Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

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

 

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

 

[Season 18, Episode 42]

 

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

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

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

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

[Erin] Love it.

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

 

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Erin] Yeah.

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

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

 

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

[Mary Robinette] Consistency?

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

[Mary Robinette] That is…

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

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

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.

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

 

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

[Mary Robinette] No, no, this is…

[DongWon] But I do think that…

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

[Laughter]

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

[Mary Robinette] Sure.

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

[Erin] Well, I think that…

[Howard] If I could address the technological…

[Erin] Sure.

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

 

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

 

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

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

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

 

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

[DongWon] I love the conjure bag. Yeah.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

 

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

 

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

[Howard] You promised a daft theory.

[Erin] A daft theory.

[Howard] I'm here for the daft.

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

[Mary Robinette] Ooo…

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[DongWon] My love for you is melting.

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

[Mary Robinette] Time. Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Very specific.

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

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

[Erin] Realistic.

[DongWon] Realistic.

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

[DongWon] Totally. Totally.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] The big dream logic.

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

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah yeah yeah.

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

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

 

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. Same.

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

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

 

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

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

[DongWon] Yep.

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

 

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

[Howard] I think the GPS.

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

[Can we push back…]

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

[Laughter]

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

[Mary Robinette] I love this.

[Erin] And has elements of both.

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

[DongWon] What a great system.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.

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

[Laughter]

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2020/11/08/15-45-worldbuilding-fantasy-with-patrick-rothfuss/

 

Key Points: Timeless urban fantasy? Set in our world, but with magic, monsters, or some other wonder. How do you make it timeless, avoid pinning it down so that in a couple decades, it's irrelevant? Make the world close, but obviously different. Pull back a little, the phone is not the plot. Dodge it! Magic and tech don't mix. Use ubiquitous references. Write about things you know and enjoy. Focus on things that are always important, to make the story timeless, even if it is set in time. Write the story you want to write, don't borrow trouble from the future. Focus on the hidden world. Go ahead and tell us exactly what time it is. How do you make an interesting secondary world fantasy without a magic system? History, politics, relationships. Wonder! The place as character. Exploring a strange world. The numinous and wonder. Think about why you want to do a secondary world? What does it buy you? What does making it an urban fantasy in this world buy you? Focus on the things you are passionate about. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 45.

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Fantasy Worldbuilding, with Patrick Rothfuss.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] 'cause you're in a hurry.

[Pat] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Pat] And I'm Pat.

[Dan] We have Pat Rothfuss with us once again. We are super excited to have you back, especially for this podcast.

 

[Dan] We're going to talk about fantasy worldbuilding. We've got some fascinating listener questions. The first one's actually about urban fantasy. How do you create timeless urban fantasy? I'm just going to read this person's question, because I think they phrase it really well. Stories set in fantasy worlds or distant futures don't have to deal with cell phone upgrades, but I can't write a story about magical teens from Baltimore without giving away the exact year by how they use their phones, laptops, tablets, etc. and by the music they listen to." So, someone's writing urban fantasies, something set in our world, but with magic or monsters or whatever it is. How do you make that timeless, how do you not pin it down to such a specific time that it eventually is no longer relevant?

[Pat] I will say, this is one of the great joys of writing secondary fantasy, is, like, my world gets to stand, like, separate from time. It doesn't end up dated like science fiction or urban fantasy. But what I've seen interesting is like the movie It Follows. I've seen this done more in movies than I've noticed it in urban fantasy. But in It Follows this is have you seen that one? Horror movie? Like, if you have sex with somebody… Oops, sorry, spoilers. If you have sex with somebody, a demon follows you.

[Mmmm]

[Dan] It's really good.

[Pat] It's very good. Better than my awful summary…

[Laughter]

[Pat] Depict it. This is why I don't do ad copy. But what's amazing about the worldbuilding there is, like, you don't know when it is. Like, one of them kind of has a cell phone but it's in like a weird clamshell. It has, like, a videophone in the top half. Sort of like a flip phone. It's… The world that is depicted is deliberately not this world, but obviously still pretty close to this world. Because of that, any discrepancies, like, or logistical inconsistencies don't necessarily damage the verisimilitude of things, which is a marvelous trick that you can do visually very easily.

[Howard] I think, coming back to the original question, you want to make something timeless, to my mind what you're saying is, "I want people in 20 years to be able to read this and to enjoy it without thinking that, oh, the technology changes of the last 20 years make this story irrelevant."

[Pat] Right.

[Howard] I don't know that the problem is as big as the person asking the question is making it out to be. I think you can tell a timeless story… I think if the teens in Baltimore are using phones and you describe them using phones in the way we use phones, and then pull back just a little bit. You don't need to tell us what apps is one running or what memes they were looking at or which version of the phone it was or which jailbreaking whatever they needed to do. The phone is not the plot. If the phone is the plot, then you're writing something that's an urban fantasy tech thriller and you kind of need to pin it down. But in this case, you don't need to pin it down. So, they can have iPhones.

[Pat] I would also say somebody who, in my opinion, does this very well is Jim Butcher. He dodges it. First off, cell phones are sort of off the map, because he very cleverly instituted that magic makes cell phones not work well.

[Dan] Technology in general.

[Pat] But, more important, as relevant to this question, he does not reference pop culture that is not ubiquitous. There's references to Star Wars and Burger King and stuff like that. I don't know how much he did it intentionally, or if it just was intuitive, but, like, he doesn't talk about that local diner.

[Mary Robinette] Well, he's also talking about his favorite restaurant, which is Burger King.

[Pat] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So… I'm saying this partly because I don't think that he's doing it intentionally, but he is writing things that he knows and enjoys. That's one of the ways that you can make something timeless is by talking about the things that you know and enjoy. In 20 years, are either of those things going to be in the public consciousness? Who knows? Like Charles de Lint, if you want to look at timeless urban fantasy… Charles de Lint is one of the first people who was really writing urban fantasy. We still read Charles de Lint. There's no effort to make that anything else. If you go even farther back than that, then we have Charles Dickens who was… I mean, Christmas Carol was urban fantasy.

