Writing Excuses 16.49: Magic and Technology: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Dec. 9th, 2021 06:10 pm
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
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Writing Excuses 16.49: Magic and Technology: Two Sides of the Same Coin
 
 
Key points: Magic and technology are often mentioned as parts of worldbuilding for speculative fiction stories. They are tools. Not inherently good or bad, it is how the author uses them that creates the interest, tension, and story. You should use them for a purpose. Either magic or advanced technology can be used to advance your plot. Set the ground rules, then remain consistent and follow those rules. Do remember that resources are never evenly distributed and accessed. People who have daily access are likely to consider it technology, while less common access makes it magic. Remember that all your characters are biased, and their view of the world is incomplete, so pay attention to your character's relationship with the magic or tech. Think about what your character does not know or misunderstands about the magic or tech. Try to avoid the "just like our world but with X" fallacy. Remember the ripple effects of even small changes. 
 
[Season 16, Episode 49]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Magic and Technology: Two Sides of the Same Coin.
[Fonda] 15 minutes long.
[Mary Robinette] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Fonda] I'm Fonda.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We're going to talk about magic and technology. We could come up with all kinds of fun little quotes about how they're related to each other. But... Tell us about them, Fonda. How are they related to each other?
[Fonda] I like talking about them together and in a sort of special separate episode because they are mentioned as such huge parts of worldbuilding when it comes to speculative fiction stories. I think of them as tools. They're both tools. They're tools in two different aspects. The first being that they're not inherently good or bad, right? I mean, you have a tool, you could use a knife to free a hostage, you could use it to cut steak, you could stab someone with it, and it's what people choose to do…
[Howard] Those are all three the same activity. Sorry, keep going.
[Fonda] Howard, I'm a little worried, but I will continue.
[Dan] [garbled] stab Howard.
[Fonda] So, what people decide to do with that tool is where the interest, where the tension, where the story lies. They're also both tools in the sense that if you create them, it is for a purpose, and if they're in the story, they need to be there for a reason and they ought to be used. So I think of them as serving similar narrative functions. It's one reason why I move very easily between writing science fiction and writing fantasy. Because, regardless of whether you are employing magic or you're employing advanced technology that doesn't exist as we know it today, you can do similar things with them in order to advance your plot. The thing to keep in mind is that in either of those cases, you establish the ground rules for your magic and your tech, and remain consistent and follow them.
 
[Dan] Now, I'm going to say this because I know that one or more of our listeners out there is thinking this right now. What if I invent a magic that is inherently good or bad? An example that comes to mind is the Reckoner series by Brandon, where having superpowers is inherently corruptive and makes you into a bad person because of the nature of the magic. That is to Fonda's second point, a narrative tool, and the way that the author has chosen to use it. So, yes, don't think of these as limits or us telling you that you can or can't do something. Just be aware that you are making choices, and that you are using these tools for a specific outcome.
[Fonda] Yeah. That's a good example of doing something different with the idea of dark magic. Right? Like, often times in fantasy, you have this term dark magic. I always want to sort of dissect that a little bit and ask, "Well, okay, what makes it dark? Is it the people who use it? A tendency to do dark things, or is it used primarily by a certain type of person, or it has been used to do terrible things in the past and so now it has connotations of being evil?" So I think if you pull that apart and tease it apart a little bit, you can find more nuance and more angles to approach something that is sometimes taken for granted, like dark magic.
[Dan] That's very cool.
 
