Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-19-a-close-reading-on-worldbuilding-an-overview-and-why-a-memory-called-empire 

 

Key points: Worldbuilding. Not just the things you invent. Spaces, relationships, and interconnections. Not just speculative fiction, worldbuilding is a part of any fiction you are writing. Where do your characters live, what kind of people live there, what kind of industries, schools, family... Worldbuilding gives you texture, realism, and plausibility. What you don't show as well as what you show! Worldbuilding establishes stakes for your characters. What's important. Legal system, physical infrastructure, what people value. Rules and systems as much as physical material spaces. Think about your establishing shot, that first scene. Not always a wide shot, sometimes a single detail can tell you a lot about the world. How much do you need to establish and explain? Beware of the "in a world" prologue. Balance show and tell. Two kinds of worldbuilding, decorative and structural. Structural things drive the story. Decorative is just fun. And sometimes things are both! Audience surrogate, fish out of water...

 

[Season 19, Episode 19]

 

[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.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, listeners. We want your input on season 20. Which, I have to be honest, does not sound like a real number. What elements of the craft do you want us to talk about? What episode or core concept do you use or reference or recommend the most? Or, what are you just having trouble with? After 20 seasons, we've talked about a lot of things. What element of writing do you wish we'd revisit for a deeper dive on the podcast? Email your ideas to podcast@writingexcuses.com

 

[Season 19, Episode 19]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A Close Reading on Worldbuilding: An Overview and why A Memory Called Empire. 

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Marshall] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] So, to kick off this second series that we're doing of close readings, we are going to be talking for the next few episodes about worldbuilding. Why it's important, how it functions, and to dig into that, we wanted to do a close reading of Arkady Martin's A Memory Called Empire. This is a really wonderful novel. It won the Hugo award. I am very biased, because as a literary agent, I represent Arkady and I worked on this book, so I know it pretty well. But to kick us off here, before we dig into A Memory Called Empire specifically, I wanted to talk a little bit about the concept of worldbuilding. What is it exactly, what are the basic mechanics? Just so we all have a shared vocabulary heading into doing the actual close reading.

[Mary Robinette] So when we talk about worldbuilding, it's really easy to get hung up and think that it's only about the things that you invent. But, for me, it's also about not just the spaces, but the relationships between people, and how all of the things interconnect. That it's… It is worldbuilding because you are thinking about those connections, and the connections are often the things that are significantly more interesting than any individual thing that you may invent.

[Dan] Well, it's worth pointing out, I think, that we tend to think of worldbuilding as being a part of spec fic exclusively, but regardless of what you're writing, worldbuilding is an important part of it. When I was writing the John Cleaver books, a big part of those books was figuring out how big is the town he lives in? What kind of people live there? What kind of industries do they work in? Where does he go to school, what is school like? What is his family like? Who are the other people that he's known? That helps give the town a lot of texture and a lot of realism and a lot of plausibility. That is absolutely a part of worldbuilding.

[DongWon] Yeah. What you don't show is as important as what you put on screen. Because any novel or any short story, whatever it is, there's going to be way more details and facets of this world than you can fit into your book itself. So, you don't have to invent every aspect, or if you do in an attempt to be realist, you don't have to show every aspect. The way I think about worldbuilding, and this kind of ties into what Mary Robinette was saying, is it's about establishing stakes for your character. Because what parts of the world you show are the things that are important to the people in your world. So, what the legal system is, what the physical infrastructure is, what rich people value, what poor people value, all those things are going to be part of your worldbuilding. So, as you're establishing what's important to your characters, think as much about rules and systems as you do about physical material spaces.

 

[Howard] You used the word establishing, which always takes me to establishing shot. As you're doing your worldbuilding, as you're writing languages, creating religions, doing geography, whatever else, at some point, the rubber will meet the road and you have to write that first scene. That first scene is your establishing shot, where you start giving people the details they need to understand what's happening here. If you look at a helicopter shot of New York City, at the beginning of something, you know that this is taking place in New York City, or a city. If you have a helicopter shot zooming over rolling fields of grain, you know that it is a completely different type of story. Just understanding that principle can help you set up that first scene so that your worldbuilding works.

