Writing Excuses 17.52: The WXR 2022 Q&A

Dec. 30th, 2022 04:03 pm
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Writing Excuses 17.52: The WXR 2022 Q&A
 
 
Q&A Points:
Q: What strategies can you use to make the reader aware of the complexities of your world without infodumping?
A: Drop bits of reference into the dialogue without details. Pick themes that your characters are passionate about. Add stuff that is not vital to the plot. Let the character interact with them.
Q: How do you balance a sense of progress with an unreliable narrator?
A: With a goal that they are aiming for. Why are you using an unreliable narrator? Knowing that, and being deliberate about it, allows you to mix it with progress. Progress is asking questions and answering them, which is not necessarily connected to whatever the narrator may be lying about. 
Q: How can I make two magic systems work in the same setting when one is very underpowered compared to the other, and the protagonist uses the weaker magic?
A: That's the best way to do it! Because it has conflict. Show that they are the underdog, but they use their skills better. This builds sympathy and rooting interest. 
Q: Have you ever based a character on yourself or someone that you know? If so, did you find that more or less difficult to write?
A: Yes, every character is a reflection of me, in some way. No, not actively base on myself, that I consider to be me. Basing a character on someone you know? Strip out the details, keep the patterns of mannerisms. Base on a struggle or a conflict. Tuckerizations!
Q: So, on book adaptations, Dan, as someone who has had a book adapted, can you talk a little bit about what the process looks like and things to keep in mind when working on adaptations?
A: New and innovative is better than faithful. Script form, on screen, is not the same as novel form. 
Q: Do you have any recommendations for conventions or other writing events an aspiring author should attend for networking purposes?
A: Surrey International Writers Conference. Nebula conference. Check your local conventions.
World Fantasy. World Con. Story Makers and Pikes Peak. 
Q: Do you use any particular methods to calibrate how detailed your scientific or technical terms are for each series or audience or genre?
A: Consider a cheese sandwich. If all it does is feed the character, you don't say much about it. If the character is a chef, you may say more. Technical jargon is the same. Think about the structural purpose they serve in your story.
Q: How do you cultivate an audience, specifically how do you interact with fans responsibly, especially starting out when they may number less than 10 and are essentially your peers?
A: Try to add value to every group, every conversation you have. Marketing is a minus value, so add value to the group before you try to market to them. Make a contribution, be interesting, make sure people enjoy spending time with you first. Consider a street team! 
 
[Season 17, Episode 52]
 
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Q&A on the Writing Excuses Cruise 2022.
[Dan] 15 minutes long.
[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] And you guys are going to ask us questions, despite our not-smartness.
[Chuckles]
 
[Brandon] Go ahead. First question.
[Julie] Hey, can you hear me?
[Dan] Yup.
[Julie] I'm Julie. What strategies can you use to make the reader aware of the complexities of your world without infodumping?
[Howard] What strategy… I love this question, and James Sutter gave us a great answer to that a couple seasons ago. Just by dropping little lines of dialogue, "the screaming hills" or "The monks of whatever" as little bits of reference without any additional details. These are just things that exist, that the characters know about, and that gets sprinkled into the dialogue, and then off they go with the plot.
[Brandon] I would pick a few themes for your book. In specific, things that you are going to… That your characters are passionate about. Right? Everybody… Kind of because Tolkien did Tolkien's thing wants to pick the ones that Tolkien did, which is not a bad idea. But your character might be a calligrapher, and they might be interested in the history of fonts on your world. They can talk about the history of fonts, and drop those hints in, not at length, not infodumps, but mentions here and there. Which will give the same sense of depth in history to your world, and be relevant to your character and their passions, rather than that same character talking about the history of that fort over there, which might be something that Tolkien would have done. Pick the ones that your characters are passionate about.
[Dan] I think so much of what provides depth to a story is stuff that is not vital to the plot. If we… If the only information we ever get is the information we require in order to understand the current story taking place, then the world is only as big as the current story taking place. Whereas, if we have other things, other history, other cultural details that have nothing to do with the current story, then that makes the world very large.
[Mary Robinette] I pick them based on whether or not my character is interacting with them. So if the character is interacting with the food, then I can describe that food. If they aren't interacting with the food, then I do not describe the national dish of whatever fiction fantasy world I have.
 
[Brandon] All right. Question number two, by the person in the excellent T-shirt. One of mine.
[Todd] Ah, yes. I'm Todd, and I'm currently wearing the same shirt as Brandon, but… For my question, I'm wondering how do you balance a sense of progress with an unreliable narrator?
[Brandon] Uh…
[Mary Robinette] Ah…
[Brandon] How do you balance… Oh, that's… I don't have to repeat them because…
[Mary Robinette] Um… So, your character can still have a goal that they're aiming for. Frequently, that unreliability is about some aspect of self. So, you don't… You can still be honest to the reader by having the character react in ways that are consistent with whatever that secret is. Which allows you to make that forward progress and then kind of drop clues before you do the big reveal about what the unreliability is.
[Brandon] Yup. I would agree. Unreliable narrators should always be a feature, not a bug. Right? Like, if you're using it, you should be using it for a reason. What is your goal in using the unreliable narrator? What are you achieving? Well, that will then tell you how you can intermix that with progress. Because you can cheat and really fun ways with an unreliable narrator. There can be several… I mean, a character that I wrote who lost several years of time in their memory, or parts of the time in their memory, becomes unreliable not because of them hiding from the reader, but they legit don't know. This then becomes a cool reveal. So highlighting those things… The thing that I would say you most want the reader to pick up on is that you as an author are doing this on purpose. The character is unreliable on purpose, not on accident. They will give you all kinds of accommodation if they know it's on purpose. As soon as they suspect it's on accident, you start to lose them.
[Howard] I think that the sense of progress and the narrator might be a false concomitance here, that those are not necessarily related. For me, the sense of progress comes from a question being asked and then later being answered. Every time I get an answer to a question I had, to a question posed by the story, I feel like we've made progress. That, for me, is completely disconnected from who the narrator may or may not be lying about.
[Mary Robinette] I just realized part of why I think they may have asked this question. That if you're writing something like a heist where…
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] The narrator has a secret goal.
[Brandon] Right, right. In a lot of heists, they do. That's a very good point to bring out. A lot of times, your character will have a secret goal. Again, I still think it comes back to make sure the reader knows that it was done on purpose. So they can start to suspect and put things together. I always feel like if you're heisting the reader, the clues should have been there all along. Now, there are really brilliant ones were you're not supposed to notice anything is wrong until the last minute before it happens. But in that case, you need to have created a narrative that has payoffs all along, otherwise it's suspicious.
 
[Brandon] Question?
[Unknown] How can I make two magic systems work in the same setting when one is very underpowered compared to the other, and the protagonist uses the weaker magic?
[Brandon] Ooo. That's the better way to do it, usually.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Why?
[Brandon] Because conflict. Stories are about conflict and what you can and can't do. I'm glad you're asking this question, but the answer is actually pretty simple in that you don't have to really worry about power level in books, particularly if your character is the weaker party. The answer is how do you do this is you make it very clear that they're the weaker party, they're the underdog, and you show them using their skills better than those who are overpowered. Right? The whole idea of I am not as strong, so therefore I must be very tactical in how I apply the strength I do have, builds enormous amounts of sympathy and rooting interest for a character. If you have a character that's superstrong, it's actually much harder because building that rooting interest when they are from a position of power means that the conflict has to be approached differently. So I would say present these kind of magic systems in an interesting way that reinforces what you're doing. Right? If the powerful magic system is in the control of the elite, and the week magic system… I mean, this is the most obvious one, but it's a good example… Is in the hands of the underdogs, both socially and narratively, then you will… It'll be… It'll flow from there.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The plucky hero is a common trope, but one of the things that you often see in superhero movies is that the super villain is ridiculously overpowered compared to the superhero. Those are essentially two different magic systems.
[Dan] Yeah. Well, also, when you start to think about what counts as a magic system in the kind of grand metaphor of just character power, look at something like the Star Wars series. The original trilogy has one Jedi, but that doesn't make the other characters not interesting. Right? Han Solo's magic system is that he can attack people from range and he can fly through space. He does that with other things. It's not as powerful as being a Jedi, but it's not on interesting and it still is vital to the story and to the society that they live in.
 
[Brandon] All right. Next question.
[Lisha] Hi. I'm Lisha Bickard. Have you ever based a character on yourself or someone that you know? If so, did you find that more or less difficult to write?
[Brandon] Okay. Let's split that into two questions. First, have you based a character on yourself?
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Howard] Yup.
[Dan] No.
[Brandon] I would say every character I write as a piece of me. Some aspect of my personality comes out. It's inevitable.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Yeah. That's… Same here. I've given up on trying to say, "Oh, this character is nothing like me." Because I am alive to write what they say, so, at some level, they're at least a little bit like me.
[Dan] But I feel like that's a very different question from have you actively based one on yourself versus do elements of yourself bleed through.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Dan] I don't think I've ever written a character who I consider to be me.
[Brandon] I would agree that I have not done that, either. There's no… I mean, I don't know if you're talking about self inserts, but, like the Dirk Pitt books, Clive Cussler always shows up in them as a character. I've never done that.
[Mary Robinette] No, I haven't done that either. But I have given my character… Like Ellena, I've talked very openly about in Calculating Stars, that while I don't have an experience personally with anxiety, my experience with depression is her experience with anxiety. That I mapped that. Also, there's several other things that I'm just like, and that's… The other thing I talk about is her experience with Parker is based exactly on someone that I used to work with. So I have done that.
 
[Brandon] Let's take the second half of this one. Basing a character on someone you know? Have you done this? Pitfalls? How did you approach it? These sorts of things.
[Mary Robinette] Again, so, Parker is based on somebody that I know. I strip out the identifying details, and what you're left with is the patterns of mannerisms. In Glamorous Histories, I've often talked about the fact that Mr. Vincent is heavily based on my husband, who I frequently describe as the love child of Mr. Darcy and Eeyore. Mr. Vincent and Rob do not have the same back story in any way, shape, or form. But they have the same mannerisms. They have many of the same interests and attitudes.
[Brandon] It's kind of uncanny.
[Mary Robinette] It really… Yeah.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Howard] There was this one time where, as a favor to a friend, I wrote a character into a story, and then had him kill his own dang self. Really stupidly, and… That was a lot of fun both for me and for my friend.
[Brandon] I don't generally base on… Well, I do and I don't. I base on a conflict often. If I have a friend who has a struggle or a conflict, I will put that in. The only characters that are based on friends more overtly than that are Tuckerizations, where they get to say they make an appearance in the books.
[Dan] Yeah. I often auction off for service auctions and charities and things the ability to be brutally murdered in a Dan Wells book. That's not so much copying the mannerisms as just, "Hey, look. You can show all your friends that…
[Mary Robinette] Your name.
[Dan] A monster killed you."
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Your name is in this book. Frequently, with Tuckerizations, they are not anything like the person, they just have a name in common.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] One of the pitfalls is that if you have not cleared it with them ahead of time, that it can be… Like, my husband knows that I put his mannerisms into books. I have a friend who was a Tuckerization, and then I was like, "Oh, I'm very sorry, but your Tuckerization is actually going to be a villain in the next book. Is that okay?"
[Brandon] Yeah. The Tuckerizations I do of friends stay in the background almost exclusively. If it's an unflattering Tuckerization of someone I know, I always change the name and the description, and it's then just kind of the concept becomes on inspiration.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is what happens when you write something that you think is a standalone and they ask you for a sequel.
[Dan] And then they ask for more. I had a character, there was a teacher, a schoolteacher in the John Cleaver books, that was named after a friend of mine who is a schoolteacher. Before that went to print, I realized, oh, wait. In the next book I'm going to turn this guy into a pedophile. So I'm going to change that name really quick and make sure that that does not come back to bite him in any way.
 
[Brandon] So, let's stop for our book of the week. Our book of the week is my book.
[Yay!]
[Brandon] So, 15 years ago plus, I started writing a little series called Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians as a way to take a break between the Mistborn books. It's as different from Mistborn as I could possibly get inside my brain. About kids who have weird magical talents that sound like drawbacks until they use them. Like being late for things or being bad at dancing or things like that. Now, long-awaited last book, last secret book of the series. I actually pitched this book to my editor. I said, "I want to do five books, and then end on a horrible, horrible cliffhanger. Because there kind of comedic, and that's what the character's been warning them. Then pretend there's going to be no sixth book because the main character refuses to write the book. Then I want to have a sixth book which is finally coming out written by another character in the series to give the actual ending because the main character was a dweeb and would not write the ending of his series, where he actually kind of proves to be a little bit more heroic than he's been telling people all along. So we have Bastille versus The Evil Librarians, written with my good friend Janci Patterson, who's been on the podcast a number of times. Who helped me get the voice right, because I was struggling with it, which is part of what took so long. It is finally out and you can get it. The series is now finished.
[Mary Robinette] Yay!
[Dan] Hooray!
[Howard] Huzzah!
 
