Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-30-a-close-reading-on-character-agency-vs-choices 

 

Key points: Agency, the ability to take action, choices, interior decisions. Many fantasy stories focus on going adventuring, but sometimes the people who stay home also live interesting lives. You don't have to be in the character's head to see them struggling with choices. Often characters will fall back into old patterns. What is this a fantasy of? DREAM: denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, and manifestation. Look at the timing of these stages. 

 

[Season 19, Episode 30]

 

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

 

[Howard] You're invited to the Writing Excuses Cruise, an annual event for writers who want dedicated time to focus on honing their craft, connecting with their peers, and getting away from the grind of daily life. Join the full cast of Writing Excuses as we sail from Los Angeles aboard the Navigator of the Seas from September 19th through 27th in 2024, with stops in Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and Mazatlán. The cruise offers seminars, exercises, and group sessions, an ideal blend of relaxation, learning, and writing, all while sailing the Mexican Riviera. For tickets and more information, visit writingexcuses.com/retreats.

 

[Season 19, Episode 30]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Character: Agency Versus Choices.

[Erin] 15 minutes long, 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] I'm Howard.

[Erin] You had a lot of agency to that.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] I made some choices. That was to…

[Howard] I chose to pause. Pause on purpose.

 

[Erin] Speaking of… What do we mean by agency and choices? Let's probably start by defining those terms a little bit.

[Mary Robinette] So, in my mind, agency is the ability to take action, and choices are more about the interior life of the character. I will admit that some of my understanding of this comes from my talking cat…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Who does not actually have an enormous amount of agency. My dog doesn't… Also doesn't have an enormous amount of agency. I decide when they're going to eat and all of that. My cat, when she goes up to her button board will press the buttons and it's like, "I'm concerned about the fate of the world." My dog goes up to the button board and is like, "Here! Here, here, here. Friend!" So my cat has this interior life. My dog really does not. My cat makes choices. My dog just kind of reacts to things. When I think about characters, I think about characters… I used to think that I needed to pick the character that had the agency, the one that could make the most change in their life. But I realized that from reading things like Matthew Satesses Craft in the Real World that that was causing me to remove characters who were incarcerated or otherwise in oppressed communities, because they didn't have a lot of agency. But the characters that are interesting are the ones that have rich interior lives. The ones who can make choices even as they are constrained by a lack of agency..

[Erin] Yeah. There's a great essay that I read about this called We Are the Mountain by Vida Cruz. It talks about how so many fantasy stories will be about somebody like leaving the small town to go, like, off in adventuring. But what about the people when their town is destroyed by a dragon, but what about the people who are still living in the town destroyed by a dragon were just having to get by, and those people are also living very interesting lives. But… It's because they have to make small choices about how they'll react, how they'll respond, how they'll think about their lives in the midst of all this Dragon destruction. I think that that relates really well to the story that we're talking about today, Your Eyes, My Beacon, which actually starts with someone on an adventure that doesn't quite go sort of the way that they planned.

[DongWon] Yeah. I love this framework because both characters in this story are deeply constrained. One is constrained both to her role as the lighthouse keeper and being the light in the lighthouse herself, and there's no one else who can take that role. She's the only person who can do this and is also trapped in a fascist state, which is explicitly hunting down and eliminating people like her. Right? She's so constrained, she's so trapped, and needs a certain medication also to survive. Right? Still, we get this rich character who's capable of making choices, who has interior wants and needs and desires. On the other side, we have this character who is this adventurer character who comes in, is wounded, is stuck here for other reasons. So, watching these two people interact and make their choices even though… Kind of going back to last week's episode, there's so many barriers in their way, there's so many different things that are preventing them from accomplishing their goals, that suddenly they're… Even what their goals are comes into question. What are they trying to accomplish becomes very fuzzy in the middle of the story in a way that I really enjoy because there's so many constraints on them that it's hard for them to figure out what it is that they want, which then leads to all the interesting choices made in the back half of the story, which are kind of heartbreaking in various ways.

