Writing Excuses 15.27: Alternate History, with Eric Flint

Jul. 8th, 2020 03:36 pm
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 15.27: Alternate History, with Eric Flint
 
 
Key points: Alternate history makes a change to real history, and explores the ramifications. One kind involves a time travel element, while another just makes a change. It takes research, and people will complain about details. One trick, use locations that were later destroyed. Use historical characters where possible. Also, crowd source your expertise! Think about how to use thoughts and actions of historical people rather than modern thinking and behavior. You may want to use old attitudes to tell a story. But, be aware that your audience may not like those attitudes. Time travelers may help you here. Also, pick the right historical period, and characters.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 27.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Alternate History, with Eric Flint.
[Howard] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Brandon] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Brandon] And we have special guest star, Eric Flint. Thank you for coming on the podcast with us.
[Eric] You're welcome.
[Brandon] We're also recording live at SpikeCon.
[Applause]
 
[Brandon] So, Eric, you are one of the established masters of alternate history. We're really excited to have you on the podcast about it with us. Just in case there is someone listening who doesn't know what alternate history is, how would you define the sub genre of alternate history?
[Eric] Basically, the author makes some kind of change in real history, and then follows what the ramifications of it might be. You can broadly break it into two parts. There's a lot of alternate history also involves a time travel element.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Eric] Where you take somebody in the modern world and put them back in older times. But then there's a different kind of alternate history, what you might consider pure alternate history, where there's no time travel element at all, where the author just makes a change in something. It can be something very minor. But something that's going to have a cascading effect. I've written both types.
[Brandon] So, that sounds to me really hard.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Because I write epic fantasy. No one can tell me I got my history wrong, that I… But it feels like if you pick a time that people have studied a lot, say World War II or something like that, and you say, "Well, this battle changed and I'm going to explore the ramifications of what happens all the way into the future if that one battle was fought differently." It sounds like you have to do a lot of research and listen to a lot of people grumble that you got it wrong.
[Eric] I make it a point… I have not, and have no intention of ever writing an alternate history set in World War II, the Civil War, the Napoleonic era, where there are a jillion reenactors and fanatics who will go berserk over every little goddamned jot and tittle [garbled]
[laughter]
[Eric] "No, those uniforms only had three buttons…"
[Laughter]
[Howard] Well, your problem is that historians, they will let you know when you're wrong, but the reenactors…
[Eric] No, no, no.
[Howard] They'll come to your house.
[Eric] Well, what really drives you nuts is that the issues they're going to give you a hard time about, who in the hell cares? I mean, they really don't have hardly anything to do with the story. My biggest series, Ring of Fire series, is set in the middle of the 30 Years War in central Europe in the 17th century. There are, in the United States, exactly one group of reenactors of the 30 Years War. I made it a point to get on good terms with them a long time ago.
[Chuckles]
[Eric] Yeah, it is a lot of work. Whenever I'm… At least when I'm starting an alternate history series. It gets easier if you go along, as you go along. But whenever I'm early on in an alternate history book, I have to budget about twice as much time as I do for pretty much any other kind of novel. The only other kind of novel I've ever done that requires that kind of research is hard SF. Yeah, there are plenty of times when I envy dirty rotten fantasy writers like you…
[Chuckles]
[Eric] Because you can just wing it.
[Laughter]
[Eric] I mean, you do have to be consistent and care… I mean, there's actually quite a bit of work goes into it, but it's not the kind of…
[Brandon] No. I've… Most of my career, I wrote just in secondary world fantasies that I'd made up. The first time I even touched our world, I made sure to make it post apocalyptic. Cities that had suffered in Norma's disasters that had changed the landscape, the physical landscape. I still got things wrong and got complaints about… I took Chicago and I changed it to steel and blew up most of it and I created an underground and most of it takes place in the underground. Still, people were like, "You know what, that street actually doesn't intersect there."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I'm like, "Uh. Man. You'd think that I could change the world enough that I could…" But it is… It's difficult. How do you… What's your go-to method for research?
 
[Eric] Well, all right. There are some tricks I use. When Andrew Dennis and I wrote 1634: The Galileo Affair which is part of the Ring of Fire series, and takes place mostly in Venice. Every single important location except the Piazza de San Marco and the Doge's Palace, which are quite well-known and you can visit them. But every other location that figure in the novel, we situated somewhere in Venice that got destroyed later. So, Mussolini razed it and put up a railroad station in one case, and I've forgotten everything else. So there's nothing left for anybody to go and prove that we're wrong. It's far enough back, there's not enough of a historical record.
[Howard] So, you're like time travelers trying to hide your tracks…
[Eric] Yeah.
[Howard] By putting your activities where something's going to wipe it out.
[Chuckles]
[Eric] It's not just [garbled]. Another thing I will do, I like to use historical characters if at all possible. But what I try to do is… One of the major characters in the Ring of Fire series is a Danish prince, Prince Ulrich. He existed. I mean, he was a real Prince of Denmark. But in real history, he was murdered at the age of 22. Very mysterious episode. So he died at the age of 22. Well, prove me wrong as to how he…
[Chuckles]
[Eric] Evolved afterwards. So I try to find people that were young. In one way or another. It's hard for somebody to… They can second-guess me, but, it's like, "Prove it."
[Brandon] Right.
[Eric] There's a lot of that. No matter how you slice it, though, you're still a lot… Actually, in terms of writing excuses, the two things I tell people there's the biggest and most dangerous forms of procrastination are research and worldbuilding. Because you can do that forever. At a certain point, you just have to say, "Enough!" And start writing a book. Then, yeah, a lot of times, you'll have to go back into more research and do stuff. There's no way around it, there's a lot of work. It gets easier if it's a big long series, the farther you go. Because the farther you get from the breakpoint, as we call it, the more possibilities open up.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop and talk about our book of the week, which is the first book in the Ring of Fire series.
[Eric] All right.
[Brandon] Will you tell us a little bit about it?
[Eric] Yeah. The premise of the whole Ring of Fire series… The first novel is called 1632… It's a very simple premise. There's a cosmic accident that's caused by basically irresponsible behavior on the part of a very powerful alien species, who enjoy manipulating space-time, and what amounts to a fragment of their art hits the earth and causes a transposition in time and place of a whole town in northern West Virginia in modern times. Modern times being the year 2000, which is when I wrote the book. A town… About a 6 mile diameter… I mean, the whole physical area is transposed, not just the people. So that this town materializes in the middle of Germany, in an area of Germany called Thuringia, which used to be southern East Germany, in the middle of the 30 Years War. They just boom, they show up, and there they are. That's the MacGuffin, I mean, that's the premise. That's the only premise. I… It's a three-page premise. I don't spend… It's really let's get on with the story. Take my word for it that this happened. Yeah, I know it's crazy, but who cares.
[Chuckles]
[Eric] We'll go from there. What the whole series is about is how this town of 3500 modern Americans… The impact that this has on the world in general, particularly Europe in the middle of what was probably the most destructive war in European history, at least since the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire. It's also a very fascinating period in history. From there, the series has sprawled out all over the place. There are seven novels that I call the mainline, that sort of run in the center of this series, followed… They depict the main characters and the main actions that happen. But then there are all kinds of side stories that branch off from there. Some become pretty major storylines in their own right. I believe we're up to about 24 novels published by Baen Books. Then, in addition, starting about two years ago, we launched our own publishing house, which we call Ring of Fire Press, which… We have a booth in the dealers' room if you want to drop by. We're publishing our own stuff set in the series. It also has a magazine called the Grantville Gazette that's been in operation professionally for about 12 years now.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Eric] [garbled] done really well.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Brandon] If you guys don't know about this whole thing, go research it. Because it is one of the most fascinating like emergent storytelling cultures in science fiction fantasy that these novel started. The people loved reading them, started talking about them, and creating forums. Out of that grew a magazine which has fiction that is kind of members of the community are writing that is all canon about this town, and they know all the people who are in it because it's a somewhat small town and just what they're doing. They'll be like, "We need to get rubber? How do we get rubber? Well, we need to write a story about somebody going…" All of these things… It is really… The network around the 1632 books is just fascinating to me.
 
