Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-23-the-lens-of-the-senses

 

Key points: Sensory details. What do you use automatically? Sound, sight... What do you remind yourself to include? Cues to memory or emotion. Use analogy to describe. Tie it to an emotional moment. The unexpected squirt in the dark. Leave space for the reader. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 23]

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 23]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The Lens of the Senses

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm stinky.

[DongWon] And we all have a regret.

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] So we've been talking about the various lenses you can use to approach how you're doing worldbuilding, how you're building your fiction, how you're just constructing your story in general. Right? We've been talking about context and time. But I wanted to bring us back down into the body a little bit today. And what is the most rooting thing you can do in a scene often is to remind your readers of the sensory details of the scene. What do they see, what do they hear, what do they taste, what do they smell? What do they feel? Those are the five senses. I believe I hit all of them. And so... 

[Mary Robinette] What do they taste?

[DongWon] What do they taste? Did I miss that one? Anyways. As we're going through these, or as we're talking about how to make your world feel really lived-in, what are the sensory details that you guys reach for in a scene automatically, or what are the ones that you find otherwise you have to remind yourself to include?

[Howard] I reach for acoustics. Very, very quickly. Because, as an audio engineer, one of the first things that I would do walking into a space is stop, close my eyes, and listen to the room. Not just listening for things that are making noise in the room, but then I also snapped my fingers or clicked my tongue and listen for the T 60, the time in which an echo will drop by 60 decibels. How long does it take for the echo to die away completely? And I realized fairly early on that with my eyes closed, I could tell, without making any noise, if I was in a little room or a big room or a giant room or outdoors. And it's such a fun exercise to do.

[Mary Robinette] I… It's interesting that you say this, because my husband is also an audio engineer. Film and television, he did location sounds. In college, I was an art major. I am very visually oriented, and tactile orientation. So we walk into the same space, and he will be absolutely driven bonkers by a buzzing sound that I don't even know exists until he points it out. And I will talk about the pattern in a carpet that's just, like, why would anyone do this, it gives people vertigo, and he is like, there's carpet in the room?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And this is… I think one of the reasons that it is such a powerful tool, because it's telling you not only about the world, but also about the character. So I tend to default to visual. And I think a lot of writers do. As a result of that, I will sometimes make a conscious decision that one of my character's other… It's primary sense is something other than sight. So… To differentiate them. I try to link it to… Usually something about the career that they've wound up in. Not because the career shapes it so much, but because I think that you get drawn to a career based on what is important to you. But I can reverse engineer that to create some character distinction.

[Erin] What's interesting hearing that is that I… I have aphantasia, so I cannot make mental images at all, and I have a horrible sense of smell. And those are my two favorite senses to use when I'm writing.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Actually…

[Mary Robinette] Interesting.

[Erin] I don't know if it's because I am try… Like with visual, I actually am trying to make it happen. So, something that I will do is I will actually pull up images of the place or something like the place I'm writing about so that I can actually look for what are the visual things that, like, would be happening. And I just love smell because I feel like it's so visceral, even though I don't experience it as much as other people maybe. I just love what it says about the way you experience something. I feel like it's the thing that's the hardest to get away from. Like, if something smells bad…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] It also will have, like, a taste effect on you. And so I think it's an interesting one because it kind of has, like, an interesting secondary effect. But I think part of the reason is because they aren't things that I'm experiencing as much, I'm able to think about the way that the character experiences them in a completely different way, and it doesn't… I'm not distracted by my own senses in coming up with the character's sensory experiences.

 

[DongWon] Interesting. It lets you put yourself in the fictional space more because they're things that aren't [garbled] connected to you… A you experienced world. But it's also really interesting about this is each of the senses are tied to memory and experience in different ways. What we see versus what we smell versus what we hear, I think, are all different cues for different people into memory. I… There's a lot of research that scent is the most strongly connected to memory for a lot of people. Maybe less so for you, Erin. But that the scent memory of something… I know, for myself, that sometimes I'll smell a particular smell and I'll suddenly just be back in when I was 13 years old in this particular space, in this particular summer, or whatever it was. And so I think… Are there things that you guys not only are connecting in terms of what's interesting for the character, but if you're trying to evoke certain emotions, do you lean towards different sensory details or do you find that it's more just what tool fits what character?

[Mary Robinette] I often, when I'm trying to evoke a specific emotion, the one that I lean towards is touch. Because I lean into what the body is feeling, where the character is feeling their tension. If they're too hot, if they're too cold. Those are the things for me, when I'm trying to create emotion, that I tend to lean towards. Which is linked to, but somewhat different than trying to create a sense of place.

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] I do feel like scent, the sense of smell… It's almost like when we remember things, smell ends up as the index tabs. Whereas other things, sounds and colors, don't. And… But I don't do that to try and… I don't include smell to try and make the reader smell something or… I'm not trying to flip through their index tabs. What I'm trying to do is let them look into the character's brain by giving a scent and have the character immediately smell…Ah. It smells like grandma's place. What? Oh, mothballs. I'm smelling mothballs. And if anybody's had that experience, and I think most of us have, where you smell the thing and immediately been in a place or had a thought, that is normalizing, that is… That draws us into the character and gives us, the reader, a sense that we experienced the same thing the character's experiencing.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I will hear people talk about sometimes is that they… Yes, they agree with that, but that they don't use smell as much as they would use sight because there's not as much language for it. However, after my husband went through the audio engineering, he went and became a winemaker. Which, sometimes I have to help him with his research, and that's very difficult.

[Erin] Oh, no.

[DongWon] What a struggle.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] sadness. But it means that I wind up going to these winemaking events, and they have so many ways to talk about scent. One of the things that I was struck by was that actually it's the same toolbox that we have for talking about sight, we're just not used to using it. When you talk about a color being creamy, that's an… That's analogy. Right?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And that's the same thing that happens when you're talking about scent. It smells chocolatey. It doesn't smell like chocolate, but there's that richness of flavor. And this… You can build a sense of something that is not a flavor or scent that occurs in the real world by linking it to things. Like, I just wrote a story where there was something called a basil willie, because people are actually really crap at naming things. We just name it by what we… But then I was sitting there, trying to describe basil. I just had a recent experience where I have a friend who has the unfortunate gene where cilantro tastes like soap, and she's like, what does it taste like to you? And attempting to link it to things that I know that she has smelled and tasted. It's like, oh, yeah, this is all analogy. One of the things that my husband says when people are learning to approach wine is if it smells like that to you, you're correct. If the way you need to describe it is it reminds me of grandma, then someone else can be turned and say, oh, knowing me, oh, your grandmother's southern and you're picking up these bacon notes and these vegetable tones. Grandma's baked green beans are amazing. Now I'm hungry.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Now I want bacon wine.

[Mary Robinette] I can introduce you.

[DongWon] I really want to talk more about the language that we used to describe sensory details. But before that, let's take a quick break.

 

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[Mary Robinette] The thing of the week is an experience that I think is actually going to be hard for you to find. It's called Darkfield. It is a train show and you go… They have containers that they have turned into a theater, and you go into a container and are in a completely dark space. This is actually something that is not commonly experienced, because most of the time, there's a little bit of an LED, there's the exit light. Completely dark space, and they tell you a story through sound and motion. It is wild. There's… They have a couple of different experiences. Flight, séance, and comma. As a storyteller, thinking about how you can tell a story with only a few senses and removing others highlights exactly where we get our information. It's very compelling. It's a little disturbing, and it is a touring show so it may be hard for you to find. But if you can, I recommend seeing Darkfield.

 

[DongWon] I started this episode by talking about how sensory details can be the most grounding. But, Mary Robinette, before the break, you were talking about ways in which actually that sensory experience is so subjective. What I experience is very different from what you experience, very different from what Erin experiences, and Howard experiences. Right? What tastes one way to us, even if we all like the same thing. My experience in eating cilantro is different from yours, because I'm a different person. I mean, my physics, biology, all these things. So when you're trying to use language to make an experience feel universal, make someone feel in the body of this character, you don't know what kind of body your reader has. What are the tricks that we can use to make sensory experience feel universal or feel connected or feel specific in different ways?

[Erin] So, it's funny, because hearing y'all talk earlier about, like, scent being the core of memory, I think, because of a lack of both sent and visuals, like, I actually have a quite poor memory. And I… The only way that I remember things is by feeling like there's a story about it, almost as if somebody was singing a song and suddenly you remember the chorus. And so, like, that's how my whole… My whole life is stories. But one of the things that I do, then, because I'm trying like to convey scents to… Or something to a reader that I don't have is I often make up what a scent is by trying to create an emotional moment and then telling you there's a scent to it. So I would say this smells like a combination of… And a lot of times I'll use a very sensory thing and a fake thing. Sort of. So I'll be like, this smells like rotten meat and sidewalk chalk the day after a rain.

[Howard] Yeah. And as a humorist, I am always, always playing with the words around smell. Because it's so much fun. This smells like something died and then went to gym class without taking a shower. That's a ridiculous metaphor. But… And what we know is that the character has passed judgment on… Maybe it's body odor, maybe it's putrescence, maybe it's both. But we are having, hopefully, a humorous emotional response to what the character is experiencing.

[Mary Robinette] The thing that Erin was saying, just taking that and tying back in, you make me think about the way perfumiers describe perfume, that they're trying to create an experience that takes you through something. So, even though you're saying an imaginary thing, it's like, yeah, it's imaginary, but there's a whole layer of scents that are associated with each of those things that builds this whole in a way that a list would not. It smells like petrichor, sidewalk chalk, and exhaust from streets… But, like, that's a very different thing than the smell of sidewalk chalk after a rain.

[Erin] And the thing is if you say, like… I can think of a lot of reasons why I think, like, that scent makes sense, like, things like rain do have their own scent, a sidewalk after the rain has a certain scent, and chalk has a scent. But I also think that it's very possible that if we had, like, smell-o-vision or, like, I could suddenly smell what you might think of when you thought of that, that we would all have different smells.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] But I've rooted it to the same emotions.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] So that if I reference it again, or if I'm using it to describe a character, it's sort of doesn't matter that the scents are different because the emotional thing…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] That I'm trying to get you to realize through using that sensory detail is the same.

[DongWon] I think that's the thing that we were all talking about, is that really, when we get to these sensory details, so often it's about emotion. How is the character feeling? We're describing sensory details to give us a sense of what their experience is, not just in a physical way, but how that connects to the emotional truth of it. Right? So, in describing… The way you're combining positive and negative imagery when it comes to the scent of something, that gives us a more well-rounded experience of, like, oh, this smells bad, but also a little nostalgic. And what does that mean that this character associates writing me with something a little nostalgic?

[Howard] The mediums that we're using… We have to pay attention to these. Because if you are writing and someone is going to read it, then you are using principally the sense of vision to create a data stream that is giving us… But if the audiobook is read… If someone reads the book to you, you're listening to an audiobook, the information stream is now going through your ears. And there are audiobooks that are not just read, they're dramatized. And so some of the sounds you might put in the text end up performed as sounds. I remember being in a planetarium for a concert, and they said if you see something you like, that's us. If you hear something you like, that's us. If you feel something you like, don't look at us. And then, during the show, they were in the back with a squirt gun.

[Laughter]

[Howard] And it was hilarious, because we were getting information through a stream that we were told we wouldn't be getting.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] Anyway, I'm just fascinated by this.

[Mary Robinette] The thing that I love about this is that we're in the module where we're talking about where and when, but we're talking about character, and this is, I think, an important thing is most of the time when your reader is experiencing the place, they are experiencing it through the lens of a character. When we're using these sensory details. How is the character experiencing it? And even if the character isn't there, the reader is interpreting it through their own lens of self and their own awareness of how their body would experience those things. Like, if I see someone who is describing stepping out into the humidity of a southern day, and they are describing the way I described it, which is, it's like stepping into a sauna and being hit in the face with a hot wet towel. I know that, and I have… I bring my own memory to it. This is part of a thing that we talk about a lot, that your reader is building the story with you. And so, invoking those sensory details, even if you're doing it in omniscient, even if you're doing it where there's not a character on the page, you are evoking them for the reader.

[DongWon] I mean, that's what I like so much about this topic is, whether we like it or not, we all have bodies. Right? Whether we like it or not, we all have… We're all in our Gundams made of ham. Right? We're experiencing the world filtered through the sensory organs that we have. And so are your characters. Right? So when you get this opportunity to remind your reader that your character has a body… They don't. They're fictional. You made them up. They literally don't have a body. But the reader does. Right? And so if you can connect those two dots, you will increase the verisimilitude of the reading experience exponentially.

[Erin] And what I like about that in setting is that you can use things that are very visceral and sensory to connect things that are very speculative, very out there…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To something that we can feel. I was at an immersive theater show at the Edinborough Fringe Festival where we were in the dark. Full black dark, in front of, like, an arcade machine, and you could, like, choose things, and it was all audio. We're just standing there. But at one point, there is… Like, somebody is killed by some really weird out there gun of some sort, and the arcade machine squirted a tiny bit of water. It was the most disturbing thing ever…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Because, like, I don't know what that machine does, I don't know what happened to the person exactly, but death plus liquid in your face…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Is making you feel like so many things. And I connected really strongly. I don't remember much about that experience other than that moment, because it was so visceral and because it was so sensory and I didn't need to know the specifics of how the thing works because I understand how the thing feels.

[DongWon] I mean… I think this is why… I talked about genres of the body. Right? Because horror is such a classic one, because you can take the most outlandish thing in the world and you bring it down to blood and bone and the smell of somebody dying and now it's so real for your reader no matter how bonkers made up the monster was or the situation was with a haunting was. You made it felt in the body, and then your reader's with you in that moment.

[Howard] I… I love the senses, and I love the idea that when you feel a thing… Feel, smell, hear, see… That seems out of place, it can be absolutely horrifying. A little bit of wetness when there's been a splotchy death noise. A little bit of open fresh air when you've opened a door you expect to lead to another room, and you realize that this door opened into… Don't take a step or you're going to fall to your death. There's all kinds of ways to play with this, where the unexpected sense is part of a reveal that can be humorous or horrific or intellectually stimulating or whatever it is you want to evoke in the reader. You do it with more than one sense, and it's harder.

[DongWon] And it's a place where sometimes doing less can be more. Right? I think if you're really trying to overwhelm your audience with the sensory aspect, it can be hard to parse what's happening. One of the… Going back to horror, I'm thinking about the famous rain room scene in Alien, part of why that is one of the most iconic effective scenes in all of horror history is because it's very quiet. He's there, you can hear the drips of water, you can feel how cool it is on his face, you're so grounded in his body, in that moment of, like, this moment of relief of, like, oh, there's water on my face, the chains are clinking, there's a little bit of a breeze, and there's all these tiny little sensory details that are making that scene pop, right before awful things happen. Right? And it's the quietness in that moment that lets you absorb the sensory reality of it, which then heightens your dread, because you know what's coming.

