Writing Excuses 19.23: Tying It All Together (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)

Jun. 13th, 2024 08:40 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 19.23: Tying It All Together (A Close Reading on Worldbuilding)
 
 
Key Points: Recapping! Scale. Juxtaposition and recontextualization. Compression and expansion. Familiar details. Multiple scales, size, wealth, experience. Use multiple ways to convey it. Language! Constructed languages, names, how it ties to culture. Don't forget the everyday things! Look at the original meanings of names of people you know. Consider multiple languages, also slang, class, etc. Technology and identity. Make it relatable, tie it to familiar experiences. Big questions, and looking at them from several angles. What's normal and what's technology? Self and tools? Double down, ask the question and dig deeper. Mix it up! Weave several tools together. 
 
[Season 19, Episode 23]
 
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
 
[Season 19, Episode 23]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding. Tying It All Together.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Howard] And I have no idea how we can talk about A Memory Called Empire in 15 minutes.
[Laughter]
[Howard] There are so many things that I learned just from reading this book, let alone putting together these episodes. Just from reading this book. So many things that I learned.
 
[Mary Robinette] That is exactly what this episode is. This episode is us going back and recapping the tools that we learned, so that you'll have like this one spot that you can return to to refresh your memory. We're going to start by kind of recapping the idea of scale. Like, how to use scale and what some of the concrete tools that we can use to indicate scale to a reader. We gave you a lot of really good examples during that episode, but some of the actual tools that we are using are things like juxtaposition between two elements. We saw that in A Memory Called Empire with the discussion of the vastness of the Empire compared to the smallness of Lsel. So juxtaposition is a really useful tool for indicating scale.
[Howard] I like juxtaposition and recontextualization. One of the first times I ever saw 3D used well in a movie was the animated Monsters Versus Aliens. There is a scene in which we look at the little monster, and we zoom in on each person, and then open the camera and look back and there's this giant robot marching across the back. It communicated scale so brilliantly.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] Because as the camera moves, the context changes. And changes again, and changes again, and everything gets bigger.
[DongWon] That's the thing I talked about earlier about compression and expansion. Right? It's this architectural concept of going in through a big space, if you compress people into a small space, and let them come back out into the big space. Right? We see that over and over again. We start broad, we condense down to Lsel Station, we condense down to Mahit,, and then we expand back out into space, and then we go back into the spaceport. Right? So, when you have somebody coming from this galactic scale and then disembarking into the gray featureless airport lobby, right, that she ends up in, that, I think, is a thing that communicates the scale of this Empire so effectively, because we're going from that huge, broad thing to something very, very familiar. Right? So when you're trying to communicate also very wild new concepts, giving us the familiar detail is going to help a lot, too.
[Mary Robinette] Scale is a tool that you can use, not only to indicate, like, the vastness of an empire. When you're talking about worldbuilding, there's a bunch of different places that you wind up using scale. Some of those are scale of wealth, and having a juxtaposition of those two things, someone who is very wealthy against someone… The poorest member of society. Those are ways to indicate kind of who some of the outer edges of the world that you've created are. Those are things that I think can be a lot of fun. You can also demonstrate that with the magic. You got a brand-new magic user versus the scale of someone who's very experienced.
[Howard] The old joke about Europeans in America saying, "Oh, that's a long drive," and Americans in Europe saying, "Oh, wow, that's an old castle."
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[DongWon] Yep. Exactly. One other thing about that is even when you're staying within one topic within one region, talking about wealth or scale of an empire, whatever it is, is think about multiple ways to get that across. Right? Not just physical description, but the way… We talked about the opening line of the book, the way she uses disembarkation there to remind us that there is a massive amount of bureaucracy here too. Right? So when you layer in these other details, and other vectors of scale, I think that can give us a lot of extra context. So, like, in something like wealth, it's not just contrasting the two people, but also what are the things that the wealthy person takes for granted that will indicate that in different ways.
[Erin] Exactly. You sort of took the words right out of my mouth, because I was just thinking, a lot of times, when you think about wealth, people think that it's all about money and stuff. Which part of it is. But some of it's about the… What you believe you can do. What you think can happen in a day? The scope of the world that it opens up for you, if you have unlimited resources, versus if you have little tiny ones. What are the ones that… What is the thing that your character is worrying about? Both people worry. Rich people worry, poor people worry, but their worries are different.
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Mary Robinette] That's something that we saw in A Memory Called Empire, the scale of power, the difference between Mahit and her one assistant, and the Emperor and all of the people that are surrounding him, and the number… The layers of people that you had to go through, just to get an aud… To talk to him. That, again, is like scale of power can be demonstrated by multiple different means. 
 
[Mary Robinette] So, let's also then talk about the use of language. I suspect that will wind up talking about this a lot, because we, strangely, like language.
[Chuckles]
[DongWon] Strange, that. Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] So, this is a tool that you can use, and we talked about a number of different aspects of that tool. We talked about some of the specific language choices that she was picking.
[Howard] Some of the con lang stuff.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] The long words that force us… The long unfamiliarly polysyllabic words that force us to slow down and absorb the paragraph at a different pace.
[DongWon] Taking the opportunity for something like the naming scheme, to introduce ways of developing the character. Right? The thing that is so interesting to me about how the language works is it builds the world in terms of, yes, they have these weird names in this culture, the numbers and the noun, but also some opportunity to show here's how Mahit, an outsider, relates to the naming scheme in this world, because we have this example of the, I believe it's 36 All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle. I always… I never quite remember the number. I hope that's correct. But that way in assimilation works and the way cultures collide is written very clearly in how that works out.
[Erin] I also think that language, one of the great things about using names is, they're everywhere and we use them all the time. I think something that… A trap that I've fallen into in the past is that you name the unusual, you name the thing in your world that is like the big weird thing, but you forget that, like, people eat every day.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] And sit every day. These are the words that actually make up most of our lives. Making changes there actually can make a greater impact on your reader then what the big thing in the sky is called.
[DongWon] Well, that's done so effectively when she learned the word for bomb. Right? Because suddenly, this thing that wasn't in her imagination, wasn't in her possibility space, is a thing that she has to directly confront, and she's laying on the ground, listening to people scream for help and then scream this other word, which she learns is bomb. Right? So, the way language also communicates what is and isn't possible within the Empire and within Mahit's experience of the Empire. It's just this masterful way of gesturing at the entire scope of the world and what the stakes are in this world.
[Howard] One of the most useful tools I've found for opening my head to naming conventions and possibilities is looking at interpretations for original meanings of names of people I know. Then, writing them down and trying to narrate a scene with them called that. My name, Guardian Clothesmaker…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Well, that's a much more heroic name than Howard Tayler.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] But, still, it's… It makes me rethink it. As you start doing this with names you're familiar with, you'll twig to all kinds of new possibilities for whatever it is you're working on.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things about that that I just want to point out is that you are, basically taking your name as we know it, the sounds… Then putting it back to original meaning. What that implies is, of course, there are two languages. One of the things that I will often see people do when they're creating worlds is that they have only one language system. Or that there is, even in that language system, that there's only one way of speaking it. There's no slang, there's no class variation in it. That's something that she hinted at, we didn't talk much about it in the episode. But that's something that… A tool that you can use to make your world feel more expansive is to think about the different languages that are in use, and also the power structure related to those languages.
[DongWon] Explicitly, Mahit is a foreigner to this language. This is a second language for her. Right? She's had to learn this, and we are learning it alongside of her. One technique to really think about is when you want to do this big expansive world, this unique culture, having that audience surrogate perspective is so, so useful. Right? This is a way that she's found to add a lot of depth to what can sometimes feel a little boring, because the audience surrogate sometimes doesn't have enough texture to themselves. But she gives this relationship that Mahit has to the language and learning the language and the culture of this world that we can feel her presence as a full person, while still getting all of the benefits of having that outsider perspective. So that she can just sometimes stop and explain, "Hey, here's what's going on with the names. Hey, here's how the language works. Hey, here's how the culture works."
[Howard] On the subject of outsider perspectives, I've got a question that I'm going to ask after our break.
 
