wetranscripts | Entries tagged with fantasy

Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-38-an-interview-with-charlie-jane-anders

Key points: A sequel? Backburner. Multiple POV and omniscient POV. Hidden narrators. The book grows up with the characters. Whimsy! Humor. Silly, noir, goofy! Pair humor with other stuff. Scientists and witches, lasers and spell books. One zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000... overload and boring. Add emotion and relationship. Fill the silence with active listening. Beat-by-beat plot? Many iterations. Little bits of information...

[Season 20, Episode 38]

[unknown] I swear, Detective, I was nowhere near the Polo Lounge on the night my poor darling husband Charles was murdered. I was on a Who Dun It mystery cruise with my assistant, Dudley, a darling boy. You, too, can join us on our next deadly cruise, February 6, 2026, seven nights out of Los Angeles on the Navigator of the Seas. Call now, if you dare, 317-457-6150 or go to whodunitcruises.com.

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

[Season 20, Episode 38]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] And I'm DongWon.

[Mary Robinette] And we're very excited to have a special guest, Charlie Jane Anders, joining us today.

[Charlie Jane] Hi.

[Mary Robinette] So, for those of you who've been listening along, we've been doing a deep dive into Charlie Jane's book, All the Birds in the Sky. And we're excited to have her here with us to talk about process, and to talk about tone, and some of the other really cool narrative tricks that she was using when we're…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] When playing with this book. And I think it… It turns out this is fairly timely, since you're working on a sequel right now.

[Charlie Jane] I mean, it's kind of on the back burner at the moment, but I wrote about 30,000 words of a sequel, and people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster… By the time you listen to this, they will have gotten a PDF with the sequel plus some deleted stuff from All the Birds. But it's… I wrote about 30,000 words, and I kind of… I have to kind of stop and think about it. So, that's on the back burner. I have other projects I'm probably going to work on first. But that's… I've written a chunk of a sequel.

[Mary Robinette] Amazing. [Garbled]

[DongWon] Interesting. I mean… We're such huge fans of the first book, and it's been such a delight talking about it in the past few weeks here.

[Charlie Jane] That's awesome.

[DongWon] So, I'm very excited for any news about a sequel when it comes around.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Eventually.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] At some point, there will be a sequel.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is… I feel like this kind of conversation is probably actually really reassuring to new writers, who are like, oh. Oh, I'm not the only one who does 30,000 words of a novel and then has to sit there and go huh.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I promised… Like, I decided to promise people who preordered Lessons in Magic and Disaster this thing as a preorder reward. And so I always kind of knew I was going to, like… Just because I was having fun playing around with writing a sequel. And so I was like I know I have enough of an idea of what I'm doing to get that much done. I mean, originally, it was going to be 10,000, and it just kind of ballooned to 30,000. Because, that was just the section I was writing got to be that long. But… Yeah. I mean, it's going to be… I think the rest of that book is going to be a lot of work, and I'm going to have to… I'll wait until I'm at the point where I like feel like I've got some breathing room and can really slow down.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well, do you want to talk about the… Some of the work that you did with the first novel?

[Charlie Jane] Sure.

[Mary Robinette] Because… There were a bunch of things that we were very excited about. When we picked it, one of the reasons I was particularly excited about it was because you were using more than one POV…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And because you were tipping into omniscient POV. It's something that we don't see used a lot. But I felt that you were using it very effectively to kind of move the reader around the story that takes place over decades.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean… It's interesting. Like, I kind of felt like I was being a little rebellious, kind of dipping into omniscient POV with that book. Like… And I didn't do it that much. I did it here and there, like, there are versions of it where it gets much more omniscient, and, like, I go much deeper into that omniscient thing. Like I'm just much more leaning into that. But I… I feel like it worked. Really, I thought it worked pretty well sparingly. Like, I thought doing it, like, once in a while, was really like fun, and if I tried to push it, it might have gotten… I don't know. I was aware that a lot of people have issues with omniscient POV. I think for reasons that are kind of misguided.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] But I think they think that omniscient narrator is going to just like literally be omniscient and, like, just tell you everything that's going on. Which I don't think has ever been the case with omniscient narrators.

[DongWon] Right.

[Charlie Jane] Like, they don't… Like, there's always a degree of, like, selectiveness in what the omniscient narrator tells you and how intrusive it is. Like, even going back to when it was more ubiquitous. But, yeah, I mean… There's a scene in All the Birds in the Sky which I'm sure you all have already talked about, where Lawrence and Patricia are sitting under the escalator at the mall…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Charlie Jane] And they're looking at the shoes of the people who go by and they're trying to guess who these people are based on their shoes, and then the narrator comes in and says that the last person that they guessed, they actually guessed right and he is an assassin. He's actually… Wants to kill them. And, like, that was, like, I was like, oh, this is going to be the part where everybody's going to throw the book across the room and quit reading. And instead, I don't know how many people have come up to me at this point and said that's their favorite moment in the book or that's when they got hooked. Which is so funny. Because I was like… I almost cut it out, I was like, oh, my God, this is gonna make people stop reading the book. It's gonna like… It's gonna destroy the book. So, for me, to just like throw that in. And I just… I felt like it was a fun playful thing. And I think the playfulness was an important thing with the omniscient narrator in general. And I did feel like there's a lot of choices I made in that book where I was kind of giving a middle finger…

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] To people on the Internet who were saying you can't do X, Y, and Z, and I was just like I'm going to do all those things because [garbled]

[laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think there's, like, a very, very vocal and very small minority of readers who get very fixated on POV and get very rigid about what the rules of POV are and how they can be deployed and I think you're exactly right, that there is such a sense of play to the way you use the POV here that makes it such a delightful reading experience. I can totally see why people… I mean, that moment jumped out at me too. It's such a great little moment, and so deftly sliding from one perspective to another, and then opening up more of the world. And I want to go back to something that you were saying about having an omniscient narrator not really being quote unquote omniscient. They're not a character in the book, but the narrator still has a perspective. How do you think about POV when you're not grounded in a particular character then?

[Charlie Jane] I mean, I think that like I said, most of the time we are grounded in a particular character, and I think if you do omniscient narration, it does kinda become a character in the book at some point. And, like… I've read, like, three or four novels published in the past year, and I'm… I think of the title of one of them off the top of my head, but I don't know… It's kind of a spoiler, so I don't even know if I should say the one that I think of the title of. But I've read, like, a few books in the past year where the narrator appears to be omniscient, and then at a certain point, like, halfway through the book, you find out it's actually a character who just knows a lot of stuff and is narrating all this stuff from there vantage point of like… And, like, that's a trick that I see people do lately, of, like, oh, you think it's an omniscient narrator, but it's actually Fred. Who, Fred, knows a lot of stuff and just hasn't introduced themself yet. Just kind of like hiding who they are from you until a certain point in the book. And, obviously, I feel like it's been out for long enough that, like, The Scent of Bright Doors. You don't find out who the narrator is until almost the end of the book.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Like, I feel like that's a trend right now, the hidden narrator. The narrator who is actually… He's a specific viewpoint, but we don't know until we get to almost the end [garbled]

[DongWon] [garbled]

[Charlie Jane] Sorry.

[DongWon] Every single time, I find that really delightful and enjoyable. So… Maybe I'm part of the trend here.

[Charlie Jane] I've always [garbled] Yeah. Like, I feel like it could get overdone at some point. Maybe we'll be like, okay, enough of the hidden narrator. Like… I definitely… I think, yeah. I really like that. But I also think that's a sneaky way to do an omniscient narrator without doing an omniscient narrator. Like, have a narrator who just by virtue of being some kind of supernatural entity or a person who just is in a privileged position has a degree of what appears to be omniscient, and then is like, ha ha ha. And there's probably a version of All the Birds where it turns out that it's narrated by Peregrine, the AI, and like… I made various attempts to adapt the book for screen a few years ago, and one of the things I toyed with was, like, maybe for me to have a narrator speak up occasionally. It could be Peregrine, the AI, as narrator [garbled]

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Because Peregrine does have this privileged viewpoint. But I actually like having an omniscient narrator that's just an omniscient narrator. But I think… Like, I very much came up… Like, one of the traditions that kind of influences me is the tradition of, like, loosely, like, Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut, who at least when I was young, they were compared a lot. In fact, how I got into Kurt Vonnegut is people kept comparing Douglas Adams to him, and they're obviously [garbled] in some ways, but they do have that kind of… They do have a narrator who is chatty and over shares and kind of like… Often will kind of intrude on the story in various ways. And I love that. I think it's really fun and funny, and I think we've lost something by not… Like, I think it's… There… It's not just that there's a minority of readers who don't like omniscient narration, there also are just busybodies who give writing advice with a little perspective where there like, these are the things you must never do, and, like… And those people… They're… I'm sure they're lovely people, but they should shut the hell up.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] Or learn to be less prescriptive, really. But, yeah, I like the playfulness, I like the… I think when you're writing… But to return to your question, DongWon, because I didn't really answer it. When you have… When you're not in a particular character's POV, I think it really helps if the narrator has, like, maybe not opinions necessarily, but, like, they are telling you information that is relevant to the story in a way that is kind of like commenting on the story from a particular, like… They're giving you perspective and often it's perspective that the characters are not aware of or that is not quite like within the confines of what people in the scene know. And so the narrators sneakily giving you little extra pieces of information. And so I like a mischievous narrator, I guess.

[DongWon] Do you see that as your perspective or do you see that as something external again, like, is it another layer in between you and the text?

[Charlie Jane] It's a little bit of both, I guess. I mean, it's not me me…

[DongWon] Right.

[Charlie Jane] It's not like me being, like, hi, is Charlie Jane, I'm going to tell you stuff. But it is kind of… It is my kind of… Obviously, everything in the story come from me in the end, of course, as always is the case. I think it's a viewpoint that is kind of closer to authorial than that of any other characters, I guess, is what I would say. But it's still not the authorial viewpoint, necessarily. And, like, you can have a narrator who is wrong about stuff. Or you can have a narrator who provides misleading information or… I feel like a part of why people don't like omniscient narrators is because they think it's just going to, like, spoil the story, or, like, tell you too much, and, like, omniscient narrators can actually mess with you in various ways and give you… Like, give you more perspective, but also maybe tell you stuff that's actually going to lead you astray. Or whatever. Or… I don't know. Um.. Yyeah.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I liked about the way you were using the omniscient narrator, for me, specifically, was the way you were using it to shape tone. Because in the first part of the book, when they are little, it takes on this kind of swami British, like, children's fantasy novel. Or children's… And then as we move, the omniscient narrator… There's a continuity of tone, but also, the narration style ages up very subtly each time we go. So that when we get to them as adults, we get very few intrusions of the omniscient narrator. They just appear at just, I think, very key points, because the rest of the time, it is stylistically more like an quote adult novel. Which is either… Which tends to be, in science fiction and fantasy, tight third person. Were you doing conscious decisions about that sort of pushing or pulling or was it just sort of happening in revisions?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, I like the idea that the book kind of grows up with the characters. That was something I thought a lot about, for sure, and I thought… I mean, I dialed it way back, like, in the earlier drafts, like, the first couple chapters, like, the opening Patricia chapter was written in a much more fairytale style. Like, almost, Once upon a time, there were two sisters. It wasn't quite that, but it was pretty close to that. And people were like this is too hard. Like… It's too jarring. That transition from, like, straight up fairytale, like, kind of to something more grown-up. I also, like, when I had the more fairytale stuff in the beginning, the omniscient narrator was going to be much more front and center, because I was going to start out with, like, two girls in the woods, and, like, it's very fairytale and… But Roberta was going to grow up to be a serial killer. And, like, just kind of throw in pieces of information that would just let you know on page 1 that this is not that story. And in the end, I cut that, because I ended up not going quite that far into fairytale land and it felt intrusive to just start throwing spoilers at you on page 1. But… And actually, Roberta is not really a serial killer in the final draft. She's just… She has killed someone, but there was extenuating circumstances. He kind of deserved it. But, yeah. I mean… But the tone kind of evolving was something that I really struggled with. And, in general, the level of whimsy was something that I really struggled with. Like, I didn't want it to go too far into whimsy and in fact in my subsequent works, I really kind of moved away from whimsy a little bit, because I felt like I… It… That can kind of take over and it can become, like, the exclusion of, like, character and emotion and stuff. Like, I feel like I had to pare back the whimsy a lot in order to make the characters feel fully… Like, fully realized and emotional and make their relationship feel as real as it needed to and… So there was a lot more kind of… For lack of a better word, twee kind of whimsical cuteness in the first draft, and I really dialed it way back, and, like, only kept the stuff that felt like it really belonged.

[Mary Robinette] Well, why don't we go ahead and take our break, and when we come back, let's talk about how we make decisions about humor and whimsy.

[Mary Robinette] And as part of our break, Charlie Jane, I think you're going to tell us about your newest book?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. Thank you. So, my newest book, which came out on August nineteenth, is called Lessons in Magic and Disaster. And it's got a lot of that sort of quirky whimsical tone as well. It does get a little darker and sadder in places. It is about a young trans woman who is a PhD student in English literature, but more importantly, she's a witch. And her mother, Serena, has been depressed and kind of hiding from the world for several years since some really bad stuff happened. And Serena [Janie?] decides the way to bring her mother back to the world and kind of help her mother kind of embrace life is to teach her mother how to do magic. Which, magic being magic, has some unpredictable results, and magic is kind of a mirror for, like, your desires and your sense of self in this book. And so, not surprisingly, Janie's mother comes to use it very differently than Janie does, and that leads to a lot of interesting mother-daughter conflict. But there's also, just, like, a lot of cozy queer vibes and occasional upsetting stuff, mixed with a lot of cozy queer vibes and, like, queer activism of the 1990s and the 1730s as, like, we get flashbacks about Janie's mom when she was a young woman, and also Janie is researching queers of the eighteenth century. Which turns out there was a lot of them.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] So, yeah, it's about kind of queer survival and queer joy and healing and forgiveness and learning to understand your mother as a human being rather than as just, like, this icon from your childhood.

[Mary Robinette] It sounds so good. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on that.

[Charlie Jane] Yay.

[DongWon] [garbled] That sounds really amazing, and just what we need.

[Charlie Jane] Well, thank you.

[Mary Robinette] Let me remind you, that is Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders.

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[Mary Robinette] All right. Now we're back from our break, and we are going to talk about how to make decisions about whimsy and humor, and where to place it, and how much to dial it up or down, and it's a fun, but complicated, subject sometimes. When you were working on All the Birds in the Sky, did you know going in that you wanted it to have that sort of whimsical tone or was that a discovery as you were writing it?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I mean, I think from the jump, it was a very whimsical novel. And, like, I was writing a different novel… Like, what happened is, backing up slightly. I had an urban fantasy novel that was a kind of noir like paranormal detective… Not quite detective, but paranormal investigator type novel, in the kind of vein of, like, Jim Butcher or Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels, or the Octave… The October Daye novels. Like, that kind of stuff. And it was like… We're talking 2011. I was working on this urban fantasy noir book, and I was walking in the park, and this idea about a witch and a mad scientist just kind of bonked me on the head. And I had to go write down a bunch of stuff about it. And so I feel like every project I write, I kind of approached differently. The urban fantasy novel also is very silly in places. It had a lot of very silly stuff, but it also had that more noir tone. So I always knew that this was going to be more whimsical. And I always knew that this was going to be more of a fun, kind of almost goofy, novel. And, like I said earlier drafts were much goofier. And I feel like, as a writer, I am someone… At least I have been someone to whom goofy humor comes really naturally. Like, my first attempts at writing science fiction and fantasy were just pure zany comedy with, like, ridiculous premises and, like,… Just like the silliest stuff I could come up with, and they weren't very good. They didn't have… The characters are one-dimensional. Often, they just ended, like they would just, like, oh…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And that's the… Story's over now. Go home, folks. Nothing to see here. Oh, you wanted resolution. Oh, well, too bad.

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] But, yeah. No, I was really good at goofy, zany humor, and it… Basically, I would say that the course of, like mo… The first, like, I don't know how many years of my career, from, like, when I started writing fiction seriously to All the Birds in the Sky, I was learning to kind of… Learning to pair humor with other stuff. And eventually kind of dial back the humor, because I got the feeling… And I got feedback from people that the humor was… That I was like sacrificing character and emotion for the sake of humor and that… And so now, I think, I am… When I use humor, it's something that I… Is an intentional thing that I put in intentionally. But originally, it was just like the automatic thing that I always did. And then I would add character and story and plot and stuff on top of that [garbled] or under that or whatever. And I think that… I mean, there's a version of All the Birds… Like, in my very, very first crack at All the Birds in the Sky, it was going to be just like complete, like, campy comedy of like scientists and witches battling it out with, like, lasers versus, like, spell books versus, like wizar… Like, ghosts and goblins and vampires and aliens and everybody's just like… There's like every silly trope from both genres, just like bursting out all over the place. And that would have been actually very boring. Because one zany trope is entertaining and fun, 3,000 zany tropes is just like…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] It just becomes… It just… Yeah. It just becomes, like, overload and it's boring and… Functionally, they all start to feel the same. Like, an elf and an alien are not that different, unless you put a lot of effort in making them different.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And so, yeah, and so I realized that I really wanted this to be… And I had just written Six Months, Three Days, my short story that [garbled] attention, which was very focused on the relationship and was more emotional. And so I was like, I want to bring that energy to it. And so it was really like challenging myself to have that kind of whimsical humor, but also that emotion and that kind of feeling of, like, being… Especially the main part of the novel, when they're growing up, being in their twenties, and just, like, getting what you always wanted, but it's still kind of sucks.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And, like, you're finally in the city and getting to like have an awesome life, kind of, but life still kind of sucks.

[Mary Robinette] You also have to be an adult.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Charlie Jane] Like, yeah. Being an adult is just… Yeah. Anyway. And so, yeah, and I feel like I really tried to have more of the humor come out of character, and I'll give a very specific example that I think I've probably touched on before. There's a moment in the book where Lawrence is starting to, like… His relationship with his girlfriend Serafina is unraveling, like, they are just… Things are not working out between them. And there is a moment where the narrator… Like, they just run out of things to say to each other, and Lawrence is trying so hard to be, like, a good boyfriend, and it's actually self sabotaging as he's just over… He's trying too hard. And there's a moment in an earlier draft, where the narrator said… Says, Lawrence tried to fill the silence with active listening.

[Chuckles]

[Charlie Jane] Which I thought was a [garbled] line, because, like, you can't do active listening if, like, nobody's talking. Right? And then I was like, you know what? That's the narrator coming in and telling us that Lawrence is a chump. What if it is Lawrence reflecting to himself, I wish I could fill the silence with active listening. Or I am… Or just realizing, in his own mind, that he is trying to do this thing that's impossible. Then it's got pathos as well as humor…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Because it's Lawrence realizing, oh, I'm screwing up. This is like… This thing I'm trying to do is not working.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And by changing… Just changing, like, three words, from, like, the narrator, like, standing above and, like, looking at Lawrence and laughing at him to Lawrence kind of realizing ruefully, kind of laughing at himself, but also realizing that he is… He's messing up, and that this is not working. That just made it… It was still funny, I think, but it was funny in a different way.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] And so that was a lightbulb moment for me, of just, like, oh, the humor can actually come from within the characters, and the characters can be part… They can be in on the joke to some extent, or if we are going to make fun of them, we can at least respect their perspective in some way. Kind of. I don't know.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I really love hearing you talk about that, because I can see now that you've pointed it out all the ways in which you've implemented that throughout the book. Right? I mean, there's about six different tones in the book. Because you have the fantasy side, the science fiction side, and then you have the three different age categories. Right? And I can sort of see that… You talk about the early version as being very whimsical, and there's certain whimsy in play in the book, but I don't think of that as my primary reaction to it in a lot of ways. Right? Like, that original concept you had of, like, laser guns versus spell books, big explosive battle. That kind of makes it into the book, but when it does, it's quite scary and really upsetting, actually.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[DongWon] I mean, like, we watch a witch die, pretty horribly, like on screen someone who's been really interesting and compelling. God, I love the way her magic works in the book, too.

