Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses 18.43: Worldbuilding In Miniature

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-43-worldbuilding-in-miniature 

 

Key points: How much world can you put in a short story? How much world do you need to write a short story? Take one or two aspects of a concept, dive into those, and handwave the rest? Throw in a few small details to make the world feel bigger? Do enough worldbuilding to make sure the framework for the story exists. Keep a tracking document, with notes on each worldbuilding element, and review after drafting. Look for places that aren't loadbearing, where a specific detail can imply a larger world without opening questions. How much exposition does it take to explain the element? Too much, it is distorting. Short fiction readers expect you to leave things out on purpose. Every worldbuilding element creates stakes for someone. Everyone has their own understanding of the world. Emphasis, something that is important to the character, or decorative flourish, adding tone for the reader? Short fiction relies a lot on the reader filling in implications and patterns. 

 

[Season 18, Episode 43]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Worldbuilding In Miniature.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're really tiny.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Erin] I love short fiction, as we've already discussed, so I'm going to talk about worldbuilding in a short fiction world. I'm really excited to kind of... This is one where I don't have a great theory, I just kind of want to think about it out loud, like, how much world can you put in a short story, and how much world do you need in order to write a short story? I will say that when I start writing short fiction, I often just have a one liner. I usually have, like a... Sour Milk Girls is the best example of this, even though it came out of a longer idea, it was what if memory were a commodity? Then, my second question is always who is suffering? Because I am me. Then, usually that's where I place my main character in that. But there is a lot of stuff that's not explained in any of the short stories that we read. There is a lot of things you don't know about the broader world. What I think short stories give you the opportunity to do is to take one or 2 aspects of a concept that have emotional resonance for your characters, dive into those, and then handwave the rest. If you can throw in a few small details that make the world feel big on top of that, all the more so the better. But I'm curious what y'all think about, like, when you're reading or writing, what is the difference between what you see in a world in miniature versus big?

[Howard] For my own part, the one idea… This is a cool thing, I want to tell a story about it. How much worldbuilding do I need to do? I need to do enough extrapolative worldbuilding… Where'd this come from, where is this going… That I can be certain that the framework for the story I've created actually exists. If your… What if memory was a commodity story, if there was something about the way commodification of memory went that made orphanages not exist, then suddenly I've unplugged the story and I would have to go back and rework it. So that's really the extent of it. I just make sure, hey, is this a cool idea? Yes. Does this cool idea negate the way in which I want to explore the cool idea? If the answer is no, I'm off to the races.

[Erin] I often think about… Thinking about did I break it midway through…

[Sputters]

 

[Erin] So I have a theory, like, that every writer does something subconsciously really well. You'll have writers will say like this character came and spoke to me at night and, like, told me their story. That never happens for me, but I feel like those people just do character on a subconscious level. For me, a lot of worldbuilding happens on a subconscious level. Where I'll toss a detail into a sentence, I'll be like, "And then they went to…" I don't know, whatever thing, random thing I've decided to put in their. Later I'll be like that doesn't necessarily make sense. Like, in a world where memory is a commodity, they're probably not in space. So I probably should take the space elevator reference out, for example. It didn't happen, but it could have. So one of the things I actually do is while I'm writing, I will sometimes keep a document open, a PowerPoint a lot of the time, weirdly, and actually put anything that I put in that's a worldbuilding element into a one particular slide on the PowerPoint. So that at the end of drafting, I can look can be like, do these work?

[Laughter]

[Erin] Actually seem like they belong in the same world, yes or no?

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, interesting.

[Erin] If one is an odd item out, I need to go back and either figure out a way to make it make sense in my head, or excise that and it needs to go into a different story.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's really interesting. That's a really neat, measurable tool.

