Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 20]

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 20, Episode 20]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Dan] The Lens of Where and When.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

[Erin] Yes.

[Laughter]

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

 

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

[Laughter]

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

[Laughter]

[Erin] [garbled] elves.

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

[Laughter]

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

[Dan] Cleaning up…

[Erin] That is…

[Dan] Pneumatic vines.

[Erin] The pneumatic vine cleaner.

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

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Oh, my God.

[Erin] Sorry, listeners.

 

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

[No, no]

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

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Like…

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

[Chuckles]

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

[Chuckles]

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

Writing Excuses 20.03: Polishing Your Writing Lens

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-03-polishing-your-writing-lens

 

Key points: Your personal lens! Writing metaphors! AB comparisons, where B might not really fit. Using experiences from your own life is not cheating. How many of you have been an elephant? How would James Bond say it? Try out different lenses! The more specific, the more general. Specificity! Avoid head bobbing. How do you find your lenses? Think about it. What's important to you, what annoys you? Introspection! Therapy! Self-examination! Do you understand? Try to explain it to a friend. 

 

[Season 20, Episode 03]

 

[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 03]

 

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses.

[Mary Robinette] Polishing Your Writing Lens. 

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] And I'm Erin.

 

[Mary Robinette] We're going to be looking this season at the idea that... We've been talking about these toolboxes, but specifically, one of the most important tools that a writer brings to their work is their own personal lens. You've heard us say this before that that's the thing that makes the story interesting is you, that no one else can write your story. So, that's shaped by your hobbies, your job, your history, your experience. This season, we're going to be looking at all of these tools, but we're also going to be doing these additional episodes where we're talking about writing metaphors. The lens that we look at… That's these personal lenses that we bring to the work. For me, you've heard me talk about puppetry a lot, you're going to get a whole episode later in which I just talk about… I just ramble about puppetry for a long time.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But everybody has these. Everybody has these personal lenses that are based on their experience. Sometimes it's a lens that you bring just to a single scene. It's like, oh, this is like that time my grandma did that thing. Other times it's just… It's the mindset that you have when you approach something.

[Howard] I have joked in the past that… And, am I joking or is it true? That I'm a one trick pony. The trick is AB comparisons, where B might not really fit. I'm thinking about lenses, and realized the story of the Hubble telescope is so beautiful, because they put it in orbit and then realized the lens was warped. It was polished to perfection, but it was shaped wrong. In order to get clear pictures from the Hubble, they had to study the distortions of the lens and understand them to the point that they could write software to correct for it. I'm here to tell you that if you know your personal lens well enough to make those kinds of corrections, you will be able to write anything.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is my twentieth year in publishing, dear God, and if there's one question that I've been asked more often than any other in my career, it's what am I looking for? Right? As an editor, as an agent, whatever it is, like, what's the thing that I'm looking for in a text, and the answer I give more often than not is, I'm looking to see you in the text. Right? If I can feel the writer as I'm reading a pitch, as I'm reading those opening pages, that's always going to catch my attention more than anything else. Because in tech culture, they talk about the unfair advantage. Right? Your unfair advantage is you. No one else has your perspective, your experience, your interest. So when I read something, what makes it feel undeniable to me, is feeling your perspective in it. Knowing that nobody else could write the story that you've written. If it feels like anyone could have written this thing, then, sure, I'll look for anyone. Right? But if it feels like you wrote this thing, now I'm locked in.

 

[Mary Robinette] I was talking to a writer who said that they worried that they were quote cheating because they kept using experiences from their own life. I'm like, no, it…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Is not cheating. That is the whole point.

[Howard] If that's cheating, I belong in jail.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] It was cheating, because I used heat to cook food.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, no. Oh…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And we so often discount the things that are… We discount our own personal experiences, because, oh, well, that's not interesting, because it's something that we experienced, therefore it's part… It has become part of our normal, and we forget that other people haven't had those experiences, like, how many of you have been an elephant?

[Dan] Me.

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Thanks, Dan.

[DongWon] Well, you can write your own voices elephant story.

[Dan] Yeah!

[Howard] The one place where… Sorry, thinking about me being in jail for cheating by using metaphor. If I were asked to write Drax's dialogue in Guardians of the Galaxy, Drax, as a person who does not understand metaphor, and I found a way to paper over me using metaphor for Drax's dialogue, even though he would… I would call that cheating. I would need to… Sorry. Howard, you need to step away from this tool you love, and you need to write something you're unfamiliar with, because that character would not talk like you want to talk. So, yeah. In that respect, okay, sure, using your own voice in some regard might be cheating because you need to stretch a little further to write a character who is unlike you in a specific way. But that's the only example I can think of.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, that's not so much… The character is still going to be having the thoughts that you want to have them, and one of the things that I love is that you can tell everyone… I know this for a fact. I give this exercise where I say, okay, we're going to say, "What did you say?" And everybody needs to change the way it means to be a specific character. And we go through a bunch of them. I will give James Bond, and everybody comes up with different ways that James Bond would say, "What did you say?" That is still the individual lens affecting the idea of James Bond.

[Erin] Yeah. I think… I love… The idea of cheating is really interesting. I also think that sometimes there are some lenses that feel fragile. They are lenses that are close to our identity, they are lenses that are maybe close to experiences that we've had that we have complex feelings about. And I think that sometimes it can be hard to try to use those lenses as opposed to more well-worn lenses that, like, we have less connection with or, like, we know well because like you seen… Like, it's like if you've seen a hundred James Bond movies… Confession, I've never seen a James Bond movie in my whole life…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] But I know he's a guy…

[Laughter]

[Howard] He is a guy.

[Garbled]

[Erin] He's a spy guy.

[DongWon] He's a spy guy.

[Erin] Spy guy. So, I'm like, but if you seen… If you are not me, and you've seen a lot of James Bond movies, like, you have a certain thing, and if you were going to write a spy guy, you might be, like, okay, this is what they do. This is how it's done. This is what they say. This is what the world looks like. Even though you might say, well, actually, I have a completely different understanding of what it means to spy, or what it means to work for one government on working against other governments, and because I have a complicated feeling about how I relate to the powers that be in my own country or what have you. But I think those are the things that are really interesting. But I do want to just call out that they are hard.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And it is possible to bump them, to bruise them, to sometimes even crack them. But I think that in testing things, in testing ourselves, that's how we strengthen our understanding of ourselves. And if a lens gets cracked, and then you, like, polish it out, where you figure out the program that works through the distortion you discovered, you actually have a stronger lens than you did before.

[DongWon] Absolutely. And, just to build off of that a little bit, the reason I'm so excited to be talking about our personal metaphors of how we think about writing and craft is, we started this year in our first episode talking about intentions. Right? And how important approaching your work with intention is. And so, as you're talking about your lenses, yeah, some get used more than others. Some are like reflexively at hand. Right? I've been working on a project recently which has involved me GMing a bunch of games pretty quickly that are pretty short. This feels like I've written a bunch of short stories in a row. And I realized how much I'm reaching for a couple repeated tropes and themes, and especially, because games are so improvisational, you're moving very quickly, so it really is like so easy just to grab that first lens. And now I need to push myself to be like, okay, what lenses are little deeper? What lenses are little less out of reach that I'm not using as much? They might be a little dusty and could use a little TLC before putting them into the rotation, but when you think about intention, when you think about why we use certain metaphors, or why we approach our craft through certain processes, I think that allows you to tap into a wider range of these lenses than you might on your own.

[Dan] Well, I want to make sure to point out as well, back to that idea of cheating. Bringing your own perspective to something, bringing your own lenses and your own personal experiences, is what makes the story relatable. In fact one ongoing true principle is that the more specific you can be, the more general it becomes. Which doesn't sound like it's true, but it's true. If I am trying to describe some kind of generic experience, that won't be relatable to the audience. Whereas if I describe my own experience or bring my own lens and my own background to a character's very personal experience, then it does become instantly more relatable to the audience.

 

[Howard] I looked at… And I'm not going to name any names, but I looked at a marketing page for an AI writing tool with before and after text. And the before text was simple, workmanlike prose that described how a character felt about the sunrise. And the AI reworked text was much more flowery, and as I read it and reread it and reread it to figure out what was wrong with it, I realized the character was now gone.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Their perspective was gone. It was no longer how they felt about the sunrise, it was words to describe color and light and warmth and whatever. But the character was now absent. So… You say, when you get more specific, you get more general. Yes. When you get more specific, when you tell us how one person feels about a thing, the general population can now feel that as well. But if you take generalized AI built on large language models, it's… You lose that completely. Because that specific experience is now gone.

[DongWon] Heading into the new year…

 

[DongWon] I always recommend writers have their own websites. It's important to have a place on the web where you can make sure people can find your press kit, upcoming releases, and bibliography. Even if you've not published yet, being out there and establishing a digital identity is incredibly important. So, when Kinsta reached out, we thought they'd be a good fit for our audience's needs. They take care of the technical stuff so you can focus on your writing. Kinsta provides managed hosting for WordPress, offering lightning fast load times, top-tier security, and unmatched human-only customer support. They offer you complete peace of mind by ensuring that your WordPress sites are always online, secure, and performing at their best. Kinsta provides enterprise grade security, and it's one of the few hosting providers for WordPress with SOC 2 and other certifications that guarantee the highest level of security for your website. And Kinsta customers can experience up to 200% faster sites by simply moving there WordPress sites to the platform. They even have a user-friendly custom dashboard called my-Kinsta that makes managing your site or multiple sites a breeze. My-Kinsta is packed with a range of features that simplify site management, including tools for cache control, debugging, redirects, [garbled] location, and even CDN set up. And thanks to their unlimited, free, expert led migrations, Kinsta ensures a smooth transition from other hosting providers so you won't experience any downtimes. Plus, their 24/7, 365, human-only support is available in multiple languages, ready to assist with any inquiries regardless of site complexity. Ready to experience Kinsta hosting for yourself? Get your first month free when you sign up at kinsta.com today. It's the perfect opportunity to see why Kinsta is trusted by thousands of businesses worldwide to power their websites. Visit kinsta.com to get this limited time offer for new members on select plans. Don't miss out, get started for free today.

 

[Mary Robinette] Specificity, when I was doing puppetry, was the thing that we kept coming back to over and over again. There was a… There's something called head bobbing, which means that the character's head moves with every single syllable, and it stops having any meaning at all. So you start looking for that one specific movement that underscores the thing that you're trying to convey. And I think this idea of specificity is not just on the biggest level of you specifically have the ability to write this, but what is the specific story you're trying to tell, what is the specific goal that you're going for, who is the specific audience that you're writing for? But often… When you start writing for someone very specific, that more people have access to the story. Sometimes not the in jokes. I'll grant that. But… Speaking of specificity, let's pause specifically now.

 

[Erin] I have a question for all of you, which is, how do you know what your lenses are? I mean, we've kind of talked as if, like, at hand, we all have, like, a nice lens catalog…

[Laughter]

[Erin] But how do you… Which I do… But how do you actually figure out what your lenses are, and, like, that you are bringing yourself versus the things that you've experienced, the things you've written, the things you've seen to the table as a writer?

[Howard] I… Sorry, you said what your lenses are, and I'm reminded of the optometrist. When he opened up, he had his box from school that's, like, roll and row after row of brass ringed lenses that are labeled, and I realized I have never before wanted something more that I don't need then I want that right now. It's just a big box of lenses. Why? I don't know, but I want it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Maybe that's one of my lenses, is covetousness of brass.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I mean… You're not alone in that one. See! Specific and general. I think that it is actually something that you have to think about. Because… For those of you who wear glasses, you forget… Your brain tunes out the frame. There's a frame, and there's a part of the world that your peripheral vision that is fuzzy. And you forget that. You tune it out until you start consciously thinking about it. And I think that one of the things you have to do as a writer, potentially, if you want to be aware of these lenses, is to think about what are the things that are important to me? And those things that are important to you are going to be things that are linked to who you are, that are going to be sometimes different than other people. So it is… Is it important to you, the sound of the prose? Is that important to you? Is the feeling important to you? What are the things that annoy you? I get really annoyed by head bobbing, like, I can't watch certain actors because I'm like, I know that you're human, but, like, don't move your head like that.

[Chuckles]

 

[Howard] We've attributed a quote to Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. I'm not going to say that anybody's life is not worth living, but I will say that the unexamined life is a very difficult life from which to write effectively.

[Mary Robinette] I think you've just given me a way to unlock one of Erin's questions. In a previous season, I talked about the axes of power. That this was a thing that we do with characters to figure out age and all of those things. All of those are part of your lens. So if you actually take that casting worksheet and you filled it out for yourself, those are all things that affect the way you move through the world.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, my glib answer to Erin's question is therapy. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.

[DongWon] Like… And whether or not you participate in Western therapy or psychoanalysis or whatever it is, the important thing is introspection, the important thing is self-examination. Right? There's a lot of ways to get there, there's a lot of tools for that. I mean, therapy is one that helped me very much. But it can be just finding time to sit and reflect. It can be journaling, it can be meditation. But what I encourage you to do as writers is to take time to understand yourself, to understand your own story, to understand the things that made you who you are, and the things that trouble you on a day-to-day basis. What are the things that make your life hard for whatever reason? And what are the things that bring you joy? Understanding all of these helps you understand where you come from and what your perspective is. That clarity helps you create art. Right? Because the more you understand yourself, I think the clearer you have an approach to making the art that you want to be making.

[Dan] Um. Therapy is such a good metaphor to bring into this. Because you can do the same thing with your writing that you do with your own brain. In fact, the writing is just an extra step in that process. If you take the time to look at things you've written, snippets that have never gone anywhere, or unfinished or even completely finished projects, and try to figure out what sort of lenses are in here? What kind of person produced this? You have to step back away from yourself a little bit. Similar to how you would do that in Western therapy as mentioned. And kind of analyze your own brain through your writing.

