wetranscripts | Entries tagged with culture

Writing Excuses 19.24: An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-24-an-interview-on-worldbuilding-with-arkady-martine

Key points: Deep historical roots, in Byzantine history. Medieval empires. Did the novel come from the research, or as you were working on a fiction project, did you just reach for the things you knew? Was it a challenge to blend elements from two different cultures? How do you know when you've done enough research? Complexity of history versus complexity of worldbuilding? How do you keep track of all that stuff? How often do you find yourself looking stuff up, or does writing it down once mean it stays in your head? How do you take that research and make it come alive for the reader? You tie character and theme together, and connect it with worldbuilding. Are your characters a lens on a thematic element, or is it scene-by-scene? Is there an example of someone with a different set of lenses that impacts what they see and how you portray the world? Was the novel always from Mahit's point of view, or did that come partway through writing?

[transcriptionist apology: Arkady seemed to be talking in a metallic echo chamber, which I found difficult to understand in some spots.]

[Season 19, Episode 24]

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

[Season 19, Episode 24]

[DongWon] This is Writing Excuses.

[Erin] An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] With us this week we have a very special guest. We've spent the last month talking about A Memory Called Empire. I'm very pleased that we were able to get the author, my friend and also client, Arkady Martine, to join us today to talk about her experience with writing the book, how she thinks about worldbuilding, and some ot the stuff that went into it. So, Arkady, welcome to the podcast.

[Arkady] Hi. I'm so glad to be here.

[DongWon] So, obviously, I love the book and I loved it from the very first time I… It came across my desk. One of the things that really stands out to us is all of the dense, intricate, and complex worldbuilding that you put into this novel. Right? Science fiction/fantasy kind of lives and dies on the worldbuilding a lot of the time. But this one felt very distinct and unique and special. I wanted to hear a little bit of where all that comes from. I know you have, like, deep academic roots as well, in history, and… I would love just to hear from you about where the origins of this novel were for you when it comes to the cultures and societies you decided to put in it.

[Arkady] Oh, yeah. Okay. Great question. So… Things not to do when you have a [garbled] in medieval history in Sweden. Write a book about the same things that you are working on in your [garbled] instead of writing the academic book that might have gotten you tenure.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] So I kind of did that. Which is all to say that I am trained as a Byzantine historian with a specialization in the eleventh century sort of eastern frontier. Armenia, Byzantine, are two different Arabic speaking kingdoms. I'm super interested in diplomacy and letter writing and empires and frontiers, and I spent like a decade of my life doing that professionally as an academic. It's a curious thing about being an academic, where you're not really supposed to get emotionally involved with what you're working on. At least, not in how you write it. I have always been emotionally compelled by that whole suite of subjects. I've also always written science fiction and fantasy. So, there was a point, like, the summer after I finished my dissertation where, for complex reasons, I was living in Phoenix for three months. Which I don't exactly recommend, those three months being Jun, July, and August in Phoenix. Yeah, I decided that I clearly needed another enormous project. That was getting kind of annoying that I was one of those people who had never successfully written a novel. So, clearly, I was going to try that. Having just put down the 250 page nonfiction thing I had written.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] What came out of that was trying to figure out a way to work on and work through all of that fascination with Empire and assimilation and medieval frontiers and frontiers in general. And, like, seeing it through a science fictional lens. And then some stuff that I had always been fascinated by and had written some very juvenile early attempts at novels. Like, what happens if you have the ghost of the person who used to have your job in your head?

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] The first version I ever tried to write was actually fantasy. That did not go well. It did not last. You may recognize a bit of it. But, anyway, that got in there too. So, Byzantium, the medieval Empire in general, that's the deep basis. I pulled a ton of little cultural events out of that. The poetry contests in my writing come from that. The dilemma of the succession crisis comes from that. I kind of started with, like, the succession crisis at Heracles in the, like, six hundreds and then it went… It doesn't follow. But it starts there. So I've used a lot of historical plot to inspire my plot.

[DongWon] Do you think that came from… You were studying this, you are interested in it, you are avoiding writing your nonfiction about it…

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] So, did the impulse to write this novel come from that research and that knowledge, or as you were working on a fiction project, did you just instinctively reach to the things that you knew? Like, was there a chicken or an egg there?

[Arkady] I feel like 60 percent egg, 40 percent base. I really knew I wanted to write about the scenarios that I had encountered in my research. Not a historical novel where I would, like, tell those stories. But, then where I found myself imagining the emotional impact of living through and experiencing historical events I had been studying. You can either write a historical book or you can just take that question and use what I love science fiction for, which is sort of expand it, explore it, it really up close to it. Then, as I was writing, because it took me a while to write the book. I had never done this successfully before. The longest thing I had ever written before Memory was, like, for Asimov's. So it took me about three years. I did find myself reaching for tools I knew. Those tools were sometimes things like, "Oh, right, I want to do political poetry contests, because I love them. I think they're very cool. I need something like that here." But there was a point also where I deliberately didn't make those choices, where I reached for other tools instead of the instinctive ones on purpose. I do want to mention, before we get away from, like, direct historical inspiration that Teixcalaan is not Byzantine in space, exactly. That's on purpose. Because if I had done Byzantines in space, I would have needed a monotheistic religion. I really didn't want to write a book about that. That's not this book. Someday, I'll write a book about God. But it's not going to be this one.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] I had too much going on. So I needed to get away from this kind of mono-ism, like one Emperor, one God, one, like, line through history, like this [detelogy?] that's in Byzantine texts. So, I was like, okay, I need a different source of completely outside of the kind of monotheistic Western traditions. I ended up being deeply interested in another very complex, very colorful, and quite simultaneous imperial power, which is the [Mehico?]. I pulled a lot of inspiration from [Mehico], the Aztecs in English, and the way that that Empire did assimilation and all of its cultural tags. Because I didn't want my readers to feel like… Well, I knew that my readers were probably going to think that space Byzantium was just space Rome.

[DongWon] Right.

[Arkady] Because that's the instinctive thing. I also wanted to make things weirder than just [people one?]. So, I, like, I very much deliberately combined cultural myths.

[DongWon] I mean, I guess what you're saying is that you didn't want to write a historical novel. Right? You wanted different aspects in there. So… Was it a challenge to find a way to pull different elements from two different histories, two different cultures, and blend them, or was it a pretty straightforward process of, like, oh, the names are coming from here, the religion's coming from here, the poetry battles are coming from here?

[Arkady] It felt pretty organic, except for the languages. Which I made some pretty stark choices early on. Because in my early drafts, I was using a lot more Greek in, like, the backdrop of the Teixcalaanli language. It just did not work. I'm not a con lang person. Like, I don't do this for real. Like some people who come up with vocabularies. No. But I am a person who unfortunately spent a while taking historical linguistics courses and I care about phonology. So, everyone had to sound like it went together and sound culturally appropriate when I use, like, [poems?] and metaphors. But, aside from the religion choices, which is probably where I had this moment of, okay, I'm going for a more Mesoamerican feel, it was pretty organic. That's partially because a lot of medieval empires actually work in very similar ways. So there's more commonality than you expect. Secondly, because I'm absolutely working off of my own aesthetic sense, like, the things I wanted to have. I love flowers. I don't think we do enough in science fiction in general, like, everything is all chrome and steel and glass. It's all very like iPhone. I find this boring. I like flowers, I like declaration, I like weird architecture. I like a kind of [Romanticism?] to my science fiction. All of that led me very easily to meso American cultures, which I have not spent a decade of my life immersed in the study of meso American cultures, I have, and am still doing a ton of research there as well. So…

[DongWon] I mean, obviously this question doesn't apply to the Byzantine component's so much, because of how much you did there, but, like, when you're doing research on meso American culture, on [Mehico] and like these ancient empires, how do you find the line of, like, this is enough research? I need to stop researching, and start writing. Like, was that a difficult balance for you or did you just sort of naturally find that flow?

[Arkady] Well, this is why I don't write historicals. Because if I wrote a historical, I would have to be able to re-create a depth of field in my [garbled] bank that matches what we actually know. When I'm working in science fiction, I do a lot on… I don't want to say just on vibes, because that's not enough. But I do a lot on defaults, I do a lot on in… If I'm pulling this kind of influence that got me interested in, like, sacrifice rituals. Why do people do that? I don't need to reproduce the argument of what scholars have come up with about why people use sacrifice rituals to accomplish political things in a particular culture. What I do need to do is understand that myself, and get a feel for it, so I get my characters to reproduce that feeling for my audience.

[Erin] Yeah. I'm curious. You were talking about the difference between, basically, the complexity of actual history and the complexity of worldbuilding. Which is, I think, naturally just less complex, because there's only so much you can bring in. I wondered, are there areas where you felt like you decided to go, like, for more complexity versus, like, more of a… More vibes? How did that intersect with the story that you were trying to tell?

[Arkady] So, the places I ended up with complexity that I hadn't originally planned to do are where the story that I was writing demanded that I knew things that never went on the page. This meant that I had… Several. Several lists of, like, okay, how does the government work? Who works in what department? How are they related? What is their history? When did they develop? None of that needs to be on the page for the story I was telling. All of that needed to be in my head so that I didn't contradict myself, and so that at some point, hopefully, some of the political intrigues stuff resolved into understandable lines of action. I did a similar thing in Desolation when I was trying to work out how the Teixcalaanli army worked and how people were promoted and how they work through it and like how… Just like the practicalities. I did a lot of, I guess what I would think of as traditional worldbuilding for that. Where I sat down and was like, "Okay. There are this many regions. Why are they called regions? Because I don't want to deal with coming up with another name for them."

[Laughter]

[Arkady] "How do you become commander of a region? What happens when you retire? What happens with training? Do people swap jobs? Do people swap, like, different parts of the military? Like, if you are a fighter pilot, are you always a fighter pilot? Or could you end up, like, a logistics officer?" All of that stuff I thought about on purpose, and sort of like brainstormed to myself and wrote down so I didn't end up making up something else later on impulse. But in terms of some of the other places where it looks like I did that, like, on the poetry contests, all of that was pretty much it should feel like this and I know there are historical examples where this worked. So I can do it.

[DongWon] Right.

[Erin] It's so interesting. It almost sounds like… Sorry, it almost sounds like the things that you were more emotionally tied to, you didn't feel as much the need to, like, research is the things that were like, intellectually… You know what I mean, like, you love the poetry contests, so, like, you knew how they needed to feel and didn't need to do as much, like, notetaking. Maybe I'm wrong there, but…

[Arkady] Yeah.

[Erin] [garbled] particularly deep, but…

[Arkady] There's a hidden thing, which is that I had already done the research. I just didn't do it for this project. I didn't do it [garbled] I knew it already. Although I think something like a poetry contest is like anything that becomes more plot or aesthetic or theme. You can kind of, like, let it exist on its own without having to justify it. You can just decide that's true. Then the question… The worldbuilding question to ask afterwards is given that this is true, what else is true? What else must be true? That's actually how I do a lot of worldbuilding, like, when I'm doing it on purpose. Like, there's a ton of edible flowers in [pig plot?]. That was a… I think, this is cool moment. But in response to that, I thought a great deal about how do these people get their food? What kind of cultural signifiers are there between eating plants and eating animals? That got more interesting for me because I have characters from place were eating luxurious food is commonplace and others from a place where eating luxurious food is exceedingly rare, if it ever happens at all, and eating animals is weird, because where would you get a whole animal just to eat it?

[DongWon] I love that moment of her horror at watching somebody eat something that was cut from the side of a cow. Right? Like, just like this idea of…

[Arkady] [garbled] turnip space sandwich.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] [garbled] more… Oh, that scene is an absolute delight. I want to dig into some of the more mechanical things about how you take that amount of worldbuilding and make it feel felt and relevant to the characters. But before we dig into that, let's go ahead and take a quick break.

[Arkady] My thing of the week is a relatively new novel by Paz Pardo called The Shamshine Blind which I just finished reading this past weekend, actually. It is a kind of classical noir, but with a deeply exciting science-fiction premise. The premise is during the Falklands war… So the war over the Falkland Islands off of Argentina, between Argentina and the UK, the Argentinians came up with a method to kind of by spraying this special powder on people, they can feel emotions. Those emotions are actually, like, weapons of mass destruction. This changes the whole course of history. The book is set 30 years after that, so it's all part of the backdrop of the world. It is… I love noir and I love, like, noir detectives and how broken down and brutalized they are by the world. Having that incredible twist and having the entire noir be rooted in is this character going to feel emotions that are hers or is she always going to rely on thinking that emotions are something that are externally imposed, like, took all of the stuff that we love about noir and made it both incredibly thematically obvious and incredibly thematically hidden, and also just incredible.

[DongWon] It's a great pull for an episode on worldbuilding, because it… The worldbuilding… It ties into the central question of noir, which is this really shut down emotionally unavailable hero, and then, it's like all the world is about these big emotions. I think that's super cool.

[Arkady] I loved it. I think you all should read it.

[DongWon] Thank you so much.

[Erin] All right. We are back. Before we get into sort of the nitty-gritty of the mechanical tools, I have a nitty-gritty process question which is you mentioned all these things that you documented and thought about, and I'm kind of curious, like, how did you actually keep track of all that? Like, how did you actually know what you had investigated and what needed to be investigated as you were doing your research?

[Arkady] So… I'm not anybody's poster child for how to do this in a sensible way. I have a Word document labeled what is everyone's motivation? That was an editing artifact, but I still only have a Word document labeled The Teixcalaanli Military which is just everything I ever thought of, but didn't really go on a page about the Teixcalaanli military. In terms of like research research, when I wanted to go find out about something, I basically used a lot of the same methods that I've always used for doing academic or policy work, which is I have a physical notebook and a pen, and I underline things in a document that I'm reading, or take notes and mark page numbers. That just… I just have a million of those. But I didn't do a ton of that. At any point. For Memory and Desolation. Some of the things that like look a little bit more like I must do research questions, like, some of the biology stuff in book 2… And I know you guys haven't talked about book 2, but there's, like, weird alien biology in book 2 that matters. A lot of that involved medical textbooks and like zoology textbooks. I didn't exactly take notes so much as, like, stick post it's all over them. I'm not actually organized. Except the lady inside my own head.

[Chuckles]

[lovely]

[DongWon] I love the simplicity of that process. I love just having Word documents that are like this is about this topic, and I know I reference it. How often do you find yourself going back to, like, those underlined passages or marked passages? Like, how often do you find yourself having to look stuff up? Or was just the act of writing down the military structure enough that it stayed in your brain when you needed to call it up?

[Arkady] The big structure stayed. Right. I understand it, I could explain it right now. Although I haven't written about it directly for a couple of years. But the thing that I always have to go back to is if I have named something, I have to write down what I named it. This can even sometimes extend two characters who actually have speaking parts. The number of times I've called… Well, the guy in chapter 3. That guy.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] But especially if I've done cool names, like names of spaceships, names of continents, names of planets, all that has to get written down somewhere because I will forget it and I will make up a new cool thing. And confuse people, including myself.

[DongWon] Suddenly you just have 10 cool things, 10 cool planets you didn't need, you know.

[Arkady] Yeah. Or you've named absolutely everybody in book 2 the number sign 2 and then a word starting with steam and you hadn't noticed.

[Chuckles]

[Arkady] Intel you did the dramatis personae at the end.

[DongWon] Hum... Yeah.

[Erin] I often wonder how… This may be the question we were getting at before we went to break, which is, so you've got all of this stuff. Because I find sometimes people do a lot of research and they know a lot of stuff, but then it's hard to, like, translate it into making the overall come alive. Which your world absolutely does. So how do you take all these things that you know, and then, like, make it exciting and juicy and wonderful for all of us readers?

[Arkady] It's character work which is to say it's theme. I know that sounds weird, but they are, for me, very, very close. The things that I want to show the reader, I'm going to show them through either a close point of view with a character or through a deliberately selected broader point of view, like an omniscient, or one of the more fun ones, like second person or like an unreliable person narrator who's telling you a story. So the secret of… The voice is always going to point out specific things about the world. Those are choices that I'm making that guide the reader's like mental eye, I guess. What do I want the reader to notice? Because the reader doesn't need to know what research I did in 99 percent of the cases. I mean, I love footnotes, but most of the time, fiction doesn't need them. The reader has to want to come along with me, so I need to give them a reason to keep looking in the direction I'm pointing. That's usually the inside of the character's head. Why is that character looking at the thing? Why do we need to know? Or, it's a POV voice that is also pointing something out to the reader, that it's doing a frame. I'm a very structure and theme oriented writer. I like playing games. The Teixcalaan books are actually pretty straightforward for me. They go in one direction, and while most of the characters are unreliable, they're not unreliable on purpose. They're trying to tell you what they see. In a way, that directness let me do more with the world. Because I'm not ever letting or making the character voice, or the authorial voice, deliberately misdirect the reader. So the reader is… If I tell the reader to look at something, like, look at these buildings, look at this edible flour, look at all the strange clothes people are wearing for a reason that are political, I'm telling them that because it's story important or character important or creates a sense of thematic community. That keeps the reader with me, even when I'm doing a bunch of fancy footwork.