[Dan] Hello. This week, are thing of the week is a role-playing game called Pasion de las Pasiones, which is based on Mexican tele-novelles. This is such a great example of how the mechanics of a role-playing game can tell a certain style of story that couldn't be told in any other way. I… This one has such a tight focus on that soap opera style of storytelling. So, instead of having attacks you can make poor spells that you can cast, this thing has special moves like express your feelings out loud, demand what you are owed, things like that that just helps sell that idea. It's a really great game. It's a lot of fun. So. Once again, that is called Pasion de las Pasiones.
 
[Howard] So, Mahit is giving us… She's our every person. She's grounding us, so that we can ask questions about Teixcalaanli culture. But Mahit herself has imago technology embedded in her head. That's weird.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] That's weird stuff. It… On the surface, to me, it feels like, "Oh, no, you're breaking that rule. You're taking the audience surrogate and you're making the audience surrogate weird." Why, how did Arkady get away with this?
[Mary Robinette] I think by making it relatable. Because one of the things that she does, right at the beginning, is tie it to experiences that are common. The feelings of being an outsider and being grateful that she had this guide with her. So, tying that to a relatable experience, it's like the times when I have been in another country and I have been solo versus when I have had someone with me. How much easier it is to navigate when I have someone with me. If… The idea that I could have someone with me who was supplementing my knowledge so that I didn't look like a bumbling barbarian. Like, that would have been… Like, I would have liked that. I would still like that.
[Laughter]
[Howard] It's like every other spy movie, where there's a person making their way through a cocktail party, and then there's the voice in the earpiece telling them, "Oh, that's so and so, and this is so and so. And uh… Oh, adjust your glasses, the camera's off." Except the imago doesn't need to do that part.
[DongWon] Right.
 
[Mary Robinette] But this does bring us around to talking about what we talked about in our third episode, which was technology and identity, and the different ways that you can use those to make your world building feel expansive and to ground the reader in different things. So, some of it is what we're talking about is tying it to the familiar experience. But then there's also this id… This idea of identity and where a character sits within the world that they are in.
[Howard] The asking of a big question.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Howard] One of the things that I love about genre fiction is that it asks questions that are difficult to ask outside of the genre. You still can. But, for me, one of the things that A Memory Called Empire asks is what is the line between human and nonhuman, if we're not talking about genetics, we are talking about what's in your head. Where is that line?
[DongWon] What is too much technology? Right?
[Howard] Yeah.
[DongWon] And what is the role of… This is a very relevant question for us these days, of what is the role of AI in our lives? Right? We all are using assistive devices in terms of our phones, in terms of our computers, to learn more, experience more, and enhance our natural knowledge of the world. How is that different from an imago, and how is that different from a cloud hook, and what's the difference between those two things? Right? So one of the things that I love is that she's using repetition to deepen the idea. Right? Every time she hits on this same subject, she's coming at it from a different angle with different nuances. I kind of think of it as, Mary Robinette, your yes-but/no-and, but at a meta level. Right? She's using that thing where she's returning to this concept of where's the line between what is technology and what is self. Then, every time she hits it, she's asking a slightly different version of it, and pushing past where she took us last time. That is so cool.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Even if you don't have something in your world that fits into this category, I think that line between what is technology and what is not technology is so interesting. Like, we're all wearing clothes. Clothing is technology, but nobody thinks about it as technology. I have glasses. My glasses are in assistive device. Nobody thinks about them as assistive devices anymore.
[DongWon] Put a camera on it. Suddenly you're wearing technology.
[Mary Robinette] Right. So, like, what does your character think of as technology versus what does your character think of as just normal. Like, you don't think about your faucet as technology. Your faucet is just part of your life.
[Erin] Yeah. What is the distinction… I would say, between, like, self and tool? Where does your identity and where do the things that you use to express your identity, to move through the world, begin? That can work for both technology and for magic. So, either way, they're something that you're using in order to make your way through the world. What I like is that, sort of as we've been saying, there's a slightly different relationship each time.
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Sometimes it's because it's a different person, so it's a different identity using the same tool. Sometimes it's because it is a different tool being used by the same person. By looking at those differences, each one gives you a different facet of understanding both the tool and the person using it.
[DongWon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, that person's… Because of that person's lens looking at that tool, like, you learn so much about them. Like, one of the scenes that I remember in Arkady's book is when they go to the neurosurgeon and there's a drawing of a prosthetic hand. There's this moment where Mahit thinks, "Why is that contraband?" Because in her world, it's not. So I think that part of the thing that you can also play with is what are the things that your character finds abhorrent about a potential technology and what are the things that they're like, "Why is anyone surprised that we have this?"
[Howard] When you ask these questions, there's a technique that I talk about in humor all the time that shares a name with something that you should never do on social media. Doubling down. Take the question, and keep asking it deeper and deeper and deeper. Keep digging that hole. Because… A Memory Called Empire is not the first science fiction book to talk about world cities, it's not the first science fiction book to question humanity or our role with technology. And yet, when Arkady breaches subjects with us… Broaches those subjects with us… I don't know which word is correct there, and I'm going to let it slide, because the salient point is, it feels fresh. She asks the questions well, and you don't have to be conversant with all of the science fiction out there in order to do this. It helps. But you have to double down and keep asking.
 