[Erin] Yeah. I agree. I was thinking the very same thing, which is that, like, when you read your writing back sometimes, specifically writing that you've written in a specific era, you can be, like, all the things I wrote this year, or three years ago. Sometimes you'll find themes that you'd be, like, huh, I didn't see that at the time, but it seems like I was working through something. And here's where you can see, I no longer cared about that. Just because it's coming through. But I also think we do a lot of self-analysis all the time. Or maybe it's just me, but, like…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] No, it's not.

[Erin] I really… It's like…

[Howard] It's not just you, but I don't think it's everybody.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Erin] But it's like sometimes you're in… People go to therapy, but also, like, any… If you've ever read, like, your sun sign, and been like, yes! That's the Scorpio in me for real. Like, that is introspection. You're like, oh, that part does… I'm not a Gemini in that way. That's introspection. That's saying, like, that's part of a specific lens which astrology is, if nothing else, a lens on personhood, same as, like, if you like Enneagram or the Myers-Briggs or Buzzfeed quizzes…

[Chuckles] [garbled]

[Erin] You're like, I'm not a Reese Witherspoon. I'm in fact whatever. Some other celebrity. Then you've learned something about yourself. I think a lot of times, we think of that as very separate from our writing. But you can use that to figure out what your lenses are, and then, how does that come through in the way you express yourself in your writing?

[Howard] As the quote from one of my freshman writing classes… I don't remember who said it, but we said it all the time after we'd heard it once. How do I know what I think until I see what I say? I… No. Seriously. Until I've read what I've written, I don't really know what I think. Because at the time I was writing it, I was thinking about the words as much as I was thinking about the thought. And reading the words, I can now see the thoughts more clearly and…

[DongWon] Well, some of the joys of doing this podcast or teaching for Writing Excuses generally is that a lot of times, people… I'll be asked, like, what do you want to teach? What do you want to talk about? And what I do is I'm like, what's a thing I don't understand?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] What's a thing I'm struggling with? What's the thing that I'm like, oh, I need to dig into that more. Then I'll take that, and then having to come up with the curriculum or in talking about it on the podcast, I will find the thought that's in there. I will find the perspective that I have.

[Howard] I almost wish we had video of this session…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because to my eye, there have been three epiphanies in this room during this session.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And that would be fun for other people to watch.

[Dan] I do the same thing…

[DongWon] Either that, or we'd all go to therapy.

[Dan] I do the same thing with classes, and I always hate myself at some point in that process.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Because I think, so, they'll ask, what do you want to teach on the cruise this year? And I'm like, that's months away. By the time we get there, I'll have a much better handle on characterization. So, I'm going to teach a characterization class. Then the time arrives and I'm like, nope, I have not done any introspection or learning. It is time to make that happen.

[Mary Robinette] Yes

[DongWon] That's like, I still don't understand the thing that I picked, because I didn't understand it. Dammit.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yup, yup. This is actually a really good way, I think, to understand where your own personal strengths are. You don't have to have, like, a formal class. If you have been listening to the podcast and you're like, ah, I think I finally understand this. Find a friend and explain it to them. If you cannot explain it to them, you don't actually understand it yet. On the other hand, if we start talking about a topic and you're like, I got that already. That may be something that you have a strength in that you have not previously recognized. So. That brings us, of course, to homework. Because would it be Writing Excuses if we did not give you homework?

 

[Mary Robinette] What I want you to do is I want you to do some introspection. I want you to think about what lenses from your non-writing life shape the way you see things. Puppetry shapes mine, woodworking shapes DongWon's, gaming shapes a lot of us.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, what are the lenses from your non-writing life that shape the way you see things?

 

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

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-14-a-close-reading-on-voice-epistolary-storytelling-through-voice

 

Key points: Epistles, letters, and voice. What do letters do for voice? 2 things at the same time, what you plan to say, and knowing that it is written for a specific audience, how you present it. 2nd person! Can we be luxuriant and indulgent without epistles? Yes, using pacing, accent, attitude, experience, and focus. Try free indirect speech. Epistles let you concentrate it. Playfulness or humor in the midst of serious situations, like gallows humor. Epistles have a performative aspect, with the character conscious that their words will be judged. The signoff yours. Repetition and resonance! 

[Season 19, Episode 14]

 

[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 14]

 

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

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Voice – Epistolary Storytelling through Voice.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] At the very beginning of our journey in this book, I talked about how much I love the fact that it used epistolaries, that it uses letters. So we're going to really dive into how voice is working within the epistolaries in this particular episode. I actually want to start before we get into a specific reading that I'm going to ask DongWon to do, just to…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Just to hear him do it, is that I'm wondering sort of what is it… Why do we use epistolaries? What is it that letters actually do in voice? I'll say, for me, one of the things I like about using letters is that there are 2 sort of things going on at the same time. There's what you planned to say, and the fact that you know you're writing it to a specific audience, that your character is writing it to someone. So they expect it to be read. That changes the way that they actually present themselves in the things that they put on the page.

[Mary Robinette] I do agree because I think that one of the things that that illuminates is very clearly what the character thinks of the other character. Because of the way they frame things, the… All of the subtext that goes into that epistolary letter. It is also, I think, one of the things that is fun because there is the epistolary that is the letter, and then there's also things that are… Like news articles, and these are very different because they are written to a broad audience, whereas a letter is written, as you said, to one specific person. That is, I think, that's fun.

[DongWon] The letter epistolary, the thing I love really about it is I'm such a sucker for the 2nd person in a piece of fiction. I love the you address. It plays with your subjectivity as the reader in such an interesting way, because it forces you into the position of the person on the other end of this. Right? So, in this case, switching between Red and Blue, and using the 2nd person… I'm put in the position where I have to identify with the person receiving the letter in a way that I think is really fascinating to me, and I think really deepens the connection to character in this book. It's a really clever trick that I really love.

[Howard] How do I know what I think, until I see what I say? I have operated on that principle for decades.

[Screech]

[DongWon] I find these so delightful is the letters can be quite silly in a way that's really good. So. Anyways, Erin is torturing me by making me read this.

 

"My perfect Red. How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol horde got bored? Perhaps you'll tell me once you finished with this strand?"

 

[DongWon] Just like these little references and jokes layered throughout… It is so delightful to me. Then, there's a later line in the same letter that… This taunting voice. Right?

 

"A suggestion of corruption in my command chain? A charming concern for my well-being? Are you trying to recruit me, dear Cochineal? And then we'd be at each other's throats even more. Oh, Petal, you say that like it's a bad thing."

 

[DongWon] There's so much dialogue here, there's so much voice-iness here. The characters are coming through. It's such this crisp playful way as, like, Blue taunts Red through this whole letter. We're going to see such, like, different evolution in the tone of their letters to each other as we go. But these early ones are such a hook for the audience.

[Erin] Yeah. I think I've been thinking since we talked about it a few episodes ago, why I find these to be so dense in some ways. I think it's because I'm responding to the denseness of personal indulgence as opposed to the denseness of poetic prose.

[DongWon] Oh, I love that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You know what I mean? Because these are the moments in which I feel like I get the best sense of who they are, because of the way that they're trying to present themselves, as opposed to… Which is like the splash of color against this beautiful backdrop of poetry. Which I absolutely love.

[Howard] Indulgence is definitely the right word there.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] The luxuriating and indulgent… That I can feel… I can feel in reading these how much Max and Amal just love to write.

[DongWon] Oh, yeah. And love to write to each other. Right? These letters… They wrote these, this novella, sitting literally back-to-back, passing a laptop back and forth. So one would write the letter and hand it to the other. I think that's where that sense of playfulness comes from. You can feel the friendship in this, you can feel the taunting, back-and-forth, as they're both trying to show off for each other in a way that I think comes through.

[Howard] Oh, you're going to go Blue du ba de...

[Laughter]

[Howard] Well, I got some draft punk on tap for you, baby.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Howard] Hey, I've got some questions about how these epistolaries… Not just how they work, but how we can do the same sorts of things. Maybe even do the same sorts of things without being epistolary. But I think those questions have to wait until after the break.

 

[DongWon] Hey, writers. Are you thinking about learning a new language? I think exploring the world, experiencing other cultures, and being able to communicate with people outside your everyday experience lets you create richer, better stories. A great way to do that is with Rosetta Stone, a trusted expert for over 30 years with millions of users and 25 languages offered. They use an immersive technique which leads to fast language acquisition. It's an intuitive process that helps you learn to speak, listen, and, most of all, think in the language you're trying to learn. They also feature true accent speech recognition technology that gives you feedback on your pronunciation. It's like having a voice coach in your home. Learn at home or on the go with a desktop and mobile app that lets you download and act on lessons even when you're off-line. It's an amazing value. A lifetime membership gives you access to all 25 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese, and, of course, Korean. Don't put off learning that language. There's no better time than right now to get started. For a very limited time, Writing Excuses listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. Visit rosettastone.com today. That's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Redeem your 50% off at rosettastone.com today.

 

[Erin] I'm excited to tell you about a song this week. It's a song Story2 by the group clipping. What I love about songs, just in general, is that they have to get put so much story into, like, a really small space. In this case, it's through a character study of a guy named Mike Winfield. I won't tell you much more, because it literally takes 3 minutes to actually listen to the song. But one thing that I want you to listen for, maybe the 2nd time around, or as your sort of enjoying it, is how he gets so much about who Mike Winfield is, where he's been, and the tension of the current moment, all at once. The 2nd thing to look for is something that clipping does that's amazing is they change the time signature of the song as it goes and tension is tightened, which is something that you may be able to use in changing the tempo of your prose. So, look at how they decide when to change that tempo and what you can learn from it by listening to Story2 by clipping.

 

[Howard] Let me start with this question. The luxuriance, the indulgence, the loving to write. Can we do this without resorting to epistolary? Are these tools available to us in other ways?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Absolutely. They're still using the same tools that we've been talking about for voice all along. They're still using pacing, accent, attitude, experience. Focus, even. But what they're doing is that, in the epistolary, it gives you a little bit more freedom… Just a little bit… To have some of those repetitions, some of the more colloquial language. You can do that absolutely when you're not in epistolary form. That's where we… That's where that free indirect speech that we've been talking about comes back in. That some of the things that are very specifically their phrasing, if you took that, and you shifted it to 3rd person and you put it into the middle of a paragraph of action, just a sentence out of that, you would get that same sense of the character, but you would get it spread out through the book instead of in this compressed place of the epistolary where it's isolated in form.

 

[Erin] I also think being playful in the middle of ser… In, like, a serious situation is something that we can all use. I mean, you are the humor expert, so you know this sort of better than anyone, but, I think, that that's something to think about here is that just because a topic is serious or a theme is serious doesn't mean that there isn't room for play. That room gives us a breath. It's like gallows humor. Even in the worst of times, people often use humor to respond to it. There's an episode of Deep Space 9 that I love where all the people are gonna die, and how they respond to it shows you so much about their character. One person gets quiet. One person jokes. One person plans. That shows a lot in the way…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] I mean, you can do that in voice. Somebody who starts making a list at the… Imminent death is coming, is going to feel different than somebody who jokes about the different ways they could die.

[DongWon] The thing I love about the humor here, though, is… When I encounter humor in fiction sometimes, it's very frustrating, because it undermines the emotional beats of the overall story. Here, the humor never contradicts the story, it never contradicts the character beats. It is so clearly a character masking an emotion or taunting somebody else or being playful. But it takes the world seriously, and it takes the stakes seriously, and finds a way to be funny in the middle of that. Right? So I think the overall impression when people talk about Time War, when they think about this book, is of this lush romanticism, of this like deep character work and poeticness. But the experience of reading it… I often find myself laughing out loud at different beats of the book. It's much funnier than I think people remember after they come back to it.

[Howard] As a humorist, that is what I reach for when I'm writing anything that is not… Would not be categorized as humor. During a critique group for one of the shorts that I published in Space Eldritch, a friend said, "The jokes that you put in this scene kind of undermines a whole lot of tension and horror that's been happening." My response was, "I know. I got too tense and scared, and so I just did it." The rest of the group was like, "So did we. Thank you." I was like, "Oh. Okay." So this is a… It's not to everybody's taste, but I reflexively use the tool correctly. That's one of the things that so cool about these kinds of tools is that sometimes if you are getting too tense, you are getting too emotional, you realize, "Oh, I need to… I need to turn a phrase in a way that makes me giggle."

[Mary Robinette] This is also that… That sense is also something that your character will be experiencing while they are writing the letter. So there is a performative aspect to an epistolary section, where the character is conscious of the fact that their words are going to be judged, so they are trying to present themselves in a certain way. When we look back at that first letter from Red…

 

"My cunning methods for spiriting her from your clutches. Engine trouble, a good spring day, a suspiciously effective and cheap remote access software suite her hospital purchased 2 years ago, which allows the good doctor to work from home."

 

[Mary Robinette] It's like I'm just going to show off just a little bit. You think you've got me? No, no, no. Look at how clever I am. I set this up 2 years before you even got here. That kind of performative nature, I think, and how am I going to be judged, is, again, a thing that you can bring outside of the epistles into the way your character's moving through the world. How are people going to judge me, by the actions that I take and the words that I say in the text of a letter, it becomes very, very clear.

[Erin] Yeah. I think it really also is a great way to show character development, because the way you move through the world changes, and therefore the type of performance. You get better at performing, maybe other people get better at judging, they become more familiar with you. I know we wanted to look also at some of the letters from the very end, because how does the relationship change? I know, Howard, you had some thoughts about how the…

[Howard] Oh, Lord.

[Erin] Even the signoff changes from the very beginning to the end…

[Howard] Yeah. There's a…

[Erin] Of the letters.

[Howard] There's a technique, that I need to give a name to so that I can just call it a thing, in which you define the terms for your reader and one of the terms that gets defined, through these epistolaries, is the signoff yours. This is from an epistle that Red's writing to Blue.

 

"I am yours in other ways as well. Yours as I watch the world for your signs [epithenic as a horospeck?]. Yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery. Yours as I review your words, by their sequence, their sounds,, smell, taste. Taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours. Still. I suspect you will appreciate the token."