[Howard] Absent any sort of support mechanism, the lighthouse keeper… Lighthouse keeper lives alone. Absent any support, the lighthouse keeper doesn't really have much of a choice as to whether or not the light stays on. They're doing everything they can, but when they reach the limits of their ability, there isn't anyone to help them. So they don't have a choice when the light goes out. That light going out removes agency from the entire crew of the ship. Suddenly, the only choices they have are figure out how to swim out of a shattered on the rocks ship, and many of them, their agency ends forever because they no longer have any choice, because dead.

[Erin] Sh… Sorry. That is sad, but also for some reason…

[Laughter]

[Howard] If you say it correctly, it's a joke.

[Erin] The way you said it tickled me. But I… What I was thinking about, also, both of what you're saying is… This story is not at all about how to stop the hunting of lighthouse keepers, about what the high court is doing, the characters don't even think about it. Like, their agency is so far removed… Sort of the way that when the light is removed, you're just trying to swim to shore. They're not trying to change the system or take down the man. They're really just trying to make connection. Like, the biggest choice is do I let another person into my flawed self or my flawed life, not do I change the way that my life is flawed. Which I think is poignant and beautiful.

[DongWon] Well, I love you bringing up the essay and going back to this idea of leaving the village versus staying in the village. Right? In a traditional epic fantasy, it falls into what I think of as a restoration fantasy, which is about fixing the world and restoring it to its prior state. Which kind of traps fantasy sometimes in a backward looking mode. So when you give characters full agency in the world, when they can change the fate of the whole world, then there's so much responsibility that goes on that character that weirdly, you remove choice from them. Because if you have infinite power, how could you not try and fix things? Right? Versus, it can sometimes be so much more interesting to put people in extreme constraints, to take away their agency, and then we get to see what does this character do in this circumstance. Right? We see that in this story where they're not trying to fix the world, they're just trying to save each other. It becomes so much more poignant and powerful. We see this across all three stories. In The Cook, no one's trying to stop this war. It's how do I survive till the next meal, how do I take care of this person who needs to be fed? In You Perfect, Broken Thing, it's how do I survive this race? No one, again, is trying to undo the systems that they're trapped in, they're trying to survive those systems. I think that's why he's made such wonderful character studies, because it's what do people do under duress, not what do people do when they have infinite power.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the other things that I want to point out is that you can demonstrate these even when you're not in the character's head.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] That's also something that I love about this story. There's a moment, shortly after our protagonist wakes up, when she's asking about the light, the light went out. So we're in first person, and we're viewing the other character. You can see the choice that is made.

 

“No,” I say. “The light. It went out.”

The other woman looks askance at the cup in her hand.

“I…was sick. I—the flame went out.” She doesn’t look at me as she says it. Ashamed-like, and why not? 

 

So this is a fascinating moment, because the… Our main character, our viewpoint character, misinterprets what is happening there. The character is choosing to lie about why the flame went out. Our character believes that she is looking askance, she is hesitating, she's coming up with excuses just because of shame. It's more than that. But you are able to see that because of these small choices that that character is making. Even though our character… Our POV character is misinterpreting them.

[Howard] I'd like to draw a parallel between the opening of this story and some of the spatial worldbuilding in Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. The idea of constriction and then expansion. At the end of the first section of this story, these three lines.

 

I have only two coherent thoughts in the frigid darkness.

Do not get hit by the ship.

Where did the light go?

 

In that moment, she really only has one choice. Swim in a direction that gets me hit by the ship or swim in a direction that doesn't get me hit by the ship. Because there's no light, I don't even know which choice I'm making. It is very desperate. It is… Arguably, it is the most desperate possible narrowing of a person's choices. Because you get to make a choice, but you don't even know what it will do. When we get to the end of the story, where we are answering her questions, finally, where did the light go? She makes a choice to do something about the light, and it's a whole series of choices. There's a myriad options that she has, along this path, in answer to the question, and to help make sure that nobody else has to make the choice about swimming or not swimming out from under the ship.

[Erin] With that, we are going to make a choice to take a break, and then we will be right back.

