Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-49-getting-to-know-you 

 

Key points: Romance elements you might use in your story. Buddy films! A bond of some kind. The meat cube... meet cute! Two characters meet because something goes wrong. A bit in common. Or the odd couple meeting. Conflict to friendship. Kowal relationship axes: mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and mirth. The half orange, the person who completes. Two aspects, the characters gaining knowledge about each other, and the reader gaining knowledge about the characters. DREAM: Denial, Resistance, Exploration, Acceptance, and Manifestation. Enemies/rivals to friends. Use other characters as foils. Catalyst actions. Flip the polarity, allies to enemies. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 49]

 

[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 19, Episode 49]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Getting to Know You.

[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] We're going to be talking about using elements of romance in your story. This does not, I have to say, necessarily mean that you have to have a love story or even romantic attraction. You can use romance elements for... This is what buddy films are. It is the coming together as a team, as a couple, as hey, we have a bond. So we're going to be talking about some of the tools that you can use when you're doing that. One of them, we foreshadowed last week when we talked about the meat cube...

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The meet cute. This is a romance trope in which your characters meet each other. Does anyone want to chime in and talk a little bit about how they...

[Howard] So they both walk into the flesh pot...

[Laughter]

[Dan] It's a cyberpunk story now.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] Or the new Netflix reality TV show.

[Erin] Right. [garbled] I think what I like about... I love a good romance. What I like about meet cutes is they're usually a situation in which there's a tiny amount of tension because something is kind of going wrong. But the cute part is, like, my dogs got away from me and they jumped on you or, like, I almost spilled my coffee on you. It's something very small and one character's able to put the other one at ease in the way that they approach it shows that there's something that's very simpatico in the way that they deal with the world, see the world, or deal with conflict. I think that helps to foreshadow the way that they will deal with each other going forward.

[Mary Robinette] That is a great way to describe it. The other thing that I think that happens about that is that there's always, in addition to the thing going wrong, and that moment of oh, yes, I care about you, there's the desire for that connection to linger. And there's usually some revelation about something that they have in common. Something that is an unexpected thing that they have in common. It's like, oh, we both go to the same gym, or, what? Your grandmother's name is Emelda as well? It's some common thing that starts to… Is kind of the first thing that's cementing the friendship.

[Howard] Yeah. You mentioned how romances and buddy cop films… Buddy films, are both at some level, fundamentally the same formula. I pose the question, what does the meet cute look like in a buddy cop film? It may end up being something like these two law enforcement officers or these two professionals at arms both come to the same scene from different agencies and there is gunplay and there is a little bit of mutual respect and then, oh, no, you two have to be partners. I work alone. And off we go.

[DongWon] I think one thing that's really important about the meet cute is… It forces the characters to actually interact. Right? Interact about something. There's so many times when I'll read a book and I feel like the author's assuming that these two characters are in the same space. They're working in the same office. They're both in the same patrol car. Therefore, there's a relationship. Right? But we, as the audience, are not seeing that interaction. We're not getting a sense of that relationship. So, the meet cute, by having a thing that goes wrong in it, again, we're talking about sort of, like, those little micro tropes we talked about last episode. Where there's almost, like, that thriller component of, like, oh, no, something has happened. But the end result is one where we're leaning into interaction as opposed to a plot event and a plot hook in that way. Right? So those characters interacting, having a conversation, one person solving a problem for another person, and then leaving us on a note where it's like, oh, there's a possibility for future interaction here, because they share something in common, or they exchange numbers, or some aspect of it that lets us carry that thread into the future. Right? So you really want to make sure, as you're exiting that interaction, that there's something that carries us out of it with momentum.

 

[Dan] I don't want to get into a long definitional conversation about what is and isn't a meet cute. So I'm just going to say this is a different kind of meeting now to talk about, because there's one thing that you also see in a lot of relationship stories, is not the cute meeting where they kind of have some common ground that they can see, but the odd couple meeting. Where they are forced into conflict with each other. This is really common, I think, in a lot of buddy comedies, because they have that sense of butting heads. Until they become friends. But you see this in romance as well all the time. You asked about, Howard, what does the meeting look like in a buddy comedy. For my money, the best buddy comedy ever is The Nice Guys by Shane Black. And that… The time the two characters meet is when Russell Crowe breaks into Brian Gosling's house and breaks his arm. Like, that sets them up as antagonists, and then we get to watch them come together and become friends.

[Erin] I think, to build on what you're saying about the kind of buddy… Because I had the same thought. Like, it's like they're forced into the same patrol car, but I think it's like a moment of intrigue in the, like, most blasé versions of that, which is that, like, oh, we maybe have something in common. Again, it's finding the commonality. It's the, like, you do this by the book, and I like to just shoot things. But also, we both like kittens.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Like, a lot of times in buddy… Like, it's about finding the commonality in an unexpected place. So whereas a meet cute is I never thought I would meet you here today, in a buddy like film, I think it's more like I never thought I would find anything interesting about you, who I have already met.

[DongWon] Or any respect for you in some way.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So there is a… There's this theory that my mother-in-law has, which I call the Kowal relationship axes…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Based on her dating advice she gave to my husband, but it's great for characters, which is that if you think about these as sliders, the more things you have in common, the greater your compatibility is. So, it's mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and mirth. So, mind is that the closer they are in intelligence, the more compatible they are. Money, same opinions about money, what it's used for, not necessarily the same amount of money. Morals, the same ideas of what is right and wrong. Manners is the same idea of what is polite, correct behavior. So this is why you can have someone that you get along with, they're so charming in person, and terrible monsters on the Internet. Because their morals… Morals are completely opposed, but their manners are aligned. Monogamy is not actually you have to be monogamous, but you have the same idea of what the relationship is. You all have had the person that totally thinks that you're BFFs, and you're just like we kind of vaguely know each other. And then mirth, that you have the same sense of humor. So you only have to tip one of these off just a little bit, one or two of them off, to have like major conflicts and fractures. When you look at Lizzie and Darcy, from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, they are actually really closely aligned in pretty much everything except manners because of her family and a little bit on mirth. Then, in the proposal scene happening, they're wildly misaligned on monogamy.

[DongWon] Excuse me while I spend the rest of this episode having a minor crisis about my last few relationships.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Sorry. Well, let me ease your mind a little bit. Okay?

[Erin] All you need is a meet cute.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Where does one find a meet cute these days? I've been going to the park and…

 

[Dan] It's all on the Internet. So, to ease your mind, a little bit, because while this is true, I also think that there is a lot to be said for the half orange. I talk about this a lot in relationships, that what a person, what a character really needs is the other half of themselves.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Someone who completes them, someone who has all the qualities they don't have so that together they are a single complete person. So, yes, you need to be aligned, you need to think about some of the things in the same way, but also, you very specifically, I think, need to have someone who can do things you can't do, who thinks of things in a way that you don't.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I love about this is it doesn't talk about personality. So, introvert, extrovert? Yeah, absolutely, I completely agree with you that you need someone who balances you. That is one of the things that I love about these is that they're both correct, I think.

[Howard] The title of this episode, getting to know you, I'm ready to visit that in a little more detail after our break.

 

[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] 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.

 

[Erin] Today, I want to talk to you about the podcast Ancient History Fangirl. It's a history podcast and the hosts tell you history through story. Ancient historical figures like Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, [Rudicuff?] Or even the mythological [Coolcollon] have never felt more like real people to me as they did when Jen and Jenny told me their stories and brought them to life. They do in-depth research, and then weave it into a fantastic way to learn more about history. They have a lot of seasons and episodes, so I suggest finding a season or an arc that appeals to you. I started with their sci-fian episode, and I highly recommend it. You can find them on any major podcast platforms or at ancienthistoryfangirl.com.

 

[Howard] So, getting to know you. There are two aspects to this. One is the characters growing in character knowledge about each other, and the other is the reader gaining knowledge about these characters. You have to pull off both. You can't just say, A now knew all about B, you have to give the reader something to chew on. Something to enjoy.

[Mary Robinette] I have a tool for that. Which is, looking at the escalation, the arc, of the relationship. Much like the… One of the reasons that meet cute works is that it is the disruption of the normal, going back to our thriller episode. But there's this other thing called DREAM which I learned from Elizabeth Boyle. Denial, Resistance, Exploration, Acceptance, and Manifestation. So this is the arc that a person goes through… She got it from an anger management class, but…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] She is a romance writer, and she's like, oh, this is…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The building block of every romance ever. So, denial is that they deny that there is any kind of problem at all. What you do is you pick an externalization of that, you pick an action that the character takes in which they are clinging to that original identity. It's like, oh, who would go out with them? So, you make very… They're going to be at what? No, I'm definitely not going to that. So what action do they take? Then, resistance, that's when you acknowledge that, okay, I see why some people find him attractive, but I will never date him. Then exploration is where you start to think about it just a little bit. All right, well, maybe one date. Then, acceptance is, oh, no, I'm in love. Then matrimony is what you do with that. Or… Uh, excuse me. Manifestation is what you do with that. In a classic romance, it's matrimony. But if you think about the end of Casablanca, when Rick realizes that he is in love with Ilsa still, and that she's still in love with him, and his manifestation is not matrimony, it's to send her off and to take himself away because that is actually what's better for everybody that's involved. So what you do with that knowledge, the action that you take. And what's fun about this is that you can go through this cycle multiple times in a single book. What I see people do a lot is the characters will just hang out in denial, and then suddenly they get married.

[Howard] I've found that… 27 years of being married has probably taught me some of this. Demonstrations of one character's understanding of another usually take the shape of actions. Okay. Blow my own horn a little bit here. The whole cast went out falconing in the cold, except for me. I made a point of arriving at the house with hot drinks because I knew everyone would be cold.

[Mary Robinette] You were correct.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Was that thoughtful? Okay, yes. Sure. But the fact that I was thinking about these other people and had an idea of what they would need and the fact that they trusted me to bring something that they could drink, that gives us a picture of a relationship. Wow, these people are friends. They like each other. In a way that us saying, oh, thank you so much for the stuff. Oh, you're welcome. Just doesn't.

 

[DongWon] Having covered some of the tools, can we dive into another one of the classic tropes of the category?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Oh, yes.

[DongWon] So, one of my favorite setups is always the enemies or rivals who are caught in each other's orbit who have to build a relationship and grow to some kind of understanding or accord by the end, if not full on romance. To me, this is always such an interesting dynamic, because you… As we were talking about, you need to have the understanding between characters, but you also need the audience understanding of these individuals as well. So, often one is more in focus than the other, so we're getting the perspective of our protagonist and only bit by bit are we learning more information about the rival to begin to understand where they come from and why they are. So it's almost like building the romance for the reader in addition to building the romance for the character. Initially, we're like, wow, that person's a jerk. They're being so mean to the person I like. They might be hot, but, like, I hate them. So, learning bit by bit why we could respect them or be interested in them, I think is one of the delicious parts of this category.

 

[Erin] Yeah. You can also use other characters as a foil there. So, it's like you've got the rival who's a jerk, but then you've got, like, the truly evil, like, not even rival, like, person who makes the rival seem like, well, I disagree with their tactics, maybe, but at least I understand where they're coming from, unlike this new person. It's one of the things I loved growing up, watching soap operas, was that there's always characters in different stages of romance so that you're always… There's always one couple falling in love, one couple getting married, one couple settling down, and one couple breaking up. So there's always… So you know, like, when you see two people interacting, you're like, oh, this fits into this type of romance. I'm not going to mistake this couple falling in love for a married couple, because I have another example on the page, and it's also a way to give you something like, oh, this is something for this new couple to aim for. So I'm excited to see them make this journey down the line.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things that I think that goes with that with the couple that's making the journey, tying back into what you were talking about with the friends still lovers or variations of that, is there's always some, like, catalyst action that is happening. There's a point at which everything gets re-contextualized for the POV character, where they been watching this thing happening, and then there's suddenly, like, oh. This person that I thought was an asshole is actually leaving abruptly because he's taking care of his aging mother. Or when, again, Darcy and Elizabeth, when she suddenly realizes the reason he's been such a jerk to Wickham is because of the history with his sister. That's… It like recontextualizes every interaction that she's had with them up to that point. That's one of my favorite things, is that recontextualization.

[Dan] One of the things that I love about this type of relationship… At least for me, it's one of the things that separates it from odd couple. Odd couple is these two people, their personalities clash. One of them's messy and one of them's clean. Whatever it is. Whereas kind of enemies and rivals, or enemies to lovers, they are specifically opposed to each other, and they are trying to one up each other or they're trying to attack each other or whatever it is. What that allows you to do is crank the competence of both characters way, way up. Higher than you could do in a lot or most other relationships. That helps build that reader attachment. We don't like this person, but we also kind of really love this person, because they are so good at being terrible that when you get to whatever point midway or two thirds of the way through the story where suddenly they find themselves on the same side, we know that they're going to be an incredible team because we watch them be incredible on their own.

 

[Howard] Now, let's say for a moment that you're not writing a buddy show, you're not writing a romance, you are writing a thriller, you are writing a mystery. All of these tools apply, and you can go all Jordi Laforge and flip the polarity and have the trope be allies to enemies and it works exactly the same way. The more they learn about each other, there's a twist, there's a reveal, and now we have a broken relationship at the end.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah, it's funny, thinking about when you were mentioning the genres, I was thinking fantasy and science fiction, I think character relationships and dynamics are really at the heart of a lot of the classics. Like, your crew that's going out into space, like, has to… How do they get along with each other? This person doesn't quite like this person, but they accept it, they're a great engineer. Or when you have your fantasy party, like, going across the country, can the Bard stand the fighter? Like, a lot of these smaller dynamics, you can have as people's relationships change help to make things interesting, and I think why it's good for this week is, helps to make it interesting for you when you're like, I don't know what's going to happen next in the plot, they're not even halfway to the mountain of doom yet. That's a good time for, like, what's going on in their relationship? Is there a small thing that can happen that can make two people grow closer together or further apart? That makes your story, like, come alive to you a little bit as you explore how they, like each other or don't?

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that that brings us to our homework. So, your homework for this week is, in this scene, the one that you're working on right now, what is something that your character finds attractive about the other person in the scene? And no, this does not need to be a romantic attraction. And then the other thing is what does your character think is their own least attractive trait, and how can you make them more anxious about that right now?

 

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

 

[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-29-a-close-reading-on-character-barriers-vs-stakes 

 

Key points: Barriers and stakes. Speedbumps and clinking jars. Use stakes that are tied to the character. Which stakes impact their sense of self. Setting up a barrier? What is the character's goal, and what stops them from achieving it? Barriers and stakes in ability, role, relationship, and status can interplay. Connect the reader with the character to make the barriers and stakes resonate. Use sensory details. Metaphorical heavy lifting.

 

[Season 19, Episode 29]

 

[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.

