Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-01-interview-with-abraham-verghese 

 

Key Points: Verisimilitude, feeling of reality, and conveying medical information. Readers have seen it all, but you can tell them what's important. Revision, it's easier to take words out then add missing details. Beware circuitous information, make sure it serves a purpose. How did you organize time passing and generations? Well, really I didn't know before I started. I did use a spreadsheet, characters, etc. New chapters allow you to sail through time. Gardening, finding your way through a novel. We all know, "I'm just muddling through..." 

 

[Season 19, Episode 01]

 

[Mary Robinette] This year, my family will be having our 67th annual Christmas Eve dinner. It's a menu passed down from my grandmother through my mom to me. The entire family shows up. I'm talking 4th cousins once removed. This is not an exaggeration. Which means that during the lead up, I don't have time to menu plan or cook anything else. That's when I turn to prepared meals like Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service. Factor can help you eat well for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. It allows me to save time and not eat garbage, while tackling all my holiday to-do's. So if you want to cross meal prepping off your list this holiday season, consider Factor. You can skip the meal planning, grocery shopping, chopping, prepping, and cleaning up, and get Factor's fresh, never-frozen meals delivered to your door. They're ready in just 2 minutes, which my dad says is the appropriate amount of time to cook a meal. He has no idea. The point is, all you have to do is heat and enjoy. If you're trying to squeeze writing into the holiday press, it might be useful to know that Factor is not just for dinner. Count on extra convenience anytime of the day with an assortment of 55 plus add-ons to suit various preferences and tastes, so you can carve out some writing time in the morning by choosing quick breakfast items, lunch to go, grab and go snacks, or ready to eat coldpressed juices, shakes, and smoothies. So, head to factormeals.com/WX50 and use code WX50 to get 50% off. That's code wx50 at factormeals.com/WX50 to get 50% off.

 

[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 01]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Interview with Abraham Verghese.

[Erin] 15 minutes long, because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard

 

[Mary Robinette] We are joined today for our first episode of the new year with our special guest, Abraham Verghese. Thank you so much for joining us.

[Abraham] Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

[Mary Robinette] I have been reading your novel, The Covenant of Water, and, of course, have read your bio. But I was wondering if you could just quickly introduce yourself to our listeners.

[Abraham] Sure. First of all, I should say that I wish you guys had been around when I was starting out writing. It would have been very helpful. I'm Abraham Verghese. I live in California. I'm the author of The Covenant of Water and 3 other books. One other novel, which was called Cutting for Stone. 2 works of nonfiction, My Own Country, and The Tennis Partner. My day job is I work as a physician at Stanford University. Yeah, that's me.

[Mary Robinette] That's amazing. I just want to say how much I really have been enjoying The Covenant of Water. There's such a richness to the language and verisimilitude. So what we're going to be talking about with you, which is something I'm very excited about, is how to kind of create that verisimilitude and also how to convey technical information like medical information in a way that is engaging to the reader. So, we often talk about this idea of verisimilitude, the feeling that something is real. When writing about medicine in particular, what have you found makes it feel real for the reader? Since you write both fiction and nonfiction, do you find that changes between the 2?

[Abraham] Well, I think when I'm describing something medical, there probably isn't a lot of difference between the way I might do it in fiction or nonfiction, other than the fact that I'm making things up in terms of outcomes and so on. But I think that, in a way, I think it's a challenge because in this day and age, most readers are also television viewers. So there's no part of the medical operation that's not familiar to them. This is not like writing in the days of Somerset Maughan when he wrote about traveling to far islands, it was exciting, because there was no other way readers could visualize those places. So you write about surgery and most viewers have seen surgery on YouTube or… So your challenge is to write about it in a way that's somehow fresh and different from what they think they know about it from having seen the operation or seen the procedure or seen whatever it is you're writing about. Part of that is, even though they may have seen something, they may not have realized what the crucial thing is in that inner scene or what the insider's view is on what really matters in all the different things that we're doing. So, I think… I'm hard-pressed to say more than that. I very often worry that I'm giving too much detail. Clearly, for some readers, it may well be too much detail. For that, I really rely on my editor who often will tell me it's not enough or rarely it's too much. So I think I have a… I'm very conscious of not taxing the reader with more than they need. I'm trying to keep it informative and entertaining. It's a fine balance.

