Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces

Jun. 3rd, 2021 05:43 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 16.22: Scenes and Set Pieces
 
 
Key Points: Scenes and set pieces? Start with setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development. Setting? Wow factor and tactical implications. Environments let players get creative. Challenge? Variety, and catering to different players. Sneak, battle, talk? Unique elements. Make your challenges hinge on character abilities, not player abilities. Adversaries. Introduce bad guys early, and make things personal. Give them distinct abilities. What's their motivation? In prose, we often challenge characters outside their area of expertise, but in games, we usually challenge players in their skill sets. Rewards, or consequences, and story development. Rewards, gear, show the reader they are making progress. Story development. Make sure characters have incentives to do the encounters, and that there are stakes. Think about how a scene pushes things forward. What are the ramification, what are the potential callbacks?
 
[Season 16, Episode 22]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[Cassandra] Scenes and Set Pieces.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[James] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[James] I'm James.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We are talking about scenes and set pieces today. We've got a lot to cover, so were just going to jump right into it. James? Get us started.
[James] Yeah. So when I'm designing an encounter or a scene or whatever you want to call it, I like to break it up into several different categories. So I like to think about the setting, the challenge, the adversaries, the rewards, and also story development. So we're going to hit each of those in turn. I just want to start off with, so, for setting, Cass… Oh, Mary Robinette?
[Mary Robinette] I just want to say… I just want to jump in real fast and say all of the prose writers have been riding along with this because they're interested and curious about it. This episode in particular has stuff that directly applies to what you do. Because every point that we're about to hit is something that you should be thinking about in your prose scenes as well.
 
[Setting]
[James] Yeah. I mean, I definitely think, Cass and I both write fiction as well and I'm sure we probably bring everything we've said in this class to those as well. But, so I want to just right now with Cass, when you're designing the setting for a scene or an encounter, what do you think about?
[Cassandra] Well, there are two things, primarily. The wow factor and the tactical implications of your environment. The wow factor can be a whole bunch of things. With video games, in particular, it's all about the visuals, it is all about the audio, and it's also about cinematography. You can have the best graphics in the world, you can have the best music, but if it's a very static kind of thing, or it's just a character walking in, it's not going to work out for everyone. It's also about individual imaginative [garbled]. In prose, for example, it could be things like how things smell, how things taste, texture. But in games, it can also be about emotional beats. My favorite example of that is Persona 5. When you start the game, you are midway through a heist. There are people with shadow faces leading you on through it. You're running through it. It's great and everything, but it's not terribly impactful because it's weird. However, at the climax of the game, after you have everything explained to you, you actually revisit that first place with the exact same parameters. It's suddenly so much more powerful, because you just had 40 hours of context drilled into your head. Well, we've come to the tactical side, since most of my design goes through actual designers. I'm curious about how you develop them into the RPGs, James?
[James] Yeah. So, in a game like Pathfinder or Dungeons & Dragons or Starfinder that's all about more or less killing things and taking their stuff, or occasionally other variations on that, environments can be really important to the design of scenes, especially combats, because it allows the characters to get really creative. It allows… And it makes, frankly, things seem more interesting than just fighting skeletons in a blank room over and over again. When you add an environment, suddenly the players have a lot more things they can work with. So, for instance, you get the players coming up with all these interesting ideas where they'll go, "Okay, if I tie the badminton net to the goat, and then I scare the goat with the airhorn, then they'll run up the end." Like, players are really creative. You want to give them props to do stuff  with. So that's where I feel like the environment can really be handy. Which… Oh, Dan, did you want to jump in?
[Dan] Yeah, I was just going to say that this is a lesson that I learned watching Star Wars movies, actually. Because the first time I played a tabletop wargame about spaceships, I very quickly realized that it's super boring. Because there's no terrain in space. So there isn't really an environment to interact with. It's the absolute epitome of an empty room. Then you watch the Star Wars movies and realize, "Oh, this space battle, they're running through a trench. This one, they're dodging asteroids. This one, they're flying through debris. This one, there's the big giant shield and it's all about which side of the shield are you on, and is it going to be brought down in time." There's always some kind of dynamic interactive element to make those encounters more interesting.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things about the setting that I just wanted to get in here for prose writers, is that the same thing is true. Like, when you're thinking about the setting, how is your character going to use that setting? How is it going to play into the overall arc of the story?
 
