Writing Excuses Transcripts

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

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 06]

 

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

 

[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 06]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] History and community.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

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

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

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

 

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

 

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

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

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Only the nouns have.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

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

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

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

 

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yep.

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

 

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

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

[Howard] Gotta tie this thread off.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

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

 

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/12/11/17-50-consistency-inconsistency-and-the-crushing-weight-of-expectations/

 

Key Points: What does your audience expect, when can they rely on you to provide new content, and what commitments have we, as creators, made to the audience? Seasons and breaks, or a never-ending juggernaut? Focus on regularity or focus on content? Under-promise and over-deliver. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 50]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Consistency, Inconsistency, And the Crushing Weight of Expectations. 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Dan] And I'm Dan.

 

[Howard] This episode was my idea. Because today is December 3… Is it December third?

[Dan] It is.

[Dongwon] It is December third.

[Howard] It's December third. Wow, look at that. We're recording this on December 3 for December 11 because we realized we had a hole in our schedule of episodes. We could not let that stand. Then we took a step backward and had to ask, well, why not? What was our original commitment to publishing an episode every week without fail? I'm actually going to throw this question to Dan. Dan, do you remember 2008? Do you remember back then when we decided how often we were going to do this?

[Dan] I have [garbled] memories of 2008. I don't remember if there was a specific decision made other than if we're going to do it weekly, let's make sure we do it every single week.

[Howard] Yeah. See, that was my memory as well. That was a 2008… I guess it was the only 2008 any of us got. But back then, I was eight years in on what would become a 20 year run of Schlock Mercenary where the daily web comic updated every day without fail. That was a thing that, and I'm not mincing any words here, made me feel important and special. So I thought it was something that we should do with our podcast as well. So we have inherited that. Here it is 2022, very nearly 2023, and we are still insisting on putting this stuff out every week. Now, fair listener, we're not recording this episode in order to tell you that we're going to change that. We're going to explore how the crushing weight of your expectations drove this recording session and what the alternatives might be for those of you who publish newsletters or do other sorts of social media things, Patreons, whatever else. Let me throw it out to the august body of two…

[Dan] I just want to say really quick that us doing an episode about how we never miss an episode kind of feels like the radio station constantly interrupting songs to tell you how they never interrupt the songs…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. There's… For my pitch to this episode originally to Dongwon, I said, "Oo, oo, I have a silly meta-meta-idea."

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] Dan, it's important to let them know what they're getting and so you need to remind them of what it is we're doing here.

[Howard] It is.

 

[Dongwon] Howard, question for you, actually. Is your streak completely unbroken? Are you at 20 years of not missing a single day?

[Howard] Yes. 20 years from June 12 of 2000 was the first strip through July 20 of 2020 was the final strip. Every day has a strip on it, and all of those strips aired on the day which they were scheduled. There was this one time where the strip aired about eight hours late because a universal… Err, uninterruptible power supply in the server farms was configured incorrectly and power cut out and the generator didn't come on and then the UPS exploded. We had to move to another host. I think that was in 06. That was the point at which everybody just insisted I was metal and I couldn't be stopped. When, in point of fact, that was I know people who can solve the technical problems and I have a buffer.

[Dongwon] How stressful has that been for you? Like, what does that feel like to know that every day I got to get this out? I mean, obviously, you're banking some, those are in the bank in advance, but what's that process felt like?

[Howard] It's like… I couldn't have accurately described it until I was out the other side of it. You ask a fish what water taste like, and they're like, "What? What does the world taste like?" No. I am now like the fish who has crawled out onto dry land. I'm like, "Hm. Water was nice. Air is different."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] There was a constant pressure, but it was also a piece of what I used to motivate me, to get me moving. The idea that a strip, that a day could go by without a strip was just absolutely unthinkable to me. Because I knew that if I missed one day, then it would be okay, and I would just start missing days over and over and over again.

[Dongwon] Right.

[Howard] So… But that's me. That's… I don't want to project that mindset on to other people. That's where… With this whole discussion, we have to be careful.