[Mmm]

[Mary Robinette] It is unquestionably… The term hadn't been invented yet, but it is a fantasy set in a city, the city is a character, it is urban fantasy. It's timeless because of the story, not because it isn't pinned into a time.

[Pat] That is a real… I think that really deflates the entire underlying fear behind the question. It is set in time, but is a timeless story because it focuses on things that are always important, like character, whatever. I also, like, A Fine and Private Place is… Or, honestly, a newer one, that more people maybe have read, The Graveyard Book. People will read that for a 100 years. It is not… I think maybe what they may be touching on, though, is, like, how do I write something that is set in this world and have people in 15 years not be baffled. Because, like, here's an example. Did anybody read the Spellsinger books?

[Mary Robinette] No.

[Pat] Alan Dean Foster wrote a series called Spellsinger.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah. I did. Yes.

[Pat] It rocked my world as a kid. But now I think of going back to them, and I'm like, those were all modern day at the time rock 'n' roll lyrics that I kind of knew just because I listen to the radio. I think they are absolutely opaque these days.

[Howard] Yeah. They may be incomprehensible to a modern audience.

[Mary Robinette] but I think they'll play differently to a modern audience. But things that are old, they just play differently. Like, Jane Austen is filled… Granted, not writing urban fantasy, but still. Filled with references. Again, Christmas Carol is filled with references to things that are important in the contemporary world. But they play differently to us now.

[Pat] Well, I'll also say some things are timeless and some things do get stale. Like, weirdly stale. I think, like, I don't know if you can… Star Trek probably isn't going to go stale. But, I don't know… In some ways, that's the peril of the genre. Like…

 

[Howard] I want to take a step back on this question a little bit. Because the fear that it won't be timeless... boy, if you want your things to still be read 20 years from now, you may never write another word.

[Laughter]

[Howard] Really. Because, I mean, we've been comparing you to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and there's so many things in here that will be… Write the story that you want to write, and don't borrow trouble from the future.

[Pat] I think that is good… I'm just… To kind of contextualize that, I remember working on my book… It's the year 1999, and there was talk about The Lord of the Rings movie coming out. It was big news. Ooh, Lord of the Rings. I'm like, "These movies are going to be awful. It's going to ruin the public perception of fantasy. I need to get my novel out before that happens, and this huge gargantuan train wreck pulls the rug out from underneath, like, my thing." So, like, I was speculating on the future in a not unreasonable, but utterly unuseful way. I'm glad I didn't waste too much time worrying about that.

 

[Mary Robinette] I'm going to mention two other urban fantasies that I think handle this question in another way. Harry Potter is an urban fantasy. One of the ways that that gets around the problem or the perceived problem is that most of our time is spent in the hidden world. Were not actually interacting that much with the contemporary world. So, like, the… Harry Potter, any of those books could play today. Because the people in the wizard and world don't use cell phones. They don't use the same technologies that we use. The other one is the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire. Those, the way she handles it is, at the beginning of each chapter, she gives you a date. She's like, "I am going to pin it." She just leans in and is like, "No. This is exactly when this is happening." So I think you can play it either way and that it's not a problem if you're pinned into a time, that people will still continue to read it. I just narrated book 13, and she puts out one a year. So people have been reading these books for 13 years. The beginning books, there are not cell phones. But that first book still plays.

[Dan] Yeah. I think, just to reiterate, as long as you got really great characters that we love and a plot that we care about, a lot of these other concerns are going to fade away.

 

[Dan] So, let's actually… Our book of the week is, in fact, a timeless urban fantasy. Pat, you were going to tell us about Something Wicked This Way Comes.

[Pat] It is… I don't know if it's my favorite book, but it's going to always probably be in my top three. It's amazing. I think it might be Bradbury's best book. I recently rere… I loved it before I was a father. Reading it as a father. Whoo, boy. Get ready to cry. Not that I'm a hard target these days in terms of things that make me weepy. It is so good. The language is beautiful and timeless is a perfect word for it. Despite the fact that there is, like, a traveling carnival. It is a great… I would think that would be a master class. Read that book and see how beautifully it depicts this world that you can still engage with. Now, that said, you will also probably see things and be like, "Hold on. What is a sideshow?" There are certain cultural predispositions that, like, we are lacking and that I imagine a 20-year-old would be lacking even more than I am. Because he's writing before my time, too. But nevertheless, the concepts… This is about being a child, being a father, feeling out of place. There's a traveling lightning rod salesman. Like, there are no traveling salesmen anymore. Like, there are no… Like, who thinks of a lightning rod anymore? But, nevertheless, this is a beautiful book.

[Dan] Awesome. Thank you very much.

 

[Dan] So, we've got another question to talk about in the second half of our episode. Which is creating a secondary world fantasy that is compelling and exciting, but does not necessarily have or rely on a magic system. How do you make that world cool, without leaning on the magic system to do that work for you?

[Mary Robinette] Can we talk about Amberlough by Elena Donnelly?

[Dan] Yes, we can.

[Mary Robinette] And also Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner. Both of these books, neither of them… There is no magic in them at all, anywhere. Both of these books… What we've done is, we've just stepped to the side of the real world. They both look at actual history and file the serial numbers off. What they're looking at are the patterns of real history. In many ways, there are… In some ways, they feel almost like alternate history. Not… An alternate history rather than a secondary world. Because what they're doing is they're looking at the politics. They're looking at the relationships. Guy Gavriel Kay, I also find…

[Dan] I was going to mention him.

[Mary Robinette] Does much of the same thing. That there's not a magic system. Not really… Well, it depends on…

[Dan] It depends on which one.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. But… Oh, shoot. I've just lost the name of the novel I was going to mention. You know the one I'm talking about, that doesn't… There's not really a magic system.

[Dan] Most of them. I don't know…

[Howard] Sailing to Sarantium is the one that I…

[Mary Robinette] That's the one, yes.

[Dan] Yeah. The… A follow-up he did, that's set in that same world, is called Children of Earth and Sky, which is actually my favorite of his. There is no magic to speak of, except for one sequence that last for maybe about a third of the book, where there is a ghost, following somebody around. He doesn't bother explaining how this works, because that's not the point. The story is not about the magic, and to some degree, it's not even about the ghost. It's what is the relationship between that ghost and the person that the ghost is talking to. The rest of it is, like you say, all politics and fascinating cultural details and how are these two cultures clashing against each other. That's what draws you in.