[Fonda] Another thing that I want to say about magic and tech is that there is no human resource in our world that is ever evenly distributed or accessed. Right? We have cell phones in the hands of pretty much everybody that… Who you see on the street, but there are places in our world where people don't have running water. So they're… An easy way to make your fantasy or science fiction world seem simplistic is to give the impression that the world doesn't have any of the same problems that we do, and everyone views the magic and the tech in the same way and has equal access to it. Because, we talked about making our worlds feel real. A world where everyone has magic and the magic is limitless and it's equally accessed feels not only difficult to believe but has less conflict and is inherently less interesting.
[Mary Robinette] I think, to your point about magic and technology being two sides of the same coin, because people are pattern seeking creatures, we treat them the same. Like, we have… We'll say… There are magic spells in our real world. Like, if you need a bus to come, you will walk away from a bus stop. It's a very simple magic system, but it works every single time. If you need to invoke rain, leave the house without an umbrella. It's a very… It's again, a simple magic system. But these are the ways that we interpret the world and the ways that we use things. Electricity is a magic system. Some people understand it deeply and can get it to do really cool things. The rest of us just apply the work that someone else already did. One of the reasons…
[Howard] There's a group of people in the middle who are dead.
[Mary Robinette] There is a group of people in the middle.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But there are people in modern-day America who do not have a good relationship with electricity, who think that it is related to many of the modern evils, and so want to limit its use. There's a number of different places where you can find that being reality. It's my parents were born in the same year, in the same city. My dad got an electric train when he was seven at a time that my mom was living in a house with a dirt floor that did not have electricity in the house at all. So, when we're talking about the things that are uneven, it's not just along one axis. It's along multiple different axes that people have uneven relationships to whatever this, whether it's magic or technology.
 
[Dan] I want to pause here in the middle to do our book of the week, which I get to talk about this time. It is David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. He is a Nigerian fantasy author. This book, it was his first published one, takes place in a post-apocalyptic Lagos, Nigeria, where magic and technology have kind of been combined together. Which is why I thought it would be fun for this one. The apocalypse in the book was that the thousands of gods that kind of live in the spirit world have collapsed into earth, and Lagos is this kind of semi-livable wasteland where these gods and their magic powers are just kind of there, and sometimes they cause good things to happen, and sometimes they just cause more entropic reactions of things falling apart or ceasing to work. David Mogo, the Godhunter of the title, he can go around and kind of collect these things and trap them and use them for different things. The villain also is trying to use the gods for various purposes. So it's a really fascinating book, not only at the culture that he develops for this kind of ruined Lagos, but also the way that magic is used in the way that technology is used by the characters in the book. That's David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa.
 
[Mary Robinette] It's a great book. It's really… It's well worth reading. But a book that you made me think of is God Engines by John Scalzi, in which the literal engines of spaceships are gods that have been harnessed as power sources. So again, both magic and technology. I think that's kind of the thing for me is whatever… Anyone who is interacting with it on a daily basis is going to view it as technology. Anyone who is not interacting with it on a daily basis is going to view it as magic, regardless of what it is.
[Fonda] I love stories that combine magic and tech. There's something about them that is so catnip to me.
[Howard] Yeah. There was an Iain Banks story, novel, Against a Dark Background, I think was the name, where it's a science fiction adventure with a MacGuffin, and the MacGuffin is called the lazy gun. All we know about the lazy gun is that if you point it at someone and pull the trigger, they will die, and the larger the group of people you point the trigger at… You point at when you pull the trigger, the more likely it is that you're just going to get a big boring explosion. Also, if you turn it upside down, it's 3 pounds heavier. That's all we know about it. Those elements never get explored. We never try and throw the gun to someone and have it turn over midair and end up heavier when it… It's… It functions in the story like a magical artifact. In that regard, in a science fiction story, it's a worldbuilding tool that tells us we've forgotten a lot. Somebody built something that we no longer know how to build. There are a lot of other things in the story that are your typical sort of science-fiction things that work the way you expect a science fiction thing to work. They have some rules and then those rules get exploited in order to use the thing in a heroic way. Huzzah. But when we get our hands on the gun, we're not actually answering questions about the gun. We're shooting it in order to get away with it and then the story ends. I was actually very satisfied that it left me with this puzzle, and this idea that in a technology and pseudo-magic story, there were elements that wouldn't be explained.
[Fonda] Yeah. I have a magic element in my trilogy, but I never call it magic. Back to Mary Robinette's point, that the people who interact with something on a daily basis don't think of it as magic. Characters don't think of this thing as magic. They would never call it magic. It's just a natural part of their world. We talked way back in episode two of this master class, all your characters are biased and have an incomplete view of the world, like the blind men and the elephant. When you are writing a world with magic or advanced tech, that principle of all your characters are biased is one to keep in mind really strongly, because what does your character have access to? What is their relationship to the magic and the tech? So you need to answer for yourself, well, who controls this technology or this magic? Who benefits? What's the power structure around it? What is possible to do with it? Do you need training? Do you need a license? Do you need someone to vouch for you? Are you born to it? Like, what are all the sort of social structures and rules, inherent rules, around the magic or technology? Then, where does your character fit? What do they see? How do they interact? Because they're not going to have the complete view. Your char… People are going to have very different opinions about magic and tech, just like they do in our world.
 