[Challenge]
[James] That brings us right into the second one, which is talking about the type of challenge. I really like variety, like you were saying. I really want to mixup the enemy types with the types of challenges. So it just doesn't become wave after wave. Thinking about challenges that cater to the different character types and player types. Because some people are going to want to sneak, some people are going to want to battle their way through. Mary Robinette's probably going to want to make friends with them if they're giant apple trolls, like from last episode.
[Laughter]
[James] So, you want to make sure that there's sort of something for everybody. But, Cass, what do you think about?
[Cassandra] Well, the balance is definitely one of the most necessary things. But I think it's also important to focus on the elements that make your game unique. If your game is all about a character with an energy whip, create challenges that explore every possible use of that whip. Let her swing across chasms, electrocuting things, retrieving objects… I remember Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I picked up this weird Taser-like ability, and my favorite thing to do would be to knock out people and just very gently, like, fill the water full of electricity to watch them very gently buzz to death.
[Laughter]
[Cassandra] In an RPG, you should always…
[Mary Robinette] Very gentle.
[Cassandra] Be sure that your challenges hinge on character abilities and not just player abilities. The players who spent points building a detective should have an easier time solving mysteries. Even if the player playing the barbarian is naturally better at puzzles.
[James] That's so important. I feel like I've absolutely been in that game where I'm the wizard with the 18 intelligence, but I'm naturally just terrible at most puzzles compared to the people I play with. So it'll be the barbarian being like, "No, it's this and this and this."
[Chuckles]
[James] I'm like, "Dude. You shouldn't know that, and I should."
[Dan] Yeah. The first time that I wrote, it was actually an adventure for Starfinder, typically the game writing that I have done has been in much more narrative systems. Starfinder is much more of a crunchy numbers-based thing. So, the main comment that the editor sent back after I submitted the first draft was, "Dan. Players like to roll dice."
[Yeah. Laughter]
[Dan] I realized that I had not really given them any skill checks. It was all based on just kind of interaction. You can ask these questions and learn this information and then you know where to go. He's like, "No. There's like 20 skills in this game. You haven't used any of them. They put points into those skills and they like to roll dice. Give them a chance to do what they're good at."
[Cassandra] That sort of reminds me, I think, of my favorite tabletop RPG story that is in [garbled]. There was a comment going around a few years ago, of this group of Avengers trying to fight, I think, this Orc Lord. Everyone was kind of dropping over dead and it was just terrible and they were all going to lose. There was this one dude left. He was like, "Okay. What? Screw it. My character has like really high charm. I am going to try to seduce the Orc Lord." He rolled a natural 20.
[Chuckles]
[Cassandra] There was just this long pause. He was like, "You know what, I am going to go for it. I am going to declare my love and just stop the war." He kept rolling natural 20s. By the end of the game, his character was leading this Orc Warlord home and going like, "Mom, this is my new husband."
[James] See, that's what I love about tabletop role-playing games. Because in a videogame, maybe you spend the resources to build out that possibility, even though it's a very, very faint possibility. But in a tabletop role-playing game, you can just change on the fly and go with that. I think that's really one of the things that has kept games like Dungeons & Dragons alive in the era of video games.
[Mary Robinette]. If you been listening to all of these things, the variety of challenges that your character faces in prose is as important as it is in a game. You don't want a character who's constantly just fighting things. You want a character who's having to solve the things in different ways. Often in ways that do not play to their skill sets. That's what often will make an interesting challenge in prose.
 
[Adversaries]
[James] Actually, that's a great segue into talking about adversaries. So, I think it's really important when you're thinking about the adversaries in your encounter, you want to introduce any big bad guys early and give players a reason to care. You want to make things personal. So, yeah, what do you folks do in terms of trying to establish a good adversary?
[Cassandra] You want to give them a few distinct abilities that strongly point towards who they are and what they are, and possibly, at least for me, have at least one encounter that completely cements their personality. I think a good example of this is Borderlands and Handsome Jack. Very early on, you meet him and you kind of get a sense of exactly who he is and why you should absolutely hate him. These things need to be done quickly. I think if you're designing a tabletop role-playing game, these parameters have to be set very clearly as well. Because players have the whole game to learn how to use a complex character effectively. A game master who is looking at your notes, he only has minutes. I'm curious about what people have done in regards to that [garbled]
[Howard] Yeah.
[Cassandra] Adversaries.
[Howard] For my own part, the word adversary is hugely informative here. If you run across something, somebody, some animal, whatever, and it just wants to kill you, that's not an adversary. That's just obstacle, it's an enemy. An adversary that I'm going to care about? Well, look, the party and I, we are trying to build a bridge across the street. But the Otter King has decided that there shall be no bridge across the stream, and he takes issue with our entire project, sabotaging us at every turn. But if we don't build the bridge, our eventual plan to unify the clans on both sides of… You see where I'm going?
[James] I romance the Otter King.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Yes. Please. Romance the Otter King, because everybody loves otters. Ultimately, if… For the adversary to feel real, and for us to feel invested, they have to be working logically and passionately and investedly in something that runs counter to what we're trying to do.
[James] I just want to throw out that in my current Starfinder game, I have a player who is literally playing an otter marriage counselor. That's her whole deal. She's incredibly effective. It's… We've talked our way through half the encounters.
[Mary Robinette] So, the thing with adversaries, we been talking about and around, comes back to a thing that I bring from theater for you prose writers. What's my motivation? The Otter King? Like, sure, the Otter King wants to stop you from building the bridge, but why do they want to stop you from building the bridge? That why can make your adversary often significantly more interesting. So think about what that motivation is.
[James] One other thing I want to throw out before we go to our game of the week is that something Cass had said about keeping abilities narrow. This is especially important in tabletop role-playing games, and which I always tell people who are designing new monsters or new adversaries is that really, you're only… If you're not going to use an ability in the first couple rounds of combat, that's often all that an enemy is on stage for. So you don't want to build an enemy with a dozen different abilities if they're only ever going to use three of them. Because that just makes it harder for the game master to process quickly. So pick a couple of things and that'll both let the GM know how to run them and let the PCs know how to fight them.
 