 

[Mary Robinette] I think along those lines, sometimes, the thing that you can do is to leave space for the reader.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There's this thing that has stuck with me for a long time from Steven King where he says, you can describe the pain in great detail, going into all of the… The nerve endings lighting up and all of this stuff, or you can say, they ripped his fingernail off. And, like… For our listeners, DongWon, sitting beside me, just winced and turned away.

[DongWon] Yup.

[Mary Robinette] And that's an example of leaving space for the reader. That sometimes you describe the thing that is happening to someone and you don't deliver the sensory details, you let the reader experience them. It's something that you use sparingly. But it's also the thing that relies on the reader having a common experience.

[Erin] I'm just thinking… It makes me think that part of the way that we experience sense is also distance. Like, how far away is the sound, how close is the smell? You know what I mean? And I think that there's like… That is something to think about. And that actually I like to play with more, which is, like, what happens when a sense… Something that you sensed as far away is suddenly closer. Or something that you sense as close… If you're smelling your grandmother's baking bread and then that becomes further away through time or further away through distance. Like, that actually can convey emotion in the exact same scent, but a different context for it.

[DongWon] Absolutely. I really love that. And that's combining the differences that we have in terms of context, in terms of time and distance, and all these things, and how you experience that in your body. So, while we think about how to make space for the audience, Mary Robinette, I believe you have some homework for us?

 

[Mary Robinette] I do. This is an exercise that I learned from C. L. Polk. We're going to link in the liner notes to the original essay. And it is an exercise that they use to create an immediate sense of place, that they got from an anxiety stopping exercise. Five, four, three, two, one. You list five things your character can see, for things your character can hear, three things your character can touch, two things your character can smell, and one thing your character can taste. So that your exercise, is to do the five, four, three, two, one. I'm going to put in a slight twist for you, which is, if your character's primary sense is something other than sight, make that the one that's the five.,

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-20-the-lens-of-where-and-when

 

Key Points: Where and when, aka setting, or worldbuilding. What are societal constraints and conventions that you can use?  How are your characters shaped by the world they are in? What nitty-gritty details of daily life are going to show up in your work? Where does the poop go? Where do place and setting hit person? What has the character experienced? Meaningful details make a world become vivid. Make your characters interact with the world. How do you build a setting that can change, without breaking? Sometimes you do upend it, and write about the consequences of that. Or you can keep the definitive parts, and change things around that. What happens after the glorious revolution can make a really interesting story.

 

[Season 20, Episode 20]

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, guess what? The 2025 Writing Excuses Cruise is over 50% sold out. During this week-long masterclass, I'm going to be leading writers like yourself through a series of workshops designed to give you the tools to take your writing to the next level. Space is limited, but there is still time to secure your spot. We're going to be sailing out of Los Angeles from September 18th through 26. Regardless of where you are in your writing journey, this event is your opportunity to learn new skills while exploring the beautiful Mexican Riviera. Whether you're revising a story, reworking a character arc, or revitalizing your plot, you'll leave more confident in your current story and bolstered by a new set of friends. Join us on board at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 20]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Dan] The Lens of Where and When.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

 

[Dan] Today we're going to talk about where and when, and we're going to talk about setting. How you view and use setting. And in speculative fiction, we often call this worldbuilding. But once you've finished building the world, how do you capture it on the page? How do you convey that world, and how, most importantly, does that world change the things that you're writing and change the way that you're telling the story? What does it really mean for a setting to be vivid, or a world to feel deep, or a place to feel lived-in? And so I want to throw this question out first, how does the setting, how does the place where the story takes place, change what you are writing and how you write it?

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that this is a thing that I play with a lot because I'm writing secondary world fiction sometimes and sometimes I'm writing alternate history, and they offer me different choices. We've talked before about how sometimes when you're writing something that's an alternate history, when we had C. L. Clark on last season, that there is a tension that comes from this, from the audience's awareness of the setting. And that you can use that to change the way the audience is thinking about the story. And you can also use it as a way of focusing in on the story, the story that you're trying to tell. So I find that when I'm trying to set a story, that one of the things I'm looking for are kind of sort of the landscape things that I use. Some of it is that, with time in particular… Yeah, time in particular, I'm looking for the societal constraints and conventions that I use. If it's a time of war, that's going to be a very different story than a time of peace. So those are things that I look at for how I support some of the other choices that I've already made.

[Erin] I think, for me, there sort of two things. One is that characters are shaped by the world they live in. And I think this is sometimes where, not to go back and think… Bring trad character into it, but I think it's really important. Because I think sometimes, because worldbuilding can be so exciting in speculative fiction, like, we can go really ham on, like, thinking of, like, every really interesting thing and how the sewer system works and, like, how the magic system works without thinking about, like, what does it actually mean for, like, John Jane Doe walking down the street, and, like, what that means in terms of what do they encounter. What systems are there? How do they get from place to place? Where are the tensions that they're getting in their everyday life? What's easy for them that we would find hard? What's hard for them that we might find easy? So, I think the first thing I think about a lot is, like, where… How does the place sort of weigh… We talked about weight earlier this season… How does the place weigh on the characters in both a good and bad way? How do they feel it? How do they live in?

 

[Dan] Yeah. And that's such an important thing to think about, when you're worldbuilding, because when we are doing worldbuilding, I know there's often a tendency to think about the really broad kind of Tolkien-esque kind of things. Like, this is a world that has elves, and they live in trees, and whatever you're trying to do. Whereas the nitty-gritty kind of daily life details are often the ones that are going to show up in your work so much more than that. How do they get around in this city that lives… They live in trees? Do they have public transportation? Do they just have to walk everywhere? Do they have any kind of…

[Mary Robinette] Like the puppet [garbled] you gotta go get that.

[Erin] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Dan] What is going on here? And I remember when I was breaking in, there was this huge push to think about economy. And every time I would go to a convention, there would be some worldbuilding panel where they were like, you have to think about where all of the food comes from and where all the money comes from. And, yes, I think that that's a useful thing to think about. But, for me, I agree with you, Erin, that so much of it comes down to character and what is going to affect these characters. And, yes, if there is no food around or if food is scarce, that's something that's going to weigh on them heavily. But if there's always food and they don't have to think about it, then maybe it's never going to come up in your story.

 

[Erin] Yeah, I think… And, I think I also… I often find, like, those systems questions, like, do you get so, like, taken away from the people. Like, people always ask, like, where does the poop go? A question we should always ask…

[Laughter]

[Erin] About our stories, truly. But, like, that's somewhat interesting, but if you're, like, so and so, like, they have a poop shooter system that, like, uses hollow vines to shoot it out of the trees. Like…

[Laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] elves.

[Dan] This is why Tolkien never got into it.

[Laughter]

[Erin] But Legolas was, like, well, like, that attracts, like, rodents, that attracts weird things to the trees, so, like, whose job is it, like, who's actually down there, like, sweeping up at the bottom, like, of, like, where the poop shooter goes out?

[Dan] Cleaning up…

[Erin] That is…

[Dan] Pneumatic vines.

[Erin] The pneumatic vine cleaner.

[Dan] Legolas! There's rats in the pneumatics again!

[Erin] Like, there are 10 more… 10 times more stories about Legolas, the pneumatic cleaner, and, like, whatever's happening there then there are, like, to me, then the big systemic questions. So, it's like when place and setting, like, hit person, that's when, for me, the sweet spot is, for sure.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and I will often use that when I'm having trouble finding traction on a thing. Where I've got the general idea, but I'm like… What am I going to do with this? I don't always go sequentially. Sometimes I start with character, but sometimes, I'm like I don't know who this story is about. And I will look at place for who is available to me. And I look across the socioeconomic spectrum, who are the people that are the poorest people of society, who are the poop cleaners down at the bottom? Maybe it's a high status job, who knows?

[Erin] I like that. It's Legolas' duty.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] That's why he's got to have the braids, to keep…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Oh, my God.

[Erin] Sorry, listeners.

 

[Dan] So. At the risk of getting us back on track…

[No, no]

[Dan] Let's talk a little bit more about time, about the when half of this where and when, because if you are writing historical fiction, if you are writing something set in our world, I think it becomes very natural to think about time. But if you are writing something about outer space, if you're writing something about… Set in a completely different world altogether, then there's… Time still matters. Like you were saying, is this a time of war or is this a time of peace? Is this a time of intellectual Renaissance? Is this a time of whatever it is? There's a lot of those when questions we can still ask.

 

[Mary Robinette] And it's also, I think, for me, one of the things that's fun to play with with when is also when in the characters life is this? What are the things that they have experienced? Knowing a little bit about their history, that's… That history is part of the when of the character. And, again, with the character, but it does affect the way the story is told. If you know that it is after a traumatic event for… In a time of war, chances are that this character has experienced traumatic events. What are those, how do they affect the story? Also, time of day can make a huge impact on a story. A scene that is set at noon can often read very differently than one that's set at midnight. Hello. Let us meet at noon…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] For our romantic tryst that no one will know is happening.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Like…

[Erin] And that… But that's interesting, because it immediately makes me think, well, what kind of world… Like, if I want to have that, if I want a tryst at high noon, but no one knows it's happening, what does that say about the way time is viewed and used in that world in a way that's different from ours? Is it, like, the sun is so hot that it's, like, so dangerous to go out during noon because your eyes will melt out of your face, and so, therefore, like, it is dangerous and difficult and that's why this is the time to meet? So I think it's sometimes fun to, like… Time is something I think is hard for us to get away from in some ways, but a lot of times, even when we create new worlds, they're still like working 9 to 5, like, in some ways, they're still doing everything during the day and sleeping at night, because that's the way we do. But, like, is that always the case? What about a place where there is no night, or there is no day? All of that kind of stuff.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm working on a short story right now, as we record this, where my character winds up in a world that… Cave systems, it's all like phosphorus and fungi, and I'm like, do they have day night cycles? Like, when is sleeping happening? How do they tell the passage of time? How do they tell seasons? I'm just finishing working on Martian Contingency. And I think I have probably complained about this multiple times, that I have so many regrets because I decided to structure it around calendar, but there's the Earth calendar and then there's the Martian calendar, and Martian days are 39 minutes longer than Earth days. So, when do we celebrate holidays? Do we keep them with what's going on at home, do we celebrate them at a new time based on the cycles on Mars? And also your living underground, so your idea of day night cycles are based on the very few people who are going out on the surface. And it's like… It becomes this whole cascading thing where the when of the story affects, like, every decision that I made and also it kind of hits a point… It's not arbitrary, but it's… It offers opportunities to be in flux and reveal something about people, because of the way they are making… They are interfacing with time.

[Dan] And speaking of time, this is the time when we are going to pause for a moment.

 

[Dan] All right. So we are back. And I would like to ask you one of the other questions that we posed at the very beginning. What does it mean for a setting to be vivid? How does a setting come alive?

[Erin] I have an answer to this, I think, that actually comes back to time as well. So, a couple of years ago, I got the opportunity to write for the Pathfinder Lost Omens travel section. And I was actually in charge of the time and calendar section, and got to think about how different cultures within this really big world of Golarion, which is the Pathfinder world, how different cultures actually dealt with time. So as I was thinking about it, I thought a lot about how we… When we decide to mark an occasion, when we decide to measure our world in a particular way, there's usually a reason for it. Sometimes it's an arbitrary Emperor, as in our month system. But it can be much more meaningful. So I think worlds feel vivid when things that we choose to put in them have meaning. Like, have a… Have, like, a real meaning to them. And so, like, for example, I think, working with goblins, and I decided that they actually measure times by the length of songs and campfires. And so everything… I like that, because I was like fire is so visceral, like, how long… And they really know, like, how long this fire will burn, and they have, like… It's something that they all kind of can figure out, like, really quickly, and they know how long this song lasts. So there like, okay, we're going to sing this long song, and by the time that's the end, we will… It will have been an hour or three hours. And you get to a point where you could sing it in your mind. And you don't actually have to sing that song out loud. And what I like about that is that it's details. So I think worlds become vivid when you have details and those details have meanings that resonate with the world and make sense for it.

[Dan] Yeah. Well, and I would add further that your story needs to take advantage of those details. If that's something that we can only learn about reading the appendix, then it didn't necessarily affect the story in any way.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Whereas if your characters are kind of constantly singing that song to themselves in the background, that that's how they talk about time and they say, "Wait for me here, I'll be back in two songs of whatever," then that matters, and it does bring it to life.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing about that is that it is an interaction with the world. One of the things that I see people do frequently when they… They have world builder's disease, is that they can describe a world, they can use all of these beautiful pieces of language to tell you about the trees and the vines in the poop shooters and all of this, like, gloriously visceral language, but no one interacts with it. And so the story can become static. For me, the thing about the where and the when is that it is a thing that is inhabited. Like, time passes. I know that my animals can tell time, because if I'm late with their meal, they definitely let me know. So they have an awareness of time. But it is that interaction with the time. It is the this is a thing that supposed to happen. So when I'm thinking about it, I am thinking about how is my character interacting with it? The thing that you were talking about, the being back in two songs. That's an interaction with it. What are the other ways my character is interacting with the world? And that, for me, is how I make it vivid. By making it a lived in place.

[Erin] And I also think, challenging the world that you've built. I think sometimes we're reluctant because we spent all this time building, like, a beautiful house of cards and you don't want to blow on it. But that's when things get interesting. So I was thinking about the measuring time by fire, and, like, what happens in a typhoon? When you really needed to measure it, and the fire goes out unexpectedly. Like, then what happens? Like, and that probably happens at a crucial moment of conflict. So, I like to set up a world, and then by… If you can knock over parts of the world and the world still stands, I think, for some reason, that feels more lived in and more vivid. Because there are many things in our world that don't make sense for that fall apart and we still keep going. So when things are too perfect and everything lines up to well, sometimes it also feels like very… Like a doll's house that's, like, really pretty, but like it doesn't feel like… It feels like dolls are living in there instead of, like, people in these stories.

 

[Dan] Yeah. Well, and that's a big question that I often think about with worldbuilding, especially with a series or, like you were talking about with Pathfinder, some kind of ongoing setting that kind of more or less needs to remain static. You want your characters to be able to affect the world. You want things to be able to change. But you still want to be able to tell more stories in there. How can you build a setting like this that has intriguing when's and why's and you're able to mess with it without completely upending it and breaking it? So that book 2 takes place in a different setting altogether?

[Mary Robinette] I think it's… I think, first of all, that you actually can upend it and have book to take place in a different setting. So that's an option. But if you don't want to do that, then you think about, for me, the things that define the world as this is the place. And you can break the things around it, but there are still definitive things. So, if I'm telling a story that set in Mississippi and I dry up the Mississippi River, it has become fundamentally a different place. So I think of the Mississippi River as being a fundamental piece of the Mississippi, and I affect a lot of things around it. But I make a decision ahead of time, I'm not going to touch that. That said, it can be really interesting when you fundamentally break the thing. Sometimes the thing that is the defining characteristic is the people that are in it. But people are shaped by environment. It's all linked together.

 

[Erin] I also think that sometimes you… [Garbled] I think it's hard to break a world in some ways. Like… Fortunately or unfortunately, one thing that I often like grate at a little bit in fantasy is, like, when it's like we killed the king, and we get a new king, and, like, that definitely fixed all the things that that king was doing.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] It's like systems are very ingrained, and so I think one way to do it is to have somebody… Like, the system of the world doesn't change, but a person's understanding of it does. The way that they try to change it in their corner does. And then actually seeing the implications of change. Because a lot of times, after the curtain goes down on book 1, and the person's like we have done the glorious Revolution, it's like but all the things that you learned, all the ways that the place has weighed on you, will change the way that your revolution runs and what you do next and how easy it is for you to fall into the trap of becoming the world that you wished to break. And I think that is, like, such a… And that, to me, is a really interesting story…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Where it's like the world persists even if I try to change it.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's the thing. It's that there's logical causal chains. It's like this follows that, this happens because of that. You actually made me think of, also, Mistborn. When you hit the end of book one, it is… I remember thinking, how do you write a sequel in this? Because they've done all the things, and the world is fundamentally different. And book 2 is very much like, oh, now the world is fundamentally different. What are the consequences of that? And…

[Dan] Yeah. The… Mistborn is a great example. It's one of the ones that I always go to when I'm working with game writers and saying, "How do you end this?" This is a problem I have right now, because I'm working on the Mistborn RPG. Wendy you set your game if you have so many different points, and his series is filled with points that completely redefine what the setting is. So many people think of Mistborn as, well, there are these grand balls in this kind of dark industrial city where terrible things happen, and people sneak around in the mist. And that is one of the seven books. And then that setting changes, and you move on to the next one. And if you want to maintain, you come up with that one cool idea that you think is great and you want to maintain that over the course of several books, maybe don't kill the Lord Ruler at the end of the first one. But if you do want to explore that concept of change and explore the world is different, then, yeah, it's okay to do that.

[Erin] I know we're running low on time ourselves, but this actually reminds me of an answer to your earlier question about what does time mean? Which is also, like, where does the actual world itself… Where does the city or the country or the universe view itself in a timescale? Do you know what I mean? Are we year one of a generation shift or year 1000? Like, we usually set ourselves against something. Are we the end of an era, the beginning, the saw he middle of an empire? And, really thinking about, like, where does your actual setting take place, like, timewise? Like, what is their image? Where does it start? Where did their causal chain start of their society and are they the first link, the middle, or the end? Because, I think, that actually… Like, dying empires have some similarities, even though they die in different ways. And so do new revolutions have similarities, even if they're very different in their goals and what they do, because there's something about newness and there's something about, like, stagnation that can actually… That are a thing of time that has nothing to do with and everything to do with the actual setting that you're building.

[Dan] Absolutely. We are going to end this episode now with some homework, which is this.

 

[Dan] Take something that you have written in which the setting matters. A scene that takes place in a certain party or setting or location, a building, whatever it is. And then rewrite it in a completely different setting and see what kind of changes that suggests to the characters or forces into the story.

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-48-beginning-with-a-thrill 

 

Key Points: Beginning with a thrill. A bang! A big, flashy question. Cold open, somebody is murdered, so who did it, why did they do it, how did they do it? Howcatchem. Start with small question, answer, to build reader trust and curiosity. Thrill or long slow burn? Little things going wrong. Let the character notice that something is wrong. Language and choice of details. Not always a burst of action or violence. Something unexpected or shocking. Mysterious stranger in the shire. Disrupt the normal. Meet cute or meat cube? Don't introduce tension through worldbuilding. Foreground action, not back story. What would startle your characters, and how would they deal with that? Give your characters stakes early on. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 48]

 

[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 48]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Beginning With A Thrill.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] Today, we are going to talk about beginning with a thrill. But first, we want to tell you a little bit about what we're going to be doing all month. And this is Erin.

[Erin] Yes. This is Erin.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] 15 minutes… No, I'm…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] [garbled] inspired by an earlier episode that we recorded with Marshall where we were talking about how different genres can help you understand writing in different ways, we're going to be focusing on a genre that does something really cool that you can take into your own work for the rest of the month.

[Howard] I am excited to be a part of these discussions…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I literally have no idea what's coming.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Well, that is also what all the people who die at the beginning of a thriller say.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Do you like that segue? So, the reason we're starting with thrillers is because thrillers in mysteries, as a genre, tend to start with a bang. You need to ask a big enough, flashy enough, question that will pull the reader through the rest of the story, and you need to do it right off the bat. Kind of establish, this is the kind of story you're in. Where we see this most bluntly is in, like, a detective show on TV, where the cold open is some random person we've never seen being murdered, and then the rest of the show is trying to figure out who did it, or why they did it, or how they did it, or whatever it is.

[Howard] Sandra and I will play a game when we're watching those shows. The game is the moment we see someone on TV, we decide whether they discover a body or become a body.

[Laughter]

[Howard] One of those two things.

[Mary Robinette] Is about to happen. Well, this is one of the things that I love, is that that discovery of the body or becoming the body doesn't actually have to be the very first thing that happens in the novel. But usually when you're watching those cold open scenes, there's something small that goes wrong first. So, what I like looking for is something that goes wrong that kind of sets the tone that is going to lead directly to the big problem, but is not necessarily the big problem. I've… Have a… I've learned that dropping the body in the first chapter is not always the best thing to do. As tempting as it is.

 

[Dan] Yeah. There's… One of my favorite mystery genres is called the howcatchem, which is related to whodunit, where the main question is who killed this person. A howcatchem story is we know who did it, but we are watching the detective to see if they're going to be able to figure out who did it and stop them. The way this often starts is we will see the killer first. They're not going to discover or become a body, they're going to produce a body.

[Squeak]

[Dan] And often the way this goes is we get to watch all the things that are wrong in their life, the person who bugs them, or the aspect of their life that needles at them and we can tell that sooner or later this person's going to explode. That is the kind of tension you can draw out for a while, because it's just ominous enough and it's tense enough that it does ask that big flashy question, what is this person going to do to get out of this situation they hate?

[DongWon] This is usually, at least in terms of bookstore genre, one of the distinctions between thriller and mystery. When you know who the killer is upfront, and then the tension is more about will the hero figure that out, and then as you have that sort of cat and mouse kind of perspective, that's how you ratchet up the tension, rather than the mystery being what pulls you forward into who actually did this thing. Right? So it's kind of two distinct hooks that define these two genres.

 

[Howard] There's a secondary principal at work here, which is that when you present that big question, you want the reader to already trust you that you are eventually going to provide an answer. The way to build that trust is that somewhere in the first page, somewhere in the first 10 pages, or the first chapter, you want to be asking smaller questions and providing answers. Small questions, provide answers. Small question, delay the gratification for the answer, get another question, and then, oh, here's the answer. You set this pattern up for the reader, where they realize, oh, yes, I am curious, and then, I am sated. Then, I am curious, and I am sated. Then I am desperately curious… And that's the page turn for the next chapter.

 

[Erin] So, I have a question. So, I'm thinking about a book where I'm reading about someone going through their life, and things are bad, and I'm wondering, I know that I bought a thriller. Like, I bought it from the thriller section of the bookstore, so I'm probably anticipating that, like, this bad thing will end in a body one way or the other. But how much of that… Let's assume that I didn't know that it was a thriller, I bought it with, like, no knowledge of the book at all. What is it that you're doing in order to make this feel like it's tense, like something's about to go wrong in this person's life in a murder-type way and not just like a day in the life of a guy whose life sucks?

[Laughter]

[Dan] Yeah. That is a very good question to ask. That's where I was going to try to go next. Because this is called starting with a thrill, not starting with a long slow burn. Although those often can be the same if you're very good at it. We talked earlier in the year about the establishing shot, and when you are writing a book or a short story, the very first thing that you show us is kind of telling us what kind of story this will be. If you start your mystery novel off with a fight scene, then you're telling us this is going to be an action movie or maybe a thriller. If that's not actually what it is, the death has to be more abrupt or less of a back-and-forth. There needs to be less interaction in the way this person dies. But, if you were doing, for example, an episode of TV or a movie, you could get away with a lot of that tension you're talking about with musical cues and stuff. Weird shots, weird POV shots that make us feel like this person is being watched or followed, spooky music, to let us say, oh, no, this person's going to die. The way you can create that… I should say, one of the ways you can re-create that in a novel, where you don't have music and things like that, is to just draw things out. Focus on details that don't seem as if they should be important. Because that makes readers nervous. Why is it taking two paragraphs to find her keys before she can get into her house? Things like that. Which is… The purpose here is not to bore the reader. This has to be tense and interesting. You're giving us little micro tensions of, oh, no, something is wrong. Oh, okay, they got out of it. Oh, no, this other thing is going wrong. Oh, they got out of it. Why is he describing so much about this type of whatever? It's to put readers on edge. Take them out of comfortable territory.

[Mary Robinette] Another tool that you can use along those lines is having the character notice that something is wrong. So, the character who is approaching their house and is like, "That's weird. I don't remember leaving a light on." And having the character… Using POV to signal to the reader, hum, things are about to be not okay.

[Dan] Yeah. Speaking of character, you can absolutely in prose do the freaky POV shot that you would get in a TV show. If the whole first scene is a couple just came home from a date, and they're flirting with each other as they walk through their house, and they talk about their bank accounts while taking their clothes off, but we're seeing the entire thing from some third perspective. Someone is listening to them. Even if that listener is never identified, and you drop hints about how they can't see what they're wearing yet or whatever it is, but it's obvious that this very private intimate conversation is being eavesdropped on, even without any direct mention of danger or threat, that's invasive and puts us on edge.

[Mary Robinette] That really is invasive and does put me on edge.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Let's come back to what it feels like to be on edge after this break.

 

[DongWon] One thing I've really loved recently is Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite, which was released in 2018. It's a brilliant historical satire about a rivalry between two of Queen Anne's ladies, played by Emma Stone and Kate Winslet [Rachel Weisz?]. The Queen herself is played by Olivia Colman, in a brilliant, hilarious, and tragic performance. It's sort of like All about Eve, but with an even more biting edge and a lot to say about class, privilege, and power, all wrapped up in a strange, almost surrealist aesthetic. It's a really wonderful movie, and I highly recommend it.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of my other favorite tools to use to make things tense is language. So, the word choice that I pick… If I'm describing a rose, and I want it to be a romance, then I'm going to talk about all of the beautiful, perfect things about the rose. But if I'm setting up for a thriller or a mystery or horror, then I'm going to be talking about, like, the diseased leaf on the rose. And even the words that I'm going to use are going to be much more visceral, I'm going to reach for the ones that are darker. Those are some fun things that you can do to set tone in the same way that a film would be able to set tone.

[Howard] When you put things in a scene and shine lights on them, you can make us comfortable, you can make us uncomfortable. The easiest example I can think of is someone striking a match or lighting up a lighter, and we see a cigarette, and we see the end of a fuse. Those are two very, very different things. Knowing what your stand-in will be for the fuse or for the cigarette or for the stove that requires a lighter… I don't know. Knowing what your stand in is, that's your job, not mine.

[Chuckles]

 

[Erin] Okay. I have another question.

[Dan] Okay.

[Erin] This one is, let's say I woke up and I decided not to choose violence.

[Laughter]

[Erin] I was like no murders here, but I still want to use these techniques in my story to draw the reader in. What should I be doing?

[Dan] You're getting to all my points right before I get to them. That's… We're on the same wavelength here. Because I would wager that a vast majority of our listeners right now are not writing thrillers. They're probably writing fantasy or science fiction, which can include thriller or mystery elements. But we focus so much on tension, whereas what we really are talking about is starting with a thrill, starting with a bang. That doesn't have to mean a burst of action or violence. What it really means for me is something that is unexpected and/or shocking that hooks us into the book. Maybe that is the person we thought the main character dies, and, okay, now I'm in for the rest of the book. I want to see who did this. Maybe that is something like you present to us an idyllic shire full of wonderful hobbits, and then a mysterious stranger shows up that nobody trusts. Then, even if you haven't introduced our main conflict, you've introduced a conflict. We know that there's the potential for danger, that things could go wrong. What about the rest of you? What answers do you have?

[DongWon] One thing I like to think about when thinking about writing in these different genres is that a genre's really made up of a whole bunch of tropes. Right? It's a whole bunch of individual patterns that we recognize of, like, oh, this has spaceships. Oh, this farmboy found a sword. Oh, this, that, or the other. That tell us we're in science fiction, that tell us we're in fantasy. But there's a thing that I think of as like micro-tropes or micro-patterns, where you can pick and choose from other genres and pull them into the main genre that you're working on. So, this is exactly what Dan was talking about, in terms of having a beat early on that's in maybe a thriller beat and have that moment or somebody's trying to find their keys or key card or whatever it is. That can increase that… Just to have that little hint of the thriller tension in there. Then you don't have to have bodies hitting the floor at that point. You can go into a different scene. You can go into a board room. You can go into the bridge of a starship. Whatever it happens to be. But you can use those little micro-tropes, those little micro-beats to really goose it in the way that you want. Right? So don't be afraid to steal from other genres and to do a little bit of mix and match, while still hitting the big beats that you want to say this is science fiction, this is fantasy.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I find that one of those small beats is just a disruption of the normal.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like, what is… What breaks their normal. And you don't have to have normal established very long before it breaks, and I think that one of the things for me with the thriller pacing is that that break in normal comes very early. It's not three chapters in, it's something that happens usually on the first or second page.

[Howard] If you throw a meet cute into the first couple of pages, you can absolutely start with a thrill and just take us at a run into a romance.

[Mary Robinette] So, just in case people have never heard this phrase before, that is meet as in meet each other, not meat as in meat cube, which is what I first heard you say.

[Howard?] Did you all think meat cube…

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because every last one of you looked at me…

[Garbled bodies. Really thought that's where we were going.]

[Dan] You guys don't put meat cubes into the first chapters of your books? That's super weird.

[DongWon] I love to start a romance with a meat cube…

[Howard] Yeah. When the two meat cubes meet, it's… I'm so sorry.

[Mary Robinette] I did read a book once that said that… That had come here, you big hunk of love [garbled]

[cool]

[Dan] Oh, man. That is not what I would name my meat cube.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] I say. As if I don't already have one. So, one way that I see this done wrong very frequently by aspiring writers is that they are trying to present their world, establish who the characters are, and where the story takes place, and the way that they try to introduce tension in those early chapters is through worldbuilding. By saying, yes, we're in an idyllic shire, but we never leave here because there's monsters in the woods. Or because there is evil travelers on this road sometimes, or because there's a dark Lord that every seven years will come and eat one of us. I mean, yes, you're adding some darkness to the world, but you're not adding darkness to the story. This needs to be some kind of action. Those mysterious strangers on the road need to show up. Or something has to, as was said, disrupt normal in some way. There has to be an immediate danger, not just the back story of danger.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because for people who… Dark Lord shows up every seven years, terrible people on the road… That is their normal, and so they continue to go about their day-to-day life. What is it that breaks their day-to-day life that is the foretelling of… The foreshadowing of the bigger thing that's coming?

[Erin] Yeah. I also think that there's a… There's something that can happen where you… Like, one of the things that… Sorry. One of the things that I love about thrillers and mysteries is that the thing that goes wrong is something that we instinctively know is bad. Like people dying, we're not a fan. Like, in general. So, when you're trying to create that for another genre, it's what is the thing that is, like, wrong in your world? What is the thing that, like, would throw things off? If the dragon shows up on year six instead of year seven, that's going to feel very, very wrong in a way that is very unique to the world that you've created. So, a lot of times, just think about what are the things that would startle the people that are in your world, and then what would… How would they deal with that?

[DongWon] Well, this is why giving your character stakes early on are so important. Right? This is why you have to start page 1 really with something your character cares about. Ideally another person, but it could be some goal that they have. Right? That's their normal. Their normal is trying to get to school to give the girl the note that you've been thinking about giving her all week. And then something happens on the way to school. Right? You need to have the thing to be disrupted, not just to be a normal everyday day, but something that somebody cares about their day. Right? Somebody is… Has to give a big presentation, then when they can't get their key card, and they can't get into the room, now you have a cascade series of events where things are going wrong. But… To make those scary things that are coming into the world feel threatening, you have to give the characters something they care about, so that I care about the character and what they care about.

[Dan] Yeah. One of the… One of my favorite examples of this, believe it or not, is the first Toy Story movie. Which we don't think of as a thriller. But that movie starts with a kid playing with his toys, and then we get the little premise of, oop, the toys are awake when he goes out of the room. Then we don't get the actual, like, inciting incident main plot conflict for a while. But what we do get right off the bat is the birthday party, and the toys lose their minds over that. Because this, to them, disrupts their normal. They know that it has the potential to change everything. So we haven't gotten to Buzz, we haven't gotten to the whole Woody's not the favorite anymore, none of that has arrived yet, but we do have a conflict that, through their eyes, we can understand is very meaningful to them, and there's a lot of action, there's emotion, there's a lot of thrilled to it. Then, four or five scenes later, we get the full, actual, oh, this… The real plot has arrived now. We have basically run out of time now. We want to give you plenty of time to write. So we are going to end with homework.

 

[Mary Robinette] That homework is what breaks normal for your character right now? The next thing you write, how does normal break for them?

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 29]

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 19, Episode 29]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

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

[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

 

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

I'm a goddamn orchestra.

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

 

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Erin] That's life, though.

[Laughter]

 

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Like the section...

 

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

 

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Laughter]

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

 

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

[Laughter]

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-19-a-close-reading-on-worldbuilding-an-overview-and-why-a-memory-called-empire 

 

Key points: Worldbuilding. Not just the things you invent. Spaces, relationships, and interconnections. Not just speculative fiction, worldbuilding is a part of any fiction you are writing. Where do your characters live, what kind of people live there, what kind of industries, schools, family... Worldbuilding gives you texture, realism, and plausibility. What you don't show as well as what you show! Worldbuilding establishes stakes for your characters. What's important. Legal system, physical infrastructure, what people value. Rules and systems as much as physical material spaces. Think about your establishing shot, that first scene. Not always a wide shot, sometimes a single detail can tell you a lot about the world. How much do you need to establish and explain? Beware of the "in a world" prologue. Balance show and tell. Two kinds of worldbuilding, decorative and structural. Structural things drive the story. Decorative is just fun. And sometimes things are both! Audience surrogate, fish out of water...

 

[Season 19, Episode 19]

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com

 

[Season 19, Episode 19]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding: An Overview and why A Memory Called Empire. 

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Marshall] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] So, to kick off this second series that we're doing of close readings, we are going to be talking for the next few episodes about worldbuilding. Why it's important, how it functions, and to dig into that, we wanted to do a close reading of Arkady Martin's A Memory Called Empire. This is a really wonderful novel. It won the Hugo award. I am very biased, because as a literary agent, I represent Arkady and I worked on this book, so I know it pretty well. But to kick us off here, before we dig into A Memory Called Empire specifically, I wanted to talk a little bit about the concept of worldbuilding. What is it exactly, what are the basic mechanics? Just so we all have a shared vocabulary heading into doing the actual close reading.

[Mary Robinette] So when we talk about worldbuilding, it's really easy to get hung up and think that it's only about the things that you invent. But, for me, it's also about not just the spaces, but the relationships between people, and how all of the things interconnect. That it's… It is worldbuilding because you are thinking about those connections, and the connections are often the things that are significantly more interesting than any individual thing that you may invent.

[Dan] Well, it's worth pointing out, I think, that we tend to think of worldbuilding as being a part of spec fic exclusively, but regardless of what you're writing, worldbuilding is an important part of it. When I was writing the John Cleaver books, a big part of those books was figuring out how big is the town he lives in? What kind of people live there? What kind of industries do they work in? Where does he go to school, what is school like? What is his family like? Who are the other people that he's known? That helps give the town a lot of texture and a lot of realism and a lot of plausibility. That is absolutely a part of worldbuilding.

[DongWon] Yeah. What you don't show is as important as what you put on screen. Because any novel or any short story, whatever it is, there's going to be way more details and facets of this world than you can fit into your book itself. So, you don't have to invent every aspect, or if you do in an attempt to be realist, you don't have to show every aspect. The way I think about worldbuilding, and this kind of ties into what Mary Robinette was saying, is it's about establishing stakes for your character. Because what parts of the world you show are the things that are important to the people in your world. So, what the legal system is, what the physical infrastructure is, what rich people value, what poor people value, all those things are going to be part of your worldbuilding. So, as you're establishing what's important to your characters, think as much about rules and systems as you do about physical material spaces.

 

[Howard] You used the word establishing, which always takes me to establishing shot. As you're doing your worldbuilding, as you're writing languages, creating religions, doing geography, whatever else, at some point, the rubber will meet the road and you have to write that first scene. That first scene is your establishing shot, where you start giving people the details they need to understand what's happening here. If you look at a helicopter shot of New York City, at the beginning of something, you know that this is taking place in New York City, or a city. If you have a helicopter shot zooming over rolling fields of grain, you know that it is a completely different type of story. Just understanding that principle can help you set up that first scene so that your worldbuilding works.

[Mary Robinette] Also, along those lines, that establishing shot does not need to be a wide shot. That often, zooming in on a single telling detail is going to tell you a lot about the world more so than the rolling fields of grain. So one of the mistakes that I will sometimes see people make with worldbuilding when they are doing it in spec fic is the feeling that they need to do that wide shot. While there are times that you need to do it, and it's something that we'll see with Arkady's work, there are also places where just starting very, very tight in is going to serve you better. That decision is based less on worldbuilding and what you want to convey about it and more about the tone of the book. Like, are you doing something that's very intimate, are you doing something that's really slow? When we start looking at Arkady's, it's a huge empire that we're being introduced to, so it is both a wide shot and, I think, a more detailed shot. Which is a lot of fun.

 

[DongWon] Part of why this is so fun to talk about in speculative fiction is that when you're doing contemporary realism, you get… You've got a lot of shorthand, right? As Howard was mentioning, if you have a wide shot, a helicopter shot of New York City, you've established a lot of world that you don't need to explain to your audience. When you are inventing a new culture, so, as we get into Memory Called Empire, when you're like approaching this massive planet-city, there's so much you need to establish and explain. So, sometimes, in that case, when you do the big wide shot, as Mary Robinette was talking about, it can be very overwhelming and not give you very much information. So zeroing in on a very specific thing often is a way to get to more information faster. Because if you try to tell them everything at once, their brain's going to shut down. That's when we start talking about quote unquote info dumps.

[Dan] Yeah. This is making me think of the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, where there is a ton of world, the incredibly expansive world… He's famous for his worldbuilding, and yet, the first several chapters, and our introduction, our establishing shot, is all just the Shire. It's a peaceful little village with just a bunch of idyllic sheep and people eating happy meals together. Not actual happy meals…

[Laughter]

[Dan] But they're eating meals and they're happy about it. That doesn't tell us what the world is like, but it is vital worldbuilding because it tells us what the characters are leaving behind.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Dan] And it establishes, like you said, the stakes. This is what we're protecting when…

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Dan] We leave here and go out into the rest of the very complex world.

 

[Howard] A common mistake that I've made myself in regard to delivering your worldbuilding to the reader is delivering it the way the late 90s and 2000's movie trailers did, "In a world." In a world, guy… He's the guy who pitches the worldbuilding in 15 seconds so that you know the pitch for the novel. Okay? He is not the guy who opened your story. Having a story that opens with some text telling you where we are, and then the first scene contextually gives me 80% of that information… You know what, we didn't need that text.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] We didn't need that. We didn't… I say we didn't. Maybe we didn't need the prologue of your novel. But consider if your prologue is "in a world," go ahead and just start with chapter 1.

[DongWon] Well, this is where I love the balance of show and don't… Show and tell. Right? Because we hear the advice all the time, show, don't tell. But when you're communicating worldbuilding, there's so much information to get across that sometimes you do just want to come out and say the thing. You do just want to explain it. I think a lot of our favorite examples are ones that don't do that, because it's more memorable to find an effective way of showing it without explaining. But also, sometimes, slowing down and just explaining, "Hey, this is how this world works. This is how this legal system works." You will have to do that, especially in speculative fiction, because there's too much to explain to let your audience infer it. When I find myself getting super confused by worldbuilding when I'm looking at submissions, it is almost always because they have tried to adhere to closely to just showing me. Then I'm like, "Wait, wai, wai, wait. I don't understand because this could mean 8 different things."

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[DongWon] So, finding that balance point is the trick, especially early in your book.

 

[Mary Robinette] I find that I break my worldbuilding kind of into 2 categories, decorative and structural. So the structural things are the things that are driving the story. Like when we get into A Memory Called Empire, one of the things that's in there is something called a cloud hook. Arkady just like drops us into it, we just… Like does not really explain it, except in pieces, like, gives it to us as a character interacts with it. The reason that it's worth taking the time to have the character interact with it and spend that time with it, is that later, the cloud hook becomes this really important thing. But there's other pieces that happen in the story, like there are these little hummingbird-like things. We don't need to know where those come from or anything like that. Those are purely decorative. That, for me, that I will see people put in a decorative thing that there super excited about, and then people don't understand it, and they try to explain it, and it's not important.

[Laughter]

[Dan] One of the things that I always try to do in my books is put in enough of these decorative elements that the reader is never sure until it matters which elements are loadbearing and which elements are decorative. This is one of the things I love about the movie My Cousin Vinny. Because it has such wonderful worldbuilding, is you take these outsiders into this small southern town and they encounter the mud, and they encounter grits, which they've never seen before, and all of these little aspects of small-town life that just blow their minds. Then, about half of them become vital to winning the case at the end. Grits doesn't sound like it would be a loadbearing element, and it absolutely is. It's just…

[Howard] You make them thick enough…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I was gonna say…

[Dan] So, yeah. It's the… That ability to… I mean, it's not quite red herring, but it's just as you are explaining the world and where your story takes place, the reader has that thrill of not knowing which elements are vital to the plot and which elements are fun and which are both.

[DongWon] This goes back to talking about how contemporary fiction can be a stretch in the imagination, because for 3 out of the 4 people here on this recording today, grew up in grits-eating country…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] So the idea that someone wouldn't know what they are…

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[DongWon] Completely baffling to me when I watched this as a child. But, on that note, let's take a break for a few minutes, and when we come back, we'll start digging into A Memory Called Empire.

 

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[Erin] I think a lot of people have heard the song Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. But if you haven't heard that song and aren't singing it to yourself right now, then really, go ahead and listen to it. Because it's amazing. I will admit a little bit of theft here. My father had taught high school English for many years, and always used Fast Car is a way to teach his students point of view. I think it's because it's a great story in the song that's all about this woman trying to get a man with a fast car to run away with her, but you get these little glimpses from her life as it is, as it will be, as it was. It's a great way to look at how past, future, and present can all come together through one particular person's POV. So, listen to Fast Car, and if you want to be like my dad's students, think about what it would be like if that song was sung from the point of view of the man with the fast car and not the woman looking for him.

 

[DongWon] Okay. So, I would love to start talking about the text itself and why we chose this particular book. In some ways, it's a little obvious, because it's right in the name, it is about Empire, and when we think about big science fiction worldbuilding, we tend to think about space empires. We tend to think in fantasy about books like Lord of the Rings that have really rich, complex settings. I find the way that Arkady, the author Arkady Martine, approaches worldbuilding in this particular book to be really fascinating and nuanced and complex, but what about you guys? I mean, what did you feel about when this book was proposed, why we decided to settle on this one for the close reading?

[Dan] I was so excited that we chose this book. I read it… I have right here with me my original ARC that I read before it came out. It blew my mind. This is one of the best science fiction books I think I've ever read. Most of that stems from the incredible work that she's done with the culture. So much of science fiction is worldbuilding a new technology or worldbuilding a new alien or a new environment. Most of the work here is a culture. The story is, in large part, about getting to know what this culture is like and how their names work, and how poetry is vital to the things that they do. It's just such a rich book because of that.

[DongWon] Yeah. Talk about surprising loadbearing elements, it's rare that you get a science fiction novel that has loadbearing poetry recitals…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] That radically alter the direction of the plot.

[Howard] Also, unusual to get something with such an epic scope that has a single POV. We… I mean, yes, there are other POVs for interludes and for chapter bumps, but the story is being told through the perspective of one character. I think that's part of why the worldbuilding is so accessible and so effective. We have a stranger comes to town, really, is the… Well, not… Somebody goes on a trip is the story structure here.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] We are seeing a new place through the eyes of someone to whom this place is new, but she has loved it from afar and has studied it and is now immersed in it. Every paragraph… Every paragraph gives us tidbits about this struc… About this place.

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, the thing that is interesting and exciting is that it is not a single world. That every paragraph illuminates 2 worlds at the same time. Because our main character, Mahit, comes from Lsel, which is a space station. It is an un-planeted world. Has come to this planet that is part of this Empire, this massive Empire. So all of everything that she sees is seen through the lens of someone who grew up not on a planet, and also has had this deep, deep love for this culture, but has never been a direct participant of it. Interacting with people who are, who have grown up in it. So there's all of this really wonderful, like, very muscular writing that is happening, where we're using all of the tools that are possibly at our disposal. She's using interactions with the environment, she's using point of view, she's using conversation, she's using every tool. Epistolary things. Every tool to convey all of this rich information. But had to create, like, there's 2 worlds that we are getting information of, and then there's bits of other places and other cultures. Even within the world that we're in, there's multiple cultures, for both. So that's why I was excited by it.

[Howard] For me, one of the scenes that best calls that out is the café bomb. Because someone sets off a bomb…

[DongWon] We're going to dig into this very deeply in a couple of episodes, actually.

[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. But, the idea that on a planet, someone can…

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] Protest by blowing things up. But on a space station, that would kill everybody. It would never occur to anyone to protest by setting off an explosion, because that would destroy the world.

[DongWon] Well, she has a whole speech, actually, where someone did do that in the consequences were that were so extreme. Right? They immediately physically spaced everyone involved and cut them off from their [imago line], so they essentially just erased them from society in a radical way. The difference in scale of response versus what you can do on a space station versus what can happen on a planet is one of those fascinating little things.

[Howard] Actually, yeah. So it calls up her perspective of I come from this place…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm now in this new place. If this thing happened in the old place, it'd be completely different.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's such a novel of contrasts, and the way Arkady uses that parallax of perspective to give you perspective on the whole universe. Right? Because 99.9% of the book takes place in one location, in one city. Really, between 2 offices, primarily.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It mostly just… The range of spaces in the book is very limited. But when you think about the book, your memory of it is so expensive, of a sense…

[Mary Robinette] Your memory of Empire.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Your memory of Empire is a sense of multiple worlds, of massive systems, of huge space wars. But the action in the book is very constrained and very limited.

 

[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say that on one hand, this idea of the outsider coming in is just My Cousin Vinny again.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Right? It's… That's such a helpful trick and a wonderful little tool to explain one culture is explain it through the eyes of an outsider. But it is rare to see the opposite done. Like, if My Cousin Vinny told us as much about Brooklyn as it does about little southern town, then that would be closer to what we're talking about here. The differences between them is kind of the whole story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] I love, in particular, how torn she is about this. Mahit… You get this sense that she doesn't want to love Teixcalaani culture as much as she does. That they are imperialists, that they are colonialists, that they are kind of absorbing and warping all of the other cultures.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] And that everyone who encounters them loses a little bit of themselves, but at the same time, she just really loves it. It's this kind of otaku visiting Japan since almost…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That she's like, "I'm so excited. I'm finally here. I've watched all of these movies about this."

[DongWon] Yeah. With the difference that Japan is not actively colonizing the United States. Right?

[Dan] Yes. Yes. Right.

[Howard] If it was a Chinese otaku visiting Japan…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] In 1940.

 

[DongWon] Well, this is why this book is so significant to me personally. The term we usually use for what you're talking about is audience surrogate. Right? You have somebody who is… Stands in for the audience, arriving at the place, and we see it through their eyes, so there's an excuse to explain all of the things about how this works. Right? So this is Kitty Pride arriving at Xavier's mansion, and we get to see oh, these are what all the X-Men are. Right? But in this case, Arkady pulled an incredible trick, in my view, where the subjectivity of the audience surrogate becomes very, very important. Because they are not just a visitor, they are someone who is resisting assimilation, resisting Empire, by the place that they are visiting. What does it mean to love the Empire that is destroying your culture? I'm Korean-American. My family is from Korea. Which was… This is a complicated statement I'm going to make, but has been occupied territory by the United States since the Korean War. Right? The influence and dominance of American culture on Korean society cannot be overstated. So the idea of coming from a colonized people, colonized by many people… Another example is the way Japan has colonized Korea. I love Japanese media. I watch animes. Some Japanese filmmakers are some of my favorite filmmakers of all time. Right? Whether that's Kurosawa or a variety of other people. Those things are very near and dear to my heart. So what it is to feel like you love the cultures that have actively or passively tried to destroy the culture of the people that you come from is a very complicated emotion. To see that represented on the page by this person who is not only trying to figure out how to survive in the most literal way, but also to preserve her identity and her people's safety. It was such an inversion of the trick of the audience surrogate, that I was completely blown away. Again, that contrast between the 2 perspectives gives you all of this depth and all of this complexity of the world she encounters.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing that she also did, in addition to that, the other layer of it, is that… Often the audience surrogate, the fish out of water, has no experience and everything is new. Mahit is a subject matter expert.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Fluent in the language, studied it, top marks. Knows the history. Still… Still, there are these enormous lacuna in her understanding. I think that the… That those gaps, those places where herself, her home, rubs up against… And her book understanding of a thing rubs up against the actual experience of it, those are the things that make the world building in this so meaty that I'm just so excited to be digging into over the next several episodes.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think many of us here have had the experience of living overseas are visiting overseas for a period of time. It's amazing how much you can do all this research, you can speak the language, and still the texture of actually being there is wildly different. Right? Again, this is a thing for me growing up as a child of immigrants, going back to Korea, is this culture I know so well in so many ways, but Korea is different from being Korean-American. Right? So, while it's not exactly Mahit's situation here, it was such a familiar experience of thinking you know how things are going to go, and then somebody says the word and you're like, "Oh, my God. What does that mean in this moment? I thought this meant this other thing, but now they're saying this…"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] How do I navigate this social interaction that made sense to me through the filtered version I experienced or from watching movies? But then somebody's saying to me right now, what do I do?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That is such a fascinating experience.

[Dan] Yeah. I… With that is this idea of loving a culture so much and living in that culture and still realizing that you're an outsider.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Dan] I had this experience living in Mexico. I lived in Mexico long enough to start to consider myself Mexican. I'm not. I would never actually say that I. But there is that bit of… I don't really fit in here. But I do, but I don't. This book explores that so well.

[Howard] I think the power of this novel lies in the fact that as readers, we come away from it understanding what it means to be Lsel…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] To be Teixcalaani. And we understand that there's a depth way beyond that that we could never have, because we weren't born there. We weren't raised there. That level of immersion is one of the things that I love about good worldbuilding and well presented worldbuilding. A Memory Called Empire pulls it off perfectly.

[DongWon] Well, I think that's a great note to leave it on. I'm so excited to dig in in-depth over the next few episodes about specific things about this book that communicate all the concepts we talked about here. So, thank you guys for joining us on this little journey here.

 

[DongWon] I have some homework for you in the meantime. That is, I would like each of you to pick one of your favorite fictional worlds, whether that's Middle Earth or the galaxy in Star Wars or what Memory Called Empire… Whatever world has spoken to you in your past. Then, I want you to write down 3 different attributes of that world. So, think about ones that establish culture, think about ones that establish legal systems and power, and think about ones that establish physical spaces. All of these things are going to communicate different things about what's important to your characters. So if you make a list of those, I think that's a great starting point to understand how you can approach writing a world that feels robust and consistent.

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] Do you like stars? I do. Maybe you would like to put up a constellation of stars by rating us on Apple Podcasts. Hello. Yes, we're talking about ratings, not astronomy. But, a 5 star review can help us by creating a navigational beacon for new writers like you to find their way to Writing Excuses. So. Rate us on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let's talk about Rude Tales of Magic. In this improvised narrative role-playing podcast, join artists, writers, and comedians from Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Marvel Comics, and more as they fight and fumble their way across the madcap and exceedingly rude fantasy wasteland of Cordelia. Branson Reese and his jesters retinue, Christopher Hastings, Carlin Menardo, Tim Platt, Joe Laporte, and Ali Fisher, star is a group of unlikely survivors. Specifically, a talking crow, a Lich in a wig, a bubbly faun, a Sasquatch punk, and a [teefling?] hunk. This group must solve the mystery of Polaris University vanishment and return balance and higher education to their world. It's going to be very hard and very, very rude. Subscribe to Rude Tales of Magic on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

 

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 18, Episode 31]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

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

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I have opinions... That don't always make it into my stuff.

[Dan] Keep them to yourself.

[Chuckles]

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Mary Robinette] The writers say other things.

[Chuckles]

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

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

[DongWon] Exactly. Exactly.

 

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

[DongWon] Absolutely.

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

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

 

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Howard] The director pranked him...

[Chuckles]

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

[Ha Ha!]

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/11/28/16-48-believable-worlds-part-2-creating-texture/

 

Key points: Similarity, specificity, and selective depth help you create texture in your world. Help give the sense that your world is lived in, that the characters are interacting with it. Let them move through their world in their daily lives, just like you do. Put conversations in different places. Along with the purpose of your scenes, consider the activity, what the characters are doing in that scene. Don't just think about big things, think about what people do in their daily lives. Give your characters strong opinions. Remember that a little goes a long way.

 

[Season 16, Episode 48]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Believable Worlds Part 2: Creating Texture.

[Fonda] 15 minutes long.

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

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] All right. So we are still talking about believable worlds. Last week was the illusion of real, and this week we're going to talk about creating texture. What is texture in a story in worldbuilding?

[Fonda] Well, this really is a continuation of what we talked about last week, because a lot of the things that we mentioned, similarity, specificity, selective depth, help you create texture in the world. When I say texture, I mean the sense that your world is lived in. That is not just sort of a stage backdrop to your characters, but that your characters are interacting with that world. One of the ways that I try to make this happen in my stories is to have the characters move through their world in their daily lives, the way we move through ours. School, religion, shopping, daily transactions that you make, transportation, getting from one place to another. If you can do this while also advancing the plot, you will do a lot of worldbuilding in the background in a way that feels very organic. So if you have characters who need to have important meetings and they need to meet with other characters to exchange information, or to have confrontations and to have different things going on from a plot level, one of the best ways to world build is just to have those conversations happen out in the world in different places. So don't have them all happening in the headquarters or in whatever, in their home. Like, have them get out there. I have a scene in which… It's a very tense situation, and it's this confrontation with the two characters, but it happens in a temple. So you get to see the temple and get a sense of what religion is like in this world and the fact that one character bows in the temple but the other does not also tells you something about the characters. I also have a scene where two characters meet at a sporting event. So, those are… That's a way to have the world move by almost like you would in film. Where of… In film, things are happening and there's so much of the world building that is in the background with the costumes and the sets and all that, and you're not paying attention to it, but you're absorbing it. You can do the same thing as a prose writer.

[Howard] Yeah. A couple of examples that leap to mind. The used universe of the first Star Wars film in 1977 which so influenced the genre. This was the idea that things get dirty. Even spaceships got dirty. They were used, and they had dents and scuffs and scrapes and whatever else. When Ridley Scott produced Aliens, he called that look Trucking in Space. It was very informative to us, and it let us feel like we were living there. Contrast that with when Lucas shot the prequels, so many of the sets were designed it just as green screen that a great many of the scenes were a pair of characters carrying on a conversation while walking down a hallway in which they interact with nothing. Even though they then built lavish whatever's around them, it felt stale. So, for us as authors, having people conversing in a temple, having people at a sporting event, where the conversation, the scene requires interaction with what is around them, that's crucial.

[Mary Robinette] There is actually an industry shorthand called touch the puppets.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Which sounds different. But it is exactly this. That when you have three-dimensional figures that the actors, the human actors, can interact with the puppet actors, and it feels very real. Whereas when you have CG characters, there's often no interaction. So it feels like they're existing in two different worlds. One of the things that I do when I'm plotting is that I will write down purpose of scene, which is my narrative intention for the scene, but then I'll write down activity. The activity is the thing that the characters are doing in that scene, which often has nothing to do with the purpose of the scene. So if they are plotting… It's like we're going to plot this heist. They're doing it over… While cooking a spaghetti dinner. The thing that does for me is it makes the world richer, but it also allows me to introduce micro tensions, because that's… There can be things that are going wrong in the scene, like the water starts to boil over. Which can mask the fact that they're just exchanging information in prepping for something. But it also, again, has that texture of making the world feel more real, because small things go wrong in day-to-day life. Like, in one of the episodes that we recorded previously, we had to start over because outside the booth, my cat had knocked over the cat feeder and had, like, jumped in it. If we had left that, this would have felt so very real.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] We removed our vital worldbuilding details. This is one of the benefits that novels have over a lot of other mediums, in that you're essentially unconstrained by budget or time. If you're making a movie or a TV show, then, yeah, you probably only have a handful of scenic locations that you can use in your story. If you are writing a novel, you can have as many as you want. You can have that meeting take place at a temple or a sporting event, because you don't have to pay extra to get a whole sports arena into your book. You just put it in there.

[Howard] I remember my first iPhone. It was expensive, and at one point I cracked the screen and could not just run out and replace it. See item 1. It was expensive. For a while, finger swiping across the screen, there was a texture as I ran my finger across the crack. It was the texture of regret for having dropped it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] It was the texture of need for not having enough money. I felt it every time I use the phone. Okay? That was a little tiny rib feeling under one finger. Those kinds of details will give you way more insight into your characters than you just got into me.

 

[Dan] All right. So, our book of the week this week is one that does this so, so well. Releasing this week into the world, we're so excited, Fonda, tell us about your book.

[Fonda] I guess I should mention that I have a book coming out this week.

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] So, I am finishing off the Green Bone saga with Jade Legacy, which is the third and final book. It is coming out November 30th in the U. S., December 2nd in the U. K. and internationally. It is… I've described the green bone Green Bone saga as an epic urban fantasy Asian inspired gangster family saga. That's probably as succinct as I've ever been in describing it. But it is about… It takes place in a modern era Metropolis, and one in which there is a resource, magic Jade, which endows certain people with very cool abilities. It is the story of two clans in conflict. I'm just super excited to bring the story to a close. It has been a long journey and I'm glad I got to come on here and talk to you guys about it.

[Dan] Well, thank you very much. The Green Bone saga is one of my very favorite fantasy series ever. So excited for Jade Legacy to come out. So, the first one is called Jade City, the second Jade War, and then this new one, Jade Legacy. So if you're unfamiliar with it, start at the beginning.

[Mary Robinette] They are so good. They are so, so good.

[Dan] If you like… If you have been waiting so eagerly, like the rest of us… Mary Robinette, you're a cover quote on it, aren't you?

[Mary Robinette] I am. I say that it's like your favorite wire work film crossed with The Godfather. It's just… But it's so good. Such, just beautiful intimate portraits of people. I just love it a lot. Also magic.

[Dan] Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee. Go buy it right now.

 

[Dan] Anyway, back into our world building and creating texture. What are some of the elements that are often overlooked when we are trying to create texture in a world?

[Fonda] So there are… There's many that people don't automatically think of, because they think worldbuilding, and they think lineage of Kings and government and geography and so on. But things that are very much a part of our own world, like pop culture and entertainment. What are people doing for fun? Fashion trends. Schooling or education. Fitness. Sports. We mentioned food earlier in this master class. Religious life. Daily commerce. These are all… Just sort of think about how you go through your day and the ways you interact with the world. Are you doing that in your fantasy world?

[Dan] Yeah. The… So I play a lot of role-playing games, and one of my favorites is Warhammer Fantasy, which is set in kind of a low magic, fake magic Europe. That world always feels much more real and grounded to me than most of the D&D settings, even though I love them as well. I was trying to figure out why. What about that feels more real? It's this concept of texture. The idea that any given Warhammer Fantasy supplement in describing the world is also going to have a sidebar that tells you about the specific names of all the pub games that they play in the taverns, or they won't just be food, they'll have names for this type of meat pie or something like that, to just add extra specificity, like we talked about last week. But then also kind of give those context, so it's not just we're in a pub, but we're in a pub playing this game of dice which is called this because of this, and the last guy who played it lost in his name is still carved into the table and things like that.

[Mary Robinette] The other… With those things, the pub food, games, all of that, give your characters strong opinions about something. Like that's… And maybe give them a foil who has a counter opinion. Again, it can give you micro tension within a scene, but it can make things feel more real if it's like he hears the sound of the arcade game and it haunts him because he broke up with his teenage girlfriend and lost the top score and has never been able to reclaim it. I don't know. I'm making things up wildly.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But… Because I was…

[Dan] It's a good writing prompt.

[Howard] The smell…

[Mary Robinette] That's where I was going.

[Howard] The smell of a dresser drawer, that at one point had mothballs in it, but hasn't for probably decades, is the smell that will always bring me back to me being 12 years old and visiting my grandmother's house for the first time. That's… But most people will smell that and think, "Oh, how do you… You haven't gotten the mothball smell out of that drawer, have you?" That's not the reaction I have.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I'm sorry… I'm… Weirdly, I'm going to wind up quoting Hemingway, which I did not expect to do in this episode.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But this goes back to something that Fonda was talking about much earlier about similarities, that you can look for similarities in these specific details. Everyone has heard the write what you know Hemingway quote. I'm going to take a moment to read the… Like, the length… The actual quote. Because it actually gets to what we're talking about here. So… It's not what most people think it is. "You see, I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of actual life across. Not to just depict life or criticize it, but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful, you can't believe in it. Write about what you know, and write truly, and tell them all where they can place it. Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study about. Whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about." So you know what it is to really like the taste of something. You can give that sensation to your character with a thing that is specific to that world. You can have someone in that world… Or a type of music that you know intimately what it is like to love as a fan. You can attach that to a new type of music that you have made up for this world. That's going to make it feel specific and real and textural and grounded.

[Fonda] Yeah. I definitely think that that phrase write what you know gets misunderstood a lot, and that really, what you're talking about, Mary Robinette, is writing what you know on a deeper level, on an emotional experiential level. Taking that and applying it to new contexts in your fictional world. One thing I want to say to all the readers here is a little goes a long way. Like, we may be giving you the impression that you have to just now all of a sudden just over describe everything and fill it with nuance and context. But that's not necessarily true. You want to pick your places. Show those moments, those glimpses that imply that the whole world has that same texture. I use the example of, like, the Hollywood back lot tour. Where I went to Hollywood studios… Or Universal Studios, and you take the little tram, and the streets on this back lot look so real. Like, down to the bubblegum that's stuck on the railing or the chipped paint on the windowsill. It's entirely convincing. Then you turn the corner, and, like, it's just held up by like boards. There's no building behind it. It's just the front. But what you do show has texture and feels very real and lived in. The reader or the audience fills in all the rest for you.

 

[Dan] Awesome. All right. So, what is our homework for this week?

[Fonda] I would like readers… Listeners to go and take a character that they have in the project that they're working on and free write your character with a day off. Have them just spend it doing what they would do on a day off. Where do they go, what do they see, how do they get around? What interactions do they have? After this exercise, see if you can't find a few cool details that you learned in the process of this free writing that you can use in the background of your main story.

[Dan] Awesome. Well. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/06/13/16-24-worldbuilding-for-games/

 

Key points: Your number one goal is to inspire curiosity, to create a place that people want to come back to, to explore, to wonder about, to invent stories over. You're giving them a springboard to tell their own stories. Use the power of allusion, drop interesting details in without fully explaining them. Ask more questions than you answer. Think about adventure hooks, details or questions that people can use to tell their own stories. Work on narrative resonance, build motifs and themes into every component of the game. Ask questions, drop in allusions, adventure hooks, and random details. Then explain and expand later, justifying and exploring those details. Fill the well, then grab one of those old ideas and queue it up. Start by inverting things or pairing things that do not go together, then follow the logical causal chains. Why, how, and with what effect. Focus on the worldbuilding that your players will interact with. Watch out for your personal biases and norms. Make sure all kinds of people can say, "They're like me."

 

[Season 16, Episode 24]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[James] Worldbuilding for Games.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[James] I'm James.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] We are so excited to be talking about worldbuilding. This is something that we all do in our normal kind of fiction novel short story writing. But how is it different for games? Cass? What do we need to know?

[Cassandra] It's actually very similar, I think, in that your number one goal with worldbuilding and games, like in novels and prose, is to inspire curiosity. You want to create a place that people want to keep coming back to. Not necessarily to stay, because some of these places can be absolutely terrible. But to explore, to wonder about, to invent stories over. I think this is especially true for tabletop role-playing games, isn't it, James?

[James] Yeah. Because in tabletop, you're often giving people the tools to tell stories, rather than telling them the stories. So the setting that you give them in something like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons or whatever is really a springboard for people to tell their own stories. One of the things I love, as a writer for games like that, is I'll have somebody come up to me at a convention and be like, "Oh, that lost city you wrote about. We've been playing a game there for a year. Let me tell you all about it." They'll get to the end of their story, and I'm thinking, "I wrote two sentences about that city."

[Laughter]

[James] They put all that detail in, it was them imagining it, and they think I'm a genius because they created all this stuff. So you're really getting the audience to do your work for you. Which is why one of my favorite things when doing game design is what I think of as the power of allusion with an a. Where I will, just like drop interesting sounding details in there and not fully explain them. Let them, let the audience sort of wonder about it or decide for themselves what that could be. That's fodder for them to tell their own stories. The same way as in like a videogame maybe you show some cool art off the edge of the map in the background.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is actually very similar to the way puppetry works. Hey, we've gotten six episodes in without me bringing up puppetry until now.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But what you want to do is you want to create certain specific aspects of the character and then trust that the audience is going to fill in the rest. Like, we've all seen Miss Piggy bat her eyes at Kermit the frog, and she does not have working eyelashes. You, the viewer, puts that into your head… In… You build that mechanic from the world.

[Cassandra] Fantastic.

[Howard] The humor classes that I teach, I use a theater principle called noises off. Which is that the pie fight you imagine is way more interesting than the pie fight I can draw. James, what you said here about allusion, dropping a reference for something and getting you, the player, you the reader, to imagine whatever that was, whatever it is, that's incredibly useful because I didn't have to draw it. I didn't have to build it. You did all the heavy lifting.

[Cassandra] I think that one really good example of that, if you want something to research, is the Bloodborne game from FromSoftware. One of the things that I remember most distinctly about it was there was this whole journey to a boss. You're kind of going up this completely red river, there are just mountains of corpses everywhere, there's no explanation, there's no one giving you exposition. At one point, you see a gate. This guy, who has been completely skinned, he's just red muscle and tissue, he's holding onto the bars of that gate and just very gently banging his head against the door. Again, there's no explanation and it never comes up again in the rest of the game. But I remember just standing there, like, "Oh, my God. What happened here?" My brain just went wild on that.

[Dan] I love that. I do want to give the counterpoint that as absolutely correct is all of this is, sometimes you do need to provide a lot of those details and fill in a lot of that allusion, which is kind of the big main job of worldbuilding.

[James] But, actually, I would… We're going to turn this into a debate show.

[Chuckles]

[James] I think that that's true, but you always need to ask more questions than you answer. You always want to make sure that if you give somebody the answer to a big mystery, you better make sure that you asked another one. Because the answers are rarely as satisfying as the questions, in terms of keeping somebody up at night thinking about stuff. Especially in tabletop. Which is why, when I'm writing for a tabletop book, I'm always thinking about adventure hooks. I'm trying to think, every paragraph, I want to be putting in a detail or a question that could lead a game master to go, "Oh. I can write a campaign about that." I'm trying to give people tools that they can use to tell their own stories. So, if you give somebody an inn, you can have whatever details you want, but make sure that there's something there they can work with. Because that's what they're paying you for. So even if all you need for your story is an ordinary basic tavern, make the tavern keeper have a criminal past so that at a moment, she's worried her old colleagues could find her and kick in the door. That's dropping something in that the game master doesn't have to use, but they could use to start a game.

[Dan] Yeah. Absolutely, and I'm… I didn't mean to imply that we shouldn't be doing that. Phrasing it the way you did, ask more questions than you answer, I think, is a really good way to put it. But, as a game master, when I come to a supplement, if it's putting all the work on me, well, then, I didn't need to buy that supplement, because I'm the one doing all the work anyway.

[James] Right.

[Dan] So, I really like it when a game offers me enough tools to work with, rather than being so free-form that there's nothing there.

 

[Cassandra] I think that's one thing that is possibly, like, definitely necessary on the topic of worldbuilding. You can go as light as you want, you can be detailed, depending on the property, but narrative resonance, I feel, is vital. You should build your motifs and your themes into everything you do, including the mechanics themselves, like, every component of the game should carry its weight, doing double duty where possible. I think the Persona series is a really good example of that. They have something called the Social Links mechanics, which makes use of the tarot arcana and builds on the idea that each of the cards has different meanings. Each of these cards are associated with an NPC. You can be friends or romance or whatever. They're fascinating, because mechanically, the Social Links are just a way of leveling up the personas that you get in the game. Even if you're not necessarily into the idea of doing the side quests, you're going to move towards them. Because you want to discover more, because you want to interrogate your understanding. There is this one character that I think of that is a really good example of this. Kanji Tatsumi in the Persona 4 game. His arcana is the Emperor. He begins as this really stereotypically rude, thuggish guy who yells at everything, who is very contrary. But he's also hiding the fact that he's an absolute sweetheart on the inside, and he is trying to compensate for the knowledge that he isn't a typical guy's guy by over exaggerating those traits. His journey becomes confronting his fears. That kind of ties to the Emperor, that sense of patriarchy and control. What happens when you have too much of it holding onto you? Even though vaguely wandering through this game, you know it's related to terror. You know it's related to the Emperor. So you sort of know what you should be doing. That is because of narrative resonance.

 

[James] We should pause there for the game of the week, which is Dan with the Dune RPG.

[Dan] Yeah. Dune is my favorite book of all time. It just got a brand-new RPG. By the time this heirs, it will be just a month old, maybe. It's from Modiphius, it uses their 2D20 system, which is the same basic game system that we use on Typecast for Star Trek: Horizon. But what they've done here that ties into the world building is Dune is a… Has a really wide range of power sets. You've got very weak, physically weak, characters set up against characters with incredible magic powers versus characters who have incredible technology, who can see the future and do all these things. How could you possibly balance all of that worldbuilding together so the game is still fun? What they've done is a really brilliant mechanic where your motivations and your drives as a person directly affect how good you are at doing something. So it's less about the powers that you have and more about why you're doing the things that you're doing. It's a really clever twist on the system and they do a really good job with it. So, the Dune RPG from Modiphius.

 

[James] All right. So with all these things we've been talking about, with dropping… Asking questions, dropping in allusions, and adventure hooks and stuff. This is something that gives game masters something to build on. But it also gives you job security. If you can get the audience excited about something, then you can come back later and continue to write more about it. This explanation and expansion way of working, forcing myself to justify and explore the random details that I dropped before, is something that I really enjoy. A lot of my best work has come out of… I drop a couple of lines… Early on in my career, I wrote about a city called Kaer Maga, and just like through in a line about, like, "Oh, yeah, and it's full of worm folk and bloat majors and sweet talkers who sew their own lips shut so that… Because they're not worthy of speaking the name of God." Like, I just sort of dropped these details in, and a bunch of fans went, "Wait! Whoa! What? Like, I want to know more about that." That led to setting books and adventures and novels. That's really my favorite way to work, is to just kind of throw out random ideas and test the waters. But I want to know, how do you all come up with interesting setting ideas? Setting details, specifically.

[Howard] At this point, I stopped coming up with them. I have… The well is too deep. I just reach in and grab something that I thought of 15 years ago and queue it up. I don't have time for new ideas. I'm going to die before 90% of these hit the page. Wasting time thinking of new ones is awful.

[Mary Robinette] So, with that helpful piece of advice…

[Explosive laughter]

[James] Kill Howard and take his ideas.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Some of the things that I'll do is inverting things or pairing things that are unexpected. So a lot of times this'll be… Like, I'll take a single starting point… Like milliner assassins was something that we used in an earlier season. I'm like, "These two words do not go together." Then chasing the logical causal chains out from that point. So I think about like, why do we have milliner assassins? How? So, for me, it's why, how, and with what effect, and chasing these in the logical. The how is kind of how it exists in that moment, and the with what effect are the effects to the future and kind of to the sides. So that's one of the ways that I will come up with interesting worldbuilding details. A lot of times, I mean, it really is that I will just fart words onto a page and be like, "Well, that looks interesting," and then carry on.

[Chuckles, laughter]

[James] I love that.

[Howard] I love the causal chain idea. For Planet Mercenary, one of the worlds has too many metals in it, and I conjured up genetically engineered pigs whose metabolisms push the metals out of the meat so they're actually safe to make bacon from. When we came up with an adventure in which someone is stealing the pigs, my daughter asked me, "Where do they push the metal?" I said, "Well, probably all the way out to the edges of their skin." She said, "So they glitter?" I realized, "Oh, my gosh. Not only do they glitter, they shed glitter." If you've stolen the pigs, you are now trying to steal animals that shed glitter everywhere.

[Laughter]

[Why would you steal that?]

[Howard] It is now a game mechanic, and it grows out of the idea of causality. You had a cool idea. Make that idea causal for something interesting.

[Cassandra] I feel like causality is definitely a very good way of developing worlds. All of this sounds very much like how I do it. I tend to start with the idea of a primary food source in a world, and build from there. Like, why is it this way, is it a migratory let's say protein? If so, do people… Are people largely nomadic? Do people settle down? What kind of world would have flying pigs wandering around? What kind of cities would come through? What kind of economies? How do you build a luxury item of it? What would pair with bacon on an alien landscape? Then I start building the flora and fauna and cultures just around that single idea to begin with. I also really like food. I don't know if that's obvious.

[Laughter]

[James] I also love approaching things from that evolutionary standpoint, of always asking yourself why things are the way they are. Also, what are the evolutionary pressures, and where are they pushing things? I think it's important when you're doing all of this stuff, like, it can be very big picture. But focus on the worldbuilding your players will actually interact with. Also, it's okay to do it patchwork. It's actually, in some ways, better. You don't have to just sit down and write the whole setting in a day. If you try to, you're probably going to end up spreading your ideas a little too thin. So by zooming in and saying, well, I'm going to develop the city today, then, next week, I'm going to develop this nation over here that's different, you'll have a different flavor just because you're different from day to day. You've taken in different stuff.

[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say the same thing about focusing on the worldbuilding aspects that players will interact with. I had to recently, for a science-fiction RPG that I was writing a scenario for, they really, for some reason, wanted it to have a diner. It's kind of a noir style adventure, and there like, "Well, we need to meet the cop in a diner." So, if I was going to put a diner into this science-fiction world, I wanted to make sure that it had an appropriate science-fictional sense of wonder to it, despite just being a diner. This particular world had brain… Everyone has a computer in their brain, and you can download memories. So I thought, well, obviously what that means then is the chef can make absolutely anything. Because he's going to just be able to download your grandma's recipe and then reproduce it for you because he can do the memories that way. Which then spun out, well, he needs access to an incredible amount of ingredients if he can make anything that a customer asks for. That started creating all these things. Then we had to think, well, how are the players going to interact with this? Not just they can get their favorite food, but are they going to be able to mess with the little drones that can deliver these ingredients? Are they going to be able to request specific different things? Keeping the players at the forefront of the worldbuilding changed how that whole scene played out.

