Writing Excuses 20.19: Cooking as a Writing Metaphor

May. 15th, 2025 03:14 pm
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Writing Excuses 20.19: Cooking as a Writing Metaphor 
 
 
Key Points: Swapping ingredients is creative! Chefs learn from recipes, you can too! Mac & cheese and fanfic. Cooking at home does not mean you are a failed professional chef. Sustenance writing? Meal prepping and writing prep. Creme Brulé. Understand the technique behind the recipe. Things will go wrong. Joyful mistakes! Know what biscuits should be before you make one. Good cooks gotta eat, good writers gotta read.
 
[Season 20, Episode 19]
 
[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 19]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Howard] Cooking as a Writing Metaphor.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Dan] And I'm Dan.
 
[Howard] Hey, you know what I love? I really love to make food for other people. Almost as much as I love eating. But I think all of us kind of love eating. I remember years and years and years ago, we were talking about creativity and how occasionally you'll talk to somone and they're like, "Oh, I'm not creative. I'm just... I can't create to save my life." "Do you cook?" "Well, yeah, of course I cook." "So, if you're cooking a thing and you don't have one of the ingredients you need, what do you do?" "Um, well, I go to the cupboard and I look at what's in the cupboard and I try and find something that'll substitute." "Aha! So what you're saying is you are creative, you just didn't know it yet." And this is one of the ways for me that cooking functions as a metaphor. At a very high level, it's an acid test for whether or not you really can be creative. At a much lower level, boy, there's a lot going on. There is so much going on. There is… I'm sure we are all familiar with the phrase necessity is the mother of invention. Recently, Sandra has had some dietary needs, some dietary requirements, and I've discovered that mayonnaise works instead of butter. How did I discover that? By doing all kinds of reading and research, and it's the same sort of thing that you do when you're writing. And so, in this episode, we're going to talk about cooking as a metaphor for us as writers for writing, and I think this is going to make all of us hungry.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It's true. One of the things that I want to say is that… You were saying everybody cooks. I'm like, actually, that's not true. There are a lot of people who don't cook. Or who think that they don't cook. But when we're talking about cooking, when we're talking about creativity, there's this whole range, like, if you have selected a frozen dinner and you stick it in the microwave, that is actually cooking. It doesn't mean always that you have to start from scratch. Like, sometimes you're cooking and you are cooking using somebody else's kitchen, sometimes you're cooking using somebody else's ingredients, sometimes you are like, I'm just not in the mood. And there's still ways to be creative within that. Anytime you're having to make a choice, the choice is the creativity.
[DongWon] Well, and… Like, in writing and in reading, there's so many valences we put on certain kinds of things. Like, we look at French cooking. Right? Michelin star French tradition cooking as like so worthy and valuable compared to other traditions. But, I've had as much enjoyment eating at a very fine dining restaurant as I have standing at a counter in a gas station eating a taco. And the way you enjoy things… And a box mac & cheese at the exact right moment is one of the finest pleasures in life. Right? So they're different kinds of writing and different kinds of creativity and art that fit different situations. That doesn't mean that the box mac & cheese is inherently worse or less valuable than the 300 dollar tasting menu. I am nourished at the end of both of those. I… Both in body and in spirit. Right? And, I think, think about what you're getting out of the things that you're making, rather than how the world would put a price tag on the thing that you're making.
 
[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. And also know that, like, there are… That those degrees of interest and degrees of skill, and that skills are things you can acquire. That the, for me, the thing at the core of this, when we're talking about cooking, is nourishing… Although there's some really good stuff that's not particularly nourishing, like, give me a delicious s'more. Like, if that's, like, a toasted marshmallow? Oh, my God.
[Howard] Burnt sugar and air.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So good.
[DongWon] There's a lot of different kinds of nourishing.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Right? There's body, there's emotion, this spirit, there's all these different things. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yes. This is absolutely true. But if you're looking at something and thinking, oh, I can't do that because I don't have those skills. The top chefs did not have those skills either when they started.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] They learned them.
[DongWon] And you learn from recipes. Right? You learn from starting to read recipes from a book that explains the basics. For me, that was The America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. I know a lot of people sort of of my generation learn to cook from that book where it just goes through, here's the core techniques, here's how to break down a chicken, here's how to heat up a pan, here's, like, all the very basic techniques that let you learn the different components of what a dish is, what a recipe is.
 
[Howard] It… I hadn't thought about this before, but boxed mac & cheese may be kind of like fanfic. In that you start with something where you know exactly what it's be… You've seen it a thousand times, you know exactly what's in it. But you make the boxed mac & cheese and then you reach for the Panko breadcrumbs and the bacon bits and you put them in on top and now you've done slash fic.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] You've done your own take on Kraft mac & cheese or whatever. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Because at some point, at some point in your cooking journey, you realize, hey, you know what? I… What if I actually use real cheese instead of this powdered stuff, and a mixture of milk and butter? How do I get to that point? That might be interesting. I'm going to try that. As a writer, boy, what if I build my own fantasy universe instead of using Gray Hawk, instead of using Dungeons & Dragons?
[Dan] So, one of the things to remember about this is… Nobody looks at the home chef and says, "Aw, it's too bad you're a failed professional chef."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes.
[Haha!]
[Dan] Right? Like, just because you cook at home doesn't mean that you have professional aspirations, or that you need professional aspirations. And writing can be the same thing. It's something that we do because we love. Even if your goal is to eventually make money with it, you start because you love it. And it is a thing that brings you joy. And, so making sure that you know kind of what your goals are as a writer can help you deal with those thoughts of inadequacy or criticisms coming from outside. Somebody finds out that you're a writer, they'll immediately ask, "Oh, have you published anywhere? Have you sold anything?" Shut up. That's beside the point.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] That might be our goal, but that's not why we're doing it.
 
[DongWon] Yeah. And one of the distinctions I think about when thinking about what the difference is between… Not the home chef and a professional chef, but what I think of as sustenance cooking versus cooking for joy. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] The… I resent sustenance cooking. When I have to make myself lunch in the middle of a work day, or it's seven o'clock on a Wednesday night and I'm starving and I need to prepare what to eat, like… I'm furious at the idea that I need to, like, stop and cook.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Right? That's sustenance cooking. Versus cooking a meal with… For somebody you love or for yourself or whatever it is. And the difference, to me, is intention. Right? When you approach what you're doing with intention, that changes… That changes from the emergency I need to feed somebody box mac & cheese to the I'm going to build a sauce for this mac & cheese. I'm going to add the breadcrumbs. I'm going to do more with it. So, even if it is fanfic that you're doing, when you're approaching that fanfic with the kind of intention about what you're trying to accomplish and what effect you want to have on your audience, that, I think, is transformative and brings a different level into it.
[Howard] Okay. Pop quiz. What is sustenance writing? I'm going to say email.
[Laughter]
[DongWon] I was going to…
[Howard] I'm going to say email.
[DongWon] I think journaling can be sustenance writing. I think email. But I do think there… There's a lot of kinds of writing… I think a lot of writing… The kind of writing you would do for fanfic, the kind of writing you do just as tests to see if something works. Right? I think there's a lot of times people are sitting down and forcing themselves to write. They're like, I have to get a thousand words out today. Right? Otherwise I can't call myself a writer if I'm not doing that. I think writing when it comes from obligation as opposed to a pull towards craft and attention… And that's not me saying that writing… That kind of sustenance writing isn't important.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] It's hugely important and valuable. And learning how to do that's import… In the same way that me learning to feed myself, even though I resent it, is also important.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, but also, like, learning to feed yourself in ways that you don't resent…
[DongWon] Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] Learning to do sustenance writing in ways that you don't resent. Like, I… One of the things that I often find is that I have something that's prepackaged, that's available. So, for my emails, I have templates, often. These are things that you can do. And also, for me, when I'm writing… Like, when I need to make progress on a project, sometimes I have to do sustenance writing on that, where it's like, I just have to make forward progress. And if I break it down into small chunks that… It's like meal prepping. Where I'm like, I know that tomorrow I'm going to be able to do actual, like, prose writing, but today I can do my meal prepping, I can set all of my ingredients up, I can make a bullet list of these of the things that I need to do. And often, when you do that prep… When you walk into the kitchen, it's like, oh! As a complete accident, we have… I've got… It turns out that I don't actually love shopping for groceries, and doing the menu planning. But I really enjoy cooking. My husband is often… He's doing some volunteer work that's 20 minutes away. And so he will let me know, I'm on my way home. And it's not a predictable time. So what I've been doing is, I've been doing all of the sous chef work, all of the prep work, and then I get that 20 minute notice, and I walk back into the kitchen and I cook. And I'm finding that that is actually starting to influence the way I'm writing, too. That I will do some prep work, and I'll take a little bit of a break, and then I'll come back and it's like, oh, look at this gift that I've given to my future self.
[DongWon] This is me spending a day and making stock…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Kimchee for the month. Whatever it is.
[Dan] Yeah. There's this… I love this idea, and it's reminding me of the cooking thing that I'm going to horribly mispronounce, because it's French. Maison plase? [Maison plais?] The idea there is that you prep all your ingredients in advance. That you pre-chopped everything, that you premeasured everything. So that when it's time to cook, you just have them close at hand. And I'm realizing as I listened to everyone talk, that that's how I use outlining. That if I have my outline, and I am an extensive outliner… I outline scene by scene. And so when it is time to write the next thing, I can open that outline and look at it and I know who's in this scene and what it is supposed to accomplish and what is supposed to happen and blah blah blah. Which is just like having everything pre-chopped and I can just pick it up and throw it in a pan.
[Mary Robinette] And it doesn't have to be outlining. You can also, if you're a discovery writer, you can also bank sensory details. So that you've got those ready at hand. So what does this room look like? I will often use C. L. Polk's five four three two one technique. Where I just write down, okay, what are the five things that are visible in this room? What are four things that I can hear? And I'll just go through those… All five senses so that they're banked, so when I sit down, I've already thought about that. Even if I'm doing some discovery writing.
[Howard] We're going to take a quick break. And after the break, I'm going to argue with someone who's been dead for 150 years.
 
[Howard] All right. In the nineteenth century, French chef Antonin Careme famously declared that there are five mother sauces. Espagnole, veloute, bechamel, tomate, and hollandaise. And I looked at those when I learned this and realized four of those are thickened with a roux, which is butter and flour. And one of them is a water and oil emulsion. Dude, there are only two mother sauces.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] There are only two, because four of them are exactly the same thing, all you're changing is the flavor. I bring this up because this only ever happens in cooking. I've never had writers argue about what kinds of forms there are for writing, or anything.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, you are not hanging out with the right writers. That's all I have to say. There are only three stories.
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] It's only Man meets man, man… It's like…
[DongWon] There's only The Heroes Journey, there's only Save the Cat, there's only…
[Howard] Yes. The one I heard was there's only two stories. Somebody… Stranger comes to town and somebody goes on a trip. And I'm like, those of the same story, it's just the point of view.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's only one story!
[Howard] The point here is that I love structure, I love formula. And the first thing that happens when I look at a formula or a structure is I begin asking it… I begin trying to break it. I wrap it around things it shouldn't be wrapped around, I play with taxonomy. I love this. Does it result in good cooking? Eh… Maybe. Sometimes. Does it result in good writing? It can. What are the things where you've done this? Where you've taken a form and you've said, well, this form is interesting, but it really doesn't mean what I think… What everybody says it means. I'm going to do something else with it.
[Mary Robinette] Um... [Kaily.]
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But it is… I think that is the heart of this, is that we'll hear a writer say, "Oh, I don't want to do anything formulaic." And the difference between formula and formulaic is very interesting. So I tend to think of writing as recipes. And when I am doing recipes, I always wind up swapping something, because, you know what, I just want a little bit more of this, or a little bit more of that. And when I'm writing, also, it's like, the number of times that I have secretly done a retelling of something and I just haven't told anyone that it's a retelling… And I haven't asked… I've like filed the serial numbers off really hard. No one's noticed. No one's noticed, but I'm using somebody else's recipe. This is… Like… There are… You go to a restaurant and you order the cream Brulé, and there's a whole bunch of… Like, boy, that is a very simple dessert that you can really mess up. But that's something… That's a recipe that someone invented, and it has become a genre.
[Howard] Someone whose first question was, can I use this blowtorch in the kitchen?
[Laughter]
[DongWon] The answer is yes.
[Howard] Yes, you can.
[DongWon] [garbled] fire.
[Mary Robinette] I had a Parmesan cream Brulé with a spicy red pepper jelly on top of the Brulé part is an appetizer that was transcendent. And that was someone going what if… What if I take this well-known thing and swap some stuff out?
 
