture that you are referencing, that blood that you're dipping your quill in, and what's actually on the page. When you grounded in someone's specific experience, I think that does a lot to add that texture and that subjectivity that makes it feel less like you're just picking something up wholesale from someone else's culture, even from your own culture. Right? So, just remember that as people are experiencing all of these things that we're talking about, you're writing it through characters, you're writing through individuals embedded in that culture. I don't know, my experience is a lot of, like, trying to understand how my culture works, both as an American and coming with… My parents coming from Korea, there's, like, all these different things that I'm trying to puzzle out all the time and trying to get them to fit together. So I think letting that be felt in how your characters experience these moments can be a really thrilling way to go about it.

[Fonda] One of the things I love about incorporating rituals, rites, and traditions in fiction, in worldbuilding, is that they do so much heavy lifting for you. You don't need to have pages of exposition when you can show your characters living their day-to-day lives and going through the traditions of their society. It just provides this natural in, where you can very seamlessly include the exposition that you need to. For example, if I was to write a story set in the United States of America and it was for an extraterrestrial audience, rather than explaining the origin of this country and how it came to be and etc., etc., I could have my characters celebrate the 4th of July. There's an automatic in for me to, through the traditions of the society, give a bit of background on where… The origins of the society and how people celebrate it. So, think about that when you are doing your world building. Can you have, as much as possible, these grounded day-to-day experiences of your characters that give you this automatic in, where you don't have to make an awkward cut to explain something about your world?

[Erin] Which is a perfect time for a tradition of our own, to pause, so that we can have our little break, and so, traditionally, this would be the time for the thing of the week.

[Fonda] Our thing of the week is a debut fantasy novel called Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao. It is a very action-packed, funny book, that takes place in a Chinese underworld that resembles 1920s Shanghai, and I especially recommend the audiobook that was narrated by Mei Mei Macleod. The reason why I've chosen this is the book of the week is because it is a great example of how one author took rituals, rites, and traditions from our own world and shaped it for a fantasy world. For example, in our world in Chinese tradition, there is the ritual of burning offerings for ancestors, and in Shanghai Immortal, some of these offerings show up in the underworld in very unexpected ways. So, like the lucky ro… Joss roosters that get burned in our world end up just over populating the underworld…

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] And there are roosters running amok everywhere and there's a disaster. Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao.

[Erin] Now that we're back from the break, I'm going to break from tradition in a little bit, and actually, we're going to do a quick wrap up section because we are on a ship right now and they are telling us that they want this room for secret rituals of their own. So, if you… We can go down, starting with DongWon, what is the one thing that you wish people knew when they were writing rites or rituals or traditions? One take away, what would it be?

[DongWon] [garbled]

[chuckles]

[DongWon] I think the thing that I wish people would really bring to it is really showing how communities come together. I think these are… The opportunities to make your characters feel embedded in a specific place and a specific group of people. Often times, when we see these scenes, it feels very individualistic, we're so focused on that person's emotions emotional experience going through it. But a thing that I often feel is missing in stories is a greater sense of a wider cast of characters, even if we're not seeing them all as individual POVs. That feeling of community, that feeling of connections, I think these ritual moments are such an ideal place to get that in and, often times, people can be very focused on the isolating experience of the character in those moments.

[Fonda] I would say that remember that at its core, rituals, rites, and traditions reflect how people relate to the world, to the community, and to each other. When you incorporate them into your fiction, they are an incredible opportunity to not just world build on a macro level, but also on a micro level, and weave in really tangible details, like food. Food is a part of so many of our rites and rituals and traditions. Dress. Is there special dress associated with certain occasions and traditions in your society? Money. Entertainment. So many of your world building blocks can be put together through the lens of the rites, rituals, and traditions of your fictional world.

[Mahtab] What I would say is try… And the first time that you're writing it, you may not know how many or what kinds of rites or rituals or traditions you want to, but I think during the revision is when you really need to figure out if you have too many strands, too many things going on, how you can roll a couple of things into one another and deepen your plot and deepen some of the things that you put in there, rather than widen it. Just give it some… Like, I would say during the revision process, go for depth, and really work those traditions out or rituals out, whatever it is that you want to work on. But narrow them down and just really work them out. I hope I'm making myself clear.

[Erin] You are. What I would say is to remember that rituals and traditions are not just things that other people have. I think sometimes we can think of rituals as that is a different culture has this ritual or tradition, but I'm just doing things because I am. But there are so many traditions that we have, like holding the door open or moving to the other side of the elevator or even blowing out the candles on a birthday cake is a ritual that exists in the birthday celebrations in America that may not exist everywhere.

[Erin] With that, I have the homework for you. Which is to pick a ritual or tradition that you are accustomed to or familiar with and make it the center of a fictional scene. You can change its meaning, you can change its impact, but keep the actual actions of the ritual or tradition the same.

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

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/07/10/17-28-keys-to-writing-dialog/

Key Points: Listen to how people speak. Learn to evoke that in writing. And make every character's voice distinct. Err and uh and the F-bomb. Cursing with a slingshot or a crew-served weapon? Culture, nationality, age, class, education, community, all define the character in a specific way. Pacing and attitude.

[Season 17, Episode 28]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Dialog Masterclass, Episode One, Keys to Writing Dialog.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] We are very excited to have with us for this brand-new class Maurice Broaddus. You've recorded with us in the past. You were one of our instructors on our retreat. We are so happy to have you back. Maurice, tell our listeners about yourself.

[Maurice] Well, A, glad to be back. I like to say I have three jobs. I am the resident Afrofuturist at a community organization called the Khewprw Institute. I'm a science fiction and fantasy author. I have… Man, I have two books that just came out this year. Then I'm also a middle school teacher. So, keeping it busy.

[Dan] Man. No kidding. That is a lot of stuff. Well, we're going to talk about one of those books that just came out earlier this year later on as our book of the week. But for right now, let's jump into this class. The next eight episodes we're going to have Maurice teaching us about dialog. So this is where we're starting. Maurice, where do we start?

[Maurice] So, it's one of those things. So, dialog comes easily to some people. It's like a chore for other people. I definitely fell into the chore category when I was first starting out. So I was kind of thinking of like different ways that I could use to just improve my dialog writing. So for me it came down to like three different things. Like, pay attention to how people speak. Then when I'm writing, only evoke how people really speak. Then, after that, it's like how do I concentrate on making each character's voice distinct. So those are the ways I tend to come at dialog.

[Dan] That is really fascinating to me. What do you mean… What's the difference there between paying attention to how people speak, then only evoking how they speak?

[Maurice] Okay. So one of the most helpful exercises I've ever done, so pay attention, this may be homework for you all later on.

[Chuckles]

[Maurice] Is I was assigned… This was back in college, and I was assigned, hey, record a family dinner. So it was… Yeah, exactly. So I was in college and it was the assignment was record a family dinner and then transcribe it. Just to see what happens. So my family dinner… This like… This was… I was much younger person at the time, so I was still living at home. But it was me, my sister, my brother, my mother, my father. My mother's from Jamaica. My dad is from here in the States. I was born in London. There's a nine year age difference between me and my sister. So I'd never really thought about it before, but when I recorded that family conversation, and, believe me, people forget about the microphone five minutes in, because my mom went from trying to be all proper, blah blah blah, to "all right, so why are you guys throwing food at the dinner table?" That sort of thing. But it was really interesting to just sit there and then analyze that conversation, because all of a sudden, you can dissect people… Well, no, that sounded awful. But you get a feeling, for instance, oh, with my parents, there's different kinds of slang that's being used. Generationally, between my dad and then my sister. There's different word jargon that gets used because my mom is a nurse and I was in college. So there's… And I was a scientist at the time. So, now there's different sorts of jargon that's being used. Then who is driving the conversation? Because people interrupt, and different people drive the conversation. So it was just a fascinating exercise just to see the dynamics of just conversation. But that's different from evoking… Because I have another friend whose name's Gerald. He's a mechanic. Me and Gerald, we go back decades. We're in the same gaming group. But Gerald can't describe the weather without using the F-bomb. I mean, there is no sentence he can't work that into. I love how he speaks, though, because he's one of the cleverest people I know. But I love his use of language. But I can't use the way he actually speaks as dialog because that is a lot. So now it's like how do I evoke how Gerald speaks versus transcribing how Gerald speaks. Does that make sense?