[DongWon] You immediately tie character and theme together. Right? You're also underlining the way that worldbuilding and theme are connected. When you're thinking of a character, are you thinking of, like, them being your lens on a specific thematic element, and therefore a specific worldbuilding element? Or is it more scene by scene, oh, this is a good time for Mahit to illustrate this aspect of assimilation or how language works or… Like, are you looking at it on like a very granular level or are you starting at a very high level of, like, this character's about assimilation, this character's about succession, this character's about whatever it happens to be?

[Arkady] Well, they're all about assimilation and they're all about succession. But some of them… Well…

[DongWon] I picked the broadest ones, I'm sorry.

[Arkady] Sorry. Mahit is in some ways… I suppose I'm glad I set this only in her point of view, except for little tiny interludes in the whole book. The whole first book. Because she has a very narrow thematic lands that… And that lens has a very wide scope. Her lens is she is… She is from the border and she wants to be assimilated if that means something different than what it does. That sounds complex, but it's actually kind of like a pretty focused thematic lands. But that touches practically everything she sees. So I just pick that up whenever I need it and pulled back to it whenever I want to sort of ground the reader in it. It also lets me show off all the world because Mahit loves it. But it's also new to her. It also is going to make her think and be uncomfortable. So I get to do all those things while I'm showing the reader what I've made, and all, hopefully, stay with me, because they care about how she is seeing what she's seeing.

[Erin] I love what you said about the, like, the width and the depth of the lens the thematic lands and the character lens. I'm wondering if there's an example that comes to mind for you of somebody who has a very different set of lenses and how that impacts the way they see and you portray the world? If that makes sense.

[Arkady] In Memory specifically, or anywhere?

[Erin] Ummm...

[DongWon] I mean, I think you can talk about Desolation if you wanted. I mean, our readers won't be as familiar with it, so be a little bit more careful about spoilers, but, like… That's one that has more POVs.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] So I can see that being…

[Arkady] It's easier to talk about in Desolation, but I think it might be more interesting to think about it in Memory. Because… Well, there's one scene in Memory that I desperately wanted to write in someone's point of view that wasn't Mahit. I didn't do it. I actually didn't even let myself do it for fun, because it would have not… It would have ruined it for me if I had done it, like, the way that I [garbled view it like the squibs in your id?] for me, which is… So, the poisoning scene, the aftermath of the poisoning scene, with the flower and the hallway and 19 Ads and Mahit. I wanted so much to write that from 19 Ads's point of view and it would have ruined the book. The book does not work when you do that.

[DongWon] [garbled that] would have been…

[Arkady] But, all my God.

[DongWon] That doesn't… I do want to see it, though.

[Arkady] But that scene played through my head from her point of view, and I kind of like had to write it deliberately. Like react against that instinct. 19 Ads has a very different lens. [Garbled] 19 ads That's lens is actually… Well, in Memory is about dealing with being in charge and being deep middle-aged and also grief. Also, like, deliberately not making choices that you might have made before. Like, not repeating your own mistakes. That's what she's thinking about all the time. Which [garbled] making new mistakes, which is always fun. But the way that she approaches that scene is from a position of a lot of knowledge and a lot of power and also a position of incredible amounts of emotional stress. Which [garbled] the book, you have figured out why she's under that much emotional stress, because it very nearly is the [garbled] commit murder again and doesn't and then has to deal with it. Like, also, there's like a different sense about sex and desire and death. So that scene would have been completely fun from her point of view. But very different. Thematically very different. It would have pulled the thematic lands of the book to be about questions of rulership rather than questions of assimilation. Like, what do you oh people? What do you oh people when you have power? Which is, like, one of my favorite questions in the world to write about. It's a lot more there in Desolation, like, on the surface. In part, that's because of who else gets point of view in Desolation. But it is an undercurrent in Memory. Where the question of okay, who has power? What can you do now? What responsibilities do you have? Can you abdicate them? Those questions are there for Mahit, but they're underground.

[DongWon] When you conceived of the novel, was it always from Mahit's perspective? Like, where you always intending it to be from the perspective of this outsider whose new to this place who loves this place. Like, she has, you're right, that super wide lens, but also all of that depth. Which is almost like very impossible to get in a certain way. Did she come to you at the beginning or was that a thing that arose part way through to solve a problem?

[Arkady] She was there from the beginning. The question I had about midway through writing was whether I was going to add anybody else. I thought about that a lot. It would have been a very different kind of book had I, because, structurally… At least the very first draft of Memory is a information control spy novel, which means that the audience and the characters… Main character, should find out about what's going on at approximately the same time. The questions about what is happening in the world are hyper dependent on who knows what. If I added more people, I could have shown a lot more things, but it would have been a novel that wasn't about what does Mahit know and when does she know it. It would… That would not have been the plot driver that allowed me to move the story forward. So I thought about it a lot, and I did not do it, because… In part, because I was absolutely terrified of what that would do. Remember that I had never written a whole novel before. It seemed difficult enough to deal with one person, and also to try to, like, go back and layer in more people. I also thought about that in some of the revisions that I considered. Essentially, voted against it, except for very, very small bits, the interludes are not, in fact, in tight third like everything else. The interludes are in a kind of omniscient third on purpose. Because of…

[DongWon] Those were a late, late addition, right?

[Arkady] Oh, yeah. Like, not the first revision I did, which got me the manuscript that I submitted to you, DongWon.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Arkady] But the… I think, like, maybe not even the first revision I did for my editor. Might have been there, might have been the second one when I realized I had accidentally… I needed a second person.

[DongWon] I think it was in the first or second revision. Yeah.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Arkady] I collapsed too much motivation into one character and needed him to be two people. I still think I probably could have ended up with three people, but it was getting hard to get them all on stage.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's already a big book.

[Arkady] Yeah.

[DongWon] Amazing. Thank you so much. I believe you have some homework for us as well?

[Arkady] I do. So this is a prompt about worldbuilding through observation. I actually, to my delight, I think there's set it up as a conversation. It is using the character in the story that you are currently working on, could be your main character or somebody else, look at the nearest building you can see out your window and describe it from their point of view. What does that say about the world that you are in and the world that they are in?

[DongWon] I love that. I love returning to that idea of the lens and the few focus and all of that. Arkady, thank you so much for joining us. This conversation was an absolute delight.

[Arkady] It was super fun. Thank you for having me.

[DongWon] With that, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

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

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

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

[Season 19, Episode 09]

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

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Fonda] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

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

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

[DongWon] [garbled]

[chuckles]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog

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

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

[Season 17, Episode 28]

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

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Dan] That absolutely does.

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[Dan] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] What! You're kidding.

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

[Giggles]

[Maurice] Is another.

[Dan] An entirely different experience.

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

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

[Laughter]

[Maurice] [garbled adjective]

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

[Mary Robinette] Very flexible word.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] It is quite a flexible word.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Speaking of stopping a conversation…

[Dan] Speaking of stopping conversation…

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

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

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

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

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

[Maurice] Right.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] And class.

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.49: Customs and Mores

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 49.

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

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] Customs and mores.

[Dan] Yay!

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

[Dan] I was.

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Dan] Okay. Go for it.

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[That's great]

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

[Brandon] Right. Yeah.

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Dan] I don't know.

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] But it's a great question.

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

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

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

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

[Dan] I can tell you.

[Brandon] Yeah?

[Laughter]

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

[Brandon] Oh.

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

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

[Dan] But it's not important.

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

[Laughter]

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

[Dan] Exactly.

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

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

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

[Brandon] Excellent.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.33: Writing Imperfect Worlds

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/18/14-33-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.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.31: Cultural Setting As Conflict

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 31.

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

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

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

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

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

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

[Howard] What is that smell?

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

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

[Brandon] Is it called Seoul Searching?

[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] I just googled it for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Howard] Less expensive than plane tickets.

[Mahtab] Absolutely.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Howard] That's Mission Mumbai.

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Laughter]

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

[Mahtab] Two hands, yes.

[Dan] Two?

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

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Laughter]

[Howard] Very, very quickly.

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

[Howard] Nope.

[Mahtab] I am going to try that prompt.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/28/14-30-eating-your-way-to-better-worldbuilding/

Key points: Food, immigrants, culture, and eating are an obsession for many of us. Immigrants bring their food and adapt, but they also lock it in time. Eating is a sense of home. Beware the tendency to either have enormous feasts or stew in epic fantasies. Food and eating are central metaphors, that you can use to share things about a character. Watch out for rabbit starvation! Food has history, food comes from places. To get it right, make sure the food matters to a character, with a memory, and why that's important. Avoid the soup stone and stew, that we just ate, scene. Make sure the descriptions of food are nourishing, that they have a purpose, not just intestine stuffing. Meals should have meaning. Meals should also tell us something about the world. Think about the production behind the food. Watch out for mush or pills in the future! Give us Klingon foods, but as a good experience, something to try. Make it palatable.

[Transcription note: My apologies, but I have almost certainly confused Piper and Amal at some points in this transcript. Also, some phrases, such as what Amal's father calls intestine stuffing, are rough guesses, since I couldn't figure out the actual phrase.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 30.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, and Eating Your Way to Better Worldbuilding.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Piper] I'm Piper J. Drake.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice Broaddus.

[Piper] You're laughing.

[Maurice] I'm already laughing. That is correct.

[Piper] This is going to be so much fun. Okay. So. Along the lines of our title, which is Eating Your Way to Better Worldbuilding. Dongwon, I'm going to totally put you on the spot.

[Dongwon] So I really like to talk about food. If you've ever met me, I do it pretty much incessantly.

[Piper] Me, too!

[Dongwon] It's an obsession. I think it's an obsession for pretty much all of us. One of the reasons I like to talk about that is, in particular, I come from an immigrant family. Both my parents are immigrants, and food is one of the main ways I relate to culture. Both the culture that my parents came from, the culture of the South where I was raised and went to school, and, I live in New York City, which is where I get to interface with so many different cultures, primarily through eating the many, many delicious things that they make. I love to see this reflected in fiction, and not just the world that we exist in in our own bodies.

[Amal] Fun fact. I decided that Dongwon should be my agent based on the fact that he talked about food in really specific ways. In addition to his many other very fine qualities, like, he is in fact a really good agent. I had been stalking him on Twitter for a while in part because he telegraphed all of these recipes that he was doing and stuff. But there was one moment in particular where we were having our first kind of tentative conversation of do we want to work together, and he gave me this really amazing, mind blowing insight into the ways in which like, immigrants bring their food to new places. Which, I mean, I can say it right now, I think it's germane to the conversation. So I'm used to thinking about immigrants moving around the world and bringing their food with them in the way that that food changes is dependent on the available ingredients, right? So you can't find the stuff that you used to make your food back home, so you adapt and use different things. What Dongwon pointed out was that's not the only variable in the food changing. The other variable is time. In that when immigrants come, their food becomes kind of time locked in the moment when they immigrated. So that different waves of immigration can have very different foods. That you might… For instance, my family emigrated from Lebanon. The food that I am used to thinking of as Lebanese food might be very different from the food that I now find in Lebanon, because cuisines are constantly changing and adapting and so on, but there's a kind of time lock that happens to it in place. I'd never thought of this before, and because Dongwon clearly was thinking along lines that were just revelatory to me in the way that I think about food and culture and the way I move through the world and inheritance and all sorts of stuff, I was like, "Yeah. This guy here. [Garbled, inaudible].

[Piper] My mind is currently blown right now, because my parents are from Thailand, and what I grew up thinking of as Thai cooking, or just home cooking, is very, very different from what you would find in Thailand now. For example, there's plenty of people who've been linking me on social media, like Facebook, on the rolled icecream dealio? I never encountered that is a child going… In Thailand, when I was there in the summers. So I was like, "I have no idea what this thing is." They're like, "You should. It's from Thailand." I'm like, "Huhuhu. I would love to try it. But it was never there when I was a kid."

[Dongwon] Koreans have recently discovered cheese, and they are so excited about it. It's on everything right now. I find it horrifying. I don't think it goes with Korean flavors at all. But you go to Korea and they're eating it on everything. Whereas for me, the food that I think of as Korean food is like New York Korean food. Which is a very specific region and time and all those things combined.

[Maurice] So, I have a kind of complicated family structure. So, I was born in London, my mother's born in Jamaica, my father's born here in the States. So we have these three sort of cultures that always sort of clashed every Sunday afternoon, because we would always have family dinners together. So we'd always have to have food that represented each culture as we came to sit down for family meals. Which is great if you ever came over to our house to eat, because all of a sudden you have this big smorgasbord of food to choose from. But for us, eating became this centering element. So eating for us was always a sense of home. Which then, as before, becomes really interesting in my personal family, since I'm married interracially. I'm also the main cook in the family, due to some of my own early mistakes in the relationship.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Again, me and my wife are fine.

[Maurice] But in our first year of marriage, she had it in her head, this is what an ideal marriage would look like. So she would… I'd come home, she'd make these meals, and the meals would be waiting for me. Then I decided to make a joke. This was a solid joke. I swear this was… I came… I said, "Hey, honey…"

[Dongwon] You're so stressed right now.

[Piper?] I know. We're making him plaintive.

[Maurice] I said, "Hey, your cooking could be considered a hate crime."

[Gasps!]

[Piper?] Why would you say that?

[Maurice] In my head, this sounded like such a solid joke.

[Why is it a joke?]

[Piper] Dongwon has fallen off the table.

[Amal?] [Garbled where was…]

[Maurice] [garbled] Should have provided better instruction and waved me off of this one. So, for the next 13 years, I became the main cook in the family.

[Dongwon] Sounds like just desserts.

[Ooooh!]

[Maurice] There we go.

[Yeah, that happens.]

[Piper] I think we should document this for posterity. Dongwon Song made a pun.

[Dongwon] Right. I'm very tired.

[Oooo. We forgive you.]

[Maurice] But it's actually worked out great across the board because I'm a foodie person. I love food. As demonstrated during the course of this trip. I love food. It has allowed me to just experiment with things, and to provide different tastes, even though I know my children aren't going to be on board with this, but it provides a touch point for me and my wife, it provides a touch point for when my family comes to visit. Learning all these different dishes in order to create a sense of home for whenever anyone comes to visit our house.

[Piper] Speaking of a sense of home, so, one of the things that reviewers have called out in some of my books obviously is the fact that I have a tendency to mention food, and that they should never read my books without having had a meal first, or they will immediately go out and eat. But one of the things that I brought up, and a reviewer really, really felt close to, was in Absolute Trust, Sophie tends to share her foods with her friends. She is Korean American. She's just saying, "You know what, this is an untraditional meal. This is just an amalgamation of all my comfort foods." She's sharing them. What it really started to click with, with the reviewer, was that growing up she didn't, or was hesitant to, share her foods with friends because friends thought it was weird, or it smelled weird, or it was pungent when you brought it into school or brought it into work. Is that something that you've seen, in books in particular, and you think it should be shared more often? Is that something good, bad? What do you think?

[Amal] I mean, I'm reminded of different podcasts… Is it okay to mention other podcasts on the podcast?

[Piper] Yeah, I think so.

[Amal] There was a podcast…

[Piper] We have the nod.

[Amal] Yeah. There was… Sadly, it's sort of on hiatus now, but there was a podcast called Rocket Talk on Tor.com that Justin Landon did and he would often interview people. I'm pretty sure it was Rocket Talk. There was a conversation about foods and epic novels, and how bored the… I can't remember who else was on the podcast now, but they were talking about how boring it was to have feasts described. Like, the registers of food and epic fantasies seemed to either be enormous feast or stew.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] It was just like this ubiquitous stew everywhere. I just feel like that's always a missed opportunity. Like all of the things that we're talking about, like, there are so many things that you do with food, with eating. Like feeding and eating are such central metaphors. So, why not use it to share everything about a character? Like, the fact that you couldn't when you worry growing up and now you want to, because it's where all of these deep tense anxieties of your soul are centered.