 

[Howard] Then Red closes the letter.

 

"Yours, Red."

 

[Howard] Every letter afterward is closed, whether from Red or Blue, with the word yours. Now we know what that word means to them. Because Blue would not write yours absentmindedly. Blue would write yours saying, "Yes. All of these definitions you gave me and more." So, by defining the terms here, Max and Amal have lent weight to the word so that one word can do a huge lift all the way through the rest of the book.

[DongWon] I really love about this technique is it lets them be more directly emotional from the perspective of the character then you would get in narration sometimes. Right? In narration, you sort of have to have a little bit of a step back. Being able to fully embody for pages at a time the deeply lovesick romantic characters that we're seeing can lead to a more direct address. In particular, there's one line it that I've seen quoted many times, but I'd love to reference it here just to show how far we've come from the playful tone of the early letters to now in these, like, deep professions of love.

[Mary Robinette] As I read this to you, I want you to think about 2 tools that we're talking about, repetition, and then there's also resonance. That's where you recognize that there's a link between something you've said before and something we're saying now. So this section has some lovely repetition in it.

 

"I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves, in skies, in my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets. I'll kill them all, and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands, it will be to you. But never again like this."

 

[DongWon] The thing I love about this passage… I mean, other than it's like heartbreakingly romantic and so beautifully written. But it's so clearly identifiable with Red. That Red's most romantic gesture is I will kill all the poets through all of time…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And replace them. Like, that's her solution to making sure Blue understands how much she loves her.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It again resonates with that first moment when we met Red on the battlefield. The thing about this resonance is that it's one of the ways that you can allow the reader… That you can make space for the reader. That's something that is really important in stories, I think, because the reader inhabits half of the story. Like, the writer has the thing, and then we invite the reader to it. But you bring so much of yourself to it, your own experience. When you are imagining a voice, you are using your own experience to imagine that voice. So, having these resonant moments where you can insert yourself and you can feel that, where you're drawing the connections yourself, makes it stronger than the stories where everything is explained out completely. Those stories tend to get very flat.

 

[Erin] One other thing I love about this, and the mention of repetition and all that, is that one of the first things we see is the repetition, which we talked about in a previous episode. "She has won. Yes, she has won. She is certain she has won. Hasn't she?" That is… Repetition can be both sure and unsure. Like, repetition's very interesting. Because sometimes you repeat something because you know it, and sometimes you repeat something because you wish you knew it. You want to convince yourself of it. Seeing Red move from this sort of trying to repeat the things I have been told and taught are important…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] To something I am claiming as important for myself is just a great way to look at how the same tool can be used 2 different ways, and is also a great way to show movement in the character as a whole.

[DongWon] This goes back to the previous episode, but in the way that Blue communicates confidence and vulnerability in her voice, we're seeing that come out of Red now. Red is much more confident in this scene than she's ever been in the early scenes. But that confidence is coming through an incredible vulnerability. An incredible moment of stress and distress in this letter as she's communicating how much she loves Blue, but also knows that Blue is dying at her hand in these moments. Right? So, the incredible complexity of what's happening here, but we're seeing a Red that is so much more certain and aware of herself and what she wants and who she is then we've seen up until this point in the book.

[Mary Robinette] She's also doing a thing in this where she is using some of the cadence of Blue with the listing. "I'll write it in waves, in skies, and my heart." But doing it with Red, short, punctuated sentences. So it's this thing where she is both reflecting the person that she loves and also truly expressing herself.

[DongWon] She's learning how to write this way. Right?

[Howard] The line, "Red may be mad, but to die for madness is to die for something," is… Ah… I get chills.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] The confidence. The acceptance. The decision. And the… I'm in the chapter where Red is at a dead run trying to fix an unfixable problem.

 

[Erin] I think on that chill we will move to the homework for you. Which is to write a short note from one of your characters to another about something that's important to them. Then you're going… Make it short because you're going to have to do it a couple of times. Rewrite it as a text message. So you're going to change the format a little bit. How does that change the way that this note is happening? Then, right it is something that's going to be screened. Think about the ways somebody in prison might have their letter read by someone else who doesn't care about it before it gets to their intended target. So that changes a little bit of the context. Then, finally, right it as the final message they will ever get to send in their life. Which changes the stakes.

 

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

 

[Erin] Would you like to help other writers be out of excuses? Review us on Apple podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Rate us 5 stars and help someone like you find us.

 

[Mary Robinette] Support for today's show comes from the Inner Loop Radio. If you listen to us because you're a writer, then you'll also want to listen to Rachel and Courtney talk about how to stay inspired, how to stay focused, and how to stay sane. Subscribe now to the Inner Loop Radio on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or any other podcasting site. Get inspired, get focused, and get [lit] on the Inner Loop Radio.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-32-the-kirsten-vangsness-expansion-pack

 

Key points: Imposter syndrome, and the expansion pack you bring from your life, from your experiences. Expressing is cathartic. Love the art in yourself. Everybody has the right to create. Anyone gets to play with the great creative gods. Honor what the audience brings. Imposter syndrome? First, agree that you are an imposter. Second, if you want to write, you are a writer. Avoid gatekeepers, including yourself! We have already gone through some gates, look back at those, and use that to get through new gates. Take care of your personal well and your art well first, let the commerce well fill when it can. 

 

[Season 18, Episode 32]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, The Kirsten Vangsness Expansion Pack.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] And we are with our special guest, Kirsten Vangsness. Kirsten, would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners?

[Kirsten] Sure. Hi. My name is Kirsten Vangsness. I am most notably seen [garbled] in my hair and a keyboard. I have played Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds coming up on its 17th season. I am a Los Angeles-based playwright, I have written four or five… Oh, shoot. I've cowritten five episodes of Criminal Mind. But I've written a few one acts… I've written a one person show that… I mean, he's my friend, but Neil Gaiman has been quoted as saying this is his favorite one person show. I took a couple of plays to Edinborough in 2019. I am the host of Kirsten's Agenda, which you can find on YouTube. I make stuff. That's me.

[Mary Robinette] Fantastic.

[Kirsten] I have a cat…

[Mary Robinette] We are so excited…

[Kirsten] [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Yes. That was also… For our listeners who are not watching the video feed, Kirsten has an extremely adorable tuxedo cat behind her. Whose name is Atrao.

[Kirsten] Atrao.

[Mary Robinette] So I… Atrao. I was delighted. Delighted to meet both of you, actually.

 

[Mary Robinette] So what we're going to be talking about is the idea of imposter syndrome and the expansion pack that you bring from your life, from the experiences that you have. So, Kirsten and I both have a theater background. Longtime listeners have heard me talk about puppets, like, a lot. What do you find yourself, like, pulling from your performance experience when you are writing?

[Kirsten] One of the… I started writing… Writing became a gateway drug when I was in fifth grade and I got a huge crush on Harriet the spy and I started keeping a journal. Then, when I started to audition for things, I realized there weren't any parts for me that I could do in a monologue way that really showed what I wanted. They were too narrative or… I don't know. Like, you needed to kind of get in there in one short period of time and you realized, "Oh, it needs a conflict, it needs something fun to do." So, writing, I would kind of walk around my room and be like, "Okay. If I was coming up with the perfect monologue, this is what it would have." I would kind of talk and do it, and then write it down, and talk a little bit more. So that was actually how I started to write. Then I would go and do the thing that I just sort of barfed out of my mouth, and it would be way more successful and get me way more attention, or… I used to do these monologue festivals. It would cost like $50 to do, and you would get $55 if you won. I didn't have any money. So, like, I need to win this thing. So it became really important. Because then you got seen by casting directors and stuff. Then, as I… I always knew, just from writing in my journal, how cathartic expressing and necessary… Expressing. Period. I think that's true for every single human being. But when I was performing, it engages the brain, the writer brain, in a different way, because… And I've noticed this when I've written the Criminal Mind scenes I've written for the character that I play. There's the writer Kirsten, and then when actor Kirsten is doing what writer Kirsten wrote, she's like, "Holy goodness. I'm discovering something over here that…" So you get to have a different perspective. Especially, I think, if you're willing to come… Which is how I do, from any kind of creative standpoint, where I believe love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art. I'm not special. My job is to stay out of the way and let… Be the muse, let the muse come, blah blah blah. Everybody has the right to create. Everybody has the right to make something. You get an award or people like it, that's great. But I think that if you're willing to stand in personally from the work, you can kind of interact with it in a way that isn't so, like, "Look at this thing I made. Look at this thing." It's like you're here and I… I've actually… I'm going to name drop again. I actually learned that a little bit, or I learned to take ownership of that, from watching Neil Gaiman. Because I've been around him enough times and watched him sign books. Obviously, he's such a meaningful writer for many of us. The way he is able to engage with people who say to him, "This book is so important to me," and he can honor it, because he stands outside of the work. Like, he understands, like, that's something that I get… I get to play with the great creative gods, isn't this wonderful. I know the secret, which is you get to play with them. Anyone gets to play with them. Any of us who know that secret should share it. I do think that there are people who are gatekeepers, and act like you need to have some sort of rights to do it. I don't believe that. I can't believe that, because I'm not good enough of a writer to believe that. I… Sometimes I am and sometimes I'm really, really not. I have to make that very clear as we… I have written very good scenes in things that have been televised where I have literally started the scene like, Person One says something important.

[Laughter]

[Kirsten] Person Two says the opposite thing. Person Three comes in with an anecdote. Like… It's so… Did I answer that question?

[Yes]

[Kirsten] Talk about expansion packs.

[Garbled]

[Howard] [garbled] you absolutely answered the question.

[Yeah]

[Howard] The best of us, and the rest of us, do that same thing. I cannot count the number of times I've flipped through a script that I thought was ready to be illustrated and realized that there is a dialogue bubble that says "Punch line goes here, Howard."

[Laughter. Right. Right.]

 

[Mary Robinette] My current novel has a thing that says, "Bilbert makes funny joke here."

[Yeah. Yeah.]

[Mary Robinette] unfortunately, it's actually really bad joke here, which is much easier to fill. The thing that I especially like that you were talking about is honoring what the audience brings to it. I think that that personally is something that I brought out of my theater experience, is recognizing that only half the show exists until we get in front of an audience. They… Each person in the audience brings their own thing, whether that's the people on the set or the people who are watching it, or the reader. For me, like, when you talk about the great creative gods, that's the audience is actually that, because that's who I'm writing for, that's… That meeting in between us is what I'm looking for.

[Kirsten] Absolutely, because that energy, the gods and goddesses in non-binary gods and creatures of power, they are… There's an energy that happens between you and the audience. I'm doing this thing I just started in LA called Bits. By the time this airs, I will have done a couple of them. The whole idea [garbled] are these really incredible writers who write things, but we don't finish it. Sometimes the thing that makes you finish it is to do 10 minutes or less of it in front of a room, and say, "I'm making this thing," and take that terrible, disgusting, horribly apathetic to your insides leap of I'm reading this in front of people, and I don't even know if it's good, I don't know where it's good. I'm hoping that these parts make sense. You know, as you start to do it, because you'll feel this wave of energy coming at you. Whether that wave is apathy or joy or curiosity, you'll feel it. It is really interesting. Because it does teach you what you're saying to the audience.

[Howard] The wave of apathy is kind of like the sound of one hand clapping.

[Laughter]

[Erin] I think one thing that's cool is you feel it from yourself as well. Like, you get things from the audience, but I… I do not really have as much of a theater background, but I'm a big karaoke person…

[Laughter]

[Erin] As some of you folks…

[No, I can tell]

[Erin] In Writing Excuses land know, and, like, what's funny is you can be at home and, like, maybe your practicing your song, but when you get up in front of people, you sing differently, because they're there.

[Yeah, that's right]

[Erin] I think the same thing when you read your work. Like, sometimes I'll go… I like to read unfinished things that are just like those little bits that you're talking about. I'll start to read a sentence and as I'm reading it, I'm like, "Oh, that's not right. Actually…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Like, that word is not the word that I should be saying." Sometimes I'll try to revise it, like, on the fly and try to like remember what did I just say, because that was the thing, because in the moment of being in front of the audience, being there and seeing them brought something out of me as a creator that I didn't get in the same way when I was reading to my cat, as lovable as she is.

 

[Kirsten] That's right. I think it's two separate things. To write on your own in your privacy, to create in your private world, that has its own trappings, right? Like, I destroy myself when I write. Like, I have to know that there is a person that lives in me, that is just going to constantly tell me what a failure I, how pointless it is, or, like, why are you doing this? You're already on a show. You're already successful. Like, just… It will do anything it can to get me to stop. Then there's another… Is another kind of risk you're taking, like you said, when you're at home, doing your karaoke, and then when you go out in the world doing it. It's like the Heisenberg principle. The observed object is going to change by the act that it is being observed. And we at least all say we want our work to be seen and heard, so we have to get it observed. But it's so terrifying to have it observed, too.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Absolutely. When we come back, we're going to talk about imposter syndrome and how to take these pieces of our lives and use them. But right now, let's take a quick break. Do you want to tell us about your thing of the week, Kirsten?

 

[Kirsten] Oh. Here's my thing… My thing! I asked if I could do plural things, and you said I could come so here's my plural things. I have a show on YouTube. I highly recommend Season Two, Season One's a little dated, because it was pandemic time deeply. But it's called Kirsten's Agenda, and it is about art and self-actualization. I don't remember most of it, but I do know that I made stuff during… I wrote things, I wrote songs, I interviewed a bunch of smart people. I have heard that it is helpful for stuff. So that is something that I would like to plug. Then, this is not something that I made, but it is a thing, it is my thing of the week, because I'm deeply invested in it. If you happen to be listening to this and you're going to the Edinborough Fringe this year, there's a show called Blue written by a wonderful playwright named June Carryl. It is about the insurrection, it is about the George Floyd incident, it is about… It's so beautifully told and so smart. It's an hour long and it's wonderful. It's called Blue by June Carryl. If you happen to be in Scotland in April, go see that at [garbled assembly room]. That's… Those are my things.