 

[Mary Robinette] I have a new short story out in Uncanny Magazine. It's called Marginalia and it gets its name and setting from the doodles in medieval manuscripts. Have you seen the ones with nights fighting giant snails? So I thought, what if the reason those were in so many manuscripts was that there were actually giant snails and knights had to defend against them, and we don't know about them today because they were just hunted to extinction. I'd love it if you'd just hop over to Uncanny and read it. That's Marginalia by me, Mary Robinette Kowal.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. Picking up with what Howard was talking about before the break, taking this idea of compression and expansion into this story, and how it applies to agency and choice is also, I think, really fascinating, because the pivotal moment in this story is when agency is restored to our protagonist. Right? When the pirate gets to rejoin her crew and go back out into the world and live the life that she ostensibly wants. One of the heartbreaking moments is that she chooses that. She chooses to do that instead of staying with the lighthouse keeper, instead of staying with Audei. She goes out into the world and reclaims her agency, and it's a terrible choice and it doesn't work and she suffers for it, and Audei suffers for it, and then people can't pass through this area, so that their suffering for it, too. It's such an interesting moment, again, where C. L. Clark is so good at this thing where I understand… It's, oh, of course she chose that. How could I have expected her to choose differently? But it's still so disappointing and heartbreaking that she does.

[Mary Robinette] This is a thing that's really great with character stories, is that often a character will fall back into their old wants and goals, their old patterns. It's something we see with people, too. That there's a pattern that has served you that is comfortable, and if a character is stressed or pressured, they don't really examine whether or not that still going to serve them. If Sigo had paused to examine it, like, had really taken the time to say, "Wait. Is this what I still want?" Then may have made a different choice. But, confronted with, oh, this is familiar, goes with the familiar, goes with the old pattern, and leaves.

[Howard] In many story forms, we see the… What we've called… In Writing Excuses episodes, we've use the term arm bar where… A term that comes to us from hand to hand combat, you put someone in an arm bar and you are now compelling them to move in a certain direction, you're restricting their agency. We talk about arm bars as moments in the first act of a three act format, where the protagonist now has to choose to protag. The flipside of that is what we see in this story. There is no arm bar, she makes what we would argue is the wrong choice, and then looks at the consequences of that choice and examines her life, and because of the breadth of agency she still retains, is able to make the choice that answers the question about where the light went.

[DongWon] I love how resistant these are to traditional ideas of the hero's journey. Right? Resisting, refusing the call to adventure, is the right choice in all three stories. All three stories are about choosing domesticity, choosing love, choosing care over choosing heroism and violence and participating in the systems that are oppressing people. I think that's so beautiful, the way the author contrasts the agency and the choice in that way.

[Erin] Yeah. It makes me think about what is this a fantasy of? So a lot of time I think of big hero's journey as being the power fantasy, I have a fantasy to change the world. I can do that in this book. To me, this is a fantasy of vulnerability and it's a fantasy of connection. I think that in some ways, it is almost scarier, because that's the thing that we can relate to. At least, I can more in my individual life. The choice to let someone in, the choice to do the thing where you are vulnerable to another person, is more my life experience than the ability to change the entire nature of reality. I think that knowing what your story is a fantasy of and that there are many different things that it can be. It can be a story of, like, big stakes or big changes, or big stakes and small changes. But the stakes are no less large for that difference.

[DongWon] Yeah. It's so fragile. Right? Audei needs medication. There's such a strong metaphor for chronic illness. They're at threat from the state. There's all of these things where Sigo is making these choices to… That are so counter to going off on adventure and the way it's portrayed here is it so much scarier than going into the world and raiding whatever… Whatever she's doing on this ship, that Audei thinks of as being a pirate. Right?