[DongWon] Cool trick, yeah.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So I… For me it's… I will also just drop in random details, and I find that when I'm specific about a thing, that it implies this whole larger world. So I look for places where I can be specific about something that's not necessarily loadbearing, that implies a larger world but doesn't open questions. That's where you get into the tricky thing with worldbuilding, is if you drop in something that… And then it opens a question about the story. Like, well, why didn't they just ride the Eagles? Then… That's where you're creating a problem for yourself with the worldbuilding. So one of the tricks that I use is how much exposition do I have to use to explain the thing that I've just dropped in. If it's more than 2 sentences, then it's a worldbuilding detail that is distorting the story. Because I'm like, that's too much. The other piece for me is the difference in expectations between audiences. So, novel readers I've found assume that if you don't put something in, it's because you forgot about it, because there reading for that immersion. Short story readers are so used to putting the story together from pieces of implication that they work on the idea that if it's not there, you left it out on purpose. So you can say, "Well, I used a Teraport thing." If you don't mention how that works, they're like Oh. Well, it's not important to the story, how it works."

[Erin] I also love one of the things I think you can do for short fiction audiences is use the way that pattern… That minds create patterns to create some of that broadness.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Erin] Like, if you say this is the 3rd God of death, okay, well, that's interesting. There are obviously 2 previous gods of death. What happened to them? I don't know. Maybe I don't need to say. But it makes me think about audience expectation as when I started writing tabletop, you can't do that.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] So if you put a detail into a scene, you have to expect players will want to go talk to the first 2 gods of death or know what happened to them, or if you create something that's like that came from the caves of pleasure, like someone's going to want to go there. In fact, when I first started getting feedback back from editors, it was like, "Stop putting in the details that you do not have the word count to explain." Because I was so used to that short fiction thing that you do where you kind of drop the things out there and let people create it. But it's interesting to think that in novels, people will expect you to kind of build the world out that far.

[DongWon] Yep. As a kind of a theory about why it happens this way, and this is sort of informed by my perspective from an editorial side more than a writer side. Right? That is to flip the iceberg metaphor on its head. The iceberg metaphor being that, like, does all this worldbuilding we only see the top 10%, but the rest of it's below water. You as the writer need to have some idea what that is. Instead, the way I think about worldbuilding, and one thing that's also important, is to realize that worldbuilding isn't a science fiction and fantasy thing. It's not a genre thing. It is a fiction thing. Any story you're writing, you are including worldbuilding. Whether you are describing a suburban cul-de-sac or a war zone or a high fantasy city, all of that is worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Because every time you introduce a world detail, it is… You're introducing a rule for that world. So people think about worldbuilding as like a particular type of technology or a particular location, but for me it's a way to tell your readers, your audience, what's important. Right? Because if you are introducing a university, then you're saying a certain type of hierarchy is important. If you are introducing a magic system, you're saying that logic is important. Right? So what matters to your characters are the rules of the world around them. So if you're saying there are police, then obeying the law is important in a certain way. Right? That creates character stakes. Right? The problem you run into in the RPG is you don't have control over the characters. So every time you introduce a worldbuilding element, you're introducing stakes for somebody. One of those stakes is I worship the God of death. This is the 3rd one, what the hell happened to the first 2? I gotta know. Right? So that becomes an impulse for that character to explore, because suddenly you've established stakes for them by putting something into the world. Right? So it is very useful, the iceberg metaphor is very, very useful, but sometimes if you're stuck about what do I actually need to include in this story, you can take a step back and say, "Okay. Who's my character, what matters to them, what rules do I need to define so that they can make the choices they need to make?" Then be hyper specific about which aspects of the world are you showing us to establish the emotional stakes for that character.

 

[Howard] See, we had James Sutter on the podcast years ago. He's one of the lead creatives at Paizo. His position, for 3rd God of death, would have been completely opposite of what your editors were telling you, Erin, in that he would encourage writers to say, "Oh, and this character is a monk from the Singing Cliffs." What are we doing with the Singing Cliffs? I don't know, I'm just putting some things together so that you feel like the world is bigger than just where you are. Are the players going to want to go to the Singing Cliffs? Maybe they are. You, as a writer, is a game master, need to be prepared to design the Singing Cliffs. Within a franchise, though, I think this is where your editors come in, James Sutter was in a position where he could drop Singing Cliffs and the whatevers all day long because he knew, at some point, he's going to get to go create those. Your editors are like, "Please stop dropping new locations in our world. We don't have that budget."