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] That absolutely does.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because one of the things also is that when you are having a conversation with someone in real life so much of it is also happening with nonverbal and with tone. And also there's all of the places where you're like, "Um. Err..." And the sentences are incomplete sentences. We can string it together when we're listening to the conversation in person because we're used to editing that out and adding in all of the nuances that are coming from things other than words. But when you put that stuff down on the page, people just sound incoherent. So you want to get that sense of… As you say, the evoking, the sense of the rhythm and background from the uh, err, uh.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I tried that once in a scene in a book. It was… I can't remember which, it was one of the John Cleaver books where I had just done jury duty.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my.

[Dan] One of the lawyers that was in the case, he said "Uh" between almost every word. It was crazy and all of the jurors were talking about it and how funny it was. So, later, I decided to try to put this into a book. It was the most miserable experience trying to read it. It was as accurate a reproduction of human dialog as I could produce, and it was abysmal to try to read.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, to be fair, when you put that much uh into uh your uh dialog, it's abysmal to listen to.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's why we're all talking about it.

[Howard] That's why it caught your attention.

[Mary Robinette] But you can evoke that by having the uh appear at significantly less frequently in dialog, and that will give the reader the sense. Like I will have occasionally my characters repeat a word. In… In the way that we do. Like that one was deliberate, but it is a thing that we do. So I'll occasionally have them do that to give a sense of someone who's like reaching for a word, trying to figure out what they're saying next. But I would never do it to the degree that I do it naturally in real life.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Maurice] The same thing with profanity. Because it's… Admittedly, I've been known to use the occasional curse word.

[Mary Robinette] What! You're kidding.

[Maurice] I know. Just in case any of my middle school students are listening to this. It's been known to happen. But in the case of like my friend Gerald, it's just like… Hey, one or two sprinkled in the in the course of a passage is one thing. One or two sprinkled in every clause…

[Giggles]

[Maurice] Is another.

[Dan] An entirely different experience.

[Mary Robinette] So it sounds like he's using the F-bomb as a uh.

[Maurice] Right. Well, as a uh, and a noun and a verb.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] [garbled adjective]

[Howard] Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, exclamation, introjection.

[Mary Robinette] Very flexible word.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It is quite a flexible word.

[Howard] Quite the word. It's funny because I think of Maurice cursing… I think… I often think of curse words as weaponized language because sometimes that's what they're there for, they're there to sting somebody. When I curse, it's like a kid with a slingshot. I'm imagining Maurice cursing with that basso profundo…

[Laughter]

[Howard] That amazing baritone and that's a crew served weapon.

[Maurice] Right. Right. It'll stop a conversation.

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of stopping a conversation…

[Dan] Speaking of stopping conversation…

[Maurice] Both of you. You're all in there on that one. All right, go.

[Dan] Let me stop this one and let's do our book of the week, which this week is your's, Maurice. Sweep of Stars. Tell us about that.

[Maurice] So, Sweep of Stars is book one in my Astra Black trilogy. It's my first foray into the space opera. It's about this intergalactic pan-African led community known as Muungano, and just their explorations in the universe. So we have Muungano proper that they're navigating, some of the internal political issues. We have a starship powered by jazz music exploring the universe. We have an elite military unit who is exploring on the other side of a wormhole. Then how all of these things are interconnected.

[Dan] Sounds fantastic. That is Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus available right now. Go and buy it with your hard-earned money and read it and love it.

[Dan] Now let me get back to one of the other things you said at the beginning. One of these key tricks or tools that you use you said is making sure that the different people have different types of dialog, that they sound different from each other.

[Maurice] Right.

[Dan] Which is, I find, also a tool that I use in something that I think is very important. To make sure that everyone sounds like a different person. How do you do that? What are some of the tools that you use to accomplish that?

[Maurice] So, this is where diagramming out that conversation was really helpful for me. Because I'm keying in on what makes each of us… Which sounds weird, but each of my family members as characters, what makes us work. Right? So my mother is from Jamaica and her patois increases or decreases… Decreases when she's in a casual setting, but increases when she's either excited or angry or surrounded by other relatives. Then all of a sudden, the patois thickens. But, also, the other quirk about her dialog is she can't cuss right. So she… Despite being here many decades, she can never get cussing right. Which is hysterical. Because then we try to provoke her to cuss at us, and just watch her butcher cussing. But, so, you have those things. Already we have culture, we have nationality, we have… Culture, nationality, and age all factoring in to help define her as a character.

[Mary Robinette] And class.

[Maurice] And class. Exactly. And class. Then… So you just apply those same things to each of the characters. How are they working in terms of their cultural origin, their level of education, their vocation, their age, their use of slang, all these different things, and the community they hang around with. Because people tend to conform to the community they're in in a lot of cases. Then when you take them out of that community… So, sometimes they sound like that community and then sometimes when you pull them out, oh, now, how do they sound? So it's all those little things which all boils down to defining those characters in a very specific way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'll talk about this more when we get… There's a point when we get to talking about the nuances of this, which… Like, just to add on to what Maurice is saying, I just want to hit very quickly that one of the things that he's talking about when he's talking about culture and nationality and class and age and all of that, all of that goes into making up what we think of as accent. It's very easy to think of accent is just this single flat thing that has to do with how you pronounce words. That's the least important part of accent. There's also the other thing… Two major things that affect the voice of the character are the pacing or rhythm of the character and also the attitude. So, like, you can have two Southerners from the same place, one of whom speaks very, very slowly, and one speaks with a clipped, rapid pace. Even though their accents are the same. Just because of their differences in personalities.

[Howard] One of the things that I've… I come back to this a lot when I'm looking at dialog. Back in the long, long ago times when I was dating, there was this terminology… There was this term for the conversation you have with your potential significant other, this person you've been dating. The term was DTR. It meant define the relationship. It's this conversation where the two of you are sitting down and talking about us. A DTR can run for hours. But in, for instance, a romance novel, you get a page and a half. How do you compress the enormous emotional romantic angry whatever explorations of a DTR in a page and a half? The answer is, well, you have to listen to a lot of dialog, you have to read a lot of dialog, and you have to learn a lot of shortcuts. You have to identify what the key moments are and you have to be willing to compress. It's kind of a lossy compression algorithm. But you gotta compress it.

[Dan] I find myself suddenly very curious as to what different patterns of speech you would find if somebody did that analysis Maurice is talking about with one of our episodes. That would be fun.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Although, again, that would also be interesting just because this is not a standard conversation. We are performing. We are teaching. There's the way we speak now is gonna be different than the way we would speak in a non-podcast scenario. But that is…

[Mary Robinette] Forsooth, what are you saying? Verily.

[Laughter]

[Dan] This is going to be our homework. Maurice, you want to send them home with some homework this week?

[Maurice] Yeah. So… I love the idea of people just taking some time and just recording a conversation… With everybody's permission, let's get that out… Make sure everybody's aware that there's a recording in progress. But, yeah, record a conversation, you and your friends, you and your family, whatever. 15 minutes of conversation. Then go through and either transcribe it or just listen to it with the ear of, ooh, how did we sound as characters? How would this work as a dialog exchange?

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to ask people to actually transcribe it, because I am going to ask you to use that transcription later in this series for a piece of homework assignment. For those of you for whom transcription is difficult, for… There's a software out there called Descript which will transcribe things for you. But if you are able to transcribe it yourself, I encourage you to do that, because it causes you to pay attention to the way the dialog happens in different ways.

[Dan] Sounds great. So there's your homework and there's a little sneak preview of what will be happening later on in this series. Join us next week, we're going to talk more and more and dig into some nitty-gritty details on dialogue. So. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.10: Paying It Forward, with Kevin J. Anderson

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/03/07/16-10-paying-it-forward-with-kevin-j-anderson/

Key Points: Paying it forward... helping one another out, sharing information, share what you have learned. One-on-one mentoring, and fostering a community. Forming friendships within structures. Find your tribe! One of the pitfalls of mentoring is that the rules change every week. Pay attention to the people around you. Treat them as peers.