[DongWon] Because, I think, getting to sort of the core of what you're talking about, and the core of what Howard's talking about in terms of, like, yes, there are the mother sauces, yes, it's important… Blah blah blah blah blah. But what matters more is that there's technique behind each of the mother sauces. Right? And I've read so many cookbooks that have been completely transformative to my practice, that have been so useful. The one that I think made more of an impact than any other is a book called Ratio by Michael Ruhlman. And Ratio, it's a very slim book, and it's just teaching you not to think in terms of recipe, but giving you the logic of why recipes are structured the way that they are. The ratios that go into thinking about food, into thinking about drink, and to thinking about… I mean, Samin Nograt's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is getting out this in a different way. Right? Those are the four elements of any dish. Salt, fat, acid, and heat. How are you applying them, that's going to make things delicious. Right? And so, think about ratio, think about elemental ingredients, and you'll see the logic behind the recipe. And then, any recipe you run into, you could figure it out. Right? Any book you want to write, if you understand the ratios, if you understand the core elements, you can write a mystery, you can write a space opera, you can write a romance, you can do whatever story you're trying to accomplish.
[Dan] I am trying to imagine… We're recording several episodes today. This one is coming before lunch.
[Laughter]
[Dan] And I am trying to imagine what this episode would be like if we recorded it after lunch. When we were full, and we didn't want to think about food anymore. We wouldn't get this enticing description of cream Brulé.
[DongWon] Dan, you're underestimating our ability to get hungry thinking about food.
[Laughter]
[Dan] And writing is a lot like that. And I think a lot of it, a lot of the time… Writer's block, for example, comes down to that same idea of I am full right now. There are words in my brain, I have already written some of them, and I'm just not feeling it anymore. And that's okay. Sometimes it is time to get up and take a walk and digest a little bit.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and…
[Dan] Because that is going to help you feel excited about writing again.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, and sometimes the reason that you are not interested in cooking or food is because you're ill. And you need to take time to rest. And it's okay. And we don't… We so often have that write every day. And it's like if you don't cook every day… No. You absolutely don't have to cook every day.
[DongWon] If you're feeling uninspired, go out to eat. Go to a nice restaurant. Go to a place you've never been before. Try a new cuisine. Try a new dish that you've never tried before. And that'll help inspire you. You've got to put in the tank to get stuff out.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things I just want to quickly hop back to when we were talking about the salt, fat, acid, heat, is that this is something that I have been thinking about more and more over the last year is thinking about the why. So, like, I tend to sit down and talk to you about what a mystery structure is. But why does it work? When we talk about the long night of the soul, or in a heist structure, the false… The all is lost moment. But that's the plot twist where, oh, this was the secret plan all along. And I think it's because there's a contrast. And so when I see people who are playing with the recipe, and they swap an ingredient out, but they don't understand what that ingredient does. That's, I think, when you get the fiction that feels lifeless or formulaic. Because they aren't swapping it with intention, they're just swapping it to swap. They're just swapping it to do something different.
[Howard] That's… Gary Larson of The Far Side perfectly described that contrast element in cooking when the polar bears are sitting outside the igloo and one of them says, "Man, I love these things. Cold and crunchy on the outside, and soft and warm in the middle.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Anyway. But, yeah, that… If you don't know why these things are there, then when you make the substitution, it's a roll of the dice.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] You're going to make the wrong sub.
[Dan] Okay. So this is bringing your metaphor back around to a place where the puppetry metaphor also got two. Which is the idea that execution is a vital part of this. That any recipe that you follow is going to be uniquely yours because you are the one who made it. Just like when we were talking about the mother sauces, and the idea that we joked that there's only one story. Something happens to a person. You could reduce all recipes down to somebody eat something. Like, when we get that granular with it, it's not helpful anymore. Whereas, you think about a hamburger, for example. That is a formula. That is a recipe. Although every hamburger that you've had is different from every other hamburger that you've had. You can get very creative with it, you can deconstruct it, you can add different elements to it. But ultimately, it is going to be uniquely yours if you are the one who made that hamburger. And I would rather eat your hamburger than a generic one somewhere else.
[Howard] I would rather eat your hamburger then let you eat it.
[Laughter]
 
[DongWon] Well, when you talk about execution, one thing that comes to mind is I think a very important thing. I cook a lot. I feel like I'm a pretty good cook. I like to cook, I make good food, people enjoy it. The number of times something goes wrong in the kitchen while I'm making a meal… Making a meal I've made a million times before. Last time I roasted a chicken and a number of small things just went slightly off the rails. Right? I was like, oh, I don't have the soil. I was making the cocktails, I was like, oh, I don't have lines. You know what I mean? And it's just like things inevitably go wrong. In terms of it could be as dire as you burn yourself, you cut yourself. It could be as minor as this is the wrong kind of onion. Right? And how you respond to that, and how you move through that, I think, is what defines a great cook from somebody who's struggling. Right? And when I see people… I've been to people's houses and they're struggling with the food is not at the level that they wished it would be, it's because they don't know how to respond to a setback. They let the setback overwhelm them and don't understand how to improvise, how to move, how to replace, because they don't know the core elements that were talking about. They don't know the ratios, they don't know the broader elements. So the reason we're talking about all these things is when you're writing, something is going to go wrong.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Right? You will get derailed in your process, a character arc is not going to work the way you want it to, an emotional beat's not going to land, an action scene won't land. How do you move past that? How do you fix that?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And I think, for me, when I have that, I try to look for the opportunities, I try to look for… Going back to puppetry, there's a thing about the joyful mistake. Croissant… Some dude forgot to put butter in when he was making… It's like puff pastry exists because somebody was like, oh, no, I forgot to add butter at the right time, and had to fold it in later to compensate. And now we have this joyful, joyful thing. So when you… When something isn't working, you can step back to what was I aiming for, what were my goals, how do I accomplish that anyway? And then it winds up being a joyful mistake that brings… Because of your response to it, because you brought your own choices to it, you wind up with something that is different than everyone else is making.
[Howard] It was a chemist at 3M who was trying to come up with a new adhesive and came up with an adhesive that really only barely worked. And that's why we have Post-it notes. This is one of the reasons why writing is so much better than cooking. Your joyful mistake may not be right for this book. But you can put it in your trunk and it will literally keep for decades.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The puff pastry is not going to last that long.
[DongWon] It freezes pretty well.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[DongWon] One thing I want to tag onto this is to return to the cream Brulé for a moment. One of the best cream Brulé's I ever had was at a Japanese restaurant which did a black sesame cream Brulé. Incredibly delicious. Combining a traditional East Asian ingredient with French technique and style and riffing on this sort of thing. When you're cooking, you're going to be pulling from lots of different traditions. You're pulling a technique… I make a lot of Korean food. I frequently pull in what would be a French technique into making a Korean dish in terms of sautéing the onions a certain way before hand or whatever, whereas Korean cooks would just toss them in. Right? And it's not that one's better or worse, it's just I put a spin on it by combining these different traditions. But it's also very important to understand why a food… To understand what the dish you're trying to make tastes like for the people who originated it. Right? I lived in Portland, Oregon for a few years, and that is a town that loves to make a biscuit. I also feel like that is a town that learn to make a biscuit by calling a friend who visited the South once and they described it to them over the phone.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Some of the worst biscuits I've ever had in my life. They are…
[Mary Robinette] Listen…
[DongWon] Tough.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You and I, both Southerners… I also lived in Portland, Oregon, and every time that people would be like, you should go to this place, their biscuits, they're Southern biscuits. I'm like, these are not biscuits.
[DongWon] They are so committed to the worst biscuits I've ever had. But the thing is, what I feel in so many cases is, they haven't had enough of the original thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] They don't know what it's supposed to taste like, so they're trying to re-create it. And when it comes to tradition, and when it comes to writing, when you're pulling in elements from other cultures, when you're pulling in structure from another culture, there is an obligation, I think, you have to understand what the origin thing was. You're not trying to replicate it. But if you want to pull elements from it, you need to at least have a facility and be able to recognize what the thing was.
[Howard] What you're saying, if I can distill this all the way down to the roux, is good cooks gotta eat, good writers gotta read.
[DongWon] Absolutely.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] I think that might be the point where we do the homework.
 
[Howard] All right. Listen, this whole episode has been about giving you a metaphor for helping you to understand the way you write. The tools that are in front of you. If we've done this correctly, every time you sit down to cook or to eat, part of your brain will also be writing. Because we are terrible people and we may have just done that to you.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And I'm going to double down on that. Make a list of your top three comfort foods. Top three. Then make a list of your top three comfort reads. These can be specific books, or they can be styles of books. Now, map them, one to one, on to each other. As logically, as rationally, as deliciously as possible.
 
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 20.06: Lens 2 - Identity 1 - History & Community

Feb. 12th, 2025 04:49 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 20.06: Lens 2 - Identity 1 - History & Community
 
 
Key points: The lens of who, by history and community. How much do you need to know about their background before the story to tell it effectively? I discover as I go, and then layer it in for continuity. Backfill! Beware the statement without narrative weight, without effect on the character. Consistency! History and identity and community are opportunities, not burdens. Make your identity verb-based. Where are they on axes of power? What stakes are driving the plot? What are their idioms? How does the character relate to their communities? Can anybody solve the plot problem, or does the character solve it because of who they are? Use pieces to imply a larger community or world. Make sure they have enough context. Build your net, drop something into it, and then tell us about the three or four threads that caught it. 
 
[Season 20, Episode 06]
 
[Howard] Writing doesn't have to be a solitary activity. That's why we host in-person retreats and workshops. At the Writing Excuses retreats, you'll get access to classes, one-on-one office hours, critique sessions, and activities to keep you inspired and motivated. Become a more engaging storyteller and learn how to navigate the publishing landscape. As you make meaningful progress on your stories, you'll also build connections with your fellow writers that will last for years to come. Check out our upcoming events at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 20, Episode 06]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Erin] History and community.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Erin] Today, we are going to continue our discussion of the lens of who by talking about what your character brings with them from who they are. Their identity, at its core, the communities that they come up in. Like, how much do you need to know… Question for the group… About who your character was before they entered the story in order to tell it effectively?
[Mary Robinette] I find that I often don't know the answer to that when I start writing, but sometimes, I will be writing and will discover a thing later as I go. But then I have to go back and layer into the early part of the story before I have made that discovery in order to have my character make sense and have them have continuity. In a beautiful, perfect world, I will have sat down and I will have figured out how old they are and how many siblings there are. But a lot of times, especially when I'm doing short fiction, I just… I just start writing.
[DongWon] You can backfill all that information in as you go. I think, in a lot of ways, like you're saying, it's not that you have to have prewritten the document ahead of time, though knowing that here's the town they grew up in or whatever. But be prepared that when something comes up, to find the answer in that moment, and give them that context that they're missing. Right?
 
[Erin] I actually think that layering and backfilling that you're talking about are actually the key things that I really want to talk about in this episode. Which is, how do the ident… Like, how does the lens of identity and community… How does that lay on the story? The reason I mentioned it that way is because sometimes I'll read people's work and they will have a fact about their character, they grew up in this neighborhood or they suffered through… They're an orphan and they grew up eating from a trashcan on the streets. As people do in fantasy worlds often. And it's like, I hear that. Then, when I read the story, if you had never told me that about the character…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] I would never know it. It doesn't feel like it has any actual narrative weight. So how do we give the identity of our characters narrative weight in the story?
[Mary Robinette] I think it is a lot of the… It winds up affecting the choices that you make. For instance, if I am… If I have to walk down a dark street at night, I am going to make different choices than a six-foot white guy who lifts. I will be evaluating things extremely differently. So, for me, this gets into something that we'll be talking about later, it gets into some of the reactions that the character makes, and also the language that they use to describe things, the internal reactions that they have. All of those things are informed by their history, their experiences.
[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, as we're talking about this, I can't stop thinking about a meme that already feels dated, and by the time this comes out, will feel truly fossilized. But the whole, like, you didn't just fall out of a coconut tree yesterday. Right? You exist in the context of all that came before. Right? Like, the thing is, is when a character feels like they fell out of a tree yesterday, that's when it feels like a failure state. Right?
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon], like, you're saying, like, you can say the detail out loud of, like, oh they grew up on the street. But then they walk into a restaurant and, like, order all the food and, like, feel like so comfortable in that. It's like a diff… It's like is that really a character who just came off the street? Right? Or, like, what is the context that led to that? So, it's not that you have to prewrite all of the context before, but you do need the consistency of it. Like, when you introduce something, you need to make sure that that feels felt in the choices, in the wor… And how you're describing it, and how they speak and what they do.
 
[Howard] This is a microscale version of the game that I'm always playing with the macro of worldbuilding. Where I have to look at the implications of the thing that I've put in my world. If this character is someone who grew up during the Great Depression, or lived through the Great Depression, they have behaviors that don't make sense to me. Lot of hoarding of things that don't necessarily need to be hoarded is something that you'd find from that generation. So I'm always asking myself, are there implications that I need to examine of whatever this back story is. Sometimes I invert it. I have the character do a thing, and then I ask myself, this is an implication… This was implied by something in their back story that I don't know yet. What is that thing? Should I write that thing now, or should I just put a pin in it? Maybe have another character put a pin in it for me? Hey, why are you hoarding Mason jars? Why are you keeping Mason jars? And nobody answers the question. But now my readers aren't going to pester me about it. Because another character asked the question, and now we know that it's obviously justified, because someone else wondered why it was there.
[Mary Robinette] Can I offer a very specific example from something that I wrote where I had to backfill character? So, I have this whole Lady Astronaut series, and it started with a book… A novelette called The Lady Astronaut of Mars. In that, my character Elma, who in the novels is Jewish, is not Jewish. That's not a decision I had made for her. I'm not even certain that she's Southern. I think she probably is. But there's a line in that, in Lady Astronaut of Mars, in which she talks about eating crawfish as a child. Which is not something that most Jewish kids who are observant would do. So when I went back to write Calculating Stars, and I had made the decision to have Elma be Jewish for a number of different structural plot reasons, I had to come up with the back story that would have allowed her to have that experience as a child. That then informed every decision that she made going through the story. And then every subsequent thing. And it… So it is something that I have both discovered, but also that I had to shape the lens through which she was viewing the world in order to have that be a… Make sense and have a consistency for the character. That her family grew up secular, because her father was in the military and they were trying to mask the fact that they were Jewish to outsiders.
 