[Cassandra] I think we're slowly running… Well, we're very quickly running out of time.

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] One thing I want to throw in there is when we're building worlds, it's important, I think, to consider our own personal biases. A very large budget game that I will not name because I do not want its fans to go after me is absolutely brilliant it is a wonderful thing. Great quests. It's also been rightly lambasted for only having white people, an entirely white cast. The developers pushed back, going, like, "Well, this is our country. The ethnic majority is X." Everyone else is like, "No. Historically speaking, this is not true." I understand everyone's arguments here, weirdly enough. If you do not think about things, you just expect your norm to be other people's norm, that can be incredibly alienating. So, when you're worldbuilding, think about your own privileges and biases, and how it will interact with your players' needs.

[Mary Robinette] This is true for prose as well. You've heard us talk about this.

[Howard] I've shared this before on Writing Excuses. My son, adult son, he's autistic. We were watching Elementary and Sherlock is interacting with an autistic woman. My son, who rarely is interested in what I'm watching, stood behind the couch and watched that and said, "They're both like me." I almost wept. Because that is the only time I've heard him say that. Everything that we build… Everything that we build can easily be built to have room for people to have that experience. Where they can look at a character, an NPC, or whatever, and say, "They're like me."

[James] I don't think were going to get a more powerful point to go out on. So we should probably wrap it there.

 

[James] Your homework for this week is to take a story or a game that you've written and drop in several casual allusions to names that you've just made up. So, places, people, objects. Don't try to figure out what they are. Just make the names as cool sounding as you can. So you throw in soultrees, and the Babbling Throne, Kobishar the Unmoored. Just write those in there. Then come back a week later and write a page of background on each of those names to sort of justify what it is and explain why it makes sense.

[Dan] Cool. That sounds great. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/07/05/15-27-alternate-history-with-eric-flint/

 

Key points: Alternate history makes a change to real history, and explores the ramifications. One kind involves a time travel element, while another just makes a change. It takes research, and people will complain about details. One trick, use locations that were later destroyed. Use historical characters where possible. Also, crowd source your expertise! Think about how to use thoughts and actions of historical people rather than modern thinking and behavior. You may want to use old attitudes to tell a story. But, be aware that your audience may not like those attitudes. Time travelers may help you here. Also, pick the right historical period, and characters.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 27.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alternate History, with Eric Flint.

[Howard] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Brandon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Eric Flint. Thank you for coming on the podcast with us.

[Eric] You're welcome.

[Brandon] We're also recording live at SpikeCon.

[Applause]

 

[Brandon] So, Eric, you are one of the established masters of alternate history. We're really excited to have you on the podcast about it with us. Just in case there is someone listening who doesn't know what alternate history is, how would you define the sub genre of alternate history?

[Eric] Basically, the author makes some kind of change in real history, and then follows what the ramifications of it might be. You can broadly break it into two parts. There's a lot of alternate history also involves a time travel element.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Eric] Where you take somebody in the modern world and put them back in older times. But then there's a different kind of alternate history, what you might consider pure alternate history, where there's no time travel element at all, where the author just makes a change in something. It can be something very minor. But something that's going to have a cascading effect. I've written both types.

[Brandon] So, that sounds to me really hard.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Because I write epic fantasy. No one can tell me I got my history wrong, that I… But it feels like if you pick a time that people have studied a lot, say World War II or something like that, and you say, "Well, this battle changed and I'm going to explore the ramifications of what happens all the way into the future if that one battle was fought differently." It sounds like you have to do a lot of research and listen to a lot of people grumble that you got it wrong.

[Eric] I make it a point… I have not, and have no intention of ever writing an alternate history set in World War II, the Civil War, the Napoleonic era, where there are a jillion reenactors and fanatics who will go berserk over every little goddamned jot and tittle [garbled]

[laughter]

[Eric] "No, those uniforms only had three buttons…"

[Laughter]

[Howard] Well, your problem is that historians, they will let you know when you're wrong, but the reenactors…

[Eric] No, no, no.

[Howard] They'll come to your house.

[Eric] Well, what really drives you nuts is that the issues they're going to give you a hard time about, who in the hell cares? I mean, they really don't have hardly anything to do with the story. My biggest series, Ring of Fire series, is set in the middle of the 30 Years War in central Europe in the 17th century. There are, in the United States, exactly one group of reenactors of the 30 Years War. I made it a point to get on good terms with them a long time ago.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] Yeah, it is a lot of work. Whenever I'm… At least when I'm starting an alternate history series. It gets easier if you go along, as you go along. But whenever I'm early on in an alternate history book, I have to budget about twice as much time as I do for pretty much any other kind of novel. The only other kind of novel I've ever done that requires that kind of research is hard SF. Yeah, there are plenty of times when I envy dirty rotten fantasy writers like you…

[Chuckles]

[Eric] Because you can just wing it.

[Laughter]

[Eric] I mean, you do have to be consistent and care… I mean, there's actually quite a bit of work goes into it, but it's not the kind of…

[Brandon] No. I've… Most of my career, I wrote just in secondary world fantasies that I'd made up. The first time I even touched our world, I made sure to make it post apocalyptic. Cities that had suffered in Norma's disasters that had changed the landscape, the physical landscape. I still got things wrong and got complaints about… I took Chicago and I changed it to steel and blew up most of it and I created an underground and most of it takes place in the underground. Still, people were like, "You know what, that street actually doesn't intersect there."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm like, "Uh. Man. You'd think that I could change the world enough that I could…" But it is… It's difficult. How do you… What's your go-to method for research?

 

[Eric] Well, all right. There are some tricks I use. When Andrew Dennis and I wrote 1634: The Galileo Affair which is part of the Ring of Fire series, and takes place mostly in Venice. Every single important location except the Piazza de San Marco and the Doge's Palace, which are quite well-known and you can visit them. But every other location that figure in the novel, we situated somewhere in Venice that got destroyed later. So, Mussolini razed it and put up a railroad station in one case, and I've forgotten everything else. So there's nothing left for anybody to go and prove that we're wrong. It's far enough back, there's not enough of a historical record.

[Howard] So, you're like time travelers trying to hide your tracks…

[Eric] Yeah.

[Howard] By putting your activities where something's going to wipe it out.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] It's not just [garbled]. Another thing I will do, I like to use historical characters if at all possible. But what I try to do is… One of the major characters in the Ring of Fire series is a Danish prince, Prince Ulrich. He existed. I mean, he was a real Prince of Denmark. But in real history, he was murdered at the age of 22. Very mysterious episode. So he died at the age of 22. Well, prove me wrong as to how he…

[Chuckles]

[Eric] Evolved afterwards. So I try to find people that were young. In one way or another. It's hard for somebody to… They can second-guess me, but, it's like, "Prove it."

[Brandon] Right.

[Eric] There's a lot of that. No matter how you slice it, though, you're still a lot… Actually, in terms of writing excuses, the two things I tell people there's the biggest and most dangerous forms of procrastination are research and worldbuilding. Because you can do that forever. At a certain point, you just have to say, "Enough!" And start writing a book. Then, yeah, a lot of times, you'll have to go back into more research and do stuff. There's no way around it, there's a lot of work. It gets easier if it's a big long series, the farther you go. Because the farther you get from the breakpoint, as we call it, the more possibilities open up.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop and talk about our book of the week, which is the first book in the Ring of Fire series.

[Eric] All right.

[Brandon] Will you tell us a little bit about it?

[Eric] Yeah. The premise of the whole Ring of Fire series… The first novel is called 1632… It's a very simple premise. There's a cosmic accident that's caused by basically irresponsible behavior on the part of a very powerful alien species, who enjoy manipulating space-time, and what amounts to a fragment of their art hits the earth and causes a transposition in time and place of a whole town in northern West Virginia in modern times. Modern times being the year 2000, which is when I wrote the book. A town… About a 6 mile diameter… I mean, the whole physical area is transposed, not just the people. So that this town materializes in the middle of Germany, in an area of Germany called Thuringia, which used to be southern East Germany, in the middle of the 30 Years War. They just boom, they show up, and there they are. That's the MacGuffin, I mean, that's the premise. That's the only premise. I… It's a three-page premise. I don't spend… It's really let's get on with the story. Take my word for it that this happened. Yeah, I know it's crazy, but who cares.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] We'll go from there. What the whole series is about is how this town of 3500 modern Americans… The impact that this has on the world in general, particularly Europe in the middle of what was probably the most destructive war in European history, at least since the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire. It's also a very fascinating period in history. From there, the series has sprawled out all over the place. There are seven novels that I call the mainline, that sort of run in the center of this series, followed… They depict the main characters and the main actions that happen. But then there are all kinds of side stories that branch off from there. Some become pretty major storylines in their own right. I believe we're up to about 24 novels published by Baen Books. Then, in addition, starting about two years ago, we launched our own publishing house, which we call Ring of Fire Press, which… We have a booth in the dealers' room if you want to drop by. We're publishing our own stuff set in the series. It also has a magazine called the Grantville Gazette that's been in operation professionally for about 12 years now.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Eric] [garbled] done really well.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] If you guys don't know about this whole thing, go research it. Because it is one of the most fascinating like emergent storytelling cultures in science fiction fantasy that these novel started. The people loved reading them, started talking about them, and creating forums. Out of that grew a magazine which has fiction that is kind of members of the community are writing that is all canon about this town, and they know all the people who are in it because it's a somewhat small town and just what they're doing. They'll be like, "We need to get rubber? How do we get rubber? Well, we need to write a story about somebody going…" All of these things… It is really… The network around the 1632 books is just fascinating to me.

 

[Howard] Well, that's the thing that I would like to ask, with regard to alternate history and the research that needs to be done, how much of that in the last 10 years have you been able to crowd source? Have you been able to go out to members of the community and…

[Eric] I was crowdsourcing it right from… When I wrote the first book, I talked to Jim Baen and we set up a special conference in Baen Bar's discussion area devoted to that book. I said to people, "I'm going to need help writing this, because all kinds of… The kind of research I have to do is impossible for one people to do." It's like, "What can you do with modern engines?" So a lot of it was technical. The basic rule I followed, with one exception, was that I used the real town of Mannington, West Virginia, as the model for the town of Grantville. The only big exception is I moved the power plant, which, in the real world, exists in another town called Grant town about 15 miles away. I moved it because I really needed a power plant.

[Chuckles]

[Eric] But that's the only thing I cheated on. So the basic rule, that's been true ever since, is if it's in Mannington, you can put it in Grantville, if it's not in Mannington, you can't. That's the rule. People spend a ton of time, believe me, researching what is and isn't in Mannington.

[Brandon] Do people in the actual town know about this?

[Eric] Yeah.

[Brandon] Do they get tired of…

[Chuckles]

[Eric] We haven't been out there in quite a while. The first… Four years now, going back, I don't know, close to 20 years, the fans of the series hold an annual convention. It's being held here this year. WesterCon is hosting it. The first five years we held it in West Virginia. We couldn't hold it in Mannington, because Mannington doesn't have a motel. That's how small a town it is. So we held it in a larger town of Fairmont, population about 30,000. We did that for five years in a row. But at that point… There would always be new people coming every year, but about at least two thirds of the people had gotten to be regulars. They came up to me and said, "You know, Eric, there's only so many times you can visit a town of 3500 people." I mean…

[Laughter]

[Eric] So… Which is fair enough. So what we started doing after that, Conestoga in Tulsa was the first one that did it. We'll go to a convention and ask them if they're willing to host us. What they get is maybe 50 people showing up who wouldn't otherwise show up. We do all the organizing and tracks and everything else. But basically, it means we don't have to organize a convention because somebody else is already done it.

 

[Brandon] So, kind of getting back to how to write alternate history. I'm actually going to pitch this at Dan first. I know you haven't done true alternate history, but you've done cousin genres.

[Dan] I've done secret history.

[Brandon] You've done secret history, you've also done historical fantasy. So, my big question is, how much do you worry about getting the thoughts, mannerisms, and actions of the historical people right when you're writing a story like this? I preface this by saying when I write epic fantasy, I generally am not trying to write… This is my mode… People who acted and thought like people did in the Middle Ages. I get away from this because I'm writing secondary world fantasies, generally with magical technology that would really place people more post-Renaissance and things like that. But really, they're thinking more along… If not contemporary, modern lines for thought processes. How much do you worry about this?

[Eric] Oh, a lot.

[Dan] I actually…

[Eric] Oh, I'm sorry, Dan. Go ahead.

[Brandon] We'll go to Dan first, and then we'll…

[Dan] I love this question, because I actually got into kind of a big ongoing argument with my editor and copy editor on my Cold War book, which, by the time this airs, will already be out. It's called Ghost Station. Straight historical, not alternate or anything. Set in 1961. Part of the plot hinges on the inherent sexism of the era. That there are two different places where people miss obvious clues because they assume that the bad guy is a man. Which is not to say that the bad guy is not a man, but… I'm trying to do this without spoilers. Anyway, that sexism was important. The editor and the copy editor were both trying to impose more modern sensibilities on this. Changing just kind of some of the minor language. In a place where I would say man, they would want to change it to person. Just in a couple of places, saying, "You know, we kind of want to be more sensitive about this." If it was in narrative, I let it slide. If it was ever in dialogue, I'm like, "No. The fact that this person has this attitude, the plot hinges on it. We have to keep that attitude there." So, it does matter. I think if you're using it on purpose to tell a particular story, you want to have those old attitudes and you want to have those older kind of more antiquated personalities. If you're not, then sure, go ahead, because obviously it's a hot button issue, if everyone who worked on the book kept trying to change it.

[Brandon] I know that when I read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, like, the way that she made people feel, I don't know, I'm not an expert in that period, but they felt like they were from the period. It really was a big selling point for the book for me. Eric, do you… How much do you worry about this?

 

[Eric] It's… Oh, you worry about it a lot. I mean, it's kind of at the center of what you do. Because if the book isn't historically plausible, it's not going to work as a story. You have to realize that people in the past do not necessarily think the same way, or behave the same way, they do today. There are various ways that I have found to deal… By the way, the issue may involve, at a purely practical level, is that if your audience is so repelled by your heroes, it's awfully hard to sell a book. To give an ill… Unless it was written 2500 years ago. Then, people will give it a pass. But, to give an instance, the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus, the very first thing he does after Troy, they're sailing down and he says, "Oh, there's a village there." And they stop, rob and plunder it. These are the good guys. Okay? There're two… There are several things you can do. One of them is that if you introduce a time travel element and people from the… Our time, then at least you've got a binocular view of what's happening. So you can be depicting the attitudes of people of the time, but you're also depicting how modern people are looking at it. The other is to pick an historical period… One of the reasons I picked the 30 Years War is that that world was not that different from ours. It was different, but it wasn't like ancient Greece, or Ming China. It wasn't that different. The same was true, even more so, with the series I'm doing set in Jacksonian America. Then what I did was went looking for the right character. I needed a Southern character, an effective political leader, whose attitudes would be at least okay for the modern audience. I was lucky, because such a person actually existed. That was Sam Houston. Sam Houston's attitudes on race were not the same as modern people, but awfully close. He was partly raised by Cherokees, so he's very friendly to Indians. He was asked once by Alexis de Tocqueville what he thought about the capabilities of the different races of North America. He said, "Well, there's no question the Indians are equal to Whites." He said, "Blacks are considered to be childish… Childlike and inferior, but nobody ever gives them a chance to do anything, so how can you really know what they're capable of or not?" That's an attitude that a modern audience, okay, they can go with that. Then, I think the other major character is a Northern Irish radical of the time. He's not exactly got modern attitudes, but they're a lot closer. It's a real issue, though. I mean, because you have to do it in a way that's going to be plausible all the way around. So far, I've been able to put off. But there are some areas of history I would just stay away from.

[Brandon] Right. Probably good advice there.

[Eric] Well, unless I could put a time travel thing in it, but other than that, I'd just stay away from it.

 

[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to thank our audience at SpikeCon.

[Yay. Applause.]

[Brandon] I want to thank Eric. Do you have, by chance, a writing prompt you can give to our audience?

[Eric] A writing prompt?

[Brandon] Yes.

[Eric] When you're… Writing takes a lot of intellectual and emotional energy. It really does. It's hard to get started at the beginning of the day. Wherever that day may be for you. I found two things help. I plot ahead of time. Which I strongly recommend, because one advantage to having a well-developed plot is I don't have to sit down in the morning and say, "Gee, what am I going to write about today?" I can look at the damn plot and say, "Okay. Here's where I am." But the second thing is just write. Write a sentence. Just get a sentence down on paper and keep writing. If it turns out that sentence didn't work out right, you can always scrap it later. But start writing, because once you do that, you've kind of gotten into the story. The story itself will kind of pull you into it. But it really is kind of hard to do it. It's kind of like jumping into a pool of ice cold water. It's like the only way to do it is just do it. That's about… That's what I do every day.

[Brandon] Thanks for the advice. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/11/10/14-45-economics/

 

Key points: Economics in worldbuilding? The science of human behavior between ends and scarce means with alternate uses. Not just money! Time, trade... Incentives and motivation. Remember, everyone doesn't have all the information! Don't spend too much time on value, worry about what people do for a living and why. Fantastic scarce resources make good fantasy books! As writers, ask what makes an interesting extrapolation by changing our culture in some way. Don't just think of currency. Most of the economics of science fiction and fantasy don't work if you look too close. So... handwave, and give the reader a chance to suspend their disbelief. You get one bye, one freebie, and you can earn more by explaining something in detail, by showing you are trustworthy. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 45.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Economics.

[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] This is a really hard one to not be that smart on…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Because there are a lot of very smart economists out there. We have touched on economics a lot in various podcasts in the past. We want to talk about how, as a writer, you consider economics in your worldbuilding, specifically. So, can we… Let's get a kind of a foundation here. What do we mean by this, what do we mean by economics? The more I study economics, the more I realize that economists see everything as economies, which is basically how every discipline is when you really drill into it. I was talking to a friend who studies math. He's like, "Oh, math is really philosophy, which is really the existence of everything, so math is everything." Well, economics is everything.

[Dan] When all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like economics.

[Mahtab] I have a really good definition.

[Brandon] Okay, go.

[Mahtab] By Lionel Charles Robbins, who is a British economist, and this was in the 1930s. But he said… He defined economics as the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternate uses.

[Brandon] That's really good.

[Mahtab] I found that was really good, because if you have alternate uses, that's where the economics comes in.

[Howard] I like that, because when you talk about economy, most people think money. When you say the word money, somebody in the room is going to remember that time is money. Well, time is a scarce resource. The economy of I am going to spend time on a thing so you don't have to spend time on a thing, so you're going to spend time on a thing so I don't have to spend time on it. Then the two of us are going to trade things. Now somehow, we've each gotten more than if we tried to spend all of our time on one thing. That is the whole market of buying things with real money that only exist in video games. Somebody spent 20 hours playing for it, and now they sell it to you. Now you have it without having spent the time.

[Brandon] Because you spent your time doing something at which you are really good, and therefore got paid for that, and spent a fraction of that on someone else's time doing something at which they are very good.

[Dan] I love in your definition, it talks about…

[Mahtab] Not mine, but it's the good one.

[Dan] Whoever. I remember your name and not his. I love that it talks about different resources with alternate uses. Because wood, for example, if the only thing we used wood for was to build a house, then it wouldn't be wood, it would just be house points. You have to accrue enough house points, and then you have a house. But wood can also be used for weapons. Wood can also be lit on fire, make fires and things. So…

[Howard] You burn your house points! What?

[Brandon] It can also be a beautiful thing as a tree that we enjoy.

[Dan] Yeah. [Garbled] preserve the forest. So when you start thinking about not just that I need to accrue enough points to make this thing, but how am I going to spend these points because there's so many different things to spend them on.

[Brandon] I really like, in economics, the study of incentives. Specifically, how human beings are motivated by different things. These points, how different points motivate people in different ways and how we can be motivated by different levels of points in different areas. That is all really interesting to me. I think it plays into storytelling really well, because the economics of how a character value something versus how someone else in the team or an antagonist values that thing is great, ripe for storytelling opportunities.

[Howard] The place where I think worldbuilding falls flat on economics is if you try and make it all logical in ways that all of the players are acting as if they have all of the information. Fundamentally… A great example is the Pentagon paying $1200 for a hammer. Where does a $1200 hammer come from? Well, in part, it can come from the guy who's building the spreadsheet, and he's told, "Look, we're charging $1 million for this thing. Add up all the stuff." He gets to the end, and he's like, "Ugh. I'm $1200 short. But they require everything to be line item. I'm just going to raise the price of a hammer." Okay? It's not a $1200 hammer. It's $1200 of the guy building the spreadsheet not caring and knowing that nobody's going to read this until it's too late. Then they'll be making fun of the Pentagon, instead of the subcontractor.

 

[Brandon] So, as you're building a fantasy or science fiction culture, do you spend time on the economics? Like, the raw economics, the monetary system? How do you decide how much things are worth in your cultures that you are worldbuilding?

[Dan] I don't spend a ton of time on value, so much as figuring out what people do and why. So, like, what do you do for a living? Is it important that this is a community of farmers or of ranchers or of fishermen or of whatever it's going to be. Because then that tells me something economically about the society and about their standard of living and so on. It doesn't matter to me as much how much a meal costs as knowing where their money comes from.

[Brandon] I really like fantastical resources in fantasy books. We're going to do an entire podcast on that in a couple of weeks. I like tying my economics to something that is scarce in a fantasy world that we just don't even have in our world. Because then it lets me start asking these questions about well, how would they value this thing? How would we value this thing if we had it? If someone could actually cast a spell and make something materialize, what does that do to the value of the thing, or the value of the person who can make that thing? Those things, in fantasy, are part of what draws me to fantasy, is that we can ask these questions that can't really be asked in the real world because it's just impossible.

[Howard] A classic example is the Dungeons & Dragons spell, Continual Light, which I think had a thousand gold piece material cost. But… Guys… It's continual light. For a thousand gold pieces, you could make a light that will never go out. We're going to find enough thousand gold pieces that in five or six generations, nobody needs candles. So, by the time we've gotten to this point, yeah, your economy… Your economy is not centering around how do we find light. There may be other things that are scarce, but light isn't one of them.

 

[Brandon] It's easy to kind of make fun of games, sometimes. Because they're building their system to play a game. But you are writers, listeners. So, you… Your job is not to ask what makes a good game. Your job is to ask what's going to make an interesting extrapolation by changing our culture in some interesting way.

[Dan] I was working on a fantasy setting several years ago in which I wanted to have magic essentially just be energy. Like, wizards could channel energy. I realized, as I got deeper and deeper into it, that there was no use for a wizard that outweighed the value of just plugging them into a power station somewhere. Which is a cool story idea on its own, and if that's the direction you want to go, that's awesome. But taking the time to think about these things helps you get a sense of what… Like Howard was saying, what the scarcity really is, what the economy really looks like with this thing you've invented.

[Brandon] There's a famous SMBC [Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal], the web comic, that postulates that the greatest good Superman could do if he really exists would be just to run really fast on a treadmill or push a thing to generate boundless electricity for the world. It takes that to ridiculous lengths. But it does make you think. "Huh. You know, rather than saving people, if Superman were pushing a turbine, it actually would do greater good for the world."

[Howard] I think it was Terry Pratchett who… There was a dwarven artifact which is a pair of rectangular blocks which one of them rotates in relation to the other and you cannot stop them from doing that. So what you do is you fix one end of the block into the mountain and then start building gear step-down systems attached to the other end of the block because you haven't… It's not turning very fast, but nothing can stop it. So all of the dwarven industry around this artifact was centered around how can we build enough gears so that everything is driven by this one miraculous thing. I loved the economy of that. It's… You only have one Superman. Well, how do we build the turbine the most efficiently so one Superman can do enough running?

 

[Brandon] Speaking of Pratchett, you have our book?

[Howard] The book of the week. Making Money by Terry Pratchett. This is the second Moist von Lipshwitz [Lipwig] book. In Going Postal, Lord Vetinari takes our hero, Moist, and puts him in charge of the postal system. Moist manages to turn stamps into a currency. In Making Money, Lord Vetinari approaches Moist and says, "Good job creating a currency. Now I need you to create a currency." And puts him in charge of the Ankh-Morpork mint. It really is a delightful… Pratchett writes social satire. It is not just a satirization of banks and commerce and economy. But it's a satirization of humanity. It's Pratchett at his…

[Brandon] It's brilliant.

[Howard] Pratchett at his best.

[Brandon] My favorite books in the entirety of Discworld are Making Money and Going Postal, so… Can't recommend it enough. They are wonderful.

 

[Brandon] Mahtab, you had something you wanted to add.

[Mahtab] Economics, most people don't… Even in science fiction and fantasy, they don't concentrate too much on it. One, because it's… The jargon that is used for it can be a little bit boring and sometimes intimidating. So most people tend not to. One is because of the fact that it is… in the fantasy genre, people are willing to suspend their disbelief, rather than if it was a nonfiction where you have to get all your rules right. But I found this really interesting essay or article on Medium.com which was between Jo Lindsay Walton, who's the editor of the Economic Science Fiction and Fantasy Database. He had... He's mentioned that as far as economics go, sometimes we only think of hard currency or something that's monetary. But there can be so many other economies that are based on a non-currency medium. So, that's something to think about. And that's a really interesting essay. If anyone wants to read about it and just get some more ideas, it's on Medium.com, The Economics of Science Fiction.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mahtab] Very interesting article.

 

[Brandon] That kind of segues into the next question I wanted to ask, which is, sometimes the economics of science fiction and fantasy just don't make any sense. They really just don't. The one that Howard and I were chatting about before the podcast is the economics of space invasions. A lot of times, if you look at the cost-to-benefit ratio for moving the ships through the galaxy, which is a really big place, the amount of energy expended that it doesn't make any sense. A lot of shipping, intergalactic shipping, just wouldn't make any sense. Most science fiction books and movies just wouldn't work. Fantasy is even worse at this, right? We like to have great vast enormous battles that are very awesome and epic. Yet, the economic system that would have to be in place to feed these forces and make this actually work just… Everything collapses if you start asking the hard questions. So my question for you is how do you approach this in your stories? Where do you handwave, where do you not handwave? How do you do this right so it won't kick people out? How do you maybe do it wrong that you've seen?

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So in my cyberpunk series, Mirador series, I was trying to create the story that I wanted to tell. That had the certain elements that I wanted to tell. That included the conceit that everybody has a computer installed in their head, and that there are drones that can do essentially everything for us. That, economically, falls apart so fast. Especially because I wanted to make sure that this world also included poverty. So how can all of these poor people have this incredible technology unless it is incredibly cheap, at which point then why is anyone poor? Like, there's a lot of things that start to fall apart. I kind of had to do the handwaving, and get to the point where I was able to come up with a couple of excuses. For example, well, people are poor because drones do all the thing, so nobody has jobs anymore, but, on the other hand, energy is essentially free because we have all this incredible solar technology and… Constructing as much of a house of cards as I could. Then saying, "What's that over there? Don't look any closer, because this will fall apart." But I needed to be this way in order to tell the story that is exciting to me to tell.

[Brandon] By its nature, science fiction and fantasy is going to fall apart. Almost all of it. Because we are doing things that can't be done. By definition, that is what leads us to sci-fi fantasy. Barring some of the really intense hard science fictions where they are postulating a few years into the future, things that they think we will do, and then we do. Every fantasy book breaks the laws of thermodynamics, just tosses them out the window. As a writer, my job is to make it so that you don't feel like you have to toss everything out the window when you read the book, that I give you that opportunity to suspend your disbelief. But that also varies very much on genre. A lot of the middle grade books that I'll read… They don't care about that and they don't need to. They shouldn't have to, because the story is not about that.

[Mahtab] The thing is if you got really bogged down with making the economics work, the story would not work. For us as storytellers, the main thing is I have to make the story work. But I have to make sure that the reader believes what I'm saying. Which basically means making sure that they have confidence in me and my writing. So I would do that with some other techniques, and then rely on making sure that they trust me enough to kind of skim past if my economics is not solid. Because…

[Howard] Previously this season, we've talked about the concept of you get one bye. You get one freebie that the audience is just going to let you have. Boy, economics is a great place to spend that.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] One of the tricks for me is the concept of scarcity, which was mentioned in the quote that you gave us earlier, Mahtab. In the Schlock Mercenary universe, it really would be regarded by most people as a post-scarcity economy. Yet, even in post-scarcity, there are things that are scarce. Time is scarce. Locations can only exist once. A unique location is, by definition, scarce. There's only one of it. So in your fantasy setting, in your science fiction setting, no matter what you have being provided for people, if time and real estate are things that still function the way they function for us, you can have poverty, you can have wealth you can have economics. Because those things are going to trade… Change hands in some way.

[Dan] Now, to extend that metaphor a little further of you get one bye, you can earn yourself more byes. By doing what Mahtab was talking about last month, of I'm going to explain this one thing in detail, and then you're going to trust me. Then, that's going to allow me to fudge two or three extra things that I wouldn't have been able to get away with otherwise.

[Brandon] Good writing can earn you a ton of byes. I would agree with that.

[Dan] So there is an economy of economies.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and end this here. Mahtab, you were going to give us a writing prompt?

[Mahtab] Yes. So, just kind of going further on what I mentioned earlier, develop a moneyless economy, where something is paid for without hard currency. It could be gift-based, honor-based, barter-based, but describe how that economy would work and what are the advantages and disadvantages of that economy would be.

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