[Howard] I'm… My approach to secondary worlds… If you've ever taken a tour of say, the Grand Canyon, if you ever stood on a seashore… I got to stand on the shore of the North Sea when 50 mile an hour winds were blasting sand around and everybody's telling me, "You're an idiot. You're supposed to be inside when it does this. What's wrong with the American?" Well, the answer is, "I have never been sandblasted by icy sand on the shores of the North Sea before. This is amazing and kind of horrifying. And I'm going back inside now." There is no magic in. But there's a ton of wonder. When I build worlds… Okay, the worlds I build are usually for science fiction, I want interesting geography. I want geography that is built around conflict, I want geography that shows us that this world has a history, and that this world is a changing, dynamic place. And, boy, you set a fantasy, you build an epic fantasy in a secondary world whose geography is inherently problematic…

[Mary Robinette] I'm glad you said that, because it reminded me of a thing that I love about these books, but also one of the things that plays in with urban fantasy, which is that the place is a character. With a really compelling secondary world fantasy, the place is a character. Which is one of the things that I like in your books, so much, is that the college is a character.

[Pat] I was going to say, "Really?" But, really, the University is absolutely… It is deep enough to feel real.

[Mary Robinette] And although there's magic, that's not…

[Pat] I would actually argue that there's, depending on how semantic we want to get here, I would argue that most of what happens in the University isn't magic. Anymore than, like, you could tell the story of a young boy who goes to MIT and learns about superconductors. I mean, it's fantastic. Like, hydrofluoric acid. Like, do you know about it? If you touch it, it is absorbed through your skin and eats all the calcium out of your bones and kills you while you're in excruciating pain. That's just in this world. Like, most of sympathy and sigaldry is pretty much thermodynamics. Most of alchemy, I mean, you could argue, but there's a sliding scale between pretty much science and then all the way over to naming. Naming is natural magic. I would say if you're making a secondary world, and you don't want to have a magic system, I would warn you, you might be really niche and unappealing to a broad market, like a couple of these other books I'm about to mention. Like, Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. Because, like, read those first two Game of Thrones books, there's no magic. Like, a dude just pours alcohol on a sword and lights it, like, that's the only… It's, like, somebody knows about a dragon once. Also, a dude who lit his sword on fire just by burning it. That's the only magic. In The Lord of the Rings, yeah, there's Gandalf. He doesn't do magic. He's putting cones on fire. He, like, talks loud, and, like, flaps his coat about. It's… I mean, yeah, he does do some magic, but to claim that there is a magic system? There's not.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Pat] At the end of the book, he's like, oh, yeah, the funking flame of Anor. Yeah, the third Elven ring. But, like, that's not a magic system. It's kind of a prop.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. The… I'm sorry, I lost my train of thought.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's like… You're right, there is no magic system.

[Pat] I would actually like to… I'm sorry to interrupt, but I would like to say, there is a difference between. Because these days, what you touched on is, what is the joy of secondary world fantasy? The joy there, one of the joys that is available to you, is the joy of exploration of a strange world. One of the things you can explore in that strange world is language. Culture. Geography. Technology.

[Dan] Food?

[Pat] Food. Magic. You could actually have magic as a subclass of technology in this breakdown. Because, like what the Taoist alchemists were doing in China might as well… I mean, you can call that magic or tech… Hell, Newton. What Newton was doing historically, it's like, eh, [horse of peace], like, maybe alchemy, maybe science. Kind of, he did both. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. Frightening.

[Laughter]

[Pat] But, magic is just a thing that you're… You have the opportunity to explore in a certain way if there's a system. Brandon creates a system, and one of the joys is learning the permutations of it. But you can have magic in a world and not have an explicit system and have it just be something that exists without exploring.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Pat] I think some things that you see there… There's a book by David Keck, In the Eye of Heaven. It was the secondary world dark ages fantasy that was written with prose like an impressionist painting. There… I mean, there were gods in it that were also kind of real, and dark things in the forest. Is that magic? Is that a magic system? Is Catholicism a magic system? Yeah, we could go way down the rabbit hole semantically here.

[Howard] But the… When we make this dividing line between urban fantasy and epic fantasy, I think the dividing line might actually be the word magic. Because with urban fantasy, you have people in the world who don't believe that these things are possible. Then, when they see elves, they're like, "Hum, well, magic." Okay. But in the worlds that Brandon creates, everybody's just kind of… They recognize that these are just physical principles. The word magic, as we use it to mean, oh, no, that breaks all the rules, it's magic. In a lot of these big secondary world epic fantasies, even if you're using that word, what you're really talking about is you've created a world whose rules are…

[Pat] You used the term wondrous earlier. I think on the spectrum, I… When I talk… Because I talk a lot about fantasy worldbuilding and magic systems, I think there's a spectrum. On one end of it, you end up with the scientific, and the joy of that is exploration and comprehension of the system within which the characters can be clever, and therefore the reader can enjoy their cleverness. On the other, far end, of the spectrum, you have the numinous. That is where wonder lives. There's not a lot of wonder in my… In the University about sympathy. It's clever. Over in the numinous, you have all wonder. Honestly, the numinous is where Lord of the Rings lives. There is a system, but it is implicit, not explicit.

[Mary Robinette] That's like some of it N. K. Jemisin's work.

[Pat] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Where she wants that numinous quality, and it… One of the things that I find interesting is that because people are pattern seeking creatures…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] We will attempt to find a magic system even when there isn't one. That's one of the things that you… I think you can play with when you're doing your world building, is whether or not you have a magic system. You often have characters who think that there is magic or characters who think that there is not… And characters who are wrong about both states.

[Pat] Right.

 

[Mary Robinette] That's a thing that can be fun to play with. I think one of the questions that I would ask you, dear listeners, when you're thinking about writing a secondary world, is thinking about why you want to go to a secondary world?

[Pat] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Why do you not want to set this in earth? What is that buying you? What do you buy by keeping it in earth, in this world and having an urban fantasy or something that is… I mean, you can have an urban fantasy that's secondary world. But what do you get by choosing those locations, what do those things buy you?