[Mary Robinette] One of the fun exercises that I play with sometimes is also what do your characters not know or misunderstand about the technology. I have a friend who's an astrophysicist. She was recently asked to explain… Like, a reporter called and was like, "Can you explain, we've got some questions from children, why is the speed of light what it is?" She's like, "Nobody knows that."
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] "That's the speed of light." He's like, "Why did the Big Bang happen?" She's like, "First of all, the Big Bang is not actually what happened, probably. Second, no one was there. We've got theoretical models, but how am I supposed to… You want me to explain that to a five-year-old?"
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But at a certain point, it doesn't matter how much you know about something, you're still going to run up against something that you don't know. Like, parachutes. We don't actually know how parachutes work. Like, not enough to be able to design better parachutes by any method other than building them and tearing them.
 
[Dan] So, while we are talking about this idea, this giving context to the magic and the technology, let's talk about some of the… I guess one of the main problems that I see with a lot of aspiring writers is the kind of just like our world but with X kind of fallacy, where everything is identical, except something has changed.
[Mary Robinette] You mean like Jane Austen with magic?
[Dan] Yeah. Which is… No. That's a good one to bring up. Because I've had long conversations with you about how you designed the magic in the world so that they could compliment each other without either one breaking the other one in half. Whereas there are a lot of things we see… The Netflix movie Bright did not do that, and it was trying to use our modern world essentially unchanged except that orcs and fairies and elves and stuff are real and everyone's known about them for hundreds if not thousands of years. Which doesn't work. There's a lot of things fundamental to even just the naming conventions of Southern California where the story takes place would be different if the Catholic Church had been destroyed or altered by the presence of fairy magic, right? So, talk to us a little bit about that, that kind of ripple effect about changing one aspect of a world can change everything else.
[Mary Robinette] So, one of the examples that I cite sometimes, or think about sometimes, is that in Valor and Vanity… So, glamour, which is the magic system, is basically… It's an illusionary form of magic. In my mind, and this is why I'm like magic is technology, in my mind, what they're doing is manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum. But they're only manipulating the waveforms. Glamour is just waves, not particles. This is my own brain. Obviously, that does not actually work. Just FYI, glamour is not real.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] Despite some of the letters I have received. So… But, the… There is a point at which I was having them do a form of glamour, and I'm like, wait, if you do that, they will have invented telephones in 1817. That changes everything. I had to go back in and layer in a little bit about having glamour droop down to the earth. Like, I basically went back and looked at the things that I already laid, and thought, which tool can I use to explain why this won't work? In order to keep it from being… From accidentally having this ripple effect. So I was constantly doing this back and forth to layer things in to keep it from changing the world too much. Because I wanted the power dynamics to stay the same. I also made the decision that glamour was equally distributed, so that what you get instead is the differences between… That's not the power difference between countries. The power difference remains the same… Related to many of the effects that happen in our world. Whereas, if I had said, "Ah. This is…" Which I did with Ghost Talkers. Their understanding of ghost was something that was very British-centric. But quite recent, and a carefully guarded secret. So, if the world of Ghost Talkers, which is set in World War I, if that had continued past that book, the outcome of World War I, the… Like, I was going to have to start changing every battle going forward, because of those decisions that I made.
 