[Howard] Well, that's the thing that I would like to ask, with regard to alternate history and the research that needs to be done, how much of that in the last 10 years have you been able to crowd source? Have you been able to go out to members of the community and…
[Eric] I was crowdsourcing it right from… When I wrote the first book, I talked to Jim Baen and we set up a special conference in Baen Bar's discussion area devoted to that book. I said to people, "I'm going to need help writing this, because all kinds of… The kind of research I have to do is impossible for one people to do." It's like, "What can you do with modern engines?" So a lot of it was technical. The basic rule I followed, with one exception, was that I used the real town of Mannington, West Virginia, as the model for the town of Grantville. The only big exception is I moved the power plant, which, in the real world, exists in another town called Grant town about 15 miles away. I moved it because I really needed a power plant.
[Chuckles]
[Eric] But that's the only thing I cheated on. So the basic rule, that's been true ever since, is if it's in Mannington, you can put it in Grantville, if it's not in Mannington, you can't. That's the rule. People spend a ton of time, believe me, researching what is and isn't in Mannington.
[Brandon] Do people in the actual town know about this?
[Eric] Yeah.
[Brandon] Do they get tired of…
[Chuckles]
[Eric] We haven't been out there in quite a while. The first… Four years now, going back, I don't know, close to 20 years, the fans of the series hold an annual convention. It's being held here this year. WesterCon is hosting it. The first five years we held it in West Virginia. We couldn't hold it in Mannington, because Mannington doesn't have a motel. That's how small a town it is. So we held it in a larger town of Fairmont, population about 30,000. We did that for five years in a row. But at that point… There would always be new people coming every year, but about at least two thirds of the people had gotten to be regulars. They came up to me and said, "You know, Eric, there's only so many times you can visit a town of 3500 people." I mean…
[Laughter]
[Eric] So… Which is fair enough. So what we started doing after that, Conestoga in Tulsa was the first one that did it. We'll go to a convention and ask them if they're willing to host us. What they get is maybe 50 people showing up who wouldn't otherwise show up. We do all the organizing and tracks and everything else. But basically, it means we don't have to organize a convention because somebody else is already done it.
 
[Brandon] So, kind of getting back to how to write alternate history. I'm actually going to pitch this at Dan first. I know you haven't done true alternate history, but you've done cousin genres.
[Dan] I've done secret history.
[Brandon] You've done secret history, you've also done historical fantasy. So, my big question is, how much do you worry about getting the thoughts, mannerisms, and actions of the historical people right when you're writing a story like this? I preface this by saying when I write epic fantasy, I generally am not trying to write… This is my mode… People who acted and thought like people did in the Middle Ages. I get away from this because I'm writing secondary world fantasies, generally with magical technology that would really place people more post-Renaissance and things like that. But really, they're thinking more along… If not contemporary, modern lines for thought processes. How much do you worry about this?
[Eric] Oh, a lot.
[Dan] I actually…
[Eric] Oh, I'm sorry, Dan. Go ahead.
[Brandon] We'll go to Dan first, and then we'll…
[Dan] I love this question, because I actually got into kind of a big ongoing argument with my editor and copy editor on my Cold War book, which, by the time this airs, will already be out. It's called Ghost Station. Straight historical, not alternate or anything. Set in 1961. Part of the plot hinges on the inherent sexism of the era. That there are two different places where people miss obvious clues because they assume that the bad guy is a man. Which is not to say that the bad guy is not a man, but… I'm trying to do this without spoilers. Anyway, that sexism was important. The editor and the copy editor were both trying to impose more modern sensibilities on this. Changing just kind of some of the minor language. In a place where I would say man, they would want to change it to person. Just in a couple of places, saying, "You know, we kind of want to be more sensitive about this." If it was in narrative, I let it slide. If it was ever in dialogue, I'm like, "No. The fact that this person has this attitude, the plot hinges on it. We have to keep that attitude there." So, it does matter. I think if you're using it on purpose to tell a particular story, you want to have those old attitudes and you want to have those older kind of more antiquated personalities. If you're not, then sure, go ahead, because obviously it's a hot button issue, if everyone who worked on the book kept trying to change it.
[Brandon] I know that when I read Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, like, the way that she made people feel, I don't know, I'm not an expert in that period, but they felt like they were from the period. It really was a big selling point for the book for me. Eric, do you… How much do you worry about this?
 