[Mary Robinette] All right, listeners. You have your marching orders. You're going to go listen to Kirsten… Or watch Kirsten's Agenda on YouTube and obviously you need to buy tickets to the Fringe festival in Edinborough. It's in April. You have plenty of time to make those plans.

[Kirsten] It's in August. It's in August. August! It's in August. They have a little time.

[Mary Robinette] They have some time.

[Laughter]

 

[Mary Robinette] Fantastic. So, now that we are back, I want to talk about imposter syndrome, because that's something that I think it's everybody. One of the things that you were talking about before the break, Kirsten, was why should I even do this? I don't even have… But also, your already successful. So there are these multiple parts of everyone's life, where there is an area that you have success, and then there's the new venture that you're trying. For a lot of our listeners, that new venture is writing, where they're very early in their career and maybe you haven't finished anything yet. What are the things that we can… I talk about with my own life that I came into writing with an expansion pack from the theater that I already knew how to deal with character. Because I had already been inhabiting characters, but structure was a hot mess.

[Ha ha!]

[Mary Robinette] What are ways that you can look for the skills that you already have and find out what your expansion packs are?

[Kirsten] I would say the first thing is to… I heard this… This was a black woman talking about imposter syndrome in business. It applies hugely with her, much less for me… In different degrees, depending upon the privilege in which our society has endowed us at this period of time, but she was saying, in terms of imposter syndrome, to get an agreement that you are an imposter. She was saying that where she is, the spaces in which she goes through life, it wasn't designed for her to be there. So she is an imposter. When you look at it like that, it's kind of cool, meaning, like, good for you for getting in there and doing it. So, I mean this in a different way obviously, because I want to make that distinction very clear, I am not trying to say that I'm going into the same situations like that, but I'm saying internally, get into agreement that you feel like an imposter, I think, is always the first thing that can end that argument. I'm a big fan of ending arguments inside myself. So, okay, I'm an imposter. Number one. Number two, I want to write. Because I want to write, means I am a writer. End of conversation. I wouldn't want to do it… I wouldn't have… I have a right to do it, because I want to do it. That's it. End that conversation. So there's some of these things that just need to be just stopped, and you need to let… Like, you need to do an act of spirit. Right? Like, don't go into your reptilian brain, just act of spirit. Then, I think, in terms of like, we all have what we need. I mean, we all have in our little hobbit bag of tricks what you need to do it how you do it. How I write is totally different than how other people write. So when I… Yes, it might be nice to read how other people do it, to give you freedom. But, like, I can't… Like, the way I write, I have to go back and edit every two seconds, which people say is terrible, you should never do that. But sometimes that's how I have to do it to make it work for me. I think that, like, you can pride yourself once you know and take pleasure… And I need to learn how to do this… In what you don't know. Like, I cannot learn to outline if my life depended on it. Like I… Literally, if my life depended upon the outline, I would be dead on the ground.

[Chuckles]

[Kirsten] But… Because I don't know how to do it yet. But it's going to feel so good when I do. But I still don't know. I think that that's part of the… It's called expansion pack for a reason. It's going to expand. So boring if it was just like the pack. You know what I mean? That's it… That's all you have. So I think that you just know what you're built with and then you go forth.

 

[Howard] Kirsten, I think in the first half of the episode you gave us a critical tool here. You talked about how we want to avoid the gatekeeping of any of this. Hey, get the gatekeepers out of the way, you should be… Hey, don't gatekeep yourself.

[That's right]

[Howard] Just stop that. We can all see ourselves doing it. Oh, I shouldn't do this because I'm… No. Week. I'm gatekeeping. Why am I gatekeeping? Because I'm afraid of failing. Because I'd rather go get a sand… I don't know. But figure out why that gatekeeper's there and then show him the curb.

 

[Erin] Yeah. I also think, like, what you said about feeling like… Understanding where the world is kind of working with you or the world is working against you is, like, you have… Everyone has gone through some gates already in your… Whether it's in your personal life, in your professional life, like, you know how to get past gates, like, you've made it somehow. So, sometimes I think we look at the gates in front of us that are closed, and we forget to look behind us at the gates that we've already unlocked, scrambled over, dug under, however you got through it, you got through it. Maybe you left a little bit of yourself behind. Maybe you got a scrape in the process. But you did it. I think going back and acknowledging that is a great way to take power forward for the next gate in front of you.

[Mary Robinette] I literally got chills when you said that, Erin. Just FYI. Yeah, that's… I think that that is absolutely important is to honor the experiences that you have had, whether they're positive or negative, for what they can teach you about the road ahead of you. In one of our other podcasts, I talked about the fact that I cannot tell you exactly how to navigate through the experience of being a writer because I start from a different point. So the experiences that I passed through our different. But, to Erin's point, to Kirsten's point, I can look at the things that I have gone over, and that can help guide me forward. I have… actually, have a conflict that I'm going to resolve after I get off this podcast. In fact, thank you.

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the things… I'm going to circle back to something from the beginning part of the episode, Kirsten, when you were talking about your gateway into writing, which is that you started it by monologueing. By trying to find monologues. Where you are now, what tools are you still using from that?

[Kirsten] Oh, I still… I mean, look. I am a… I think that there are people that move in a linear fashion, and there are people like little onions that just go in a little circle. I'm the circle kind. So, like, I'm doing the same… I dress the same as I did when I was five. So, it's like… I just go a little more provocative, a little more provocatively. I'm going down a road and I'm stopping the road because it's not going to make any sense to anybody but me.

[Chuckles]

[Kirsten] But I think that the things that I use, luckily for me, the way in which I speak to myself, the way in which I externalize, a lot of stuff I write about is about all the people who live inside of us. I do a lot of like persona stuff… Very easy for me to write dialogue, just based on the various things that I combat with inside of my own person. So, dialogue is really easy for me, because I can do it based on what goes on inside of me. If that makes any sense. So I think just journaling… To me, you know how you know you're a writer? You know how I know I'm a writer? I write. If you wrote a sentence today, I will argue, that by dint of recording yourself saying something, writing something down, drawing something out, you are a writer. That day. Check the box. You might want to be more of a writer, by writing a little longer. But if you don't right, are you a writer? Like, who's the actor? The one who has the nachos commercial that's running all the time, making money by just sitting on their couch, or the person who is doing day to day today scene work and monologues and plays for two dollars a night? Like, who's the actor? Like, who's the writer? So, like that's… To me, the act of doing it creates more moments of success. Like, I… You have to make the gross stuff, and then through all that gross stuff that you're puking out, there'll be like a little bit of gold.

[Garbled]

[Howard] I had a friend, years ago, said, "Lots of people will tell you you can't write. Don't let any of them tell you you don't."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I will also, just to layer onto that, continuing to use theater as the metaphor, that sometimes you go through slumps. Where you cannot find a gig. At all. Or you can't even get in the room to audition. That doesn't make you stop being an actor. It doesn't… Likewise, as a writer, just because you don't make a sale doesn't mean you aren't a writer. Then, also, one thing I want to say for mental health. If you have to take a break, surgeons go on vacation, they're still surgeons. So if you have to take a break from writing, you're still a writer, even if you're not actively doing it because of mental health or other health things.

[Kirsten] Yes. I would say, though, that creativity is one of those wonderful, terrible, jealous mistresses. That once you open Pandora's box, if you try to shut her again, you will feel pain. Your body will scream at you. So maybe not writing… Maybe you can take a break from writing, but your creativity is something… It's there, and it's there for you, always. It's always there for you. That's the thing that I find so touching about it. I can leave her forever and she's always there. She might be, like, "you forgot about me and I feel lonely and you need to tend to me more so I'll wake up to you. You're going to have to be nice because I'm not just going to drop pearls of wisdom at your feet right now because I'm a little mad." But she's always there. If I can impart this to everybody, if I could give… I want to share this with the world, that's how important this is. Because I am very… Like, I have a successful job. People can point… Look! There she is. She must get paid for that. She's… Like I do the thing.

[Chuckles]

[Kirsten] Also, you see my name on it. Write… Cowritten by there's my name. That is great and fine. But if I don't… If I knew a lot of rich successful people that were happy, I would… If money and success made you happy, I would know a lot of rich and successful happy people. And I don't. I would say equal, but maybe not even that. There's your art well and there's your commerce well. They are not the same well. Very rarely can I say that I have… put… my commerce well is the thing I make money doing. Your art well is your art well. You hope that the art well becomes a commerce well. But it becomes a commerce well, it's kind of, now, it's a job to make you money. You can't… To put all of this into this isn't fair. Like, so we have to also look at the joy of the doing of it and the deep, deep important cool value of the doing of it. The fact that you are writing, that's cool. The fact that you're writing and that no one's paying attention to it, no one's giving you money, that's even cooler. That's what they write songs about and make movies about is you. So, like the second you become successful, you're just like, "Whatever." You chew up gum. You're going to get attention for that. But, like, I want everyone to know that coming from someone whose commerce well is very full, I always have to keep my art well full. That's my responsibility, and our responsibility as people to our own inner artists that needs tending. The world will become progressively a more kind of place you want to live in if we each just tend to our own pleasure, tend to our own art well.

[Erin] Just to feed on to that, and to add to what Mary Robinette was saying earlier, the most important well… I love that, by the way. I love the art well and the commerce well, and there's also, like, your personal well. Like, your actual I can exist as a person well. That is the well that you really, really must feed the most, because if that well goes dry, you lose it all. So, sometimes you have to… I have found that, literally in the last week, that I was struggling, staying up late, working on a project, not doing very well, and then I was, "You know what? I'm going to go get eight hours of sleep. I'm just… It's going to put me back, but I'm just going to try it." Then I woke up, and the next day, my art well… My personal well was refilled, and so my art well was moving much faster than it was when I was, like, struggling through the art and letting the personal go. So, it's really about making sure you feed yourself so that you can feed your art and then hopefully we all become rich and happy and successful at the same time.

[Mary Robinette] Amazing. I think that that is a great point for us to move on to our homework, which will give you, dear listeners, something to fill your art well with.

 

[Kirsten] Ooo. Okay. So I came up with this. I'm going to try to make it concise. Brevity is not my forte. I have these big questions that I always write about. I always write about time. I'm fascinated by time. What is young, what is old, who lives inside of us? That Madeleine L'Engle quote we are every age we've ever been. These are things I think about all of the time. I also think about the female sexual response cycle all of the time. These are two things I constantly think about. So I end up writing about them, because there my big questions. Now you might know what your big questions are. You might be like, "Oh, these are the things I think about all of the time." I'm talking about big [contemplations?] Like what do we do after we die, or, I really, really, really am this political affiliation. This is why and I feel deeply about it because… What are your big questions? If you don't know what they are, or even if you do know what they are, get a recording device on your phone, whatever. I like those voice to text things very much. I use that almost all the time. Record yourself. You can hear yourself, because I think cadence and the way things you're stressing on is important. And see the words. Go on a rant. Rant about your philosophical big question or questions. Then, sit down, make it easy on yourself if you can only I feel stressed out, I can't do it for too long. Like, make a timer. Like 10 minutes. Do it… Do a little mini. Mini task. Now make a scene based on that philosophical idea. Don't write about the philosophy. Have the people doing the thing. Make a thing where you try to avoid talking about the concept. But show the concept. Maybe even don't even have any dialogue, if you don't want to, just by their behavior you see it. That is my homework.

[Mary Robinette] All right. Fair listeners. Your task is to identify what your big questions are, and then write a scene in which you have characters living out and embodying that big question.

[Kirsten] I would expansion pack this and say do all that while making sure that at least all three wells are filled up as high as you can get them. The other two, the personal as Erin was talking about, and the commerce, as high as you can get them at that moment, before you get to this. That would be my… Be gentle with yourself. Give yourself grace as you do it. That would be the expansion pack part of that.

[Mary Robinette] You should maybe do that by taking a break and go watch the Kirsten's Agenda.

[Laughter]

 

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

[Howard] To stay up-to-date with new releases of upcoming in person events, like our annual writing retreats and Patreon live streams, follow Writing Excuses on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Or subscribe to our newsletter.

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/09/04/17-36-space-for-everyone/

 

Key points: Space for everyone, and how we can send as many people as possible into space. More space companies, new space organizations. Doing it, going up, but also sharing it. Experiences! Making space available for different people makes it safer for everyone. We need to start thinking as a species, as earthlings, because big things don't respect the borders of countries. People want to explore, we need a frontier. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 36]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Space for Everyone.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Cady] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cady] I'm Cady.

 

[Dan] We are here in Capitol Reef at the UVU field station for the Writing Excuses retreat. We've got a live audience of wonderful writers.

[Cheers]

[Dan] And we have an absolutely wonderful special guest, Dr. Cady Coleman. Tell us about yourself.

[Cady] I am, I guess, a former astronaut. I'd like to think once you're an astronaut, you're sort of always an astronaut. But I flew twice on the space shuttle and I got to live up on a space station for six months. I've just been having so much fun learning about how to share through writing here at the retreat.

 

[Dan] That's awesome. Thank you so much for being here. This writing retreat has been specifically focused on space exploration and science communication. Our writers are all wonderful. Today we're going to talk about space for everyone, and how we can send as many people as possible into space. Cady, tell us about that. This is something that is kind of a big focus of yours as an astronaut.

[Cady] Well, it has two parts to it. One is that now you see more space companies, more possibilities that more people are going. It's not only people who have a lot of money, it's not only governments. I mean, there's new space organizations popping up all the time. Which, to me, is really exciting, because basically together we really make everything easier for everyone. Everything that each of these companies figures out, it brings all of us ahead. Coming from a government agency, being at NASA for 24, 26 years…

[Laughter]

[Cady] Something like that. Anyways, it's pretty wonderful to have so many more players involved and so many more possibilities. That means more people are going, and also that more people are a part of the planning and figuring out how. I just, that's really exciting to me. So more people doing it. But then, what we get to do, sharing that is another way of making space for everyone. To me, as much as we're great engineers and scientists, we are apprentice storytellers, I would say, in the space program. So I've been really excited to be here and learn more about… Sort of the… Maybe making… The making of the sausage, of how you can compel people to understand the story that you're trying to tell. It's one thing to get to go, but I really… It's really, really important to me to share it and to help people who… It might not occur to them to share, but to share their experiences as well.