[Erin] Yeah. We are going to talk more about this and about the iceberg theory when we return from the break.

 

[Erin] Often times when we think about tabletop role-playing games, you think big D&D playing with a bunch of friends. But there are a lot of smaller games that can actually help you build worlds, and think about your writing in really interesting ways. One of them is The Quiet Year from Buried without Ceremony. What it is is a game where you're mapping out a new community on a tabletop using playing cards that you probably have in your own home to answer really interesting questions about that community. Like, what are the omens? What's the largest body of water? What are people afraid of? What do they run towards? I love using this when I'm trying to think about building a new world, to make me ask interesting questions that can help to broaden my story and make it that much more interesting. So, definitely check out The Quiet Year by Buried without Ceremony.

 

[Erin] So, I was very excited when you talked about the iceberg theory…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Because I love thinking about it. One of the things that I think came up earlier was the idea about, like, a that character and worldbuilding intersect. Which I think is even more important in short fiction than it is in longer fiction, because it's so much more character focused a lot of the time. I was thinking, like, and iceberg has a very different meaning to the captain of the Titanic as it does for somebody who is a coldwater swimmer, or somebody who is an iceberg diver. That's not a thing, but let's say it is. Where…

[Howard] A climatologist.

[Erin] A climatologist. Thank you. I think that one of the things I like to think about with worldbuilding is every single person does not understand the world in the same way. I think that sometimes a mistake or something that I see that like gets me under my skin is when it seems like everyone has the same knowledge of the world within a world. You know what I mean? It's like everyone knows about the battle of X. Y'all, we barely know our own history…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Going back like a year. You know what I mean? It's like things that people said everyone would remember, like, I love looking at all the crimes of the century that have existed. Like, I remember in Ragtime The Musical, they talk about the crime of the century being, like, Evelyn Nesbitt's husband murdered her somebody… I don't remember, because no one cares. So, I think thinking about like what do your characters know of what the world is and how it works is very different… Even between the 3 of us, we would probably explain something differently about the way of the world. That gives you a lot of ways to think about worldbuilding, to think about power in worldbuilding, to think about what are the ways in which a world matters. Because if you make the world matter to the character…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Then you make the world matter to the reader.

 

[Mary Robinette] So this… That idea of what matters to the character and matters to the reader gets back, for me, to how to control that in short story form. As you all have been talking, I feel like I've had a little bit of an epiphany. Let me just try this out and see how this fits for you all. So I was thinking that one of the ways that I will use worldbuilding's for emphasis. That, using the puppetry metaphor of focus, that the longer you linger on something, the more important it is to the character. That long gaze. So, I think that worldbuilding comes in, like, when we're dropping these specific details for the reader. That there's kind of 2 modes with a spectrum in between of the decorative flourish and the emphasis. That the thing that you're trying to put emphasis on, with the emphasis, these are the things the character interacts with. These are the things we're going to have to know what the ripple effects are. But then you also have the decorative flourishes which exist to create tone for the reader. So when you're looking at, like, your PowerPoint slide of the things, it's like do these fit in the world, it's not just do these fit into the system, it's like do these support the tone I'm trying to create for the reader in the short form and is my character interacting with them in a way that moves the story forward. Like, those are the pieces that I think that were looking at, and everything else we can kind of… Like, if it's not doing one of those 2 things, does it belong in the story? How does that fit?

[Erin] I love this, and I especially love it because it lets you know when your worldbuilding is not going wrong, but where you may be creating issues for yourself in making your story too big. If your decorative flourish feels like something that should have impact on the character, but it's not…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] You treated as a flourish, but it actually… Like, why would they not care… Why would this not be the thing that matters to them? That's when it feels like, okay, now I want to go explore that. So part of it is figuring out what should be just a flourish.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] What is just an extra that helps to create tone, and what is it that actually hits the core of your story, which means you have to understand what's the core and the heart of the story and the characters.

[DongWon] Well, some of the examples you brought up are things that you wanted to be flourishes, but end up being loadbearing in a certain way. Like, putting a space elevator in your story, your like, "Oh, wait. This was supposed to be a flourish, but if I introduce that, it complicates things too much." Right? So I think finding that balance… I do love this framework… Is such the trick of the whole thing.