[Eric] It's… Oh, you worry about it a lot. I mean, it's kind of at the center of what you do. Because if the book isn't historically plausible, it's not going to work as a story. You have to realize that people in the past do not necessarily think the same way, or behave the same way, they do today. There are various ways that I have found to deal… By the way, the issue may involve, at a purely practical level, is that if your audience is so repelled by your heroes, it's awfully hard to sell a book. To give an ill… Unless it was written 2500 years ago. Then, people will give it a pass. But, to give an instance, the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus, the very first thing he does after Troy, they're sailing down and he says, "Oh, there's a village there." And they stop, rob and plunder it. These are the good guys. Okay? There're two… There are several things you can do. One of them is that if you introduce a time travel element and people from the… Our time, then at least you've got a binocular view of what's happening. So you can be depicting the attitudes of people of the time, but you're also depicting how modern people are looking at it. The other is to pick an historical period… One of the reasons I picked the 30 Years War is that that world was not that different from ours. It was different, but it wasn't like ancient Greece, or Ming China. It wasn't that different. The same was true, even more so, with the series I'm doing set in Jacksonian America. Then what I did was went looking for the right character. I needed a Southern character, an effective political leader, whose attitudes would be at least okay for the modern audience. I was lucky, because such a person actually existed. That was Sam Houston. Sam Houston's attitudes on race were not the same as modern people, but awfully close. He was partly raised by Cherokees, so he's very friendly to Indians. He was asked once by Alexis de Tocqueville what he thought about the capabilities of the different races of North America. He said, "Well, there's no question the Indians are equal to Whites." He said, "Blacks are considered to be childish… Childlike and inferior, but nobody ever gives them a chance to do anything, so how can you really know what they're capable of or not?" That's an attitude that a modern audience, okay, they can go with that. Then, I think the other major character is a Northern Irish radical of the time. He's not exactly got modern attitudes, but they're a lot closer. It's a real issue, though. I mean, because you have to do it in a way that's going to be plausible all the way around. So far, I've been able to put off. But there are some areas of history I would just stay away from.
[Brandon] Right. Probably good advice there.
[Eric] Well, unless I could put a time travel thing in it, but other than that, I'd just stay away from it.
 
[Brandon] We are out of time. I want to thank our audience at SpikeCon.
[Yay. Applause.]
[Brandon] I want to thank Eric. Do you have, by chance, a writing prompt you can give to our audience?
[Eric] A writing prompt?
[Brandon] Yes.
[Eric] When you're… Writing takes a lot of intellectual and emotional energy. It really does. It's hard to get started at the beginning of the day. Wherever that day may be for you. I found two things help. I plot ahead of time. Which I strongly recommend, because one advantage to having a well-developed plot is I don't have to sit down in the morning and say, "Gee, what am I going to write about today?" I can look at the damn plot and say, "Okay. Here's where I am." But the second thing is just write. Write a sentence. Just get a sentence down on paper and keep writing. If it turns out that sentence didn't work out right, you can always scrap it later. But start writing, because once you do that, you've kind of gotten into the story. The story itself will kind of pull you into it. But it really is kind of hard to do it. It's kind of like jumping into a pool of ice cold water. It's like the only way to do it is just do it. That's about… That's what I do every day.
[Brandon] Thanks for the advice. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.28: Warfare and Weaponry

Jul. 23rd, 2019 02:20 pm
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.28: Warfare and Weaponry
 
 
Key points: Combat, fight scenes, warfare, weapons? How do you write it when you aren't the expert that some of your readers are? First, if you think it may be wrong, let it be a character who can make a mistake. Super soldier takes more homework to get it right. Second, pay attention (reading or listening) to people who "have seen the elephant." Talk to somebody who has been there. Search the online community, including YouTube historicals and recreations. Make it personal. Why is the reader going to be invested in this? The more you know about human beings doing human things, when you write about them in a situation not too far different from things you have seen before, you will get a lot of it right. Use extrapolation, add elements of technology, magic, or combat that change the way the game is played. Add wildcards to make it your story. Keep the lens tight, and focus on a few characters, even if the landscape is very wide. Give us someone to care about.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 28.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Warfare and Weaponry.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.
[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.
 
[Brandon] We are going to talk about weapons!
[Dan] Yay!
[Brandon] This is actually one of my favorite topics, because it lets me talk about a hobby horse of mine.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] One of the big dangers with dealing with fantasy and science fiction, particularly when it comes to warfare, I find, is that, well, I don't have the time to become as much an expert as some of my readers in how to go about conducting war. I've never been in a war. This was actually kind of a bit of an issue when I was working on the Wheel of Time books because Robert Jordan had been in a war. He was in Vietnam. So the way he wrote warfare was very different from the way I write warfare. So my first kind of question for you guys is how do you approach, specifically, with this sort of thing, combat, fight scenes, warfare, weapons? Doing this right when you know that many of the readers out there are going to be better at this than you are?
[Howard] Um… The crutch that I fall back on forgetting things wrong is… I try and make sure that when tactically something might not be a good idea, might not be the best way to do a thing, I'm okay with that character having gotten it wrong. If I'm trying to write somebody as a super soldier who tactically gets everything right, I have to do a whole lot more homework, because that's the character that the actual soldiers in my readership will take issue with first. The… The second thing is there's an aspect to soldiering that no one who has not soldiered can really understand. The… It's a blend of adrenaline and esprit de corps and fright and thrill and… Often they talk about it as seeing the elephant. But compensating for that, you have to make sure that you have read extensively and listened extensively to people who have had those experiences. So that when you describe things, you don't describe… Especially describing feelings, describing things from a point of view character, you're not doing so in a way that an actual soldier will say, "Nobody feels that. Why would they feel that? You wrote that wrong."
 
[Dan] We give this answer so much, but that's because it is incredibly true. Talk to someone who knows what they're talking about. I've got a handful of police and soldiers that I will send something to, to alpha or beta read for me, if I suspect that I've gotten it wrong, which is most of the time. It's the emotions in battle. It's, for me, where I often fall down, is the tactics. I'll have a scene and they'll come back and say, "These are the dumbest soldiers ever. Why didn't they do X, Y, and Z?" I realize, "Oh. There's a procedure that's already in place for this common combat situation that I didn't know anything about." So having good reference points and readers who can help out is really valuable.
 