[Brandon] All right. So, let's go to the next question.
[Unknown] Awesome. So, on book adaptations, Dan, as someone who has had a book adapted, can you talk a little bit about what the process looks like and things to keep in mind when working on adaptations?
[Dan] Yeah. So, my general theory of adaptations is that I am far more interested in something that is new and innovative rather than endlessly faithful. That is an assertion that gets sorely tested when it is your own little baby…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] Being adapted. I did not have creative control over the Serial Killer movie, but I did get the chance to read all the drafts of the script and be involved with casting and things like that. The initial drafts of the script, and even the final shooting script, included some changes that I disagreed with pretty wildly. Fortunately, I had, over the process, become good friends with the director to the point that he was able to just say, "Hey, trust me. This is an art form that I am familiar with and you are not. Give me the benefit of the doubt here." I did, and ultimately realized, oh, the changes he was making would not have worked in the book. They would not have been effective in novel form. But the changes I was suggesting he make to his script would not have worked in script form. They would not have worked on the screen. So I was right and he was right, and he was smart enough to know that that's why I was arguing with him, is because it was simply an art form that I didn't know as well. The final product, he made the right calls on those adaptive changes, and I made the right call in that I stopped making a stink about it.
 
[Brandon] All right. Next question.
[Unknown] Hi. Do you have any recommendations for conventions or other writing events an aspiring author should attend for networking purposes?
[Brandon] Oh. Specifically for networking purposes.
[Mary Robinette] There are two major ones that I would recommend. Surrey International Writers Conference in Surrey, B. C., Which is my favorite writers conference besides the… Including the ones that I run, actually. The one that were currently on, Writing Excuses, we constantly tell our students that the best thing they get out of this is the interactions, but you know that because you're here. Then, the Nebula conference is designed specifically to be a thing for developing and professional authors.
[Brandon] I met my agent at the Nebula conference 20 years ago. And he's still my agent.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So those are the big things for me. But I would also look at your local conventions. Because you don't have to travel places. And also, you don't have to go to conventions to network. You can network online. Also, you don't have to network to be successful. There are plenty of authors who are successful who are complete recluses. There are a number of things that it helps with. But you can also have a career without doing that, if it is something that you're not comfortable with.
[Brandon] indeed, I'd say it's the least important it's ever been before breaking into the business. Not to say it can't still be useful, but as in the publishing is happening… Happened, as publishing has started to spread out and move out of New York a little bit more, and things like that, the need to network has decreased a little.
[Dan] Let me ask a question. One con we always used to recommend as a really fantastic networking con was World Fantasy. It is my perception that that is no longer as helpful of a networking con as it used to be. Is that… Would you agree with that, or am I wrong?
[Mary Robinette] You are correct. Yeah, you're correct. The… That was David Hartwell's home convention. He always asked his fellow editors and his author stable to attend the convention. With his passing, while networking still happens, there is not quite the same presence...
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Mary Robinette] There since that. They also had some other issues that often happen when you move a convention from place to place. World Con is another one of those which depending on where World Con is… And this is also true with World Fantasy. Depending on which group of volunteers are running it, they can be more helpful than others. But you have to be pretty deep into the community already to know which one is going to be a good one. So when they're close to you, absolutely go to them. But I wouldn't always recommend making the trip for it.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Brandon] If you are in the inner mountain West, the Story Makers Conference tends to be our best conference in the Salt Lake area.
[Mary Robinette] Oh, Pikes Peak in Colorado is very good as well.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] The one piece of counsel I'd offer when thinking about networking is that if you are slightly impatient, and what you are looking for is someone a few rungs up to help you really launch the career, that's challenging, and that's a hard relationship to build. If you're willing to be patient, if you're willing to network and make friends with people who are at your level in career launching or in book writing or whatever, and you begin to grow with those people, in many cases these are the relationships which five years or even 10 years down the road, these are the relationships that will redefine your career when somebody comes to you and says, "Oh, hey, by the way, I just got a show green lit, and I need a script doctor, and I know you can do it." It's… I love to see people just willing to make friends. Those friendships that you make are going to be more genuine and I think they're going to be more helpful to you.
 
[Brandon] All right. Go ahead.
[Unknown] Do you use any particular methods to calibrate how detailed your scientific or technical terms are for each series or audience or genre?
[Mary Robinette] My cheese sandwich analogy. So, if you've got a cheese sandwich and it is in a scene where everyone knows what a cheese sandwich is in the cheese sandwich serves only the function of feeding the character, you don't need to describe it deeply. If your character is a chef and they are doing something exquisite with the cheese sandwich, you need to describe it more deeply, because the character is going to have a different relationship with it. It's the same with the technical jargon that you throw out. If you've got an alien that is… Has never experienced a cheese sandwich before, what often happens to a reader, to an early career writer, is that they want to say, "All right. So a cheese sandwich is made out of cheese and bread." The alien is like, "But, okay, what is bread?" You're like, "Bread comes from wheat, which is grown in…" Like, none of that is actually useful. What you want to say is a cheese sandwich is something that you hold in your hands and you eat it and it's tasty. So when you're thinking about the jargon, you're thinking about the structural purpose… The mechanical research details… You're thinking about the structural purpose that they serve in the story. I often just put in a bracket that says technical detail goes here. Or jargon goes here. Because frequently the only reason it's there is to demonstrate competence porn.
 
[Brandon] All right. This is going to be our last question for this episode. So, hit us.
[Qwamai] Hello. My name is Qwamai Simmons. How do you cultivate an audience, specifically how do you interact with fans responsibly, especially starting out when they may number less than 10 and are essentially your peers?
[Brandon] Mmm. That's an excellent question. So, interacting with an audience. There's a couple tips that I would be… If they are your peers, in particular, but… You always want to be value adding to any group that you're part of. Marketing generally value negatives, so keep in mind that it's like your value to a group is going to earn you chances to occasionally network. The sorts of things that I don't like seeing our social media feeds that are just… Network is the wrong term. That was from before.
[Dan] Market.
[Brandon] Market. Are just marketing, are just big marketing. You'll see this sometimes on Internet forums or things. People pop in and be like, "Hey, I just sold my first book. Here it is." And it's the first time you've even seen them. If you're not value adding, don't be doing that. Try to be adding something to every group you're part of and every conversation you're part of.
[Dan] Yeah. Think of your community of readers as a group of friends that you interact with. Not necessarily close friends that you invite to your house all the time, but people that you want to hang out with and that you want to pay attention to you. If you and your friend group, all you ever say is, "Hey, I have a lot of shirts for sale on my website," you won't get invited to parties anymore. Whereas, if you are contributing things, if you are interesting, if people enjoy spending time with you, then, suddenly, you are a valuable friend that people love to hang out with.
[Howard] This comes back to what I said earlier about patience. We're all inherently impatient to some degree, we want to launch ourselves from zero readers to 20,000 readers. I don't have a magic bullet for that. I don't have a magic trick for that. The thing that I have found is that it is… Doing marketing where I am asking the marketing under something, that's exhausting. I just allow myself to be myself with my audience and be silly. Then, every so often, I let them know that I'm doing a thing. Is that effective? I don't know if it's effective, I don't know if I'm actually good at this. But I know that I'm way more comfortable with that than I am with the other approaches.
[Mary Robinette] The last thing that I would say about this is that it's very easy to sound very calculating when you're thinking about this. I've heard people talk about it as a social bank. You have to put things into the social bank in order to have a withdrawal later. That is true. Also, being a good person, which is what we're talking about, being a value add, is not transactional. It's like when you are a good, contributing member of the community, you're not doing it because, well, then they're going to be nice to me.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] That is the wrong way to approach it. The way you approach it is by being genuinely interested in other people. Finding the community that you want to be part of. That's the piece that you're doing. The people that you want to be part of, that you're genuinely interested in, they don't owe you friendship in return. Right? They don't owe you anything. You're doing that because it is something that you find satisfying. You kind of have to approach it that way. Otherwise, you are going to be angry and bitter, because you've entered a transactional relationship that no one else agreed to.
[Dan] Yeah. I do want to point out that there's kind of a community building thing that I have seen a lot of authors use. This has become pretty common over the last two or three years, at least in some of the circles that I move in, called the street team. I'm sure that there are other authors that have different names for it. This is something that is kind of overtly transactional in a way that avoids the problems Mary Robinette is talking about. Saying… Assembling a group of people and saying, "Hey, I will give you an advance manuscript or I will give you these other things because you're a super fan and I would love to have you help me spread the word about my books." That's something that I see… Maybe it's mostly in YA. I don't know if this is something the rest of you have run across. But it is a system that if you handle it correctly works well to build a community that way. Like, you're part of my club now. Here's all the benefits of the club. Then, also, you're going to help.
[Howard] I was standing at my booth at World Con and a super fan had bought a book from me and someone else came up to the booth and was kind of like, "What's this?" Super fan launched into a fantastic pitch for my stuff. I very calculatedly, very carefully, did zero things to stop them.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Are you overselling me? I don't care. You dearly love this, and you love this in a way that I would love for other people to love this. So go. Run. Do the thing.
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to put in a quick plug for my Lady Astronaut club. Which is, basically, I have built a community. You can send away a self-addressed stamped envelope, you can be a member of my Patreon, someone can vouch for you in the community. We call it the kindest corner of the Internet. It is a place where I get to interact, but also, it is, at times, a street team. Like, if I come in and say, "Hello, I really need help with X." But I never approach it with the expectation that they will do these things for me.
 
[Brandon] All right. We are out of time. Thank you all for the excellent questions here at the Writing Excuses Cruise.
[Applause]
[Brandon] Your homework is to write out a few questions. To think about it, think about what are the things you need help most on in your writing career right now. Now, we are unavailable to answer your questions because we are off somewhere else. But I find that formulating these things, sitting and thinking what do I need, really helps you kind of put a point on what you need to do, where you need to learn, where you need to grow. That's going to help you get those answers. So, ask yourself the question, what is holding me back the most in my writing career, and what question would I have for the team if I were able to ask it. Maybe you will eventually be able to do so. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 17.29: The Job of Dialogue

Jul. 20th, 2022 06:31 pm
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 17.29: The Job of Dialogue
 
 
Key points: What is the job of dialogue? Conversation has no real purpose or direction. Dialogue, however, needs to move the story forward, provide information, and help with characterization. It also has authorial intent, the reason the author put it there, and character intent, why the character is saying these things. Another part is to be entertaining, funny, to reward the reader for reading. It conveys information, but we mask that to keep the reader from noticing. Beware the unmasked info dump! Evoke an emotional response. Transition. Questions and answers. Sometimes you need to cut dialogue, because it doesn't move the story forward.
 
[Season 17, Episode 29]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Episode Two of our Dialogue Masterclass, The Job of Dialogue.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Maurice] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And I wish I sounded as good as Maurice.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Maurice] I'm Maurice.
[Howard] Oh, he sounds good when he's laughing.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] That's Howard.
 