[DongWon] What I love about this story is… there's a little bit of a language we've been talking about this so far that almost makes it feel like a burden. Like, how do you keep track of it? How do you have this consistency? But what I love about it is the way in which history and identity and community are opportunities. Right? Like, you found a thing and that gave you an opportunity to make the character feel more interesting and nuanced and three-dimensional. Right? There… All of these elements of introducing aspects of the character's context, of their history, of their connection, are storytelling prompts for you to then fill out your role more, to find plot in it. Right? It's what I love about characters in role-playing games is that you don't just say a thing or introduce a thing, then it's suddenly, like, oh, the whole character's descending from this one prompt that… Or turn of phrase that he used or an attitude that they had. Erin, you and I were in a game together recently, and I introduced a character who was extremely cantankerous…
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] And fought with everybody. So then the question kind of became a little bit, why is she like this? Then we developed a whole relationship of, like, oh, she was sibling with your character, and, like, all of these other things. The joy for me is finding that opportunity and letting that be the seed for character, story, conflict, all the things that we want to make the story work.
[Erin] Yeah. I think that, to me, like, identity is such an important thing. It drives a lot of things.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Trying to figure out, like, why a character is the way they are, and all the things that they carry with them, is a huge part of writing for me. I think it's why I love voice so much. I think that one of the… A lot of times, we think of identity as noun based. It's about the things. Like, this person carries this item or eats this food or goes to this place of worship or what have you. But I think that, Mary Robinette, you sort of alluded to this earlier, to me, the interesting thing about identity is identity as a verb. The way you make choices, the way that you, like, take action in a situation is going to be… Hoarding is like, that's the verb. Do you know what I mean? Like, the Mason jar isn't the important thing. It is the collecting, the keeping, fear of things being taken away from you. I think that really thinking about how can we take identity from feeling like a noun, which I think can sometimes make things feel more shallow, like, I added all the right nouns, how come this person doesn't feel like they embody this identity? It's because their verbs haven't been changed.
[DongWon] Yes.
[Erin] Only the nouns have.
[Howard] There's a nineties sitcom… I can't remember the name, I don't think it ran past one season. But it had Jenna Elfman in it. At one point, she is very upset that she's going to this place and she's not going to identify with anybody, she comes from lower income or something, I don't remember. And her brother says, "You'll be fine. Y'all were raised by the same TV." I remember loving that line because in the nineties, we were kind of all raised by the same TV. But that's no longer a thing. That's… There's a different set of com… We weren't all raised by the same YouTube, the same cnn.com. The disparity of pop-culture background or the diversity of it is so significant now that you can't all be raised by the same TV. So I now ask myself often, rather than what are the implications, or what is this… How is this one character different in terms of background, I ask myself how is everyone the same on any point, and why? What is it that they would all have in common? How could they possibly have all that in common?
[Erin] Which is a great time to say that something that all of our episodes have in common is a break. And we'll be right back after it.
 
[Erin] All right. Thinking a little more about identity and community. So we've talked a little bit about what you do with it, but how do you, and I feel like I've said this in earlier episodes, how do you actually figure out, like, what your character's identity should be? You talked about making a character Jewish for specific story reasons. Is it, like, when we're picking the identity of the community of our characters, what are the things that we should be looking out for so that we can find those opportunities to make our stories richer?
[Mary Robinette] I have talked about this in previous episodes, the wonderful book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? This introduced me to the ax… The idea of axes of power. Which is why when I needed with Elma, I made her Jewish, was that I tried to think about where my character sits in axes of power. Where do they have power, where do they not have power? I try to make sure that all of my characters have at least two areas where they do not feel like they have power, where they feel subordinate in the larger society. Because that introduces vulnerability, but it also often introduces some of their strengths, some of the ways that they defined themselves. So that was one of the reasons that I did that with Elma, was that in Lady Astronaut of Mars, she's older, she's a caretaker. Both of those are sliders on that axes of power that are farther down. But when I move all of the way back to Calculating Stars, she's young, she's beautiful, she's smart. And I didn't have enough sliders that were lower on the power structure, and it was 1952. So I made that choice. But, for me, that's what I start looking for, is where do they feel like they are lacking in power and where do they have power that they are unaware of.
[DongWon] I love axes of power as a framework here. I think kind of ties into how I think about it. Which is about stakes. Right? When you have a character… Plot derives from character in my mind, because of stakes, because of a character's… How they relate to other characters, how they feel about them, how they feel about themselves. Right? So when you're looking at what stakes do I want this character to have, what relationships are at risk by choices that they make, or what pressures are put on them by the world that puts these relationships at stake? That leads you to the point where you're now asking questions about history and community. Right? Who are they connected to, what history do they have with that person, and why is that relevant for the story I'm trying to tell? Right? You get to plot by developing these stakes. But as you're asking questions of what is this book about, why am I writing this book? I think that's when you get to that layering in these pieces of history and identity and a sense of self.
[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that… When we were talking about community, one of the other things that I have begun using as a shorthand since we did the space economy camp is thinking about the idioms that they grew up with. Because those shape the opinions that we have. They are parts that we don't… We often don't interrogate because it's like, well, everybody says, no such thing as a free lunch. But that's extremely different if you grew up with that as your truism, that's extremely different than somebody who grows up with their core idiom, their core truism, as a rising tide raises all boats. Like, those are two different ways of interacting with community. So I will often think about how the community defines that. Where the community sits with that. Like, if my character embraces that or if they push against it.
[Erin] One thing I really like to think about axes of power is who's aware of them. So, one of the biggest things that, like… There are many definitions of privilege, but one of the definitions is the ability to ignore the axes of power, because you're really high on it.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] So why do you care. Because I always think about… I know the book you're talking about, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? I remember talking to friends, black friends, about it at the time, being, like, well, why isn't it called Why Do All the White Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria, because they do too. So, but it's, like, no one ever asks that question because there's a… An idea that that's a default.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] Like, that… Why wouldn't they? That's… They're just… That's just Jimmy hanging out with Jen versus, like, if I'm hanging out with somebody, then that is… Something is wrong there, something is off. So being able to recognize the axes of power and what your relationship is to them. Do you understand where you are in the world? Like, do you understand the axes of power that you're on, or is it one that you either can ignore or that you're in denial about? Like, what is the relationship? I also think it's interesting to think about, like… I love relationships between individuals and structures.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Erin] You know what I mean? So it's, like, you and an axis of power, or you and community. Are you someone feeling, like, you're in the midst of your community? Well embraced by them? Do you feel on the outskirts of one community, but the in in another community that you think is very core to who you are is also one that you feel at odds with, that's a very different character than one who comes from the exact same community but who feels like they are the absolute, like… I am that community. We view things exactly the same way, we use the same idioms, we do the same things. So I think thinking about how your character relates, not just to other people, but two other structures, is a really fun way of looking at it.
[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] One piece that I want to come back to is the idea of these lenses as a way to examine… Or a way the audience experiences the story. We're talking about who these characters are, what their history, their tradition, their influences, so on and so forth. Sometimes I'll have to ask myself whether the plot, mcguffin, action, the whatever it is that needs to happen to resolve things, could that have been done by anyone? Or can it only be done by someone who comes from this tradition? Because those are actually two very different stories. I like the story where anybody could have solved the problem, if they brought tools to bear and tried to solve the problem. But this character solved the problem in this way because of who they were. And that… For me, those are the stories that feel the most real. Those are the stories when I read them, I feel like I could have been that person. I'm experiencing the story as if I were there.
 
[Mary Robinette] You're making me think of something, just tying it back to something that Erin was saying, which is that you're using the tools that you have available, because of the experiences that you have. One of the things that I enjoy doing is thinking about this community, this connection. When you're looking at how to bring that to life on… For the character on the page for the reader, I often think about the pieces of the community that imply larger pieces of the community. That if you say, oh, yeah, I had to do that on my Naming Day. It's like that suddenly implies this whole… That there's a whole thing about Naming Days. That then implies this bigger ripple, especially if your character's like, oh, oh, my God, I had to do that on my Naming Day, my parents made me. It's like, okay, so there's a difference. It's implying these levels of… That there's more than one way to view the thing, there's more… That then implies that there's multiple groups within a larger group. Which I think is fun. I love that, but I also think that only works… You can't do it with something that is existing in isolation. Like, you can't just say, "Oh, yes. Oh, Naming Day, we all do this." It's gotta be tied to the emotions of the character. It's the connections.
[DongWon] I mean, this to me is like the flaw of, like, a certain type of dystopian YA. Right? Like, that was way popular, was it was so focused on just, like, the one thing that was different and existed in isolation and just didn't feel like there was other connections to that. Right? There wasn't further context. So when a character came from a place or had an identity or any of those things, it felt very reductive in a certain way. Right? Like. So without the further context and complexity, it didn't feel rich enough. Right? I think the ones that succeed very well, something like Hunger Games, does a great job of pulling in those other details, pulling in those other contexts around the central thing, and then ones that, I think, did not do as well were ones that failed to ask the further questions, failed to look at intersecting axes of power, failed to look at the ways in which this event connects to all these other events that happened in a person's life. Right?
[Erin] I think that's what makes it work when somebody uses a tool in an unexpected way.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] If there have been all these connections, you understand how they got there, and how something that character A sees as an oh, my gosh, an obvious tool I can use, character B would never recognize as a tool at all. Do you know what I mean? I love that type of thing where one character's like, yes, it is… The answer is so obvious, and another character is like, I don't even understand the question.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Yep.
[Erin] And that is like such a beautiful moment of character, because even if we don't understand that culture, that identity, that context, we do understand that there are things that we know that others don't and things that we don't understand that others live in.
 
[Howard] When you look at these connections between characters and society and traditions and economies and po… There's this enormous network of things which as a writer, you can become very very oppressed by. Because drawing a matrix in which you have defined every point and drawn every line is nightmarishly difficult. The tool that I use… You treat that matrix as a net. Drop something onto the net. Where did it hit? You only need to define the threads where it landed. Those are what caught it. By defining those threads, those three or four threads, you have now implied the existence of the entire net, and the reader will believe in the entire net. Now you have to describe those three things well. You have to describe them in ways that make sense for the character, that imply the actual history of the character. But you only need three or four things to get us to believe that that whole web of your society, of your world, of your universe, from those three pounds of wet stuff between your ears, that whole universe you've created, we can believe it's real. You just gotta give us three threads.
[DongWon] I think about it as a GM, I think about it in terms of [paduke?] the game of go, where you are not defining all the connections between all the things. But what you will do when you're playing go is, as a strategic move, you'll put a piece out at a distant part of the board from which you are right now, and it's communicating I'm interested in that. I'm going to be making moves around that in the future. Hey, opponent, just so you know, we're going to be fighting about that in the future, so whatever's happening here, think about that, too. So, when it comes to worldbuilding a lot of times, I will just make a lot of stub documents with nothing in them, just a title of like this culture, food here, geography over there. I won't fill those in until they become relevant, and as things start becoming relevant, then I'll go and, like, okay, I need to think about this now because my characters are going over there now.
[Howard] Gotta tie this thread off.
[DongWon] Exactly. So, like the net you that you're talking about, you have this disparate web, but don't lose your mind trying to fill in all those details.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Take big swings when your character does interact with something. Define broad things. Reach for whatever their cultural contexts are and use those to keep building as they connect.
[Erin] To come back to something we talked about at the very beginning about weight, I think weight can often sound like a burden, but, to me, when you talk about building a net, it's making people feel like your worldbuilding has enough weight to catch the story.
[DongWon] Yeah.
 
[Erin] With that in mind, we're going to go to the homework. Which is to identify something from your character's life from before the story begins. Identify… Especially if it's something, a community, an identity, some way that they interact with the broader world. Write a scene in which that element of the character weighs heavily on the scene but is never explicitly mentioned.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 19.01: Interview with Abraham Verghese

Jan. 12th, 2024 04:00 pm
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Writing Excuses 19.01: Interview with Abraham Verghese
 
 
Key Points: Verisimilitude, feeling of reality, and conveying medical information. Readers have seen it all, but you can tell them what's important. Revision, it's easier to take words out then add missing details. Beware circuitous information, make sure it serves a purpose. How did you organize time passing and generations? Well, really I didn't know before I started. I did use a spreadsheet, characters, etc. New chapters allow you to sail through time. Gardening, finding your way through a novel. We all know, "I'm just muddling through..." 
 
[Season 19, Episode 01]
 
[Mary Robinette] This year, my family will be having our 67th annual Christmas Eve dinner. It's a menu passed down from my grandmother through my mom to me. The entire family shows up. I'm talking 4th cousins once removed. This is not an exaggeration. Which means that during the lead up, I don't have time to menu plan or cook anything else. That's when I turn to prepared meals like Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. Factor can help you eat well for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. It allows me to save time and not eat garbage, while tackling all my holiday to-do's. So if you want to cross meal prepping off your list this holiday season, consider Factor. You can skip the meal planning, grocery shopping, chopping, prepping, and cleaning up, and get Factor's fresh, never-frozen meals delivered to your door. They're ready in just 2 minutes, which my dad says is the appropriate amount of time to cook a meal. He has no idea. The point is, all you have to do is heat and enjoy. If you're trying to squeeze writing into the holiday press, it might be useful to know that Factor is not just for dinner. Count on extra convenience anytime of the day with an assortment of 55 plus add-ons to suit various preferences and tastes, so you can carve out some writing time in the morning by choosing quick breakfast items, lunch to go, grab and go snacks, or ready to eat coldpressed juices, shakes, and smoothies. So, head to factormeals.com/WX50 and use code WX50 to get 50% off. That's code wx50 at factormeals.com/WX50 to get 50% off.
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 01]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Interview with Abraham Verghese.
[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] I'm Howard
 
[Mary Robinette] We are joined today for our first episode of the new year with our special guest, Abraham Verghese. Thank you so much for joining us.
[Abraham] Pleasure to be here. Thank you.
[Mary Robinette] I have been reading your novel, The Covenant of Water, and, of course, have read your bio. But I was wondering if you could just quickly introduce yourself to our listeners.
[Abraham] Sure. First of all, I should say that I wish you guys had been around when I was starting out writing. It would have been very helpful. I'm Abraham Verghese. I live in California. I'm the author of The Covenant of Water and 3 other books. One other novel, which was called Cutting for Stone. 2 works of nonfiction, My Own Country, and The Tennis Partner. My day job is I work as a physician at Stanford University. Yeah, that's me.
[Mary Robinette] That's amazing. I just want to say how much I really have been enjoying The Covenant of Water. There's such a richness to the language and verisimilitude. So what we're going to be talking about with you, which is something I'm very excited about, is how to kind of create that verisimilitude and also how to convey technical information like medical information in a way that is engaging to the reader. So, we often talk about this idea of verisimilitude, the feeling that something is real. When writing about medicine in particular, what have you found makes it feel real for the reader? Since you write both fiction and nonfiction, do you find that changes between the 2?
[Abraham] Well, I think when I'm describing something medical, there probably isn't a lot of difference between the way I might do it in fiction or nonfiction, other than the fact that I'm making things up in terms of outcomes and so on. But I think that, in a way, I think it's a challenge because in this day and age, most readers are also television viewers. So there's no part of the medical operation that's not familiar to them. This is not like writing in the days of Somerset Maughan when he wrote about traveling to far islands, it was exciting, because there was no other way readers could visualize those places. So you write about surgery and most viewers have seen surgery on YouTube or… So your challenge is to write about it in a way that's somehow fresh and different from what they think they know about it from having seen the operation or seen the procedure or seen whatever it is you're writing about. Part of that is, even though they may have seen something, they may not have realized what the crucial thing is in that inner scene or what the insider's view is on what really matters in all the different things that we're doing. So, I think… I'm hard-pressed to say more than that. I very often worry that I'm giving too much detail. Clearly, for some readers, it may well be too much detail. For that, I really rely on my editor who often will tell me it's not enough or rarely it's too much. So I think I have a… I'm very conscious of not taxing the reader with more than they need. I'm trying to keep it informative and entertaining. It's a fine balance.
[Howard] I find that when the time comes to rewrite, it is a lot easier to take words out than to put words back in. So, erring on the side of too much information means, oh, all I need to do is remove the wrong ones and I will be left with exactly what I need. Rather than needing to sit down and add a bunch of details that I didn't realize was missing.
 
