wetranscripts | Entries tagged with premise

Writing Excuses 19.09: LIVE Recording - Rituals, Rites, and Traditions

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-09-live-recording-rituals-rites-and-traditions

Key Points: Rituals, rites, and traditions: making beliefs tangible as practices. Building the rites helps you discover a little about your characters, about what they believe, and helps make them more real. Incorporating them into our fiction makes characters more believable, realistic, vibrant, and tangible. Births, weddings, and funerals are what make a culture work. Do you work from culture to tradition or ritual, or start with the ritual, and then work out the culture? Start with an existing culture, but add elements and tweak it. Start with the premise of the story world, and then think about the implications of that. When you're working from a real culture, what can you take or not? Be respectful. Don't dip your quill in somebody's blood. Use characters, individuals, who are resistant, lack understanding, or are trying to understand as buffers for the culture. Rituals, rites, and traditions can do so much heavy lifting for you. One takeaway? Show how communities come together. Remember that rituals, rites, and traditions reflect how people relate to the world, community, and each other. During revision, go for depth, and work out the rituals. Remember that rituals and traditions are not just something that other cultures have, we have them too!

[Season 19, Episode 09]

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

[Season 19, Episode 09]

[Erin] This is Writing Excuses. Rituals, rites, and traditions.

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Fonda] Because you're in a hurry.

[Mahtab] And we're not that smart.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Fonda] I'm Fonda.

[Mahtab] I'm Mahtab.

[Erin] We are going to talk today about tradition. We're going to be talking about what happens when you take beliefs in a world and make them tangible by turning them into practices. This happens in our real world, and it often happens in our fiction. I'm wondering how do you all do that? Have you done it, are you interested in doing it, how do you tackle it?

[Mahtab] It would absolutely… I think it is definitely a very important, I would say, a part for worldbuilding, because that is how people… Like, first of all, when you develop rites or any kind of rituals, which is… And I'm talking my experience when… Which is what I did for my novel Valley of the Rats. I built up these traditions and these rites that the people in the village go through. That was actually how I discovered a little bit more about my people. It's what they believe. It makes them a little bit more real. And, it was an aspect of worldbuilding, which made it really interesting.

[Fonda] Same. I love incorporating rituals, rites, and traditions into my worldbuilding. If you think about our own daily lives, we go through the world performing a whole series of rituals, rites, and traditions, many of which we're somewhat unconscious of. Right? Everything from our day-to-day practices of holding the door open for another person to the order in which your family members talk when they're gathered together to big scale traditions like our holidays and our societal values and principles, like, those all feed so much into our day-to-day lives that, to the extent that we can incorporate them into our fiction, it will make our fictional worlds that much more believable, that much more realistic, and that much more vibrant and tangible.

[DongWon] Yeah. One of my clients once told me, Kate [Ballahide] said that the 3 things you need to define a culture are births, weddings, and funerals. If you have those 3 parts of a person's life, you have a strong understanding of what makes that culture work. Because, when I think about worldbuilding, I think less about material physical things that make up that world and more about what are the rules that define this society. Right? That's important to people, what are the taboos that you can't break. So those 3 points of how do we treat a new life, how do we celebrate 2 people coming together, and then how do we honor a loss, I think are the things that we really communicate to the audience this is what our characters value, this is what they aspire to, and this is what they're afraid of.

[Erin] I'm curious, does it come that way for all of you? Like, is it something where you decide here's the value, here's the culture, I'm going to create this tradition or ritual? Or are you like, I want to make this really cool ritual, I will figure out the culture that would make it happen? Is it always the same way for you, or one or the other?

[Mahtab] I'm always… Because a lot of my stories have been set in India, I take that… The culture that's currently exists as the starting point, but then I will try and add a few fantasy elements, or I'll try and switch it around a little bit, and go against people's norms of beliefs and just try and make it a little bit more interesting. And, because I love scary stories and horror, I will add a horror element to it as well, which is… Most people are not going to, but the main thing is that I want some kind of a reaction from the reader. So I will take something that's existing, and then I try and tweak it. I think sometimes, you know what, when you take something existing and tweak it, not only are you showing differences between what people believe, but sometimes you can even show similarities between different cultures or different beliefs and different people. So it's a good way to play with things and play with the character and the world, and I love doing that.

[Fonda] I start with the premise of my story world. Which, for me, involves some speculative element. Then I go through the thought exercise of what are the implications that that entails for the society and for the individuals that navigate that world. So, the example of the Green Bone saga, I have a coded East Asian society, but there's a speculative element that doesn't exist in our world. Which is this magic jade that confers powers. So an entire society has been developed around this one resource and there's a whole culture that is grounded around the practices and traditions and beliefs surrounding this speculative element that I've introduced into the world. So I couldn't just go and wholesale take an East Asian culture and then transplant it into my story world, I had to create this hybridized world where I was cueing certain rites and rituals and traditions that readers would pick up on as being East Asian in origin, but then just weaving it together with my own imagination based around what kind of world I wanted to create around the speculative element. The more that you can get down to that microlevel of even the things like the idioms, the sayings that people have, the day-to-day interactions that they have around the speculative element and the rich… Religious aspects, the spiritual aspects, social aspects… Hopefully, if I've done my job right, it will feel like a very grounded place that's been built from the starting principles.

[Erin] I feel like you've hit on two really, really exciting things. One is, I think, a question people often have when they're working from something that's real. They're working from a real culture, is, what can you take and when can you not take? This is something that I've thought about. I've used rituals that come from basically conjure, like, folk magic, that come from, like, a black American folk magic tradition, and I don't want to depict closed practices, which are basically practices only meant, rituals and rites that are only meant to be done by the group themselves. If you're not in the group, like, don't do it, and you'll know if you are. I think, number one, I don't want to be disrespectful. Number 2, I actually don't want a bunch of folk magic practitioners mad at me. They were like… That's not a good group to have on your bad side. So I think that is something that I thought about, is, what is the essence of what's going through? I think that's what you're talking about. What is the core value that is underlying that tradition, which is the thing that that tradition is meant to do. Or what was it originally developed to do. Then, how can I develop it in a different way? What if this same objective was expressed differently? What if it had a different practice, but the same underlying goal? So I think a lot about that in, like, trying to avoid doing things that just seem like I'm kind of using somebody else's closed practices or, as I like to say it sometimes, dipping my quill in somebody's blood. Which is not a good thing unless that's what your story is about.

[DongWon] That is such an evocative image. I love that.

[Yeah. Chuckles.]

[Mahtab] I think one thing that we must remember whenever you do… Whenever you're writing something like this, is be respectful. Like, make sure that if, one, there is no misappropriation of someone else's traditions or practices. Use your own, something that you have, but whatever you change it into, whatever you tweak it into, make sure that it's respectful. If there is a fantasy element or a speculative element to it, that's fine, but try to make sure that you're not offending anyone by just making it so egregious that it's like it's wow, but it's really, really bad. So, just respect. Keep that in mind.

[DongWon] I think one of the things that can really help there is, especially in fiction, we're seeing these rites and rituals and traditions through an individual's perspective. Individuals have an imperfect understanding of the traditions that they're embedded in. Right? Nobody fully understands why it is that we do this ritual on this day, or why we honor this tradition in this way. So, having a character that is resistant to it, or doesn't quite understand it, or is trying to understand, I think are great ways to build a little bit of a buffer between the culture that you are referencing, that blood that you're dipping your quill in, and what's actually on the page. When you grounded in someone's specific experience, I think that does a lot to add that texture and that subjectivity that makes it feel less like you're just picking something up wholesale from someone else's culture, even from your own culture. Right? So, just remember that as people are experiencing all of these things that we're talking about, you're writing it through characters, you're writing through individuals embedded in that culture. I don't know, my experience is a lot of, like, trying to understand how my culture works, both as an American and coming with… My parents coming from Korea, there's, like, all these different things that I'm trying to puzzle out all the time and trying to get them to fit together. So I think letting that be felt in how your characters experience these moments can be a really thrilling way to go about it.