[Season 16, Episode 10]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Paying It Forward, with Kevin J. Anderson.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] We are joined today by our special guest, Kevin J. Anderson.

[Kevin] And I'm Kevin.

[Giggles]

[Mary Robinette] Hey, Kevin.

[Amal] Hello, Kevin.

[Mary Robinette] So, Kevin has published more than 165 books, 50 of which have been national or international bestsellers. He's written novels in Star Wars, X-Files… You may know him from Dune. Then, his original work, like the Saga of Seven Sons series, the Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, and then he, like, edits anthologies, he has a publishing house called Wordfire. Generally speaking, he is very involved in the industry and has done a lot of mentoring as well. So we thought we'd bring him in today to talk with us about the idea of paying it forward.

[Mary Robinette] So, Kevin, do you want to describe what paying it forward means?

[Kevin] Well, I kind of want to come up with what right at this moment, as we're recording this, if not for the pandemic, I would be in my last day wrapping up our 12th Superstars writing seminar.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Kevin] Which would have like 370 [garbled] on it, and we've done it for 12 years. It was founded with me and my wife, Rebecca Moesta, with Brandon Sanderson, Eric Flint, and David Farland. We got together because we were talking with one another about business stuff and then intellectual property and copyrights and contracts. We realize that nobody taught us this stuff. We had to learn it, and we had to make mistakes and screw things up, and then we would rapidly go, "Dave, don't do this," or "Brandon, watch out for this." We realize that there needed to be some more stuff in the industry where we would help one another out, that we would go to our colleagues and our fellow writers and just kind of share information. That was what started our first Superstars. So we held it in Pasadena, then we moved to Las Vegas, and then Salt Lake City, and then we've been in Colorado Springs ever since. But we just felt like we wanted to like share what we learned. This would have been our 12th year.

[Mary Robinette] So, Kevin…

[Kevin] Go ahead.

[Mary Robinette] I was just… You said… Talking about sharing what you know and sharing the info. Can you talk about, like, why you felt like that was important?

[Kevin] Well, when… Every year when I do this, it feels like the greatest thing ever. Even though it really takes a lot of time. As you said in the introduction, I've got a lot of books I'm doing. I've got a lot of comics. I'm working in film and TV and all kinds of stuff. I got back to thinking about all the people who mentored me, when I was starting out. There were some big-name people who, for some reason or other, kind of took me aside and steered me in the right direction. Terry Brooks was a huge help to me. Dean Koontz was an enormous help to me. Harlan Ellison was a big mentor. I remember one time, after spending hours talking with Dean Koontz and him giving me advice, I wrote him a letter afterwards to thank him. I said, "I don't understand why you spent so much time paying it forward in helping me. Why me in particular?" He said, "Oh, I help a lot of people, Kevin, but you're just one of the only ones who ever listens."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Fun fact. On the third Superstars event, when you came to Salt Lake City, Brandon and Dan and I all came up… Mary Robinette was there. That was when we pulled Mary Robinette aside and said, "Hey. We are really, really Y-chromosome poisoned, and maybe… You're awesome. That one episode you did with us in Season three, the puppeteer episode." At that point, was still the most talked about episode we'd done, and we were like two seasons past it. So we extended the invitation to Mary Robinette to join us. So, Superstars, bringing people together, directly impacted what we became in the years that followed.

[Mary Robinette] Well, this is an interesting point, that one of the things that you do with Superstars is that you're not just doing individual one-on-one mentoring, that you are fostering a community. So I think that there's a couple of different ways that we can think about the idea of paying it forward. There's the one-on-one, the individual mentorship thing, and then there's also the community building aspect. I think that we've all been involved in that in one way or another. Amal, you've done some community building as well, but I'd love it if you'd share with us some of your perspectives on that.

[Amal] Yeah. Absolutely. One thing I was thinking about as you were talking to them, was just how much when I… So, I teach creative writing now in a university as well as having taught at other very community forward institutions like Clarion West or like Viable Paradise and stuff. But the first thing that came to mind as you were talking was having started a magazine called Goblin Fruit when… Many years ago now. But I started it with a close friend, partly because we had been reading poetry magazines and thinking we can probably do this thing too, and make a space for a different kind of poetry that we wanted to see flourish alongside what we were reading. But we had no idea about how to go about it. We would read them, but we didn't know how to actually make one. Mike Allen, who was behind Mythic Delirium at the time, and who has since changed Mythic Delirium from a magazine into a small press publisher and so on, was enormously generous with his time and with his… Just kind of sharing perspectives on how to run this. Terri Wendling was enormously helpful… Someone who, like, we had been so admiring of for all sorts of reasons, and she was… Like, people who basically we had no sense of as peers, but rather of people to whom we looked up and stuff, being generous with their time absolutely enabled us to do this. Once we launched, we in this case being Jessica Page Wick, Oliver Hunter, and myself. Once we launched Goblin Fruit, this community built up around Goblin Fruit, but then managed to, within a few years, had other people decide they wanted to start their own poetry magazines, like R. B. Lemberg and Shweta Narayan started Stone Telling that had a totally different perspective. Or, well, related, but different perspective on what kind of poetry they wanted to create. Once those structures were built, they… It's the whole thing about build it and they will come, right? So people started pinging off of each other, sparking off of each other, forming friendships within these structures of poetry magazines and reading each other's work, and going on to collaborate in other ways as a consequence. So there's just this feeling that once you love something and you want to share it with people, that that simple act kind of kick starts a whole beautiful chain reaction of people talking to each other and sharing with each other. That just continues to blow my mind. It's the thing, when I talk to my students now, I say that the one thing that you can't really be given in a class… Sorry. There's a lot of stuff that you can be taught in a classroom that you can just kind of figure out on your own, but one of the things that is just difficult to find on your own is a cohort, or is a sense of community. So, like, actually taking part in building those structures seems like just so crucial to have in these conversations.

[Kevin] At Superstars, we call it the tribe. It's like a tribe mentality that we all sort of get together. We very much feel that the rising tide lifts all boats, and that if we all sort of help each other, especially now, with indie publishing and bookselling and publishing taking so many different turns, that you can't just go buy a book that says how to do it. That everything changes weekly. One of the other kind of big important ways that I'm working on paying it forward is I'm running this whole Masters degree program at Western Colorado University on getting an MA in publishing. They hired me a couple of years ago just to take this thing from scratch and create it. They gave me no curriculum. I just had to make up what I thought people needed to know in traditional publishing and in indie publishing. Look, my publishing house has released 300 books with 100 authors. In the traditional publishing, I've published 140 some traditional books of my own. So I kind of have the experience. Of course, I couldn't be hired until I went back to college and got my own MFA because that's a qualification to teach. But I did that, because I thought it was important to do this right. I wanted to have the students learn, like, practical stuff and do hands-on things so that they could actually do it when they had a Masters degree, rather than just esoteric things. So I developed the program where these… We teach lectures on traditional publishing and copyrighted bookselling and printing and distribution and cover design and all that stuff, but what they actually do, hands-on, is we get funding from Draft2Digital to have a professional anthology that they edit. So they spend… They create it, they send out their solicitation. This year, the students got 535 slush pile submissions that they had to go through. At the beginning, it was kind of funny, because they were all dedicated, they wanted to do the right thing to these authors, they wanted to read every single submission straight through…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's noble.

[Kevin] I told them at the very beginning, I said, "No, that's not going to happen." No, they were determined. After like a month, they started… In fact, within six days, one of my students wrote back and said, "You weren't kidding. These are terrible. Most of these are terrible."

[Mary Robinette] Still noble.

[Kevin] So, they went through them and it really got to the point where, toward the end, when they had 100 stories piled up to read, they go through the first paragraph or so, and they'd go, "Nah, this isn't going to make it." They learned, as writers, what they're up against…

[Laughter]

[Kevin] In the slush pile. Even if you just do a polite cover letter, you're up in the top 10%. Even if you do… Like, a thing without typos on the first page, you're in the top 10%. So they… This was their job for their masters degree. They read the slush pile. They had a budget. They had a specific you-can-only-spend-this-much money, you can only buy this many words. Then they had to argue over the… Do we have too many funny stories or too many intense stories?