[Brandon] One of the advantages that we have right now that writers didn't have even just 10 years ago is a large online community that talks about historical warfare and battlefields. For someone writing fantasy, like me, I can go to YouTube and there's a whole ring of them. Some of the ones I watch are… There's one called BazBattles which is just historical battles, kind of showing the tactics that each general is using and why they were using them. There are people like [Lindy Mage? Lindybeige] and Scholar Gladiatorius [Schola Gladitoria]… I'm very bad at saying his YouTube channel, but they talk about historical battles. There's people like Shadiversity that just will talk about here is how a weapon was used in these sorts of things. They can be really handy. I will sometimes just go to some of these…HEMA, historical martial arts things and say, "All right. Let me see some people fighting sword against knife." They will have 20 bouts of people…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Doing a recreation for you, where they are fighting…
[Dan] That's fantastic.
[Brandon] You can see directly 20 times in a row how that battle might play out. It lets you write it.
[Dan] There was a BBC series… I can't remember the name, and I'll try to get it for the liner notes… Where there was a historian and his father who was also a historian. They were British. They would just go around to famous sites of battles in… That had taken place somewhere in England and say, "Okay. This is the hill. That's where this guy's army was. That's where this one was." So you got a really great sense of the tactics and how the terrain affected them.
 
[Mahtab] Writing for young readers, you don't have to get that technical, you don't have to get all your facts so correct, because you're writing for younger readers, and they are not as experienced as the adult readers. But what I like to do is make it very, very personal. One of the stories that was set in World War I was War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. That is actually told from the perspective of the horse, but of course, you have the young protagonist who really loves this horse. It's recruited by the Army, and the entire journey is about the horse getting back. It's… The thing is, you could have something as big as war, but you can make it very, very personal to the character. The interaction with how it feels to lose something and want it back and then kind of work that in. So, you're more looking at how it is personal… How that warfare is personally affecting your main character, as opposed to just focusing on the tactics or the weaponry. At least for us, I think it's a little bit easier than writing…
[Brandon] It tends to actually work really well, right?
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Like, one of the questions I wanted to ask is how you might have a large-scale war happening, but keep it personal. But I think you just got to it. Making sure that you're keeping your eye on why is someone really going to get invested in this. Often times, the reader's investment is directly tied to how invested they are in one character, or a set of characters, life through this battle and how they are surviving and what their goals are other than just staying alive, or does their goal just become I want to live through this.
[Dan] My grandfather fought in World War II, and he was specifically a supply sergeant. So all the stories he would tell us were about… They were not about battles, they were not about who won and who lost and who got killed. There were about we didn't have enough socks so here's how I found some socks so that our unit could have some and things like that. Which really gave me a different sense of how personal it can be, and the kinds of concerns that soldiers actually have. It's like two minutes of fighting and then three weeks of waiting around wishing you had clean socks.
[Howard] My grandfather fought in the first World War. He was born in 18…
[How old are you?]
[Howard] He was born in 1899.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] He died in 1968. I never met the man. But he wrote, when he was… I think when he was in his 30s. One of his kids said, "Dad, you are always harping on these old guys who talk about their Civil War experiences, because obviously they've inflated them and whatever. Why don't you write a book about yours?" So he did. He wrote… In my family, we just call it PFC 1918. Because it is his journals from the year 1918 when he enlisted through his experiences in Europe. He did not see the horrors of World War I that we so often talk about. But he got there afterwards. His descriptions… Some of them are very emotional, and some of them are very clinical. Having never met the man, I… He doesn't write much in the way of emotion. But it's been an incredible resource for me because it's a point of view that I don't get from any of the history books.
 
[Brandon] Mahtab, you have a book of the week for us.
[Mahtab] Yes, I do. It's one that I really, really love, I read it quite recently, although the book is, I think, maybe three or four years old. It's called The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey. It's a dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. What I love about this is, it's basically a fungus has destroyed most of humanity. What it does, in terms of changing humans, is once it kind of infects the humans, they turn into cannibals and they just want to devour the other humans. This has basically destroyed most of civilization. But, just outside London, there is a small little place called Beacon. There is a lab that has been set up by a scientist who's rounded up these kids. They're called Hungries because the moment they smell humans, they just want to devour them. They're studying them to find out a cure to it. But, what I loved about it is this book needs a lot of expo. But it is… It gives you the bits and pieces just as needed. So it's a very, very close focus lens. It starts out with Melanie who is a Hungry. She is in this lab being tested. She just makes a joke, like. She's put in this wheelchair, strapped up, and then under the like a military watch with guns trained on her, this child who's probably about 11 years old is taken into the classroom. That just poses so many questions. It sets up the narrative, and you know you're in good hands. So the story is about finding the cure, being attacked by the remaining humans, and the conclusion is just so fabulous. I mean, it's unexpected yet satisfying, which is something you guys always talk about. This one really demonstrates it. So, The Girl with All the Gifts, M. R. Carey.
 
[Brandon] Excellent. Howard, I wanted to put you on the spot again. I know I've done this a couple times already in this episode, but you write military science fiction and you write about what it is like to live as part of a military group. But as far as I know, you've never been in the military.
[Howard] I never have.
[Brandon] So what… Are there things you know you've gotten wrong that our listeners might get wrong? That you have been corrected on, or that you've learned to do right? Or are there certain things, specifics, they have really helped you to get this right other than, of course, get some friends…
[Howard] The things that I got wrong… The things that I got wrongest, I got wrong early on, which was me poking fun at my ignorance by having ranks and forms of battle and whatever where it… I deliberately made it so it did not make sense. I stopped doing that. Because you can really only tell that joke once. It's a joke that I'm telling on myself. Those aren't funny for very long. Research, and a large part of what I get right, I got right because I spent 11 years in a dysfunctional corporate environment, and a top-down management structure that is dysfunctional is not unlike a military command structure under fire. Because a lot of those same hotheaded, emotional decisions, lieutenants that are kissing up, people who have more authority than they should and less knowledge than they should, all of those things existed in that environment. I got lucky when I extrapolated them out to the military setting that I had built. But ultimately, I come back to this idea that at least if we're writing about human beings, the more you know about human beings, the more you've seen human beings do human being things, when you write about them in a situation that is not entirely unlike something you've seen before, the odds are you're going to get a lot of it right.
 