[Howard] The decorative flourish of this character is a monk from the Singing Cliffs, that's fine, that's decorative. But if we then, a few paragraphs later, talk about this pattern of stucco as being something that is commonly found among the tribes of the Singing Cliffs, suddenly the reader sits forward and says, "Oo. Singing Cliffs. That must be important." If you didn't want it to be important, don't use that flourish in 2 places.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Because you've now…

[DongWon] That lingering gaze.

[Howard] Now created a clue that you didn't want to create.

[DongWon] Yeah.

 

[Erin] I also think it's good to look at your flourishes. This gets back to what you said about if you put police in, then that's a specific society. I think sometimes the flourishes that we go to are the flourishes we know from our own lives.

[DongWon, Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, when we're trying to create like a quick obstacle, we might have like a garden, for example, show up. Because guards prevent you from getting places. But having a guard says something about the system of justice, about a system of power. So even though that may not be what your story's doing, and you may choose in the end not to care about it… One of the things that I also think is fun to do is look at what is the broader world that my flourishes are implying, and is that the world that I want my story to live in.

[DongWon] That's such an interesting one, because, as I mentioned, I like to run a lot of RPG's, I do a lot of campaigns and campaign settings. I almost always do homebrew. The challenge I have set myself multiple times and I have failed at every time is to build a city or world that doesn't have police. Right? This is a of me pushing, and then trying to advance my anti-[garbled incarcerate] thinking, how do I imagine a world that doesn't have those kinds of systems of power? Right? It is very hard. Right? It's very hard to envision that world from where we stand right now, and it is so interesting of a for me to explore this idea, and interesting to me in watching the ways in which I failed to do that. Because I do have an instinctive like, well, the characters did something chaotic, we need some police to chase them around now. Or they killed somebody, what do we do about this? Like, what systems of justice can we put into play here? It becomes very difficult. But I do like this idea that you can use worldbuilding as a critical tool in your set. Right? I think we think of it so much as a thing just for the characters to bounce off of, but it can be so generative on its own. I think that's part of why I love RPG's in general, is because the main tool I have as a GM often is those worldbuilding rules to influence my characters and guide them and direct them. So the way that works into fiction is giving your characters those stakes and those things to bounce off of.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Yeah. I will say that I… One of the things that I'm really proud of in my work on Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is that the setting I created, God's Breath, has no police.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] And also has no centralized power. Which is very difficult. Because it is hard. It's like at the end of a story…

[DongWon] A fun challenge.

[Erin] You know what I mean? Like, you… Like, who is then telling you to go do things?

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] Who is rewarding you when you come back with stuff? Also, like, how do you make big changes, because I think something that we often see in fiction, which doesn't work in the real world, but feels good in fiction, is the idea that, like, you change the king, you change the world.

[DongWon] Yup.

[Erin] You change the corporate, like who's running the evil corporation, the evil corporation fixes itself. So, like, there's the idea that you want to take an evil and like personify it. So figuring out how to make things a little more about the system and less about the person…

[DongWon] It highlights how much of our fantasy stories rely on restoration fantasy. Right? So if you want to tell a fantasy story in a high fantasy setting, so much of what we're looking for is, how do we depose the evil king and restore the rightful heir? Right? When we take out some elements like policing, like jails, like centralized power, then suddenly you're in a much more complicated world. That can be really fun. Also, my players were like, "We don't know what to do with this world half the time." It's interesting to watch the ways it failed in that way. Because without some of those narrative structures, your audience won't always know how to interact with the world that you've created.

[Mary Robinette] Right. When you're dealing with short fiction, because you're relying so much on the implication and the pattern seeking that the reader comes with, you have to be aware of what those societal things are because the reader is going to apply that lens. If you aren't thinking about it ahead of time, with your world building, even if it's not fully on the page, the reader will impose stuff for you.

[DongWon] Exactly. Everyone comes to the story with their own baggage and their own understanding. Being aware of that and conscious of that is part of your challenge as the creator.