[Erin] Yeah. I also love what you said about figuring out what matters, and that using that as a way to focus in. I'm curious, like, how do you decide in a certain scene, what is it that matters, like, to you, to the characters, to the readers, in order to focus in like that?
[Abraham] Well, I'm not sure that I have a blanket rule about that. But, for example, when I was describing a particularly hazardous labor scene in The Covenant of Water, I'm thinking a lot about the layperson involved in that, delivering that child, and what this must seem like to them. They obviously don't have the medical terms, so they're looking at it through a different lens than say I might look at the scene. Also, I'm trying to really understand what the patient might be going through. So, for example, in terms of the feeling of a woman giving birth, obviously, that's something that I can only imagine. I don't have personal experience of that. But I was able to talk to the women around me, but also to a gynecologist friend who was also a mother. There were something she talked about that I would never have found myself or by imagining the scene. She talked about the tremendous isolation, the moment that labor starts. Despite the fact that there's all these people around you, suddenly it's you against the world. Everybody else sort of disappears, your focus is so intense on yourself. So I'm not sure how to give you more specifics than that. But I think it's recognizing… I mean, it's rare that I'm describing something from the point of view of purely of a physician, but when I am, even then, if it's routine for the physician, I need to convey in that routine this, what are the things that this person is looking for, what is essential to this whole complicated act. That's often true in my medical practice, for example. People come with a lot of complex complaints. But there are also keywords they say, there are key things they say that are much more important than the things they don't say. Or other things they say. Sometimes it's what they don't say that matters. So certain words, certain acts are terribly important. I try to make sure I underline that for the reader.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I think that…
[Abraham] For example, chest pain is pretty common. But chest pain with any tinge of anxiety and sweating, say, that comes with the chest pain, just makes little alarm bells go off. Because this is probably a different kind of chest pain. So, just small… That may be not the best example that I… Just to give you a sense…
[Howard] Oh, no. That's a good example. I had chest pain, and then I had a dull ache spreading down my left arm. I decided this was… 99, this was, 25 years ago. Decided to go into the hospital and they said, "Well, good news. Yes, a lot of what you're experiencing is indigestion. Bad news. Your heart is doing a thing and we're not going to let you leave for 3 days." I learned all kinds of new words.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] My point of view from the beginning was, yeah, my chest hurts and my arm aches. At the end, I had all kinds of medical terminology and things that if I were being described in a book, that would be my character arc.
 
[Abraham] I think the other… That's well said. It's I think the other thing that I have to keep in mind is not to belabor the reader with medical information that's circuitous. It has to serve a purpose. I think readers are interested in technical details of the world that they don't know very well. So, whether it's Tom Clancy on submarines or, I don't know, Arthur Hailey on the working of an airport, I think we as readers have an inherent interest in the working of a locale and a profession that we don't have a great deal of familiarity with. So you want to provide them enough details to create verisimilitude that you mentioned, but not so many to sort of flash your knowledge. You don't want to just…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah
[Abraham] Pour out words to impress them. It's a fine line, and I think, as you said, the real art is in the revision, it's not really in the writing of the scene. It's in the many, many attempts at revision that hone it down.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I'm struck by as were talking is about the difference between insider knowledge and translating it for an audience. I find that often some of the things that are the most difficult for me to write are the things that I have a deep intimate knowledge of because I can't tell what I have to unpack for the reader. You're dealing with a couple of different knowledge bases in this book, both your medical knowledge but also the knowledge of this particular community. I can see the… My writer brain can see the places that you are translating for outsiders. Where you will use a word, and then you will say, and this is what this word means. But it's all very much, for me, seated in point of view, in the tactile details, the way the character is moving through the world. I think one of the questions that I have is, like, do you… I'm certain that the answer is going to be it depends, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you find that you just write it, and then rely on your editor to say, "Oh, you're going to need to unpack that for people," or do you have a sense of, oh, I should probably pause here to explain this before I carry on?
[Abraham] I think I have a pretty good sense. So I don't really rely on the editor to do the hard work for me. I really have to catch myself if I feel I've used the term that's very familiar to me, and may not be for the reader. On the other hand, you don't want to keep stopping to say, oh, that word means this. I will often use a big word or an unfamiliar word, and as a reader, I enjoy when I don't know the word, but the next sentence or the context makes it clear what this might be. For example, I love reading Horatio Hornblower's series on sailing, or the whole Audrey Martin… Help me out. The other big sailing series? Patrick O'Brien? Is that…
[Mary Robinette] Patrick O'Brien. Yeah.
[Abraham] So, I mean, I still don't know a lee shore from a not lee shore…
[Chuckles]
[Abraham] But it doesn't really matter. I certainly get the gist of it. I think that's what you're after, you're not for a complete explication, but enough so that the reader's not lost. By the way, I meet readers from time to time who tell me, "I have to skip over all the medical parts." I just have to bite my tongue when I hear that because…
[Laughter]
[Abraham] I don't want them to skip anything, but some people do for whatever reason.
[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of things we don't want to skip, we're going to pause right now. We're going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, we're going to talk more about how to make things feel real without overwhelming the reader.
 
[Abraham] Yeah, I've been drawn to this book that I read about, I don't know where, and I ordered. It's called How to Draw a Novel. The title alone is intriguing. It's by Martin Solares. He's a fairly well-known foreign writer. I don't think his work is as well known to us. But it literally has… It's a very erudite meditation on novels. But he uses graphics to sort of illustrate the course of particular novels. So you have a little figure comparing Moby Dick to Wuthering Heights. It's really quite entertaining. The figures are sparse, there's a lot of text in between. But the whole thing is a delight. So that's what I'm recommending and reading right now.
[Mary Robinette] That's How to Draw a Novel by Martin Solares.
[Abraham] Yes. Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] Sounds amazing.
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, let's dive back in. One of the other things that you do when you're… You're not only dealing with the technical information, but The Covenant of Water takes place over multiple generations of a family. One of the things that I find fascinating is how to convey time passing and how to show the connections between generations. When you were diving into this, did you have touch points in your head about, "Oh, if I mentioned this," or "I want to draw this piece of history out?"
[Abraham] No, not really. I mean, I knew… There are very few things I do about this novel before I started.
[Chuckles]
[Abraham] I'm embarrassed to say. I knew the geography. I think that's terribly important because setting this in the South India, in this community of Christians who believe their religion came when St. Thomas the apostle landed on the shores of Kerala, India, in 52 A.D. That was an important decision. Because the same story anywhere else, in Hoboken or somewhere, would be a very, very different story. I also knew that I wanted it to be multi generational. Mostly because, as someone who's practiced medicine for almost 40 years now, I really liked being able to see, in my early years, some entity for which we just have a label but no understanding, and then watch it evolve over decades to where the molecular basis was better understood, and then eventually completely understood, and then we have a diagnostic test, and then we have treatment. That sort of unfolding requires generations. So I knew that much. But I didn't really know much else. So I was sort of… As I was writing, I actually had a spreadsheet with the characters, when they were born, when they died. I had a parallel column with milestones from my grandparents and parents lives, just because they were sort of helpful touchstones in terms of helping me imagine that moment in time. Rather than saying, "Okay, World War I," you can say, "Well, the year my grandparents got married," or something like that. So then I had 1/3 column with milestones and world history that pertained to that region. For example, seminal events in the long, long journey towards emancipation from the British in India [garbled] about independence in Independence Day, August 15, there were many, many milestones, hundreds of years of them leading up to that. Of course, world events. And, yet another column for medical milestones. I had to keep in mind that my current medical knowledge is not the knowledge I should be using describing something. I had to stay true to the knowledge of that time. So, I suppose in that sense, I was very conscious of time and history. But I didn't really know until I was well into the writing how to weave all these elements together and when to switch scenes. One very useful thing that an editor told me many years ago was the great magical thing about a blank page or a white page or a new chapter is that you can skip over years, just by doing that.
[Chuckles]
[Abraham] You don't really need explanations. Which was a huge revelation to me at the time. I think it was with Cutting for Stone. So, make use of that. The white space allows you to just sail through time.
[Howard] As an aside, I think I deserve an award for not shouting, "Yes!" When you said spreadsheet. Because I have preached spreadsheets…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] A lot. I use them in exactly the same way. Columns for events, columns for character lives. I even have a column sometimes that describes what I'll call story beats. I want this story beat, needs to be dark night of the soul. Or, this needs to be a moment where I tell the reader that this is a character they can trust. For this is a character they can't trust. Very explicit notes to be, so that when I sit down to write, I can write words that are better than that.
 
[Mary Robinette] I think it's going to be really comforting for our listeners… A couple of us, like, I'm an outliner, usually. It's I know that a lot of listeners are people who garden, who find their way through the novel. I think it will be very comforting for them to hear, "Oh, yeah, I didn't… I sat down and I kind of found my way through the novel." Especially if they pick up the novel and read it, which, it feels so cohesive after it's all done.
[Erin] I was going to say, I wonder a little bit, like, how do you… If you are gardening, if you are finding your way through, but also you have this structure, these columns that like sort of form a trellis, let's say, in the garden, sort of, how do you ensure that you garden to it? How do you make sure that, like, your spreadsheet says X, but you're really feeling Y as you're writing. How do you reconcile between those differences to make sure that you're telling something that both works, and also works for you?
[Abraham] Yeah. I mean, first of all, I should say, the spreadsheet came much, much later. I'm almost embarrassed to confess this, but my books have taken a long time. The last novel I wrote, Carving for Stone, was 14 years before this one. I spent 8 years writing that novel. So with this novel, I really wanted to not spend 8 years, or 14 years. I wanted it to be a few years. So I really wish I could have plotted out the whole novel. In fact, on my right side is this whiteboard with a fairly extensive drawing of the entire novel. Which I know your listeners can't see, but you guys can. So I would plot out the entire novel, and I love to think visually. I draw things out, kind of cartoon fashion. Then I would start writing, only to find that the novel is wandering off in a completely different direction. So then I would photograph the whiteboard, and start all over again. So, to be quite honest, I started with a mood, I started with one character. That was a young bride on her wedding day in 1900. It's I vaguely knew that I wanted 3 generations. I knew where this was situated. But I really didn't know the central conflict of this novel. I didn't know very much of anything. I wish I wasn't that kind of a writer. I wish I knew everything that was going to happen. There are writers like that. I'm a friend of John Irving, who's been a mentor and a correspondent for many, many years. I'm amazed. He knows the first and last line of the novel before he starts, he knows the first and last line of every chapter. So when he begins, it's not that new things don't come up, but he really knows the entire story. He has said… He will say, "If you don't know what you're showing to the reader and what you're hiding and when you're going to reveal it, you're just making it up as you go along, Abraham. You're not a writer, you're just an ordinary liar."
[Laughter]
[Abraham] I think he's right.
[Mary Robinette] I hate to disagree with John Irving, but…
[Abraham] I was going to say that, at the end of my stumbling process of pushing this feeling long and many dead ends and many hundreds of pages in months and months in the wrong direction… Realizing that that's not the novel. There is a point where you finally arrive where… For me, it was almost halfway, two thirds into the novel where I could suddenly see everything. See exactly how it ended. Immediately, many extraneous but important characters and scenes fall away. You realize that they're not critical to this outcome. So I think we eventually all arrive at the same place as John does, but he spends many months in the planning before he embarks on it. So you could say that my writing for all those years was an inefficient way to come to that same point.
[Howard] It may be inefficient, but I would… I'll put a stake in the ground and say, "You're not just a writer, you're an extraordinary writer, and you're a really good liar."
[Laughter]
[Abraham] I'm happy to take that from you. I feel very blessed actually… When you write without any sense of how it's going to be received. So hearing things like this now our wonderful, but at the time, you're not sure. You just do your best.
 
[Mary Robinette] I think we all feel that sense of, "Oh, I'm just muddling through, and hopefully no one catches me." But since you are a man of science, I'm just going to remind you and our listeners that there's… In science, there's no such thing as a failed experiment. In writing, there's no such thing as a wasted word. You find the story often by discovering what the story is not.
[Abraham] Especially mysteries.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Nancy Kress, who is one of my favorite writers, said that her process is that she writes a draft of the story. She doesn't outline. She blunders her way through it. Then when she finishes, she knows what the story is about, and she tosses her first draft completely, and starts over from scratch, and this time she knows what the story is. So she doesn't extremely long, detailed outline.
[Chuckles]
[Abraham] I think, very much like you, I'm fascinated by process. In my library, such as it is, in my study, I have bookshelves very well organized, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, one whole shelf of marriage self-help, which didn't help, by the way. Then, I have a whole section on writing. Because I keep thinking there will be some book there that's going to give me the key to make the process more efficient. I finally gave up when I bought a book recently and they were quoting me. Here I was trying to find the key, and there quoting something I said. I think we just all have to muddle our way through it, and some of this is organic to the individual. You just can't adopt someone else's method and have it work for you. It doesn't always happen that way.
[Mary Robinette] That is so true. I think that's actually a great note focus to move to our homework. I think you've got some homework for us?
 