 

[Dan] 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 29]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Character: Barriers vs. Stakes.

[Erin] 15 minutes long, 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.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Howard] I drove over here with some glass bottles in the back of the van that were full of what is essentially marmalade for making hot tea. For making, like, citron or honey [honey tea]. Every so often, I would hit a bump, and I would hear the jars clink together. There were no speedbumps. A speedbump is kind of a barrier. Slow way down for it. The glass jars in the back of the van? Those are stakes. If you don't slow down for the speedbump, you will get marmalade all over everything in the back of the van. So there is my one-trick pony explanation for barriers versus stakes. Now, let's get out some other tricks. More ponies, please.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So we're looking at You Perfect, Broken Thing by C. L. Clark for this episode. One of the things that I very much like about it is… Well, there's a bunch of things that I like about this story. But, it's a really good example of barriers and stakes. The barrier in this story is very clear and escalates. It's that our main character has to run a race. Not only… So, that's barrier one. Barrier two is that they have to run a race while they are sick. Then, we've got this additional thing that there are family members that are dependent on them, and the more that they practice, the sicker they get. The family members depending on them are the stakes. This is the reason that they're running the race. The need for the cure which is what they earn when they run the race is the… Is one of the stakes of this. So, it's a really short story, but there are multiple barriers and there are multiple stakes, all interacting simultaneously.

[Howard] One of the things that works so well for me with this story, and I wish it worked less well, because it's a me thing not a story thing, that is the description of physical pain. The description of… Well, it's this line at the very beginning. 

 

When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women's locker room. I can't stand anymore. But I know if I sit, I'll never get back up. At least, not for another hour. 

 

Oh, I feel so seen. What do the kids say these days? It's me. So much, it's me right there. If I sit down, I will never get back up.

[Erin] I also think that that… There's a great technique that's being used to demonstrate this a little later in the story, the, 

 

I use the railing like a cane. All my strength bent to keeping my feet for one, two, three, four. Five, six, seven, eight, nine. Ten, eleven, twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen stairs.

 

You just feel in the punctuation… There's nothing else going on in this sentence. At that moment, everything stops for the I need to get from step one to step fourteen, and I cannot think about anything else because it's taking all of my will to get past this pain. Without even saying exactly what's happening, it's coming through so clearly in that moment.

 

[DongWon] One of the things I really love to see is when I can feel the writer in the story itself. I can feel their perspective in it. I can… I get such a sense of C. L. Clark's own experience with exertion, with working out, with pain, with exercise, and it's coming through so clearly. I think, when you think about character, when you think about projecting and empathizing with someone who's not us, but also don't forget the ways in which you can utilize what is you to really enhance the reading experience.

[Howard] One of the places where the barrier and the stakes… The line between the two begins to blur, is the… If you've experienced the pain of that with a really tough workout, and have experienced the pain of, I think I've injured myself. We get both of these. "It takes a long time," I'm quoting now. "It takes a long time for the lightning pain in my ankles, knees, hips to dissipate to a dull throb." For my own part, when I work out, which is not a thing I do much anymore, but when I've worked out in the past, if I start getting lightning pain, it's time to stop. I am past the barrier of I am exhausted and I am into the stakes of how much do I really want to pay for the rest of this work out. Do I want to pay with not being able to walk tomorrow?

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that this is a great example because it's so personal to you. When you're trying to choose a stake for your character, you're looking for a stake that is tied to the character. You can have big global stakes, but when we're talking about character stakes, it's something that is going to affect the character's sense of self. So… We have this, right in that first sentence, or in the first paragraph. "When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women's locker room. I can't stand anymore. But I know if I sit, I'll never get back up." So, that is directly tied to the character's ability. That… This very small stake. If I sit, I do the thing that I want to do, which is to sit down. That's my goal, I want to sit. But I can't. I can't. What is at stake is my ability to stand back up. I can't… I don't have that ability anymore. So when you're looking for those, you can interrogate the character's identity which we talked about in the previous episode to find the stake that is going to most directly impact their sense of self.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that the barrier… I think one of the things that really works for me here in terms of that identity barrier is if it's hard to sit, to stand, to climb, and the stakes are so high for something that is much more physical exertion than, Lord knows, I'm doing on a daily basis, then how hard is it going to be? I really feel when the race starts, I'm not anticipating that the main character's actually going to make it through.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] To be honest. Like, I'm like… Like, you are not even making it from, like, barely to the starting line. How are you going to make it…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] All the way through? There is a surprise… I think I get the same surprise in ability that the character does, which is great. It brings me on the journey with the character, because as Coach is learning, like, Oh, I actually did climb this wall, and did murder that person. I'm also learning that that's what they're capable of. Then that, actually, makes me identify with them more, and makes the emotions of the story hit that much more… Like, much more… With much more of a punch.

 

[DongWon] In what is a very brutal story, one of the most brutal lines, in my opinion, at the end of the first section when it just says, "This is not my first race."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] We understand that she has done this before, and she may do it again in the future. That's how she's thinking about it. Even though we see how much her body is breaking down, we see how much she's at the limits of her ability, but the idea that she's been doing this for a while is just heartbreaking, and it sets the stakes of how important this is, that she is going to keep pushing herself to accomplish this.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm going to read a bit of the breakdown for you, after the break.

 

[Erin] This week, I have got to plug one of my favorite books of all time, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. This is a voice story, like, from start to finish, in my opinion, which is why I love it so much. It starts with this opening paragraph. "My name is Mary Catherine Blackwood. I'm 18 years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead." If that doesn't get you to read We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I don't know what will. So check it out.

 

[Mary Robinette] When you write a novel, there are often things you have to leave out. Scenes that predate the main book, situations that just didn't fit in, character moments that hit the cutting room floor. I've taken nine stories like that from the Lady Astronaut series and put them together into a short story collection called Silent Spaces: Tales from the Lady Astronauts. It's on Kickstarter right now. It includes stories about the arrival of the meteor in 1952, the race to the moon and Mars, and my Hugo award winning novelette, The Lady Astronaut of Mars. And there's one story, Silent Spaces, that is 100 percent new for this book. The Kickstarter funded in eight hours, so this is not so much a please help me make this, as a please help me make this even cooler. Because the stretch goals bring the Lady Astronaut series off the page and into the real world with tons of memorabilia, like patches, drinkware, teletype reproductions, recipe cards, spacesuits, and more. I hope you'll be a part of its journey and help out Silent Spaces on Kickstarter.

 

[Howard] Welcome back. I promised you some reading. There we go. Our protagonist is climbing a climbing wall. 

 

The colorful rubber is rough under my fingers. I think of Little and try to imitate her gibbon's grace. Each contraction of my lats pulls me higher and my biceps thrill at their strength. My legs forget their fatigue and I'm –

I'm a goddamn orchestra.

Until I'm not, and numbness webs across my back, a note out of tune. Maybe it started in my fingers and I didn't notice and now it's too late.

 

I have been in… I have been in that… Not exact position, not on a climbing wall, but I've been in that position more times than I care to count. It really struck home to me. The feeling of oh, I can do this, I've got this, oh, I'm fine. And then all of a sudden, there is pain and I realize not only am I not fine, I'm not fine and I'm in a place where I should not have put myself. This is another one of those barriers that blurs into stakes because we failed to clear the barrier properly.

[Mary Robinette] So I'm going to talk about how to set up a barrier. Again, you're looking for something that your character can't get through. So if you think about what their goal is, like, her goal is to run the race. So, if she can run the race well and quickly, then story's over. Immediately. So you have to put barriers. The barriers are the things that stop your character from achieving their goal. So the first thing we do at the beginning is we establish what our goal is. Then we have a series of barriers. You can tell the reader what those barriers are, and disguise it as part of the character thinking. So when there's a part where right before the section that Howard read to you where she's thinking about, she puts the climbing harness on and her teammates say, "Don't do that. Shut that shit down. You just ran a mile's worth of sprints." "I didn't need them to tell me that. I calculated our needs the night before, our weak spots. I accounted for his lack of stamina, for Shell's lack of speed. My pain. Our weakness will come with us to the race. The wall is there, too, and I need to be able to take it." So, very clearly, we've laid out exactly what the problems are, we've foreshadowed what's going to happen in the race. Doing that allows the reader, knowing what the barriers are ahead of time allows the reader to anticipate those and to anticipate the failure points and also to be surprised when they play out in different ways. But all of these things are, again, still tied to that goal of I need to run the race and we've also been told what's at stake if we don't run the race. So it's the here's the goal, here are the things that are going to stop me from hitting that goal, and then when we actually get into the race, there are even more things that go wrong.

[DongWon] I still love that line, our weakness will come with us to the race.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's just… You just feel it in your chest when you read that.

[Erin] That's life, though.

[Laughter]

 

[Erin] Also, Mary Robinette, when you were talking, it made me think about the fact that there… The barriers also can exist in those ability, role, relationship, status, and that when a barrier hits in one, then maybe one of the others can be the thing that gets you past it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So I'm thinking about the other moment in the race, where, like, the strength gives out, and then somebody's like, "You got this, champ." Which, as a former [crossroader?] Like, there is something very powerful weirdly about some random person being like, "You can do it." It is the role. You are a champion. A reminder of the role that helps you get forward a little more. Then, when that runs out, it's something of the relationship.

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[Erin] To the people that you need to bring this medicine forward to. So it makes me think about my own work, how can I create a barrier in one of these areas and then solve it with another, and then hit a barrier there and solve it with another, and sort of pass back and forth between the different aspects of character is a way to create story moments.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I want to be clear that there are other ways to create barriers for character. You can use milieu. So… We'll see this in the race itself, where the place itself is the problem. You can create things with the questions. That… If a character has a question, they can't get the answer. I'm specifically in this section, because we're talking about character, thinking about barriers to the character and to their sense of identity. But I want to be clear that barriers can, in a lot of different ways.

 

[Howard] It's important to note that the… This several extreme connection that I developed to this story grows out of the very close parallel between the physical experience in the story and some of my own physical experiences. It's challenging to set up a barrier or to set up stakes when that connection isn't apparent. For instance, the wizard who just needs to cast that spell right. But it's not tied to exhaustion or hunger or migraine headache or any… It's tied to some magical sense. Finding a way to communicate that so it is personal to us, the reader, can be a challenge. That's where, for me, stories that fail to deliver barriers and stakes in ways that resonate? That's usually why they fail. It's because, for some reason, worldbuilding didn't connect me to those things.

[DongWon] Because it's really about character choice. Right? To bring all these barriers and all these stakes back to creating a character that we are interested in, engaged with, whether we hate them, whether we love them, whether we empathize with them or not, it has to be about choice. So when this comes down to that moment of Coach in the mud pit, right? And making a choice about what she will do to win this race, what is worth it to her? I think that's one of the things that communicates so much about the character, about the stakes that are going to occur, and our understanding and compassion for her, even as she does something that in some ways is unforgivable.

 

[Erin] I also really like how we're taught a little bit how to read that moment. So, one of the things that I love is the series of, like, the very long kind of sentence paragraph of just things that are happening, that I will not read, because it's very long. But there's a series of things that is going on as she's in the mud and trying to get out of the mud. When I was looking back and doing a close reading, I noticed that we… It's not the first time we get this long sentence paragraph. We also get it with the meal the night before, which is also, like, a moment of, like, just really being in the moment. So, sometimes you can be in the moment with the food and enjoying it and the companionship. Then, the next day, you're in the moment of survival. I don't necessarily relate to life or death survival in that way, but I do relate to eating a good meal. I feel like the story sort of taught me a little bit how to take in that kind of sentence, and how to be in that moment with the character, and then used it for something that I was less comfortable or less familiar with.

[Howard] We actually talked about that principle in the very first season of Writing Excuses, a bazillion…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Bazillions ago. The idea of get one thing, one small thing, exactly right and we will follow you along for the big thing. If you can connect me with the character enjoying a meal, then I will stay connected when they are trying to cast color magic using their sense of [oxareen].

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[DongWon] I love picking Clark for character because they do embodied character so well. Right? They do sensory detail. I always feel I am in the room with them. I feel like I can smell the things that the character smells, tastes the things, feel the pain and the burn in my body.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's so wonderful to be so deeply entrenched in a perspective like this.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The other thing that I love about it is how they managed to do that with such often sparse description.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like the section...

 

I don't want to tempt the ache in my body, but I don't want to die tomorrow without remembering the good things my body does. So we’re two bodies, in flexion, extension, the slow eccentric stretch and the isometric clenching hold, over and over, until we can release.

 

Like, she does not tell you what is exactly happening in that scene, but you can understand it and feel it in your own body. The other thing that I want to call out about that particular section that I read is that this is also one of the two moments where she makes… The character makes it clear that she is not expecting to survive the race. That her motivation has changed. Which, for me, also helps with that moment in the mud. Knowing that this is something she's doing for other people. That the relationship aspect of it…

[DongWon] Drowning another runner is okay because she doesn't expect to survive herself?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? There is… If she weren't willing to sacrifice that much, it would make that moment less sympathetic. Then, of course, we get the moment at the end which… I don't know why, it caught me off guard. I was surprised by it, when she turns down the shot for herself…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And gives it to the kid. In retrospect, it's, of course, and that's what so lovely about that moment is when you're doing character and you're setting up the stakes and all these things, getting to that moment of, oh, of course, this is what they would do even when you didn't see it coming, is so much what let's character drive a story. Because it means you're leaning into choices, it means you set up the stakes well. Right?

[Howard] It's ironic almost to the point of a pun to say, Mary Robinette, that example you read is a fine example of muscular prose.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because it's giving us so much information. All of the words are doing the metaphorical heavy lifting for us, explaining to us what's going on.

 

[Howard] I've got the homework for you. We're going to return to the speedbump metaphor. But you're not allowed to use my speedbump and my jars.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Write a short scene in which your character has to deal with a mundane obstacle. Then, rewrite it as if that obstacle now has life or death stakes. How do you shift it to make those stakes clearer?

 

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

 

[Erin] Are you struggling to find time and energy for creative work or writing? Sandra Tayler has a new book that might help. Structuring Life to Support Creativity is a resource book for creative people who want to make more space in the life that they have for the creative work they want to do. This book is drawn from 30 years experience in juggling creative work along with everything else life throws at us. Inside the book, you can find such topics as managing your mental load, arranging your physical space, how to come back to your creative work after life goes sideways, the problem of motivation, and more. The whole book is written with a focus on adapting for how your brain works instead of trying to change you to fit expectations. The book is not prescriptive. Instead, it provides concepts and tools so you can find the ones that work for you. This makes the book autism, ADHD, and neurodivergent friendly. Preorder your copy today at sandratayler.com. Just make sure that Tayler has an e r in the Tayler.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-31-getting-personal-mining-your-life-for-themes

 

Key points: How do you take personal stuff and mine it for fiction and storytelling? Sometimes it's just things you love day-to-day. The things we carry! Sometimes it's small details. Try putting the polar opposite, or at least different approaches, into your story. Turn it up to 11, and then back it down and play with it. Take care of yourself, too. Give yourself time and space for tough stories. Life is more than just trauma, you can mine happy stuff and good memories, too. Make sure the reader knows what is going on, too. Give them the signposts, breadcrumbs, context to make sense of the inside joke, the emotional tug.