[Charlie Jane] Oh.

[DongWon] But then I can sort of see where you start with this idea of, like, oh, here's the fun big concept, but then adding that character depth to it. You don't lose the crazy energy of it, because it's still a bunch of witches fighting a bunch of scientists with guns, and there's something about that that's so delightful and exciting and strange. But then it's like grounded in this very deep way that lets you get out the core issues of how to be a person, how to be in community, how to be a partner to somebody. Right? All of those things that, to me, were so resonant with my experiences of growing up in a city, of trying to figure out how to be in a community with people, and all of that.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Likewise, I feel like this book has so much heart to it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And it really is about people just trying to connect and to be the best version of themselves, while they are… Have been influenced by someone…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Else's idea of what the best version of themself looks like. And I love watching them unpack the layers, but using the humor as this kind of scalpel to sort of… It's like, aha! That's funny, but now I'm going to make you hurt just a little bit more.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It's not just a spoonful of sugar. Right? But there is a little bit of that, like, that candy coating that gets us into the meat of the story a little bit. And it's interesting, because you can… I think both are failure states in terms of only being whimsy and only being lightness, and then only being darkness and grittiness. Right? Like, I think I've seen both cases where you lose the core message of what the author's trying to get at, if it's just, like, overwhelming violence and horror and upset versus overwhelming just charm and whimsy and… Both are hard to dig your sort of, like, teeth into. Right? To continue with food metaphors here. It's hard to get into the body of it sometimes.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because, like, if you look at this book on a beat-by-beat plot basis, it's very dark and grim.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah, I guess so.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like two different kids who were… Who dealt with very different forms of abuse from neglect.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean…

[Mary Robinette] And then the… And increasing, like, escalating bullying, escape to places in which they experience different kinds of bullying. They have a brief… They both get a brief heyday of everything seems to be going well. But then they're both in relationships that are not the right relationships. And then the world ends.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] It's like… It's pretty…

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Bleak. But it doesn't feel bleak while you're reading it. I mean, a couple of places that it does, but it is [garbled]

[DongWon] Only in moments that feel very, very intentional that we feel…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That, as we feel that heaviness before heading into the next sort of emotional beat. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, like the whole sequence with the hot pepper sauce.

[Charlie Jane] Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] That was so… I mean that… I think I went into Roald Dahl mode a little bit, like Roald Dahl…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] Books was like stories that I read when I was a kid, of, like, people being really kind of tortured…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] By adults, or by each other, and, like… I don't know. I… Yeah, I didn't realize how intense some of those childhood scenes were until people told me, dude, that was like… That was really a lot. And this is the thing, I… With every book I write, like, I don't know… Like I just… I don't know until I… Until it's out in the world or until beta readers read it. There's some parts where there like oh, this is funny, and other people are like, that's really horrifying…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] And I'm like, oh. Okay. Like I just… I don't know if that's because I'm a terrible person or if it's just because it's really hard to tell sometimes when you're inside a story.

[Mary Robinette] It's hard to tell.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. God.

[DongWon] When you're inside it… And then… I think it's also sometimes what community you're in. You know what I mean?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah.

[DongWon] And if you're surrounded by a lot of people who've been through a lot, then what is baseline funny in those circles can sometimes not travel well and certain other communities.

[Charlie Jane] That's very true. Yeah. And like… Yeah… I mean, I think this book was just me throwing everything out there and just being like I'm just going to do all of it and see what I can get away with, kind of.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Can I ask you… You said there's one version where it's like this, and there's one version where it's like that. Do you know how many versions or drafts you went through to find this book?

[Charlie Jane] I mean…

[Laughter]

[Charlie Jane] For that… For… When… I'm going to send people… When, I'm hopefully by the time you hear this, we'll have sent people the PDF of bonus material. I had to… Like, one of the things that I did was grab deleted scenes that were like… Scenes that almost made it into the book, like, they got very close, but they were cut for link reasons. But also, there's a whole… Like, I'm calling it an alternate ending. It's like I feel a little bit bigger than that. It's like a whole other, like, version of the climax with a lot of stuff leading up to it that was different. And I… So the other day, I was looking back through the draft folder and I have things labeled, like, sixth draft, seventh draft, but it's very arbitrary.

[Mary Robinette, DongWon] Yeah.

[Charlie Jane] What you consider a draft, what you consider… What's just another pass. But it definitely went through, even before I got an agent and made changes for the agent and then made changes… Went through editing with Tor. It had already gone through a bunch of different versions before that, for sure. Like it had already gone through multiple iterations. And, like, there were versions that were very different. Like people who get that PDF are going to be like, whoa. This book was going to be much weirder. Like, I had forgotten quite how weird it was going to be. Like the… There was a very different version where, like, the climax is very different. And the plot is much more elaborate. Like, I think I dealt… I pared back the plot a lot to try to reach something that was more kind of… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Well. Speaking of paring things back, okay, it is probably time for us to pare back to our homework. Did you have some homework for our fair listeners?

[Charlie Jane] Yeah. I mean, since we've been talking about tone and like having a narrator that kind of like pokes… Like, intrudes into the scene a little bit with, like, little touches of omniscient, I thought… Think it would be fun is take a scene that you've already written and, just like add, like, five or six narrative asides that are providing information that the characters couldn't possibly know in the scene. Just like little bits of information. It doesn't have to be, like, major reveals, it could just be, like, oh, and by the way, this guy ran over someone's dog and nobody knew, and he got away with it, or something like… Just little bits of information that there's no way that anybody… Any of the characters, other than maybe the character we're revealing a secret of, could have known. Or, unbeknownst to these characters, three blocks away, this was happening. I don't know. But make it at least relevant to the scene, not just like… Not… Not just like complete like random information, but stuff that's, like, relevant to the scene and hopefully adds, like, a little bit of humor, but also, just kind of a different perspective, a different way of thinking about what's happening in the scene.

[DongWon] I love that.

[Charlie Jane] And just see how that looks, see if… What it does to that scene.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's great homework.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.42: Creating Magic Outside of a System

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-42-creating-magic-outside-of-a-system

Key points: Does magic need rules to work? You don't need to build a magic system ahead of time. Just dive in and let things happen. But... Humans are pattern-seeking creatures, and we will make a magic system out of everything. Does magic have to have a personal cost? Is magic consistent, in terms of costs and consequences? Some technology might as well be magic. Fantasy stories tend to personalize cost. Technology stories tend to make the cost less personal. It's less about the cost of magic, and more about consequences. Folk magic, magic beyond our understanding and control, is a force on the story, not something exerted by the protagonist. Use SMART as scales to think about magic (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based). Build a try-fail cycle around ordinary things, which magic as the danger in the pit. When you make the choice of a SMART magic system or not, how do you decide? If it feels technological, put rules around it. What is the premise of the story? You don't always need to understand the rules, just roll the thunderstorm in. Science, learning, civilization can coexist with magical thinking, understanding, and folk logic. Instead of X or Y, what is the Z in between?

[Season 18, Episode 42]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Creating Magic Outside of a System.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Erin] I am so excited to talk about magic outside of magic systems. Which is one of my favorite things to play with as a writer. Two of the stories that I had y'all read were… Had magical elements in them. I mean, wolfmen are not real that I know of. Conjuremen actually are real, but that's a type of folk magic that's very different than the way we think about magic a lot of times, where it's like you say, "Alakazam," and something happens. What I really enjoy about these is that I think sometimes we think we have to come up with rules in order for magic to work. But I would say that we really don't. I have a theory as to how we can determine the type of magic that we're using in our worlds. But before I do that, you, Mary Robinette, I keep thinking about you because you actually have worked in a magic that has more of a system. I'm curious, like, do you like it, do you not like it, how do you feel about it?

[Mary Robinette] Um, so I… Hmmm, this is hard, because I don't agree with your central premise, and I agree with your central premise, simultaneously.

[Erin] Love it.

[Mary Robinette] So, I don't think you need to do any building ahead of time on a magic system. I think you can just dive in and let things happen. Which is actually the way I did that with the Glamorous Histories. I dove in, I let things happen, and then I was like, "Well, you better not let that happen because now you've accidentally invented telephones. Let's roll that back." So I found the magic system as I went. But then I also made some very deliberate decisions about it. I've also written stories that are much more in the fairytale mode of magic system where it's just like magic things happened, and there's not… But, here's where I disagree with it. Humans are pattern seeking creatures, and we will make a magic system out of everything. Which is why, like, what is the one magic spell that works perfectly for hiding something in the real world. You put it anyplace safe. What is the counter spell for that? You buy a duplicate. Everybody knows this spell. Right? We make systems. If you walk away from the bus stop, the bus is going to come. If you say that Wolfy Things doesn't have a magic system, but it 100% has a magic system. The wolfsbane is a magic system. It's just not the kind of thing where you sit down and you turn it into… I think when people think about magic system, they think about something that you can turn into basically an RPG.

[Erin] Yeah. I think that's exactly it. When I think magic systems, I think things with rules that can be codified easily and always work the same way. One of the reasons that I often push back… There are 2 rules that I was taught about writing magic, neither of which I like for my own writing. One is that magic always has to have a cost. A personal cost. It is often the way that it's described.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] I mean, I guess I understand where it comes from, because magic can't just be unlimited. But like…

[DongWon] The desire to work magic into the logic of capitalism, though…

[Erin] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's a desire to work magic into an imperialist possessive extractive mode of thinking that I think is sometimes very fun. I love playing Dungeons & Dragons which is absolutely in that mode. But also there are other ways to think about the numinous and the magical that I think can be rule-based and consistency-based, but aren't necessarily highly systematized in a hierarchical way.

[Mary Robinette] Again, Nikki pays a cost for gathering the wolfsbane. He talks in the beginning about the prickles and the stings of gathering it. Like, there is a cost there, whether or not it's a monetary or economic cost. It's not… I agree that it doesn't necessarily have to be there. But there is… If we think of it as an effort, that there is something that is… Something happens. There is some sort of exchange.

[DongWon] One of the things… Where I'm going to push back on consistency.

[Mary Robinette] Consistency?

[DongWon] Yes, there can be a cost. But what one character pays in one moment versus one another character pays in another moment doesn't always have to be the same. Right? Think about this in terms of Studio Ghibli movies. Right? So there is consequence and cost. If you eat the food, then you end up turning into a giant pig. Right? There's a certain logic to that, a certain cost to that. But what one character experiences won't always be the same as what the next character experiences. Even though there's an underlying logic to it. Right?

[Mary Robinette] That is…

[DongWon] So I think when we're talking about systems, for me, at least, that's kind of like where I start to push back on the idea of like this has to be systematized in a concrete way. But I also understand what you're saying, that there's an underlying logic to how these things work.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Also, I mean, in the real world, when you're looking at systems, people do not pay the same costs under any…

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So that's why I'm like I understand, but I think that whether or not you intend it, the reader is going to find a system and the characters will find a system. That systemizing will happen.

[DongWon] I'm going to push back a little bit. I'm sorry to keep pushing on this…

[Mary Robinette] No, no, this is…

[DongWon] But I do think that…

[Howard] Erin and I are having a great [garbled time?]

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I do think a Western reader will want a kind of rigor and system to it that is different from what readers from other cultures might [garbled think]. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Sure.

[DongWon] I think… I just want to be cautious about generalizing too much. I think the experience of an American reader or a European reader tends to be slightly different from the experience of a reader who is coming from a different culture, and has different expectations of what the logic and implied costs and consequences of magic could be in that world.

[Erin] Well, I think that…

[Howard] If I could address the technological…

[Erin] Sure.

[Howard] Elephant in the room. Erin, you began by saying to of these stories have magic in them, and one of them doesn't. I'm sorry, the technology to remove… Transfer… Manipulate… Bank, not bank memories might as well be magic. It is a technology, and you may have technological rules and costs associated with it, but the story does nothing to explore that beyond the most superficial level. It could just as easily have been a wizard did it.

[Erin] What I… This actually gets to one of the things about costs that I find really interesting, which is a slight pivot from what we've been talking about. But I think a lot of times, fantasy stories tend to personalize cost. It is your finger, your soul, your whatever, your blood. Technology stories tend to make the cost more like the way we think of cost. Electricity has a cost. But it's a bill, not like my soul. You know what I mean? Like, ultimately, that cost changes, and there are some people who can't pay their electric bill and have to deal with the consequences of that. But I think some of the desire to make fantasy really individual… A lot of times bloodline oriented in a weird way, like inherited, makes the cost really like about the actual person wielding it and not the systemic cost. Because, like, there's something going on… The memory tech is very magical, but it is something that is run by a company outside of, like, individual people, and the choices they're making are how to use that system, not that they have to create it themselves or sacrifice part of themselves other than their morals in order to do something with it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I completely agree with all of that. I think, as we're talking, something that is clarifying in my mind is that part of the reason we say magic… I suspect that part of the reason the magic must have a cost arose as a rule is because what we're really saying is for your protagonist to succeed, they must exert effort, and that frequently people were doing things where… It's like, "And now we do magic."

[DongWon] I think it's less about the magic having a cost, and more about the characters choices having consequences.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? So when Nikki's picking the berries, he is feeling a cost, but that cost is his choice to engage in this act of hunting, in this act of violence. He's giving blood to do that. I think that's a part that's so interesting to me. More than necessarily like magic works in a certain way.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. One of the things, going back to what your thing about electricity is, I will often tell people like electricity is a spell that will does one thing, and we figured out how to do a lot of really interesting things with this one spell.

[Erin] I love that. I also think a lot about folk magic. I thought a lot, because I did a lot of research into folk magic in working on Snake Season and, like, the conjureman has all of these different potions and things and… Do they work? Do they not work?

[DongWon] I love the conjure bag. Yeah.

[Erin] It's not clear. I think that's true of a lot of folk magic. I was talking with someone the other day who said, like, "Does it work to paint your house [garbled] blue, so that the spirits don't come in?" It's like, well, who's going to not paint their house that? Like, you don't want to be the one person that paints your house green and now the spirit's in you. So we believe, and sometimes a belief in something is its own magic. It doesn't actually have to work. If you paint your house blue and a ghost gets in anyway, you just figure you did something wrong with that. But you don't have to codify it. It's not like I didn't mix the paint correctly and do the right spell. It's more like, "Oh, well. I guess something happened, and, oh, well, they got in another way. Like, I'll have to deal with those consequences." I think that's where you see cultural differences. The idea that like ghosts are real, that there is just kind of magic around us that is beyond our understanding, beyond our control, is something that I find really interesting, because then it just becomes a force on the story as opposed to something that is being exerted by the protagonist within the story.

[DongWon] Well, it lets you draw on a cultural component in a really interesting way. Right? So, the fact that everyone paints the roof of their porch a specific shade of blue is a regional cultural thing. It is also superstition, it is also part of maybe a magic system of sorts. But it's also… It's a people saying this is who we are. We are people who paint our porches this color. Right? I think that is where folk magic intersects with narrative in ways that I find really rich and exciting and fun.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] We're going to take a break, and when we come back, I have a daft theory to propose, and I want to see what you think of it.

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[Mary Robinette] I recently read a short story collection called The World Wasn't Ready for You by Justin C. Key. I was blown away by this. It's his debut collection. It… Like, from the very first page, I was like, "Oh, this guy knows how to tell a story." Each story feels different. Also, warning, they are horror. Like, this is heavy stuff. The way the publisher described it was Black Mirror meets Get Out. So you're dealing with science fiction and horror and fantasy to examine issues of race and class and prejudice. It's fantastic. I highly recommend this. The World Wasn't Ready for You by Justin C. Key.

[Erin] Okay, I promised a theory, and here it is.

[Howard] You promised a daft theory.

[Erin] A daft theory.

[Howard] I'm here for the daft.

[Erin] I was thinking about how do we think… Like, if you're creating magic, if you want to make a more systemic or otherwise, how do you describe how magic works within your world? I started thinking about the acronym SMART that people always tell you to use for goalsetting. That your goal should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based. I decided that each of these could be a scale to think about magic.

[Mary Robinette] Ooo…

[Erin] So, is your magic specific, as in, like, it does one thing, or is it general? Is it measurable, like you can actually, and sort of controllable in that way, or is it more kind of broad? Is it attainable by certain people, or by everyone, or can only certain people wheeled it? Is it realistic or does it just do gonzo…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Wild stuff that you wouldn't expect? Is it time-based or is it always available to you? So this was my random theory. I'm curious, does any of that make sense for you guys?

[DongWon] Oh, my God, I love it so much.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. I'm so excited by that. I'm like…

[DongWon] My love for you is melting.

[Howard] It makes sense, and I'm going to need… Let's see, what was the T for? Time-based?

[Mary Robinette] Time. Yeah.

[Howard] I'm going to need a big time-based spell in order to unpack it. One of the thoughts that I had about the magic… In Wolfy in particular, we talk about the wolfsbane as something that will work for killing a wolf.

[Mary Robinette] Very specific.

[Howard] Yeah, it was specific. But the effort that needs to be put in by the protagonist in order to kill the wolf that way has nothing to do with the wolfsbane, and everything to do with coaxing, using things that are real to all of us, the wolf up to the edge of the pit, and then pushing, using tools that are available to all of us, the wolf into the pit, and then let the magic do its thing. That aspect, when you've got a magic where the try-fail cycle is not focused on the magic, because you don't want to have to build all those rules, you have the try-fail cycle around can I get the wolf up to the edge of the pit and push it in, and then let the magic do the rest. It's a very simple… It seems very simple to me, anyway, a very simple toolbox for taking non-rule-based, non-systemic, non-gamified magic and working it into the familiar and useful structure of a try-fail cycle.

[Mary Robinette] As you were talking, Howard, I was going back to the SMART. I'm like, Yep, specific, it does this thing. Measurable? Yep. The wolf is dead. Accessible? Anyone can grab it. Then I was like, "What was R? What was R?"

[Erin] Realistic.

[DongWon] Realistic.

[Erin] Is it realistic? That's what gives space for like gonzo magic. Right?

[DongWon] Totally. Totally.

[Erin] So, is it like the wolf falls in and turns into like [a blues?]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Like, there is like that sort of surrealistic way of approaching magic where it never does…

[DongWon] The big dream logic.

[Erin] Yeah. Exactly. It doesn't do what you think. It does something, but it doesn't do what you would expect it to do. It probably isn't very repeatable, which is another thing that R sometimes stands for.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah yeah yeah.

[Erin] In that because the next time you do it, it might lead to a completely different effect. Which makes it harder for you to like wield it as a tool. Because every time, you're sort of taking a chance that it would do the thing you wish it would.

[Howard] That was in Iain Banks Against a Dark Background. The MacGuffin is a weapon called the lazy gun. All we know about the lazy gun is whatever you're pointing it at, when you pull the trigger, it's going to die. For small targets, it might be a tele-portal opens above it and jaws come down and chomp them. Totally gonzo. For large… The larger the target tends to be, is, the more likely it is that you're just going to get a boring explosion. I loved that magic system, and the whole story, once they get their hands on the gun, has nothing to do with how the gun works, and everything to do with hanging onto it long enough to point it at something.