[James] But, let's pause for our book of the week.
[Mary Robinette] So, book of the week, or game of the week, is Shadow Point Observatory. Which is a game for Oculus Quest 2. It's a puzzle game. But I picked it up because it's beautiful. It's about observatories, which are totally my jam. You're trying to solve this thing where this young girl has been ripped out of time. It's the character that you're going in and you're trying to figure out how to restore her to her time. But because she's been ripped out of time, every time you encounter her, each layer of the puzzle, she gets older and older. It takes decades in her… For her for you to figure this out. There's this one point… It's a spoiler, but this is also like… The kind of excruciating thing that they're doing. Because you're in this beautiful environment, and she begs you not to leave. You're like, "But I have to go, because I have to finish solving these puzzles in order to bring you back." It's so painful to walk away from her. It's just… It's really nicely done. I liked it a lot. My dad likes it too. So. Shadow Point Observatory. Highly recommended.
 
[Dan] Super cool. Before we move on to the next thing, I cannot get this thing out of my head that Mary Robinette said earlier, when we were talking about challenges. She said that for prose, it is often, and I would say usually, really important to challenge the character in something that is not their area of expertise. Which is the exact opposite of what we were saying about game writing. Where often you want to let people do what they are good at. I think that that's a really key thing to bring out, that in games, the players want to excel. They want to have a chance to use their powers. They want to show how awesome they are. In fiction, we often kind of… We want to let our characters demonstrate their awesomeness, but we also want to force them to be weak and to overcome those weaknesses. Which, I think, is a really interesting dichotomy.
[James] Well, it's important to remember that when you're doing a game, you're designing for a range of characters, often in a role-playing game. You don't necessarily know which one you're getting. So you want to make sure that the challenge you design is hard enough to challenge the person who specializes in that particular type of challenge, so that it's a satisfying thing, but they can succeed. But it still needs to be beatable by characters who aren't specialized in that. So you want to make sure that you are accommodating for all of the above.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Even… In both cases, I think, the thing that will happen is the thing that happens in real life, which is that whatever tools you bring to the table, whether it's your characters bringing it to the table in prose or in games, they're going to solve it with the tools that they have on hand. So, just because the challenges and set up for them to be like this is the… The character who in prose who walks into the room and is like, "Oh, there's a lot of people here that I'm supposed to shoot at and I can't… I don't actually know how to use a gun. But I'm very good at sneaking." So they do this… They use the skills, even though the challenge in front of them is set up for them to fail.
[Howard] I want to do a quick call back to something Cassandra said two or three episodes ago about choices yielding consequences. The reward being consequences. I don't mind failing a challenge in a role-playing game, provided the failure isn't, "Oop. Wawawawawa. Game over. Start again." If the challenge going back to the Otter King… I failed to talk to the Otter King, now we have to fight the entire otter tribe. Well, that's a sad failure, because I don't want to fight the otters, I want to befriend the otters. If you build the challenges in such a way that the failures alter the choices we can make, then failure isn't catastrophic. I feel like in role-playing games, failure should be fun.
[James] Yeah.
 
[Rewards]
[Mary Robinette] I feel like that is a natural segue to talking about rewards as part of the consequences.
[James] Yeah. Absolutely. Rewards, and even putting rewards and story development together. Because in many ways, like you were just saying, there kinds of the same thing. The rewards, the consequences, and the development, all fall into the same category. So how do you all handle that?
[Cassandra] Very carefully. Because I feel like…
[Chuckles]
[Cassandra] The entire feel of a player's experience can be ruined, honestly, if they end up with, let's say equipment that is meant for them in the end dungeon. Now, for some players, again, I am a power player, I am happiest when I can just bulldoze through things. It makes me laugh. But for other players, it just takes away the enjoyment, because all the challenges are gone. The environment, the varieties you build in the consequences, they no longer matter if one strike of the sword is enough to stop an adversary cold. So you do not want to end up with a character that is overpowered. Similarly, it's important to track the rewards, because an underpowered character is just going to be miserable. The grind isn't fun when you're dedicating a few hours of your life to fun.
[Mary Robinette] The thing that I think about in prose is that the rewards are part of the way of letting the reader know that you're making progress. It's not just about the gear that you pick up, but that yes, this slog is worth it. Because it's really easy in prose, we talk a lot about yes-but, no-and, and making things worse for the character, and it's really easy to forget the importance of the yes, which is the reward. Even if there is a consequence for that reward. It's still that forward momentum, that forward progress, is still important to think about.
[Howard] One of the mechanics we built into Planet Mercenary, if players embrace in character their failures, they get role-play points. You can spend the role-play points to boost die rolls, to reroll dies, to reroll dice, to… There's all kinds of uses for them we didn't put limitations per game around on how you spent these. One of the players in one of the play tests I ran, to my great joy, figured this out, so that when we got to the point where it's time to defuse the nuclear weapon, he has accrued all of his role played failures and plays this stuff and Bam! The weapon is defused. Nothing about that felt steamroll-y. Everything felt earned. Because he had done such a good job of owning all of the earlier failures.
[Dan] That's great. One thing about rewards, when we're talking about gear, I keep talking about Star Wars and I apologize for that. I don't know why that's the example that leaps to my mind. But when you're talking about giving overpowered gear to a character too early, Luke Skywalker gets his lightsaber like 20 minutes into the first movie. That's the best weapon in the game, so to speak. But what's fascinating about it is that he… The reward is not the gear. It's his own skill with it. We have to get into the middle section of the second movie before he really learns how to use it. It's not until the end of the third movie that he gets it into a full-blown lightsaber battle where he gets to show off all his skills. So sometimes rewards are… It can be really valuable to give someone the crazy equipment early on, and then just let them learn how to use it.
 