[DongWon] Well, I think the magic is in the connections. Right? We've talked about these techniques in isolation, but she's not just doing one of these at a time. She's doing all of them at once. Right? That sense of compression and expansion, she's doing as we're also learning about the imago technology, as were also learning the language and the culture. Then we start to see how the technology intersects with our understanding of the culture through the epigraphs, through the poems, through people's reactions to things. Right? So, language, identity, culture, physical spaces, bureaucratic spaces, all of these things, she's interweaving in such a beautiful way. Right? So, Howard makes a great point, which is all of the things are pulled from other sources. It's easy for me to go through and say, "Oh, this is like Anne Lackey. Oh, this is like Star Wars. Oh, this is like this or that." You can do that with any work of fiction. The beauty of fiction is how you we've those things together to be their own distinct portrait. As were talking about here, being able to tie these different techniques together and switch it out from beat to beat to beat is going to be the thing that makes your fiction feel rich and exciting and fresh.
[Mary Robinette] It's also not something that's limited to science fiction…
[DongWon] Yes.
[Mary Robinette] Or fantasy. These kinds of things are things that you can do with a modern day thing. Someone and their relationship to their cell phone versus someone else who's like, "Why are you attached to that device at all times?" So looking at those ways that they reveal the character, and reveal the character's relationship to society, is something that you can do, I think, and should be doing, kind of as a tool to make things feel more expansive and grounded. I'm going to question a real quick thing that occurred to me as you were talking. Again, when you think about technology, it doesn't have to be complicated. I was recently talking to a medievalist who talked about the introduction of the fork.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Up to that point, everybody was like knife and spoon. When the fork got introduced, people were like, "What is this?"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] "You're being so hoity-toity, and this is…" There's a woman who had her forks and she was very proud of them and she died of plague, and everybody was like, "Well, it's because she had forks."
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Well, also, the difference between one culture having forks and one culture having chopsticks.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[DongWon] Right? The difference in how you eat, what you eat, how polite society operates, all of that is rooted in this technological device in this difference.
[Erin] I also think it's so funny how technology, like, comes around again.
[Mary Robinette, DongWon chorus] Yeah.
[Erin] We talked about… I mean, I think we're not going to get rid of forks, although you never know. But, thinking about…
[DongWon] The day of the fork is coming.
[Laughter]
[Erin] All rise. But I think it would be… I'm thinking about letters. Like, I'm thinking about the way that, like, letters to emails, that there was a period of time in which people would be like, "Why would you write, when you could call?" Now people say, "Why are you calling me? This could have been an email."
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] The fact that the technology has changed, but the question between whether or not I want to read your words or hear them continues to go… Maybe it will take another iteration in another generation [garbled]
[Harward] Why are you replying to my post when all you really needed to do was click on the 100 and the thumbs up emoji.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because that's all you said.
[DongWon] Well, this circles back to A Memory Called Empire, because she's imagined a world where emails are physical objects that are sealed with wax and sent around. Right? There's such a deliberateness to that choice of… And that tells me so much about this culture, that they have email. They just think it's crass to use. So they send each other physical memory sticks instead.
[Mary Robinette] Physical memory sticks that are encoded with poetry.
[DongWon] Yes. Exactly.
 
[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness. So, speaking of encoding. We're going to encode a little bit of homework for you. The homework is, find a piece of worldbuilding that you love, and come up with a different way to use it in another part of your work in progress.
 
[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.50: Write What You… No.

Dec. 18th, 2019 10:06 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.50: Write What You… No.
 
 
Key points: An old writing adage, Write What You Know. But what does it mean? Tap into what you know from your own experience! Extrapolate from what you know. Write what you know is true. Know your genre... or not? Write what you love. Mix the familiar and the strange. Write what you know, but add what you don't know, too. Write what you know may be boring to you, but your experience is individual. As a writer, you filter everything through your own experience. What you are passionate about may be a better story. Use your own emotional touchstones to make a richer story. Expand your knowledge, know more. When you tackle something difficult, put the other parts on an easy setting.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 50.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Write What You… No.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] This is an age-old adage in writing circles. Write what you know. You may have been taught…
[Howard] Can I just say write what you nope?
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Yes. You may have been taught it before. It's kind of confusing. The first time I heard it, I'm like, "Wait. So I can't write fantasy or…" What do you guys think of this adage?
[Mary Robinette] So, I agree that this is one of the things that is often wildly misunderstood. The idea behind the original is that there are things that you know, that you can tap into. You know what it's like to be afraid. You've had these different experiences in your life. If you tap into those and write from your own personal experience, you're going to have a story that's rich in texture. The thing that I often say for fantasy people is extrapolate from what you know.
[Brandon] Yeah, that's a good suggestion.
[Margaret] A phrasing I heard of it once from Alice Chadwick at a conference on narrative and nonfiction. He said, "Write what you know is true." There's some unpacking around that, but I think that really it speaks that same grain of truth, of you don't have to write your own literal experience… I'm not necessarily giving advice to journalists with this, but as a fiction writer, you can write from your own experience. If that is grounded, then that will ground your story, no matter how fantastical you get from there.
[Howard] For journalists, it's write what you've verified with an additional source.
[Laughter]
[Howard] The… Early in Schlock Mercenary, I hadn't done a whole lot of research with military folk yet. But I was fresh out of a very unhealthy corporate environment where… I've talked about this principle before… Position power was being substituted for personal power. I am your boss, therefore you must like me. All the time, all over. It was very top-down. I was familiar with how that worked and how it was broken. I just sort of built the personalities of my mercenaries in that manner. I got email from people saying, "Were you and I in the same unit? Because I swear you've described my lieutenant or my captain." I found that very flattering, because what it said to me is I know enough about broken people to have correctly described one that I've never met.
[Brandon] One of the things that… When I think about write what you know, I get actually really conflicted. Because I like some of the sentiment that this phrase is telling you. But then I go the rounds. If I kind of look at fantasy novels, there is a big part of me that thinks, if you're going to write in a genre, you should familiarize yourself with this genre. You should know the conventions of the genre and you should become part of the discussion. There's another smaller part of me that says, "Yeah, but people who have none of that baggage sometimes create things that are just wildly new and completely off the beaten path and doing something very interesting with the genre." So you can see, I kind of… The two different sides of me fight about this pretty often.
[Mary Robinette] I think one of the questions there is, like, where is the line between what you know and what you love? So I think that when people are writing something that… And they're coming to science fiction and fantasy from outside the genre, there still chasing the thing that they love and they're still writing the thing that they know. They're just adding this unfamiliar to it. Which is the same thing that we do in genre. We're writing something that we love. We're always trying… We talk about this all the time on the podcast, the familiar and the strange. It's just that for us, the genre is the familiar. That is us writing what we know. Then we add other things that we don't know onto it. So I feel like it's two sides of the same coin.
[Margaret] Yeah.
 
[Brandon] How do you guys incorporate who you are into the settings that you're building?
[Uh…]
[Howard] You know what, that's a question that…
[Margaret] I try not to, honestly.
[Howard] That is a question that will be very specifically answered in great detail when I'm no longer around to defend myself.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Because I remain unaware of an unknown number of my biases that creep into my work in ways that I cannot see, hear, smell, taste, touch, whatever. I like to think that I'm aware of how I'm influencing these things, but there is a voice up in the nosebleed seats that says, "Expect to be wrong. But don't worry, because you'll be dead before anybody really points it out in detail."
[Margaret] When… At a slightly more literal level, I know my first published short story, Jane, was in Shimmer magazine. This is a story about a paramedic who winds up at the center of a zombie apocalypse. Really, it's about her relationship with her foster mother. I have her walking in the streets of Los Angeles. She absolutely lived in the first apartment that I lived in in LA. Even… It's like… It was boring to me, but I'm like, "Only one other person has ever lived in that apartment with me." So, it's like… Walking up the street, if you were familiar with the street when I lived there, the empty lot that's there was absolutely there. She is fictional, the dog is fictional. Like, I don't know much about zombies, but I can root it in a Los Angeles that I've walked the streets of, and I've heard the traffic, and I understand it.
[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that you said in there that I really want to underline for the readers about why write what you know actually works. It's boring to me. But the experience that you have as a person is individual. It's not an experience that other people have. It's why you all get so excited every time I break out the puppetry stuff. When I'm in puppetry communities, it's like… They're like, "Oh, that thing went wrong? Let me one up you with this." It's like this is… It's all old hat to us. But when I come over to writing, to prose, it's a novel and fresh way to look at things. So, one of the things that… To get back to your question about how to put yourself in there, is that you act as a filter for everything that you're writing. We get asked all the time where do the ideas come from. We also always say they're all around you. But what you're doing as a writer is that you're filtering it through your own experience. So I think, for me, one of the things with the… Parts of the way write what you know that is true is to trust your taste, and to trust your own experience, and to trust that it is interesting to other people.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which, Mary, you have.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So this is Armistice by Lara Elena Donnelly. I was the audiobook narrator for this. It's the sequel to Amberlough, which I raved about previously. This is such a strong book. It follows on the heels of Amberlough, which it basically feels like it's the Weimer Republic. Here we have three of the… Or two of the viewpoint characters that we had in the previous book plus a new one. So we've got to people that we are familiar with and they've moved… They are refugees now in another country. So what you're getting there is a lot of the outsider "OMG, what's going on?" But you can still see Lara's voice coming through, even though this is in a totally new place. Also, the characters and their interactions are all informed by where they have been… By their past. I think that honestly you could read this book without having read the first one, but the emotional resonance between the two books is so powerful if you read them sequentially that I… I'm recommending Armistice, but if you have not read Amberlough, pick up Amberlough, then read Armistice.
 