[Mary Robinette] Also, along those lines, that establishing shot does not need to be a wide shot. That often, zooming in on a single telling detail is going to tell you a lot about the world more so than the rolling fields of grain. So one of the mistakes that I will sometimes see people make with worldbuilding when they are doing it in spec fic is the feeling that they need to do that wide shot. While there are times that you need to do it, and it's something that we'll see with Arkady's work, there are also places where just starting very, very tight in is going to serve you better. That decision is based less on worldbuilding and what you want to convey about it and more about the tone of the book. Like, are you doing something that's very intimate, are you doing something that's really slow? When we start looking at Arkady's, it's a huge empire that we're being introduced to, so it is both a wide shot and, I think, a more detailed shot. Which is a lot of fun.

 

[DongWon] Part of why this is so fun to talk about in speculative fiction is that when you're doing contemporary realism, you get… You've got a lot of shorthand, right? As Howard was mentioning, if you have a wide shot, a helicopter shot of New York City, you've established a lot of world that you don't need to explain to your audience. When you are inventing a new culture, so, as we get into Memory Called Empire, when you're like approaching this massive planet-city, there's so much you need to establish and explain. So, sometimes, in that case, when you do the big wide shot, as Mary Robinette was talking about, it can be very overwhelming and not give you very much information. So zeroing in on a very specific thing often is a way to get to more information faster. Because if you try to tell them everything at once, their brain's going to shut down. That's when we start talking about quote unquote info dumps.

[Dan] Yeah. This is making me think of the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring, where there is a ton of world, the incredibly expansive world… He's famous for his worldbuilding, and yet, the first several chapters, and our introduction, our establishing shot, is all just the Shire. It's a peaceful little village with just a bunch of idyllic sheep and people eating happy meals together. Not actual happy meals…

[Laughter]

[Dan] But they're eating meals and they're happy about it. That doesn't tell us what the world is like, but it is vital worldbuilding because it tells us what the characters are leaving behind.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Dan] And it establishes, like you said, the stakes. This is what we're protecting when…

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Dan] We leave here and go out into the rest of the very complex world.

 

[Howard] A common mistake that I've made myself in regard to delivering your worldbuilding to the reader is delivering it the way the late 90s and 2000's movie trailers did, "In a world." In a world, guy… He's the guy who pitches the worldbuilding in 15 seconds so that you know the pitch for the novel. Okay? He is not the guy who opened your story. Having a story that opens with some text telling you where we are, and then the first scene contextually gives me 80% of that information… You know what, we didn't need that text.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] We didn't need that. We didn't… I say we didn't. Maybe we didn't need the prologue of your novel. But consider if your prologue is "in a world," go ahead and just start with chapter 1.

[DongWon] Well, this is where I love the balance of show and don't… Show and tell. Right? Because we hear the advice all the time, show, don't tell. But when you're communicating worldbuilding, there's so much information to get across that sometimes you do just want to come out and say the thing. You do just want to explain it. I think a lot of our favorite examples are ones that don't do that, because it's more memorable to find an effective way of showing it without explaining. But also, sometimes, slowing down and just explaining, "Hey, this is how this world works. This is how this legal system works." You will have to do that, especially in speculative fiction, because there's too much to explain to let your audience infer it. When I find myself getting super confused by worldbuilding when I'm looking at submissions, it is almost always because they have tried to adhere to closely to just showing me. Then I'm like, "Wait, wai, wai, wait. I don't understand because this could mean 8 different things."

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[DongWon] So, finding that balance point is the trick, especially early in your book.

 

[Mary Robinette] I find that I break my worldbuilding kind of into 2 categories, decorative and structural. So the structural things are the things that are driving the story. Like when we get into A Memory Called Empire, one of the things that's in there is something called a cloud hook. Arkady just like drops us into it, we just… Like does not really explain it, except in pieces, like, gives it to us as a character interacts with it. The reason that it's worth taking the time to have the character interact with it and spend that time with it, is that later, the cloud hook becomes this really important thing. But there's other pieces that happen in the story, like there are these little hummingbird-like things. We don't need to know where those come from or anything like that. Those are purely decorative. That, for me, that I will see people put in a decorative thing that there super excited about, and then people don't understand it, and they try to explain it, and it's not important.