[Chuckles]

[Kevin] Do we have all male writers, or do we… All this stuff that they had to work on. They really got to the point of, like, pragmatic stuff, of we don't just get to accept everything we like. You had to really fight over things. Then, after that, they had to write the rejection letters, and they had to write the contracts, and they had to go through the copyediting with their assigned authors. They designed the cover. They go through… They lay out the book, they release the book, they publish it. So when they graduate, that's sort of their… It's a one year program. So, at the end of their year, this book comes out with their names on the title page as the editorial board. We… Our first one, called Monsters, Movies, and Mayhem, got a boxed, starred review in Publishers Weekly, and they're all thrilled about that. So it's… So I'm really happy to be… See, it's my cohort of students. I'm in my second one now. They have real, practical stuff they're doing.

[Mary Robinette] That's fantastic. I think that's a great segue for us to talk about our book of the week. So, the book of the week is, of course, something that our esteemed guest would like to tell us about. So, I'm sorry to make you keep talking, Kevin…

[Laughter]

[Kevin] Well, that's usually not that hard.

[Laughter]

[Kevin] Because when I write… I write the 700 page books, so it's obvious I'm not a man of few words.

[Mary Robinette] That's okay, we're used to Brandon. These are… 700 pages is short.

[Kevin] Well, my… I call my fantasy book, this big doorstop thing, I call it one half of a Brandon Sanderson unit.

[Laughter]

[Kevin] So it's not quite that, but it is… I've got this huge epic fantasy trilogy. The first one was called Spine of the Dragon, and the second one called Vengewar, which just came out. They're from Tor, they're in hardcover. I have already delivered the third and final book in the trilogy. So for those of you listeners who don't want to start anything because you don't know if the author's going to let you down, well, I've already turned it in. It's already done. All three books are there, so you can go pick… It's sort of… Two continents at war and dozens of different main characters and dragons and monsters and sword writing in romance and religion and philosophy and a little bit of humor here and there. So… Your typical book.

[Dan] The thing I love about Kevin is that every time I talk to him, he has a brand-new trilogy I didn't even know about.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Like, you are shockingly prolific.

[Kevin] Yes. Well, Mary Robinette was saying, "Is this bio still up-to-date?" It was like three weeks old. I went, "Well, it's actually not, but I can't spend all my time updating."

[Laughter]

[Dan] All right. So, that's Vengewar, right? Is the newest one?

[Kevin] I'd like people to read Vengewar, so Vengewar together, it's two continents clashing over stuff.

[Mary Robinette] Sounds great.

[Kevin] I also want to throw in that on my website, wordfire.com, I have a whole section on the publishing MA. So if you want to see some links, a little more background on that, that… And a picture of me with my beard, which I don't have the full beard anymore, but since this is audio, you can't tell that.

[Mary Robinette] It's a very luscious full, full beard. I mean, it's almost Gandalfian right now. That's exactly what I'm seeing in this thing.

[Dan] Gone full [inaudible]

[Kevin] You're looking at Howard.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, right. It's so easy to confuse the two of you.

[Dan] Easy to confuse bald guys.

[Mary Robinette] Something that I wanted to draw attention to for our listeners that everyone has talked about in, is that there has been a mentor that has helped. Then, rather than attempting to thank the mentor through some concrete action, we pay it forward by then turning into mentors ourself. Which is the… I think at the heart of what it means to pay it forward. And very much part of the science fiction and fantasy community in particular. So, one of the things that we've been talking about is ways in which we've been helped. But if we want to turn around and help other people, I mean, not everyone can go and start a writing seminar. But there are small ways that we can help. So, what are some of the ways in which we can begin to serve as mentors, and what are some of the kind of pitfalls to mentoring, the things you have to sort of watch out for?

[Kevin] Well, one of the pitfalls to mentoring, especially when I'm talking about publishing and how to get an agent and how to break into the publishing world is the rules change every other week. So my experience when I broke in is just not relevant to anybody. So when I tell them how I got my agent, well, that's interesting, but it doesn't help them very much. So that's one of the pitfalls. But mentoring is one thing, but being a tribe is kind of another thing. I think you should help one another. It's great if you can have Terri Brooks explain to you how to deal with crowds and a book signing line, but I think more… It's your own cohort. Find writers who are at your level of writing and then you help each other out. If things like… Like, last week, as we're recording this, last week would have been LTUE. We… I mean, we would all go there. I'd see most of you there, and would help all these other writers, and they would help each other as well. If you hear about something new that changed on Kindle Unlimited, then share it with other people, because there is no… I mean, you can't just get the newspaper that tells you everything that changed in publishing this week. We listen to Writing Excuses. We listen to various podcasts just to keep up.

[Dan] That's one thing that we noticed very quickly with the Writing Excuses Retreat. We kind of went into this thinking that the instruction that we would provide to the students would be the most valuable part, and realized almost immediately that, no, it was the relationships they formed with each other and the networking that students were able to do. In the six years we've been doing it, our conference has spawned so many writing groups and so many different support groups. Even at least two marriages that I know of, but that's beside the point.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, yes. Finding ways to support each other at your own level of skill and your own level of professionalization is still super valuable.

[Mary Robinette] Amal, you…

[Howard] A simple example that I like to share. About five years ago, I was at Gen Con Indi, visiting with my friend, Lar deSouza, who is a cartoonist of… He is an amazing cartoonist.

[Amal] He's so great.

[Howard] I was talking to him and I said, "Yeah I… How do you do it, Lar? My hand hurts all the time." He handed me a pen and said, "Draw." So I drew, and then he said, "Okay, stop. You're gripping too hard and you're pushing too hard." I said, "Yeah. I know that. I don't know how to stop." Then he handed me a brushpen that I'd never seen before and said, "Take this. Just take it. It will reward what you're doing, you'll figure it out." I said, "I tried brushpens. I can't do them. I've never made them work." He said, "You're ready for them now. Just go. It'll make this work."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's the cartoonist's version of wax on, wax off?

[Howard] It was the cartoonist's version of wax on, wax off. No lie, that five minute discussion saved my hands, took my art to a new level, and it happened because Lar, in the role of mentor, didn't expect anything from me, but he knew exactly what he was talking about. He knew exactly how to watch what I was doing and say, "Oh, this is the problem. You're trying to make these kinds of lines with this kind of a pen and you're working too hard at it and the fix is this and you know everything you need to know to make this work. Now go." When I mentor others, I look for those moments. I look for the times where I can see, "Oh. Oh, you're doing that thing that used to leave bruises on my fingertips," or, "You're doing that thing that made me forget names of characters," or whatever. So I offer those little things. It's not a permanent mentoring relationship, it's let me give you the peace of help that you need to let you take yourself to the next level.

[Amal] So, this is super interesting to me. I feel like that we've been circling around something that I'd like to highlight a bit from what you've all been saying, because thinking of what Mary Robinette's question was, about, like, potential pitfalls of men touring, I feel like you've all talked about actually addressing the thing without necessarily naming the pitfall, which is that it is very easy to kind of calcify in an idea of oneself as a mentor, and to think that your experience is going to be a definitive one in some way. So, like the fact that, Kevin, that you just recognize right off the bat that like, no, actually, things are constantly in flux, is to me something that is crucial. Recognizing that things change as… And one of the things that changes is your degree of authority, your expertise. That that's always kind of in relationship to a landscape that's shifting around us. I just… I love that recognition, and also the fact that a mentor relationship doesn't need to be permanent, it can be permeable instead. But I mean, it seems to me, Howard, that, like, Lar is as much a peer as he is a mentor in so many ways. There are plenty of things that you could probably share at those crucial moments and stuff. That makes your relationship a more lateral one, rather than a hierarchical one. That also, like, I love this idea of trying to think of paying things forward as not like a top-down relationship, although often we are forced into those positions. There's another metaphor that I've heard people use, which is sending the elevator back down. Where, basically, like if you have managed in your career to ascend to a certain height, then you send the elevator back down in order to try and lift somebody else and stuff. That still kind of assumes a very vertical structure of people rising through something. But when we talk about community and we talk about cohorts and relationships and stuff, it is a lot more horizontal, it is a lot more lateral. So, yeah.

[Dan] Thank you for bringing that up, Amal, because that's really great. I wanted to talk about that, too, that, for example, Kevin and I. I met Kevin 12 years ago when my first book had just come out, I Am Not A Serial Killer. I was at the BEA in Manhattan, and we were at a signing. So I sat down for my little scheduled signing, and realized that my Tor publicist was sitting behind me, and that I was sharing a table with Kevin. I thought this is amazing. I'm going to impress their socks right off. I was just on point and I was trying to be as personable as possible and as professional as possible, just to impress them and try to build some networking that way. What I realized very quickly is that, first of all, I didn't need to try quite as hard. Second of all, what Kevin was doing was just already paying attention. He was on the lookout for rising talent, and immediately was treating me as an equal, rather than as a student or as an underling or anything like that. That is what I have tried to do is these two things. Number one, pay attention to the people around me. And then two, treat them as peers. I have had a lot of authors that I work with tell me that I am one of their favorite teachers to work with because I treat them like A rather than like a student or a minion or something like that. Having that equal relationship and recognizing that we are all together, we are all on the same level, has… It's not only helped me professionally, but I've gotten so many more friends that way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I completely agree. That's something we say at the Writing Excuses retreats all the time, that we are all peers, we're just at different points on the career path. That's something also that I think for people who are wanting to ask for help but are afraid to, to remember that people who are farther along the career path are actually helped by the questions, because it helps us to keep from calcifying, by having things pop up, it's like, oh, yeah, I haven't thought about things from that angle, or, I guess things have changed. The landscape has changed, or let me articulate what it is that I do, which then helps me do it better. Or sometimes just someone helped me, let me help you. So there's a lot of different reasons and ways that this pay it forward can help both individuals and the community at large.

[Mary Robinette] Now we have some homework, which, I think is Howard.

[Howard] Absolutely. This is one of my favorite exercises. It's a life hack, as much as anything else. Sit down and make a list of the people who have influenced you personally, who have personally interacted with you in ways that maybe it was full-on mentoring, maybe it was a kind word that pulled you out of a professional bind at some point, maybe it was someone who, like me and Lar deSouza, gave you that piece of critical information that let you take it to the next level. Make a list of the people who've been influential, and write yourself a little note about what they did. Then, stage three, write them a note. Maybe you're going to email them, maybe snail mail it, maybe it's a direct message via Twitter. But find a way to say thank you. Most times, as Kevin has pointed out, when we mentor, we're not doing it because we expect to be thanked or credited in any way. But I gotta tell you, we love hearing from people we've helped.

[Mary Robinette] Just as a note. When Howard says write to someone, he's not asking you to write to us.

[Howard] No. Nonononono. Not us. Unless… In fact, explicitly leave me off the list, so I don't have to feel bad about making you write a letter to me. Find the people who have helped you and thank them.

[Kevin] Howard, thank you for all that you've done for me.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you, Kevin, for everything that you've done for us, too. And all of you. And thank you listeners. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go thank someone.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.38: Depicting Religions That Are Not Your Own

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/09/20/15-38-depicting-religions-that-are-not-your-own/

Key points: Mainstream religion, historic religion, made up religion? Widespread? In the open or hidden? Beware of exoticizing and making them evil. Respect their beliefs. Research, practitioners and texts. Try to get into the head of someone who believes that. Understand it and respect it. Don't just default your characters, think about how they see their relationship to the cosmos. Religion also sets morals, ideals, ethics. Do they practice it, or do they just live in a culture where it is practiced? How does the religion stand in the community?

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 38.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Depicting Religions That Are Not Your Own.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Tempest] Because you're busy.

[Nisi] And we're not that smart. Clearly.

[Laughter]

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Nisi] I'm Nisi.

[Tempest] And I'm Tempest.

[Tempest] And I called it.

[Laughter]

[Tempest] [garbled] gonna miss this one up.

[Dan] That's okay. Because they are busy.

[Laughter]

[Dan] That's why they're in a hurry.

[Laughter]

[unclear] They're so busy, that's why they're in a hurry.

[Dan] It's still accurate.

[Tempest] It's all true.

[Unclear] Oh. Okay.

[Dan] Okay. So we went back and forth on this one as to exactly how we wanted to title it, and we like… Depicting religions that are not your own.

[Piper] Right. But really, because this is a writing the other episode, it's also going to be about depicting religions that are not necessarily mainstream ones. Or at least not mainstream ones…

[Dan] Where you live.

[Piper] Where you live, right. So, for us, our context is mainly Western and American. But for… In other places, that context may be different. But for whatever context you're in, there's some things that are important to remember when depicting religion. That includes, like, a living religion, a religion that maybe people have worshiped in the past but may not be worshiped at this time, and, I think, a little bit about religions that we make up. Because a lot of the religions that are come up with in worldbuilding, some of the same problems with inventing religions comes up in depicting religions that are not your own.

[Tempest] A lot of the time when you're building your own religion, you're not just creating it out of thin air, you're building it from factors and events that you have drawn from other religions. Religions, as you were saying, that are living religions or religions that are no longer being practiced but that perhaps have contributed somehow importantly to a living religion.

[Nisi] Exactly.

[Piper] So we're here with Nisi Shawl, again, who is the co-author of the Writing the Other text and the person who came up with the idea for the seminar that became the text. One of the reasons why I especially wanted to talk to you about this is because you practice a religion that is not a mainstream religion here in America, but is a religion that often ends up in fiction depicted badly.

[Nisi] Yes. Well, I've been thinking about whether it was a mainstream religion or not. I would have to say it's not familiar, but it is widespread. Because my religion is Ifa, and it is related to Santeria,Vodun, Lucumi... Which is very widespread in Brazil. So there are a lot of practitioners of my particular religion. The thing is that they may not be out in the open about it, and that you may not know that you're hanging out with someone that practices this religion. Actually, I remember I got on the bus once and I was talking with someone I know about whether or not we could keep up with our religious duties when one of us was suffering from a broken arm. Then my friend got off, and the bus driver started singing one of our sacred songs. It was an Ifa bus driver. So, you never know. So I would say that person was a practitioner, but not out in the open. They weren't like wearing regalia for it or anything like that. When it comes to the depiction, my least favorite is the movie Angel Heart with Lisa Bonet. Yeah. It was supposedly taking place within New Orleans. There are like people with like goat eyes, it was like all this devil stuff. I'm thinking, "This is Christianity. This has nothing to do with anything that I have ever experienced." When I think of good depictions, I immediately think of… First of all, I think of Tananarive Due's Good House. Because that is a horror novel, and the temptation often in horror novels is to exoticize the other and make them evil. She did not do that with my religion. She had problems going on that people were trying to solve with my religion. Thank you, Tananarive.

[Piper] So, of the good examples that you can think of, what are some of the other hallmarks of what makes them good? You mentioned not exoticizing or making the religious practitioners the evil ones.

[Nisi] Respect. And research. Respect in that often people are trying to think of my religion as magic, and trying to play it down, lessen it, belittle it, because it's unfamiliar to them. They would classify it as magic rather than religion. So to flip that, I would say respecting any kind of traditional practice and realizing that what is magic to some people's religion to other people. So there's that. Doing research and finding out from practitioners as well as from texts, how things actually went. In the bad example that I keep thinking of, they have people sacrificing babies, they have people like stabbing pins in dolls. Nah.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Nisi] You could just go to a very open ceremony and you would not find any of that going on. You would think, "Oh, well, maybe they're just hiding that from me."

[Chuckles]

[Nisi] No.

[They're not doing all that.]

[Nisi] No.

[Piper] I'm going to pause us and ask you for the book of the week.

[Nisi] Oh. Okay. My book of the week is an anthology that I edited that came out in 2019. It's called New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. 17 stories from writers of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds. From as many places around the globe as I could get.

[Piper, Tempest] Awesome.

[Thank you chorus]

[Dan] Cool. I wanted to ask you a question really quick. The… A lot of what you're talking about, Nisi, is this idea of letting… Treating that religion on its own terms, rather than trying to see it and therefore portray it through the lens of your own beliefs. I think we see that a lot. Especially here in the West, which is very, very predominantly Christian and all of these other things that come along with that. So, if somebody wants to present a religion, whether it is a real-world one or just one they've invented for their own fantasy novel, what are some good ways that they can kind of break out of that mindset they grew up with and really see that new religion for what it is rather than some… I don't know, altered version of Christianity or of whatever else it is?