[Story Development]
[Cassandra] Last of all, one you really do need to consider is how story development ties in with encounters they are creating. Make sure that your characters are incentivized to actually do the encounters. Make sure there are stakes. They don't need to be big stakes, however. Assassin's Creed Valhalla had this one [cat] that you could find and [stick, take] to your boat. It was a completely separate, quiet quest. Mechanically, it did nothing. It's just a decorative item. But, good Lord, it's also a kitty that you can have on your Viking boat for the rest of the game. James, do you have anything to add on that point before we run away [garbled]?
[James] Yeah. You want to think about how does a given scene push things forward. What are the ramifications? What elements do you want to tag for future reference, so that, as we said before, you can call back to something? What can the outcomes of this scene lead to later so that when, three scenes down the road, somebody calls back to a thing you just did, you've laid the groundwork for that?
 
[Mary Robinette] You all had homework for us, I think?
[Cassandra] We did. We would like you to design an encounter for a game that you've enjoyed, getting all of the factors that we mentioned. Setting, challenge, adversaries, rewards, and story development.
[Dan] Wonderful. Well, thank you very much. This is been a long, but I think, really fantastic episode. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.47: Writing Characters With Physical Disabilities

Nov. 27th, 2019 11:14 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 14.47: Writing Characters With Physical Disabilities
 
 
Key Points: Should the otherness be the focus of the book or not? Which way is richer? It depends. Most people don't really know disabled people. The world is not accessible. How do you write about this? Use your imagination, feel the embodied sensations. Consider different kinds of disability and mobility aids. Compare it to things you know, such as getting over the flu is like the fatigue of using crutches or pushing a stroller is like using a wheelchair. Pay attention to the physical environment and embodiment. How do you include full, rounded characters, including sensuality, in your books? Think simple, practical things. Mechanics. When a wheelchair user goes to a club, they are talking to people's belt buckles. So sympathetic characters will sit down, to talk to them on the level. Go to primary sources, but be circumspect and polite. Books about becoming disabled versus I have always been disabled? The real question is are they integrated with it now, are they comfortable with it as it is now, not when they changed. Small kids, a wheelchair, crutches... take them into that restaurant.
 
[Transcriptionist note: I suspect I have mislabeled Piper and Tempest at times in this transcript. My apologies, but I could not tell by listening who was talking.]
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 47.
[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, Writing Characters With Physical Disabilities.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Nicola] Because you're in a hurry.
[Tempest] And we're not that smart.
[Piper] I'm Piper.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Nicola] I'm Nicola.
[Tempest] I'm Tempest.
 
[Tempest] Today we have a special guest joining us for our special episode on writing the other, author Nicola Griffith. Who is one of my favorite authors, and I'm so glad that she had the chance to join us today. I'm going to give you a chance to just tell us a little bit about yourself as an author.
[Nicola] I write novels, mostly. Occasionally short stories, but they're rare for me. I prefer to focus at length, because I get a bee in my bonnet about something, I'd like to explore it.
[Tempest] What do you get a bee in your bonnet about mostly?
[Nicola] Norming the other.
[Tempest] Okay.
[Nicola] That's kind of what I do, and it's in fact what I wrote my PhD thesis on, too.
[Tempest] Oh, sweet. So, in your work, have you tackled writing characters with physical disabilities that are the same or similar to the physical challenges that you have experienced in your life?
[Nicola] The only novel I've actually written from the perspective of a woman with disabilities is my most recent book, So Lucky. It's the only novel where I have written a character where I ignore her difference. All my other books, the main characters are queer, but that's not the focus of the book. But So Lucky, my most recent novel, it's about becoming disabled, and how that changes one's view of life.
[Interesting]
 
[Tempest] Do you feel as though, in your work and the work of people that you admire, it's more of a richness to just have a character who has an otherness and that's not the focus of the book, or is it, I guess I want to say, richer if that is the focus? Because I know that that's a lot the conversation around like whether or not when writing characters who are the other in mainstream society, or the other to you, whether it should be about that or whether they should just be that, and the book be about something else.
[Nicola] I think it really depends. For me, in terms of queerness, I always wanted to just have a world with queer people in it, and to just… I don't walk around thinking, "[gasp] My name's Nicola. I'm a woman. I'm queer."
[Chuckles]
[Nicola] I just go through life. I just assume the world is how it is. To me, that's what I want a character to do. But the difference for me was that I really, really wanted to talk about becoming disabled. So I had to address disability very specifically.
 
[Tempest] That makes sense. So when others… Other people, other writers are writing characters who have physical disabilities, what are the things that you see when it's done well that you wish you saw more of, and the kind of stuff that you put in your work that you want to model for other writers writing these types of characters?
[Nicola] I have to say, I'm a bit stumped at that, because I think there is very, very, very little good fiction with characters with physical disabilities. Because disability fiction is at the stage where queer fiction was I think about 60 years ago, honestly. It's still at the stage of a lot of kind of coming out fiction.
[Tempest] Okay. That makes sense.
[Nicola] People are very used to queer people now. It's much more acceptable. Still, not that many people really know disabled people. I mean, we literally don't get out much. It's… The world is not an accessible place. So it used to be that five years ago, you couldn't really get to conventions very easily. Now, science fiction conventions are brilliantly organized, mostly. So people know more disabled people, so you don't have to educate people to quite the degree that you do about queerness.
[Okay]
[Nicola] But, so for someone who uses a wheelchair, it is… A lot of people don't really understand. They'll say, "Oh, yeah, my house is completely accessible. Well, it's just a small step."
[Laughter]
[Nicola] They don't get it. So I felt the need to write my most recent book with a lot of this stuff in it, to say, "No, here's what accessible actually means in fictional terms."
[Dan] Yeah. That's so important. I grew up… My mom's in a wheelchair. I thought I knew these things. I'd grown up with them. Then, recently became lactose intolerant, and went to a Mexican restaurant without my Lactaid. That redefined accessibility for me in a way that I thought I already had internalized, and I hadn't. Suddenly, I was confronted with this entire restaurant that I couldn't access, that I couldn't use. It was very eye-opening.
 