[Pat] I would love to say one of the things, because I've thought about this a fair amount, one of the choices you're making when you do that… If you set something in this world, the benefit you get is that everyone lives here and if you say Paris, you're done. You don't have to describe Paris, they'll go the Eiffel Tower, baguettes, there's people with berets and mimes.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] But that's also the problem, is that some people, like me, even though I've been to Paris, will go, "Oh, yeah. Paris. Mimes and baguettes." Whereas really Paris is… That's an awful way of thinking of Paris.

[Mary Robinette] Except the baguettes are really good.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] So that's… It's a double-edged sword, where you don't have to do as much work to describe… Like, what a car is. Or, like, how the dollar works. Or, like, a lot of those things. The problem is that everyone will come to the table with a different understanding of those things. Which means you're writing to many different complex audiences all at once, which can make your life a hell. The hell that you experience writing secondary world fantasy and doing the worldbuilding there is that you start from zero. If I make something, I'm kind of beholden to my audience to explain it. That means world, culture, geography, magic, religion, past religion, mythology, folklore, where the rivers come from. Like, you could… I mean, you can kill yourself going down every single rabbit hole, which is why it's better to focus on certain elements and make those the focus of the world that you're revealing. Those elements should be, in my opinion, the things that you are passionate about and that you feel love towards. Tolkien made his, as he referred to it, his silly fairy language, and he was into mythology and folklore. So all of Middle Earth is built around language, mythology, the Eddas, and folklore. But that's just because… That's what… That was his jam. If you are into like, stamp collecting and butterflies and… I don't know, scuba diving, like, turn that into… I would read that secondary fantasy.

[Chuckles]

[Pat] That would be awesome.

[Howard] Stamps are going to get sticky fast.

[Pat] C, there's conflict built right into the world.

[Dan] Perfect. Awesome. So, we do need to end. We could talk about this for a while. Thank you, huge thank you to Pat for being on here to talk about this for us.

 

[Dan] Pat, do you have homework for us?

[Pat] One of the things that I notice sometimes in worldbuilding, whether it be urban fantasy or whether it be secondary world fantasy, is people feeling the need to do everything and a bag of chips different and new and strange. Whereas the truth is, if you were to change just one thing in the world, and then follow the permutations logically through the culture… So, like, for example, what if a meteor hit the United States at a certain point in history? Like, well, how might that change things?

[Mary Robinette] I don't know. I've never thought about it.

[Dan] Someone really ought to write a book about that. I bet it would win a Hugo.

[Howard] It would take quite a bit of calculating.

[Yeah]

[Howard] Sorry.

[Dan] Oh, you just ruined it.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] My stars.

[Pat] The Difference Engine is a good example of that. It's, like, what if they hadn't given up on this really old first version of a computer? So, what I would recommend is, think of a thing, and maybe it might be easiest to do this in this world, but, here's my example, is assume that suddenly not even all of alchemy is real, just one piece. They find out how to turn lead into gold. What does this do in this world? The obvious answer is that it does a bunch of really interesting things to and economies, but not as much as you might think, because we haven't been on the gold standard in years. We exist in a fiat currency. So, actually, the US currency doesn't take, but a bunch of people's mutual funds do. So, like conserv… Like, blue-chip stocks are fucked. So, like a lot of rich people lose a ton of money, but that's very basic. Like, the fact is, computers suddenly get very fast and become more efficient. Suddenly, communities that are centering around copper mining collapse, because copper isn't worth nearly as much, because gold is a much better conductor. But even that is very basic. Like, what else would happen with this one change. You can go three levels deep, four levels deep, until you end up with huge social change. You end up, probably, with a rise of a huge class of people who can perform this alchemy. Like, those people are a power. Those people might become the target of governments. Like, is this suddenly a new value trade, or is this owned by corporations? All of those permutations are what make your story and worldbuilding interesting. So I would say, pick one thing that might… Pick one thing. Then experiment with how you would permute it in this world.

[Dan] Awesome. That's fantastic homework. So, do that, and you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/07/21/14-28-warfare-and-weaponry/

 

Key points: Combat, fight scenes, warfare, weapons? How do you write it when you aren't the expert that some of your readers are? First, if you think it may be wrong, let it be a character who can make a mistake. Super soldier takes more homework to get it right. Second, pay attention (reading or listening) to people who "have seen the elephant." Talk to somebody who has been there. Search the online community, including YouTube historicals and recreations. Make it personal. Why is the reader going to be invested in this? The more you know about human beings doing human things, when you write about them in a situation not too far different from things you have seen before, you will get a lot of it right. Use extrapolation, add elements of technology, magic, or combat that change the way the game is played. Add wildcards to make it your story. Keep the lens tight, and focus on a few characters, even if the landscape is very wide. Give us someone to care about.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 28.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Warfare and Weaponry.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

 

[Brandon] We are going to talk about weapons!

[Dan] Yay!

[Brandon] This is actually one of my favorite topics, because it lets me talk about a hobby horse of mine.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] One of the big dangers with dealing with fantasy and science fiction, particularly when it comes to warfare, I find, is that, well, I don't have the time to become as much an expert as some of my readers in how to go about conducting war. I've never been in a war. This was actually kind of a bit of an issue when I was working on the Wheel of Time books because Robert Jordan had been in a war. He was in Vietnam. So the way he wrote warfare was very different from the way I write warfare. So my first kind of question for you guys is how do you approach, specifically, with this sort of thing, combat, fight scenes, warfare, weapons? Doing this right when you know that many of the readers out there are going to be better at this than you are?

[Howard] Um… The crutch that I fall back on forgetting things wrong is… I try and make sure that when tactically something might not be a good idea, might not be the best way to do a thing, I'm okay with that character having gotten it wrong. If I'm trying to write somebody as a super soldier who tactically gets everything right, I have to do a whole lot more homework, because that's the character that the actual soldiers in my readership will take issue with first. The… The second thing is there's an aspect to soldiering that no one who has not soldiered can really understand. The… It's a blend of adrenaline and esprit de corps and fright and thrill and… Often they talk about it as seeing the elephant. But compensating for that, you have to make sure that you have read extensively and listened extensively to people who have had those experiences. So that when you describe things, you don't describe… Especially describing feelings, describing things from a point of view character, you're not doing so in a way that an actual soldier will say, "Nobody feels that. Why would they feel that? You wrote that wrong."