 

[Dan] Well, that's what I want to bring up next, is… I honestly, despite doing two of them, I don't listen to a ton of podcasts. So is never missing a week, is that actually a rare thing? Or does everyone do that?

[Dongwon] I think, as one who listens to an insane amount of podcasts, it depends on the podcast. There are many that I follow that are religious about weekend, week out. Then there are some who are like, "Yeah, we missed four or five over the course of our several year run." Then there are some who update irregularly, and you just get new content when you get new content. I think one way that podcasters sort of get around the burnout component is by bundling them into seasons. Right? So we'll do 10 episodes weekly, and then take a break for two months while they prep the next season, and then come back for another 10 episodes. I think that's a way to sort of manage that schedule and manage expectations because really that's what it comes down to. So much of what this is what does your audience expect, when can they rely on you to be providing new content, and what commitments have we, as creators, made to that audience.

[Howard] Yeah. With some of the more produced… Produced is the wrong word, and I don't want to put a negative connotation on it. The more heavily produced… The higher production value podcasts run a lot like television seasons would run, which is, hey, we're going to do a run of a couple of dozen episodes, and then we take a break. During that break, what is happening is we are arranging for the sponsors and the ads and the content and whatever else for the next season. That's… When you've got five or 25 people working on a thing, that makes a lot more sense than insisting that this is a weekly juggernaut that just never stops rolling and outputting a thing.

[Dongwon] Well, so much of the advice for authors these days, is integrate multiple touch points for the audience. Right? So, you have your books, but then you're also maybe you have a podcast, maybe your Patreon, a substack, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. All these are ways in which you're interacting with your audience on a regular basis. So I think the reason I found this topic interesting was what's the logic behind how you structure that, how do you approach that, how do you manage your own burnout and audience expectations at the same time.

 

[Howard] Yeah. On the subject of authors, we should have a book of the week. Dan, did you bring us… Did you bring one?

[Dan] I did bring a book of the week. So, I am a big fan of Sylvia Moreno-Garcia. She has a relatively new one, I think it's a month or so old, called The Daughter of Dr. Moreau. Which is a retelling of The Island of Dr. Moreau, set in the Yucatán Peninsula in the either early 1900s or late 1800s. I'm not deep enough into it to know exactly where. But Sylvia writes a very distinct subset subgenre that I adore. Which is historical Mexican feminist horror. If you're into that, she is so good. Her… Last year, she put out one called Mexican Gothic which was a haunted house story. This one is much more kind of that H. G. Wells Dr. Moreau thing, but all from the point of view of this daughter, transplanted from France, growing up in the Yucatán Peninsula, raised by a Mayan nanny. Then, at the center of this giant culture clash, written with this delightful core science-fiction element on top of it. It's really good stuff. I'm not done with it yet, like I said, but it's fantastic, and I recommend it. So that is The Daughter of Dr. Moreau by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia.

[Dongwon] That's tremendously exciting. Mexican Gothic was really one of my favorite reads last year.

[Dan] Oh, it was so good.

[Dongwon] Just terrific.

[Dan] This one, thus far, I'm liking even more.

 

[Howard] That's… It's cool, and I love the way you described… And I'm going to make a point out of this… When you said the genres. Name those off again.

[Dan] Historical Mexican horror.

[Howard] Okay. Historical Mexican horror. One of the things that's fun about following authors on social media is that discovery that if you like, for instance, horror, branching into a historical horror is not a big stretch. You start seeing some of these overlaps. If you like historical, branching into Mexican and horror at the same time, that is not a big stretch. So, yeah, when you say Mexican historical horror, if you are into that thing, no, if you are into any of those things, there's a really good chance that you're going to like this new thing. This is one of the reasons why having some sort of presence on social media or whatever is useful to us so that we can find those places where we overlap with people's existing interests and say, "Oh, well, you know, you liked The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you might actually like Schlock Mercenary. It's not a book, and it's not British, and it has pictures, and it's not as funny, but…"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] There are enough parallels.