 

[Mary Robinette] I think that's one of the things that when we're thinking about space for everyone, that was apparent to me when I was doing the research, Cady was one of the people who helped me. The experiences that she had as a woman in the space program were very different than the experiences that male astronauts had. What's interesting, and also for those who are not watching the video feed… Also, for those who are listening for the first time, there is no video feed… But…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] For those not watching the video feed, Cady is at the very… She's the smallest person to ever qualify for a spacewalk. Is that correct?

[Cady] Upon a space station.

[Mary Robinette] To qualify… Tell me what it actually is.

[Laughter]

[Cady] Well, Mary Robinette's trying to be polite about the fact that I'm on the shorter end of things. I'm not the shortest astronaut. We used to have a range of sizes of… Of spacesuits. We had many more women that were qualified to do spacewalks, myself included. But then when we got to the space station, we cut down on the sizes. We got rid of the small suit. So I am the smallest person to qualify in the sort of big suit, and get to go up there. Unfortunately, nothing broke while we were up there.

[Laughter]

[Cady] I mean, fortunately, I was excited about being able to come home again and not having life-threatening things happen. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Cady] But I think you do have a different experience when you're a different size, when you come from a different place or a different culture. Life with your family was different. All these things add up to who you are when you're sitting there on the launchpad, ready to launch, or being that person in space. You bring all that stuff with you.

 

[Mary Robinette] The analogy that I use a lot for people who aren't thinking about this on a regular basis because they're completely obsessed with it, like me, is the history of flight. Like, when… Anyone who's ever flown knows that those seats are not made for everyone. They are made for a specific body type, and if you're not that body type… Like, if you are comfortable on an airplane, that seat was made for you, and nobody else is comfortable on that seat.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And I'm astonished. But the thing is that flight, when it started, was just for the elite. It was just for… You had to have a certain amount of athleticism to do it, you had to have a certain amount of income. Then, over the 50 years between when Orville and Wilbur took off to when we go to the moon, it became more and more available for people, because they could afford to fly, because the seats… The cabins were enclosed, and pressurized. So it's interesting when you think about space to think about it where we are right now is that point where…

[Cady] It's our chance.

[Mary Robinette] Things are. It's our chance. Things are… As commercial spaceflight comes in, we're starting to be able to go even if we aren't special military pilots.

 

[Dan] Well. Yeah. Cady, a point that you made the other day, that I thought was really fascinating, is that you're working with a lot people who have different levels of physical ability. You made the point that making space available for them actually makes it much safer for everybody overall. Can you talk about that?

[Cady] Well, when we think about like something really important for everybody who goes to space is to know that there… When something goes wrong and there's an alarm. So for the space station, I think there's going to be lights that are flashing, there's going to be an audible alarm that tells me what level, is this just like, "Oh, something crummy just stopped working," or is this "Within a minute and a half, go and get your oxygen mask." Right? So those are transmitted to us by being able to see, being able to hear. So what if you don't have one of those senses? Right? Or what if you don't have maybe even both? So the fact that we're looking at some creative ways, because people… Lots more people are flying, they'll be coming up to the space station. This might not be for the national space agencies, but by making sure there's several methods to understand that there's a problem which we already do. But they're not accessible to everyone, right? It's going to be helpful for everyone. What if as I am translating around, flying around the space station… We don't just give ourselves one push and go. We actually kind of tend our way around. We sort of grab handrails, touch things on the way. What if when there's an alarm, one of those vibrated? That that was an indication to us? So it's kind of like down here on the ground when we started designing streets, city streets, to have curbs that sloped down at every corner. I mean, it was at first designed for blind people. But now it's actually really beneficial for so many of us. So, by building a space station, the newest space stations and the newest spaceships to be ones that fit everyone, we really open up the possibilities of who can come and who can contribute. I'm nominating writers, okay?

[Laughter]

[Cady] Now I want to bring writers. Having gotten to spend a couple days here and understand actually how you think about what we get to do and how you open up actually more possibilities about what we could be doing in space has been really fun for me.

[Mary Robinette] We're going to be doing another episode where we talk specifically about how to use some of this narrative excitement there. But…

 

[Dan] Let's have our book of the week. Our book of the week this week is actually not a book, it is a podcast. Cady, you have your own podcast. Can you tell everyone about it?

[Cady] Well, it's not just mine.

[Dan] Okay.

[Cady] It's out of Arizona State, and the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State. This is a school that has a school of… This is a college, a university, that has a school of Earth and Space Exploration. Like, when you think about it, if you love volcanoes, you don't just love them on Earth. You don't just love them on Venus. The same person is going to like both worlds. So we bring them together in the school of Earth and Space Exploration. But, more than that, at Arizona State University, they're looking at we are becoming an interplanetary species. I mean, if you acknowledge that the robots that we built did not make themselves, we already are. So what are the big questions that we need to answer? Who's going to decide when we get to the moon? Who decides the rules? Who decides what's okay to bring, what's okay to like put on the moon, take back from the moon, Mars? All these things that involve people. For example, I'll say that we wanted to have an episode about… We have one, and I thought, well, it'll be about colonizing Mars. Then you start doing some research and talking to people and you realize I might not want to use that word because it's actually reflective of an era when we weren't all that thoughtful, put it lightly, about how we did things. So we're asking questions like that. One of my favorite episodes, of course, is with Mary Robinette and Tony Harrison where we suggested the first crew to go to Mars be all women.

[Mary Robinette] We had opinions, and you can listen to…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Interplanetary and find out exactly what those are.

[Cady] I mean, when you think about it, okay, it is probably our turn. Right?

[Laughter]

[Cady] Okay. This is my opinion. But was that my final opinion? Probably not. But it's also great for things like understanding space debris. I mean, we talk to Mark Brown, an astronaut whose just really good at explaining what's big, what's small, and how all of it is up there, and how now we know more about it. Really, what is the scariness of this? So, we have those kinds of episodes. But we call it asking the big questions. It's myself and Andrew Maynard is the cohost. He's a futurist and someone who looks at people and machines and how they interact and the creator of this podcast is a wild guy that casts robots and other things in plays and shows. I mean, he's just a very creative guy. He designed that, the podcast, and it has a sequence called Sounds of Space which is really cool.

[Dan] That's awesome.

[Cady] So. You asked me a short question, I gave you a long answer.

[Laughter]

[Dan] No, that's okay. The podcast is called Interplanetary…

[Cady] It's called Mission Interplanetary.

[Dan] Mission Interplanetary. Where can people find it?

[Cady] They can find it on all their favorite platforms. Season three is starting up in the fall, and we would love to hear from people. So, look for us. I mean, go… We'd love reviews, but we'd love to know what you… What are the big questions for you? Those are the kinds of things that would really love to understand.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you very much.

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. So. When we're talking about space for everyone, I think that there's a couple of different ways to be thinking about. We've been talking kind of broadly, but it's basically there's the ability level and then there's the… Which you… There's also the monetary level. The access. Like… So what are your thoughts about the commercial space program?

[Cady] I mean, more people, more better. But I would urge people to listen to the news carefully. Really listen. Listen for the voices of the people. I mean, we can talk about a three… Kind of the big main companies. There's Space X, which is working with NASA, bringing people up and down on a spacecraft where we get to do this from the US. Which is really convenient in terms of the research that we do, not to be carting all that… Taking baseline data on our bodies and things like that. I love launching from Russia. I went to space on a Soyuz, returned home that way. At the same time, just to get a lot of things done, launching from here is great. But then there's the company's like Blue Origin and like Virgin Galactic which are taking people on a different kind of journey. It's still space. I mean, they are going above… I consider the 50 mile mark to be space. That was what was really considered for the longest time to be space. People who go up, either they're going up in a rocket and then the rocket… The sort of capsule gets dropped off, and it goes up, up, up [garbled still up] above the 50 mile like line, and then lands with a parachute on the ground. Or, in the case of Virgin Galactic, they're launching in a rocket underneath an airplane. That airplane is going up, up, up, up, up, let's this rocketship go, and the rocketship then takes that big arc up 300,000 feet or so, and then down. They get about five or six minutes of floating around in microgravity, and they get that view of the Earth. It's easy to say that many people you see… I mean, it's true that many people you see on these vehicles have paid a lot of money for their seats. Right? And that these companies are run by billionaires. But in talking to these people, I see them, each of them, as people who have a different vision, each of them, and resources, about how to pave the road to space for all of us. That's what I see. Not necessarily the sort of like the battle of the billionaires that you… It's so much easier to talk about that. But doing these things is hard. People are not doing this, I don't think, for the money. I think they're all losing a lot of money as we speak. But they have a certain dedication to making sure that we bring people up to space. Different kinds of people. Some with resources and means. Others with a certain background that gives them a unique view looking back at our planet of what we have to do here and also that exploring further… I mean, Earth is still going to be our home. So it's about Earth, it's about space, but it's a whole new world.

 

[Dan] So let me ask you a question. You've said a couple of times, the more people in space, the better. I agree. I love space, almost just for itself. But, what are the concrete benefits of becoming an interstellar people, of getting all these people into space?

[Mary Robinette] Just interplanetary, don't jump ahead to interstellar.

[Dan] Okay. Whatever it is. Why? Why is getting more people into space better?

[Cady] I don't know if I've said… Well, I guess I have said that it's better. That's kind of based on the premise that if we're going to space, we should bring lots of different kinds of people. Because I've been on teams, and the person that you, unfortunately, least suspect sometimes… We all can stereotype… Comes up with some idea. You're like, "Wow, I never thought of that." So having teams that include people who think differently, come from different backgrounds, and also, candidly, having left the planet and looked back, it is… It's almost a non sequitur to think that it's so important exactly what part of that planet that you came from. What country, what borders. Part of the reason that it's important to start thinking as a species, as earthlings, is that when big things happen, when there's a big meteorite strike, when space debris is happening, these things are not going to respect the borders of certain countries. These are things that we, as people who all live on this planet, have to solve together. One of the ways that we've already started doing that amazingly and astonishingly well is the International Space Station. I mean, there are 17 main partners in the space station, many more countries around the world represented. It's not just that there's astronauts from different places and they all get along and do some great work up there together. It's the team on the ground that really is making big decisions every day together. About where will the Mars rover go next. What are the most important targets? We've only got one more flight… I'm making this up, right? Of Ingenuity. What should that flight be? So those are international ventures.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think one of the things that a lot of people forget when you're talking about the concrete stuff is that we use space, all of us use space technology every single day. With GPS, when we check the weather, like that's the… While we're here in Capitol Reef, we are checking the weather obsessively, because of flash floods. The radar imaging that we're getting… Like, you don't get that without space.

[Cady] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Every time you send someone up, they have that different perspective of, "Oh, did you know that you could maybe do this in space?"

 

[Cady] Well, Dan was asking, is it better, why is it better to send everyone? But the other part of that is, I think, that people are just designed and made, going to explore. That's what I see so much of in the writing that I see, in science fiction. I mean, these are reminders of who we are as people, and this is just going to happen, and it's going to happen in a gazillion different ways.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Michael Collins said, and I'm going to get this a little bit wrong, but it was that he thought that people had a spiritual imperative for a frontier.

[Cady] I believe it.

[Dan] I think that is a wonderful note to end on. Cady, thank you so much for being here for this episode. You're incredible. We're excited to have you. Thank you again. And thank you to all of our writers here.

[Applause]

 

[Mary Robinette] All right. I'm going to give you a writing prompt. So your prompt this week is to think about sending someone to space that is a non-traditional astronaut.

[Cady] Can I just make a note that usually our…  Just like round-trip, so when you're thinking about your teenagers, I mean, they're going to come back.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yes.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Good point. You're right. This is not…

[Dan] Dang it.

[Mary Robinette] This is not spacing the people you don't want. Sending someone to space, and bringing them safely back.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/05/24/15-21-writing-about-children-with-shannon-and-dean-hale/

 

Key Points: Writing about children can be difficult, and you may stray into caricature. How do you avoid making fun of them? First, don't just transcribe what kids actually say. Try to give the sense of being children without hitting the reader over the head, especially in dialogue. Children focus on different things than adults. If you add grammatical issues, be sparing. Kids are sometimes overly precise, applying a rule everywhere. Why are you writing about a child, focus on the bits that enrich the story. Looking at the world as a child does can let you portray the fresh wonder of the world. The life experience, and stakes, are very different for children. When the protagonist is a child, or a teen, the stakes rise, and the tension, too. Consider kids as foreign visitors, trying to avoid faux pas. Teenagers are spies in adult country! Teens are not little adults, they are trying to figure out the transition from child to adult. Don't minimize their feelings. To write about kids or teens, you need to respect them. Pay attention to what is important for the story, and the relationships, how other characters react to what the children say and do. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 21.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Writing about Children.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Shannon] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Brandon] And we have special guests, Shannon and Dean Hale.

[Shannon] Hello!

[Dean] Hi. I'm Dean.

[Shannon] And I'm Shannon.

[Brandon] Thanks, you guys, for coming on the podcast with us.

[Shannon] Yeah, it's great.

[Dean] Thank you.

 

[Brandon] You're going to tell us how to write about children.

[Shannon] Okay, let's do it.

[Dean] Awesome.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] So, this has been surprisingly hard when I've done it. I'm never sure if I'm going too far and it's straying into caricature. Like, I can usually tell for an adult when I've gone too far in a vernacular or a voice or things like this. When you're approaching writing about children, how do you keep away from making it… It almost seems silly to me. Does that make sense? Like, I'm making fun of them rather than actually writing like them.

[Shannon] It's actually… I've written… Where I've taken direct transcrip… Directly transcribed what my children have said, and tried to put it into a story. Our editors are always like, "That's too extreme."