[DongWon] So I guess my question for you is, Sour Milk Girls has a very specific, let's call it a magic system quote unquote, that is systematized, that has hierarchy, has all these consequences. Right? It fits most of the categories of SMART in those ways. Then, Snake Season definitely does not. Like, for you, when you're making those choices of what kind of magic system you want in this story, when do you want something hierarchical and rigorous, and when do you want something that's more fluid and numinous?

[Erin] Well, that's interesting. I think that I… The more it feels technological, for me, the more I want to put rules around it.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because that's just I assume that technology has rules in a way that I'd never assume that magic does. So, the more… The closer it comes to tech, the more I think about it that way. I think it also comes down to, like, what is the premise of the story. So, in many ways, when I came up with Snake Season, the premise was, what if this… What if there's a woman living on the Bayou whose kids are messed up? Like, you know what I mean? Which has nothing to do with magic. But then the Bayou in that culture has so much magic infused into it that it like kind of leaks into the story. Like, even if I didn't mean for it to be there, it did. It was. Something I find… This is a complete aside… Very interesting about folk magic of sort of the Bayou New Orleans all of that area is that it actually mixes like traditional folk magic with Catholicism in a really interesting way. Catholicism is very rulebound, and folk magic is very not. I found something really interesting in that. Maybe a parallel to the ways in which Marie's trying to figure out like where she fits within the rules of something she doesn't fully understand.

[Mary Robinette] So I think the thing that… Sorry, my brain is exploding over here.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. Same.

[Mary Robinette] I think that… Circling back… Taking that, and then circling back to what you said, the more it feels like tech, the more it feels like a system, I think what you're actually getting at is the more mainstream it is. The more it has been monetized and become a technological system then something that is… Where it is all self-taught. So in the self teaching of it, the non-rulebound, that's where it's like, "Well, yeah, I do it this way." In the same way that when you're looking at art, it's like, well, you have to have perspective, and you have to have this. Then you see folk artists, you see outsider artists who are not doing it that way at all, who are exploring totally different things.

[DongWon] You see this around like tarot and arcana. Right? Like the massive industry that surrounds that at this point in terms of specific interpretations, specific things like that.

[Howard] If you look at our understanding of weather, climate, and ecology in, like, the 12th century. There are cycles of the moon, there are ann… Our passage around the sun, there are tides, there are seasons. But they don't always align and it's difficult to tell why. Moss grows on the north sides of trees. What is it about the windward and leeward sides of mountains? We didn't have an understanding of the water cycle, of where rain comes from, and we obviously didn't have satellites to predict thunderstorms. But we had this magnificent experience of a thunderstorm rolling in from nowhere and doing things that, in the context of the 12th century whoever is a huge force that… Did it come from the moon, did it come from the things we did, what did it have to do with the trees and the mountains and whatever else? So I look at that, and I map that onto how would I build a magic system where maybe it has rules, but I don't need to understand them. I just need to roll the storm in.

[Erin] In truth, I think we take comfort in the idea that we can understand it all in a way that is not true. I keep thinking about like… I can't think of a very specific example right now, but there are cases where there will be a village that relies on folk magic. They're like, "We are eating this thing or doing this thing, and it has this effect." People will come in and be like, "That makes no sense. It doesn't fit in. We can't codify it. We can't understand it. Stop doing that." Then there will be some tragic consequence. Then, later, they'll be like, "Oh, it turns out that actually you eating that mushroom did inoculate you against the thing we didn't realize was happening around you." Because there's this idea that we have to be able to put something in a box in order for it to make sense to us. I think part of that is the pattern seeking nature of humanity, but I think the fact that those patterns have to be kind of in written form or really measurable form in order for them to work for us is kind of the capitalism impulse.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Erin] It's why, for me, the more technological something is, the more systemic it feels like it needs to be. Like, the more systematized it feels like it needs to be, because I associate it with needing… With capitalism, and I think capitalism, like, abhors a vacuum and uncertainty, because you can't monetize uncertainty.

[DongWon] I think this conversation's been so wonderful because it's unlocking a certain thing in my brain about how I think about this. I think one thing I realized about why I find this dichotomy to be a little bit of a frustrating one, between like highly systematized and folk magic in certain ways, and kind of even going to how Howard was sort of explaining people trying to understand natural phenomena, is it sets up science and learning and kind of civilization almost as opposed to magical thinking and understanding and folk logic. When, in fact, I think they coexist beautifully. Right? I mean, also, science is becoming more and more a magical thing. Like, you can spend 30 seconds thinking about quantum mechanics and you are in magic land at that point as far as I'm concerned. But…

[Howard] I think the GPS.

[DongWon] Exactly. But I think folk or magical thinking, dream logic, can exist in a way that doesn't negate that this is how the storm works, this is why the moss grows here. It can both be there are magical reasons for that, there are spiritual reasons for that, that are important to us as a community, as a culture, and also, water flows this way, storms work this way for reasons. Right? So I think when you have that in a story and when you're making your magic highly rigorous and systematized in a very Dungeons & Dragons way, you're telling a story that is more science fictional about systems, about abstraction, about society in a certain perspective, and when it's more dream logic, folk logic, more numinous in that way, it is more about the character growth and development and personal experience. Right? It's sort of the scale of the lens… I'm making a very broad generalization.

[Can we push back…]

[DongWon] Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. I am a… Obviously, I'm down for that. But, like, I think there's a reason why I think we tend to want the magic system in one type of story, very broadly speaking, and a little bit more of a certain kind of logic and character growth in a different kind of story.

[Mary Robinette] So, the reason I'm like, yeah, yeah. The Glamorous Histories are totally about exploitation. I mean, I'm like… I write… Like, Glamorous Histories are highly systematized, and you're telling me they're not about character?

[DongWon] No, I'm not saying they're not about character. What I'm saying is the Glamorous Histories are also very concerned with societal questions of how society is structured and oriented in the way the Jane Austen books are. Right? Her books are as much a critique of money and power and social dynamics as they are personal character driven romance stories. I'm not saying these are mutually exclusive categories. I'm saying scale of lens comes into play. I do think the glamorous histories That books have a lot to say about the world in a very broad lens way.

[Mary Robinette] But one of the things… Like… One of the things that I actually do use the magic system… Specifically use the magic system for is that… In book 5, is that James and Vincent have grown up with this very systematized, very European, and then they are encountering people who use Glamour but have been trained… Who've grown up Evo and come at it from a different way, and they been told, "Oh, that doesn't work that way. That's not how Glamour works." They've been like… They have been treated as if the way they use magic is folk… Is not real. Even though they're using exactly the same tools. But it's just the language that they use to talk about it has been pooh-poohed.

[DongWon] One thing I love about this conversation and one thing that… You can tell we keep wandering into like slightly prickly corners of this conversation, is because so many different valences have been attached to these currents. Right? So even me talking about a more systematized versus character driven way sounds like I was making a value judgment between commercial and literary in some way, or something along those lines. I wasn't doing that, but it comes off that way. You know what I mean? We talk about, like, Western versus non-Western, like hierarchical versus non-hier… There's all these like cultural judgments that get caught up in this. I think that is part of what makes this conversation so energetic and fascinating. Being live to those assumptions about what is better writing, what is better fiction, how should magic work, should it be SMART or not? Right? Like you… There's a valence in that, too. Right? I don't know, I love it. This is a super fun conversation for me.

[Erin] I actually… One of the reasons I had fun with SMART, other than, this is what I do when I sit in my house…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Is that… My cat's used to it… Is that, like, thinking about ways in which you can separate letters that seem like they would go well together… So, specific and measurable feel like, okay, that's your systematized versus your sort of generalized, like, uncontrollable. But what happens if you have something that's both specific, but uncontrollable? Or highly measurable, but very general? Like, what happens when we play with… Get rid of the idea that were actually talking about it either has to be X or Y, and figure out what's the Z that lives between…

[Mary Robinette] I love this.

[Erin] And has elements of both.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. I really love this.

[DongWon] What a great system.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Just thinking about that as a set of sliders that you can push back and forth… It's very yummy.

[DongWon] It makes me want to, like, map every piece of fiction I love to that right now.

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.

[Howard] The readerly can of worms here is when someone reads one of these speculative fiction pieces, however the magic was, however the characters were, what is the piece that they come away from and tell you, "Oh, I have got to tell you about this book. It's so cool because the magic does…" and then they tell you all about the magic, versus them saying, "Oh, I love this because these characters do…" For me as a writer, whatever it is that gets me excited about it, is… That is the important piece. I hope that's what the reader comes away with. But as often as not, I'm just wrong.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Well, this has been such a fun conversation. But to think about SMART in a different way, now we have some homework for you.

[DongWon] So, your homework is to write a thing that brings… Write a scene that brings an element of magic into a mundane place that you know well. The grocery store, a bank, whatever. Try to make it impactful without explaining how it all works.

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

[Mary Robinette] Do you like stars? I do. Maybe you'd like to put up a constellation of stars by rating us on Apple Podcasts. Well, yes, we're talking about ratings, not astronomy. But a 5 star review can help us by creating a navigational beacon for new writers like you to find their way to Writing Excuses. So, rate us on Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.03: An Interview with Erin Roberts

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-03-an-interview-with-erin-roberts/

Key Points: Erin Roberts. Working nonprofit communications, then science fiction, fantasy, and horror. MFA! Short stories, and beyond. Telling stories about the way the world is, and the way it could be. The black experience in the American South. Game writing, letting people play in your world. It's all storytelling and worldbuilding. Getting paid? Be scrappy. Check out grants, residencies, and scholarships. Look at projects for creative nurturing, setting you up for the future, and it pays well. Love the work you do.

[Season 18, Episode 3]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] An Interview with Erin Roberts.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] 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.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] So today we are talking with Erin Roberts. We're going to find out a little bit more about her background and where she comes from and the perspective that she's bringing to the podcast. So let… I kind of wanted to start with you've said that you're kind of the early-stage writer here among the five of us, and you're bringing that perspective to the podcast. So let's just dive right in. Where did you get your start? What was the thing that brought you to writing as a serious thing that you were pursuing?

[Erin] Great questions. So I often think of myself as a little bit of a late bloomer, because I was just going about my life, living, working the nonprofit field, doing my thing. In New York, there's the Gotham Writers Center. They were having a class on writing science fiction and fantasy in person, which was like the first time they'd had it in person ever. I decided to take the class, and had a really great professor who just… Was actually, "You're not bad at this. Like, you might want to look into this some more, like this writing thing. It could work out for you." Which is why I love teaching, and why I think teaching is so important, because you just need somebody to kind of believe in you and say, "Like, this could work." So that was not that many years ago. I think it was 2014. So, 2014, 2015. I had not been doing any writing or other than in the margins of my notebooks during boring work meetings. So I just decided to mainline writing. Basically, like think of me with an IV with writing [garbled] coming into it. So I went off to Odyssey writing workshop, I went and got an MFA, I listened to Writing Excuses podcasts…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I did everything that I could to just try to learn about it. But I really kind of came sort of out of nowhere in my life and decided to take this kind of radical shift.

[DongWon] That's such an exciting transition. When… What was your first sale? Like, how long did it take you to get to that first professional sale?

[Erin] My first sale was in… I think it was 2016. It was actually while I was at the MFA program, which was great because it forced me to write all the time because I had to turn in things to my professors or they would beat me.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] Not really. They… So I was turning in things all the time and working on stories. I think actually the first story I sold, Wolfy Things, was something I wrote during Odyssey, and then reworked a bit during my MFA, and then sold to PodCastle. Go, PodCastle. Just really… It was just like a couple of years for that to happen. Then I just kept writing and had a few more sales. I had a few things out in 2018. Then blah blah blah pandemic. I've been doing a few other things with my time as well, but I continue to love and work in the short story form.

[DongWon] Was that the first place you had submitted to or had you submitted to several places before you got there? Like, how long did it take you from the time that you're like, "I think this is good enough to send out," to it ending up on PodCastle?

[Erin] That one took… It took a little bit of a journey. It went around the world. You know that old song? "Been around the world, and I, I, I, I can't find my baby." It's like that, but with short stories. So, I think it was maybe the 10th or 11th, it took a while for that one to sell. That's how it goes a lot of the time.

[Mary Robinette] I was wondering, because you talked about the MFA. I know that you're a science fiction, fantasy, sometimes horror. I always hear people talking about how difficult it is to do science fiction and fantasy in an MFA program. Did you have any pushback? Is that where you started? Like, what was that like?

[Erin] I specifically picked the Stone Coast MFA program because they are science fiction and fantasy, horror, friendly. I will say that from the time that I went to the MFA program, which was like 2017 2018 to now, programs in general have become much more friendly to speculative fiction. I see that now as somebody who teaches at a university, the people that they're looking for as professors, the classes that they're offering. I think people were like, "it was a fad. It'll go away." Then they were like, "It didn't go away, and our students are going to write it. So we might as well bring people on who know about it, and who don't turn up their noses at it." So I think we're actually coming into a really rich, amazing hero for learning about speculative fiction in an MFA program, if that's the thing that you want to do.

[Howard] Okay. So, in 1999, my next-door neighbor had just gotten out of medical school and started an OB/GYN practice at age 45.

[Mary Robinette] I cannot wait to see where this segue goes.

[Howard] He had no idea… He'd been a gym coach…

[Erin] [garbled to me]

[Howard] A collegiate gym coach, and then decided, "No, this isn't what I want to do with my life." It was super inspiring to me. I quit my day job doing software middle management to become a cartoonist. I've seen in my own life that there's a huge effect on my writing that comes from all that stuff that happened before hand. So the question for you… Yes, you say you came to writing late. There's nothing wrong with that. You frontloaded with all of this information, all of this life experience. How has that colored, how has that altered, how has that affected the things that you create?

[Erin] Oo, I love that question. In part because I don't really know. I think it's something that… It's something good to think about more. I think it's something we all could think about more. Because you are you. Sort of like if your face changes every day, you don't notice it. It's when you go and you look at someone else and they're like, "Oh, my gosh, your face has shifted." How this is happened, I don't know. But you see yourself differently than other people see you. So the experiences I've had to me are just the experiences that I've had. But I've had a lot of fun times. Like I… There are things that I've learned in working the nonprofit sector, in working in the social justice philanthropy, this really… That really impacted the way that I think about how writing can create positive change in the world, the ways in which we see the world. One of the things that you learn a lot when you work in nonprofits, and I worked in nonprofit communications, is that there are well-worn paths that we have in our thinking a lot of the time. Part of what you try to do when you're in my job is to shift that path a little bit, and say, "Hey, you know, the world could be a little different if we go this different way." Writing can do that, fiction writing does that as well. Every piece of fiction is telling some sort of story about the world, the way it is, the way it could be. I think that having thought about that differently outside of the fiction world really helped me think differently about how fiction does that as well.

[DongWon] Great. Let's take a break for a second to talk about the thing of the week, and we will be right back with more from Erin Roberts about how to build a career and how to build a life in the writing world.

[Erin] All right. Our thing of the week is Dungeons & Dragons, y'all. It is Journeys through the Radiant Citadel which is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure book. It's a compilation of different adventures, including one written by me, yours truly, Erin Roberts, that's about horror and Southern Gothic and black folks. But what's really important and exciting about this book is in thinking about the different perspectives that we all bring to the table in the way that it shapes the world's that we create, Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is a D&D book, an official out from the Wizards of the Coast D&D book that was written entirely by people of color. Bringing our own lived experiences and perspectives to the page and saying, medieval European fantasy, awesome. But what else can I bring to the table? For me, it was what can I bring about the black experience in the American South. For other folks, it was what can I bring from Mexico. From other folks, it was all around the world. So people were really bringing themselves to the table and saying, "Play in our world. Experience our adventures. Just have a good old time, in a D&D way." So, it's Journeys through the Radiant Citadel, and it's out from Wizards of the Coast.

[Dan] All right. So I have a question for you. As someone who has also worked in the gaming industry, I'm really fascinated to hear about your game writing. How did you get into that? What are your plans for it in the future? Do you see yourself as primarily a game writer, primarily a fiction writer who does games? Tell us about that aspect of your career.

[Erin] Sure. I'll start with the second part first, which is that I think of myself as a storyteller. Really, what it's about is figuring out what's the best venue to tell each story. So there are times when you want to control the story, you want to know exactly how the person is moving through it. That's what prose is great for. That's where you're trying to control everything from where somebody takes a breath to what they think of the characters. Not always successfully, but that's a little bit of the dream. In game writing, you're letting people play a little bit in your world. Part of it is creating a backdrop for other people to tell their stories. So it's just a very different type of storytelling. But it's all storytelling, and it's all worldbuilding, which is one of my favorite parts of just storytelling as a whole, and why I've always liked science fiction and fantasy and horror. For me, I got involved because a very kind person, I told them I really wanted to do some game writing. Ajit George, an amazing game writer himself, he passed my name to a few folks, and then I wrote for them and they were like, "Come back and write more. And write more, and write more." Because as… If you're ever a freelancer or someone working in a field like that, getting the first job is hard, getting the second job is harder, and the third is the hardest. Because that's where you really have to prove that you've got your mettle, and that like it wasn't a complete fluke. So I will continue working and going forward and doing more game writing and doing more storytelling in all forms.

[DongWon] That's amazing, and that kind of segues into a thing that I'm wondering about. Because I'm a literary agent. My concern is how do we get people paid for the creative work that they do. Right? You've mentioned some creative sale… Or professional sales. Doing the game writing. What does that look like for you in terms of putting together a sustainable life that is centered around your storytelling, around your writing?

[Erin] I'm a scrappy, scrappy girl. So I'm all about making sure that I get paid, no matter where it comes from. One thing that I think we could all be is a little bit scrappier, actually. Obviously in… One of the great things about speculative fiction is that people are generally paid, especially in the short story world, which they aren't in other genres. But like I've gotten my local jurisdiction to give me grants. Like, I'm a big fan of grants, of residencies, of scholarships. There is money out in the world for people who… They're just like, "We want you to write more. We want to support that." A lot of times, they're not even getting as many applications as they could. So I'm taking all the money. I'm going to just ruin my life here by telling other people to like look and see what's available in your area. Even if you take the money out of my pocket, I want other folks to have it as well. But I've used grants, I've used freelance jobs, game writing pays. It's doing a little bit of everything to balance it out. One of my favorite things when I'm trying to decide what I want to do next and take on a project is something I saw recently on Twitter that apparently Dolly Parton says, which is to decide it's got to do two of the following three things. One, it nurtures you creatively. Two, it sets you up for the future. And three, it pays well. So if it does two of those three, definitely consider it. If it does all three, you probably want to do it if you can. Also, I would say, if you can like keep your own health and sleep at night and have relationships with other people. But those are the things that kind of I think about. But money is definitely one of them. So, get scrappy.

[DongWon] That is such fantastic advice. I love that so much. I just want to add one last note, just to tag onto that, is I so wish more science fiction and fantasy writers knew about the grants, knew about how to apply for residencies. It's a thing that's incredibly common in the literary world. I've seen writers really build a whole life for themselves, even before publishing their first story, even before publishing their first book. Really, just do some searching, learn how to write a grant application, learn how to apply for residencies. See what's out there, and there's a ton of opportunities to help you figure out how to build a life that is centered on writing that isn't necessarily about directly getting paid for the fiction that you're putting on the page.

[Howard] Okay. So, Erin, I don't know that I've got the dates right here, but sometime between 2010 and 2014, something happened where you went from doing the thing, or doing all the things, you were doing many things, and you decided, "Hey, I think I want to be a writer." What was it about writing that appealed to you? I mean, was it something you read? What planted the hook? What was it that so gigged you out of what you were doing before and pulled you into this horrible world we all live in now?