[Howard] I find that when the time comes to rewrite, it is a lot easier to take words out than to put words back in. So, erring on the side of too much information means, oh, all I need to do is remove the wrong ones and I will be left with exactly what I need. Rather than needing to sit down and add a bunch of details that I didn't realize was missing.

 

[Erin] Yeah. I also love what you said about figuring out what matters, and that using that as a way to focus in. I'm curious, like, how do you decide in a certain scene, what is it that matters, like, to you, to the characters, to the readers, in order to focus in like that?

[Abraham] Well, I'm not sure that I have a blanket rule about that. But, for example, when I was describing a particularly hazardous labor scene in The Covenant of Water, I'm thinking a lot about the layperson involved in that, delivering that child, and what this must seem like to them. They obviously don't have the medical terms, so they're looking at it through a different lens than say I might look at the scene. Also, I'm trying to really understand what the patient might be going through. So, for example, in terms of the feeling of a woman giving birth, obviously, that's something that I can only imagine. I don't have personal experience of that. But I was able to talk to the women around me, but also to a gynecologist friend who was also a mother. There were something she talked about that I would never have found myself or by imagining the scene. She talked about the tremendous isolation, the moment that labor starts. Despite the fact that there's all these people around you, suddenly it's you against the world. Everybody else sort of disappears, your focus is so intense on yourself. So I'm not sure how to give you more specifics than that. But I think it's recognizing… I mean, it's rare that I'm describing something from the point of view of purely of a physician, but when I am, even then, if it's routine for the physician, I need to convey in that routine this, what are the things that this person is looking for, what is essential to this whole complicated act. That's often true in my medical practice, for example. People come with a lot of complex complaints. But there are also keywords they say, there are key things they say that are much more important than the things they don't say. Or other things they say. Sometimes it's what they don't say that matters. So certain words, certain acts are terribly important. I try to make sure I underline that for the reader.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, I think that…

[Abraham] For example, chest pain is pretty common. But chest pain with any tinge of anxiety and sweating, say, that comes with the chest pain, just makes little alarm bells go off. Because this is probably a different kind of chest pain. So, just small… That may be not the best example that I… Just to give you a sense…

[Howard] Oh, no. That's a good example. I had chest pain, and then I had a dull ache spreading down my left arm. I decided this was… 99, this was, 25 years ago. Decided to go into the hospital and they said, "Well, good news. Yes, a lot of what you're experiencing is indigestion. Bad news. Your heart is doing a thing and we're not going to let you leave for 3 days." I learned all kinds of new words.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] My point of view from the beginning was, yeah, my chest hurts and my arm aches. At the end, I had all kinds of medical terminology and things that if I were being described in a book, that would be my character arc.

 

[Abraham] I think the other… That's well said. It's I think the other thing that I have to keep in mind is not to belabor the reader with medical information that's circuitous. It has to serve a purpose. I think readers are interested in technical details of the world that they don't know very well. So, whether it's Tom Clancy on submarines or, I don't know, Arthur Hailey on the working of an airport, I think we as readers have an inherent interest in the working of a locale and a profession that we don't have a great deal of familiarity with. So you want to provide them enough details to create verisimilitude that you mentioned, but not so many to sort of flash your knowledge. You don't want to just…

[Mary Robinette] Yeah

[Abraham] Pour out words to impress them. It's a fine line, and I think, as you said, the real art is in the revision, it's not really in the writing of the scene. It's in the many, many attempts at revision that hone it down.

[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I'm struck by as were talking is about the difference between insider knowledge and translating it for an audience. I find that often some of the things that are the most difficult for me to write are the things that I have a deep intimate knowledge of because I can't tell what I have to unpack for the reader. You're dealing with a couple of different knowledge bases in this book, both your medical knowledge but also the knowledge of this particular community. I can see the… My writer brain can see the places that you are translating for outsiders. Where you will use a word, and then you will say, and this is what this word means. But it's all very much, for me, seated in point of view, in the tactile details, the way the character is moving through the world. I think one of the questions that I have is, like, do you… I'm certain that the answer is going to be it depends, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Do you find that you just write it, and then rely on your editor to say, "Oh, you're going to need to unpack that for people," or do you have a sense of, oh, I should probably pause here to explain this before I carry on?