 

[Dan] We give this answer so much, but that's because it is incredibly true. Talk to someone who knows what they're talking about. I've got a handful of police and soldiers that I will send something to, to alpha or beta read for me, if I suspect that I've gotten it wrong, which is most of the time. It's the emotions in battle. It's, for me, where I often fall down, is the tactics. I'll have a scene and they'll come back and say, "These are the dumbest soldiers ever. Why didn't they do X, Y, and Z?" I realize, "Oh. There's a procedure that's already in place for this common combat situation that I didn't know anything about." So having good reference points and readers who can help out is really valuable.

 

[Brandon] One of the advantages that we have right now that writers didn't have even just 10 years ago is a large online community that talks about historical warfare and battlefields. For someone writing fantasy, like me, I can go to YouTube and there's a whole ring of them. Some of the ones I watch are… There's one called BazBattles which is just historical battles, kind of showing the tactics that each general is using and why they were using them. There are people like [Lindy Mage? Lindybeige] and Scholar Gladiatorius [Schola Gladitoria]… I'm very bad at saying his YouTube channel, but they talk about historical battles. There's people like Shadiversity that just will talk about here is how a weapon was used in these sorts of things. They can be really handy. I will sometimes just go to some of these…HEMA, historical martial arts things and say, "All right. Let me see some people fighting sword against knife." They will have 20 bouts of people…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Doing a recreation for you, where they are fighting…

[Dan] That's fantastic.

[Brandon] You can see directly 20 times in a row how that battle might play out. It lets you write it.

[Dan] There was a BBC series… I can't remember the name, and I'll try to get it for the liner notes… Where there was a historian and his father who was also a historian. They were British. They would just go around to famous sites of battles in… That had taken place somewhere in England and say, "Okay. This is the hill. That's where this guy's army was. That's where this one was." So you got a really great sense of the tactics and how the terrain affected them.

 

[Mahtab] Writing for young readers, you don't have to get that technical, you don't have to get all your facts so correct, because you're writing for younger readers, and they are not as experienced as the adult readers. But what I like to do is make it very, very personal. One of the stories that was set in World War I was War Horse by Michael Morpurgo. That is actually told from the perspective of the horse, but of course, you have the young protagonist who really loves this horse. It's recruited by the Army, and the entire journey is about the horse getting back. It's… The thing is, you could have something as big as war, but you can make it very, very personal to the character. The interaction with how it feels to lose something and want it back and then kind of work that in. So, you're more looking at how it is personal… How that warfare is personally affecting your main character, as opposed to just focusing on the tactics or the weaponry. At least for us, I think it's a little bit easier than writing…

[Brandon] It tends to actually work really well, right?

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] Like, one of the questions I wanted to ask is how you might have a large-scale war happening, but keep it personal. But I think you just got to it. Making sure that you're keeping your eye on why is someone really going to get invested in this. Often times, the reader's investment is directly tied to how invested they are in one character, or a set of characters, life through this battle and how they are surviving and what their goals are other than just staying alive, or does their goal just become I want to live through this.

[Dan] My grandfather fought in World War II, and he was specifically a supply sergeant. So all the stories he would tell us were about… They were not about battles, they were not about who won and who lost and who got killed. There were about we didn't have enough socks so here's how I found some socks so that our unit could have some and things like that. Which really gave me a different sense of how personal it can be, and the kinds of concerns that soldiers actually have. It's like two minutes of fighting and then three weeks of waiting around wishing you had clean socks.

[Howard] My grandfather fought in the first World War. He was born in 18…

[How old are you?]

[Howard] He was born in 1899.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] He died in 1968. I never met the man. But he wrote, when he was… I think when he was in his 30s. One of his kids said, "Dad, you are always harping on these old guys who talk about their Civil War experiences, because obviously they've inflated them and whatever. Why don't you write a book about yours?" So he did. He wrote… In my family, we just call it PFC 1918. Because it is his journals from the year 1918 when he enlisted through his experiences in Europe. He did not see the horrors of World War I that we so often talk about. But he got there afterwards. His descriptions… Some of them are very emotional, and some of them are very clinical. Having never met the man, I… He doesn't write much in the way of emotion. But it's been an incredible resource for me because it's a point of view that I don't get from any of the history books.

 

[Brandon] Mahtab, you have a book of the week for us.

[Mahtab] Yes, I do. It's one that I really, really love, I read it quite recently, although the book is, I think, maybe three or four years old. It's called The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey. It's a dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. What I love about this is, it's basically a fungus has destroyed most of humanity. What it does, in terms of changing humans, is once it kind of infects the humans, they turn into cannibals and they just want to devour the other humans. This has basically destroyed most of civilization. But, just outside London, there is a small little place called Beacon. There is a lab that has been set up by a scientist who's rounded up these kids. They're called Hungries because the moment they smell humans, they just want to devour them. They're studying them to find out a cure to it. But, what I loved about it is this book needs a lot of expo. But it is… It gives you the bits and pieces just as needed. So it's a very, very close focus lens. It starts out with Melanie who is a Hungry. She is in this lab being tested. She just makes a joke, like. She's put in this wheelchair, strapped up, and then under the like a military watch with guns trained on her, this child who's probably about 11 years old is taken into the classroom. That just poses so many questions. It sets up the narrative, and you know you're in good hands. So the story is about finding the cure, being attacked by the remaining humans, and the conclusion is just so fabulous. I mean, it's unexpected yet satisfying, which is something you guys always talk about. This one really demonstrates it. So, The Girl with All the Gifts, M. R. Carey.

 

[Brandon] Excellent. Howard, I wanted to put you on the spot again. I know I've done this a couple times already in this episode, but you write military science fiction and you write about what it is like to live as part of a military group. But as far as I know, you've never been in the military.

[Howard] I never have.