[Brandon] All right. So, kind of, I want to push on this theme a little bit further, because I think this is really interesting. A lot of times, when I'm talking to my students and working with them at the university course, this is something that they completely miss. This idea that something that they are really passionate about can make a much better story than trying to in some ways write something patterned after what you've seen before.
[Howard] Certainly, write something bigger than they could ever be is…
[Brandon] Or just more bland. Really.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] That's the thing. People don't trust themselves that what they're passionate about is going to translate into stories. I really do think if you are really excited and passionate about something, that's going to help you make a better story.
[Absolutely]
 
[Brandon] Now there is a danger there in the kind of waxing too long about a topic or going too deep into jargon or things like this. Kind of losing track of a story because you're too busy writing about the ins and outs of breeding rabbits which is really interesting to you. How can you balance this?
[Howard] For me, it's emotional touchstones.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] I'm going to share a very personal example. In 2006, I separated my shoulder and was prescribed Lortab and ended up addicted to it. The addiction was not one where I was stealing in order to illegally obtain pills. It was one in which I now had a dependency that was controlling me, instead of me controlling it. We went off of Lortab, and when I say we, it was Sandra removing it from the house and shepherding me through the process of living without this stuff. For two years after that, if you said the word Lortab, I wanted to cry. Because I knew that this was a thing that would relax me, that would make me kind of happy, and I absolutely could not have it. That experience was incredibly alien to everything else about me. You could say a word and it would hurt me. That knowledge… I can use that as a writer. In 2018, I injured my arm in a different way. The doctor said, "Well, we don't know what's wrong yet, but maybe ibuprofen, or we can get you some hydrocodone." I know what hydrocodone means. That 12-year-old addiction came back all at once. I almost broke down in the doctor's office. Now I have this understanding of how when an addict says, "I'm not no longer an addict, I'm just not using. No, I'm always an addict." I have an understanding of that. I don't need to write a story about someone who separates his shoulder and then has a blood pressure problem. I can write a story about somebody who has lost a loved one and thinks they're over it, and 15 years later stumbles across a photograph and discovers that they're not. When I think write what you know, that's a thing that I know.
[Mary Robinette] That's a great example. Yeah. The… Less personal example, but all puppets, all the time, which is what I do, is… We talk about voice and things like this. I've talked about this when we were talking about the voice podcast, that there's three things when we're talking about puppetry, style of puppet. It's mechanical style, the aesthetic style, or the personal style. The mechanical style is what kind of puppet is it? The aesthetic style is what does it look like? Does it look like a Muppet? Does it look like it's handcarved? The personal style is you can hand the same puppet to two puppeteers and it will look like a different character. It's because of the individual taste of the performer. Jim Henson, if you look at anything else that he did that is not Muppets, like, was much more in a Dada, surreal, experimental land of filmmaking. Steve Whitmire, who initially took over Kermit, was much more of a linear storyteller. So they're going to just make different choices. This is the kind of thing that were talking about with write what you know. It's like when we're saying trust yourself, trust your own instincts, it's… These things will allow you to create something that is special and unique. When you're taking something that's deeply personal, like what Howard experienced, you're going to explore that in ways that are different from someone else who has that. It's going to allow you to bring an honesty to your work when you're reaching for things that you know. This is why also when we, in the larger picture, when we're talking about the hashtag #ownvoices, which is the importance of reading fiction and supporting fiction written by people from a lived experience writing about their lived experience, the reason is because that lived experience is going to inform that fiction. When you sit there and say, "Oh, but my world is boring. My world is normal." What you're also doing is you're setting yourself… First of all, you're devaluing yourself.
[Margaret] Right.
[Mary Robinette] But you're also kind of setting yourself up as the default, as the dominant, and exoticizing everybody else. That's… That is also a problem. This is not to say that you're not allowed to write other people. That's not… It's not that you're never… It's like I am totally allowed to write people who are not a… Let's see when this podcast airs… Not a 50-year-old white woman. But… Oh…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Sorry.
[Howard] I'm already a 50-year-old white man as of this recording, so… Have fun with it.
[Mary Robinette] Thanks. I'm actually really looking forward to it. To be honest. But the point being that I am allowed to write other characters. I'm allowed to do these other things. But when we talk about write what you know, there's two aspects of that. One is that my work should be influenced by what I know. The other thing is that my work will be influenced by what I know, whether I want it to or not, and I have to be aware of that when I go into stuff.
[Margaret] I think the other thing that strikes me about… I think probably the first time I heard write what you know, I was maybe a second grader, it was like one of those came across in elementary school…
[Howard] I have bad news for you, kid.
[Margaret] Well, that's the thing, because it sort of… You get told that as a child, and it's like, "What do I know?" What you know is not set in stone. One of, I think the charge inherent in write what you know is expand your knowledge. Know more.
[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I'm going to say is, especially if you are tackling something that is very difficult, it is totally okay to put everything else to the easy setting. If you are… Especially if you are an early career writer, and you're like, "I am trying to get a handle on plot." Don't try to get a handle on writing the other at the same time that you're trying to get a handle on writing plot. With Calculating Stars, I knew that I was going to have to be handling mathematics and orbital mechanics and all of these other things. Judaism! Which, I don't know if you noticed, been raised Southern Baptist and Methodist. Really, this is not… I was handling all of these things. So I set Elma to a Southern woman, I gave her a mother that's very much like my mother, that relationship, I gave her a marriage that's very much like my marriage. I sent everything I could to what I really know, to give myself room to work on and concentrate on the things that I don't know. Even there, I was extrapolating from what I know.
[Howard] And you decided to tackle this project when you are already pretty comfortable with what goes into writing a novel.
[Mary Robinette] That's true. That's the other aspect.
 
[Brandon] Well, I'm going to have to wrap us up here. It's kind of a sad moment, because this is us saying goodbye to Margaret. Not forever. But this is our last podcast with Margaret, so we're going to let her give the homework this week.
[Margaret] All right. So, the homework assignment this week. We want you to take an area that you are super familiar with and turn that into a superpower. The same way Mary talked about how we all think her puppet stuff is completely cool, the way that my background as a screenwriter has made me a structural god among novelists…
[Chuckles]
[Margaret] This is…
[Mary Robinette] Quite true. Accurate. Accurate.
[Margaret] Find something in your life that you maybe don't think is all that interesting and make it the coolest thing on the planet.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you, Margaret.
[Margaret] Thank you.
[Brandon] For hosting with us this year. You all are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.7: How Weird Is Too Weird?