[Abraham] I think I have a pretty good sense. So I don't really rely on the editor to do the hard work for me. I really have to catch myself if I feel I've used the term that's very familiar to me, and may not be for the reader. On the other hand, you don't want to keep stopping to say, oh, that word means this. I will often use a big word or an unfamiliar word, and as a reader, I enjoy when I don't know the word, but the next sentence or the context makes it clear what this might be. For example, I love reading Horatio Hornblower's series on sailing, or the whole Audrey Martin… Help me out. The other big sailing series? Patrick O'Brien? Is that…

[Mary Robinette] Patrick O'Brien. Yeah.

[Abraham] So, I mean, I still don't know a lee shore from a not lee shore…

[Chuckles]

[Abraham] But it doesn't really matter. I certainly get the gist of it. I think that's what you're after, you're not for a complete explication, but enough so that the reader's not lost. By the way, I meet readers from time to time who tell me, "I have to skip over all the medical parts." I just have to bite my tongue when I hear that because…

[Laughter]

[Abraham] I don't want them to skip anything, but some people do for whatever reason.

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of things we don't want to skip, we're going to pause right now. We're going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, we're going to talk more about how to make things feel real without overwhelming the reader.

 

[Abraham] Yeah, I've been drawn to this book that I read about, I don't know where, and I ordered. It's called How to Draw a Novel. The title alone is intriguing. It's by Martin Solares. He's a fairly well-known foreign writer. I don't think his work is as well known to us. But it literally has… It's a very erudite meditation on novels. But he uses graphics to sort of illustrate the course of particular novels. So you have a little figure comparing Moby Dick to Wuthering Heights. It's really quite entertaining. The figures are sparse, there's a lot of text in between. But the whole thing is a delight. So that's what I'm recommending and reading right now.

[Mary Robinette] That's How to Draw a Novel by Martin Solares.

[Abraham] Yes. Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Sounds amazing.

 

[Mary Robinette] Well, let's dive back in. One of the other things that you do when you're… You're not only dealing with the technical information, but The Covenant of Water takes place over multiple generations of a family. One of the things that I find fascinating is how to convey time passing and how to show the connections between generations. When you were diving into this, did you have touch points in your head about, "Oh, if I mentioned this," or "I want to draw this piece of history out?"

[Abraham] No, not really. I mean, I knew… There are very few things I do about this novel before I started.

[Chuckles]

[Abraham] I'm embarrassed to say. I knew the geography. I think that's terribly important because setting this in the South India, in this community of Christians who believe their religion came when St. Thomas the apostle landed on the shores of Kerala, India, in 52 A.D. That was an important decision. Because the same story anywhere else, in Hoboken or somewhere, would be a very, very different story. I also knew that I wanted it to be multi generational. Mostly because, as someone who's practiced medicine for almost 40 years now, I really liked being able to see, in my early years, some entity for which we just have a label but no understanding, and then watch it evolve over decades to where the molecular basis was better understood, and then eventually completely understood, and then we have a diagnostic test, and then we have treatment. That sort of unfolding requires generations. So I knew that much. But I didn't really know much else. So I was sort of… As I was writing, I actually had a spreadsheet with the characters, when they were born, when they died. I had a parallel column with milestones from my grandparents and parents lives, just because they were sort of helpful touchstones in terms of helping me imagine that moment in time. Rather than saying, "Okay, World War I," you can say, "Well, the year my grandparents got married," or something like that. So then I had 1/3 column with milestones and world history that pertained to that region. For example, seminal events in the long, long journey towards emancipation from the British in India [garbled] about independence in Independence Day, August 15, there were many, many milestones, hundreds of years of them leading up to that. Of course, world events. And, yet another column for medical milestones. I had to keep in mind that my current medical knowledge is not the knowledge I should be using describing something. I had to stay true to the knowledge of that time. So, I suppose in that sense, I was very conscious of time and history. But I didn't really know until I was well into the writing how to weave all these elements together and when to switch scenes. One very useful thing that an editor told me many years ago was the great magical thing about a blank page or a white page or a new chapter is that you can skip over years, just by doing that.

[Chuckles]

[Abraham] You don't really need explanations. Which was a huge revelation to me at the time. I think it was with Cutting for Stone. So, make use of that. The white space allows you to just sail through time.

[Howard] As an aside, I think I deserve an award for not shouting, "Yes!" When you said spreadsheet. Because I have preached spreadsheets…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] A lot. I use them in exactly the same way. Columns for events, columns for character lives. I even have a column sometimes that describes what I'll call story beats. I want this story beat, needs to be dark night of the soul. Or, this needs to be a moment where I tell the reader that this is a character they can trust. For this is a character they can't trust. Very explicit notes to be, so that when I sit down to write, I can write words that are better than that.