[Erin] Yeah, I will talk really quickly, I know we're getting towards the end of time, but one of the things that was a challenge for me, when I wrote Snake Season, is that it's very much in one person's head…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] She was very isolated from the world. Part of the reason that the Conjureman exists as a character, and that also the women that visit, like, exist… You don't see them, but they are like a function in the story, is to give you a sense of what the world thinks it is around her. Because otherwise, she's just… You don't… You can't tell what's real and what's not real, what's going on, but by having these characters who represent like the world trying to exert itself on the character, it gives a to give some more meat to what's going on and to tell what is a flourish and what is actually like a loadbearing wall of this particular narrative.

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah. We had such a fun conversation over breakfast, Mary Robinette and I, over what actually happened in the story, like what's real.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] I love that it's slippery. Right? I love the implication that there is reality somewhere here, but your world building elements make it kind of slippery in a way that's really fun and… I don't know. It makes it energetic in that way.

[Howard] Well, bear in mind that the reader experience here is… This was not a story about what kind of world is this. This is a story about what is this person going to do. What has this person done. I mean, the reader can go back and ask those larger questions, but the story wasn't created to answer them. The story was created just to… I say just to. The story was created just to mess…

[Laughter]

[Just to mess with you.]

[Laughter]

[Howard] Mess with you.

[DongWon] Because you are the antagonist, going back to a previous episode.

[Mary Robinette] But I think what it does is that… That because it's slippery, because to refer to the magic system, the magic system episode, because it is not well defined, it creates more space for the reader to bring themselves into it. I think that's one of the real powers of short fiction, is that all of that implication stuff means that the reader… Each reader's reaction is going to be different, because they are putting more of themselves into the story, I think, in a lot of ways.

[Howard] There's more room for the reader to do that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

 

[Erin] I think we are about at the end of things. But before we go to the homework, just a heads up that we are going to be taking a quick pause in this deep dive. Because National Novel Writing Month is upon us. As much as I love short fiction, I also love Nanowrimo as a way to stretch and see what I can do in a different form. We're going to invite you all to come with us and think about the ways we can all sit down and write a novel or novel shaped object together. With that, the homework.

 

[Howard] Right here. Take a big worldbuilding concept, and when I say concept, I mean interrelated, the whole big worldbuilding thing, and pick one or 2 iconic elements that bring it to life for you. Then take one of those and make it a key piece of one short scene.

 

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

 

[DongWon] Please rate and review us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice. Your ratings help other writers discover us for the first time.

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/01/14-35-what-you-leave-out/ 

 

Key Points: Worldbuilding an iceberg? Just build the tip of the iceberg, and make readers think the rest of it is there, too. Build what's needed for verisimilitude. Figure out where your scenes are set, then figure out what that looks like and how it works. What are you going to be using the most? What will my characters be directly interacting with? Give the reader information in ways that asks questions, instead of answers them. Use relationships to other events, rather than exact times. Leave it out, if it doesn't help the story. Think about what the book is, then do the research. Do you need to show the event happening or can you just tell the reader that the event happened and had an outcome? Sometimes, you don't want to go there. Postpone that decision until you need it! Be aware of the uncanny valley of worldbuilding -- far off, skip the details, it's okay, we got the broad strokes. Too close, too many details, and suddenly readers start asking questions. Don't fall into that valley! Watch out for the super-detailed realistic piece that makes everything else look fake. Focus on what you actually need to keep the story from falling apart. Avoid worldbuilding details that would ruin the story.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 35.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What You Leave Out.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pause]

[Howard] That probably wasn't what I was supposed to leave out, but go ahead.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] We all just sat there, going, "What is he? Oh!"

[Mary Robinette] And you are?

[Dan] I'm Dan, I guess.