[Dean] Nobody would be like that.

[Shannon] "No one talks like that. Come on!"

[Dean] What are these, monsters?

[Shannon] So you can't actually… Actually, I did write what I thought was a humorous slice of life story about our four-year-old twins. The editor legitimately thought it was a horror story.

[Laughter]

[Shannon] I was very… The notes were very confused. I was like, "Why is she saying… Why is she reacting…" Then, finally, she referred to it as a house of hell. I was like, "Oh, she thought it was a horror story. That's just our everyday."

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] But it is… You can't do exactly what kids do. Just like… But it's true with any characters. Dialogue would be really boring if we just transcribed what people actually say. So you have to get the sense that they're a child without hitting the reader over the head. Particularly in dialogue.

 

[Mary Robinette] What are some of the markers in dialogue that you find for believable child language? Is it a difference in vocabulary, sentence structure, con…

[Shannon] You know… First of all, I would say children are very observant about things that adults don't care about. So for… Just what they talk about is going to be different. That can be so much fun. What does this kid… What are they interested in, what would they notice? So there are these non sequiturs that just kind of pop up. It's a great thing for humor. I would say also, just as with any character, if you want to have like grammatical issues for the kid, pick like one or two and stick with those. Don't hit the reader over the head with, like, weird grammar things constantly. Just have that consistency be for that character. Just like you would for an adult character who might have a certain quirk with the way they speak. You don't… You wouldn't do it every single sentence because it gets to be too much.

[Mary Robinette] When I was doing the puppet theater, we were often… I mean, the protagonist was always a child. One of the things that I found was that… Also, going into schools a lot, was that kids tended to be overly precise sometimes. That they would have learned a rule and they wouldn't actually have any nuance about how the rule was applied.

[Brandon] I've noticed this in my children. This is absolutely true for almost all kids I've met. That they… You tell them something. They want that to be the way the world works. They now understand the world. Then, when you immediately violate it, because of the wiggle room we give ourselves, they call you on it. I remember when my… He was only like three or four. We had talked about certain words that we don't say. Then we went to a Disney movie and they said like one word that was like this. Then, later on, that kid was describing the movie to my father… His grandpa… And said, "Don't go see that movie, grandpa. It is filthy."

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It's like a Pixar movie, right? I'm like, "Oh. Okay. Yeah."

[Shannon] I actually wrote a chapter book that was based on our twins, and really tried to be true to what it felt like to be that age. My… I sent it to someone who didn't know it was about these twins. My response was that the character was unlikable and nobody would be interested in this child.

[Laughter]

[Dean] Your children are unlikable and no one is interested in them.

[Mary Robinette] She's also living in a hell house.

[Dean] Right.

[Shannon] But it can be too much. You don't… Like, too much reality, nobody wants. So what do… Why a child? Why are you writing about a child, first of all? What are they bringing to it? So you focus on those little quirks, those little bits that can just enrich a story.

[Dean] The best part for me about writing from… As a child, because that's kind of where I go, is get into that headspace, is just looking at the world in a different way. It makes the story somehow more interesting. It's like that quote from… Was it GK Chesterton? That's about the dragon and the… I can't remember how it goes, but the idea that…

[Shannon] That… The quote you're talking about is GK Chesterton says that fantasy doesn't tell you if dragons exist. Fantasy shows you that dragons can be defeated. I think you're thinking of a different quote.

[Dean] No, I am… I'm thinking of the door one. That there's a…

[Shannon] Oh… Yes. So… Like a kid of 10…

[Dean] Go, quote.

[Shannon] Is interested in reading a story that says, "Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon." A kid of four is interested to read a story that says, "Tommy opened a door."

[Dean] It's finding…

[Shannon] Everything is still so new.

[Dean] Finding the wonder in those things that are sort of rote and old is… For… As a writer, is awesome. I mean, you can be able to kind of get that reinvigorated look at something from the other side.

[Dan] Yeah, that's what I did with Zero G, which was the middle grade that I put out. The plot is… I always pitch it as Home Alone in Space, but really, it's Die Hard in space with a 12-year-old. It's Die Hard if John McClane were super interested in how fun it was to jump around in antigravity, right? Like, that's his focus. He's always either trying to have fun or he's hiding from bad guys. Because those are the cool things that a kid is going to care about in that situation.

[Shannon] Yes.

 

[Brandon] So, when we were talking about this ahead of time, you mentioned the stakes are really different for children in life, which really struck me. Can you expand upon that? How are stakes different for children? How does that influence writing about them?

[Shannon] Children don't have the same… Well, life experience. But, just, they don't have as much in their toolbox. They don't understand how things work, they don't have the confidence, they don't have experience, they don't have a credit card, you know, they don't have… So when they're put in a situation, it's going to be totally different than if an adult were in it. You can get so much tension by having the protagonist be a kid. And a teen as well. Also, even if the main character isn't a child, if you insert a child into a situation, the stakes go through the roof. Immediately. Oh, we've got to save these people. Yeah, let's do that. Oh, and there's a three-year-old about to fall off the bridge. [OOOOH!] I mean, it just…

[Dean] We did that with Squirrel Girl. Like, we were like, "We need more tension here."

[Shannon] Let's add a baby.

[Dean] Yes.

[Laughter]

[Dean] That's exactly what we did.

[Shannon] She's not just saving the day, she's saving a specific baby. Suddenly, it's like, "Yes, we need to do this immediately." I was… We were just watching Adventures in Babysitting last night with our kids. I was trying to explain to them, because I'm a nerdy writer mom that's explaining story to my children in the middle of a movie…

[Dean] Mom, we're watching.

[Shannon] I know. But, I'm like, "Do you understand why…"

[Dean] Pause.

[Shannon] If this was about adults, it wouldn't matter, because…

[Dean] Can we watch it now, Mom?

[Shannon] They've got a credit card, they can just get a new tire. But, added to the fact that all these things are happening, is the fact that they can't let their parents know. They can't make the most logical easiest way… Choice to get out of this situation because they can't let their parents know. An adult wouldn't have that same situation. So, the stakes are higher, the tension's higher, and then [you opt] for fun.

 

[Mary Robinette] Sorry, it just occurred to me… One of the things that I often say, like, when I'm talking about kids is that… What you said, that they just lack experience. But I think of them as foreign visitors. Like, when you come… When you go to a foreign country, what you want is someone to explain what the rules are so that you don't make any social faux pas. So, like, when I go into… When we would go into schools doing school visits with the puppets, the mob mentality was the thing you kind of had to fight. Because they would… Like, if one kid did it, everyone would assume that that was the thing you should do. But it occurs to me that teenagers are actually like spies who have come into adult country and don't want anyone to know…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] That they're from the outside or child land. So they're desperately trying to not get caught is still being children.

[Shannon] Yes. Oh, teens are… I love writing about teens. I think a mistake a lot of writers make is they don't want… First of all, they don't want to be annoying. They don't want their character to be annoying. So they just make them into adults. They say they're 16, but they really just behave like adults. They're missing so much great story matter there. What matters to a teenager? What are they going through in their lives? But in addition to the science fiction adventure or whatever you're writing, you've also got that element of this is a person trying to figure out… Navigate that transition from child to adult. That's really interesting.

[Dean] I think one of the things that we do as adults, or at least that I do, is tend to believe or to minimize the feelings of the kids, or minimize the experience.

[Right]

[Dean] To believe here they are going through this thing that… [Adolescence?] Oh, that's ridiculous. How is that difficult? But if I go into writing it that way, it rings weird. But the kids are feeling with the same intensity or more than we would if we were put in… If we were plucked out of our familiar environment and put into an environment where we don't know what the rules are.

[Mary Robinette] It's stressful.

[Shannon] That's a good point, that you have to absolute… When you're writing about kids or teens, you absolutely have to respect children and teenagers. You can't…

[Dean] It can be hard.

[Shannon] It will come off as false if you go in thinking and judging them and being like annoyed with them and wanting to just make them older. Come in respecting their point of view or it will be false.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Dean, you're going to tell us about The Princess In Black.

[Dean] The Princess In Black is a phenomenal…

[Shannon] Phenomenal.

[Laughter]

[Dean] Yes, it's a… Let me see if I think of another word that you can say. No, it… What's the type of book that we are calling it? It's like transitional chapter book about a g… Princess Magnolia who is a princess and loves being a princess and walks around in pretty dresses. But when the monster alarm rings, she becomes the princess in black, and puts on a black costume and goes out and fights evil. As a superhero would. There are many books in the series, some of them…

[Shannon] There are seven so far. Yes.

[Dean] Oh, and if… Wait…

[Shannon] [Gorgeously?] illustrated by LeUyen Pham.

[Dean] How close are we to Easter? We're past Easter. Because I was going to recommend, there's a hungry bunny horde book if you're celebrating Lagomorph Liberation or some other kind of…

[Chuckles]

[Dean] Day.

[Shannon] [A bunny horde book] belongs in every Easter basket.

[Dean] That's true. That's true. So, The Princess In Black by Shannon and Dean Hale. Illustrated by…

[Shannon and Dean] LeUyen Pham.

[Dean] Something…

[Brandon] We love these books in our household. My sons just went straight through the whole series eagerly, so… They're fantastic.

[Shannon] Yay. Thank you.

[Dean] More coming.

[Dan] I purposely did not tell my children that I was hanging out with you guys today because they would have just blown a gasket. So.

 

[Shannon] I have to tell a quick story. One time I… My son borrowed a bunch of books from a friend. Several of them were Sanderson books. We were going out to dinner with the Sanderson's, so I brought my son's friend's books with us and he signed them to this guy. When I returned them, I was like, "Hey, just FYI, I saw Brandon Sanderson, so we just had him sign your books to you." He said, "Hold on a second." He ran upstairs, he ran back down, with all seven Harry Potter books and said, "Would you like to borrow these?"

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'll sign them.

[Shannon] That's not going to happen. But only because… Also, talking about Princess in Black in terms of writing about children, these kinds of books… There's lots of different ways to write about children. In some of them, we like get inside a kid's head and show the world how they're seeing it. In other ones, like Princess in Black, it's purely wish fulfillment fun. There are no adults in this world. So we're not showing children by comparison to what they're not. We are just having kids in adventures. So the way they talk and the way they experience things is a very different style than in some of our other books.

 

[Brandon] I want to circle back to this what you said before about respecting children as you're writing about them. Because I find this is a hard line to walk sometimes, because some of the things my children do, as we've talked about, you just can't put on the page. Like my children, I think all children, are basically sociopaths for a large part of their…

[Narcissistic sociopaths. Yup.]

[Brandon] Getting that across, getting across… Like, I love my 10-year-old. He's awesome. But he will not accept that the world is not the way he wants it to be. If we say, "You have to do this." He says, "No." We say, "But if you don't, your teacher said this." "No, she didn't."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right? I'm like, "No, we have a piece of paper here." He's like, "She didn't say that. It doesn't say that." He won't accept it, it's right there. Like, evidence means nothing to my 10-year-old, right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Because he says it's not. So, how do you do things like this in a story about children, but also respect them and not act like they're… There's this fine line between talking down or treating down and also presenting how they are. That line can be really tough for me sometimes.

[Shannon] Yeah. It is a really fine line. Honestly, if we really wrote children exactly as they are in movies and books, nobody would like those characters at all.

[Dean] They just really aren't likable.

[Shannon] But we love them in real life.

[Dean] Yes.

[Shannon] But you just can't show that.

[Dean] [garbled… The paranoids aren't there… The paranoia…]

[Chuckles]

[Shannon] It's insane. So you have to show the bits… We're always asking ourselves, what's most important for this story? So, what matters about this story? Then characters in service of this story. Also, I mean, I think the… I'm sure you guys have talked about this many times. The heart, the foundation of every single story, no matter the genre, is relationships.

[Dean] Relationships. Oh, yeah.

[Shannon] Relationships between characters is all that matters, ultimately. Everything else is set dressing. So how the other characters react to the children is equally important to what the children say and do.

[Brandon] That's a really good point, thinking about it. Like, that's another dynamic that changes your perspective. Asking what the stakes are, asking what are the relationships, how does the child view the relationships with those around them? Which is going to be very different, but still very intense and important than the way I view the relationships.

[Dan] Well, those relationships… I love what you said about that being the most important thing. To talk about my own middle grade series again, the second one, Dragon Planet, I had this fantastic plot built, of how he was going to go out and explore this brand-new planet and there were dragons on it and all this stuff. I'm like, "This is still so boring."

[Chuckles]

[Dan] "Why is this Dragon book so boring?" Then just added in the little character arc was that the little boy is trying to get his dad to think of him as a scientist. All of a sudden, all of the stakes were there because that relationship was in place.

[Mary Robinette] I mean, I think of examples of stories where… That do not have relationships. But all of the ones that I get really excited about, like, the ones that I read for… Certainly, I think if you have characters on the page, that if they are not having relationships, there is a problem.

[Shannon] I mean any relationship, not just romantic, but any kind of connection…

[Mary Robinette] No no.

[Shannon] Between other characters.

[Mary Robinette] I just… There's… This is a total digression, but there's a story that I love that has no characters on the page at all. So…

[Brandon] Once in a while.

[Mary Robinette] Once in a while. Once in a while, you can do it.

[Shannon] Any rule can be broken.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. But one of the things that I was thinking about with the honoring of the children is that… What I've found is that when I try to remember like specific incidents from my own childhood, rather than looking at the outside of the children… From an outside observer point of view, that it is often a lot easier for me to have them move through the world in a way that makes emotional sense.

[Shannon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] There was something that someone said when they were… It was at an assembly. Like an art exhibit opening, and someone had brought their infant, and the infant cried. You could hear a couple people in the audience make a dismissive sound. But the speaker said, "I am so glad that you brought your child, because we've all been that child. We have all cried." It was just like, "Yes, yes. We have all cried." It's a good reminder that everyone can enjoy art.

[Shannon] Some of us have been the mom who desperately needs to get out of the house. But I can't leave without the baby.

[Brandon] Didn't you take the twins on tour with you?