 

[Mary Robinette] The other thing also with Audei and Sigo is that Audei also has a full character story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Also is… Even though her sections are much shorter, they're in third person, she is making choices in every single one of those. So there's an acronym that I've used in previous seasons called DREAM, which is denial, resistance, exploration, acceptance, and manifestation. This happens for Audei. When we first start, in that first section, she's very much like I do this alone, and I can do this alone. She's in denial that she needs help. She's in denial that this is something that is more than one person. She had a family, she's doing alone, she's in denial. Then, when the stranger comes, when Sigo… She goes into resistance. But she still alone. She still believes that she can do the job alone, but she doesn't object to having company. So, when we are in resistance, she's not upset at the prospect of company, when the storm blows in. That's that… She's still in resistance, but she starting to let the idea of someone else exist. Then we get to exploration, where we try out the idea of what would it be like if someone else knew. That's when… That exploration is as she's letting Sigo help around the property doing the different chores. It's like, oh, this does make it easier. Then we get to acceptance.

[DongWon] There's such a moment here that I really love, and it's when Sigo stepped away to go get the medicine from town. We know that she's not going to… Or, I guess we don't know at this point she's not going to come back. But that's the next moment.

 

The sudden crush of loneliness is too much to bear, but there is also hope and patience. Sigo will come back soon. She will come back and Audei will ask her to stay.

 

That moment of her accepting, like, oh, no, I do need this person, I'm going to ask her to stay. But she hasn't done it yet. So the choice that Sigo's about to make we know is the wrong one, we know that Sigo knows it's the wrong one. But, Audei never actually asked her to stay.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is, I think, also one of the things that brings that idea of choice back in. Had Audei made that choice to ask, then the tragedy would not have continued to unfold. By leaving, Sigo has removed that tiny piece of agency from Audei, because now she no longer has the ability to ask. So that's part of what happens there. It's not until Sigo returns that we actually get the manifestation where we see what they do with the knowledge that they are working together. It is the last line of the story.

 

They are light. They are light, together, they are light.

 

That's the manifestation, which is so lovely that I am sitting here, as we're podcasting, trying not to actually cry…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Again, because of this story. But it's… This beautiful little arc that is all about the choices that the character is making and the times that they have agency and when agency is removed from them.

 

[Erin] But that makes me think that I think is fascinating is thinking about the span of time on the page between the letters of DREAM. So, here, sort of, we get the first four in, not like rapid pace, but they're coming pretty regularly. Then there's this delayed manifestation. Because that's what the story is driving towards, that's what it's about. Are they able to… They realize, I think, both of them, even in making the wrong choices, what they are to each other, what are they able to manifest, and that's the question that the story is answering.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] So, thinking about a different story, like, that's telling… A different tale, might have a big gap before acceptance, or a big gap before any of the other letters in DREAM. So it just makes me think where can you put those gaps in your story and where have you put them maybe not even thinking about it, and what does that tell you about the kind of story you're trying to tell?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Each of them has a try fail cycle where the character's trying to hold onto their character, to their self-identity, and when they fail to do that, that's the catalyst that moves them to the next level. But sometimes a character will get stuck. Like, they will just be doing resistance over and over again. Those are the character stories that feel very flat. Or the ones where we jump straight from dream to manifestation, without the character demonstrating change through the choices that they're making.

 

[Erin] All right. With that, I'll take you to the homework. Which is to write a scene in which your character has very little agency for whatever reason, but still must make a choice. Do your best to make that choice feel exciting, feel high-stakes, feel real for the reader.

 

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

 

[Erin] Are you struggling to find time and energy for creative work or writing? Sandra Tayler has a new book that might help. Structuring Life to Support Creativity is a resource book for creative people who want to make more space in the life that they have for the creative work they want to do. This book is drawn from 30 years experience in juggling creative work along with everything else life throws at us. Inside the book, you can find such topics as managing your mental load, arranging your physical space, how to come back to your creative work after life goes sideways, the problem of motivation, and more. The whole book is written with a focus on adapting for how your brain works instead of trying to change you to fit expectations. The book is not prescriptive. Instead, it provides concepts and tools so you can find the ones that work for you. This makes the book autism, ADHD, and neurodivergent friendly. Preorder your copy today at sandratayler.com. Just make sure that Tayler has an e r in the Tayler.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-35-organizing-your-writing-or-managing-the-mega-arc

 