Feb. 20th, 2019 10:45 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 14.7: How Weird Is Too Weird?
 
 
Key Points: How do you balance the familiar and the strange in your storytelling? Typically, you get one bye, you can ask the audience to believe on big thing. Everything else has to follow from that. Beware of "Oh, it's magic" so anything goes. This depends on the expectations of the audience, and the genre you are writing. But even serial urban fantasy has one major shift, not anything and everything. Make sure the audience knows where they are and what they are doing. Sometimes the worldbuilding is too weird the first time, but re-reading is okay, because now you know something about what is going on. Sometimes you can do more weird things by connecting them to the first bye. Think of a budget -- weirdness, boring, anything that challenges the reader, they all draw on your budget. Too much, and you lose the reader.  Learning curve... add weirdness slowly, building off other weirdness. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Seven.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How Weird Is Too Weird?
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] My friends used to call me How Weird.
[Ooh! Garbled… Starting this podcast]
[Howard] Yeah. How Weird is too weird. Just…
[Brandon] Oh, no. Sorry. No.
[Howard] That was like fourth grade.
[Margaret] [garbled]
[Howard] And junior high.
 
[Brandon] Well, let's… We're going to theme this again. This is our year of worldbuilding. So we're talking about how weird is too weird, specifically in our worldbuilding. Let me just ask, how do you, and I kind of want to bounce this off Margaret first, because she's the one we've heard the least from regarding these topics. How do you balance the familiar and the strange in your storytelling?
[Margaret] Well, it depends to a certain extent on the media that I'm working on for that particular project. But in television, one of the rules of thumb that I sort of inherited from my training in my experience is the idea that you get one bye. Like early on, you're setting up, the beginning of your film or the pilot episode of your show, and you get to ask the audience to believe one big thing. Everything else has to sort of follow on from that. A show that… I mean, an exciting example of a show that no one has seen because it never actually turned into a TV show, but I was working on a show called Day One for NBC. The bye for that was these giant alien monoliths suddenly erupt out of population centers all over the Earth. This is the vanguard of an alien invasion. It would have been a really cool show. But that's the one thing we get. We don't get that and armies of flying elephants and dolphins can now talk. Like, you get the one thing. Past that, everything either has to come from those monoliths and the alien invasion, or it's got to be rooted in the familiar world that the audience is already going to be familiar with.
[Brandon] That's very interesting.
[Howard] There's a flipside to that coin that gets cited a lot by apologists and whiners of all flavors. That's, "Oh, you can believe in a universe that has dragons, but you can't believe in a sword that cuts through a horseshoe?" Well, you didn't say it was a magic sword. A sword can't cut through a horseshoe. I will totally believe in dragons, because they gave me… That was their one bye. If they want to tell me that dragons cut through horseshoes, that's fine, I can probably absorb that, and say that their one bye is magic exists and that includes creatures. But you have to pay attention to this. You don't just get… You don't just get to throw these things down because, oh, hey, it's magic.
 
[Brandon] So let me ask you, Margaret, do you take that same perspective on fiction? The one bye? Or would you kind of say that's a short form, television thing?
[Margaret] I think it depends a lot on the expectations of your audience, and the genre that you're writing in. When I'm working on Bookburners, this is very much designed to be in the vein of something like X-Files or Warehouse 13. It's that urban fantasy sort of set up. So the assumption is that the world works basically the way that we assume that it does, but also there is this encroaching magical force that is coming into the world that causes this. We don't get that and the major power… And the Vatican doesn't exist. You can only shift around so many things before it starts to feel arbitrary. What you want to do is make sure that you're setting your audience up in a way that they know where they're standing and what they're doing.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Mary Robinette] I think that's a really good point. As you were talking, I was thinking about China Mieville. Like, with the new weird movement, the basic bye is stuff is going to be weird. We're going to have women whose heads are bugs. Not the head of a bug, but their head is a bug. But gravity works the way gravity works. Electricity works the way electricity works. So if China were attempting to do stuff is going to be weird, I'm not going to explain the physiognomy of any of these creatures. But and also gravity doesn't work the way you think it does. That would be two byes. So I think that you can do kind of a blanket bye in terms of this is sort of a genre expectation thing.
[Brandon] Right. Say, I'm thinking of like Hitchhiker's, right? Where the… There is not one bye. The bye is nothing will make sense, but it will be funny. But I do think genre expectations are a big deal here, right? When you write… You pick up an epic fantasy that's a 1000 pages long, it's secondary world, you are going on board for I'm going to get a lot of worldbuilding. When you sit down to watch a new show that's been pitched to you as a science-fiction thriller with a singular hook premise, you want that premise to be the focus of the show, not and then this other thing.
[Howard] You brought up Hitchhiker's… I assume you're talking about Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Yes. So much weird. The reason they get away with it is that the narrative voice would take some of the weirdest… Hey, boy, this came at you from left field. I'm going to now use this… Use the opportunity to explain it, as an opportunity to be funny and to satirize something you didn't see coming. So as that extreme weirdness happens, the voice sells it in service of something else. I think that's where I draw the line.
[Brandon] The voice is the familiar.
[Howard] You want to make it weird…
[Brandon] In the Hitchhiker's Guide.
[Howard] The voice is the familiar.
[Margaret] You, as the reader, have a literal guidebook to all of the strange stuff that is going on in those books.
[Mary Robinette] Plus, the point of Hitchhiker's is that you are Arthur Dent. So the expectation that has been thrown down is everything is just going to seem strange.
[Brandon] Everybody else gets this but you. That's kind of the joke.
 
[Brandon] Let me ask this, then. Have you guys experienced media or read books or stuff where the worldbuilding was too outlandish for you? That it was hard for you to get into?
[Howard] Yes. I'm going to apologize for it, because I loved it anyway. Iain Banks, Look to Windward. The opening sequence is a war, battle thing, in which we are just immersed in the POV of an alien who is essentially a six-legged giant ferret. He never says, "These are six-legged giant ferrets." I never get all at once a description to tell me where I am. I read the first chapter and was lost as to who I was until I got to the end and thought… Oh, I was actually kind of disappointed. Oh, these aren't people. This had felt very human. Then I read it again. Reading it again, I was fine. I felt like I was the target audience for this. I was absolutely the target audience for any Iain Banks' novel. But that first chapter was too weird on first reading. Iain Banks… His one bye for me is if you have to read it again, read it again, this is going to be fine. You're going to love this. It's going to be okay.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Which, Mary, you're going to give to us.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, this is The Nine by Tracy Townsend. Which is, for me, right on the edge of too weird, but in ways that are… I, like, finished the book and have been recommending it quite a bit. It's… It feels like London, and it feels like a steam punk London, but there are these other creatures that are going through. It's a… It's taking advantage of the many worlds theory, so it's a version of our London, but definitely on a different world, and there are these creatures that have their eyes in their feet.
[Brandon] That's different.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And, so there's all of this very solid worldbuilding that goes from that single premise. But my brain is like, "Why would that evolve?" Like, and then trying to picture it, and trying to understand how it all works. So they tend to be arboreal, they do a lot of moving through trees. They have ferocious teeth, but they have no eyes in their head. Their eyes are in their feet. It is… It's… For me, like, I think one of the lines for me on the weird factor is how much time I spend trying to picture it in my head and if that's going to throw me out of the story. Now I pitch this is a book of the week because I think it's a gre… Terrific heist novel. It's got great character building. The steam punk makes sense. Frequently, when I read steam punk, it's like, this does not… Why… None of this makes sense. There's so much to love about this book. But if you are looking for something that is like, "All right, things are going to get weird," the nonhuman races in this world are weird. There's also tree people who are… Will shave their bodies, plane their bodies to take on specific shapes in order to cater to humans. It's like… There's so much stuff in this book. It's just filled with "Whaaat?" There's a ton of that. But mostly the reason you read it is because great characterization. And just a thrilling heist novel.
[Brandon] Awesome. That was The Nine.
[Mary Robinette] By Tracy Townsend.
 