[Shannon] I took my kids everywhere. Yeah. The twins, specifically, came when we shot the movie Austenland in England. So they were there for seven weeks with me.

[Brandon] On set?

[Shannon] Well, you know.

[Dean] When they let you on the set.

[Shannon] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] All right. We're out of time on this episode. It's been awesome. Shannon, you're going to give us some homework.

[Shannon] Yes. So we talked about how the stakes change when you've got a young protagonist. So find a storybook or a movie that is about adults, and conceive of it as instead to be about a teenager or a child. Just write a paragraph about how that plot would change. What would… How would the heart of the story change if everything that happened in the book still happens, but it happens with and to a child?

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/15/14-50-write-what-you-no/

 

Key points: An old writing adage, Write What You Know. But what does it mean? Tap into what you know from your own experience! Extrapolate from what you know. Write what you know is true. Know your genre... or not? Write what you love. Mix the familiar and the strange. Write what you know, but add what you don't know, too. Write what you know may be boring to you, but your experience is individual. As a writer, you filter everything through your own experience. What you are passionate about may be a better story. Use your own emotional touchstones to make a richer story. Expand your knowledge, know more. When you tackle something difficult, put the other parts on an easy setting.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 50.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Write What You… No.

[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 Howard.

 

[Brandon] This is an age-old adage in writing circles. Write what you know. You may have been taught…

[Howard] Can I just say write what you nope?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Yes. You may have been taught it before. It's kind of confusing. The first time I heard it, I'm like, "Wait. So I can't write fantasy or…" What do you guys think of this adage?

[Mary Robinette] So, I agree that this is one of the things that is often wildly misunderstood. The idea behind the original is that there are things that you know, that you can tap into. You know what it's like to be afraid. You've had these different experiences in your life. If you tap into those and write from your own personal experience, you're going to have a story that's rich in texture. The thing that I often say for fantasy people is extrapolate from what you know.

[Brandon] Yeah, that's a good suggestion.

[Margaret] A phrasing I heard of it once from Alice Chadwick at a conference on narrative and nonfiction. He said, "Write what you know is true." There's some unpacking around that, but I think that really it speaks that same grain of truth, of you don't have to write your own literal experience… I'm not necessarily giving advice to journalists with this, but as a fiction writer, you can write from your own experience. If that is grounded, then that will ground your story, no matter how fantastical you get from there.

[Howard] For journalists, it's write what you've verified with an additional source.

[Laughter]

[Howard] The… Early in Schlock Mercenary, I hadn't done a whole lot of research with military folk yet. But I was fresh out of a very unhealthy corporate environment where… I've talked about this principle before… Position power was being substituted for personal power. I am your boss, therefore you must like me. All the time, all over. It was very top-down. I was familiar with how that worked and how it was broken. I just sort of built the personalities of my mercenaries in that manner. I got email from people saying, "Were you and I in the same unit? Because I swear you've described my lieutenant or my captain." I found that very flattering, because what it said to me is I know enough about broken people to have correctly described one that I've never met.

[Brandon] One of the things that… When I think about write what you know, I get actually really conflicted. Because I like some of the sentiment that this phrase is telling you. But then I go the rounds. If I kind of look at fantasy novels, there is a big part of me that thinks, if you're going to write in a genre, you should familiarize yourself with this genre. You should know the conventions of the genre and you should become part of the discussion. There's another smaller part of me that says, "Yeah, but people who have none of that baggage sometimes create things that are just wildly new and completely off the beaten path and doing something very interesting with the genre." So you can see, I kind of… The two different sides of me fight about this pretty often.

[Mary Robinette] I think one of the questions there is, like, where is the line between what you know and what you love? So I think that when people are writing something that… And they're coming to science fiction and fantasy from outside the genre, there still chasing the thing that they love and they're still writing the thing that they know. They're just adding this unfamiliar to it. Which is the same thing that we do in genre. We're writing something that we love. We're always trying… We talk about this all the time on the podcast, the familiar and the strange. It's just that for us, the genre is the familiar. That is us writing what we know. Then we add other things that we don't know onto it. So I feel like it's two sides of the same coin.

[Margaret] Yeah.

 

[Brandon] How do you guys incorporate who you are into the settings that you're building?

[Uh…]

[Howard] You know what, that's a question that…

[Margaret] I try not to, honestly.

[Howard] That is a question that will be very specifically answered in great detail when I'm no longer around to defend myself.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Because I remain unaware of an unknown number of my biases that creep into my work in ways that I cannot see, hear, smell, taste, touch, whatever. I like to think that I'm aware of how I'm influencing these things, but there is a voice up in the nosebleed seats that says, "Expect to be wrong. But don't worry, because you'll be dead before anybody really points it out in detail."

[Margaret] When… At a slightly more literal level, I know my first published short story, Jane, was in Shimmer magazine. This is a story about a paramedic who winds up at the center of a zombie apocalypse. Really, it's about her relationship with her foster mother. I have her walking in the streets of Los Angeles. She absolutely lived in the first apartment that I lived in in LA. Even… It's like… It was boring to me, but I'm like, "Only one other person has ever lived in that apartment with me." So, it's like… Walking up the street, if you were familiar with the street when I lived there, the empty lot that's there was absolutely there. She is fictional, the dog is fictional. Like, I don't know much about zombies, but I can root it in a Los Angeles that I've walked the streets of, and I've heard the traffic, and I understand it.

[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that you said in there that I really want to underline for the readers about why write what you know actually works. It's boring to me. But the experience that you have as a person is individual. It's not an experience that other people have. It's why you all get so excited every time I break out the puppetry stuff. When I'm in puppetry communities, it's like… They're like, "Oh, that thing went wrong? Let me one up you with this." It's like this is… It's all old hat to us. But when I come over to writing, to prose, it's a novel and fresh way to look at things. So, one of the things that… To get back to your question about how to put yourself in there, is that you act as a filter for everything that you're writing. We get asked all the time where do the ideas come from. We also always say they're all around you. But what you're doing as a writer is that you're filtering it through your own experience. So I think, for me, one of the things with the… Parts of the way write what you know that is true is to trust your taste, and to trust your own experience, and to trust that it is interesting to other people.

 

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So this is Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly. I was the audiobook narrator for this. It's the sequel to Amberlough, which I raved about previously. This is such a strong book. It follows on the heels of Amberlough, which it basically feels like it's the Weimer Republic. Here we have three of the… Or two of the viewpoint characters that we had in the previous book plus a new one. So we've got to people that we are familiar with and they've moved… They are refugees now in another country. So what you're getting there is a lot of the outsider "OMG, what's going on?" But you can still see Lara's voice coming through, even though this is in a totally new place. Also, the characters and their interactions are all informed by where they have been… By their past. I think that honestly you could read this book without having read the first one, but the emotional resonance between the two books is so powerful if you read them sequentially that I… I'm recommending Armistice, but if you have not read Amberlough, pick up Amberlough, then read Armistice.

 

[Brandon] All right. So, kind of, I want to push on this theme a little bit further, because I think this is really interesting. A lot of times, when I'm talking to my students and working with them at the university course, this is something that they completely miss. This idea that something that they are really passionate about can make a much better story than trying to in some ways write something patterned after what you've seen before.

[Howard] Certainly, write something bigger than they could ever be is…

[Brandon] Or just more bland. Really.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's the thing. People don't trust themselves that what they're passionate about is going to translate into stories. I really do think if you are really excited and passionate about something, that's going to help you make a better story.

[Absolutely]

 

[Brandon] Now there is a danger there in the kind of waxing too long about a topic or going too deep into jargon or things like this. Kind of losing track of a story because you're too busy writing about the ins and outs of breeding rabbits which is really interesting to you. How can you balance this?

[Howard] For me, it's emotional touchstones.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm going to share a very personal example. In 2006, I separated my shoulder and was prescribed Lortab and ended up addicted to it. The addiction was not one where I was stealing in order to illegally obtain pills. It was one in which I now had a dependency that was controlling me, instead of me controlling it. We went off of Lortab, and when I say we, it was Sandra removing it from the house and shepherding me through the process of living without this stuff. For two years after that, if you said the word Lortab, I wanted to cry. Because I knew that this was a thing that would relax me, that would make me kind of happy, and I absolutely could not have it. That experience was incredibly alien to everything else about me. You could say a word and it would hurt me. That knowledge… I can use that as a writer. In 2018, I injured my arm in a different way. The doctor said, "Well, we don't know what's wrong yet, but maybe ibuprofen, or we can get you some hydrocodone." I know what hydrocodone means. That 12-year-old addiction came back all at once. I almost broke down in the doctor's office. Now I have this understanding of how when an addict says, "I'm not no longer an addict, I'm just not using. No, I'm always an addict." I have an understanding of that. I don't need to write a story about someone who separates his shoulder and then has a blood pressure problem. I can write a story about somebody who has lost a loved one and thinks they're over it, and 15 years later stumbles across a photograph and discovers that they're not. When I think write what you know, that's a thing that I know.

[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Yeah. The… Less personal example, but all puppets, all the time, which is what I do, is… We talk about voice and things like this. I've talked about this when we were talking about the voice podcast, that there's three things when we're talking about puppetry, style of puppet. It's mechanical style, the aesthetic style, or the personal style. The mechanical style is what kind of puppet is it? The aesthetic style is what does it look like? Does it look like a Muppet? Does it look like it's handcarved? The personal style is you can hand the same puppet to two puppeteers and it will look like a different character. It's because of the individual taste of the performer. Jim Henson, if you look at anything else that he did that is not Muppets, like, was much more in a Dada, surreal, experimental land of filmmaking. Steve Whitmire, who initially took over Kermit, was much more of a linear storyteller. So they're going to just make different choices. This is the kind of thing that were talking about with write what you know. It's like when we're saying trust yourself, trust your own instincts, it's… These things will allow you to create something that is special and unique. When you're taking something that's deeply personal, like what Howard experienced, you're going to explore that in ways that are different from someone else who has that. It's going to allow you to bring an honesty to your work when you're reaching for things that you know. This is why also when we, in the larger picture, when we're talking about the hashtag #ownvoices, which is the importance of reading fiction and supporting fiction written by people from a lived experience writing about their lived experience, the reason is because that lived experience is going to inform that fiction. When you sit there and say, "Oh, but my world is boring. My world is normal." What you're also doing is you're setting yourself… First of all, you're devaluing yourself.

[Margaret] Right.

[Mary Robinette] But you're also kind of setting yourself up as the default, as the dominant, and exoticizing everybody else. That's… That is also a problem. This is not to say that you're not allowed to write other people. That's not… It's not that you're never… It's like I am totally allowed to write people who are not a… Let's see when this podcast airs… Not a 50-year-old white woman. But… Oh…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Sorry.

[Howard] I'm already a 50-year-old white man as of this recording, so… Have fun with it.

[Mary Robinette] Thanks. I'm actually really looking forward to it. To be honest. But the point being that I am allowed to write other characters. I'm allowed to do these other things. But when we talk about write what you know, there's two aspects of that. One is that my work should be influenced by what I know. The other thing is that my work will be influenced by what I know, whether I want it to or not, and I have to be aware of that when I go into stuff.

[Margaret] I think the other thing that strikes me about… I think probably the first time I heard write what you know, I was maybe a second grader, it was like one of those came across in elementary school…

[Howard] I have bad news for you, kid.

[Margaret] Well, that's the thing, because it sort of… You get told that as a child, and it's like, "What do I know?" What you know is not set in stone. One of, I think the charge inherent in write what you know is expand your knowledge. Know more.

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I'm going to say is, especially if you are tackling something that is very difficult, it is totally okay to put everything else to the easy setting. If you are… Especially if you are an early career writer, and you're like, "I am trying to get a handle on plot." Don't try to get a handle on writing the other at the same time that you're trying to get a handle on writing plot. With Calculating Stars, I knew that I was going to have to be handling mathematics and orbital mechanics and all of these other things. Judaism! Which, I don't know if you noticed, been raised Southern Baptist and Methodist. Really, this is not… I was handling all of these things. So I set Elma to a Southern woman, I gave her a mother that's very much like my mother, that relationship, I gave her a marriage that's very much like my marriage. I sent everything I could to what I really know, to give myself room to work on and concentrate on the things that I don't know. Even there, I was extrapolating from what I know.

[Howard] And you decided to tackle this project when you are already pretty comfortable with what goes into writing a novel.

[Mary Robinette] That's true. That's the other aspect.

 

[Brandon] Well, I'm going to have to wrap us up here. It's kind of a sad moment, because this is us saying goodbye to Margaret. Not forever. But this is our last podcast with Margaret, so we're going to let her give the homework this week.

[Margaret] All right. So, the homework assignment this week. We want you to take an area that you are super familiar with and turn that into a superpower. The same way Mary talked about how we all think her puppet stuff is completely cool, the way that my background as a screenwriter has made me a structural god among novelists…

[Chuckles]

[Margaret] This is…

[Mary Robinette] Quite true. Accurate. Accurate.

[Margaret] Find something in your life that you maybe don't think is all that interesting and make it the coolest thing on the planet.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you, Margaret.

[Margaret] Thank you.

[Brandon] For hosting with us this year. You all are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/14/14-29-field-research/

 

Key points: Field research is mostly about the stuff you can't get from books, the tiny details. Do your research before you go. Identify an expert who can help you. Offer an honorarium. Then go and experience visceral sensory details. Use the framework, known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns (a.k.a. Howard's realm). Nothing replaces walking down a street thinking I'm going to have to describe this someday, what are the little details that can convince a reader of the large details. Try free writing everywhere you go, capturing sensory details. Do analog field research! Don't forget, sights, sounds, smells, get it all. Tell your readers what someone else is feeling, so they can also enjoy the experience.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 29.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Field Research.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And field research is going to take more than 15 minutes to do.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] We're talking about field research. The fun, fun part of our job where we get to go places and write it off.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's… It is actually my favorite part of the job.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I remember talking to Jessica Day George, who we've had on the podcast before, who said… Basically, tweeted and said, "I'm going to Europe and I can't tell you where because it's all about my next book." She was going to look at castles and to look at historical stuff. That is not the field research that I get to do, but I remember looking at it and thinking, "Oh, that's actually a thing, isn't it?"