 

[Mary Robinette] I think it's going to be really comforting for our listeners… A couple of us, like, I'm an outliner, usually. It's I know that a lot of listeners are people who garden, who find their way through the novel. I think it will be very comforting for them to hear, "Oh, yeah, I didn't… I sat down and I kind of found my way through the novel." Especially if they pick up the novel and read it, which, it feels so cohesive after it's all done.

[Erin] I was going to say, I wonder a little bit, like, how do you… If you are gardening, if you are finding your way through, but also you have this structure, these columns that like sort of form a trellis, let's say, in the garden, sort of, how do you ensure that you garden to it? How do you make sure that, like, your spreadsheet says X, but you're really feeling Y as you're writing. How do you reconcile between those differences to make sure that you're telling something that both works, and also works for you?

[Abraham] Yeah. I mean, first of all, I should say, the spreadsheet came much, much later. I'm almost embarrassed to confess this, but my books have taken a long time. The last novel I wrote, Carving for Stone, was 14 years before this one. I spent 8 years writing that novel. So with this novel, I really wanted to not spend 8 years, or 14 years. I wanted it to be a few years. So I really wish I could have plotted out the whole novel. In fact, on my right side is this whiteboard with a fairly extensive drawing of the entire novel. Which I know your listeners can't see, but you guys can. So I would plot out the entire novel, and I love to think visually. I draw things out, kind of cartoon fashion. Then I would start writing, only to find that the novel is wandering off in a completely different direction. So then I would photograph the whiteboard, and start all over again. So, to be quite honest, I started with a mood, I started with one character. That was a young bride on her wedding day in 1900. It's I vaguely knew that I wanted 3 generations. I knew where this was situated. But I really didn't know the central conflict of this novel. I didn't know very much of anything. I wish I wasn't that kind of a writer. I wish I knew everything that was going to happen. There are writers like that. I'm a friend of John Irving, who's been a mentor and a correspondent for many, many years. I'm amazed. He knows the first and last line of the novel before he starts, he knows the first and last line of every chapter. So when he begins, it's not that new things don't come up, but he really knows the entire story. He has said… He will say, "If you don't know what you're showing to the reader and what you're hiding and when you're going to reveal it, you're just making it up as you go along, Abraham. You're not a writer, you're just an ordinary liar."

[Laughter]

[Abraham] I think he's right.

[Mary Robinette] I hate to disagree with John Irving, but…

[Abraham] I was going to say that, at the end of my stumbling process of pushing this feeling long and many dead ends and many hundreds of pages in months and months in the wrong direction… Realizing that that's not the novel. There is a point where you finally arrive where… For me, it was almost halfway, two thirds into the novel where I could suddenly see everything. See exactly how it ended. Immediately, many extraneous but important characters and scenes fall away. You realize that they're not critical to this outcome. So I think we eventually all arrive at the same place as John does, but he spends many months in the planning before he embarks on it. So you could say that my writing for all those years was an inefficient way to come to that same point.

[Howard] It may be inefficient, but I would… I'll put a stake in the ground and say, "You're not just a writer, you're an extraordinary writer, and you're a really good liar."

[Laughter]

[Abraham] I'm happy to take that from you. I feel very blessed actually… When you write without any sense of how it's going to be received. So hearing things like this now our wonderful, but at the time, you're not sure. You just do your best.

 

[Mary Robinette] I think we all feel that sense of, "Oh, I'm just muddling through, and hopefully no one catches me." But since you are a man of science, I'm just going to remind you and our listeners that there's… In science, there's no such thing as a failed experiment. In writing, there's no such thing as a wasted word. You find the story often by discovering what the story is not.

[Abraham] Especially mysteries.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Nancy Kress, who is one of my favorite writers, said that her process is that she writes a draft of the story. She doesn't outline. She blunders her way through it. Then when she finishes, she knows what the story is about, and she tosses her first draft completely, and starts over from scratch, and this time she knows what the story is. So she doesn't extremely long, detailed outline.

[Chuckles]

[Abraham] I think, very much like you, I'm fascinated by process. In my library, such as it is, in my study, I have bookshelves very well organized, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, one whole shelf of marriage self-help, which didn't help, by the way. Then, I have a whole section on writing. Because I keep thinking there will be some book there that's going to give me the key to make the process more efficient. I finally gave up when I bought a book recently and they were quoting me. Here I was trying to find the key, and there quoting something I said. I think we just all have to muddle our way through it, and some of this is organic to the individual. You just can't adopt someone else's method and have it work for you. It doesn't always happen that way.