[Howard] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think with the social media component, like having sort of these regular contact points like I was talking about earlier is… Can be really, really important. Right? I think having the daily updates, the regular updates, that you were talking about from Schlock Mercenary. I think the basic advice for Instagram is, like, post a reel a day. Right? For TikTok, it's like regular… Make sure you're regularly updating your content. That can be really important. But that can also create an enormous amount of pressure on creators. I think it holds a lot of people back from even trying to start to build their brand that way. I launched a newsletter a few years back, it's called Publishing Is Hard. I really love doing it. One thing that I decided before I launched it was I'm not going to commit to a regular schedule. Because I know me. I know what my life is like, I know how much work I have on my plate at any given time, and, as a literary agent, the amount of work that I do goes up and down wildly. One week will be completely insane, the next week will be quiet. Right? So it just wasn't realistic for me to make a commitment of I'm going to send a newsletter every week. Now, my colleague Kate McKean also has a brilliant newsletter called Agents And Books. She does two newsletters a week. Right? We both have different audiences, different strategies, different approaches, and it's really cool to see what she does and what I do slightly different because I, at the beginning said, "I'm going to send these irregularly." When I first created it, it was in sort of the copy that I made. Anybody who has followed it has known that there will be periods where you won't hear from me for a minute, but then I'll send a new one out. The balance is you can sort of focus on regularity of getting the piece of content out, and it's usually a little bit shorter, it's a little bit more pointed, or, what I do, is make sure that what I'm giving somebody… I'm trying to make sure every piece is pretty special to the audience. Right? I'm putting a lot of care and craft into what I'm writing. Not that you don't for a daily update, but I'm giving something a little bit more emotional, I think, then what my colleague Kate does. Right? So I think finding that balance point between okay, if I'm not doing a weekly update, what am I offering my audience that sort of makes up for the lack of regularity in a way that balances it out for them.

[Howard] Yeah. To be sure here, if we had decided that Writing Excuses was going to be a 30 minute episode instead of a 15 minute episode, the weekly schedule would have crushed us.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] Because the recording sessions, we just wouldn't have had enough time to do the things that we wanted to do.

[Dongwon] Yeah. Those people who do like weekly three hour podcasts? Unimaginable, to me, how they do that. I mean, it's just a bigger part of their lives. I think we all have primary things that we're doing that are incredibly time-consuming. So we can fit in these 15 minute a week episodes. Which is, just, again, a really different balance point.

 

[Howard] Dongwon, you talked about how the crushing expectations can prevent people from even getting started. For a while, I had a twitch stream… I still have technically, a twitch stream, I just haven't streamed in forever. A twitch stream in which the art that I was doing for the X DM books was showing up as part of the stream. Then something happened, I don't remember exactly what it was, but I realized the effort of configuring things so that I can stream this is preventing me from getting the work done. The stress of having an audience in front of me is preventing me from doing the really hard work where I have to be unafraid of making mistakes. I'm just not comfortable doing that on stream. Which is weird to hear from the guy whose 20… Or whose year 2000 artwork is available for everybody to look at. But, long story short, I stopped streaming and started getting the work done. So, yeah, the decision to create regular content can be a decision that results in less productivity. That's not what any of us want.

[Yeah]

[Dan] Well, I'm glad you brought that up because one of the points I want to make here is this is not an episode about how you should start a podcast.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Or about how you should have a TikTok. Right? We are not telling you that any of these outlets are necessary for an artist's career. What we're trying to get across is the idea that you need to look at your own output, at your own schedule, decide for yourself if one of these extra peripheral activities might be valuable to you, and then see what would be the best format to stick that into. If you want to do a podcast, you want to do a quick and dirty weekly one like we're doing, you want to do something longer and research that comes out in discrete chunks once a year, how do you want to structure that? Maybe the answer is nothing at all. All three of us used to be on Typecast which ran for about three years with different cast members here and there. We really worked hard to make that a weekly thing as consistent as possible. It wasn't always. Eventually, we had to let go of it because our schedules became such that it was not worth our time anymore. Sometimes that happens.

[Dongwon] Yeah. I think an important point here…

[Howard] I still miss it.