[Brandon] Yeah. It is great.

[Margaret] You get to embed with a space mercenary fleet, though, right?

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] So, I guess my first question for us is, when we're talking specifically about field research, you're going to go someplace and do a thing or interview someone for a primary source, how do you approach it? What is your methodology? How do you take the notes, how do you decide where you are going to go, that sort of thing?

[Mary Robinette] So the… I've done this both as a writer and then also come at it from puppet theater. A lot of what you're looking at is the stuff that you can't get out of the books. Most of this is going to be tiny details. So, what I do first is, I do a ton of research before I go, so that I'm not asking the stupid 101 questions. Because that's a waste of everybody's time. The other thing that I do is, I, in the process of doing that research, I usually identify an expert that I can reach out to. For instance, we were working on a play about Mary Anning, who is the first widely recognized paleontologist, or fossilist, excuse me. Was born in 1799. So I found Dr. Hugh Torrins, wrote to him, said we're doing this, I'd love to… We're going to be coming to London to do research, I would love to connect with you. This is the honorarium that I can offer. It's not a big honorarium. It was like $150. For that $150, he went with us to Lyme Regis, he was delighted to talk about this thing that was his passion. He introduced us to the paleontologist that he knew, he introduced us to the fossilists that he knew. He told us which fossil… Fossilists were worth talking to, which fossil sites to go and look at, what details were relevant. So we went and did those things. Having an expert to give you kind of a targeted in about the stuff that you don't know about was incredibly useful. That… From that, we were able to bring back a lot of visceral sensory details. Similarly, when we did the NASA thing, I got to go into the NASA museums a lot, but the difference between doing that and being taken on a tour by an astronaut…

[Brandon] Right. Climbing through the replica of the ISS…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. It's a totally different thing. So you can go without an expert, but for me, if you can find someone who is an expert or knows the area, you're going to get a lot more out of it. Among other things, they're going to help you shift your lens, so that you're seeing things the way they see them.

 

[Howard] Circling back real quick on the honorarium, it's worth noting that what you are paying for with 150 or $200 is not their time. You are buying their belief that you are serious about this. It's a small sum, but by offering it… Experts often know to look for that. Oh, there's an honorarium. Oh, you want to learn things from me. Okay, cool. I'm happy to do this.

[Margaret] Depending on where you are in your career and what you're doing and who the expert is that you're approaching, the definition of small sum can become flexible.

[Mary Robinette] Very much so.

[Margaret] If you're going to a local university because you would like information from someone who is a professor there, or something like that, take them out, buy their coffee. That can be a perfectly appropriate honorarium for something like that. Especially if you're in the early stages of your career and you're doing something that's basically on spec for you.

[Mary Robinette] When I was getting information about meteor strikes, I thought I only had one question. So I took a person out for coffee, and then it turned out that I had more than one question.

[Laughter]

 

[Howard] There's a framework that I use for a lot of things knowledge-related. Which is this grid that says there are the things that we know that we know. There are the things that we know we don't know, the known unknowns. There are the things that we don't know that we know. We have information, but we don't know how to categorize it. Then there's the unknown unknowns. I don't know… I don't even know how to ask the question that will get me the information that I need. Acknowledging upfront to yourself that there are unknown unknowns… Mary, you said you don't want to ask the bonehead questions, you don't want to ask the stupid questions. Sometimes you have to acknowledge that I'm going to ask some stupid questions because I just don't know how this works. But you own that upfront, and then when you get thrown a curveball… You wanted to ask one question about meteor strikes and now suddenly you have 100. You're not surprised by that happening. You accept, "Oh. Oh, my goodness, the unknown unknowns' space was larger than I wanted it to be. Now I have a known unknowns space and a long list of questions, and I am prepared to forge ahead into that."

[Mary Robinette] When I say I don't want to ask the bonehead questions, again, working on Calculating Stars, there was no way I was going to learn the amount of orbital mechanics that I needed to know for those books. But I knew the area of information. Like, I knew this is the kind of thing, these are the effects I'm coming for. Whereas what happens to me a lot as a puppeteer is that I'll get people who will email me and say, "Can you tell me how to make a puppet?" I'm like, "Okay. So there's five different types, five different major branches of puppetry. Within each branch, there are subtypes. What is your budget? How… What is…" Like, that's a question I cannot answer. I mean, there are books and books and books about that.

[Howard] It's the same measure of complexity as can you teach me to build a bicycle.

[Margaret] Or the… I feel like the equivalent in my area of the biz. "So, how did you get started in the business?" Or, "How can I break into television?" Like there are a lot of blogs and a lot of books and a lot of information on that topic out there. If someone approaches me with that question, I'm sort of like, "Uh, Google is your friend." If you have… If someone has done their homework and they have a more specific question, that's when it's like, "Oh. Yeah. I can help you out with that."

[Mary Robinette] I just spent hours answering the "How do you build a wing?" Because they had watched a video and they came to me with a specific question. Then we did some follow-up stuff. Totally happy to do that.

[Brandon] This is 100% my experience as well, writing on books. Like, I just recently did a fighter jet book. I thought I had done my 101.

[Mary Robinette] Ha Ha. Oh, yeah.

[Brandon] Then I went to the fighter pilots and it turns out I was full of questions I didn't know that I didn't know, in Howard's realm. But at least approaching it, once my eyes were opened, I was able to kind of get it closer, send it to the fighter pilots, have them say, "No, you still got it wrong, but your closer. Here's this and this and this." Kind of just work towards getting it right.

[Howard] You just named the unknown unknowns space Howard's realm.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yeah, Howard's realm.

[Howard] Thank you. Thank you for that. When I sat down to draw the Munchkin Star Finder deck… I'm going to take this into a visual space for a moment. I needed lots of… I needed ways to do shorthand for a space pistol, shorthand for a helmet, shorthand for a Velcro pocket. Where with just a very few lines, I could do a thing. So I found myself googling a lot cartoon image noun. Then I would look at clipart, I would look at things so that I could get silhouettes of them. My favorite example of that was in the Star Finder book, there is this giant space creature that we just kind of acknowledge is a space whale. I wanted an iconic whale, that everyone would look at and just see whale. I ended up with the silhouette of the whale that eats Pinocchio and Geppetto. I used that as the silhouette. It looks incredibly simple when you look at it, but there's 2 1/2 hours of research that went into that card because there were so many options for things which, when I simplified them, started looking less like a whale and more like a shark.

 

[Brandon] All right. Let's stop for our book of the week. Which is actually not a book. It is... Howard.

[Howard] It's not a Howard, either. It's a podcast.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] PBS Spacetime. We'll post the link in the liner notes. The original host was Gabe Perez-Giz. He never actually says his last name. Gabe. The current host, Matthew O'Dowd. These are astrophysicists, who, for about 15 minutes, talk about astrophysics. They go into the math. It is hard-core stuff. But the very first episode, introductory episode, is Gabe talking about let's look at the Super Mario games and determine what the gravity is on the planet of Super Mario.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] What's funny, the answer is it's a lot heavier than Earth. Because he comes down so quickly.

[Oooo]

[Howard] Which means Mario's legs are like rocket engines. But there's another thing that I'll put in the liner notes is my playlist of chronological episodes. They been doing this, I think, since 2013 weekly. At the end of each episode, there's an astrophysics problem for you to look at and try to answer. If you get to the problem… I didn't do any of the problems. I don't do math, I draw pictures. But I would listen to the problem very carefully and ask myself, "What realm does the solution lie in? Am I going to have to do calculus? Am I going to have to do astronomy?" Then, at the end of the next episode, they give you the answers to the questions from the previous. It's super educational.

[Brandon] Awesome.

[Yeah]

[Howard] Super educational.

 

[Brandon] So, we're talking technically about field research. We've kind of strayed a little bit. I knew that we would with this topic. Let's talk about going places. I find that nothing can replace just walking down the street with the mindset of I'm going to have to describe this someday. What are the little details that I'm going to notice? We've spoken many times on the podcast about how small details can convince a reader of a larger reality. If you get the little details right, they will actually assume the large details. So, for me, even if it's I'm going to put this specific café in my book, and it's a café down the street from me, it doesn't mean I'm having to go to Paris. Just saying I'm going to put this building in, what do I notice that's real about this building, has been super helpful for me.

[Mary Robinette] I usually try to do some free writing in whatever place that I go. I give this exercise to my students. It's one of the first exercises, formal writing exercises, I was taught. Which is that you go someplace and you write for half an hour. You don't let your fingers stop moving. You try to capture all of those sensory details. You're basically banking them for narration later. The thing that I would say, also, while were talking about this, is that not everyone can afford to go to NASA or go to Europe. So you can also look for analog field research. So, it's like, I can't go perhaps to Europe, but I can find a narrow street. I can find a narrow street and feel what that's like to walk down. I can't go to that cemetery, but I can go to this other cemetery and I can notice these details about it. I can't go into the NBL pool, but I can go into a pool.

[Margaret] I think, sort of what you're talking about, is getting those sensory details. Because as much as I love my camera, when I'm going out and I'm going to a place, or I'm documenting something for research that I'm doing… It's sort of like when you're going on a vacation and you're snapping so many pictures, you sort of forget to look at things outside the lens. What your camera captures is different than what your eyes capture. So making sure, even if you are photo documenting details, if that's helpful for you, that, sort of, taking a step back, breathing literally and figuratively in the place where you are.

[Howard] One of my favorite research moments… It wasn't really research. Going to Phoenix ComicCon. A bunch of us stepped out of the airport, and, boy, it was hot. We were in the shade, okay. We all commented, "Oh, wow, this is hot." Then we stepped into the sunlight.

[Laughter]

[Howard] David Willis, fellow cartoonist, said, in a very deadpan voice, "We've made a horrible mistake."

[Laughter]

[Howard] Everybody laughs. But that sensory experience, you look at the picture of the line between shade and sunlight, and it looks like that line anywhere that shade and sunlight might fall. But that was not what we experienced.

 

[Brandon] Along those lines, a reminder. Don't just write down what things look like. I have to re-emphasize this time and time again to my students. You will naturally focus on sight, at least most of us will. Try to get the sounds, try to get the smells. Try to get how it feels to step out of an air-conditioned area into the heat. Get those details as well.

[Margaret] I had an apartment fire in the first apartment I was living in after college. The fire was actually in the apartment immediately underneath ours.

[Whoof]

[Margaret] So, our apartment… Not so much. There was some fire, that had come up through the walls, but it was mostly smoke and the fire department coming in and wetting everything down. The most profound memories that I carried forward from cleaning out the apartment after that was the smell of smoky mildew.

[Oof]

[Margaret] Because it is summer in Boston, it is humid, there's no air circulation because all the windows got busted out and are covered in plywood. Whenever I… I was writing something else, I described a fire, and it's like, "The smell of smoke and mildew hung over the place in the following week." It's one of those things…

[Mary Robinette] Very, very evocative. 

[Margaret] I never would have thought about it until I was there, trying to get stuff out of that apartment. So, smells are like hardwired to your memories.

 

[Howard] On the 2017 Writing Excuses Retreat, I got to tour a World War II era Russian submarine. One of the things that I noticed most was not how cramped the large spaces were, but it was when we peered into the cabins and I realized these one… I'm not a tall person, but these people must not have been very tall either, or they were curled up. There's just not much space. A physical description of what you see can convey the size of things, but there is an emotion related to cramped, there is an emotion related to open space. There is an emotion related to all of my things that smell like burnt cheese. That, as writers, is one of the things that is the most critical for us to try to convey. You don't want to tell your reader how to feel. You want to tell your reader how someone else is feeling, so that they can come along for that experience.

 

[Brandon] We are out of time. Hopefully, this has been helpful for you guys. Howard is going to give you some homework to kind of push it along.

[Howard] Yeah. Go someplace close to you, where you've never been. It can… A side street, a store, a restaurant, whatever. Bring your phone… Your phone. Your camera. Take a few pictures. Then go back, look at the pictures, and look for things in the pictures that your eyes didn't notice. Sit down and describe what is in this photograph as if you are writing that is a setting for a story. As if a character is noticing these things. Teach your eyes how to look at the camera and see the things that the camera saw that your eyes didn't see the first time around.

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2018/08/12/13-32-how-to-handle-weighty-topics/

 

Key Points: How do you decide to tackle characters who are suffering from difficult things like racism, sexism, or people who are different from yourself in your fiction in an appropriate way? Start with who you are, your worldview, your writer voice, and be authentic. How do you handle it carefully? Start with "everyone knows what it's like to bite into a piece of fruit," and remember that we have more in common than not. Start with the things you have in common, don't make your character just differences and marginalization. Start with empathy, and let the character teach you something. Be careful when writing about something you do not have a personal connection to, to avoid damage. Will getting it wrong damage people? Am I reiterating something learned from the media that already reinforces issues that the community has to deal with on a daily basis? Watch for the pressure points, where people are already bruised. See the other as people. Readers are not a monolith. Where do you draw the line between what is my story to write versus my need to write the other? Think about why you feel that you have to write this, what do you think you are doing with it? Remember that your life experience may be the exotic thing to your reader. Representing diversity does not always mean pain, marginalization, and trauma. Sometimes people just want characters who look like them and talk like them to have adventures and be the protagonist, going on the kinds of adventures and interesting things that we love in science fiction and fantasy.

 

 

[Brandon] Amal, will you give us some homework?

[Amal] Yes. So this is… Basically, this is a little tricky. It's maybe more of a sort of shift in perspective than it is about generating something new. Basically, if you've ever… This is more of a revision exercise. If you take something that you've written where you represented someone from a group that you are not part of, and write a scene in which a person of that group is reading the thing that you wrote. This kind of forces you to imagine the fact that someone of that background will probably encounter your work, and see where that takes you.

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