[Mary Robinette] That is so true. I think that's actually a great note focus to move to our homework. I think you've got some homework for us?

 

[Abraham] Yeah. I think, I was going to suggest something that I found useful is to either take something you've written that describes something, sort of passive, a landscape or a… Ideally, a landscape. But then write it in 3 different moods. Pretend that someone very precious to you has just died, and you're now gazing at this, and you describe the landscape without any reference to this event in your life. The 2nd time you write it, at a moment of great joy, whatever that is, the birth of your first child, and you're looking at the landscape. Again, no reference to what just happened to you. The 3rd time, imagine you're in a terrible rage, and you're describing this landscape. You can actually see this happening in the best of Dostoyevsky and some of the other writers, where the very landscape is affected by the mood of… That the narrator's carrying into that scene. It's quite beautiful. It's a good exercise to show us how even the most unrelated things to the emotion and the characters can still take on the hue of the prevailing emotion.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. That's wonderful homework. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for joining us.

[Abraham] My pleasure. Thank you.

 

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

 

[Howard] We love hearing about your successes. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Tell us about it. Tell us about how you've applied the stuff that we've been talking about. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2022/03/20/17-12-structuring-a-story-within-a-story/

 

Key points: The story within a story structure can give a mythical or mystical feeling. It also engages the reader in discovering the link between the two. Often it adds essential information or explanations. You can also use story within a story to illuminate the theme. Smaller narratives can make the story feel richer. It's especially useful for twists and reveals. Is it one frame around a single story in the middle, or is it a photo collage frame with lots of little stories inside? Frames can add verisimilitude. They can also help control pacing. Sometimes they can help the writer figure out what kind of story they want to tell. 

 

[Season 17, Episode 12]

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Structuring a Story within a Story.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Peng] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Peng] I'm Peng.

[Howard] And I'll be relating Howard's tale.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Very good. So, this is another structural element we… I don't think we've ever talked about on the show before. Story within a story. Peng, what do we want… Where do we want to start talking about this?

[Paying] Story within a story is such a beautiful and really delicate type of structure, I think. I think it works really well for stories that you want to have a kind of mythical or mystical feel to them. There's always this element of like discovery that you want to uncover the link between the two. So, I think, I mean we could start by just talking about some stories that do this really well, or ways that you can kind of back into this structure.

 

[Dan] Yeah. Give us an example so people know what we're talking about.

[Peng] Sure. So, I think a really great example, well, everybody knows Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, but a more recent example might be the 10,000 Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. In that book, it's about a girl who… She's got magical powers that  she doesn't fully understand where she can open portals to other worlds. Early on in the novel, she finds a journal hidden away in the attic of this house that she lives in. As she starts reading the journal, you realize that it has a much stronger connection to her story then you might at first realize. It turns out that she… Oh, should I spoil it? I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't. Um…

[Mary Robinette] You realize things.

[Peng] Yes. Which is… I'm sorry. It's just such a great book. I just realized that I was about to spoil it. But it's a great example of how you can have an artifact… Not an artifact, you can have a story within the greater story that you're telling, and it ends up adding like essential information that you might need to understand the present narrative or explains magic or something like that.

[Howard] A couple of examples that are not recent. There's the Canterbury Tales which I was alluding to, obviously. I will be relating Howard's tale.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] He's not the knight, he's not the baker, he's the cartoonist. Also, not going to Canterbury. And One Thousand and One Nights, which is a compilation of Middle Eastern folktales, compiled during the Islamic Golden age. The editors who put this together created multiple layers of framing stories connecting this material. It's one of the most outstanding examples of story within a story because of how many layers there are and the way it's structured.

[Dan] Yeah. The kind of modern… One of the modern takes on Canterbury Tales is The Hyperion Cantos, which updates it into this big kind of sweeping space opera story. The way they use story in a story, there is a much larger thing going on, this kind of sweeping across the whole galaxy, and by the end of the second book, you know they have fundamentally altered everything about this vast space faring civilization. So they use the story within a story element to kind of illuminate different aspects of that society that they're about to… That they're eventually going to change. So we get to see what the different… Some of the different cultures are like. We get to see some of the different religious beliefs. We get this very widespread vision of the world as we are doing this much larger story that will change it all.