[Brandon] One of the things I wanted to bring up in this podcast was talking about fantasy and Science Fiction extrapolation. Something you were talking about there reminded me of it. You mentioned you don't make a joke out of getting things wrong. One of the things I do intentionally is kind of along those lines, in that when I am building a situation in my fantasy books that… Even my science fiction book that just came out, Skyward, I am looking to have some elements of science fiction or fantasy technology or combat that will change the way the game plays out dramatically. To the point that it removes it far enough from the experience of a lot of the really historical readers, so that they can suspend their disbelief and say, "Well, maybe this sort of situation could never exist in our world, but we didn't have shard blades and shard plate and we were crossing these impossible chasms to try and reach this one goal." In that situation, taking what I know of warfare, applying it, and then adding some wildcards that make it completely into my control, really has been helpful for me. I know with Skyward, which is kind of based on starship fighter pilot stuff, that taking it a few steps away from the way that we fight by letting the starships have technology that we don't have allowed some of the fighter pilots that I gave it to to read to say, "You know what, this works for me, even though you're doing things we could never do. The fact that I haven't done this thing lets me just have fun with the story." Then, of course, they gave me the things that they had done that I was doing that I was doing wrong, so I could get those details right. But that mix is really handy for science fiction and fantasy in specific. Anything…
[Mahtab] There's just one thing I'd like to say, and I'm going to refer to a movie right here, which is the recent one, Crimes of Grindelwald, which there was a battle between good and evil, but when there is just too much happening, when there is no focus on a character, the readers or the audience do not know who to identify with, who to empathize with. I think that is a mistake, especially in war, because it's huge, there are many people in there. You may take the lens so far back that the audience is not left with anyone to care about. That makes it… For me, this did not work. So I would say that some of the things that you have to remember is although the landscape may be extremely wide, try and focus on at least a couple of characters. Make it personal so that readers can feel that, "Okay, this is something that I want, I care about this character, and hence, I want to go forward." Just coming back to the book that I had recommended, which is The Girl with All the Gifts. Melanie is a Hungry. At first, she's viewed with suspicion. You don't empathize with her. But, as the story goes on and the lens pulls back, you're still… It's very much still focused on Melanie and a person who was viewed with suspicion all of a sudden has to be viewed with trust. That little tip makes the story works so much better. So I would say even if you have a wide landscape, give us someone to care about.
[Dan] Another author that does this really well, particularly with warfare, is Django Wexler. He writes historical fantasy, very Napoleonic era, with cavalry and infantry forming a square and all these things. I remember one battle in particular where we were in one infantry person's head. When they all started firing, that kind of weapon reproduces so much smoke that all of a sudden, they couldn't see what was going on in the rest of the battle. He didn't change perspective, he didn't give us the Broadview, he stayed in the middle of that infantry square that was fully blind, just trying to listen. Are the horses getting close? It was really effective. Because it had that one single focus that we could stay with and empathize with.
 
[Brandon] All right. I'm going to call it here and give you guys some homework. I would like you to invent a powerful weapon that is not based on technology. I want you to take this to the side of technology. In fact, make it more powerful than technology in your setting could exist… The technology people understand, this is something completely un-understand… Non-understandable. I want you to invent this weapon, and see how society adapts to it. Try to build a battlefield around the idea of a weapon that no one even really knows what it can do. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.29: Field Research

Jul. 17th, 2019 10:33 am
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are

Nov. 1st, 2018 11:01 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 13.43: Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are
 
 
Key points: To write a character who is super clever, amazingly smart… Gift the character with your indecision. Show the character going through the process of thinking, then show the character making logical jumps. Clean the brain vomit off the screen, but keep the key portions. Give the reader enough clues to understand the problem and try to solve it themselves, so they participate in the intelligence of the character. Brainstorming, pacing, and cleaning it up. Letting the reader arrive at a conclusion before the character does is satisfying, but don't overdo it. Make sure the key clues are all out there for the reader. In mysteries, the reader is one step behind the detective, but in thrillers, the reader is one step ahead. It may take the writer some time to figure out a clever answer, but if the character does it in seconds, the reader is amazed at how smart they are! Similarly, if all the other characters react as if this character is very smart, the reader will accept it, too. If the character knows they're smart and displays that confidence on the page, the reader sees it. Also, borrow expert knowledge from other people. Sometimes, for instance in a heist novel, later revelation of how something gets done works best. But when you reveal the monster, make sure it's horrifying! Lastly, consider Dave and the fizz buzz test.
 
Expand( Bits and pieces... )
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Characters Who Are Smarter Than You Are.
[Mary] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Amal] And we're not… That… Smart? Are we smart?
[Howard] We… Okay.
[Amal] We're pretty smart.
[Howard] We are rejoined for this episode by Amal El-Mohtar, who I personally believe is very much that smart.
[Hah!]
[Howard] But even at that level, if she takes time… Yes?
[Mary] We should actually introduce all of ourselves.
[Howard] Oh, damn.
[Dan] He's just demonstrating how not smart we are.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm just… 
[Laughter]
[Howard] I was so excited to be able to do something right.
[Laughter]
[Howard] And then Mary told me I didn't.
[Dan] You know, at some point, the opportunity might arise again.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I'm thinking 2020…
[Mary] What's er name?
[Howard] Amal El-Mohtar.
[Mary] What's your name?
[Howard] My name? Or her name?
[Mary] Your name.
[Howard] My name. I couldn't hear you. I said, "What's her name?" I was missing like a little piece of the syllable.
[Mary] He's Howard. I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan. 
[Howard] I was going to start again.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Hey, you know what, we're keeping it.
[Amal] We're keeping this?
[Howard] We're keeping it. I was going to pre-roll over the whole beginning again. Amal, thank you for joining us. I'm so sorry for how not smart we are. It's so nice to have you back.
[Dan] Because you are.
[Amal] It's a pleasure to be here.
 