[Abraham] Yeah. I think, I was going to suggest something that I found useful is to either take something you've written that describes something, sort of passive, a landscape or a… Ideally, a landscape. But then write it in 3 different moods. Pretend that someone very precious to you has just died, and you're now gazing at this, and you describe the landscape without any reference to this event in your life. The 2nd time you write it, at a moment of great joy, whatever that is, the birth of your first child, and you're looking at the landscape. Again, no reference to what just happened to you. The 3rd time, imagine you're in a terrible rage, and you're describing this landscape. You can actually see this happening in the best of Dostoyevsky and some of the other writers, where the very landscape is affected by the mood of… That the narrator's carrying into that scene. It's quite beautiful. It's a good exercise to show us how even the most unrelated things to the emotion and the characters can still take on the hue of the prevailing emotion.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's wonderful homework. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for joining us.
[Abraham] My pleasure. Thank you.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you've applied the stuff that we've been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.
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Writing Excuses 14.48: How to Practice Worldbuilding

Dec. 5th, 2019 10:37 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 14.48: How to Practice Worldbuilding
 
From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/01/14-48-how-to-practice-worldbuilding/

Key points: What insights have you had about writing related to worldbuilding? Your brain isn't big enough to keep your worldbuilding in your head. Use a tool, and give yourself permission to forget. You don't have to preplan everything, just use find and a while-writing research document. Randomizers make it feel more real. What you are writing is a snapshot of your life and the way you respond to things in a story Don't try to fix your snapshots. It's not about finding the right way, or the best way, to tell this story. If dinosaurs are birds without their feathers, think about the fat on a penguin's skeleton. What if dinosaurs had that much fat? Practice worldbuilding by turning the knob to 11 and to zero and see what you get. How can you use hobbies or other parts of life as practice for writing? Try using role-playing games to try out scenarios, to see what kind of story comes out of a premise. Consider the dominant pedal and music composition is a metaphor for writing. Recast characters as family members to see how they might react. Look at the politics of game players see how nations might interact. Figure out how human beings work.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 48.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How to Practice Worldbuilding.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] Granted, this entire season has been about practicing your worldbuilding, so I understand if you've given me a kind of quizzical look as I have introduced this to you…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Listeners. But we are in our last month of our year of worldbuilding, and I wanted to ask some questions that just didn't fit into any of the other episodes, and talk about, like, some of our favorite worldbuilding exercises and things like that. So, one thing we like to do when we wrap up a year is kind of ask is there anything you've learned this year or anything now you've been trying in your fiction, just kind of relating to worldbuilding?
[Howard] Your brain isn't big enough.
[Brandon] Hmmm.
[Howard] You cannot…
[Dan] Speak for yourself.
[Howard] Keep all of this in your head. So, ultimately, your worldbuilding… You're trying to build an entire world. Of course it's not going to fit in your head. Heads go inside worlds. You are going to have to use some sort of tool to record this. It might be index cards, it might be a spreadsheet, it might be a wiki, it might be some sort of relational database, I don't know. But for me, that discovery that I cannot hold all of these things in my head, and I have to write them down, I have to record them in some way, was intensely liberating. Because the moment I did, I gave myself permission to forget those things. Oh, I can forget that, because I've written it down, my computer will remember it. It definitely won't crash. Ever. Sure enough, the ideas flow faster, the world deepens itself much more quickly, as I commit things to paper.
[Mary Robinette] Ironically, mine is the polar opposite of that.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Which is that I don't need to preplanned before writing, once I have internalized a lot of other things. So, one of the things that I was working on this year was a novel, just for fun, which is a Alfred Hitchcock writes the Dragonriders of Pern kind of thing.
[I want to read that!]
[Mary Robinette] It… Rather than doing what I would usually do, which is sit down and think about the breeds of dragons and all the… It's a secondary world and all of that, I just started writing. Because what I realized was anything that wasn't on the page in the novel isn't canon. So I only… And if it's in the novel, then I can use my find function to just go back and find the thing. The only things that I'm writing down in a separate research document are the things that are difficult to search for, like, "What was the name of that dragon? I made up the spelling of the word." So I've got a document that I say breeds of dragon, and I go and put them… At the end of a writing session, I will go and drop it in there if I've come up with a new breed of dragon. But it was… It's been… That novel came faster than pretty much anything that I've written up to this point. But… It's also not something that I would have been able to do early in my career, because of the number of different other pieces of story structure that I would have… That I hadn't internalized.
[Howard] You already know how to cut worldbuilding… The unnecessary bits from the dialogue, from the exposition, from the whatever. So you can discovery write your way on the way in and it will feel like what you have written before… It's like kinesthetics. It's…
[Mary Robinette] I had to learn it. But that has been… It's been interesting, because it also means that I'm not being bogged down in details that I will never use.
[Dan] One of the things that I have started to rely on more and more this year in my worldbuilding is randomizers.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.
[Dan] Because I… If I'm trying to come up with whatever it is, if it's geography, if it's a religion, if it's anything… If it looks exactly like what I need it to look like, it's going to feel fake. So, using random generators or just asking three-year-olds for ideas, whatever it is that you're doing, that adds enough noise into it that it feels more real. It forces me to figure out, "Well, why is this religion… Why are horses so important to them?" It's not something I planned, but the randomizer spat it out and now I've got to deal with it. That ends up producing something much more layered and much more textured than what I probably could have come up with on my own.
 
[Brandon] That kind of plays into something… It's not necessarily worldbuilding related, just writing related, that I've come more and more to see the books that I'm writing… I talked before about this on the podcast… As performance art. In that you are capturing a moment of my life and the way I respond to things in a story. It's like, I've often thought when I was younger that something was either right or wrong in storytelling. I have to find the right way to tell this story, I have to find the best way to tell this story. The older I get, the more I'm looking at this is a capture, a snapshot of who I am as I'm doing this. So previous things that I feel like now I've gotten wrong… I feel more liberated from them. That it's not like I did this worldbuilding element wrong, or this part of Mistborn One wrong. That was a snapshot of who I was, and how I viewed storytelling, at that moment. Which also helps me to kind of avoid the impulse to Lucas my old things…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Right? Because what they are is, they are a piece of performance art that was me at that point in time. Now, what I'm writing, it's a piece of performance art that is me. The… Adding the randomizer and things to it kind of captures this essence, because it's less about making sure that all the pieces are exactly right, and more about what does the person that I am with the skills that I have trained myself in do with this set of inputs? What piece of art comes out of it?
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Sorry. It's just making me think about the project that we worked on together. Because… So Brandon gave me a story bible, and then I… And an outline, then I wrote from that. There were pieces of the worldbuilding that I'm reading and I'm like, "This makes no frigging sense at all. Brandon, what? You're supposed to be so good at worldbuilding, what is this?"
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] The conversation that we had was that… Which I thought was really interesting was that a lot of times, it's not so much that you have it all worked out ahead of time, it's that when you get to it, you can make the interstitial pieces work. So, like, coming into it and going, "Okay, so I just need to figure out how to make this work." It was like having a randomizer. There were a number of things where I'm like, "This does not make any sense at all."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But the thing that I forced out of not changing it is way more interesting than just like, "Well, I'm going to change it so it makes sense to me." It's like, "No, let me see if I can find the connecting pieces that…"
[Howard] So it was a Brandomizer.
[Mary Robinette] It was a randomizer.
[Howard] A Brandon…
[Mary Robinette] A Brandomizer!
 
[Dan] Whoo ho ho. You know what that is reminding me of is… The current theory that dinoswaurs were most closely related to birds.
[Mary Robinette] Did you say dinoswords, because I really want...
[Dan] I tripped over that. Dinoswords is actually the title of my next writing prompt.
[Laughter]
[Dan] So. No. One of the things that I've seen recently is there's this big focus on we think dinosaurs look so weird. But look what happens when we take all the feathers off a swan. That is one freaky looking thing. So that's kind of what a lot of outlines are, is they are just the swan with no feathers, or the bear with no hair. Of course, it looks weird, and of course, it doesn't look right. While you're writing, that's when you add all the rest of the stuff and make it look like a real thing.
[Howard] The flipside of that, and I would encourage readers to go look this up. What do penguins look like with no fat? What does a penguin's skeleton look like? A penguin looks like a weird, waddling swan. Their neck is enormous. They don't have no neck. They're like all neck. The artist who looked at this says, "Well, what happens if I put that much fat on a dinosaur?"
[Laughter]
[Howard] The answer… They all look like very frightening slugs. As a worldbuilding practice, sort of trick, that sort of turn the knob all the way to 11, turn the knob all the way to zero, and see what you get. That visualization is just beautiful.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which is a really interesting story… Not story, nonfiction book.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, this is The Incomplete Art of Running by Peter Sagal. I read it because it was given to me, and he's a friend. I'm like, "Oh, I don't really like running. But, okay, I'll read your book." A book about running should not make me cry as many times as it did. It is part memoir, part why you should run, part kind of reflection on culture, and filled with stories. It begins… Oh, the storytelling in this is so good. But it begins with him running in the Boston Marathon right… He crosses the finish line right before the bomb goes off. That is not the most heartbreaking story in this. It is just wonderful. I… The reason… I'm encouraging you to read it because it's just good, honestly, and I'm excited about it. But I also feel like it's one of those books that is useful to apply to other aspects of life. Like, persevering when something is difficult, and finding the reason… One of the things he talks about in this is that you… Sitting down and practicing etudes is not going to get you to Carnegie Hall. Having a goal, that is the thing. I feel like it's that way with writing, too. It's not just like, "I'm going to put down a bunch of words." It's like, "I'm writing with a goal." So read this. It's a great book.
[Brandon] The Incomplete Art of Running.
[Mary Robinette] By Peter Sagal from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.
 
[Brandon] So, another question I had, that didn't quite fit into anything else, but I think kind of comes here. Have you guys ever used non-writing hobbies or parts of your life, things you've done, as practice for your writing? I'm, of course, targeting RPG playing, because I know Dan and I have both done this. How has playing role-playing games…
[Dan] So here's one that I would… The most fascinating part of the Sleeping Beauty story for me are all the people who woke up after 40 or 80 years or whatever it was and found their home and their whole country covered with thorns and realized that they now lived in what was essentially this post-apocalyptic wasteland because of a curse that it happened generations ago that everyone had slept through. I would love to tell that story. But I don't know exactly how everyone would react. So putting that into a role-playing game, presenting a group of four or five players and saying, "Okay. You wake up. Check it out. What do you do?" is a really great way to kind of run an experiment and say, "Well, how would people react to that situation? What would they do? What would that look like?" Then, kind of collaboratively figure out here's a really compelling story that could come out of that premise.
[Brandon] Howard, have you ever used role-playing as a way to try out a character, an idea?
[Howard] I don't know that I've done it with role-playing in that way. The thing that I keep coming back to is the music composition study that I did. The shaping of a piece of music is very similar to the shaping of a story. The dominant pedal which is that key change thing that happens right towards the end in a lot of Western music that tells you we are approaching the end. That exists in fiction. That's a thing. Often I will look at what I'm writing and ask myself, "Okay, which of these threads is the dominant pedal?" Which is not a question anybody who doesn't know something about music would ever ask. You wouldn't think about it that way. It's perfectly possible… Perfectly possible? Lots of writers don't have any music training at all. They successfully signal we're approaching the end of the book. They talk about it differently. I think that's part of what gives us… I'm moving wide now… That's part of what gives us our different voices, is that the analogies, the metaphors, that we use for the tools that are in our toolbox cause us to deploy them perhaps a little differently.
[Brandon] Now, I would pitch this at you, Mary Robinette, but we know that there is nothing in your past…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Like a another career that has ever informed the way that you…
[Mary Robinette] I know. Just go… Was it Season Three, Episode Six, I think? Yeah, or whatever it is. Yeah. You hear me talk about puppets all the time. The thing that you probably don't hear me talk about is… As much, is the relationship that I have with my family, which winds up informing pretty much everything that I write. It's not quite using role-playing where I'm running scenarios with them. But I will… I will think about how like, my mom would react to a situation, or how my dad would react. They're very different people. They're best friends, but they're very different people in a lot of ways and where their commonalities are. So sometimes, I will cast… Recast a character briefly as a family member in order to figure out a true honest reaction for that character. Even if that's the only piece of the family member that goes in there.
[Brandon] People ask me a lot, because they know one of my nerd hobbies is Magic, the Gathering. They say, "Oh, how does Magic, the Gathering influence your stories?" I've had to think about this. They, I think, are going to assume, oh, it's the worldbuilding or you like cool magic systems, so maybe the game mechanics or things like that. It's very hard for me to separate that out, because I just grew up in an era where you played video games, you played lots of boardgames. All of these things are a jumble in my brain. I can't point to any one that Magic has done with that. But there's an unexpected one. Which is the politics of four people playing a competitive game against one another…
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Ooooh!
[Brandon] Where you're each trying to win the game and have certain tools and resources at your disposal, has really influenced the way I do political work between nations in my books. In fact, I was writing an outline yesterday where I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to use this aspect." How, if you are the weaker party, how do you win in a war? Well, if there's three people, you look for the person who's strongest, and you gang up on the strong person with the other weak party. Almost always, the person who is doing best in the game loses first. Almost always. Because if they're a threat, everyone else gangs up on them. So… That's not the case in a one-on-one…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] But in a four-person free-for-all, you don't want to be the strongest party. So I actually wrote in my outline, a character's like, "I know how I can bring this person down. It's by exposing how strong they are, so everyone else will gang up on them." Those sort of political games has been really handy for me in designing epic fantasy stories.
[Dan] This is why, back in college, the number one rule of any Magic game we played was kill Brandon first.
[Brandon] They always ignored you when you told them that.
[Dan] Nobody ever believed me. You always kill Brandon first.
[Brandon] If you don't, I will figure out how to get everyone to gang up on you, and then… But that sort of stuff was really fun for me to figure out…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] How human beings work. So, there you go. You can trace my political intrigue stories to me playing Magic with Dan.
[Dan] To multiplayer Magic.
 