[Fonda] One of the things I love about incorporating rituals, rites, and traditions in fiction, in worldbuilding, is that they do so much heavy lifting for you. You don't need to have pages of exposition when you can show your characters living their day-to-day lives and going through the traditions of their society. It just provides this natural in, where you can very seamlessly include the exposition that you need to. For example, if I was to write a story set in the United States of America and it was for an extraterrestrial audience, rather than explaining the origin of this country and how it came to be and etc., etc., I could have my characters celebrate the 4th of July. There's an automatic in for me to, through the traditions of the society, give a bit of background on where… The origins of the society and how people celebrate it. So, think about that when you are doing your world building. Can you have, as much as possible, these grounded day-to-day experiences of your characters that give you this automatic in, where you don't have to make an awkward cut to explain something about your world?

[Erin] Which is a perfect time for a tradition of our own, to pause, so that we can have our little break, and so, traditionally, this would be the time for the thing of the week.

[Fonda] Our thing of the week is a debut fantasy novel called Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao. It is a very action-packed, funny book, that takes place in a Chinese underworld that resembles 1920s Shanghai, and I especially recommend the audiobook that was narrated by Mei Mei Macleod. The reason why I've chosen this is the book of the week is because it is a great example of how one author took rituals, rites, and traditions from our own world and shaped it for a fantasy world. For example, in our world in Chinese tradition, there is the ritual of burning offerings for ancestors, and in Shanghai Immortal, some of these offerings show up in the underworld in very unexpected ways. So, like the lucky ro… Joss roosters that get burned in our world end up just over populating the underworld…

[Chuckles]

[Fonda] And there are roosters running amok everywhere and there's a disaster. Shanghai Immortal by A. Y. Chao.

[Erin] Now that we're back from the break, I'm going to break from tradition in a little bit, and actually, we're going to do a quick wrap up section because we are on a ship right now and they are telling us that they want this room for secret rituals of their own. So, if you… We can go down, starting with DongWon, what is the one thing that you wish people knew when they were writing rites or rituals or traditions? One take away, what would it be?

[DongWon] [garbled]

[chuckles]

[DongWon] I think the thing that I wish people would really bring to it is really showing how communities come together. I think these are… The opportunities to make your characters feel embedded in a specific place and a specific group of people. Often times, when we see these scenes, it feels very individualistic, we're so focused on that person's emotions emotional experience going through it. But a thing that I often feel is missing in stories is a greater sense of a wider cast of characters, even if we're not seeing them all as individual POVs. That feeling of community, that feeling of connections, I think these ritual moments are such an ideal place to get that in and, often times, people can be very focused on the isolating experience of the character in those moments.

[Fonda] I would say that remember that at its core, rituals, rites, and traditions reflect how people relate to the world, to the community, and to each other. When you incorporate them into your fiction, they are an incredible opportunity to not just world build on a macro level, but also on a micro level, and weave in really tangible details, like food. Food is a part of so many of our rites and rituals and traditions. Dress. Is there special dress associated with certain occasions and traditions in your society? Money. Entertainment. So many of your world building blocks can be put together through the lens of the rites, rituals, and traditions of your fictional world.

[Mahtab] What I would say is try… And the first time that you're writing it, you may not know how many or what kinds of rites or rituals or traditions you want to, but I think during the revision is when you really need to figure out if you have too many strands, too many things going on, how you can roll a couple of things into one another and deepen your plot and deepen some of the things that you put in there, rather than widen it. Just give it some… Like, I would say during the revision process, go for depth, and really work those traditions out or rituals out, whatever it is that you want to work on. But narrow them down and just really work them out. I hope I'm making myself clear.

[Erin] You are. What I would say is to remember that rituals and traditions are not just things that other people have. I think sometimes we can think of rituals as that is a different culture has this ritual or tradition, but I'm just doing things because I am. But there are so many traditions that we have, like holding the door open or moving to the other side of the elevator or even blowing out the candles on a birthday cake is a ritual that exists in the birthday celebrations in America that may not exist everywhere.

[Erin] With that, I have the homework for you. Which is to pick a ritual or tradition that you are accustomed to or familiar with and make it the center of a fictional scene. You can change its meaning, you can change its impact, but keep the actual actions of the ritual or tradition the same.

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

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 18.42: Creating Magic Outside of a System

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

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

[Season 18, Episode 42]

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

[DongWon] 15 minutes long.

[Erin] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

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

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

[Erin] Love it.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

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

[Erin] Yeah.

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Consistency?

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

[Mary Robinette] That is…

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

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

[DongWon] Exactly. Yeah.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] No, no, this is…

[DongWon] But I do think that…

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

[Laughter]

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

[Mary Robinette] Sure.

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

[Erin] Well, I think that…

[Howard] If I could address the technological…

[Erin] Sure.

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

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

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

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

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

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

[DongWon] I love the conjure bag. Yeah.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] Hey, writers. I love to cook. It's one of my main ways of winding down from a hectic week, and it's a I show care for my favorite people. But a busy fall schedule doesn't always leave me with a lot of time to spare. With Hello Fresh, I can actually get a wholesome meal together even when I haven't had time to run to the store or figure out a menu. With their quick and easy recipes and 15 minute meals, you can get a tasty dinner on the table in less time than it takes to get takeout or delivery. And Hello Fresh is more than just dinners. You can also stock your fridge with easy breakfasts, quick lunches, and fresh snacks. Just shop Hello Fresh Market and add any of these tasty time-saving solutions to your weekly box. To start enjoying America's number one meal kit, you can go to hellofresh.com/50WX and use code 50WX for 50% off plus 15% off for the next 2 months.

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

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

[Howard] You promised a daft theory.

[Erin] A daft theory.

[Howard] I'm here for the daft.

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

[Mary Robinette] Ooo…

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

[DongWon] My love for you is melting.

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

[Mary Robinette] Time. Yeah.

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

[Mary Robinette] Very specific.

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

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

[Erin] Realistic.

[DongWon] Realistic.

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

[DongWon] Totally. Totally.

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

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

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

[DongWon] The big dream logic.

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

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah yeah yeah.

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

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yeah.

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

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

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Yeah. Same.

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

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

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

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

[DongWon] Yep.

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

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

[Howard] I think the GPS.

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

[Can we push back…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Laughter]

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

[Mary Robinette] I love this.

[Erin] And has elements of both.

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

[DongWon] What a great system.

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

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

[Mary Robinette] Right. Yeah.

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

[Laughter]

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

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

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

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

mbarker

Writing Excuses 17.2: It Was a Promise of Three Parts

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/01/09/17-2-it-was-a-promise-of-three-parts/

Key points: Sometimes the first line promises beautiful and evocative prose. Often pilots and prologues are violent or romantic, to show the range of what you can expect. Action, excitement, characters at their extreme. Try flipping to the middle! Use revisions to create consistency. Craft your promise and deliver on it. Use chapter beginnings as opportunities to write killer first lines. Watch for the dips when you're connecting the tent poles you are excited about.

[Season 17, Episode 2]

[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, It Was a Promise of Three Parts.

[Kaela] 15 minutes long.

[Sandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Megan] And we're not that smart.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Kaela] I'm Kaela.