[Dan] That's awesome. Well, it is on this subject, in fact, that we have our homework. So, Fonda, tell us our homework.
[Fonda] Yeah. This ties very closely to what Mary Robinette was talking about, which is thinking about the ripple effects and the second, third, fourth order effects that adding a speculative fiction element to your world would result in. So I want you to think of one just thing that you would change about our world and come up with as many aspects of the world that would be different from our own as a result. So, let's say, children have night vision, or, dogs can talk. Just one little thing. Do a brainstorm of how that would affect everything that you can think of in sort of our society daily life. After you've done that for a little while, mark one or two that could be the seed for an interesting conflict or an interesting story.
[Dan] Sounds great. Well, this is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.46: Unusual Resources

Nov. 21st, 2019 10:14 am
mbarker: (ISeeYou2)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.46: Unusual Resources
 
 
Key Points: How do you take a fantastical resource and use it to power magic or technology, or somehow interact and change the world? What are the ramifications, how does it affect the economy, the social conventions? Pay attention to scarcity. Consider seed corn, and how do we bootstrap things. How do you assign value to a fantastical resource? Pattern it on real-world things, relative scarcity. How much labor is need to produce it? Relate it to food. Use orders of magnitude. Do you worry about a fantastical resource breaking supply and demand or economy? Yes, but... ignore it, and tell the story! Do think about supply and demand, but tell the story first. Don't forget Realism vs. the Rule-of-Cool!
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 46.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Unusual Resources.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Margaret] I'm Margaret.
[Howard] I'm out of air.
[Brandon] Howard, you're our unusual resource.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Peculiar resource, at any rate.
 
[Brandon] This is a very common trope of science fiction and fantasy, where you make a fantastical resource of some sort, that can either be a MacGuffin to power your magic or your technology, or in other ways interact and change the world. So we're going to talk about worldbuilding these. How we have come up with them when we've used them, what we think works and what we think doesn't work? Obviously, my favorite, which I've talked about a lot, is the spice from Dune which kind of when I read that as a teenager changed my whole perspective on economics in science fiction and fantasy. You can see that reverberating through a lot of the books I write. Where I really, really like it when my magic has some sort of connection to an economic resource in some way. Most obviously, in Mistborn where people use rare metals to do magic. So… But even in Stormlight… This comes directly from Dune, this idea that magic has… Or the resource has an effect on the world other than just the magic. If you haven't read the Stormlight books, people collect magical power in little pieces of gemstone inside of glass, and then use that to light their houses or to power their magic. What have you guys done? Why have you made the choices you have, and how has it worked?
[Mary Robinette] So I did this in a science fiction short story that I have on a colony world. It's called Salt of the Earth. It's a planet that is very low in salt. Which is something that people actually need. So it becomes… There's entire industries around reclaiming salt. When you go to a funeral, one of the things that you do is you've got tissues and you catch the tears under your eyes and put them in an offering thing, so the family can reclaim the salt that you have shed on their behalf.
[Brandon] Why did I not write this story?
[Laughter]
[Brandon] I love salt, for those who don't know. I salt everything. Man, that is really [garbled]
[Howard] Probably because it just would have depressed you. That level of shortage.
[Mary Robinette] So one of the things that I was thinking about like what are the ramifications of having this thing that's absolutely necessary for survival, but is incredibly rare on this planet. How does that affect all of the social conventions, how does that affect the economy? The main character's family is from a salt-rich family. So these are the things that you kind of look at. It's in some ways not that different from the economics of Dune, because that's how scarcity works.
[Brandon] How did… What inspired that? Where… What made you start this story?
[Mary Robinette] Honestly, I was taking Orson Scott Card's Literary Boot Camp. Which was a great camp, all other things aside. He had us do five story seeds, one of which was a story seed based on research. I went in… He told us to go into the bookstore and find a nonfiction book. There was a book called Salt.
[Brandon] It's quite actually a famous one, if it's the same one.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. So one of the things that then happens to me in the real world is I start noticing all of the things from when salt was a precious resource. Like Salzburg. It's like, "Oh, right. Salzburg is Salt City. Oh, yeah."
 