[Erin] Well, I'll tell you a secret about myself first. Which is that I love most things that I do. I think a lot of folks, there's this theory that you sort of have like your soul sucking regular life jobs and things, and then like your creative amazingness. I loved my work in the nonprofit field, and there's another version of me who's doing that now. But what I loved about it was the ability to… I love puzzles. I love the puzzle of figuring out how to take the story that's in your head and put it on the page. I just finished working on a story and I… There's the thing that happens where you're working on a sentence and you realize, "I've got it. Oh, my gosh, this thing is in my head, it now came out, and it came out the perfect way that it was supposed to." To me, there's magic in that. In really being able to… Who knows where it's happening in your brainstem, but that process is something that's so magical. Trying to capture that magic, even on the days when I want to like shred everything I've ever written, is part of what keeps me going and keeps me motivated from day to day.

[Mary Robinette] I love that so much. It's something that I think is unfashionable, the idea that we love what we do. The fiction of the "oh, the angst… Oh, it's so hard, my writing, my craft. I suffer for it." We never hear the "I love what I do. Look at that, I wrote something good." So, I'm delighted to hear that that is part of what guides you.

[Erin] Absolutely.

[DongWon] Yeah. For me, it's always like I think writers are their own best advocates. No one's going to fight better or more clearly or more cogently then you will. I think that starts with loving what you do and loving your work. Erin, it's just such a delight to hear you talk about that and about that aspect of it.

[DongWon] So, Erin, I believe you have our homework for us this week.

[Erin] I do. This has been an amazing time, because it's gotten me to think about what's brought me to where I am. So the homework is to think about what's brought you to where you are. When you write, when you read, you bring a bit of yourself to the table. So write down what are three things that have happened in your life that you loved as a storytelling conceit. It could be anything from the real world to the imaginary, that you think you carry with you and that you bring to the page. Either when you're reading or when you're writing.

[Mary Robinette] That's wonderful homework. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.01: Twenty Twenty-Three, By Way of Introduction

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-01-twenty-twenty-three-by-way-of-introduction/

Key Points: Where is everyone? Mary Robinette is now a mid-career writer, focusing on science fiction and fantasy, with a heaping teaspoon of theater background as an influence. DongWon is a literary agent, who has worked as an editor, and brings the industry perspective, along with a deep interest in craft. Erin is an early career writer, in various formats, including tabletop role-playing games and audio narratives. She also is a teacher. Dan is starting to work as the vice president of narrative in Brandon Sanderson's company. Howard is a cartoonist who hasn't been cartooning for a while, and is finishing up the Schlock Mercenary 20 year run, and doesn't know what comes next. So, metaphorically, everyone re-introduced themselves, and there's a lot of reinventing going on! Stay tuned to see what happens next!

[Season 18, Episode 1]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Twenty Twenty-Three, By Way of Introduction.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] 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.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] Welcome to 2023. This is our very first episode of the New Year, and of our new cast and format. We decided that it was time, after so many years, a decade and a half, to shake things up. So, let's start first by giving a fond and loving farewell to our founding and now emeritus member, Brandon Sanderson. He's been kind of unofficially stepped away from this show for a while now. He still comes in for a few episodes a year. He has now moved on to other things. So, farewell, Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. He's been very supportive about the transition and about welcoming our two new hosts.

[Dan] Yeah. So we've got two brand-new core hosts this year. We're going to spend the whole 15 minutes introducing all five of us, actually, but DongWon and Erin, welcome to the show. New core hosts, new Writing Excuses wonderful people. We're happy to have you.

[DongWon] Thank you. I'm super happy to be here.

[Mary Robinette] I really wish that we had done this while we were on the cruise ship so you could hear the thunderous applause in the background. You can just imagine it though. Because we did introduce them to our… To the people on the… Who come on the Writing Excuses workshop and cruise. Who know both DongWon and Erin very well, since they been with us for several years on those.

[Yes]

[Mary Robinette] So part of what we realized was that with Brandon stepping away, we were looking at wanting to expand the cast, and we also were like we would like people who are younger than we are…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But who also have different perspectives than we do. Who are at different places in their careers or who are coming at it from a different angle. So…

[Howard] By way of clarification, when Dan said we want to introduce you to our new hosts this year, it is not our new hosts for this year, it is our new hosts, as of this year.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Howard] This is not just 2023. This is time immemorial…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Until something terrible happens or you quit, both of which are kind of the same thing.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] We are bound to this forever.

[Mary Robinette] That's right.

[Dan] So, DongWon and Erin, as Mary Robinette said, they been with us on the event side for years now. DongWon's been on almost every cruise we've done. Which is wonderful. Erin has, for the last couple years, been helping us run all of the events. We're incredibly excited to have all of them now core hosts on microphone. Going forward, it's going to be cool. So what we want to do with this episode is introduce them in more detail, but also kind of reintroduce all five of us. What do we bring to the table, what kinds of things are you going to hear from us throughout the year, where we are in our career, what kind of things we're working on, what skills we're trying to develop. So let's take some time to dig into that. I would actually love to start with Mary Robinette. Tell us what you're doing and what kinds of things you are working on and what perspectives you're going to bring to us this year.

[Mary Robinette] So when I started the podcast… And this is part of why we wanted to kind of reintroduce ourselves… I was a very early career writer. I am now a decade into my career. More than that, actually. That's alarming. Anyway, I have 10 books out in the world. 10 novels. A children's book, two short story collections. I am a professional puppeteer and a voice actor. So the… My views on writing have shifted. There's a lot of things that… About the way the industry has changed since I came in that I'm excited to talk about. Also, as I have been moving through my writing process, I'm constantly having to… The shape of my imposter syndrome shifts. It never completely goes away, but the battles that I'm fighting are different each time. So you're going to get to hear from me a lot of stuff about what it's like to be a mid career writer. You're going to get to hear about the differences between writing science fiction and fantasy. You're going to get to hear about how my theater background influences the way I approach writing.

[Howard] Briefly, I'd like to take a moment and say that in our episode pie, Season Three, Episode 14, Mary Robinette came on as a guest and took principles of puppetry as they applied to writers. The whole episode, Dan and Brandon and I were just floored. Jaws dropped, being school. In that moment, the first thing we learned was, wow, it would be cool if Mary Robinette could always be with us. We didn't make that change for another couple of seasons. The second thing that we realized, kind of belatedly, is, wow, other people's perspectives can be just mind blowing, just based on a simple change to background. Sure, we're all trying to write, but we're all so danged different. Mary taught us that.

[Yay]

[Dan] Let's also point out as you were enumerating the accolades of your resume, Mary Robinette, you failed to mention that in the time since you started on our show, you have won pretty much every award this industry offers.

[Mary Robinette] Oh! Um…

[Laughter]

[Dan] You're incredibly accomplished successful and wonderful writer. So…

[Mary Robinette] Thank you. That's right. I should probably say that. I do have four Hugo awards, a Locus, a Nebula, and… Yes. I do that. Let's talk about DongWon.

[DongWon] Hi. I'm DongWon Song. I've guested on a number of podcasts in the past, so some of you have heard me before. I'm a literary agent by trade. I've been in the traditional publishing industry since 2005, so 17 years now, which is terrifying. Pretty much my entire adult career has been in this business. I've been an agent for seven of those years. I've worked as an editor at a big five house, I've worked in a digital publishing startup, so I have a pretty wide range of perspective. Really what I'm bringing to the podcast is a little unsurprisingly that industry perspective. I can speak to what's going on on the bookselling side, on the publishing side, what agents are looking for. Really coming at it from a perspective of not just how the writing process happens, but what happens once that gets into the hand of the industry. What are the business perspectives around that? Right? I'm someone who cares very deeply about craft, and I love talking about craft as well, but I can sort of blend that with that other perspective and bring in a little bit of context of what's happening out there on the business end of things. I really love talking about these issues. I love sort of educating people on how the business works. I love teaching craft things as well. So this is a true delight for me.

[Dan] That's great. Can I ask you for a very quick resume? When you were an editor, what kind of books people might have heard of that you worked on? Now, as an agent, who do you represent? Just so people can kind of place you in the industry.

[DongWon] Yeah. When I was an editor, I was an editor at Orbit, so I've done science fiction and fantasy primarily my whole career. As an editor, I acquired and published the first two books in The Expanse series, by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the name James S. A. Corey. I published the Mira Grant books, the Feed series, under the name Mira Grant. I'm sorry, that's Seanan McGuire writing under the name Mira Grant. I've worked with Walter Jon Williams, Greg Bear, a really wide range of writers doing science fiction and fantasy in different forms. Now, as a literary agent, I do primarily science fiction and fantasy, but I also do middle grade and YA and some graphic novels as well. On the science fiction and fantasy side, I work with Sarah Gailey, Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone. So they did This Is How You Lose the Time War. I've worked with Dan Scott Lynch, who is obviously a very well-known fantasy author. Arkady Martine, who has won two Hugos for her first two novels. On the young adult and middle grade side, I work with Mark Oshiro, who is co-authoring the next Rick Riordan book. Carlos Hernandez who has two really lovely little grades out from the Rick Riordan Presents line. On the graphic novel side, I work with Harmony Becker who has a memoir out by the name of Himawara House and Shing Yin Khon who has a wonderful graphic novel by the name of The Legend of Auntie Po for which they won an Eisner and were nominated for a National Book Award.

[Dan] Awesome. Cool. Thank you very much. Very excited to have you here. We are going to take a break for our thing of the week. When we come back, we will hear from Erin.

[Mary Robinette] I want to talk about The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson. I have been a fan of the Mistborn series since the moment I discovered them. It's really exciting to watch the ways Brandon keeps evolving this world. So many times when you go into a fantasy world, it's like one era and there is very little that changes. This goes through a huge evolution in the way the magic system works, in the way the characters work, and it is… I find these books so exciting. So, The Lost Metal just came out. It's the fourth and final book in the Wax and Wanes series, which is the second era of Mistborn. I recommend starting if you have… You can actually just jump in with the Wax and Wane books, but it's also really a lot of fun to go through the whole journey. I realize that I am telling you to read seven books, and I'm comfortable with that. I know what you're familiar with when you think of Brandon Sanderson. These are short for him. So I highly encourage you to pick up The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson.

[Dan] All right. Thank you very much. Now, Erin. We're so excited to have you with us. Tell us about yourself.

[Erin] So, I have to say, after these first couple of introductions, I feel like the person on the Star Trek show that's there to make the audience feel like they can relate to humans.

[Laughter]

[Erin] So I… Which is a nice way to say that I'm sort of taking the 10 years ago Mary Robinette early career writer kind of slot… Plot… Slot. I don't know what that is. Or perspective, and bringing that to the table. So I am an early career writer. I've had a few short stories published in places like Asimov's and Clarke's World and The Dark. I also like to say that I get around a bit. Which is to say that I like to write in a few different formats. I also write for tabletop role-playing games. So I have had my work in Dungeons and Dragons official books, and Pathfinder, Starfinder, all those kinds of fun tabletop games. I've also written interactive fiction. I've written for audio narrative… The audio narrative thing, Zombies Run. If you know it, you know it. If you don't…

[Mary Robinette] I love Zombies Run so much.

[Erin] So, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Very fun being chased by zombies.

[Erin], I guess, and try out different things and see what kind of writing works in what kind of setting. I also love teaching. I teach at the University of Texas at Austin and warp the minds of the next generation. Now I'm here to do the same to you.

[Mary Robinette] The first time I saw Erin teach, I was like, "Oh. Oh, you're really good." It was… So I should also… I also want to say that Erin first came on the Writing Excuses cruise as a scholarship recipient.

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] We have basically been impressed by her since we met her. So I'm really excited. Every time we talk, I'm like, "Oh, that's really smart." So, no pressure. No pressure at all.

[Erin] It ends here.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, well, because we're not that smart. Sorry about that. We have done that to your career.

[Dan] We're going to ruin everything now. Awesome. Erin, so excited to have you here. Thank you also for the Star Trek reference in your introduction. Back when Howard and I had a Twitch D & D show, we spun it off into a Twitch Star Trek show, and Erin was our captain on that. So… DongWon also. Actually, Mary Robinette, you're the only one that was never a cast member on our Twitch show. Sorry.

[Mary Robinette] You never invited me, so…

[Dan] I know. We should have.

[Mary Robinette] I guess I know where I stand now. Thanks.

[Dan] We'll have to resurrect that whole thing. Anyway, let's…

[Erin] You can be a Tribble.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] [squeak]

[Dan] All right. So it is my turn now. I also am… I have… I'm in the middle of a big career transition. About a month and a half ago, I started working full time as the vice president of narrative in Brandon Sanderson's company. So a lot of people are wondering what that means. What it mostly means is that I'm doing the same thing I used to be doing, I'm just getting paid slightly better for it now.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] I'm still writing books. I am only a year or two further into my career than Mary Robinette is. I think I have 19 books published. What I'm doing right now is mostly audio. The last several years, the Zero G series was audio originals which I wrote as scripts rather than as prose. Those I did eventually put into kind of prose format for e-book and print books, and you can find those out. Audible original Ghost Station was my brief and unsuccessful foray into historical fiction.

[I loved it]

[Dan] I'm a huge fan of that, and I tried to write one. I really like the book. All 12 people that have read the book really liked it. But it's my least successful by far.

[Mary Robinette] It's really good.

[Dan] Thank you. What I'm doing right now is I am still doing some of my own books. I'm working on a middle grade fantasy. I'm working on another YA horror series, but I'm also writing a bunch of Brandon collaborations. Our first one is called Dark One. Actually, the first thing you'll be able to read from that or listen to is another audio series. It's called Dark One Forgotten. I don't know exactly when that is launching. Sometime this month allegedly. But then eventually down the road I will be doing a Cosmere series, and lots of other things. It's been a very different experience for me to be doing. First of all, having a… What essentially is a day job again where I go to an office and I have coworkers. I haven't had that in about 15 years and it's very strange. But, yeah, I'm seeing a different side of the publishing industry. A kind of lower mid list author who is now working with the most successful fantasy author in the world, and seeing things from many different sides at once. So that's what you're going to get from me this year.

[Howard] Now it's my turn.

[Dan] Yes.

[Howard] I'd just like to start by saying, "Erin, get off my lawn." You're not the one who is the every person, the human being. That's been my job forever.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I'm the not that smart. I was the not that smart for like five years and I still am. Not that smart. I'm a cartoonist. I say that with the joking self-confidence of I haven't really done any cartooning in quite a while. Because my… And I'm going to use these words absolutely unironically… My magnum opus, the Schlock Mercenary web comic, ran for 20 years with… Daily, without missing a day, and is now complete. For the next year, we're focusing on getting the last of the books into print, which is a project that I'm up to my eyeballs in, with my wife and collaborator and co-conspirator, Sandra Tayler. When that's done, I'm not sure what comes next. I don't know. What do I bring to the show? Based on what I've heard from listeners who come up to me at Gen Con and say, "Wait. Wait. I recognize that voice. Is Howard Tayler somewhere in this booth?" I think, "What the heck? How is that how someone's rec… Can you not read? My name is in 1 foot tall letters right behind my head."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They come up and say, "Thank you so much for recasting these incredible things that everybody else says in dumb words that I get." Mwah, okay. They're not dumb words, they're words that I get. If I'm a one trick pony, the trick is a metaphor. I look for ways to take the tools that I'm always learning from our cohosts, from our guests, and trying to cast them in ways that I can actually wrap my head around them and use them. The operating question obviously is will I actually use them? What will I use them for? What is coming next? I don't have answers to those questions right now.

[Mary Robinette] But we will all discover those together.

[Yay]

[Mary Robinette] Thanks, Howard. Since you didn't actually say your name. That was Howard Tayler.

[Dan] So, that is what you've got coming from us in the year to come. This episode has gone long because we wanted to make sure that you are getting a good introduction to us. Our format for the year is going to be kind of similar to this. We are going to take the time to dig into specific works and specific ideas that each of the cast members has. Then, let them teach us. Then, bounce new ideas around. We think you're really going to like it. So, stay tuned for the rest of the year. This is going to be awesome.

[Mary Robinette] So, along those lines, one of the things that we're going to be doing is we're going to be taking a work in using it as the spine of a series of episodes that explore ideas. So you can think of this year as having a certain aspect of book club. The first book that were going to be looking at is in February. That's… We're going to be doing a deep dive on my novel The Spare Man. That's going to be full of spoilers. Just want to be very, very clear about this. That we are going to… I am going to spoil the heck out of this book as we talk about the choices that I made and how. Then we'll use that to talk about how you can use tension, how you structure murder mysteries. There's going to be a lot of things that are going to come out of that, using it as an example. So, before you get to February, listen or read The Thin Man… The Spare Man by me, Mary Robinette Kowal. Then we'll give you warnings about what the other books are well in advance so that you can be prepared for those. It's not always going to be a book, don't worry. Sometimes it'll be a short story, sometimes it'll be something on the internets that we are like let's dig into this.

[Mary Robinette] All right. Now, homework?

[Dan] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] For your homework, as you've noticed, we have all been talking about who we are. Several of us, and the series, are talking about how we're reinventing. What I want you to do is I want you to look at your work. This is the beginning of a new year. Look at your work, look at your process, look at where you want to be. Think about an aspect that you want to reinvent. You don't have to reinvent everything. But, just one thing that you're like, "I want to try something different, I want to try something new." This is your opportunity to do that, so write that down. Then put it someplace where you can look at it every now and then, like this is a thing I'm going to try. All right. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/02/16-18-poetry-and-the-fantastic/

Key points (and angles?): If poetry breaks language into meaning, then fantasy breaks reality into truths. Take reality, and tip it on its side, so you can see the interconnective tissue. Puppetry, science fiction and fantasy, and poetry all do these. Consider the aesthetic, what things look like or what language is used, the mechanical, the structure and plot, or the personal, the idiosyncratic choices of a person, their narrative and message.

[Season 16, Episode 18]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetry and the Fantastic.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Amal] And we're all fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, we are.

[Mary Robinette] This is the final episode in our eight part poetry master class with Amal. She's going to bring us around to a coda, I believe.

[Amal] Yes. So, throughout the series, we have talked about ways to approach poetry, to make it less scary. We talked about differences between poetry and prose. We've talked about strategies and approaches for writing poetry, appreciating poetry, structuring poetry, and some of the failure modes that can come from those things. But what I'd really like to talk to you… Talk about, rather, in this last episode is just how inseparable to me poetry and the genre in which I love writing, science fiction and fantasy, are. I want to talk about the fantastic more broadly, to incorporate multiple elements and facets of our genre. But I also just want to say that these things are not separate in my head. They are so often absolutely married to each other. I wanted to just kind of dive into the why's and wherefore's of that a little bit. So there is a quote by T. S. Eliot that I often refer to. The quote specifically is that discussing poetry, the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more elusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. So, I like to take that quote and break it, essentially. Do unto it, as T. S. Eliott says, the poet does in general. I like to say, to recall it as that poetry breaks or dislocates if necessary language into its meaning. I think about this a lot, because of the way that I was raised with poetry. I… So, my family is from Lebanon and Syria. I was born in Canada, but my parents were born in Lebanon. When… I lived in Lebanon for a little bit when I was little for two years when I was seven. That was where I first wrote poetry. I wrote my first poem at the age of seven when we were living in Beirut. When I did that, my parents were very moved and they told me that I was part of a sort of lineage of writing poetry, essentially. That my grandfather, my father's father, had been a celebrated poet and that poetry was part of my inheritance, essentially, and that they were very happy to see me writing poetry. I cannot stress enough how, like, the poem that I wrote when I was seven, was not a work of staggering genius.