[Laughter]

[Dan] One of the things that I always try to do in my books is put in enough of these decorative elements that the reader is never sure until it matters which elements are loadbearing and which elements are decorative. This is one of the things I love about the movie My Cousin Vinny. Because it has such wonderful worldbuilding, is you take these outsiders into this small southern town and they encounter the mud, and they encounter grits, which they've never seen before, and all of these little aspects of small-town life that just blow their minds. Then, about half of them become vital to winning the case at the end. Grits doesn't sound like it would be a loadbearing element, and it absolutely is. It's just…

[Howard] You make them thick enough…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I was gonna say…

[Dan] So, yeah. It's the… That ability to… I mean, it's not quite red herring, but it's just as you are explaining the world and where your story takes place, the reader has that thrill of not knowing which elements are vital to the plot and which elements are fun and which are both.

[DongWon] This goes back to talking about how contemporary fiction can be a stretch in the imagination, because for 3 out of the 4 people here on this recording today, grew up in grits-eating country…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] So the idea that someone wouldn't know what they are…

[Mary Robinette] Yep.

[DongWon] Completely baffling to me when I watched this as a child. But, on that note, let's take a break for a few minutes, and when we come back, we'll start digging into A Memory Called Empire.

 

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[Erin] I think a lot of people have heard the song Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. But if you haven't heard that song and aren't singing it to yourself right now, then really, go ahead and listen to it. Because it's amazing. I will admit a little bit of theft here. My father had taught high school English for many years, and always used Fast Car is a way to teach his students point of view. I think it's because it's a great story in the song that's all about this woman trying to get a man with a fast car to run away with her, but you get these little glimpses from her life as it is, as it will be, as it was. It's a great way to look at how past, future, and present can all come together through one particular person's POV. So, listen to Fast Car, and if you want to be like my dad's students, think about what it would be like if that song was sung from the point of view of the man with the fast car and not the woman looking for him.

 

[DongWon] Okay. So, I would love to start talking about the text itself and why we chose this particular book. In some ways, it's a little obvious, because it's right in the name, it is about Empire, and when we think about big science fiction worldbuilding, we tend to think about space empires. We tend to think in fantasy about books like Lord of the Rings that have really rich, complex settings. I find the way that Arkady, the author Arkady Martine, approaches worldbuilding in this particular book to be really fascinating and nuanced and complex, but what about you guys? I mean, what did you feel about when this book was proposed, why we decided to settle on this one for the close reading?

[Dan] I was so excited that we chose this book. I read it… I have right here with me my original ARC that I read before it came out. It blew my mind. This is one of the best science fiction books I think I've ever read. Most of that stems from the incredible work that she's done with the culture. So much of science fiction is worldbuilding a new technology or worldbuilding a new alien or a new environment. Most of the work here is a culture. The story is, in large part, about getting to know what this culture is like and how their names work, and how poetry is vital to the things that they do. It's just such a rich book because of that.

[DongWon] Yeah. Talk about surprising loadbearing elements, it's rare that you get a science fiction novel that has loadbearing poetry recitals…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] That radically alter the direction of the plot.

[Howard] Also, unusual to get something with such an epic scope that has a single POV. We… I mean, yes, there are other POVs for interludes and for chapter bumps, but the story is being told through the perspective of one character. I think that's part of why the worldbuilding is so accessible and so effective. We have a stranger comes to town, really, is the… Well, not… Somebody goes on a trip is the story structure here.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] We are seeing a new place through the eyes of someone to whom this place is new, but she has loved it from afar and has studied it and is now immersed in it. Every paragraph… Every paragraph gives us tidbits about this struc… About this place.

[Mary Robinette] So, for me, the thing that is interesting and exciting is that it is not a single world. That every paragraph illuminates 2 worlds at the same time. Because our main character, Mahit, comes from Lsel, which is a space station. It is an un-planeted world. Has come to this planet that is part of this Empire, this massive Empire. So all of everything that she sees is seen through the lens of someone who grew up not on a planet, and also has had this deep, deep love for this culture, but has never been a direct participant of it. Interacting with people who are, who have grown up in it. So there's all of this really wonderful, like, very muscular writing that is happening, where we're using all of the tools that are possibly at our disposal. She's using interactions with the environment, she's using point of view, she's using conversation, she's using every tool. Epistolary things. Every tool to convey all of this rich information. But had to create, like, there's 2 worlds that we are getting information of, and then there's bits of other places and other cultures. Even within the world that we're in, there's multiple cultures, for both. So that's why I was excited by it.

[Howard] For me, one of the scenes that best calls that out is the café bomb. Because someone sets off a bomb…

[DongWon] We're going to dig into this very deeply in a couple of episodes, actually.

[Howard] Yeah. Yeah. But, the idea that on a planet, someone can…

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] Protest by blowing things up. But on a space station, that would kill everybody. It would never occur to anyone to protest by setting off an explosion, because that would destroy the world.

[DongWon] Well, she has a whole speech, actually, where someone did do that in the consequences were that were so extreme. Right? They immediately physically spaced everyone involved and cut them off from their [imago line], so they essentially just erased them from society in a radical way. The difference in scale of response versus what you can do on a space station versus what can happen on a planet is one of those fascinating little things.

[Howard] Actually, yeah. So it calls up her perspective of I come from this place…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I'm now in this new place. If this thing happened in the old place, it'd be completely different.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It's such a novel of contrasts, and the way Arkady uses that parallax of perspective to give you perspective on the whole universe. Right? Because 99.9% of the book takes place in one location, in one city. Really, between 2 offices, primarily.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] It mostly just… The range of spaces in the book is very limited. But when you think about the book, your memory of it is so expensive, of a sense…

[Mary Robinette] Your memory of Empire.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Your memory of Empire is a sense of multiple worlds, of massive systems, of huge space wars. But the action in the book is very constrained and very limited.

 

[Dan] Yeah. I was going to say that on one hand, this idea of the outsider coming in is just My Cousin Vinny again.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Right? It's… That's such a helpful trick and a wonderful little tool to explain one culture is explain it through the eyes of an outsider. But it is rare to see the opposite done. Like, if My Cousin Vinny told us as much about Brooklyn as it does about little southern town, then that would be closer to what we're talking about here. The differences between them is kind of the whole story.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] I love, in particular, how torn she is about this. Mahit… You get this sense that she doesn't want to love Teixcalaani culture as much as she does. That they are imperialists, that they are colonialists, that they are kind of absorbing and warping all of the other cultures.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] And that everyone who encounters them loses a little bit of themselves, but at the same time, she just really loves it. It's this kind of otaku visiting Japan since almost…

[Chuckles]

[Dan] That she's like, "I'm so excited. I'm finally here. I've watched all of these movies about this."

[DongWon] Yeah. With the difference that Japan is not actively colonizing the United States. Right?

[Dan] Yes. Yes. Right.

[Howard] If it was a Chinese otaku visiting Japan…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] In 1940.

 

[DongWon] Well, this is why this book is so significant to me personally. The term we usually use for what you're talking about is audience surrogate. Right? You have somebody who is… Stands in for the audience, arriving at the place, and we see it through their eyes, so there's an excuse to explain all of the things about how this works. Right? So this is Kitty Pride arriving at Xavier's mansion, and we get to see oh, these are what all the X-Men are. Right? But in this case, Arkady pulled an incredible trick, in my view, where the subjectivity of the audience surrogate becomes very, very important. Because they are not just a visitor, they are someone who is resisting assimilation, resisting Empire, by the place that they are visiting. What does it mean to love the Empire that is destroying your culture? I'm Korean-American. My family is from Korea. Which was… This is a complicated statement I'm going to make, but has been occupied territory by the United States since the Korean War. Right? The influence and dominance of American culture on Korean society cannot be overstated. So the idea of coming from a colonized people, colonized by many people… Another example is the way Japan has colonized Korea. I love Japanese media. I watch animes. Some Japanese filmmakers are some of my favorite filmmakers of all time. Right? Whether that's Kurosawa or a variety of other people. Those things are very near and dear to my heart. So what it is to feel like you love the cultures that have actively or passively tried to destroy the culture of the people that you come from is a very complicated emotion. To see that represented on the page by this person who is not only trying to figure out how to survive in the most literal way, but also to preserve her identity and her people's safety. It was such an inversion of the trick of the audience surrogate, that I was completely blown away. Again, that contrast between the 2 perspectives gives you all of this depth and all of this complexity of the world she encounters.

[Mary Robinette] Well, the other thing that she also did, in addition to that, the other layer of it, is that… Often the audience surrogate, the fish out of water, has no experience and everything is new. Mahit is a subject matter expert.

[DongWon] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] Fluent in the language, studied it, top marks. Knows the history. Still… Still, there are these enormous lacuna in her understanding. I think that the… That those gaps, those places where herself, her home, rubs up against… And her book understanding of a thing rubs up against the actual experience of it, those are the things that make the world building in this so meaty that I'm just so excited to be digging into over the next several episodes.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I think many of us here have had the experience of living overseas are visiting overseas for a period of time. It's amazing how much you can do all this research, you can speak the language, and still the texture of actually being there is wildly different. Right? Again, this is a thing for me growing up as a child of immigrants, going back to Korea, is this culture I know so well in so many ways, but Korea is different from being Korean-American. Right? So, while it's not exactly Mahit's situation here, it was such a familiar experience of thinking you know how things are going to go, and then somebody says the word and you're like, "Oh, my God. What does that mean in this moment? I thought this meant this other thing, but now they're saying this…"

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] How do I navigate this social interaction that made sense to me through the filtered version I experienced or from watching movies? But then somebody's saying to me right now, what do I do?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] That is such a fascinating experience.

[Dan] Yeah. I… With that is this idea of loving a culture so much and living in that culture and still realizing that you're an outsider.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Dan] I had this experience living in Mexico. I lived in Mexico long enough to start to consider myself Mexican. I'm not. I would never actually say that I. But there is that bit of… I don't really fit in here. But I do, but I don't. This book explores that so well.

[Howard] I think the power of this novel lies in the fact that as readers, we come away from it understanding what it means to be Lsel…

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] To be Teixcalaani. And we understand that there's a depth way beyond that that we could never have, because we weren't born there. We weren't raised there. That level of immersion is one of the things that I love about good worldbuilding and well presented worldbuilding. A Memory Called Empire pulls it off perfectly.

[DongWon] Well, I think that's a great note to leave it on. I'm so excited to dig in in-depth over the next few episodes about specific things about this book that communicate all the concepts we talked about here. So, thank you guys for joining us on this little journey here.

 

[DongWon] I have some homework for you in the meantime. That is, I would like each of you to pick one of your favorite fictional worlds, whether that's Middle Earth or the galaxy in Star Wars or what Memory Called Empire… Whatever world has spoken to you in your past. Then, I want you to write down 3 different attributes of that world. So, think about ones that establish culture, think about ones that establish legal systems and power, and think about ones that establish physical spaces. All of these things are going to communicate different things about what's important to your characters. So if you make a list of those, I think that's a great starting point to understand how you can approach writing a world that feels robust and consistent.

 

[Howard] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.

 

[Mary Robinette] Do you like stars? I do. Maybe you would like to put up a constellation of stars by rating us on Apple Podcasts. Hello. 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.

 

[Mary Robinette] Let's talk about Rude Tales of Magic. In this improvised narrative role-playing podcast, join artists, writers, and comedians from Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, Marvel Comics, and more as they fight and fumble their way across the madcap and exceedingly rude fantasy wasteland of Cordelia. Branson Reese and his jesters retinue, Christopher Hastings, Carlin Menardo, Tim Platt, Joe Laporte, and Ali Fisher, star is a group of unlikely survivors. Specifically, a talking crow, a Lich in a wig, a bubbly faun, a Sasquatch punk, and a [teefling?] hunk. This group must solve the mystery of Polaris University vanishment and return balance and higher education to their world. It's going to be very hard and very, very rude. Subscribe to Rude Tales of Magic on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

 

 

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.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/04/21/14-16-your-setting-is-a-telegraph/

 

Key points: Setting can be used to quickly telegraph the kind of story they are reading, the tone and mood. E.g., a prologue can establish the tone of the entire story. Specific, concrete details can help. Don't forget the Stooges' Law, a coconut cream pie on the mantle in the first act means by the end of the third act, someone will get hit in the face with it. Screenwriting has the opening shot, with a visual setting. Where a meeting is happening, what they're doing, where the events are happening can do a lot to indicate the type of story. If you have a tonal shift, before telegraphing it, consider whether the surprise of the unexpected shift is part of your point or not. When you finish a book, you may need to revise the first chapter and fine-tune the setting to get the tone right. 

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 16.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Your Setting is a Telegraph.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Margaret] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Margaret] I'm Margaret.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] Howard, when we were preparing this, you gave us the title. So why don't you explain what you mean by Your Setting is a Telegraph.

[Howard] it comes from the term telegraphing the punch, telegraphing the punchline, telegraphing the joke, whatever. Which is often used negatively. But here we mean your setting is going to telegraph to the reader very, very quickly… You're going to communicate to the reader very, very quickly what kind of a story they're reading. Are they reading a comedy, are they reading military sci-fi, are they reading a puzzle story about alien archaeology, all of those sorts of mood things can be established by your setting, and can actually be established very, very quickly when you introduce them to your setting.

[Brandon] Yeah. You can always, of course, establish these other ways, as well. Through word choice, through what your character is doing, through situation, but this… We're talking about world building this year, and we want to really talk about how to use your descriptions, your settings, or where people are, or things like this to give an immediate and powerful indication of the tone of your story. A lot of times, one of the big questions I get from students is, "Should I use a prologue or should I not?" Which is one of those loaded questions, which is… What kind of juice do you want? Right?

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Should I have a drink of juice or not? Do you like juice? Is it breakfast? Do you want a prologue? Well, one of the reasons you might want a prologue is if you are having trouble with your first chapter establishing the tone of the entire story, then you can use your prologue to do this. Now that's of course dangerous because maybe you need to look at that first chapter and learn how to maybe make that one, but it is one of the things you can do, is… I often use the Wheel of Time as an example of this. In the beginning of the Wheel of Time, in chapter 1, the first few pages take place with the young man on a farm with his father. It's a little bit creepy because he keeps seeing shadows, but that's not a real indication of tone. If you were taking those opening scenes as a promise, it might be, "Oh, this is going to be a pastoral, perhaps horror." So Robert Jordan has a prologue where a madman is wandering through a burning castle, screaming for his dead wife and children, who are at his feet and he can't see them. Things are on fire, and there's been a big war, and it's like, "All right. We're in the middle of a giant war drama with some psychological elements." So that early introduction of tone is very important to set the tone for the entire series. How can we do this? What suggestions do you have to our listeners?

 

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find is that if you are specific and concrete with your choices in the beginning, that this does a lot. So, like if I am writing military SF, then having a hand cannon says we're going to be shooting some things. If I'm doing a comedy, then in very broad terms, if there's a coconut cream pie there, we know that at some point… It's the Stooges' law, that if there is a coconut cream pie on the mantle, then by the end of the third act, someone is going to get hit in the face with it. These are the things that happen that can communicate tone to the reader, because we latch onto these concrete details.

[Howard] Well, it's important to recognize that the version of Chekhov's law that Chekhov actually said, which is if you want to fire a gun in act three, you need to show it on the mantle in act one. If you want to hit somebody with a coconut cream pie, you have to show us a coconut cream pie on the mantle in act one, so that we know that this is a story in which there can be a pie fight.

 

[Margaret] I think it's interesting in the difference between fiction and what I'm thinking in terms of screenwriting, because it's your opening shot. Right? It's very hard to avoid establishing setting, because the visual is right there. In screenplay format, the first thing you say is this an interior or an exterior? What is our setting? Is it day or is it night? That's the first thing somebody reading after fade in is going to encounter in a script. In fiction, you have a little more freedom in there. Like, if you're starting with a character, but it's remembering to put the character in a place, because you can get so much lifting done, as you say, in terms of tone by where you're meeting somebody, what they're doing, where these events are happening. A conversation that happens in a diner is different than a conversation that happens in a car that's speeding towards a cliff or in a prison visiting area. All of those start you on three very different types of stories.

[Howard] If I have a science fiction… An opening science-fiction shot that is in the science-fiction equivalent of a mausoleum with data-encoded corpsicles or whatever, and that is what I am describing, the reader has a pretty clear indication that life and the ending thereof is going to be one of the thematic focuses of this story.

[Brandon] One of my favorite episodes of Firefly is the one that starts with Mal in the desert naked. Opening shot.

[Mary Robinette] That's one of my favorites, too.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] That shot indicates wacky hijinks are going to occur. Not just him, desert, naked, but his pose, the way he's talking. He's not, like, lying there, dying of thirst, crawling through the desert. He's like, "Huh." Just one shot. He says something, but you wouldn't even need to. You know that you are going to chuckle and wacky hijinks ensue. I really like this.

[Margaret] Things have gone rapidly out of his control over the course of this episode.

[Brandon] I love when stories can do that.

[Mary Robinette] I think, actually, one of the things about that is that you've got the specific concrete detail, but you also have the character's relationship to that detail. So, one of the examples that I think of is the difference between Star Wars and Space Balls. Both of them say this is science-fiction and they both have the same opening shot, which is ginormous ships scrolling through. But Space Balls, it goes on so long that it becomes comical. That tells you, "Oh, no no no. This…"

[Brandon] You're going to laugh.

[Mary Robinette] You're going to laugh all the way through this.

[Howard] Then there's a bumper sticker on…

[Mary Robinette] There's a bumper sticker.

[Howard] On the back of the spaceship.

[Mary Robinette] Just in case you missed how long it was going on.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week, which is Terminal Alliance.

[Howard] Yes. Terminal Alliance by Jim Hines. My family, we bought this book twice. I was on my way back from Cedar City, with Kellianna and I put on the audiobook of Terminal Alliance so we could listen to it. We got home and she said, "Are you going to listen to this in your office while you draw?" I said, "Maybe. But I'm not working yet." She said, "Well, I want to keep going, and the reader is too slow. So do we have a copy of this book in print?" So we bought it in print. No regrets. No regrets. It's a comedy about space janitors and zombie apocalypse. You know, that's kind of all you need to know. If I say space janitors and zombie apocalypse, you have enough setting that I've telegraphed to you the tone of this thing from my friend Jim that you're really going to enjoy.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just going to second that I enjoyed the heck out of this book, too.

[Howard] I think the cover was a Dan Dos Santos. I'm not sure. I love the cover. I love the cover.

 

[Brandon] So, kind of riffing off that, Howard, how do you indicate that there are comedic elements in your stories, and how do you indicate sometimes… Sometimes, Schlock Mercenary gets very serious. I feel like you use setting to distinguish these two quite well.

[Howard] There's… Well, first of all, I need to establish that if you're reading Schlock Mercenary and have been reading it for a while, if there isn't a punchline or if things happen and there are no repercussions, there is no serious side of it, you'll feel like I've broken some rules. That's… We've talked in previous episodes about budget. So I have this currency that I have spent to get you to this point. That said, I try to begin every book with some sort of establishing shot, that will tell us this is science-fiction. I'm going to end the strip with a punchline, which, because of the beat, beat, punchline format of things will tell you very quickly we're going to tell a lot of jokes. But I like to establish the scope of the story. In the most recent… I say most recent. When book 19 launched, I did a joke about prologues. We had a prologue in which an alien spaceship is flying and they're saying, "There's a star system ahead, do we need to change course?" "No, we're going to fly through their cloud… Comet cloud, we should be fine." "But anything…" "We're big. Anything we nudge, those inner planets are going to have to deal with." "Sure, they're going to have to deal with it, but it just means millions of years." 8 million years later, we have a little velociraptor with a telescope who looks kind of like Leonardo da Vinci, if he were a feathered velociraptor talking to another velociraptor who also has a similar sort of da Vinci-ish look who is building something. He's saying, "Huh. How soon can your flying machine be ready?" That has told us this is going to be a tragic story about the ends of civilization, but you're going to laugh.

[Brandon] Excellent.

[Howard] That was a very long-winded…

[Brandon] No, that's great.

[Howard] Approach to it, but... I also made so much fun of prologues, and I was thinking of you the whole time.