[Nisi] That is really hard. That is what separates a writer from someone who's just kind of fooling around with words.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Well said.

[Nisi] I mean, I myself have tried to do this in my own work. I was very conscious of doing it with Christianity, actually. Because that is not my tradition. Actually, I was taken to a Christian church as a child, but my mother told me we just go to this place because people will talk about us bad if we don't. So I had a basis of skepticism to work from. So I had to write a missionary woman in Everfair, and I had to make sure that I was respectful of her take on things. I think if I can do that, then anybody else that wants to be taken seriously can try.

[Tempest] I think though… What I find interesting is that with religion, that's the one that I have noted that our students have the most resistance to, in part because of there being so much emotionality bound up in religion and religious choices. You say to them, like, you need to get into the head of the African-American woman if you're going to write her. Okay. You need to get into the head of the deaf person if you're going to write them. Okay. You need to get into the head of a person who believes this about angels. They're like, "Yeah, but that's not true."

[Laughter]

[Tempest] But they're… But that's wrong. You're like, "You can… I'm not telling you that you have to believe what your character believes about angels." But you need to understand why your character and people like them believe what they do and respect that in order to then depict that in a respectful way. But it just seems like that's one of the places where people catch, that makes, like, this particular identity category different from the others that we talk about.

[Nisi] I think so. I think another thing came to mind when you were talking about our student, is that we have a spreadsheet of characteristics, traits for different characters in a book. You have students fill this out. They almost always leave the religion column blank. They have not thought about are their characters atheists, are they agnostics, are they practicing Buddhists, what are they? They just… They deliberately, or more likely, unconsciously, don't think about how their characters see their relationship with the whole cosmos.

[Right]

[Piper] I would actually challenge that a little. Not a lot, but a little. In the fact that I think that sometimes, rather than not think about it, they default. Well, of course, it would be this way. There's nothing other or different about what I have in mind for this character when it comes to this topic. So they default. Right? Because there's so much about thinking about religion that also sets your morals and your ethics and your ideals. There's so much that's ingrained, that when a person is developing their character, if they leave religion blank, they're defaulting to the set of morals and ideals and ethics that may have been established. They may not recognize or they may compartmentalize, but it is bound up, often, in your religion. Right? There are certain tenets, or there are certain values that, unless they're atheists or unless they're completely agnostic in some way, deliberately so, they're unconsciously defaulting to the religion they're most familiar with whether they technically practice. Right? Because there's a difference between being a Christian and living in a Christian culture, and the defaults that come with living in a Christian culture. Like, in America, we live in a Christian culture, not because, like, everyone is Christian, but because Christmas is a federal holiday.

[Yeah]

[Piper] Like, that's an artifact of the fact that we live in a Christian culture. Like, so Christmas is a national… Or a federal holiday. Like Rosh Hashanah isn't. But then I always think about the fact that when I lived in New York City, the New York City school system, Jewish high holidays were days off from school. That was a reflection of how much there is a Jewish culture in New York City, and how much that has to be respected because of the fact that it's a large community. You can't just ignore their high holidays, so they get incorporated. But that's one example in one place. I don't know of other places that have that. But I'm sure there are, I just don't know about them. It was a thing that I keyed on to specifically because it was so very different from what I was used to growing up.

[Nisi] Yeah, I agree. I think that that brings us to another point that's really important in representing a religion that's not your own. That is to think of how that religion stands in the community that your writing about. Is it like the majority religion in that community? Is it a minority religion? Are there sects? Are there different kinds of… Is there a historical curve to it? To the practice of this particular religion? Are there insiders and outsiders, orthodoxies, heretics? So you definitely have to think about that in depicting my religion or a religion that you make up or any religion that is not familiar to you as your own.

[Piper] Exactly. That actually brings us to our homework for this week. Which is that I want you to choose an aspect of culture that ties in with religion. My favorite example of this is how do people in your culture deal with those who have died. What do they do with the bodies? What kind of ceremonies are done around them? Whether you are writing and what we will call mimetic fiction, present-day America, whether you're writing in a secondary world fantasy, sit down and write 500 words about what happens when a person dies, what happens to their body, what happens to their soul, according to the religious or cultural values, and how does that play out with people in the family, in the town, in the immediate area.

[Dan] All right. That's really cool.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Okay. Well. All of you. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 15.12: Writing the Other – Being an Ally

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/22/15-12-writing-the-other-being-an-ally/

Key points: What demonstrates being a good ally? Don't just promote your book, but also boost the work of others. Make them the center of the conversation. Build a relationship with a whole person, not just the identity. What's an ally? Someone who will ride or die for you on your terms. Empathy writ large. Think raid group makeups, the tank, the person who makes safe spaces for others, lots of different roles. Beware Leeroy Jenkins! What about the ally who overshot and missed the mark? People who step up and speak for me, taking away my agency. You don't get cookies, credit, a prize for being an ally. When was someone a good ally without blocking your voice? White people shaming a woman who used the N-word in karaoke rapping. The support of a micro-community when you need it. People in a large conference who smiled, made room, and invited participation. When writing the other, listen to your sensitivity readers, and do no harm. If you can't write the other, maybe you can challenge inequity, and the systems that create it. Be aware that there are lots of different marginalizations, and lots of different kinds of ally-ship needed.

[transcriptionist note: I may have confused Piper, Tempest, and Erin in the transcript. I have very little hearing in the high tones, which makes it easy to confuse female voices. My apologies for any mistaken attribution.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 12.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Writing the Other – Being an Ally.

[Tempest] 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Erin] And we're not that smart.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Piper] We've been joined by our special guest, Erin Roberts. Erin, could you please give us some background on yourself?

[Erin] Sure. I'm a black speculative fiction writer. I mostly write short fiction. I do a little bit of fantasy, a little bit of science fiction, a little horror. I think the thing that I'm proudest of in my career so far is that my story, Sour Milk Girls, was in both The Year's Best Science Fiction and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror.

[Whoohoo!]

[Erin] So [garbled – we'll have to get] around that.

[Piper] Yeah. All right. So I'm excited because I love these takeovers. Particularly this topic is about being an ally. So I'm going to kick it off and ask all of you, what are some things that people have done that you view as having demonstrated that they are good, positive allies?

[Tempest] Well, around this topic in particular, the writing the other, being an ally, one of the most important things that I have seen is when people who are… Say they've written a book, in which there's marginalized characters that are not that writer's identity, they not only talk about their book in the promotion of it, but they also say, like, "I have read so much great fiction by people who actually do come from this identity. These are the people that I went to." Or "These are the books that I read for research." As many people would tell you, one of the most important things for writers is to have people like boosting your work, right? Like, to have people saying, "Yay, I love this," and just like letting their audience know. So, if you're, just for example, say a white person who is writing a book in which you have a black protagonist, you're going to have a whole bunch of people looking upon you, all of a sudden, on your twitter or whatever, and for you to then boost up black authors writing black protagonists is a really good thing to do.

[Dongwon] Yeah, I think being a good ally is so much about centering the voices that you're trying to support, right? The mistake that I see so often, not to talk about the negative sides of this too much, but the mistake I see is that somebody's trying to be an ally, and what they're doing is, "Hey, look at me, I'm doing a great job at promoting this other person." But if you're doing that, then you're really talking about yourself. It really is about taking the other person and making sure the spotlight is on them, they're the center of the conversation. Not to flatter our group too much, but I think the Writing Excuses group is doing a great job. They put the four of us on this podcast to talk about these issues. They're not looking for us to give them accolades, even though that's what I'm doing right now. It's really about promoting voices from people who come from other communities, who can speak on the topics that they want us to speak on.

[Erin] I also think that what's… What I really love is when people care about you beyond how you can inform their story. So something that you sometimes see is somebody will come up to you and say, "Well, I am writing this book with a black protagonist. Tell me about the black things." You're like, "Okay. That's lovely." But I like if that person has a relationship with you, that somebody cares about the parts of you that don't just inform your identity, but you as a whole person. Because identity is just a part of who you are. It shapes who you are, but isn't all of who you are.