[Laughter]

[Amal] But it was a poem, and it was recognizable as such. I absolutely still remember it. It was… It involved like a lot of playing with language, with unfamiliar bits of it, and it was also addressed to the moon. My grandfather's poetry was political, was revolutionary, was part of this kind of lineage of speaking truth to power and being a voice for the voiceless and stuff like that. My address to the moon was not that.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But it was, nevertheless, something that showed my parents that I wanted to use language in the ways that he did as something transformative, as something that made the world different than it was otherwise.

[Howard] My father had memorized a lot of poems, and would storytell with them. One of the ones that he told a lot, because us kids ask for it a lot, was The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. Which I love. I love it because my dad… I can hear my dad saying it. My dad, when he read the poem, relied heavily on the rhyme and meter, he leaned way into it as he read it. My freshman year in college, one of my professors on an outing recited The Cremation of Sam McGee and was much more… Conversational is the wrong word, but more natural dialogue-y with the way things flowed. I remember the first couple of stanzas thinking, "Wait. Did he… Are those the right words? No, I've heard this enough, that those are the right words." Then, the whole rest of the poem, as I listened, I think poetry itself became unlocked for me. Because I realized, "Oh. The meter and the rhyme aren't the point. The story isn't necessarily the point." It's sort of this whole thing, and the poem has a life outside of what Robert Service gave it. The poem has a life that is experienced differently depending on the listener and depending on the person who says it out loud. Okay, this was 17-year-old, or maybe I was 18 at that time… 18-year-old Howard having what at that time passed for an epiphany.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But I still love that poem, and I still like sometimes reading it and hearing the different voices in my head as I scan through it.

[Amal] Do you feel like one of them has like superseded the other in your head, or that your own reading voice has sort of introduced a different natural cadence into it?

[Howard] My voice dominates all of those at this point. Because my dad passed away when I was 20, and the reading I heard from Prof. Lyons was when I was 18. I'm now 53. So the voice that's in my head at this point is my own. But I cherish… This… I think this comes back to poetry as meme. I cherish this memetic series of events because there's a whole bunch of information compressed into that poem that Robert Service didn't put in there.

[Amal] Hah! That's absolutely true. This is the way that... I feel like a lot of us talk about novels in this way, too, that you read a different novel when you come to it at a different age, or that you might have one version of this novel in your head that gains or loses elements as you grow up, and then revisit it as a different person, essentially. To me, there's a lot of fantasy in that as well. There's a lot of… Even though this is obviously a very natural and observed progress of mortality, the idea of departure and return, moving through time in these ways, or, like the kind of time travel that feels inherent in [garbled] to something that you first experienced at a different age. All of that, to me, partakes of these relationships, of this kind of sense of the fantastic. There is this beautiful, beautiful essay by Sophia Samatar called On the 13 Words That Made Me a Writer. I like all of Samatar's work. I return to her work on a bimonthly basis, basically. I just reread her essays all the time, because I always… They always speak to me in a way that I feel like I need at a given moment. What she does in this essay is she talks about how, for her, fantasy resides in language. That when she was a child… I'll say like… So the 13 words in question are

There was a library, and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble.

These words made me a writer. When I was in middle school, my mother brought home a used paperback copy of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast…

And so on. So she draws these comparisons between like… So, this was a fantasy novel. So she tried to then go and find other fantasy novels that would make her feel the way that this made her feel. It became very hit or miss. She would get that feeling from some books, but not from others. She came to realize that the thing that catalyzed this very specific feeling in her of wonder and awe and marvel was more to do with the language that was being used than the plots or characters or tropes in a given story that might market it as fantasy. So she found herself finding that experience of fantasy in books that were not marketed or labeled as such. That that spirit of wonder and stuff like that she could find in lots of different places. I feel that way about fantasy, because it brings me back to this idea about what poetry does to language. So if poetry breaks language into meaning, I feel like fantasy breaks reality into truths. That what poetry does to language, fantasy does to reality. That the experience that we get from it as writers of genre fiction in so many different ways is that we are always figuring out ways to break and hack reality into a specific experience for our readers, right? And that poetry is doing that too, but at the level of language in a way that you can foreground or background as much as you like. But I also want to say that literature has been poetry for a lot longer than it has been not poetry. That we have… The novel is actually a very recent technology in terms of literature. Poetry is ancient. Similarly, fantasy is ancient. We have had domestic realism for a lot less time than we have had fantasy and the fantastic in our literature. I want to just give people this similarity because I want people who love reading science fiction and fantasy to look at poetry as as much theirs to play with, to read, to be moved and transformed by as the stunning books that they read when they were 12.

[Mary Robinette] So, I have… You've given me a thought that I want to dive into, but first, let us pause for the book of the week, which is Monster Portrait.

[Amal] Yes. So, Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar, whom I adore. It's by Sophia Samatar and her brother, Del Samatar. Del Samatar is an artist. So the book, Monster Portrait, is a very slender book of fictionalized autobiography, where Sophia Samatar is responding to these illustrations, these images that Del has made with snapshots that involve interrogations of what is a monster, like, thinking about monsters and monstrosity, and when those things are valued and when they are not valued. Thinking of those in relation to race, to borders, to belonging. It's just an absolutely luminous… I know luminous is like a massive cliché in terms of talking about [garbled]

[chuckles]

[Amal] I review books for a living, I am too keenly aware of this, but genuinely, reading this book gives me an experience of light that I just don't know how to talk about otherwise. It's deeply beautiful. I just cannot recommend it enough. If you wanted to read a book that kind of could be a bridge to you between prose and poetry, I cannot recommend this one enough for doing exactly that thing.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that sounds amazing. So, that was Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar and Del Samatar.

[Mary Robinette] So, here's the thing that was running through my head as you were talking. There's a thing that longtime listeners will have heard me say before that one of the things that drew me to puppetry is the same thing that drew me to SF and fantasy, which is that it takes reality and it tips it to the side, so that you can see the interconnective tissue. As you were talking, I was like, "Oh. Okay. That's what poetry does, too."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But the other thing that went through my head as you were talking was about why a person picks a particular form. There's this other idea that I often talk about, usually when I'm trying to explain to people what voice means. It was in puppetry, we have these three ideas. There's the aesthetics, the mechanical, and the personal. The aesthetic is what something looks like. The mechanical is literally like what kind of puppet are you using. The personal is all of the idiosyncratic choices that you, as a person, make. The example that I use is that if you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it will look like a different character. But what occurred to me as you were talking is that I can take that kind of model and think of it as the kind of thing that drives you as a writer. The story you were telling with Sophia that it was the language that called to her, it's like, "Oh, that she is drawn to aesthetic." Whereas I am… There are a lot of people who are drawn to the plot, the structural mechanics of a story. Then, other people are drawn to the kind of the personal story, the personal narrative, the message, so to speak, that's within it. That kind of knowing which thing drives you as a writer also tells you where your defaults are and where your weaknesses are.

[Amal] Yes. I completely agree with that. That's so helpful.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was like, "Oh. That is part of why…" Like, Pat Rothfuss talks about the fact that he needs to get the next word right before he can move on. I've always been like, "What's the point of him polishing words if you're not going to use them?"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, if I'm going to [garbled delete them?] later.

[Howard] How do I know if I'm going to use them if they're not polished?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Wait. Yeah. This is exactly that thing.

[Howard] That's the dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. So it strikes me as a… That, for listeners who are not naturally language driven, that one of the really arguably most powerful reasons to dive into this is because it gives you a different way to approach story. It gives you a different understanding of the ways we communicate. It basically tips your entire narrative form on its side to allow you to see the interconnected tissue.

[Amal] I think that is a beautiful, beautiful way of approaching that. I completely agree. I'm reminded… Gosh, who was saying this? Mmm… I'm not going to get this right. I think that Vonda Lee at some point was talking about… Possibly had an article on Tor.com or something that was about exactly this kind of thing, about how writing outside of your comfort zone being to learn… Actually, I'm not… I could be totally wrong, that it wasn't Vonda Lee, either. But mostly what I'm remembering is an article on figuring out where your facility is so that you can figure out in reverse, essentially, where your lack of facility is so that you can work on those things. I love that thought of approaching… Like, the thing that interconnected tissue and stuff. Because I think, too, of how many fantasy novels can… Like, are maybe not thought of as ones that are poetry forward and stuff, but, to me, absolutely are, because… I'm thinking of something like Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Where, like it's written… It's not written in a way that is difficult to get into and stuff. It's very clear. But it's also very stylized. It's also very… And poetry is like a thematic plot-based concern. In the book, you need to know poetry in order to be able to read bureaucratic documents that end up on your desk as an ambassador and stuff like that. The crux of the novel, the climax of it, is the writing of a poem. Which is something that is unbelievably difficult to pull off. Like, this is where you absolutely do not want to miss the mark with a piece of rhyme that is not landing in a way that… Your whole plot depends on whether or not this is a good poem.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Amal] And she absolutely nails it. Like, I think that the phrase "I am a spear in the hands of the Sun," is like the last line of this, and on the back of that line, they build a revolution and it's this whole enormous thing… Sorry, spoilers for a book that came out two years ago.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But, hey, it's just absolutely wonderful, and poetry is part of the texture of that book. But I… Like, I don't know if Arkady would talk about herself as having written it poetically, or of [garbled]. But, nevertheless, there's this sensibility, I guess, to that style, to that aesthetic, that is truly wonderful to me.

[Mary Robinette] This has been fantastic. We are, I'm afraid, at the time which we need to wrap things up with our time with poetry. Do you…

[Howard] I would love… Dan, you remember that thing that I read from Robert Service at the very beginning to you? The…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] That feels like closure. I'm just going to go.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. I have no idea what you're talking about. So you say that thing.

[Amal] Do you want to do it after the homework or before the homework?

[Howard] Have we done the homework yet?

[Amal, Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] No. We did not do… Okay. Do the homework.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Dan] Someone was looking up a poem instead of paying attention.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So, as the… As sad as I am to leave things here, I… We have come to the homework part. Talking about novels and about prose and poetry, and to bring this all full-circle, the homework I want to leave you with is I want you to find a favorite line from a novel or a short story, one that moves you really, really deeply, one that you kind of keep in your head every now and then. I want you to take that line and use it as the epigraph for a poem. So, essentially, if you see a poem and there's like a single line in italics at the start, before the poem actually starts, that's what I mean. I want you to use that line from a novel or a short story, and I want you to write a poem following it, I want you to write a poem sparked by it. A kind of poetic tribute to whatever that line did to you.

[Howard] The reason I brought this up is that it feels like a poet's version of "you're out of excuses, now go write." It's from Robert Service.

Lone amid the café’s cheer,

Sad of heart am I to-night;

Dolefully I drink my beer,

But no single line I write.

There’s the wretched rent to pay,

Yet I glower at pen and ink:

Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,

It is later than you think!

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's lovely. Also, so painful and so true. I'm… As we send folks away, I'm going to also share my father's favorite poem by Ogden Nash. Further Reflections on Parsley.

Parsley is gharsley.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Dan, do you want to share a poem, too?

[Dan] That poem reminds me of the time that someone auditioned for our high school musical by singing Minimum-Wage by They Might Be Giants.

[Laughter]

[Dan] The only words in the song are minimum-wage. He just shouted it and left the room. It was great.

[Amal] Beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] That's the only thing you want to share before we wrap?

[Dan] Yes. I am going to share a poem with you. This is one of my all-time favorites. By Brian Turner, who was a medic in Afghanistan and wrote a lot of poetry, and then came home and he was, for a while, the poet laureate of the US. His most famous poem is called Here, Bullet.

If a body is what you want,

then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,

the aorta’s opened valves, the leap

thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,

that inexorable flight, that insane puncture

into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish

what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,

here is where I complete the word you bring

hissing through the air, here is where I moan

the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering

my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have

inside of me, each twist of the round

spun deeper, because here, Bullet,

[Whoof]

here is where the world ends, every time.

[Amal] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with all of that, my dear listeners, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.32: Worldbuilding Gender Roles

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/08/11/worldbuilding-gender-roles/

Key points: How do you worldbuild different gender roles for science fiction and fantasy stories? Start by recognizing that most fiction has a clearly defined binary, male and female. But... Until you have words and categories, you may have trouble perceiving things. Blue, or nonbinary genders. Try reading some things written by different genders. Listen to conversations. Avoid simply reversing roles. Beware exoticizing, objectifying, or fetishizing the unfamiliar. First, do no harm. Don't use changes in gender roles or identity as sprinkles on your sundae. Have you built a society, have you considered the effects, the ramifications? Remember story purpose, and ask yourself if removing this piece will break your purpose for writing the story. Sometimes background affects how we perceive foreground elements, too.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 32.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Gender Roles.

[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] We're talking about how to worldbuild gender roles. How to approach this topic, which can be a little tricky. You can veer into some problematic areas in this direction. So we want to touch this very carefully, but very sincerely, and talk about how you might go about worldbuilding different gender roles for your science fiction and fantasy stories.

[Mary Robinette] So, one of the first things that I think we should acknowledge is that most of us have grown up reading fiction with a very clearly defined binary, male and female. There's some fiction, like Sheri Tepper's Gate to Women's Country or The Left Hand of Darkness where there are things that are being played with. But as we become more aware in the 21st century, we realize that gender is a spectrum. I'm going to use an analogy here that is a visually-based analogy. So bear with me. There's… I listen to Radio Lab and they had this episode on color.

[Margaret] I remember the show.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. This is amazing. The question was why doesn't the word blue appear in Homer's… In the Odyssey, or the Iliad? It's the wine dark sea. The answer is because the word blue doesn't exist yet. At all. There's just no word for blue. It's such a basic color that it's difficult for us to imagine a world in which the word blue doesn't exist. What becomes more difficult to grasp is that the reason it doesn't exist yet is because people weren't perceiving that color as blue. It turns out that when you start analyzing all of the languages, that the order in which words come into the language for color relates to when we begin to be able to reproduce them. So everybody starts off with kind of red and black and white and kind of…

[Margaret] Brown.

[Mary Robinette] And kind of a brownish-green and a greenish-brown. So, anyway. So, they reference this video which I then went and tracked down, where they talked to a tribal people who still do not have the word for blue. Show them this color wheel. To my eye, it's like all of these greens that are exactly the same green and one blue that is very, very clearly blue. They're like, "Which square is different?" Everyone sits down and goes, "Um, that one?" and points to the bottom right or "This one?" And points to the upper left. "That one?" It's like getting the one that is totally blue is totally by chance. Then they show them another wheel which, to my eye, is all this kind of olive green all the way around. They say, "Which one is different?" They all go, "That one." With no hesitation at all, to a square that, to me, looks identical to the others. What they have discovered through all of this is that once you have a word for something, that you're able to define that and put things in that category. Until then, you don't see it. What I've realized is that gender is basically the same thing. We've got… We talk about a spectrum. But it's really kind of an umbrella. It's sort of messy. But there's no… The delineations are delineations that we have created because of language. So what's happening now is that because language has expanded, we have more things we can talk about. Which means that when you are approaching that in your fiction, that starting with a binary is very limiting, and not necessarily as interesting and representative as you can be with your fiction.

[Brandon] Well, where would you go… Where someone's starting off with this, what would you suggest? They're just like, "All right, I don't want to represent a binary, I want to do something that is exploring this direction." Where do you go?

[Howard] The simplest path for me was reading things that are written by genders that are not me and that perceive and describe genders differently. My first experience with this not gender who isn't me was David Brin's Glory Season in which he reverses the gender roles that I was familiar with, and does so for biological reasons. I look at that now and I'm able to say oh, he is… He's still making assumptions about the biological determination of gender roles, which is in and of itself inherently problematic in our culture, but by reversing things, he allowed me to see… He helped me to see things completely differently. That was my first step. Are there things that you guys have read that do this well?

[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I found was pronoun.is. This actually came up very recently for me, 'cause I was helping… There's a game that I very much enjoy, and they had set up a binary and then realized that they shouldn't have and were trying to figure out… To course correct. So they wanted some non-binary pronouns. Pronoun.is deals with non-binary pronouns. That's a very useful thing to look at. The other things that I find are looking at Tumblr's and watching people talk about their own lived experience. Own voices? #ownvoices is also very useful. So if you do #ownvoices and #nonbinary, those two things will bring up conversations that you can listen to. It is important, I want to say, that you're listening and not inserting yourself into conversations when you're first trying to kind of understand stuff. But those are places where you can kind of watch people interact. Most of the information that I know has come from people who have been very patient with me to explain things. Which is not the best way to learn things, because it involves emotional labor on someone else's part. Which is why I suggest doing some listening before you sit down and start asking questions.

[Margaret] Doing your basic research to get the 101 questions.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Margaret] Before you do your more advanced field research, in a way. I think it's… It's one of those things where if you're setting out to tell a story, and you deliberately don't want to replicate gender roles as they are found in whatever your home culture is. For everyone at this table, gender roles in…

[Mary Robinette] 21st-century America.

[Margaret] 21st-century America.

[Mary Robinette] Actually, 21st-century white America.

[Margaret] White America, yeah. If you're trying to break away from whatever feels home, normal to you, I think the point that Mary has really made, and what Brandon started us out with is, the temptation is like, "Well, I'll take what we have and I'll flop it. Men will stay home and raise children, and women won't." But right there, you've just replicated the binary and turned it on its head. Taking the opportunity to step into… To put yourself… As we were saying in the earlier episode, into sort of our unknown unknowns. It's not just the opposite of what we have. It's probably closer to your normal then you might want to think it is. What's 90° different from your normal?

[Howard] You have to start somewhere. As I said, talking about the Brin novel, which was thankfully a little more complex than simply reversing it. It was pretty cool what he did. But you acknowledge that there is a first step. Then you want to do more research, and as Mary has said and as I would reiterate over and over and over again, listen to people and listen nonjudgmentally.

[Yeah]

[Howard] Listen to their experience and try to understand how their experiences different from yours, and why their experiences different than yours. Not whether their experiences good or bad in relation to yours.

[Margaret] Yeah. I do want to stress, when I say your normal, I'm using your normal… Because it is subjective, whatever normal is to you.

[Brandon] I'm not sure if I have the language to even ask this question correctly, but is there a danger in exoticizing the unfamiliar and then going that direction and falling into clichés and tropes?

[Chorus yes]

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. Which is why it's important to do the research and to understand why you're making the choices and also to know… This is why I recommend listening in on Tumblr or Twitter conversations, because this is where people are going to complain about times that they have been objectified or fetishized or exoticized. Where people are, just like doing things that are harmful. That's where people will be complaining about it. Where your least likely to see some of the complaining in a published work, partly just because it's gonna necessarily be behind the times. It's not ideal, but it is useful.

[Margaret] I think that… going into recording this episode, that we were a little sort of all kind of sidling up to this topic a bit. In part, some of that probably comes from the fact that the four of us at this table, we have what, from a classical standpoint, is, we have a good gender balance at this table. But we do all identified as either male or female, as far as I'm aware.

[Howard] We recognize that the entire topic is inherently fraught.

[Yes]

[Howard] Because of how deeply it affects everyone, and how, to borrow a phrase from Mary, how if we write things incorrectly, it's not just that we offend, it's that by reinforcing a stereotype, we can do harm.

[Yeah]

[Howard] I like that. I like the stated goal that as we write things, we want to represent things well, I want to tell a story that is interesting, but above all, I don't want to hurt anyone by telling it wrong.