Key points: Tools to keep big projects in line. Use string to align things! Simple tools can manage big things. Airtable, a database. Track character names, places, what you've done, what you mean to do. Find things that you are missing! E.g., over using one gender, or personality traits or alignments. Tracking helps you recognize patterns, and be intentional about them. Obsidian, a digital whiteboard for visual layouts, and automatic linking, a kind of mind map of connections. Wikidpad, use tools that work for you, that seem intuitive. Use find to see if you have already written something, so it is canon, and a collection of useful links. Measure twice, cut once, or relative measurement. Think about monetizing your references or research results. Worldbuilding, prep work, pre-writing is not wasted work if it works for you and your project. Spreadsheets and other pre-writing can tell you what you care about, what's important to you. The beginning needs to introduce the important characters, and the end needs to resolve or answer questions asked at the beginning of the book. What is the big story? Who are the specific characters in this book? 

 

[Season 18, Episode 35]

 

[1:30 minutes advertising, almost inaudible]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Managing the Mega-Arc.

[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.

 

[Howard] This week, we're going to talk about big projects and the tools we use in order to keep them in line. I'm reminded of the… I can't remember who it was who was making such a big deal about how the stones and the pyramids were laid out in perfect straight lines, and someone else pointed out that, "Dude, they had string." You pull the string straight and, boy, you got a straight edge right there. You can just line these things up. There are some very simple tools that we can use to manage really big things. So I'm going to pitch this to the rest of the cast. What is your string?

[DongWon] Hey, Erin, do you want to talk about airtable?

[Erin] [chuckles] I do want to talk about airtable. So, I will say first that while airtable is actually free to use, I am not being a shill for airtable. Any sort of database or way of tracking things can work. It's just the one that I really love, because it has a really great fun way of looking on the screen that works for me. But what I like to do is a lot for my game writing projects is to track things like character names, places, what I've done, what I mean to do. One of the reasons that I really like tracking is actually maybe for a different reason than other people do. I use tracking a lot of the time, and I use airtable, which is, like, I set up this database and I'll list like every character I've ever mentioned. Every place that's ever shown up in this particular game, is to find places… To find the things that I'm missing about myself. So, for example, if I track all of my characters and their genders, I may find that I overly skew one way or the other in terms of gendering characters. If I then add in a little bit about their personality traits or alignments in like a D&D or TP RPG world, I may find, for example, that I love chaotic good women, which I do, because I am one. So I… And that I make all men evil, because they… No, just kidding.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Those types of things we often miss in our own work, the patterns that we're creating. I think that a lot of times when you create patterns, and you're not intentional about them, that's when you can replicate bad things in the world that we don't necessarily want to put on the page. So, for me, tracking is a way to keep things straight, to learn that I love names that start with the letter K, and that I can't make everybody's name a two syllable K name…

[Laughter]

[Erin] Because eventually it will be very difficult to keep them apart.

[DongWon] I don't know. World of Karen seems pretty terrifying.

[Laughter]

[Erin] Wow. That's actually a bad theme park. The World of Karens.

[Howard] That feels very much like the string metaphor I led with. You stretch that string out, and if one of the bricks is sticking just a little to one side, oh, you can see, oh, that is so clearly a thing I've done wrong. Let's fix it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] I also do a spreadsheet for similar reasons about my internal biases. But then I also… The thing that I started doing, and this gets to the… Over the course of a long series. I originally was putting in the characters ages. But, in the Lady Astronaut books, I just finished writing book four, which takes place 17 years after the first book. So when a character, a new character enters the world, I'm like, "Okay. So I just wrote down their age, but their age in what year?" So now I write down what year they were born in instead, which makes it much easier to track. I still have to do math. But it makes it much easier to figure out, like, where they are in relationship to the other characters in the book and how old they are as the story progresses.