[Howard] Thank you. One of the trickiest things to do in any of our writing is to write a character who comes up with a solution that is super clever, amazingly smart, in just seconds, and we try to write that in the same amount of time, or even in 10 times that amount of time. We try and write characters who are far cleverer than we are. What are the tricks that you use to make that happen?
[Mary] One of the things that I often use is actually gifting the character with my indecision. Because what I find is that there are two things that will make a character seem smart. One is watching them go through the process, and the other is watching the logical jump. Strangely, I often find that watching them go through the process, especially early in the piece, will make the character… Make the reader think, "Oh, this character's smart," because they can see all of the logical chains. So when I'm struggling, like how would you solve this problem? Having a character who is thinking, "Okay, I'm stuck in a room. How do I get out of the room? Do I try that door? No, that door has killer bees outside.
[Hah!]
[Mary] Do I try this door? There's someone with a drill outside it.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Whatever it… Okay. So, I know, I will open this third door, and there's a balcony, and I can hang glide from it. Whatever that process is, that gifting… Basically what's happening there is I am brainstorming on the page in the voice of my character. What the reader is receiving is a character is thinking logically through the problem. Then, later in the story, I don't have to do that. I can brainstorm off the page, and just have the character jump to that, and the reader will then assume the character has exhibited all of those smarts, because I've laid the groundwork earlier.
 
[Dan] Yeah. When you write that kind of brainstorming scene, and I do it a lot as well, I find that I almost always need to go back and clean it up a little bit, because you don't want to have the full brain vomit all over your screen. But keeping the key portions of it, do… They set it up so your audience trusts you that the character is figuring out all the rest of the things that you don't have to show.
[Amal] I think that… What you're describing there too is sort of a pacing issue more than anything else. There's a difference in demonstrating an intelligent character's intelligence in film and television which I think we're really used to seeing at this point with… Especially in genre with Dr. Who and with Sherlock and with all the iterations thereof, we're used to this kind of fast-paced banter stuffed with things that you the audience can't keep up with how smart the characters are. But on the page, I think that for that effect to be achieved, there's a certain degree of working the readers through the situation. So what you were describing, both of you there, is that giving the reader enough cues to understand the problem and get to solving it themselves as they're reading it is, I think, a big part of sharing in the intelligence of the character. I think part of the question here is not only how do we make our smart characters smarter than us, but how do we make our smart characters have smartness that the reader participates in in a degree that is enjoyable, and to what degree we want that joy to come in. There are… Like I think of… There are narrative level joys there where you have a kind of meta-experience of it, and there are character level joys where you're tense and nervous and wondering how you're going to get out of that locked room as well with this character, and a big part of that is seeing how impossible it is to do that. So it feels like… Like it's… The pacing of it is kind of the middle of the Venn diagram between the brainstorming it in the first place and then the cleaning up of it afterwards that you just described.
 
[Howard] There's also a piece that if you're… I'm going to go back to the escaping the room. Where you have something that many savvy readers will already know. A character says… Grabs one doorknob, "Oh, that doorknob's really hot. I'm going to need a towel. No, wait. Doorknob's really hot, I shouldn't open it, there might be a fire on the other side.
[Right]
[Howard] Because the reader might already know that thing, and the reader arriving at the conclusion before the character does is very satisfying for the reader. This is the… That's a quick thing that you can give them. You might not want to give them that for the whole book, because then, oh, they totally saw it coming.
[Amal] Exactly. Oh, the doorknob's really hot, I'm going to use it to burn the ropes that are holding my hands together before I do anything else, and so on.
 
[Dan] I love what Amal said about characters… Or the reader participating in the character's intelligence. That, I think, is really important. You can look at mysteries, which I think are a fantastic example of this. Because there's always… For me, the very disappointing mysteries are the ones where the key clues that solve it are stuff we hadn't heard before. Or something that the amazingly brilliant detective has pulled out of the air. We're like, "Well, I didn't know about that offshore account. I couldn't have solve this mystery." Conan Doyle does this really well with Sherlock. One of the reasons that Sherlock Holmes has become such an iconic character is because, for the most part, he does give us all the clues. We can look back and go, "Oh, it was all there, and I could have done this." One of my favorites is in The Redheaded League, where he has an entire interrogation of the character, and we think that that's important, and then, at the very end, as they're walking away, Watson says, "Well, what did you learn?" He says, "Oh, it doesn't matter what I learned. I was just there to look at his knees. They're dirty." We don't know why that's important, but we start to think about it… 
[Wow]
[Dan] And we realize his knees are dirty. He was kneeling in dirt. He was digging through into the next building.
[Laughter]
[Dan] That's so cool. That makes us feel smart. Which makes us think the character is smart.
[Amal] Right.
[Mary] One of the things… I'm glad you brought up mysteries, because one of the things that I often go back to is that there is a difference between the thriller and mystery, which is that in mystery, you're one step behind the detective, in thrillers, you're one step ahead of the character. So when you're looking at whether or not you're making the character smart, part of that participatory aspect is whether you let the reader figure it out before the character, or if they figure it out after. I think if you want the reader to feel like this character is supersmart, you let them figure it out one step after the character. It doesn't have to be like pages and pages later, but if you let them figure it out just a little bit later. One of the tricks that I will do sometimes with that, I will gift them with my uncertainty, but with what Dan was talking about, about cleaning up afterwards, I'll sometimes pull steps out. Because that allows my character to figure it out a moment before my reader does.
 