[Margaret] A project that I worked on recently is the new Netflix series coming in 2019. Or perhaps already arrived in 2019. Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, which of course ties to the original, Dark Crystal, the film made by the Jim Henson company and Jim Henson. Where really that entire story ends up revolving around the resource of essence, which is the life force of Gelflings, which the Skeksis decide they want, they need, it's what's keeping them young…
[Brandon] It makes them young.
[Margaret] And alive and it's like, "Aha! We've already destroyed our planet, but we can pretend we didn't if we suck the life out of Gelflings or Podlings." That just traumatized an entire generation of young people who went to see that film not knowing what they were in for.
[Brandon] Traumatized some of us, the rest of us, it turned into fantasy or science fiction novelists who think it's cool.
[Mary Robinette] And then some of us became puppeteers.
[Margaret] Traumatized and inspired are not mutually exclusive conditions. But yeah, that was a really interesting thing to look at, because there is definitely that ecological side. As we're told, the Skeksis have really done a number on Thra.
 
[Brandon] By the time this comes out, this episode, hopefully your series will have released.
[Margaret] Yes.
[Brandon] So we're going to make that our book of the week, is go watch Dark Crystal: Age of…
[Margaret] Age of Resistance.
[Brandon] If it's not out for some reason by now, then go watch the original, because it's fantastic.
[Mary Robinette] It is fantastic.
[Margaret] It's very exciting.
[Howard] In multiple definitions of the word.
[Brandon] Definitions of fantastic.
 
[Brandon] Howard, fantastical resources?
[Howard] The one that leaps to mind is the post-transuranics in the Schlock Mercenary universe. I took the concept of islands of stability, and, as other science fiction writers have done, postulated islands of super stability with massive nucleus elements, and then said that if you want to build a power plant that converts neutronium into energy in a way that gives you artificial gravity cheaply, you really have to build the whole powerplant out of post-transuranics. The best way to create post-transuranics is to have a really high density power source, like one built out of post-transuranics. So I built a system whereby the corn and the seed corn are incredibly… Well, I mean, they're obviously related, but there is very much a resource divide here. A lot of the story, especially here in the final couple of years of the story, asks the question, "Where did we bootstrap this stuff? If it's so difficult to make, unless you already have it, who made it the first time?" It's a fun question to ask, it's a fun question to answer… No, I'm not going to tell you the answer here. But it's tied into the Fermi paradox. Why haven't we seen aliens yet? Why, in the science-fiction universe that I've created, aren't people asking, "Why wasn't the galaxy already colonized a billion years ago? 2 billion years ago?" All of it came down to looking at the economics of this resource and what happens when it's fought for.
[Brandon] One of my favorite other things you've done with fantastical resources is kind of a different take on it. You have a person who got cloned several hundred thousand times, and made… You basically…
[Howard] 900 million times.
[Brandon] 900 million times.
[Howard] 900 million Gavs.
[Brandon] So, suddenly, a very unique and scarce resource, maybe not super valuable, but still… Is suddenly… You have 900 million of them. Which is a really interesting change in a little subtle way… Of course, in a very large way.
[Howard] The economic impact… The real life person upon whom Gav was originally based, Darren Bleuel, loves Guinness. You cannot feed the existing supply… You cannot make 900 million Guinness lovers happy…
[Chuckles]
[Howard] With the existing supply of Guinness. Some'pins gotta give.
 