[Sandra] I'm Sandra.

[Megan] And I'm Meg.

[Howard] The title of this episode comes to us paraphrasedly from the opening line of Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. Which I'm going to go ahead and read in its entirety.

It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

This is beautiful and evocative prose. Among the many things that this first line does, it promises us a book in which there is going to be beautiful and evocative prose. Rothfuss's writing is delicious. It is… It's delicious. That's just a great word to lead with. When we talk about first lines, first scenes, first paragraphs, first pages, first chapters. Establishing shots. Overtures for a musical. Opening splash pages in a comic. All of these things make promises to the audience about what's going to follow. We need to make sure that we make those promises consciously. So let's talk a little bit about what some of those promises are. Meg, I think you had an example from Lower Decks that you wanted to…

[Megan] As a call back, when Howard was talking about the Lower Decks pilot, I brought this up in our notes as an example to really hammer home in this episode. Often, the pilot episode of a television series needs to show the full range of what you're going to experience within the show. So this means your pilot is often the most violent or it has the most romantic content. This is one of the reasons why, also branching over to books, you'll often have a prologue that's full of action and excitement for you to meet our main character. So, the specific cold open that Howard mentioned, when we first meet Boimler and Mariner initially put a lot of viewers off the show, because Mariner was so extremely Mariner and Boimler was so extremely Boimler. But in order to introduce these two characters, we had to see them at their most extremes to get an idea of what their dynamic would be like throughout the show. The final bit is that slice into Boimler's life at the very end of the cold open with… You can see the sinews and the tendons and the little fountain of blood to show that, oh, hey, other Star Trek shows are not going to have the kind of… I'm not going to say gore, but we're going to go a little bit further visually then your use to in a Star Trek. So that minute and a half had to show the full extremes of what the comedy, action, and characters would be like through the remainder of Lower Decks.

[Howard] Well, that first episode was, if memory serves, a splotchy Star Trek zombie comedy in which at the end of it, well, it's Star Trek, we found a medical cure and the zombies all got better.

[Uhuh]

[Howard] So…

[Ramsey met a guy, but… Giggles]

[Howard] Oh, yeah. I mean, there were a couple who were now nothing but ex-zombie excrement, but the… That slice in the opening promises us, to borrow the title from Brian McClellan's debut novel, it's a promise of blood…

[Laughter]

[Howard] And then the episode delivers that.

[Kaela] I like… For starters, you just explained to me pilots in a way that will make me kinder to pilots for the rest of my life.

[Me, too] [laughter]

[Kaela] I love it. But it brings to the fore, for me, how… Which is what we talked about last episode, genres are different, and mediums are different. Because in a book, you don't want to telegraph that much all upfront. You do need to telegraph some. You need to let people know this is what you are signing up for. However, in a book, some of this is what you can expect from this book is taken care of by the packaging of the book, the cover, the art, the back blurb, which will all talk about in a later episode in more detail. But we, as writers and creators, that first page, that first chapter, gets so much rewriting because you have to promise the right things.

[Megan] I had a friend once… Rachel, I'm going to say you by name…

[Laughter]

[Megan] Once, I gave her a copy of one of my favorite books. I actually think it may have been The Way of Kings. I'm like, "This is my very favorite book, and you will love it." She takes it from my hand and opens to the middle of the book and start reading. I actually yelled the word "Spoilers!"

[Chuckles]

[Megan] And I smacked it out of her hands.

[Laughter]

[Megan] She's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "What are you doing?" She says, "Well, I find the first chapter of books to be very overwrought because that's where the author spends most of their time." So she always reads a page of prose in the middle of a book, any book, to see if she likes the author's voice, and then she will start it from the beginning. Which I think is just… Makes sense…

[Wrong]

[Megan] It makes sense.

[Readers]

[Howard] No, that's fair. Because if you're reading a page from the middle of the book and… You read the opening, and you're like," Oh, wow, this looks good." Then you flip to the middle of the book. If I'd flipped to the middle of The Name of the Wind and it was suddenly super, super dry, low-end, workmen's prose… Sigh. Then the promise of the front of the book is not being kept in the middle, and I might not have read it.

[Sandra] Yeah, I know of a…

[Howard] The challenge for us… Sorry to keep going. The challenge for us is to make our first lines and are pages and paragraphs not overwrought, but wrought to the same extent as we are going to wreak… Wrought, wreak…

[I think it's wreak]

[Howard] Wring the rest of the book.

[Right]

[Sandra] Yeah. I once… I knew of an author who sold a three book deal after the first book was written and the other two were not, and sold it on the strength of the first two chapters, which then got completely edited out of existence.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] So, the thing that had hooked the editor, and the agent and everything, was wiped out. The whole series kind of just fell flat for everyone. Book 2 kept just like not being accepted and not being accepted and not being accepted. It was just, to me, case of that… Part of the problem was that those first chapters didn't actually match any of the other stuff. They were gorgeous and beautiful, and the rest was so much weaker in comparison. We don't want to do that either.

[Howard] Yeah. You don't try out for the long distance team by showing them how quickly you can run the 50 yard dash.

[Sandra] Right.

[Howard] Meg.

[Megan] In… Wait. No, I got it. Sorry. Reset. In video games, something that will happen, especially in very long story driven games, is you will start with a big action sequence, with a lot more abilities than your character will normally have later on in the game. So I'm thinking the opening of Ghost of Tsushima, the opening of the first Assassins Creed game, where you're playing a character at full strength. Then something happens that nerfs them back down to level I. It's a way to promise your audience that, "Hey, listen. Although you're going to start at a level I, can't do anything person, you will eventually work up to be this great grand thing." This is why shows like Star Wars or books like Eragon open with this big action sequence of a princess running from the villains with something very important that ends up in the hands of this farmboy. That happens in both of those. It's to promise the audience that, yeah, our protagonist is at the very beginning of their journey, but it inherently has this promise that eventually they will get to the level where they are participating in the story on this grand scale.

[Howard] I think one of the finest examples of this is the mission completion text of the first gun mission in Borderlands 2. The mission completion text is, "You just moved 5 feet and opened a locker. Later, when you're killing skyscraper-sized monsters with a gun that shoots lightning, you'll look back at this moment and be like, heh."

[Laughter]

[Howard] It's perfect. It's perfect because… Yeah, you're told what's coming.

[Howard] We need a book of the week. I have paged away from my outline. Who's got that?

[Kaela does]

[Kaela] That is me. Oh, uh… Wait.

[Yes. Yes, it is you.]

[Kaela] It is my book! So prepare yourself.

[I'm excited]

[Kaela] Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls is the book of the week. The reason why I suggested it for this episode is because, as I have been doing school visits and things like that, I read out like the first page and a halfish, the first page is actually half a page, anyway. So I read that out to the kids, and my favorite part is ending right after the main character, she's lost in the desert, ending right after she turns around, looks up, and she meets her first dark criatura. It is a woman who is half skeleton, traced by the moonlight, and is like known as the devourer. She's like, "Don't eat me." Is her thing, and I end right there. That's because, from the very beginning, I want people to know that even though that, yes, this is a middle grade adventure and it is… Like, we're starting out in an adventure. We're out in the desert, we're soaked in what the world is like, we have a very fearful main character because she's going to be throughout the book, and we're meeting very otherworldly, very frightening things. She is going to be in life-threatening situations very often. But also, they're cool, and the pros as well, I've found very important to bring in some of the descriptions, like the stripes of moonlight coming through her ribs, things like that. Where you know that going to be soaked into this world from the beginning. You're going to be meeting very ancient, very primordial creatures who are both dangerous but also quite unexpectedly kind as well. Because this criatura ends up taking her home. Even though she's known as the devourer.