 

[DongWon] Going back to tools specifically, Erin mentioned the airtable is a database, which is technically true, but also makes it sound very scary. Functionally, when you're interacting with it, it is a series of linked spreadsheets is kind of what it looks like, that you can make it show your information in various ways. It is an incredibly powerful tool. It's a very cool tool, and one that I highly recommend playing around with and exploring a little bit. If you want something that's slightly less hierarchical for… I use this a lot for my games. I use a tool called Notions… Or, sorry, not Notions. I use Obsidian which is sort of like a series of linked text documents. But the reason I really like it is it has two features. One, it has a digital whiteboard version, so you can sort of lay stuff out visually. The other is it automatically links different documents together. If you mention something in one document, it'll give you a sort of a mind map, so you can sort of see how things are connected and clustered and it gives you a really useful way to be like, "Okay, this location, these characters, these plot points are all linked in this way." So you can find connections, or see where you didn't draw a line that you need to. So a lot of these tools are just different ways to visualize all the information that's in your head in a really structured way that can give you more insight into what it is you're trying to accomplish.

 

[Howard] Often we resist tools that have a learning curve at the front of them. You look at a tool, you're like, "Oh, I'd… I don't want to have to learn how to program a database. I don't want to have to learn how to format a spreadsheet." The very first planning tool that I really used for Schlock Mercenary was a standalone wiki software called Wikidpad. Wiki D Pad. I always pronounced it Wikidpad because it never occurred to me that the developer was making a fun pun and calling it wicked pad. I loved it because while I was typing, by doing just a couple of keystrokes at the beginning and end of a name, it automatically turned that name into a link for a new page. So I could just right and by doing whatever those little blips were, I don't know if it was double pipes or whatever, by doing those at the beginning of the thing, I was making a note to myself that says I'm going to expand on this later. Then I go back on it and click it, and boom! Up comes a blank page and I could start writing again. The desktop version, the only me version of the Schlock Mercenary wiki, was born. We talked about it in an early episode of Writing Excuses. I'm not here to pitch Wikidpad to you. I'm saying the tool that's going to work for you might be the tool that is the most intuitive. Maybe that's sticky notes on the wall, maybe that's a clipboard.

 

[Mary Robinette] So the two… Like, you'll hear people talking about needing to build their worldbuilding bible and things like that. Yes, I use a spreadsheet to track my characters ages, I use things like eon timeline to track the big over… Making sure that I've actually allotted them enough time to get from point A to point B. But most of my worldbuilding, I don… My two organizational methods are the find function…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So that I can look for it in something that I have already written. Because if it's not in the document, it is not canon, and I can change it. Then, my Scrivener, I have a section that's called useful links and I just dropped the links in randomly. Like when… After I've researched something, I will drop a link into what I've researched. The reason that I'm bringing this up is that I know a lot of people who feel like they have to create this very detailed document before they can start writing. I am here to tell you that if you are chaotic neutral about your organization, or chaotic evil as my case may be, you don't actually have to… What Howard said earlier about using the tool that works for you to solve the problem that you need to be solved. All I need to solve with my links is if someone says, "Where did you get that?" that I have someplace where I have it saved.

[Howard] I think my alignment is lawful lazy…

[Laughter]

 

[DongWon] In woodworking, which is another one of my hobbies, permitting me to pull extended metaphors from my hobbies, there's two ways… There's the old saying that if you're a carpenter, you measure twice and cut once. There's a whole different school of thought to that. Right? So in this case, measure twice, cut once, is very much like I'm cutting this to this exact dimension, it is going to be this size, and I've planned it all out, and you've built a cut list of like 15 different things that are exact measurements and you have to follow that to a T. If you screw up, your whole project is going to be off. Right? That is how I think of very much this, like, worldbuilding document where you're pre-building all these things in a very detailed way. There's another mode of thinking that I find more useful. It's a very traditional method called relative measurement. Right? You have a board. You are now going to mark that board in ratio to the next thing you want to make. Right? So if you have a drawer back, then that is the size of your drawer, you're going to cut your drawer front in a way that matches the size of that. It doesn't matter how big it is. You don't need to know that it's 9 inches and three quarters. You just need to know it's this size, I'm marking it to be the same as that size. So you can do that with all your joinery and all of your pieces, and you have a thing at the end that is very beautiful and very proportional that fits the design that you wanted, but you're doing it all relative to each other rather than trying to impose this top-down hierarchy on it. So if you approached your organization that way, I think for a lot of people, I think it can be much more intuitive and fluid, and sort of takes some of the stress off, of having to figure all these things out before hand.