[Brandon] So let me ask this question of you guys. How do you value a fantastical resource? How do you decide what its value in the economics of your story is going to be? You've made it up wholesale…
[Mary Robinette] I tend to pattern it based on real-world things. So I look at the relative scarcity of the thing. When we're talking about a resource… So far, we've been talking about things where it's the item itself is scarce, but there's also the labor involved. So sometimes, something is a scarce resource because it is difficult to produce or refine. Sometimes it's because there's just not… It doesn't exist very much. But either way, what that tells me begins to tell me is how difficult it is and how expensive it is. So aluminum is a good example.
[Brandon] Yeah. It's a great example.
[Mary Robinette] Right. Because aluminum used to be super, super expensive to refine.
[Brandon] I think we've mentioned it on the podcast before, like, Napoleon had his gold plates, his platinum plates, and then his aluminum plates.
[Garbled]
[Margaret] Which were oh, super fancy.
[Mary Robinette] The top of the Washington Monument has an aluminum cap on it that the ladies of Washington DC fund raised for to put this amazingly precious thing up. Now it's like I wrap my leftovers in aluminum. Because we've solved that problem. So… But what that shows me is the way something is treated when it is precious. It goes… It's something that we layer on things to say this is special. We reserve it for special occasions.
[Brandon] Right. Aluminum's a really interesting one, because aluminum is a way more useful metal in most cases than gold. You might say, "Oh, well. Something is valuable because it's really useful." But gold, a lot of times in a lot of cultures, wasn't that useful. It was pretty, but it was not a useful metal. So different cultures have treated it differently based on who wants it and how badly they want it.
[Mary Robinette] And whether they have it in their ground.
[Brandon] Yeah. Go ahead.
[Margaret] I was about to say, another interesting variant on that is you look at a resource like diamonds. Which are not actually that rare, but they have value, because value has been attributed to them, and because there's a monopoly on the global supply.
[Howard] Well, there's a monopoly on the global supply of natural diamonds.
[Margaret] That's true.
[Howard] We now have the technology to very, very easily make really, really useful and pretty… If you stick impurities in them… Diamonds. But the money generated by the original landowning diamond folk has been used to influence…
[Margaret] The market itself.
[Howard] Influence the market so that you can't make a diamond ring out of something that came out of a press.
[Margaret] But I feel like I occasionally do see that in fantasy stories, where you'll have the very precious resource or magic is very tightly controlled because it is very valuable. The Trill symbionts kind of fall into this mode, as well. Then you discover it is more common than we thought.
[Brandon] One of the things…
[Margaret] What happens to the people in power then?
[Brandon] That I did which was kind of a little bit of… I wouldn't call it a cheat, but when I was looking at how to value things in the Stormlight Archive, I made it so that you could use this magic, the light that you collect in the crystals, to make food. Then I was able to price how much the food was. Of course, not everyone can do this, so there are other market supply things. But in an economy that can one-to-one translate this stuff to food, I can then value or price how much the gemstones and things go for, because of the amount of grain it creates.
 
[Howard] I look at orders of magnitude. The model I use is sock, shoe, bicycle, car, airplane. Where… Whatever my universe needs that are analogs for those, how much of this resource is required for each of those things. I use orders of magnitude because I don't need to hit it on the nose, I just need to be in the right neighborhood, so… There should be something between airplane and car, I know, but…
[Margaret] As valuable as it needs to be for the story.
[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing about this also is the narrative that attaches to the thing. So if we attach a narrative, like a shoe… You say shoe, bicycle? Okay. I have seen shoes that are priced more than any bicycle.
[Howard] Yep.
[Mary Robinette] That is because of the narrative that is attached to them. Because of the… And because of the scarcity. The Dutch tulip craze is a fine example of a resource that exists because of narrative. Because people have this love of tulips, and they venerate the tulip, and all of this. Then…
[Howard] There are automobiles that cost more than private planes.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] And there are automobiles that cost less than bicycles.
[Margaret] Thank goodness a commodity bubble like that could never happen again!
[Chuckles] [Whew!]
 