 

[Season 18, Episode 31]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Getting Personal: Mining Your Life for Themes.

[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 have opinions... That don't always make it into my stuff.

[Dan] Keep them to yourself.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] No, this is an opinion episode. So, this is our last episode where we're kind of digging into Dark One: Forgotten and how and why it was written. One thing that is very personal for me is the concept of memory. I, when I was first married, spent eight months living with my grandfather who has Alzheimer's. This is one of my favorite people in the world, he practically raised me for a huge chunk of my childhood. Then I… The situation was reversed, and I became his caretaker and helped kind of guide him through this disease that eventually killed him a few years later. I had not realized how much un-dealt with trauma there was until I wrote a John Cleaver novella called Next of Kin, which is specifically about a monster who consumes other people's memories and then relives them. All of this stuff just came gushing out. I have since written several books that deal very closely with memory and what it is to have or lose memories. Dark One: Forgotten is one of them. That becomes a major part of the story, especially at the end when all of the supernatural stuff is revealed. So, I thought it would be really interesting to talk about this specifically. Not memory, but the broader category of how do you take something that is so personal, that means so much to you, and then mine it for fiction and storytelling?

[DongWon] I get the question all the time of, like, "What are you looking for in a project? What makes something stand out to you? What makes you pluck something from the unsolicited submission pile?" Not every book has to be this way. Obviously, there's lots of reasons to write, there's lots of fiction that works. But, for me, the thing that I'm looking for is always where do I see the author in this story? When I read a pitch, when I read a piece of fiction, I want to know that a person who is in a place in a situation felt that they had to tell me this story. Why were they the only person who could do this? That comes from really personal places. That comes from stories that are rooted in people's childhoods and their experiences and their hopes and dreams and fears. I think that, for me, is always the thing that makes me really just like sit up and pay attention and get so excited to work on a story.

 

[Howard] Sometimes it's as simple as the things that you love day-to-day. Like… I mean, the foods that you eat, the things that you listen to. As somebody who studied music and sound recording technology, I listen a lot. So, describing sounds in the things that I write is fun for me. I like to do that. That's… Now, it has to be the right character in order to be noticing something. Some character will say, "Well, what's that booming noise?" Another might say, "There's a 30 Hz rumble and it's increasing…" Whatever. But the foods that I love to eat and the smells associated with those foods, these are things that bring characters to life. That absolutely make the page into something that lives for us. Because the things that we love, the things that we sense, the things that we are passionate about, we infuse into our characters in small ways. It doesn't need to be a book about food, or a book about pipe organs, or whatever, it can just be a book about people who experience things the way you experience them.

 

[Erin] When I think about sort of personal issues and the personal things, I think about the things we carry. Which is, a lot of times, the way that I think about like the issues that we're going through in our lives and the things that we're processing. There are some things that we carry for a long time that may show up in all of our fiction. Memory may always be a component of what you're talking about, Dan. I'm also fascinated with memory for different reasons, because I don't have a very good one. So I'm very fascinated with how much memory makes up who we are. But then there are things that you pick up along the way. Some of them are things like foods, smaller things that bring you joy. Some of them are issues that you're working through for a specific period of time in your life, and then set down. What I think is really exciting is that fiction gives you an opportunity to, number one, find out what things you're carrying. Like, you didn't realize, Dan, like, how much that was a part of you until you put it on the page. So, sometimes when you're writing, you can go back and find out, "This is something I've been carrying, and I been carrying it so long that little bits of it are like sprinkling out on the pages that I'm writing in the things that I'm doing." But what can be kind of difficult is that over time, the things that you carry change. One thing that I found really interesting, I think I've talked about it before on the podcast, is during the early pandemic, like, so much of what we were carrying was changing. As writers, you're trying to catch up to the issues in your life that are changing, and it's changing the way that you do fiction, and it's changing the stories that you're trying to tell. There's something really amazing and beautiful in that. But I think it also can be difficult to know how to catch up to the issues that are now the things that you're carrying.

[Dan] Yeah. I love that metaphor for what you're carrying, because so much of carrying something comes down to how you're carrying it. Carrying a rock might be very easy, or very hard, depending on the size of it. But also, if I'm carrying it in a backpack versus carrying it in my shoe, that is going to totally change the way that I am interacting with it and the kind of the amount of pain that something relatively small might cause. If it's just something that I'm not aware of or that I'm not dealing with. That can spill out sometimes problematically into fiction. With that first draft of Next of Kin, I had to tone it back and say, "Okay, wait a minute. This needs to be a story about John Cleaver, not a journaling entry about Dan Wells."

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that that… To get to some more practical nuts and bolts of how to do this, that when you're looking at stuff from your life, when you're mining it, you don't have to say this is a thing that is happening in my life and then put it in as a major plot point in the book that you're writing. It can just be something that you're holding in your head and it will inflect it. Or it can be showing up in small details. Like, one of the things that I talk about all the time is that I will gift my characters with the things from the real… From my real world that are just nagging at me. Like, when you look at Lady Astronaut of Mars, there's a scene in which Nathaniel cannot make it to the toilet in time. I had spent time with my grandmother who at the time was 105 years old, and we had that moment together. She has no relationship to him. Like, I didn't write a story about my grandmother. I didn't write a story about that. But I explored the feelings and the moments and the viscerality of that, and transplanted it into another time and place and with another character. You can do that with large thematic things or you can do that with just small pieces of it.

[Dan] Doing that can add so much flavor and emotion to a story. Because it is something, like DongWon said at the beginning, that is intrinsic to you. We can read that scene and go, "Oh, this author has gone through this. This author knows what they're talking about and has helped put me into a position to experience some of those same emotions." Which, for me, is a huge part of why I read in the first place.

 

[Howard] One of the most challenging, and I would argue, the most likely to make your story robust, techniques is to take whatever this is and find the polar opposite and be able to put both in the story. If you have a particular hobbyhorse… I mean, it might be a sensory thing, like foods or music, it might be a political stance. If you can take the polar opposite and represent that well, then not only will you succeed as a human in more deeply exploring that thing you're passionate about, you will also make your story more robust, and it won't feel like… It won't feel didactic. It won't feel like you're just preaching to us.

[Erin] The polar opposite may not be like the obvious like political difference. The reason I say this is one of the things I was working through in my own writing is a lot of my published short stories are about somebody who is facing a culture that is the enemy. Like, the antagonist of the story is the cultural norms that don't support this person's life, and figuring out a way to kind of get past that. Often by lashing out at that culture. I felt like a lot of what I was exploring in retrospect was the idea, like, the master's tools can never dismantle the master's house. But during Covid and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, part of what I started thinking is, well, what am I saying does dismantle the master's house? Am I saying that it gets to remain standing? That isn't what I necessarily want to be saying. I want to be looking at different ways around this issue that are separate. So, some of the stories that I'm working on now are more about people having differing opinions about how to accomplish the same goal. They all agree that the master's house should be dismantled, but some people want to blow it up, some people want to burn it down, some people want to use the tools. Figuring that out has made the stories richer because I'm experiencing this issue on a deeper level and therefore so are my characters.

[DongWon] One of the things I love about that is sometimes that can be really direct in terms of like the metaphor and… When I say I want to be able to see the author in the piece, sometimes that is very obvious in terms of like I have a book that will have come out just this last spring called Chlorine that's by a young woman who is a child of immigrants, used to be a high school swimmer, and the book is about a child of immigrants who is a high school swimmer. Right. There's like a very much one-to-one, like, I can see, oh, yeah, you are in this story. But other times, it's like layered through many, many filters of metaphor. Right? So I think about N. K. Jemison's Broken Earth books, which are just a searing portrait about… Of marginalization, of oppression, of colonialism and all these things, that feels like she wrote a book about living in America. But there's nothing in that book that I can one-to-one map to this is that ethnic group, this is that cultural group, this is that… She is writing a book about magic schools and wizards and magic rocks. But still managed to make something that felt very politically trenchant to me as a reader in 2020 or whenever I was reading that. 2019. It was very transformative for me of understanding how an author's experience can completely inform a text without it necessarily being legible about what specific thing maps to what.

[Howard] After the break, I'm going to talk about turning the knob to 11 first. But we're going to take a break.

 

[DongWon] So, the thing of the week this week is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. As we are talking about how stories can be very personal for us, sometimes the audience's relationship to that is also very personal. Right? So, this is a movie. It just swept the Oscars a little while ago. It's made by a directing pair named the Daniels who wrote and directed it. So it is very much a story of Asian immigrants to the United States and their children's relationship to them. For me, as a queer Asian American child of immigrants, it hit very, very close to home for me. There's so many different aspects of that story that I identify with, and there's so many things that feel so specifically grounded in someone's experience and their perspective and then, the specific experiences of the actors themselves and what they brought to those roles, that it, I think, really resonated with the audiences because it did have a very deep personal connection. It felt like everyone was bringing their own selves to that set, to that production. That is so touchable and it's so tangible and legible in the end product in a way that meant… Means it was hugely impactful for me when I saw it, and for a lot of my peers and for a lot of people in the world generally. So, if you haven't seen it yet, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is a magnificent movie. I love it almost on every level. It is absurdist, it is strange, it is charming and romantic and funny and exciting. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

 

[Howard] So, in This Is Spinal Tap, there's this joke about how the guitar amp has a knob that goes to 11. Well, how does that make it louder? This one goes to 11. Ha ha, very funny. As a sound engineer, there's this technique that I learned that works great in audio engineering, it works great in applying filters in Photoshop. It is terrible to try and work with in cooking. The principle is this. Start by turning the knob to 11. Somebody [garbled] "Does this need more bass?" I don't know. Let's see what more bass sounds like. All the way to 11, and then pull it back. When I said earlier, find the polar opposite, I didn't mean start with 11 and keep it there. I met start with 11, and then… And then nuance it and play with it. Because until you know how loud it goes, you might not really feel the shape of it. The same thing in Photoshop. You're applying a filter, throw the filter all the way down, crank it all the way up. Then pull it back and start to massage it. This doesn't work well in cooking, when you're, say, trying to see how much cummin is enough and you begin with the whole jar. That's hard to undo. But I love this principle. This is kind of a multilayered sort of approach to the approach, because audio engineering and visual stuff and cooking are things that I've already talked about, and they colored, not just what I write about, but how I talk about what I write.

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to bring up is that… It occurred to me while you were talking about this in terms of turning it to 11, is also remember as a writer that you are also a person. I would encourage you to take care of yourself first and foremost, and to be gentle with yourself. A lot of what we're talking about when we're talking about mining your own life for themes is digging into your own traumas, into some of the worst things that happened to you, into oppressions that you experienced on a daily basis. I once made a joke to my own therapist that [garbled] Of my job is sticking a crowbar into a writer's trauma and then pulling until a novel pops out…

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I don't actually do that to my writers. I don't actually mine their traumas in that way and don't try to re-traumatize them.

[Mary Robinette] The writers say other things.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I'm sure that they do. I do want to encourage people though to remember that this is dealing with very difficult material and that you should be taking care of yourself first. You should be paying attention to what your limits are, and I would encourage you, if you're doing this work, to make sure that you are working with people who can support you in that, whether that's professional mental health or a support network, whatever it is. Make sure that you are checking in and seeing how you're doing as you're going through this process.

[Erin] That also may mean giving yourself more time and space for stories that hew closer to your heart, closer to the bone. So, whereas you might be, like, "I finished the story and I'm going to send it to my critique group the next day," if this is something that is very personal for you, you may come more personally… More of yourself may be exposed when you're getting feedback, when you're talking about it. So it's wise to give yourself a break and make sure that you're sort of ready for that experience so that you're not sort of out there, like raw, and then people are trying to give you feedback and it's hard for you to take it, because it feels like it's feedback to who you are and not what you wrote.

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly.

 

[Mary Robinette] But also bear in mind that when we talk about mining your… Getting personal and mining your own life, your own life is made up of more than trauma.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Mary Robinette] You can mine the happy stuff. You can mine the good memories. You can mine those good sensory details, the good relationships. Like, every romantic relationship that I write is in some aspect based on my relationship with my husband. My picture book, Molly on the Moon,… Actually, I guess this is a trauma, but it is based on a real life thing that happened with me and my brother, where he took my stuffed lamb and I was like five. But it's also based on this other happy memory of me making a toy for him. You can look for those, those are gems. There's a thing that I think we do when we discount our own life and experiences as being like normal. But there only normal for, like, you. They're not an experience that anyone else has had.

[DongWon] This goes back to what Howard was saying of put sounds, put foods, put tastes, put sensory things that you experience in there. You're mining more than just like the big heavy dark stuff. I completely agree that I would also encourage you to find the joyful things in your life and put those in your text. Find the friendships, the relationships, the experiences. Plenty of people have great relationships with their parents and their family. It is just as important to see good parents in the young adult section as it is to see neglectful parents. Right? So I think finding that balance is so important to building a really important, well-rounded presence in your book.

 

[Dan] I loved what you said about kind of being careful, making sure that when you get feedback on this type of very personal storytelling, that you're in the right place to receive it. I also… I want to add to that, that I find the need for revision to be even stronger when I'm dealing with something that I care about this deeply. Because often the first thing I've put down does not work for the story. There's a thing I say all the time, which is that your first draft is for what you want to say, and your final draft is for how you want to say it. When it's dealing with something that relates specifically to a pain or a trauma that I am processing, the first draft isn't even what I want to say yet. It's just this kind of blurp of feelings that come out. Then I need to go back and work it into a form and say, "Yes, the story does want this emotion here, and it does want this rawness, but maybe not… Maybe it needs to be shaped a little better. Maybe I need to turn this more into what the character is going to do rather than just me."

[Erin] I think that's true for joyful fun things as well. I mean, think about when you have a shared joke with someone and somebody else walks in and you're trying to like explain it. There's 18 amazing like things about your friendship with that person that are like all boiled down to this sentence, that you have no… It's really difficult to explain. That can happen in your own relationship to your happy memories. Like, you have a very deep relationship with why this particular thing that happened is so meaningful for you, this food, this sound, and you have to make sure to bring the reader along and give them enough of it that they can understand it, so that they don't feel like they're eavesdropping on a joke that they will never get.