[Howard] My own woodworking mantra is I've cut this three times and it's still too short.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Then you just cut the other board to be short enough that it fits.

[Howard] Exactly. When we returned from our break, I'm going to talk about turning my planning tools into money.

 

[Mary Robinette] I want to talk to you about Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. This book… Like, I started recommending this book before I finished it, which is unusual for me. He imagines a future where the sea levels have risen, as they're going to. That's not really imagining the future, but one of the things he's looking at is whether or not octopi… podes can be sapient. He's got that layered on with the way AI might manage fishing vessels. Like, there's all of these different layers, and it's heavily, heavily researched. All of the characters are also scientists at the top of their game. So the amount of research that he had to do was huge. But it feels pretty effortless on the page. So if you want to look at, like, what the end result of some of these tools that were talking about are, and you want just a really good read, it's very thought-provoking. I highly recommend Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler.

 

[Howard] Probably the single most profitable thing Sandra and I put together for Schlock Mercenary was the Planet Mercenary role-playing game. I have a PDF of the Planet Mercenary role-playing game on my desktop that I refer to all the time so that I can get my worldbuilding details right. It's totally fair to write a 300,000 page role-playing book and expect to make money off of it and then to refer to it yourself. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. As I joked in a previous episode, between the words schlock and mercenary, which word suggests I wouldn't do something like that?

[Mary Robinette] So I've done a similar thing, which is not the role-playing game, but one of the things that I've done to monetize my research is that I have a bookshop.org, so I have on that bookshop.org, I have a list of… The bibliography that I have for the books that I used to research my stuff. It's there for two reasons. One, it makes an easy reference for me. Two, people are always asking me, like, where can I go to get information like this. Then, because it's through bookshop.org, I actually get an affiliate kickback from that. It's not that you have to do this thing, but one of the things that you will be doing as a writer is looking for multiple income streams.

[DongWon] Just one thing in general I want to remind you is that there's no such thing as throwaway work in writing. Right? It may be frustrating to feel like you've written however many words in worldbuilding and prep work and pre-writing, 50,000 words, whatever. That all goes into building up your internal understanding of this world in the way that you may need it, so that that work is going to go into the book that you're writing. Right? Words that you write and throw away just because they're not ending up on the final printed page doesn't mean that they were worthless. It just was what the project required. Right? Not every book will require that. Maybe that's something you do for your first book. Maybe it's something you find you need to do for your seventh book. Right? But I love framing, like, being able to take the pre-work you're doing and make it work for you in other ways. I think that's an absolutely brilliant way. I think writers yeah… Look for ways to monetize that work you're doing. Look for other income streams. But also don't feel like you're wasting time by doing these things. Yes, sometimes for some people it's a mode of procrastination, but I just encourage people really, like, if that's your process, that's your process. Lean into it. Find ways to make that work for you, and don't beat yourself up just because that doesn't end up on the printed page.

[Howard] One of my favorite outgrowths of the research was I had a spreadsheet for when people were born. I realized that two of my main characters were from the same area, had the same life… About the same life span, and may have been sitting on different sides of the same war. I had never explored that. An entire story and the whole bunch of character data came out of one moment where I looked at a spreadsheet and went, "Huh."

[Erin] Yeah. I think something else that spreadsheets can do, and, granted, I love them more than I should, is it teaches you what you care about. So a lot of the process of making a spreadsheet is trial and error. So you decide, I'm going to make a spreadsheet today. You're like, "Oh, put all the character names down," or something very easy. You're like, "I'm going to track their age." Then you're like, "Oh, no, that's wrong, because my thing goes through time. Actually, I need to track their date of birth." That tells you something about the way you view the story, the timescale that you're working on. If you keep going back to your spreadsheet and being like, "Oh, this spreadsheet is not working because it doesn't tell me X." That means X is important. Number one, figure out if there's a way to add it to your spreadsheet. Number two, like, that should be, then, something… If that's important to you, then it's something important to the story, and you should see is that actually coming through. That thing that you keep thinking about. So, I think that a lot of times what tools do is they force you to take the wide creative universe that you're working in and put it into some sort of structural mode. Even if it's just like I've made power points of stories before, being like random things I mentioned that I should get back to. They don't have a lot of form to them, but it's a way of putting it somewhere on paper, put it in some sort of box, even if it's just a box that I'm going to rifle through later to see if there's something really interesting that I can use to inspire myself going forward.