[Piper] Awesome. I guess this may be a little belated, but for people who might be unfamiliar with the topic or the point of discussion, what's your quick, clearest pitch or definition for what is an ally? If someone were to just come up and ask you, "No, really, what's an ally?"

[Chuckles]

[Tempest] Well, an ally is a person who not only wants to… Who not only likes says, "I really want to support you and make it so that like the spaces that you come into and the communities that I belong to are safe for you or safer for you," but actually like does that work, and actually is, like… I get in our communities, say, will you ride or die for me? Like, allies will ride or die for you, but they will ride or die for you on your terms. Not on their terms, but they're like, "What do you need? Do you need me to step forward or to step back? Do you need me to be the loud voice talking about these things or do you just need me to be the quiet voice stepping up and going yes." Because it's going to change, it's going to be different, depending on the situation. But allies, real allies, always look for their cues from the people they're being allies to.

[Erin] Yeah. I always believe that empathy is at the core of ally-ship. It's empathy writ large. So, looking to the other person, and how they're feeling and what they want from you and realizing the power that you have, the power that they do or don't, and then, trying to do what's best for the other person. I think sometimes where ally-ship can go a little bit awry is when you make it about yourself and your reaction. I want to show I'm a good person by being an ally as opposed to I want to make the person I'm allying with their life better or make the situation better for them.

[Dongwon] I think about it sometimes in terms of like online gaming, like raid group makeups, right, like…

[Yeah]

[Dongwon] Sometimes you need an ally who's the tank, right? They're going to draw [agro?] from whatever's happening out there. They're going to get in front of the issue and say, "Hey, pay attention to me right now." So that other people have time to figure out how they want to respond and what they want to do. Especially in a dangerous situation, or in an online dog pile kind of situation, right? Then there's other people who are out there trying to make safe space for people. Make sure that there is a place to have a conversation, a place to sit and recharge, a place to kind of do the work behind the scenes that needs to be done sometimes to sort of figure out, okay, how are we going to move this conversation forward, how are we going to make improvements in the communities that we're part of, right? So there's lots of different roles that allies can play out there, and thinking about how you get into it, what kind of skill sets you have, and what kind of presence you have can be a really great way to figure out how to be a great ally, and how to support the communities and the marginalized identities that you're trying to work with.

[Piper] So I guess one of the things is that occasionally someone who really wants to be an ally pulls a Leeroy Jenkins…

[Laughter]

[Piper] And all of us are just standing there like, "Don't…"

[Dongwon] But come back… Oh boy.

[Tempest] For those of you who aren't aware of this… I wasn't aware until like criminally recently, this is a reference to a video of like a group of people, like, they're getting ready to go raid something, and then one guy just breaks off, and he's like, "Leeroy Jenkins!" He runs into the fray. They're all like, "No! We have a plan…"

[Piper] They all had to go in after him and they all died.

[Tempest] They all perished.

[Laughter] [horribly]

[Dongwon] Somebody add…

[Piper] A quick line on fried chicken. But anyway. So, in any case, yeah. Say Leeroy Jenkins as you…

[Tempest] Let's be real.

[Piper] What's one of the most… The experience that stands out most in your mind of someone who tried to be an ally and just overshot? Missed the mark? Anybody?

[Dongwon] So there was this event that was for people of color in publishing. It wasn't officially with the group, POC In Publishing, but it was an event that was intended for POC in a certain community to come together and sort of celebrate and talk about the issues that we're facing and an ally decided to take the mic and talk about what a great job that they had done to support everybody while… And were literally taking upstage time and presence away from the actual POC in the room who might have had something to say. That was a frustrating moment.

[Tempest] Yeah. I would say, for me, I've had quite a few instances where someone tried to demonstrate being an ally by stepping up and speaking for me. I have to say, one of the things that I really appreciate about my partner, about some friends who've known me for a long time is I don't need help being loud. But I am usually the tank that needs to heal. Right? So having someone stand at my shoulder and give me agency has often been what I prefer personally. So, the times when it's missed the mark for me is when someone literally has stepped in front of me to say words that would not necessarily have come out of me and took away my agency for how to handle the situation.

[Dongwon] To generalize a little bit, the place I see that most… We kind of hit this note a couple of times, but when I see that happening in a variety of circumstances, it's usually because an ally is saying, "I want credit for what I did." But there's no cookies for being a good ally. You don't get a prize at the end. The prize is you do the work, because the work needs to be done. It's important, and it's hard, and it's uncomfortable, but no one's going to say, "Good job," and give you a trophy at the end of it, right? So if that's why you're doing it, I need you to sit back and reconsider. What is my role in this community? How is that being an ally to somebody, if I'm trying to get a benefit out of it? Right?

[Definitely]

[Dongwon] Those are things I need people to think about as they're approaching these communities and as they're trying to be helpful. But sometimes somebody trying to help, as we're kind of hinting at here, can do more harm than good.

[Piper] I'm going to pause us for the book of the week. I think, Dongwon, you have that.

[Dongwon] I do have that, yes. Thank you for reminding me that I have that. The book I want to talk about is Paul Krueger's Steel Crow Saga. It is a secondary world fantasy that takes a lot from East Asian cultures. It has sort of analogues for a bunch of Southeast Asian and East Asian cultures. It takes place in the aftermath of a period of colonization and empire, where three of the nations have come together to throw off the fourth imperial power. So, it takes… It follows four characters, one from each of the different countries, who are all trying to figure out what to do in the aftermath of this big war. How do you make peace? How do you rebuild a world that's more equitable? How do you keep other powers from swallowing your country when maybe your country is smaller and has less military might than some of the others. Just because you won the war doesn't mean peace is easy to achieve and that people's desire for empire and control and power stop. This is also a book that I talk about as postcolonial Pokémon. So it's got a great magic system, there's lots of anime nonsense. If you like Fullmetal Alchemist, if you like those kinds of things, you're going to love this book.

[Piper] Awesome. All right, so I'm going to slightly switch gears for us in the fact that I'm going to ask for real experiences again, or memories that stand out to you, but instead, I'm going to ask for an example of a moment when someone steps to your side and really was an ally without blocking your own voice. Thoughts?

[Erin] I have an example that has nothing to do with writing whatsoever, but it was a very sort of real moment for me. So, I am a big karaoke enthusiast, as my friends and family all know. One of the issues that you sometimes have an karaoke is that you'll have a white person go up to the stage, they'll sing a rap song, the N-word comes up, and they decide that this is the moment to say it out loud. It's not, for the record, ever. So, I was at a karaoke bar and that happened. I was in a bar where I think I was like one of the only black people there. All of the white people in the room when the woman did it like gasped and like sham… They like sent shame stares at her. The woman stopped doing it. I loved it because this is something that really bothers me, but it has nothing to do with their lives. But their like visceral reaction really made me feel like, "Okay. Other people care about the things that are part of my identity experience, even though it's not part of their's."

[Piper] Awesome.

[Tempest] Yeah, I… I've been talking a lot recently about the value of community, and the value of, like, small, teeny-tiny communities as well as big ones, and just, like, encouraging especially my artist friends, and like artists include writers, to not only like find their place in large communities but their fun micro communities, groups of like five, six people maybe, that you can have like a group chat with, whether… Whatever you use to have group chats. So that you can get the support you need without necessarily having to expose all of your stuff to everybody in the group, and everybody in the group is just like, "We don't know how to help." But, like, you expose some sensitive stuff to like five really close friends, it's a different experience. So I have… I'm very lucky to have a lot of these little micro communities, micro groups. That is where I find most of the expressions of awesome ally-ship. Because I will come in and I will be like, "Oh, my God, this is happening." Or, "Did you see?" Or, "Let me tell you…" The best thing that they can do is they can just say like, "What is it you need me to do?" I'm like, "I just need you to sit here and just listen to me go off about those white people over there who did that thing that made me sad, right?" They're like, "Cool." Then they do. Or, I'm like, "I really need you to like boost this thing that's going on on Twitter." And like…

Or very publicly be like, "Shut up, people. Like, Tempest is awesome." Or whatever it is. They're like, "Okay. I can do that." I do that for them, too. Not all the people in these group chats are necessarily people who are outside of my identity group. Like, some of them are and some of them aren't. But, like, regardless of what they are, what I am, what the situation is, these are people that have my back. I just think it's really important to have people that have your back, in general. But then, like, that is where sometimes some people begin to understand what good ally-ship is. You don't necessarily have to have a close relationship with a person to be able to do that. To ask those questions, to be like, "Is there anything that you need me to do, like, what do you need me to do in this moment to be a good ally?" Sometimes, it's to run out on Twitter and start like yelling. Or sometimes it's just to listen. But, yeah, like that's the biggest thing with ally-ship is that you have to learn how to listen to what people need you to do and need you to not do.