[Dan] So, this week we're going to talk about the job of dialogue. So, Maurice, I'm just going to ask you, what is the job of dialogue?
[Maurice] So, first off, I mean, there's a difference between dialogue and conversation. Right? I think we touched on this last week with the whole idea of just recording a conversation between folks, between friends, family, whatever. When you listen to a conversation, I mean, a conversation is just this… Well, it's people who are in each other's presence, they're enjoying each other's company, hopefully, but it's going all over the place. There's no real purpose or direction to it, it's… It's a conversation. It's an exchange of ideas. Versus dialogue. Dialogue has a very specific purpose in writing and in telling a story. So the way I look at it is that whenever I'm coming to a scene and dialogue's involved, it's like, all right, I'm keeping in mind, I need to be moving the story forward, I need to be providing information, and I need to be honing in on characterization of the people who are engaged in this conversation or in the dialogue. All right. So I see those as the… Those three things, that's the actual job of dialogue.
[Mary Robinette] Right. Within that, there's… Something that I'm going to be talking about a couple of times throughout this course, which is the area of intention. The area of intention is, like, why the dialogue is, why the spoken line is happening. This goes for, like, actually verbal and unspoken dialogue. But whenever someone is talking, there's a reason they're saying the thing. Every piece of dialogue has two areas of intention. There's the authorial area of intention, the reason the author needs it to happen, and there's the character area of intention, which is why the character is saying the thing. So in this episode, what we're focusing on is the authorial area of intention, that's why is this here and what loadbearing thing is it doing for us.
[Howard] As often as not, when I'm writing a portion of the job of the dialogue is to be entertaining. It needs to be funny, it needs to be witty, it needs to be pithy. It's… It has to do more than just advance the story and inform us about who the characters are and what they want or don't want and where conflicts are and… I mean, that's a huge load. That's… That's… That's some seriously heavy lifting, but then, for my own part, I have to make sure that the reader feels rewarded for reading some of these lines of dialogue, that the banter is entertaining.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So a lot of what you're doing is… Like, I joke, and it's not a joke, that everything that happens in a story is exposition because all of it is… It's conveying information and sometimes that information is about the tone, sometimes that information is about the characters, but it's all conveying information. Part of our job is to mask that and to use a bunch of different techniques so that the reader doesn't notice that. So, banter, keeping them entertained in whatever form, whether that's through tension or humor, all of that is to mask the fact that I'm giving you a piece of information that you need in order to understand what happens next.
[Maurice] So, yeah, cool. I keep remembering, because there's always this conversation like, oh, wow, in terms of providing that information, it's like… We see a lot of bad examples of that, because… All right, let me confess. First off, I'm a TV junkie.
[Chuckles]
[Maurice] Particularly of like police procedurals. I just love police procedurals. So, CSI is like one of my comfort watching things. Actually, I'm watching… What am I watching right now? Assignment Witness, which is basically a British version of CSI.
[Mary Robinette] Aha.
[Dan] That's cool.
[Maurice] But it's all… But you see all of the best… And by best, I mean worst examples of this providing information. Right? Because you have these scientists, and they are explaining these tests out loud. Right? But they're explaining it to their colleagues who hopefully took the same classes and understand the same things that is going on. That's a poor mask.
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[Maurice] Of providing information, that's a poor mask of info dumping. So I often get that question. It's like, "Oh, when is info dumping bad?" I'm like, "Well, bad isn't quite the word we're looking for." Right? Because we need the information as readers, as viewers. We need that information. It's how do you mask that because one of my favorite books is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That is literally one big info dump. The whole book is just one big info dump. But we don't care, because, what Howard said, because it's entertaining. Right? So you don't really notice, oh, he's just… It's literally an encyclopedia giving us information all the time.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I was just watching… We've been re-watching CBS Elementary. The Sherlock Holmes with Johnny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu. There was a moment where Johnny Lee Miller asks a scientist on screen, says, "Tell Watson what you told me about DNA profiles." The old scientist says, "I would be happy to. But I think I need to ground you first in a bit of molecular cellular biology." At which point Holmes says, "Hold that thought a moment," and cuts the connection and turns to Watson and says, "He can get kind of long-winded." I love that moment because it tells us, yes, there's a whole bunch of science here, and we're going to hand wave it and just arrive at the conclusion. There's this tension release where the old guy starts talking and you think, "Oh, please, no. This is going to be boring, and I want to hear Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu talk." Then he disconnects…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And there's a moment of joy as the old guy gets cut off.
[Maurice] Great.
 
[Dan] Yeah. Those are, I think, another kind of entertaining. In addition to all of the loadbearing informational properties that dialogue has, sometimes it's funny, like Howard said. Sometimes it needs to be frightening or it needs to be triumphant or bad ass or something where we are evoking a specific emotional response. Because that's the part of the story where we want the audience to feel a certain way. We want them to be quoting a particular line because it's so good. Yeah. All of these different kinds of entertainment.
[Mary Robinette] Sometimes the job is to transition us into another part of the story. So, sometimes it's like this is the line of dialogue where everything shifts. It's representing the moment when a character changes their mind. Or the moment when I need the reader to understand that this is not the story that they thought it was. Not quite a reveal, but it's a… Like, oh, no, no. Reader, just remember this looks like we're all having a good time, but you are actually in a horror story.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Which is most of [garbled]
 
[Dan] So, speaking of transitions, let's transition into our book of the week. Which, this week, Mary Robinette, is you. You were going to tell us about The Murder of Mr. Wickham.
[Mary Robinette] So. The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray. This is a book that was basically written for me. It is a Jane Austen murder mystery. By that I mean Claudia Gray has taken all of the Jane Austen main characters and their love interests. They're all married now, and brought them to a single house party for reasons that makes contextual sense. Then, Mr. Wickham shows up, and someone kills the guy. It's a good murder mystery, it's a good Austen pastiche, it has a romance between two new characters that are the children of some of your beloved characters. It's so good. The reason that I brought it up particularly for this is that as a murder mystery, every line of dialogue contains a potential clue. So, the authorial area of intention there, the amount of loadbearing that the dialogue is doing, is so good. They also all sound like Austenian characters, they all sound like distinct characters. Then, kind of one of the other things that I love about it is the absence of a thing that we have not yet talked about, which is maid-and-butler dialogue, or, we haven't talked about it by name, which is basically where a maid and a butler stand around and have a conversation about things that they both know about only so that the audience will also know about this thing. So… There's none of that in this, even though there are in fact maids and butlers and they do speak. It's great. It's just a good read. I really enjoyed it a lot. So that's The Murder of Mr. Wickham by Claudia Gray.
[Dan] That's awesome. I remember when she told me about that book, and I said, "Please make sure you send that to Mary Robinette." She said, "I already did. Don't worry." So, that's great.
 
[Dan] So, yeah, let's talk some more about the job of dialogue. One of the things that we have referred to, but haven't really gone into in detail is how dialogue can move the story forward. We said that's not the only thing it has to do, but that is one of the things it has to do. How do we make sure that our dialogue is actually advancing the story instead of just spinning wheels?
[Maurice] Right. So, one of the things that I think about is this whole idea of like dialogue is kind of like conversation that confronts conflict. Right? So one of the things that we do as… Actually, Mary Robinette has got me thrown off, because I'm still thinking about this whole idea of areas of intent, so let me see if I can weave these two ideas together. Right? So we have this whole idea as an author each conversation has to confront conflict that's either in that scene or in the overarching narrative. Right? But then as a character, dialogue's a tool that they used to achieve their objective. Which still serves the authorial intent, but on the character level, dialogue becomes a tool which they are trying to work out what it is they're trying to seek, to complete their arc. So I've… Yeah. Sorry, Mary Robinette, you just… I'm like, "Oh, I've got all these things going on in my head." So you talk right now while I get all this stuff untangled.
[Mary Robinette] Okay. This is why I love hearing these podcasts because every time, I also have the oh, yeah. Yeah, I had this whole unpacking thing when you were talking earlier, and wrote a ton of notes. So when we're talking about moving the story forward, basically stories… We've talked about this in other episodes, that stories are a series of questions that you're answering for the reader. Some of them are things where the reader supplies their answer based on the information you've given them, and some of them are here's the next piece of information you need. So it's this causal event chain that's happening. So, one of the things that dialogue can do as part of that moving forward is that it can either give the reader a piece of information that they need or it can raise a question for the reader that creates tension that causes them to want to keep going. There's also the entertaining aspect, which is just this is funny. Which is part of like keeping them engaged as other things are happening. But if it's just funny, eventually they will opt out. Because they'll get frustrated that there's no forward momentum. So the two things that are moving the story forward are providing information or providing a question. Raising a question.
 
[Maurice] Yeah. Sorry. There is a… You just reminded me of that. So I think… There's a lot of times when I'm in the act… I'm going to call it the Howard mode, where I have my two characters and their doing this rapid banter, back-and-forth, back-and-forth. There comes a point where I realize, usually in editing, that I've just fallen in love with these characters.
[Laughter]
[Maurice] And I just wanted to hear them talk.
[Mary Robinette] Yes.
[Maurice] So then I have to ask myself, does this dialogue scene, does this actually move the story forward or have I just fallen in love with their voices and I just want to keep that going and is it actually necessary to the story?
[Howard] That's what we call Brandon mode or Mary Robinette mode which is to I step in now and cut off Howard?
[Laughter]
[Howard] I love the idea of conversation, of dialogue being inherently funny, because the compression algorithm that we used put a conversation from real life into dialogue in a book breaks some of the rules that we implicitly understand about the way that people converse. For instance, information should not flow that quickly from a conversation. But in dialogue in a book, it can flow that quickly. That's a thing, any time you are breaking a rule, whether it's throwing a crusk… Cuss word or falling into a manhole or whatever, there's the opportunity for humor. So the very fact that we compress conversations into dialogue can be a source of humor just because of the pacing. I love that, and I exploit it a lot.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. You just also reminded me of a thing that I should've mentioned when we were talking about moving the story forward with the information or the questions, is that sometimes the thing that moves the story forward is achieving a goal. When you're doing that compression that you're talking about, it's… Part of it is compressing it to the point where it is serving that need. Whichever needed is that you've pegged as this is the thing that the loadbearing thing that this piece of dialogue is doing. A conversational… Like, not just a line of dialogue, but a dialogue that is ongoing, will serve multiple functions. Each individual line may serve one or more. But it is this constant pull-through and you use whatever carrot you can pull the reader through.
[Howard] Yeah. In the novella Shafter's Shifters and the Chassis of Chance, which is probably going to hit Kindle in June or July, there's an interview scene where it could have been hugely info dumpy. One of the characters, yes, this is a Howard Taylor thing. "Tell us what happened," said Judd. "Start at the beginning." "No," said Chris. "I'll start with what's important. And then you'll tell me something important, and will keep taking turns until we run out of important things to say." Everyone in the room was like, "Oh, that seems really smart." It sets up this enter pattern of reveal after reveal after reveal. The reveals include some lies, which we find out to be lies later. But it fixed a huge pacing problem that I had in the first two drafts of the scene which is, no, I can't let this guy tell the story from the beginning. That breaks everything.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Yeah. That's something I'm struggling with in a book right now, which is all about… Or one of the main functions of the magic system is memory loss. Which meant that I had three different points in the second half of the book where a character had to reexplain everything to a character who should already have known it. It just got so boring. I had to find different ways to get around that or to have it happen offscreen or to do compressions or abridgments so that we weren't bored recapping the book 4 times.
 
[Dan] Anyway, let's end with our homework and you can probably guess what that homework is. Mary Robinette, what is it?
[Mary Robinette] So. Your homework is about area of intention. I want you to do two things. That's right, this is a two-part homework. One is to grab a book or a movie or whatever that you really enjoy. Or, it's okay if you do it was something that you don't enjoy, because this may break it slightly. Identify the area of intention for the lines of dialogue. So what you're doing is, you're looking at how an author has… Another author has done this. Because it's often easier to identify with someone else's work. Like, why do you think each line is there. Then, the other thing that I want you to do is I want you to go back to that transcript that Maurice had us do previously. I want you to decide an authorial area of intention for yourself. Like, if I were going to have this happen, what is my intention for this scene. I want you to cut every line of dialogue that does not serve your authorial area of intention.
[Dan] Sounds good. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition

May. 13th, 2020 11:19 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 15.19: As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition
 
 
Key Points: As you know, Bob, maid-and-butler dialogue is all about exposition, and not very convincing. The good news is that at least you're thinking about exposition. Levels? First, dialogue is more fun to read than an infodump. Second, natural dialogue, not exposition dummies. Third! Too much dialogue, using it for everything. Answer? Symbols! Make sure your scenes have a plot movement as well as dialogue. Only tell the reader what they need to know, and tie it to conflict and character. Context! Be careful not to add actions and beats to every line of dialogue. Write your dialogue outward from the point. Why are these people having this conversation? All conversation is combat, is conflict. Focus on the details of what each character wants and notices. Use the person coming into the conversation late to fast-track exposition. How do you add description and exposition? Write five sentences, then pare it down. Try emulating screenwriting, setting the scene with just enough for a director or artist to know what to do, what the mood needs to be. Consider spatial intimacy. You don't paint an entire city, you paint one room, one street. You may build an entire house and decorate it, but give the reader just a glimpse, enough for them to infer the rest from the reflection off your iceberg. 
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 19.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, As You Know, This Episode Is About Exposition.
[Victoria] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're Bob.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Victoria] I'm Victoria.
[Dan] I'm not Bob.
[Laughter]
[Howard] As you know, Howard…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Sorry. That's the classic, as you know, Bob. The maid-and-butler dialogue where two people talk about a thing that both of them already understand, but they talk about it so they can exposite to the reader. So, fair reader, listener, if you didn't get the joke…
[Dan] Don't do that.
[Howard] Yeah, don't do that. If you didn't get the joke, now you do.
[Victoria] Can we talk about how meta it is that you just like explained the entire show?
[Laughter]
[Howard] Expositioned it… Expositioned it. Well, because it's… Never mind.
 