 

[Peng] I think one of the other… One of the best ways that you can employ this technique, this structure, is, I think, often when you've got a story within a story, you're able to illuminate your theme a lot more directly in a way that isn't going to hit people over the head with it or come off as soapbox-y because you're doing it within the story that is within the story. So you have a little bit more room there to, like, explore something like the theme that you're trying to get at or the lesson, if you have a lesson.

[Mary Robinette] One of the… One of my favorite examples of this is The Neverending Story, which is…

[Peng] Oh, yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I don't… Most people know the film. The book, the physical artifact of the book, is just also a beautiful thing. One of the things that happens in it is that as the… As we go between the embedded story within the book, we are also… And then come back out to the hero's main… Real life and then back in, the lessons that he is learning in both places affect the way he moves through the world. It's really, really lovely. The other thing that I kind of want to say about this idea of story within a story is that while you can use it for big overarching structure, you can also illuminate a story or have the idea of story within a story affect something on a smaller scale or a microcosm. Honestly, the thing that comes to mind most is a Star Trek episode, the Darmok episode, in which there's the Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. It's this culture that entirely speaks in embedded metaphors. At a certain point, the only way to communicate is when Picard tells them another story. The thing for me about this is that these smaller stories, even if it doesn't become a huge structural element, embedding smaller narratives into your work can make it feel richer. Because it gives you these views into the culture and again contrasts, I think.

[Dan] Yeah. I agree. That's one of the strongest… That's actually my favorite Star Trek episode out of any of the series. Part of the reason is it provides this kind of mythic backdrop to it. I mean, Patrick Stewart reciting Gilgamesh would be powerful in almost any context. But once they have established the importance of story as a cultural element, then him sitting down and relating the story of Gilgamesh by a campfire just gives it this absolutely epic tone that is absent in a lot of other Star Trek.

 

[Dan] We are definitely far enough into this. We're well over half. Let's have our book of the week, which is also Mary Robinette.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's right. So I'm going to briefly pause to embed another story in the episode. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a fantastic novel. I listened to it in audiobook. The narrator was Chiwetei Ejiofor. He's just so good. But one of the things that… the whole novel is him writing journal entries. As the story unfolds, he comes across a trove of additional material. I'm going to say it that way to avoid some spoilers. That unlocks a bunch of things and makes you realize that what is happening in the story is not at all what you thought was happening. It's a really, really clever use of the story within a story.

[Dan] Cool. That is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

 

[Dan] Excellent. Now we've talked a lot about ways that story within a story can kind of recontextualize what's going on in the larger story, the frame that the other story's within. It seems like this is very useful for twists or reveals. Is that the best use? Is that the only use? Are there other things we can be doing with the story within a story?

[Peng] Well, that… Yes. I think so. But I would say that that's one of the… At least one of the best uses. Because often times when you have a story within a story, it'll start with the character who finds the story within the story in whatever form it is, a book or an almanac or something. They, when they find it, are usually not clear on exactly what it is or how it will relate to their life or their journey. So, I think it just creates this kind of an automatic desire in the reader to solve the question and figure out in what way does this story relate to the present narrative, or is it real or is it not. Because that's also usually one of the first questions that comes up when you encounter the story within a story, you're wondering if it's purely some kind of a fable or if it's a second reality that is also happening or has just happened.

[Howard] Yeah. I've found that the… Up until now, I typically just called this structure the framing story structure. Where there is a frame that is its own story, and there's a story on the inside. The realization that I've had recently is that with things like The Canterbury Tales and the One Thousand and One Nights, the frame is framing multiple stories. One of the first structural questions that I'd ask is are we going to build it like, for instance, I think it was Name of the Wind. There is an outer framing story, and then there's the meat of the story which is just one thing in the middle. Or are we building a single frame… A frame like those photo collage frames…

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You'll get at the big box store, where you have lots of little stories stuck inside. The big framing story I think is… It's a fun way to make a thing feel epic, but the photo collage approach is a great way to build a very complicated puzzle which resolves itself as you make your way through the various stories.

 

[Dan] So let me ask a question of you all, because I'm curious. Now that we're talking about frames, Frankenstein, for example, is famously a frame story. There… It is the story of somebody telling the story to someone else. But, also rather famously, most adaptations of Frankenstein, the movies that have been based on it and things like that, do away with the frame. What do we get by adding… What is the value of adding a frame to a story, of doing a story within a story, instead of just telling us the tale of Frankenstein without the frame around it?