[Brandon] We are out of time. So, homework. What we would really like you to do is do the thing that we have done in our writing careers. Take something that's very familiar to you that may not seem like it has anything to do with writing. Like audio engineering. Or puppetry. Or playing card games. Look at something you're fascinated by. Try to see if you can extrapolate from that storytelling principles that'll help you understand the way that you might tell stories and the way that your life experience might turn you into a better writer. Kind of a philosophical one for you this week. But, hopefully, it will be really handy for you. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications

Apr. 2nd, 2019 10:49 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.13: Obstacles vs. Complications
 
From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/31/wx-14-13-obstacles-vs-complications/
 
Key points: obstacles versus complications. People, things, or circumstances that impede the progress of the character or the story. Obstacles can simply be overcome, but complications cause ramifications that make the story take a turn. In terms of MICE threads, obstacles keep you on the same path, but complications take you to another thread. Obstacles are linear, complications change the direction or goals. Obstacles often are within scenes, while complications strengthen act breaks and make the audience come back. A story that is all complications may be too twisty, while a story that is just obstacles may be too linear and frustratingly slow. Try mixing yes-but, no-and with complications and obstacles. A couple of major complications may be plenty.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 13.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Obstacles vs. Complications.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] I'm in the way.
[Chuckles, laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So, I wanted to do this because a couple of times on Writing Excuses, you've heard me say, talking about obstacles versus complications and how I learned about it from Margaret Dunlap, and it occurred to me that we actually have Margaret here, so instead of having to listen to my fumbling attempt to distill this theory that she has come up with, we could just have her explain it to you. So, Margaret, tell us, please, about obstacles versus complications.
[Margaret] Okay. So, obstacles versus complications is, I think… I was trying to think back to the origin of this. For me, it goes back to learning how to write to act breaks. Because you… Classically, you write to the act break, you're going to stop, have commercials, and you want something that's going to drive the audience to come back. The problem of writing television today is the television audiences have watched hundreds of hours of television, and they kind of know how television works. So if you put in a classic kind of cliffhanger of like, "Oh, no. Is Mulder going to die?" on the X-Files, well, probably not. Most of your audience is pretty well aware that at the end of act one, it's likely Mulder's probably still going to be with us for the rest of this episode. So, TV writers had to get better at making stories twistier. So, obstacles versus complications, both of these are people, things, or circumstances that are somehow impeding the progress of the character or the story. The difference is, while an obstacle is something that your character can overcome and then keep moving, a complication is something that they have to deal with and then causes ramifications that causes the story to take a turn.
[Mary Robinette] If I can jump in here, one of the… Because we spent a delightful period of time talking about this, and for me, one of… It clarified something that I've talked to my students about, which is when I talk about the MICE quotient and talk about how you can have multiple threads and they can be braided together, I intellectually like… Not intellectually. I had an intuitive sense of what it meant, but I had a difficult time articulating it. So an obstacle keep you on the same path. It's like a straightahead thing. If you're on a milieu line, you stay on a milieu line. Whereas, a complication will kick you off over into a character line.
[Brandon] That is really fascinating.
[Mary Robinette] Isn't it!
[Brandon] Yeah. That's really helpful.
[Howard] Obstacle is the speedbump, complication is the detour sign which you're not actually sure which side road it's pointing to.
[Margaret] Right. Or the detour sign that someone has taken away, or… I have an example of if I am a renowned thief and I am trying to break into Mary's home, the locked door is an obstacle. The fact that Mary is home, and I thought that she wasn't, that is a complication. Potentially. If I knock her out because I am awesome, because I'm an internationally renowned thief, then she is effectively an obstacle. But if she provides information that the thing I have come to steal, I'm not stealing it back, I'm just stealing it, that creates a complication.
[Brandon] Yeah, this is really interesting, because a lot of plot formats, particularly some of the ones rooted in screenwriting, talk about this idea of at some point during the story, you're… The characters are going to realize their goals are larger or different than they wanted them to be. Knowing the difference between obstacle versus that complication that can open their eyes to a greater plot could be really helpful.
 
[Margaret] Yeah. It's also a way to take a story that has a very linear progression, and think about… Because often we know where we want a story to end. It's like, "All right. Well, the character starts and they had that way." If you think in terms of complications, maybe they start out going in this direction… Yeah, as you can tell from watching me moving my hands on the podcast…
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] They start moving to the right. A series of complications might bend them around 180° and get… Or, more likely, 90°, speaking narratively. We rarely have a character start out seeking the exact opposite of what they wind up getting. But those are the complications that can create those twists that aren't… A shocking twist that you'll never see coming. But just those little shifts in the narrative.
[Howard] There is a classic twist in the… Elementary, CBS's Sherlock Holmes thing, that I've described to my kids as the act two corpse. Which is the point at which we are moving along, and then someone is dead who we are not expecting to be dead. Maybe it's an obstacle, because we can no longer ask that person questions. But we discovered that it's more complex. What's fun is that even though my kids will now watch TV with me and lean forward and say, "Act two corpse? Is it… Yay! Act two corpse!" The episode still works, because we don't know what the complication is going… We don't know what's going to happen. We just know there's been a complication, and we are on board for where our heroes take it.
[Margaret] It's the murder mystery where your prime suspect is the second victim.
[Brandon] I've done that before. It's very handy.
[Margaret] And classic for a reason.
 
[Brandon] Let's break here for our book of the week.
[Mary Robinette] Great. So our book of the week is Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse. This is a fantastic book. On one level, you can read it as just monster hunters going after monsters. But it's so much more than that. So this is after the world has basically drowned under the big water. It's set on what used to be a Navajo reservation. It has been reborn as Dinetah. All of the gods and heroes of the land are kind of there again. So, like, there's Coyote. It's wonderful. It's relevant to this because it has a great series of obstacles in complications. There are obstacles that are just getting in the way of her tracking down the monster, and then there are complications which are completely affecting the way… A relationship with herself, her relationship with other people. It's wonderful, wonderful storytelling.
[Brandon] So tell us one more time.
[Mary Robinette] It is the Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse.
[Brandon] Excellent.
 
[Mary Robinette] All right. So. Since we are talking about obstacles in complications, one of the things that I wanted to also talk to our listeners about, we've talked a little bit about how to use them. I also want to talk about the dangers of them. Like the dangers of a story that is only complications.
[Margaret] Only complications. The danger of a story that is just piling complication on top of complication on top of complication is that it can be easy to lose track of the stakes. If we are constantly shifting what's going on, what are we after, how is it happening, it's tough for the audience to… It can be difficult for the audience to remain invested. Because it's who's on first. They're losing track of what is our ultimate goal, what are we actually pushing towards, are we making progress towards it, or do we keep just getting derailed into detours? It is possible to make a story too twisty.
[Mary Robinette] Is it possible to go the other direction, and just have just obstacles?
[Margaret] Yeah. I think the danger of a story that is only obstacles is that, one, it can feel like your character isn't getting anywhere because anytime they're building up a head of steam, they're hitting another wall. The other risk that we sort of talked about earlier is that the story can feel very linear. It's like I am headed to grandma's house. The road goes out. So I've got to get a boat. The boat blows over. It just keeps going. One thing to another thing to another thing, but we never shift years. You can do it. But there is a risk that it just feels like a straight shot down a hallway, and why is it taking you so long to walk?
[Brandon] I've worried about both of those things, with the yes-but, no-and methodology that we've talked about, that Mary introduced me to, which is great. I use it in my class for those discovery writers who don't know how to outline, and don't really want to outline. I say, here's a method. But I worry about if they do this the wrong way, you're going to end up with only complications, because it's so easy to say, yes, they do accomplish this, but weird wacky things happens that sends us off in another direction.
 
[Mary Robinette] So that brings up the question of progress in pacing. One of the things that I talk about sometimes with the yes-but, no-in is, since in Western storytelling, we have the rule of three. Which is three times are funny, third times a charm, three times are unlucky. We just… We're geared to think in terms of threes. That you can use that in hack with it. If you want something to feel easy, then you have it happen with less than three trial error cycles. If you want it to feel hard, then you do more than three try-fail cycles. So with a yes-but, it's like yes, but complication. Then with no-and, it's like no, and obstacle. To a certain degree. So you can… I feel like you can control pacing to a certain degree that way. How do you con… Do you use these as tools to control pacing?
[Margaret] Um…
[Mary Robinette] I mean, it's hard… It feels like it when you're talking about act breaks.
[Margaret] Yeah. I mean, it is a way to control pacing. I think when writing in television format, it's such a set structure. Even now, as we're seeing more TV being written without commercial breaks. If you're writing for a Netflix or one of the other premium services, you don't necessarily have commercials that are coming in between, but I like to try to write on that 4 to 5 act structure anyway, just because it ensures that things are happening. That you're not getting the episode that feels like, "Okay, this is just an installment, but nothing's really happening. It's a lot of kind of dithering around and nothing is really changing, nothing's really progressing." Having those sorts of stops along the wheel of setting up the problem of the week, making our first attempt at it, a big turn at the midpoint that shifts things around, having to recover and prepare for that, and our final confrontation act five, having that is a kind of baseline structure sets up that… One, the idea that we're accomplishing something in a single episode, even if it's a piece of a much larger story. But also, again with a television audience that watched a lot of television, there are certain rhythms that you get use to. You can shift those rhythms. I watched a lot of Law & Order in high school and college. Then I started watching Homicide: Life on the Streets. I realized that I would start getting really antsy around the half-hour point in Homicide, because subliminally I was waiting for the cops to hand it over to the lawyers to handle the second half of the show.
[Mary Robinette] [Ooooo]
[Margaret] But Homicide is all cops. It took a while to get used to the different pacing and the different rhythm. But having that television falling into those… Saying familiar patterns feels like it's cliché, but just that sort of the storytelling rhythms that at a certain level feel comfortable that you can use or shift up in order to really unsettle your audience.
[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, I realized that when I earlier said yes, but complication, no, and obstacle, that made it sound like those are the pairings that you have to do. Which is not actually true at all. Yes his progress towards the goal, no is progress away from the goal. Then, complications and obstacles are additional tools that you can use in terms of shifting. I find that I am more likely to use obstacles as a… Within a, roughly put, within a scene, and then use the complications kind of as I approach a scene end.
[Margaret] I think, complications, you do have to be judicious with them, at least in terms of major complications. If you look at… If you look at the Leverage pilot, which I'm guessing many listeners and people here on this podcast are familiar with, you get a couple of really big complications in that, but only a couple. We've been hired to steal airplane plans. It turns out those airplane plans, we didn't steal them back from the person who stole them. We just stole them from the people that created them. Then they have obstacles in trying to get revenge from the person who set them up. With… There are some additional complications buried in there, but they aren't all necessarily… A complication doesn't have to be earthshaking. It can be you have to take your little sister with you on this heist job, and how are we going to handle that?
[Howard] The nice thing about the Leverage show format with regard to complications is that when the heist is one in which we are going to be shown, after the fact, that there was a piece they were actually prepared for this. The final complication looks to us like the nail in the coffin that, nope, they're not going to survive this twist. Oh, wait, this is the one they were ready for. That bit of formulaic TV writing… Yes, if formulaic, and yes, if you watch an entire… You binge watch Leverage, you can start to see the seams, but… It's beautiful. I love the way it's done.
[Margaret] I would just like to say, John, Howard said it was formulaic, I didn't.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] All right. Let's… This has been really fascinating. It's really helped kind of frame this in my head. Something that… Like Mary said, I've always kind of known, but never been able to put words to.
 
[Brandon] You also have a piece of homework for us, right, Margaret?
[Margaret] What I'd like you to try to do is take a story, either something you've written or another story, and either find or insert an obstacle into it. Then, brainstorm what might happen if that obstacle were actually a complication. It's something that forces the narrative to take a turn. See what happens.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1

Feb. 27th, 2019 03:15 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.8: Worldbuilding Q&A #1
 
 
Q&A Summary:
Q: What cultural stuff do you need to know throughout the writing process?
A; What are the axes of power in the world. Economic status, social hierarchies, which ones will your character intersect with in the story. What cultural stuff do I need to make the world feel real? What cultural stuff drives the conflict in my story? What cultural stuff impacts the characters to give them character arcs? Specificity! What practices are embodied in your story, where did they come from, why are they used? What is likely to come up, what do I need to think about to make it interesting and varied.
Q: When worldbuilding religion, I often find that portions of the fictional religions have overlapped with real world religions. How do you treat those overlaps with respect, especially when problems with the in-world religion are part of the story's conflict?
A: Being a real-world religious person with a deep and abiding respect for the multiple sides. Multiple viewpoints wherever possible. Tell somebody's specific story, not a story about a class of people. 
Q: For your worldbuilding, how much do you have figured out before you start your first draft, and how much do you discover later as you write?
A: It depends. Do it in layers, a broad overview, then dig in where needed, with research in the recesses of your imagination. Frontload where possible, but go back and patch and connect, too. 
Q: Much like how it can be bad if you introduce key characters too late in the narrative, such as the last one third, what would you say is the threshold where you should have introduced all major worldbuilding elements? Halfway or something else, and does it change based on genre or intended audience?
A: Tie the new worldbuilding elements to character conflict and development, and you can keep doing it. Introduce the new elements slightly before they matter. Introduce the element for a different reason.
Q: I was wondering how do you ensure the world comes through as a character of its own?
A: It doesn't always have to be a character, sometimes it's just an important setting. Name it, then give it a personality. How does the POV character interact with the environment? Is it an antagonist, or a sidekick? Give the world scene time of its own. Look at how the setting influences plot and character decisions. Pay attention to the language you use to describe the environment.
Q: When worldbuilding in science fiction or fantasy, how much change to terminology is too much? For example, a new calendar system, units of measurement, or currency?
A: Some worldbuilding elements are more easily grokked than others. Hemi-deca blerks! What do you want to say about the culture? 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Eight.
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding, Questions and Answers.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
[Howard] And you have questions. By you, I'm speaking to the you in the audience of WXR 2018 attendees before me.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Howard] This episode was recorded live on a ship in the Caribbean. We're pretty in love with this model. It's a lot of fun.
[Mary Robinette] This… I really like the way we have built our world, I have to say.
[Laughter]
[as…]
[Dan] Although technically, we're in the Gulf of Mexico, not the Caribbean. Just pointing out the errors in your worldbuilding. Consistency is key.
[Howard] We're on the water, and it's pretty.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That piece of the worldbuilding is all I actually need to know. Which is often the case with worldbuilding.
[Howard] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] But the nice thing about this is that we have a live audience, which means that we can go to them for questions. Shall we start with your first one, or do you have other things to do?
[Howard] Nononono. That's just great.
 