[Margaret] I think, you don't want to use changes in gender roles or changes in gender identity… You don't want to use that as the sprinkles on top of your sundae.

[Brandon] I was just about to kind of ask that question. Actually, because…

[Margaret] I'll make this exciting, by having five genders! It's like…

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week. Then I'll have hopefully an interesting question along those lines.

[Mary Robinette] So, the book of the week is Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. This is really… So, first of all, it's a good book and you should just read it. But the main character is a robot… Is a cyborg. In the net… No, it's a robot. The character has a brain, a human brain, that does some visual processing. That's the only thing that the brain does. There are no memories attached to it, there's nothing. The character gets to choose what pronoun is being used. Most people, because it's this in normal battle robot, use he at the beginning. Someone asks, "Is that what you want?" The robot realizes, "Oh. Actually, I can choose that." By choosing she part way through the novel, it changes the relationship that she has with the other main character. It's very interesting and an interesting exploration of the fact that as humans, we desperately want to put things into boxes. Like, a robot has no need of a gender at all. A robot is a robot. But our need to do that, and then the perceptions that we have about the role that that robot then fulfills based on the gender assignment… Or assigning the gender based on roles. It's very interesting what that does, the things that happen to your brain, especially when the gender switch happens. Or the pronoun switch happens. Because… Robot, there is no gender.

[Margaret] Robots.

[Mary Robinette] When the pronoun switch happens. So, it's a wonderful book. It's also just… Let's say there's a lot of ecological terrorism and stuff going on. There's lots of rollicking adventure and explosions. So it's not just hello, gender studies.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Mary Robinette] It's really good.

[Brandon] That sounds fascinating.

[Margaret] It reminds me a little bit of… There's a thread in some of the later books in the Parasitology trilogy by Mira Grant where… Spoilers if anybody hasn't read these… Intelligent tapeworms are basically taking over their human hosts. They're tapeworms. Tapeworms do not have a binary gender. There is one of these characters who does not identify with the gender of their current human host. There's another tapeworm who's like, "What is your problem with this? You are a tapeworm. You shouldn't be identifying as male or female and being bothered by whether or not that matches the human body you are in."

[Brandon] So I have a question for you. We're going to try this out, we'll see if this works. I am writing a science fiction book which has alien races who don't reproduce or view reproduction in the way that humans do. So I'm going to say what I'm doing here, and I'm going to ask you to point out directions I could go that would be bad or directions I could go that would be good.

[Mary Robinette] It's only 15 minutes long, Brandon.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Yes, I know.

[Mary Robinette] People are in a hurry.

[Brandon] We'll see if this works. If it doesn't work…

[Howard] I'm definitely not that smart.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] You guys won't even hear this.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, umm… All right. So what I'm writing right now is an alien species where their sexes are Lefts and Rights. They are Left and they are Right. A Left and a Right will combine together and create a new trial personality, that, if they end up liking, and their family ends up liking, they will give birth to that person who will have the memories of those, of that event of being this person for a while. If it is not, they will break the coupling, and it will not. So, for a period of several months, they are one individual together as one. Walking around and interacting, accessing some of the memory and knowledge of the two parents. I have humans interacting with this and really struggling to wrap their brains around it. Where could I go wrong? How would you approach something like this? Any suggestions for me?

[Mary Robinette] Well, I mean, the obvious question is what happens when two Lefts are compatible?

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Like…

[Howard] No. Two Lefts are compatible. Right?

[Brandon] Was that two… Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] Who's on first. Sorry.

[Margaret] It's… In a weird way, when you describe it to me, it almost doesn't feel like a stand-in for gender or the biological sexes. It's… You have two halves that are coming together and potentially creating a third being, but it seems like it's not necessarily reading as reproduction, unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

[Garbled]

[Brandon] I intended it to be their reproductive cycle. This is how they… This is how new individuals are born. [Garbled]

[Howard] So the two of them combine, and if they decide that they like what has been created here…

[Brandon] They will split and a baby will be born.

[Howard] Okay. That… The newborn… How do we determine if it's Left or Right? Is that random, is that…

[Brandon] I think that is random.

[Howard] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] Which… Does the newborn come out of the Left or the Right?

[Brandon] I think they both have…

[Mary Robinette] They have to connect…

[Brandon] Yes.

[Margaret] Is it… Just like what… I don't want to ask biologic sort of plumbing related questions here, but why is there a difference between Lefts and Rights?

[Brandon] Lefts and Rights… Hum. Um. Maybe because I'm just going with a binary because I'm used to it?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Brandon] Would be my guess. I did want, when this individual is made, you can tell that there's… They are larger than a normal individual and they have…

[Howard] There's a seam.

[Brandon] There's a seam. I'm probably shading… the only sexual dimorphism, if that's the right term you would have, as kind of a red shade and a blue shade, so that we have kind of this alien different skin color that is kind of a trope in science fiction that I'm trying to play with.

[Margaret] But, I mean, why not have it be being and being, like Mary said, two beings are designated as Right, but why shouldn't they be compatible, or why not have red, blue, yellow, green, aqua? Sort of like, oh, an orange and an aqua have gotten together.

[Brandon] I would say my reasoning for that, and it's totally possible I could have bad reasoning in this. My reasoning for that is it's a lot to take in in a YA novel, and I need to build on some foundations of quick conversation. I'm introducing like eight alien species in this book, so it felt simpler to say they have two sexes that are not anything like the two sexes you are used to.

[Mary Robinette] I guess the thing is as you're talking about it, I'm like, "But why did they have sexes? At all?" Like, why isn't it just these things combine and…

[Howard] The term you may want is the term that we use in chemistry. You have left-handed and right-handed sugars. They're isomers.

[Brandon] So, let me ask you this. Is it wrong for me to want that? Just because, in the worldbuilding, that is what I like?

[Mary Robinette] It's not wrong, but it feels like you're defaulting it. That there are more interesting options. That's really… Like, I don't hear anything, as you're talking, going, oh, there's a real problem there. What I hear is that it's not as interesting as I think you could be, and I don't think it would take that many more words.

[Howard] I think the interest is going to stem from how the humans react to what they're seeing. Because the humans are going to be our stand-ins for our interaction with this. If there are difficult questions that you want to ask, about how humans… About this, about our understanding about how this alien culture works, about how their rules may be different whether they're a Left or a Right isomer… I'm already writing your book for you by giving you the word. The way the humans react, I think, is where you can get into the most trouble, because if you have somebody, and you almost certainly will, who is passing judgment, the way in which the narrative treats that person is going to tell the reader how they should feel about non-binary genders. About genders that are different from them.

[Margaret] Well, also, if you have two categories, and in order to have reproduction, two dissimilar categories, individuals of two dissimilar categories get together and create a third, it's going to… I mean, if I were reading that cold, that to me would read as an allegory or an analogy of a gender binary. It's sort of the… It's the thing that eats grass and has long ears and a fluffy tail, goes around and hops. Even if it's on an alien planet, it's kind of a rabbit.

Mary Robinette] I feel like that's kind of what is happening for me is that it still feels like you have a gender binary.

[Brandon] Is it okay, though? Like… I guess okay is the wrong term. If that's the direction I want to explore…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just… I think where I would… What I would say, and this is why I asked what happens if there are two Lefts that want to get together, is the assumption that everyone is comfortable in the body that they are born into?

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Which is not the case. It's not the case with humans. It's often… I don't understand why it would be the case with an alien species. We know that…

[Margaret] Not to mention it assumes everyone is… Wishes to be compatible with somebody of the opposite handedness.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Then I'm like, the other parts of my worldbuilding stuff are going, well, obviously… I assume that you are able to do more when you are coupled because there must be an additional advantage there. So therefore is there an advantage to being coupled, and do you have difficulty getting work when you are uncoupled? So these are the questions that I'm like… What happens, and what is the incentive to uncouple? If everybody likes this, this individual? Is it that you can only have the child if you uncouple? Like, what are the… There's a lot of societal ramifications that are inherent in this that I'm…

[Howard] No, it's… A concept that gets explored in science fiction a lot is the alien race that shows up and the idea of war or the idea of lying is completely alien to them. A society, a race in which gender… I don't know what the word would be… Where you're not happy with the body you've been born into or created into. A society in which that never happens would be very alien to us. Our interactions with those people, especially the interaction of someone who isn't happy with the body they have, and is interacting with these folks, that could be interesting to explore. That path is fraught because you don't want to say, "See, these aliens are better than us, because they're just happy the way they're born." That's not the message you want to send at all.

[Mary Robinette] Also, I don't think that that would actually be… Like, I find that implausible. Anyway.

[Margaret] That's a planet of hats.

[Mary Robinette] It's a planet of hats. I mean, just because it's… When you look at the behavior of… Granted, these are fictional creatures, but when you look at… Margaret already said it better, it's a planet of hats if everybody's comfortable.

[Brandon] Like, when it's… One of the difficulties… I'll say difficulties you run into when doing this is you can do anything. The question… Like, when you say why can't it just be to individuals of any sort couple, I could totally do that. Absolutely. So I have to ask myself why am I not, or why do I want to do it this other way. This is the question when… we come into like is it sprinkles. Right? Is it sprinkles on your cake? When are you just adding these things to add flavor and is that… Can simply be reductive of the way that people see the world and using them to exoticize your story. Which is a dangerous path to go down. But at the same time, science fiction's job, in my opinion, is to start asking some of these questions and say, "Reader, what if we encountered something like this? How do we respond to it?" And this sort of thing. So it's really an interesting sort of tangled problem that is important to approach. Asking yourself where is it a sprinkle, where is it actually part of your story. Where would you say that line is and… Probably not a line, but that continuum. How do you go one way rather than the other?

[Margaret] To me, I feel like… And not to swerve away from the question here, but I think it is a question that's difficult to answer in the abstract. Because it depends on the story you're telling. There's one thing when you're constructing a story specifically to explore or make a statement about the role of gender in our society or potentially in alien society. But that's also… It doesn't mean that any story that has humans or aliens with other than binary gender has to be a story about that. Every story with a queer person doesn't have to be about the struggles and agonies of being queer. Sometimes it's just happening and you're saving the world and it doesn't really matter.

[Mary Robinette] For me, the line… When I see it done badly, it's that they've added this thing and it has absolutely no impact on the society at all. Where the world maps exactly the same. It's like, "No, of course. Women are in charge. This is totally a matriarchy." And yet, our great leaders are all men. All of the courtship rituals are still the man coming to the woman and proposing. It's like, no, if the women are in charge…

[Margaret] All the female characters are really obsessed with the men.

[Mary Robinette] These are… So if there's no effect, that's when I feel like it's just a sprinkle. When I say effect, what I mean is not that it becomes a major plot point, as Margaret was saying. But that it affects the way the character moves through the world. The example that I've used in previous podcasts is I'm 5 foot seven, my husband is 5' 11. So that very small difference between us affects the way we move through the world, in that when we go to get cereal down, he can just reach out and get it. I sometimes have to get a footstool or stand on my toes. It's a small detail. But it does affect the way you move through the world. As someone who is white and a cis woman, I don't ever have to do any defense about when I go to the store, about where I'm shopping. I don't have to do any thinking about what bathroom I use. Never will I have to think about those things. So that affects the way I move through the world. I think that if you have… If you've introduced genders, that there will be people who have opinions about these genders. The gender roles. It's going to affect the way the character moves through the world, if you have actually constructed a society around it. If you haven't, again, it doesn't have to be the plot point, but if you haven't done that, then it is just sprinkles.

[Howard] There is story purpose, where your purpose in writing the story is broken if this piece is removed. I come back to that a lot. Is there a story purpose for this thing that I'm including? There's the concept of the way a background color affects how you perceive the foreground color. You can put things in your story that exist so that we perceive the actual elements differently. Then it's not just background. It's background that influences our perception. That's a… It's complicated to think about, it's easier to picture with one of those optical illusion things with the grays or whatever. But that model works well for me, because sometimes I will say a thing and realize, oh, it's just a background. It doesn't matter to the story. Except its existence makes the story tell differently. Does that make sense?

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Yeah. When Mary was talking, sort of going back to the effect that it has, and I think that also ties to people… Whatever the gender spectrum looks like in the world you're creating, people will have opinions about it. That said, if everybody's opinions aligned to the opinions that you would expect to run into in our 21st century American white society, you probably haven't thought through the ramifications so much. If this is what everyone has grown up with, why is everybody acting like men are in charge… Men are real men, women are real women, people who are neither real men or real women are kind of the auxiliary floating off in the background someplace. That's the place… That's something to be worried about, I think.

[Brandon] All right. This has been really interesting. I hope this has been helpful to our listeners. Mary, you're going to give us some homework.

[Mary Robinette] Right. So, I'm going to send you to a spreadsheet we have used before. Which is a spreadsheet about axes of power. We'll link to this in the liner notes. Basically, what I want you to do is take a look at your characters, taking a look at their gender, and think about the axes of power. Like, which is the dominant gender, which is the subordinate gender, where do things line up on that spectrum? So, for instance, in 21st century America, a cis man, which is a man who was born into a male body or with male genitalia. So, a cis man is at the top. He's the dominant. Cis women are farther down. When you get down to the lower end of the spectrum, we have non-binary, trans men, trans women, in terms of the power that they're able to exert in society and the dangers that they encounter just living in the world. So what I want you to do is I want you to take this idea and look at the characters that you have in your story and decide whether or not you are sticking with the default or if you are shifting it. Whichever choice you make, just do it deliberately. Don't do it by accident. That's all I ask. But, as an exercise, break out of your defaults.

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/28/14-30-eating-your-way-to-better-worldbuilding/

Key points: Food, immigrants, culture, and eating are an obsession for many of us. Immigrants bring their food and adapt, but they also lock it in time. Eating is a sense of home. Beware the tendency to either have enormous feasts or stew in epic fantasies. Food and eating are central metaphors, that you can use to share things about a character. Watch out for rabbit starvation! Food has history, food comes from places. To get it right, make sure the food matters to a character, with a memory, and why that's important. Avoid the soup stone and stew, that we just ate, scene. Make sure the descriptions of food are nourishing, that they have a purpose, not just intestine stuffing. Meals should have meaning. Meals should also tell us something about the world. Think about the production behind the food. Watch out for mush or pills in the future! Give us Klingon foods, but as a good experience, something to try. Make it palatable.

[Transcription note: My apologies, but I have almost certainly confused Piper and Amal at some points in this transcript. Also, some phrases, such as what Amal's father calls intestine stuffing, are rough guesses, since I couldn't figure out the actual phrase.]

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 30.

[Piper] This is Writing Excuses, and Eating Your Way to Better Worldbuilding.

[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Maurice] And we're not that smart.

[Piper] I'm Piper J. Drake.

[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Maurice] I'm Maurice Broaddus.

[Piper] You're laughing.

[Maurice] I'm already laughing. That is correct.

[Piper] This is going to be so much fun. Okay. So. Along the lines of our title, which is Eating Your Way to Better Worldbuilding. Dongwon, I'm going to totally put you on the spot.

[Dongwon] So I really like to talk about food. If you've ever met me, I do it pretty much incessantly.

[Piper] Me, too!

[Dongwon] It's an obsession. I think it's an obsession for pretty much all of us. One of the reasons I like to talk about that is, in particular, I come from an immigrant family. Both my parents are immigrants, and food is one of the main ways I relate to culture. Both the culture that my parents came from, the culture of the South where I was raised and went to school, and, I live in New York City, which is where I get to interface with so many different cultures, primarily through eating the many, many delicious things that they make. I love to see this reflected in fiction, and not just the world that we exist in in our own bodies.

[Amal] Fun fact. I decided that Dongwon should be my agent based on the fact that he talked about food in really specific ways. In addition to his many other very fine qualities, like, he is in fact a really good agent. I had been stalking him on Twitter for a while in part because he telegraphed all of these recipes that he was doing and stuff. But there was one moment in particular where we were having our first kind of tentative conversation of do we want to work together, and he gave me this really amazing, mind blowing insight into the ways in which like, immigrants bring their food to new places. Which, I mean, I can say it right now, I think it's germane to the conversation. So I'm used to thinking about immigrants moving around the world and bringing their food with them in the way that that food changes is dependent on the available ingredients, right? So you can't find the stuff that you used to make your food back home, so you adapt and use different things. What Dongwon pointed out was that's not the only variable in the food changing. The other variable is time. In that when immigrants come, their food becomes kind of time locked in the moment when they immigrated. So that different waves of immigration can have very different foods. That you might… For instance, my family emigrated from Lebanon. The food that I am used to thinking of as Lebanese food might be very different from the food that I now find in Lebanon, because cuisines are constantly changing and adapting and so on, but there's a kind of time lock that happens to it in place. I'd never thought of this before, and because Dongwon clearly was thinking along lines that were just revelatory to me in the way that I think about food and culture and the way I move through the world and inheritance and all sorts of stuff, I was like, "Yeah. This guy here. [Garbled, inaudible].

[Piper] My mind is currently blown right now, because my parents are from Thailand, and what I grew up thinking of as Thai cooking, or just home cooking, is very, very different from what you would find in Thailand now. For example, there's plenty of people who've been linking me on social media, like Facebook, on the rolled icecream dealio? I never encountered that is a child going… In Thailand, when I was there in the summers. So I was like, "I have no idea what this thing is." They're like, "You should. It's from Thailand." I'm like, "Huhuhu. I would love to try it. But it was never there when I was a kid."

[Dongwon] Koreans have recently discovered cheese, and they are so excited about it. It's on everything right now. I find it horrifying. I don't think it goes with Korean flavors at all. But you go to Korea and they're eating it on everything. Whereas for me, the food that I think of as Korean food is like New York Korean food. Which is a very specific region and time and all those things combined.

[Maurice] So, I have a kind of complicated family structure. So, I was born in London, my mother's born in Jamaica, my father's born here in the States. So we have these three sort of cultures that always sort of clashed every Sunday afternoon, because we would always have family dinners together. So we'd always have to have food that represented each culture as we came to sit down for family meals. Which is great if you ever came over to our house to eat, because all of a sudden you have this big smorgasbord of food to choose from. But for us, eating became this centering element. So eating for us was always a sense of home. Which then, as before, becomes really interesting in my personal family, since I'm married interracially. I'm also the main cook in the family, due to some of my own early mistakes in the relationship.

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Again, me and my wife are fine.

[Maurice] But in our first year of marriage, she had it in her head, this is what an ideal marriage would look like. So she would… I'd come home, she'd make these meals, and the meals would be waiting for me. Then I decided to make a joke. This was a solid joke. I swear this was… I came… I said, "Hey, honey…"

[Dongwon] You're so stressed right now.

[Piper?] I know. We're making him plaintive.

[Maurice] I said, "Hey, your cooking could be considered a hate crime."

[Gasps!]

[Piper?] Why would you say that?

[Maurice] In my head, this sounded like such a solid joke.

[Why is it a joke?]

[Piper] Dongwon has fallen off the table.

[Amal?] [Garbled where was…]

[Maurice] [garbled] Should have provided better instruction and waved me off of this one. So, for the next 13 years, I became the main cook in the family.

[Dongwon] Sounds like just desserts.

[Ooooh!]

[Maurice] There we go.

[Yeah, that happens.]

[Piper] I think we should document this for posterity. Dongwon Song made a pun.

[Dongwon] Right. I'm very tired.

[Oooo. We forgive you.]

[Maurice] But it's actually worked out great across the board because I'm a foodie person. I love food. As demonstrated during the course of this trip. I love food. It has allowed me to just experiment with things, and to provide different tastes, even though I know my children aren't going to be on board with this, but it provides a touch point for me and my wife, it provides a touch point for when my family comes to visit. Learning all these different dishes in order to create a sense of home for whenever anyone comes to visit our house.