[Dongwon] I do miss it too, actually. Yeah, it was fun. If I have any point here, it's… Yeah, don't feel like you have to do these things. If you do do it though, if you're thinking about it, don't be afraid to experiment. Right? Don't feel like just because most or some newsletters are weekly, that this is a thing that you're tying yourself to, but you're going to have to do every week. I think that expectation can actually limit you more than open things up. Right? So, don't be afraid to experiment, try new things, and don't feel like you have to do the one piece of advice that you've heard elsewhere. You can do in a regular schedule. My only advice is as you do that, to under-promise and over-deliver. If you're not sure you can do weekly, don't tell people upfront you're doing weekly. Right? Just say, "I'm trying this out, this is an experiment, let's see how it goes." Right? I'm currently launching a monthly twitch stream and I've said many times, this is experimental. We're trying this out. I'm trying to figure out how do I do scheduling, how do I coordinate this, how do I get guests on. All of this stuff. It's been super fun so far, pretty easy so far. But we'll see where I'm at in six months. So, just make sure that you're being realistic with yourself and realistic with your audience. Because where this goes wrong is when people feel really misled. Right?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Dongwon] There have been times where I've under-promised and under-delivered. Right? Like, that happens. But I think if you have that relation with the audience, you can work with them and sort of make it up to them and find a way to balance that out.

[Dan] Yeah.

 

[Howard] If you take away anything from this episode, under-promise, over-deliver. That's your soundbite. Thank you, Dongwon.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That's a very good one.

[Dongwon] You're welcome. Words to live by.

 

[Dan] Let me throw out one more thing that I've learned with my newsletter. Which I do try to send out regularly. But regularly for me use… It is not tied to a day of the week or a day of the month. I try to do a monthly newsletter, but it is more important for me to get it out on a Monday than it is to get it out on the first Monday of the month. Just because I know that that is the time when it is most likely to be seen and clicked on. So that's a different kind of consistency, and a different kind of schedule keeping to keep in mind.

 

[Howard] Yep. Hey, Dongwon, you want to send us home with some homework?

[Dongwon] Yeah. So, here's what I'd like all of you to do. Make a list of all of your regular commitments, the stuff that you're obligated to do every week. Whether that's going to therapy, picking up your kids, whatever it is that you have that is a regular thing. Put that on the list somewhere. Then, once you have all of that together, consider your bandwidth for adding new items to that list. Is that a daily Instagram post? Is that a weekly TikTok? Is that a newsletter? Is that this, is that another thing? Really think about what do I actually have time for. Then make a rough schedule of what content updates you could do in a sample month. Right? What feels realistic, what feels manageable. Then reduce that by a little bit. Right, in that under-promise kind of component. Right? Think about what feels realistic now, and then realize that you're probably not going to hit that target. What's a little bit under that that you could shoot for. Yeah. I think that's a good place to get started in terms of putting together a content plan for yourself.

[Howard] Outstanding. That's… It almost sounds like a life hack. Hey, I think we did it. I think we filled our December 11 hole.

[Dan] Yay!

[Howard] So. Fair listeners, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/08/14-36-languages-and-naming/

 

Key points: How do you name things? How do you come up with names? Baby name websites! Sanskrit or foreign languages. Read the credits on movies. Internally consistent, and different. Borrow names from other countries. How do you approach constructed languages, dialect, or jargon in stories? A few words go a long way. Read it out loud. Make sure readers can tell your names apart! Consider using the language as a source of conflicts, either because people don't speak the same language, or because of the way their language makes them see the world. Misunderstandings and cultural expectations can lead to conflicts. What does this do in your story? What's the role it plays in the plot? Can you use dialect or wording to help with setting?

 

[Transcriber's note: Apologies to the Ursumari, Hindi, and Korean for any mistakes in the transcription of names and words in those languages.]

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 13, Episode 36.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Languages and Naming.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] [pause] I'm… Okay, I'll tell you my name. I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] She won't make you work for it. Like Howard does.

 

[Brandon] Languages and naming. So. I would say the number one question I get, usually from younger writers who come through my line is, "How do you name things?" So, I'm going to actually point this at you first, Mahtab, because I think they've probably heard us answer this question. How do you come up with names for your stories?