[Piper] I can say I attend a lot of different conferences, both having to do with writing and the writing sphere and also having to do with my day job and my career in a corporate world. Especially, in my corporate position, I am often the only Asian American in the room. Sometimes it's really hard to walk into a really big place. For example, before I came to the Writing Excuses Cruise and Retreat 2019, I was at a summit of 1700 people. Often times, I was one of maybe two or three Asian American people in the room of 1700. One of the biggest things that really helped me be able to walk in and be confident and be a part of everything was the fact that a couple of my colleagues recognized me with a smile, made room for me at a table, were like, "Hey, we're going out." Acknowledged me, acknowledged my existence. Even if you don't know someone, the openness and welcome you can give by giving them a smile and seeing them… Or, if they're sitting by themselves, saying, "Hey. Are you eating alone? Do you want to be alone, or would you like to join us?" Just being open to that, and not being upset if your kindness is not taken well. Because they could be under stress. But just having it there, leaving it out there, and then stepping back, is an amazingly valuable thing in any kind of conferencing situation, any kind of public situation. I would say those are some of my best memories.

[Erin] Yeah. Another thing, specific to writing the other, one way that one can be a good ally is to do all the things that we have said on this podcast, I have said in other places, etc. That… To make sure that you're going to your sensitivity readers and listening to your sensitivity readers when it comes to the stuff that you're writing. To make sure that, like, the stuff that you're going to be putting out isn't going to be doing harm to the community. Do no harm is sort of like the philosophy that I try to instill in people with this. That is like one of the best ways to be a good ally as a person who is like trying to write other identities, is to make sure you listen to the people from those groups that you are trying to represent when they say, "This is harmful, let's change it."

[Tempest] Yeah. Don't just look for permission. Oh, I'm sorry.

[Piper] No, that's okay. I also really think that a lot of times… I think diversity is very important, but I also think equity is really important, and that in writing… So you don't necessarily… It's always good to have a diverse cast, but also, thinking about the systems that have created inequity and challenging those in your writing I think is also a great way to be an ally. Maybe you're not at a point where you're like, "I can actually successfully write the other." Like, "I tried it. It was a bad idea." Like, "I'm not there in my craft." But maybe I can challenge the way that justice works in my system. Maybe I can challenge the way that's sort of racial essentialism works in my world. By doing that, you put new ideas out into the world that I think also help to promote equity and change the way that we think about the world.

[Tempest] Yeah. One of the best examples of this that I've seen, and I'm pretty sure that we've talked about this on the podcast before is Justine Larbalestier. She's a YA writer, and the first several novels that she wrote, she always had a protagonist who was mixed race, POC in some way, they were all different. She did that at first, just with her first book, she just did it because that's what fit the character. Then she realized, like, how important it was for kids to be able to see themselves more. So she's like, "Oh, okay. It's cool. Now I'll just make this happen." But then, at some point, she realized that actually, because she was doing this, then the publishers are like, "We already have a book with a black protagonist, we don't need to buy one from a black person." She's like, "Wait. Oh, no. That is not what I wanted. That's not why I was doing this." So then she shifted, and she decided that like in any book that she wrote where she had one protagonist, like one POV character, that that protagonist would be white. But that didn't mean that she wasn't going to include people of color and people of other marginalized identities in the work. It's just that they wouldn't be the protagonist. Because the protagonist is the one that like publishers tend to focus on, people tend to focus on. Right? But she did that so that she could… That was her way of being a good ally, it was her way of making a space, and saying, "I am no longer going to be the one taking up this space. They can't use me as an excuse not to buy your book."

[Dongwon] One thing I want to point out is we've been talking about a lot of sort of POC oriented issues. We're talking about race and those kinds of elements, but there's a lot of different kinds of ally-ship out there, right? Disability, queer, there's a lot of marginalizations that people experience, and even within POC communities, there can be a lot of tension between different racial groups, right? So, one thing is just because you're marginalized in one way… This kind of plays into the conversation about intersectionality… You have to remember that just because you're marginalized here doesn't mean you get to be a bad ally over here. Right? We all need to be looking out for each other, and looking out for other people's communities and paying attention to different vectors of marginalization and trying to make sure you're supporting voices and respecting other people's identities. Because, even if you have an own voices project, you're only one or maybe two of those identities represented in the book. Ideally, you've got a bigger range of that in your project, right? So you have to make sure, even if you are a marginalized person and coming from that background, that there are other things you need to be really attentive to and make sure you're not stepping on those things. The work isn't done just because you're own voices, is really what I'm saying.

[Piper] All right. So we're going to have to wrap this up with homework.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] Did anyone think of homework?

[Erin] Oh, yeah. I have the homework.

[Piper] Oh, you have the homework. Whoo!

[Erin] I'm ready with the homework. Here is your homework. I want you to find the most recent short story's, book, any piece of literature, novella, whatever that you have consumed recently that you liked. Then, I want you to do two of the following five things at least. But you can do all five. You can… I want you to leave a review on Amazon and on Goodreads. Even though they're kind of the same thing, they're kind of not. Leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads. Tweet about it and say why did you love this book. Facebook about it, because Twitter's not Facebook and Facebook has a longer reach sometimes. Tell other writers. Explicitly be like, "Do you need my copy? Let me just put this in your hands. Please read this, please look at this." The fifth thing has gone out of my head, so I'm going to say… Instagram?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Pull a Instagram, take a picture, take a selfie with the book. Everybody loves a selfie. Take a picture with the book, and be like, "Read this book, it's great." But do that. Because that's a way of being an ally. Just putting out your love for that author and their story or their book or whatever it is.

[Dongwon] Can I suggest a number five?

[Erin] Yes.

[Dongwon] Tell a bookseller or a librarian.

[Erin] Yes! That was what flew out of my head. This is why we have Dongwon. Yes. Tell them. Because then they can be like, "Oh, really. We'll get more of that in."

[Piper] Awesome.

[Erin] That's your homework.

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

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Writing Excuses 6.3: Professional Organizations

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/06/19/writing-excuses-6-3-professional-organizations/

Key Points: You can say it SeFWA, you can say it SiFWA, anyway you say it, it's SFWA! Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers -- of America, but you don't have to be American. Make a sale, buy a membership. SFWA is a service organization. Or there's the professional guild for self-employed people, which offers access to insurance. Why join? First, for individual benefits, such as helping you with contract disputes, or access to other writers. Second, for group clout. You don't have to join, but it's fairly cheap. It's also "I made it" recognition -- I am a card-carrying professional science fiction and fantasy writer. And... it's community. And you get a decoder ring!
( Why the pros are pros... )
[Howard] Do you want a writing prompt?
[Brandon] Oh, yeah. A writing prompt. Sorry.
[Howard] Okay. Come up with a way, with rappelling, for me to join SFWA.
[Brandon] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

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Writing Excuses 20.34: Deep Dive into "All the Birds in the Sky" -- Using the Lens of Who

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

Writing Excuses 19.52: End of Year Reflections: Navigating Speedbumps

Writing Excuses 19.34: Grants and Fellowships

Writing Excuses 19.09: LIVE Recording - Rituals, Rites, and Traditions

Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog

Writing Excuses 16.10: Paying It Forward, with Kevin J. Anderson

Writing Excuses 15.38: Depicting Religions That Are Not Your Own

Writing Excuses 15.12: Writing the Other – Being an Ally

Writing Excuses 6.3: Professional Organizations

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