[Brandon] Thank you very much. I'll have you know that… 

[Margaret] I wanted to giggle at your description, but I didn't want to mess up the audio.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I've restrained myself, and most of my books only have two now.

[Wha!]

[Brandon] Way of Kings has four prologues.

[Mary Robinette] I know. I know. I'm just… I'm amazed at your restraint.

 

[Brandon] Yes. All right. So. Building off of that, let's say you want to shift tones in your story, you know you're going to do it. You're going to be writing a comedic story that is going to get serious, or you're going at it the other way, you're going to write a serious story but you know you're going to have some comedic elements. How do you indicate that from the beginning? Do you need to indicate that from the beginning?

[Howard] I think the second part of that question is the more important bit. If the surprise that people experience with a tonal shift that they weren't expecting is your point, then you don't need to telegraph it. If, however, you don't want to alienate them… You know there's a tonal shift, and you don't want to alienate them, then you do need to telegraph it.

[Brandon] Okay. I would absolutely agree with that. Though, we're talking specifically about using setting. Right? The methods of using setting. So, let's in our last few minutes here, let's give a few tips. What are things you've done using your setting to indicate your tone?

[Mary Robinette] So, I did this in Calculating Stars. Calculating Stars opens with a couple in the Poconos, and they're having sexy fun times. Then I slam a meteor into the earth.

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] So… What I did with that, and I made very, very deliberate choices in that first page. The opening line is "Do you remember where you were when the meteor struck?" That tells you this is going to be a disaster story. Then, the

is "I was in the mountains with Nathaniel, and we were stargazing, by which I mean sex."

[Brandon] Right.

[Mary Robinette] Which gets a laugh. It tells you… Having those two things back to back tells you about the setting that we're in… And, granted, I'm doing this in narration. It is a first-person character. But I'm using the setting there to tell you what this is going to be about. That you can expect a story in which we're dealing with relationships, we're dealing with disaster, and that there's going to be some comedy. It's not going to be disaster all the way down.

 

[Brandon] I often have trouble with first chapters. Not starting them. I've talked about this before in the podcast, though, that when I get done with the book, I feel like my first chapter no longer belongs with the book that I ended up writing. This is coming from someone who architects and outlines a ton. That first chapter, getting that tone right, can be a big deal for just kind of establishing how the whole story's going to play out. I had to do this just with my most recent book, that will have just come out at this point about six months ago. Skyward. Where I wrote the first chapter, I even did readings from it. At the end, it was just not right. Even though when I rewrote it, it was basically the same events happening. I needed to make… They live in a cavern system underground, I needed to make the caverns a little more claustrophobic. I needed to make the stepping on the surface for the first time more full of wonder, because the idea of we as a people are escaping the caverns and getting into the skies, that's the point of the story. It just… I find finishing my book and then going back and saying, "What was my book's tone really about?" And "How can I hit this metaphorically in the first chapter?"

[Mary Robinette] I think that that's a really good point, that… For me, a lot of times, it's about going back in and finessing the specific physical details of the space. I have a story called Cerbo in Vitra ujo which is one of the true horror stories that I've written. When I wrote it initially, it read like it was going to be a teen drama. What I had to go back in and do was bring out… Even though I didn't move the location, I shifted the… They're in a conservatory on a space station, so there's all of these plants around. But I made sure that there is like a broken rose, that there is a diseased rose. That there are elements there that are unsettling in order to indicate that that's where we were going. It was about going back and adjusting the setting to match the tone.

 

[Brandon] So, our homework plays right into this idea. Which you have for us, Mary?

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So what I want you to do is I want you to write an opening. It can be taking an opening of something that you're already working on or just starting from scratch. But I want you to write the first half page. In that first half page, I want you to hit three specific concrete details. I'm picking three as an arbitrary number, because I want you to actually really dig into this. But I watch to pick three specific concrete details that telegraph setting… That telegraph the tone. That telegraph what the mood is. These details are obviously your setting. So I want you to do that. Then I want you to write it again and telegraph a different mood.

[Brandon] Use, maybe, even the same dialogue, but use the setting to indicate a different tone. All right. This has been Writing Excuses, you're out of excuses, now go write.