[Dan] So, one of the things we like to do in this series is talk to people about how to write something from an experience that is not their own. We love own voices, we want people to write about their own experiences, but also, we would love people who may be don't have a physical disability to include more of that in their fiction. What is… What are some things that they can do to do that research and to do that homework and to get that right?
[Nicola] The best way is to actually use your imagination. By that, I mean actually feel the embodied sensations. So imagine you are walking into a restaurant… Imagine you just had the flu, and you're recovering from flu. So I'm trying to imagine… For example, if you're using crutches, because there are a huge spectrum of disabilities and mobility aids. So imagine someone on crutches. Their problem is not so much steps, although that is a problem. It's fatigue. So a way to imagine that is to think, "Okay, how do I feel when I just had flu? I'm weak as a kitten!" You need to think about spaces. Then, if you think, for a wheelchair user, I don't know how many people listening have kids, but imagine what it was like you had a small person in a stroller. What's accessible? What's not? I can only imagine if you are someone who has epilepsy. Again, to use the exercise of going into a restaurant, if you are the kind of person who has grand mal seizures, perhaps what you look at is the floor. Most people with physical disabilities will think of the floor. Is it shiny? Is it slippy? Does it have steps? Is it steep? Is it… Does it tilt? If you fall down, when you have a seizure, will you hurt your head? So it's very much about the physical environment and embodiment. So, yeah, think about bodies.
[Thank you]
[Dan] That's great.
 
[Piper] I think I'm going to stop us for the book of the week. I believe you have the book of the week for us, which is So Lucky. Could you tell us a bit about it?
[Nicola] So Lucky is a short novel about a woman called Mara, who is one of those type A, angry people who's on top of her world. She's married, she's got a fantastic job, she loves her work. Then, in the space of a week, she is divorced by her wife, diagnosed with MS, and loses her job. As you can imagine, that makes her a little unhappy. So the whole novel is about that, and it is about how she deals with monsters, human and otherwise.
[Piper] That sounds impactful. Thank you.
 
[Piper] So, for the next question, I would like to give you one of my own. It's referring back to something you had said earlier in our discussion. When it comes to living their lives, I was wondering what advice you would give authors who want to include people with disabilities, especially particularly mobility disabilities, who are not only living their best lives, their experiencing happiness, sadness, they're taking challenging lives and they're going after their goals? But also, they're living very full lives relationship-wise and perhaps even exploring sensuality. I think that sometimes that's erased, or people don't want to think about that. But that is a part of life sometimes. Could you talk a little bit about that for authors who want to include characters like that in their books?
[Nicola] Sure. Just imagine an ordinary person and how they might want to have sex sitting down or on a bed. You don't… If you're a wheelchair user, you can't have sex standing against a wall, for example. There are some very, very simple practical things. But that's all it is, is simple practical things. Just think about… Again, think about the body. Think about the mechanics of the thing. Then there's things like, well, if you are the kind of person who picks people up in clubs, you go to a club and you're going to be talking to people's belt buckles.
[Chuckles]
[Nicola] Which alters the conversation a little. So, if you want to write a sympathetic character who's nondisabled, you can have them immediately see someone in a wheelchair and think, "Okay. I'm going to sit down, so that I can speak to them on a level." So, I suppose, it depends if you want your other characters to be good guys or bad guys. How sensitive are they to this stuff? Am I making sense?
[Tempest] Absolutely. I think that that's really helpful. Not only because there are things that people can do to kind of see eye-to-eye, shall we say? But also considerations from a physical perspective and the mechanics of… Are there any resources that you could recommend for researching the mechanics, or… Because I know that that would be another popular question.
[Nicola] Actually, no, I can't think of anything. But I will think about it. Then, if I find something, I'll post it on my website. But right now, offhand, no, I can't. I'm sorry.
[Piper] No, no. Posting it on your website would be wonderful, because then your website would be the reference.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Yeah. One resource that is always valuable, although you need to be very circumspect and very polite, obviously, when asking, is just going to primary sources. Talking to people who have disabilities, and saying, "Well, are you willing to answer a few questions? Can I ask you what your life is like?" Maybe don't jump straight into the sex question with a stranger, obviously.
[Chuckles]
[Hi. You don't know me…]
[I was not the one who said that.]
[Laughter]
[I specifically said at the right moment.]
[Laughter]
[Dan] But, yes. Like I said, my mom grew up… My mom's in a wheelchair, and she is always happy to describe her experiences to people that she is comfortable with. So, making friends and asking them questions is a great way to do a lot of this research.
[Nicola] Yes. And, like everything else, it's a question of degree. So, certainly queer people, people of color, people in wheelchairs, get a little tired of being information dispensing machines. But if you are going to ask us to dispense information, perhaps you could do something for us.
[Dan] Absolutely.
[Tempest] Always pay your [substitute?] readers.
[Chuckles]
[Piper] For those of you who can't see us in the room, because this is a podcast, there's a whole lot of nodding going on around here.
[Laughter]
[Tempest] It's always a big thing.
 