[Brandon] It's actually kind of nice to see in my students. As you know, Bob, or whatever, I call it maid-and-butler dialogue, it's nice to see in one way because they're at least thinking about exposition, right? Like, your first level up is when you realize dialogue is just way more fun to read than a big infodump. So I'll put this into dialogue. But then, your next level up is realizing that dialogue needs to feel natural and you need to construct a scene in such a way that the dialogue feels like it's coming from real people rather than exposition dummies there to give the exposition.
[Dan] If you want to see this done wrong, CSI Miami was shocking sometimes at the level that two forensic scientists would sit there and recite textbooks at each other while looking at a body or whatever.
[Brandon] Now, most of our questions, or most of our episodes this year are coming from questions from readers. There's actually a really… Readers? Listeners. There's a really great question starting this off, which is the next level up moment. This listener says, "I've noticed that a lot of my scenes are little more than conversations, typically with other actions used to set in a secondary capacity, if at all. Back story, plot revelations, growth, all shown through conversations." I'm going to assume this character… This read…
[Howard] This listener.
[Brandon] This listener, noticing that, is not writing maid-and-butler dialogue. They're writing good dialogue, but they're noticing, I'm doing… Making my dialogue do a ton of heavy lifting on this. I've noticed this in my own writing as well. So it's something that I worry about.
[Dan] So, this is something that can be handled really well with symbols. I don't mean symbolism in the AP English sense. I mean that you assign a visible thing or an action to a thing. The really obvious one is Luke, you've turned off your targeting computer. Right? We don't have to come out and say Luke has learned that he needs to use the Force. Because he turns off his targeting computer, and everyone goes, "Oh. Okay, I understand what this means. They establish that earlier. With the blast shield down, I can't even see. How am I supposed to fight? We get that same thing, reversed. Another really beautiful one is actually in the movie Toy Story where the first scene is we're going to spy on the little boy's birthday party and see what the new present is. It's all… Woody's in charge, and he's doing this thing, and he wants to make sure he maintains his position as the favorite toy. The final scene is that exact scene re-done, but now he has a friend. Now he's with Buzz, and they're partners. So without coming out and saying, "I have learned the value of other people and that friendship is important and I don't have to be the favorite toy to be valued," we get all of that through the use of this really stark visual symbol that just relays it to us.
[Victoria] Two things. I personally feel like this is a plot problem. I feel like this is a reflection, if the only purpose of your scene is this dialogue, then you need to separate out the verbal content of the conversation from what you're trying to accomplish in a plot sense of the scene. If the only forward movement in the scene is through the dialogue, then I think your scene is not working as a holistic scene, moving the overarching plot forward as well. I come from the anime school of worldbuilding. The anime school of worldbuilding states, basically, we do not infodump because we don't tell you anything except what you need to know going in. Everything that you learn, be it dialogue or exposition, is tied to conflict and character. So when I see scenes like this when I'm teaching or when I'm reviewing for people, and I see these large chunks of conversation, then that starts to happen in a vacuum in my mind. They're just hovering there in space. So I start to ask those authors, those writers, to start separating out the two lines, almost as if you're making a song, and you would separate the musical instruments or separate the lines and say, "What else is this scene accomplishing?" Because the nice thing about conversation, the beautiful thing about dialogue, it can happen in a context and then some. You get twice as much out of your scenes when there's a physical underlying context to the scene as well as a conversational context.
 
[Brandon] Let me ask you this, though. One of the things that I've just started becoming may be hyperaware of, too aware of, is that people using non-dialogue beats and actions and things in order to replace writing better dialogue.
[Howard] Well…
[Brandon] It gets really bothersome when I see my students and every line of dialogue is modified by a sentence saying what they're doing. They've learned that if someone slams their coffee cup down, it helps add an exclamation point. So every character with every beat is doing something.
[Victoria] But that is the equivalent of somebody thinking that they're revising by moving commas around. That is not actually fixing the motion of the scene, right? Those are crutches of the scene. So I actually think it's a lot better, I'll advise students to create a block of the scene and then a block of dialogue. Like, work us between the two. I actually think that a paragraph of the scene bracketing the dialogue is a lot more efficient than slicing up your bracketing scenes as notes throughout the dialogue.
[Brandon] I tend to agree with that as well. I like it, personally, with reading when you go into dialogue, the dialogue has been tightly worked so that it just gets across emotions and things without… With as very little outside the dialogue is possible, and then you transition back into motion and…
 
[Victoria] It also comes down… I know this is a tangential thing that relates to this, but let's talk about dialogue for a moment. Because I'm shocked by how many people think that when you write dialogue, you begin at the beginning and you go to the end. When, like, the truth is most conversations have a point. So when I write dialogue, I build outward from the point. What is the thing that the two or three or four people engaged in this conversation are trying to get to? I think when you build out from the point, instead of the hello, hello, goodbye, goodbye of it, then you start to understand why they're having the conversation. Really, like, we don't have conversations in a void. We have conversations in a context. So often when I see a lot of dialogue happening, a lot of information being conveyed this way, I start to wonder why there's an absence of context. Sometimes the context can replace some of the dialogue. Absolutely, it's a balance that you find in the writing. Like so many things that we talk about, you learn the right balance by doing it wrong and by doing it right. But I think… I mean, this is the time where you have to remember that all writers are readers. Find the things that really work. Find the good examples of it, and study them, the way that you would study anything.
[Howard] I think it's important to recognize that… And I use this as a punchline in a Schlock Mercenary strip a decade ago. Good Lord. The punchline was, "Captain, all conversation is combat."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The Captain's response is along the lines of I think I'm going to enjoy it a lot more now. The idea that we converse because there is a… There are competing ideas, and at the end of the conversation, those ideas will have changed in status. At a almost theological level, the religion of the sharing of information, conversation is conflict.
[Victoria] Absolutely.
[Howard] Even if we agree, there is conflict here, because if there wasn't conflict, we wouldn't need to talk. So, as you know, Bob, is broken because there is no conflict, there's no reason for me to tell you what you know. But, if I'm saying a thing… If I'm trying to explain a piece of worldbuilding to someone who doesn't know it, the disagreement… The conflict there is not I am providing information that you need. The more interesting conflict is I'm providing information that you don't believe, and you're now going to refuse or refute. It becomes an argument. You layer that atop character conflict, atop other things, and suddenly… I will read page after page after page of that, because it can be fun.
 
[Victoria] I think the pointedness of exposition is important. Either the fact that in dialogue, no two people come together to have the same conversation. We each come to a conversation with an idea that we want to convey to the other. So often, what's the interesting part of dialogue is when we miss each other in the conversation, when each of us is trying to basically have a monologue to the other one, and we have to have that collision point. I also, on the character building exposition side of it, I feel strongly that… This so often gets put into first person, but when you think about writing, regardless of whether your writing third person or first person or second person, you are writing a perspective. Every single character will notice different things. Every single character that you write is moving through their world and their environment differently. They see the world differently, they have different philosophies, and they're going to notice different things. So often, unless you're writing a purely omniscient world, you can tie the details of the things that we notice, of the things that we perceive that are relevant, to the attention of the character that you are writing about. So remembering that each of us has a bias, a way of moving through the world, each of the characters that you write is going to perceive different things about the world around them. Honing it into those details can help it from feeling infodumpy, can help the exposition from feeling it doesn't serve a point.
 
[Howard] One of my favorite stupid tricks is the person… We have this happen all the time, all of us. Someone walks into the room late and tries to join the conversation, but they don't know what's been said yet. Everybody is now instantly mad. "We just covered this!" "Yeah, but I wasn't here." "Why do we care that you know?" "I care that I know."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] One, there's comedy inherent in it because we've all been there, we've all been annoyed, and we are now watching the lessening in status of the person that we would like to see drop. One of my… One of the rules of comedy. But the other thing is, it allows you now to fast-track the exposition and give them the equivalent of the as you know, Bob, in a way that has conflict just running… Just oozing off of it.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week.
[Dan] Book of the week, this week. One of my very favorite things in the entire universe is…
[Howard] Me?
[Dan] When… Well, you're related to it.
[Laughter]
[Dan] When Writing Excuses listeners, students at our retreat, people who listen to the podcast, come to me and show me their book that they wrote and have published. Like, that is just… Makes me so happy. That happened recently. Suyi Davies Okungbowa, who is one of our scholarship winners for the 2019 cruise, has got a fantasy book published. It is called David Mogo Godhunter. He gave me a copy. It's super, super good. It's basically the Dresden Files if it took place in Lagos, Nigeria. About a guy who is hunting fallen gods for a wizard. It's really good stuff. Really well written. He is presenting a very new, unique world that he does a great job of exposing that information to us. So… It applies to our episode as well.
[Brandon] Title and author, one more time?
[Dan] David Mogo Godhunter. The author is Suyi Davies Okungbowa.
 
[Brandon] All right. So, the other question we have for this week is about adding description. How do you add description when it doesn't come easily? How do you find the balance between worldbuilding and exposition?
[Victoria] I am one of those people that believe you write five sentences, and then you ask yourself if one sentence will do the same amount of work. That's not to say that you should underwrite. I think you're totally fine to overwrite. But I usually believe that if you take a paragraph to describe anything, and then you ask yourself if every sentence in that paragraph is pulling the same amount of weight, you can usually get it down to one or two very powerful sentences. I think sometimes, especially in the fantasy tradition, we think more is more. Sometimes, more is more. But usually… I come from a poetry background. So, usually, what I think is especially in moments where we're truly setting up world, where the exposition and the description is not actively engaged with any one thing, with conflict, with character, with anything, but we feel the need to set the scene, that in that case, less can be more, when it is done pointedly.
[Howard] I think that the tradition of writing… When I say tradition, the form, the syntax of writing for the screen and writing for comics, where at some point, you are telling the director, you are telling the cameraman, you're telling the artist what to do. As the writer, there is a line you don't want to cross, where you may have told them too much. Yet, there's also this point where all you've given them is a white room full of people talking and they don't have anything to work with. When I talk about writing comic scripts, often what I will focus on, and this is useful for writing other things, is colors and moods and shapes. I'll say, "Establishing shot, longshot, super desaturated background to show distance, trees in the foreground, characters in the immediate foreground, brightly lit, whatever." That establishes a mood, where we are close up on the characters and they are in a huge space. Well, if I were to write this in prose, obviously I wouldn't write it that way. But I would want to talk about the tree that is nearest. I would want to mention that we can see for miles. It feels like we can see to the end of the world. Something poetic that establishes this same feeling of huge space with people in it up close. So, it may be that an exercise for description is to look at screenplays and the way they handle some of these scenes, and then look at how you would write it in prose to accomplish the mood. Rather than to say these are all of the millions of things that were in that picture.
[Victoria] So, this kind of comes back, for me, to the idea of spatial intimacy. Right? You cannot paint an entire city. Not in any way that a person can keep in their mind. But you can paint a room or a street in that city. I have this theory that there are two kinds of fantasy authors. There are… Or really any genre authors. There are authors who build you an entire house, decorate every room of that house, then give you as the reader the key to that house. You now get to explore every room. If you don't see it, it doesn't exist there. That's like the Tolkein philosophy, right? Then there are authors who build the entire house, decorate the entire house, and instead of giving the reader the key, they leave one curtain open. What you can essentially see then is one room, perhaps an open doorway, a hall beyond, and you're given just enough details to be able to infer the house beyond. I think that when you're writing fantasy or something where you feel like there's a lot of room for description, remembering that a few key details instead can have that iceberg philosophy, can show you and be reflective of an entire world.
[Brandon] Absolutely. I like to go back… Going back to what you said earlier and kind of tying this all together, if your worry… One of your worries is you're doing too much conversation, a few of those very well described tight… Like… This is when one paragraph is better than 17. A really, really like curious paragraph that gives you that window, that gives you that drape, that shows you… And brings you right in there is a wonderful powerful balance to some of these dialogues.
[Victoria] Absolutely.
 