[Christopher] Hello, my name is Christopher Adkins. What cultural stuff do you need to know throughout the writing process?
[Dan] Cultural stuff?
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things that I like to think about are what the axes of power are for the world? Because those are going to affect the way my character moves through the world. The economic status, social hierarchies, those are the things that I think about. I only think about the ones that are… My character's going to intersect with in the story. So in short fiction, I'm likely to kind of think about the axes of power. But probably only a couple of them are going to come into play in the story. So there's only going to be… Those are going to be the ones that I will really define.
[Howard] I… The things that I need to know about cultural stuff upfront is do I need cultural stuff in order for the world I am building to feel real? Do I need cultural stuff in order for there to be conflict that drives my story? And, do I need there to be cultural stuff that impacts my characters in ways that gives them character arcs? I approach it first from narrative. From there, there's a bazillion stuff I'll end up needing to know.
[Dongwon] I'll just say, specificity is really important in building culture. Often times, if you're modeling a real-world culture, what you want to do is make sure that you have specific practices that are embodied in your work. But also make sure you know where those come from and why they're used, right? Where I see this going off the rails a lot of times is they'll take a practice without understanding the role it plays in the society, and therefore undermine the purpose of that practice or end up saying something insulting about it by accident. So what you want to do is do your homework, pick something very specific, and then figure out how to transform it so that it fits your world without being in direct contradiction to the purpose and the point of that practice in the first place.
[Dan] Before I start to write, I will come up… I will think about the things that are most likely to come up that I will need to describe on-the-fly, and I will kind of prep them in advance. So when I wrote my cyberpunk series, I had a whole list of technologies and companies that made them. When I… In the fantasy that I'm currently writing, I figured out, well, in this country, these are the kinds of foods they eat and the kinds of jobs they have. Just because then… If I don't do that, I know that everyone is going to be a lumberjack eating stew.
[Laughter]
[Dan] So having something ready to go, so I can be more interesting and more varied, helps me a lot.
[Howard] Hearty stew.
[Dan] Yes. With crusty bread.
[Mary Robinette] By contrast, I don't do that at all. I will square bracket it when I get to it, and then invent it on the spot. But I am lazier than Dan is.
[Howard] I find that difficult to believe, but let's go to our next question.
[Laughter]
 
[Xander] Hi, my name is Zander Hacking. When worldbuilding religion, I often find that portions of the fictional religions have overlapped with real world religions. How do you treat those overlaps with respect, especially when problems with the in-world religion are part of the story's conflict?
[Mary Robinette] That's a good question.
[Dan] That's a really good question.
[Yeah]
[Howard] I have a question. Is Zander Hacking your real name, because if I tried to use that name in a book, no one would believe it.
[Xander] It's actually Alexander Hacking, but that's way too much effort.
[Howard] It's still too awesome to be real.
[Dan] I can say it, but Mary Robinette wouldn't.
[Howard] Honestly, one of the things that helps me…
[Dan] You just said you were lazier than me.
[Mary Robinette] [Tee-hee-hee]
[Howard] One of the things that helps me a lot with regard to writing fictional religions and paying respect to real-world religions is being a real-world religious person who has a deep and abiding respect for the varying epistemologies that exist in the world. I believe that I can learn things by faith, by scriptural study, by revelation, and I believe that I can learn things in no other way than through science. It's a weird fence to sit on. Not always comfortable. But it's one I'm on. So anytime I'm writing about a religion, I'm writing it from this inherent understanding that there are multiple sides to what is going on.
[Mary Robinette] I think the multiple sides is a really good point. I try to remember to represent multiple viewpoints where possible. Because we all… Even people within the same denomination, going to the same church and the same building, will have different relationships with faith. So I tried to make sure that that is represented in the page, that it is not a monolith. I also try to remember that things are interwoven, that nothing exists by itself. So making sure that I'm thinking about the way it stretches out into the other parts of the culture is, I think, one of the ways I can be respectful and also make it feel more organic.
[Dongwon] To build off of Mary's thing a little bit, when you have that fictionalized religion, it is probably… Has a real-world analog, but the thing to remember is you're not telling a story about that entire religion. You're telling a story about a person who intersects and lives within that culture or that experience. So don't think of it… Where you'll get in trouble is when you're trying to tell a story about the whole class of people as opposed to telling about somebody's specific story. That person has a place, they were raised a certain way, they have certain feelings about the religion in which they exist. Those are not going to be 100% representative of the monolith of the organization, right? So remember you're talking about an individual. Invest them with as much specificity and as much physicality as you can. Then that will help you make sure that you're articulating a perspective and an experience, rather than saying… Or rather than criticizing the whole group or criticizing a real-world religion in that way.
 
[Gail] My name is Gail. For your worldbuilding, how much do you have figured out before you start your first draft, and how much do you discover later as you write?
[Mary Robinette] I vary a lot, depending on what it is that I'm writing. I often treat worldbuilding when I'm doing something that's completely made up the same way I treat historical stuff. Which is that I think about it in layers. I kind of get a broad overview, and then will dig in. It's just that the research that I'm doing is in the recesses of my own imagination. But I… Sometimes I get very, very specific, and other times I write into it… I discovery write my way in, and then hit something that's an odd juxtaposition, and try and figure out why it's that way. For me, it depends on the story.
[Dan] I like to frontload things, as I said before. But, because I like to do that, I have noticed how often I go back, which is every single story, every single book. I'm still going back and patching holes and making things connect that didn't connect before. So it's really just kind of a half-and-half mix, almost, I would say, for me.
[Dongwon] I recently had a conversation with a client who was in the early stages of developing a project. I asked him about it, and he took a deep breath and paused and said, "Well, at the beginning of time…"
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] I was like, "Oh, this is going to be a long conversation." I think what Mary said is very valuable, that it varies a lot project to project, even for one writer. Sometimes, you will need to start at the beginning of time and build up your whole cosmology, and sometimes, you can just jump right in and figure out things on the fly. So I think it depends.
[Howard] With the early Schlock Mercenary books, I was making up the worldbuilding as I went on a weekly basis. With the one that I'm working on right now, book 18, the piece that I already know is that Galactic civilizations come and go  in cycles. There are lacuna during which there is no Galactic civilization for millions of years. What I don't know is exactly how many of those there have been, and what were the characteristics of each of those, and what was the trigger event that ended each of those. Those pieces I am definitely discovery writing as I go. So when you ask the question, well, at the beginning of time… I'm working my way backwards to that.
[Laughter]
 
[Cooper] Hey, my name's Cooper. Much like how it can be bad if you introduce key characters too late in the narrative, such as the last one third, what would you say is the threshold where you should have introduced all major worldbuilding elements? Halfway or something else, and does it change based on genre or intended audience?
[Dongwon] I would say I think this is more flexible than most people think it is. The best piece of worldbuilding I've seen in recent media is the TV show Stephen Universe, which, at every major turning point in the show, has completely upended my understanding of the world and the cosmology of that series. The reason it never feels like a problem is they always tie it to character conflict. Every time they introduce a new worldbuilding element, one of the major characters is having some personal crisis or some personal conflict that ties directly to the thing that they're introducing. So when you meet more of the Gems or when you meet the Diamonds or whatever it is, it always feels like a character development, and therefore you can add more to the world as you go without disrupting that, if you keep it really grounded in how the characters are experiencing that and how they feel about the world around them.
[Dan] I try to make sure to introduce new character elements or new worldbuilding elements, I mean, slightly before they matter. So that when they show up, they don't feel like, "Oh, Dan needed to explain this thing, so he changed the way horses work," or whatever. But I'll tell you a couple chapters earlier how horses are different, and then it will matter a couple chapters later. So if I'm always… The worldbuilding's always a couple steps ahead of the story itself. Then you could introduce something all the way at the end of the book, and it would still feel natural, because we'll know about it before it matters.
[Mary Robinette] I do that, but sometimes… Often, the way I'm doing that is that I will use it at the point that it matters, and then go back and find spots…
[Dan] And fill it in. Exactly.
[Howard] Doctor Who is kind of a delightful mix mash of doing it in many different ways, and sometimes a way in which they do it is exactly right, and sometimes the way in which they did it… I find it very dissatisfying. There have been episodes where there is a new reveal about world technology, world whatever, that happens after the Doctor has announced it is important. Often, I find that unsatisfying, but sometimes it's just beautiful, because it wasn't the point. The point was something else. The point of this is… Doctor Who is good lesson material for learning a lot of these things…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And also, there are reasons in which to do it in lots of different ways, and they can all work.
[Dan] That's a good point to bring up, is that in those instances where it works really well, it's often because it… That element was introduced for a different reason. So the reader is not saying, "Oh, look at this very telegraphed this-is-going-to-be-important." It's already important, but for something else. So you're serving two purposes at once.
 
[Howard] Let's pause for a book of the week.
[Amal] The book of the week is…
[Howard] Oh, go ahead and introduce yourself.
[Amal] Hello, my name is [Amal Massad?]. I am giving you the book of the week. So the book of the week is Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver. It is a development of a short story that she first wrote in an anthology called The Starlit Wood. It's a fantastic reclamation of the Rumpelstiltskin story from a Jewish perspective, because Rumpelstiltskin is a famously anti-Semitic folktale. So what she has instead is this absolutely fantastic reversal, where she has a Jewish money lender who is a woman who gains a reputation for being able to transform silver into gold through the practice of her skill. This attracts the attention of these really scary fairies called the Staryk Knights. They decide that they want to test her. So it's this fantastic reversal where the supernatural element is taking the role of the king in the original story, and it's in this really wonderful world that she develops with a… Draw… Inspired by a lot of Eastern European folklore and stuff. The worldbuilding in it is tremendous. It's got this fantastic rumination on capital and labor and transaction and that sort of thing. But it's also full of female friendships. If you read Uprooted and thought I really liked that book, but I wish there had been more women in it being even more friends, you should definitely read Spinning Silver. Because it's so great.
[Howard] Thank you, Amal. That was Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. Now we have our next question.
 
[Cory] Hello. My name is Cory. I was wondering how do you ensure the world comes through as a character of its own?
[Pause]
[Mary Robinette] Wow, that's such a good question that we're all sitting here going, "How do you do that?"
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Well, I'm actually sitting here wondering if I do that. There's a lot of works that I can think of, books and movies, where yes, the setting is a character, to the point that New York is really a character in my story has become a cliché and a trope. I don't know if it needs to be every time though. Sometimes, the setting can just be important to the characters without being a character it self.
[Howard] At risk of telegraphing some of our episodes on marketing and career building, if your setting is an important marketing point… For instance, Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere. Being able to say, "This is a Cosmere book," is going to sell the book into an audience that would have been reluctant to pick it up if it hadn't been a Cosmere book. So having a name for it, so that it kind of becomes its own character, is useful. That's reverse engineering it. I've named it, therefore it must have a personality.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But I think that when you do have a book where you want the terr… Or a short story where you want the environment, the worldbuilding, to be a character… I mean, naming it helps, but giving it a personality is, I think, really hitting it on the nose there. It is, for me, the times that I do that, it is about the way the character, my POV character, is interacting with the environment. The environment will take on the role, somewhat, of an antagonist, sometimes. Or somewhat of a co-partner. A sidekick. Depending on what relationship my character has with the environment. So I will look at pla… Ways that the worldbuilding can be a barrier. I will look at places where the worldbuilding can be a help. More specifically, I look at my character's relationship with that, and how they feel and think about it. That's, for me, how I can make it, rather than just a place they inhabit, another… A character that's on the page, a personality. The other thing that I'll say is that I'm much more likely… When I do this myself or when I've… I notice it when I read other people's… To give space for the world without my character in it. So it's as if it gets its own scene time, own stage time.
[Dongwon] One way I think about it is, does your setting have agency? Right? That doesn't mean it's necessarily conscious, but is it influencing the plot decisions and the character decisions? Design spaces are incredibly important. We are all currently on a cruise ship, which is extremely deliberately designed space, designed to promote certain kinds of interaction, and certain kinds of movement. When you become aware of how you're being moved through the ship, and why you will walk across on certain decks and not on other decks, you can sort of start to see how the setting can shape the plot of your story. When… That's why cities often become this sort of character role in a story like that, especially in… Heist stories often have that as well. The Bellagio in Oceans 11 becomes a character, because the physical attributes of that building become very important in determining how the characters will move through it and accomplish their goals or won't accomplish their goals. So if your setting is influencing plot, if it's influencing character decisions, then it will itself start to feel like a character, in, I think, a really exciting way.
[Mary Robinette] Along those lines, I think one of the things is to pay attention to the language that you're using to describe it. So when we're talking about it, it having a personality, New York's a great ex… Is the example that everyone returns to, that it's gritty, it's stark. Those… The vocabulary that people use to describe those settings is very different than the vocabulary that one would use to describe Disneyland.
[Yep]
[Mary Robinette] So, paying attention to that…
[Dan] Not the way I do it.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] YES.
[Laughter]
[I have questions now. I have so many questions.]
[Howard] Well, there's this…
[Dan] We should all go to Disneyland together.
[Howard] There goes our Disney sponsorship.
[Dongwon] I would recommend you all start listening to the podcast 99% Invisible. I apologize for pushing another podcast. But if you want to really understand how design spaces influence character and plot decisions, than that is a great place to start.
 