[Piper] One very quick question before we end. So, you said that with So Lucky, you wanted to write a novel about someone who becomes disabled. But I know that also there are some activists, author activists, who talk about how a lot of narratives about people who become physically disabled, it's about them becoming it. Like, they weren't before, they were able-bodied before, and then somewhere during the course of the story, they become disabled. But there's not a lot of fiction about people who were born with a disability that meant they would always have to be in a wheelchair. How do you feel about sort of the balance of those types of stories? Do you think that basically, like, any representation is good, or do you agree that, like, there should be more stories about people who were born with a disability and have always lived with it?
[Nicola] I personally long for stories about disabled people the way I write stories about queer people. Which is just a thing. I actually don't mind one way or the other. I don't have a preference about whether or not someone's always been disabled. It's more a question of are they integrated with it now? That's what I would like. Moving forward, that's what I'll be writing. The book I'm working on now, which is a sequel to Hild, it has disabled people in it. It's very interesting trying to figure out what the world would be like in the seventh century for people with disabilities.
[Tempest] Awesome. Well, thank you very much for joining us. We very much appreciate it.
[Nicola] It was my pleasure.
[Dan] Thank you.
 
[Piper] At this point, thank you. We do have the homework to give our listeners. So, would you mind please giving us our homework?
[Nicola] Sure. I want to go back to various points in today's interview where I talked about the Italian restaurant. I use this a lot with my students. You can use it for almost any situation. It's all about what it means to be the character in their own body. So. Someone is going into an Italian restaurant. What do they see? What do they notice? How do they feel, and why? I'm going to give you an example. So, for example, a guy who's just been queer bashed, he would go in there and he would be really nervous around men with loud voices. For example. Or a woman with a small child might be looking for sharp objects. A lot of fancy Italian restaurants, they have those big open flames. Big open kitchens. A woman with small kids would be like, "Oh, I don't think this is the right place for us." So, someone in a wheelchair will see different things. Someone on crutches will see different things. So that would be your prompt. Put yourself in your character's body. Take them into that restaurant. See what happens.
[Piper] Thank you.
[Tempest] Awesome.
[Piper] Well, there you have it, everyone. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict

Jul. 10th, 2019 09:45 am
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.27: Natural Setting As Conflict
 
 
Key points: Person versus nature, setting, environment! Adventure based on survival, disaster, endemic. Start with research! You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. In person versus nature, nature serves the function of the antagonist, stopping the protagonist from achieving some goal. There are often plateaus of goals for the protagonist to achieve. Sometimes nature is a time bomb. You can also use person versus nature as one arc or subplot in a story. Person versus nature, especially in science fiction, often has a sense of wonder reveal as the resolution. So it's a mystery story, a puzzle box story. Setting is more interesting when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Person versus nature, in MICE terms, is a milieu story, with the goal of getting out of the milieu, or at least navigating and surviving it. So, what does the setting throw up as barriers that block that? Especially unanticipated consequences of decisions that the character makes. Often there are anthropomorphized elements, too. What does the character or the setting want, need, and get? Start with entry into the milieu, end with exit from the milieu, and add in lots of complications in the middle.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 27.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Natural Setting As Conflict.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] And we're in conflict with our environment.
[Chuckles]
[garbled]
[Howard] I don't think you should do the joke.
[Dan] We are in Houston. It's so humid and hot.
[Brandon] Yeah, we are.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, sweetness. It's so cute that you think it's humid outside.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] I'm just… Oh, poor bunny.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] We, on the podcast, have rarely done anything where we've dealt with person versus setting. In specific, setting as natural setting, natural… Meaning, these are adventure stories that are survival based, disaster based, or even endemic based. These sorts of things. We're going to talk about how to do that, how to approach making this type of story. You guys have any starting out pointers when you're going to create a person versus setting story?
[Dan] Yes. Do your research. Because, in my experience, the more research you do, the cooler your story is going to get. Because you… Even if you think you know how to survive in a particular environment or overcome a particular disaster, the more you learn about the things that could go wrong and the various solutions that already exist to solve them, will suggest a thousand cooler things you hadn't thought of yet.
[Howard] I… Years and years ago, I think I watched one episode early in the season of Survivor. I watched that for 10 minutes and thought, "Okay. It is taking them way too long to invent stuff that I learned how to make in Boy Scouts. There's got to be a reason why these people don't know how to do that." Because when I was 10 years old… Well, 13 years old, it made perfect sense. I only had to be shown half of this before I figured out, "Oh. Well, obviously, this is the other half." If you're doing person versus nature, you have to be smarter as a writer… You have to be smarter than the Boy Scout in the room. Because the Boy Scout is going to be pretty disappointed if the story starts and they feel like, "Oh. I've got this."
[Mary Robinette] I think, also, for me, one of the things about the person versus nature is that the nature is serving the function of your antagonist. So that means that your protagonist has to have a goal that the nature is stopping them from achieving.
[Brandon] That's a very good point.
[Mary Robinette] That's something that a lot of people leave out. That's why frequently they wind up being very flat. So, a lot of times, it is a character driven goal or some other aspect, but it's the nature that is keeping them from doing that.
[Dan] One thing I see a lot in nature survival stories is that the protagonist's goal is allowed to change more frequently and more completely than normal. Because they achieve plateaus of, "Well, now I've got the shelter built. Okay, I can move on to another goal now."
[Howard] I want to point out that it's… When we think of person versus nature, we very often default to survival. But you can absolutely have a person versus nature story where the big conflict is I am trying to go up the hillside, and come back down with the perfect Christmas tree. The mountain doesn't want to let me do that. The mountain isn't trying to kill me. The mountain's trying to ruin Christmas.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Would you call Calculating Stars, even though I know there are some villainous characters in it, would you call this a person versus nature story in some ways?
[Mary Robinette] Certainly part one is. I mean, I've… I'm killing the planet, so yes. But part one is very much we have to get out of nature. After that, it is… Most of the major conflicts are coming from societal problems. Where you're having trouble convincing people that in fact the climate is changing on the planet.
[Brandon] Right. But there's also this sense of we have to overcome this thing together as a species. I wonder if that could be put in that same category?
[Mary Robinette] I think it can. Because it… This is one of the things that when you're introducing it into your story… I said that it serves the function of as… Excuse me, of an antagonist, that it's preventing your character from achieving a goal. But the other thing that it can do, which is why I hesitated with Calculating Stars, is it's not so much serving the function of an antagonist. It's a time bomb.
[Brandon] Right. Yeah, that's true.
[Mary Robinette] That's what it's doing. It is providing goals. It's actually allowing people to break hurdles. So I don't know that in… That's in part two of the book, I don't know that it serves the function…
[Howard] Well, what you've raised is… I don't love a novel length pure person versus nature story because that's a long time to wrestle with nature. That said, I loved The Martian.
[Mary Robinette] I was going to cite Isle of the Blue Dolphins.
[Howard] Yeah. I haven't read that one, but I loved The Martian. But it is absolutely useful and beautiful to work person versus nature as one of your big arcs. Knowing how person versus nature works, and knowing how to do it correctly, means that if you're using some sort of formula for timing the delivery of emotional punches, you know how to time these things.
 