[Howard] And I'm Howard. And unapologetic.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] All right. What you leave out.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled not amused]

[Brandon] So when I teach my students about this topic, one of the things I mention is when I was a newer writer, one of the things I got told frequently is that you want to, in worldbuilding, worldbuild a ton. But not put all of it in. Put enough of it in that the reader… You're indicating to the reader that it's like an iceberg, right? You can see the tip and you can see that there is so much more beneath. The more I became a published writer, the more I worked in it, the more I realized that that was… not a fantasy, but perhaps people in the business making it sound a little more grandiose than it is. Because most people I know do not worldbuild the entire iceberg and then show you the tip. What they do is they worldbuild the tip, and then they find a way to worldbuild a hollow iceberg that makes you think that there is the rest…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Underneath there. The goal in worldbuilding is not to do everything, just to do as little as you can and still look like you've done everything.

[Howard] Two nights ago, I was watching the special features for the movie Deepwater Horizon, for that film. They built an 85% scale oil rig over a little 3 foot deep pond. The reason they did it was so that when the actors were outside up high, shooting scenes, the actors are reacting as if they are outside and up high. They could have done the whole thing green screen, but they didn't. They needed that level of verisimilitude. Then there was this point where the VFX guy said, "So, we didn't actually build the whole oil rig. We only built the front." You see this scene where the helicopter is coming in and the camera has panned around the oil rig and it is just… Like 25%, 20% of the oil rig. Then the VFX says, "This is what we had to build," and throws all the other stuff in. After hearing how much time they spent building 20% of the oil rig for verisimilitude, the peace that they needed, this iceberg thing totally makes sense. Build the piece that's required for verisimilitude. Drill all the way down on that. Then fix the rest in post.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] So, how do we apply this to our worldbuilding? What do you guys do when you are worldbuilding? How do you give this indication that there's more underneath there? How do you decide what to leave out of your story? How do you decide what not to worldbuild?

[Dan] So, following along with this set building metaphor here, I remember reading an early interview with Gene Roddenberry when they were doing the original Star Trek series. He said that he wanted to have an engine room, and they weren't going to build him one, until he put that scene into the pilot episode. He's like, "Look, well, we have to have a scene here. I'm sorry, there's no way around it." So they gave him an engineering. What I do when I'm building my worlds and planning my books is I figure out, "Well, where are my scenes set? Where do I want those scenes to be set?" Am I going to be talking enough about main engineering, for example, that I need to figure out what it looks like and where it is and how it works, or is my story going to focus on some other thing? So they didn't build the entire, or even 20%, of the Starship Enterprise. They built a bridge and an engineering room and a transporter room, and that's kind of it. Maybe some hallways. Because that's where they knew their story was going to take place. So I try to figure out what am I focusing on, what am I going to be using the most, and that's what I focus on.

[Mary Robinette] I'm very much the same way. I really only worry about the things that my characters are going to be directly interacting with. I want to make sure that I understand enough of how they interact, of how it works, so that the interaction makes sense. But, like, when we move through our daily life, we interact with a lot of stuff that… There's a number of houses that you passed on the street and you have no idea what's in those houses. But they're still houses. You go to Disneyland. You don't actually know what it takes to make Disneyland work. It's just the front facing stuff. So one of the things that I do is that I think about the pieces that my character is going to have that direct interaction with, like you were talking about. One of the ones that I find works really well our past events. Referring to things… Usually these are things that I have no idea of what they actually are. But instead of saying, "Well, this happened in 1457." Like, I don't actually want to figure out how long ago a thing happened. I don't know. So I'll say, "Well, it happened during the… Right after the battle of the seven red armies." Everyone's like, "Oh, well, the battle of the seven red armies."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Clearly, she spent all of this time thinking about that. What that's done is it saved me from actually working out a timeline. Because I've… Now I can place the battle of the seven red armies anywhere I need to be.

[Dan] One of the things that that suggests to me is that you have given them the information in a way that asks more questions rather than answers them. That gives a gre… I mean, we know when it took place, but we know it based on a relation to an event rather than an exact number of years. In the audience's mind, it's not answering the question so much as it's saying, "Don't worry, I've got this. Also, here's something else to worry about."

 

[Brandon] Have you ever spent a lot of time in your worldbuilding before writing or during writing a story and then decided to leave that out of the story?

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.

[Brandon] When, why, and what made you make that decision?