[Brandon] We are out of time on the podcast today. I am going to give you some homework. What I want you to do is I want you to take a favorite piece of media of yours, whether it's a book, a television show, a movie. I'm going to use Star Wars for this example because it's pretty universal, a lot of people have seen it. I want you than to make a list of all the worldbuilding elements that are necessary to understand Star Wars. Right? To understand how that movie, how that world works, how that society works. Then, once you've got that done, I want you to watch the movie, read the book, the show again, and see at what pace the creators of that media put all of those things in. So you can get a sense for how somebody else is doing it, how they are using their learning curve and their description and their exposition to give that information to you. So, have fun doing that. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules

Mar. 20th, 2019 11:09 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
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Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules
 
 
Key Points: Magic without rules, soft magic, numinous magic -- what does it mean for the reader and the story? At least the characters don't know the rules. Mysterious, scary, we don't know what will happen! Sometimes it isn't important to understand the rules. The story is about something else besides the mechanics. Handwavium! Sometimes there is internal logic, but it is not explained. Other times, the magic does not appear to have internal logic. This creates wonder and awe. Also, a sense of dread. It also saves pages and explanations! Save your infodump equity. As yourself, does the reader really need to know how this works? Be aware, people and characters will try to find patterns or rules, but you as writer can show that they don't work consistently.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 11.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Magic without Rules.
[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] And I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] We are going to be talking about non-rule-based magic systems in this podcast. The title is actually a little bit contentious…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I wanted to call it soft magic. If you Google soft magic, you will mostly find me…
[Yeah]
[Brandon] Defining soft magic this way. It is a term… Lots of people like to use the term soft fantasy to mean different things. So we're just going to say magic without rules. This is the definition we're looking at.
[Howard] In terms… Talking about the term for a moment. Magic without rules gives us a nice level of specificity for why we are doing anything with magic, what it means to the reader, what it means for the story. Provided we understand what we mean by the words magic, without, and rules.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah. One of the other terms that you will hear for talking about this kind of concept is numinous magic. Which is, again, magic in which the rules are not delineated.
[Brandon] Now, this doesn't necessarily mean there are no rules. It can mean you're just writing a story and there are no rules. Basically, when we talk about rule-based magic system, non-rule-based magic system, the idea is that the characters don't know necessarily. Like, they are not… A rule-based magic system is often… The story is about or involves the characters coming to understand, manipulate, and use and control the world around them. That's…
 
[Howard] It's best understood, Brandon, through the example you use when you illustrate Sanderson's First Law. The One Ring is hard magic. We know what happens when you put it on, we know how to break it, we know that nobody is able to willfully throw it into the lava.
[Brandon] Yeah.
[Howard] Gandalf is soft magic. Or Gandalf is a rule-less magic. There are no rules. We don't know what Gandalf can do. Wizards are mysterious and scary, we don't know what's going to happen with the Balrog, we don't know if he can wave his staff and make the bad guys go away. He's a wizard.
[Brandon] Yep. Of course, there are Tolkien fans out there listening right now who are like, "No, no. I can list off the powers of a wizard." That's fine. That's from appendix material, you've dug into it. We're just talking about the general effect on the characters, specifically hear the hobbits. Or the reader not really knowing and not needing to know.
[Mary Robinette] That is the thing that I was going to say, is that when we're talking about this, it's okay to not have rules unless it is important to the story for the character to under… For the reader to understand. But when we're talking about rule-ba… Magic in which there are no rules, we're talking about a story in which it's not important to understand the rules.
[Brandon] Yes. Exactly. In fact, the goal of the story is that you don't.
[Howard] Or where it is important to not have a full understanding of how this works.
[Mary Robinette] Or just that it's not important. You just don't need to know.
 
[Margaret] The story is about something other than the mechanics of how this works.
[Brandon] Exactly. Some of these… Sometimes, like, it's for ambiance reasons, but, Margaret, you just reminded me, there's lots of times that if you take one step into the explaining the magic realm, suddenly you are raising a whole host of questions, that if you don't address and answer can really make the story feel off. If you never take that first step, if you tell the reader from the get-go, "No, this is not relevant. Accept it." This is your bye as we talked about last month, and then go forward. Your story is free to focus on this other thing, without getting caught in the weeds of having to explain this level of magic and this level of magic and this magic stone and that sort of thing.
[Howard] The science fiction concept here is handwavium. This is not the… I'm waving my hand like these are not the droids you're looking for. Except it's this is not the physics you're looking for. Below a certain point, we're not going to go into the physics, we're not gonna talk about the neutrino output of this, we're just going to let this slide, because the moment we commit to math at that level, everything starts to unravel and we're no longer telling the story we want to tell.
 
[Mary Robinette] Well, like… One of the examples that I actually think of is King Arthur. Like, how exactly does that sword stay in the stone? Like, how does it know? Is there… Is it a DNA test? Like, what is the rule system for keeping the sword in the stone and identifying the one true king? We don't know, we don't care.
[Brandon] Right. The one…
[Margaret] I was thinking, as we were talking, of the water that falls on you from nowhere. Nobody knows where the water comes from, it just falls on you when you lie. It's never explained, and we never want to know how it's explained, because that's not what it's about.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Why does Pinocchio's nose grow? [I don't know]
[Margaret] it just does.
[Mary Robinette] He lied.
 
[Brandon] Now, I do also want us to say, when we're talking about this, there is a distinction, to me, between… There's several different ways to do this. One is to have internal logic and never explain it, which is where we're getting here. But there is another way, which is magic that doesn't seem to have internal logic. Which can be really cool. This is the magic that you not only don't understand how it works, you don't understand what the consequences will be if you use this magic. A classic example of this would be like the monkey's paw, where you are given some little bit of information. Hey, this thing will grant you wishes. But the wishes… you'll have no understanding of the consequences. Often, they will go far beyond your expectations. Where the story becomes less about the magic or even what the magic can do, it becomes about the terrible things that happen when you can use forces you can't comprehend.
[Howard] For me, the whole… The story… The point of the story of the monkey's paw is attempting to understand the rules by which this thing works is going to result in you being betrayed even worse by your use of this thing. The more conditions you try to place on it, the more disastrous this will be.
 
[Brandon] So, why would you write a story like this? What are some of the things you gain from it?
[Mary Robinette] Often, you gain a sense of wonder. A lot of times when we do start putting rules in, it makes something feel mundane and ordinary. Sometimes, what you want is something that is numinous, that there is a sense of wonder, a sense of awe to it. So one of the things that you can do is to take some of the explanation away, and just let this magical thing happen.
[Brandon] Okay. I would say a sense of wonder can also be replaced by a sense of dread.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Brandon] They can go very hand in hand. This is one of the things I see from really great rule-less magic systems sometimes is that the main character feels so small. They are presented with a world in which like… Howard, you were telling a story about a gun?
[Howard] The lazy gun. The… I quoted… Referenced Iain Banks last month. I'm going to do it again. Iain Banks, Against A Dark Background. The whole story is… It's a MacGuffin story. We're trying to find the lazy gun. The only things we know about the lazy gun are if you turn it upside down, it weighs about 3 pounds more, and, if you point it at something and pull the trigger, whatever you've pointed it at, will die. The method of death, at one point, it gets fired and a monster mouth appears out of nowhere and munches the guy in half and he's dead. The result, for me, I'm going to come back to Mary with the sense of wonder, the numinous magic concept. It's a MacGuffin whose rules we don't need to understand. What's important is that the fact that no one understands it and the fact that it is so magical and powerful, now everybody wants it. That's what drives the story. It's the wanting of the thing, it has nothing to do with how the thing works.
[Brandon] I love that example of… If you pull the trigger, you expect them to explode. But something comes out of another dimension and eats them… It leaves you with a sense of… Again, this is something beyond my comprehension currently. I have no idea how this thing is working. That's scary. This is… This whole kind of eldritch Lovecraftian idea that we are actually very small is a really interesting and frightening emotion that fiction can evoke.
 
[Margaret] I think the other thing that you get when you have magic without set rules, is, just in terms of resource allocation, which we were talking about last month, the page weight or the word count that you're not using for explaining how magic works or for having characters who are masters of it. You get to apply it to other things. If that's not what your story is about, even if you worked out the rules for how magic works, your story might not need it.
[Brandon] Right. That's a really good point, because one thing when newer writers are talking about info don't send things like this, one thing they don't seem to get, and it's been hard for me to explain sometimes, is that when a reader is really curious about something, you gain infodump equity. Right? That as soon as you start to infodump on something there really interested in, then that paragraph kind of blurs away and the world comes to them. That same paragraph describing something else might be really frustrating to them. That's often whether you've used your cues correctly, leading them to questions and curiosity, whether… I read a lot of books where I'm really interested in this world element they brought up, and instead I get an infodump on a different one.
[Oh, yeah]
[Brandon] Oh, I get so bored so quickly. Or I'm really interested in this character's conflict and we stopped for the worldbuilding infodump. You gotta put these in places… 
[Margaret] You gotta prime the pump for us.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I say, and I think this gets to the heart of what Margaret was talking about with the focus, that you can buy time basically, is that unless this… That the… Unless the information… This is true for all exposition, but in less it affects why we care about something, unless it affects our understanding of what the character wants or if it affects… If it doesn't affect our understanding of how they will achieve their goal, we don't… The reader doesn't actually need to know it. A lot of times, people are like, "Well, let me explain my magic system." Like, do we actually need to know? Do I actually need to know how the spaceship works? That's kind of one of the other things that you can do when you're looking at this soft magic, is… It's like I know that when I pick up my phone, I can take pictures with it and occasionally make phone calls. I can tell you well, it works with a computer inside. That's about as far as I can go. I think that you can do that with magic, too.
[Howard] I'm reminded of the… I think it was a comedy clip about the airline attendant telling everybody to turn their devices off.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] They're arguing with her about the devices. She finally collapses and says, "Okay, look, people. Airplanes are magic. We don't know how it works."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] "You guys just need to turn that stuff off, because if you break the magic, we fall out of the sky."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] It's kind of beautiful, because honestly, that's sort of how all of us feel about airplanes.
[Laughter]
[Howard] I see a dichotomy here in the magic without rules, and it is that there is magic without rules that the reader can see, and there is magic that is explicitly… There is an absence of rules so that what the reader sees is an inconsistency, or an absence of any sorts of sense. The lazy gun is that inconsistency. I don't know… Well, there is one consistency. It's going to kill you. But beyond that, I don't see any rules to it.
[Brandon] Very, very infrequently do you write a magic with no rules. It can happen. But usually, if were talking about magic without rules, it's magic where the characters can't… Don't understand usually what will happen, or at least the consequences of what they're using.
 
[Brandon] Let's stop for the book of the week, though, which is actually Bookburners.
[Margaret] It is. Bookburners is… It's going to sound like television when I talk about it, because we discuss it in terms of season and episodes, but it is a series of novelettes that are released in e-book and audio form. Written by Max Gladstone, Mur Lafferty, Andrea Phillips, Brian Francis Slattery, and also by me. We chose Bookburners for this particular episode, because this is a series about a group that works for a black budget arm of the Vatican, charged with keeping encroaching magic, which seems to be coming more and more into our world, and it is their job to try to hold back the tide and keep it out. The justification that the organization that they work for has always given for this is the fact that we have no idea how this works. Anybody who has ever tried to use magic constructively or productively ends up being like a toddler with a machine gun. Things go wrong very, very quickly. It is Season Four is out now. Season Five will be released episodically at some point this summer. You get to see over the arc how well they do that job, and how they have to change their attitudes towards how magic is.
[Howard] By way of clarification, when you say this summer, summer of…
[Margaret] 2019. Thank you.
 