[Cool]

[Howard] Thank you. So that's Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls. Cece is spelled c.e.c.e., for those of you who are thinking it's a carbon copy email to Rios.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] No. Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls by Kaela Rivera.

[Howard] Meg. You've got your hand up, and no one can see it except those of us with cameras.

[Megan] That's something, as you're creating, as you're writing, as you're drawing, whatever you're making. Check back in. What is the promise of the premise that you've set up? Are you still bringing the same level of fire and excitement to the remainder of your book as you do in that very beginning part that you've polished and framed?

[Howard] How do you avoid the problem of writing checks you can't cash in your first page? How do you avoid being so clever or so purple or so whatever that you just can't maintain it for a book?

[Sandra] Well, this is a problem we all have.

[Laughter]

[Sandra] I mean, like… It's… One of the things I think to make sure is while, yes, we do end up spending a lot of time on getting that beginning right, doing what Meg's friend did and flipping to the middle and seeing what does the middle feel like, and maybe when you see what the middle feels like, while we want to telegraph this book is going to be exciting and whatever, if your book is actually contemplative, trying to make it exciting in chapter 1 is setting a bad expectation. So if you have a contemplative, quiet book, then you do want a contemplative, quiet opening. Because lips us even though that feels like, oh, no, people won't get hooked, yes, they will. They will, because they ca… If they're a person who wants a contemplative book, and they pick up and see excitement, they're going to put the book down. So then you've suddenly created a mismatch between the reader and what you're delivering.

[Howard] Kaela.

[Kaela] Yeah. I think this is particularly achieved through revisions. Like, no matter what media you are doing, whether you're doing books, video games, whether you're making a show, you need to do revisions. It's inevitable. Because that's how you get consistency. I think consistency is absolutely key to this. Both crafting the right promise and delivering on that promise. Because, for example, both pacing and tonally wise, a previous book of mine that is not published and will need major revisions, like, the first third of the book was this very slice of life experience, and it was contemplative and soft and painful and hard and beautiful. Then, the last two thirds are this life or death video game tournament, where you're like, "Go, go, go, go!" Even though I liked both of these things, it did not mesh into the same book properly.

[Howard] You have written two very cool books.

[Kaela] Yeah.

[Howard] Or at least parts of two very cool books.

[Kaela] And they're both unfinished. Yeah.

[Howard] Yep.

[Kaela] So…

[Howard] One of the tools that I use is treating chapter beginning as another opportunity to write a killer first-line. I'll review my first-line and I'll ask myself, okay, was it awesome because it planted a hook, was it awesome because it was pithy, was it awesome because it described something in a new way? Do I do that again, or do I do what the first-line didn't do, and do something else in order to show that this chapter still has a powerful first-line, but contains a continuation of the story in an expanding sort of way? But always treating… Always treating the page turn to a new chapter as an opportunity to overwrought again.

[Chuckles]

[Sandra] Yeah. One of the tools that I really find very powerful is finding the voice of your book. This is a thing that newer writers are sometimes very, very confused by, because voices this amalgamation a lot of word choice and tone shift and character voice and all of these things. But when you… Like… When you find the voice for the book as a whole, you can then go back to your beginning and make sure that the voice is matching. Again, it's flip to the middle and make your beginning promise accurately what the middle is delivering.

[Howard] Flip to the middle, but be standing more than an arm's length away from Meg…

[Yes. Laughter. Garbled.]

[Megan] Something else is when you are working on a creative… We all start with an idea. Be that one scene we love, one character we love. Something you need to watch out for is you set your tent poles of the scenes you're really excited for, and the dips come when you're like, ugh, I have to connect these, but it's so boring to get from A to B. You may either need to take out a tentpole or put something more interesting in the canvas of your connectivity.

[Howard] Yep. One of the things that I found working on the illustrations for Extreme Dungeon Mastery version 2, and I knew this going into it. I've got about a couple of hundred pictures to draw, and I knew that my style and my technique and my stamina was going to change on the way through. I was going to get better at what I was doing, and I was going to get tired of doing it. That was going to change things. One of the ways I tackled that was by drawing some of the last pictures first and revisiting some of the first pictures later, and doing a little bit of revision.

[Howard] We are approaching a 20 minute episode of a 15 minute podcast. So, I think it's time for homework. I've got our homework. You ready for this? Write six different first lines. For your work in progress or for a work in progress that you're imagining maybe sometime someday doing. Or maybe for six different works in progress. Six different first lines. But each of them should make a promise that you personally don't think you can keep. Now ask yourself why you don't think you can keep it, and how you would change the first-line to be something that you can do. There you go. This has been Writing Excuses. Thank you for listening to us. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.48: How to Practice Worldbuilding

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/01/14-48-how-to-practice-worldbuilding/

Key points: What insights have you had about writing related to worldbuilding? Your brain isn't big enough to keep your worldbuilding in your head. Use a tool, and give yourself permission to forget. You don't have to preplan everything, just use find and a while-writing research document. Randomizers make it feel more real. What you are writing is a snapshot of your life and the way you respond to things in a story Don't try to fix your snapshots. It's not about finding the right way, or the best way, to tell this story. If dinosaurs are birds without their feathers, think about the fat on a penguin's skeleton. What if dinosaurs had that much fat? Practice worldbuilding by turning the knob to 11 and to zero and see what you get. How can you use hobbies or other parts of life as practice for writing? Try using role-playing games to try out scenarios, to see what kind of story comes out of a premise. Consider the dominant pedal and music composition is a metaphor for writing. Recast characters as family members to see how they might react. Look at the politics of game players see how nations might interact. Figure out how human beings work.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 48.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, How to Practice Worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] Granted, this entire season has been about practicing your worldbuilding, so I understand if you've given me a kind of quizzical look as I have introduced this to you…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Listeners. But we are in our last month of our year of worldbuilding, and I wanted to ask some questions that just didn't fit into any of the other episodes, and talk about, like, some of our favorite worldbuilding exercises and things like that. So, one thing we like to do when we wrap up a year is kind of ask is there anything you've learned this year or anything now you've been trying in your fiction, just kind of relating to worldbuilding?

[Howard] Your brain isn't big enough.

[Brandon] Hmmm.

[Howard] You cannot…

[Dan] Speak for yourself.

[Howard] Keep all of this in your head. So, ultimately, your worldbuilding… You're trying to build an entire world. Of course it's not going to fit in your head. Heads go inside worlds. You are going to have to use some sort of tool to record this. It might be index cards, it might be a spreadsheet, it might be a wiki, it might be some sort of relational database, I don't know. But for me, that discovery that I cannot hold all of these things in my head, and I have to write them down, I have to record them in some way, was intensely liberating. Because the moment I did, I gave myself permission to forget those things. Oh, I can forget that, because I've written it down, my computer will remember it. It definitely won't crash. Ever. Sure enough, the ideas flow faster, the world deepens itself much more quickly, as I commit things to paper.

[Mary Robinette] Ironically, mine is the polar opposite of that.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Which is that I don't need to preplanned before writing, once I have internalized a lot of other things. So, one of the things that I was working on this year was a novel, just for fun, which is a Alfred Hitchcock writes the Dragonriders of Pern kind of thing.

[I want to read that!]