[Piper] Speaking of a sense of home, so, one of the things that reviewers have called out in some of my books obviously is the fact that I have a tendency to mention food, and that they should never read my books without having had a meal first, or they will immediately go out and eat. But one of the things that I brought up, and a reviewer really, really felt close to, was in Absolute Trust, Sophie tends to share her foods with her friends. She is Korean American. She's just saying, "You know what, this is an untraditional meal. This is just an amalgamation of all my comfort foods." She's sharing them. What it really started to click with, with the reviewer, was that growing up she didn't, or was hesitant to, share her foods with friends because friends thought it was weird, or it smelled weird, or it was pungent when you brought it into school or brought it into work. Is that something that you've seen, in books in particular, and you think it should be shared more often? Is that something good, bad? What do you think?

[Amal] I mean, I'm reminded of different podcasts… Is it okay to mention other podcasts on the podcast?

[Piper] Yeah, I think so.

[Amal] There was a podcast…

[Piper] We have the nod.

[Amal] Yeah. There was… Sadly, it's sort of on hiatus now, but there was a podcast called Rocket Talk on Tor.com that Justin Landon did and he would often interview people. I'm pretty sure it was Rocket Talk. There was a conversation about foods and epic novels, and how bored the… I can't remember who else was on the podcast now, but they were talking about how boring it was to have feasts described. Like, the registers of food and epic fantasies seemed to either be enormous feast or stew.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] It was just like this ubiquitous stew everywhere. I just feel like that's always a missed opportunity. Like all of the things that we're talking about, like, there are so many things that you do with food, with eating. Like feeding and eating are such central metaphors. So, why not use it to share everything about a character? Like, the fact that you couldn't when you worry growing up and now you want to, because it's where all of these deep tense anxieties of your soul are centered.

[Dongwon] Well, when I think about those feast scenes in fiction, I actually quite like scenes where people eat food, and I like these feast scenes because they're often an opportunity to see a lot of characters interact, and people love descriptions of food. Where I have a problem is, this is where my nerdiness gets away with me, because there'll be a very Western oriented fantasy, in a medieval setting, and everyone's eating potatoes. I'm like, "Those didn't exist in Europe at that point in time. Those are a New World ingredient." Or, they're on the road on some grand epic adventure hunting through the wilderness, and they stopped to make a stew which takes hours and hours to make when using resources that they probably have at the time. Or they're only eating rabbits. Here's an interesting fact that I really love is there's a thing called rabbit starvation that's what happened to trappers.

[What?]

[Dongwon] If you only eat rabbits, it takes more calories to burn the meat than it gives you.

[Piper] They're like celery?

[Amal?] Because they're lean.

[Dongwon] They're like celery.

[Piper] Like, rabbits are celery.

[Dongwon] Rabbits are so lean.

[Amal] But wait. Were they actually eating the eyes, because that is a really good calorie source?

[Dongwon] Maybe they should have been eating the rabbit eyes. This I don't actually know. But there's not enough of the proteins in there to have the enzymes for you to digest the meat properly. So you will actually starve to death if all you eat is rabbits. So every time Samwise Gamgee shows up with a brace of rabbits and potatoes, I get mad.

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] It's pedantic, but to me, it's really important because food has history. Food comes from places. Food reflects things about the way we move through the world. So until we explored the New World and brought potatoes to Europe, that was an ingredient that we didn't have. If your world has potatoes in it, that means there is sea exploration in a way. That implies a whole nother depth to your world that you may not have considered if it's not there initially.

[Maurice] All right. Hang on. One more time. What was the question? I do this a lot.

[Chuckles]

[Piper] So I was asking about whether or not… Or how you felt about including the sharing of food, especially if it's your character's home cooking, and what kind of thoughts or memories they evoke?

[Maurice] Well, there's a couple, 'cause like even on this trip, I've been reflecting on different sort of food memories that we have. So, like at one point, I felt the need, I have to have some beans and rice, and I had to have some plantains. These are foods that I took for granted when my mom fixed them every week. But now, I just was like, "Oh, no. I feel the need to have them." But on the flipside, there are foods I want no part of. Like, one of them was aki and salt fish, because my mom would make that every Saturday morning. It has this older that would fill the house. The whole idea of being embarrassed or having to share that, I'm like I can't have my friends over, spend the night, because my mom's going to fix aki and salt fish, and it's going to stink up the whole house. What are they going to think about me? The same thing with chitlins, 'cause…

[Laughter]

[Piper?] Chitlins? But they nomee. They so nomee…

[Maurice] Sure. Yeah. But see, I was also so scarred early on because there was one time when my grandmother was fixing chitlins and then…

[Amal?] What are chitlins?

[Maurice] What are chitlins?

[Amal?] I don't know what chitlins are.

[Piper] Let's just say they're innards.

[Amal] They're what?

[Dongwon] Or large intestines.

[Amal] Oh. Okay.

[Dongwon] Or small intestines? I get confused.

[Piper] They are part of the intestines and you will find out that Piper will eat very, very… Well, let's just say that there are very few things in this world that I won't eat.

[Maurice] Right. But when my grandmother was cleaning them… Because you have to clean them first. It produces a sort of… I don't know… There was a sheen to her hands and a stink to the process. Then she would be like, "Come give grandma a hug!"

[Laughter]

[Maurice] Put me off on entire… Yes. So things happened.

[Amal] Testicular sheen feels like a term now in my head, which I didn't ever…

[Piper] Intestinal?

[Amal] Intestinal, not testicular.

[Piper] Sorry. You said intestinal, and I heard testicular.

[Dongwon] Those are Rocky Mountain oysters. [Garbled]

[Piper] Rocky Mountain oysters, different food type.

[Amal] Sorry.

[Piper] But on that note, let's go to the book of the week.

[Laughter]

[Piper] So. The book of the week just happens to be a cookbook.

[Amal] Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Piper] We're trying to talk about…

[Laughter]

[Piper] If I could stop laughing. We're going to talk about A Feast of Ice and Fire, the official Game of Thrones companion cookbook. This is by… And I apologize, they're not here to correct me on name pronunciation, so I may mess this up. Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sarian Lehrer, I believe. The reason why I recommend this is because I really have a lot of great memories associated with this cookbook. I probably got this cookbook before I really watched Game of Thrones and really read the book. But the thing I loved about it was that it not only has recipes that are historically accurate or recipes from their historical research, but it has a contemporary adjustment, I guess you could say. A remake of the same recipe, so you have the two options. What was kind of funny as I was going through it was I actually preferred the historical preparation and presentation more than I like the modern. So it's just a really cool cookbook to go through. It does have a foreword by George RR Martin. But I think really I was more focused on the food, because the food looks fantastic, has pictures, etc. They talk about the historical research behind the recipes.

[Dongwon] So, when we think about food in fiction, what are the things that are hallmarks for you of when somebody gets it right, in terms of including food? A different dish, or a cultural dish, in presenting either an alien race or a fictional fantasy culture or something along those lines?

[Piper] How do they get it right?

[Dongwon] Or where they go off the rails?

[Piper] Oh, gosh, I gotta go first on this?

[Laughter]

[Piper] How they… Like, hallmarks of how they get it right is when it matters to a character. Because that's why you remember a particular dish. Whether it's a good memory or a bad memory, it matters to a character, and I want to know why. Not just what's in the dish, but what is it about the cooking of it, is it a communal cooking effort, is it for a particular purpose, does it bring together memories? I mean, Maurice shared that awesome memory of… About the preparation on Saturday nights for Sunday morning. Like, that kind of thing is a fantastic memory and it's character building and it's worldbuilding. It tells you about culture, it tells you about everything from the large to the detailed. I think that that's a fantastic way to do it. One of the things that I don't like is when somebody's like, "So, we got a soup stone and we got some wild onions and we threw some protein in there and it makes this delicious stew. Hooray." Then why did… Like, how did that do anything for character building or plot, except show that they ate?

[Amal] There's an expression that my dad uses for when food is just basically adequate and it's just… It's fine. He says [hash ris and thron?] Which is relevant to what we were just talking about, because it just translates literally to intestine stuffing.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] So I feel like there's… Yeah, that's right.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] I'm recovering from that moment. But I think it applies to this. Like, are the descriptions of food in your book [hash ris and thron?] or are they actually nourishing? Are they something that is providing something in the narrative that is going to serve a purpose? By purpose here, I don't mean plot mechanics, although that would be awesome. I would love to read a book where the plot hinged on food. Like, that would be great. But more just what you were describing there. But, like I remember this one seen in a book that I don't like very much. There's… It's An Ocean at the End of the Lane. I don't like that book very much. But there's a moment in that book where… The main character's a little boy, and he has been eating terrible food, like the kind of cold porridge grimy badness sort of thing. He's suddenly in this home where he's given warm toasted bread and butter and jam. The memory of the description of this book that lingers with me is going from cold gray darkness to warm golden light. Even though I don't like the book very much, that one thing about the book has totally stayed with me because it was this experience of food locked to all the other experiences that the character is having and the experience the character had, this joy, and this unbelievable almost painful simplicity, was enormous.

[Maurice] So there's a couple different things. One, I like the ritual of food. From the moment of preparation to how it's presented and how it's consumed. For me, there's a ritual about it. The more that there's a ritual, the more that the meal has meaning, I love when I read scenes like that. But the other thing, for me, in terms of worldbuilding is what does the food say about the world itself. So, like, for me, I have trouble dieting, for example, because whenever I diet, as soon my belly grumbles from trying to cut down on calories, what triggers is I have a lack of food, I don't know when I'll have my next meal. I have all of these… It's like a poverty throwback to when we lived much more food insecure, growing up wise. So it becomes… So it's almost like diets for me trigger that, so then it almost has the opposite effect, which is I must eat now, so I can feel like I'm secure in having a meal again. So I say all that because I love it when stories reflect upon that in the greater world. So we have these meals… All right. So if we have this huge rich banquet of food. All right, so we're obviously living in a wealthy culture. If we are having food of opportunity, that says something else about the culture. I love those little shadings, and when people bring that out in their work.

[Amal] [inaudible. Something?] I want to highlight too that we almost never think about in terms of food. So we're talking a lot about where food comes from, its provenance, and of reflecting that in worldbuilding. I don't think we tend to think about food production very much. This is a hole that I would love to help fill for everyone by recommending a Twitter account and a podcast. Dr. Sarah Taber on Twitter is someone who absolutely everyone should follow. She's magnificent. She has a podcast called Farm to Taber which is great, a great title.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] She works… I mean, she has worked on a farm, she's worked in the agricultural industry in the United States, but she has a wonderful sense of where food production and food standards intersect with worldbuilding. So, where… For instance, why is it that in some places you raise cattle instead of raising crops? Well, perhaps it's because in those places, all… It's too arid to actually grow crops that sustain human beings, and the only vegetation that is edible is edible by animals. So you get your cattle to eat the rough terrible things that you can't actually digest, and then you eat the cattle. There is a logic to it. There is a kind of food management aspect to it. But I have… Like, it blew my mind to start thinking about… I never had thought about it before. So it's, I think, part and parcel of thinking about things like empire and colonialism and all this stuff that we think about just on the regular… All of us obviously all think about that on a regular…

[Piper] We do.

[Dongwon] And class and power and privilege…

[Amal] And class and power and privilege. Thinking about food production can often be… Like, I just got… A missing link in the ways in which we talk about these things. So she's a great place to start.

[Dongwon] It's a truly brilliant podcast, I cannot recommend highly enough. It's one of my sort of top three right now.

[Maurice] One of the things… You mentioned going off the rails. I'm not excited for the future.

[Ooh. Ha ha ha.]

[Maurice] 'Cause people don't eat well in the future. I mean, all the food seems to be like this weird mush type thing that people are eating, or like we get pills, like that's what I have to look forward to?

[Dongwon] Well, I think about two things in terms of like food in science fiction. On the one end, you have Star Trek, right? Where you sort of have replicators, and they're just reproducing various sort of Western-style foods. Then you have the way that Klingon food is presented…

[Ha!]

[Dongwon] This is the thing that bothers me, because it's very one-dimensional. Klingons are presented as this violent species, and therefore they eat violent foods. So the food is living, it's bugs, it's worms, it moves. It's played for the sense of horror from the Federation officers who have to go to diplomatic dinners with Klingons or whatever it is. Except in this one really beautiful moment in Deep Space Nine that I really liked which is why Deep Space Nine is the only Star Trek I really like. You can all yell at me later.

[Laughter]

[Piper] Actually, I see fists being shaken in the audience.

[Dongwon] Exactly. Then, there's this beat where Dr. Bashir takes a date to this Klingon food stall, and it's just presented as this delightful moment that they share their love of Klingon food. He's just slurping up worms…

[Chuckles]

[Dongwon] And it's just like really… It's played for laughs in some ways, but it's also this really endearing sense of like, "Oh. This is a guy who's lived in a multicultural environment. He's lived in a place where Klingons lived, learn to eat their food, and can order in their language, and just loves doing it." It just, to me, I was like, "Oh. He's a New Yorker, right? This is what we do…"

[Laughter]

[Dongwon] We go down to the [garbled ballfields?] and order food or we go to the food courts or whatever it is and you order the thing that you're excited to try and the thing that you know how to order. I find that to be two different models of the way in which we can look at food from other cultures and food in the future. The Expanse also does this really well. They have done a great job of not only mingling languages, but then mingling cuisines and then giving them new names, right? So you get a sense that Martians eat a certain way, the Belters eat a certain way, and those things are… They often talk about how they're like, things that sound horrible in some ways. That they're like yeast products, or they're grown in space environments. But then you can feel the cultural roots of how they're using those products, those soy products and yeast products, whatever it is. So food in the future can be depressing, but I think if we apply our imagination a little bit more and make it rooted in the cultures of who's actually going to space, and if we make sure that the futures we envision aren't just white Americans going into space, then maybe the food will be a little bit more pilatable.

[Maurice] Palatable.

[Dongwon] Palatable.

[Piper] Yea, food.

[Amal] Street food? What will we call street food once it hits space?

[Piper] We'll have to have space streets.

[Amal] Space streets?

[Piper] Space street food. Space markets?

[Amal] Yeah.

[Dongwon] Yeah.

[Space markets]

[Amal] I have two quick recs on food in space. Two things that came to mind were my favorite thing that Alan Moore ever wrote called The Ballad of Halo Jones. It's an amazing book, it's one of his very early things. There is a really cool food thing that I will get into later. But the other one is Max Gladstone has a book coming out next year called Empress of Forever. Is that the title now? Yes. Empress of Forever, and there's a lot of culture hopping there. In every one, it feels like there's an introduction based in food and rooted in hospitality and cultural exchange and stuff like that. It is the future, probably. It's space.

[Dongwon] It definitely is future.

[Amal] It's definitely the future. Yes. It's really great.

[Piper] Okay. So we've talked a lot… I'm very hungry now… About eating your way to a better worldbuilding. So, now, it's time to talk about homework. Dongwon?

[Dongwon] So, the homework is, I would like you all to imagine a fictional meal. Imagine a meal at your character's eating in a fantasy world, or in a science fictional world. Describe the history of that meal. What does it mean to the family who is eating it? Where do the ingredients come from? What are the cultures that led to it? Then write a sort of mini story that just tracks the way this particular meal came together, and what things came about because of certain cultures or certain ingredients or certain availability, certain restrictions, led to that particular meal happening for those particular characters at that moment.

[Piper] Okay. Then… Wait, there's a thought.

[Amal] No, no.

[Piper] You didn't have a thought.

[Amal] No, I didn't.

[Piper] I don't remember how to finish.

[Amal] This has been Writing Excuses… Sorry, I just…

[Laughter]

[garbled]

[Amal] You're the one doing it.

[Piper] I don't know…

[Amal] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. That was the thing. You can [inaudible]

[Piper] Now go write.

[Laughter]

[Piper] All right, we're done.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/02/10/14-6-fantasy-and-science-fiction-races/

Key points: Worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction races. [Avoid the pitfall of othering your alien races, coding them using characteristics of Earth races and people. See the May 26 episode coming up on Writing the Other.] Realize that to an alien, e.g. Sgt. Schlock, everyone else is an alien. Your aliens need to function as people that can tell the story. You may take shortcuts or compromises. Think about "How does this alien see the world differently than other people, and is that important to the story?" They need to feel alien, but not incomprehensible and not just some aspect of humanity. Remember, to aliens, humanity is all one race. How do you make your aliens relatable to the readers? Your protagonist can try to figure it out and react to it. Explain what is important to the alien, and then show them trying to achieve that goal or overcome that obstacle. That process is easy to relate to. When is a horse a horse, and when is it a zyloplick? (a.k.a. Don't call a rabbit a smeerp.) Treat your races as full cultures, and treat your not-a-horse the same way. Think about the consequences of the differences. Let us taste grass, and experience a sense of wonder with the wind in our nostrils. Force yourself to not let your races be one note. Beware of coming up with races to fill a role in your story, and then not putting in the work to fill out their culture. "How is this going to change the way they interact?" You need to know the rules and the reasons behind them, to make them feel like real people, but you don't need to dump all that information on the readers.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Six.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Fantasy and Science Fiction Races.

[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] And I'm Mahtab.

[Brandon] We are going to be talking about worldbuilding fantasy and science fiction races. Before we dive into this episode, I wanted to bring up a potential pitfall in dealing with this. That is, very naturally, as you write, you are going to other your alien races. In so doing, by making them different from yourself, you are probably going to start to naturally code them by giving them characteristics that are very similar to Earth races and Earth people. You can see this famously in George Lucas's prequel trilogy about the Star Wars, where he takes the person who is the merchant and he codes this person by the way he speaks and the way he looks as Jewish. This is dangerous, and it is something you're going to naturally do. Because of the biases you have, because of the world we live in. We have an entire episode coming up in May, on May 26, where we talk about this. Dan and Tempest talk about Writing the Other and kind of a giving permission… Giving yourself permission to do this, even though you will probably get it wrong sometimes. We think it is important to be trying to reach and stretch.

[Dan] Exactly. It is more important… Obviously, you need to do it right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Put in the work, do your effort, we've got a huge slate of Writing the Other podcasts this season and we'll let those episodes cover this. Right now, we're going to move on and just talk about cool fantasy and science fiction races.

[Brandon] Yep. So, taking that huge can of worms and setting it to the side as a real issue that you should be thinking about and researching about, we're going to turn slightly the other direction and just talk about building fantasy and science fiction races. I kind of want to put you on the spot, Howard.

[Howard] That's just fine.

[Brandon] Because I love…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Your science fiction races. This is something you are really, really good at.

[Howard] I am…

[Brandon] How?

[Howard] Flattered and terrified. A large part of this grows out of the realization early on that calling… For anybody to call Sgt. Schlock, the amorphous… The carbosilicate amorph… Anybody calling him an alien is… Well, they are alien to him. There are other aliens. At one point, I made the joke where some… "Schlock, don't you have any alien superpowers?" He's like, "You guys are all aliens. Do you have any alien superpowers?" That's the easy version of that joke, and I never get to tell it again. What I had to wrap my head around is that I need all these aliens to function as people that can tell the story in a way that I don't have to use a lot of words, because I'm a cartoonist.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I have to take some shortcuts. I have to give them all eyebrows. The Uniocs, the guys with the great big one eye, have two eyebrows. Why? Because I need two eyebrows.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] They don't need two eyebrows. I do. So there are compromises that I have made. But fundamentally what I am trying to do every time I introduce an alien… My first thought is not, "What cool superpowers does this alien have?" It is, "How does this alien see the world differently than other people, and is that important to the story?" As I've been working on prose, Dragons of Damaxuri, which is… It was my nano project in 2018, and I didn't finish it, because it needs more than 50,000 words…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I didn't get to 50,000. It needs more than 28,000 words. But that book, every time I mentioned an alien, I realized I don't have any pictures to work with. I have to give the reader enough so that when we mention that this is an alien, when they do something, they feel alien without feeling incomprehensible and without feeling like I've just mapped them onto some aspect of humanity. Fundamentally, with the alien races, from that standpoint, humanity is all one race.