[Howard] Let's pause for our book of the week. Dan?
[Dan] Yes. Our book of the week is a really fantastic nonfiction, called What If by Randall Munroe. This is the guy that does XKCD, which is a really cool science-based web comic. He did a book that I believe is subtitled Ridiculous Answers to Serious Scientific Questions. He will take… People will ask him things like, "What would happen if you had a mole of moles?" Then he will go through into exhaustive detail all of the actual science behind if you had literally millions of moles, the animal, just floating in space in a giant ball, and how would gravity affect them, and what would happen to them? And things like what would happen if a submarine went into outer space? All of these things. In the process of answering these questions, you learn so much about the science and you learn it in a very engaging way. It's something that I have continued to go back to as I write my fiction, because there's really good science in there, presented in a really intelligible, accessible way.
[Howard] There's good science in it. It's quite funny.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] What would happen if the pitcher threw the ball at the speed of light?
[Hah!]
[Howard] He begins by telling you, "Okay. Bad things are going to happen once we're moving at this speed. So, let's assume that a moment after he releases the ball, it accelerates to the speed of light. Because that way, the bad things are going to happen in a more interesting way."
[Laughter]
[Dan] He's got one where somebody asked if the planet in The Little Prince could actually exist, and have its own gravity, and people could live on it. In the process of exploring what would happen to a planet like that, what would it have to be like, how dense would it be, what would the gravity be like, I have gone back to that exclamation over and over as I write my outer space science fiction because of the way he explains gravity. So, What If, by Randall Munroe, is a really great resource. We recommend you look it up.
 
[Howard] Okay. Coming back around to our tricks for writing characters who come up with solutions that are bit more brilliant than we've come up with. Have there been moments where you've been stuck and the solution you've arrived at is one that you're particularly proud of and would like to share with the class?
[Dan] I do have one. In the first Mirador book, Bluescreen, I've got the characters caught in the middle of a drive-by gang war. Two rival gangs are shooting at each other, the main character needs to stop them, but she does not have combat powers. She is a gamer and a hacker, and I wanted to make sure to solve that problem with intelligence, rather than her just picking up a gun and going Rambo on everybody. I had to stop and think about it for a couple of days before I figured out, "Oh, okay. I think some of those seeds that I've earlier put in about how pop up… Everyone has a computer in their head, and pop up ads will come and kind of intrusively come into your vision." So she was able to use that advertising system to blind all of the gang members essentially, so they weren't able to attack each other. It took me a few days to figure that out. She does it in seconds. I'm very proud of it.
[Howard] DDoSed with pop-up ads.
[Laughter]
 
[Howard] That's horrifying. While you guys… While you all are thinking about the answer to the question, I want to clarify something. This episode actually airs just three and a half weeks from us recording it, because it's a replacement episode. So, Amal, you're not appearing a season later than you appeared before, you're appearing right in the middle of the season in which we're already enjoying episodes with you. The thing that feels weird is that Dan and I have not had the opportunity to record with you.
[Amal] This is true. This is a delight. I have now recorded… Well, when we are done recording, I will have recorded with all the core cast of Writing Excuses.
[Dan] Hooray!
[Amal] Which is really awesome.
 
[Howard] Any other boasting you'd like to do?
[Mary] So, with Calculating Stars, one of the challenges… And Fated Sky… One of the challenges that I had is that I have someone who can do math, who's a mathematician, and I am… I have dyscalcula. I like legit cannot do math. Not in the math is hard, but like I… Geometry? Fine. Absolutely. My spatial awareness, wonderful. Arithmetic and I are, wow, we are really not friends. We have not been on speaking terms for decades…
[Laughter]
[Mary] At this point. I have this character who is a computer, who is a calculator. What she does is she does math. So my problem was I don't. I'm not actually that interested in it. So what I did was I treated it like a magic system. Rather than having her do all of the math that I need her to do in these books, I laid the groundwork ready early that Elma can do math. Then I decided that Elma can do math in her head and that she visualized it. Which is the same thing that they do in the television Sherlock Holmes films, series, that the BBC series. Where you get to see… Things whipping around him, that's the visualization. Because that way, rather than having to explain the logical leaps, it's like, "Oh. Magic system happens. Math is magic."
[Hah!]
[Mary] So I am particularly proud of that, because it allows me to get around my own weakness in this area. While at the same time, because early on, I have every other character treating her as if she can do amazing calculations. Actually, through the entire book, everyone is like, "Oh, yeah. No one is faster at math than Elma. She can do amazing math in her head." Everyone reacts to her as if this is a truth in the world. Which means that I can just put the conclusions on the page. I don't, in that case, have to step through the process to get there.
 
[Amal] Similarly, so I have this novella, which… I've talked about it… No, I haven't talked about it yet. Oh, no. Sorry.
[Howard] You will have talked about it…
[Amal] I will have talked about it.
[Howard] In an episode previously recorded.
[Amal] That's exactly it. That's exactly it.
[Chuckles]
[Amal] I wish I could… I wish I were smart enough to make that seem like something that I just know from understanding times…
[Howard] It's happened to us enough times, that I already have all those parts of speech.
[Mary] They are used to our time travel.
[Chuckles]
 
[Amal] So, Max Gladstone and I have co-written a novella that is coming out in probably… I think it's… Probably, I think it's July 2019. It's a book of two dueling time traveling super spies. One written by Max and one written by me. I have a number of insecurities in this regard because, first of all, I mean, they're time traveling super spies, they have all of time and space at their disposal, they are the best there… They are the best there are at what they do. But Wolverine quote, "And what they do is not very nice." Etc. So, they're brilliant, and they're constantly outsmarting each other and one upping each other. I am not a time traveling superspy.
[Howard] Probably.
[Mary] What!
[Amal] Probably not. But… The thing was, the insecurity I had around this, is I also haven't read a time of spy fiction. Like, there are, I think, a lot of protocols around this genre, that I only feel glancingly familiar with. So what I started to do, I realized, was writing this character… And especially because Max has a lot more of those protocols than I do. He is far more savvy with all of the kind of… Especially Cold War era stuff. He's literally writing a serial for Bookburners… Not for Bookburners. A serial for Serial Box, which is not Bookburners. Which is the spy… The witch that came in from the cold. Anyway, it's literally Soviet era spy stuff. So what I found myself doing was kind of the opposite of what you described at first, Mary Robinette, of the… Of giving… Gifting the character the uncertainty. I had my character strike constant confident poses. That confidence, like that maintaining of I know I'm a brilliant superspy. I know that I can outsmart you. And stuff. And to just kind of dwell in the affect of knowing that she is that brilliant helps to overcome those hurdles. So I feel like it was like a sustained thing across the whole project, to just find the confidence to display that confidence on the page was the [fall] for me in that situation.
 