[Mary Robinette] It… Rather than doing what I would usually do, which is sit down and think about the breeds of dragons and all the… It's a secondary world and all of that, I just started writing. Because what I realized was anything that wasn't on the page in the novel isn't canon. So I only… And if it's in the novel, then I can use my find function to just go back and find the thing. The only things that I'm writing down in a separate research document are the things that are difficult to search for, like, "What was the name of that dragon? I made up the spelling of the word." So I've got a document that I say breeds of dragon, and I go and put them… At the end of a writing session, I will go and drop it in there if I've come up with a new breed of dragon. But it was… It's been… That novel came faster than pretty much anything that I've written up to this point. But… It's also not something that I would have been able to do early in my career, because of the number of different other pieces of story structure that I would have… That I hadn't internalized.

[Howard] You already know how to cut worldbuilding… The unnecessary bits from the dialogue, from the exposition, from the whatever. So you can discovery write your way on the way in and it will feel like what you have written before… It's like kinesthetics. It's…

[Mary Robinette] I had to learn it. But that has been… It's been interesting, because it also means that I'm not being bogged down in details that I will never use.

[Dan] One of the things that I have started to rely on more and more this year in my worldbuilding is randomizers.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah.

[Dan] Because I… If I'm trying to come up with whatever it is, if it's geography, if it's a religion, if it's anything… If it looks exactly like what I need it to look like, it's going to feel fake. So, using random generators or just asking three-year-olds for ideas, whatever it is that you're doing, that adds enough noise into it that it feels more real. It forces me to figure out, "Well, why is this religion… Why are horses so important to them?" It's not something I planned, but the randomizer spat it out and now I've got to deal with it. That ends up producing something much more layered and much more textured than what I probably could have come up with on my own.

[Brandon] That kind of plays into something… It's not necessarily worldbuilding related, just writing related, that I've come more and more to see the books that I'm writing… I talked before about this on the podcast… As performance art. In that you are capturing a moment of my life and the way I respond to things in a story. It's like, I've often thought when I was younger that something was either right or wrong in storytelling. I have to find the right way to tell this story, I have to find the best way to tell this story. The older I get, the more I'm looking at this is a capture, a snapshot of who I am as I'm doing this. So previous things that I feel like now I've gotten wrong… I feel more liberated from them. That it's not like I did this worldbuilding element wrong, or this part of Mistborn One wrong. That was a snapshot of who I was, and how I viewed storytelling, at that moment. Which also helps me to kind of avoid the impulse to Lucas my old things…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Right? Because what they are is, they are a piece of performance art that was me at that point in time. Now, what I'm writing, it's a piece of performance art that is me. The… Adding the randomizer and things to it kind of captures this essence, because it's less about making sure that all the pieces are exactly right, and more about what does the person that I am with the skills that I have trained myself in do with this set of inputs? What piece of art comes out of it?

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Sorry. It's just making me think about the project that we worked on together. Because… So Brandon gave me a story bible, and then I… And an outline, then I wrote from that. There were pieces of the worldbuilding that I'm reading and I'm like, "This makes no frigging sense at all. Brandon, what? You're supposed to be so good at worldbuilding, what is this?"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] The conversation that we had was that… Which I thought was really interesting was that a lot of times, it's not so much that you have it all worked out ahead of time, it's that when you get to it, you can make the interstitial pieces work. So, like, coming into it and going, "Okay, so I just need to figure out how to make this work." It was like having a randomizer. There were a number of things where I'm like, "This does not make any sense at all."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But the thing that I forced out of not changing it is way more interesting than just like, "Well, I'm going to change it so it makes sense to me." It's like, "No, let me see if I can find the connecting pieces that…"

[Howard] So it was a Brandomizer.

[Mary Robinette] It was a randomizer.

[Howard] A Brandon…

[Mary Robinette] A Brandomizer!

[Dan] Whoo ho ho. You know what that is reminding me of is… The current theory that dinoswaurs were most closely related to birds.

[Mary Robinette] Did you say dinoswords, because I really want...

[Dan] I tripped over that. Dinoswords is actually the title of my next writing prompt.

[Laughter]

[Dan] So. No. One of the things that I've seen recently is there's this big focus on we think dinosaurs look so weird. But look what happens when we take all the feathers off a swan. That is one freaky looking thing. So that's kind of what a lot of outlines are, is they are just the swan with no feathers, or the bear with no hair. Of course, it looks weird, and of course, it doesn't look right. While you're writing, that's when you add all the rest of the stuff and make it look like a real thing.

[Howard] The flipside of that, and I would encourage readers to go look this up. What do penguins look like with no fat? What does a penguin's skeleton look like? A penguin looks like a weird, waddling swan. Their neck is enormous. They don't have no neck. They're like all neck. The artist who looked at this says, "Well, what happens if I put that much fat on a dinosaur?"

[Laughter]

[Howard] The answer… They all look like very frightening slugs. As a worldbuilding practice, sort of trick, that sort of turn the knob all the way to 11, turn the knob all the way to zero, and see what you get. That visualization is just beautiful.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and stop for our book of the week, which is a really interesting story… Not story, nonfiction book.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, this is The Incomplete Art of Running by Peter Sagal. I read it because it was given to me, and he's a friend. I'm like, "Oh, I don't really like running. But, okay, I'll read your book." A book about running should not make me cry as many times as it did. It is part memoir, part why you should run, part kind of reflection on culture, and filled with stories. It begins… Oh, the storytelling in this is so good. But it begins with him running in the Boston Marathon right… He crosses the finish line right before the bomb goes off. That is not the most heartbreaking story in this. It is just wonderful. I… The reason… I'm encouraging you to read it because it's just good, honestly, and I'm excited about it. But I also feel like it's one of those books that is useful to apply to other aspects of life. Like, persevering when something is difficult, and finding the reason… One of the things he talks about in this is that you… Sitting down and practicing etudes is not going to get you to Carnegie Hall. Having a goal, that is the thing. I feel like it's that way with writing, too. It's not just like, "I'm going to put down a bunch of words." It's like, "I'm writing with a goal." So read this. It's a great book.

[Brandon] The Incomplete Art of Running.

[Mary Robinette] By Peter Sagal from Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

[Brandon] So, another question I had, that didn't quite fit into anything else, but I think kind of comes here. Have you guys ever used non-writing hobbies or parts of your life, things you've done, as practice for your writing? I'm, of course, targeting RPG playing, because I know Dan and I have both done this. How has playing role-playing games…

[Dan] So here's one that I would… The most fascinating part of the Sleeping Beauty story for me are all the people who woke up after 40 or 80 years or whatever it was and found their home and their whole country covered with thorns and realized that they now lived in what was essentially this post-apocalyptic wasteland because of a curse that it happened generations ago that everyone had slept through. I would love to tell that story. But I don't know exactly how everyone would react. So putting that into a role-playing game, presenting a group of four or five players and saying, "Okay. You wake up. Check it out. What do you do?" is a really great way to kind of run an experiment and say, "Well, how would people react to that situation? What would they do? What would that look like?" Then, kind of collaboratively figure out here's a really compelling story that could come out of that premise.

[Brandon] Howard, have you ever used role-playing as a way to try out a character, an idea?

[Howard] I don't know that I've done it with role-playing in that way. The thing that I keep coming back to is the music composition study that I did. The shaping of a piece of music is very similar to the shaping of a story. The dominant pedal which is that key change thing that happens right towards the end in a lot of Western music that tells you we are approaching the end. That exists in fiction. That's a thing. Often I will look at what I'm writing and ask myself, "Okay, which of these threads is the dominant pedal?" Which is not a question anybody who doesn't know something about music would ever ask. You wouldn't think about it that way. It's perfectly possible… Perfectly possible? Lots of writers don't have any music training at all. They successfully signal we're approaching the end of the book. They talk about it differently. I think that's part of what gives us… I'm moving wide now… That's part of what gives us our different voices, is that the analogies, the metaphors, that we use for the tools that are in our toolbox cause us to deploy them perhaps a little differently.