[Brandon] So what… Are there things you know you've gotten wrong that our listeners might get wrong? That you have been corrected on, or that you've learned to do right? Or are there certain things, specifics, they have really helped you to get this right other than, of course, get some friends…

[Howard] The things that I got wrong… The things that I got wrongest, I got wrong early on, which was me poking fun at my ignorance by having ranks and forms of battle and whatever where it… I deliberately made it so it did not make sense. I stopped doing that. Because you can really only tell that joke once. It's a joke that I'm telling on myself. Those aren't funny for very long. Research, and a large part of what I get right, I got right because I spent 11 years in a dysfunctional corporate environment, and a top-down management structure that is dysfunctional is not unlike a military command structure under fire. Because a lot of those same hotheaded, emotional decisions, lieutenants that are kissing up, people who have more authority than they should and less knowledge than they should, all of those things existed in that environment. I got lucky when I extrapolated them out to the military setting that I had built. But ultimately, I come back to this idea that at least if we're writing about human beings, the more you know about human beings, the more you've seen human beings do human being things, when you write about them in a situation that is not entirely unlike something you've seen before, the odds are you're going to get a lot of it right.

 

[Brandon] One of the things I wanted to bring up in this podcast was talking about fantasy and Science Fiction extrapolation. Something you were talking about there reminded me of it. You mentioned you don't make a joke out of getting things wrong. One of the things I do intentionally is kind of along those lines, in that when I am building a situation in my fantasy books that… Even my science fiction book that just came out, Skyward, I am looking to have some elements of science fiction or fantasy technology or combat that will change the way the game plays out dramatically. To the point that it removes it far enough from the experience of a lot of the really historical readers, so that they can suspend their disbelief and say, "Well, maybe this sort of situation could never exist in our world, but we didn't have shard blades and shard plate and we were crossing these impossible chasms to try and reach this one goal." In that situation, taking what I know of warfare, applying it, and then adding some wildcards that make it completely into my control, really has been helpful for me. I know with Skyward, which is kind of based on starship fighter pilot stuff, that taking it a few steps away from the way that we fight by letting the starships have technology that we don't have allowed some of the fighter pilots that I gave it to to read to say, "You know what, this works for me, even though you're doing things we could never do. The fact that I haven't done this thing lets me just have fun with the story." Then, of course, they gave me the things that they had done that I was doing that I was doing wrong, so I could get those details right. But that mix is really handy for science fiction and fantasy in specific. Anything…

[Mahtab] There's just one thing I'd like to say, and I'm going to refer to a movie right here, which is the recent one, Crimes of Grindelwald, which there was a battle between good and evil, but when there is just too much happening, when there is no focus on a character, the readers or the audience do not know who to identify with, who to empathize with. I think that is a mistake, especially in war, because it's huge, there are many people in there. You may take the lens so far back that the audience is not left with anyone to care about. That makes it… For me, this did not work. So I would say that some of the things that you have to remember is although the landscape may be extremely wide, try and focus on at least a couple of characters. Make it personal so that readers can feel that, "Okay, this is something that I want, I care about this character, and hence, I want to go forward." Just coming back to the book that I had recommended, which is The Girl with All the Gifts. Melanie is a Hungry. At first, she's viewed with suspicion. You don't empathize with her. But, as the story goes on and the lens pulls back, you're still… It's very much still focused on Melanie and a person who was viewed with suspicion all of a sudden has to be viewed with trust. That little tip makes the story works so much better. So I would say even if you have a wide landscape, give us someone to care about.

[Dan] Another author that does this really well, particularly with warfare, is Django Wexler. He writes historical fantasy, very Napoleonic era, with cavalry and infantry forming a square and all these things. I remember one battle in particular where we were in one infantry person's head. When they all started firing, that kind of weapon reproduces so much smoke that all of a sudden, they couldn't see what was going on in the rest of the battle. He didn't change perspective, he didn't give us the Broadview, he stayed in the middle of that infantry square that was fully blind, just trying to listen. Are the horses getting close? It was really effective. Because it had that one single focus that we could stay with and empathize with.

 

[Brandon] All right. I'm going to call it here and give you guys some homework. I would like you to invent a powerful weapon that is not based on technology. I want you to take this to the side of technology. In fact, make it more powerful than technology in your setting could exist… The technology people understand, this is something completely un-understand… Non-understandable. I want you to invent this weapon, and see how society adapts to it. Try to build a battlefield around the idea of a weapon that no one even really knows what it can do. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/03/10/14-10-magic-systems/

 

Key points: How do you go about designing magic for a book or story? With younger readers, you can get away with a softer magic system. I drew on Indian mythology, but then change or craft it to fit. Hard = rules, crunchy. Soft = more free-form, less description. Take something from mythology or folklore, and turn it into a system. Think about what the readers are looking for -- wish fulfillment, fun, aspirational geewhiz. They want escapism, a world of new experiences, but where they can still identify with the problems and conflicts. Don't forget the flipside, the speculative what if and social exploration. Why do we like favorite magic systems? Essentially giant puzzles. A visual component to the magic. The immediate combination of "it would be cool to do this" and "Oh, wow, the implications are really frightening." Surprising, yet inevitable fulfilling of promises. Collecting plot coupons! Knowing what it would be like to experience or confront the magic.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 10.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Magic Systems.

[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. Why are you laughing?

[Mahtab] And I'm Mahtab.

[Laughter]

[Dan] I'm laughing because she copied our vocal intonation.

[Laughter]

[Dan] It was really funny.

[Howard] Okay. You know what I do when I'm traveling in a foreign country? I start to sound like them. We are aliens and… Welcome, Mahtab.

[Laughter]

[Dan] [garbled cool aliens house]

[laughter]

 

[Howard] One of my alien powers is to invent magic systems.

[Dan] Ooo… Talk about that.

[Howard] Did that bring us back on topic, Brandon?

[Brandon] Yes, it did. Before we started this, Howard looked at me and said, "Brandon, you're not going to just talk this whole time, are you?"

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because you could.

[Brandon] We decided together…

[Dan] Probably what the listeners want. Tough.