[Brandon] Can I put you on the spot and ask for any tips along those lines? What makes these stories tick? Why do we love them? What are some of those beats? Dan's already mentioned one, reassessing of goals, as you achieve smaller and smaller… Larger and larger goals, I should say. You start off saying, "I am helpless. I am going to die. Well, at least I'll do this thing. Well, since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing. Since I did that thing, maybe I can do this thing." Then, it just escalates to the point that you believe that they can survive in this.
[Dan] Then they build a radio out of coconuts.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] In a science fiction setting…
[Mary Robinette] Gilligan!
[Howard] Often the… Yeah. Was it Gilligan who built that, or was it the Professor?
[Mary Robinette] The Professor. It's always the Professor [garbled who's building things?]
[Howard] I was pretty sure I saw transistor tubes in there somewhere.
[Dan] Those are also made of coconuts.
[Howard] Yeah.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Coconut glass.
[Mary Robinette] Everything that you need, you just pull out of that ship.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] It was the most amazing… Anyway, your point being, Howard?
 
[Howard] Yeah. The point being, when you are doing person versus nature in science fiction, often the resolution is not oh, I learned how to make a structure out of sticks, the solution is some sort of sense of wonder reveal about how this alien environment really works. That moment… If you've planned that, what you've written isn't what we classically think of as a person versus nature story. What you've written is a mystery story, in which we're being a detective and we're solving a problem. Then you wrap that around a story in which characters are in conflict and the solving of the mystery… It could be a time bomb, it could be a puzzle box type story, but… I do think of these things as name dropping the formulas as I'm building them, because that allows me to very quickly picture what it is I want to do. Then, when I have that picture, I start mapping character names onto it and moving things around. I'm writing a longform serial where I already have a whole lot of established pieces. Coming up with a story and then very quickly mapping a bunch of characters on it… The mapping the characters onto it is often the easiest part. It's coming up with what is that fun reveal? One of the ones I'm working with right now in the Schlock Mercenary universe is Fermi's Paradox. Which is fascinating to think of as person versus nature, because nature here is, and the mystery as it stands, Galactic civilizations have been wiping themselves out every few million years and we do not know why. Is it an enemy? Is it something natur… It's a mystery. It is a reveal. It's fun. If I can stick the landing, I'm going to make so much money.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That's really what person versus nature is all about. It's about the money that you're…
[Howard] I want to get out of these woods as a millionaire.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Dan, you have our book of the week this week.
[Dan] Our book of the week this week is what I consider one of the classic man versus nature survival stories. It's called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. It's Newberry winning young adult novel. It's about a kid who gets for his birthday a hatchet and throws it in his suitcase and hops on the little Cessna that's going to take him to visit his dad on an oilfield in the Canadian wilderness. Part way there, the pilot has a heart attack and dies, and the kid has to do his best to land the plane in a lake and then survive as long as he can in the middle of nowhere. He's the only character. It's all about him doing his best to survive. It's really… Everything we've been talking about in its purest little young adult form. It's a fantastic book. Very short and easy to read, and awesome.
[Howard] Boy versus nature.
[Dan] I'm going to recommend one more, though.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Dan] We're getting two book of the weeks for the price of one.
[Mary Robinette] Whoo!
[Dan] Ryan North, the guy who does dinosaur comics. He's got a brand-new book out called How to Invent Everything.
[Brandon] Oh, I really want to read that.
[Dan] He sells this, he promotes this as kind of like a cheat sheet for time travelers. If you end up stuck in the past for whatever reason, and have this book with you, you will be able to invent electricity and penicillin and everything you need to make a civilization work. So, as a resource for writers who want to be able to describe characters doing this stuff, it's a really good resource.
[Brandon] Yeah, I think it's… He has this poster that I've seen for years, that is… Hang this poster in your Time Machine, that has all the little tips you would need. It's done jokingly, and he's adapted that now into an entire book.
[Dan] Expanded it into a full book.
 