[Brandon] So let me ask you, specifically, Margaret, how did you go about writing a story where the magic doesn't have rules? Or, if it… How did you do this?
[Margaret] It started out… Because we are writing it collectively and we're sort of building on things and we're building the characters, it did start… There was a certain amount of okay, try weird things, and if it seemed to fit the right tone for the broad strokes of what we thought magic would do, all right, we'll go with it. In the first season, Mur did an episode where you have a restaurant kitchen that is made out of meat, where people are cutting pieces off the walls and frying it to their customers and everyone is obsessed with this one restaurant in Scotland. We have episodes where an entire apartment… This is one of Brian's episodes. It transforms into this strange mutant… Mutable magical landscape, and a guy opens the wrong book and gets kind of sucked into it, and becomes part of his apartment. As we went forward, we were like, "Okay. If this is what we have established…" Eventually, we reached the point where it's like, "Okay. Let's come up with some guidelines," as the story is progressing and our arc plot is going on. What is actually going on behind the scenes, and what do we think is the cause of what they call the rising tide?
[Brandon] Okay. So you kind of just like… You're discovery writing and kind of doing that classic discovery writing thing, where you're waiting to see what connections the kind of group hive mind comes up with that you will then push forward with.
[Margaret] There is a certain amount of building the bridge as you are crossing the river going on, yeah.
[Brandon] That's awesome. What about the rest of you? How do you write something… Now, I have a lot of trouble with this. I'll be perfectly frank. Writing something where I don't start explaining the rules… I just, ah… I don't do that very often. If I do, it doesn't go very well. So, how do you approach it?
[Howard] Well, I don't outline the rules, but I generate the rules.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Howard] We're going to talk about constructed languages at some point. I created a language because I needed a code in which someone knew what the code meant and knew how to find a thing and it needed to feel like this is a thing that will actually work. It needed to feel as if there was a consistency behind it. But I absolutely didn't have time to explain all of the things that went into it. Pages and pages of numerology creation went into two lines of dialogue. That's what happens when I try to build magic without rules.
[Mary Robinette] So what I find is that… Like, I've got a story that's coming out in the last… Or that came out in the last issue of Shimmer. It is ruleless magic. Except there are a couple of things that we know. That you don't want to make Gramma say something three times. What I find with the ruleless magic, when I work with it, is that because people are pattern seeking creatures, that even if the magic, even if I just free write the magic and things are just weird and stuff just happens, that the characters within that world are still going to try to find patterns to it, and that there's usually one thing that they will still kind of hang onto. So, like we all know that if you walk away from a bus stop, the bus will come. If there is a chance of rain and you leave the house without your umbrella, it will definitely rain on you. Absolutely, 100%. We know this. Even though that is clearly not actually how this magic system on Earth works. Nora Jemisen's 100,000 Kingdoms, the magic is a written form of magic. So we know that, but the rest of it is clueless. So what I tend to do is say, "Well, people are going to try to apply stuff to this. They're just wrong, so it doesn't work consistently, because it is a rule that they have put on it in a desperate attempt to understand it.
 
[Brandon] I like that idea a lot. That's very helpful. In fact, I think I'm going to assign homework along those lines. Because I've been thinking, take a story that has… That you've worked on or that you been planning that has a very rule-based magic. Where you think you know the rules. Have the rules all go wrong intentionally. Like, you have control of the story, but have the characters realize they don't know the rules, and deal with the ramifications of that.
[Mary Robinette] While you're working on that, I'm going to tell you a secret. There are rules in the Glamorous Histories that Jane and Vincent are completely wrong about.
[Brandon] Awesome. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.9: Showing Off

Mar. 8th, 2019 09:51 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.9: Showing Off
 
 
Key Points: Showing off awesome worldbuilding and podcasting skills? No, just how to make infodumps interesting. As you may recall... How do you let characters explain the world without it being a boring infodump? Let the character interact with the information, give it emotional weight. Beware of "As you know, Bob," but an argument let's you slip in lots of information about characters and whatever they are arguing about. Use "Bob, you idiot!" Giving directions also can help. Humor makes the moments of worldbuilding go down easier, too. Sex positions, mixing sex scenes and exposition, might work for you. Convincing someone who has given up lets you summarize everything that has happened, and what we need to do. Ephemera! Establishing shot, relationship shot, insets, pictures! Worldbuilding that is important impacts the story, so the impact gets mentioned in the story. Maps and grand poems. People in a bar talking about what they watched or did last night can tell you what's important in this culture. Newspaper clippings, broadcast transcripts, a character overhearing a snippet of a news clip... all good ways to let the reader know "Today, the ocean is boiling." Consider when to deploy ephemera and what effect you want it to have on the reader. Watch for the gorilla in the phone booth.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Nine.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Showing Off.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] We are going to show off our awesome worldbuilding skills for you…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] And our awesome podcasting skills.
[Howard] That is not what you told me we were going to do. Now I'm nervous.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Um…
[Mary Robinette] As you know, Brandon…
[Dan] He would've dressed totally differently. 
[Laughter]
[Brandon] As I know, we're going to talk about infodumps, but we're going to make the infodumps interesting. Basically, this whole podcast is 14 seasons of infodumps.
[Laughter]
[Howard] As you may recall, we've been talking about worldbuilding all year.
[Brandon] Yes, we have, Howard, and did you know…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] All right. So. My first question for you guys is how do you make characters who know a lot about the world talk about the world without it being an infodump, or without it being boring?
[Mary Robinette] So, I had to deal with this a lot in Calculating Stars because I have this mathematician pilot astronaut, and there's oh, the amount of information that you need to… No, I didn't really think about it when I'm like, "I'm going to write hard science fiction." Huh.
[Brandon] You're going to not just write hard science fiction. You're going to mix it with alternate history.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Which are the two most research heavy sub genres of sci-fi fantasy.
[Mary Robinette] It was a good choice there. Also, I'm going to make my main character a mathematician, and Jewish. None of which I am. So… But what I did was very much what I talked about last month, which was the interacting and having emotional weight to the information that the character is conveying. So, if I need you to know how to fly an airplane, when I… And I want you to know this airplane is a really cool airplane, then I have her walk in and go, "Oh, who has the T35 and how do I become their best friend?" That immediately tells you that this is interesting. Then, she can start to list all the things about it. What I'm doing for the reader is I am completely infodumping all of this information, and I'm tying it to emotion. So it is using POV…
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] But it is very specifically about that interaction with the thing and masking it as an emotional state, rather than a "Please, here's my knowledge."
 
[Brandon] Well, and you say as an emotional state. A lot of the ways that this has been done historically, and it still works very well, but it's where the cliché "As you know, Bob," came from, is to have two characters have an argument or discussion about the thing. Saying, "I like this sort of gun," and the other character says, "Oh, those guns are crap. I like these sorts of guns." Suddenly, you've got an argument and you're getting information about both characters, their preferences, and the guns.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Brandon] It's a great way to go about it. How do you do it without it sounding like, "As you know, Bob," that sort of thing?
[Dan] Well, the reason that the argument works well is because it isn't "As you know, Bob," it's "Bob, you idiot."
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Dan] Then they're not telling each other things they already know. That's when it really is awful.
[Howard] I did almost that exact… I mean, it wasn't guns, they were talking about the floating cities in the… One of the places. It ends with a joke. It's very much an introduction of characters. There's a ring of giant floating cities going all the way around the planet. "I grew up on Venus, I've seen floating cities before." "Okay, but the bartender… He makes these drinks inside other drinks." "Depth charges. I've had those before, too." Then they look out the window and everything is gone. "Where are all the cities?" "Where are we going to get drinks?" It's just a brief moment of insight. I now know that Jengisha is, one, from Venus, where there are floating cities, but I needed to introduce… This is the first time we've been to this place in the book, and I'm showing the reader what isn't there. So I have to describe what was there, in order to then have it be gone. [https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-07-29]
 
[Mary Robinette] Oh, giving directions is actually a great way to do that.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] It's like, "Oh, you drive down the road where the old school used to be…"
 
[Brandon] I just realized something. That is that we always joke that Howard cheats because he has pictures for his worldbuilding. But he cheats twice, because he also has jokes to make us laugh in between the moments of worldbuilding. You're just a cheaty cheater.
[Howard] I am a cheating cheater, and I could talk about how the humor lowers your defenses and allows me to slip information in there. But that's… That goes beyond cheating and into evil.
[Chuckles]
 
[Mary Robinette] I'm not going to say that the number of sex scenes in Calculating Stars are there because I have a ton of exposition that I needed to get across, but…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Sex positions.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Call it what it is.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] That's exactly what it is.
[Howard] I am so glad I didn't try to make that joke.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Oh, wow. All right.
[Mary Robinette] There's multiple layers of that joke. We're just going to move on there.
[Brandon] How do you make your worldbuilding interesting?
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Sex position. So, here's an example of something that you should not do. I read… As research, I read Mars, a Technical Tale by Wernher von Braun, which is labeled as a novel, and it is von Braun… He's the father of modern rocketry. It was him saying, "Let me tell you how we could do a Mars mission." It was his idea to get the American public… Or just get the public excited about the idea of Mars. There is a chapter in there in which we literally have the professor says, "Let me tell you about Mars, the professor began his exposition." That's an actual sentence.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Then, the next line is, "Mars is the fourth planet from the sun." It is a chapter of as-you-know fact dump. There is no… Oh, it's… There's charts and graphs. It is worth picking up just so you can go…
[Dan] To see how not to do it?
[Mary Robinette] It's really… Oh… It's very, very useful for reference, and it is really challenging as a novel.
 
[Brandon] One of the best plot recaps I've ever read is in A Night of Blacker Darkness.
[Laughter]
[Brandon] Which is a lengthy plot recap so that we can get caught up to remem… Getting it straightened out what the characters need to do, what they have already done, and what their goals are. It is the facts conversation. Tell us about this, Dan.
[Dan] The facts… Well, A Night of Blacker Darkness was me trying to write a farce, which I learned is so much easier to do on stage, which is why I eventually went back and did it on stage. But one of the problems with farce is that it is very information dense at a very fast pace. So I got halfway through the book and realized that a lot of the writing group had either missed important details or had forgotten them because 900 other important details had happened. So let's take a minute and get on the same page and make sure we know what's going on, all done as a conversation between the characters. One of them has decided it's not worth carrying on and wants to give up, and the other two are trying to convince him, no, we can still win. That gives them an excuse to run down all of the plot points that have happened.
[Brandon] Now, what makes this scene really work is the fact that I came out of it understanding, but the facts are all really complex and funny. So how did you not lose us in the thing that was supposed to reorient us as you were making jokes about how convoluted the plot was?
[Dan] Um. I numbered all of the facts, and that's why it's called the facts conversation. If you talk to people who've read the book, almost everyone this is their favorite chapter. What I did was I knew that there were three, maybe four, very important facts. They were really driving all the action. But numbering, I think at final count it was 17 or 18 total facts, made you think that there was a lot more going on than there really was. So you're kind of in the middle of this whirlwind and they always refer to the facts by number rather than what they are, except for the four important ones.
[Oooh!]
[Dan] So you know, "Oh, okay. Running away to Rome, so that we don't get murdered by a vampire…" That's fact whatever it was. That one they will say both the number and the title. The rest of them are all just numbers.
[Mary Robinette] That's very clever. I mean, that's a really common stage technique which you are transposing directly to the page.
[Brandon] And then back to the stage.
[Mary Robinette] Very nice.
[Dan] That's why it was so much better on stage.
[Brandon] It occurs to me that you probably repeated the four important facts a number of times?
[Dan] A lot of times.
[Brandon] Where the other ones were only one-offs.
[Dan] Yeah. There's a lot of times in the conversation where they'll say, "Which brings us back to fact four, blah blah blah. There is a vampire trying to kill us," whatever it is. So that hammers home the important stuff and lets you have the joy of being confused by the unimportant stuff.
 
[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week.
[Howard] It's not a book. It is not a YouTube University, but he calls it Shadiversity, s_h_a_d_i_versity. This is a guy who, Shad is his name, vidcast… Deconstructs scenes, ideas, technologies, things from fantasy and science fiction pop culture, and talks about the historical underpinnings, why they're getting it wrong, why they're getting it right. I mean, one of them is this thing that we keep calling a tabard. It's actually a monastic scapular. Tabards didn't look anything like this. He's got an episode called Best Medieval Weapons to Use against Elves.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Then a follow-up episode, An Even Better Way to Fight Elves. What he's doing is digging into actual historical combat, warfare, construction, whatever, and layering the pop culture we consume over that. It is fascinating and educational. You can find it on YouTube. Shadiversity, or you just Google Shadiversity and you'll be there.
[Brandon] Awesome.
 