[Dongwon] Well, when I think about those feast scenes in fiction, I actually quite like scenes where people eat food, and I like these feast scenes because they're often an opportunity to see a lot of characters interact, and people love descriptions of food. Where I have a problem is, this is where my nerdiness gets away with me, because there'll be a very Western oriented fantasy, in a medieval setting, and everyone's eating potatoes. I'm like, "Those didn't exist in Europe at that point in time. Those are a New World ingredient." Or, they're on the road on some grand epic adventure hunting through the wilderness, and they stopped to make a stew which takes hours and hours to make when using resources that they probably have at the time. Or they're only eating rabbits. Here's an interesting fact that I really love is there's a thing called rabbit starvation that's what happened to trappers.

[What?]

[Dongwon] If you only eat rabbits, it takes more calories to burn the meat than it gives you.

[Piper] They're like celery?

[Amal?] Because they're lean.

[Dongwon] They're like celery.

[Piper] Like, rabbits are celery.

[Dongwon] Rabbits are so lean.

[Amal] But wait. Were they actually eating the eyes, because that is a really good calorie source?

[Dongwon] Maybe they should have been eating the rabbit eyes. This I don't actually know. But there's not enough of the proteins in there to have the enzymes for you to digest the meat properly. So you will actually starve to death if all you eat is rabbits. So every time Samwise Gamgee shows up with a brace of rabbits and potatoes, I get mad.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It's pedantic, but to me, it's really important because food has history. Food comes from places. Food reflects things about the way we move through the world. So until we explored the New World and brought potatoes to Europe, that was an ingredient that we didn't have. If your world has potatoes in it, that means there is sea exploration in a way. That implies a whole nother depth to your world that you may not have considered if it's not there initially.

[Maurice] All right. Hang on. One more time. What was the question? I do this a lot.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] So I was asking about whether or not… Or how you felt about including the sharing of food, especially if it's your character's home cooking, and what kind of thoughts or memories they evoke?

[Maurice] Well, there's a couple, 'cause like even on this trip, I've been reflecting on different sort of food memories that we have. So, like at one point, I felt the need, I have to have some beans and rice, and I had to have some plantains. These are foods that I took for granted when my mom fixed them every week. But now, I just was like, "Oh, no. I feel the need to have them." But on the flipside, there are foods I want no part of. Like, one of them was aki and salt fish, because my mom would make that every Saturday morning. It has this older that would fill the house. The whole idea of being embarrassed or having to share that, I'm like I can't have my friends over, spend the night, because my mom's going to fix aki and salt fish, and it's going to stink up the whole house. What are they going to think about me? The same thing with chitlins, 'cause…

[Laughter]

[Piper?] Chitlins? But they nomee. They so nomee…

[Maurice] Sure. Yeah. But see, I was also so scarred early on because there was one time when my grandmother was fixing chitlins and then…

[Amal?] What are chitlins?

[Maurice] What are chitlins?

[Amal?] I don't know what chitlins are.

[Piper] Let's just say they're innards.

[Amal] They're what?

[Dongwon] Or large intestines.

[Amal] Oh. Okay.

[Dongwon] Or small intestines? I get confused.

[Piper] They are part of the intestines and you will find out that Piper will eat very, very… Well, let's just say that there are very few things in this world that I won't eat.

[Maurice] Right. But when my grandmother was cleaning them… Because you have to clean them first. It produces a sort of… I don't know… There was a sheen to her hands and a stink to the process. Then she would be like, "Come give grandma a hug!"

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Put me off on entire… Yes. So things happened.

[Amal] Testicular sheen feels like a term now in my head, which I didn't ever…

[Piper] Intestinal?

[Amal] Intestinal, not testicular.

[Piper] Sorry. You said intestinal, and I heard testicular.

[Dongwon] Those are Rocky Mountain oysters. [Garbled]

[Piper] Rocky Mountain oysters, different food type.

[Amal] Sorry.

[Piper] But on that note, let's go to the book of the week.

[Laughter]

[Piper] So. The book of the week just happens to be a cookbook.

[Amal] Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Piper] We're trying to talk about…

[Laughter]

[Piper] If I could stop laughing. We're going to talk about A Feast of Ice and Fire, the official Game of Thrones companion cookbook. This is by… And I apologize, they're not here to correct me on name pronunciation, so I may mess this up. Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sarian Lehrer, I believe. The reason why I recommend this is because I really have a lot of great memories associated with this cookbook. I probably got this cookbook before I really watched Game of Thrones and really read the book. But the thing I loved about it was that it not only has recipes that are historically accurate or recipes from their historical research, but it has a contemporary adjustment, I guess you could say. A remake of the same recipe, so you have the two options. What was kind of funny as I was going through it was I actually preferred the historical preparation and presentation more than I like the modern. So it's just a really cool cookbook to go through. It does have a foreword by George RR Martin. But I think really I was more focused on the food, because the food looks fantastic, has pictures, etc. They talk about the historical research behind the recipes.

[Dongwon] So, when we think about food in fiction, what are the things that are hallmarks for you of when somebody gets it right, in terms of including food? A different dish, or a cultural dish, in presenting either an alien race or a fictional fantasy culture or something along those lines?

[Piper] How do they get it right?

[Dongwon] Or where they go off the rails?

[Piper] Oh, gosh, I gotta go first on this?

[Laughter]

[Piper] How they… Like, hallmarks of how they get it right is when it matters to a character. Because that's why you remember a particular dish. Whether it's a good memory or a bad memory, it matters to a character, and I want to know why. Not just what's in the dish, but what is it about the cooking of it, is it a communal cooking effort, is it for a particular purpose, does it bring together memories? I mean, Maurice shared that awesome memory of… About the preparation on Saturday nights for Sunday morning. Like, that kind of thing is a fantastic memory and it's character building and it's worldbuilding. It tells you about culture, it tells you about everything from the large to the detailed. I think that that's a fantastic way to do it. One of the things that I don't like is when somebody's like, "So, we got a soup stone and we got some wild onions and we threw some protein in there and it makes this delicious stew. Hooray." Then why did… Like, how did that do anything for character building or plot, except show that they ate?

[Amal] There's an expression that my dad uses for when food is just basically adequate and it's just… It's fine. He says [hash ris and thron?] Which is relevant to what we were just talking about, because it just translates literally to intestine stuffing.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So I feel like there's… Yeah, that's right.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I'm recovering from that moment. But I think it applies to this. Like, are the descriptions of food in your book [hash ris and thron?] or are they actually nourishing? Are they something that is providing something in the narrative that is going to serve a purpose? By purpose here, I don't mean plot mechanics, although that would be awesome. I would love to read a book where the plot hinged on food. Like, that would be great. But more just what you were describing there. But, like I remember this one seen in a book that I don't like very much. There's… It's An Ocean at the End of the Lane. I don't like that book very much. But there's a moment in that book where… The main character's a little boy, and he has been eating terrible food, like the kind of cold porridge grimy badness sort of thing. He's suddenly in this home where he's given warm toasted bread and butter and jam. The memory of the description of this book that lingers with me is going from cold gray darkness to warm golden light. Even though I don't like the book very much, that one thing about the book has totally stayed with me because it was this experience of food locked to all the other experiences that the character is having and the experience the character had, this joy, and this unbelievable almost painful simplicity, was enormous.

[Maurice] So there's a couple different things. One, I like the ritual of food. From the moment of preparation to how it's presented and how it's consumed. For me, there's a ritual about it. The more that there's a ritual, the more that the meal has meaning, I love when I read scenes like that. But the other thing, for me, in terms of worldbuilding is what does the food say about the world itself. So, like, for me, I have trouble dieting, for example, because whenever I diet, as soon my belly grumbles from trying to cut down on calories, what triggers is I have a lack of food, I don't know when I'll have my next meal. I have all of these… It's like a poverty throwback to when we lived much more food insecure, growing up wise. So it becomes… So it's almost like diets for me trigger that, so then it almost has the opposite effect, which is I must eat now, so I can feel like I'm secure in having a meal again. So I say all that because I love it when stories reflect upon that in the greater world. So we have these meals… All right. So if we have this huge rich banquet of food. All right, so we're obviously living in a wealthy culture. If we are having food of opportunity, that says something else about the culture. I love those little shadings, and when people bring that out in their work.

[Amal] [inaudible. Something?] I want to highlight too that we almost never think about in terms of food. So we're talking a lot about where food comes from, its provenance, and of reflecting that in worldbuilding. I don't think we tend to think about food production very much. This is a hole that I would love to help fill for everyone by recommending a Twitter account and a podcast. Dr. Sarah Taber on Twitter is someone who absolutely everyone should follow. She's magnificent. She has a podcast called Farm to Taber which is great, a great title.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] She works… I mean, she has worked on a farm, she's worked in the agricultural industry in the United States, but she has a wonderful sense of where food production and food standards intersect with worldbuilding. So, where… For instance, why is it that in some places you raise cattle instead of raising crops? Well, perhaps it's because in those places, all… It's too arid to actually grow crops that sustain human beings, and the only vegetation that is edible is edible by animals. So you get your cattle to eat the rough terrible things that you can't actually digest, and then you eat the cattle. There is a logic to it. There is a kind of food management aspect to it. But I have… Like, it blew my mind to start thinking about… I never had thought about it before. So it's, I think, part and parcel of thinking about things like empire and colonialism and all this stuff that we think about just on the regular… All of us obviously all think about that on a regular…

[Piper] We do.

[Dongwon] And class and power and privilege…

[Amal] And class and power and privilege. Thinking about food production can often be… Like, I just got… A missing link in the ways in which we talk about these things. So she's a great place to start.

[Dongwon] It's a truly brilliant podcast, I cannot recommend highly enough. It's one of my sort of top three right now.

[Maurice] One of the things… You mentioned going off the rails. I'm not excited for the future.

[Ooh. Ha ha ha.]

[Maurice] 'Cause people don't eat well in the future. I mean, all the food seems to be like this weird mush type thing that people are eating, or like we get pills, like that's what I have to look forward to?

[Dongwon] Well, I think about two things in terms of like food in science fiction. On the one end, you have Star Trek, right? Where you sort of have replicators, and they're just reproducing various sort of Western-style foods. Then you have the way that Klingon food is presented…

[Ha!]

[Dongwon] This is the thing that bothers me, because it's very one-dimensional. Klingons are presented as this violent species, and therefore they eat violent foods. So the food is living, it's bugs, it's worms, it moves. It's played for the sense of horror from the Federation officers who have to go to diplomatic dinners with Klingons or whatever it is. Except in this one really beautiful moment in Deep Space Nine that I really liked which is why Deep Space Nine is the only Star Trek I really like. You can all yell at me later.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Actually, I see fists being shaken in the audience.

[Dongwon] Exactly. Then, there's this beat where Dr. Bashir takes a date to this Klingon food stall, and it's just presented as this delightful moment that they share their love of Klingon food. He's just slurping up worms…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] And it's just like really… It's played for laughs in some ways, but it's also this really endearing sense of like, "Oh. This is a guy who's lived in a multicultural environment. He's lived in a place where Klingons lived, learn to eat their food, and can order in their language, and just loves doing it." It just, to me, I was like, "Oh. He's a New Yorker, right? This is what we do…"

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] We go down to the [garbled ballfields?] and order food or we go to the food courts or whatever it is and you order the thing that you're excited to try and the thing that you know how to order. I find that to be two different models of the way in which we can look at food from other cultures and food in the future. The Expanse also does this really well. They have done a great job of not only mingling languages, but then mingling cuisines and then giving them new names, right? So you get a sense that Martians eat a certain way, the Belters eat a certain way, and those things are… They often talk about how they're like, things that sound horrible in some ways. That they're like yeast products, or they're grown in space environments. But then you can feel the cultural roots of how they're using those products, those soy products and yeast products, whatever it is. So food in the future can be depressing, but I think if we apply our imagination a little bit more and make it rooted in the cultures of who's actually going to space, and if we make sure that the futures we envision aren't just white Americans going into space, then maybe the food will be a little bit more pilatable.

[Maurice] Palatable.

[Dongwon] Palatable.

[Piper] Yea, food.

[Amal] Street food? What will we call street food once it hits space?

[Piper] We'll have to have space streets.

[Amal] Space streets?

[Piper] Space street food. Space markets?

[Amal] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Space markets]

[Amal] I have two quick recs on food in space. Two things that came to mind were my favorite thing that Alan Moore ever wrote called The Ballad of Halo Jones. It's an amazing book, it's one of his very early things. There is a really cool food thing that I will get into later. But the other one is Max Gladstone has a book coming out next year called Empress of Forever. Is that the title now? Yes. Empress of Forever, and there's a lot of culture hopping there. In every one, it feels like there's an introduction based in food and rooted in hospitality and cultural exchange and stuff like that. It is the future, probably. It's space.

[Dongwon] It definitely is future.

[Amal] It's definitely the future. Yes. It's really great.

[Piper] Okay. So we've talked a lot… I'm very hungry now… About eating your way to a better worldbuilding. So, now, it's time to talk about homework. Dongwon?

[Dongwon] So, the homework is, I would like you all to imagine a fictional meal. Imagine a meal at your character's eating in a fantasy world, or in a science fictional world. Describe the history of that meal. What does it mean to the family who is eating it? Where do the ingredients come from? What are the cultures that led to it? Then write a sort of mini story that just tracks the way this particular meal came together, and what things came about because of certain cultures or certain ingredients or certain availability, certain restrictions, led to that particular meal happening for those particular characters at that moment.

[Piper] Okay. Then… Wait, there's a thought.

[Amal] No, no.

[Piper] You didn't have a thought.

[Amal] No, I didn't.

[Piper] I don't remember how to finish.

[Amal] This has been Writing Excuses… Sorry, I just…

[Laughter]

[garbled]

[Amal] You're the one doing it.

[Piper] I don't know…

[Amal] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. That was the thing. You can [inaudible]

[Piper] Now go write.

[Laughter]

[Piper] All right, we're done.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.12: Writing the Other – Latinx Representation

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/24/14-12-writing-the-other-latinx-representation/

Key points: Latinx, a catchall term for people with Latin American heritage. You will make mistakes, that's part of the process. Latinx is not just one thing. To write a Latinx character, think about where they live, how they got there, what's their family story, how did they grow up, what kind of foods do they eat and when. Remember they are people. Think about immigrant mashup foods and traditional foods. Comfort foods! Consider intersectionality, the mixture and crossing of various aspects in identity. Broad portrayals of a culture or group are likely to be misleading, while being specific about a culture or family can be very relatable.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 12.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Writing the Other – Latinx Representation.

[Tempest] 15 minutes long.

[Dongwon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Julia] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Tempest] I'm Tempest.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Julia] And I'm Julia.

[Dan] Awesome. This is the second in our awesome Writing the Other series, where we give you the tools that you need as an author to write about other cultures and other people that are different than yourself. We today have the wonderful Julia Rios with us. Can you tell us about yourself?

[Julia] Yes. My father is… Was from Mexico. He is no longer with us. He grew up in Yucatán and he immigrated to the United States and married my mother, who is a white woman from California. So I am half Mexican, Mexican-American, choose your choice. I am a writer, I'm an editor, I'm a podcaster, I'm a narrator. Primarily, I edit fiction for Fireside magazine and I write short stories and flash fiction in the form of text messages for an app called Flash Read under the name Julie Rivera.

[Oooo]

[Dan] Cool.

[Tempest] Fancy.

[Dan] Well, awesome. We are excited to have you here. Please tell us what we're going to be talking about today, and let's start with the word Latinx, because that's actually the first time I've ever heard it pronounced out loud and I haven't known exactly how to say it. I know a lot of our listeners might not know what it means.

[Julia] Okay. It's really funny, because once I was on a panel about it, and we spent most of the panel, all of the Latinx people participating, trying to decide how to pronounce it.

[Laughter]

[Julia] We all… The four of us settled on Latinx, but it's unclear to us that that is correct, so… 100% correct. There are probably other opinions available. But, roughly, Latinx we think is a good choice. I and four other people at least. No one has challenged me on that yet. It is a catchall term for people who have Latin American heritage. There are very many different labels, and we could have a really long conversation about that, so I don't really want to get into it. But that means people from North America, Central, and South America, places where Spain came and conquered and colonized. Then you have a lot of mixed race people, which definitely, I fit in with that. My heritage is going to be some European and some of the indigenous Mayan ancestry.

[Dan] The word itself comes from, if I'm not mistaken, in Spanish we have Latino and Latina, which is gendered because of the way Spanish functions.

[Julia] So, because Spanish is a gendered language, to try to not default to male, which is the sort of old-fashioned way of saying… Like, "if one enters a room, he must pick up his glass of water," and we don't really use that anymore. So, instead of saying he or she, we move to they often in English. Latinx is the inclusive word that includes everyone, across the gender spectrum.