[Mary Robinette] In the Glamorous Histories, for Without a Summer, I spent a great deal of time figuring out how Parliament worked in relationship to glamour, and what laws were being passed and not passed, and got into the novel and realized that that entire plot structure was completely irrelevant. I like knew… I had spent all of this research on this one particular historical figure who never appears in the novel now. It was basically, it just didn't help the book. Chucked it. It was one of the things that made me realize that I really need to think about what the book is and then do the research. I will say that I approach my research now the same way that I… I mean, I approach my worldbuilding the same way that I approach my research, which is that all do like these broad strokes, but I only really drill down on the stuff that I actually need to.

[Brandon] I spent a lot of time in the Stormlight Archive before I was writing it, working on the writing systems. The glyphs that they were going to draw and things like this. I left that all out because once I actually wrote the book and I looked back at the stuff I'd done, I realized I'm not an artist.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Beyond that, I'm not an expert in languages and… I just hired that out. So I took all the stuff I did… I didn't even give it to them. Because I'm like, "You know what, I'm going to use the text that I've written in the book." I'm going to give this to the artist and I'm going to say, "What would you imagine this to be?" Isaac came up with stuff that was waaay better than any of the stuff that I had come up with. It kind of taught me, also, that maybe I should spend my effort where I know I'm going to be using it in the story, and then I can, after the fact, I can hire some of these things out.

[Dan] Brandon, you and I just did this yesterday, actually, on the project we're collaborating on. The Apocalypse Guard. We've been wrestling with this book for months now, and yesterday made the decision that kind of the main thing we need to do to fix it is to axe one of the magic systems.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] It was something very cool that we considered foundational to the story, but now that we're looking at the book in its current form, it's kind of beside the point.

[Brandon] It's also the thing that is causing the biggest problem with the story, because where the story is spiraling out of control are all these scenes where I spent lengthy amounts of time talking about the worldbuilding and the history. Scenes that Dan cut out a lot of when he did his revision.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But the effect of it's still there. It's leading to this big confusing ending where I have… Do what I do, tie all these worldbuilding elements together. But in ways that were cool for those worldbuilding elements and don't really work for the story.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] It's a point where we have to cut out… One of the things that is my signature is a magic system. Granted, we have multiples. So it's still going to be cool. But it's going to be a way better book if we just streamline.

[Howard] My approach here is often to ask where the line is between show versus tell. There are times in the story where it's absolutely required for the reader, because it's fun, because there's emotional content, whatever, to show an event happening. Then there are times when all the reader needs is to know that the event happened and there was an outcome. So entire scenes will vanish from the writing, because what I needed to do, with the story needed, was for somebody to say, "Battle was fought. So-and-so won." "Oh, really, that sounds terrible." And off we go with the core story.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So our book of the week is Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder. I got to read this, an arc of it. It is fantastic. This is near future. It's an Internet of Things. A young woman discovers that her father has been murdered. She thinks. Everyone else thinks that it was a… Just an accident. Then people start coming after her. How do you disappear when everything is connected? So it's really, really cool. It feels like he has thought of everything. But the stuff that we're actually seeing is just the stuff that she interacts with directly. It's great worldbuilding, great characterization. I mean, it's a really good book. It also happens to illustrate some of these points.

[Brandon] Excellent. That was Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder.

 

[Brandon] So, we've talked about worldbuilding elements that we cut out. Are there ever things that you have decided even before you launch into the book, you're like, "I'm just not going to touch that. I'm not going to go that direction with the worldbuilding." Things that you just… Why have you done this?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, like in the Lady Astronaut books, I very carefully do not talk about what the rocket engine is that is driving this ship to Mars. I like really carefully do not talk about that. Because of the amount of research that I was going to have to do. But also, my character is not a rocket engineer. Right? She pilots things. She needs to know how to pilot things, and she does math. So, she needs to do those things. But I did not need to know how the rocket engine worked. And as soon as I worked on figuring that out, that was going to lock me into certain decisions. Like, if I decide that it is atomic oxygen, that locks me into one line of technology. If I decide that it is nuclear, that locks me into another line of technology. Because I don't know what subsequent books are going to need, I decided to not make that decision and to leave room for it to be any of those things, and just… I establish some trust with the reader early on, so that I can just… Like, just get in there and…