[Brandon] So how about this? What do you do in your story… Have you ever worried about breaking things like basic supply-demand or breaking your economy of your story with a fantastical resource, just completely in half?
[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes, I do worry about that.
[Howard] I live in terror of that.
[Margaret] I don't know if this applies, but it's a funny anecdote that I would like to share. I was… In my D&D campaign, at one point, the characters had undergone a five-year gap. So we're all coming back together. It's like, characters are bringing each other gifts. My character had had two kids since anyone had seen her. So one of the magic using characters is like, "Okay." Magic is new in this world. People are just figuring out how to make magic items. She's like, "Prestidigitation is a very low-level spell. I could put this on a diaper. Oh, like, we have self-prestidigitating diapers!" Then we started thinking, like, "Why are we adventuring? Why aren't we just billionaires making self-prestidigitating diapers? And chamber pots? Why are there sewers in our world anymore, because clearly, this is just what everyone could do?"
[Howard] No matter how expensive the spell Continual Light is, if the spell exists, the candle makers are out of business forever.
[Mary Robinette] This was ex… I had this problem in Glamorous Histories. It's why the glamour does not cast actual light. Because then it stops being an alternate history and starts being… Or a historical fantasy and starts being something completely different… Because why candles? Why fireplaces? Why any of those? None of those things would ever exist.
[Brandon] Perpetual energy. Yeah.
[Margaret] We were all there around the table, and one guy looks like, "Yep. No, that's true, and we're going to totally ignore it and move on with our adventure now."
[Brandon] Let's add the suggestion that using game mechanics… If you played a lot of video games or pen-and-paper role-playing games, they are built to be fun. Not economically sound. So just keep in mind the different goals of the medium.
[Mary Robinette] It does depend on the game, but by and large, you cannot… You do have to think about supply and demand.
[Brandon] At some point, you do have to, with your story, do what Howard said last month, which is at some point I'm just I want to tell a story rather than be right. Rather than writing an economic simulation in book form, I want to tell a story. So that is a line to walk.
[Howard] In the Planet Mercenary book, in the sidebar comments, someone says almost exactly that.
[Brandon] Yeah. Well, we will have talked…
[Howard] "There's the abstraction of economics. You abstracted this to the point that the economics aren't even real." Somebody else said, "That's because we wanted them to play a game, not figure out that they're not being paid enough."
[Margaret] it's… I think Star Trek does this with the idea that the Federation… Nobody uses money, nobody gets paid, and yet we have this gold pressed latinum economy going on, and why can't you replicate it? Everyone's like, "Yeah. No." We can technobabble around it. For the most part, we just kind of hand wave past, as if we know what we're about.
 
[Brandon] I'm going to have to wrap us up. If you're really interested in more of this, two weeks ago we did a podcast, Realism Versus Rule-Of-Cool. Which I'm sure was really, really a great podcast.
[Laughter]
[Howard] It will have been amazing.
[Mary Robinette] It will have been amazing.
 
[Brandon] Let's do our homework. Howard, you have our homework.
[Howard] Yes. Take something common. Super common. Maybe you've got a lot of it, maybe lots of people have a lot of it. Something that is super common. Now, make it super valuable. Maybe it's super rare. Maybe it's superpowered. But now, whatever it is, it's like the gold standard. It's like currency. Then, write about how your life, the lives of the people around you, change as a result of this common thing now being either incredibly rare or incredibly valuable. Or both.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
 
[Brandon] I'm sorry if you dislike the fact that I used wholesale instead of whole cloth. If you've already written your comment in the comments section before finishing the podcast, I still love you.
 