[Dan] Awesome. Cool. So… Well, the… Like I said, the purpose of this series is to give people tools of how they can do this right. So what are some things that people can do when they're writing about Latinx people that they can… To do it right, to do it well.

[Julia] Yes. Okay…

[Dan] I should say well, instead of right.

[Laughter]

[Julia] Okay. The first thing I'm going to say is there are many ways to be Latinx and there's no one right way and there's no umbrella term. Also, there are always going to be mistakes. No one's ever going to be 100% perfect. So, understand that you will make mistakes, and that's okay, that's part of the process. But one of the things that I think can be hard to realize when you're looking at a culture and you say, "Oh, Latinx people, we need more Latinx rep," is it's easy to think of that as one thing. I am Mexican. That's one country. I am Mexican-American, so I have a different experience than people who are living in Mexico. Like, in Mexico, there are thousands of micro-cultures depending on where you live. Which state you live in, which city you live in, are you in a rural area, are you in a city? All of these things inform your experience and your cultural heritage. That's just within Mexico. In the United States, we have a big diaspora of people from all kinds of countries and places, like Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Central and South America, Mexico, Cuba, and, depending on where you are in the States, you are more likely to have a high population of one kind of person. Like in South Florida, you have a lot of Cubans, because Cuba is right there. In New York, there are a lot of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. In California, there are a lot of Mexicans. So it kind of… Those things can inform some of your Latinx population in the United States. But also, it includes everyone in Canada, South America, North America… Anyone who is coming from those countries and then settled in those areas. So there are a lot of different people. That's the first thing to realize. When you're going to set out to write a Latinx character, ask yourself, where do they live? How did they get there? What's their family story? How did they grow up? Did they grow up as a fully assimilated American, because that can be a very different experience than growing up as a first generation immigrant whose first language was Spanish and they didn't start learning English until they were nine and they crossed the border. Then also, who's their family? What kinds of traditional foods do they eat and when do they eat them? What kinds of relationships do they have with their families? Remember that all of these people are people just like you. You have a lot of complex experiences in your life. Your ways of operating at school would be different from your ways of operating when you're at your grandmother's house for a formal dinner.

[Dongwon] I think we call that term code switching.

[Julia] Code switching. Exactly. That's exactly what I was getting at. So when you think about all of these things and you realize that people from all over the place have different things informing who they are. So your traditional foods for Thanksgiving might be very different from your neighbor across the street, depending on how they've grown up, and where they've grown up, and what their family story is. So that would be the first thing that I think is important to…

[Dongwon] I have a particular fascination with immigrant mashup foods, where, like, weird American and then whatever immigrant culture they're coming from get all crossed over together. Like, not Latinx obviously, but my family would eat pickles with spaghetti, just because it was like looking for a little bit of like kimchi like thing. Anyways.

[Julia] No. This is totally a thing. So, we had a foreign exchange student… For a while, my mother was taking a lot of foreign exchange students. We had one from Thailand. She got to the United States and didn't know what to do with our food at all. She was, "This is just completely foreign to me." Then she discovered ketchup. She was like, "This is a sauce that you put on things." So she just put it on everything. It became like the thing. We were all like, "What are you doing?" She's like, "Well, I have to have something that gives the flavor. This is the American flavor. I will now put it on all my food."

[Laughter]

[Tempest] Oh, the American flavor.

[Dongwon] What's great about that is she's not… Wrong…

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It's how she's trained to eat her food.

[Julia] Exactly. Exactly.

[Dan] Different immigrant cultures and immigrant families all have their own style of changing the way that they act while also kind of staying true to where they came from.

[Dongwon] But there are so many Latin American cultures where there's that iconic sauce, whether it's chimichurri, whether it's… Whatever it is. But…

[Julia] What your family's traditional foods are will make a big difference. So, for me, right now we are on the Writing Excuses cruise and we just spent a day in Cozumel, which is very close to where my family lives in Yucatán. So the food here is very similar to what I grew up eating. That was very exciting because I got to go and have some of the foods that remind me of my childhood. Like ceviche and fish that's grilled in achiote, which is a Spanish, or a Mexican spice.

[Chuckles]

[Julia] I get kind of confused about my languages, because I've been speaking both of them today.

[Laughter]

[Julia] These things are traditional to me. They make me very happy, they feel like home. Also here, pretty much all throughout Latin America, which is a really weird term, but that means anywhere that Spanish people came and did conquests. There… You'll find dishes with rice and beans. But everybody presents it slightly differently. So the kind of rice and beans that you get in Yucatán are similar in some ways to the rice and beans that you get in places like Cuba. And different from the rice and beans that you get in northern Mexico, which is what most United States Americans will associate with Mexican food. Here, the beans are black beans that are in a sort of paste. It sort of looks like chocolate pudding. When I was six and I visited, I thought that was chocolate pudding, and I was very disappointed the first time I tried it.

[Chuckles]

[Julia] Then I realized it was super yummy and I stopped being disappointed. But the first time, I was like, "This is not chocolate pudding."

[Laughter]

[Julia] "Somebody tricked me, it's beans." But that was something that I got to eat, and it was very comforting. Someone who is from a different culture will have a very different style of beans that they consider comforting. That's one of those details that if you decide where your character's from and what they grew up eating, you can think about like what's comforting to them. In the same way that you'll have your own comfort foods. For me, as growing up in California, is a very assimilated American, and also with Mexican heritage, I have these Mexican comfort foods and I love mashed potatoes. They're my favorite. I have eaten mashed potatoes every day on this ship.

[Laughter]

[Julia] I go to the Wind Jammer before dinner to get mashed potatoes.

[Dan] That is great.

[Tempest] That makes sense to me. I feel that that is a correct choice. I'm wondering though, in terms of thinking about making your character very specific when it comes to their culture… Like, what kind of Latinx person are they? How does intersectionality play into this?

[Julia] [Ooo] Intersectionality plays a big role. Intersectionality is the idea that everyone has more than one thing that informs their identity. So, often we talk about these in terms of marginalization. So you could be Latinx and disabled, or Latinx and queer… I am both of those things. So that's exciting. But there are also just a lot of different things that you can be. I had a conversation with a woman in a shop today when I was buying something. She was surprised that I knew something about what I was buying. I said, "Well, it was because my father was from Yucatán." We made a connection, and she said she was from Yucatán. She told me some of her heritage. Then she wanted to exchange the kind of mixtures that we were. So she was a mixed race person from Yucatán, and she wanted to explain exactly how. Then she was asking me like who I was, and wanted to know who my parents were, and what kind of people had formed me. This is the kind of thing that was important to her, and is important to a lot of people here because they want to make that connection with you, and they want to see where we can be together. Because we recognize that we are also very different. So she has other identity things that don't match up with mine. We're both mixed race, but we have different things. The intersection of those things makes us who we are.

[Dan] That's awesome. Let's pause here a little late for our book of the week. No, that's okay, because this was super cool. What is our book of the week, Julia?

[Julia] Our book of the week is Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez. It's a wonderful middle grade novel. It's through the Rick Riordin Presents from Disney Hyperion. It is about a boy named Sal, and he breaks the universe.

[Laughter]

[Julia] I don't want to ruin it.

[Dan] Very descriptive title.

[Julia] I want you to go and read this book. Also, it will make you very, very hungry for Cuban food.

[Dongwon] Oh, yes, it really does.

[Julia] Specifically Cuban food. I brought this book because I got to be to read it and I know it's deliciously wonderful. I keep waiting for the whole world to get it so I can make everyone read it and squee about it with them. But also, specifically because Carlos has written a character that is Cuban-American, and it's a very specific culture that he's dug into, that's also his own cultural identity. But you get a lot of the details of how he interacts with the world. Some of them overlap with my experience, and some of them are very different, because Cuban-Americans have a different experience than Mexican Americans. So I recommend it for those specific details.

[Dan] Well, awesome. That is Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez. It is available now, so go out and look for it.

[Julia] [garbled I will tell you it] will make you laugh really hard.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] Maybe cry just a little bit.

[Julia] Oh, and cry.

[Dan] Laugh, and cry, and be hungry…

[Julia] It will be really good though.

[Dan] The entire gamut of human emotions contained in this middle grade novel.

[Dan] I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of specificity. Because it's very important. That's one of the things that we hear a lot is that if you try to portray a culture or a group very broadly, you'll end up getting a lot of things wrong and offending a lot of people. When you zero in on one very specific culture or even one very specific family, then it's actually even more relatable in a lot of ways. But… I want to tell this story because this is one that I did wrong.

[Chuckles] [Uh-oh]

[Dan] I've got… My Mirador series is about… It's a cyberpunk trilogy, YA, from Harper. The main character is Mexican-American. I've lived in Mexico for a few years. I thought, I can do this. I've got this. I'm going to do this right. The Mexican-American community has not really picked up the book. I was wondering why. Then I came to Mexico, where the book is huge. What I realized is that I was portraying a very Mexican family, and doing it in a way where they felt seen and they felt this is us. You have portrayed us in your book. The Mexican-American community didn't feel that, because I was not doing them, I was portraying Mexican people. So, being specific is very important. What can people do to portray these kinds of cultures and people very specifically?

[Julia] So, the first thing that I would recommend that you do is think about who specifically is your character and what their family is like. Because I don't think it's coming from one specific culture will give you enough. Like, I'm Mexican, but I know a lot of other Mexican people who have very different experiences. Part of that is my family, going back to intersectionality, I have within my family people who are Muslim, people from Afghanistan, people who have come from a lot of different places. So when we have Thanksgiving dinner… I always love to ask people what they eat at Thanksgiving dinner, because families bring out their favorite foods. When we would have Thanksgiving dinner growing up, we would often have turkey and mashed potatoes, but also like Afghan rice with raisins in it. That's something that we would have because I had people from Afghanistan in my family. So your character is going to have a very specific family. That's not something that you would associate necessarily with a Mexican experience. But it was my experience, and I'm a Mexican-American. Your character is going to have a lot of specific things like that. They're going to have specific things that are Mexican-American. One thing you can do is go to a Mexican restaurant, and asked the people who work there where they're actually from. Sometimes they're from Mexico, and sometimes they're not. Because they know that selling Mexican food, if they look Latinx, is the best way to make a restaurant successful in the United States. But if you ask them and they say they're from Mexico, ask them what part of Mexico. Find out a little bit more about that. I don't want you to bother the restaurant people too much.

[Laughter]

[Julia] But usually they'll be happy to tell you what region or what town. If they do, go home and like look that up. Find out what makes the food taste like what it is. Think about like, "Oh, okay. That's an interesting thing." Can you think about what those things that they might have carried with them, what comforting memories they might have brought? How those things would mesh with where you live now? If you live in the middle of Indiana and your Mexican restaurant is run by people from Guadalajara, they might really like corn in very different ways at the same time.

[Dan] That's very cool.

[Tempest] This is all been very food based. I feel like…

[Julia] Well, this is because food is a really big part of culture…

[Laughter]

[Julia] Especially…

[Tempest] That's very true. Yeah. But also like, I love the emphasis that you have on family, because I feel that… I mean, especially when it comes to YA novels. I know that with YA that the whole thing is to like get the parents out of the way, so the kids can go out and have a dangerous adventure. But it just never seemed to be like my experience, that I would be able to like escape my parents at that point. Not necessarily even wanting to escape my parents or my family or my cousins or whatever. I really love Guadalupe Garcia McCall's books. One of the things I love about it is that it's about like families together dealing with issues. I feel like that's another thing that in some cultures, that kind of family togetherness is not necessarily emphasized. But in Guadalupe's, it is.

[Julia] I believe she is… Guadalupe is Mexican-American. She lives in Texas. She wrote a book called Summer of the Mariposas. It's wonderful. It's a YA retelling of the Odyssey by Homer. But starring four sisters who have to go rescue their father. They go on a quest, the same way Odysseus does. They run into some of Odysseus's kinds of monsters, but in Mexico. So they cross the border and go into Mexico to rescue their father from someone. It uses Loteria cards, which are a very specific Mexican game that I grew up with, and a lot of Mexican Americans will have grown up with. It's a very specific to this family and their experience of living in a border town, and of having their parents come from Mexico and having that specificity that they have within the home. So I think that's a really rate example of using specific culture.

[Dan] It is such a great book, too. So you get two books of the week this time.

[Laughter]

[Dan] One of the ways to get this level of specificity and to do it well is, like you said, to talk to people. Be polite about it. But talk to people and find out where they're from, and who they are, and what they like and what they don't like. What they brought with them? What they miss?

[Dan] I believe that's kind of the homework that you're going to be giving us, right?

[Julia] Yeah. I think so. My homework originally was to write a scene about someone from a very specific culture, and to think about the things that inform who they are and what they like. I think if I had had like an hour, I would have gotten into other things that weren't food, but since I primarily talked about food…

[Laughter]

[Julia] I want you to write a scene where people are eating a meal. It could be any meal. It could be a holiday meal, or it could be just a regular meal. It could be a fast food meal. But I want you to think about your character and who they are and where they're from. How they feel about this food and why they feel that way? How does that inform the conversation that they're having over the meal, or their thoughts that they're having if they're alone, or whatever. This could be anywhere. It could be in your fantasy world, it could be on a space station, whatever. But it will definitely inform who they are, and I want you to think about that and write that eating a meal scene for me.

[Dan] That sounds fantastic. Make us hungry as well while you're doing it.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Julia. And, obviously, Dongwon and Tempest as well. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/24/14-8-worldbuilding-qa-1/

Q&A Summary:

Q: What cultural stuff do you need to know throughout the writing process?

A; What are the axes of power in the world. Economic status, social hierarchies, which ones will your character intersect with in the story. What cultural stuff do I need to make the world feel real? What cultural stuff drives the conflict in my story? What cultural stuff impacts the characters to give them character arcs? Specificity! What practices are embodied in your story, where did they come from, why are they used? What is likely to come up, what do I need to think about to make it interesting and varied.

Q: When worldbuilding religion, I often find that portions of the fictional religions have overlapped with real world religions. How do you treat those overlaps with respect, especially when problems with the in-world religion are part of the story's conflict?

A: Being a real-world religious person with a deep and abiding respect for the multiple sides. Multiple viewpoints wherever possible. Tell somebody's specific story, not a story about a class of people.

Q: For your worldbuilding, how much do you have figured out before you start your first draft, and how much do you discover later as you write?

A: It depends. Do it in layers, a broad overview, then dig in where needed, with research in the recesses of your imagination. Frontload where possible, but go back and patch and connect, too.

Q: Much like how it can be bad if you introduce key characters too late in the narrative, such as the last one third, what would you say is the threshold where you should have introduced all major worldbuilding elements? Halfway or something else, and does it change based on genre or intended audience?

A: Tie the new worldbuilding elements to character conflict and development, and you can keep doing it. Introduce the new elements slightly before they matter. Introduce the element for a different reason.

Q: I was wondering how do you ensure the world comes through as a character of its own?

A: It doesn't always have to be a character, sometimes it's just an important setting. Name it, then give it a personality. How does the POV character interact with the environment? Is it an antagonist, or a sidekick? Give the world scene time of its own. Look at how the setting influences plot and character decisions. Pay attention to the language you use to describe the environment.

Q: When worldbuilding in science fiction or fantasy, how much change to terminology is too much? For example, a new calendar system, units of measurement, or currency?

A: Some worldbuilding elements are more easily grokked than others. Hemi-deca blerks! What do you want to say about the culture?

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Eight.

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding, Questions and Answers.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Howard] And you have questions. By you, I'm speaking to the you in the audience of WXR 2018 attendees before me.

[Whoo! Applause]

[Howard] This episode was recorded live on a ship in the Caribbean. We're pretty in love with this model. It's a lot of fun.

[Mary Robinette] This… I really like the way we have built our world, I have to say.

[Laughter]

[as…]

[Dan] Although technically, we're in the Gulf of Mexico, not the Caribbean. Just pointing out the errors in your worldbuilding. Consistency is key.

[Howard] We're on the water, and it's pretty.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That piece of the worldbuilding is all I actually need to know. Which is often the case with worldbuilding.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] But the nice thing about this is that we have a live audience, which means that we can go to them for questions. Shall we start with your first one, or do you have other things to do?

[Howard] Nononono. That's just great.

[Christopher] Hello, my name is Christopher Adkins. What cultural stuff do you need to know throughout the writing process?

[Dan] Cultural stuff?

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I like to think about are what the axes of power are for the world? Because those are going to affect the way my character moves through the world. The economic status, social hierarchies, those are the things that I think about. I only think about the ones that are… My character's going to intersect with in the story. So in short fiction, I'm likely to kind of think about the axes of power. But probably only a couple of them are going to come into play in the story. So there's only going to be… Those are going to be the ones that I will really define.

[Howard] I… The things that I need to know about cultural stuff upfront is do I need cultural stuff in order for the world I am building to feel real? Do I need cultural stuff in order for there to be conflict that drives my story? And, do I need there to be cultural stuff that impacts my characters in ways that gives them character arcs? I approach it first from narrative. From there, there's a bazillion stuff I'll end up needing to know.

[Dongwon] I'll just say, specificity is really important in building culture. Often times, if you're modeling a real-world culture, what you want to do is make sure that you have specific practices that are embodied in your work. But also make sure you know where those come from and why they're used, right? Where I see this going off the rails a lot of times is they'll take a practice without understanding the role it plays in the society, and therefore undermine the purpose of that practice or end up saying something insulting about it by accident. So what you want to do is do your homework, pick something very specific, and then figure out how to transform it so that it fits your world without being in direct contradiction to the purpose and the point of that practice in the first place.

[Dan] Before I start to write, I will come up… I will think about the things that are most likely to come up that I will need to describe on-the-fly, and I will kind of prep them in advance. So when I wrote my cyberpunk series, I had a whole list of technologies and companies that made them. When I… In the fantasy that I'm currently writing, I figured out, well, in this country, these are the kinds of foods they eat and the kinds of jobs they have. Just because then… If I don't do that, I know that everyone is going to be a lumberjack eating stew.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So having something ready to go, so I can be more interesting and more varied, helps me a lot.

[Howard] Hearty stew.

[Dan] Yes. With crusty bread.

[Mary Robinette] By contrast, I don't do that at all. I will square bracket it when I get to it, and then invent it on the spot. But I am lazier than Dan is.

[Howard] I find that difficult to believe, but let's go to our next question.

[Laughter]

[Xander] Hi, my name is Zander Hacking. When worldbuilding religion, I often find that portions of the fictional religions have overlapped with real world religions. How do you treat those overlaps with respect, especially when problems with the in-world religion are part of the story's conflict?

[Mary Robinette] That's a good question.

[Dan] That's a really good question.

[Yeah]

[Howard] I have a question. Is Zander Hacking your real name, because if I tried to use that name in a book, no one would believe it.

[Xander] It's actually Alexander Hacking, but that's way too much effort.

[Howard] It's still too awesome to be real.

[Dan] I can say it, but Mary Robinette wouldn't.

[Howard] Honestly, one of the things that helps me…

[Dan] You just said you were lazier than me.

[Mary Robinette] [Tee-hee-hee]

[Howard] One of the things that helps me a lot with regard to writing fictional religions and paying respect to real-world religions is being a real-world religious person who has a deep and abiding respect for the varying epistemologies that exist in the world. I believe that I can learn things by faith, by scriptural study, by revelation, and I believe that I can learn things in no other way than through science. It's a weird fence to sit on. Not always comfortable. But it's one I'm on. So anytime I'm writing about a religion, I'm writing it from this inherent understanding that there are multiple sides to what is going on.

[Mary Robinette] I think the multiple sides is a really good point. I try to remember to represent multiple viewpoints where possible. Because we all… Even people within the same denomination, going to the same church and the same building, will have different relationships with faith. So I tried to make sure that that is represented in the page, that it is not a monolith. I also try to remember that things are interwoven, that nothing exists by itself. So making sure that I'm thinking about the way it stretches out into the other parts of the culture is, I think, one of the ways I can be respectful and also make it feel more organic.

[Dongwon] To build off of Mary's thing a little bit, when you have that fictionalized religion, it is probably… Has a real-world analog, but the thing to remember is you're not telling a story about that entire religion. You're telling a story about a person who intersects and lives within that culture or that experience. So don't think of it… Where you'll get in trouble is when you're trying to tell a story about the whole class of people as opposed to telling about somebody's specific story. That person has a place, they were raised a certain way, they have certain feelings about the religion in which they exist. Those are not going to be 100% representative of the monolith of the organization, right? So remember you're talking about an individual. Invest them with as much specificity and as much physicality as you can. Then that will help you make sure that you're articulating a perspective and an experience, rather than saying… Or rather than criticizing the whole group or criticizing a real-world religion in that way.

[Gail] My name is Gail. For your worldbuilding, how much do you have figured out before you start your first draft, and how much do you discover later as you write?

[Mary Robinette] I vary a lot, depending on what it is that I'm writing. I often treat worldbuilding when I'm doing something that's completely made up the same way I treat historical stuff. Which is that I think about it in layers. I kind of get a broad overview, and then will dig in. It's just that the research that I'm doing is in the recesses of my own imagination. But I… Sometimes I get very, very specific, and other times I write into it… I discovery write my way in, and then hit something that's an odd juxtaposition, and try and figure out why it's that way. For me, it depends on the story.

[Dan] I like to frontload things, as I said before. But, because I like to do that, I have noticed how often I go back, which is every single story, every single book. I'm still going back and patching holes and making things connect that didn't connect before. So it's really just kind of a half-and-half mix, almost, I would say, for me.

[Dongwon] I recently had a conversation with a client who was in the early stages of developing a project. I asked him about it, and he took a deep breath and paused and said, "Well, at the beginning of time…"

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] I was like, "Oh, this is going to be a long conversation." I think what Mary said is very valuable, that it varies a lot project to project, even for one writer. Sometimes, you will need to start at the beginning of time and build up your whole cosmology, and sometimes, you can just jump right in and figure out things on the fly. So I think it depends.

[Howard] With the early Schlock Mercenary books, I was making up the worldbuilding as I went on a weekly basis. With the one that I'm working on right now, book 18, the piece that I already know is that Galactic civilizations come and go in cycles. There are lacuna during which there is no Galactic civilization for millions of years. What I don't know is exactly how many of those there have been, and what were the characteristics of each of those, and what was the trigger event that ended each of those. Those pieces I am definitely discovery writing as I go. So when you ask the question, well, at the beginning of time… I'm working my way backwards to that.

[Laughter]

[Cooper] Hey, my name's Cooper. Much like how it can be bad if you introduce key characters too late in the narrative, such as the last one third, what would you say is the threshold where you should have introduced all major worldbuilding elements? Halfway or something else, and does it change based on genre or intended audience?

[Dongwon] I would say I think this is more flexible than most people think it is. The best piece of worldbuilding I've seen in recent media is the TV show Stephen Universe, which, at every major turning point in the show, has completely upended my understanding of the world and the cosmology of that series. The reason it never feels like a problem is they always tie it to character conflict. Every time they introduce a new worldbuilding element, one of the major characters is having some personal crisis or some personal conflict that ties directly to the thing that they're introducing. So when you meet more of the Gems or when you meet the Diamonds or whatever it is, it always feels like a character development, and therefore you can add more to the world as you go without disrupting that, if you keep it really grounded in how the characters are experiencing that and how they feel about the world around them.

[Dan] I try to make sure to introduce new character elements or new worldbuilding elements, I mean, slightly before they matter. So that when they show up, they don't feel like, "Oh, Dan needed to explain this thing, so he changed the way horses work," or whatever. But I'll tell you a couple chapters earlier how horses are different, and then it will matter a couple chapters later. So if I'm always… The worldbuilding's always a couple steps ahead of the story itself. Then you could introduce something all the way at the end of the book, and it would still feel natural, because we'll know about it before it matters.

[Mary Robinette] I do that, but sometimes… Often, the way I'm doing that is that I will use it at the point that it matters, and then go back and find spots…

[Dan] And fill it in. Exactly.

[Howard] Doctor Who is kind of a delightful mix mash of doing it in many different ways, and sometimes a way in which they do it is exactly right, and sometimes the way in which they did it… I find it very dissatisfying. There have been episodes where there is a new reveal about world technology, world whatever, that happens after the Doctor has announced it is important. Often, I find that unsatisfying, but sometimes it's just beautiful, because it wasn't the point. The point was something else. The point of this is… Doctor Who is good lesson material for learning a lot of these things…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And also, there are reasons in which to do it in lots of different ways, and they can all work.

[Dan] That's a good point to bring up, is that in those instances where it works really well, it's often because it… That element was introduced for a different reason. So the reader is not saying, "Oh, look at this very telegraphed this-is-going-to-be-important." It's already important, but for something else. So you're serving two purposes at once.

[Howard] Let's pause for a book of the week.

[Amal] The book of the week is…

[Howard] Oh, go ahead and introduce yourself.

[Amal] Hello, my name is [Amal Massad?]. I am giving you the book of the week. So the book of the week is Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver. It is a development of a short story that she first wrote in an anthology called The Starlit Wood. It's a fantastic reclamation of the Rumpelstiltskin story from a Jewish perspective, because Rumpelstiltskin is a famously anti-Semitic folktale. So what she has instead is this absolutely fantastic reversal, where she has a Jewish money lender who is a woman who gains a reputation for being able to transform silver into gold through the practice of her skill. This attracts the attention of these really scary fairies called the Staryk Knights. They decide that they want to test her. So it's this fantastic reversal where the supernatural element is taking the role of the king in the original story, and it's in this really wonderful world that she develops with a… Draw… Inspired by a lot of Eastern European folklore and stuff. The worldbuilding in it is tremendous. It's got this fantastic rumination on capital and labor and transaction and that sort of thing. But it's also full of female friendships. If you read Uprooted and thought I really liked that book, but I wish there had been more women in it being even more friends, you should definitely read Spinning Silver. Because it's so great.

[Howard] Thank you, Amal. That was Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. Now we have our next question.

[Cory] Hello. My name is Cory. I was wondering how do you ensure the world comes through as a character of its own?

[Pause]

[Mary Robinette] Wow, that's such a good question that we're all sitting here going, "How do you do that?"

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Well, I'm actually sitting here wondering if I do that. There's a lot of works that I can think of, books and movies, where yes, the setting is a character, to the point that New York is really a character in my story has become a cliché and a trope. I don't know if it needs to be every time though. Sometimes, the setting can just be important to the characters without being a character it self.

[Howard] At risk of telegraphing some of our episodes on marketing and career building, if your setting is an important marketing point… For instance, Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere. Being able to say, "This is a Cosmere book," is going to sell the book into an audience that would have been reluctant to pick it up if it hadn't been a Cosmere book. So having a name for it, so that it kind of becomes its own character, is useful. That's reverse engineering it. I've named it, therefore it must have a personality.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But I think that when you do have a book where you want the terr… Or a short story where you want the environment, the worldbuilding, to be a character… I mean, naming it helps, but giving it a personality is, I think, really hitting it on the nose there. It is, for me, the times that I do that, it is about the way the character, my POV character, is interacting with the environment. The environment will take on the role, somewhat, of an antagonist, sometimes. Or somewhat of a co-partner. A sidekick. Depending on what relationship my character has with the environment. So I will look at pla… Ways that the worldbuilding can be a barrier. I will look at places where the worldbuilding can be a help. More specifically, I look at my character's relationship with that, and how they feel and think about it. That's, for me, how I can make it, rather than just a place they inhabit, another… A character that's on the page, a personality. The other thing that I'll say is that I'm much more likely… When I do this myself or when I've… I notice it when I read other people's… To give space for the world without my character in it. So it's as if it gets its own scene time, own stage time.

[Dongwon] One way I think about it is, does your setting have agency? Right? That doesn't mean it's necessarily conscious, but is it influencing the plot decisions and the character decisions? Design spaces are incredibly important. We are all currently on a cruise ship, which is extremely deliberately designed space, designed to promote certain kinds of interaction, and certain kinds of movement. When you become aware of how you're being moved through the ship, and why you will walk across on certain decks and not on other decks, you can sort of start to see how the setting can shape the plot of your story. When… That's why cities often become this sort of character role in a story like that, especially in… Heist stories often have that as well. The Bellagio in Oceans 11 becomes a character, because the physical attributes of that building become very important in determining how the characters will move through it and accomplish their goals or won't accomplish their goals. So if your setting is influencing plot, if it's influencing character decisions, then it will itself start to feel like a character, in, I think, a really exciting way.

[Mary Robinette] Along those lines, I think one of the things is to pay attention to the language that you're using to describe it. So when we're talking about it, it having a personality, New York's a great ex… Is the example that everyone returns to, that it's gritty, it's stark. Those… The vocabulary that people use to describe those settings is very different than the vocabulary that one would use to describe Disneyland.

[Yep]

[Mary Robinette] So, paying attention to that…

[Dan] Not the way I do it.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] YES.

[Laughter]

[I have questions now. I have so many questions.]

[Howard] Well, there's this…

[Dan] We should all go to Disneyland together.

[Howard] There goes our Disney sponsorship.

[Dongwon] I would recommend you all start listening to the podcast 99% Invisible. I apologize for pushing another podcast. But if you want to really understand how design spaces influence character and plot decisions, than that is a great place to start.

[Andrew] Hello, my name is Andrew. When worldbuilding in science fiction or fantasy, how much change to terminology is too much? For example, a new calendar system, units of measurement, or currency?

[Howard] [Bwoosh! Oh, wow.]

[Mary Robinette] This is something I struggle with.

[Dan] Oh, yeah. Some of those…

[Howard] So very fraught.

[Dan] Some of those are easier to talk about than others. Units of measurement, for example… If I don't understand what a blerk is, then telling me that the city is five blerks away doesn't really tell me anything. Whereas I don't need to know how much money a blerk is worth if you say the bowl of soup is worth five blerks, then I kind of get a sense of it. So there's… different kinds of worldbuilding elements are much more easily grokkable than others.

[Howard] So the distance to the city is a soup?

[Dan] Yes. How far away is the city? Well, about the cost of a bowl of soup.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Or a hemi-deca blerk.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But actually… The thing is…

[Dan] Did you just well, actually us?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] No. I but actually'd you. Which seems more appropriate.

[Dan] Okay. There we go.

[Mary Robinette] The thing is that when we are talking about units of measurement… This is where I look at whether or not I need to shift it. I look at whether or not there is an underpinning that has shifted. So are units of measurement are things like… There's the… If we have an Imperial inch, that tells you that there's an empire. If you don't have an empire, then having something that weighs an Imperial inch is not a useful thing. So I will sometimes look at that, at whether or not there is something in the unit of measurement that doesn't fit with the world. The months, for instance. August, September, October. Those… That implies that there was a Rome. So I'm much more likely to shift something like that then I am worrying about whether or not I need to have something weigh… The five feet tall versus five blerks tall.

[Dan] I love how something can weigh an inch and also weigh five feet tall.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] I love this. And also the city is five blerks away.

[Howard] It's about soup height.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] About soup height.

[Dan] We're getting into so many like really… I almost wonder if we need to can of worms this, which we haven't even done in years. Because even the October, September thing, there's an entire school of thought in fantasy that the book was written in its own language, but it's been translated into English. So we just are calling it October, because then our readers can understand it. There's a lot of worldbuilding elements like that, that some portions of your audience are going to care about deeply, and others are just going to gloss right over and go, "Okay. That's fine."

[Dongwon] It's really a question about what are you trying to say about your culture. Because the choice of a foot versus a meter says something about the culture that you live in. Does it come from somebody who's trying to scientifically impose a unit of measurement, or is it, "Oh, my foot is roughly that large, right?" That tells you a lot about the history of that culture, what they prioritize and what's important to them. Names of the months are the same thing. Those come from specific places. So when you're making those choices of choosing to invent a new system, that better be a very relevant piece of worldbuilding and a really important concept for how this culture operates. You want to pick things that are very close to your central metaphor that drives the book that you are writing, and make sure that you're picking new invented terms that have histories and meaning for very good reasons. Be very… You can only change so many things before people start going, "I don't know what all these words are." So be very deliberate about which ones you invent new words for, is my advice.

[Mary Robinette] The thing that I'm just going to add on to that is that if you want to avoid using August… If you decide that that doesn't fit into your world, it's not that you have to invent a new month. You just need to not refer to the month. Like, oh, summer vacation is in August. It's like, no, summer vacation is in summer. That kind of thing is often an easier thing for your reader to grok than actually doing inventions.

[Howard] Our mastering engineer, Alex, has very carefully edited out all audible sounds of dismay as we had to cut off the questions because we're out of time. So my notes here say that your homework is toss something to Mary.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That's right. So, we've had a number of different questions come up. I'm going to leave you with the most difficult one. Which is, what do you do about time in your universe? So what I want you to do is you're just going to think about calendars. You're going to think about in your world, what are the things that change, what are the markers? Is this a culture that marks things by the moon? What if there are two moons? How does that influence what their calendar system looks like? I'm not asking you to actually put this into your story, but I just wanted to take time and think about how the culture and your worldbuilding deals and measures time.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/10/14-6-fantasy-and-science-fiction-races/

Key points: Worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction races. [Avoid the pitfall of othering your alien races, coding them using characteristics of Earth races and people. See the May 26 episode coming up on Writing the Other.] Realize that to an alien, e.g. Sgt. Schlock, everyone else is an alien. Your aliens need to function as people that can tell the story. You may take shortcuts or compromises. Think about "How does this alien see the world differently than other people, and is that important to the story?" They need to feel alien, but not incomprehensible and not just some aspect of humanity. Remember, to aliens, humanity is all one race. How do you make your aliens relatable to the readers? Your protagonist can try to figure it out and react to it. Explain what is important to the alien, and then show them trying to achieve that goal or overcome that obstacle. That process is easy to relate to. When is a horse a horse, and when is it a zyloplick? (a.k.a. Don't call a rabbit a smeerp.) Treat your races as full cultures, and treat your not-a-horse the same way. Think about the consequences of the differences. Let us taste grass, and experience a sense of wonder with the wind in our nostrils. Force yourself to not let your races be one note. Beware of coming up with races to fill a role in your story, and then not putting in the work to fill out their culture. "How is this going to change the way they interact?" You need to know the rules and the reasons behind them, to make them feel like real people, but you don't need to dump all that information on the readers.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Six.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fantasy and Science Fiction Races.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] And I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] We are going to be talking about worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction races. Before we dive into this episode, I wanted to bring up a potential pitfall in dealing with this. That is, very naturally, as you write, you are going to other your alien races. In so doing, by making them different from yourself, you are probably going to start to naturally code them by giving them characteristics that are very similar to Earth races and Earth people. You can see this famously in George Lucas's prequel trilogy about the Star Wars, where he takes the person who is the merchant and he codes this person by the way he speaks and the way he looks as Jewish. This is dangerous, and it is something you're going to naturally do. Because of the biases you have, because of the world we live in. We have an entire episode coming up in May, on May 26, where we talk about this. Dan and Tempest talk about Writing the Other and kind of a giving permission… Giving yourself permission to do this, even though you will probably get it wrong sometimes. We think it is important to be trying to reach and stretch.

[Dan] Exactly. It is more important… Obviously, you need to do it right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Put in the work, do your effort, we've got a huge slate of Writing the Other podcasts this season and we'll let those episodes cover this. Right now, we're going to move on and just talk about cool fantasy and science fiction races.

[Brandon] Yep. So, taking that huge can of worms and setting it to the side as a real issue that you should be thinking about and researching about, we're going to turn slightly the other direction and just talk about building fantasy and science fiction races. I kind of want to put you on the spot, Howard.

[Howard] That's just fine.

[Brandon] Because I love…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Your science fiction races. This is something you are really, really good at.

[Howard] I am…

[Brandon] How?

[Howard] Flattered and terrified. A large part of this grows out of the realization early on that calling… For anybody to call Sgt. Schlock, the amorphous… The carbosilicate amorph… Anybody calling him an alien is… Well, they are alien to him. There are other aliens. At one point, I made the joke where some… "Schlock, don't you have any alien superpowers?" He's like, "You guys are all aliens. Do you have any alien superpowers?" That's the easy version of that joke, and I never get to tell it again. What I had to wrap my head around is that I need all these aliens to function as people that can tell the story in a way that I don't have to use a lot of words, because I'm a cartoonist.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I have to take some shortcuts. I have to give them all eyebrows. The Uniocs, the guys with the great big one eye, have two eyebrows. Why? Because I need two eyebrows.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They don't need two eyebrows. I do. So there are compromises that I have made. But fundamentally what I am trying to do every time I introduce an alien… My first thought is not, "What cool superpowers does this alien have?" It is, "How does this alien see the world differently than other people, and is that important to the story?" As I've been working on prose, Dragons of Damaxuri, which is… It was my nano project in 2018, and I didn't finish it, because it needs more than 50,000 words…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I didn't get to 50,000. It needs more than 28,000 words. But that book, every time I mentioned an alien, I realized I don't have any pictures to work with. I have to give the reader enough so that when we mention that this is an alien, when they do something, they feel alien without feeling incomprehensible and without feeling like I've just mapped them onto some aspect of humanity. Fundamentally, with the alien races, from that standpoint, humanity is all one race.

[Brandon] Right.

[Howard] People of color, people of… Whatever. We're all one race.

[Mahtab] Howard, that's something very interesting that you mentioned, because you said you need the two eyebrows, especially because you have to show them. Now, that just makes me think about what if I just wanted to make an alien a blob of… An amoebic substance? But then, how would I make them relatable to the readers? Like, it's kind of a… Two sides of the coin. You want to make an alien not like a human being. He could have three or four arms, they could have five legs, but you have a head, you have a body, so that the readers can relate to it. But if you did not, and if you just had it made into a blob, then how do you show expression or… Well, it won't be illustrated, but… That's what I always wonder. What if I wanted to make something so weird that no one's ever seen it before, but then how do they relate to it?

[Howard] The trick that I'm using in Dragons of Damaxuri… And it's comedy. So I can freewheel a little bit. My point of view character is an artificial intelligence who has a physical avatar body, and who wants to fit in and wants to understand people and recognizes that everybody has a body language. So periodically an alien will do something with its ears, or it will take the two eyes on stalks and look at each other. Which I took from Larry Niven. But any alien with eyes on stalks is going to do that. Lou, the protagonist, she either knows what it means or she doesn't know what it means or she's guessing. She knows that it's important. So as I'm describing these things, these are becoming people who feel things and who do things that mean things. Our protagonist is trying to figure it out and trying to react to it.

[Dan] An author who did very alien aliens very well was Ursula K Le Guin. One of the things that she did in several of her stories and books was… She would present these incredibly bizarre things that we almost don't know how to relate to them, but she would explain what was important to them, and then we would watch them try to achieve that goal or overcome that obstacle. That process is incredibly relatable. So even though we don't necessarily understand who they are or where they're coming from, we know what it's like to try to get something that you want. We know what it's like to lose something that you love. So those aspects can still come out.

[Mahtab] Yeah. I think that's a good point.

[Brandon] Next week, we'll delve into this a little bit more…

[Howard] How weird is too weird.

[Brandon] Because our topic is how weird is too weird. But I did want to talk about this idea a little bit, about… Like, for instance, one thing in my writing group that a friend of mine always will point out is he hates it in books when they use something that's not a horse to be a horse.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Now, personally, I kind of like that, right? But where do you guys fall on this? When do you just call a horse a horse, when do you call a horse a zyloplick, which is what they ride on this planet, and in all ways it is a horse, except it's got scales.

[Dan] Well, see, for me, that comes down to a lot of the same issues of… Not just animals, but the races themselves. I remember, in our old writing class with Dave Wolverton, one of the things he said about kind of the standard Tolkien-esque fantasy is that what we said at the beginning, elves and dwarves and orcs and stuff, are really just kind of Earth cultures super-otherized. How much more interesting is it to just treat them as full cultures? So they're not just every dwarf is Gimli and has a Scottish accent and an axe, but maybe they like really spicy food. Maybe they have all these other massive facets to their culture that real cultures have that fantasy cultures sometimes don't because they're based on stereotypes. So with the horse, it's the same thing. If the horse doesn't do anything different than a normal horse, just call it a horse. But if it has scales, does that mean it's also a lizard? Does that mean that it's cold-blooded and you have to have a completely different kind of stable? Like, there's a lot of interesting roads you can go down if you want to look at that kind of stuff.

[Howard] The movie Avatar…

[Mahtab] That's just… Yes.

[Howard] Had…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The horses…

[Mahtab] Direhorse.

[Howard] Except it wasn't a horse because… Because…

[Dan] You plugged yourself into it.

[Howard] You plugged yourself into it. The place where, for me, that fell short was I wanted him to be experiencing some of what the horse is experiencing, because now it's not a horse. Now, he's got the wind in his nostrils, and I'm going to taste grass. This is so… Now, there's a reason for that connection to… Now it's got sense of wonder for me.

[Brandon] Book of the week this week is Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen. Grand Master of SFWA, Jane Yolen, one of my favorite writers of all time. I recently reread this book to do a piece on it for Tor.com. I love this book. It was one of the very first fantasy books I ever read as a kid, and a lot of the stuff in this book went completely over my head.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But it was my first boy and his dragon story. Which, there are a lot of classic kid and dragon stories, but this one is wonderful. It's about a young man who is a slave, who works for a wealthy man who owns dragons that fight in pits. They're basically cockfights with dragons. As a kid, this was just awesome. Reading it as an adult, I'm like, "Wow, this is… This is really uncomfortable."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] In ways she obviously wanted it to be. Because these are inten… Intelligent creatures that they are raising to fight, and the young man, his way to get freedom is he's going to steal an egg, which in this culture, you're kind of allowed to do. They won't really talk about it, but if someone is… Like, grabs an egg and raises it themselves, they all kind of think that's a cool thing, and you can get away with it if you can actually make it happen. Which very rarely would it ever happen. He has the dream of doing this, and he actually gets an egg, a young dragon, and starts raising it. But the story is about how he's going to have to raise it to go fight to the death for him to have a chance at freedom, and his growing bond with it as he realizes it really is intelligent. A beautiful story. Kind of a brutal story. Both whimsical and realistic at the same time. Which is really an interesting mix, but Jane is very good at that. So I recommend Dragon's Blood to you. If you've never read it, it's a wonderful book.

[Brandon] I want to bring us back to this concept that Dan was talking about. Because I find one of the things that is most difficult, but most satisfying, about worldbuilding races is forcing myself to not let my races be one note. This is really… It takes a lot of work. Because very naturally, and I think this is partially for shorthand reasons, it's also for bias reasons, but it's also… It's very natural for us to go and watch a movie and the movie has only an hour and a half to show us something, so it shows us this fantasy race, and it's like, "These are humans, but they have no emotions." Or, "These are humans, but they don't get metaphor." That works really well as a cool shorthand in a film. But as we are writing and we have more time to spend on these races and cultures, I think it's really important to make them more than one note. How do you do this? It is really, I think, very difficult.

[Mahtab] I think Ursula Guin did that in The Left Hand of Darkness when she did the andro… Yuck, I can't even figure that word, but androgynous races. I think that was a really cool way to deal with… Not making them male or female or… Just exploring that entirely different way of doing it and the relationship between Estravan and Genly Ai, who came in… I thought that was very cool. So, just to take away the gender and do it in that way, I thought that was pretty well done.

[Brandon] Yeah. Left Hand of Darkness is a masterwork in how to do this right.

[Dan] I suspect that some of the problems that we have in kind of making our fantasy and science fiction races feel rounded, is because we come up with them to fill a role in our story first. Then we realize it's too much work to also give them all of this cultural baggage that is very different and very nonhuman. So we're just like, "Well, they're… It's just a Wookie. He's just like the quiet mechanic who never talks and is very hairy." So if you force yourself to do it, to actually go in and say, "Well, how is this going to change the way they interact?" This is something Howard has recently done with the… I can't remember the names of any of the aliens. But there's the ones with four arms.

[Howard] The Fobottr.

[Dan] Yes. You kind of recently… I don't know if ret-conned is the right word, but you defined more solidly how they interact and the way that they require groups… I just thought that was really interesting, because all of a sudden, they were more interesting and they were distinctly different from the humans.

[Howard] Part of what I did…

[Dan] In a measurable way.

[Howard] Part of what I did when I designed them and when I designed their culture, I gave them a history that involved a diaspora… Diaspora? I don't know how to say that word. I know how to read that word. They were scattered. They have traveling merchant clans, warrior clans, whatever. Their culture is not monoculture. Sometimes when they connect with people of their own kind who have done a better job of preserving their original culture, there is conflict. Your naming conventions are all wrong. Why… None of that made it into the story, but all of that made it into my notes. What it let me do, and it's a silly thing… What it let me do was have characters whose names didn't fit the pattern of everybody else. I knew that there was a rule behind it. I knew it fit.

[Dan] Well, I think maybe the big lesson for the rea… For our listeners, then, is reading the comic, it's not a treatise on Fobottr… How do you say it? Culture.

[Howard] Fobottr.

[Dan] But I could tell very clearly the strip at which oh, Howard's changed the way this… He's defined this culture all of a sudden. They feel like real people. Even though you're not going out of your way to dump all the information on us.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and wrap it up here. Mahtab, you were going to give us some homework?

[Mahtab] Yes. Take one major historical incident that occurred on Earth and set it in space, with an alien race or races.

[Dan] Cool.

[Brandon] Awesome. I'm very curious to hear what you guys… Or read what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.33: Reading Outside the Box

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/08/19/13-33-reading-outside-the-box/

Key points: To understand what you are reading about another culture, start by understanding the culture. Ground yourself with a good spread of writing by people from inside the culture. Try reading nonfiction. Culture is not a monolith, it varies from place to place, even within a single family unit. Think about how many things your neighbor gets wrong. Read things produced for the culture by people from that culture. Read advertisements! Be aware of subtext and context. Be cautious about what you think you already know about a culture. Watch for evolution and time.

( Plenty of discussion to follow... )

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Reading Outside the Box.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Aliette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Aliette] I'm Aliette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] And we are currently trapped in a floating box in the Baltic Sea, but it is okay because we are here with wonderful special guest Kristie Claxton.

[Kristie] Hello.

[Dan] Awesome. Kristie, tell us very briefly about yourself.

[Kristie] I am a POC writer. I… In my typical day job, I am a mom to about nine people…

[Chuckles]

[Kristie] During the day, then I go home and I'm a boss to four people.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Very well put. Awesome. You're also a writer as well.

[Kristie] I do write. I typically… I typically submit to a lot of contests and pray that someone will notice how great I am. It doesn't typically happen, but sometimes I do. Right now, I'm writing a thriller about a con woman who comes to meet her… The fiancé of her deceased daughter, and she is picking up the con that her daughter had started.

[Dan] That sounds awesome, and I'm excited to read it. Cool. Well, we are happy to have you here, Kristie.

[Dan] We want to talk today about a question… We're currently on the Writing Excuses cruise… The retreat… And in one of the classes that Aliette taught yesterday, a really good question came up and we said, "We are totally going to answer that in an episode, because everyone needs to hear this." The question was, basically, if I remember correctly, "How can I know when I'm reading about a different culture, that what I'm reading is accurate and respectful and well done?" So, Aliette, what would you like to… Where would you like to start us on that answer?

[Aliette] Well, I think the… If you really want to have an idea of whether something is respectful or not to a given culture, then you need to actually understand what the culture is. To get a good grounding on what that culture is, then you need to read as much as possible that comes from people inside the culture, so that you have a good reference for okay, this is what's happening. You also want to get a good spread, because cultures are going to be… Like, no culture is a monolith. You're going to get very different perspectives. Like, for instance, in Vietnam, if you go… It's still happening to some extent, North Vietnam, south-central Vietnam, and South Vietnam are going to be very different entities, and of course, you know, every province have their own. So you have to get a sense of, like, every author is going to have their different biases. It's really hard. I mean, especially if you're coming from outside, it feels very much like you're staring at a wall of everything that feels similar, but as you read more and more, you become more aware of how things are playing out, and how someone's… Someone may have prejudices against their neighbor, and the neighbors might give it back to them. Then, when you have… I think when you have that sort of grounding, then you can start getting a sense of whether the story that you're… The one that you're actually reading actually makes sense from that culture's perspective.

[Howard] The thing that I've found, and I think I first discovered it when I was reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is a Syrian Christian. In his descriptions of… The book is about how we tell ourselves stories in order to make the world make sense, but our stories are wrong. Our stories create a narrative, and then reality will deny that narrative with the introduction of an element that he would call the black swan. But in reading it, he told… He shared anecdotes from his life. It's a nonfiction book. I learned things about the Syrian Christian community, which was a thing that I didn't even know existed until I picked up that book. In picking up that book, I recognized that the void in my own life was, one, I'm not reading enough nonfiction, and, two, I'm not reading enough anything written by people who aren't me. So the filter that I see on fiction, whether or not the people are from my culture, is that fiction is when we make stuff up, and if I'm from outside the culture, I can't tell if they're making up things or if they're reporting things correctly. So I start… Boy, I hate to lay this at everybody else's feet, because I haven't done it well yet, but if you read nonfiction from people who aren't you, you are more likely to get the straight story that will then help you judge the fiction that you read.

[Aliette] Why do… I don't know if we really get the straight story, because… I mean, we all tell stories, that's how… I mean, one of the things that I was talking about in the course is that when you have family histories and family stories, for instance, no two people are going to give you the same explanation of what went down on Aunt Bea's wedding, right?

[Laughter]

[Aliette] So, whenever you tell a story that's a bit the same, you're telling it from your perspective. But I agree that with nonfiction, you don't have the filter of I have to make up this to be entertaining, to follow certain conventions, so memoirs are fine. Like, one of the memoirs that I always recommend very heavily is Andrew Pham's Under the Eaves of Heaven, which is about his father's life in Vietnam from around the 1950s to when they settled in America, after the Vietnam War. It's a really interesting piece about, like, that section of Vietnamese history seen through the eyes of his father, and seen through the eyes of the sun as well, so you really get that sense. I think it's a really interesting thing for getting the sense of the life of both the father and the son.

[Mary] I think that's a really good point that you make about the fact that… We always say culture is not a monolith, but it's not just, "Oh, people who are coming from here have a slightly different…" Like, I'm from the American South, and my family is East Tennessee. I grew up in North Carolina. There are cultural differences between the two places. But it's not just that, it's even within a single family unit, you will have these differences. Kristie, you and I were talking yesterday a little bit, and you had some… Right after Aliette's class, and you had some things to say.

[Kristie] Well, I think it's very important not to just take one point of view or read just one thing. I'm from the American South. My family is from Tennessee. Southern Tennessee.

[Mary] Whereabouts?

[Kristie] Right before the border of Georgia.

[Mary] I'm from Chattanooga.

[Kristie] I do not… Okay. Yes.

[Chuckles]

[Mary] We are…

[Kristie] Kissing cousins. I didn't grow up in Tennessee. My father was in the military. I've lived all over the place. I do not have the same experiences as someone from the… Someone who's lived in the South for any long period of time. Because I've lived in the North, we've lived in Germany, we've lived out West, I've lived… I've spent the majority of my time in Rhode Island. However, I've lived a completely different life than someone who has spent all of their time in Tennessee. So you can't just take one point of view or one story or one… You can't just interview one person and think, "Oh, I just know everything there is to know." That's… No.

[Chuckles]

[Kristie] Next to impossible.

[Mary] I mean, just think about how many things your neighbor gets wrong.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah. Let's pause right now for our book of the week, which Kristie is going to tell us.

[Kristie] I recently read Warlock Holmes: A Study in Brimstone. It is a retelling…

[Laughter]

[That is so fabulous]

[Dan] Which is too perfect to not have already existed. That's amazing that… Okay. So tell us about it.

[Kristie] It is a retelling of Sherlock Holmes and he has taken the majority of Sherlock Holmes' stories and just made them supernatural. Where Watson is the logical deductive reasoner, and Warlock Holmes is the one who is using magic to solve the mysteries.

[That's great.]

[Kristie] There is also a sequel as well.

[Dan] That's fantastic.

[Kristie] The Hell Hounds of Baskerville.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Who… Who's it by?

[Kristie] You… No.

[Mary] That is something that we will Google and include in the liner notes.

[Dan] Excellent.

[Mary] We're on a ship…

[Howard] If you can remember Warlock Holmes, you've got it. If you can't remember Warlock Holmes…

[Aliette] Maybe it's not the book for you, right?

[Laughter]

[Mary] But since we are talking about books, one thing that I want to say is that when you're looking for… Since this prompt is for… This began from the what should I be reading. One of the things that I would say… Encourage people to do is read not just fiction and not just nonfiction, but making sure that you're reading things that are produced for that culture by people from that culture. So magazines are actually really useful, and not just I'm going to read an article here or there, but actually read the entire magazine, cover to cover, including the advertisements. Because what people are trying to sell to other people within their community is really telling. Like, what do we sell on this podcast? We sell books that are science fiction and fantasy, predominantly, because that is who our community is. We also try to sell you that we know what we're talking about.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Jonathan Coulton's song SkyMall, where he deconstructs the SkyMall magazine on airplanes and sings from the point of view of a SkyMall shopper… I wept when I listened to it, because he turned that high-end consumer life into something just so empty, and yet so full of wonder. Yeah, you read SkyMall and you think, "Who are these people?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] "These people are not me. Who are these people?" SkyMall's not a great example, because it's trying to advertise to a cross-section of people with more money than sense, but any magazine will fulfill this in different ways because of... With the advertisers, because of that desire to feel a need they have.

[Aliette] I do want to caution this… That's why I was talking about grounding, which is a lot of these things are going to have subtext that you're just not going to see. The example I always take for this is there's a series of short stories that are set during the Ming dynasty, and for the life of me, I can't… It's Stories to Warn the World [Stories to Caution the World?], and then i can't actually remember the name of the author. But I remember being very struck because at one point, a woman crosses the street, very slowly, very daintily, and there's a lot of description… It's like two sentences of description or something. The subtext is she would have had bound feet, and that's why she was crossing the street so slowly. If you don't know this, then you'll just miss it. It's the same with like, a lot of… For instance, the Vietnamese magazines are going to have… I saw one that was for a shampoo brand, because there is a tem… [Garbled] it was based on a Vietnamese fairytale, where one of the characters actually gets the other out of the house under the pretext of washing her hair. If you don't know that this is a reference to this particular fairytale, then you're like, "Oh, this is nice, but…" You kind of… You don't have the vocabulary. It's like when you're learning a foreign language, and all those proverbs are like, "I'm sorry, what does that mean exactly?"

[Dan] That's a really good point, that sometimes without context, you can miss a lot of those clues. One of the cultures that I love to read and to read about is South American literature. One of my all-time favorite authors is Isabel Allende. If you have the chance, for example, Allende writes for both a Chilean audience and for an English-speaking audience in different books. It's fascinating to read both of them and compare what is she emphasizing when she's writing House of the Spirits versus some of her stuff that's written in Spanish. So if you have the chance to compare two works like that, and see what gets emphasized or what gets left out, that can tell you a lot about those contextual clues.

[Kristie] I just wanted to mention using vernacular because I think a lot of… I… Like I said, I spent a majority of my time in Rhode Island. There are a lot of things that are specific to New England that I know about, that someone may not pick up if they're from, say, the South or the Northwest or even from another country. I think that's one of the biggest things around here that, with Writing Excuses, is that we're trying to be everything to all people. Sometimes you can get that. And sometimes you can't. You have to be very careful about how you put it when you're doing it.

[Howard] I've found that the best I can hope for personally is to be honest about myself to all people, and to be honest about what I don't know when I'm trying to tell stories that involve other people. Because the older I get, the stupider I get.

[Choked laughter]

[Howard] The less I know that I know. Does that make sense?

[Mary] I want to say, on that note, that one of the things that you have to be most cautious of, the thing that I would encourage you to do is that… The things that you think you know about another culture are the things that are all… Those are the things where you are at the biggest risk of getting it wrong. Completely and totally wrong. I was writing a novel that was set in theater in 1907, and I'm like… I was researching the clothes, the hats, streetcar timetables. Didn't do any research on the theater, because I've spent 25 years in the theater. Dress rehearsal. Not a thing. Tech rehearsal. Not a thing. There were all of these historical mistakes that I was just making right and left. So, also, when you are… Along with that, remember that cultures evolve over time. So it's not enough to just be like, "This is the way it is now." How was it 10 years ago, 15, 50 years ago? Because that evolution is also going to tell you a lot about conflict points between characters. So when you're trying to write another culture, it's not fast research.

[Kristie] No. It definitely is not fast research, and you have to pay attention. Because my mother will say something that does not translate to what I think at all.

[Chuckles]

[Kristie] When my mother goes into a store, they're following her because she's black. When I go into a store, they're following me because they want to sell me something.

[Laughter]

[Kristie] So you've got to be… You've got to take all stories as much as possible. Unless you're truly trying to say something just from one person's point of view, from the South. You can tell that story.

[Howard] A couple of things that I think are worth watching. One of them hasn't come out… One of them hasn't come out yet, and that's Marvel's new Black Panther movie. Which has a black director and a largely black cast. They are… They appear to be trying to do justice to a lot of these cultural things. The original Black Panther comic book did not do any of that. So it'll be fascinating to see what they come up with. The other was the Netflix Luke Cage, which I, as a white dude, watched and I could tell I am missing inner-city cultural note…

[Laughter]

[Howard] After inner-city cultural note. I know there is context I don't have, but I was… There were tears in my eyes as I realized there is a huge library of knowledge here I don't have, but other people are getting it and they didn't used to get this from TV. They didn't used to get this. I've watched it a couple of times now. I still don't understand it. So the trend of native voices producing things, there's no substitute for that. There's no substitute for that. Consuming that is the only way I'm going to approach any sort of knowledge.

[Dan] All right. This has been a really good discussion. Mary, you have our writing exercise, our thing for the end of the episode.

[Mary] Right. I'm going to give you homework that I actually did. This is a year-long project. Because, as we've said, this is not simple. This thing of learning to write outside of your box. What I want you to do is I first want you to identify your box. This is tricky. There are two ways you can do it. One is you can categorize yourself by census records. So, like, I'm a white woman, American white woman. The other thing you can do is walk over to your bookshelf and look at your bookshelf and categorize the patterns that you normally read in, specifically, since we're talking about life experience and lenses, specifically the kinds of authors. Their background. So I did this and discovered that despite all of my feminist rhetoric, I was tending to read mostly men. And tending to read mostly white American men. So I spent a year in which I said, "Okay. I'm not going to read white American men." Specifically, I'm not going to read white Americans. I'm not going to read American fiction for a year. That was the box. Because I had already experimented with not reading… Not reading white people. Some of my best friends are white people, but…

[Laughter]

[Mary] I still identified that pattern and spent a year reading fiction from people who were from Europe, from Asia, from Africa, from Australia, and people who were not white. The things that I discovered about my own defaults have made me a significantly better writer. Because you don't realize the defaults that you have until you start reading fiction by people who do not come with the same set of defaults. So it's a long project. You're still allowed to buy books by other people, but I just want you to put off reading them for a year. Part of the reason is the first month that you're doing this is about deprogramming your brain, and learning to read outside of that box.

[Howard] The first book will be a real hurdle and be really tricky. But this doesn't start to pay off until book three.

[Mary] Three, six… Three or four was when I started to realize what was happening to my brain. It's very useful. No matter which box you find yourself in.

[Dan] Awesome. This has been Neurological Hacking Excuses.

[Laughter]

[Dan] You are out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 13.15: What Writers Get Wrong, with Mike Stop Continues

From https://www.writingexcuses.com/2018/04/15/13-15-what-writers-get-wrong-with-mike-stop-continues/

Key points: Gay people just want to read about people who happen to be gay, not about gay topics. Gay people often lean into stereotypes. Gay people create their own culture. There is a whole spectrum of ways that you enact being gay. Even passers support flamboyant gay people. The media does seem to have more flamboyant gay characters than subdued gay characters. Pay attention to the order of reveals. Happily married, loves sushi, and gay OR gay, happily married, loves sushi? Look at characters as a mystery, reveal clues, and then the big reveal. Be aware of you and your readers' defaults. Do your research, get gay readers from within the gay community, and talk to people on the Internet to write better gay characters. "What's his secret?" Mostly, just make characters who happen to be gay.

( Behind the curtains... )

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, What Do Writers Get Wrong, with Mike Stop Continues.

[Mary] 15 minutes long.

[Aliette] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary] I'm Mary.

[Aliette] I'm Aliette.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Joining us today, we have special guest, Mike Stop Continues. Mike, that is an awesome name. Please tell us about yourself.

[Mike] Thanks. So, I'm the author of the King Cage superhero series, which takes place almost entirely beneath New York City, and Underworld, a young adult coming-of-age story that takes place in rural Pennsylvania.

[Dan] Well, awesome. Okay. So, this is part of our series of what do writers get wrong. Mary, tell us about what that series is about.

[Mary] So, with this series, what we're doing is, we're talking to different people who… About their life experience and using that… Using them, yes, we are using them…

[Chuckles]

[Mary] To help you as writers better represent people in your books. So, Mike, for instance, has multiple facets that we could talk about. What are some of those facets?

[Mike] So, in addition to being an author, I love sushi, I've got no sense of smell, and I'm a gay man who's happily married.

[Mary] What are we going to be focusing on today?

[Mike] Me being a gay man.

[Mary] So, what writers get wrong about being a gay man. Awesome.

[Dan] I am excited to talk about this. So the first question is given away in the title. What is something that you see often, portrayed in television and movies and in books, about being a gay man that writers get wrong?

[Mike] The biggest thing is that most gay people, most gay men, just want to read about people who happen to be gay, not about AIDS or coming out or about homophobia or about any of that stuff. They just want to see characters who happen to be gay.

[Mary] I think that is the case with a lot of the topics that we're going to covering, which is one of the things that I just want you readers to remember that, that people can exist in your story without having a reason to be the way that they are.

[Mike? Exactly.]

[Mary] Unless you are justifying why they are.

[Dan] I want to push this question even a little further. I think that's a great answer, but I want something juicier than that. What do you absolutely hate when you see gay men, gay people, portrayed in media, and you're like, "That again! Grrr."

[Mary] Like, the clichés that are actively offensive.

[Mike] Well, that's the funny thing about… There are obviously some characters that are taken way too far. But, in general, I think that the thing that's different about gay characters is that a lot… You meet a lot of people who lean into stereotypes in the gay community. Like, the fun part about that is that since all the gay people come from all different parts of the planet, we have to create our own culture. So, to do that, we sort of play with it more than other people do. So you'll end up with people who lean into stereotypes, who enjoy them. So that's something that I think that sometimes… Sometimes it's just wrongly done, but most of the time, we relate with those characters because we know those people. It's… There's a whole spectrum of kinds of… I guess the way that… the way that you enact being gay, right? So…

[Mary] Can you talk a little bit more about what it means to lean into a stereotype? Because I think that a lot of people aren't familiar with that, necessarily, as a term.

[Mike] Okay. So, for instance, you've all seen the… Like, the flamboyant gay character. Right? Someone who's… You know, like you could say that they're flaming or you could say lots of things that are negative about them. But, in general, they're… They're actively… They're proud, and they're loud, about being gay. Right? Now that's something that… That… That we learned to do because most of our lives are spent being… Feeling ashamed, right? And being closeted. Not being willing to show anyone that we were gay. So once you come out of the closet, you sort of want to have the exact opposite experience. So really, they're… And we all do it to different levels, like… You know, in small ways… I guess those of us who end up being classified as passers, right? In small ways, we all find ways to let the people around us know that we're gay. But some people… Some people like to do it more. No matter what gay person you encounter, no matter what their… No matter what their tells are, we all support that. So, you know what I mean? Like, that I think is the big thing that gets mistaken a lot. So, like when someone like me goes out into the world and somebody discovers I'm gay, they typically will say something like, "Oh, I never could have… I never would have told. I never…" "Oh, excuse me. I never would have known." Then they'll… Occasionally, say something that's less nice about people that they did know were gay from how they behaved. That's… I mean, sometimes… Like if… No gay person will ever be okay with you saying that. You know what I mean? So, like… We like that they do that, because… Because they're as proud as we are, it's just that some… We just all express it in different ways.

[Mary] You use the word that I wasn't sure that I recognized. You said labeled as…

[Mike] Oh, passers.

[Mary] Passers!

[Mike] That's obviously…

[Mary] I just didn't hear it clearly. But again, we should probably define that for our listeners.

[Mike] Right. So that's… That's a term borrowed from African-Americans, right? African-Americans who could pass as being white. It's the same thing in the gay community. We have gay people who can pass as being straight. So… There is where that word comes from.

[Aliette] Well, I mean, one of the things I see a lot with like Asians for instance is like you tend to always have the same representation over and over again. I wonder how much of that is happening with like gay people on screen. Do they always seem like they're the same kind of person? Because you mentioned, there's a whole spectrum, and different people have lots of different experiences. I wonder, when people say, "So-and-so was gay," and "I guess that they were gay," and they say these rudely offensive things, basically, I wonder, like you get that from media, right? So how much of that do you think [inaudible change]…

[Mike] Right. So, in media, we definitely do see flamboyant gay men more than… More than, I guess, let's say passing gay men, right?

[Aliette] Subdued? Maybe subdued or quieter?

[Mike] Subdued. Yeah. And that's okay. But I can say from personal experience that I was like in my late 20s when I first saw Capt. Jack on Doctor Who, and I cried, because that was… I wish I had that character in my life when I was younger. So, like, it's important that there are lots of different kinds of gay characters out there, and that's why the best and most important way to do that is just make a character who happens to be gay.

[Howard] Yeah. In my consumption of media, some of my favorite… Some of my favorite characters are the gay characters who didn't have a tell until something came up where it was important, and I'm allowed to realize that… Just like you, I am married and I love sushi. We are very, very similar…

[Laughter]

[Howard] On a couple of key counts. And I'm allowed to identify with characters who, in one aspect, yes, they're unlike me. But I can still identify with them. Part of what… I think part of what we struggle against is that culturally, a great many of us will be pushed away by the flamboyance, by the initial representation, because for fear or for any number of other reasons, we don't want to identify. My feeling is, no, I want to identify because that's how everybody gets to be a human in my head.

[Aliette] But, I mean, isn't there a risk if you do, like, that reveal really late, that the reader's going to feel like it's a little bait-and-switch? Of like, oh, I didn't think they were gay, and then… Because I've had people say, "I didn't realize that the character was gay," or queer or [Persian?] until fairly late in the book, and then, you're pushing back against their own preconceptions. They build this sort of mental image, and you're like basically coming in and crashing their party and saying, "No no no no no, I'm the author and I'm right." So I feel like… Do you think it would work if you had a… Like a normal… Like a person who was… Sorry. Who was married, loving sushi, and was out… Who you said was gay from the start?

[Mary] So, it looks like Mike had something to say.

[Aliette] Sorry.

[Mike] So, I mean, recently we have lots of gay characters in media… Or, not enough, but more than we've had before.

[Laughter]

[Mike] But… But… But if you look at, for instance, like a… Like gay film criticism, we look at movies that don't overtly have gay characters in it, and we spend a lot of our time, and historically have spent a lot of our time, dissecting characters that seemed to suggest that they were gay. So we get used to… We get used to looking at gay characters… Okay, looking at characters as a mystery. So I've heard from many author that exact criticism, Aliette. But I think the way that you can do it, maybe better… Not you. I think the way that writers can do it…

[Aliette] Aaaa… I'm really interested.

[Mike] Is to frame it like a mystery. Have a few clues that once you get to the point where you… Where it's… Where the character becomes obvious, then you can say, "Oh, I should have known," based on these few little things that came up beforehand.

[Mary] I just want to flag…

[Dan] We… We… We… Go ahead.

[Mary] Need to stop for…

[Dan] We need to stop for a book of the week. Like three minutes ago. But. You finish your flags.

[Mary] So, the thing that I wanted to… I just want to flag that one of the things that we're talking around here is that we have a default, and the default is straight. This is the same way in fiction that the default in America in 2017 and for quite a while after that and probably quite a while in the future, the default is white. Like, when you guys are listening to this podcast, you guys cannot see us. But we were talking the other day, and the core podcasters, Dan, Howard, Brandon, that other guy, and me…

[Chuckles]

[Mary] We're… This podcast is 100% white. This podcast is also 100% straight. We're only 75% women. Er... We're only 75% men. Excuse me, 25% women.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I was excited for a minute.

[Mary] But the thing is… The thing is that the fact that this podcast is all white and all straight is not surprising to you. Because you have a default set in your head. So one of the things to be aware of when you're doing this is that… If you feel like I need to mark my character as gay, you should also perhaps be considering that one of the ways you can address that default is by also marking your straight characters. And marking your characters who are ace or bi or… Or… Pansexual as Capt. Jack is. So be aware of your own tendency to default to an unmarked state, and this is a good time to examine that.

[Mary] Now we have a book of the week.

[Dan] We do. Thank you for handing it to me. I'm going to hand it to Mike. Mike, what's our book of the week?

[Mike] So, the book of the week is my first novel, Underworld. It's about two brothers growing up in rural Pennsylvania who are chasing… Who are chasing the same girl. One because he loves her, and the other because he doesn't want to be gay. So, I think it's clear what the… Why that's the… Why I said… Why I picked that as the book of the week.

[Dan] That sounds awesome. Tell us the title again.

[Mike] Underworld.

[Dan] Underworld. Awesome. I actually first heard that as two boys growing up in rural Transylvania, but I'm…

[Laughter]

[Dan] [garbled switching] it to Pennsylvania.

[Aliette] I also heard Transylvania, but…

[Laughter garbled]

[Aliette] As a default.

[Dan] Two young vampires growing up in rural T… Okay. Underworld.

[Mary] No. Two young men who people assume are vampires…

[Mike] Well, now they do.

[Dan] Now we're getting…

[Dan] We don't have much time left, and I would really love to focus, if we can, on some constructive advice. I'm going to start with the question, what have you seen… Can you give us a quick example of something you've seen in media that made you think, "Wow. That writer really did his or her research. They know what they're talking about."

[Mike] Actually, yes. This book has a tremendous trigger warning. It's by Hanya Yanagihara. She wrote… She. It's a woman. This is what is so special about this book. Wrote this book called A Little Life. It's one of the best gay love stories I have ever read. It's beautiful. On every level, this book is beautiful. The thing that showed that she understood the subject matter was that her characters' discovery of their love for one another is so organic and so real that there was… That even though… That there was no question in my mind that this woman had spoken to many gay men about how the… What their experience of romance and what their experience of sex was. It was beautiful. Brilliant.

[Dan] Cool. So what are some things then that writers can do… And I'm going to make this question difficult, because you're not allowed to say do your research and you're not allowed to say have gay readers from within the gay community. What can writers do, other than those things, to help write better gay characters?

[Mike] Okay. So. Oh, gosh, I don't know if I'm going to be breaking your rules here, but…

[Chuckles]

[Mike] One thing that I do when I need to learn about people who are not myself is I go on the Internet and I find those people. So, for instance, if you go on Reddit or you make an account on OkCupid or like anywhere that people meet other people, it's really easy to meet other people and to start talking to them about whatever it is about them that you're interested in. That doesn't mean... like I just mentioned OKCupid because it's great for talking to people about... especially intimate issues. They're more willing to talk, I think, there. But don't catfish people. Don't pretend to be a gay man to talk to gay men. You know what I mean? Like, be yourself, and just say, "Hey, listen. I see your profile. You're very much like a character that I'm interested in writing. Can I ask you some questions about your experience?"

[Mary] That's a really great idea that I'm totally stealing.

[Laughter]

[Howard] The takeaway, I think, Mike, from your answer to Dan's questions with its completely unfair precondition...

[Laughter]

[Howard] Is this is a difficult thing for which there are no shortcuts. There is no easy button. You can't just make sure you include this word or this sentence. It doesn't work that way. You have to do some homework, you have to meet some people, you have to talk, you have to learn how people... How people be.

[Mary] So one of the things that we often talk about is the whole write what you know, which I think is better expressed as extrapolate from what you know. When you were talking about how you would search for representations of yourself in media, what are the tells? What are the things that make you feel like you are present in that?

[Mike] In non-gay characters?

[Mary] In characters that are not demarcated.

[Mike] Okay. Right.

[Mary] Yes.

[Mike] So, actually anyone who seems… For me, as a gay man, anyone who seems uncomfortable with women or any man who seems uncomfortable with women. Any male character who has… Who seems to be portrayed as having a secret. You think, "What's his secret?" Especially… I can think of two Hitchcock movies that are brilliant with this. I think they both unquestionably have gay subtext. One is Strangers on a Train and the other is Rope. The main character in both of those movies is a gay man. The movies, there's no suggestion that… Or there's no overt suggestion that the movies are about being gay. But both of them definitely are. So I highly recommend those as a way to see that thing. Because I'm having a little bit of a hard time articulating it.

[Mary] It is difficult, I think… And this is also one of the things for you, readers and listeners, is that… Remember that your experience is normal. So when you're going to someone from within a community, you're asking them to describe their own normal, which is like asking a fish to describe water. It's often very difficult to pinpoint the parts of your life that other people don't experience. Which is why I thought, well, if we can talk about the things that you see, that these are potentially things that other people can extrapolate from. Like I extrapolate from what it's like to have a secret, even if it isn't that secret.

[Mike] Actually, one more [thought?] that I had similar to that is that… Like I said earlier, since gay people come from every walk of life and they come together, they are… There is very different subcultures within the gay community. So if you're interested in writing gay characters, the one easy way to do it is just to make a character who happens to be gay. But if you're interested in going deeper into the community, learn the different subcultures that exist there, because just like in the world that you live in, there are lots of different smaller groups that you might find interesting enough to write about.

[Dan] That is super interesting. I wish we had time to go into some of those subcultures, but we're unfortunately out of time. Thank you very much for being here.

[Mike] Thank you.

[Dan] This was a really interesting discussion. So, do you have some writing homework you can give us?

[Mike] Yes. So take your work in progress. Take any… Start with a scene. Take any character in that scene, and make that character… Change their sexual identity. So it could be to gay, to lesbian, bisexual, asexual, pansexual. Whatever it is. Rewrite the scene. But see just how little you have to change to make that character a different… Have a different sexual identity. You'll be surprised. It might be zero words. You might have to change literally nothing.

[Dan] Awesome. I think that sounds fantastic. Well, thank you again. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/07/30/12-31-what-makes-a-good-monster-with-courtney-alameda/

Key Points: The best monsters subvert the status quo and remind us that we are not the top of the food chain. Frightening means posing a threat to the protagonist or that culture. Some monsters are people, too. Subverting expectations. Monsters also reflect or represent other aspects of the stories. But beware of parallelism that turns into too on-the-nose, or pushing the subversion beyond fear into comedy. Building a monster? Start with folklore from all over. Look at the role of the monster in the story, themes, and symbolism. Think about fears, and what frightens you, and then spin that into a monster. Make the protagonist super-competent, but let the monster be powerful in ways that leave the protagonist incapable of responding. Look for the patterns that cross cultures, the fears that are universal (Yungian!). Then make them your monster. And shiver a bit.

( Did you hear something clank? )

[Howard] Well, on that note, we should probably wrap this up. Because we don't want to leave our listeners just terrified all night. Susan, can you give us a writing prompt?
[Susan] Yeah. It's funny, because Courtney actually mentioned the writing prompt that I was thinking about. Which is that Neil Gaiman's American Gods kind of envisioned like an American monster… I'm sorry, American Gods, like what using all of the different mythologies and kind of coming to America and kind of creating a uniquely American God. So I would like you to write about a uniquely American monster. Whether or not he has orange hair and [inaudible]
[laughter]
[Susan] I'll leave up to you.
[Courtney] Really great. I mean, really great.
[Howard] I love it.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Fair listener, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 11.46: Colonialism with Steven Barnes, Tempest Bradford, Dongwon Song, and Shveta Thakrar

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/11/13/11-46-colonialism-with-steven-barnes-tempest-bradford-dongwon-song-and-shveta-thakrar/

Key Points: Colonialism? Contextualizing conversations about race and culture in history. Manifest destiny. What gets appropriated, how it's told, and who gets to tell. Justifying taking things from other people. Colonialism is two-directional, first the impact on those who were colonized, but then reflection when those people internalize it. De-colonize, don't diversify. Colonizing erase culture, but it also creates cultures. Navigating that intersection of cultures is our challenge. Colonialist narratives make colonizers feel better about themselves, and those who are colonized or marginalized feel worse about themselves. The meaning of a communication is the response you get, and repeating an offensive communication is not respect. Repeating a trope again and again, the impact accumulates, and leaves a mark, a wound over time. Doing this is a craft problem -- why are you repeating what 10,000 people have done? Do something new, exciting, interesting, and specific instead. There are resources out there. Sit down, talk to someone, and do your research.

( Lots and lots of good stuff! )

[Mary] That is great advice to end on. So we are going to end by giving our listeners some homework, or a writing prompt. Which I…
[Tempest] That's me.
[Mary] You got that?
[Tempest] I got the writing prompt. All right. So. What I want you to do is I want you to take a character that you know very well. You want to start… Do this exercise the first time with a character that's not yours. With some character from a book, TV show, movie series, whatever…
[Mary] Fanfiction!
[Tempest] Yeah. That you know all about that character. Or you feel like you know all about that character. Write a character sketch of them. Like one page, two pages. Then change that character's… Something about that character's identity that has to do with their race, their ethnicity, their culture, their… Where they come from. Make that change. Think about it. Then sit down and write the character sketch again. Really think about what would be different about that person, about their history, about their life, about the way they interact with people that they're on the superhero team with or their friends or whatever it is. How those things might be different? How they might be impacted by that major change?
[Mary] That's a great prompt. So I'd like to thank our panelists. I would like to thank our listeners on the Writing Excuses cruise.
[Whoo! Applause.]
[Mary] You guys are out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: overloaded

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Writing Excuses 11.35: Elemental Humor Q&A with Victoria Schwab

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/08/28/11-35-elemental-humor-qa-with-victoria-schwab/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you add humor to a serious story without breaking the mood or how do you inject humor into a dramatic scene without breaking the building tension?
A: Humor can be a good pressure valve, to deflate just a bit. You can also have humor fall flat. If a joke relieves tension but makes the situation worse, you have relieved pressure and moved forward. Watch for gallows humor and similar emergency relief.
Q: My sense of humor consists only of dad jokes. How do I get real humor into my writing?
A: Really good puns are doing multiple things in a scene. Read better humor. Make sure the humor suits the context.
Q: How do you make sure your humor is really funny and not just funny to you?
A: Have other people read it.
Q: How does the culture of the world you write in influence the humor?
A: Pay attention to folktales, idioms, and humor. Watch for shared context jokes. Use jokes to tell the reader about the culture.
Q: When is humor necessary in horror? Can you write a horror book without humor?
A: Yes, you can. But you miss all the great jokes. And horror can be darker with a humor contrast.
Q: Where/what is the line between a book whose purpose is to be comedic and a book that could have funny parts in it?
A: Right through Terry Pratchett. What is your book driven by?
Q: How do you make dialogue sound natural but still funny?
A: You may not be able to. Funny and natural is usually character-based, while funny and wordplays are sometimes not very natural. See who can tell that joke naturally. Watch for natural cadence, and see where the joke fits. What function does this serve in the plot? Why would this character say this?
( Who's there? )

[Brandon] We are going to end with a writing prompt. Howard?
[Howard] I came up with this 3 1/2 minutes ago. Write a joke and have each of your characters tell that joke. Find a way for them to tell that joke in their style.
[Brandon] That is perfect. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: rhythmic

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Writing Excuses 7.7: Historical Fantasy

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/02/12/writing-excuses-7-7-historical-fantasy/

Key Points: alternate history changes a historical fact and extrapolates, while historical fantasy adds a magical element to history and goes on from there. Think through how it affects society, but don't push too hard. Mary said, "Jane Austen needs more rotary cannons." Historical fantasy mixes the familiar with the strange. Do your research! Historical fantasy and urban fantasy are the same thing, just in different times. Get familiar with the culture and society. Talk with experts. Beware language, for it doth shift, but you are writing for modern readers.
( Petticoats and parasols? )
[Brandon] You know, let's make that our writing prompt. Just to say, think about a story from the past, or a historical period that you have been particularly interested in at one point in time. Go ahead and try and write a story set in that time. Do a little bit of research. Don't go crazy overboard. Do a little bit. Write a story. Then start to fact check yourself. See if this is a process you enjoy.
[Howard] Figure out if you love it.
[Brandon] Yup. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: wayback

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

April 2025

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Page Summary

mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.24: An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine
mbarker - Writing Excuses 19.09: LIVE Recording - Rituals, Rites, and Traditions
mbarker - Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.49: Customs and Mores
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.33: Writing Imperfect Worlds
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.31: Cultural Setting As Conflict
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.12: Writing the Other – Latinx Representation
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races
mbarker - (no subject)
mbarker - Writing Excuses 13.15: What Writers Get Wrong, with Mike Stop Continues
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.46: Colonialism with Steven Barnes, Tempest Bradford, Dongwon Song, and Shveta Th
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.35: Elemental Humor Q&A with Victoria Schwab
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 7.7: Historical Fantasy

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with culture

Writing Excuses 19.24: An Interview on Worldbuilding with Arkady Martine

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

Writing Excuses 17.28: Keys to Writing Dialog

Writing Excuses 14.49: Customs and Mores

Writing Excuses 14.33: Writing Imperfect Worlds

Writing Excuses 14.31: Cultural Setting As Conflict

Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.12: Writing the Other – Latinx Representation

Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1

Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

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Writing Excuses 13.15: What Writers Get Wrong, with Mike Stop Continues

Writing Excuses 12.31: What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda

Writing Excuses 11.46: Colonialism with Steven Barnes, Tempest Bradford, Dongwon Song, and Shveta Th

Writing Excuses 11.35: Elemental Humor Q&A with Victoria Schwab

Writing Excuses 7.7: Historical Fantasy

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