[Dan] Absolutely. I remember… There was an episode of Babylon 5 where the captain had been given a teddy bear. It was so weird, the way he interacted with this teddy bear in the way he kind of growled at it all the time. I was convinced that this was part of some plot centric supernatural or science fictional something that was going on. No, I found out afterwards, that it's just that the guy writing that episode really hated toys and really hated funny cute things, and assumed that every member of the audience would share that exact relationship…

[Laughter]

[Dan] And… So all of… None of the jokes landed, none of the stuff he was trying to do made sense without the context that was inside of his brain. So making sure that you give her the reader all of these…

[Howard] The director pranked him...

[Chuckles]

[Howard] By filming the whole thing and giving it to us.

[Ha Ha!]

[Dan] No, but you have to provide the audience with the right signposts, the right breadcrumbs, the right context so that this emotion, whether it is good or bad, whether it is painful or whatever, this inside joke makes sense to them as much as it makes sense to you.

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that brings us to our homework.

[Howard] Well, fair listener. As you may suspect, the homework is going to feel pretty obvious here. I'm going to make this a three-part assignment. Take something that is joyful for you, that you think about and that brings you joy. Take something that is painful for you, that you think about it, it brings you pain. Take something that is vivid for you, that when you think about it, there are sensory associations. Those three things, give those things, either individually or altogether, to a character or characters in whatever you are writing and see if you can express those things in ways that feel real to you.

 

[Mary Robinette] Our next episode will feature a special guest. It's Kirsten Vangsness, who is best known for her role as Penelope Garcia in Criminal Minds. Kirsten is also an incredible writer, and we loved talking with her about imposter syndrome and using tools from your non-writing life to fuel your writing.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-13-finding-the-core-conflict/

 

Key points: Conflict, fights, disagreements, or other struggles, are often easy to teach. They are usually external, with beats. Set up, try-fail cycles, consequences, resolution. But, how do you make them interesting, and ramp up the tension? Make sure the reader is invested in the characters. Sometimes the conflict is because they have different plans to get the same thing. Action scenes, fights, wars, car chases, can be boring because we know who is going to win. So, show us something that we've never seen before, use the action to explore character, or make sure there's some real uncertainty. Don't forget that conflict can be fun! To make it satisfying, add something new and exciting. Consider the emotional need of the character, the superobjective or tragic character flaw. Watch for the underlying rules or agreement behind the conflict about how to solve things. Or for the gaps in that agreement. Consider having your characters question their motives before, during, or after a fight. You may make the world better.

 

[Season 18, Episode 13]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Finding the Core Conflict.

[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] No, you're not!

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about conflict.

[Howard] I was about to try to quote the argument sketch from Monty Python…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And I just didn't have the piece I needed, so…

[DongWon] See, my mind went to I demand that he may or may not be Howard.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That is correct.

[Erin] I was just going to say World Star, but…

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] So, when we're talking about conflict, it can come in a bunch of different ways, but it is the form that most people think about. It can be fights or disagreements or struggles. These are all easy to teach because they're usually external and you have a clear set of beats. You've got the setting up of the conflict, you've got the try-fail cycles, you have the consequences. Then you have the resolution, where the character gets or does not get the thing that they're looking for. But when we're thinking about that, like, how are the ways that we can build conflicts that are more interesting, that are doing a good job of ramping tension up and as… To quote Erin from much earlier… That readers… Or to paraphrase Erin… That readers experience tension and only characters experience conflict, so how do we get the readers to feel tense about the characters' conflict?

[Dan] So, I want to start by reiterating something we touched on early on, which is that tension, and in our case now conflict, only really matters to you if you're invested in the characters who are a part of it. This is why a solid 60 to 70% of every horror novel is just slice of life of this person and what they're doing and what they care about and what's important to them. Because if we don't have that grounding we don't love them and we're not invested in their survival, then whatever conflicts they experience won't mean anything to us.

[Howard] As a tension tool, conflict… If we can see the conflict coming before they can… The old math problems about a train leaves Chicago at this time, a train leaves Nashville at this time, going this speed, where will they meet? Oh, by the way, both trains are on the same track and can't stop. Well, now suddenly, the math problem has tension in it because we want to find out how to stop trains, or what's going to happen when they collide. We have these two conflicting… Irresistible force versus immovable object, and they're going to meet.

[DongWon] This is what drives a ton of westerns. Right? You know at some point that the gunslinger and the sheriff are going to drawdown. Right? The question is when's that happening? When… How are we going to get to that point? So, knowing that that conflict is there and building up the terms of why are they going to fight, what is at stake here, is so much… What drives a great Western is knowing all the back story, all the trauma, all the history between these characters that is going to lead to the standoff. I mean, samurai films, same structure. Yeah.

[Erin] I also think that having like an emotional weight and some depth to the conflict is really important. What are the reasons that this particular person wants this thing? It's not just that it's a thing and it's cool, but maybe they have some emotional tie to it, or it fills some need that they don't even realize that they have. It's another reason that I really like it when two opposing parties are in conflict not because they just want to oppose each other, but because they want the same thing for different legitimate emotional reasons. That's what really drives their conflict. So it doesn't feel like conflict for conflict's sake, it feels like you're invested in their emotional journey, and therefore you're invested in what they want out of it.

 

[Mary Robinette] Or, taking out another way, is when they both want the same thing, but have totally different plans for how to get there. Right? That sometimes is driven by their own emotional state. Sometimes it's just that. Like, I tend to solve things by saying, "Let's turn it into a show. Can we theater our way out of this?" Someone else is going to look at it and say, "Well, that's silly. Let's math our way out of it."

[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, this is like Black Panther and Killmonger. Right? They both want the same thing for the future, but they have such different visions of how to get there. So it becomes a question of methodology, it becomes a question of how you execute those things, your ethics there, also, hashtag Killmonger was right. But, it is…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Like, interesting questions. Sometimes that leads to the most interesting conflicts. Not do we think this obviously moral things should happen, it's how do we actually do that? How do we get there? Right? How do we get from this future or this present to that future? Those are the conflicts that I, on a bigger scale, not necessarily on a personal emotional scale, get much more interested in intellectually and emotionally.

 

[Dan] So, this conversation is much wider than just action scenes. But I want to talk a little bit about action scenes, whether it's a fight or a war or a car chase or whatever. Because most of the time, I find those to be incredibly boring. The reason is because I know who's going to win. It's rare that a fight scene will justify itself as more than just a display of people punching or shooting at each other. Because the outcome is rarely ever actually in question. So, if you're going to do some kind of action scene, I find it really useful to do a) show me something that I've never seen before. This is why, like a Jackie Chan or a Tony Jaa fight scene is so much more compelling than a lot of the other ones. Because they are doing something I've never seen in a way I've never seen. Or b) use that action scene as a way to explore character. To demonstrate something intrinsic about these people that I wouldn't be able to see in any other way. Or b) just make sure that there's some actual uncertainty. That maybe the characters involved might actually die even though they're on the poster. Or however you do it so that there's still some tension, some uncertainty, and some investment in what is otherwise a fairly wrote exercise.

[Mary Robinette] Wes Chu, when we had him on, talked about fight scenes as being a conversation. That the conversation is basically, "I want this thing. You want a different thing. How do we work that out? Which of us is going to get the thing?" I've always felt like that was a really… A useful way to think about it structurally, because conversations have an arc, and fight scenes can have an arc, the really well constructed ones have an arc, and that conflict is… That… Is that exchange between them.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, let's take a moment and pause for our thing of the week.

[Howard] The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This is nonfiction and huge and brilliant. I'm going to go ahead and read the blurb that one of my other favorite nonfiction authors wrote about it, Nassim Taleb. 

 

"This is not a book. It is an intellectual feast. There's not a single chapter that does not playfully disrupt well seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read. This is… It begins with a deconstruction of the 19th or 18th century question, what are the origins of societal inequality. It takes that question and says, why were they even asking that? A better question is what is the origin of the question what are the origins of societal inequality. What they arrived at, in a nutshell, is 18th-century, 17 through 19th century Europe, colored our perceptions of human history in such a way that we've been misinterpreting pre-human history, pre-history of humans badly. Most of the book is devoted to looking at the new research and telling new stories about primitive peoples in ways that make way more sense than the ones that Rousseau and the others were looking at."

 

[Howard] I know that sounds kind of heavy and heady and maybe not fun, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb is right. It is pleasurable, it is glorious, it is humorous, it is eye-opening, it is fun. The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

 

[DongWon] One thing I wanted to talk about as we're talking about conflict that I don't want to lose sight of. I generally agree with everybody that character development, all those things are incredibly important, and that's what generally you need around conflict, but I also don't want to lose sight of the fact that conflict itself can be really fun. Right? A scene involving conflict is often the meat of certain types of stories. Right? I really love action movies. I love kung fu movies, things like that, and executing an action scene incredibly well should be revealing of character. You should learn stuff about the world. There should be advancement of story. But also, just executing on the thing itself is its own joy. Seeing a good argument unfold on screen between two characters… One example I think of is Hereditary. The most thrilling scene in that very upsetting movie, to me, is just Toni Collette at the dinner table yelling at her family. It's this moment of just pure like terror and excitement as she finally lets loose. It is this conflict that's happening in this moment. But it's just hearing, seeing her face and hearing her language. Or, I think a very effect… Like, all the John Wick movies. Right? The conflict in those… The tension in those movies is incredibly basic, which is, will John Wick get revenge on the people who killed his dog? I'm not spoiling anything, that's the plot of the whole first movie.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And sort of the plot for three more movies. Right? The joy of those movies is watching this guy beautifully, athletically, murder a billion people over the course of several hours. So, do you guys have thoughts in terms of how to make sure your conflict, whether it's a physical conflict or argument, whatever it is, is satisfying in its own right, beat for beat, style for style?

[Howard] I do, and I think we're going to talk about it in the next episode where we talk about micro-tension.

[DongWon] Yeah, it does overlap with that. I can live with that.

[Howard] Because you've got that whole big conflict, and there can be smaller conflicts that are being explored, resolved, as we are going forward with the big obvious one.

[Dan] A short answer I can give right now is kind of what I said earlier. What you're talking about is my point about showing me something I've never seen. I've seen a million car chases. But until Fast and Furious Five, I think, I don't think I'd ever seen a car chase where they were dragging a bank vault behind them on the street. There's always ways to add something new and dynamic that really takes it to another level.

[Mary Robinette] For me it gets to… Goes back to that emotional thing or… I say that it gets… As if there's a single answer. There's multiple of them. But a lot of times, what I find myself reverting to is the idea of objective and super objective. That there's this big deep character want or need that's in the middle of them, and that the conflicts that they're going through are a series of objectives, each of which is targeted to try and solve… To try and fill that super objective in them. So a super objective is a very large thing, like safety, security, love. Revenge. Then the objective is the specific action that you're going after. Sometimes I will see conflicts and they don't seem to emotionally link back to whatever gaping hole the character has… Sometimes we call this the tragic character flaw. But I find that if I can link it back to that… Can draw a link between the objective/super objective, that allows me to have a series of conflicts that are also linked and also escalating in a way that is interesting.

 

[Erin] This is not going to answer that question at all… Not to cause conflict on our conflict discussion…

[Laughter]

[Erin] It's something that I just find really fascinating about conflict, is the inherent agreement in it. So think back to what Killmonger and Black Panther, they may disagree about a lot of things, but they definitely agree that single hand-to-hand combat is the way that one should determine who gets to rule your kingdom. Like, they… There's a certain baseline in a lot of conflict, like this is something we should solve by violence, or these are, like, a well-placed bon motte is the way to get under the skin of your opponent, like, maybe more of a Jane Austen type novel. What I think is really interesting is thinking about where do the people involved in the conflict agree at least on the ground rules, and what that conflict should be composed of. Then either leaning into that, so showing it at its most extreme, Fast and Furious level, or, that can also be a way of keeping it interesting if they kind of disagree on what the ground rules are. If somebody gets the rug pulled out from under them because the way the conflict was happening turns in a way that they weren't expecting.

[Mary Robinette] You just made me think of a thing, Erin, which is something we talk about so frequently in other episodes, which is the consequences of something. So if it's the… If you've got someone who's coming in and they believe that it's… That the way to deal with something is with the crushing bon motte, but they are facing someone who believes that the way you deal with it is by pulling out a rapier, that that's a consequence. Then, me and the M.I.C.E. quotient, frequently, conflicts are built around events, it's a disruption of status quo. So, often if you can have… If you can have the conclusion of conflict A be creating the problem, creating the status quo disruption that becomes the problem that conflict B must solve, that you again have that linking. I think an interesting way to do it would be to bring to people who do not agree on the rules of engagement together. It's not the only way, but I'm like, "Oh, that's an interesting thing to play with."

 

[Howard] When we prepared for this episode, Erin asked the question, "What are the emotional needs that are underlying a person's investment in the conflict?" I keep coming back to that, because… Just in my own life, when I'm feeling a thing, when I'm angry or conflicted about a thing, the first step I take… Okay. I'm 54. I've been living inside this skull, this meat frame, for quite a while. Maybe this is 400 level stuff. But the first thing I do is ask myself, what am I really angry about? What is the underlying emotional state here? Am I reacting nonlinearly? Am I going ballistic over something that should be perhaps a little less hyperbolic in nature? The characters in our stories… It's probably not super interesting if they all do that before getting in a fight, because then maybe there wouldn't be a fight at all. But then again, if they have those discussions with themselves after the fight, if they have those discussions with themselves during the fight, so that we are exploring those emotional states, exploring the changes to those states, exploring how the consequences of the fight might alter those states, now we're invested. Because that's the thing… I mean, I've said this before. Fiction is a tool by which we can make the world better. If your action scene accidentally teaches people to question their motives before getting in a fight, I think you performed a public service.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of performing, it is time to perform some homework. So, for our homework assignment…

[Howard] I think Erin's got this one.

[Mary Robinette] Erin's got this one.

[Erin] Oh, look at that. I do have this one. In this one, it is… It's a perfect segue from what Howard was just talking about, which is to write a conflict twice. Each time, change the POV character's underlying emotional need. So, have them need one thing in the first version of the scene, and something completely different, emotionally, in the second version. See how that scene changes for you.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/10/24/16-43-the-narrative-holy-trinity-of-world-character-and-plot-with-fonda-lee/

 

Key points: The story is like a three-legged stool with world, character, and plot working together. Worldbuilding is a part of all kinds of fiction. Most stories start with a kernel, either a world kernel, a character kernel, or a plot kernel. Then you build out from there. For example, starting with a world kernel, look at what attracts you to this world and what kinds of conflicts does it have. That will suggest potential plots, and lead you to types of characters. Starting with a character kernel, think about the character's journey, and what kind of world would make that journey more compelling and difficult. From a plot kernel, backfill, and think about what kind of world would make the stakes of that plot compelling and gripping. The world, in turn, is made up of environments, culture, and technology. Think about the ways things are interconnected. Wherever your story starts, take that kernel and build the world around it, tie the world, characters, and plot together.