[Mary] One of the other things, like that confidence and the I don't know this thing, that I also find that I use is expert knowledge from other people.
[Uhum.]  
[Amal] Ah. Yes.
[Mary] Which I have talked about in other places. That I am totally comfortable with going to someone and just leaving blanks in my manuscript, and going to someone who actually is an expert in this field, and then having them fill in my blanks, so that my character is literally smarter than I am, because they're talking about things that I know nothing about.
[Amal] Right.
[Mary] Whether or not that's one of my astronaut friends.
[Laughter]
[Amal] Wait, wait. Do you have astronaut friends, Mary?
[Mary] I do. I know, I know, it's shocking to everyone.
[Howard] You want to know something funny?
[What?]
[Howard] This episode airs immediately after Writing Excuses interviews an astronaut.
[Laughter]
[Amal] That's so great.
[Howard] We couldn't will have timed this better.
[Laughter]
[Mary] Well, that was exactly why we did this. Will have done this.
 
[Amal] There is one quick thing I wanted to say, too, just about things that we've been discussing. It occurs to me that some of the things that we've touched on are kind of generic distinctions between… In ways to talk about… To convey the smartness of characters who are smarter than we are. Because I think of… So we've talked about mystery, we've talked about other stuff, but I… If you're writing a heist novel, for instance. I have to assume that part of the way you display the smartness of the character is by revealing afterwards how a thing was done. What you're doing, instead of showing how smart they are, is showing how impeded they are throughout, in order to then kind of just reveal at the end the way that those things fell together. It feels like writing kind of backwards the things that we were initially talking about.
[Mary] I think that gets into that thing we were talking about earlier, about whether or not you want the reader to be ahead of or behind the character. You were going to say something, Dan?
 
[Dan] Yeah. The more that Amal is talking about this, I'm kind of coming to this epiphany, that a lot of this intelligence that we see in characters follows the same principles of a horror movie when you finally reveal the monster.
[Oooo]
[Dan] Right. It's the monster…
[Mary] I'm shocked that you refer to this as…
[Dan] I know. Isn't that weird that I would go there?
[Laughter]
[Dan] If you've been building up the monster as something horrible, and then you finally show it and it doesn't live up to our expectations, then it feels very disappointing. It feels so much worse than if we'd never seen the monster at all. If you're doing this, if you're building up your character's confidence or intelligence or capability, and then we finally get to the point where we see them, for example, do some math and it's like super simple math…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Then that's not going to impress us, and we're going to be like, "Really? That's the math that Elma's so good at?" So that's one of the things I thought, for example, that Elma did really well, that you did well with Elma, was when we finally saw the monster, so to speak, when we finally revealed that capability that we'd been hearing so much about, it lived up to, if not superseded, our expectations.
[Mary] And because… The reason it did that was because I was using someone else's math. The one scene in the novel where I actually have her talking at length about a formula is when she is at the Congressional hearing, and there is a formula, and she is explaining it to the Congressman. That formula comes out of Wernher von Braun's Mars, A Technical Project. Wernher von Braun was the father of modern rocketry.
[Dan] Modern rocketry.
[Mary] So… And that formula, by the way, is ridonkulous.
[Chuckles]
[Mary] It is so long. So she explains the first maybe 16th of the formula. It is that… Again, it's like I don't give the reader everything. But I give them… It is competence porn, is basically what we're dealing with.
[Dan] Well, one of the reasons, again, that that particular scene works well is that she is presenting it to a group of very smart, very capable, very competent people, and they can't follow it. So we're seeing not only her own intelligence, but her comparative intelligence.
 
[Howard] There is a… A test, a quiz, that's often administered to people who are hiring for programming jobs. It's called the fizz buzz test, which is write a program that prints the numbers one through 100, that if it's a multiple of three, you substitute the number with fizz, if it's a multiple of five, it's buzz, and if it's a multiple of both three and five, do fizz and buzz. Write a computer program that will do that. Elegant is good, writing it quickly is good, writing it so it is tight is good. Solve this problem for me, let me see what kind of a problem solver you are. My friend Dave had an interview in which the guy asked this question. Dave said, "Well, first thing I'd do is I'd write a program that says call FizzBuzz.lib from whatever this hub is because somebody else has already solved it."
[Laughter]
[Howard] The guy laughed and laughed and laughed. Then Dave provided his solution. Then, that night, Dave went home, wrote a very elegant, over the course of about four hours, fizz buzz program that he uploaded to the library, so that when his boss to be came in the next morning to look it up, he found it and saw who wrote it.
[Laughter]
[Mary] That is…
[Laughter]
[Mary] That is smart.
[Howard] That is brilliant and beautiful and kind of hilarious.
 
[Howard] On that note, I would like to offer our listeners some homework.
[Mary] Yes, please.
[Howard] Time. Is. Your. Friend. Your character might not have a lot of time, but you do. Write a solution, off of the top of your head, to a character problem that you are currently facing. First thing you can think of. Now, over the next couple of days, it might be two days, it might be a week, it might be longer, spend time researching on the Internet, in books, from friends, anything even tangentially related to that problem. Maybe it's math, maybe it's science, maybe it's climate, maybe it's geography, maybe it's pop up ads. Research these things and as you are doing the research, write down the solutions that come to you. Then, after you've done all this, order these solutions in a list of what you think is dumbest to smartest, and see how much smarter you are able to get with time. You are out of excuses. Now go write. Because this is Writing Excuses. And I got those out of order. I'm terrible at this.
[Laughter]
 
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Writing Excuses Season Four Episode Four: Agents -- do you need one?

Feb. 21st, 2011 02:43 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Four Episode Four: Agents -- do you need one?

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/01/31/writing-excuses-4-4-agents-do-you-need-one/

Key Points: Why get an agent? Expertise in negotiations, contracts, foreign rights, etc. that you don't have. Wider view and experience. Career builder and consultant? A key question: do they have skin in the game? (I.e., are they invested in you or not?) Beware: there is no quality control for agents. Bottom line: everybody doesn't need an agent, but you might.
Expand( Secret agent? )
[Howard] Write yourself a story about a famous recluse author and his or her agent. The author dies. The agent is now scrambling to keep that career alive without telling anybody.
[Brandon] That's awesome.
[Dan] Very nice.
[Howard] That's skin in the game.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.
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