[Brandon] Now, I would pitch this at you, Mary Robinette, but we know that there is nothing in your past…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Like a another career that has ever informed the way that you…

[Mary Robinette] I know. Just go… Was it Season Three, Episode Six, I think? Yeah, or whatever it is. Yeah. You hear me talk about puppets all the time. The thing that you probably don't hear me talk about is… As much, is the relationship that I have with my family, which winds up informing pretty much everything that I write. It's not quite using role-playing where I'm running scenarios with them. But I will… I will think about how like, my mom would react to a situation, or how my dad would react. They're very different people. They're best friends, but they're very different people in a lot of ways and where their commonalities are. So sometimes, I will cast… Recast a character briefly as a family member in order to figure out a true honest reaction for that character. Even if that's the only piece of the family member that goes in there.

[Brandon] People ask me a lot, because they know one of my nerd hobbies is Magic, the Gathering. They say, "Oh, how does Magic, the Gathering influence your stories?" I've had to think about this. They, I think, are going to assume, oh, it's the worldbuilding or you like cool magic systems, so maybe the game mechanics or things like that. It's very hard for me to separate that out, because I just grew up in an era where you played video games, you played lots of boardgames. All of these things are a jumble in my brain. I can't point to any one that Magic has done with that. But there's an unexpected one. Which is the politics of four people playing a competitive game against one another…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Ooooh!

[Brandon] Where you're each trying to win the game and have certain tools and resources at your disposal, has really influenced the way I do political work between nations in my books. In fact, I was writing an outline yesterday where I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to use this aspect." How, if you are the weaker party, how do you win in a war? Well, if there's three people, you look for the person who's strongest, and you gang up on the strong person with the other weak party. Almost always, the person who is doing best in the game loses first. Almost always. Because if they're a threat, everyone else gangs up on them. So… That's not the case in a one-on-one…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But in a four-person free-for-all, you don't want to be the strongest party. So I actually wrote in my outline, a character's like, "I know how I can bring this person down. It's by exposing how strong they are, so everyone else will gang up on them." Those sort of political games has been really handy for me in designing epic fantasy stories.

[Dan] This is why, back in college, the number one rule of any Magic game we played was kill Brandon first.

[Brandon] They always ignored you when you told them that.

[Dan] Nobody ever believed me. You always kill Brandon first.

[Brandon] If you don't, I will figure out how to get everyone to gang up on you, and then… But that sort of stuff was really fun for me to figure out…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] How human beings work. So, there you go. You can trace my political intrigue stories to me playing Magic with Dan.

[Dan] To multiplayer Magic.

[Brandon] We are out of time. So, homework. What we would really like you to do is do the thing that we have done in our writing careers. Take something that's very familiar to you that may not seem like it has anything to do with writing. Like audio engineering. Or puppetry. Or playing card games. Look at something you're fascinated by. Try to see if you can extrapolate from that storytelling principles that'll help you understand the way that you might tell stories and the way that your life experience might turn you into a better writer. Kind of a philosophical one for you this week. But, hopefully, it will be really handy for you. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

mbarker

Writing Excuses 14.37: Outlandish Impossibilities

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/15/14-37-outlandish-impossibilities/

Key points: Outlandish premises, impossibilities. Extrapolate beyond the reasonable to make us laugh and make us think. To explore an issue, to have a conversation. Outlandish impossibilities may be the fastest way to set up the discussion we want to have. How do you clue the audience in? Telegraph it up front. You get one buy in. Hit them early with the premise they need to accept. Treat it as a budget for buy ins. What is the story purpose? To enable other things, spends budget. Build reality and credibility, build the budget. How much can the reader absorb? Prioritize, paint the big picture first, then add smaller details. Hang a lantern on strangeness, let the character ask a question (and promise an answer!). Or put a lampshade on it, treat it as part of the furniture, let the characters take it in stride as normal, while making other things important. Play it straight or play it silly? Scene-sequel and emotional beats. What kind of emotional response do you want the reader to have. Use the character's reactions, the prose leading up to it, linebreaks, and pacing to signpost this.

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 37.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Outlandish Impossibilities.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Brandon] Some fantasy and science fiction books have very outlandish premises. I'm not just talking about magic, right. That you have to accept magic. Dan and I were talking about these before the podcast. He started groaning immediately when I brought up some dystopian stories, for instance, ask you to swallow a really, really hard-to-swallow premise.

[Dan] So, like, Divergent, as much as I enjoy it as a book, the premise is a future that there's no conceivable way human civilization will ever arrive there. It is an absolute impossibility. But the story it tells is cool and worth telling. So…

[Brandon] I remember when my wife was reading the book Unwind. She came in and I said, "Well, what's the premise?" She's like, "Oh. Um. People argue over abortion so much that they decide that abortions are illegal, but when a kid turns 16, you can turn them in to the state to have them harvested for organs to give to other people. As a compromise…

[Laughter]

[Brandon] On the abortion debate.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I said, "What?"

[Dan] Okay…

[Laughter]

[Dan] As the father of two teenagers, I'm okay with this plan.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] My reaction, afterwards, like, I bet every teenager thinks that their parents would do that. It's obviously just…

[Dan] Mine will now.

[Brandon] Ridiculous, right. But some of the best stories come from a place of a ridiculous premise. This is what science fiction and fantasy is about, right?

[Howard] It's not just science fiction and fantasy. This is where I live. I am writing social satire…

[Mary Robinette] You are writing science fiction.

[Howard] Yeah. Well, no, but I'm writing humor. I'm writing social satire. It is my job to extrapolate something beyond the point which is reasonable in order to make us laugh and make us think. That is, in many of these cases, especially the YA dystopias that we talk about, in many of these cases, what we're trying to do is explore an issue that is not even tangential to the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is just there so that we can have a conversation about what do you do if you are friends with a group of people and only one of them is going to live and you want to be that one. What is… Well, okay, we have to set this up in some way, and we don't care how, because the story is about this situation. So, for story purposes, outlandish impossibilities are there not because, at least to me, not because they are the story, but because I want to have a discussion about a thing, and that's the fastest way I get to have that discussion.

[Brandon] Absolutely. A lot of the original Star Trek episodes were like that. Where they're like, what happens to a culture where they're stranded on a planet for so long that the story of Chicago mobsters becomes their Bible? How does that change their society? That's ridiculous, but it's interesting to talk about. That's the fastest way to have that conversation.

[Howard] Though the Star Trek episode, the Next Generation episode where all of their conversations are memes. Which we now look at and recognize as oh, that is actually a portion of where our language is drifting. We recognize that we can't drift completely there, because…

[Mary Robinette] I mean, we had already drifted there. Like, that's why Shakespeare is written in nothing but clichés.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] He really should have been [inaudible] better than that.

[Mary Robinette] I know.

[Brandon] So, let's say you want to write a story like this. Is there any special setup that you would use to clue the audience in, to make them swallow this really, really difficult to swallow pill?

[Mary Robinette] So, there's a thing, I think Margaret was the one who talked about it, about the buy in, that you get one buy in. For me, what I try to do is telegraph that kind of upfront. It's like, this is the world that were going to be inhabiting. A really simple thing is Little Mermaid under the Sea. The buy-in is there are mermaids. There are mermaids. That's the… It's like, after that, you roll forward from there. But, you demonstrate to it. The other thing that's happening in Little Mermaid though is this is a musical at a time when people had stopped doing musicals. So that entire opening number is getting people used to the idea of mermaids and undersea culture and musical with only very, very tiny plot progression. Like, there's really very… Not much is going on there besides this is the culture. This is the buy-in we're asking you to do.