[Brandon] Let's… On the topic here, Mary talked about setting as antagonist. Let's dig into this idea a little bit more. How do you go about making your setting an interesting antagonist? How do you go about having a story that perhaps has no villain other than survival, or… Yeah?
[Dan] One of the principles that I teach in my How to Scare People class is that something familiar becomes unfamiliar. That's one of the basic premises of a horror story. It's also exactly what's going on in survival and disaster stories. Something like the Poseidon Adventure. It's a cruise ship, we know what a cruise ship is like. Now it's upside down. So we recognize everything, but it's also weird and new at the same time. That gives us that sense of horror, and that sense of unknown. Even though we still kind of understand what's going on.
[Mary Robinette] That's exactly why the upside down is disturbing in Stranger Things. Huh. Interesting.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] Surprising no one, for me, one of the tricks on making it an effective antagonist goes back to the MICE quotient, which is… It is often a straight up milieu story. So, for me, the thing is, again, you got a character goal, there's the character goal of… Whatever their emotional character goal is, but then there's also the goal of I want to get out of this place. I need to navigate this place. So, finding the environmental setting things that can throw up barriers, that challenge your character's competence, and that are, often, I think, most effectively a result of a choice that they have made. So it's like, well, we've got fire ants coming at us. So, in order to stop them, we're going to flood this area to keep them from coming in. But now, having flooded it…
[Howard] Oh, no. Oh, no.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Islands of swimming fire ants are a thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. This is a film. So it's this unanticipated consequence that makes things worse. I think that's often one of the ways that you can ratchet up the tension and something that a good antagonist does, is they react.
[Brandon] All right. And escalating. That's like… That's a very good point. Making it worse and worse and worse, even as our protagonist is leveling up in what they're able to accomplish.
[Dan] A lot of survival stories also have… Not, they don't have villains, but you can see anthropomorphized elements of the environment that function as a villain. You mentioned Island of the Blue Dolphins earlier. She's got this rivalry, so to speak, with an octopus. She knows, she's scared to death of this octopus, but she knows at some point she's going to have to dive down into that part of the reef, or she's not going to have enough to eat. So it's building this thing up as a villain over the course of the story until you get a showdown. You get a similar thing in the movie Castaway with his tooth. I'm going to do my best to survive here, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to confront that tooth. It's going to be a showdown.
[Brandon] Howard, earlier you mentioned something I thought was very interesting, which is using person versus nature as a subtheme in a story, which you pointed out, you like a little bit better sometimes. Any tips on keeping this as a subtheme or as a secondary plot cycle?
[Howard] The book, Michael Crichton's book Jurassic Park, the character of Dr. Malcolm is… He is the personification of chaos. Chaos is the person versus… Is nature in person versus nature. Malcolm tells us we have a complex system and things are going to go wrong in unexpected ways and they are going to amplify each other and things are going to get worse. By giving voice to that, when it happens, it doesn't feel like, oh, the author just picked the worst possible thing to happen and it happened. It feels like a natural consequence because now we can understand chaos theory. That is layered on top of a corporate espionage plot where it was corporate espionage that caused all these things… That we like to think caused all these things to go wrong at the beginning. But when you stand back and look at the book, you know, well, if it hadn't been corporate espionage, it would have been something else. So having a character who gives voice to the nature without actually being on nature's side can be useful.
[Mary Robinette] Something that you said made me actually think of Lord of the Flies, which definitely begins as person versus nature. One of the things that happens over the course of that, as the boys achieve goals… It's like, okay, we've created shelter, we've created fire, and all of those things, is that the antagonist shifts from being the island to being the boys… The society of the boys themselves. I think that that's something that you can actually do. Something that we see when we have human antagonists, that a lot of times on antagonist will shift. It's not the antagonist that you thought it was the entire time, it's something else. So I think that's something that you can play with with your worldbuilding and your… The setting as…
[Howard] It's an echoing of the principle… The story begins and there's a thing that our main character wants. There's a thing that our main character actually needs. And there is a thing that, in the course of the story, the main character's actually going to get. Often, these are three different things. If you treat nature, the antagonist, the same way, the want, need, get being different things, there's this twist as we discover it doesn't matter what nature wanted, this is what nature needed… And this is what actually happened.
 
[Brandon] Mary, you've got some homework for us.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is, we're going to take the milieu MICE thread concept. Which is that a story begins when you enter a place in a milieu story, and it ends when you exit the place. All of the conflicts are things that stop from getting out, they stop you from navigating. They are things that get in your way of achieving that exit strategy. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick a milieu. Pick a setting. Just pick your starting point, this is a character entering. Pick your exit point, that's the character leaving. Then brainstorm about 20 things that are going to get in the way of your character exiting the place. Then, I want you to pick your five favorites and rank them in an escalating order of difficulty. So this is just a structure exercise. If you wind up with something that sounds fun, you can write it. But really, what I want you to do is think about a way to build that setting as antagonist, and that setting is getting in your way.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 11.15: The Environment, with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

Apr. 28th, 2016 12:35 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.15: The Environment, with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

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

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

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

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