[Brandon] No, it's… We… I have written a bunch of essays on magic systems. We're not going to touch on the things in those essays. Because we've covered them in episodes of Writing Excuses, I've talked about them at length. Instead, we're going to kind of talk to the side of them. So if you want to read those essays, Sanderson's Laws, you can go find them. You can read them. Instead, I want to ask… I'm going to start with Mahtab. How did you go about designing the magic in The Third Eye or in any of the stories you've worked on?

[Mahtab] Well, first of all, because I'm writing for middle grade, I do not need to have too many hard facts or go at extreme length in terms of describing the system. I think you can… With younger readers, you can get away with doing a softer magic system, where… So one of the influences that I had was the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That was one of my absolute favorite novels that I read. Things are not really explained. When Aslan sacrifices himself to save Edmund, and then he dies, and he's on this Stone Table which breaks, and that is some deep magic related to Christianity and sacrifice. I didn't know all of that. I totally didn't understand. But, I mean, I felt that wonder when he came back alive, and the kids went back with him. So, as far as mine, when I was writing The Third Eye, I drew a lot on Indian mythology. So one of the… Well, the main character's Tara, who is a young child, but the mean villain is Zarku, who is an evil character and he hypnotizes people with his third eye, which I borrowed directly from the god Shiva, who has a third eye. Except that Shiva uses it to burn evil things, whereas I actually gave that quality to my evil protagonist, who could hypnotize people and make them do things. I had a couple of really gruesome scenes which kids kind of love and the parents hated. Which is fine by me, as long as they picked up the book to read.

[Howard] But, you know what, that's the mark of a really good book for kids.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Kids love it, and their parents hate it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You've done society a great service.

[Mahtab] Thank you. That's actually the one book that won the Silver Birch, which is a reading program in Ontario, and it kind of kick started my career. I was really happy about that. So I drew a lot on Indian mythology. Even when Tara has to solve problems, she prays to Lord Ganesh and she has… Lord Ganesh is supposed to have a helper in the form of a little mouse. That is what comes to save her. So, my magic system was soft, but it was based a lot on drawing from Indian mythology, and then kind of changing or crafting it to suit the story.

 

[Howard] It's worth pointing out that next week we're going to talk about magic without rules. So…

[Dan] That's kind of what we mean by hard and soft.

[Brandon] Right.

[Dan] She was throwing those terms around. If it has a lot of rules and is very crunchy, that's a hard. If it's more free-form…

[Brandon] Yeah. There is sometimes this sense, like, when I start talking about these, people assume that I don't like soft magic systems. You'll be disabused of that next week.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I really like a good soft magic system. I like magic in all its different varieties, and what it does in stories.

 

[Brandon] So let's talk about building… You said you reached into Indian mythology to get a lot of your ideas. I do this too. A lot of my ideas for magic systems will come from something from mythology, or something that… Like, I love the idea of spontaneous genesis, right? That things get… They used to believe that frogs were born out of mud, because you always find frogs around mud. That idea is so cool…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] And so interesting. A lot of my magic systems are born out of me looking back at some sort of folklore or myth, and then saying, "Well, can I make that into a system?"

 

[Dan] One of the things that I have started to value more and more, every time I try to write magic, is the idea of wish fulfillment. That what readers are really looking for, even though they don't always admit this, especially adults, is magic that is fun, that they would want to use. I think that's one of the major reasons that Harry Potter has been so successful, is because everybody wants to go to Hogwarts, everybody wants to be using those cool spells. So while there's certainly a place for magic that requires sacrifice or that causes pain or something like that, I think there's a lot of aspirational geewhiz in fantasy, where the reader wants to be able to go, "Oh, I want to write a dragon. I want to use all these metals and then fly through the sky. I want to be able to do that. That looks awesome."

[Brandon] That comes into something I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is the draw of fantasy. What is it? How is that maybe different from some other genres? I hadn't even really put this together, but if you look at like movies, some of the big ones, what is the difference between the superhero movies and Star Wars? Star Wars is a lot more fantasy, right? Even though it's got science-fiction trappings. You see with Star Wars, people… They don't necessarily just dress up as the characters in the movies. They go get their own Storm Troopers costume and become a Storm Trooper and things like this. I saw this a lot in The Wheel of Time fandom, that people didn't necessarily when they would do costumes, not necessarily want to be one of the characters. Sometimes they would, but often they would want to put themselves into the setting, and dress themselves like a character and come up with a persona from that world. That's a very kind of distinctive thing, I think, for fantasy.

[Dan] It really is.

[Mahtab] It's a lot to do with escapism. I mean, most people who read fantasy, they're just so bored with… Well, bored or whatever. They just want to go into a whole new world, be the characters, live with them, experience totally new things that they wouldn't, and then they kind of come back to their lives. For me, science fiction and fantasy is exactly that. Just getting out into a different world, yet being able to identify with the problems, with the conflicts that the characters face, so that there is something that I can feel, I mean, it should be something that I feel is relatable to me. But it's still… It's a whole new world.

 

[Howard] Well, there's a flipside to that, which is the speculative fiction aspect of fantasy and science fiction. At risk of calling the elephant in the room an elephant, Brandon's Steelheart takes the social concept of absolute power corrupts absolutely and wraps that… Or maps that onto a superhero universe, and asks us the question, and it's a socially important question, what happens if there are superpowers and absolute power corrupts absolutely? That question, whether or not there's escapism involved, it's a fascinating read for the social reasons. I think that's kind of the other half of magic systems. We talk about wish fulfillment, we talk about escapism, but we also talk about how the ability to obey a different set of rules, a set of rules that are not the laws of physics as we understand them, but are themselves rules, how will that change us as people? If it doesn't change us as people, how will it change our relationships with other people? That's… So that was really deep and maybe way to crunchy, but…

[Dan] No, that's something that a lot of urban fantasies in particular get into. The TV show called Lost Girl, The Dresden Files series, they both get very heavily into that idea. The Magicians, as well. If you have all of this power, and can get away with stuff, you're going to start getting away with stuff, which I think adds another really cool dimension to the magic system, is there are people who use it well and there are people who don't. People who use it for evil.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop, and our book of the week is actually The Third Eye. So, will you tell us about it?