[Brandon] So tell me this. Mary, when you're working on short fiction, how do you budget your weirdness?
[Mary Robinette] So. The… It's actually surprisingly like television in that you do pretty much get the one bye, you get the one thing that is this is weird. Mostly because everything that you put on the page, you have to spend words on to explain to the reader. So when I'm trying to get the reader to understand something, I know that it's going to throw them out of the story. Proportionally, that's going to take more of the narrative than it would in a novel. Even the same number of words. So I tend to also do one bye for short fiction. Usually, the short story is something that is exploring that one idea.
[Brandon] Something Margaret said earlier really kind of hit with me. We will have a podcast later in the year about how to make a story have worldbuilding depth rather than just breadth, which is the idea of taking a concept and digging deep into it. You said earlier this monolith story that you were working on. The idea being that you get your one bye as the monolith, but that doesn't mean that has to be the only weird thing. You are just going to connect any other interesting science fiction/fantasy elements through the monoliths.
[Margaret] Right, right. The idea in this series, and I think I can safely talk about what we might have done had this been a thing. My apologies, Jesse Alexander, if I'm spilling anything here. But in the pilot episode, there are these giant monoliths. Everybody is dealing with the fact that these things have erupted out of the ground. After that, other strange things start to happen. But it kind of comes at you one at a time. I think that speaks to what Mary was talking about on the short story. The idea of that subjective line of how weird is too weird… When you lose your audience, it's too weird. Anything up to that point, not too weird. When I started in film school, one of the things they told us was that the only firm rule of screenwriting is that you can't be too boring for too long.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Try to cut the boring stuff.
[Howard] That's a really good rule for everything.
[Margaret] Yeah.
[Brandon] I thought about this a lot when I've been teaching my class. I've said to my students, worldbuilding is the place where you generally are given more leeway. If you can keep your characters relatable, it doesn't matter how weird it gets as long as that character remains familiar. Now, sometimes, that character you want to be part of the weird, and then you're going to do other things to ground us. I really like what we've come up with with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thing, where the guy is the normal, and everything else can be a little weird, or a lot weird.
[Chuckles]
 
[Howard] I… I'm thinking about this in terms of budget. Let me give you an analog… Or analogy. The concept of social capital. People will often ask me, "Oh, will you plug my Kickstarter?" Well, I have a limited amount of social capital. If I plug your Kickstarter, then I'm digging myself into a hole when the time comes to plug mine. As you are writing, as you are introducing weird things, as you are spending time on exposition, but it really needs to be exposed. As you are spending time on navelgazing, but you really want to dig into this emotion. All of these things are coming out of a budget. I don't know how exactly readers quantify the budget as they are reading, or television viewers quantify that budget, but if you think about it as a budget, you are doing a thing that is challenging the reader, and if you go too far, you lose them. Boring is challenging. Because a slog is challenging. How weird is too weird? When you've gone over budget, it's too weird.
[Brandon] Yeah. I would rely a lot on your beta readers, on early looks at things. Also, I think learning curve… We haven't even touched on in this, but I do think if you add your weirdness on slowly, building off of other weirdness, then you have things that feel perfectly normal by the end, that if you would have thrown it at the reader in the first chapter, you would have been in trouble.
 
[Brandon] We're going to do our homework. Margaret, you've got our homework this time.
[Margaret] Yes. The homework today is to… Well, your homework today, if you choose to accept it. Take a project that you are working on. Figure out what your one bye is. Can you narrow it down to one science fictional or fantastical element that is the core to the story you are telling, and have everything flow from that?
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.02: Geography and Biomes

Jan. 16th, 2019 11:38 am
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Writing Excuses 14.02: Geography and Biomes
 
 
Key points: Where do you start when you are worldbuilding geography or a world? What do I need the geography to do? Sense of wonder is different than mystery. Start with the familiar, with components that you know really well. That gives you authenticity. The familiar can be immersive for the reader. What kind of geography suits the story? Then dig into the ramifications of that. Biomes can help you build a world. Biomes are kind of packaged ecosystems. Pay attention to transitions, too! Be aware, the map is not the territory. Go out and look at the actual landscape if you can!
 
[Mary] Season 14, Episode Two.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Geography and Biomes.
[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] Mahtab, thank you so much for coming and being on the podcast with us.
[Mahtab] Thank you for having me.
[Brandon] Will you tell us a little bit about yourself?
[Mahtab] All right. Well, first of all, let me start with my name. It means moon… In Persian, it means moon light, and I was named by my grandmother. I have done everything from hotel management to credit card sales to IT sales and writing is actually my fourth career. I think I'm going to stick with this one. I absolutely love writing. Science fiction, fantasy… Though I have written fantasy before, in my Tara trilogy, trying to work on science fiction. I'm just looking forward to continuing writing for as long as I live.
[Brandon] We're super excited to have you. Mahtab is going to be helping us on the second week of the month episodes…
[Dan] All year long.
[Brandon] This year. So you'll be able to hear a lot from her.
 
[Brandon] We're talking geography and biomes this year. I figured starting off worldbuilding, we would start right at the fundamental, the actual geography of the worlds that we create.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] So I want to ask you guys, where do you start when you're building geography, when you're building a world, what's your start point?
[Howard] I ask myself… And I'm going to go back to elemental genres… I ask myself what I need the geography to do.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] If I need sense of wonder, that is a very different geography than if I need… Then if I'm writing a mystery and the geography is factoring into the mystery. In large measure, that is because if I want sense of wonder, I have to break out the wordsmithing, and I have to talk about the colors in the sights and the smells and the feeling of the air and all of these things in a way that's very different than if I want it to be puzzling.
[Brandon] Yeah. I've seen a lot of sense of wonder in your writing. Give me an example of geography you might use if you were doing the mystery, instead?
[Howard] [breath] Uh.
[Brandon] Put you on the spot?
[Howard] No, no no no. That's fine. I'm writing, right now, a novel set on a desert planet which has a thriving atmosphere, even though there is nothing growing on the surface.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] Part of that mystery is… Everybody's afraid to go outside, and you don't go outside because it's radioactive. There's not enough… There's not enough electromagnetic field. The science behind this says if you go outside, you will eventually die of cancer. Why is there an atmosphere? So you have this fear of being outside, and this puzzle about what is it underground that keeps pumping fresh oxygen to us, that keeps drawing carbon dioxide in? That puzzle is central to the whole book.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Howard] But there's also going to be sense of wonder in there, because [garbled they all does]
 