[Brandon] Right.

[Howard] People of color, people of… Whatever. We're all one race.

[Mahtab] Howard, that's something very interesting that you mentioned, because you said you need the two eyebrows, especially because you have to show them. Now, that just makes me think about what if I just wanted to make an alien a blob of… An amoebic substance? But then, how would I make them relatable to the readers? Like, it's kind of a… Two sides of the coin. You want to make an alien not like a human being. He could have three or four arms, they could have five legs, but you have a head, you have a body, so that the readers can relate to it. But if you did not, and if you just had it made into a blob, then how do you show expression or… Well, it won't be illustrated, but… That's what I always wonder. What if I wanted to make something so weird that no one's ever seen it before, but then how do they relate to it?

[Howard] The trick that I'm using in Dragons of Damaxuri… And it's comedy. So I can freewheel a little bit. My point of view character is an artificial intelligence who has a physical avatar body, and who wants to fit in and wants to understand people and recognizes that everybody has a body language. So periodically an alien will do something with its ears, or it will take the two eyes on stalks and look at each other. Which I took from Larry Niven. But any alien with eyes on stalks is going to do that. Lou, the protagonist, she either knows what it means or she doesn't know what it means or she's guessing. She knows that it's important. So as I'm describing these things, these are becoming people who feel things and who do things that mean things. Our protagonist is trying to figure it out and trying to react to it.

[Dan] An author who did very alien aliens very well was Ursula K Le Guin. One of the things that she did in several of her stories and books was… She would present these incredibly bizarre things that we almost don't know how to relate to them, but she would explain what was important to them, and then we would watch them try to achieve that goal or overcome that obstacle. That process is incredibly relatable. So even though we don't necessarily understand who they are or where they're coming from, we know what it's like to try to get something that you want. We know what it's like to lose something that you love. So those aspects can still come out.

[Mahtab] Yeah. I think that's a good point.

[Brandon] Next week, we'll delve into this a little bit more…

[Howard] How weird is too weird.

[Brandon] Because our topic is how weird is too weird. But I did want to talk about this idea a little bit, about… Like, for instance, one thing in my writing group that a friend of mine always will point out is he hates it in books when they use something that's not a horse to be a horse.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Now, personally, I kind of like that, right? But where do you guys fall on this? When do you just call a horse a horse, when do you call a horse a zyloplick, which is what they ride on this planet, and in all ways it is a horse, except it's got scales.

[Dan] Well, see, for me, that comes down to a lot of the same issues of… Not just animals, but the races themselves. I remember, in our old writing class with Dave Wolverton, one of the things he said about kind of the standard Tolkien-esque fantasy is that what we said at the beginning, elves and dwarves and orcs and stuff, are really just kind of Earth cultures super-otherized. How much more interesting is it to just treat them as full cultures? So they're not just every dwarf is Gimli and has a Scottish accent and an axe, but maybe they like really spicy food. Maybe they have all these other massive facets to their culture that real cultures have that fantasy cultures sometimes don't because they're based on stereotypes. So with the horse, it's the same thing. If the horse doesn't do anything different than a normal horse, just call it a horse. But if it has scales, does that mean it's also a lizard? Does that mean that it's cold-blooded and you have to have a completely different kind of stable? Like, there's a lot of interesting roads you can go down if you want to look at that kind of stuff.

[Howard] The movie Avatar…

[Mahtab] That's just… Yes.

[Howard] Had…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The horses…

[Mahtab] Direhorse.

[Howard] Except it wasn't a horse because… Because…

[Dan] You plugged yourself into it.

[Howard] You plugged yourself into it. The place where, for me, that fell short was I wanted him to be experiencing some of what the horse is experiencing, because now it's not a horse. Now, he's got the wind in his nostrils, and I'm going to taste grass. This is so… Now, there's a reason for that connection to… Now it's got sense of wonder for me.

[Brandon] Book of the week this week is Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen. Grand Master of SFWA, Jane Yolen, one of my favorite writers of all time. I recently reread this book to do a piece on it for Tor.com. I love this book. It was one of the very first fantasy books I ever read as a kid, and a lot of the stuff in this book went completely over my head.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But it was my first boy and his dragon story. Which, there are a lot of classic kid and dragon stories, but this one is wonderful. It's about a young man who is a slave, who works for a wealthy man who owns dragons that fight in pits. They're basically cockfights with dragons. As a kid, this was just awesome. Reading it as an adult, I'm like, "Wow, this is… This is really uncomfortable."

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] In ways she obviously wanted it to be. Because these are inten… Intelligent creatures that they are raising to fight, and the young man, his way to get freedom is he's going to steal an egg, which in this culture, you're kind of allowed to do. They won't really talk about it, but if someone is… Like, grabs an egg and raises it themselves, they all kind of think that's a cool thing, and you can get away with it if you can actually make it happen. Which very rarely would it ever happen. He has the dream of doing this, and he actually gets an egg, a young dragon, and starts raising it. But the story is about how he's going to have to raise it to go fight to the death for him to have a chance at freedom, and his growing bond with it as he realizes it really is intelligent. A beautiful story. Kind of a brutal story. Both whimsical and realistic at the same time. Which is really an interesting mix, but Jane is very good at that. So I recommend Dragon's Blood to you. If you've never read it, it's a wonderful book.

[Brandon] I want to bring us back to this concept that Dan was talking about. Because I find one of the things that is most difficult, but most satisfying, about worldbuilding races is forcing myself to not let my races be one note. This is really… It takes a lot of work. Because very naturally, and I think this is partially for shorthand reasons, it's also for bias reasons, but it's also… It's very natural for us to go and watch a movie and the movie has only an hour and a half to show us something, so it shows us this fantasy race, and it's like, "These are humans, but they have no emotions." Or, "These are humans, but they don't get metaphor." That works really well as a cool shorthand in a film. But as we are writing and we have more time to spend on these races and cultures, I think it's really important to make them more than one note. How do you do this? It is really, I think, very difficult.

[Mahtab] I think Ursula Guin did that in The Left Hand of Darkness when she did the andro… Yuck, I can't even figure that word, but androgynous races. I think that was a really cool way to deal with… Not making them male or female or… Just exploring that entirely different way of doing it and the relationship between Estravan and Genly Ai, who came in… I thought that was very cool. So, just to take away the gender and do it in that way, I thought that was pretty well done.

[Brandon] Yeah. Left Hand of Darkness is a masterwork in how to do this right.

[Dan] I suspect that some of the problems that we have in kind of making our fantasy and science fiction races feel rounded, is because we come up with them to fill a role in our story first. Then we realize it's too much work to also give them all of this cultural baggage that is very different and very nonhuman. So we're just like, "Well, they're… It's just a Wookie. He's just like the quiet mechanic who never talks and is very hairy." So if you force yourself to do it, to actually go in and say, "Well, how is this going to change the way they interact?" This is something Howard has recently done with the… I can't remember the names of any of the aliens. But there's the ones with four arms.

[Howard] The Fobottr.

[Dan] Yes. You kind of recently… I don't know if ret-conned is the right word, but you defined more solidly how they interact and the way that they require groups… I just thought that was really interesting, because all of a sudden, they were more interesting and they were distinctly different from the humans.

[Howard] Part of what I did…

[Dan] In a measurable way.

[Howard] Part of what I did when I designed them and when I designed their culture, I gave them a history that involved a diaspora… Diaspora? I don't know how to say that word. I know how to read that word. They were scattered. They have traveling merchant clans, warrior clans, whatever. Their culture is not monoculture. Sometimes when they connect with people of their own kind who have done a better job of preserving their original culture, there is conflict. Your naming conventions are all wrong. Why… None of that made it into the story, but all of that made it into my notes. What it let me do, and it's a silly thing… What it let me do was have characters whose names didn't fit the pattern of everybody else. I knew that there was a rule behind it. I knew it fit.

[Dan] Well, I think maybe the big lesson for the rea… For our listeners, then, is reading the comic, it's not a treatise on Fobottr… How do you say it? Culture.

[Howard] Fobottr.

[Dan] But I could tell very clearly the strip at which oh, Howard's changed the way this… He's defined this culture all of a sudden. They feel like real people. Even though you're not going out of your way to dump all the information on us.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and wrap it up here. Mahtab, you were going to give us some homework?

[Mahtab] Yes. Take one major historical incident that occurred on Earth and set it in space, with an alien race or races.

[Dan] Cool.

[Brandon] Awesome. I'm very curious to hear what you guys… Or read what you guys come up with. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/12/24/12-52-cross-genres-as-gateways/

Key Points: Cross-genre books can be gateways to get readers to read in new genres. People who don't read a genre often pretend it is monolithic, because the iconic stories in a genre do so well. But each genre has blends and hybrids and explorations of new directions and interesting things! Romance is the genre that other genres like to pick on. Set aside the notion that some genre is untouchable, start with an open mind. Young adult used to be not segregated by genre. Most Americans think comic books are all superhero stories. Gateway cross-genre books are fun! Give readers more possibilities for reading and enjoying. Listen to Season 16... no, make that 11! Elemental genres let you mix the concepts. But don't just do windowdressing, or paint on the walls, build your genres in so they can't be easily separated. Cross-genre stories can help reluctant readers find what they love. So mix it up! Science fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, mystery... cross the genres and build gateways into new and fascinating world! The familiar, and the strange.
( Crossgenres and hopscotch? )

[Brandon] I am going to close us out with a writing prompt. Our writing prompt is I want you to write a story where one of the characters thinks they're in a different genre from what the story actually is. They think they're in a story from a different genre. How does it go? This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

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Writing Excuses 11.48: Elemental Issue Q&A, with DongWon Song

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/11/27/11-48-elemental-issue-qa-with-DongWon-song/

Q&A Summary
Q: Can only certain people tackle certain issues in their stories?
A: Yes. Imagination and empathy let you project yourself into someone's experience, imagine it, and render it. The farther away, the harder. No. Maybe you can, but should you? Consider the cost.
Q: Science fiction seems to excel in making issue stories engaging by changing the context a little bit. Why does this seem to work better?
A: Science fiction and fantasy, puppetry, anything that lets you look at the issue from one step outside the real world, from an angle, let's the audience look at things in a different way, see connections, and draw their own conclusions. Science fiction and fantasy lets you make a metaphor to attack an issue from a different direction. Without instant triggers, your audience can hear the whole discussion.
Q: Do you have any tools for handling these issues in the context of short fiction?
A: The same tools. Represent multiple points of view, let the character be wrong sometimes. Attach it to a different main driver. Don't answer the questions, let the reader think about them.
Q: How do you make sure you research the issue enough, while not paralyzing yourself with high expectations to do it justice?
A: Break your research into two parts. In part one, learn what you can to tell an honest story. In part two, get readers who know the issue to let you know what you need to fix.
Q: How do you avoid accidentally including an issue that you didn't notice in your writing?
A: You probably will accidentally include issues in your writing. Good alpha and beta readers, and learn to say I was wrong. Recognize that your first reaction is based on the culture you grew up in, while your second reaction is who you want to be. Consider hiring a sensitivity reader.
Q: How do I write a perspective I don't agree with convincingly, without convincing my readers that I'm not on the side of the argument?
A: Empathy and imagination let you embody that position in a person. That's not you, that's the character. Make sure there are people in the text calling them on it, and examples in the text of the problems with it. Hang a lantern on it.
Q: How do you write about an issue deeply personal to you without turning it into a look-at-me sob story? But still retaining accuracy and emotion behind the issue?
A: Show the positive aspects too. Gallows humor can help. Also, metaphor, to transform the situation.
( So many words... )

[Brandon] I think we are going to go ahead and call it there. Dan, you have some homework for us.
[Dan] Yes. So. We've been talking about issue for a month. Next month, we are going to talk about ensemble. So your homework this week is to kind of bridge those. You're going to take an issue and create an ensemble out of it. Take an issue that you haven't dealt with yet in any of the previous homework that we've given you. Gun rights. Or price gouging in pharmacology. Something that you haven't talked about yet. Then examine as many sides of that as you can. Create a cast of characters who each espouse a different viewpoint on that issue. So that you have a large ensemble cast. Next month, we'll talk about ensembles.
[Brandon] All right. Thank you, DongWon.
[DongWon] Thank you for having me.
[Brandon] Thank you, Writing Excuses cruise members.
[Applause. Whoo!]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: chilled

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Writing Excuses 11.15: The Environment, with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

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

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

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

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

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Writing Excuses 6.27: Fantasy Setting Yard Sale

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/12/04/writing-excuses-6-27-fantasy-setting-yard-sale/

Key Points: Building a setting based around a magic system? How can someone obtain magical powers in a non-traditional way? Think of options, then explore those. Push them. What kind of unusual power could they gain? Think of the expected ones, then go on. Consider how this affects the society, history, interactions. What limits does it have? Time, resources, geographic? Consider different variations. Make sure people are proactively involved! What has changed?

What's an odd way to set up a government? Religion? Why are people chosen? What drives this? What are the problems? What are the taboos and the accepted things? What's different? What are the different classes? Are there rebels, and why? How do they act? Are there minorities, and what sets them apart?
( Today only! Get 'em while they're hot! )
[Howard] This whole episode's been like a big writing prompt, hasn't it?
[Brandon] So we don't have to...
[Howard] Does that mean we're all off the hook?
[Brandon] I think we're off the hook for the writing prompt.
[Mary] Go write.
[Brandon] This has been great. You guys are totally out of excuses. Now go write.

Current Mood: fingertalk

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Writing Excuses 5.16: Critiquing Dan's First Novel

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/12/19/writing-excuses-5-16-critiquing-dans-first-novel/

Key Points: Avoid discontiguities. Stomp out the cliche that all fantasy starts with a long, dry, boring description. Character before things! Punch it up and show us a character's viewpoint. Consider your genre, but put the promise of the story as early as possible. Start the story where it starts, and don't tell us all the stuff you wanted to tell us, just start it and go. You don't have to fill in everything. One telling detail beats pages of prose. Evoke plot, character, and setting. Make each sentence do multiple things. When you rewrite, make decisions. Consider your pace, and rearrange information as needed.
( Between the bindings... )
[Brandon] All right, Dan. I'm going to let you give us our writing prompt.
[Dan] Our writing prompt?
[Howard] And remember that time travelers may be reading this writing prompt for last week.
[Dan] May be reading this right now? Okay. This is... take an idiomatic expression and literalize it. So, for example, the crack of dawn... a world in which dawn actually cracks, visibly or audibly. Then describe that going on. Not as a pun, but as world building information.
( Final jokes )

Current Mood: fancy

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Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld

from http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/12/05/writing-excuses-5-15-steampunk-with-scott-westerfeld/

Key points: Steampunk is Victorian science fiction, extrapolated without restriction to current notions of possibility. It's also very tactile. Fashions and manners and brass and chrome and leather. Plus flamethrowers. Not just a literary genre. To write Steampunk, start with alternate history world building, and add other technologies -- crazy weird stuff. The familiar and the strange. Do your research, but don't bury the characters and the story under the world. "If it's not fun, you're doing it wrong." Cherie Priest.
( Under the steam robot clanking... )
[Howard] Final piece of advice for us, Scott? For writers who want to embrace the steamy punkiness of the Victorian era?
[Brandon] Or just any writing advice?
[Scott] Well, I'll quote Cherie Priest. "If it's not fun, you're doing it wrong."
[Brandon] Writing prompt is Tesla is President. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: clank

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Writing Excuses Season Three Episode Two: Keeping It Real

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/06/14/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-2-keeping-it-real-with-aprilynne-pike/

Key points: Make your characters feel real by studying real people. Research (Google maps, pictures, etc.) can help with setting. Also, distill the essence for imaginary settings -- how do places like that work? Ground your fantasy in science for plausibility. Give your readers convincing gnats, then don't try to explain the black boxes. Real characters who react in believable ways help make even ludicrous plots believable. Research can suggest plot hooks and twists that make the plot more real. Baby steps -- start small, then work up to big stuff -- can help writers to create and maintain the illusion of reality.
( the nitty-gritty )

Current Mood: fantastic
Current Music: Last Call, Lee Ann Womack

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Writing Excuses 5.21: Alternate History

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/01/23/writing-excuses-5-21-alternate-history/

Key Points: Alternate history: take real history and change something, then write a story based on that history. Pure alternate history just changes a historic event. "Duck, Mr. President" alternate history usually triggers a change through time travel. Fantasy alternate history adds magic. Write what you know, and write what you're passionate about. IF you want to write alternate history, be ready to do a lot of research. Use the little fact, big lie technique -- distract the reader with facts and details you know, so that he doesn't notice the blank background over there. Find the scholar who knows what you need and make friends with them. Only put details in that move the plot forward, build character, or set the stage. Beware the historical detail that can't be explained easily to a modern audience. Work hard to make your alternate history accessible to a modern audience, with characters who readers identify with that do not have modern attitudes. Be true to the period, show your reader how and why people thought then, and avoid caricatures.
( Duck, Mister President? )
[Dan] I do indeed. We're going to just do the classic branching point alternate history. Pick a major event in history that you happen to love, decide that it comes out differently, and then write a little story.
[Howard] So a Duck, Mister President?
[Dan] Not a time travel, but like a branching point. A... where somebody won the wrong war or lost the war...
[Howard] Horseshoe fell off.
[Dan] Or the wrong thing happened. Then write a story that takes place 100 years later.
[Howard] Excellent. Well, this has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: branching

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

December 2025

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Page Summary

mbarker - Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.42: Creating Magic Outside of a System
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.03: An Interview with Erin Roberts
mbarker - Writing Excuses 18.01: Twenty Twenty-Three, By Way of Introduction
mbarker - Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.32: Worldbuilding Gender Roles
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding
mbarker - Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races
mbarker - Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.48: Elemental Issue Q&A, with DongWon Song
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 11.15: The Environment, with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 6.27: Fantasy Setting Yard Sale
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.16: Critiquing Dan's First Novel
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses Season Three Episode Two: Keeping It Real
mbarker.livejournal.com - Writing Excuses 5.21: Alternate History

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Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with fantasy

Writing Excuses 20.38: An Interview with Charlie Jane Anders

Writing Excuses 18.42: Creating Magic Outside of a System

Writing Excuses 18.03: An Interview with Erin Roberts

Writing Excuses 18.01: Twenty Twenty-Three, By Way of Introduction

Writing Excuses 16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic

Writing Excuses 14.32: Worldbuilding Gender Roles

Writing Excuses 14.30: Eating Your Way to BetterWorldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

Writing Excuses 12.52: Cross-Genres as Gateways

Writing Excuses 11.48: Elemental Issue Q&A, with DongWon Song

Writing Excuses 11.15: The Environment, with L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

Writing Excuses 6.27: Fantasy Setting Yard Sale

Writing Excuses 5.16: Critiquing Dan's First Novel

Writing Excuses 5.15: Steampunk with Scott Westerfeld

Writing Excuses Season Three Episode Two: Keeping It Real

Writing Excuses 5.21: Alternate History

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