 

[Season 16, Episode 43]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Master Class with Fonda Lee.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We are incredibly excited to be starting a brand new eight episode series. We're going to be talking about worldbuilding. We have one of, in my opinion, the very best worldbuilders working today. Fonda Lee, can you tell us about yourself?

[Fonda] Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. I'm Fonda. I write science fiction and fantasy novels. I'm best known for the Green Bone saga, which begins with Jade City, continues with Jade War, and concludes with Jade Legacy, which is coming out November 30. I'm also the author of a few science fiction novels, Zeroboxer, Exo, and Cross Fire, and a smattering of short fiction. I live in Portland, Oregon, and I love food and action movies.

[Dan] Cool. Well, thank you for being on the show. We're really excited to have you here.

 

[Dan] You have prepared a class for us about worldbuilding. This first episode, we're going to talk about what you call the narrative holy trinity, world, character, and plot. What… Start us off with that.

[Fonda] Yeah. So, I love worldbuilding. It's one of the topics I always enjoy talking about. People often ask me about my worldbuilding process, how do I actually go about it, how long do I take, what steps. I often have a difficult time describing the actual process for them, because in my mind it's really impossible to distinguish the act of worldbuilding from that of developing the plot and character. The reason I called this episode the holy trinity is because in my mind, the story is like a three legged stool, or perhaps a three cylinder engine, that only functions because the pieces of world, character, and plot are working together. When you ask yourself as an author, "Well, why do you go through all the effort of worldbuilding in creating this entire fictional campus?" On one hand, you could say, "Well, it's really fun." Which is true, a lot of us authors worldbuilding because it's really enjoyable. But for me there also has to be a reason why that invented world exists and contributes to making the story uniquely what it is from a narrative perspective. I feel like we often talk about the relationship between plot and character, and what I'd really love to do in this master class is dive into the relationship between the world and the other elements of story.

[Howard] As I was thinking about this, I looked at the outline last night, I was reminded of an anecdote that I love to share about college Howard. Which has each of these elements in it. I was waking up in the morning and thinking, "Oh, I'm so happy that today is Friday, because I don't have my 7 AM class. I'm so glad that today is… Or, no, I'm so glad that it's Thursday because I don't have my 7 AM class, and I'm so glad it's Friday because the weekend is beginning." Howard is lying in bed, mulling over these things and suddenly realizes, "Wait, those can't both be true." I asked my roommate, "Hey, David, what day is it?" He's like, "It's Friday." "Oh, good, I'm glad it's Friday. Wait, what time is it?" "It's 6:45." At which point, I leapt out of bed. The worldbuilding detail that I've left out is that the day before, David and I had installed bunkbeds, and I was on top.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] So I pancake on the floor and David looks at me and says, "If this is going to happen every morning, we can trade."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The point here though is that there is this character who's kind of doofy, and there's this plot about what he likes and what he doesn't like. Then there is this worldbuilding detail which arrives a little late, but which sells the whole story. If you don't have all three of those, it's just another story about me waking up late.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] The other… And there are so many of those, honestly.

[Fonda] Now I want an entire series of just Howard's college exploits.

 

[Mary Robinette] Right! But actually, this is a thing that I do want to point out for our listeners, because I know that while we tend to focus on science fiction and fantasy, and people think about worldbuilding as being a science fiction and fantasy hallmark, and it certainly one of the things that drives us, worldbuilding is something that you have to do with any kind of fiction. Even something that is set contemporary in your real home because you are still making narrative decisions about every piece of the world that goes on the page. So all of the things we're going to be talking about are things that you will still be able to find and apply, even if you're writing something that is contemporary.

[Fonda] Yeah. I've often said that even if you have your story set in a small town, or a nuclear submarine, the odds that your reader has actually been to that small town or has been on a nuclear submarine are vanishingly small. So you have just as much work to convince your reader of that world as you do a fictional world. The only advantage, or really difference, that you have when you're writing that is opposed to a speculative fiction story is that you have more… You can count on your reader having more real-life cues to help them along in building that world in their mind than you necessarily would if you're creating a completely secondary world from scratch.

[Dan] Yeah. I made this mistake yesterday, actually. In the book that I'm writing, I have a scene set in a law office. I wrote it. It just didn't feel wrong, it felt hollow and weird, and I realized I had included zero worldbuilding details in it. There… If someone doesn't already know exactly what a law office looks like or how it works, they would be completely lost trying to read that scene and understand it. So, yeah. You need to include this whether it's real or… Real stuff or stuff you make up.

[Fonda] If you don't get those details right in a real-world setting, there are people who will tell you that you got your worldbuilding details wrong.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Even if you do get them right, I'll just say, FYI, even if you do get them right, people will still tell you that you're wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yes, but at least you can feel good about yourself.

[Mary Robinette] I know. So, what are some of the tools that we can use, Fonda?

 

[Fonda] Well, often times people have asked how do you come up with the ideas for your story? Like, every single one of us has had that question put to us, at a reading or a book signing. The reality is that there's no idea factory. Most of the time, we have some little kernel, and we glom additional material onto that kernel in order to make it turn into something that could potentially be a story. I find, at least in my case, that the story tends to show up as an initial kernel of either a world kernel, a character kernel, or a plot kernel. This is happened to me with each of my different projects. They've come to me as different kernels. The Green Bone saga, for example, that came as a world kernel first. So the world, the premise of the world, was what first arrived, and then I had to do the work of developing plot and characters. So if your world comes to you first, I think the thing to ask yourself is what attracts you to this world and what inherent conflicts are there that are present in that world? That will lead you then to what kind of potential plot might unfold as a result of the conflicts. It might lead you to what types of characters will enable the reader to experience that world and to experience those conflicts. But if you have, let's say, a character kernel come to you first, then you can ask yourself, well, what is the character's journey and what is it that you can do with your worldbuilding that makes that journey more compelling and difficult. Then, finally, if you have a plot kernel come to you first, it may be a twist or a cool climax idea, then you can backfill it with, okay, now you're going to go do your worldbuilding. What kind of external worldly pressures are going to make the stakes of that plot extremely compelling and gripping?

 

[Dan] I am excited to talk about all three of those and dig into some examples. Let's do a book of the week first, which is actually me. I'm going to talk this week about a book called She Who Rides the Storm by Caitlin Sangster. This came out just a couple of weeks ago, and it is an epic fantasy heist novel, with some really just incredible worldbuilding. One of the main characters has this incredible magical sense of smell. So, not only is it written with this really wonderful sense of sensory detail, but the smells that she is including in her fantasy world are all incredibly compelling. It has kind of driven her to create all kinds of interesting foods and medicines… She's an herbalist… Things like this that came together through the sense of smell to give a really fascinating sense of place to the world that she is telling the story in. So that is She Who Rides the Storm by Caitlin Sangster.

 

[Mary Robinette] Cool. Well, there's a thing that Fonda was talking about right before we took the break that made me think of a thing, which is that when we're talking about the world, that I also find that the world is another three-legged stool. That it's made up of environments, culture, and technology. And that each of those pieces influence the others. One of the things that I want you to be thinking about as we're going through this whole thing is that just as the culture's influenced by the environment… If you're in a very warm place, that's going to affect the kind of clothing that someone wears. The technology that you have will affect that as well, because if you're in a warm place with air conditioning, you're going to have a completely different reaction than if you're in a warm place without air conditioning. So there's this kind of cyclical interconnectedness. When we're looking at all of these things, again, through the whole master class, one of the places that people come part with their worldbuilding is that they don't think about the way things are interconnected. So they don't think about how the technology affects the character and that then affects the plot. Or they don't think about the way the plot affects the technology. Like they don't think about the ways… That there's a web. The thing about a three-legged stool is you can't take any of those legs away without the whole stool falling over.

[Howard] There's the classic example that we used in one of the very first episodes of Writing Excuses, which is the continual light spell in the Dungeons & Dragons setting. Which, if it's been around for a generation or more, candlemaking is dead. Because I don't care how much those things cost, now… They're continual. You've upset an entire economy. So contemplating the implications of that cool stuff that attracts you to the world is key to making that world feel believable. Because at some point, we walk through these worlds that people create and something rings wrong and we realize it's because, "Oh, wait. If A, then definitely not B. We're spending all this time on B. We need to skip straight ahead to M."

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] Right. I mean, there's so many choices that you make in worldbuilding. Ideally, you want all of those choices to continue to reinforce your characters, challenges, and their choices, and enable the story that you want to tell and make your plot more compelling. You don't want your worldbuilding to undermine your story. I think we'll talk a lot over the course of this master class about how do you make choices that help your story as opposed to just acting as a backdrop for the story.

 

[Dan] I really love this idea that you gave us about the kernels. World first, character first, and plot first. I'd love to dig into those a little bit and get an example. I kind of want to ask about the Green Bone saga. You mentioned that idea came to you as world first. Can you give us, very quickly, kind of a sense of how you developed that? How starting with the world informed the way that you came up with the plot and the characters?

[Fonda] Yeah, so my initial kernel for the Green Bone saga was Jade City. That was… Those were the two words, it's the title of the first book, and that's what came to me first. The premise of it was almost an aesthetic one. I wanted to create a world that had these… An awesome kung fu magic powers that I saw in my favorite films. People being able to like leap off buildings and punch through walls, and ground that in a story where that made sense and there was a magic resource that explained that. Then mashed it with my favorite crime drama aesthetics. So that was the premise of the world. In order… Where I built off from that was saying, "Okay. Well, what kind of world is going to most fulfill this vision?" That allowed me to decide where to set it in terms of time. Because the default with a lot of fantasy stories is to set it in like a medieval period. But I had a really clear aesthetic in my mind. I'm like, "What is a gangster family drama unless it's got luxury cars and the submachine guns and the dark alleys and the men in suits smoking in rooms?" So that led me to the decision to set a fantasy… An epic fantasy story in a more modern, latter half of the 20th century time period. Because I knew from the start that I wanted to invoke a family saga, like the Godfather, that made me make a decision around characters. They have to be… I had a multiple POV story with a cast of characters, and each of them has a different role in the family. Then, that led me to a lot of plot decisions, around how the characters would interact. So it's sort of a cascading effect in which you come up… You have a kernel, and then you make a number of choices in your worldbuilding that help you tell the story that you want to tell.

[Howard] I find it really useful to prioritize the things that you loved early on, the decisions that you're making. Because I inevitably in my worldbuilding in my storytelling will arrive at a point where I can see very clearly, "Oh. This is the thing that I absolutely need to be exploring, but in order to do this, I have to knock down that very first piece of foundation I built because those don't work." Because I'm working in comics or in prose, that's not terribly expensive. If I were working in cinema and had already built a movie set, then that would be a terrible decision to have to make, but I don't. So that's not the way it rolls.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We are running… Letting this episode run slightly long because we wanted to introduce the full master class. Let me give a really quick example of a plot first story kernel. With my Zero G middle grade books on Audible. The whole impetus behind that story was Home Alone in space. The idea that there is a kid on a colony ship who has to defend it from pirates, because everyone else is asleep. In order to tell that story properly, starting purely with the plot, that created or forced a lot of worldbuilding decisions such that I didn't want it… If he has to defend the ship by himself, then the cryo-technology that keeps everyone asleep can't be something that he can just undo… He can't wake people up and put them back to sleep again. It forced a lot of the technological details because I needed a story in which a 12-year-old boy had to solve all of the problems by himself. Does anybody very quickly have an example of a character first?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I do. Ghost Talkers started with the character of Ginger Stuyvesant. All I really knew about her, the sense that I had, was that she was this glamorous heiress, and that she was a medium. That was kind of all I knew. I wanted there to be some banter, and that there was a noir feel, kind of a… Then I had to figure out sort of where she lived and figure out what the world was that she inhabited that allowed her to be a medium that solved crime. Which I knew that… That also then gave me the plot. It's like, "Oh, she's solving mysteries. That's what she's doing with this thing." But it definitely started… I had a very clear image of Ginger. Then I had to figure everything else out around her.

[Fonda] What I love about all these examples is that it shows that wherever your story starts, you are taking that kernel and you are building that world around it as opposed to just sort of putting it up against a backdrop. You're trying to find ways to tie the world into all the elements of character and all the elements of plot.

 

[Dan] Awesome. Well, this has been a fantastic episode. We're going to end with some homework. Fonda? What would you like our listeners to do?

[Fonda] I would like you to pick a favorite book with worldbuilding that you admire, and see if you can identify in what way the worldbuilding supports the character journeys that happen in that story, supports the plot, and also supports the themes.

[Dan] Cool. Well, there you go. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/22/15-47-worldbuilding-science-fiction-with-cory-doctorow/

Key points: Extrapolating to make futuristic parables? Think of a throat swab, one factor to focus on. Take one technology or phenomenon and build a world around it. Enduring issues are that we only know how to make one kind of computer, and that encryption works, so computers are colonizing everything. Or consider organ transplants from something like pigs. Take a single point and follow logical causal chains and branches to see where it goes. What about worldbuilding for stories set in the present? For example, romance writers need to think through their setting, even a small town. Worldbuilding gives you opportunities for conflict and to add depth to characters. Don't forget economics! What do people do, what are their jobs?
 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 47.

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding Science Fiction, with Cory Doctorow.

[Piper] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Cory] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Piper] I'm Piper.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Cory] And I'm Cory.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we're talking about worldbuilding and science fiction. Most of the time, when we talk about worldbuilding, it's very fantasy oriented. But worldbuilding is actually something that you need to do, regardless of what kind of fiction you're writing. Since Cory writes science fiction and is… often near future, just around the corner science fiction, the worldbuilding that he does has to tie pretty tightly to what's going on in the real world. So how do you get there, how do you extrapolate?

[Cory] Yeah. So extrapolating is a good word for it, because I like to be really clear that it's never predicting. Right? There's nothing more fatalistic than the idea that we can predict the future, because one thing I believe, and that kind of animates me, is that we can change the future based on the choices that we make. So I like to feel like futuristic parables are a good way to understand the present, but they only work as parables if they feel plausibly futuristic. There are some good cheap tricks for that. I often analogize near future SF to going to the doctor to get your throat swabbed. Right? The doctor goes… The doctor takes a swab of your throat, she puts it in a petri dish, she gives it 72 hours. What she's got then is not an accurate model of your body. She has this, like, usefully inaccurate model of your body. Where she's taken one fact of your body she wants to use to understand a factor that is otherwise drowned out by the noise of the thousand other processes going on in your body. She's reified it so it's the one fact in this little world in a bottle. As science fiction writers, we can reach into the world and we can take a technology or a phenomenon and we can build a world around it in which that is… Has a centrality that isn't… It isn't predictive, because there would be all the confounding factors that would go into it. But by elevating it to this like… To the center of a narrative, we can equip the readers to understand the subtle effects of that technology as we're living in it now. Which gives them a benchmark to understand it in the future. It becomes a kind of emotional architect's fly through of a 3D model of what it would be like if… As this technology becomes more significant, more important.

[Howard] Worldbuilding strep.

[Cory] Yeah. Well, exactly. So, drones are never going to be the only important thing in our world, but drones are going to have a big important effect on our world. You could write a drone story where drones had a centrality that would let you think through some of those issues and let… Give readers a vocabulary for comparing the world that they're in to it, in the same way that we can say that mass surveillance is Orwellian. You might be able to say that it's Robinette-Kowalian, or Doctorow-vian, or whatever. For Drake-ian. If you found the right narrative and hooked it up the right way. So that diagnostic tool, that kind of predicting the present for me is a really useful way to think about science fiction and its role in the world.

[Howard] I bought some solar powered sidewalk lamps at Walmart for like five bucks. Opened them up and realized they had AA rechargeable batteries in them. What I had was a six dollar solar powered AA battery charger.

[Cory] Right.

[Howard] It forced me to rethink every post-apocalyptic thing I had ever read, because, now, boy, the lights aren't going off until I run out of rechargeable batteries.

[Cory] Right.

[Howard] Because… And I'm not likely to run out of those soon, if it's like a zombie post-apocalypse. This kind of extrapolation is so much fun, because we are living through some fun tipping points. The tipping point of solar and renewable, tipping points of surveillance sue-valence drone technology. Extrapolating these things just 20 years forward is fun.

 

[Cory] Yeah. I also want to say that if you want to give your work an enduring legacy, if you want to make it continue to feel realistic in the future or at least salient in the future, one really good way to do that is to understand that computer science theory is actually pretty static. Computer engineering is a very fast moving field, but the theory on which it's built is pretty static. Like, since the war years, we've known how to build really one kind of computer. It's the Turing complete computer, that can run every program that we can conceive of. Now, this has been a huge boon, because it means that if you can make computers faster and smaller, then any program you can think of can run on them. It means that computers colonize everything. The device that you're listening to this on is a computer. The house that you're in maybe a computer at this point, in the sense that if you took the computers out, the house might become uninhabitable. If you have a pacemaker, you have a computer in your body. Your car is definitely a computer if it was made in the last 10 years, and you trust your body to it. It whisks you down the road at 80 miles an hour. 5 miles an hour if you live in Los Angeles.

[Chuckles]

[Cory] That computer design, the one computer that can run every program, also has this major downside, which is we don't know how to not make it run undesirable programs. Right? We don't know how to not make it run programs that pirate copyrighted works, and we don't know how to not make it run programs that are malicious, and we don't know how to not make it run programs that are… We don't want criminals to have access to like encryption technology. There's this move now to restrict access to encryption technology, so that criminals can't have conversations in secret, and it's somewhat of a moot question, because you might say, "In this country, we don't let you run that program." But how do you stop people from downloading that program and running it on their computer? We don't know how to make a computer that can't run the program period. We don't know how to make an iPhone that can't run software that's not blessed by Apple. So this is a really interesting point, because our closest approximation is the Apple solution, which is a program that has spyware running on it that checks to see whether you're doing something that the manufacturer disapproves of. If you try to do it, it says, "I can't let you do that, Dave." So that fact, that's a really important fact that like plays out in our policy all the time. Then a related fact that I alluded to is that we know how to make encryption that works and we know how to make encryption that doesn't work. What we don't know how to make is encryption that works only when we need it to stop working.

[Gasp]

[Cory] Right? Like, when criminals use it. Like, we keep trying. It is a catastrophic failure, because encryption is how we make sure that the firmware update in your pacemaker doesn't kill you in your boots. If we say, well, we're going to ban working encryption, then what we really say is that we're going to make it so that we can't validate the payloads that we send to your pacemaker to make sure that it's getting new firmware.

[Howard] We can keep criminals from conspiring, we can't keep them from killing you with the thing in your chest.

[Cory] Right. Indeed, they will continue to conspire.

[Howard] Right.

[Cory] So, both of these facts, and then the third fact about technology is that governments are really struggling to come to grips with both of these two other facts, that encryption works and that we only know how to make one kind of computer. They will not cease to struggle with it because computers are colonizing every category of device, which means that they're central to every policy problem we have. Which means that they'll keep making this mistake. If you make any one of or all three of those facts central to your fiction, it will continue to be a parable about all the bad things going on in our world, unfortunately, for the entire foreseeable future. That means that you can have a book like Little Brother, the novel of mine that I'm really best known for, that I wrote in 2006, that continues to be cited as an incredibly, like, gripping futuristic salient tale that has something to tell us about our present day only because it has this techno-realistic element to it.

 

[Piper] You can also take a look at science from another aspect as well. That's from medicine, which you touched on with pacemakers. But you think about what we can do with DNA at this stage. For a while there, we wouldn't… The main basis for why the FDA wouldn't allow organ transplants and organs to be grown in something like porcine, like pigs, was because pigs had a retrovirus that could potentially be transferable to humans, which was… Would be terrible, considering the timeframe and what it could do. But now we have the ability, now, in today's day and age, to adjust their genetic makeup and composition to eradicate that virus in that string of pigs. Therefore, making it safe. We do now… There's a company that does it, that grows kidneys in pigs and have gotten to successful transplants in primates, and has proposed to potentially go to successful transplants for humans. Which could change the lives of people who are on the list waiting for kidneys. Now that doesn't take that much more in terms of steps forward to imagining what that kind of science, that kind of medicine, can do to change the near future. Or, if we play with the zombie apocalypse, because at least one of my series has done that, we look at vaccines, like, BSE is a major thing that I do in my day job, or not do. But that's related to what I look at in terms of data in my day job keep it safe. It's bovine spongiform encephalitis. It is nontransferable to humans. But. What if it became transferable? What if that virus became transferable? You have zombies now. You have people with brains that look like Swiss cheese when you take a cut of it. So…

[Howard] Delicious, delicious Swiss cheese.

[Cory] I mean, we have [garbled cases of it?] already, right? That's the human form of it, but it's thankfully, very, very rare.

[Piper] Very rare. But still, it's not that far in the future, when you can see the zombie apocalypse coming out of that.

 

[Mary Robinette] What you're basically talking about here is taking a single point and following logical causal chain to see where it goes and the branching effects as you move forward. In many ways, what you're talking about is treating technology like a magic system.

[Cory] Sure. And not trying to… Yes, it's good to have lots of texture in their other technologies, but not trying to play Nostradamus.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes.

[Cory] Instead, trying to make a little parable.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, let's go ahead and pause here for the book of the week.

[Cory] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Which is one of yours.

[Cory] Yeah. I wrote… The most worldbuilding-ish novel I wrote, I think, is called Walkaway. It's the one with the fewest of what Karl Schroeder calls the Backless Maiden, from the Arthurian legend of the knight who meets the beautiful maiden, but she never shows her back to him, and then she steps in front of the fireplace and the fire flickers through her eyes and he realizes she has no back. That's really so much of our fiction doesn't have a back to it. Walkaway I really thought a lot about what was going on behind the scenes. It's an optimistic disaster novel. A utopian disaster novel. It's about people being good to each other in times of crisis and working to rebuild. It's not a world in which there are good people and bad people. It's a world in which there are people who think the world is made up of good people and bad people and people who think that the world is made up of people who think that there are good people and bad people and people like themselves who know that most people are just a mixed bag of goodness and badness, and that incentives and structures and exigencies determine whether we're good or bad at any given moment, and who are trying to make a world that brings out the good in everyone. It's full of people doing things like using drones to find our bridge in blighted climate wracked badlands and then using software to figure out what kind of fully automated luxury communist resorts they can build out of garbage and then moving into them and then reveling in how cool it is until weird oligarchs come along and say, "Hey, that's my garbage." Then they walk away and find some more garbage in another blighted brownfield site to build on. This is kind of their journey. It goes well until they have a shot at practical immortality, which they acquire from scientists from the oligarch classes who decide that they're not going to be complicit in speciating the human race into infinitely prolonged plutocrats and mayflies disappearing in the rearview mirror, which is the rest of us. They steal the fire from the gods, bring it to us so that we can be immortal too, and when rich people realize that they're going to have to spend the rest of eternity with us, they cease to see these walkaway communities as like cute bohemias that they can steal fashion and art from, and instead, bring out the hellfire missiles. That's when it kind of all gets interesting and kicks off.

[Mary Robinette] So, it's a simple novel?

[Cory] Yeah. It's got a lot of moving parts, that book, for sure.

[Mary Robinette] It's a really fantastic audiobook, I have to say.

[Cory] That's very kind of you.

[Mary Robinette] It's very good. I'm very picky about my audiobooks.

[Cory] I produced the audiobook myself. The readers are spectacular. The bulk of it is carried by Amber Benson from Buffy. But also we have Wil Wheaton on it and Mirron Willis and Gabrielle de Cuir and a guest appearance by Amanda Palmer. It's really a terrific audiobook.

[Mary Robinette] So that's Walkaway by Cory Doctorow.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, let's talk about worldbuilding for stories that are set in the present, because this is a thing that I think a lot of people overlook. They forget that you have to establish a world for people in the real world. Especially if you're tweaking things a little bit. Whether that's adding a single technological element to your present day or just even establishing a world within a closed ecosystem, like a high school or a corporate structure that doesn't actually exist. So what are some of the ways that you think about worldbuilding when you're used to… Doing something in the present day?

[Piper] I will say, and this is kind of a dangerous thing, but I will say that romance writers get a lot that we don't have to do worldbuilding. Because…

[Mary Robinette] That's not true.

[Piper] Exactly. Particularly contemporary or romantic suspense romance writers, because of the fact that it is set in the modern-day or contemporary times. But we do. One of the best worldbuilding that I can think of right off the top of my head is the Lucky Harbor series by Jill Shalvis because it is a small town. It is a made-up small town in the Pacific Northwest. It feels so real that you think the town is there. The people are real, the bed-and-breakfast is real, you go into town, the diner is real, and buildings feel real. You almost have a mental map in your head of where everything is. That's because the worldbuilding is done so very well by that author. Because the author took the time to think about where this was going to be, what the weather was going to be, even what the highway would be like driving up to it, and how long it would take to walk down to the bed-and-breakfast. That is one of the key points. And what the actual focal points around the town were that built up over the course of all the books in the series. The series itself is successful, but it's going to like, I could be wrong, but I think it's around 9 to 12 books. That's pretty amazing for a contemporary romance to have the kind of worldbuilding where people… You think you know where, like, the Ferris wheel is, you think you know where the pier is, you think you know where the boat is docked that they hanky-panky'ed in, in this book, and then the tree that they fell out of that the person broke their leg in.

[Mary Robinette] The thing is that this kind of worldbuilding gives you opportunities for conflict, it gives you opportunities to add depth to the characters, it's not actually just worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding. It definitely makes things feel more real and gives the reader some… A way to ground… I read a novel for professional reasons that I can't recommend and so I'm not going to name, in which all of the love interests were retired baseball players. Like…

[Cory] That narrows it down.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. In a small town. I'm like, the economics of being retired baseball players in small towns, and they were all people who had been forcibly retired. So… But none of them had other jobs. It was like, how does that…

[Howard] This sounds paranormal.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It does, and it was not.

[Cory] It's the "how do the friends afford that apartment in New York" problem.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly that problem. Which is why the worldbuilding… It's like… The only one who had a job was a barrista, as far as we can… I mean, technically, the others had jobs, but it was…

[Howard] The… I talked about it in other contexts, the CBS Elementary, the Sherlock Holmes show, is set in present-day New York, but the worldbuilding… There's the massive criminal organization run by Moriarity. There's the massive business organization run by Morland Holmes. These elements, there are callbacks to these things throughout it. The precinct, the officers, the judges, the brownstone that Holmes lives in, all of these details have been overlaid on a New York that feels very real to me, who doesn't live in New York. But the series gets good reviews from people who do live in New York. They've managed to blend location research with some fun worldbuilding and some fun callbacks to the Conan Doyle Holmes from…

[Cory] My favorite example of contemporary science fiction worldbuilding is William Gibson's Pattern Recognition trilogy. These are science fiction novel that were set about two years before they came out. So a science fiction novel set in 2000…

[Howard] Oh, wow.

[Cory] 2003 that came out in 2005, that sort of thing. They are science fiction novels about people, particularly New Yorkers, after 9/11, living true the rise of the surveillance state. A lot of the characters are spooks, and a lot of the characters are sort of spook adjacent or in the crosshairs of spooks. It's about people living through a moment of absolute technological upheaval. What he does is he approaches it, this thing that had happened in our recent past, he approaches it as though it were a great technological upheaval that people were living through, which we had. But it had been just long enough that we'd become adapted to it. The shock of them was just spectacular. It reminds me of my favorite Brian Eno aphorism. Brian Eno has this thing called the deck of oblique strategies that he used when he was recording Roxy Music and a bunch of other bands, which were these like gnomic aphorisms that you would draw out of a deck of cards and he would make everyone try and do it. My favorite one is be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before. There's so many times where this comes up, when I'm thinking about how you might try something new. Gibson wrote futuristic science fiction about the recent past. He was the first person not to set futuristic science fiction in the future. It was great.

[Piper] Every one of us has our mouths dropped open right now. Yeah, the faces that we have in the room.

[Cory] Brian Eno was a smart guy.

[Piper] Yeah.

[Cory] Came up with the Windows 95 chime.

[Mary Robinette] Really?

[Cory] Yeah. He made the start of music for Windows 95.

[Mary Robinette] I had no idea.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, on that note, [hum...] let's go ahead…

[Cory] I think you mean [huuh...]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. Let's go ahead and give our fair listeners a homework assignment. Cory?

[Cory] Sure. One of the things that's often missing from worldbuilding is economics. I think it was Steven Bruce that observed that you can always tell if a Marxist has written your fantasy novel because the ratio of vassals to lords is right. I wrote a novel about gift economics. Gift economics are economies in which things are not given on a reciprocal basis, that's barter. Things are given with no expectation of return. We've just lived through a kind of forty-year social experiment in making everything transactional. Where there is no such thing as society and greed is good and selfishness produces pretty near optimal outcomes. It's hard not to reciprocate. But if you think through the things in your life that are nonreciprocal, you'll find that some of the most important things in your life are nonreciprocal, right? Like, you came out and said to your partner, "Look, the only reason I'm married to you is that I expect that when the day comes and I can't wait my own ass, that you're going to do it for me in thanks for all the times I brought you a cup of coffee," that you would be a kind of human monster. Right? Make a list of 10 things in your life that are purely nonreciprocal, that you do only for the pleasure of giving something to someone else, the intrinsic pleasure of giving something to someone else.

[Mary Robinette] That is a great homework assignment. With that, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/08/14-49-customs-and-mores/

 

Key Points: Truth is stranger than fiction, consider child widows on the banks of the river Ganges, Thimithi firewalking, vulgar rhythms in Mexico, gourds for clothing, and open containers and paper bags for alcohol. In stories, how y'all use y'all can get you in trouble. Don't overdo it, one or two wonky details are enough to make a society feel alien. Give us the norm, then show us how it is broken. Showing characters breaking customs and reactions of other characters is good. What we do is normal, but others do is weird. Why do we shake hands? For most characters, why is just that's the way we do it. Use obviously different things to make readers think about it. Using a different point of view allows you to explore or showcase the culture, and use it for conflict and fun. Consider a cat and you walking through your house in the dark. Flavoring a war story that takes decades with cultural details makes it interesting.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 49.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Customs and Mores.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

 

[Brandon] Customs and mores.

[Dan] Yay!

[Brandon] Dan. You were an anthropology major in college.

[Dan] I was.

[Brandon] Tell us what I… What the word mores means.

[Dan] A mores is essentially… It's a manner of interacting in a culture. It is a specific thing that a… The way a culture does something. So one of the ones that Brandon mentioned before we started was shaking hands. There are some cultures that greet each other by shaking hands, and there are some cultures that don't. That's just the way in which we, as a society, have decided to say hello to each other, and often goodbye. It's different from society to society. That can apply to essentially every form of interaction that we have, there's some kind of mores that governs how we do it.

 

[Brandon] Let's start with some of our favorite kind of real-world mores or customs that seems stranger…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Than fiction. Just to kind of put ourselves on the right foot here.

[Dan] Okay. Go for it.

[Mahtab] I can start. I do not have to look further than India…

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] For some of the most weirdest stuff I've seen.

[Howard] That's really far for us, but go on.

[Mahtab] Okay. Well, let me share it with you. One of them. This one I do not like, but it's the way things are done. Widows, no matter what age, they are… First of all, there used to be a lot of child marriage. If for… And the kids used to be married to older men. If the men died, the child was a widow. There was no remarriage. There is a beautiful movie called Water, which was made… Produced by Deepa Mehta, which just talks about a child widow who has to live on the banks of the river Ganges. Love is forbidden. Any kind of comfortable amenities… They just have to live a really harsh life. So that, I found, is really weird, to kind of give up your life. Whereas here, I mean, if a spouse passes on, you are allowed to find happiness. That is not allowed in our customs. The other thing which I just recently found out. It's called Thimithi, which… It's actually Timothy, which is a firewalking festival, which happens just before the Hindi New Year of Deepavali. It has its origins in the Mahabharata, which was the war which was fought between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. But basically, one of the groups insulted the wife of the other group, and to prove her innocence, she walked on coals. She emerged unscathed. Men, not women… Men, in a little village in India, walk on coals to prove their purity. They have to walk really, really slowly. I found that really strange. It still happens.

[That's great]

[Mahtab] That's just two. There are a lot more, but I will…

[Dan] So here's one of my very favorite ones. In Mexico, there is… Every culture has their curse words, and their swearwords. In Mexico, there is a rhythm that is considered incredibly vulgar. It's the rhythm of shave and a haircut. I know, now that I've said this, people are going to come up to me at events and signings and whatever, and knockout shave and a haircut on the table. It's incredibly offensive. Just the rhythm by itself. I've never encountered that anywhere else before. It's fascinating to me.

[Brandon] My favorite one, since we're going on these, is penis gourds.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] If you're not aware of this, in some South American indigenous tribes, men will wear a gourd on the tip of their penis to be clothed. To us, they just look naked. But to them, that is fully clothed. If the gourd is off, then they are naked and it is taboo. But if the gourd is on, then they are not considered naked. That… I love this one, because what it really says is a lot of our taboos in cultures, which are related to mores, are really social constructs. Right? What we consider vulgar, obscene, or honorable or pure or whatever is a social construct. Playing with these things in fantasy and science fiction books is one of my favorite things to do.

[Howard] We have the same gourd here. It's in a different place. It's the open container law for drunk driving.

[Brandon] Right. Yeah.

[Howard] Is the top on the bottle? The top's not on the bottle, you're going to get a ticket. Because the bottle's naked.

[Dan] Well, a lot of states still have the paper bag law with alcohol as well. That if you are walking down the street with a bottle of alcohol that everyone can see, then you get arrested. But if it's in a paper bag, even if we can see you drinking it and we know what's happening, it doesn't count.

 

[Brandon] So, how do we go about creating these in our stories? How do we use them? Truth is stranger than fiction, how do you convince people that these things are real? One of the most difficult places I've gotten myself in the most trouble with social mores was use of the word y'all in one of my books.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because I found that there is regional variation in how y'all is used. I used it a way that is the less widely used method. I have heard many, many times about how I got that wrong. It kicks people out of the story, even though it was right for that character. How do you use these?

[Dan] I don't know.

[Laughter]

[Howard] The hardest thing to do is to, in your own life, distinguish between the things that you have to do and the things that you don't have to do. The… Finding serial killers, finding patterns and what they do. What are the things that that they did that didn't have to be done? Why did they do those things? Well, those are incredibly significant. Does the killer think about it? Well, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. What are the things in my life that I do that I don't have to but I'm going to do it anyway? I hadn't asked myself that question before right now, so I don't have an answer.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But it's a great question.

[Dan] I would say, for the most part, unless you are writing a story that is very specifically sociological or anthropological, don't overdo this. Pick one or two things. For example, in the Stormlight Archives, the women have the safe hand that they always keep covered, and the women aren't… They don't eat spicy foods. That's… Those are the only two I can remember. I'm sure there might be a couple others. But you throw those in, and then the rest of the society is surprisingly familiar. But it feels very alien, because the setting is different, and because there's those two details that stand out as wonky.

[Mahtab] The way I like to see it is customs are important because it shows you how that particular race or culture behaves. It's but a great way to use this is give us the norm and then show us how it is broken. This… The example I want to share is not really a fantasy example, but it's done really well, which is Lord of the Flies by William Golding. Which is where a group of boys crashland on an island. All customs, social mores, just basically breaks down, where the boys just forget about all laws of how to behave. They're all kids. There is complete lawlessness. There are two leaders that kind of try and draw the boys to each other, so there are two groups. Their weapon of power on that island is one of the boy's glasses, because that's the only way they can create a fire. It completely breaks down, where one of the boys is killed, and everyone comes to their senses when a patrol ship comes looking for them and they're rescued. Everyone kind of comes back down to earth. But it's a fabulous example of when there is no… When social customs and mores breaks down, you could have a fabulous story. Lord of the Flies by William Golding. He's expressed it really well. So, the point I was trying to make is find one or two customs. Show us what the norm is. Then break it completely. That'll give you so much of your story.

[Dan] Showing characters break it, and then the reactions of other characters, can lend it a lot of gravity. So, like, we don't necessarily understand why they have to do this one particular thing in their society. But as soon as we see the horror in everyone else's eyes… Oh. Now I don't necessarily feel that that's important, but I can tell that it is.

 

[Brandon] You bring up the safe hand in the Stormlight books. One of the more common questions I get asked is what's the deal with that safe hand? Why do they have that safe hand? Which, as a writer and having studied anthropology myself and things, that question always seems really weird to me. As a writer. Because it is expressed by the outsider looking at a culture, saying, "Why are they so weird?" It displays a shocking lack of self-awareness about the way that human beings work. Now, I understand why they do it. Obviously. I'm not saying that the readers are weird. But this is how we are as human beings. What other people do is strange, and what we do is normal. We don't ask ourselves, "Why do we shake hands?" Maybe someone does. Maybe somebody… I'm sure someone has traced back where it came from.

[Dan] I can tell you.

[Brandon] Yeah?

[Laughter]

[Dan] Look. We shake hands because it is a way of signifying whether we do manual labor or not.

[Brandon] Oh.

[Dan] So it is a direct enforcement of the caste system. That's subconscious, but that's kind of what we're doing is "Hey, look how smooth my hand is. I'm rich."

[Brandon] Yeah. Um... That's awesome.

[Dan] But it's not important.

[Howard] I'm not even going to let you touch my hand. I draw with it.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It is, but it isn't. Right? Because I do want to talk about creating these things and having purpose behind them, but one of the things to understand is, to the characters in your stories, to the vast majority of them, there's not a why.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Brandon] The why is because it's the way it should be done. This is what's appropriate. Why do you wear this and someone else wears this? Well, in most cases, it's just this is what's familiar. This is what we wear. This is what's right to wear.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop and do a book of the week.

[Mahtab] I'd like to recommend The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge. She is a British writer. This particular novel actually won the Costa book award in 2015. The premise is very intriguing. It's… In her… In… So the protagonist is a female. Her name is Faith Sunderly. She's a 14-year-old girl. What… The premise of the novel is that in trying to discover who murdered her father, she discovers that he was trying to shield a fossil. A tree that feeds off lies. Then the fruit that it bears actually gives the person the truth. So she… So it's basically [fertilizes], those laws are spread throughout a certain community, and the tree bears certain fruit. The language of this story… Her language is just absolutely exquisite. So, it's kind of a part horror, part detective, part historical novel. You should all go read it.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Howard] I like the conceit, and I want one.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] So, going back to this idea of customs and mores. Stormlight Archive. Why do I do what I do? As a writer, I can say why I do what I do. Why did I come up with the safe hand? I wanted to indicate this is a stratified society, a deeply sexist society, and I wanted to have social constraints that readers from our world reading it would be like, "Wow, that is too constraining." The flipside of that is men aren't allowed to read. Right? Men don't read. There are these… Like, these restrictions that I knew my readers would read and just bash their heads against. The purpose of that is to indicate it's a different culture. It's also a very constrained culture in a lot of ways. I wanted the reader to feel those things.

[Dan] Well, one of the values of doing that in a weird way is that it forces readers who live in patriarchal or sexist societies to confront it, without it just… Without being comfortable with it. There's a lot of the sexist things that we do in our society that get carried over accidentally into fantasy, and a lot of people don't think about them when they read them. So, a custom like the safe hand is weird and it is shocking. It forces us to go, "Oh. Okay. That's different. Now I see what I wasn't seeing otherwise."

[Brandon] Why else do you use these in your stories? What purposes do you have for them? How do they enhance your stories?

[Howard] The piece I'm working on now, the protagonist is an AI who desperately wants to be able to understand everything that's going on around her. She manifests as female. There are aliens everywhere. When she is talking with aliens, when she is communicating with them, she is observing everything, the body language, she's listening to what they're saying. Some of it she can interpret and some of it she can't. Some of it she will get wrong. There's a fight scene that I've written and somebody comes down and breaks up the fight. The fight started because she didn't want the bird with the long tongue to lick her. The person who breaks up the fight says, "If you want the licky birds to not lick you, ask them. Don't touch their tongue." I loved that moment because it inverts our idea of personal space. Well, of course, you're not going to lick me, and if you're going to lick me, I'm going to slap your tongue out of… No. You have to ask in order to not be licked by the licky birds. Also, the word licky bird is just inherently funny.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Having it delivered in that way told a nice joke. But it allowed me to explore the inverse of this concept of personal space in a culture that has lots of aliens in it who are struggling to figure out each other's cultures in order to live together comfortably.

 

[Brandon] Mahtab, you wrote an entire book about the cultural differences between India and America. Why were you doing it the way you did? What did you gain from it in the story you were telling?

[Mahtab] Well. For one, I wanted to showcase India, but from a totally different point of view. So the point of view for this particular book, Mission Mumbai, is from the American's point of view. For him, it is a huge cultural shock, because he's never been there before. Now had I made that point of view from the Indian boy, half the jokes would not have worked, half the plot points would not have worked. Just basically showcasing it from someone else's point of view who's never been exposed to it, it helped me set up a lot of, as I said, humor, a lot of plot points, a lot of… Showcasing the Indian culture as well, and an appreciation by a person who was non-Indian. Because there's also a lot of stereotyping as far as a certain place is concerned. That's perpetuated by movies. You see certain movies on India and you just think, "Okay, there's a lot of poverty. People don't speak English out there." When I first came to Canada, often I was asked the question, "How is it that you speak so… English so well?" I just wanted to give them the Matrix answer. When I came in, at Immigration, they asked me, "English or French?" I responded with "English."

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] So… But, so one of the reasons of using this as a setting and having a totally different viewpoint talk about the culture was to not only showcase it, show the weirdness of it, but also use it as a good place of conflict and fun.

[Howard] If you look at the difference between you walking through the house in the dark and your cat walking through the house in the dark. The cat knows where everything is. A lot of things are taller than the cat. The cat has a completely different perspective of that room. Your experience with that room is going to be banging your shins, and tripping over the cat. Both examples… Both points of view can tell you about the room. The one that involves pain is often the more interesting one. It's also, to my mind, more quickly going to tell me where all the furniture is.

[Dan] My very favorite book series is the Saxon Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. I talk about it all the time. One of the things he's doing in there is he's telling essentially a war story that takes place over decades and decades. The middle Saxon period. This portion is generational warfare. But by setting it up… I mean, it's historical, but setting it up so that it is Saxons versus the Danes, we get a distinct sense of who the cultures are. So the way the two armies fight is defined by their background and their culture. The way that they maintain the territory that they win changes from culture to culture. So you get… Bringing out all those cultural details add so much flavor to what is otherwise just a war story that takes a really long time.

 

[Brandon] Mahtab, we have loved having you on the podcast. This is your last week with us. So, thank you so much.

[Mahtab] Thank you so much for having me. I've always loved Writing Excuses, so it's a pleasure to have shared this.

[Howard] Wait, you've listened to us before? Ordinarily we don't let fans into the room.

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] I have not taken anything. But anyways, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

 

[Brandon] We are going to end with some homework from Howard.

[Howard] Yes. Um. That pause was me remembering what the homework is. Take a culture… Take a cultural quirk, a mores… Something that is weird and preferably really annoying to you. Take that thing and extrapolate upon it. Build a whole set of culturalisms, of mores, of behaviors that just bug you. But that are logically connected in a way that this culture makes sense. Your goal is to create a culture that is very different from anything you'd want to live in, without creating a strawman.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/06/14-31-cultural-setting-as-conflict/

 

Key Points: To some extent, every story has some aspect of characters in conflict with their setting. Consider conflict as either a desire to move or resistance to being moved. Also, I don't like the way this is built, and I want to change it. A.k.a, ideals in conflict with reality. Immigrants are automatically in cultural conflict. Children of immigrants, growing up, face a challenge between what their parents want and what the culture around them teaches. Nobody represents 100% of their culture, we are all slightly in conflict. But don't use this as the main conflict, use it to make the characters more well-rounded. Start with a character in friction with their society, then let the main plot smash into them. Cultural conflict may not drive a story, but it often grounds us in the character. One story archetype is the person who doesn't fit saves society. Consider sensory writing -- what senses show the conflict of character and culture? What are the standard conversational moves that the character doesn't know? Casual or respect? Use conflict with your culture to add layers to the plot and enrich your story.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 31.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Cultural Setting As Conflict.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

 

[Brandon] Cultural setting as conflict. A little preface here. This is using my definitions for worldbuilding. I define physical worldbuilding as all this stuff that exists if human beings or sapient races weren't around, and cultural setting is all the stuff that they create. I think I announced that last month, too. But just so you know, when I say cultural setting for this particular podcast, we're talking about all of this. Religion, linguistics, economics, all of this stuff. We want to talk about how to put your characters in conflict with their setting, and with their culture. Obviously, this is one of the great ways to tell a story. In fact, I think every story that I write has some aspect of a character in conflict with their setting.

[Howard] I think the easiest place to start with this is to look at the conflict as either a desire to move or a resistance against being moved. For instance, if you are a member of the wealthy class, you do not want wealth to be redistributed, because that is moving you into a different place. If you are impoverished, perhaps you want to move into a different class. Those two work within whatever framework of the culture may exist. I mean, whether it's economic or gender or racial or multi-species or whatever. I want to move or someone is trying to move me, is one of the easiest ways to define the conflict. The other big one is I don't like the way this is built. I want to change it so that everybody can move. Or nobody has to move. Or something.

[Brandon] Right. Putting your ideals in conflict with the actual reality of the system.

[Mahtab] You know what, the very fact… Just from personal experience, the very fact that I'm an immigrant in Canada is straightaway a cultural conflict. Because there are certain things that I'm used to doing in India, there are certain traditions that we follow, certain norms. But take that out and put me in a North American setting or a Canadian setting, and all of a sudden, I want to follow certain things, but I cannot. So, I mean, just… For example, I love cooking Indian food. When I first came to Canada and the winters were cold, I would cook with the doors closed. I would be smelling like a day-old samosa. Maybe a week-old samosa. Then you'd go out into the world and you would have people just kind of… I was nose blind, but people would wonder, "Does she not know what she smells like?"

[Howard] What is that smell?

[Mahtab] It took me a while. I mean, I had to get onto an elevator with someone who was a lot more fragrant than I was till it hit me. So, the fact is, I can still cook Indian food, but even in the midst of an Ontario winter, I have to have all the doors and all the windows open… Not the doors. All the windows open, proper ventilation, and then… So it's just like… The fact is that you can have conflict if you just take someone who's used to following a certain cultural norm, put them in a different setting, and that's it. Also, with kids growing up. When, especially, the kids are young, the parents are not very well educated or not very well integrated into a certain culture. They are still holding to the old norms, whereas the kids who are growing up are now influenced by the culture they are growing up in. They are treading a very fine line between what should I follow, because this is what my parents want, and this is what my friends and teachers and everyone are doing. It can be huge. I mean, I've seen a lot of teens go through a lot of anguish because of that.

[Dan] There was a really cool movie a couple years ago, and I can never remember the title of anything. Sorry. That was about a group of Korean American teenagers, all of them first-generation Americans, who went to like a cultural summer camp. Their Korean families are like, "You need to know about our culture from back in the old country, so you're all going to go to this thing." It was just fascinating to watch that whole dynamic play out as they were trying to embrace their roots while also staying true to who they had become. There is a lot of cool compelling stuff that can be pulled out of this.

[Brandon] Is it called Seoul Searching?

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] I just googled it for you.

[Dan] Seoul Searching, Seoul being the pun. Ha ha ha.

 

[Brandon] I… It's interesting to think about this, because nobody 100% represents all aspects of their culture. None of us do. Which is this weird thing to think about, in that there is this nebulous sort of culture, right? Whichever set of culture… Religious culture or whatever. Society. There's nobody that is that thing. We are all not aligned exactly to everything in that culture. So we're all going to be slightly in conflict with our culture. There's not a person who isn't. We're just going to be in conflict with it in different ways. I think as writers, sometimes, we want to make this the main conflict of the story. Sometimes it's appropriate to do so. Sometimes this is what our story is about. But I think in every story, these sorts of things are what's… Are the sorts of things that are going to make your characters become well-rounded and feel real. People often ask me, "How do I make well-rounded characters?" Our kind of cliché but true response is don't write them to a role in a story, write them as they are and make the story kind of come along and make things messy for them. I think this is one of the ways you indicate this is these characters are going to be having friction with their society and culture, even before whatever the main plot of your story is comes along and smashes into them.

[Howard] It's not uncommon… I say it's not uncommon. I can't actually think of any examples off the top of my head. But you have a protagonist whose motivation is I want to fit in with my family. Or I want to get a promotion. It's very cultural, but then they are thrown into an adventure that has nothing to do with fitting in with their family or getting a promotion. At the end of the adventure, they have changed or their family have changed or the corporation has changed, and they have the thing that they need. So the cultural conflict there is not necessarily what's driving the story, but it's what's grounding us in the character.

[Dan] One of the books that I talked about last month, A Memory Called Empire. Like I said, it's a political story and it's a murder mystery, but the main character is an ambassador from one tiny nation who has gone to this massive Empire. What's fascinating about her attempt to fit in is that she loves their culture. So it's specifically kind of has this subplot in there of you're the big evil empire that's trying to consume my little nation, but I love your art, I love your stories that you tell, and I watch your TV shows all the time. It added a really interesting dimension of that cultural conflict.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and do our book of the week.

[Mahtab] Right. So, the book of the week that I'd like to recommend is one that has been written by yours truly. It's called Mission Mumbai. This is a story of a friendship between two boys. One of them is an Indian, Rohit Lal, one of them is an American, Dylan Moore. They have a friendship that is based on their love of reading fantasy novels. But it's a very fragile friendship. When they take a trip to India, that is when they realize that there is a certain amount of jealousy involved. Their friendship is not as strong as they expected it to be. But one of the reasons that I love having written this story is that I take someone from a North American culture and put him into the Indian culture. Which is just as alien as having gone to a totally different place. I give both the boys certain problems. It's only when… Their friendship is stretched really, really thin, and it's only when both the boys decide to put aside their own issues and help one another is when their friendship becomes a lot stronger. So it's a coming-of-age, it's a friendship, it's a loyalty story. But it's also a fun way of exploring India from your own room.

[Howard] Less expensive than plane tickets.

[Mahtab] Absolutely.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Howard] That's Mission Mumbai.

 

[Brandon] For this podcast's second half, let's kind of try to drill into the why… Or the hows. The nitty-gritty details of how to use conflict with culture as plots in your stories. I'll give an example. Oftentimes, I notice that in films and in books, one of the things you do at the beginning is show the character not fitting in as a method of showing what their kind of arc is going to be. They're the person that doesn't fit into their society. Taking classic Disney movies, if we look at Mulan. Mulan doesn't start with her out sword fighting. It starts with her not fitting into the society of gender roles and the marriage rituals and things that she's expected to participate in as a way to reinforce that she's kind of outside her culture. So that when she leaves to go do something very different from what someone in her situation would do, you believe that she would do this. Because she obviously doesn't quite fit in. Then, the whole story is about this idea of the person who doesn't fit in being the one who saves the society. You see this used a ton. It's a really great story archetype. It's used in Dragonlance, it's used in a lot of different stories. It's one of those ways you use someone in conflict with their setting in a small way to inform your entire story.

 

[Howard] We talk about sensory writing quite a bit. Mahtab, you described the way you smell when you've been cooking. The smells of things, the colors of things. When you're uncomfortable with a culture, if you've been dropped someplace where you are not comfortable, which of your senses are uncomfortable? Which… Where are you feeling the conflict? Is it because it's too loud? Is it because it's too quiet? Is it because it doesn't smell like you want it to smell? Is it because the flavor of the food that makes you comfortable just isn't available anywhere? Is it because you're one of those people who is genetically unable to appreciate cilantro? Because there's a group of people for whom cilantro is just terrible. These sorts of… And Indian food, which I love, and I love cilantro too, has lots of cilantro in it. So you got this whole class of people who are genetically unable to appreciate the thing that you cook, Mahtab. Those senses are a great way to ground us in a character's fitting in or not fitting in. How much you love the smell? How much you love the color? How it feels like being embraced to all your senses?

[Mahtab] One of the things that I also felt or experienced when I came here is that there is a whole unspoken language which is just by looks and gestures, and some things that are… I mean, just to give an example. Whenever you start a conversation, now, I'm not saying that it's not done in India, but over here you discuss the weather a lot. In India, all you have is rain and heat.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] So you really do not open a conversation with, "Oh, we're having a really nice day today." So when I was doing sales and I was on calls, I would be like, "Hello. I'm calling from so-and-so and just wanted to talk to you about XYZ." I was told, "Nonono. You're supposed to talk about the weather," and this and a TV series going on or something. Or a little bit of the news. So, the thing is that in terms of making the story or the character a little bit more layered, it's not just the sensory, which is very, very important. But it's also the unspoken stuff that the… The norms that the culture that you're in follows, which is not quite what you do. So there are lots of clues that you have to pick up which are not… Sometimes, may be told to you, but sometimes you just have to observe. It took me at least a few years of observing, or being corrected or being told that this is what you're supposed to be doing. Again, I had no idea about time zones. I remember calling someone at 6 o'clock in the morning from the East Coast to the West Coast…

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] I'm like, "Hi." He says, "Do you know it's 6 o'clock?" I'm like, "Why did you pick up the phone, then?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] When I went to Korea for the first time, the thing I kept getting in trouble with is, Americans can be very casual with how they give things to one another. Which is nothing… Something I hadn't ever thought about. But, in Korea, a lot of people expect you… If you're going to give something… Just, like, if you say, "Hey, pass me a roll," that you're going to hand it and present it to them as a gift, with two hands.

[Mahtab] Two hands, yes.

[Dan] Two?

[Brandon] Two hands, and kind of respectfully. Whereas Americans, we'd be like, "Hey. Roll!" I did that to someone. They're like… I'm like, "Hey. Roll!" And threw it. They were like hugely offended. This was a teenager my age, but that is just not something you do in that culture. It was one of those things I had to really get used to. The kind of casualness versus respectfulness.

[Howard] I have to remember not to ask anybody to pass me the bread in Nebraska.

[Garbled] [without having my eyes open. Boom!]

 

[Dan] Just throw it at you. The Asian market where I shop, even the receipt. They will pull it out. They'll rip it off the thing. Fold it, and hand it to you with two hands. Because that is how you're supposed to do it. One of my very favorite cultural stories is a TV show called The Americans. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. It's Soviet spies, sleeper agents, living in the United States in the 1980s. So every episode has like an espionage story, but the overall story it's telling is how do these people who are like trained, practically brainwashed to hate America, how do they live and fit in and look and act like Americans.

[Howard] I grew up during the 80s. I would not want the job…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Of fitting in in the 80s. Oh, man.

[Dan] It's just a really compelling thing. They're doing a lot of the stuff that we're talking about. Where they will confront situations where they would do something the way it would be normal to them. Obviously, they have been trained in American culture, but it comes off wrong. Or they react the wrong way to something and they have to remember, "Oh, no. I'm American. I have to treat this like an American, not like a Russian." It's just really, really interesting, and really well done.

[Howard] There are a lot of cultural dialect sorts of things, whether it's jargon or just dialect things. In the UK, just now means immediately prior. What was that noise? A bookcase fell over just now. In South Africa, just now means really soon, about to happen. Yes… Not really soon, but kind of soon. I'll be there just now. I'm on my way, I'll be there just now. Are you in a hurry? Okay, fine, I'll be there now now. Okay, I like now now as a construct. When I first heard it, I thought, "Well, that's brilliant. That's a great way to say ASAP." But these sorts of things, if you don't… I don't want to crossover too much into the language discussion we'll be having later. But there have been a lot of times, especially online, where all participate in an online chat about a game and realize, "There is a jargon here." Somebody just threw a string of characters, and they are very clearly making a request, and I do not know how to respond, because there's like six acronyms in there.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And I don't know what any of them stand for.

[Mahtab] I would just like to say here that conflict with your culture is important, but don't make that the focal point of your story. Just use that to flavor it, to add layers to the plot which would make it richer. But don't make that the focus of the story. Because that would be too kind of clichéd or stereotyped, and you're just going to end up going a very predictable path. But use that to just enrich the narrative.

 

[Brandon] So, we're out of time on this, but we will come back later in the year and do an episode on worldbuilding culture and mores, so you can look forward to that. I have our homework this week. I'm quite tickled with this one. I want you to clone yourself and make an entire planet of clones of you. I want you to decide what the culture would be like if everyone on the planet were you. Then, I want you to create a trading post with this planet where people off world who are not you have to trade with you and what they have to go through in order to make trade deals with an entire planet of you.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There's going to be a war, and my planet's going to get wiped clean…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Very, very quickly.

[Dan] The galaxy will decide we can't let this planet hang around any longer.

[Howard] Nope.

[Mahtab] I am going to try that prompt.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/07/08/13-27-characters-as-foils/

 

Key points: A foil is a character in a story who acts as a contrast to the main character, externalizing a point of conflict or contrast. May be a sidekick, two side characters, or even two protagonists. Sometimes the foil fills in weaknesses. Beware of flanderizing a foil, reducing them to a flat character. The best foils make both characters more rounded as they change in interesting ways. Foils can be good for exploring knotty topics, showing more than one opinion or view. Often, the foil can hang a lantern on the discussion. Heist novels can be an example of a group of foils! Specialists, weaknesses, and plenty of interaction playing on those weaknesses and the cracks in the process. Foils are a natural with teams who are just meeting, but they also can be good for introducing the long-term relationship of a couple. What keeps foils together? Family! Also, try using the Kowal relationship axes -- mind, money, morals, manners, monogamy, and the Marx Brothers. Keeping the morals aligned can help keep a couple together. Manners are a good place for friction.  

 

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and wrap this up with some homework. The homework I'm going to give you is I want you to take a famous soliloquy, like from Shakespeare or something like that, a monologue, a single character saying something, and I want you to insert a foil. It doesn't have to be comedic. It probably will, from the nature of this assignment, but someone who is contrasting what they're doing, and interrupting this. Or go the other direction. Take a famous comedy bit, like Who's on First, and remove one side or the other. Take out Abbott, or take out Costello, and maybe replace them with someone who completely plays along, and see how far it goes, and see how it works when both characters are trying to one-up each other to the joke. Or just take one out and see if the… It works on its own. So, this has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.