[Dan] I do a very similar thing, actually. I will look at what I need the world, what I need the geography to accomplish. In the middle grade that I'm writing right now, I was trying to figure out… They have… It's science fiction and they've arrived at a brand-new planet. So I looked at the outline and realized that the actual function… Like, the size of the continents, what their land around it is like, wasn't as important as like the physics of the world. I wanted to have very low gravity, I wanted to have very high density in the atmosphere… Things like that, in order to make certain things work.
[Brandon] Can you tell us what any of those are without giving spoilers, or… Just curious.
[Dan] Yeah, well. This is actually the sequel to Zero G, which is my big middle grade audiobook. In that one, they are going to a planet and it all takes place in zero or microgravity. You can fly, basically. I wanted to have a similar feeling in the second book. So I actually talked to a bunch of physicists. We came up with a combination of gravity and atmospheric pressure and things that would basically allow you to fly on muscle power. Then, looking at that, realized, "Oh, well, okay, if the atmosphere is dense enough to provide buoyancy, it's also going to be narcotic." So how can we work around that? Basically, producing an environment in which the little middle grade protagonists could have a lot of fun and do a lot of cool things. Making sure that I had the atmosphere chemically composed so that it would be narcotic rather than poisonous. So that it would make you kind of loopy and giggly, rather than kill you, was very important for the middle grade, as well. Whereas if I'm doing the fantasy series that I'm trying to write, that isn't as important. What I need is different kingdoms that can be at war with each other. Why are they at war with each other? Well, there's a geographical answer to that, as well.
 
[Mahtab] When I started writing, I wanted something that was more familiar to me, so at least my first four novels are set in India. I just feel that because every component of a story, whether it's setting or character or plot or pacing, everything has to work together. It would be easy if new writers, at least especially for me, to start with one component that I knew really, really well. So, which is why… I mean, I don't have to spend too much time, all I have to do is close my eyes and I can imagine myself in India, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the touch, tastes, everything. That is why… That is one component that's kind of taken care of. As you progress towards getting better at writing, at making sure that everything works, then, I think, you can start working on fantasy lands where you do need to do a bit of research, go to experts that could probably tell you a little bit more about that. I mean, you could probably put some more effort into the geography. So, for me, I like to start with the familiar. In fact, the next novel that I'm going to be working on is set on Mars. Now, that's a little bit difficult to try and figure out what the place is going to be like.
[Chuckles]
[Mahtab] You have to rely on lots of stuff. So I like to start with the familiar, and then moved to something that's made up.
[Howard] There's so much to be said for the familiar as something that is immersive for the reader. The sugar sand beaches in Sarasota, Florida, where I grew up. Some details. One, when you walk barefoot in that sand, it's hard. It pushes out of the way. You end up taking different kinds of steps. You sort of do this shuffle step. The humidity is cloying. Every time I've stepped off a plane in Florida, I've taken one breath and realized [sniff] "Oh, that's right. Oh, that." Then… And this is something that people often don't think of. We get on those beautiful white beaches, you can have a snow blindness from the glare. These are all things that I've experienced, and I know well enough that I can write about them when I am talking about a desert. Because they all fit just well enough that I can leverage that.
 
[Brandon] When you were writing about India, were you picking a specific city that you knew or were you creating a made up one?
[Mahtab] It was made up. I mean, the little town of Morni in northern India was made up. But everything else, it's like the foods or the smells or the cultures and the customs of the people, that was… I mean, I've lived in India. So I know. Then, of course, you could tweak a little bit, but it started out with a familiar base of what it is like, and then I kind of changed it around. I put a lot of Indian mythology in it. Which kind of added a bit more texture and flavor to the story. So, yeah, I mean… Of course, India is vast. It's got lots of languages, cultures, so what happens in North India doesn't happen in South India, but the fact is that you… Because it was a made up little town, I could add bits and pieces and still get that authenticity in the narrative.
[Howard] I recently watched a documentary about the monsoon season in southern India and the way it shapes whether all over the globe. It was utterly fascinating. The documentary… You look at the towns, the villages, the communities in that area, and how… Yeah, they really have two times of the year. Which is monsoon, and everything else.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for the book of the week.
[Howard] Oh. Yes. I have a history book for you, written by my friend, Myke Cole. It's called Legion versus Phalanx. It's his first history book, and I am absolutely in love with the voice that he uses for teaching us history. Specifically, teaching us about the Roman Legion and the Greek, the Hellenistic, Phalanx, and how those two related. The fundamental question is well, who would win? We all think we know the answer. Well, the Romans would win because…
[Dan] They did.
[Howard] That's who would win because they did. But the why behind that is kind of the meat of the book. Myke takes all kinds of angles in discussing this, including… And that's why I want to do that one this week… Including geography. One of the fascinating facts is that the Roman Legion can turn more quickly than a Phalanx can. So if you're fighting on the flat, maybe it's a level… Pardon the pun… Playing field. But the moment there are hills, or trees or whatever, the Legion has an advantage. That's just scratching the surface. The book is awesome, I think you'll love it. Myke Cole, Legion Versus Phalanx.
 
[Brandon] Dan, you said something earlier that relates to this idea, with Legion versus Phalanx. Where you said if you're designing a fantasy world, you would take the geography into account for developing the politics, the governments, the systems. Talk a little bit more about that. How would you do that?
[Dan] Well. Um. In this particular instance… This is the book I've been working on for a long time, and it still is not out, and may never be. But I needed… the premise is that the fantasy world is also a reality show that people from other planets watch. One of the main shows that got everyone's attention was this kind of ongoing War of the Roses style thing. Where there was the constantly moving border. You look historically at the War of the Roses between the French and the English, and the definition of what is French and what is English changed constantly, and who was who and who was in charge. So I wanted to create the kind of geography that would (A) give you something to fight over. Some kind of resource or power that made that land worth a multi-generational war. But that also allowed for that kind of fluid border and fluid national identity. So that the people could… We used to belong to this, but now we belong to this, because that King won the last war. Which is different than just I want to have two kingdoms fighting. In my case, I ended up giving them a religious component. There was a religious lake that was central to the religion shared by both of these kingdoms. So they were kind of fighting over that, Dome of the Rock style. We want to make sure that this belongs to us, because it is very important, and not to those other terrible people on the other side of the border. Then figuring out, well, okay, this is therefore the kind of place that has a lake. What does that signify about the surrounding area? I love thinking about it in these terms because then, once I have a premise, I can spin that out. What are the ramifications of that? What is this lake used for? If it's religious, do they fish it or is it off-limits? How is that going to affect the culture? Are they going to be a fishing culture or not? All of those questions can be answered as you follow yourself down the rabbit hole.
 