[Brandon] So we're getting back to how to show off your worldbuilding in ways other than viewpoint. Because we covered viewpoint really well last month. For the last part of the podcast, let's dig into ephemera. Nonnarrative parts of the story. How do you use this, Howard? Let's talk about pictures.
[Howard] Um. Okay. The… There's several kinds of pictures categorically in Schlock Mercenary. One of them is the establishing shot, where I tell you… The narrator will tell you where we are. You know what the name of this spaceship is, but we will have… Often have an external shot that shows you what this spaceship looks like. Or it's a city. Or it's a landscape, whatever. There are then relationship shots where I'm showing you where the characters are standing in relationship to each other and what is in the room with them. Are there props? Are there things that are going to be important? Then there are the panels that I call insets where I'm just zooming in on faces and showing reactions. I've talked about comic syntax in other podcasts. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, that's going to give you more information than I can ever give you. When there is a critical story piece, I always make sure that it is showing up in an establishing shot, and then within the same page, within the same week of scripts, it's going to show up in one of the relationship pictures. It's going to be mentioned in the dialogue, so that we know that this is a thing that we are going to come back to.
[Brandon] Are there ever things that you rely exclusively on the pictures for with the worldbuilding? Or do you always use a footnote… Always is probably too strong a term, but…
[Howard] [sigh]
[Brandon] Is it a rule of thumb that you're going to… You said you mention it in dialogue?
[Howard] Mentioning it in dialogue… If it's a piece of worldbuilding that is important, it's probably impacting the story in some way. So what is going to get mentioned in story is the impact. There are places where I can do things with pictures that… Obviously, you can do this with prose. There's a scene in which… It is a scene between person A and person B, Kevin and Jengisha. Ellen, whose husband is the other Kevin, the time clone, who is dead, is in the very background. She is being pulled out of the room by two of her friends. She has an expression on her face that looks bewildered and sad. It is one shot. I knew when I was putting it in there that I needed it because I'm going to show her having a conversation with the cloning tank where her husband is going to be coming back. But I have to have people know that there's this relationship. I got mail from people who were like, "Oh, my gosh. That thing you did, that little tiny half a square inch of panel, I got the feels from that." These are the sorts of places where a comic, I can put things in. It's not explicitly worded, it's easy to miss. With prose, I feel like it's harder to hide those things because the words are all usually read in order. Does that make sense?
 
[Brandon] Yeah. This is kind of hard for me, because I know my books are going to end up in audio books, but I love ephemera, and worldbuilding through them.
[Howard] Sticking them in the middle of paragraphs?
[Brandon] Yeah. Well, usually it's on an opposite page. I'm talking like the maps.
[Howard] Oh, them. Okay.
[Brandon] The maps from [garbled lights].
[Dan] Like the grand poems.
[Brandon] Yeah, the poems. The poems will get read.
[Dan] Things like that.
[Brandon] But the maps, for instance. There's like seven, eight maps in Way of Kings. What we do is have a big, gorgeous painted map, and then we have the survey map that says at the bottom, created by His Majesty's Royal Surveyors. Then we have a map scrawled on the back of a turtle shell sort of thing that somebody has been using to get around the camp. We have like all of these different maps that I put into the book to kind of show different ways that people are orienting themselves.
[Howard] So the Planet Mercenary sourcebook is a 250,000 word ephemera.
[Laughter]
[Howard] With an unreliable narrator.
[Dan] Sold separately.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Exactly.
 
[Dan] In the Mirador series, I… One of the basic worldbuilding premises was this is a world where e-sports have replaced regular sports. I never wanted to, and never did in the series, come out and say, "E-sports have replaced regular sports." But instead, we just have… They fill the same role. People in a bar all talking about the videogame they all watched on TV last night. Things like that. When the second book came out, I had a chance to do a bunch of ephemera. I had logo drawn up for the main team, I had a bracket of the tournament of all the players that we posted online, and things like that. Which all helped everyone to get into this mindset of oh, this game is important, and everyone's excited about it.
[Mary Robinette] I used newspaper clippings at the head of the chapters in Calculating Stars. That is a… That's a very useful thing. Because…
[Howard] Chapter headings?
[Mary Robinette] Chapter headings, the ephemera that shows up at the top, which is a newspaper article or a transcript from a radio play. But I'm going to say that you can actually use that technique without having to go to that… Of the newspaper clipping or the television or something else. You can use that to get your worldbuilding across without actually having to have chapter headings. Because you can do that same thing by having it be something that a character overhears. Having a little bit of a news clip playing in the background can allow you to just have an announcer literally tell you, "And right now, the ocean is boiling." You can do that. It's effective. You don't want to… Like any technique, you don't want it to be one note and that's the only thing that you use, but it's really useful.
[Brandon] Can I say, I really like your news reporter voice?
[Laughter]
[Brandon] For when you read those books? There are different ones. But you got that sort of…
[Mary Robinette] Ladies and gentlemen…
[Brandon] Yes. It's that. You know… It's that.
[Dan] Yes. Ladies and gentlemen. These marshmallows…
[Laughter]
[Dan] Are delicious.
[Howard] Not actually her voice, but…
[Mary Robinette] But it does tell you things. That's… That is actually a thing that we do have to navigate when I'm doing audiobooks, is if I just do a straight read of that and have that in the same voice as Elma, as the rest of the narration. You have to come up with something that's going to distinguish the two.
[Brandon] Right. It just… It sounds like it's coming from the old radio broadcasts that people would do. It is very distinct. You know exactly what it is right away.
[Mary Robinette] March third, 1952.
[Laughter]
[Dan] Pertinent to this conversation, I just sold a historical thriller. A Cold War book that I talked about a couple of times. I just sold that to Audible. It's going to be an Audible Original. I had created essentially as ephemera a bunch of codes. It's about a photographer in 1961. So there are number codes and there are replacement codes and there are ciphers and there are all these things all over the book. After we sold it, the editor and I looked at it and realized most of these aren't even going to function properly in audio. So we had to really rethink. We're still figuring out exactly how we're going to convey all that stuff that was invented as ephemera and ended up being important to the plot, and now we're… Now we're in a hole.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. The… We can… You and I can talk about that later, because there are in fact ways to handle that, because I've had to deal with that. I actually had that problem in Fated Sky, because there's big chunks of code.
[Brandon] Right. Yeah. I'm… This is off on a tangent, but I have, at the beginning of a chapter in one of my books, something that just looks nice on the page, that is just a bunch of… A random string of letters because it's… A character who went through a period of pseudo-madness, and this is their scrawlings, right? The reader just read all those letters, and the audiobook listeners came to me and said, "That chapter. It was just going on and on and on…"
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] "With the letters." So these are things to be aware of.
[Howard] Oh, man.
 
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Often… This is actually getting into something that I… That is completely pertinent to the kind of infodumping that you do and the kind of ephemera that you create. That's when you deploy it and what effect are you trying to have on the reader? So with something like that, what you're trying to convey to the reader is that there was something not right going on with this character's head. That there were all of these things. So there are other ways to do that vocally, but you do have to shift when you go to the different medium. One of the things that I will see early career writers do, and sometimes in published work, is that the infodump just comes in the wrong place. They aren't thinking about the effect of the information on the reader.
[Brandon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] There only thinking about this is information.
[Brandon] Yeah. I often use the phrase gorilla in a phone booth… Which… There are times in your story where something's going to be really interesting to the character. You often in the podcast use the puppet metaphor. What the puppet is looking at, the character looks at. You have the puppet look at something cool, but then you start giving us an infodump on something else. We're going to say, "Nononono. You turned our attention toward something cool. You can't infodump me right then." But you could infodump me a little bit later on, once our mind can come back to this sort of thing.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Exactly.
[Howard] Years ago, David Kellett did… I think this was for the podcast that he did with Scott Kurtz… And impersonation of a New York taxi driver doing the audiobook version of Garfield. Saying, "Oh, you guys. This last panel, he's sitting in the pan of lasagna. Sitting in a pan of lasagna." I was rolling, because I know that the Schlock Mercenary audiobook is really just never going to get made, but that problem, bouncing off of that problem, at that level when you've got the ephemera which are… on one level, what you would call ephemera is 90% of my product. The translation into audio means it would have to be completely rewritten.
 
[Brandon] We're going to have to stop here. Mary Robinette, you have our homework.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So for your homework, I actually want you to write some ephemera for your world. Write a transcript of a news program or a newspaper article… Some ephemera that fits into your world. Have it be about a fact that you've been struggling to get in there that you want people to know. Then try, because it's ephemera, see how concise you can make it. So you're only allowed one paragraph. No more than 75 words.
[Brandon] And, like, we are only allowed 15 minutes that became 22…
[Laughter]
[Brandon] You are out of excuses. Go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.6: Fantasy and Science Fiction Races

Feb. 13th, 2019 10:10 am
mbarker: (BrainUnderRepair)
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Writing Excuses 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.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding

Feb. 6th, 2019 10:32 am
mbarker: (Me typing?)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.05: Viewpoint As Worldbuilding
 
 
Key Points: Worldbuilding using character viewpoint? How do you integrate setting into your characters?  Start with the way the character interacts with the world, both physically and emotionally. Use actions and dialogue to show us assumptions and attitudes, how things work, without lengthy info dumps. Use two or more characters with different backgrounds or opinions, different viewpoints, to give the reader information about the thing, about the characters, and about the unreliable viewpoint. One way to use viewpoint to intersect with worldbuilding is in the way characters describe other characters. The same character seen through the eyes of two different characters can be very different. Think about how the character's voice directs the narrative versus keeping the narrative safe and trustworthy. First person, the character runs everything. Third person, you need to balance. Some voice, some straight narration. To make your worldbuilding richer, think about what people swear by, who makes what jokes, and how your character interacts with the environment. A room with marble floors comes to life when heels clack across it.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode Five.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Viewpoint As Worldbuilding.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
 
[Brandon] One of my personal favorite topics… Perhaps even hobby horses, is to talk about how to worldbuild by using character viewpoint. I love it when books do this. In fact, it is one of the things that when I pick up a book, if the first chapter does, the first page does, I know I'm going to have a good time, at least with that character. I really like it. I want to talk about how we do it. So, how do you make setting an integrated part of your characters?
[Mary Robinette] I think a lot of it is the way the character interacts with it, not just physically, but also emotionally. That... the weight that things carry. So, using Jane Austen as an example, someone can… Like, two characters can look at each other, and that's no big deal. But when Austen handles it, she gives you that emotional weight. It's like she… And I'm thinking specifically in Persuasion, there's this scene when Capt. Wentworth pulls a small child off of Anne Elliott's back, and there's a moment where he's touching her. The emotional weight of that tells you, as a modern reader, that oh, there is no touching. This is… There is a lot going on between these two. It is… It gives you all of these layers of detail, while just being a physical interaction in the world. So that's the kind of thing that I find very interesting.
[Dan] One, very similar to that, is in Age of Innocence, when he takes her glove off. It is so steamy, and it's just a glove. But it tells you so much about the world and what it's like and the rules they have to follow.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, you do that. It's actually one of the things I enjoy in the Stormlight, is the safe hand.
[Brandon] Right. Right. The safe hand came from… So, for those who aren't familiar. Society has eroticized the bare left hand of women. This has all kinds of social implications, and all kinds of… People always want to ask me, they want to say, "Why?" They often come to me, "Why, why is this?" I can answer. From, like, I… In the worldbuilding, the past, well, there were these events and these influential writings that happened, and then there was some institutionalized sexism that insp… But really, the answer is, "Why? Because that's how their culture is."
[Laughter]
[Brandon] That's how they see things. It's not why because they are like, "Well, when my great…" No. They're just like, "This is how my culture is." Then that culture becoming a big part of how people see the world is the sort of thing that I just love.
[Dan] You just look at all the different cultures on Earth today and the cultural assumptions that we carry and assume are common to the entire human race. Then you go to another country, and it's… They've never even heard of it before. You realize that we do this all the time.
 
[Howard] Last season, we had an episode on confronting the default, in which we talked about exactly that. When I wrote, I think it was Scrap Ante for Privateer Press, they wanted me to develop a character for them… Develop an existing character. They wanted me to give a POV to a character who was a mechanic… And this, they've got game fic… They've got game stuff surrounding this guy already. Who is a mechanic, and he needed to sound like a mechanic, and they wanted to talk a little bit about how these things work. Then it needed to not be boring. So I created a mystery in which someone is sabotaging a Warjack, and in as lean writing as I could, I have this mechanic digging in and finding out that somebody has swapped a part that looks like another part, and he has names for all of these, and he's rattling them off the way a mechanic would. In the course of writing this, I started lifting names and altering them a little bit from actual steam engines and diesel engines and whatever else. When I sent it into the Privateer Press guys, Doug, who's the chief worldbuilder, read it and said, "you have done something that I have been terrified to do forever." Which is explain how these things work.
[Laughter]
[Howard] They loved it. It read like a fun story, and it was all POV. It was not, "Oh, this is how the magic flows through the whatever." It's just a guy fixing a thing and looking for a problem, and then determining that somebody had sabotaged this to kill him.
[Brandon] Awesome.
[Dan] So. An example from one of my books. In the Partials series, one of the things that I wanted to play with for the worldbuilding was the generational divide. People who remember life before the apocalypse and the kids who have grown up in a post-apocalyptic world. So I had the chance then to start with two or three chapters entirely from this teenage point of view, just describing a normal world. She didn't think it was scary, she wasn't constantly concerned with the things that they had lost. Then, we finally get to a meeting with adults, and they spend their whole time bemoaning how rustic everything is. Just the difference between their attitudes immediately tells you a lot about the world and the society.
 