[Brandon] You know…

[Mary Robinette] It's like, they're going to Mars. Obviously, they've solved how they get there.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I had a conversation with this… About this same topic with a writer that I know… That we were kind of brainstorming on some worldbuilding and things. The way I presented it as there's like an uncanny valley of worldbuilding where at a certain point, it's far off, and you're leaving out the right details from what we're doing so that nobody starts to question really how it works. Like, if you don't do enough, people are confused and you start to lose them. You do the right amount, and people are willing to take your word on it. They suspend their disbelief, they accept the worldbuilding, it feels really logical to them, you've got the couple of corner cases that they would assume. Then there's a stage where you start explaining it so much that the rational part of their brain kicks in and says, "Well, wait a minute. This and this and this and this," and you start to hit this sort of uncanny valley where suddenly you lose them. They aren't willing to suspend their disbelief anymore. That can be a really fine balance to walk.

[Mary Robinette] We have this problem in theater, with… All the time. Where you've got a set, and if you go very minimalist with it, you're asking the audience to be engaged. You go too minimalist with some shows, and everything falls apart. But if you've got like a set where everything looks really nice, and then there's this one piece that is hyper realistic, everything else in the story feels just awful. Beauty and the Beast, the animation… When they had… That was the first stuff of the computer animation…

[Dan] They introduced CG in the ballroom scene.

[Mary Robinette] The ballroom scene looks… It looks wrong, because it is more rendered than everything else. Then everything else starts to look false.

[Dan] I did a black box production of Assassins in college. It was all just super minimal sets, but we had a super realistic like rolltop desk, and it just… It looked terrible. Because it made the rest of the show looked terrible.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite pieces of set design that I ever did… This is a side tangent, but a good example. A friend of mine called me on a… On Monday and said, "We had a reading this weekend and are set designer did not show up with the set. I have just found out that she has skipped town with all of the money which she has spent on drugs. We open on Friday. Help me. I have $75."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I'm like, "Okay." We sat down and we talked about what are the things that have to be on stage or the show will fall apart. It was a tree, the moon, and a wall. That was basically it. So I bought some foamcore, and I got some paint, and I did this dry brush minimalist New Yorker style thing of a tree, a moon, and the wall. I think I gave him a chair, too. As a bonus.

[Dan] 'Cause you're a benevolent god.

[Howard] You had eight dollars left.

[Mary Robinette] I still had eight dollars. I had to get paid out of that $75, you know. So I… But we stripped it down to what you actually need or the show will fall apart. When the review came out, it raved about the minimalist design and delicate ethereal touches of the set. Meanwhile, in the program, I am listed as scene proctologist, because I pulled that set out of my ass.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, point being, just look at the worldbuilding details that you need to keep the show from falling apart.

[Dan] Well, it can also be helpful to look at the worldbuilding details that would ruin things. When I did my cyberpunk series, I specifically avoided artificial intelligence. There's algorithms, there's swarm intelligence, but there is no self-aware thing because that is a singularity that I was not prepared to deal with. So, that's not in the story, it's not a possible technology in that world.

 

[Brandon] This story of Mary Robinette's actually leads us really well into our homework. Which Howard is going to give us.

[Howard] Yup. I want you to take your worldbuilding slider and I want you to pull it all the way to zero for one of your chapters. Take a chapter that's got some worldbuilding exposition in it, that's got some cues about what's going on in your world that are deepening things, and pull all those out. Leave yourself with zero worldbuilding. Have a look at that chapter and see which elements of the story fail and which elements of the story still work. This is not so that you can tell yourself that you don't need to worldbuild. This is so you can tell yourself… What the…

[Dan] I need a tree and a moon and a wall…

[Howard] I need a tree and a moon and a wall, and I will give myself a chair.

[Mary Robinette] As a bonus, in the liner notes, I'm going to give you a copy of the first scene of Shades of Milk and Honey in which I have done this exercise. So I have stripped out everything that I identified as exposition. I have to say, that scene is a mess.

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