[Brandon] I want to touch briefly on the idea of biomes. Next week, we will come back and talk about a fun concept called world of hats. This is where…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Sometimes a planet will express only one idea. We'll talk about that next week. But I want to talk about the idea of different biomes in your stories. Because specifically, when I started to really get into worldbuilding geography, there was so much to learn. In any of these topics we'll be talking about this year, we could spend an entire year's podcasts just on geography. As a newbie coming into it, I often felt as a fantasy author, I needed to have working knowledge of so many different things, it sometimes felt overwhelming. When I started to learn about the idea of how biomes interact and why they are where they are, that helped me to start to be able to build some of these fantasy worlds and kind of make some sort of short hands. So, what are biomes? What do I mean by that? How does that shorthand help?
[Dan] A biome is kind of like… This is a generalization that a bio scientist would be upset with. But it's kind of like the ecosystem. It's kind of like, say, well, this is a desert biome versus a tundra versus a jungle versus a forest, whatever. It's a really good thing to think about, especially if you're writing fantasy. Because we come from such a strong kind of overpowering tradition of medieval European fantasy that everyone tends to have the rolling hills and forest biome, with maybe some snowy mountain peaks where the barbarians live.
[Howard] I've got a great example of that. I've recently been reading up on the Judean wilderness. There is a word that they have in Arabic, wadi, which is a dry riverbed. Our word for it in English is dry riverbed. In English, you say this because it's something that… Your river broke. It's not… The river doesn't exist anymore. Something went wrong. In Arabic, it is a word for a feature of the landscape. So you have the geography directly impacting the language. What's interesting is Guadalcanal and Guadalajara get their names from Arabic, wādī al-qanāl and wādī al-ḥijārah are the original names of those places. So in reading this, I quickly realized that Arabic geography, Arabic peninsula geography was influencing language and place names where there really weren't that many dry riverbeds. Really cool stuff.
[Mahtab] The other thing one also has to remember is that you… When you're also thinking of biomes, you just do not have hills, and then you have a desert, and then… There's a lot of gradual transition from one to the other, so think of the hybrids as well. Like, the mountains rolling into foothills into some kind of a desert land and then into the river or the seashore or something like that. So don't just think when you're building a biome or when you're thinking of your geography or landscape that, okay, it's just gotta have mountains, it's gotta have this. Try and do a gradual transition. That's why sometimes it's necessary to know a lot of stuff and then combine it together to see what is necessary and where your city or your town or your protagonists are located.
[Dan] Yeah. That's a really good point to make, especially because, not only are we very heavily influenced by old European fantasy, but also by Star Wars. So we do tend to have this concept of, "Oh, well, this is the snow planet, and this is the desert planet." Those transitional areas are not only more common, but they're much more interesting. Utah is a desert, and we have a big, nasty Salt Lake. But what that Salt Lake also provides is an incredible saltmarsh wetland that's one of the coolest bird preserves in the country. That often gets forgotten, because we're just kind of broad brushed is a desert. So when you do your research and figure out what all these transitional states are, there's a lot of cool stuff in them.
[Mahtab] That could actually inform your story or your character or could be a point of… Plot point, conflict, what have you. So you gotta research that.
[Howard] There's a quote from Robert De Niro… Actually, I had to look this up. The movie, Ronin, 1998. They're doing this tactical map on a whiteboard and talking about this plan. De Niro says, "The map is not the territory." They all go out and look at it, and everything changes as they realize that these sightlines are not two dimensional, this is… For me, having the whiteboard translate to an actual landscape, I realized, "Oh. All these fantasy maps that I love drawing, which was a thing that I loved drawing in 1998, are not the territory. I'm going to have to go outside to get a feel for this."
 
[Brandon] Let's wrap it up here. Mahtab, you have homework for us.
[Mahtab] Yes, I do. Normally, when we start describing geography or describing a setting, we tend to rely mostly on our sense of sight. So the homework for you today is when you… Take your setting, your fantasy world, whatever it is. Take out the sight. Out of it. Just describe it using sounds, smells, tastes, and feels. No sight. So, for example, if it was a blind person who was describing a setting, how would you do that? That's… Yeah, that's your homework.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.24: Creating Great Outlines

Jun. 15th, 2017 01:44 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 12.24: Creating Great Outlines

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

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

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

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

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Writing Excuses 11.21: Q&A on Elemental Horror, With Steve Diamond

May. 26th, 2016 09:44 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.21: Q&A on Elemental Horror, With Steve Diamond

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/05/22/11-21-qa-on-elemental-horror-with-steve-diamond/

Q&A Summary:
Q: If I want to make something ordinary, like peanut butter, terrifying without coming off as silly, how do I do that?
A: Start with the character's reaction. Then look at specific words you are using. When familiar things start acting in unfamiliar ways, it scares people.
Q: What is your personal line between good horror and gore-nographic?
A: Does it change the character? What is the purpose? What is the audience reaction? Remember, gore is not horror. Context.
Q: How do you avoid going too far?
A: Again, gore is not horror. Who are you writing for? Your first reader is you -- is it too much for you?
Q: In movies, horror is often communicated through subtle incidental things like lighting, sound, and music. How do those things transfer into the written word?
A: Details and mannerisms. Get into the character's head early and understand what makes them fearful. Word choice and rhythm. Establish the familiar, then change a small aspect of it.
Q: For someone who has written similar genres to horror, thrillers and suspense, what would be the best way for me to start edging into writing a horror story instead?
A: Write for your audience. Atmospheric details. Beta readers who love horror. Don't flinch. Lay out your plot, then find a way to force the character to make a horrible decision and deal with the consequences.
Q: How do you decide when to show the monster, and how does it change your story once you have?
A: When it fits your plot. After you prepare the reader to be scared, and when it will cause the most harm. When you show the monster, either make it different than we expect OR far worse than we expect.
( Questions, and more answers! )

[Brandon] All right. That's all the time we have. But Dan is actually going to give us some homework.
[Dan] All right. We gave this homework to one of our listeners. We're going to give it to all of you. We want you to plot out a story and build an outline that will force your character to make a horrible choice. Force them to do something they shouldn't do, to compromise themselves morally, to do whatever awful thing. Then build it so that that's the only choice they can make when the situation arrives.
[Brandon] All right. Well, thank you again, to Steve Diamond.
[Steve] Thank you.
[Brandon] Let's also mention Residue, his book, which you can get at fine bookstores everywhere, but mostly Audible and online is your best bet, right?
[Steve] That is the best bet.
[Brandon] And you guys are out of excuses, now go write.
[Chuckles fading into the distance]
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Writing Excuses 5.36: Non-traditional Settings with Saladin Ahmed

May. 15th, 2011 04:05 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 5.36: Non-traditional Settings with Saladin Ahmed

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/05/08/writing-excuses-5-36-non-traditional-settings-with-saladin-ahmed/

Key points: Non-traditional settings raise the learning curve for the reader. Splice familiar elements with unfamiliar to provide a familiar hook. Nontraditional settings take research! Look for the grand sweep of history and the little daily details of everyday life. (My suggestion -- think what it would be like to live there!) Focus on a specific country, area, or time. "The past is a foreign country." Take that seriously. Blend the familiar and the strange. Think about the learning curve of your reader, and adjust it. Use familiar situations to ease readers in. Be judicious with strange language ("Don't call a rabbit a smeerp." From the Turkey City Lexicon at http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/) Consider using something that you know better than anyone else, and build a nontraditional setting around that.
( Open Sesame? )
[Howard] Well, Saladin, I think we may need to put you on the spot here to take us home. One of the things we do for our readers... our listeners, excuse me, is we give them a writing prompt. Often it's related to the cast. But sometimes when the guest has been put sufficiently on the spot, it's just nonsense syllables. So, Saladin, writing prompt?
[Saladin] Writing prompt. Describe a food that is familiar to you from the point of view of a character who has never encountered it or anything like it before.
[Brandon] Wow. That could be really good.
[Howard] That's way better than the nonsense syllables we sometimes get.
[Brandon] Mac and cheese from someone who's never eaten it. All right. You can find Saladin's work at his website. Saladinahmed.com. Ahmed is spelled A-H-M-E-D. Saladin is spelled S-A-L-A-D-I-N.
[Howard] Saladinahmed.com.
[Brandon] Dot com. There are some short stories up there that people can read for free. His book is coming out next year from DAW. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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