[Mahtab] Well, I consult a lot of websites. Especially, I start with baby names. But Sanskrit is also a really good source, because… Really, I mean, writing for a North American audience… And since most of my books are published in English, even if I threw in a few Hindi words, it would seem, like, exotic. But, for example, in The Third Eye, I used the word Zarku, which is… It means, in Sanskrit, it means evil. Which is… So I would do Google translate and take keywords off… Which personify the character that I'm naming and try and find the right word. Play around with it. Just, as I said, Google some interesting names and see… And and say it out loud to see what sounds good.

[Howard] Reading… For starters, you should all be staying through the end of the credits of all of the movies you see. But reading the names on the credits is a great way to read a bunch of names that you're probably unfamiliar with. It's also a great way to realize that wow, portions of this film were produced or managed in, I think that's Southeast Asia, or I see a lot of Indian names. I like that. I like seeing that in the films, but seeing that variety opens me up to naming things, because… I mean, just the way we name other human people is hugely diverse.

[Brandon] Now, you were talking about one of the naming conventions you came up with for one of the races in Schlock Mercenary.

[Howard] Yeah, I… The role-playing book, the Planet Mercenary role-playing book, one of the things that we realized is that if people are going to role-play, they're going to want to be able to name their characters. What are the naming conventions for these different species of alien? The first thing that I did was panic, because, how am I going to come up with seven different naming conventions? The second thing I did was, well, I'm going to start subtractively. So I looked at my own language and said, all right, they will never have some of these sounds in their names. I used a different set of subtractions for each of them. One of the groups, one of the races, all names are 10 syllables long. They are all 10 syllables long, and this is how the construction works, and this is where the accenting works, and this is where the pieces of the names come from. It was still familial, which is something we're all familiar with, but it created these names that just looked incredibly alien. But after I knew how to build them, I could suddenly rattle off 10 syllable names very quickly. It made them start to seem real. I think that's, for me, the most important aspect of naming and language stuff in worldbuilding, is that once you have some of the words that your aliens are your monsters or your whatevers use, they become different than you, and they begin to develop their own voice.

[Dan] I think a key part of that, that a lot of as you said especially young writers are overwhelmed by, is making a lot of those decisions. They can be meaningless or random at the point where you're establishing those rules, as long as you come up with something that is con… Internally consistent and that is different, it's going to feel cool. The readers don't necessarily need to know, oh, he just pulled those letters out of the alphabet at random and disallowed them, or however it is that you're building these. You don't need to overthink that initial process. There doesn't need to be some kind of divine foundation for where these names come from, as long as you come up with consistent rules that sound cool and unique.

[Howard] The uplifted polar bears in Planet Mercenary. What I said was the first two generations of uplifted polar bears, it was very common to give them Inuit names, Siberian names, those were very common. Then the polar bears realized you're just naming us after the humans who live near us. That's awful. So for two generations, all of their names are a little more blended. The whole reason for that was so that I could tell the joke of oh, some common Ursumari names are Jones, [Ketchikan, Ggrrnnkk!]

[Laughter)

[Howard] But as I was writing it, I realized that's probably exactly how the bears would do it.
 

 

[Mahtab] It's also a very good idea to borrow names from other countries. To point out an example, Avatar. It still sounds weird in my mouth, because it is basically avataar in Hindi, which is just a version of… Most gods and goddesses in the Indian… Hindu mythology have various forms are various versions which are avataars. So when I say avatar, it's like, that is not the correct pronunciation.

[Chuckles]

[Mahtab] The other thing that I also remembered was tsehelyu [sa-hey-loo?] which is the bonding of the horse and the person. It's… I thought it was spelled differently, but I looked it up, it spelled t-s-e-h-e-l-y-u. But it sounds so close to [sahelee?] which is friend in Hindi. It's just a friend bonding. So you can use existing words. Change the spelling, change the pronunciation, and you have a totally different word.

[Brandon] [garbled] This is how language works. It really does. Like my son was assigned… They're doing a Christmas thing at school, and they said all the kids are going to say Merry Christmas in different languages. He came to me and said, "I chose Korean. How do you say Merry Christmas in Korean?" I'm like, "Merry Christmas. That's what they say."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Now I… There is actually a way to say it in Korean, but I had to go look it up, because when Christmas time was around, everyone just said Merry Christmas because even though it's not in Korean…

[Howard] It's Western…

[Brandon] It's a Western holiday. They just use the English words.

[Dan] We borrow stuff from each other all the time. I will say, following from what Mahtab said about kind of borrowing words and names from other cultures, use a really wide variety of them. I made a world map for a fantasy series that I wanted to put together. I realized, after I had kind of named 15 or so nations on this map, that most of them were kind of the obvious this is based on German or Welsh or maybe some Russian if I was feeling saucy. Why did I not have some more Southeast Asian? Some Chinese? A lot of these other completely different sounds that are not as European and not as obvious that we tend to skip over?

[Brandon] One of my favorite things… We're on a side tangent here, but with making maps, is to think about who's making the map. Because if you make the map, that country's names for all the countries in the world, are going to be that country-ized, that country-ize. Like, we call Korea Korea, right? In Korea, it's Hangug. It's… The Koryo dynasty was years and years ago, but that's the name that stuck for us. All countries do this, right? They don't call us America, they call us migug. That's just how… When whoever's making the map is going to use their biases to create all of the names for all the countries. That is a lot of fun for me, for worldbuilding aspects.

[Dan] Because a lot of those names will come from the first person that they encountered from that region, or, like with Korea, whoever was in charge at the time we decided to codify the name.

 

[Howard] It is important to be careful with this. The apocryphal possibly story of a games workshop sending their materials to be translated in German, and the Germans coming back and saying, "Okay. We need to work on naming with you, because you've literally named the villain villain.

[Laughter]

[Howard] You've named the hero hero. You've just…

[Dan] Yes.

[Howard] Taking these words from German and naming them as your characters in English, because you think it sounds exotic, is not going to work well because it spoils the surprise for everybody here…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Who can read German.

[Dan] Yeah, which is why I liked, again, what Mahtab said about changing the spelling, changing the pronunciation. Use it as a base and then make it your own.
 

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Mahtab] Yes. I would love to recommend Binti by Nnedi Okorofor. I hope I'm not butchering her name. But it's a novella. An excellent mix of African culture and science fiction. It centers around Binti, who is from the Himsa [Himba?] tribe. She has been offered this place in this university. It's called the Oomza University. Which is a place of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept this, she has to leave her people. So when she does, and against everyone's wishes, against the family's wishes, she decides to go. But the one thing that she takes with her as something to remind her of home is this earth, which the Himsa people tend to apply on their hair and their skin. It turns out that this is something that helps her when there is a war that the University is with, with the Meduse people which is an alien race. I'm not going to, again, give away the ending. It's a short novella, but it's beautifully written. It's, as I said, a very good mix of an African culture, science-fiction, and a must read.

[Brandon] It won the Hugo and the Nebula. It's free to read on Tor.com, I believe. Maybe it's not free.

[Mahtab] I don't think so.

[Brandon] Yeah, it's actually one of the Tor.com novella programs. But it is a novella that you can get very cheaply online, and well worth a read.

[Mahtab] Excellent. Excellent book.

 

[Brandon] Let's stray a little bit from naming towards language conventions. So let's talk about conlangs, which is kind of the word for constructed languages that you use in your books, or your own kind of feel on how to use dialect or jargon in your stories to kind of enhance the authenticity or the worldbuilding of your story. So how do you approach coming up with languages and things like this?

[Dan] Let's start by saying that we did an entire episode on conlangs with a linguistic professor last year. So, for a much more full discussion, look that up.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Dan] But now I got nothing.