[DongWon] Aabria Iyengar has this brilliant worldbuilding question that she uses that is, "What is the lie that the people of your world believe in?" Right? The questions you're asking and putting into your spreadsheet can be so thematic and so creative and so generative that… Yes, you want the biographical details, when was this character born, who knows who, what are the connections. But also, going to Howard's example of here are two people on opposite sides of the war, what lies were each of those characters told? Right? What things do those characters believe and how is that going to drive story down the line? The way that... These tools are storytelling tools. They sound cold and mechanical when you say, "It's a spreadsheet. It's a database." But I think from that you can find such rich narrative hooks and chase your own interests, as Erin was just saying. You list the things that you are interested in. Sometimes you will be like, "This is boring. I'm not interested in this part of this world, or the set of characters, or this question," because when you're making a spreadsheet you are asking a question, and I think that is a really useful way to think about these things as you approach it.

[Howard] In structuring Schlock Mercenary, I realized on around I think book 5 or six, I realized that every book needed to stand alone. Because it needed to be a salable product without someone having to buy the earlier books. That may sound crassly commercial, and that's because it is. It would have been a terrible business decision to tell people, "Oh, you have to start with my very first thing that I ever did before you can read this thing that I'm super proud of." The solution… I mean, it should be obvious, I need to make sure that the beginning of every book introduces the characters who are going to be important, and that the end of the book resolves questions, answers questions that were asked by those characters at the beginning of the book. That started going into my planning spreadsheets very early on. I would have some cells for this is the plot, this is the big story. Then I would have columns and cells for the specific characters that this book was tracking. I had people come to me later and say, "You know, I always thought that Schlock was the main character, but he's almost never the main character in the stories." Yes. Yes, I'm so glad you noticed that. That's how we're supposed to say that, right, Mary Robinette?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Yeah, I'm so glad you noticed that. He's very rarely the protagonist. Because he very rarely gets an arc that tracks things. I realized on about book 17, book 18, I realized that I needed to return to Schlock for the finale. So the ending that I had originally envisioned, the big solution, the big resolution to the plot that I had originally envisioned and that I had in my spreadsheets needed to have more Schlock in it. I went back to, and this is going to sound funny, I went back to an old forum post from like 2003 where someone said, "Yeah, the answer to a lot of these stories is just Schlock eats it." I looked at that and thought, "You know, I bet that'll work."

[DongWon] Character is destiny, you know.

[Howard] I bet that'll work. It felt so… It was one of those moments… Again, it grows right out of staring out the spreadsheet and realizing there's this pattern and there's this missing piece of this pattern, and I have to fill it with this character. I took my proposal for the changed ending to my brother and said, "This is what I'd like to try." His response was, "Oh, my gosh, that's genius. How long have you been planning this?" I'm like, "30 minutes."

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm so glad you noticed. Speaking of 30 minutes, we don't want to run for a full 30 minutes. So, let's wrap this up with some homework. Erin?

 

[Erin] So we have talked about a few different tools today. Sometimes I think about tools as hammers in search of a nail. So the homework is for you to actually find what are the nails within whatever story that you're working on? What are the things that you can or could track within your story? What I would challenge you to do is find three different things that your story could be tracking, whether those are informational, thematic, character driven, emotional. Write down what those are. Maybe a few examples of what those could be. If it's birthdays, right down five characters birthdays. If it's theme, write down what five characters are thinking about thematically. Then start looking at what are some tools that could actually help you take those nails and build something really cool out of them.

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

 

[Howard] We are now offering an interactive tier on our Patreon found at patreon.com/writingexcuses called Office Hours. Once a month, you can join a group of your peers and the hosts of Writing Excuses to ask questions.