[Brandon] This is a really excellent example, because, as I was thinking about this topic, there are some times where for learning curve purposes, you play a little coy with some of your worldbuilding elements. In some of my books, I wait to introduce the magic till later in the story because I know people are picking up a fantasy book, and I'm going to step them through characters and things first. But in a lot of other stories, you need to hit people right up front. Little Mermaid's a good example. Harry Potter. Often times, the prologue is there to say I am hitting you up front the premise you need to go… You're going to need to accept. There are wizards in this world, and there's a dark wizard who almost took over the fantasy world. Buy into that, and then we'll talk about the character.

[Dan] I see this a lot with the chapter critiques that I do, where they are trying to slow roll the revelation of their world and some of those worldbuilding elements. You can do that with some things, but there are some things you have to get out right upfront because otherwise we're going to be constantly redefining your story every couple of pages and going, "Oh, oh, wait, they're actually riding on mammoths instead of horses. Oh, oh, wait, they also have holograms." Like, some of that stuff you need to…

[Mary Robinette] That sounds like a very specific…

[Howard] Holographic mammoth mounts?

[Brandon] No, Dan's absolutely right. I get this with my students a lot. They don't know which things to get you to buy into first. A lot of this is we need to know a tech level for a fantasy book very quickly. We need to know kind of your big premise of the world very quickly. If it has got this really big premise.

[Howard] Our episode with Margaret, How Weird Is Too Weird. It was back in February. One of the… That's when Margaret said, you get one buy [or tennis bye?]. The concept that I use is you've got a budget for buy ins. What is your budget? With your new students, just the concept of you have a budget… They may still overspend. But you can point at it and say, "The problem here is not that you have too many ideas. It's that you exceeded your budget." How do we… Can I quantify budget on a spreadsheet? In a sense, I can. Because when I am outlining things in the spreadsheet, I have a column that says, "What's the story purpose for this?" If the story purpose for anything is make the other things possible, then that is a budget negative. That is something that is… That is a spend that I need in order to make the rest of the story work. So I have to look at the other cells and I have to… Those things have to… They have to be really important to the story. They have to be putting money in the bank. They have to be building credibility. Hunger Games works because the interactions between the kids feel real. If the interactions between the kids felt fake, then we don't have anything that we're going to read.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that someone told me early on… I can't remember who this was… Was that you can drop a worldbuilding detail about every once a page. What they meant was not you get one worldbuilding detail per page, it was that you get one thing that matters per page, roughly. That that's about how much the reader can absorb before they drop something else and forget. So you have to give them time to absorb something before you give them the new thing. Which is what can often lead to that slow roll. That you will have… Like, well, I'm going to give you these worldbuilding details, but you don't prioritize the ones that you need to do. So it's like you hit them with kind of a worldbuilding detail that paints sort of a big picture thing, and then you can start feeding them the smaller details after that. Does that make sense?

[Brandon] Yeah, that really does.

[Brandon] Let's go ahead and pause here, though. You're going to tell us about our book of the week, which is You Owe Me a Murder?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. You Owe Me a Murder, which is not by Dan Wells. It is by Eileen Cook.

[Dan] I don't owe anybody, I always pay up.

[Mary Robinette] That's true.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] You are not a serial killer, either.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, You Owe Me a Murder by Eileen Cook. It is a young adult novel. It is basically Strangers on a Plane. So if you've seen the Hitchcock film Strangers On a Train, it is that premise, but it's teenagers on a field trip, like, study abroad thing to London. That scenario happens on the airplane. It's an outlandish premise, that someone would sit down next to… A teenager would sit on a plane next to someone else and say, "Why don't you kill my person? I'll kill yours." Yet, that is exactly what the book is. I tell you, this book is one of those things where I'm reading it and pretty much every page, I'm like, "Oh, no no no no no no no. No no no no noooo." It is such good characterization, because when she has made that single outlandish premise, every character interaction after that is completely plausible, follows this logical causal chain. It's so tightly crafted. It's such a good book.

[Brandon] So that is You Owe Me a Murder…

[Mary Robinette] You Owe Me a Murder by Eileen Cook.

[Brandon] So, kind of along that topic, how do we write characters who take something very strange is normal, and how do you not alienate the reader from that character, but instead, pull them into that character's way of thinking? I'm thinking of a lot of these fantasy and science fiction books where you… Dystopian, but also just epic fantasy, where people just take it for granted that X, Y, or Z. In the Wheel of Time, we take it for granted that there are dark friends who live among us who, it could be any of our friends, who might just murder us in the middle of the night. They just accept that. That's part of their world.

[Dan] That one's easy, because it's true.

[Brandon] How do you write characters that take something really outlandish, that's part of their life, and integrate into them and not make them alien?

[Howard] If I have… As a reader, if I have a question, if I think something's outlandish, and a character beats me to the punch by asking the question, and shrugging and moving on because there's no way for them to find an answer, I will shrug and move on. Especially if that character is already sympathetic. Because the author has acknowledged that, "Hey, some of this…" Maybe it's a question that I'm given the answer to later. That is… They've bought another 20 pages from me, because they promised me I'm going to get an answer. They can break that promise and give me something that I like more. They just have to have that character in that moment ask the question that I'm going to ask.

[Brandon] So, this is one classic method, which is hang a lantern on it. When the character asks the question, it allows us to say, "Oh, the author's thinking about this. I'll get an answer eventually." But what about these worlds like, say, the Golden Compass, where everyone's soul manifests, or a chunk of it, as an animal that skitters around the world and interacts with them? No one questions it because the whole world has it. How do you make that work?

[Dan] Well, one of the ways to do that is, first of all, to just let the characters take that completely seriously and take it in stride, the way that that world is, by giving them something bigger to worry about. When someone from our world reads the Golden Compass, that's the first thing that stands out. It's like, "Wait, what's a demon? Why is there this cat following her around?" Like, we have these questions. She doesn't, because she's very concerned about whatever other thing it was, and… it's been years. She's traveling around inside a university or something. She has her own wants, she has her own desires, she has her own goals. That is what is important to her. So we get caught up in that story, is she going to be able to find her friend, is she going to be able to get that thing she wants, then, a chapter later, we realize that we've just kind of taken the rest of it in stride, the way the characters have.

[Brandon] So, this is kind of the opposite to hanging a lantern on it…

[Dan] Exactly.

[Brandon] Is to downplay it so much, and make other things important, that we start accepting it.

[Howard] It's lantern versus…

[Mary Robinette] Well, I don't…

[Howard] Sorry. Lantern versus lampshade, for me. Lantern is when you're calling attention to it by asking a question. Lampshade is when you're turning it into furniture.

[Mary Robinette] So, I feel like it's less about downplaying it and more about assigning it a place on an emotional scale. That, for me, is that if you have a thing that is outlandish, it occupies an emotional reality for the character. Carol Burnett talked about this when she was doing comedy, specifically, she was talking about the… For those of you who do not know Carol Burnett…

[Dan] You're wrong and terrible people.

[Mary Robinette] It's okay, I just turned 50. That's why I watched her as a… When I was a small child. But just do yourself a favor and pull up YouTube… We'll put this actually in the liner notes. The Carol Burnett scene where it's a Gone with the Wind takeoff, and she… There's this wonderful scene in Gone with the Wind, where in the original, where Scarlett doesn't have anything to wear, and so she takes down the curtain and makes a gown out of that. They do that same scene, and she makes a gown out of it, but she does not remove the curtain rod.