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Writing Excuses 14.11: Magic without Rules

Mar. 20th, 2019 11:09 am
mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
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 11.26: Elemental Mystery Q&A

Jun. 29th, 2016 11:53 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.26: Elemental Mystery Q&A

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/06/26/11-26-elemental-mystery-qa/

Q&A Summary:
Q: How do you balance between two mysteries in the same story? Should you even try?
A: Yes. Especially small mysteries. A plot, B plot. Be aware of when you open and close each one, and the proportion of time spent on each. Sequential, with the answer to the first mystery introducing the real problem.
Q: What types of mysteries can fit as subplots? For example, when does a murder work as a subplot rather than as a main plot?
A: Any mystery can be a subplot, just set the scope and number of clues. A subplot find the murderer can heighten tension and build characters. Make sure your murder is a complication, that it changes things for the characters.
Q: When the beta readers all figure out the mystery too early, how can I tweak it so that my readers won't have the same experience as my beta readers?
A: Ask the beta readers what tipped them off, then take that out. All mysteries in first draft are either too obtuse or too obvious, and you have to add and remove to get it right. A good red herring that gets pulled out from under everyone helps.
Q: In terms of the MICE quotient, do all mystery plots have to be idea based?
A: Yes.
Q: How do you write a protagonist that is smarter than yourself?
A: Use revision, young writer! Accelerated thinking through rewriting. Jump to a conclusion, then explain the process of thought and clues -- it was not a guess! Extra mysteries with quick solutions to show how smart we are.
Q: So you've made your protagonist really smart, smarter than the average reader and the other characters. How do you still have it be a struggle for them to solve the mystery without losing people or ruining the story just by having it all internal inside of the protagonist's head?
A: Let them make mistakes. Use red herrings that mislead them, too. Make the cost of being wrong really steep. Lack of resources, or other kinds of obstacles.
Q: How do you keep a kidnapping victim from just being a MacGuffin if they aren't recovered until the end of the story?
A: Given them a point of view, and agency through trying to rescue themselves.
Q: How intellectually stimulating can you make a genre mystery? How literary or serious can it be?
A: There's what's happening (the story) and how you tell it. These are not intrinsically related! You can tell any story with any method. Genre, especially elemental genre, does not dictate method of writing.
( All the questions... and answers, too! )

[Brandon] So, your homework. I've got your homework this time. One of the things when we were discussing these episodes we realized is mysteries are embedded so much in our stories. There are often so many of them, a surprising number. So I would like you to take a book or film that you enjoy and just jot down every mystery you can see. From who drank my milk to who killed this person or how does the magic work. Whatever it is, write down every one, and you'll start to see that the curiosity of solving a mystery is integral to almost every story that's been written. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
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Writing Excuses 7.23: Time Travel

Jun. 14th, 2012 11:55 am
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 7.23: Time Travel

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/06/03/writing-excuses-7-23-time-travel/

Key Points: 12 Monkeys: past is set, no changes. Doc Brown: branches galore. Sound of Thunder: changes in the past are reflected in the future you return to. "Paradoxes are often what time travel stories are about." [Brandon] Don't use time travel just as a MacGuffin to save the day, use it because it is interesting, it provides a conflict, or to grapple with character. Be aware that there is a lot of history of time travel stories. Don't try to use time travel just as a geewhiz factor. Be careful of ramifications and cliches. Make sure to put your own spin on it!
( Is today the tomorrow you dreamed about yesterday? )
[Brandon] Interesting. Yeah. All right. We are completely out of time. So we're going to leave you with the writing prompt that I gave you before, and dare you to write the story before one of us does, because we may actually do it. That is, only... You can only go back in your own time, and they find something catastrophic has happened a hundred years ago. They need a team of...
[Dan] Super old dudes.
[Brandon] Super old...
[Howard] Dudes and dudettes.
[Brandon] Probably dudettes, statistically. To be trained like as Navy SEALs and go back and stop it.
[Mary] Yeah. I should say that this is a novel I'm working on. Thanks, Brandon.
[Dan] That exact one? Okay.
[Mary] Close.
[Dan] Then do it differently than Mary.
[Mary] I'm kidding, because even if they write it exactly the same, it'll be a different novel.
[Dan] They have to grant sentience to one of those giant turtles because they're like 300 years old.
[Brandon] You're totally out of excuses, now go write.
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