[Laughter]

[Mahtab] I can start, because I was very taken up with Dothraki, which was invented by David J. Peterson. I was listening to a TED talk of his in terms of how he came up with it. So what he said is he used the text George R. R. Martin wrote and he used certain words. He kind of broke them apart. So words like cow and ruck and hudge, cuss, which is consonant vowel consonant. He kind of used that as a base and then he developed a language. Of course, there is a lot between using those words and what he came up with. But just writing for younger readers, I think one has to be very careful because large paragraphs or large texts in a very weird language could actually pull the reader out. Which is why I appreciated just a few words of parsel tongue in the Harry Potter movies, or just a couple of words here and there, because you do not want to trip up young readers. If you do come up with interesting words or made-up words, I would read it out loud. Just to see if you're tripping up, which is what would happen with the… With your readers.

[Howard] Or if phonetically you're saying something you don't want to say.

[Mahtab] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] One of the tricks that I look at is… Primarily for naming things, but if you're making up a language, English readers… I don't know if this is a problem in other languages, but I know it's a problem in English. English readers will tend to conflate foreign looking words that all begin with the same letter for each other. You have three six letter names that all begin with F. They're all going to be kind of read as the same person. So you may want to find a set of rules for your language that allows you to have different first letters. That's a… It's a silly sort of constraint, because you may have a language where all of the first letters are the same. Every word begins with F.

[Brandon] Orson Scott Card has a really great essay on his website about naming, where he talks about this sort of concept. Varying the length of the names, varying the… Some of them being… Sounding like a word, like calling someone Bean as opposed to calling someone Ender which will… Ways that different names stick in people's heads. It is well worth reading.

[Howard] But with regard to language, specifically, if you are going to be dropping snippets of your alien foreign whatever made-up language in your book, having the words… Let us be able to tell the difference between the words. So that if one of those words shows up later, in a chapter heading, maybe we'll recognize it as a word we've seen before. Maybe that's a plot point. Maybe it's a significant touchstone for us as readers. There needs to be a reason for you to have gone to all this trouble to construct your own language.

[Brandon] I, when I'm building books, I'll use a couple of different styles. It's going to depend, for me, on how much time I want to spend with the language being a source of conflicts. Last month we talked about this idea of cultural setting as conflict. In some of my books, the fact that people don't speak the same language, or the ways that their linguistics work informs the way they see the world becomes a conflict in the story or at least a way that characters are not quite understanding each other or the cultural expectations are being expressed. In those worlds, I spend a lot more time on my worldbuilding and my language. I am not a linguist. Fortunately, my editorial director, Peter, is a linguist. I've taken enough classes that I can be dangerous in this field, so to speak. But you don't need to be a linguist to be able to do this. I really do approach it results-oriented. Why am I doing this? Like Howard said, what is the function of this in my story? Why am I having this happen? In the Stormlight Archive, I have one character who uses a lot of words in a different language. It is to reinforce that his culture is really important to him, and the way that he sees the world involves giving people nicknames from his language. Which really changes the way that the reader and the other characters interact with this character, and has been wonderful for using those linguistics. But the actual linguistics don't matter as much to me as what the role… The role they're taking in the plot.

[Mahtab] Dialect or using certain words can also help you… Help give you a setting, a time. Like, for example, Feed by M. T. Anderson. They use words like unit, which is wow. Or "This is really meg." Words like this. Which was… Although the book was written in 2002, it was an indication that this is a society in the future. I was just reading To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the lines that Miss Maudie says is, "Mockingbirds don't do one thing except make music for us to enjoy." People don't normally speak that way. So if you use a dialect, or if you use a certain way of putting words, and the order in which you put them could also help you describe whether it's southern US that you're talking about or even India. There are so many dialects. By using it, you can say so much more without saying it. Because that's the way the people in that area talk.

 

[Brandon] Excellent. We are out of time on this episode. Howard, you have our homework.

[Howard] Yes. You are probably familiar, fair listener, with the way human beings name each other. We name each other after our progenitors. We have first names, we have last names. They all sort of run in families. Come up with a naming convention for aliens or fantasy races, whatever. Come up with a naming convention that has nothing to do with family and is completely, completely different.

[Brandon] Completely removed from the way that we do our naming.

[Howard] Completely removed from the way that we name each other.

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