[Andrew] Hello, my name is Andrew. When worldbuilding in science fiction or fantasy, how much change to terminology is too much? For example, a new calendar system, units of measurement, or currency?
[Howard] [Bwoosh! Oh, wow.]
[Mary Robinette] This is something I struggle with.
[Dan] Oh, yeah. Some of those…
[Howard] So very fraught.
[Dan] Some of those are easier to talk about than others. Units of measurement, for example… If I don't understand what a blerk is, then telling me that the city is five blerks away doesn't really tell me anything. Whereas I don't need to know how much money a blerk is worth if you say the bowl of soup is worth five blerks, then I kind of get a sense of it. So there's… different kinds of worldbuilding elements are much more easily grokkable than others.
[Howard] So the distance to the city is a soup?
[Dan] Yes. How far away is the city? Well, about the cost of a bowl of soup.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Or a hemi-deca blerk.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But actually… The thing is…
[Dan] Did you just well, actually us?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] No. I but actually'd you. Which seems more appropriate.
[Dan] Okay. There we go.
[Mary Robinette] The thing is that when we are talking about units of measurement… This is where I look at whether or not I need to shift it. I look at whether or not there is an underpinning that has shifted. So are units of measurement are things like… There's the… If we have an Imperial inch, that tells you that there's an empire. If you don't have an empire, then having something that weighs an Imperial inch is not a useful thing. So I will sometimes look at that, at whether or not there is something in the unit of measurement that doesn't fit with the world. The months, for instance. August, September, October. Those… That implies that there was a Rome. So I'm much more likely to shift something like that then I am worrying about whether or not I need to have something weigh… The five feet tall versus five blerks tall.
[Dan] I love how something can weigh an inch and also weigh five feet tall.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] I love this. And also the city is five blerks away.
[Howard] It's about soup height.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] About soup height.
[Dan] We're getting into so many like really… I almost wonder if we need to can of worms this, which we haven't even done in years. Because even the October, September thing, there's an entire school of thought in fantasy that the book was written in its own language, but it's been translated into English. So we just are calling it October, because then our readers can understand it. There's a lot of worldbuilding elements like that, that some portions of your audience are going to care about deeply, and others are just going to gloss right over and go, "Okay. That's fine."
[Dongwon] It's really a question about what are you trying to say about your culture. Because the choice of a foot versus a meter says something about the culture that you live in. Does it come from somebody who's trying to scientifically impose a unit of measurement, or is it, "Oh, my foot is roughly that large, right?" That tells you a lot about the history of that culture, what they prioritize and what's important to them. Names of the months are the same thing. Those come from specific places. So when you're making those choices of choosing to invent a new system, that better be a very relevant piece of worldbuilding and a really important concept for how this culture operates. You want to pick things that are very close to your central metaphor that drives the book that you are writing, and make sure that you're picking new invented terms that have histories and meaning for very good reasons. Be very… You can only change so many things before people start going, "I don't know what all these words are." So be very deliberate about which ones you invent new words for, is my advice.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that I'm just going to add on to that is that if you want to avoid using August… If you decide that that doesn't fit into your world, it's not that you have to invent a new month. You just need to not refer to the month. Like, oh, summer vacation is in August. It's like, no, summer vacation is in summer. That kind of thing is often an easier thing for your reader to grok than actually doing inventions.
 
[Howard] Our mastering engineer, Alex, has very carefully edited out all audible sounds of dismay as we had to cut off the questions because we're out of time. So my notes here say that your homework is toss something to Mary.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That's right. So, we've had a number of different questions come up. I'm going to leave you with the most difficult one. Which is, what do you do about time in your universe? So what I want you to do is you're just going to think about calendars. You're going to think about in your world, what are the things that change, what are the markers? Is this a culture that marks things by the moon? What if there are two moons? How does that influence what their calendar system looks like? I'm not asking you to actually put this into your story, but I just wanted to take time and think about how the culture and your worldbuilding deals and measures time.
[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.48: Q&A on Novels and Series, with Brian McClellan

Nov. 29th, 2017 05:02 pm
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Writing Excuses 12.48: Q&A on Novels and Series, with Brian McClellan

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/11/26/12-48-qa-on-novels-and-series-with-brian-mcclellan/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you write an ending that gives a sense of closure, but still leaves it open for more stories?
A: Make sure the ending is satisfying. Try introducing a cast in the first book of strong supporting characters, then have your satisfying HEA ending, and future books star other supporting characters. Wrap up most of the plot lines, large and small, but leave tantalizing bits. Finish this villian, but expand the scope for the future.
Q: If I write one book and it takes me a long time, should I put it out as a serial? I understand people put out serials or make their first book free to get people interested in sequels, but what if I don't plan on having a sequel? Is a serial a bad idea?
A: The serial is in a renaissance. Make sure the chunks are satisfying, with a climax, hook, and lead-in to the next part. Make sure you finish the story before you start releasing pieces, because you want to be able to revise early parts.
Q: For an unpublished writer, is it a waste of time to pitch a multi-book series, or should I focus on standalone works until I've gained some traction?
A: Best, to go in with a standalone that has series potential. Every editor wants a book to be standalone when they start reading, and a series when they end.
Q: How do you keep readers engaged, and coming back for more, between novels in a series?
A: Teasers! Short stories, novellas, anthology stories, even outtakes.
Q: For a first-time author, should a series be completed before looking for an agent, or is the first book enough?
A: First book.
Q: Do you ever find that you have this great outline for a trilogy, but when you go to write it, you find you've written the story for all three books in a short period of time? How do I fix this? Am I cutting too much? Am I missing more subplot?
A: Give it to test readers and see what they think. If it is moving too fast, add subplots, add character plots, add viewpoints. Check your try-fail cycles, and make it hard on your characters. Consider expanding on why your characters made the choices they made. Add set pieces.
Q: Is it possible to write a series as a discovery writer?
A: Yes. Make sure your ideas are big enough, and then go!
Q: What are some specific examples you can give of foreshadowing and how it works on a longer piece of writing?
A: Fix it in post! Make sure you foreshadow three times. But don't be heavy-handed. Don't forget the red herrings to go with your foreshadowing.
( One more question, and then... )

[Brandon] All right. So let's do the homework, which again, I have written down Dan does something weird.
[Dan] Yes. Okay.
[Piper] Wacky.
[Dan] So, this is Dan gets to be weird again. This is actually a game that you will hear on a lot of comedy podcasts. So, in honor of this being our series, closing out our series idea, I want you to take two books or two movies. Get suggestions from friends, make sure that they are whatever weird things. Then, that is going to be part one and part three of a series, and you have to figure out what part two is, in the middle.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Piper] That's fun.
[Dan] It's a lot of fun.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 12.26: Q&A on Outlining and Discovery Writing

Jun. 28th, 2017 03:11 pm
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Writing Excuses 12.26: Q&A on Outlining and Discovery Writing

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/06/25/12-26-qa-on-outlining-and-discovery-writing/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you outline a scene? Not an entire book. Do you outline scenes?
A: Yes. Index cards: what's happening, what's the joke, what am I moving forward, who are the characters. One line: Awesome hanky-panky hwere while car explodes. If the way it happens is important during outlining, yes. How does it work, what are the beats. My outline is a list of bullet points to accomplish a goal. When I sit down to write a scene, I will write down a sequence of events.
Q: When outlining, how do you know when to stop adding to the outline?
A: When I start adding dialogue, it's time to write the story. When I have the emotional beats to earn a climactic moment.
Q: How much do you have to know about your characters/world before you begin writing?
A: Nothing. Nada. (Implied: you discover that through the writing!)
Q: What do you do to diagnose and fix a structural problem when you have a finished, mostly discovery written draft?
A: Reverse outline. Talk to alpha, beta readers, and analyze the problems they had. Sit down with the scripts and index cards, and push it around. One problem is bad, but two problems may solve each other, if you look at it right.
Q: I taught myself to outline like Dan did, but sometimes I can't always get into an outline like I should be able to. How did you address this, Dan?
A: Change formulas (outlining systems) and see if that helps.
Q: So far I've written five novels. The preparation/outlining process for each has been different by virtue of the story's needs. As pros, do you still deal with this frustration or have you worked out a system that consistently works for you?
A: It's different every time. We aren't chainsaw sculptors making grizzly bears, sometimes we make cabinets and coffee tables. Every book is like a first kiss with a different person. My process has stabilized over the years, but different genres have different processes. Find out what constraints your process has, where the borders are, and then adjust within those borders and constraints.
Q: What are some major indicators that a piece needs more structure?
A: If you find yourself going off track every time you start a new scene or chapter, you may need more structure. Learn the difference between a story and a bunch of stuff that happens. If you've just got a bunch of stuff, your characters aren't growing, you probably need more structure. Stuck, bored, don't want to sit down and write? You may have a broken structure that needs fixing.
( Questions, answers, and MORE! )

[Brandon] All right. So we're going to go to our homework. I have written on my guide for this episode…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Simply the words "Dan does something wacky weird." Because he promised us.
[Dan] Okay. So here we go. We're playing around with outlines. This is what you're going to do. We're going to force you to think outside the box. You're going to find another writer, or someone who wants to do this with you. Each of you are going to come up with just a quick outline for a story. Point by point, however many points you want. Six or seven. Then, you're going to cut… Print them out, cut them into strips, and then hand the other person the pile of strips. They know the beats of the story, but they don't know what order they go in. Then you have to reorder them, turn that into a cohesive story, and write it.
[Brandon] That's awesome. I love that.
[Piper] That sounds super fun.
[Laughter]
[Howard] It's our I Ching episode.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Ooo, don't remind me of that one.
[Howard] Okay.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 12.24: Creating Great Outlines

Jun. 15th, 2017 01:44 pm
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Writing Excuses 12.24: Creating Great Outlines

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/06/11/12-24-creating-great-outlines/

Key points: This episode is about outlines to help you write, not sales tools. People like structure, it is comforting. Mix a familiar structure with a bit of strange, and you can relish the oddity. First, the Kevin J. Anderson: pitch, expand to 5 pages, 20 pages, and keep blowing. Thumbnail sketch, synopsis (internal beats), scenes. This approach keeps you focused on what this novel is about. It also gives you room to be creative and get the discovery writing out as you expand. Beware, too much interesting stuff in the outline can make writing the novel boring. Don't try to include everything, just the key details. The Wesley Chu: outline 30%, write a bit, outline more, write more. The structuralist: seven point, three act, Hero's Journey, etc. Create your beats and build the outline. Also good for diagnostics -- what's wrong with this story? The George R. R. Martin: use historical incidents. Often used in science fiction and fantasy, based on a historical record taken fantastical. The Sanderson: build your outline backward. Start with a great ending, then look at what promises lead to that. How do you justify awesome things? Prequels, interstitial tales. The strength of an outline is that restrictions breed creativity. Structural requirements can push you in directions you might not have gone otherwise.

( Details, details, who has the details... )

[Brandon] All right. Well, we are out of time. We are going to go ahead and have Mary give us some homework.
[Mary] Yes. Okay. So we've talked about a bunch of different outline structures. What I want you to do is I want you to take the list of events in whatever it is that you're thinking about writing. I want you to take a list of structures. So, seven point plot structure, The Hero's Journey, all of these different things. Heist! List out the scene types. Then slot the scenes from your event list into the scene type list for each of these different structures. See which of these kind of fits organically with your story, and which one kind of makes you excited, and what opportunities they allow.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 19: Discovery Writing

Feb. 24th, 2011 04:38 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Four Episode 19: Discovery Writing

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/05/16/writing-excuses-4-19-discovery-writing-2/

Key Points: Outline or write, that was the question? Map and plan your road trip, or get in a cool car and take off? False starts may be your friends. Throw some interesting characters in interesting situations and see what happens? Start with characters talking? Discovery writing helps show us who the characters are. Do your characters suggest things and do their own thing? You may be a discovery writer! Don't be afraid to use some structure if it helps. Advice for endings -- analyze what you've written, identify the Chekhov's guns you've hung, and pull those triggers. Brainstorming with other people is outlining for discovery writers. Discovery writers revise -- go back and make it solid. Think of your first draft as a really detailed outline. Fix it in post.
( Off we go... )
[Brandon] All right, Howard, discovery write us a writing prompt.
[Howard] Discovery write us a writing prompt? You know what, we're going to do Brandon's improv technique. Okay? Wherever you are right now, unless you're in your car, look around and pick six unrelated items. Pick six unrelated items.
[Dan] You can do this in a car, just don't crash.
[Howard] They're going to be related, because you're on the road. Okay, six unrelated items and weave them together in the first chapter of your discovery written thing. Knowing that at least two of them are Chekov's gun's that are going to prove to be important throughout your story.
( Tail wagging the dog )
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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode Seven: Questions and Answers with James Dashner

Feb. 22nd, 2011 10:34 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Four Episode Seven: Questions and Answers with James Dashner

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/02/21/writing-excuses-4-7-qa-with-james-dashner/

Key Points: To outline or not... follow your guttural instinct. Do what works for you, but don't avoid the hard parts -- practice them and make them easy. You learn more about writing by writing. Hands-on research makes killings believable, but do it with meaning. You don't have to be gory to be scary. Sometimes you gotta staple some extra ideas onto your premise to make it strong enough. Don't stop with the first, easy answers -- look for the simple, surprising, excellent ones. Make sure you have revelations, plot twists, and scenes of suspense scattered throughout your story.
( The questions... and some answers! )
[Brandon] We're out of time. I'm going to let James just throw out any writing prompt he wants to give us.
[James] You are flying in an airplane, and suddenly, one of the wings falls off. But the plane doesn't start diving toward the ground.
[Brandon] James Dashner's book The Maze Runner is in stores now. You can also read his books The 13th Reality Series for middle grade readers. Thank you, James. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode Three: How to Manage Your Influences

Feb. 21st, 2011 02:41 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Four Episode Three: How to Manage Your Influences

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/01/24/writing-excuses-4-3-how-to-manage-your-influences/

Key points: we are surrounded by influences, media, people, etc. Being aware of them and conscious of what you select is important. Be conscious of your decisions, what you are doing in your fiction, and why you are doing it. "Create the art you want to create, and then make it good enough that other people like it." There are lots of great things to do, but they don't all belong in your story. Be selective. Readers may know that there is a problem, but it's your job as the author to figure out which knob to turn to fix it, or even if it needs fixing. Consider advice very carefully.
( Influence peddlers? )
[Brandon] It's my turn to come up with a writing prompt. I'm going to suggest that you write a story in which you pretend a famous literary figure or historical figure is sitting over your shoulder giving you feedback on it, and you're writing according to what they are telling you to do. So come up with a plot, an outline, and then write your story, pretending that Abraham Lincoln walked in and is telling you feedback as you write. I don't know what that's going to do, but it should be interesting. This has been Writing Excuses that's gone way too long. You're out of excuses and so are we. Thanks for listening.
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