[Mahtab] Absolutely. This is actually the very first novel that I wrote. I think I sweated blood and tears over it. It's about a young girl, Tara, who slowly… I mean, she is living in this village with her father and her stepmother, and slowly, as the story progresses… There's a new healer in town who has got three eyes and just about everyone's enamored with him, but she's the only one who can see behind that façade of his and realize that he's evil. The story is about her journey in trying to find her grandfather, who's the only other person who's kind of strong… You could call him a Dumbledore kind of thing. Who is strong enough to fight Zarku and defeat him. But throughout the journey, what I try and do is take away the entire support system, so that eventually, Tara is just relying on herself, and a little bit off the soft magic system based on Hindu mythology that I talked about earlier, to try and defeat Zarku.

[Brandon] It's a delightful book.

[Mahtab] Thank you.

[Brandon] I'm really enjoying it, although I will tell you, I did not expect it to be as much of a horror book as it is.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That's not where I thought I was going.

[Howard] Brandon loves it, his parents do not.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] It is genuinely creepy in a lot of places in a really delightful way.

[Mahtab] It's a different horror. I was just telling Dan on the way here, saying I'm delving back into horror, but, yeah, there are some very graphic, gruesome scenes which I really enjoyed writing. I often get teachers saying, "What were you thinking?" But then, it's like, the kids like it, and there isn't anything else that shouldn't be in there, so let them enjoy it.

 

[Brandon] All right. Let's ask you guys, favorite magic systems in books or films that you've experienced, and kind of why? What made this magic system work? What made you enjoy the story?

[Dan] Well, at the risk of over inflating Brandon's ego…

[Howard] It's now an inflatable elephant in the room.

[Laughter]

[Dan] The… I love the Mistborn magic system, but for two very specific reasons. First of all, they're essentially giant puzzle games. Where, here's all of the pieces. You know how these work. How are they going to solve the problem at the end of the book? For me, reading any of the Mistborn novels is essentially just a cool puzzle to solve. Okay, this guy can do… Here's, in the Alloy of Law series, here's the girl who only has the one weird power that she doesn't think is of any use, she likes slows time down or something. How is that going to be valuable, because you know it is? I love ciphering those puzzles.

[Brandon] They are slightly Asimov Laws of Robotics books, stories.

[Dan] Exactly.

[Brandon] Where you set up several laws, and then you show they're not working or that there's a hole in them somewhere, what are we not understanding? Then you kind of put it together at the end.

 

[Dan] That's not what every magic system has to do, and shouldn't. There needs to be variety. But I like those for that reason. One of the others, though, and this is another one of the rules that I've kind of set for myself as I develop my own, is that magic should have a visual component to it. I always used to try to make magic very mental, very cerebral. I think a lot of aspiring fantasy writers do the same. But adding that visual element… So again, back to Mistborn, you've got things as simple as being able to pull or push on metal, and you don't need a visual component, but you added the blue lines. The blue lines bear so much weight in these stories, and they serve such a powerful function, even though it's a very simple thing. Because that gives us a sense of what it looks like, and what it would feel like to do it, and it helps us understand what's going on. Just because of these dumb little blue lines.

 

[Brandon] I love magic systems where, when you start reading it, you both see why it would be so cool to have this magic and also, are instantly worried and frightened about the implications of it. Right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] A great example of that is our former professor, Dave Wolverton's Runelords series, in which you can take someone's strength and brand it onto yourself with a branding iron, and that person loses their strength and you have it. You're twice as strong. But now, you have this person that you need to take care of, because if someone can get to them and kill them, you lose your magic strength. The social implications of that are just staggering. The moment you read it, you realize, "Oh, man. This changes society in some really dark ways." He goes there.

[Dan] Yeah. He follows through on the ramifications. Like, every evil thing that you think as you're contemplating that, he comes… He deals with at some point or another. It's a really great example of how to show the effects of magic, and how to show a society shaped by magic.

[Brandon] How fantasy can, as Mahtab was saying, can take some our world element and in some ways by exaggerating it really kind of bore down into that issue. Like with the Runelords, the fact that the strong become stronger and the weak become more and more subject to the strong, is really well exemplified in that story, to ways that make, I think, you start to realize this is kind of how our society works, and that's an ugly underbelly to it.

[Howard] Deadbeat by Jim Butcher. The… I suppose I'll just spoil it, because…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Do it.

[Howard] That's what we're here for and it's an old book. The name of the book is both a reference to our detective, our wizard, Harry Dresden, who is kind of a deadbeat, and this idea that necromancy works best when you have a rhythm to which all of the dead are marching. I don't remember the exact details, but the older the bones are, the more powerful a thing you can raise. We end up with a guy dressed like a one-man band drummer riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton through town. It is surprising, yet inevitable. It fulfills all of the promises of necromancy as he set it forth. It was a lot of fun. I mean… Undead dinosaur, you can't go wrong with that.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Any other favorites?

[Mahtab] I have one which is… I read it a few years ago. But, The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper. Where Will Stanton, on his 12th birthday, realizes he's one of the Old Ones, and he has to collect these six symbols of… I think they're called the Champions of Light, which is… Is to circles made of wood and bronze and iron, fire, water. Then that… He has to collect it, it makes a powerful object, then he repels the Dark with it. But it's just so beautifully written. It's kind of a coming-of-age, a fantasy, there's wild magic, high magic, but it's really, really good. The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper.

[Dan] I also wanted to mention, just to have like a really soft magic system in here, the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. I love the magic as he presents it there. Because there's maybe one or two rules, and I don't know anyone who could name them off the top of their heads, but it has a distinct flavor to it. Like, there's no… We don't know what the rules are governing it, but we absolutely know what it feels like. We absolutely know what it would be like to experience or confront the magic that we find in those books. I loved the way he pulled that off.

 

[Brandon] All right. So, I've also got our homework for this week. Now, next week we're going to be talking about soft magic systems. What I would like you to do is kind of… Make you take some sort of soft magic system that you've read about or you've loved. The example we came up with was… Is Gandalf. Gandalf's very soft. We never know what Gandalf can do, specifically, we just know he's awesome. Well, I want you to take a soft magic system, and apply rules to it. Give Gandalf rules. Take a soft magic system you have written and give it rules. Flip it on its head, and see how the magic works differently if you explain exactly how it works and have it work according to those rules. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.