[Laughter]

[Dan] And is knocking things over…

[Mary Robinette] Comes down and just… Someone asked her how she played something like that. She's like, "My character believes that she has made the right choice." My character… She occupies the emotional truth of her character. I think that when we're dealing with an outlandish thing, it occupies a place on an emotional scale for our character. If we assign it there and give them appropriate responses, that then also tells the reader how to react to it. So if they are reacting to it as if this is completely normal, then our reader knows, "Oh. Okay." If they are reacting to it as if it's outlandish, then that tells our reader a different thing.

[Dan] To go back to what I was saying before, that scene's a great example, because that scene is not about there's a curtain rod in my dress. No, that scene is about I have to impress the suitor. So she has a goal. She has a thing. We have hung, to abuse the metaphor, we have hung a much bigger lantern on something else. So that's where all our focus is pointed.

[Brandon] This segues us really well into my kind of last topic for this podcast, which is, when do you play it straight and when do you be silly? Howard has made an entire career of this dichotomy.

[Dan] Dancing across that line.

[Howard] You're not wrong.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] So, how do you do it?

[Laughter]

[Brandon] How do you decide when…

[Howard] Fundamentally, it's about scene-sequel and emotional beats. The punchline… If you read Schlock Mercenary strips back-to-back, all in one sitting, it does not read very much like a book. Because the beats are just weird. If I were to tell the whole Schlock Mercenary story as prose, there would be fewer punchlines and they would be spaced differently. So, the comic strip itself is a bad example in some ways. And yet, there are emotional beats in a story which need to be played seriously. Which need to… I want the reader to cry. I want them to be unhappy. If there is going to be a joke, in Schlock Mercenary, I will usually try and pull the joke afterwards, not to undercut the emotional response, but to give us an escape valve for the emotional response. The math, the timing of these things, is a lot different when I'm working with prose. But looking at scene-sequel format, looking at your beat chart for your story, will tell you where you're going to be silly, where you gotta play it straight, and…

[Mary Robinette] I think the thing that you said that I just want to draw a line under is thinking about the emotional impact on the reader. When you're trying to make that decision, that is ultimately the decision you're making, is what effect do you want this to have on my reader? I'm going to play it silly if I want my reader to have a laugh here. If I want them even that as a cathartic thing in a much more serious piece. So what I will do then is that I will attempt to sign post it, again, by the character's reaction, but also by the prose that I'm using to lead up to that. Where I put my linebreaks in order to get those beats that Howard is talking about in a prose format. If I want to hit something as a punchline, then I'm going to put it in a different place in the paragraph then I would necessarily if I wanted it to just blend into the world.

[Brandon] Right. I think also some of the things we were talking about earlier will affect this. For instance, we talked about a lot of these dystopian books, what they do is this really outlandish premise, but then the characters' emotional responses are played straight and their interactions are played straight. So even if there are laughs, the story is serious, and you have to accept this premise. A lot of the comedic ways of doing it escalate, right? The premise is weird, and then the next thing that happens spins off of that is even weirder. That's a very Terry Pratchett way of doing things.

[Howard] There's a simple tool for prose writers. It's the line feed. If you have something that you want to stick, that's where the line feed goes. If you have a punchline, and you want people to take time to process the punchline, that should have been the last thing in the paragraph. If it's in the middle of the paragraph, then the rest of the paragraph may be working against the joke. Now, it's entirely possible that that's the effect you wanted to have. That you wanted them to giggle, and then suddenly realize in horror that that wasn't where this was going at all. But I use white space a lot. Because for writing humor, the wall of text doesn't tell people… It doesn't sign post it. It doesn't tell you where you're supposed to laugh. Where you're supposed to… What's setting up the joke versus where the joke is.

[Mary Robinette] Technically, that's because those linebreaks create a… Represent where we pause naturally in speech. The same way the end of a sentence does. But with the sign posting, it's not just those linebreaks, it's also, as I said, the prose that we use leading up to it if… Douglas Adams, the opening line of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is a great example of this kind of sign posting, because the style of prose that he's using gives you permission to laugh. That is… That's the thing that you need to convey to the reader if you want them to know that it silly, you have to give them permission to laugh. Otherwise, they'll go into it and you haven't given them permission, they will not take it seriously in ways that are damaging to the story.

[Dan] I think it is important to point out, whether you're going for serious story or comedic story, that a lot of what makes these outlandish premises and outlandish ideas work is the emotional resonance that the reader has with them. Divergent, like I said, is not a world that could exist, but Veronica Roth wrote that when she was a college freshman. When she was in a period of her life where she did feel like I am being locked into one path, and the society is trying to choose who I am going to be for the rest of my life. People in high school and early college feel like that. That's a very familiar emotion. So for the audience she was writing for, it wasn't a real-life detail, but it felt very familiar, and we have that resonance with it.

[Brandon] We're out of time. But, Dan, you actually have my favorite homework that we've come up with this year.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] Give us this homework.

[Dan] Okay. We want you to write an outlandish impossibility. The best way that I know of to do that is find a three-year-old. Ask them to tell you a story. Then take that story seriously. Write it out as if it were a real thing. Whatever bizarre relationships or things or monsters or whatever that that person, that three-year-old, tells you, that's your reality. Write that story and make it work.

[Brandon] If you want an example of this, go read the webcomic Axe Cop.

[Dan] Yes.

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

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.21: Brainstorming Random Ideas

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/10/23/writing-excuses-6-21-brainstorming-from-story-seeds/

Key points: Who took Dan's dollar? Look for conflict, character, and premise. Find or make distinctive characters with quirks. Is there an antagonist? What can you do distinctive? Insert technobabble. Beware the Lizards of Leipzig! If you go last, someone may steal your pun.
( Four amazing tales! )
[Brandon] I'll send mine to Howard so he can post them in the liner notes. Just... Mine are bullet points. You can see kind of how I outline a book by looking at my bullet points. Any of the others, if they want to send them along, will do it too. Hopefully, this was useful to you. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

Current Mood: punished

mbarker.livejournal.com

Writing Excuses 6.7: Brainstorming a Cyberpunk Story

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/07/17/writing-excuses-6-7-brainstorming-a-cyberpunk-story/

Key Points: Premise. What are we going to do with our character? Who is our character? Metaphors! Don't forget the punks -- black market? Don't forget the science. Plot? Character conflict, problem, and personality. Dystopia plus extrapolated science plus what-if's -- mix it all together, it spells cyberpunk!
( brainstorms and tattoo viruses )
[Brandon] All right. Mary, writing prompt.
[Mary] Come up with a cyberpunk world. For your seed for it, think about penguins.
[Brandon] Okay. Penguins in a cyberpunk world.
[Dan] Nice.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[Howard] Just don't write Happy Feet.
[Dan] I don't know. The cyberpunk Happy Feet, I would watch.

Current Mood: flippers

Profile

Writing Excuses Transcripts

April 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Patsy by sforzinda
Theme: Clay Deco by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Apr. 23rd, 2025 02:05 pm

Navigation

Writing Excuses Transcripts

Entries tagged with premise

Writing Excuses 19.09: LIVE Recording - Rituals, Rites, and Traditions

Writing Excuses 18.42: Creating Magic Outside of a System

Writing Excuses 17.2: It Was a Promise of Three Parts

Writing Excuses 14.48: How to Practice Worldbuilding

Writing Excuses 14.37: Outlandish Impossibilities

Writing Excuses 6.21: Brainstorming Random Ideas

Writing Excuses 6.7: Brainstorming a Cyberpunk Story

Profile

April 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags