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Writing Excuses 20.20: The Lens of Where and When 
 
 
Key Points: Where and when, aka setting, or worldbuilding. What are societal constraints and conventions that you can use?  How are your characters shaped by the world they are in? What nitty-gritty details of daily life are going to show up in your work? Where does the poop go? Where do place and setting hit person? What has the character experienced? Meaningful details make a world become vivid. Make your characters interact with the world. How do you build a setting that can change, without breaking? Sometimes you do upend it, and write about the consequences of that. Or you can keep the definitive parts, and change things around that. What happens after the glorious revolution can make a really interesting story.
 
[Season 20, Episode 20]
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 20]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Dan] The Lens of Where and When.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
 
[Dan] Today we're going to talk about where and when, and we're going to talk about setting. How you view and use setting. And in speculative fiction, we often call this worldbuilding. But once you've finished building the world, how do you capture it on the page? How do you convey that world, and how, most importantly, does that world change the things that you're writing and change the way that you're telling the story? What does it really mean for a setting to be vivid, or a world to feel deep, or a place to feel lived-in? And so I want to throw this question out first, how does the setting, how does the place where the story takes place, change what you are writing and how you write it?
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that this is a thing that I play with a lot because I'm writing secondary world fiction sometimes and sometimes I'm writing alternate history, and they offer me different choices. We've talked before about how sometimes when you're writing something that's an alternate history, when we had C. L. Clark on last season, that there is a tension that comes from this, from the audience's awareness of the setting. And that you can use that to change the way the audience is thinking about the story. And you can also use it as a way of focusing in on the story, the story that you're trying to tell. So I find that when I'm trying to set a story, that one of the things I'm looking for are kind of sort of the landscape things that I use. Some of it is that, with time in particular… Yeah, time in particular, I'm looking for the societal constraints and conventions that I use. If it's a time of war, that's going to be a very different story than a time of peace. So those are things that I look at for how I support some of the other choices that I've already made.
[Erin] I think, for me, there sort of two things. One is that characters are shaped by the world they live in. And I think this is sometimes where, not to go back and think… Bring trad character into it, but I think it's really important. Because I think sometimes, because worldbuilding can be so exciting in speculative fiction, like, we can go really ham on, like, thinking of, like, every really interesting thing and how the sewer system works and, like, how the magic system works without thinking about, like, what does it actually mean for, like, John Jane Doe walking down the street, and, like, what that means in terms of what do they encounter. What systems are there? How do they get from place to place? Where are the tensions that they're getting in their everyday life? What's easy for them that we would find hard? What's hard for them that we might find easy? So, I think the first thing I think about a lot is, like, where… How does the place sort of weigh… We talked about weight earlier this season… How does the place weigh on the characters in both a good and bad way? How do they feel it? How do they live in?
 
[Dan] Yeah. And that's such an important thing to think about, when you're worldbuilding, because when we are doing worldbuilding, I know there's often a tendency to think about the really broad kind of Tolkien-esque kind of things. Like, this is a world that has elves, and they live in trees, and whatever you're trying to do. Whereas the nitty-gritty kind of daily life details are often the ones that are going to show up in your work so much more than that. How do they get around in this city that lives… They live in trees? Do they have public transportation? Do they just have to walk everywhere? Do they have any kind of…
[Mary Robinette] Like the puppet [garbled] you gotta go get that.
[Erin] Yes.
[Laughter]
[Dan] What is going on here? And I remember when I was breaking in, there was this huge push to think about economy. And every time I would go to a convention, there would be some worldbuilding panel where they were like, you have to think about where all of the food comes from and where all the money comes from. And, yes, I think that that's a useful thing to think about. But, for me, I agree with you, Erin, that so much of it comes down to character and what is going to affect these characters. And, yes, if there is no food around or if food is scarce, that's something that's going to weigh on them heavily. But if there's always food and they don't have to think about it, then maybe it's never going to come up in your story.
 
[Erin] Yeah, I think… And, I think I also… I often find, like, those systems questions, like, do you get so, like, taken away from the people. Like, people always ask, like, where does the poop go? A question we should always ask…
[Laughter]
[Erin] About our stories, truly. But, like, that's somewhat interesting, but if you're, like, so and so, like, they have a poop shooter system that, like, uses hollow vines to shoot it out of the trees. Like…
[Laughter]
[Erin] [garbled] elves.
[Dan] This is why Tolkien never got into it.
[Laughter]
[Erin] But Legolas was, like, well, like, that attracts, like, rodents, that attracts weird things to the trees, so, like, whose job is it, like, who's actually down there, like, sweeping up at the bottom, like, of, like, where the poop shooter goes out?
[Dan] Cleaning up…
[Erin] That is…
[Dan] Pneumatic vines.
[Erin] The pneumatic vine cleaner.
[Dan] Legolas! There's rats in the pneumatics again!
[Erin] Like, there are 10 more… 10 times more stories about Legolas, the pneumatic cleaner, and, like, whatever's happening there then there are, like, to me, then the big systemic questions. So, it's like when place and setting, like, hit person, that's when, for me, the sweet spot is, for sure.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and I will often use that when I'm having trouble finding traction on a thing. Where I've got the general idea, but I'm like… What am I going to do with this? I don't always go sequentially. Sometimes I start with character, but sometimes, I'm like I don't know who this story is about. And I will look at place for who is available to me. And I look across the socioeconomic spectrum, who are the people that are the poorest people of society, who are the poop cleaners down at the bottom? Maybe it's a high status job, who knows?
[Erin] I like that. It's Legolas' duty.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] That's why he's got to have the braids, to keep…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Oh, my God.
[Erin] Sorry, listeners.
 
[Dan] So. At the risk of getting us back on track…
[No, no]
[Dan] Let's talk a little bit more about time, about the when half of this where and when, because if you are writing historical fiction, if you are writing something set in our world, I think it becomes very natural to think about time. But if you are writing something about outer space, if you're writing something about… Set in a completely different world altogether, then there's… Time still matters. Like you were saying, is this a time of war or is this a time of peace? Is this a time of intellectual Renaissance? Is this a time of whatever it is? There's a lot of those when questions we can still ask.
 
[Mary Robinette] And it's also, I think, for me, one of the things that's fun to play with with when is also when in the characters life is this? What are the things that they have experienced? Knowing a little bit about their history, that's… That history is part of the when of the character. And, again, with the character, but it does affect the way the story is told. If you know that it is after a traumatic event for… In a time of war, chances are that this character has experienced traumatic events. What are those, how do they affect the story? Also, time of day can make a huge impact on a story. A scene that is set at noon can often read very differently than one that's set at midnight. Hello. Let us meet at noon…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] For our romantic tryst that no one will know is happening.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Like…
[Erin] And that… But that's interesting, because it immediately makes me think, well, what kind of world… Like, if I want to have that, if I want a tryst at high noon, but no one knows it's happening, what does that say about the way time is viewed and used in that world in a way that's different from ours? Is it, like, the sun is so hot that it's, like, so dangerous to go out during noon because your eyes will melt out of your face, and so, therefore, like, it is dangerous and difficult and that's why this is the time to meet? So I think it's sometimes fun to, like… Time is something I think is hard for us to get away from in some ways, but a lot of times, even when we create new worlds, they're still like working 9 to 5, like, in some ways, they're still doing everything during the day and sleeping at night, because that's the way we do. But, like, is that always the case? What about a place where there is no night, or there is no day? All of that kind of stuff.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm working on a short story right now, as we record this, where my character winds up in a world that… Cave systems, it's all like phosphorus and fungi, and I'm like, do they have day night cycles? Like, when is sleeping happening? How do they tell the passage of time? How do they tell seasons? I'm just finishing working on Martian Contingency. And I think I have probably complained about this multiple times, that I have so many regrets because I decided to structure it around calendar, but there's the Earth calendar and then there's the Martian calendar, and Martian days are 39 minutes longer than Earth days. So, when do we celebrate holidays? Do we keep them with what's going on at home, do we celebrate them at a new time based on the cycles on Mars? And also your living underground, so your idea of day night cycles are based on the very few people who are going out on the surface. And it's like… It becomes this whole cascading thing where the when of the story affects, like, every decision that I made and also it kind of hits a point… It's not arbitrary, but it's… It offers opportunities to be in flux and reveal something about people, because of the way they are making… They are interfacing with time.
[Dan] And speaking of time, this is the time when we are going to pause for a moment.
 
[Dan] All right. So we are back. And I would like to ask you one of the other questions that we posed at the very beginning. What does it mean for a setting to be vivid? How does a setting come alive?
[Erin] I have an answer to this, I think, that actually comes back to time as well. So, a couple of years ago, I got the opportunity to write for the Pathfinder Lost Omens travel section. And I was actually in charge of the time and calendar section, and got to think about how different cultures within this really big world of Golarion, which is the Pathfinder world, how different cultures actually dealt with time. So as I was thinking about it, I thought a lot about how we… When we decide to mark an occasion, when we decide to measure our world in a particular way, there's usually a reason for it. Sometimes it's an arbitrary Emperor, as in our month system. But it can be much more meaningful. So I think worlds feel vivid when things that we choose to put in them have meaning. Like, have a… Have, like, a real meaning to them. And so, like, for example, I think, working with goblins, and I decided that they actually measure times by the length of songs and campfires. And so everything… I like that, because I was like fire is so visceral, like, how long… And they really know, like, how long this fire will burn, and they have, like… It's something that they all kind of can figure out, like, really quickly, and they know how long this song lasts. So there like, okay, we're going to sing this long song, and by the time that's the end, we will… It will have been an hour or three hours. And you get to a point where you could sing it in your mind. And you don't actually have to sing that song out loud. And what I like about that is that it's details. So I think worlds become vivid when you have details and those details have meanings that resonate with the world and make sense for it.
[Dan] Yeah. Well, and I would add further that your story needs to take advantage of those details. If that's something that we can only learn about reading the appendix, then it didn't necessarily affect the story in any way.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Whereas if your characters are kind of constantly singing that song to themselves in the background, that that's how they talk about time and they say, "Wait for me here, I'll be back in two songs of whatever," then that matters, and it does bring it to life.
[Mary Robinette] The other thing about that is that it is an interaction with the world. One of the things that I see people do frequently when they… They have world builder's disease, is that they can describe a world, they can use all of these beautiful pieces of language to tell you about the trees and the vines in the poop shooters and all of this, like, gloriously visceral language, but no one interacts with it. And so the story can become static. For me, the thing about the where and the when is that it is a thing that is inhabited. Like, time passes. I know that my animals can tell time, because if I'm late with their meal, they definitely let me know. So they have an awareness of time. But it is that interaction with the time. It is the this is a thing that supposed to happen. So when I'm thinking about it, I am thinking about how is my character interacting with it? The thing that you were talking about, the being back in two songs. That's an interaction with it. What are the other ways my character is interacting with the world? And that, for me, is how I make it vivid. By making it a lived in place.
[Erin] And I also think, challenging the world that you've built. I think sometimes we're reluctant because we spent all this time building, like, a beautiful house of cards and you don't want to blow on it. But that's when things get interesting. So I was thinking about the measuring time by fire, and, like, what happens in a typhoon? When you really needed to measure it, and the fire goes out unexpectedly. Like, then what happens? Like, and that probably happens at a crucial moment of conflict. So, I like to set up a world, and then by… If you can knock over parts of the world and the world still stands, I think, for some reason, that feels more lived in and more vivid. Because there are many things in our world that don't make sense for that fall apart and we still keep going. So when things are too perfect and everything lines up to well, sometimes it also feels like very… Like a doll's house that's, like, really pretty, but like it doesn't feel like… It feels like dolls are living in there instead of, like, people in these stories.
 
[Dan] Yeah. Well, and that's a big question that I often think about with worldbuilding, especially with a series or, like you were talking about with Pathfinder, some kind of ongoing setting that kind of more or less needs to remain static. You want your characters to be able to affect the world. You want things to be able to change. But you still want to be able to tell more stories in there. How can you build a setting like this that has intriguing when's and why's and you're able to mess with it without completely upending it and breaking it? So that book 2 takes place in a different setting altogether?
[Mary Robinette] I think it's… I think, first of all, that you actually can upend it and have book to take place in a different setting. So that's an option. But if you don't want to do that, then you think about, for me, the things that define the world as this is the place. And you can break the things around it, but there are still definitive things. So, if I'm telling a story that set in Mississippi and I dry up the Mississippi River, it has become fundamentally a different place. So I think of the Mississippi River as being a fundamental piece of the Mississippi, and I affect a lot of things around it. But I make a decision ahead of time, I'm not going to touch that. That said, it can be really interesting when you fundamentally break the thing. Sometimes the thing that is the defining characteristic is the people that are in it. But people are shaped by environment. It's all linked together.
 
[Erin] I also think that sometimes you… [Garbled] I think it's hard to break a world in some ways. Like… Fortunately or unfortunately, one thing that I often like grate at a little bit in fantasy is, like, when it's like we killed the king, and we get a new king, and, like, that definitely fixed all the things that that king was doing.
[Chuckles]
[Erin] It's like systems are very ingrained, and so I think one way to do it is to have somebody… Like, the system of the world doesn't change, but a person's understanding of it does. The way that they try to change it in their corner does. And then actually seeing the implications of change. Because a lot of times, after the curtain goes down on book 1, and the person's like we have done the glorious Revolution, it's like but all the things that you learned, all the ways that the place has weighed on you, will change the way that your revolution runs and what you do next and how easy it is for you to fall into the trap of becoming the world that you wished to break. And I think that is, like, such a… And that, to me, is a really interesting story…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Where it's like the world persists even if I try to change it.
[Mary Robinette] I think that's the thing. It's that there's logical causal chains. It's like this follows that, this happens because of that. You actually made me think of, also, Mistborn. When you hit the end of book one, it is… I remember thinking, how do you write a sequel in this? Because they've done all the things, and the world is fundamentally different. And book 2 is very much like, oh, now the world is fundamentally different. What are the consequences of that? And…
[Dan] Yeah. The… Mistborn is a great example. It's one of the ones that I always go to when I'm working with game writers and saying, "How do you end this?" This is a problem I have right now, because I'm working on the Mistborn RPG. Wendy you set your game if you have so many different points, and his series is filled with points that completely redefine what the setting is. So many people think of Mistborn as, well, there are these grand balls in this kind of dark industrial city where terrible things happen, and people sneak around in the mist. And that is one of the seven books. And then that setting changes, and you move on to the next one. And if you want to maintain, you come up with that one cool idea that you think is great and you want to maintain that over the course of several books, maybe don't kill the Lord Ruler at the end of the first one. But if you do want to explore that concept of change and explore the world is different, then, yeah, it's okay to do that.
[Erin] I know we're running low on time ourselves, but this actually reminds me of an answer to your earlier question about what does time mean? Which is also, like, where does the actual world itself… Where does the city or the country or the universe view itself in a timescale? Do you know what I mean? Are we year one of a generation shift or year 1000? Like, we usually set ourselves against something. Are we the end of an era, the beginning, the saw he middle of an empire? And, really thinking about, like, where does your actual setting take place, like, timewise? Like, what is their image? Where does it start? Where did their causal chain start of their society and are they the first link, the middle, or the end? Because, I think, that actually… Like, dying empires have some similarities, even though they die in different ways. And so do new revolutions have similarities, even if they're very different in their goals and what they do, because there's something about newness and there's something about, like, stagnation that can actually… That are a thing of time that has nothing to do with and everything to do with the actual setting that you're building.
[Dan] Absolutely. We are going to end this episode now with some homework, which is this.
 
[Dan] Take something that you have written in which the setting matters. A scene that takes place in a certain party or setting or location, a building, whatever it is. And then rewrite it in a completely different setting and see what kind of changes that suggests to the characters or forces into the story.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.18: How to Build Fictional Economies
 
 
Key points: Economics is the study of the rules that make a world work. What are the scarcities, what are the resources available? The law of unintended consequences. Radioactive kaiju manatees stomping across Florida. What is your incentive mechanism? Trade economies, reputational economies, gift economies. The tragedy of the commons. Arguing about who gets the check. Pay it forward. TANSTAAFL. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 18]
 
[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.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com
 
[Season 19, Episode 18]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] How to Build Fictional Economies.
[Erin] 15 minutes long. Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're out of money.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Mary Robinette] We're going to be talking about fictional economies. So, 3 of us, myself, Erin, and DongWon recently had an opportunity to participate in something that we called the Space Economy Camp for Writers. Which was designed to give writers greater literacy in economic theory for when they're doing their worldbuilding. There were a bunch of other things the camp had as a goal, but one of the things that I became aware of, even though I was one of the people helping create this camp, was that I fundamentally did not understand what the word economy meant.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I had an advantage going into this event because as an undergraduate, I'd studied economics. I double majored in English literature and economics. I was a pretty poor Econ student. If I'm going to be honest, the statistics wasn't a strong suit. But as a literary agent, people are always like, "Oh, that makes sense. You studied economics and English. Those seem to marry very perfectly. But the reality is that my Econ degree did nothing for me on learning how to do business. Econ isn't really about that. My understanding of economics, and my interest in economics has persisted past undergrad, is that it is very much about understanding what are the rules that make a world work. Right? Economics is the study of why is the world the way it is. So it is fundamentally really core to worldbuilding. It's not the entirety of how you do your worldbuilding, but it will play into major parts of it. What do the people in your world value? What do they need? What do they trade for? What do they not have enough of? So, I like to think a lot about what are the systems that are in place when examining a fictional world, and what makes them work? What are the scarcities? What are the resources available? Why is it weird when Sam Gamgee talks about potatoes for like 10 minutes when we're not sure the new world exists? Right? All these different things that can come into play of, like, where are people getting sugar from to make the cakes you're writing about. Sometimes these can be really finicky silly questions, and sometimes these can be questions that will unlock huge parts of your storytelling and give you tools to put pressure on your characters or give them things to aim for.
 
[Howard] It's also worth paying attention to what has been described by many people, but I was introduced to it by the Freakonomics authors, as the law of unintended consequences.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Howard] A great example of that is the moment you start paying the testing team to log… To identify and log bugs, you will develop an underground economy between testers and coders whereby the coders right bugs and the testers find them and give a kickback.
[DongWon] The economics term for that is an externality. Right? You have a negative externality or positive externality. So, a nuclear power plant has… Releases warm water as a waste product. Right? It's not polluting in any sense, but it is just several degrees warmer than everything around it. So the positive externality is that manatees really love that warm water and they will congregate there. It becomes a safe place, a breeding ground, and a feeding ground for manatees. That's a positive externality. A negative externality is when that nuclear power plant melts down and then poisons the area around it for hundreds of years to come.
[Howard] Radioactive kaiju manatees…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Stomping across Florida.
[DongWon] In my opinion, a positive externality.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Anything that involves stomping across Florida [garbled]
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Howard] Manatees learning to stomp…
 
[Mary Robinette] But the thing that I see a lot of writers doing with the economy of their world is just thinking about what are my coins called. Not paying attention to any of the systems that are around that or the values that the people are… That are driving that. One of the terms that came up during the camp that I was very excited about was what is your incentive mechanism? Like, why does a person do the thing that they're doing? Like, why do you show up and go to work? Why do you sit down and write? What's your incentive mechanism? What's the thing that makes you go, "Aha!" Those can be internal, it makes you feel good, it can be external, someone gives you money. Like, what is the… What are the incentive mechanisms in your world? Why do people do magic if magic is painful and magic… And it's also secret? Like, magic is going to aid you when you can't tell anyone that you're going to do it, why do you do it? I don't know.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] It's so funny. I feel like sometimes we put our own… Like, magic just seems so cool that you just assume in a world with magic, people would use it even if they lose a finger every time.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Also, no one can ever know, and all it does is warm the water one degree.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] But you're like, "Wow, that still seems like fun. It's magic!"
[Laughter]
[Erin] Maybe that… You're doing it for the reader, like, that's the reason. But then you want to figure out… It's richer if you can figure out a reason within your world that this is happening, as opposed to just because, like, it's fun and cool and different.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. Exactly. So think broadly about what an economy can be. Right? If you're talking about gold coins or doubloons or whatever it is, you're talking about monetary… Like, a trade economy. But there are also reputational economies. Right? So the reason you might want to go save the village is because people will consider you a hero afterwards. There is an economy of that. Not everybody can be considered a hero, and getting that reputation will cost you something and will have value for that character going forward. There's also gift economies. Right? There's other ways to think about how people exchange goods and services that don't have to be rooted in a capitalistic monetary system. Right? So if you're imagining new worlds, if you're imagining magic systems, if you're imagining future societies, there's a lot of ways we can approach this that are simply rooted in our sort of extractive exchange of goods that we have now.
 
[Erin] I think something we don't realize is that the paths that we're used to are very well-worn in our heads.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Like, the stories that we tell about the way people are in the way people use money are… We're used to them, and so they're ours. I was thinking about one of the most fascinating things we learned at this camp was about the tragedy of the commons.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Which was a commons… And correct me if I'm wrong, is basically some sort of resource that an entire community sort of needs to take care of. Like access to water, if you're fish… If you're all fishing. There was a theory that okay, if that happens, somebody will exploit it. There was an entire theory of economics that, like, went off on that. But there's actually no evidence of it in the real world. In truth, people don't necessarily exploit a common. But, like, once it was decided that that's kind of what people would do, because that's what a capitalist hell scape is about, then we actually developed that hell scape in order to prevent the exploitation that we assumed would be happening.
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] So if you end up creating your own problems, because you're used to the path that you've been on…
[DongWon] Yeah. This was interesting to me, too. I hadn't heard about the pushback against the tragedy of the commons, because that's driven economic policy in our world for the last 50, 60 years. In my own personal belief, to our detriment. Right now, there's a huge fight going on about the digital commons and what is a public good, and what should be held back for private industry, and all these different things. It is shaping our world in really [bountiful?] ways. So it's really interesting to stop and think about… We make certain assumptions, and then we build our economy based on those assumptions. So when you're building your fictional worlds, what are your assumptions about who the people are in it like? Right? What is picking a certain style of economy imply that people are like? If everything is very cutthroat and everybody has to be paid to do any kind of service or task, whether that's mercenary work or whatever that is, then you're making very strong implications about what kind of people live there versus something like Lord of the Rings, where people are just going to get together to save the world because it benefits them, because they want to. Right? There's a very different kind of economy implied by Lord of the Rings than by a Joe Abercrombie book.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Howard] Ask yourself what is scarce and what is necessary. There's a term, post-scarcity economy, which refers to, in essence, when everybody has… Can have their needs met at no cost, what does the economy look like? Well, it's got the phrase post-scarcity in it, but there are some things that will necessarily still be limited or scarce. Like, say, real estate. If we can all get fed, if we can all get educated, if we… But we can't all own a piece of land, what sort of economy develops? What happens when water is free and food is free, but we have to charge for air? Air is scarce, and we all need it.
[DongWon] It's one of my critiques of Star Trek, for example. Right? Star Trek introduced the idea of a post-scarcity economy, but then because of the strictures of producing a television show that has to be written on a certain schedule for a broad audience, the writers end up constantly reintroducing scarcity into this world and reintroducing a kind of… A certain kind of economics. Right? Whether it's like, "Oh, we're going to bring the Ferengi in," and suddenly money is important again. Right? They keep reinventing currency, they keep reinventing certain kinds of conflicts. Like, because when you imagine a post-scarcity world, it requires a more radical act of thinking than a TV show is… Maybe not capable of, but it's hard to sustain over as long as Star Trek has existed.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that came up… So, in this camp, we wound up splitting into different groups, and one of the things that came up when I was talking with an economist was a real world example of post-scarcity which was when the Empire arrived in Borneo. That the folks who were there were like, "Yeah. No, we have everything we need. Thanks, we're good. We're great." They're like, "But we need you to build these things." Like, is it interesting? If it's not interesting, I'm not gonna do it. There's other things I want to do. That was where they started to apply all of these external pressures of oppression in order to get them to do things. Because folks were like, "Yeah." There was no incentive mechanism for them to do it.
[DongWon] [garbled] trade, too. Right? To introduce a false scarcity by getting people very addicted to this thing, to assert Western control over governments that were kind of like we don't really need you. What are you doing here?
[Erin] That's so interesting. I know we're going to the break, but I would love, like in a worldbuilding way, to think what if they had actually come up instead with, like, some amazing incentive, like, is it interesting? No, we're going to make it really interesting and here's how or why. I think that is something that's really fun, is to think about… I think a lot of times, even in my own work, you think about people bringing oppression as opposed to, like, bringing awe. Like, maybe that's the thing that they're bringing that's lacking… The new thing, something that's going to energize people in an interesting way, and that creates a completely different kind of world.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. All right. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about some more economics that you can explore in your world building.
 
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[DongWon] This coming July, we have the new horror novel from best-selling author, Chuck Tingle. It's called Bury Your Gays and it tells the story of a Hollywood TV writer who is strong-armed by TV executives to kill off the gay characters quote unquote for the algorithm. When he refuses, he realizes he's put a target on his back. What's more, monsters from his previous movies begin to haunt him and pursue him through the Hollywood Hills. It's a trenchant, clever, and gripping novel, and Chuck Tingle is back, and I couldn't be more excited.
 
[Howard] Episode 3 of Fall of the House of Usher has a monologue in it, where a character goes off on "when life gives you lemons." He says, "No, you don't make lemonade. You don't make lemonade." He then takes off on this beautifully capitalistic tirade on how you turn you having nothing but lemons into a billion-dollar monopolistic global management of culture and lemons and everything. It's beautiful. When I listen to it, when I watch it, I can't help but think, is there something besides lemons that I could also do this with?
[Chuckles]
[Howard] This is… You've just given me a roadmap for developing a capitalist system that is very believable and utterly fantastic at the same time.
[Mary Robinette] The thing about that is that what they did was they applied their values and the model that they understood to the problem. It's that if the only thing you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail. Again, when we're talking about economies in your world building, the only economy that I know is the one that I grew up in, which is this capitalism thing. I had to… I knew that there were other things out there, but it started to get exciting for me to think about, okay, well what happens if we're going into space, and it's a gift-based economy? What would that look like? How would people interact with that? We… China came up with this… Came up in conversation when we were talking about gift economies, that at a certain point if you're trading with someone, and you're a gift economy, it's like, "Oh. Great. We're going to give you this." People who are not coming from a gift economy are very confused and don't know what to do with it.
[DongWon] One… Just to clarify a little bit, by what we mean by gift economy…
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] One thing that distinguishes a gift economy is that goods and services are given with no direct expectation of return. There is a more ambient expectation that your needs will be met down the line when that arises, maybe not by the person who directly gave you the first thing. Right? So if everyone is participating in a gift society, gift economy, then needs and desires are taken care of collectively without anybody having to map out who is owed X, Y, or Z. Right? Which is a very foreign concept to people who live in a deeply capitalistic sort of mindset…
[Mary Robinette] The moment that I was like, "Oh, I understand this more," was when the economist I was speaking to said, "Okay, but if they give you something, they've just won."
[DongWon] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] And then I was like, "Oh. This is the moment when you're at dinner and you're all arguing about, no, I'll get the check."
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] I'll get the check. That we've all experienced gift economies, especially those of us who live in the South as politeness battles. Where it's like, "No, no. I will be the one who does the nicest thing."
[Erin] Or, it's just… Your incentive is community growth, so…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Erin] I always think about… I didn't know that's what it was called, but one of the things I found really interesting at the camp is, I was like, "Well, what about barter?" One thing that I learned is that actually barter usually comes into play when you have 2 groups that don't… Either don't trust or don't know each other, because they can't give each other gifts because they don't understand what to give or what the other person needs, so they figure out, like, one chicken equals 3 potatoes, and 3 potatoes equals a trip to the moon. That's a weird economy, but…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Potatoes are very high in that case. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] I mean, I know they're very valuable on Mars.
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Erin] What I… My mom talked about when she used to visit from Mississippi where my mom's family is from, people would just be like this person has a peach tree, so they'd just give people extra peaches. These people fix fences for folks. My great-grandmother would read documents for people, and sort of be like, "This is something you should sign. This is something you shouldn't sign." All of these things were just about, like, the community needs to look out for itself, so it is good for everyone if we all have a good amount of peaches.
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] Have fixed fences, and know not to give the government our land by mistake.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Like, nobody loses in that situation, but you just have to think, like…
[DongWon] Right.
[Erin] What should I do for other people?
 
[DongWon] When you think about economies, really think about 2 things. What are you assuming that people are like? And what do… What does your community value? Right? So in a gift economy, people value community health and well-being above individual needs. Right? So if you believe that actually everyone good to be better off if everybody gets peaches, rather than I need to extract the most value from these peaches, even if 10% of them rot. Right? Those are 2 different sets of values. There's also 2 different assumptions, talking about barter versus gift. In a barter economy, you assume that people will try to screw each other over in a direct way. In a gift economy, you assume that everybody fundamentally cares about other people and is going to do their best, or at least enough people are going to do their best, that it will compensate for those who are trying to be more exploitive.
[Howard] We've talked about this when we talk about building a community of writers. When we talk about you going out and meeting other writers for critique groups and whatever, and how we don't want that to be transactional. There is no sense… If you come up to me at a convention and ask for a bit of writing advice, I will give it to you completely non-transactionally. I do not expect anything in return. It is possible that I won't give it to you because I'm busy or off to a meeting or brain-dead or whatever, but it is not transactional. That idea, that exchanges can take place that aren't really transactions… They're not even really exchanges. It's a gift.
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, this idea of... People in science fiction and fantasy say, over and over again, is pay it forward. There are these phrases that we use that underline what our values are. In Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, we get their "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch," that, like, gets painted on their flag. [Tanisfal?]
[Howard] Tanstaafl.
[Mary Robinette] Tanstaafl. Right. There are these things, these phrases, these aphorisms that underline what our values are that are an interesting piece of worldbuilding that you can do, but that kind of… Even if you're having trouble wrapping your head around the actual economy, coming back to that can also be a grounding thing.
[Erin] I also think that just looking at things that you're doing, like when you said, "Oh. I'll give you a piece of writing advice." The worldbuilding part of my brain is like, what if that was the thing? Like, what if that's the thing, like, instead of the reputation economy, it's the advice economy. When you run out of good advice to give people, you're broke. What if it's gossip? Like, there's so many things that we could be…
[DongWon] I work in publishing. I do both those.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] [garbled]
[Erin] But I think there are a lot of interesting things. So I think a lot of times we think… Because we think of economics as being about always exchanging money directly, we miss all the other exchanges that could be the basis for interesting different worlds.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] There are also things like different… Like our Patreon, for instance, goes back to the patron model, which used to be, back in the old days, someone's like, "You know what, I just want art to exist in the world." So you would just pay artists to do art. But part of what you were also doing at the time was, you were also being, like, "Look how fancy I am. I can… Look at these artists…"
[Howard] Some of this art's going on the ceiling of my house.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, it's… I am the patron of da Vinci, I'm the patron of Michelangelo. That means, in a reputation economy, you are rich.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] You are like 1%. Right? So I think, even in things that we think of as altruism, even in things that we think of as these gifts or whatever, people have reasons for doing those things. Economics is thinking about why people are making these choices on a systemwide level. Right? I love that you're connecting it to culture. Right? So, like, Heinlein's there ain't no such thing as a free lunch or I was thinking about Octavia Butler. Right? Everything you touch, you change, everything you change, touches you. That is such a radically different view of what your values are. That represents people trying to live according to a different kind of economic system in a world that's collapsing around them, that demands something very different from them than what they are trying to accomplish. Right? That is the fundamental tension of that book, is how do you survive with these ethics and values intact.
[Erin] I love that, because it makes me think about that's the way to approach this, is to think about what are the values of our world?
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Then, based on that, what do they place value in? How do they track that value?
[DongWon] I think everyone thinks that building an economy is about asking what do you… What is valuable? But instead, I think the question is, what do you value? These are 2 fundamentally different ideas that sounds very similar.
[Howard] When I leave the house, there's this checklist. I need to have my keys. I need to have my glasses. I need to have my phone. I need to have my wallet. Inquiring into each of these individually, why do I need these? Why is it unthinkable for me to be caught naked in the wilds of Orem, Utah without one of these? Will inform an entire world of thought about the economy that led to them. I have to have a lock on my car and on my house, and my money is… I have to have it, and I can't seal it anyway. Perform that same experiment on yourself. What is it that you have to have? Why?
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, I'm going to give you some homework. This is homework that I had… An exercise that I had my students do at our… At the Space Economy thing. Which is to come up with 3 catchphrases that someone who grew up in your economy would know. So, for instance, the difference between there ain't no such thing as a free lunch versus the fictional economy that we were building for a moon, which was see it, fix it. You can see those 2 totally different worlds and economies that would spin out of those. So, come up with 3 value statements, 3 aphorisms, someone that grew up in your world would say, and then see what economies spin out of those.
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Do you like stars? I do. Maybe you would like to put up a constellation of stars by rating us on Apple Podcasts. Hello. Yes, we're talking about ratings, not astronomy. But, a 5 star review can help us by creating a navigational beacon for new writers like you to find their way to Writing Excuses. So. Rate us on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice.
 
[Mary Robinette] Let's talk about Rude Tales of Magic. In this improvised narrative role-playing podcast, join artists, writers, and comedians from Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Marvel Comics, and more as they fight and fumble their way across the madcap and exceedingly rude fantasy wasteland of Cordelia. Branson Reese and his jesters retinue, Christopher Hastings, Carlin Menardo, Tim Platt, Joe Laporte, and Ali Fisher, star is a group of unlikely survivors. Specifically, a talking crow, a Lich in a wig, a bubbly faun, a Sasquatch punk, and a [teefling?] hunk. This group must solve the mystery of Polaris University vanishment and return balance and higher education to their world. It's going to be very hard and very, very rude. Subscribe to Rude Tales of Magic on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.48: NaNoWriMo Week 5 - Writing Endings
 
 
Key points: How do you wrap up your novel? What makes a satisfying ending? Make sure the parentheses are closed. But how do you decide what to resolve, and what to leave open? Endings let the characters and your reads feel everything that has happened. Give the readers the same grounding that you did at the beginning. Where, who, why, how. Restate the core thematic elements of the story. Give us the aftermath. How do you leave the door cracked for a follow-on, and still give a satisfying ending? Remember, life is messy, and your character may not achieve all their goals. Leave some things unanswered. Think about how you want your reader to feel, and make sure that is the last beat, but leave other questions hanging. End with a success that leaves something else to try. Revision! Not for NaNoWriMo, but when you reach the end, you know what questions you should have been asking, and you may need to go back and set it up right. Go ahead and try different endings! Nowhere near the end? Write yourself some notes about what you want the ending to be.
 
[Season 18, Episode 48]
 
[DongWon] Hello, writers. Whether you're doing NaNoWriMo, editing your newest project, or just desperately trying to keep up with your TBR pile, it's hard to find the time to plan and cook healthy and nutritious meals to keep you energized on these jampacked days. So, I'm here to tell you about Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. They can help you fool's [one word fuel up fast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef prepared, dietitian approved, ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. You'll save time, eat well, and stay on track with one less excuse to keep you from writing. This November, get Factor and enjoy eating well without the hassle. Simply choose your meals and enjoy fresh, flavor-pack deliveries right to your door. Ready in just 2 minutes, no prep and no mess. Had to factormeals.com/WX50 and use code WX50 to get 50% off. That's code WX50 at factormeals.com/WX50 to get 50% off.
 
[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 18, Episode 48]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 5, Welcome to the End.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Erin] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
 
[Mary Robinette] Congratulations. You have made it to week 5. For those of you who are still writing, and all of you should be, because we believe in you, you are now trying to wrap this thing up. Listen, if you lost steam, you don't have to have 50,000 words. This is about just moving forward. You can save this episode and listen to it when you're ready. But we're going to be talking about how to wrap up your novel. So, what are some things, like when you are thinking about moving towards a satisfying ending? What are some of the elements that you think about as, hmmm, this feels good?
[DongWon] It's funny. I have an issue, editorially, in thinking about endings. I have such a bias towards openings and the beginnings of books, and all like getting into the story and asking all these big questions, but I sometimes forget to think about how important the ending is. So I've made it a real focus for myself in the past few years to really pay attention and really care about how a book ends and how we're moving on from the story, emotionally. Right? There are so many very famous authors, very successful authors, who are notoriously bad at endings. Where the book just kind of stops. Right? So I think we criticize those endings, but there's a way in which maybe we can think about endings as a broader category than just making sure there's a long denouement, where everything is fully wrapped up. But, overall, I think making sure those parentheses are closed, that we were kind of talking about last week, as we were talking about starting to get to the climactic beats and making sure certain things are tied up. But how do you prioritize what are the things that you want to close off, what are the things that you want to leave your reader with a real sense of resolution on, and what are questions you want to leave open?
[Erin] I think endings are difficult because they're quiet. In some ways. Not all. But there's a moment where everything you've been doing sort of resonates in the room. It's like the moment after a concert ends, when you can still hear the mild echo of the music in the air. There's something like really beautiful about that. But also frightening in the stillness. Because it's sort of you don't have the candy bar scenes that we were talking about last week to like distract you, you're really sort of left with you and the word. I think that's why a lot of times I'll say, for me, I had a real tendency to like just try to murder everyone…
[Chuckles]
 
[Erin] At the end, because then there's no one left to be in the quiet and in the stillness. I could just be like, "The end. They're dead." But I actually have found out that… Somebody told me once that it's like landing a punch. When you punch someone, you want to actually let that impact happen. If you punch someone, and then go to black, you never really see them feel it. And that endings are the moment where actually your characters get to feel everything that has happened. As frightening as it is, it's really important to also give your reader an ability to feel what has happened at the end or throughout the course of the book.
[Dan] Yeah. I love the way that The Wire ends. As much as I think season 5 went wildly off the rails, that final moment, you've got McNulty driving down the highway with a person. He stops, and he gets out of his car, and he just stares at the city for a while. Then we get a chance to see, like, what is each one of these people doing, and we get to see McNulty thinking about it and digesting it and processing it. Then he gets back in his car and he drives away. Giving your characters the chance to process what has happened and what they've gone through gives your readers that same chance. Rather than just yanking out the rug and saying, "Thanks for reading my book. Imagine for yourself what happens next."
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I had a lot of problems with when I started the switch from short fiction to novels is that I would in my novels the short story pacing. That I would stick the landing and I would be out. Because novels are about immersion. I wasn't giving my readers time to absorb this. The dénouement that we talk about sometimes. So what I've started realizing is that I need to give them the same things that I gave them at the beginning of the book. I need to ground them, because my character is in a different emotional place. They're often in a different physical place. So I find that if I start thinking about it with the why, where, who, and how that we talked about at the beginning, that I can… I know more of the elements that I need to include. It's like it helps me ground my readers. Like, who is my character now? Who have they become over the course of this journey? What physical actions are they doing in this scene that conveys that to the reader? Where are we? Like, how is the status quo changed? Like, what does the environment tell me about this new landscape, and, like, why is it important? So these are the things that I will be thinking about. Like, we're talking about the very, very last piece of it. But it's that looking back at the beginning for my answers to what we're talking about at the end. Some of it is what Dan was talking about in the previous episode of the inverse thing, or, you've heard me talk about it with nesting code. But that's what I start thinking about, is easing them out and kind of very similar pacing to how I brought them in. If it was a fast opening, that I'm going to give them a faster paced close. If it was a thoughtful opening, that's going to tell me something about the pacing at the end. So, sometimes I'm looking at mirroring that kind of pacing that I had at the beginning, sometimes I'm looking at doing an inversion, because it's saying something about the changes that have happened across the course of the novel.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. Sort of building off of that idea, I think there's sometimes… One of my favorite types of endings that I've run into that I think kind of plays into this is when the last scenes are just a restatement of the core thematic elements of the story that you've just experienced. Right? So I think going to your Wire example, McNulty, looking at the city of Baltimore at the end is just a statement about what this whole show was about, what this 5 season project was, was we did a portrait of Baltimore, and now we're looking at it and reflecting on the journey that we went on. One of my very, very favorite endings to a TV show, finished last year, was Better Call Saul. Which, I don't want to quite spoil it, but the way that it ends is such a statement of what is important in the show. Right? Why did we spend all of this time with Saul as he went on this whole journey? It's making really clear, crystal-clear in some ways, the importance that love has in that story and what he stands for and what is important to him and who he wants to be. That is all restated in the final episode in this really beautiful, elegaic way. So I think when you're looking at your ending, it's almost a little bit like writing an essay in college, where you start with you state your theme. You explain how you're going to say your theme. That's kind of the opening to your story. Then you get to the business of explaining all the things. At the end, you're like, "Here's my conclusion. In this story, we discover that love is real." You know what I mean? There's a very simple, boiled down version of how you end the story that can look like that, that I think can be simple and impactful. I'm thinking about your punch example. There's a thing in Hong Kong cinema where you will actually see the punch 3 times. Right? You'll see the blow land, and then it'll cut to the slow mold impact of like you can see how it's affecting the person who got it, then it'll cut back to the wide angle and you'll see them jump backwards or fall down or whatever it is. So you see these 3 different beats and 3 angles on the same strike. That's the thing that makes it feel so impactful to the audience of, like… It can also seem corny when it's done certain ways, but, so often, it happens very quickly, you don't even really see what's happening, you just see boop, boop, boop. And you realize that that guy just got crushed in that moment, he got hit so hard. You can feel his ribs breaking, in that moment. Right? I think letting it sink in in that way and being a little obvious in your ending is not a bad way to go.
[Dan] If you've ever watched a GIF of like a disaster, someone falling down, something collapsing, and it ends right as soon is the disaster happens, and you're like, "But wait, I wanted to watch it land. I wanted to watch it fall. I wanted to look at the rubble for a minute." That's what we're talking about, that sense of, yes, you've seen the big thing, but you didn't really get a look at the aftermath, that's what really is satisfying about it.
[Mary Robinette] We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the other tools you can use to make that disaster really satisfying.
 
[Mary Robinette] Hey, writers. Welcome to week 5. How are you doing? I wanted to share something with you. I wrote my first published novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, during NaNoWriMo. I also wrote multiple unpublished novels during NaNoWriMo. I've won Nano and I've had years where I could not hit that 50,000 words. So as you enter this last week, I want you to remember that every word you've written this month has been a victory. Because the journey is the thing. By writing, you are learning to write. You're learning to set goals. You are learning about your writing process and what works for you. Whether you wrote 50,000 words or 5000 words this month, you are a writer.
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we're going to talk about kind of the messiness of it all. I think you had something you wanted to say?
[DongWon] Yeah. I had a thought as we were talking about all this, where we've talked about closing things out and leaving things on this very resonent ending. I think that can be really important. In the categories that most of us work in, there's a lot of series writing, a lot of people writing trilogies, a lot of people writing ongoing series, and a lot of people are doing quote unquote standalones with series potential. So, one of the things I would love to hear your thoughts on a little bit is, how do you leave that door cracked open? How do you give the satisfying ending, make a book feel like a book, even if it's middle of a trilogy? Right? Make the audience feel like I went on a journey, this had a conclusion. I feel good about where we're ending. And still have more questions to be asked. Have… They want more story, they want to spend more time with these characters. What do you do to leave that door cracked open?
[Mary Robinette] The trick that I've found is that life is messy, and that I don't have to give my character all of their goals. When you read a book and the character achieves all of their goals, those are the ones that feel too tight. So sometimes I don't… It's not so much that it's a cliffhanger, it's that I have deliberately left something unanswered, knowing that that can be a problem for later. But I think about… To give that sense of satisfaction, I think about how I want my reader to feel. When I'm looking at nesting things at the end, I try to make sure that whatever solution, whatever goal thing lines up with the emotional feeling I want my reader to have, that that's kind of the last beat I land on. That's the thing that gives it the sense of closure as a standalone, while the other questions that are still hanging there are available if I want to use them for future books. So, like in Calculating Stars, Elma achieves her goal of going to the moon. Right? But I don't answer your questions about what it's like when she gets there. I don't answer your questions about what the next steps are. I leave all of that open. Her conflict with Parker is still a conflict with Parker. Like, that's not a solved problem. So I have all of that to play with when I come back to the subsequent books. Then… This is outside of the scope of NaNoWriMo, but when I am looking at my next book, I look at my solution to the first one, and that becomes my problem for the 2nd book.
[Erin] Yeah, I was thinking about the fact that we've talked a lot about try-fail cycles. Generally, a novel ends on a success. I mean, it can end on a failure, but I think it has some sort of emotional closure. But, it feels to me like it's a success that leaves something else to try. That thing that you're trying becomes the thing that happens in the next book. So that's sort of like… So there's a finishing, but there's something more.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Dan] This is such a horrible thing to bring up the last week of NaNoWriMo, but a lot of what makes a lot of this work is the revision process. Knowing that, okay, we've reached this point. Now we need to go back and set it up right. Getting to the end, having satisfying answers, really means you need to make sure what questions you're asking. In the Fellowship of the Ring, for example, that first book ends with the Fellowship breaking and everyone splintering off into different places, and yet it does feel conclusive, because Tolkien made sure that the question asked at the beginning, is Frodo constantly wondering am I leading people into danger? Can I really live with the fact that I am corrupting everyone around me? So, leaving the group behind and setting off on his own with Sam, that is a victory for that specific question. So it feels, okay, this feels very natural. We've asked this question, we've answered it, obviously there's other problems, but we've concluded this part of the story.
[Mary Robinette] But this is why we… When we talk about you have to keep writing and finish, this is why. Because you don't know always what questions you want to set up at the beginning until you're getting to the end. It's… Like, when I was an art major, I would see people… I mean, I did it myself. Where you would draw the perfect hand and the perfect arm and the perfect shoulder, and then you would step back and the entire figure was entirely out of proportion. Because you work thinking about the entire picture. So with novels, like, one of the things that you can be doing for yourself during this last week is coming to an agreement with yourself about, oh, this is what I want the book to be. Like, these are the… And if it doesn't match what you started, that's okay. You have a new understanding of it. You can go back and fix everything that you did earlier later.
[Erin] I would say one other way to do that is if you want… If you liked what you had at the beginning, and you feel like you've gotten away from it because that also happens is something that I like to do right before, when I've done Nano, like, right before I get into the last bits is to actually tell myself out loud, or actually to be honest, tell my cats out loud…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] The story so far. Like, not every single thing, but, like, what I can remember of the story. I find that what I go to, like, the things that I choose to explain are the things that have continued to stick with me about the story that I'm telling. So I may have forgotten one subplot or one character, but, like, when I go to say, like, the Fellowship of the Ring, which I wrote during Nano… No…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Wow. It is about X, like, that's what gets to the core of it for me. Then I can say, if that's the core, then what's the ending that works for that core? Then, like Mary Robinette was saying, go back and fix the rest in post-, as they say in the movie business.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, truly, when working with clients on projects, the things that usually change the most our beginnings and endings. Right? Often in tandem. If the last act isn't quite working, then you'll find the roots of those problems in the first act. Middles always… I mean, every part needs revision, but the middle tends to be a little bit more defined from the jump, and then really… It really is about asking questions and answering them. So if the answers are wrong, then maybe the questions are wrong, and vice versa. So, this is again, this is NaNoWriMo. If you're not feeling super great about your ending, that's totally fine. Right? We're not… No one's expecting you to have the perfect answer to the question you didn't even know you were asking on day one, because it's been a crazy month. You've made it this far. Right?
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that will also catch you here is that you're like, "I don't know how to solve this. My character has to solve this thing and I don't know how to solve it." You feel like you're locked in because of everything that you've written up to this point. But your… When the book is out in the world and you're letting other people read it, they never have to see this draft of it.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] So you can always go back and just say, "You know what? They could have solve this the entire time, if they had only been able to tesseract spiders into the building with bees."
[Laughter]
[Erin] I knew it!
[Mary Robinette] "But I didn't introduce the ability to tesseract earlier. So, I'm just going to say that they can do it, and I'm going to make a note to myself that I have to establish that when I go back and do my revisions." So just go ahead and give yourself the tools that you need and fix it in post-.
 
[Dan] Well, one of the great things about writing and NaNoWriMo does this perfectly is you can try different endings. This is what I said about free writing in the beginning. If you get to the end and you think, "Well, maybe this would work as an ending. Maybe this is a good solution to the problem." Write it. If it doesn't work, don't delete it. Try something else. Right that. I know that for a lot of you, that is so painful, me telling you to write a bunch of extra words that are not going to be in the final manuscript. Well, guess what. That's most of this job.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah. I had a project recently where 500,000 words were written that went into the trash that will never see the light of day, for the 150,000 that got published. Right? Sometimes that's what happens. Right? I think one of the best lessons about NaNoWriMo is there's no such thing as a wasted word. Everything that you put down to paper got you to this point. It helps you realize that these extra scenes need to be written, even if the older scenes also had to be put in a drawer somewhere. All that was useful work. All that was the work that got you to understand what your book really is and make your book the best version of it it could be. So I hope you're hearing us talk about revision and not feeling discouraged. Instead, be excited that you now have clarity about what it is you're trying to accomplish with your book, even if it's just a little bit. Even if you have one degree more…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] I hope you don't have to write 500,000 words…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] To the 150 that got published. That's not great. We all felt not great about that. But also, we all felt great about the book that was there at the end, and so proud and so happy about the work we did on it.
[Dan] Well, the same thing that I said earlier about endings, making sure that you're asking the right questions to provide a satisfying answer, apply that to your life! Apply that to the process. Apply that to NaNoWriMo. Don't necessarily think of this as I'm going to end November with one awesome book. Think of it as I'm going to end November having learned how to write a book. Then, even if the ending is weird or there's bits in the middle that are clunky and awkward, that's okay. You learned how to write a book.
[Mary Robinette] Just briefly, I want to speak to the people who are like, "Hey, you know what, I'm coming up on 50,000 words, but I'm nowhere near the end of my book."
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That's fine. You can… We're talking about things in proportion right now.
[DongWon] Totally.
[Mary Robinette] You're totally fine. Don't worry about it. You don't need to have, like, the ending. You just need to hold on to what you're aiming for.
[Erin] Yeah. You can… You may want to take a break. You may say, like, writing 50,000 words in a month was a lot, so even though I don't have the ending like I want to get there. This is when you could leave yourself lots of fun notes in brackets, like, "And here's the part where they figured out the meaning of love," and, like, "Here's where he defuses that bomb filled with spider bees."
[Laughter]
[Erin] Right? Then you can come back and your future self will have the problem of figuring that out. But I hope the main thing that your future self takes away from it is you wrote stuff that did not exist at the beginning of this month and it exists and only you could have written it.
[Mary Robinette] That's right. So we're going to give you some homework. This is, again, a way to help you just keep moving forward. Especially those of you who are like nowhere near the ending and you're just like, "I gotta keep going. I've just gotta keep going."
 
[Mary Robinette] Here's your homework. Gift your character with your insecurity. Brainstorm about what should happen next in the voice of the character as they're facing the challenges in the scene. Because your character doesn't know what's going on either. So all of that and just be part of your character development, and the brainstorming process may get you closer. It also will just get you words on the page, which is very useful. You may wind up cutting it later, but after you hit 50,000 words.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. Good luck. You're out of excuses.
 
[DongWon] Do you have a book or a short story that you need help with? We are now offering an interactive tier on Patreon called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, to ask any question that is on your mind.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.46: NaNoWriMo Week 3 - Raising the Stakes
 
 
Key Points: Raising the stakes! Consequences! Try-fail cycles. Plan A, but... Multi threads! Ground increasing the stakes in what your character would do. Layer failures! How could this be "blank"er? Bigger, or deeper emotional reaction? What is already on the table, and how can I threaten that? Physical reactions! Establish the conflict first, then introduce emotional stakes. Dramatic irony! Be mean to your characters. Put them in difficult situations. Use the kind of stakes you have in your own life. Add try-fail cycles. 
 
[Season 18, Episode 46]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] NaNoWriMo Week 3 - Raising the Stakes.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Erin] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
 
[DongWon] So this week, as we're entering into the third week of NaNoWriMo, we're going to talk about sort of the next step in developing your story, and developing the book that you're working on. Which is, raising the stakes. So, now that you've had your inciting incident, now that you've introduced your characters and your setting, we're going to talk about starting to introduce some consequences for your characters. So, yeah, I'm just going to turn it over to the group. How do you guys think about the next phase here? How do you start revving the engine, as it were?
[Dan] Well, we talk about try-fail cycles a lot. I think one of the great ways to raise the stakes is to have a plan A, and maybe it works and maybe it doesn't, but either way, it's going to go horribly wrong. Right? This is the yes-but, no-and. I keep talking about Star Wars. I'm going to keep talking about Star Wars. In the inciting incident gets them off the planet and their plan is to fly to Alderon, and that's plan A. Do they succeed? Yes, they fly to Alderon. Does that help? No, Alderon's been exploded, and then they get captured by the Death Star. Like, it is a completion of their first goal, sort of, kind of, but it's also this drastic failure that ruins everything. On the other hand, look at Toy Story. What would he wants to do is be the favorite toy. He's decided that his… That's his super objective. Being the favorite toy. His objective is I need to get rid of Buzz. Does he succeed in doing that? Yes, he does. He gets exactly what he wants. But it just goes horribly wrong. He kicks Buzz out of the window, and he feels like it's his fault. He tries to rescue him and that spins off the whole rest of the story.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I enjoy playing with with raising the stakes and the idea of consequences is that I… Stories are not like just one track. There's multiple things going on all at the same time. So I enjoy interrupting the progress towards one goal with another goal. Where it's like, "Am I able to do this thing? No, because…" So I think of this as… Because I often think in terms of MICE Quotient, as single thread versus multi thread. So in single thread, the consequences of one action, like, are continuing straight in that line. So using… Continuing our Star Wars…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] When we've got the rest doing the princess thing, it's a milieu. We get in, we have to rescue the princess, we have to get back out. So are they able to rescue her? Like, they're being chased by Storm Troopers. What's the smartest thing they can do? They can try to shoot out this vent and get into a chute. Does it work? Yes, but they wind up in a trash compactor. Or a garbage chute, actually, they don't know it's a trash compactor yet. What's the smartest thing they can do? Well, not actually the smartest, but very… The Luke-ist thing they can do…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Is try to shoot…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Their way out. Does that work? No, and they wake up something under the water. But the entire time, they're still dealing with environment. It's all milieu until finally they get a yes resolution which is R2 letting them out. Multi thread does a different thing, though.
[Erin] Oh. I… You know what, keep on going.
[Mary Robinette] Okay. So…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] In multi thread, the consequences of one action affect another goal. You most commonly see this with event threads, where you have to give up something that is precious and personal in your character thread in order to make the event move forward. It's like do I… My going to be able to unlock this? Yes, but only by sacrificing my grandfather's pocket watch. So it's one of these things where you can interrupt one. It's also very useful in mysteries, where you're trying to ask someone a question, and then something goes wrong with the environment that causes you to not be able to finish asking that question.
[Erin] Yeah. I got so excited…
[Chuckles]
[Erin] And interrupted your thread.
[Laughter]
[This is multi thread]
 
[Erin] but what I got excited… When you said it was the Luke-ist thing they could do, because it really reminded me that the increasing of stakes works the best when it's really grounded in what your character would do. Like, there are things that can be done that will make the stakes worse, but feel like they're out of nowhere. I feel like if you think like what's the worst decision that your character could make at this moment, and then be like let's convince them to make it, like, that often raises the stakes, but it also reinforces what it is that your reader really likes about the character.
[DongWon] Yeah. One thing I think about on that front as well is so much of, for me, of what does raise the stakes, what makes me so invested in character, is their relationship to each other. Right? How they feel about each other, or how a character feels about themselves. Right? We think of, like, life-and-death situations as great stakes, but I actually find that those can be really flat. What's interesting about Alderon getting destroyed isn't the fact that all those people died, it's about we're seeing it through the eyes of someone who watches their home destroyed. That raises the stakes for the entire galaxy. What's interesting about the trash compactor isn't necessarily are they going to survive this or not, but we see 3 different approaches to solving a problem as these characters are in conflict, of Leia making fun of Han, of Han just shooting things for no reason, and then Luke being the one who is, kind of the [garbled], they need to keep rescuing throughout this whole sequence. So we start to see the dynamic that is going to form the core of these movies for the whole trilogy, of these 3 characters interacting and their feelings about each other starting and deepening in these moments. Now we have stakes. Now we care about how Leia sees Luke. Now we care how Han sees Leia. All of these different parts of the triangle, some of them become very important, and now I'm emotionally invested in this movie at a whole different level than I was when it was just Luke being sad about his parents.
 
[Mary Robinette] This is a great point. One of the things that there are 2 things that are happening in the trash compactor scene. One is they have to get out of it. But the other is Luke is trying to impress Leia.
[Yeah. Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So when you can have… One of the ways that you can raise the stakes is not by making the individual failure point, but by layering two failure points onto a single action.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That's one of the things that you can do, is, like, hang more on it. Which is, I find, a lot of fun.
[Dan] Yeah. Another thing I love about that… Sorry, this is turning into the compactor scene episode…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Luke's entire character arc in that movie is that he has to learn to rely on something that is larger than himself. What is his solution to get out of the trash compactor? It's he calls for help, he relies on R2-D2. Which is a really nice little nod toward he's not trying to do it all on his own, he's trying to rely on outside help. That is setting him up to be able to make the choice he makes at the end of the movie.
 
[Erin] I really feel like I should have seen Star Wars more than one time in my life…
[Laughter]
[Erin] In order to participate in this conversation. So, I'm going to take it, sorry, turn away, as I don't know nothing about no trash compactor.
[Wait! Star Wars podcast! Garbled]
[Erin] To talk a little bit about zombies. Something that you said, DongWon, maybe think about it, because when we were doing Zombies Run, we were always like, "What can the zombies… How can the zombies become…" They chase you all the time, every single episode. So you kind of get like, "Oh, zombies again." But are they closer, are they scarier, are they bigger, are there more of them? But instead of thinking of these as life or death space, I like taking them and moving them into whatever situation you're in. So, the fact that like there's a normal-sized zombie, and then a giant zombie, that's bigger. But something can also be bigger in terms of, like, it just has more impact. It will do more damage if it catches up to you. So, giving a speech in front of a lot of people is one thing. Giving a speech in front of a lot of people that include your crush, who, I guess is Leia… Are there other speeches in Star Wars? Like, is bigger. Like, the impact is larger. So one way to raise the stakes is by being, like, could this be blanker, and just take any word of your choice, that's a… Any word of your choice. I'm not going to hold you back.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Think, can this be blanker? Then figure out how do you do that. That's one way to also to raise the stakes.
[DongWon] On that note, as we think about how to make things more blanker…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Let's take a break, and we will start digging into what exactly that means when we are back.
 
[Mary Robinette] NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, and it's time to start planning. If you're aiming for 1600 words a day, it's easy to de-prioritize eating. But you need to keep the brain fueled. During Nano, I turned to meal kits. Hello Fresh makes whipping up a home-cooked meal a nice break from writing with quick and easy options, including their 15 minute meals. With everything pre-proportioned and delivered right to your door every week, it takes way less time than it takes to get a delivery. I find that stepping away from the keyboard to cook gives my brain time to rest. I love that with Hello Fresh I can plan my meals for the month before NaNoWriMo begins, and then I can save all my decision-making for the stories. With so many in season ingredients, you'll taste all the freshness of fall in every bite of Hello Fresh's chef crafted recipes. Produce travels from the farm to your door for peak ripeness you can taste. Go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use the code 50WX for 50% off plus free shipping. Yeah, that's right. 50WX, 50 for 50% off and WX for Writing eXcuses. We are terrible with puns. Just visit hellofresh.com/50WX and try America's number one meal kit.
 
[Dan] Hi, everybody. It is week 3 of NaNoWriMo. You're halfway through. You've been writing this thing, and you have, at this point, pretty good sense of your pace. How far are you into it, how much longer is it going to take. More than anything, at this point, you're probably thinking, this is the worst thing anyone has ever written. That's okay. What I want to do today is give you permission to write an imperfect book. I give you permission to write a bad book if you need to. I wrote 5 books that were terrible before I finally wrote one that was good. This is good. This is a good thing. Is more important for you to learn how to finish a bad book then how to endlessly spin your wheels perfecting a book that is never going to be perfect. Perfect is out of our reach. So, I give you permission to write a bad book. Finish this. Leave some scenes unfinished. Leave some dialogue clunky. It's okay. What you are doing right now is learning how to write the next book. That is going to be best if you turn off that internal editor and just crank through it and learn how it feels to finish a book. I believe in you.
 
[DongWon] Okay. So. As we're coming back from the break, we've been talking about how to make things bigger, and we've also been talking about how to make things more, deeper in terms of the emotional reaction. So, one of the ways that I love to do that, is to really start to draw out the personal connections. I kind of touched on this a little bit before, but going back to your zombie example, the way that the zombies always become so upsetting and so threatening is, one, the visual or them approaching en mass, but there's always that moment where the character you cared about gets bit. Now you have to deal with the awful consequences of the slowness of them starting to turn. Right? So, for me, I think that's such a perfect example of how to make the stakes almost unbearable by adding this emotional quotient that relies on the personal connections that you have between the characters. How do you guys build to that? What are the things that you can introduce that, like, start establishing those stakes so that you can pull that trigger when you need to.
[Mary Robinette] Well, one of the things that I will do, especially during NaNoWriMo, is that I will look at the things that I've already put on the table. So, in an ideal world, I am laying down groundwork and I thought ahead and… But, in reality, especially during nano, I'm often at the point where I'm like, "Okay. I have to make this work. What have I already established that they care about? And how can I threaten that thing?" So most of the work that you have to do is actually before you get to the point where you raise the stake. It's establishing some relationship, something that will make the person feel like it's a failure, so that when you get to this, you can threaten it. Like, one of the things that I think about sometimes is, like, someone's house being robbed is bad. Okay? But someone's house being robbed and their grandfather's pocket watch being taken, that's worse because it's a specific personal thing. But if it's… I always, like, "How can I make this worse for the person?" If they weren't supposed to have it out of the house, and they had taken it with the intention of getting it repaired, and then it's stolen… That's worse. Because now there's multiple layers of failure that are accompanying that. So, for me, it's not so much that I have to make it bigger or flashier, but, looking at the character's connections. One of the other tools that I'll use for that is their physical reaction to it. Like, just the… All of the… Like, thinking about all of the visceral reactions that happen to your body when you're in failure mode can really make a character like…
[DongWon] I love this idea of making stakes felt in the body. Because, I think when you can make your reader feel the things that your character is feeling in a physical way, that's, I think, like a huge success.
 
[Dan] Another way to do this is to approach it backwards. Rather than establish emotional stakes first and then introduce a conflict into it… I'm thinking, for example, of the movie RRR which establishes the conflict first. Two people on opposite sides of a revolution are trying to find each other, trying to capture each other. Then they meet in disguise, they don't know who the other one is, and they become best friends. So, suddenly you have raised the stakes, not by adding that conflict, but by adding the dramatic irony of, "Oh, no, inevitably they will find out who the other one is, and this beautiful friendship will be destroyed."
[Mary Robinette] I think that's a really great point. That a lot of times when we're talking about stakes, that we think in terms of direct conflict, and that it doesn't have to be that, it can be a layer of tension that you give to the audience, where they are waiting for… Everyone is waiting, when they're watching that film, for the moment when the two of them realize who the other person is.
[Dan] There's multiple near misses. It's just excruciating every time.
[DongWon] This is where dramatic irony can be such a useful tool in raising stakes. Right? To return to Star Wars, I'm a big fan of the Clone Wars era of Star Wars. Which is so wonderful, because you know what's going to happen at the end of this, because we've seen the movies. We know things don't work out for these people, and that most of these people were interacting with over the course of the show are either going to be dead or gone in some way by the end of it. So it creates incredible stakes over and over again as we're in this sort of prequel mode of thinking, because we know where things are going to end up. So you can use really heavy foreshadowing in your story, as in this RRR case, and rely on your reader's knowledge of just how stories go sometimes, what genre you're in, what beats are coming in this story. Returning to the zombie example as well, we know someone's going to get bit. Right? There is no zombie movie that ends with the whole cast surviving. Right?
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] If it is, that's a very low stakes zombie movie. I'm not sure I want to watch it. Right? So you can rely on your audience's awareness of category, of story, and of the stakes that you're setting up to sort of increase that tension. You can be very playful with that as a creator. That can be really fun.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Did anyone else just feel the moment when someone out there said, "That's it. No one in my book is getting bitten!"
[Laughter]
[Erin] It happened in my brain. Out there? In here!
[DongWon] To use Erin's recommendation, you want to make sure you're going with more biterer.
[Laughter]
[Erin] That really works for any word, but…
[Dan] More bite-ier?
[Erin, Mary Robinette] Bite-ier.
 
[Dan] Well, it's… This is may be a good time to mention that you, as the author, you have created these characters, you love these characters. You have to be mean to them. I used to describe my job is that I was just mean to John Cleaver for a living. Because that's how all of these books are constructed. There has to be conflict, there has to be something horrible happening to the characters. Sure, maybe they recover from it, and that's great. Maybe they don't and someone else moves on and recovers. But you have to be willing to pull the rug out from under your characters and put them through the wringer.
[DongWon] Even if you're telling a cozy story or a romance or something like that. There are still… I mean, you might change the settings so it's not going to 11, you're going to 7…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] But you're still… You're putting them in difficult situations. Right? Even if you're doing a coffee shop hey you kind of thing, somebody's going to get their order wrong or somebody's going to be… You're going to run out of milk. I don't know, whatever it is. But your stakes can change in terms of scale, but the technique is still the same. The core principle is still the same. Your story will need stakes of some sort. [Garbled]
[Dan] Well, it goes back to what you were saying about that emotional core. I would argue that in a romance, raising the stakes can often be to an 11. I'm going to be alone forever because the person I am in love with doesn't love me back. That's an 11.
[DongWon] Oh, absolutely.
[Dan] To that person.
[Erin] Yeah. Something to remember is that in our own lives, while… Not to speak for any of you, most of us are dealing with stakes that are those kind of stakes, the romance stakes, the coffee shop getting our order wrong stakes, and our lives often feel very dramatic to us.
[DongWon] Oh, dear me, it's always an 11.
[Laughter]
[Erin] You know what I mean? I think sometimes we feel like in fiction we have to, like, add all this outside force, and you can. But sometimes you can think about the ways in which your individual life feels like it has stakes, and go with those types of stakes within your fiction.
[Mary Robinette] Along those lines, one of the things that happens in your real life, the things that make it feel worse, is when you have more try-fail cycles. Like, I just want to make a cup of coffee, and… Or I just want to record a podcast, and first, they're using grinders outside, and then they're pounding on metal, and then there's a drill, and you're like, every time, it's like, "Really? Are we gonna finish this ever?"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So sometimes you can make it worse for your character just by adding in a try-fail cycle. Making it harder for them to solve a problem that you've already set up.
[DongWon] I think, on that note, you are entering into week 3 of NaNoWriMo, and it's time for you to raise the stakes and get to that word count.
 
[Mary Robinette] And we have some homework for you. I know that this part of NaNoWriMo is often a little challenging, so our homework this time is just designed to help you move forward with your work in progress. Pick an aspect of craft that you feel weak on, and choose to focus on it during your next writing session. So instead of trying to think of everything all at once, just pick one thing. Just say, "You know what, I'm going to really nail dialogue this time." Or, "This time, it's all going to be about description." Will you have to go back and correct and balance some things later? Yeah. Probably. But it allows you to move forward and feel like you're making progress in making your craft better without having to worry about getting the scene exactly perfect.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Howard] We are now offering an interactive tier on our Patreon found at patreon.com/writingexcuses called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.
 
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Writing Excuses 18.42: Creating Magic Outside of a System
 
 
Key points: Does magic need rules to work? You don't need to build a magic system ahead of time. Just dive in and let things happen. But... Humans are pattern-seeking creatures, and we will make a magic system out of everything. Does magic have to have a personal cost? Is magic consistent, in terms of costs and consequences? Some technology might as well be magic. Fantasy stories tend to personalize cost.  Technology stories tend to make the cost less personal. It's less about the cost of magic, and more about consequences. Folk magic, magic beyond our understanding and control, is a force on the story, not something exerted by the protagonist. Use SMART as scales to think about magic (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based). Build a try-fail cycle around ordinary things, which magic as the danger in the pit. When you make the choice of a SMART magic system or not, how do you decide? If it feels technological, put rules around it. What is the premise of the story? You don't always need to understand the rules, just roll the thunderstorm in. Science, learning, civilization can coexist with magical thinking, understanding, and folk logic. Instead of X or Y, what is the Z in between?
 
[Season 18, Episode 42]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Creating Magic Outside of a System.
[DongWon] 15 minutes long.
[Erin] 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.
 
[Erin] I am so excited to talk about magic outside of magic systems. Which is one of my favorite things to play with as a writer. Two of the stories that I had y'all read were… Had magical elements in them. I mean, wolfmen are not real that I know of. Conjuremen actually are real, but that's a type of folk magic that's very different than the way we think about magic a lot of times, where it's like you say, "Alakazam," and something happens. What I really enjoy about these is that I think sometimes we think we have to come up with rules in order for magic to work. But I would say that we really don't. I have a theory as to how we can determine the type of magic that we're using in our worlds. But before I do that, you, Mary Robinette, I keep thinking about you because you actually have worked in a magic that has more of a system. I'm curious, like, do you like it, do you not like it, how do you feel about it?
[Mary Robinette] Um, so I… Hmmm, this is hard, because I don't agree with your central premise, and I agree with your central premise, simultaneously.
[Erin] Love it.
[Mary Robinette] So, I don't think you need to do any building ahead of time on a magic system. I think you can just dive in and let things happen. Which is actually the way I did that with the Glamorous Histories. I dove in, I let things happen, and then I was like, "Well, you better not let that happen because now you've accidentally invented telephones. Let's roll that back." So I found the magic system as I went. But then I also made some very deliberate decisions about it. I've also written stories that are much more in the fairytale mode of magic system where it's just like magic things happened, and there's not… But, here's where I disagree with it. Humans are pattern seeking creatures, and we will make a magic system out of everything. Which is why, like, what is the one magic spell that works perfectly for hiding something in the real world. You put it anyplace safe. What is the counter spell for that? You buy a duplicate. Everybody knows this spell. Right? We make systems. If you walk away from the bus stop, the bus is going to come. If you say that Wolfy Things doesn't have a magic system, but it 100% has a magic system. The wolfsbane is a magic system. It's just not the kind of thing where you sit down and you turn it into… I think when people think about magic system, they think about something that you can turn into basically an RPG.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I think that's exactly it. When I think magic systems, I think things with rules that can be codified easily and always work the same way. One of the reasons that I often push back… There are 2 rules that I was taught about writing magic, neither of which I like for my own writing. One is that magic always has to have a cost. A personal cost. It is often the way that it's described.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] I mean, I guess I understand where it comes from, because magic can't just be unlimited. But like…
[DongWon] The desire to work magic into the logic of capitalism, though…
[Erin] Yeah.
[DongWon] It's a desire to work magic into an imperialist possessive extractive mode of thinking that I think is sometimes very fun. I love playing Dungeons & Dragons which is absolutely in that mode. But also there are other ways to think about the numinous and the magical that I think can be rule-based and consistency-based, but aren't necessarily highly systematized in a hierarchical way.
[Mary Robinette] Again, Nikki pays a cost for gathering the wolfsbane. He talks in the beginning about the prickles and the stings of gathering it. Like, there is a cost there, whether or not it's a monetary or economic cost. It's not… I agree that it doesn't necessarily have to be there. But there is… If we think of it as an effort, that there is something that is… Something happens. There is some sort of exchange.
 
[DongWon] One of the things… Where I'm going to push back on consistency.
[Mary Robinette] Consistency?
[DongWon] Yes, there can be a cost. But what one character pays in one moment versus one another character pays in another moment doesn't always have to be the same. Right? Think about this in terms of Studio Ghibli movies. Right? So there is consequence and cost. If you eat the food, then you end up turning into a giant pig. Right? There's a certain logic to that, a certain cost to that. But what one character experiences won't always be the same as what the next character experiences. Even though there's an underlying logic to it. Right?
[Mary Robinette] That is…
[DongWon] So I think when we're talking about systems, for me, at least, that's kind of like where I start to push back on the idea of like this has to be systematized in a concrete way. But I also understand what you're saying, that there's an underlying logic to how these things work.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, I mean, in the real world, when you're looking at systems, people do not pay the same costs under any…
[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So that's why I'm like I understand, but I think that whether or not you intend it, the reader is going to find a system and the characters will find a system. That systemizing will happen.
 
[DongWon] I'm going to push back a little bit. I'm sorry to keep pushing on this…
[Mary Robinette] No, no, this is…
[DongWon] But I do think that…
[Howard] Erin and I are having a great [garbled time?]
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I do think a Western reader will want a kind of rigor and system to it that is different from what readers from other cultures might [garbled think]. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Sure.
[DongWon] I think… I just want to be cautious about generalizing too much. I think the experience of an American reader or a European reader tends to be slightly different from the experience of a reader who is coming from a different culture, and has different expectations of what the logic and implied costs and consequences of magic could be in that world.
[Erin] Well, I think that…
[Howard] If I could address the technological…
[Erin] Sure.
[Howard] Elephant in the room. Erin, you began by saying to of these stories have magic in them, and one of them doesn't. I'm sorry, the technology to remove… Transfer… Manipulate… Bank, not bank memories might as well be magic. It is a technology, and you may have technological rules and costs associated with it, but the story does nothing to explore that beyond the most superficial level. It could just as easily have been a wizard did it.
 
[Erin] What I… This actually gets to one of the things about costs that I find really interesting, which is a slight pivot from what we've been talking about. But I think a lot of times, fantasy stories tend to personalize cost. It is your finger, your soul, your whatever, your blood. Technology stories tend to make the cost more like the way we think of cost. Electricity has a cost. But it's a bill, not like my soul. You know what I mean? Like, ultimately, that cost changes, and there are some people who can't pay their electric bill and have to deal with the consequences of that. But I think some of the desire to make fantasy really individual… A lot of times bloodline oriented in a weird way, like inherited, makes the cost really like about the actual person wielding it and not the systemic cost. Because, like, there's something going on… The memory tech is very magical, but it is something that is run by a company outside of, like, individual people, and the choices they're making are how to use that system, not that they have to create it themselves or sacrifice part of themselves other than their morals in order to do something with it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I completely agree with all of that. I think, as we're talking, something that is clarifying in my mind is that part of the reason we say magic… I suspect that part of the reason the magic must have a cost arose as a rule is because what we're really saying is for your protagonist to succeed, they must exert effort, and that frequently people were doing things where… It's like, "And now we do magic."
[DongWon] I think it's less about the magic having a cost, and more about the characters choices having consequences.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Right? So when Nikki's picking the berries, he is feeling a cost, but that cost is his choice to engage in this act of hunting, in this act of violence. He's giving blood to do that. I think that's a part that's so interesting to me. More than necessarily like magic works in a certain way.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things, going back to what your thing about electricity is, I will often tell people like electricity is a spell that will does one thing, and we figured out how to do a lot of really interesting things with this one spell.
 
[Erin] I love that. I also think a lot about folk magic. I thought a lot, because I did a lot of research into folk magic in working on Snake Season and, like, the conjureman has all of these different potions and things and… Do they work? Do they not work?
[DongWon] I love the conjure bag. Yeah.
[Erin] It's not clear. I think that's true of a lot of folk magic. I was talking with someone the other day who said, like, "Does it work to paint your house [garbled] blue, so that the spirits don't come in?" It's like, well, who's going to not paint their house that? Like, you don't want to be the one person that paints your house green and now the spirit's in you. So we believe, and sometimes a belief in something is its own magic. It doesn't actually have to work. If you paint your house blue and a ghost gets in anyway, you just figure you did something wrong with that. But you don't have to codify it. It's not like I didn't mix the paint correctly and do the right spell. It's more like, "Oh, well. I guess something happened, and, oh, well, they got in another way. Like, I'll have to deal with those consequences." I think that's where you see cultural differences. The idea that like ghosts are real, that there is just kind of magic around us that is beyond our understanding, beyond our control, is something that I find really interesting, because then it just becomes a force on the story as opposed to something that is being exerted by the protagonist within the story.
[DongWon] Well, it lets you draw on a cultural component in a really interesting way. Right? So, the fact that everyone paints the roof of their porch a specific shade of blue is a regional cultural thing. It is also superstition, it is also part of maybe a magic system of sorts. But it's also… It's a people saying this is who we are. We are people who paint our porches this color. Right? I think that is where folk magic intersects with narrative in ways that I find really rich and exciting and fun.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] We're going to take a break, and when we come back, I have a daft theory to propose, and I want to see what you think of it.
 
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[Mary Robinette] I recently read a short story collection called The World Wasn't Ready for You by Justin C. Key. I was blown away by this. It's his debut collection. It… Like, from the very first page, I was like, "Oh, this guy knows how to tell a story." Each story feels different. Also, warning, they are horror. Like, this is heavy stuff. The way the publisher described it was Black Mirror meets Get Out. So you're dealing with science fiction and horror and fantasy to examine issues of race and class and prejudice. It's fantastic. I highly recommend this. The World Wasn't Ready for You by Justin C. Key.
 
[Erin] Okay, I promised a theory, and here it is.
[Howard] You promised a daft theory.
[Erin] A daft theory.
[Howard] I'm here for the daft.
[Erin] I was thinking about how do we think… Like, if you're creating magic, if you want to make a more systemic or otherwise, how do you describe how magic works within your world? I started thinking about the acronym SMART that people always tell you to use for goalsetting. That your goal should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based. I decided that each of these could be a scale to think about magic.
[Mary Robinette] Ooo…
[Erin] So, is your magic specific, as in, like, it does one thing, or is it general? Is it measurable, like you can actually, and sort of controllable in that way, or is it more kind of broad? Is it attainable by certain people, or by everyone, or can only certain people wheeled it? Is it realistic or does it just do gonzo…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Wild stuff that you wouldn't expect? Is it time-based or is it always available to you? So this was my random theory. I'm curious, does any of that make sense for you guys?
[DongWon] Oh, my God, I love it so much.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I'm so excited by that. I'm like…
[DongWon] My love for you is melting.
[Howard] It makes sense, and I'm going to need… Let's see, what was the T for? Time-based?
[Mary Robinette] Time. Yeah.
[Howard] I'm going to need a big time-based spell in order to unpack it. One of the thoughts that I had about the magic… In Wolfy in particular, we talk about the wolfsbane as something that will work for killing a wolf.
[Mary Robinette] Very specific.
[Howard] Yeah, it was specific. But the effort that needs to be put in by the protagonist in order to kill the wolf that way has nothing to do with the wolfsbane, and everything to do with coaxing, using things that are real to all of us, the wolf up to the edge of the pit, and then pushing, using tools that are available to all of us, the wolf into the pit, and then let the magic do its thing. That aspect, when you've got a magic where the try-fail cycle is not focused on the magic, because you don't want to have to build all those rules, you have the try-fail cycle around can I get the wolf up to the edge of the pit and push it in, and then let the magic do the rest. It's a very simple… It seems very simple to me, anyway, a very simple toolbox for taking non-rule-based, non-systemic, non-gamified magic and working it into the familiar and useful structure of a try-fail cycle.
[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, Howard, I was going back to the SMART. I'm like, Yep, specific, it does this thing. Measurable? Yep. The wolf is dead. Accessible? Anyone can grab it. Then I was like, "What was R? What was R?"
[Erin] Realistic.
[DongWon] Realistic.
[Erin] Is it realistic? That's what gives space for like gonzo magic. Right?
[DongWon] Totally. Totally.
[Erin] So, is it like the wolf falls in and turns into like [a blues?]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, there is like that sort of surrealistic way of approaching magic where it never does…
[DongWon] The big dream logic.
[Erin] Yeah. Exactly. It doesn't do what you think. It does something, but it doesn't do what you would expect it to do. It probably isn't very repeatable, which is another thing that R sometimes stands for.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah yeah yeah.
[Erin] In that because the next time you do it, it might lead to a completely different effect. Which makes it harder for you to like wield it as a tool. Because every time, you're sort of taking a chance that it would do the thing you wish it would.
[Howard] That was in Iain Banks Against a Dark Background. The MacGuffin is a weapon called the lazy gun. All we know about the lazy gun is whatever you're pointing it at, when you pull the trigger, it's going to die. For small targets, it might be a tele-portal opens above it and jaws come down and chomp them. Totally gonzo. For large… The larger the target tends to be, is, the more likely it is that you're just going to get a boring explosion. I loved that magic system, and the whole story, once they get their hands on the gun, has nothing to do with how the gun works, and everything to do with hanging onto it long enough to point it at something.
 
[DongWon] So I guess my question for you is, Sour Milk Girls has a very specific, let's call it a magic system quote unquote, that is systematized, that has hierarchy, has all these consequences. Right? It fits most of the categories of SMART in those ways. Then, Snake Season definitely does not. Like, for you, when you're making those choices of what kind of magic system you want in this story, when do you want something hierarchical and rigorous, and when do you want something that's more fluid and numinous?
[Erin] Well, that's interesting. I think that I… The more it feels technological, for me, the more I want to put rules around it.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Because that's just I assume that technology has rules in a way that I'd never assume that magic does. So, the more… The closer it comes to tech, the more I think about it that way. I think it also comes down to, like, what is the premise of the story. So, in many ways, when I came up with Snake Season, the premise was, what if this… What if there's a woman living on the Bayou whose kids are messed up? Like, you know what I mean? Which has nothing to do with magic. But then the Bayou in that culture has so much magic infused into it that it like kind of leaks into the story. Like, even if I didn't mean for it to be there, it did. It was. Something I find… This is a complete aside… Very interesting about folk magic of sort of the Bayou New Orleans all of that area is that it actually mixes like traditional folk magic with Catholicism in a really interesting way. Catholicism is very rulebound, and folk magic is very not. I found something really interesting in that. Maybe a parallel to the ways in which Marie's trying to figure out like where she fits within the rules of something she doesn't fully understand.
[Mary Robinette] So I think the thing that… Sorry, my brain is exploding over here.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Yeah. Same.
[Mary Robinette] I think that… Circling back… Taking that, and then circling back to what you said, the more it feels like tech, the more it feels like a system, I think what you're actually getting at is the more mainstream it is. The more it has been monetized and become a technological system then something that is… Where it is all self-taught. So in the self teaching of it, the non-rulebound, that's where it's like, "Well, yeah, I do it this way." In the same way that when you're looking at art, it's like, well, you have to have perspective, and you have to have this. Then you see folk artists, you see outsider artists who are not doing it that way at all, who are exploring totally different things.
[DongWon] You see this around like tarot and arcana. Right? Like the massive industry that surrounds that at this point in terms of specific interpretations, specific things like that.
 
[Howard] If you look at our understanding of weather, climate, and ecology in, like, the 12th century. There are cycles of the moon, there are ann… Our passage around the sun, there are tides, there are seasons. But they don't always align and it's difficult to tell why. Moss grows on the north sides of trees. What is it about the windward and leeward sides of mountains? We didn't have an understanding of the water cycle, of where rain comes from, and we obviously didn't have satellites to predict thunderstorms. But we had this magnificent experience of a thunderstorm rolling in from nowhere and doing things that, in the context of the 12th century whoever is a huge force that… Did it come from the moon, did it come from the things we did, what did it have to do with the trees and the mountains and whatever else? So I look at that, and I map that onto how would I build a magic system where maybe it has rules, but I don't need to understand them. I just need to roll the storm in.
[Erin] In truth, I think we take comfort in the idea that we can understand it all in a way that is not true. I keep thinking about like… I can't think of a very specific example right now, but there are cases where there will be a village that relies on folk magic. They're like, "We are eating this thing or doing this thing, and it has this effect." People will come in and be like, "That makes no sense. It doesn't fit in. We can't codify it. We can't understand it. Stop doing that." Then there will be some tragic consequence. Then, later, they'll be like, "Oh, it turns out that actually you eating that mushroom did inoculate you against the thing we didn't realize was happening around you." Because there's this idea that we have to be able to put something in a box in order for it to make sense to us. I think part of that is the pattern seeking nature of humanity, but I think the fact that those patterns have to be kind of in written form or really measurable form in order for them to work for us is kind of the capitalism impulse.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] It's why, for me, the more technological something is, the more systemic it feels like it needs to be. Like, the more systematized it feels like it needs to be, because I associate it with needing… With capitalism, and I think capitalism, like, abhors a vacuum and uncertainty, because you can't monetize uncertainty.
 
[DongWon] I think this conversation's been so wonderful because it's unlocking a certain thing in my brain about how I think about this. I think one thing I realized about why I find this dichotomy to be a little bit of a frustrating one, between like highly systematized and folk magic in certain ways, and kind of even going to how Howard was sort of explaining people trying to understand natural phenomena, is it sets up science and learning and kind of civilization almost as opposed to magical thinking and understanding and folk logic. When, in fact, I think they coexist beautifully. Right? I mean, also, science is becoming more and more a magical thing. Like, you can spend 30 seconds thinking about quantum mechanics and you are in magic land at that point as far as I'm concerned. But…
[Howard] I think the GPS.
[DongWon] Exactly. But I think folk or magical thinking, dream logic, can exist in a way that doesn't negate that this is how the storm works, this is why the moss grows here. It can both be there are magical reasons for that, there are spiritual reasons for that, that are important to us as a community, as a culture, and also, water flows this way, storms work this way for reasons. Right? So I think when you have that in a story and when you're making your magic highly rigorous and systematized in a very Dungeons & Dragons way, you're telling a story that is more science fictional about systems, about abstraction, about society in a certain perspective, and when it's more dream logic, folk logic, more numinous in that way, it is more about the character growth and development and personal experience. Right? It's sort of the scale of the lens… I'm making a very broad generalization.
[Can we push back…]
[DongWon] Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. I am a… Obviously, I'm down for that. But, like, I think there's a reason why I think we tend to want the magic system in one type of story, very broadly speaking, and a little bit more of a certain kind of logic and character growth in a different kind of story.
[Mary Robinette] So, the reason I'm like, yeah, yeah. The Glamorous Histories are totally about exploitation. I mean, I'm like… I write… Like, Glamorous Histories are highly systematized, and you're telling me they're not about character?
[DongWon] No, I'm not saying they're not about character. What I'm saying is the Glamorous Histories are also very concerned with societal questions of how society is structured and oriented in the way the Jane Austen books are. Right? Her books are as much a critique of money and power and social dynamics as they are personal character driven romance stories. I'm not saying these are mutually exclusive categories. I'm saying scale of lens comes into play. I do think the glamorous histories That books have a lot to say about the world in a very broad lens way.
[Mary Robinette] But one of the things… Like… One of the things that I actually do use the magic system… Specifically use the magic system for is that… In book 5, is that James and Vincent have grown up with this very systematized, very European, and then they are encountering people who use Glamour but have been trained… Who've grown up Evo and come at it from a different way, and they been told, "Oh, that doesn't work that way. That's not how Glamour works." They've been like… They have been treated as if the way they use magic is folk… Is not real. Even though they're using exactly the same tools. But it's just the language that they use to talk about it has been pooh-poohed.
[DongWon] One thing I love about this conversation and one thing that… You can tell we keep wandering into like slightly prickly corners of this conversation, is because so many different valences have been attached to these currents. Right? So even me talking about a more systematized versus character driven way sounds like I was making a value judgment between commercial and literary in some way, or something along those lines. I wasn't doing that, but it comes off that way. You know what I mean? We talk about, like, Western versus non-Western, like hierarchical versus non-hier… There's all these like cultural judgments that get caught up in this. I think that is part of what makes this conversation so energetic and fascinating. Being live to those assumptions about what is better writing, what is better fiction, how should magic work, should it be SMART or not? Right? Like you… There's a valence in that, too. Right? I don't know, I love it. This is a super fun conversation for me.
 
[Erin] I actually… One of the reasons I had fun with SMART, other than, this is what I do when I sit in my house…
[Laughter]
[Erin] Is that… My cat's used to it… Is that, like, thinking about ways in which you can separate letters that seem like they would go well together… So, specific and measurable feel like, okay, that's your systematized versus your sort of generalized, like, uncontrollable. But what happens if you have something that's both specific, but uncontrollable? Or highly measurable, but very general? Like, what happens when we play with… Get rid of the idea that were actually talking about it either has to be X or Y, and figure out what's the Z that lives between…
[Mary Robinette] I love this.
[Erin] And has elements of both.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I really love this.
[DongWon] What a great system.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Just thinking about that as a set of sliders that you can push back and forth… It's very yummy.
[DongWon] It makes me want to, like, map every piece of fiction I love to that right now.
[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.
[Howard] The readerly can of worms here is when someone reads one of these speculative fiction pieces, however the magic was, however the characters were, what is the piece that they come away from and tell you, "Oh, I have got to tell you about this book. It's so cool because the magic does…" and then they tell you all about the magic, versus them saying, "Oh, I love this because these characters do…" For me as a writer, whatever it is that gets me excited about it, is… That is the important piece. I hope that's what the reader comes away with. But as often as not, I'm just wrong.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Well, this has been such a fun conversation. But to think about SMART in a different way, now we have some homework for you.
 
[DongWon] So, your homework is to write a thing that brings… Write a scene that brings an element of magic into a mundane place that you know well. The grocery store, a bank, whatever. Try to make it impactful without explaining how it all works.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Mary Robinette] Do you like stars? I do. Maybe you'd like to put up a constellation of stars by rating us on Apple Podcasts. Well, yes, we're talking about ratings, not astronomy. But a 5 star review can help us by creating a navigational beacon for new writers like you to find their way to Writing Excuses. So, rate us on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice.
 
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.39: Deep Dive into Event
 
 
Key points: Event stories are driven by disruptions of the status quo, the normal. They tend towards externally driven conflicts. Begin with a disruption of the status quo, end either with a restoration of the old or a new status quo. Events happen! But mostly, sequences of breaking, over and over and over. Cascades following one decision. But not just big events, small disruptions too. Obstacles are when each action further disturbs the status quo. Complications are when one problem opens up a different problem. Focus on where the characters are expending effort, what are they trying to solve. External events can be overwhelming, how do you avoid that? First, every try-fail cycle does not need to be the same size, or have the same difficulty. So, control pacing by picking smaller events and consequences, and stacking them. Make a list of possible problems, and slowly escalate them. Consequences are what matters to the character. When you start a story, you have a million choices. When you get to the climax of a story, you only have one. Gradually take away choices, close doors, until there is only one left. Make it a hard choice!
 
[Season 16, Episode 39]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Dive into Event.
[C.L.] 15 minutes long.
[Charlotte] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mary Robinette] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[C.L.] I'm C.L.
[Charlotte] I'm Charlotte.
[Mary Robinette] And I'm Mary Robinette.
 
[Dan] We are back with the fifth episode of our M.I.C.E. Quotient master class. So excited to have you all here for it. Today we're going to talk about the fourth and final element, event.
[Mary Robinette] Right. So event stories are driven by disruptions of normal. These are… Tend to be very externally driven conflicts. They began when a status quo is disrupted, and end when it is restored or there's a new status quo. So many things that we think of as plot are actually event. There's a tendency I've noticed among particularly science fiction and fantasy readers to think that the big actions that are happening are all of the plot, and they forget that all of the other pieces are also plot.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But event is all of the things that happen. But it's mostly about things breaking over and over and over again. It's that thing that happens in the real world where you're like, "I'm just…" And I should say, we are having our bathroom remodeled as we are recording this.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] The cascading effect of making one decision to change a status quo, which is, let's have a new bathroom, winds up impacting everything else. Because once you decide that you're going to peel up the floor, then you discover that since your grandfather built the house, that the floor beams are actually two by sixes instead of two by tens which is standard for a floor. So that then in turn breaks their ability to put in water lines and air conditioning because they have to fit them into smaller spaces. Also, then you have to have things reassembled. Then, when you're trying to record a podcast, there are contractors who are constantly coming in and interrupting. None of you have heard any of this because we have solved it by managing to record around things. But it is this cascading chain led from one decision to make one change in the status quo that is then breaking all the rest of my normal. Good times.
 
[Charlotte] Good times. I'm so glad that you said that, because I think certainly for me when I was starting out with event, I always thought of it is something massively big, explosions, a meteor coming, Independence Day type thing, but it can actually be something much, much smaller, like a bathroom or a tap on your sink breaking, something like this. Anything that disrupts the status quo, or your normal. Right?
[Mary Robinette] That is absolutely correct. So, again, as you say, this is… But a lot of times when we think about ramping up the tension in event stories, we think about needing to make things bigger and bigger and bigger. It's really just about this cascade of normal breaking, that you attempt to fix something and not only does it not work, but something else breaks next to it. So, again, in the obstacle versus complication thing, obstacles in this form are when each action causes the status quo to become more disturbed. So, again, in small frame world, if someone has a problem with their boss, that's an external problem. That's not the problems they have with themselves, that's an external problem. So they want to change that status quo. They go to HR to try to resolve it. That action then directly causes them to get fired. So that's an obstacle. It's where they tried to change something and a problem in the same thread line causes it to just go wrong. Complications are when a question opens up to a different problem. So someone has a problem with their boss. They go to HR. That, in turn, leads to them being held prisoner by terrorists. Who are the terrorists? Where did they come from? This is heading things in a completely different way. So these are… This is the kind of thing that you're looking for. I mean, you could make the argument in some cases that this is a continuation of a disruption of status quo. I am thinking of it is kicking off an inquiry thread about who are these people and the milieu of escaping a hostage situation.
 
[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say, event is the one that is the hardest for me to get my head around. Is that your experience as well? Is there something trickier about event, or am I just thinking about it wrong?
[Mary Robinette] I think that it is that… Because event is action driven, everything feels like it's an event. Stories are inherently about change. That's a thing that happens in stories. So when you're looking at… Let's say that you're doing a milieu story and your characters… Let's say your characters crash land on a planet. If they arrive on the planet, that is definitely a milieu story and the thing that they're trying to solve is getting off the planet. If they are explorers and they land under a controlled set up in the story begins after they have already arrived on the planet and they are attempting to… Their ship breaks. Okay, the ship breaking is, at this point, an event. Because it has disrupted their status quo. Because they're supposed to be there and they're supposed to be exploring. Whereas if they are crashing on the planet, if they are there unexpectedly, and trying to leave, their primary goal is to leave the planet and fixing the event of the problem with the ship is incidental to the primary thrust, which is getting off and surviving the planet. That's why it is… With this one, and with all of them, the question that you're looking at and the thing that is often the deciding factor isn't necessarily… I mean, a lot of it is where you start and stop. But a lot of it is what are they trying to solve. Where are they expending their effort? In a murder… If someone is murdered and you put the focus, the primary effort goes into trying to answer questions, that's an inquiry. If the primary focus goes into learning to live after this person has been murdered, and someone else's dealing with the question of who did it, there are detectives who are going off and solving things. But the focus of the story is on how does the widow survive, how does the widower learn to fold his own laundry… It's a little bit of gender stereotyping, and…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] We're just going to roll with it right now. My husband is actually the one who does laundry in our household. So… But this is… That's the… One of them, the focus is on trying to establish a new normal, and the other is on trying to answer a question. That tells you the kind of conflicts that go in the middle and where you're putting your emphasis.
[Dan] Okay. So, as with some of the other ones we've looked at, the value then of figuring out what kind of story, which of the four M.I.C.E. elements you're dealing with is that it helps you to focus your story and it helps you take it in the right direction, so that you're not spinning off like you said into story bloat and adding unnecessarily unnecessary elements because you know more exactly what your story is about.
[Mary Robinette] That is correct.
 
[Mary Robinette] Actually, I'm going to talk… Pause here to talk about our book of the week, because I think that's a good example of this, and the trickiness there. So I am the audiobook narrator for Seanan McGuire. Also, currently, as we are recording this, I am in the process of recording When Sorrows Come which is her new book. When you hear this, it will be out. It's book 15 in the October Daye series, so FYI. But the thing about these books is that they are a combination inquiry-event with character going on as well. But the thing about the inquiry… Toby is a detective, and there are things that she needs to answer. But really, when you're signing up for the books, what you're interested in is watching her kick some ass. So the primary driver in a lot… Is arguably that these are event books. Chaos just surrounds her, things are constantly going wrong. She's constantly getting stabbed, she's constantly needing to solve problems. There is much less emphasis put on the actual detecting. The detecting exists is a set up to give us all of the events that go wrong. Are we there and interested in it? Yes. Does it need to carry weight? Absolutely, because it's a novel, and it has multiple threads. But the driver for most of this is about this… These events, these things going wrong. There's also character stuff that's happening that is wonderful. There's… It's kind of a constant coming-of-age. But it is a coming-of-age that is always being kicked off by things going terribly, terribly wrong. And that affecting everything else in Toby's life. I like these books a lot. I enjoy narrating them. I… In every book, Seanan makes me cry while narrating.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, I highly recommend them. I get better as a narrator, FYI, over the course of 15 books. So don't judge me too harshly on the first books. But…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] But that was… The new one is When Sorrows Come. Correct?
[Mary Robinette] When Sorrows Come by Seanan McGuire. Yes. It…
[Dan] Awesome.
[Mary Robinette] Is absolutely a… It is status quo disruptions, just constant status quo disruptions. Like, we're going to check this thing out. Then the process of checking this thing out causes someone to get killed. The process of checking out how they get killed causes someone else to get killed. This is not a spoiler if you ever read an October Daye novel.
[Chuckles]
 
[Charlotte] So, with an event story, if it's about action, external things happening, status quo's being disrupted, how do you keep that from becoming overwhelming? Like, something happens and then something else happens and then another thing happens and it's all related, it's all consequence and staying in the same M.I.C.E. element. I guess it's a question about pacing, really. Like, how to control that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, pacing… The… One of the things that I misunderstood what I was first learning to apply the M.I.C.E. elements to things is thinking that every try-fail cycle had to be the same size, and that they all had to be the same levels of difficulty. So, similarly, that I that all of the consequences had to ramp up at the same proportional level.
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that you can do when you're trying to control pacing through the events that happen in the consequences of those events is to think about smaller consequences and stacking them. Sometimes what I will do is I will make a list of possible consequences, things that can go terribly wrong. Then I'll… This is in a… I should say, this is in a phase when I'm stuck and brainstorming. It is not the way I just… Normally I just write. But when I'm stuck and brainstorming, I'll list the consequences and then I'll rank them in kind of best case scenario to worst-case scenario.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Then remove the best case scenario and sort of dole out the worst-case scenarios in a slowly escalating piece of rolling disasters.
 
[Charlotte] Right. This is all…
[Mary Robinette] But, like pacing is… Go ahead.
[Charlotte] No, I was going to say, this is always in relation obviously to your character, because what is devastatingly awful to me might not be the same for my sister or my friend. So it's always with the character in mind, right, the list of consequences?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Charlotte] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Right, right. Exactly. Because you're thinking about the character's status quo being disrupted. Although… So it is their sense of normal and their place in the world. The world being disrupted, for instance, there are big disruptions like the horrible disruptions happening in Greece right now as we're recording this. Terrible, terrible fires. Those are not affecting me. So it is a disruption of the status quo, but it is not a disruption to my status quo. C?
[C.L.] There was something I wanted to add around pacing. One thing that really got my head around the concept of pacing was the idea that when you begin a story, you have a million choices. When you get to the climax of the story, you have one. Pacing is all about taking choices away, gradually. Closing more doors until there is only one thing left to do.
[Dan] Oh, that's brilliant.
[Garbled]
[Mary Robinette] I'm sitting here going, "Yeah. Yeah, because it really is…" It is about getting to… Trying to get them to a point where it's an impossible choice, it's a choice that is hard.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Yeah.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Speaking of things that are hard, should I give them homework?
[Yes]
[Dan] I think that's great.
[Mary Robinette] All right. Grab your fairytale. You are going to attempt to strip out everything except the event stuff. So with Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the three bears come home, there is a home intruder in the bear's home. Furniture has been broken. They have to drive this little blonde girl out of their home. Their dinner has been eaten, they have to re-make dinner. Papa Bear has to repair furniture. Then, and only then, after they have restored their status quo, are they truly safe.
[Dan] Awesome.
[Mary Robinette] Or there's a home intruder and Papa Bear just kills her. Now they have to live with the consequences.
[Laughter]
[garbled… Porridge. What are you doing, Papa Bear? I'm retiring.]
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] Okay. So I want to ask, and I know this is homework, but I want to dig into this for a second. Is there a way to cast Goldilocks and the Three Bears as an event story from Goldilocks' point of view without making it just a milieu story?
[Mary Robinette] So, it is about a disruption to the status quo. If we start…
[Dan] If we start the story when she's in the house and the bears show up?
[C.L.] I think in this case…
[Dan] I don't know.
[C.L.] Goldilocks and the Three Bears, as an event story, Goldilocks is the antagonist.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. The only… Like… I think if you… Huh. So, it is about a change in the status quo. If Goldilocks wants to make a change in the status quo, then she would need… What does she want to change? Goldilocks. Goldilocks' mom won't cook her lunch. You have to start it at a different point.
[Dan] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] Goldilocks' mom won't cook her lunch and is trying to force her to take a nap. She doesn't want anything to do with that. So she is going to make a forcible break from her family and she's going to run away from home. It gets back into character again.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Wow. I'm not sure. I think there's got to be a way to make Goldilocks an event story.
[Dan] Well, rather than puzzle over it now, that'll be a bonus homework. If anyone comes up with a really good one, let us know.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] But, for now, you are out of excuses. Go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces
 
 
Key Points: Scenes and set pieces? Start with setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development. Setting? Wow factor and tactical implications. Environments let players get creative. Challenge? Variety, and catering to different players. Sneak, battle, talk? Unique elements. Make your challenges hinge on character abilities, not player abilities. Adversaries. Introduce bad guys early, and make things personal. Give them distinct abilities. What's their motivation? In prose, we often challenge characters outside their area of expertise, but in games, we usually challenge players in their skill sets. Rewards, or consequences, and story development. Rewards, gear, show the reader they are making progress. Story development. Make sure characters have incentives to do the encounters, and that there are stakes. Think about how a scene pushes things forward. What are the ramification, what are the potential callbacks?
 
[Season 16, Episode 22]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Cassandra] Scenes and Set Pieces.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[James] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[James] I'm James.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We are talking about scenes and set pieces today. We've got a lot to cover, so were just going to jump right into it. James? Get us started.
[James] Yeah. So when I'm designing an encounter or a scene or whatever you want to call it, I like to break it up into several different categories. So I like to think about the setting, the challenge, the adversaries, the rewards, and also story development. So we're going to hit each of those in turn. I just want to start off with, so, for setting, Cass… Oh, Mary Robinette?
[Mary Robinette] I just want to say… I just want to jump in real fast and say all of the prose writers have been riding along with this because they're interested and curious about it. This episode in particular has stuff that directly applies to what you do. Because every point that we're about to hit is something that you should be thinking about in your prose scenes as well.
 
[Setting]
[James] Yeah. I mean, I definitely think, Cass and I both write fiction as well and I'm sure we probably bring everything we've said in this class to those as well. But, so I want to just right now with Cass, when you're designing the setting for a scene or an encounter, what do you think about?
[Cassandra] Well, there are two things, primarily. The wow factor and the tactical implications of your environment. The wow factor can be a whole bunch of things. With video games, in particular, it's all about the visuals, it is all about the audio, and it's also about cinematography. You can have the best graphics in the world, you can have the best music, but if it's a very static kind of thing, or it's just a character walking in, it's not going to work out for everyone. It's also about individual imaginative [garbled]. In prose, for example, it could be things like how things smell, how things taste, texture. But in games, it can also be about emotional beats. My favorite example of that is Persona 5. When you start the game, you are midway through a heist. There are people with shadow faces leading you on through it. You're running through it. It's great and everything, but it's not terribly impactful because it's weird. However, at the climax of the game, after you have everything explained to you, you actually revisit that first place with the exact same parameters. It's suddenly so much more powerful, because you just had 40 hours of context drilled into your head. Well, we've come to the tactical side, since most of my design goes through actual designers. I'm curious about how you develop them into the RPGs, James?
[James] Yeah. So, in a game like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons or Starfinder that's all about more or less killing things and taking their stuff, or occasionally other variations on that, environments can be really important to the design of scenes, especially combats, because it allows the characters to get really creative. It allows… And it makes, frankly, things seem more interesting than just fighting skeletons in a blank room over and over again. When you add an environment, suddenly the players have a lot more things they can work with. So, for instance, you get the players coming up with all these interesting ideas where they'll go, "Okay, if I tie the badminton net to the goat, and then I scare the goat with the airhorn, then they'll run up the end." Like, players are really creative. You want to give them props to do stuff  with. So that's where I feel like the environment can really be handy. Which… Oh, Dan, did you want to jump in?
[Dan] Yeah, I was just going to say that this is a lesson that I learned watching Star Wars movies, actually. Because the first time I played a tabletop wargame about spaceships, I very quickly realized that it's super boring. Because there's no terrain in space. So there isn't really an environment to interact with. It's the absolute epitome of an empty room. Then you watch the Star Wars movies and realize, "Oh, this space battle, they're running through a trench. This one, they're dodging asteroids. This one, they're flying through debris. This one, there's the big giant shield and it's all about which side of the shield are you on, and is it going to be brought down in time." There's always some kind of dynamic interactive element to make those encounters more interesting.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things about the setting that I just wanted to get in here for prose writers, is that the same thing is true. Like, when you're thinking about the setting, how is your character going to use that setting? How is it going to play into the overall arc of the story?
 
[Challenge]
[James] That brings us right into the second one, which is talking about the type of challenge. I really like variety, like you were saying. I really want to mixup the enemy types with the types of challenges. So it just doesn't become wave after wave. Thinking about challenges that cater to the different character types and player types. Because some people are going to want to sneak, some people are going to want to battle their way through. Mary Robinette's probably going to want to make friends with them if they're giant apple trolls, like from last episode.
[Laughter]
[James] So, you want to make sure that there's sort of something for everybody. But, Cass, what do you think about?
[Cassandra] Well, the balance is definitely one of the most necessary things. But I think it's also important to focus on the elements that make your game unique. If your game is all about a character with an energy whip, create challenges that explore every possible use of that whip. Let her swing across chasms, electrocuting things, retrieving objects… I remember Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I picked up this weird Taser-like ability, and my favorite thing to do would be to knock out people and just very gently, like, fill the water full of electricity to watch them very gently buzz to death.
[Laughter]
[Cassandra] In an RPG, you should always…
[Mary Robinette] Very gentle.
[Cassandra] Be sure that your challenges hinge on character abilities and not just player abilities. The players who spent points building a detective should have an easier time solving mysteries. Even if the player playing the barbarian is naturally better at puzzles.
[James] That's so important. I feel like I've absolutely been in that game where I'm the wizard with the 18 intelligence, but I'm naturally just terrible at most puzzles compared to the people I play with. So it'll be the barbarian being like, "No, it's this and this and this."
[Chuckles]
[James] I'm like, "Dude. You shouldn't know that, and I should."
[Dan] Yeah. The first time that I wrote, it was actually an adventure for Starfinder, typically the game writing that I have done has been in much more narrative systems. Starfinder is much more of a crunchy numbers-based thing. So, the main comment that the editor sent back after I submitted the first draft was, "Dan. Players like to roll dice."
[Yeah. Laughter]
[Dan] I realized that I had not really given them any skill checks. It was all based on just kind of interaction. You can ask these questions and learn this information and then you know where to go. He's like, "No. There's like 20 skills in this game. You haven't used any of them. They put points into those skills and they like to roll dice. Give them a chance to do what they're good at."
[Cassandra] That sort of reminds me, I think, of my favorite tabletop RPG story that is in [garbled]. There was a comment going around a few years ago, of this group of Avengers trying to fight, I think, this Orc Lord. Everyone was kind of dropping over dead and it was just terrible and they were all going to lose. There was this one dude left. He was like, "Okay. What? Screw it. My character has like really high charm. I am going to try to seduce the Orc Lord." He rolled a natural 20.
[Chuckles]
[Cassandra] There was just this long pause. He was like, "You know what, I am going to go for it. I am going to declare my love and just stop the war." He kept rolling natural 20s. By the end of the game, his character was leading this Orc Warlord home and going like, "Mom, this is my new husband."
[James] See, that's what I love about tabletop role-playing games. Because in a videogame, maybe you spend the resources to build out that possibility, even though it's a very, very faint possibility. But in a tabletop role-playing game, you can just change on the fly and go with that. I think that's really one of the things that has kept games like Dungeons & Dragons alive in the era of video games.
[Mary Robinette]. If you been listening to all of these things, the variety of challenges that your character faces in prose is as important as it is in a game. You don't want a character who's constantly just fighting things. You want a character who's having to solve the things in different ways. Often in ways that do not play to their skill sets. That's what often will make an interesting challenge in prose.
 
[Adversaries]
[James] Actually, that's a great segue into talking about adversaries. So, I think it's really important when you're thinking about the adversaries in your encounter, you want to introduce any big bad guys early and give players a reason to care. You want to make things personal. So, yeah, what do you folks do in terms of trying to establish a good adversary?
[Cassandra] You want to give them a few distinct abilities that strongly point towards who they are and what they are, and possibly, at least for me, have at least one encounter that completely cements their personality. I think a good example of this is Borderlands and Handsome Jack. Very early on, you meet him and you kind of get a sense of exactly who he is and why you should absolutely hate him. These things need to be done quickly. I think if you're designing a tabletop role-playing game, these parameters have to be set very clearly as well. Because players have the whole game to learn how to use a complex character effectively. A game master who is looking at your notes, he only has minutes. I'm curious about what people have done in regards to that [garbled]
[Howard] Yeah.
[Cassandra] Adversaries.
[Howard] For my own part, the word adversary is hugely informative here. If you run across something, somebody, some animal, whatever, and it just wants to kill you, that's not an adversary. That's just obstacle, it's an enemy. An adversary that I'm going to care about? Well, look, the party and I, we are trying to build a bridge across the street. But the Otter King has decided that there shall be no bridge across the stream, and he takes issue with our entire project, sabotaging us at every turn. But if we don't build the bridge, our eventual plan to unify the clans on both sides of… You see where I'm going?
[James] I romance the Otter King.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Yes. Please. Romance the Otter King, because everybody loves otters. Ultimately, if… For the adversary to feel real, and for us to feel invested, they have to be working logically and passionately and investedly in something that runs counter to what we're trying to do.
[James] I just want to throw out that in my current Starfinder game, I have a player who is literally playing an otter marriage counselor. That's her whole deal. She's incredibly effective. It's… We've talked our way through half the encounters.
[Mary Robinette] So, the thing with adversaries, we been talking about and around, comes back to a thing that I bring from theater for you prose writers. What's my motivation? The Otter King? Like, sure, the Otter King wants to stop you from building the bridge, but why do they want to stop you from building the bridge? That why can make your adversary often significantly more interesting. So think about what that motivation is.
[James] One other thing I want to throw out before we go to our game of the week is that something Cass had said about keeping abilities narrow. This is especially important in tabletop role-playing games, and which I always tell people who are designing new monsters or new adversaries is that really, you're only… If you're not going to use an ability in the first couple rounds of combat, that's often all that an enemy is on stage for. So you don't want to build an enemy with a dozen different abilities if they're only ever going to use three of them. Because that just makes it harder for the game master to process quickly. So pick a couple of things and that'll both let the GM know how to run them and let the PCs know how to fight them.
 
[James] But, let's pause for our book of the week.
[Mary Robinette] So, book of the week, or game of the week, is Shadow Point Observatory. Which is a game for Oculus Quest 2. It's a puzzle game. But I picked it up because it's beautiful. It's about observatories, which are totally my jam. You're trying to solve this thing where this young girl has been ripped out of time. It's the character that you're going in and you're trying to figure out how to restore her to her time. But because she's been ripped out of time, every time you encounter her, each layer of the puzzle, she gets older and older. It takes decades in her… For her for you to figure this out. There's this one point… It's a spoiler, but this is also like… The kind of excruciating thing that they're doing. Because you're in this beautiful environment, and she begs you not to leave. You're like, "But I have to go, because I have to finish solving these puzzles in order to bring you back." It's so painful to walk away from her. It's just… It's really nicely done. I liked it a lot. My dad likes it too. So. Shadow Point Observatory. Highly recommended.
 
[Dan] Super cool. Before we move on to the next thing, I cannot get this thing out of my head that Mary Robinette said earlier, when we were talking about challenges. She said that for prose, it is often, and I would say usually, really important to challenge the character in something that is not their area of expertise. Which is the exact opposite of what we were saying about game writing. Where often you want to let people do what they are good at. I think that that's a really key thing to bring out, that in games, the players want to excel. They want to have a chance to use their powers. They want to show how awesome they are. In fiction, we often kind of… We want to let our characters demonstrate their awesomeness, but we also want to force them to be weak and to overcome those weaknesses. Which, I think, is a really interesting dichotomy.
[James] Well, it's important to remember that when you're doing a game, you're designing for a range of characters, often in a role-playing game. You don't necessarily know which one you're getting. So you want to make sure that the challenge you design is hard enough to challenge the person who specializes in that particular type of challenge, so that it's a satisfying thing, but they can succeed. But it still needs to be beatable by characters who aren't specialized in that. So you want to make sure that you are accommodating for all of the above.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Even… In both cases, I think, the thing that will happen is the thing that happens in real life, which is that whatever tools you bring to the table, whether it's your characters bringing it to the table in prose or in games, they're going to solve it with the tools that they have on hand. So, just because the challenges and set up for them to be like this is the… The character who in prose who walks into the room and is like, "Oh, there's a lot of people here that I'm supposed to shoot at and I can't… I don't actually know how to use a gun. But I'm very good at sneaking." So they do this… They use the skills, even though the challenge in front of them is set up for them to fail.
[Howard] I want to do a quick call back to something Cassandra said two or three episodes ago about choices yielding consequences. The reward being consequences. I don't mind failing a challenge in a role-playing game, provided the failure isn't, "Oop. Wawawawawa. Game over. Start again." If the challenge going back to the Otter King… I failed to talk to the Otter King, now we have to fight the entire otter tribe. Well, that's a sad failure, because I don't want to fight the otters, I want to befriend the otters. If you build the challenges in such a way that the failures alter the choices we can make, then failure isn't catastrophic. I feel like in role-playing games, failure should be fun.
[James] Yeah.
 
[Rewards]
[Mary Robinette] I feel like that is a natural segue to talking about rewards as part of the consequences.
[James] Yeah. Absolutely. Rewards, and even putting rewards and story development together. Because in many ways, like you were just saying, there kinds of the same thing. The rewards, the consequences, and the development, all fall into the same category. So how do you all handle that?
[Cassandra] Very carefully. Because I feel like…
[Chuckles]
[Cassandra] The entire feel of a player's experience can be ruined, honestly, if they end up with, let's say equipment that is meant for them in the end dungeon. Now, for some players, again, I am a power player, I am happiest when I can just bulldoze through things. It makes me laugh. But for other players, it just takes away the enjoyment, because all the challenges are gone. The environment, the varieties you build in the consequences, they no longer matter if one strike of the sword is enough to stop an adversary cold. So you do not want to end up with a character that is overpowered. Similarly, it's important to track the rewards, because an underpowered character is just going to be miserable. The grind isn't fun when you're dedicating a few hours of your life to fun.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that I think about in prose is that the rewards are part of the way of letting the reader know that you're making progress. It's not just about the gear that you pick up, but that yes, this slog is worth it. Because it's really easy in prose, we talk a lot about yes-but, no-and, and making things worse for the character, and it's really easy to forget the importance of the yes, which is the reward. Even if there is a consequence for that reward. It's still that forward momentum, that forward progress, is still important to think about.
[Howard] One of the mechanics we built into Planet Mercenary, if players embrace in character their failures, they get role-play points. You can spend the role-play points to boost die rolls, to reroll dies, to reroll dice, to… There's all kinds of uses for them we didn't put limitations per game around on how you spent these. One of the players in one of the play tests I ran, to my great joy, figured this out, so that when we got to the point where it's time to defuse the nuclear weapon, he has accrued all of his role played failures and plays this stuff and Bam! The weapon is defused. Nothing about that felt steamroll-y. Everything felt earned. Because he had done such a good job of owning all of the earlier failures.
[Dan] That's great. One thing about rewards, when we're talking about gear, I keep talking about Star Wars and I apologize for that. I don't know why that's the example that leaps to my mind. But when you're talking about giving overpowered gear to a character too early, Luke Skywalker gets his lightsaber like 20 minutes into the first movie. That's the best weapon in the game, so to speak. But what's fascinating about it is that he… The reward is not the gear. It's his own skill with it. We have to get into the middle section of the second movie before he really learns how to use it. It's not until the end of the third movie that he gets it into a full-blown lightsaber battle where he gets to show off all his skills. So sometimes rewards are… It can be really valuable to give someone the crazy equipment early on, and then just let them learn how to use it.
 
[Story Development]
[Cassandra] Last of all, one you really do need to consider is how story development ties in with encounters they are creating. Make sure that your characters are incentivized to actually do the encounters. Make sure there are stakes. They don't need to be big stakes, however. Assassin's Creed Valhalla had this one [cat] that you could find and [stick, take] to your boat. It was a completely separate, quiet quest. Mechanically, it did nothing. It's just a decorative item. But, good Lord, it's also a kitty that you can have on your Viking boat for the rest of the game. James, do you have anything to add on that point before we run away [garbled]?
[James] Yeah. You want to think about how does a given scene push things forward. What are the ramifications? What elements do you want to tag for future reference, so that, as we said before, you can call back to something? What can the outcomes of this scene lead to later so that when, three scenes down the road, somebody calls back to a thing you just did, you've laid the groundwork for that?
 
[Mary Robinette] You all had homework for us, I think?
[Cassandra] We did. We would like you to design an encounter for a game that you've enjoyed, getting all of the factors that we mentioned. Setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development.
[Dan] Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. This is been a long, but I think, really fantastic episode. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.20: Branching Narratives
 
 
Key Points: Branching is what separates role-playing games from traditional stories, by letting players make choices. Like choose-your-own-adventure games. It's easy to let possibilities multiply out of control, so you need to plan the endings and the pruning. Make sure you know the intersections or checkpoints that keep the story on track. Let the players make meaningful choices. Tie the big beats (story, character, or whatever) to the checkpoints where the paths converge. If you put something important on one path, make sure other paths have something of equal value. How do you make branches fun? One trick is branches within branches. Another is responses by NPCs that help make them persons, not just information sources. Use conditionals and callbacks to show that choices make a difference, that they have consequences and ramifications. Avoid hat economies, choices need to matter. The best reward is consequences. Leave room for the players to make interpretations. Objectives or item collection can give an illusion of control, an apparent freedom of choice, while still pointing the players in the direction you want the story to go. Consider using access as a consequence to help control the direction of the narrative.
 
[Season 16, Episode 20]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[James] Branching Narratives.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[James] I'm James.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.
[Howard] And I want to go left.
[Laughter]
 
[Dan] So, we're talking about branching narratives this week, which is a big part of the player choice we were talking about last time. Cass, where do we start with branching narratives?
[Cassandra] Branching narratives is, I think, over the years something I've learned to see as both almost a poem and a puzzle. It needs to be this elegant, very spare thing, but there's just so much thought that goes into it. It is really what differentiates a role-playing game from a traditional story, because branching allows the players to step into the narrative and make their own choices. Kind of like those old classic choose-your-own-adventure games. But every time you give a player a choice, you're kind of splitting off into two different realities. On paper, this doesn't sound too bad. Life is an infinite split of possibilities, after all, but if you're writing a game, you will not have a life if you follow that momentum. So every turn and every binary decision, these can quickly multiply out of control. As such, you need to have certain things figured out. Such as the ending where you plan to have people go, any early failures, and you need to kind of prune it, to make sure it fits the kind of format that feels both dynamic and elegant, and is still leading a player towards the information you need them to go. But if you do too much of it, players will notice that they're being… Well, you're leading them along. Sorry. James?
[James] No, like, I'm with you. I think, like what you said about pruning branches, you always need to be bending those branches back toward the main story you want to tell. You want to have things divide, but you want to think of it like links in a chain potentially. Where characters make a choice, and their paths diverge, and you can totally see the hand gestures I'm making, because podcasts are a very visual medium…
[Chuckles]
[James] But you diverge and then you bend those choices so they come back towards an intersection that I think of as like checkpoints that let you keep the story on track. So, for instance, if you give the players the choice of talking to the witch or talking to the Dragon, they can head off in those different directions, but you know, as the writer, that whatever they do in those two interactions, they're still going to get request to go find Bigfoot. So then both of those paths will converge again on Bigfoot's lair. So now, suddenly, you've branched apart, people got to make a meaningful choice, but now they're back headed towards the direction you want to tell.
[Howard] Yeah. For my own part, it's been helpful… I love the term pruning that you used, Cass, because there are… At times, you have to prune and remove possible choices, just in order to keep yourself sane. Other times, what you are pruning is choices that are no longer available because of a choice that the player has made. Then there's the decision, like with Bigfoot's cave, this is the thing I'm not going to prune no matter what gets cut or chosen elsewhere, this piece of the tree remains because I need it. Often it's helpful when outlining these things to make decisions ahead of time as to which pieces you just can't prune and which pieces you will be removing, you'll be swapping out, or, if they decided to kill off an NPC versus talking to them, you have the option to file the serial numbers off of that NPC and have them show up elsewhere, so the dialogue you've written, the clothing you've designed, whatever, those assets can be reused.
 
[Dan] One thing that I want to throw out really quick as a resource, if… It was very hard for me initially to get my head around how to write a branching narrative like this, and specifically how to outline one. Until I realized that there are several websites that have mapped the full flowchart of all of the original choose-your-own-adventure books. You can Google those…
[What!]
[Dan] And they're these beautiful little just kind of line drawing look like a subway map kind of things. They really help you to wrap your head around this idea of how the story can branch apart and then checkpoint back together. It kind of helps visualize it in a way that helped me a lot.
[Cassandra] I did not know that existed.
[Mary Robinette] I'm just like the effort it was taking me to not Google that right now is…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I want you to appreciate that I am not going down that branching narrative path.
[Howard] Well, I did Google it because I'm going to be told to include it in the liner notes.
 
[James] Well, I think one trick that's important to remember for that is to, in the story you're telling, tie the big story beats or big character beats or whatever that you want to make sure are in there, you want to tie those to your checkpoints. So you want to make sure that if there's a crucial piece of character development, it doesn't happen on just one branch, because you want to make sure that… To tell a successful story, if you know you have to hit certain key plot points, you have to make sure that they're at those points where all the paths sort of re-converge or else you need to do it separately in each of the paths. But doing it multiple times is expensive.
[Cassandra] I would also say that if you're insistent on let's say not sharing a narrative beat or like something important to the story at a certain checkpoint and, like, you want to keep it exclusive for one node, the other node should have information of equal value and consequence. Players don't necessarily mind it if they miss something if they get something else in return.
[James] Yeah.
 
[Dan] Okay. Let's pause here for our game of the week, which I believe is coming from Howard today.
[Howard] It is. Several years ago, I decided that I wanted to create a Schlock Mercenary role-playing game. It's something that I'd been asked about for a decade and a half until that point. So I sat down with Alan Bahr and we created the Planet Mercenary role-playing game. We looked at the possibilities of licensing a game engine from someone else or homebrewing our own. Ended up going with homebrewing. Because one of the things that I wanted to be able to do is create game mechanics that gave characters… Gave characters? That gave players the tools they needed to tell a story in the spirit of the Schlock Mercenary comic space opera. I wanted it to be funny. So we created the Mayhem deck and a whole bunch of fun materials so that… Our goal was I want you to be able, with your friends, to play a Schlock Mercenary game and have it feel like I'm there telling jokes with you. That was a pretty high bar to clear. I feel like we cleared it. Of course, I'm the authoritative source here.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Alan recently with… He went on to form Gallant Knight games and has done lots of role-playing game design since, has released the Tiny Planet Mercenary rules set which uses many of the same tools that we created, but is in the… It's a much smaller format. So there's Planet Mercenary and Tiny Planet Mercenary which are both tabletop role-playing games in the Schlock Mercenary setting.
[Mary Robinette] Isn't it pronounced [squeaky voice] tiny planet mercenary?
[Laughter]
[Howard] Now it is. I think Alan might request that soundbite from us.
[Laughter]
 
[James] All right. Thanks, Howard. So, I want to know, Cass, how do you make these narrative chains fun? How do you make them fun and interesting?
[Cassandra] Oh, there are a lot of different techniques. You… Once you know the scope of what you're working with and how much you can play around with those dimensions, there are a bunch of weird little tricks. The simplest one being having branches within branches. When you're talking to the witch, who will eventually lead you on towards Bigfoot, there could be a whole subsection where you kind of coax her into discussing who she is, why is she there, and that can be a whole thing. Or… This is something that shows up in one of the games that I wrote that unfortunately fell through because AAA is full of games that die without anyone ever knowing its name.
[Laughter]
[Cassondra] I had a character there with prosthetic limbs, and there was always this option where you could ask him, "Hey, why do you have a prosthetic limb?" And he would give you progressively sillier and sillier answers constantly. I think for about 50 or 60 loops. Finally, as you get to the end of it, he just goes, "Really, this is none of your business, snoop," and just shuts off that entire dialogue chain, stopping you from repeating that whole thing again. Little tricks like that show up very often in video games to really build up a sense of this is a real person versus just an NPC that is regurgitating information for its use. Has anyone else seen like interesting things in branching narrative design?
 
[Mary Robinette] I have, but I actually wanted to pause to ask a question that I should have asked last episode. You used the phrase AAA games and I realized I have no… I can extrapolate what that means, but I don't actually know.
[Cassandra] Oh, basically games by companies like Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Bioware, things that tend to involve 100, 200, 300, or, in Ubisoft case, several thousand people in its production. So, usually, really, really high budgets, of a number that absolutely terrifies the crap out of me.
[Mary Robinette] Great. So it's a metaphor that is related to baseball, not to automobile repair?
[Chuckles]
[Cassandra] Yes?
[Or batteries]
[Dan] AAA games are the ones that can help you get your car off the highway.
[Howard] All games are physics simulations.
 
[James] So, having never worked on a AAA game, I want to throw out something that you can do that is cheap, and it doesn't require a team of a thousand people, which is conditionals and callbacks can be a really great way to make things feel significant. What I mean by that is when the players make a choice, just putting some sort of little tag or reminder in their so that later on in the game, something can be different depending on their choice. So if you insult the witch and the first scene, when you took that branch, just having something towards the end of the game where you run into the witch again and she goes… She clearly dislikes you because she remembers that you said that thing. That can be one line of dialogue, but it suddenly makes the player feel like, "Oh, this is a real world with real consequences. Because a choice I made a long time ago is continuing to have ramifications." It wasn't superexpensive. It didn't lead to a whole new branch. It was just one thing that was tweaked. Similarly, if somebody picks up a different item or gains a different ability or even just has like a shifted NPC attitude, anything you can do that calls back to a decision a player made earlier feels like a reward, even if they didn't get anything. Because you're reminding them, like, "Hey, we're paying attention to what you're doing. Your choices matter."
[Howard] Yeah. One of the things that you see a lot in big MMORPG titles is what my friend Bob calls a hat economy. Which is, you can spend money to get hats, to get costumes, to get outfits, to get whatever. These have no bearing on the story. They're just this is how I want my character to look, and I have spent the money, so now I have a new costume. When you present a choice to a character, what they get needs to be more than just a hat. It can't just be, oh, I beat the game wearing red clothing. Oh, I beat the game wearing blue clothing. The choice has to matter.
[Cassandra] The best reward is always consequences. I am curious if anyone else has tips and tricks and things they've learned from writing branching narratives?
[Mary Robinette] When I was working on… I did the dialogue for Hidden Path, and it was a game called Brass Tactics which is in VR. The thing for me that was interesting about it, because it was really the first time that I had attempted to do this, was that I needed to be able to really create space for the player in that they could interpret one of the lines of dialogue that the NPC was delivering to them, that they could interpret it in multiple different ways depending on their own emotional state in that moment. Trying to figure out how to sculpt things that felt like they were… That inherently belonged to the character who was speaking them, knowing that an actor was going to imbue them with meaning, but also then leaving enough space. So, like, sometimes it would be something as simple as, "Oh, is that the choice you're making?" That leaves room for the character… For the listener, for the player, to think, "Wait. Does that mean that I should make this choice? Or are they trying to fake me out?" It's… That's all about what the player is bringing to it. But whereas saying, "I wouldn't make that choice if I were you," that is not leaving space for the character… For the player to bring their own interpretation to it.
[James] Yeah. Going back to something that Dan had said in the previous episode about incentivizing players to sort of go the directions you want them to go. I think it's important, you can use things like objectives or item collection or other requirements to kind of maintain control of the story while still allowing an apparent freedom of choice, that illusion of control. What I mean by that is, like, let's say you got players that need to steal the crown jewels from a castle vault. You want to make sure, like, you detailed the whole castle. That's the game. You want to make sure that people hit all those areas and don't just bypass it. So you could force them to go linearly, where you say, "Okay. Well, they'll go in through the tower window, the fight their way all the way down through the castle to the vault, and that way they'll hit everything along the way." But that's a very linear, railroad-y sort of approach. A thing you could do instead is give them multiple options for how they break into the castle. Maybe they sneak in through the moat, maybe they sneak in through the gate, maybe they go in through the tower. But either way, if they somehow managed to get to the vault without going through all the castle stages, then when they get there, they discover, oh, you still need to get the key which is up in the Queen's chamber. So they're going to have to hit all those same encounters you designed, just from the other direction as they go back up to the top. So you still sort of force them to go through all the things that… The challenges that you designed, but you've done it in a way that made them feel like it was their choice.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I was thinking, as you were talking, that access as a consequence is a way of controlling the direction of the narrative. Shadow Point Observatory, which I'll talk about later, is one of those where your reward for figuring something out is access to the next layer of the puzzle. It also feels like… They also managed to tie consequences to feeling, like, oh, no, I'm not going to get there. But you can… But there's multiple paths to get to that access point.
 
[Dan] This has been a really wonderful discussion, but I'm going to cut it off here. Thank you so much. We have some homework now. I believe it is Cass.
[Cassandra] Yes. I would like everyone to write their choose-your-own-adventure story. You can use any of the multitude of pre-tools that are available on the Internet right now, including Twine, [Inkle?], and probably a whole number of things that I don't know about, because there are a lot of indy engines out there. Just check out the websites and see what it's like to make your own story.
[Dan] Great. That sounds good. All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.34: Writing Deliberate Discomfort
 
 
Key Points: How do you write when parts of what you are writing make you uncomfortable? Cursing, sex, violence, racism, misogyny? Where is the discomfort coming from, and is it desirable? Do it on purpose. Signpost what you are doing. Let other characters balance. Don't kick the puppies! Consequences! Be aware that for marketing, this may be hard to place. You may be uncomfortable, but you may also be hurting specific readers. Listen to your beta readers. Make sure you have thought through the discomfort, and you are doing it for a reason. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 34.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Deliberate Discomfort.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Lari] Because you're in a hurry.
[Erin] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm definitely not that smart. My name's Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Lari] I'm Lari.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] We are very excited to have Erin Roberts back with us. I won't make you introduce yourself this time. But she's amazing.
 
[Dan] We want to talk about deliberate discomfort. This was a really fascinating question that came in from a listener, and I'm going to read it to you. It says, "What do you do when your writing includes elements that make you uncomfortable, but you're writing the story you want to write?" Someone asked this a while ago in the comments section in relation to a character cursing, but I'd like to ask this question in a broader sense. What if my mom reads this? This is uncomfortable to write. Thank you for submitting that question. I think this applies to so many things. Whether it is you are not a person who uses curse words, but your characters do. Maybe you are uncomfortable writing the sex scenes, or the violence. Maybe you're writing about racism or misogyny or something like that that makes you very uncomfortable. How do you deal with this as authors, as editors? Deliberate discomfort. For yourself, or for the reader.
[Mary Robinette] I think all of us are uncomfortable about jumping on this one.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] So, I've done this a couple of times. What I find is that there are… There are different degrees of discomfort, and you have to understand where that discomfort comes from, and also think about whether or not it's desirable. So there's the what will people think aspect of it. So, like, I have a story Cerbo en Vitro Ujo, which I've told my parents, "Do not read this." Like, I just… I don't want to have that conversation. That's a different kind of discomfort then when I am writing sexism in a novel, because that is stuff that I have experienced directly and I am putting things in that made me uncomfortable when they happened to me, and I know that they're going to make my readers uncomfortable in the same ways, hopefully, that I was uncomfortable, and that for some people, it's going to be even more painful than that. So… And with those, I am like, that discomfort, I know that I'm doing it on purpose because I want to invoke that sense of "Oh, this is really… Oh, God." But other times, it is about making sure that I am reflecting the shape of the world. So, for me, it's really about interrogating why am I putting that discomfort in there. 
[Dan] Yeah. I had to have this conversation with my editor with my historical novel, Ghost Station. There are two major plot points that kind of turn on sexism. The fact that the women in the main character's life, he doesn't necessarily respect them as much as he should or consider them as equals. Which sounds horrible, and it is horrible. What that meant was that for the first two thirds of the novel, there's a lot of kind of gendered language that I worked for 15 years to edit out of my own writing. Making sure to include more inclusive environments and cast of characters and so on. For this book, I was deliberately pulling back from that, so that we would be building this character towards the moment… Two different ones, like I said, where he realizes, "Oh. I screwed up because I have this massive blind spot in my life." I had my beta readers, I had my editor, I had the copy editors, all of them for those first two thirds of the book were like, "You did this wrong. This is a wildly sexist book." I had to say, "Yes. But it's on purpose. I know that it's painful to read. But that's what we're going for at the end, and it does pay off."
[Erin] One thing that I love to do and stories in general is write horrible people that are… I like to call them sympathetic monsters. One of the things that you have to do, or at least that I have to do, when I'm writing a like really not the greatest person, is to remember that there is a difference between the story the character is telling and the story that I am telling about them. Even in a first-person perspective. There, you can signpost out there that what they're like… I'm stuck in my horrible evil world, but you can still indicate by how other people see them and react to them, by what else you put in the descriptions of what they're doing, to show people that it's not necessarily… That you are not your character, and that they're something that you're trying to do, and that the discomfort is there for a reason.
[Dan] Relying on other characters is a good way of doing that. Because then you can still have that character, whether it's the viewpoint or a side character, expressing an opinion that you as an author disagree with, but then you still get to have the balance in there through the other characters.
[Mary Robinette] I think that one of the…
 
[Erin] I was going to say, you could also use objectives… So I do a lot of unreliable narrators as well. I think there's a similar craft there. If you take something objectively wrong, and the character is agreeing with it, it helps to show people that they're… Something is off in the way that they see the world and that there's… And that you realize the difference. They talk about it sometimes as like the kicking… Kicking puppies is always a good example people use in film. Like, if you have a character kick a puppy, and be like, "That's the greatest moment of my life," then you're showing… Everyone objectively agrees that kicking puppies is wrong. So you're showing that there's… That the discomfort of living in that character is something you know about, and that you know the reader is experiencing and you're saying that's on purpose.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think also giving consequences to some of the horrible action that… Even if it's your protagonist doing it, like, not letting them get away with it is something that you can do to kind of mitigate that and indicate that it… This is not acceptable behavior, there are consequences. Lari, I'm curious. How do you handle this as an editor?
 
[Lari] Also… I wanted to point out from a market perspective, just how what Dan did with 1/3 of the novel being a misogynist character is not something that everyone can do at any point. I do think that there should be… There is discomfort for yourself, like we were saying, there is discomfort for… In terms of who's reading this. Then, I do think that when you're trying to break through, there are a few things that I would consider inadvisable. That is one of the things, if you just spend a lot of time in it. As incredible as the second and third part would be, if that's your breakthrough, that might be really hard to place.
[Mary Robinette] There was something that I recently saw someone say about Calculating Stars. I was like, "Oh, yeah. That's a really good point." It was on Twitter. It was a Black reader saying that she wondered when Elma's friends would get tired of her continually making the same basic nice White lady mistakes. And that she found it exhausting to read because she had to deal with it so much in her own life. I think that that's an important thing to understand, that when you put in something that's deliberately discomforting… Uncomfortable, that it is often going to be significantly worse for… Like the misogyny that Dan was putting in. That's uncomfortable for him. For me, reading that, that's going to be worse for me reading it because it is an environment that I live in all the time. So you do have to think about the cost that you're putting in there is that you are… You're not just making yourself uncomfortable, you're also potentially hurting specific readers. That… It's like is that… You probably need less of the deliberate discomfort than you think you do.
[Dan] I definitely want to dig really deep into this. Everyone's raising their hand, they have something they want to say.
 
[Dan] Let's pause first for our book of the week, which is actually a short story, and then we'll get back into it. Erin, you've got the story of the week.
[Erin] So the story of the week is The Lamentation of Their Women by Kai Ashante Wilson. It can be found, I believe, on Tor.com originally, and then it was republished at PodCastle as an audio. What I love about this story is it wants to make you uncomfortable because it has a point to make. So it is a story that has curse words in it, it has violence in it, it has a really stark look at policing in America in it. It is something that… Where discomfort is used as a tool to try to be part of the story that it is telling.
[Dan] Excellent. That is The Lamentation of Their Women by…
[Erin] Kai Ashante Wilson.
[Dan] Awesome. Thank you.
 
[Dan] So, yeah, let's dig into this. Being deliberately uncomfortable in your work is going to affect your readers. It is going to cause discomfort in them, and, like Mary Robinette was saying, it's going to be a lot more painful for some readers than for others. So why do we put it in? What is the purpose of this? What value does it have? I know Lari and Erin both have comments they wanted to make. Lari, let's start with you. What were you going to say?
[Lari] I was going to talk about the importance of beta readers. I think it's really important when you're writing uncomfortable scenes to have people who are in that group make some comments. They might be something that you want to incorporate or not. But sometimes it's a little hard to know where you are in that line. If… How far you've gone, how hurtful it might be. So I do think it's really important to have people make comments.
[Erin] What I would say, to build on all that, is that you need to do the discomfort work first. If it's something that you're not comfortable enough with to write well, and to really do the work and make yourself feel horrible and all that stuff, don't do it. Because… If you're not doing that work, you're putting it on your readers. It is unfair to ask readers to do work that you are not comfortable doing yourself. So make sure you're in a place where you can use that discomfort as a tool, because there's a specific thing you're trying to get out of it. I would also say don't do it as a thought exercise, like, "Can I write horrible people just for funsies?" When I do it, it's usually because I'm trying to make a point about the way that culture… Oppressive culture can warp the people within them. So for me it's important to show how a monstrous culture turns a person into a monster. But there's a point that I'm trying to make. I'm not just doing it like to see if I can.
[Dan] That might be valuable as a writing exercise. But if it's something that you are going to put in front of readers, then, yeah, I think you're right. It is important to have a purpose, and have a purpose in mind. Why am I including, for example, racial oppression in my fantasy world? It doesn't have to be there. I'm making this world up. So if it is there, why is it there?
[Mary Robinette] Within that, also, the… Like, again, that… It was just a single tweet. I don't want to make it sound like I'm spending my entire life… But it did make me sit back and go, "Oh, yeah." I knew that I was writing this book for an audience… For me. But this is a really good reminder that that also meant that specifically I was… As much as I want those books to be inclusive, that I was writing this book for a White audience. The realizations about race that are in there, that I… Like, I see a lot of people who are like, "Ah. I realize that I was doing the things that Elma was doing." I'm like, "Yeah. Yeah. That's… I mean, that is the realization that I want you to have." But Elma's realizations are all in there because I had friends who did the emotional labor to teach me. But that means that I have to recognize that any Black readers are also having to do emotional labor to like my character. That wasn't something… That was not a deliberate choice. Like, that part of it was not a deliberate choice. That's… That is the piece that I'm like… That was a thing that I missed when I wrote it. And that I'm trying to think about when I'm writing other things. Which doesn't mean that I'm going to leave out the discomfort, but I'm also… It does mean that I'm going to think about… I'm going to think more carefully about how much is necessary to have that character arc and growth. It's usually less than you think it is.
 
[Dan] All right. Well, let's have some homework. Lari, you have homework for us.
[Lari] I'm calling this an exercise in confession. It is a short story in first person about a character whose point of view you completely disagree with.
[Dan] Excellent. A short story or a paragraph, write something with a character you disagree with. Excellent. This has been… I've been looking forward to this episode because I was hoping for a great discussion, and we got one. So, thank you, to all of you. This was awesome. Wonderful listeners, thank you. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.13: Using Elections in Stories
 
From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/03/29/15-13-using-elections-in-stories/ 

Key Points: Don't make the outcome of the election the climax of the story! Election day is anti-climactic, just waiting for the votes to roll in. Do use elections as a background that affects your characters' lives. Do use the fun, quirky people in the campaign. The candidate, with or without spouse, is arrogant and emotionally fragile. The campaign manager is counselor, manager, has plenty of experience, and is willing to put some spin on it. They also have a deputy. Next is the communications director, a people person who interacts with the press and social media. They have to balance responses and how does this make the candidate look, will it persuade people to vote for the candidate. Again, they may have a deputy to help. The finance director tells the candidate who to call and how to ask them for money. They're accountants who know how to schmooze. Finally, the field director knows the statistics and how to manage volunteers. Volunteers have time but no money, and go out to knock on doors, call phones, or whatever you do for this selection. Donors have money but no time. Volunteers and donors can be kooky and eclectic and strange. Know what the stakes of the election are for your characters, on a personal and societal level. Think about how elections are run, across history and across geography. Think about what your characters have to do to schmooze, and what are the consequences of schmoozing and the election.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 13.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Using Elections in Stories.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[Brandon] We have special guest Daniel Friend. Thank you for coming on.
[Daniel] Thank you for having me. 
 
[Brandon] You have been running or part of some political campaigns…
[Daniel] That's right. So the reason I want to talk about elections in stories is because I've been involved in a lot of them. Normally, I'm a science fiction and fantasy editor, and I don't see nearly enough elections in stories considering how often and how important they are to our own lives. So, in 2012, I actually worked in the Utah County elections office during the Presidential campaign between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. In 2017, I was the communications director for a US congressional campaign in Utah. In 2018, I ran for the Utah House of Representatives as a candidate. Lost, but that's okay.
[Dan] Well, then you have nothing important to say.
[Laughter]
[Daniel] We'll see.
[Laughter]
[Daniel] This year, I am reprising the communications director role for a third-party US congressional campaign. So I've been around elections a lot, and they're a very strange little world that not enough people know about. There's some really cool things that we can do in stories with them.
 
[Brandon] All right. Well. Take us on that trip. You pitched this episode to us. It sounds really interesting. You actually have an outline. You're way more prepared than…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] We have ever been.
[Brandon] Yes. So let's go through it.
[Dan] Well. Mahtab.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Mahtab.
[Dan] We've got to give her props.
[Mary Robinette] Fair.
[Daniel] Well, I'm glad I can be second in something. Besides just a vote.
[Mary Robinette] [garbled... reminder]
 
[Daniel] So, the first thing… I want to start out with how not to use elections in stories. Because there's a really big pitfall in thinking that the outcome of the election is the climax of my story. That's the most important thing that's going to happen. But, don't do that.
[Brandon] Why not?
[Daniel] Because elections are inherently anti-climactic. It's a very strange thing. Because if you're working in an election, you're going out every day and you are meeting strangers and you're working so hard. You're putting your heart and soul into this thing that is really important to you. At least presumably. Then, at the end of the day, all that work you did boils down to hundreds or thousands of other people making a decision about you. So when election day comes, that's actually the most laid-back yet high strung day of an entire campaign.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Daniel] Because there is nothing left for you to do. You're sitting there, biting your nails about what's going to happen, and you are completely powerless. Now, you don't want to have a character be inactive as your protagonist. On election day, despite all the activity that they've done up to that point, they're just really sitting around, watching TV, waiting for those results to come in. So, make sure that there is something going on in your climax other than just what's the results of the vote.
[Brandon] Right. I didn't really grasp this until you said it. But now I can totally see that the last day is the most boring day, with a really nice exciting moment at the end of it.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I'm trying to think.
[Daniel] Or a soul crushing disappointment [garbled]
[Dan] I'm trying to think of stories about elections. I remember there was a movie with Chris Rock and Bernie Mack years and years ago. They got to that point where there is nothing left to do, and they showed that moment where he was sitting around bored. He's like, "You know what, I'm going to go drive people to work." So he got a bus and he went… They had him doing something during that period.
[Daniel] Another example is I just finished watching the season of Parks and Rec where Leslie Knope runs for city council. Now, that isn't exactly a great example because they treated it like a U.S. Senate campaign.
[Choked chuckles]
[Daniel] There was way too much money going on in that race for a small town city council. But…
[Brandon] That's the joke, right?
[Daniel] That is the joke.
[Howard] It's Parks and Rec.
[Daniel] So do use it for… As a good example of what people do to each other in campaigns. Don't think that a city council race looks anything like it. That's U.S. Senate and above.
[Mary Robinette] You're making me think about Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly, which is all about this political campaign that is going on in the background. It is… None of the characters are directly involved in the campaign, but their lives are being influenced by everything that's going on around them. It's… You're right, it's fantastic in that way.
 
[Daniel] That's an excellent way to use elections in a story, is to have this thing that is really going to affect your characters' lives happening in the background, and to what extent do they pay attention to it, to what extent do they understand that this is actually going to matter to them? Do they get involved or not? So, to use elections as a vehicle for telling interesting stories, doing it within an election campaign is actually a great idea, because there are so many fun, quirky people in a campaign. Everybody in a campaign is automatically a little bit weird. Because they are willing to take a job that's going to last for a few months, and it does pay decently for those few months, but then after that, you're out of work, and you either have to move to another place to get a new job, or you have to do a completely different kind of job, which is what I'm lucky enough to be able to do. They're really just a little bit kooky because they're not just getting involved like, "Oh, I'm going to donate." "Oh, I'm going to have a yard sale." They're actually putting their 40 hours a week or more into this. So I want to just run down the cast of characters within an election campaign and tell you a little bit about why they are going to be fun. So, the most obvious person is, of course, the candidate, the person who is running for office. Whether or not they have a spouse is also going to be a big deal, because candidates' spouses make a huge influence. But the candidate is going to be arrogant. Arrogant enough to think that they can win. And yet also emotionally fragile. Candidates are always needing reassurance from somebody that they're doing okay, that they can actually win, that this is worth all of the time and effort they are putting into it, because everyone is so invested.
[Howard] It sounds like writers.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Laughter]
[Dan] I was going to say, the TV show Veep, in the season where she was running for President, they did that beautifully. That combination of just absolute bullheaded arrogance and complete fragility. So that's a good example to look up.
 
[Daniel] Yes, it is. Now, the person who is most often going to be helping the candidate feel better about these things is the campaign manager. Besides being the psychological counselor for the candidate, their main job is to manage. Now, campaign managers tend to have lots of experience under their belts. They tend to not really… Like, they want to make sure that they're supporting someone that they like, but, there also very willing to spin things, to color the truth a little bit. That's part of the job. So, campaign managers tend to be interesting that way. Under… They also usually have a deputy to help them when they're not around. The next job is the communications director, which is what I know the most about because I did it. Communication directors are usually a people person, because they have to interact with the press. They have to figure out social media. Beyond them, you have the finance director.
[Brandon] Wait, wait wait wait. What makes communication directors weird?
[Dan] Yeah, you skipped over that.
[Daniel] Oh, now I have to tell you something weird about me. Communication directors are the people who have to think about how we are going to persuade people to vote for you. What's the message? So they kind of have to get into other people's heads. They like this. They think of it as really, really fun when somebody drops something, like some insult on Twitter, and they get to respond to it and really burn the other guy. Yet, they've also got to balance this with how is it going to make my candidate look. They're always the ones who want to get the zinger, the "Oh, yeah, gotcha!" But they've also got to be really careful. How well your communication director balances those things or how well they don't, makes a really interesting character. Now, when I tell you these things that the person should be good at, a really interesting thing to do in a story is make them not so good at one of these things. Now, in the real world, your deputy should cover for you. I'm not the best at social media. My deputies do that really well. But what if in your story, they don't have that deputy for whatever reason, and they have to fail really hard at something that's really important.
[Howard] It's interesting to note that when you describe the communications director… I mean, I have years of corporate experience as a marketing guy. I realized, oh, that is squarely in the middle of the marketing wheelhouse. Squarely in the middle. All of the skill set of marketing, whether or not you think marketing is evil, that is where it fits. It's just that the product you are marketing, the message that you are marketing, is… It's this weird sort of flexible undulating brand that is a person whose brand will necessarily change during the course of the campaign.
[Daniel] Yes. That is all very true. Just to give you a real life example in me, I was told the other day that I'm really good at writing fundraising emails. Which is something I have never aspired to be.
[Mary Robinette] I'm just making a note of that for my own [garbled]
[laughter]
 
[Brandon] Let's pause here for book of the week, then we'll come back to the rest of the roles. So. Our book of the week, you were going to pitch at us…
[Daniel] So, every year, there is the Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium in Provo, Utah, that is a wonderful conference. I'm sure it has been talked about multiple times. Now, last year, they started having a benefit anthology that keeps prices low for students going to this. I'm in that first benefit anthology. My story is called Launch, and the benefit anthology is called Trace the Stars. So, it's available on Amazon. All of the stories in there are fantastic, I've read every one. The reason I want to bring this up is because the next benefit anthology is already opening up their call for submissions. The topic is A Parliament of Wizards. If you don't think elections go into that, well, I'll just tell you, I'm going to write something for it. We'll see if it gets in.
[Brandon] Now, this is for charity, right. So there's no payment for the stories once they been picked up.
[Daniel] That's correct. It is a benefit anthology to benefit students who are attending this writing symposium.
 
[Brandon] Excellent. All right, let's get back to our roles.
[Daniel] All right. The next one is the finance director. This is the person who sits next to the candidate while the candidate is calling up people like Brandon and saying, "Brandon, can you give me $2700, please?" The finance director is the person saying, "This is how you ask. This is what you need to do." The thing is, they're usually only paid on commission. So their job is to bring in money so that they can actually get paid.
[Brandon] Wow. So they're getting paid on commission to raise money for the political campaign. So a percentage of what you're giving is going…
[Daniel] To the finance director.
[Brandon] Interesting.
[Daniel] For their services and figuring out who to call, figuring out how to ask them for money. Because if I just walk up to Brandon and say, "Hey, please write me a check." I'm probably not going to get anywhere. The financial director is the person who goes, "I know that Brandon has enough money to give you a max donation, and this is the best way to ask him for it." Whereas they'll say, "Daniel doesn't have enough money to give you a max donation. You probably want to get him to volunteer for you instead." So the financial director is a very strange numbers punching kind of person. They have to have a weird mix of an accountant and someone who can really schmooze people.
[Dan] Well, someone who can read people, it sounds like.
[Mary Robinette] This is something that's common in all fundraising. Most fundraising, except at some nonprofits… But most fundraising, you do get a commission for the amount of money…
[Brandon] I had no idea.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. My mom was a fundraiser for years. She is where I learned all of my schmoozing from.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But it is this constant interplay of a political and financial conversation that you're having.
[Dan] When I was raising funds to put together a scholarship locally… I built an endowment at one of the local universities. We would 100%, every person that we targeted, we research them and we figured out what's the best way to approach this person specifically.
[Brandon] What did you determine about me?
[Dan] We said, "Hey. Brandon."
[Chuckles]
[Dan] "I've known you forever. Give me some money." It worked.
 
[Daniel] Sometimes that works. Finally, the last person in charge is the field director. This guy has to be really good with numbers, because he's looking at statistics. This is the guy who actually figures out how many voters do we need to win this election? Where do they live? How do we contact them? Then he leads a team of volunteers to go out and knock on doors, call phones, do whatever you need to do. Go on the Galactic Inter-Webz and give them a holo-projection, whatever it is that works in your election. That person's got to have both the numbers aspect and a managing aspect. Those don't always come in the same package. Finally, you'll have volunteers who are always kooky and eclectic and have more time than they have money.
[Laughter]
[Daniel] You also have donors, who are exactly the same as volunteers, except that they have more money than they have time. So you can make them just as strange as you want them to be, and it will not be different than real life.
[Howard] That feels so incredibly safe right now…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because I have insufficient quantities of both money and time.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] We're almost out of time on this episode. Is there a last point that you want to hit?
[Daniel] Yes. Just really quick. Make sure you understand what the stakes of the election results are for your characters, both on a personal level, because either they'll lose and nothing will change, or they win and everything in their life changes, and also on the societal level. What are the impacts to the society, based on who wins this election? Also, make sure that you take some time to look at not just how American elections are run, but also how elections across history and across geography have been run. You've got parliamentary elections where it's based on what party gets a percentage of the vote. That's how the seats are allocated. You have ranked choice voting, like you have in the Hugo awards, which we've all done. You also have very small electoral colleges, like in the Holy Roman Empire, where seven princes would choose the next Emperor. Each of those elections plays out differently. If you only have to schmooze seven people, that's a very different election than if you're trying to schmooze a Galactic community of several billion. So, know what your race is, if it's local, if it's provincial, if it's national, if it's Galactic or what have you. Then follow the consequences of that.
 
[Brandon] All right. What's our homework?
[Daniel] So, your homework is to go out and volunteer for a political campaign that you support. It doesn't matter if it's local or national or what have you. Then go out and do whatever they have you do, whether it's knocking on doors or calling phones or whatever. Then, when you get home, start writing down what you did. When your imagination takes off in a different direction, start writing that story.
 
[Brandon] So, this was a really awesome episode. I learned a ton. I can imagine that there might be people out there who are writing books about elections who might need a really good editor, and you freelance.
[Daniel] Yes, I do.
[Brandon] How could they get ahold of you?
[Daniel] You can email me at dcfeditor@gmail.com. Daniel Craig Friend initials editor at gmail.
[Brandon] Awesome. Well, you guys, get out there and knock on some doors. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.40: Deep Vs. Wide
 
 
Key points: An ocean that's an inch deep? 4000 dungeons, all the same? Do you worldbuild with depth, or width? Depth comes from causal chains, how things are linked together. History, consequences, ripples in the rest of the world. Pick a few, and dig deep on those, consider the ramifications. Watch for the one that gives you surprising yet inevitable, that makes the story unfold the right way. You can't go deep on everything. If a character uses something, science, technology, magic, to solve a problem, you need to know how it works. How do you make characters with the same background express something different? As a writer, stretch to make characters with similar backgrounds who are also distinctive individuals, who offer something different to the story. Audition characters! Choices and actions make characterization. Think about how the axes of power reflects self-identity, and what each person's primary driver is. 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 40.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Deep Vs. Wide.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] I've shared this story before on Writing Excuses, but it is one of my favorite stories. I once read a review of a videogame that was an RPG game that was known for having an expansive world. The review was critical because they said, "Yes, it's really, really expansive, but it's like an ocean that's an inch deep. Every town you go to has the exact same copy-and-pasted rooms and things. There's nothing to explore. All the dungeons are exactly the same. Yeah, there's 4000 of them, but if you just copy-and-paste the same three dungeons 4000 times, then you're not exploring 4000 locations, you're going into three places 4000 times." This has stuck with me, because the more I worldbuild, the more I realize that I prefer as a writer to have depth to my worldbuilding. I ran into this policy early in my career, where I had started to get popular. I had three magic systems in the Mistborn series, and fans are starting to hear that I was working on something new, the Stormlight Archive, which was going to be big. They started asking me, "How many magic systems do you have in this one? You had three and your previous one, how many are in this one?" I would be like, "There's 30. There's 30 different magic systems." I kind of fell into this more is better sort of philosophy. When I actually started working on the book, I realized one of the things that had made the Way of Kings fail in 2002 when I tried to write it the first time was this attempt to do everything a little bit, to have 5% worldbuilding and characterization across a huge, diverse cast and a huge setting, where the book had failed because nothing had been interesting, everything had just been slightly interesting. So I want to ask the podcasters, with that lengthy introduction, what constitutes a deep story to you, specifically when you're talking about worldbuilding? What draws you to those stories, and how do you create it in your own fiction?
[Mary Robinette] For me, it's looking at causal chains, the ways things link together. A lot of times when I see something that is shallow, there is an item, but it doesn't appear to have any ripple effects, it doesn't have any effects on the rest of the world. Whereas with deep things, you can see that there's a history, and you can also see that there are consequences to having this thing in the world. When I'm teaching my students, I talked to them about, and when I'm doing it myself, I think about why. Why did this thing arise? What was the need that caused this piece of technology or magic to occur? How does it affect everyone, and what is the effect, with what effect does using it? It's not like necessarily the personal toll, but what is the effect on the society? That's the piece, for me, like looking at how it affects the society, that I feel like a lot of worldbuilders fall apart, because they think about the effect on the individual magic user, but not the connections between those things.
[Dan] So, during the time that I was writing the Mirador series, there was a cyberpunk TV show called Almost Human with Karl Urban, if you remember that one. They did that, they had this very shallow worldbuilding. I remember in one of the episodes, a guy walked by an electronic billboard in a mall, and it like read his retina or did facial recognition and knew who he was and called up his shopping history and offer him a product. I'm like, "Oh, that's a cool detail." But if they have that technology, it would be in so many other places in the city. It would enable so many other things. They didn't explore any of that. It really frustrated me. So when I started building my cyberpunk, I'm like, "Well, I can't do that with everything. I'm going to do that with… Here are three or four branches of technology's, and just drill really deep into them and try to figure out how is this going to change society?" How will the entire city feel different if all cars drive themselves, for example? Just really dig into those and try to figure out what the ramifications are.
[Howard] For me, the decision point on deep versus wide occurs after I've only gone deep on as many things as I go deep on, because I will find the one which in conjunction with the others, gives me surprising yet inevitable. Gives me all of the pieces I need for the story to unfold in a way that it's going to do the things that I want it to do. At that point, I feel like… Whatever that thing was, and whatever pieces it touched in order to function in that way, that is where the depth has to be. Everything else, I'll go wide, and, if I have more budget, all sink an extra couple of holes over here as red herrings. But for now, that's the research that needs to be done.
 
[Brandon] You bring up an important point, which is that you can't go deep on every topic. We've been talking about this concept all through the year. But this idea that sometimes you do need to touch lightly on things, basically to pitch yourself ideas that you can catch in later books or later scenes.
[Howard] I wanted to tell a joke about the history of our solar system 75 million years ago. I was wondering how old Saturn's rings were. So I started doing research. What I determined is that in 2006, Saturn's rings were as old as the solar system. In 2018, when we dove Cassini through the rings, Saturn's rings are about 100 million years old, and will probably be gone in the next 200 million. The more I looked into this, the more interesting it got. The reasoning behind, the math of all this, which I'll spare all you. At the end of that session, I had four hours of information in my head, and zero jokes.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Now that's familiar.
[Howard] So, I left all of that out, because I realized, "Yeah, I totally write things about that. But it's not going to move my story forward, it's going to make people argue because it's not every… Some people know the 2006 science." I just have to give it a wide miss. The point here is that portions of my week are absolutely lost in that way. I'll research something and come away with nothing useful. But I don't get to have useful things if I don't do at least some of that research.
[Brandon] For me, where I went wrong on Stormlight Archive, looking back at it, when I first tried to write it, was I was a big fan of the Wheel of Time, which was, at that point, on its 10th book, 11th book soon to come out, I believe. I was trying to compare my series with one that had been going for 12 years.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Brandon] I wanted to jump in at the 12 year mark and say, well, this is what I love about the Wheel of Time. So I'm going to write a book that evokes those same feelings without doing the groundwork and characterization that the Wheel of Time had been doing for over a decade in order to create a really spectacular experience later in the series. What I ended up doing is, I ended up just touching lightly on all these things that I had spent my worldbuilding time on preparing. I ended up with a story that just wasn't satisfying because of that. Have you guys ever been working on a book and realized I need to do a deep dive on this one topic? What made you decide to do that, and what was it?
[Mary Robinette] I'm actually in the process of doing that right now on the Relentless Moon. One of the things that I went a little shallow on in the Fated Sky was the political situation on Earth. Because most of the book takes place on the way to Mars. Well, the Relentless Moon is a parallel novel that takes place on Earth and the moon, while Fated Sky is going on. Which means that I actually have to dig deep. In order to dig deep into the political situation on Earth, I have to do some… A deeper dive on the climatology of the planet after the asteroid strike. Because I'm like… Like, I have actually no idea as we are recording this whether or not the jetstream is still functional. Because where that asteroid strike was, it's like it may not be. I… So, I have to sit down… I've got an appointment with a… Someone who specifically does computer modeling of this kind of thing to figure out what the climate looks like. Because I didn't need to know. Now I do. It's… Yeah, it's…
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] Irradiation…
[Mary Robinette] Totally stalled on the novel right now.
[Howard] The secondary radiation of the regolith, the soil, the dirt, the whatever on a world where there is no magnetic field shielding you from radiation, and deep dove on this and came up with a quote from a Russian scientist who was asked, "Which one's worse on the moon, the solar radiation or secondary radiation from the regolith?" The Russian scientist said, "They are both worst."
[Laughter]
[Howard] Which means if you don't shield against one of them, you die. You have to shield against both. But again, this is a case where I was reading for four hours before I found that moment, where… For me, this is a moment where I laughed. Out loud. I'm like, "Okay. I even say that with a Russian accent." I'm not even going to put it in the book. But the idea that the dirt can be as dangerous as sunlight on a planet where there's no magnetic field… I tell jokes on that until the radioactive cows come home.
[Dan] In Partials, I am… That whole series deals with a lot of different kinds of science, but there was only one of them that was in the outline. It said, part of my thinking was, "And then Kira figures out how to cure the disease that's killing everybody."
[Laughter]
[Dan] Which meant that I had to figure out how to cure disease. Right? I could totally gloss over all the ecology, all the genetics, all the everything else, but, and I've said this before, I never want to write the sentence, "Then she did some science." So if I have my character actually using a science or a technology or a magic or whatever to solve a problem, I need to know how that works. So I did actually enough study into virology that I was later able to convince a doctor that I knew what I was talking about when my father was in the hospital. So finding out which one is key to the plot, which one hinges a whole story, that's the one I focus on.
[Howard] As a side note, writers tend to be dangerous that way.
[Dan] Yes.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and talk about Squid Empire.
[Howard] Oh, yes. Danna Staaff. Nonfiction book called Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods. Which is a discussion of… It's a… Well, it's a whole book about cephalopod evolution on Earth. The cephalopods were the first creatures to rise from the seafloor. They invented swimming. Then, at some point, fish invented jaws, and the kings of the ocean became the ocean's tastiest snack. This book walks you through all of that. If you are interested in worldbuilding, the discussion of this, just the way these things interoperate and interlock and unfold is useful. But it is also fun and beautiful.
[Brandon] Awesome. That was Squid Empire.
[Howard] Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods by Danna Staaff.
[Brandon] Awesome.
 
[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. How can you take a single culture in a say science fiction or fantasy book and build a bunch of characters who all maybe come from the same background, but all express something very different? The reason I ask this is often times I think our go-to in a fantasy or science fiction book is we're going to have this alien, and that's going to represent this, and we're going to have this fantasy race, and they're going to represent this. Or, this kingdom is the kingdom of merchants, and we're going to bring in a character from the kingdom of merchants. Where, sometimes what you end up doing is then creating a bunch of caricatures or things like this in your world. Digging deep, I found that sometimes, the best thing to force me, as a writer, to stretch and make sure I'm not making each of my races or my worlds or my settings or my kingdoms stereotypes of themselves is to say I need three characters who come from a very similar background with a very similar job who are cousins and who are all distinctive individuals, who offer something very different to the story. This has been a really good exercise for me in forcing my worldbuilding to stretch further, where I'm not just pigeonholing certain people from certain countries into certain roles in the story.
[Howard] I audition characters. I mean, I have a cast of thousands in Schlock Mercenary. I will often tell myself, "Okay, I'm going to be doing a scene. There's a side character here who is this particular race, and I haven't represented that race before. So, here are four different faces, and here are some different backgrounds, and here are some different attitudes. Which one of those… Which of these people gets to be in my story?" Then I pick one who gets to be in the story. The other three are now completely real to me. By keeping them real, by keeping those three real while the fourth is on the page, the fourth feels less like a stereotype to me. I don't know if it works for the readers, because I'm taking a comic strip.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] It is actually something I think you do really well. When I pick up Schlock Mercenary, and I get different critters from all around the universe, I often… I will often associate the main character personality with that critter. Then they start acting different and I'm reminded, "Oh, wait. This is a culture of a bunch of different people who all act differently." You've actually really helped me to view this in a Good Way, Howard. So, good job.
[Dan] One thing that I am kind of, just now, really learning the depths of, is the idea that characterization is action. That who a character is has very little to do with where they come from and everything to do with what they choose and what they do. I think actually the hobbits in Lord of the Rings are a great example of this, because from a certain point of view, all four of those hobbits are the same. They're remarkably similar. But if you see one leaping recklessly into danger, it's probably Merry. If you see one screwing around and causing a problem by accident, it's probably Pippin. If you see one making a very grumpy, pragmatic choice, and planning ahead, it's probably Sam. So even though they come from the same place and they all like the same things and, given the opportunity, they will all sing a song in a bar, you know who they are, and they're all very different.
[Mary Robinette] So… I completely agree with you, that the actions are the things that we judge other people by. Since with secondary characters, we don't get to go into their heads. One of the ways that I make decisions about which character is going to do what is that I think about the axes of power, but specifically the way it affects… We've talked about axes of power on previous podcasts. But specifically, the way it reflects our self-identity. Which I find kind of breaks down into role, relationship, hierarchy, and ability. That we have… We are each driven by these things. Each person will have one of those that is kind of their primary driver. So if I have four characters that are all from the same background, then I make sure that each of them has a different primary driver. So, for instance, Elma, her primary driver is… She's very much driven by relationship and sense of duty. Whereas Nicole is very much driven by hierarchy and status. Even though they have exactly… Very similar backgrounds. They're both astronauts. They're both first… Among the first women astronauts. But they're driven by different things. Because of that, they make different choices and do different actions. So, for me, it's about the driver. That's one of the ways that I make… Differentiate… To try to make the world seem richer.
 
[Brandon] That's awesome. We are out of time. Dan, you have some homework for us?
[Dan] Yes. What I want you to do is a little bit of what I did and what I talked about earlier, writing Mirador. Is to take one thing, one kind of science or one kind of magic system, one aspect of your world, and just drill as deep into it as you can. Figure out what all of the ramifications are. I talked earlier about self driving cars. One of the recent discoveries, someone crunched the numbers and realized that it's actually much cheaper for a self driving car to putter around the city until you need it again, rather than park itself. What is that going to do to the city? What is that going to do to the traffic? When you really take the chance to look as deep as you can into one thing, you're going to find a lot of very cool story ideas you had never seen before.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 

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Writing Excuses 14.33: Writing Imperfect Worlds
 
 
Key points: Writing a setting where underlying ideas aren't what you believe? Imperfect, flawed worlds, with cultural ideas or norms that you don't agree with? We write these to help understand the imperfections of our world and how to solve them. Popular genre, with a flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair as the big bad guy. Take an imperfection in our world and push it. If you are writing historicals, beware of telling the reader that "this is okay." You might try to lampshade it, to have the protagonist stand against the prevailing attitudes. But they need to have spots where they are ignorant or unaware, which they confront. Fiction about imperfect worlds can give us a script, a lens, that we can use in the real world. When writing stories in a historical period or fantasy world, don't just pretend that problems weren't there, don't rewrite history by ignoring the issues. Instead, be aware of the unjust imbalances, the ramifications, the external costs. To write a character who is a realistic product of a society with biases we would consider reprehensible, make sure to include someone who can call them on their bullshit. Give the reprehensible traits real consequences. Think through why they have these beliefs or opinions. Don't give the protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they are the protagonist.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 33.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Imperfect Worlds.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] I'm going to ask you, how do you write a setting in which the pervasive ideas, cultural ideas or cultural norms, are not ones that you think should be?
[Mary Robinette] That's basically my entire existence with every piece of fiction I write because I am a woman in modern-day America.
[Laughter]
[Howard] You said imperfect. Any piece of nonfiction is inherently going to be the writing of an imperfect world. I would say that the question you're asking is more along the lines of writing deeply flawed worlds.
[Brandon] Yes.
[Howard] In order to help us… And I guess this isn't part of your question, it'd be part of my answer… You write these in order to help us better understand the imperfections of our own world and how we might go about solving them.
[Margaret] Well, I think we've seen a lot of popularity of this genre in recent world… In recent years. I mean, what else is something like The Hunger Games? They've created this deeply flawed, imperfect society that is clearly unfair. It exists to give Katniss something that's worth fighting against. It's… There's that… You're setting up a big bad guy and there's no bigger bad guy than society.
[Mary Robinette] Handmaid's Tale is another good example. A lot of times what you're looking at here is taking an imperfection in our world and pushing it, when you're creating a science fictional society. I write a lot of historical stuff, which is going into areas where… Like the 1950s, Jim Crow is still very much a thing. The Glamorous Histories. Regency England, which we all love, is built on a base of slavery. So these are things that… One of the challenges is writing it in such a way that it doesn't tell the reader this is okay and valorizes it.
[Brandon] Right.
[Margaret] I know one time when Madman was coming out, I think it was like season one or season two, and I watched a couple of episodes. I'm like, "Hey, mom, have you ever watched Madman?" Her response was, "No, thank you. I lived it." I had… It's not necessarily the imperfect world. Eh, it is not relevant. I need not cite this example.
 
[Brandon] Right. Okay. So, I would say the first thing that I have tried when I did this is kind of lampshade it. It can be difficult because I think your first instinct is to have your protagonist be the person who is not as sexist or racist or ist as the culture around them. Which, to be perfectly honest, I'm okay with picking up a story and then reading it and being like, "Oh." Because there were people, even back in Regency times, who were like, "This is not okay."
[Mary Robinette] The anti-… The whole abolitionist movement there.
[Brandon] That is certainly one approach to it, and I actually kind of appreciate, like, Mary, that you walk that line. I would say a lot of times your protagonists are several steps further along than the average person, but they are… They still have blind spots that they end up usually getting confronted by in the story. So it's not this perfect character who has no problems, but at the same time, it makes me sympathetic towards the character because at least they have the blinders a little bit further open. It kind of makes me think, "You know, I probably still have my blinders on to an extent."
[Mary Robinette] In fact, you're doing that right now, with blinder and blind as a pejorative term.
[Brandon] Okay. Yeah. Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Which is one of those things that I have worked very hard to train out of my own vocabulary, and talk about spots where I'm ignorant. Spots where I have lack of knowledge or lack of awareness. But it is… It's very easy when you're writing these to trip up on stuff that society has imprinted you with. So one of the fun things about doing this, one of the reasons to do that, is to interrogate these things and to look at them and sort of hold them up to the lens and use science fiction and fantasy to tip them to the side.
[Margaret] For me, where I hit the line is where I'm reading a book… Because sometimes it's fun to read books that take place in worlds that are not like ours. That's why we read fantasy and science fiction. Sometimes it's even fun to read stories in a pseudo-medieval setting where gender equity is stepped back from where it is today, shall we say? For me, where I reach the line is where I start to feel as if I've started to read a Prussian porn. It's like this was just written to talk about oh, how terrible it was to be X in X time, or in this scenario. I love Bujold's The Curse of Chalion books. It's like there is a lot of sexism and allusion to sexual violence in those. It's not explicit, but there is this kind of threat of your main character being a woman, there's stuff that she is worried about. For me, that doesn't cross the line. Everyone places their lines in different places where there comfortable reading, but it's not a story that's about like, "Oh, no, I'm going out into the world. What's going to happen to me now?"
 
[Howard] In the… Around 2015, the Schlock Mercenary installments, our cast finds a giant, abandoned station if you will, world-sized, that makes them incredibly wealthy. In the 2018-2019 installments, the original inhabitants turn out to never have left and they want their stuff back. Yes, you can take a step back and look at this and say, "Oh, my gosh, this is exactly like what would happen if the indigenous peoples of the Americas or Australia or wherever rose up and demanded all of their land back. What would we do?" Well, it's not exactly like that. But having the protagonist deal with it in a way that says, "You know what, they're right. This isn't my stuff. It's their stuff. Not a whole lot I can do about that." We now have an enormous debt, which is part of our plot problem. The story is not about returning things to indigenous peoples. The story is about we made an enormous budgeting mistake and now we have problems to solve. It's fun to write and having a protagonist who recognizes, "Oh. Somebody lives here. Actually still does live here." And immediately said, "Well, okay. That's…"
 
[Mary Robinette] A lot of times what I think fiction is doing, and especially when we're dealing with imperfect worlds, is it's giving us a script that we can use and take into the real world. One of the things that I do that is actually the opposite of writing imperfect world is that I tend to write happily committed married couples. I do that because I so rarely see it in fiction. I see a lot of people who have taken their social cues from these narratives about men who are stalkers and men who are abusive. It's like that's not the relationship that you should be aiming for. So when you deal with an imperfect world and you have a character who is coming to grips with their own imperfections, it gives the reader a script and a lens with which to interrogate their own stuff. I know that I… That's certainly one of the things, the side effects, that happens when I read. It is one of the things that I think fiction and science fiction and fantasy particularly do very well.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is actually Mary's book.
[Mary Robinette] Right.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I've been talking a lot, but I'll talk some more. So, The Fated Sky is the second book in my Lady Astronaut series. The reason I suggested this book for the book of the week is because it is set in the 1950s. It is set in the heart of the civil rights era. It is dealing with a lot of the problems that are inherent in the world at that time. My main character, Elma, is not actually a completely reliable narrator. It's first person narration. There's another character who has been her antagonist for the entire book. As this book unfolds, we find that as she is interrogating her assumptions, that… And he is interrogating his, that there is… There's actually more common ground than either of them thought. But the big thing for me with this is the idea of the narratives that we bring into relationships. That when we are describing our relationships to someone else, it's like, "Oh. I hate him, he hates me." That's the narrative. That's part of what happens with an imperfect world is that it's built by people who come with their own narratives that they're applying to just stuff that happens.
[Brandon] I haven't read the second one yet, but I've read the first one. The first one deals with the same sort of thing, and I loved it.
[Mary Robinette] Thank you.
[Brandon] It is one of those… It was just really, really interesting and fun to read, and eye-opening at the same time.
[Mary Robinette] I suppose I should mention that this is a book about going to Mars in the 1950s when women are the computers because we don't… Haven't miniaturized computers yet.
[Margaret] But with punchcards.
[Mary Robinette] With punchcards.
[Brandon] It's an alternate history.
[Mary Robinette] An alternate history. And imperfect… There is an entire chapter that is nothing but clean… Zero G toilet repair.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Selling point.
[Howard] Do you use the word milk dud?
[Mary Robinette] No, but we do talk about satellites in orbit.
[Howard] Okay.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] So. Veering back…
[Laughter]
[Margaret] I'm just remembering all of the rocketry euphemisms in the first book. I'm like, what euphemism?
 
[Brandon] What do you guys… Do you have an opinion on stories that are set in a historical period or in a fantasy world that just tries to pretend the problem was never there? Meaning people who want to write a steampunk story and just say, "You know what, we're going to write an alternate history version where this isn't an issue." Or people who write a fantasy novel, where they say, "You know what, in my world, racism just isn't an issue. We're not going to deal with it."
[Mary Robinette] The thing is… There are parts of me that love these optimistic visions of the world. I think when you're doing steampunk and doing that, you actually have to move it to a different world. You can't just erase history. That is deeply problematic. It's taking a lot of people's pain and going, "Ah, I just don't want to deal with your pain, so I'm not going to. I'm not going to acknowledge that you've been hurt. I'm just going to… Goggles, dresses, and overalls! Whee!"
[Brandon] Right. Can I… I don't want to… But this is… This is something that is very natural to start doing, and is a place where you might end up having to confront some of your biases because natural human instinct is, "Oh, I'll make it better. Isn't it just better…"
[Margaret] If that never happened?
[Brandon] If that never happened?
[Mary Robinette] While, yes, that would be… It did happen. The other thing that I would say has just slipped out of my head, so, Margaret, you talk, since you had a thing you wanted to say.
[Margaret] I was saying that I don't want to say that you can… It's like, "Oh." I think a trap that one can fall into in, say, steampunk or historical period, and you know that racism was a problem or sexism was a problem, but you don't want to deal with that. The way to not deal with not dealing with that is to not have, say, any characters of color in your book, so that lets you ignore racism.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Margaret] That's a bad way of dealing with that.
[Mary Robinette] Don't do that.
[Margaret] I mean, clearly, if you're doing steampunk, you're creating an alternate history. There were not giant rail lines of flying zeppelins. I don't even know why you'd have a rail line if you were flying, but… 
[Mary Robinette] But still… 
[Margaret] Whatever, it wasn't there. But if that's the only thing you've changed, and everybody is also still white and upper-class and… Who is shoveling coal and how are we thinking about this?
[Mary Robinette] That, for me, is the thing that… Unfortunately, as a species, we tend to just always other people. If we're not going to do it along race lines or gender lines, we're going to find something else. There is always, unfortunately, going to be oppression. I wish that that were not the case, but I find it difficult to believe that there wouldn't be some form of oppression. So when you decide that it's like, "You know what, I'm not going to have racism." But there will still be some other… It's like there's something, unfortunately, is going to fill that gap. There's going to be…
[Howard] There needs to be an unjust imbalance somewhere.
[Mary Robinette] There's going to be ramifications of that choice.
[Margaret] It's ignoring the fact that this lifestyle was made possible because of an oppressed underclass.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Honestly, folks, and this is uncomfortable truth to hear, it's still the case.
[Margaret] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Like, the majority of the wealth in the world is in the United States, and even if you are poor, there are people in the world who are supporting your lifestyle who have it worse than you.
[Howard] There's a concept that super useful for trying to understand the unjust imbalances. Marginalizations. That is the concept of an external cost. If you want to write a flawed society, think about what the external cost is. A good example of external cost is secondhand smoke. I want to smoke. Yes, it cost me something, and it also makes everyone around me uncomfortable, and it changes the smell of the room, and that one's kind of obvious. What if the cigarette smoker couldn't get cancer, and there is no primary cost for them? Suddenly, we have an unjust imbalance that's really unjust. So look at external costs, and as you are creating your society, your secondary world fantasy, your far-flung future, ask yourself who benefits from the external cost and who is paying the external cost unjustly.
 
[Brandon] So, last question along this topic. You want to write a protagonist who is a product of their society, and therefore has certain biases that we would consider reprehensible. You don't want to… Say you're writing a historical novel. You want to be realistic, although sometimes realism is used as an excuse for things, as we've talked about before. But you want to… You want to be realistic. You don't want this character to be villainous, but you also want them to be a product of their society. Any tips?
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I do is to always have someone that can comment or call them on their bullshit.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] Because that's one of the ways that you can let the reader know that this character is reprehensible, but that you are not giving approval to that. Because there's a difference between the character being reprehensible and the text saying that that reprehensible trait is a good and positive thing. So having someone who can call them on it, having there be consequences for the reprehensible traits, these are things that I think can help when you're doing that. The other aspect of that is trying to understand why the character has those opinions. Sometimes it's just the way they were raised and imprinted and they have no idea that those things are false or bad or problematic. Sometimes it's… More frequently, when you're dealing with forms of oppression, there is a sense of safety that has been challenged in some way, and that they think, by maintaining this particular status quo, that they will maintain their own security. Or that they will lose something if the status quo shifts. So if you think about the why's of their choices and their opinions, that's going to help you have a character that isn't just "I have this terr… I'm evil." Yeah, evilness is evil.
[Margaret] I'm thinking also if you have a protagonist who is a product of an imperfect society, and being a product, you want to be able to say, "Well, yes, they probably hold some of these imperfect views." What I would be careful of is making sure, since I'll probably have other characters of the society who probably have similar views who are villains, making sure I'm not giving my protagonist a pass on their imperfect views just because they happen to be the protagonist.
[Brandon] That's a very good point. Yeah.
[Margaret] It's like, "He's a great guy, so it's okay that…" That's where I think it can get really sticky.
 
[Brandon] Yeah. I'm going to give us our homework today. Your homework's actually to take a character who is either in some media form or someone you have written who is a wish fulfillment character. This is a character for whom things have gone really well. Things might be easy. They're at the top of their power structure. Even though they might be facing very hard external problems in the form of slaying a dragon or rising to the head of their company or something like this, there are certainly obstacles to them, they are in a position where they're able to command a lot of weight of authority and privilege. Take that character, and move them to the bottom of a different power structure or put them in a place where suddenly those things no longer exist for them. See where that story goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict
 
 
Key points: Person versus nature, setting, environment! Adventure based on survival, disaster, endemic. Start with research! You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. In person versus nature, nature serves the function of the antagonist, stopping the protagonist from achieving some goal. There are often plateaus of goals for the protagonist to achieve. Sometimes nature is a time bomb. You can also use person versus nature as one arc or subplot in a story. Person versus nature, especially in science fiction, often has a sense of wonder reveal as the resolution. So it's a mystery story, a puzzle box story. Setting is more interesting when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Person versus nature, in MICE terms, is a milieu story, with the goal of getting out of the milieu, or at least navigating and surviving it. So, what does the setting throw up as barriers that block that? Especially unanticipated consequences of decisions that the character makes. Often there are anthropomorphized elements, too. What does the character or the setting want, need, and get? Start with entry into the milieu, end with exit from the milieu, and add in lots of complications in the middle.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 27.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Natural Setting As Conflict.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] And we're in conflict with our environment.
[Chuckles]
[garbled]
[Howard] I don't think you should do the joke.
[Dan] We are in Houston. It's so humid and hot.
[Brandon] Yeah, we are.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, sweetness. It's so cute that you think it's humid outside.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I'm just… Oh, poor bunny.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] We, on the podcast, have rarely done anything where we've dealt with person versus setting. In specific, setting as natural setting, natural… Meaning, these are adventure stories that are survival based, disaster based, or even endemic based. These sorts of things. We're going to talk about how to do that, how to approach making this type of story. You guys have any starting out pointers when you're going to create a person versus setting story?
[Dan] Yes. Do your research. Because, in my experience, the more research you do, the cooler your story is going to get. Because you… Even if you think you know how to survive in a particular environment or overcome a particular disaster, the more you learn about the things that could go wrong and the various solutions that already exist to solve them, will suggest a thousand cooler things you hadn't thought of yet.
[Howard] I… Years and years ago, I think I watched one episode early in the season of Survivor. I watched that for 10 minutes and thought, "Okay. It is taking them way too long to invent stuff that I learned how to make in Boy Scouts. There's got to be a reason why these people don't know how to do that." Because when I was 10 years old… Well, 13 years old, it made perfect sense. I only had to be shown half of this before I figured out, "Oh. Well, obviously, this is the other half." If you're doing person versus nature, you have to be smarter as a writer… You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. Because the Boy Scout is going to be pretty disappointed if the story starts and they feel like, "Oh. I've got this."
[Mary Robinette] I think, also, for me, one of the things about the person versus nature is that the nature is serving the function of your antagonist. So that means that your protagonist has to have a goal that the nature is stopping them from achieving.
[Brandon] That's a very good point.
[Mary Robinette] That's something that a lot of people leave out. That's why frequently they wind up being very flat. So, a lot of times, it is a character driven goal or some other aspect, but it's the nature that is keeping them from doing that.
[Dan] One thing I see a lot in nature survival stories is that the protagonist's goal is allowed to change more frequently and more completely than normal. Because they achieve plateaus of, "Well, now I've got the shelter built. Okay, I can move on to another goal now."
[Howard] I want to point out that it's… When we think of person versus nature, we very often default to survival. But you can absolutely have a person versus nature story where the big conflict is I am trying to go up the hillside, and come back down with the perfect Christmas tree. The mountain doesn't want to let me do that. The mountain isn't trying to kill me. The mountain's trying to ruin Christmas.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Would you call Calculating Stars, even though I know there are some villainous characters in it, would you call this a person versus nature story in some ways?
[Mary Robinette] Certainly part one is. I mean, I've… I'm killing the planet, so yes. But part one is very much we have to get out of nature. After that, it is… Most of the major conflicts are coming from societal problems. Where you're having trouble convincing people that in fact the climate is changing on the planet.
[Brandon] Right. But there's also this sense of we have to overcome this thing together as a species. I wonder if that could be put in that same category?
[Mary Robinette] I think it can. Because it… This is one of the things that when you're introducing it into your story… I said that it serves the function of as… Excuse me, of an antagonist, that it's preventing your character from achieving a goal. But the other thing that it can do, which is why I hesitated with Calculating Stars, is it's not so much serving the function of an antagonist. It's a time bomb.
[Brandon] Right. Yeah, that's true.
[Mary Robinette] That's what it's doing. It is providing goals. It's actually allowing people to break hurdles. So I don't know that in… That's in part two of the book, I don't know that it serves the function…
[Howard] Well, what you've raised is… I don't love a novel length pure person versus nature story because that's a long time to wrestle with nature. That said, I loved The Martian.
[Mary Robinette] I was going to cite Isle of the Blue Dolphins.
[Howard] Yeah. I haven't read that one, but I loved The Martian. But it is absolutely useful and beautiful to work person versus nature as one of your big arcs. Knowing how person versus nature works, and knowing how to do it correctly, means that if you're using some sort of formula for timing the delivery of emotional punches, you know how to time these things.
 
[Brandon] Can I put you on the spot and ask for any tips along those lines? What makes these stories tick? Why do we love them? What are some of those beats? Dan's already mentioned one, reassessing of goals, as you achieve smaller and smaller… Larger and larger goals, I should say. You start off saying, "I am helpless. I am going to die. Well, at least I'll do this thing. Well, since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing. Since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing." Then, it just escalates to the point that you believe that they can survive in this.
[Dan] Then they build a radio out of coconuts.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] In a science fiction setting…
[Mary Robinette] Gilligan!
[Howard] Often the… Yeah. Was it Gilligan who built that, or was it the Professor?
[Mary Robinette] The Professor. It's always the Professor [garbled who's building things?]
[Howard] I was pretty sure I saw transistor tubes in there somewhere.
[Dan] Those are also made of coconuts.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Coconut glass.
[Mary Robinette] Everything that you need, you just pull out of that ship.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It was the most amazing… Anyway, your point being, Howard?
 
[Howard] Yeah. The point being, when you are doing person versus nature in science fiction, often the resolution is not oh, I learned how to make a structure out of sticks, the solution is some sort of sense of wonder reveal about how this alien environment really works. That moment… If you've planned that, what you've written isn't what we classically think of as a person versus nature story. What you've written is a mystery story, in which we're being a detective and we're solving a problem. Then you wrap that around a story in which characters are in conflict and the solving of the mystery… It could be a time bomb, it could be a puzzle box type story, but… I do think of these things as name dropping the formulas as I'm building them, because that allows me to very quickly picture what it is I want to do. Then, when I have that picture, I start mapping character names onto it and moving things around. I'm writing a longform serial where I already have a whole lot of established pieces. Coming up with a story and then very quickly mapping a bunch of characters on it… The mapping the characters onto it is often the easiest part. It's coming up with what is that fun reveal? One of the ones I'm working with right now in the Schlock Mercenary universe is Fermi's Paradox. Which is fascinating to think of as person versus nature, because nature here is, and the mystery as it stands, Galactic civilizations have been wiping themselves out every few million years and we do not know why. Is it an enemy? Is it something natur… It's a mystery. It is a reveal. It's fun. If I can stick the landing, I'm going to make so much money.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's really what person versus nature is all about. It's about the money that you're…
[Howard] I want to get out of these woods as a millionaire.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Dan, you have our book of the week this week.
[Dan] Our book of the week this week is what I consider one of the classic man versus nature survival stories. It's called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It's Newberry winning young adult novel. It's about a kid who gets for his birthday a hatchet and throws it in his suitcase and hops on the little Cessna that's going to take him to visit his dad on an oilfield in the Canadian wilderness. Part way there, the pilot has a heart attack and dies, and the kid has to do his best to land the plane in a lake and then survive as long as he can in the middle of nowhere. He's the only character. It's all about him doing his best to survive. It's really… Everything we've been talking about in its purest little young adult form. It's a fantastic book. Very short and easy to read, and awesome.
[Howard] Boy versus nature.
[Dan] I'm going to recommend one more, though.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Dan] We're getting two book of the weeks for the price of one.
[Mary Robinette] Whoo!
[Dan] Ryan North, the guy who does dinosaur comics. He's got a brand-new book out called How to Invent Everything.
[Brandon] Oh, I really want to read that.
[Dan] He sells this, he promotes this as kind of like a cheat sheet for time travelers. If you end up stuck in the past for whatever reason, and have this book with you, you will be able to invent electricity and penicillin and everything you need to make a civilization work. So, as a resource for writers who want to be able to describe characters doing this stuff, it's a really good resource.
[Brandon] Yeah, I think it's… He has this poster that I've seen for years, that is… Hang this poster in your Time Machine, that has all the little tips you would need. It's done jokingly, and he's adapted that now into an entire book.
[Dan] Expanded it into a full book.
 
[Brandon] Let's… On the topic here, Mary talked about setting as antagonist. Let's dig into this idea a little bit more. How do you go about making your setting an interesting antagonist? How do you go about having a story that perhaps has no villain other than survival, or… Yeah?
[Dan] One of the principles that I teach in my How to Scare People class is that something familiar becomes unfamiliar. That's one of the basic premises of a horror story. It's also exactly what's going on in survival and disaster stories. Something like the Poseidon Adventure. It's a cruise ship, we know what a cruise ship is like. Now it's upside down. So we recognize everything, but it's also weird and new at the same time. That gives us that sense of horror, and that sense of unknown. Even though we still kind of understand what's going on.
[Mary Robinette] That's exactly why the upside down is disturbing in Stranger Things. Huh. Interesting.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, for me, one of the tricks on making it an effective antagonist goes back to the MICE quotient, which is… It is often a straight up milieu story. So, for me, the thing is, again, you got a character goal, there's the character goal of… Whatever their emotional character goal is, but then there's also the goal of I want to get out of this place. I need to navigate this place. So, finding the environmental setting things that can throw up barriers, that challenge your character's competence, and that are, often, I think, most effectively a result of a choice that they have made. So it's like, well, we've got fire ants coming at us. So, in order to stop them, we're going to flood this area to keep them from coming in. But now, having flooded it…
[Howard] Oh, no. Oh, no.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Islands of swimming fire ants are a thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. This is a film. So it's this unanticipated consequence that makes things worse. I think that's often one of the ways that you can ratchet up the tension and something that a good antagonist does, is they react.
[Brandon] All right. And escalating. That's like… That's a very good point. Making it worse and worse and worse, even as our protagonist is leveling up in what they're able to accomplish.
[Dan] A lot of survival stories also have… Not, they don't have villains, but you can see anthropomorphized elements of the environment that function as a villain. You mentioned Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier. She's got this rivalry, so to speak, with an octopus. She knows, she's scared to death of this octopus, but she knows at some point she's going to have to dive down into that part of the reef, or she's not going to have enough to eat. So it's building this thing up as a villain over the course of the story until you get a showdown. You get a similar thing in the movie Castaway with his tooth. I'm going to do my best to survive here, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to confront that tooth. It's going to be a showdown.
[Brandon] Howard, earlier you mentioned something I thought was very interesting, which is using person versus nature as a subtheme in a story, which you pointed out, you like a little bit better sometimes. Any tips on keeping this as a subtheme or as a secondary plot cycle?
[Howard] The book, Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, the character of Dr. Malcolm is… He is the personification of chaos. Chaos is the person versus… Is nature in person versus nature. Malcolm tells us we have a complex system and things are going to go wrong in unexpected ways and they are going to amplify each other and things are going to get worse. By giving voice to that, when it happens, it doesn't feel like, oh, the author just picked the worst possible thing to happen and it happened. It feels like a natural consequence because now we can understand chaos theory. That is layered on top of a corporate espionage plot where it was corporate espionage that caused all these things… That we like to think caused all these things to go wrong at the beginning. But when you stand back and look at the book, you know, well, if it hadn't been corporate espionage, it would have been something else. So having a character who gives voice to the nature without actually being on nature's side can be useful.
[Mary Robinette] Something that you said made me actually think of Lord of the Flies, which definitely begins as person versus nature. One of the things that happens over the course of that, as the boys achieve goals… It's like, okay, we've created shelter, we've created fire, and all of those things, is that the antagonist shifts from being the island to being the boys… The society of the boys themselves. I think that that's something that you can actually do. Something that we see when we have human antagonists, that a lot of times on antagonist will shift. It's not the antagonist that you thought it was the entire time, it's something else. So I think that's something that you can play with with your worldbuilding and your… The setting as…
[Howard] It's an echoing of the principle… The story begins and there's a thing that our main character wants. There's a thing that our main character actually needs. And there is a thing that, in the course of the story, the main character's actually going to get. Often, these are three different things. If you treat nature, the antagonist, the same way, the want, need, get being different things, there's this twist as we discover it doesn't matter what nature wanted, this is what nature needed… And this is what actually happened.
 
[Brandon] Mary, you've got some homework for us.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is, we're going to take the milieu MICE thread concept. Which is that a story begins when you enter a place in a milieu story, and it ends when you exit the place. All of the conflicts are things that stop from getting out, they stop you from navigating. They are things that get in your way of achieving that exit strategy. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick a milieu. Pick a setting. Just pick your starting point, this is a character entering. Pick your exit point, that's the character leaving. Then brainstorm about 20 things that are going to get in the way of your character exiting the place. Then, I want you to pick your five favorites and rank them in an escalating order of difficulty. So this is just a structure exercise. If you wind up with something that sounds fun, you can write it. But really, what I want you to do is think about a way to build that setting as antagonist, and that setting is getting in your way.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.48: Character Death and Plot Armor
 
 
Key points: When and why do you kill off characters? First, ask yourself what is the worst thing that could happen to your character. It may not be death. Character death should be the best move for the story, not just an easy way to make the reader feel loss. What are the consequences of the death? Do writers look at character death differently than readers and fans? Everybody hates it when you can predict a character's death. Make them care, but don't telegraph a death. "Most people don't die for real at a point where the story is geared for maximum impact." A death, like any event in a story, should be surprising yet inevitable. Set up a longer arc for the character, follow through on consequences, and make it pay off. Beware of fridging! Killing a character as inciting incident, as backstory… Make sure the dead character has a purpose beyond simply acting as motivation for the protagonist. When do you decide to give a character plot armor, because they are too important to the story to die? Consider ablative plot armor!
 
[Mary] Season 13, Episode 48.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Plot Armor and Character Death.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary] [squeal]
[Dan] I'm okay. Don't worry.
[Laughter]
 
[Brandon] Well. That line… I'm okay. To kill off this season of Writing Excuses, we're going to be talking about character death. So. First question. When do you kill off characters and why?
[Mary] Chapter 6. No.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I've come back to…
[Oh, he's serious…]
[Howard] Any time I'm thinking about killing a character or threatening the reader with that as an option, I always come back to what I think Pat Rothfuss said on one of our casts years ago, which was there are so many things that are worse than death that can happen to your characters. I ask myself that question first, because I want to know that I am choosing character death because it is the best failure mode or the best success mode that this particular story can have. I can't just default to it, because I think that's the only way to move the story forward or to make the reader feel loss.
[Mary] I look at the consequences of the death, for exactly the same reason. Because the death itself, sad that that character's dead and all, but people who survive, those are the ones that I'm going to be traveling with. The consequences of that death on the plot, that… If it's just, "Oh, and then everybody's going to be really sad…" That's not a consequence. I mean, yes, that is a consequence, but that's not a unique consequence that's going to drive things, usually.
 
[Brandon] Let me ask you a follow-up on that, because it prompts something in my thoughts. Do you think we look at this differently because we're writers than readers and fans do?
[Mary] I started doing this because deaths in books as a reader annoyed me so much. It wasn't a structural thing. Because I didn't know why they annoyed me. I just… I hate reading things where I'm like, "Oh, that character's going to die." Or where they die…
[Howard] I hate reading things right can do that…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Where I can say, "Oh, they're dead."
[Dan] Where you can tell.
[Mary] I hated it when characters would die and I didn't feel anything. Because I just didn't care.
[Brandon] I would say that annoys me a lot in cinema. They do that sometimes.
[Dan] My brother and I came up with the phrase, "That character wants to live in Wyoming." Which comes straight from Hunt for Red October, where there is the one Russian officer who's like, "I would like to live in Wyoming." He's gone. You know he's dead as soon as he says that.
[Howard] Was that Sam Neill? Was that Sam Neill's character?
[Dan] Yeah. So as soon as somebody starts talking about how they're going to retire soon or they're going to go to this place, all their plans for the future… They want to live in Wyoming. It's hard, because the space that you're aiming for is in between those. You don't want to telegraph it, but you also want to make them care. Those were the two problems that you had. Finding that middle ground… This is a character I love and don't see their death coming. That's what I shoot for, basically, with most of my characters.
[Howard] But I don't want that death to feel like a cheap shot. This is one of the places where the argument for narrative-driven fiction versus fiction that feels real is often centered around that. Most people don't die for real at a point where the story is geared for maximum impact. That's probably not how I'm going to go. That's probably not how any of us are going to go. But when you look at deaths in stories, we always have… Always is the wrong word. But we very often have the narrative is shaped around that death. When it isn't, often I'm annoyed. When it is, sometimes I feel like it was too convenient. There's no pleasing me. Just stop killing your characters.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] See, I asked this question as a writer just because the thing that it prompted in my mind is how I will have people come through my line, and just really be torn up by a character death. Which, for me, this is kind of maybe seeing in my brain, I'm like, "But that was a really good death." Right? I'm like, "Why are you torn up about that?" It was… They fulfill their character arc, it came to a good conclusion, it… They sacrificed for something they believed in. This was a really good death."
[Howard] I respond… in that exact situation, my response has nothing to do with my work and everything to do with the person at the table in front of me. The person at the table in front of me is grieving, and what they need me to do is grieve with them. My response is, "I loved that character too. In fact, I may even have loved them more than you did."
[Mary] Now, see, I'm evil because my response to that is, "I am so delighted I made you cry. Thank you for telling me. I worked really hard on that."
[Dan] My usual response is, "That's why I killed the character, is because I knew you would react that way. If you wouldn't react that strongly, what's the point?"
 
[Brandon] Though, I will say… This is something that's maybe just a little pet peeve of mine. I remember… This is going to date me, it's a long time ago, but there was this TV show called 24. This had a really big cultural impact on myself and my friends when the first season came out. We watched it, riveted. In that scene… Spoilers for a 20-year-old show or whatever… The main character's wife dies. The whole plot is set up for we need to save her. He's going to save her. He's the action star. He gets there a little too late, and she's dead. I was… totally thought it was great, until I listened to the commentary, which was the wrong thing. Where they said, "Yeah, we weren't sure if we were going to kill her or not. Then we decided, well, what would the reader… Or the viewer, not expect." For me, hearing that, that is not what I wanted to hear. I did not want to hear you just said, "Well, what's going to… What's the most unexpected?" This may just be a thing for me, because that's good storytelling in some ways. But I don't want it to just be what's unexpected. I wanted to be what the story's pushing for.
[Howard] I don't want it to be unexpected. I want it to be surprising, yet inevitable. It's startling, but when you look at it in retrospect, you're like, "Nope, that's…"
[Mary] I'm really sympathetic to the, "Well, what would the readers not expect?" Especially when you are trying to decide in the moment. Because sometimes… Like, I mean, I have done things where I have plotted, planning for the character to live, and thought, "Well, maybe I will kill them. I'm not sure." It's not until I get there that I really… The story itself kind of… The shape of everything that's come up to that point makes it clear to me which choice I'm going to need to make. I have a… This is going to involve spoilers.
[Brandon] Okay. For?
[Mary] For one of my own stories.
[Brandon] Which one?
[Mary] The Worshipful Society of Glove Makers. Which is on Uncanny. I kill a character in that. I can avoid… I'll just tell you which one. I did not plan to kill that character. At all. I had planned for them to have the… We're going to try to work this out. There's… Trying to deal with the situation. The simplest solution for this problem character was to just… If they were just dead. So another character just kills them. I wrote it, and I was like [gasp]. Because sometimes you just… Sometimes you do just right things and discover it. I looked at it and I was like, "Oh. That… Huh."
[Howard] Surprising, yet inevitable.
[Mary] Because it's the simplest choice. But, because I had set up this longer arc for the character, people consistently tell me that they actually gasp out loud when they get to that death. So… That's why I'm like… I'm a little sympathetic to that.
[Dan] Well, I think the way to make that work is to follow that up. You kill a character on a whim like that, which I've totally done. But then, like you were saying in the beginning, you need to follow…
[Mary] Consequences.
[Dan] The people who survive, and follow through on the consequences, and you can totally make that pay off, even if it isn't inevitable.
[Brandon] I think it is good storytelling. It just didn't work for me, because I wanted to believe they were doing what was best for the story, not what would surprise me.
[Mary] But it worked for you until you knew their motivation.
[Brandon] It did. That's what I'm saying.
[Mary] Never asked the author why they did something!
 
[Brandon] Let's go to our book of the week.
[Howard] Ah, yes. Schlock Mercenary book 13, Random Access Memorabilia. I did two things in this book that I totally loved, and I'm totally going to spoil for you, because there's so much more going on in the book that's fun. One of them is that I killed Sgt. Schlock and brought him back from a completely… Like, from a backup. From a clone. He'd lost five days. At one point, he's watching the video of his death, and somebody says, "Are you… How do you feel about this?" He looks at her and says, "It's kind of cool." It was significant to me because one, it pulled plot armor off of everybody. I demonstrated that anybody can be killed, and can lose something. Yes, I may bring them back. Second was if this is the only consequence for death, if the reader doesn't have to mourn, how can I possibly threaten characters with death in the future? The second thing that I did was part one, part two, and part three were called Read, Write, and Execute. When part three aired, all of the computer nerds in the audience were like [choke] surprising, yet inevitable. Just by the naming of the chapters.
 
[Brandon] All right. So. Question for you. Can you kill off a character, as… Like a side character and have it provide motivation for other characters, but not simply fridge the character? Do you know what I mean by fridging?
[Dan] Yes.
[Mary] But why don't you define it? Or shall I define it?
[Brandon] I'll define fridging. Fridging comes from an old Green Lantern comic book, where Green Lantern arrives home to his house and finds his girlfriend stuffed in a fridge. Famously, without any kind of warning that this would happen. Simply to add more character to Green Lantern himself, to give him something to mourn over, to provide motivation. It's become a cliché of the comic book, and just at large, media industry, that if you want to provide motivation, for often a guy, you will then kill off a female love interest or friend, to give them something to mourn over. Yet, at the same time, we've just been talking about killing a character when it's completely unexpected, and the effect it has on the people around them. What is the difference between these two things?
[Mary] So, for me, this was the thing that I had to reverse engineer, because I was planning to kill off a character. For me, it's making sure that the character has a longer plot arc that is clear and obvious, and they're going to be fulfilling this all the way through the story. It usually involves something with the main character. Like not, "Oh, we're going to go be happy together," but "I am disagreeing with you about this thing." That there's a conflict they have with the main character. So that when you kill them off, that is left unresolved. Which is the way things happen in real life. That there's a lot of unfinished business that you have with the people who are gone. There's a whole that they leave. I think that that's one of the things that happens when a lot of these characters are fridged, is that they don't leave a hole in the plot.
[Howard] It's very, very difficult… Very difficult for… If you kill a character as your inciting incident, and that character has a close relationship with your protagonist, you're going to have to have done some miraculous writing to not be accused of having fridged that character. Because that piece as a motivation to start the story is very, very hackneyed.
[Brandon] Well, let's… 
[Howard] It's super hard to do right. I wouldn't try it. That's just the way I feel about it. At this point. And I work in comics. So.
[Brandon] You're extra sensitive to it.
[Howard] I just gotta steer away from it.
 
[Brandon] I mean, I'm going to push us on this one, just because… I do think this is totally a thing. I'm not trying to discount fridging as a cultural thing we should avoid, but at the same time, some of the best stories are told about people who wear loss as a motivation. If we look at… Just even Batman. Batman is a guy who lost his parents, and it changed him into this thing. That's like this archetypal story that has been retold and retold and we are fascinated by it. What's the difference between that and fridging? Is there a difference?
[Mary] Well, Batman, it's backstory. Which is, I think, a little different.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary] The… I mean, honestly, you can fridge someone mid book. I think when… I mean… I keep feeling like I'm saying the same thing over and over again.
[Howard] That character needs to feel like they had a purpose beyond simply dying as a motivation point, as an arm bar for the protagonist, for the plot.
 
[Brandon] Okay. So, spoiler for the first Avengers film. When Agent Coulson dies and it brings the whole team together and that's like the pivotal moment of the whole thing. Agent Coulson? Not a fridge? Because he had had all these interactions with them before, or is he a fridge because he…
[Dan] Well, Coulson specifically sacrifices himself. So it's a very different situation. It's not an inert character being acted upon. It is someone making a choice.
[Brandon] So you think… That one you would say… That was a [big point]
[Howard] Well, Nick Fury even… Nick Fury knows that he needed something to pull these characters together, and so… To pull the heroes together. So he dials up the emotional impact by throwing the bloody trading cards at Capt. America. Coulson never did get you to sign these, did he? He staged that. He went and got them out of Coulson's locker, and made them bloody. So, yes, you can argue that this is fridging, but you could also argue that it wasn't because Fury… Fury didn't want this to happen. He used it. He used whatever he had to turn the team into a team.
[Mary] But Coulson is also an example of how you can give a character a sense of a life outside. I've pointed to this in previous podcasts. The scene when he's getting off the elevator with Pepper and he's… And she's like, "Are you still dating that cellist?" That's just… It's like, "Oh. There is this whole other life to this character." Whereas most of the time, you're like, "What can I tell… What can you tell me about the character who's been fridged? They really, really loved the main character so much. They just loved them."
[Howard] One of the reasons that Coulson works so well is that Stark really just does see him as… "Why are you calling him Phil? His first name is Agent." Then we come around to Ironman facing off against Loki and saying, "And there's one more person you upset. His name was Phil." We realize that yes, he liked… He had come to recognize that Agent Coulson, Phil Coulson, had a life that Tony Stark was now wishing had continued.
[Mary] This is an example… Thank you for bringing that up. This is an example of that thing I was talking about, about making sure that the… There is a conflict point that the dying character has with the main character. Because it looks like the arc that they're setting up is Ironman learning to recognize the puny ordinary people. Which is actually an arc that Ironman goes on. It's just Phil is not there at the end of it.
 
[Brandon] I appreciate you guys letting me push you on this one. It is something that I'm really interested in. So thanks for putting up with me on it. I do want to ask just a different question. We have very little time left. I want to ask when do you decide to do the opposite and give plot armor? This is the phrase where we say a character is too important to die in the story right now. They haven't fulfilled their plot arc. I'm going to prevent them from dying. I'm going to rescue them in some narrative way from the consequences of their choices. When do you do this? Why do you do this? Mary's wincing, so maybe she does…
[Mary] I haven't done that. I haven't done that yet.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Well, I did that in book 15. Lieut. Sorlie, who I had kind of planned for her to sacrifice herself heroically. I got to the end of the story and realized nothing she can do at this point will seem more heroic than what she has already done. The death would be a downer, and it doesn't need to be a downer. That's… I don't need that sacrifice in this story. So… She lived.
[Brandon] I've done it before. I have a character that their story isn't done and I feel it will be less sat… More satisfying to rescue them and continue their story than it would be to let them die there with unresolved major plot things. But I don't always make that choice. It's always a really hard one.
[Dan] Well, Howard touched on this earlier, but there is so many things that are worse than death. So if I find myself in this situation, I'm not going to kill that character, but I'm going to hurt them. I'm going to make them live through something, or experience something, or maybe even they get off scot free and all their friends are dead because they are the only one that lived through whatever it was. So that there are still consequences for the scene. They don't get off scot free.
[Howard] That's ablative plot armor.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Something hits them, it explodes outward…
 
[Brandon] All right. I'm going to give you a writing prompt instead of some homework this time. A good old classic Writing Excuses writing prompt. I've been thinking a lot about the story Mary talked about last month, where she had the people… The alien race where they went through a kind of butterfly-like transformation at the end of their lives and lost all of their memories and had to be reminded of them. I thought this is an interesting take on death. That a story where the characters die, but don't die. So your writing prompt is that. Do something where, perhaps fantastical, perhaps not, one of your main characters is going to go through a major transformation that is going to feel like death to those around them, but they're not actually dying. Write that story. See how it goes. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 12.41: Raising the Stakes

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/10/08/12-41-raising-the-stakes/

Key Points: Raising the stakes over the long haul? How do you keep it interesting? Lots of smaller plots, smaller scenes that raise the stakes in different ways. Subplots! Make the failure worse, and worse. Mounting consequences! Put yourself into it. Find the personal issues for the character. More specific, and more personal. Use try-fail cycles, yes-but/no-and, and build new problems out of old solutions. Rest points can accent the pedal-to-the-metal moments, if they are real. Build a stairway, always up and progressing, but there are plateaus as well as risers. The question raised at the beginning must matter, it must be gripping, then the stakes will carry you. Don't raise the stakes too fast and too high! Save your great finish for the end, don't give it away too early. Also, delayed consequences, or solutions that postpone the problem without solving it may work for you.
Raise the stakes? Bet on it! )

[Brandon] This has been a great discussion. I'm going to have to call it here. But I do have some homework for you guys. I want you to try a few of the things that we've talked about in this episode. Specifically, raising the stakes, number one, by making… Try taking a side character from a story you're working on, and raise the stakes for what's going on for them. I want you to try by making it more personal first, but I'm not going to let you use the crutch that a lot of us use, that they have lost someone in their past or that it's personal because this is the person that killed their mentor or something like that. It can't be related to the loss of a loved one.
[Mary] No fridging!
[Brandon] Yes. Just make that one not on the table, and just see what you can do with that then. And then make it more specific. Try to make it a little less epic, but more specific to the person. Try that. Try that instead. See if this raises the stakes for you in interesting ways for your story. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.15: The Environment, with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/04/10/11-15-the-environment-with-l-e-modessit-jr/

Key Points: Environment, climate, underlies everything. Its effects, pollution, can change the whole structure of a culture. Beware the city in the desert -- how does it get water and food? "Everything we do in any society is an interconnected ecology." Think about the ramifications of the environment on technology, economy, class structure, etc. Think about what the environment allows, and what it prevents. Consider the distribution of minerals and resources in different regions. Even the stars and their influence on navigation are worth a look!

Smog, frogs, and other irritations... )
[Brandon] Well, I'm going to have to call it here, because we are running out of time. I want to thank our audience here at Life, the Universe, and Everything.
[Whoa! Applause.]
[Brandon] I want to thank L. E. Modesitt, Jr. I actually have some homework for us. This is a classic Brandon Sanderson style homework pitch for you. I want you to come up with a fantasy fuel… Not fantasy football, fantasy fuel. Some sort of fuel system in a fantasy world that has some extreme, but unintended, consequences on the environment people live in. I don't want you to go with the standard ones that we've had in our world that we've dealt with. I want it to be something weird and bizarre that… Burning this fantasy fuel makes one in 100 children turn into a demon. Or something like this.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Like I want something interesting for your story based around the thing they find in the environment that they can use for fuel. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

[Mary] 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
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.12: Idea As Subgenre, with Nancy Fulda

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/03/20/11-12-idea-as-subgenre-with-nancy-fulda/

Key Points: Start with a geewhiz idea. Where does it happen? Who's going to be there, who is affected? Who has what at stake? Often idea as a subgenre or spice is set dressing for a story. Pick a cool what-if, and then tell a thriller, mystery, romance, or whatever in it. Idea, or fascination, makes a great seasoning for a story, just like black pepper! Use idea hooks for characters and setting, to add "Oh, wow!" moments. Idea stories may not have a single protagonist or main conflict, just various viewpoints showing a discovery changing society. Follow the awesome! Pair the idea with something, like black pepper and chocolate. Think about how the idea will change the story. Watch what happens at the intersection of ideas! Mix it up, shake it up, extrapolate, and see where you go. It doesn't have to work the first time! Add more pepper. Idea stories are driven by what-if combined with fascination. Then think about consequences and implications, and follow the awesome. Push it further, make it weirder in a geewhiz kind of way!

Ideas here, ideas there, ideas everywhere... )

[Brandon] That's very good. I think we're going to end on that note. Although I'm going to give you guys some homework. This is something I push my students to do a lot in my class, which is to take a step further on something in their story. Often times, I'll have students come to me and say... They'll have actually a really compelling character, but they'll be in the most bland, generic world that's ever existed. So I want you to take a story that you've been working on, and I want you to push either some world building element or some character element further. I want you to brainstorm an idea. I don't want you to just have a monarchy. I want your monarchy to be weird in some way. I want you to follow the awesome. I don't want you to just use coins in your thing, or just fly on spaceships like every other spaceship you've seen. I want you to take a story you've actually written, and make it weirder in a geewhiz kind of way.
[Mary] While you're doing that, make sure that you are thinking about the implications and consequences.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Nancy, thank you so much.
[Nancy] You're very welcome.
[Brandon] You all listening are out of excuses, now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.10: Idea, As Genre, with Nancy Fulda

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/03/06/11-10-idea-as-genre-with-nancy-fulda/

Key Points: The elemental genre idea story. Not MICE idea. Idea, question, what if? Fascination is the key emotion driving the idea story. What is this, what is happening? Mental exploration, ramifications, consequences, and poking. The reader needs to be fascinated, although the character may not be. Outside of SF/F, often close to mystery, drama, thriller. E.g., mystery looks at why did this happen and who did it, while the idea story looks at the ramifications of it. Beware of falling into world builder's disease -- put in character responses, and give the reader cues to understand and feel, not just details. Think about what could go wrong, who reacts to it, who gains or loses. Show how the idea changes familiar activities. Didactic stories and agendas often use idea stories. But the idea story really comes alive at the intersection with a strong character. Make sure that someone has a personal stake and consequences in the idea. For a story, start with an idea, then add in character, plot, setting, conflict.
Brainstorms and other fallout... )
[Brandon] I like how this discussion's been going. I don't know if we've drilled yet into enough practical advice on how to write these. Fortunately, we're going to come back to this topic in a couple of weeks. So wait for it then, and we'll try to drill into the hows and whys you use this. Until then, we have some homework for you. Dan is going to give us our homework.
[Dan] All right. What we want you to do now is to go out and find a cool idea. Find a science blog or find a cool new piece of technology somewhere in the world or a great idea for a magic system you have floating around in your head. Find an idea, and then brainstorm 20 stories you could tell about it. Conflicts that could arise, using that idea as the core.
[Brandon] All right. Nancy, thank you so much for joining us.
[Nancy] Any time.
[Howard] Can you come back in two weeks?
[Nancy] Absolutely.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 6.27: Fantasy Setting Yard Sale

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/12/04/writing-excuses-6-27-fantasy-setting-yard-sale/

Key Points: Building a setting based around a magic system? How can someone obtain magical powers in a non-traditional way? Think of options, then explore those. Push them. What kind of unusual power could they gain? Think of the expected ones, then go on. Consider how this affects the society, history, interactions. What limits does it have? Time, resources, geographic? Consider different variations. Make sure people are proactively involved! What has changed?

What's an odd way to set up a government? Religion? Why are people chosen? What drives this? What are the problems? What are the taboos and the accepted things? What's different? What are the different classes? Are there rebels, and why? How do they act? Are there minorities, and what sets them apart?
Today only! Get 'em while they're hot! )
[Howard] This whole episode's been like a big writing prompt, hasn't it?
[Brandon] So we don't have to...
[Howard] Does that mean we're all off the hook?
[Brandon] I think we're off the hook for the writing prompt.
[Mary] Go write.
[Brandon] This has been great. You guys are totally out of excuses. Now go write.

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