[Brandon] Yeah. That's one of the things I like the most is when you can take two different characters and describe the same thing, the same event, or the same cultural mores, and then, with those two contrasting opinions, the reader is given a bunch of information. They are, number one, told about the thing. Right? You're getting the worldbuilding. But you're, number two, told about the characters. You're told what they find important and valuable, or what they notice. But, number three, you're also told viewpoint is untrustworthy.
[Dan] Yes.
[Brandon] Which is a really important thing with these sorts of stories.
[Dan] That can make it very difficult. If you want to do that, that's something that you might need to refine and polish quite a bit, because your readers of the first or second draft might say, "Oh, you've got an inconsistency here." No, I don't. You need to look at who is saying it, and maybe I need to finesse this a little bit so that that is more clear.
[Howard] The number of times I have taken an inconvenient fact about the Schlock Mercenary universe and backtracked it to determine who said it…
[Laughter]
[Howard] And then ascertained, "Oh. That person is actually allowed to be wrong about this." Did the narrator ever… Nope! Narrator didn't… Did a footnote ever… Nope! Oh, this is awesome.
[Laughter]
[Howard] This is awesome. I am off the hook.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have… There's a timeline problem in the Lady Astronaut universe. Because when I wrote the novelette, I was just like, "Eh, it's a one-off." I wrote it. I didn't do a lot of worldbuilding. Basically, when I got into doing the actual hard-core how long does it take to get people into space when you're kickstarting a space program… I'm like, "Oh. Elma's just wrong."
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] About some of her memories. She's just conflating them.
[Dan] Just misremembering.
[Mary Robinette] Just misremembering.
[Brandon] I run into this a lot. But it is nice to establish viewpoints that are untrustworthy for this sort of reason.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So a book that I'm reading right now that's doing a really interesting job of this shifting viewpoint is Semiosis by Sue Burke. It's a multigenerational novel. So you will move forward like an entire generation, and it's a colony world. So the first generation are the first people on the planet. Then the next generation are kids who've grown up there. The way they view their parents versus… The worldbuilding is fascinating, because… They're… You see how they're shifting and how the culture is shifting to adapt to the place that they're living. It's really, really interesting. It's all POV that's doing it.
[Brandon] Now, that is not our book of the week, but it would be a good book for people to read.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Brandon] Dan actually has our book of the week.
[Dan] Yeah. The book of the week actually hits this topic perfectly. It is Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. Which is a YA fantasy. Big secondary world fantasy set in a world inspired by Africa. What's fascinating about it… Many things are fascinating about it. But pertinent to this discussion, there are three viewpoint characters. It's a world where magic has been stolen. No one can do it anymore. The people who used to be able to do it are an oppressed class. So one of our viewpoints is one of these kind of former mage people. Then we have a princess who has been sheltered her entire life and runs away from home. Then we have her brother who is struggling with the King's policies. So they all have completely different ideas about what the world should look like and what it does look like and how they want to change it. It's really fascinating to see the interplay of those viewpoints as you go through.
[Brandon] Excellent. That is Children of Blood and Bone. I was on a panel with her, and she was really interesting. Had some really cool things to say about magic. So I anticipate it being a great book. Emily really liked it.
[Dan] Yes. She describes the book as Black Panther but with magic.
[Brandon] She does.
 
[Brandon] Now, one of my favorite ways to use viewpoint in worldbuilding, to intersect them, is by the way the characters describe other characters.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] Uhuh.
[Brandon] I first picked up on this as a young person reading The Wheel of Time, where… And I'm not going to be able to quote these exactly. I'm sorry, Wheel of Time fans, but you have one character who would describe someone and say, "Wow. They look like they spend most of their day at the forge." Then another character describes the same person and says something along the lines of "Wow. If you beat that person at cards, leave early. Because otherwise, they'll jump you in the back alley." Those two descriptions are both "This is a tough, intimidating person." But seen through the eyes of two very different characters. I love this sort of thing. Description. Now, my question for you guys is, do you ever worry about the blend of… When you're in narrative, how much you're going to let the character's voice direct the narrative and how much you're not?
[Mary Robinette] It does depend on whether… Which voice you're using. Are you using first person, or are you using tight third? Because first person, all over the place. It's no problem. But with tight third… With third person, it is a tricky line. Because what I find is that the… Unless it is very obviously voice-y, that the reader will interpret that as being safe and trustworthy. So I tend to try to be fairly honest when I'm doing narration that is less flavored than when I'm doing something that… If I'm doing free indirect speech, I try to… That's… I try to reserve the perceptions for those.
[Brandon] Yeah. I always kind of go back and forth on this, because, of course, Robert Jordan did very much a lot of tight thirds. There would be these moments where it felt like it was right in their head, and other times when the narrator was speaking. He balanced it really well. I'm always a little scared about that. Because you do want the narrator, the non-present narrative, to be trustworthy. But you want the viewpoint of the character to maybe not be.
[Mary Robinette] Sometimes it's a thing that you can do… I was just reading The Killing of Kings by Howard Andrew Jones. It's not… At the time of recording, it is not yet out. But one of the things that he does is there is this character who's constantly… Male character who's constantly looking at women with a very male gaze. Like, constantly looking at boobs and ass. Just all the time. Then will say things like, "I don't understand why this woman doesn't like me."
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Right. Right.
[Howard] Wow.
[Mary Robinette] "It's like she's always so cold and distant. There's always a piece of furniture between us." I'm like, "Yep. Yes, there is. Absolutely, yes, there is." But it is… It's deftly handled, because he is staying absolutely true to the character's point of view. But by giving us very obvious physicality and recognizable body language from the other character, he's telling us how this behavior is actually perceived in the world.
[Brandon] Later in the year, we're going to do an entire week on writing imperfect worlds. Or imperfect characters. With… Using topics like this, not validating but acknowledging that some people are like this. We will cover that. It's going to be in a few months, but we are going to get to that. That is one of the… That's like Using Viewpoint and Character Level 501.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Being able to pull off some of this stuff.
 
[Brandon] Before we go out, any tips for writers on making their sentences, particularly their worldbuilding sentences, do more than one thing at once?
[Howard] What do these people swear by? I love that. My favorite examples of this currently are from the various different NPCs in the ESO world, where they swear by different gods. They are consistent in the way this works. It adds a measure of depth. Because some of them will swear by those gods, and somebody who is from the same culture will never utter those words. You can now tell that those two people are actually different. That's not the sort of thing that you expect to see… Well, if you grew up with video games. It's not the sort of thing that you expect to see in a videogame. But videogame writing has progressed to the point that we are expecting that level of worldbuilding, especially in dialogue that has to be read by an actor in a way that sounds conversational and believable.
[Dan] Very similar to that, and I'm starting to notice this more as I read… In the current science fiction that I'm reading, is what our people allowed to make jokes about. Which jokes can come from which species in the space station? And things like that.
[Mary Robinette] I would say, for me, the tip that I would hand to our listeners is to make sure that your character is interacting with their environment. Which is where I started us, but I'm going to give a really concrete example. Like, I can describe a room and say, "The room had marble floors, tall vaulted ceilings, and green velvet curtains." That tells you what the room looks like. But if I say, "My character's heels clacked across the marble floor as she strode to the window. The velvet was soft against her skin as she pushed the curtains back." You know so much more about the character and the world. So you're getting both things at the same time. I think that's going to make it feel richer to the reader, as well.
 
[Brandon] Awesome. Howard, you've got some homework for us.
[Howard] I do. This is the from-within, from-without episode, the Buck Rogers, Wilma Deering, the Twoflower, Rincewind. Take a character who is alien to the culture or the setting that you are writing within. But obviously has a reason to be there. Describe things from their point of view. Now describe those same things from the point of view of a native. Somebody who's grown up there, who's been there, who is familiar with it.
[Brandon] Excellent. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 12.7: Description Through the Third Person Lens

Feb. 15th, 2017 11:14 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.7: Description Through the Third Person Lens

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/02/12/12-7-description-through-the-third-person-lens/

Key Points: Learn to let the character's voice, thoughts, and feelings come through when describing, especially in third person. Combine characterization and description! Get specific with what the character notices and does. Pay attention to what they notice, and what they miss. Describe the small things, let the reader imagine the large things. Focus indicates thought -- what the character sees, what they hear. Exercise: try and include every sense in a scene. But don't spend too long! And beware going overboard on all the senses all the time -- no one licks a vase. Add your infodumps in third person to emotion, action, dialogue -- dribble them across a scene. Pick out the important information and avoid the irrelevant infodump. Losing viewpoint? Check the emotional investment in the scene. Make sure you have the right scene. What happens when the main character knows something, but doesn't let the reader know? Frustration! Use focus, something else compelling to keep the main character going, and sometimes, it's just background for the character, no matter how surprising it is for the reader. Or... give the reader the information! Often knowing the secret makes the action more compelling. Or make that other plan a contingency. Think surprising, yet inevitable.

( The third person thinker? )

[Brandon] We are out of time. Mary Anne, you were going to give us some homework?
[Mary Anne] Well, I was just going to say that I love Ursula Le Guin's book, Steering the Craft. It's a very short little how-to-write book. She's got like three chapters with exercises on various variations of third person that I find really helpful. I still… I assign it every semester and I do them again with my students every semester. I get something out of it every time.
[Brandon] Well, excellent. That is your homework. Go read some Ursula Le Guin. You will always find it time well spent, I have found. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
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Writing Excuses 12.6: Variations on Third Person

Feb. 7th, 2017 12:58 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 12.6: Variations on Third Person

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2017/02/05/12-6-variations-on-third-person/

Key points: Omniscient: the narrator knows all, sees all, and tells all. Or, the bodyhopper! Beware headhopping confusion, though, and the accidental omniscient. Then there's third person cinematic, just the camera, folks. A good tool for establishing shots! Limited third person uses a single viewpoint character at a time. Very widely used, and lets you handle large casts and epic scope easily, while still knowing what is going on in the viewpoint character's head. Be careful to quickly show us whose head we are in! Why does sci-fi fantasy use this so heavily? History, it feels natural for storytelling, it makes infodumps easy. Maybe because of the roots in short fiction? Third person limited lets you have your background and know a character closely, too. Mostly, though, it's just background -- what you read is what you write!

( Then he read some more... )
[Brandon] Well, I think we're going to call it here. We're going to give you some homework. My homework for you this week is the same as last month's homework, except now with third person. I want you to take the same passage that you may have written in limited, and try the two different forms of omniscient. Try the one that there's like a narrator that's able to say, "What they didn't know…" and things like this, and try the one where you're just body hopping with every paragraph. Or take something you've written in omniscient, and try it in cinematic. Try it in limited. I want you to experiment with these tools and find out how they go. We will be back next week with the Chicago team where we'll be talking really about how to describe and do description through the lens of a third person narrator. We're really excited again to have you guys with us for season 12. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses Episode 32: Talking Exposition with Patrick Rothfuss

Feb. 2nd, 2011 02:20 pm
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Episode 32: Talking Exposition with Patrick Rothfuss

from http://www.writingexcuses.com/2008/09/15/writing-excuses-episodes-32-talking-exposition-with-patrick-rothfuss/

Key points: don't start with info dumps. Avoid essays, police artist sketches, thesis statements, repeating. Use three good details, and characters in action. Toss readers into the world, and move the story and the characters forward. Arguments are good. Make every sentence do more than one thing. Give your readers a little tease, then wait. Make the exposition a payoff instead of an entry price.
( to da dump, to da dump, to da dump, dump, dump )
Take one thing that's unimportant and explain the heck out of it. Take something else that is very important and don't explain it all.
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