[Mary Robinette] So, historically, one of the reasons that you would have a frame story was to lend a sense of verisimilitude, that this is obviously a true thing that is being shared with you because there is a narrator here in the here and now that you can relate to and that will guide you through the story. So one thing that a frame story can do is to do that and give that sense of trust. But, the other thing that a frame story can do is that it can serve as, in much the same way that a frame would for a painting, that you may have a painting that needs a very narrow, thin band just to set it off from the things that are around it, but that helps you focus in on the important things. Or you may have like a miniature that needs quite a large frame around it in order to give you time to get into the meat of that tiny, tiny little thing in the center. So I think that those are things that that frame can do. I also think that frequently it is a tool that authors will reach for because they don't trust themselves to tell the center story.

[Mmmm]

[Mary Robinette] So as a modern writer, we're no longer having to deal with some of… Like, you used to have to do a frame story because that was the only way you could tell fiction.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So you have a lot more leeway now to do that. So you have to figure out whether or not it's serving the story, the emotional experience that you want the reader to have. The other piece of that, I would say, is whether or not your frame story is only around the outside or whether or not it has interjections and interludes within. Those can be a way to control pacing. Those are often useful in that way.

 

[Dan] Peng, let me get your opinion on this. If an author is looking at their work, the story they want to tell, what are some signs that they might want to wrap another story around the outside or insert another story into the middle?

[Peng] Well, it's a really interesting thing that you just said right before this, Mary Robinette, because what I was going to say was I often find that this technique can be really great to use if you're stuck. So it's interesting that you said sometimes you feel that writers might use it if they're lacking confidence in the thing that they're writing. But I would wonder if a lot of stories that end up having a story within a story ended up that way or rather started that way because the writer was stuck and they were having trouble figuring out exactly the kind of story they want to tell. So, if you're stuck, and this will kind of relate to our homework, but it can be really useful in some cases to try to go deeper and to write a story within the story you're trying to tell, because you're working with this really encapsulated smaller version of the thing where you just trying to explore the purpose and figure out exactly what you're trying to say. Then, once you have that thing as a guide, you can build the larger story around it, or it can help you move the larger story forward. So it's sort of like a guide in reverse, because it's a smaller thing, but it's a lot more straightforward in some ways.

[Dan] Your description actually calls to mind the Greenbone Saga by Fonda Lee. Which, each of those books includes little interludes that are basically small in world stories or legends or history pieces that are only a couple pages long, but that she definitely is using to kind of help explain what's going on in the present. To give you cultural context for something or just to let you know who this important historical figure is that someone's about to reference a few chapters from now. Yeah. Anyway.

[Mary Robinette] They also serve as pacing. Because, if I'm remembering correctly, there is usual… They often, as kind of an [entre act?], A thing where there's going to be a jump in time. So helping give that also emotional distance from the stuff that happened in the chapter prior.

[Dan] That's true.

[Mary Robinette] Which is a… I know that we are close to the end. We are over time. But I did just want to mention The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars by Steven Brust. That has a story within a story which is… The basic set up is there is a painter, modern day. He's trying to… Well, it was modern day when I read it in the 80s. But he needs to do a painting. The book follows him from beginning to end. One of the things that he does, there's a Hungarian folk story that is cut up and interspersed through the novel. There's no explanation for why you're getting it. Until, at a certain point, you realize that it is a story that he is telling to his studio mates every evening. Because he doesn't tell you where it's coming from, as a reader, you try to draw parallels yourself. That is another thing that I think that this structure can do, is that it can engage the reader by giving them another vessel in which to put themselves and draw their own parallels, so that each reader can wind up having a… Their own intimate relationship to this work.

 

[Dan] All right. Peng, you have our homework this week.

[Peng] I do. Your homework is to take or create some kind of an artifact within your current project. Like, a letter or a diary entry or an in world almanac or a spell book you've got magicians. Flesh it out for a passage or a scene or a chapter. See what that adds to your story. If it enhances the world building or if it lends depth to a certain part of the plot or reveal something about your characters that you otherwise weren't getting at.

[Dan] Sounds like fun. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/02/16-18-poetry-and-the-fantastic/

 

Key points (and angles?):  If poetry breaks language into meaning, then fantasy breaks reality into truths. Take reality, and tip it on its side, so you can see the interconnective tissue. Puppetry, science fiction and fantasy, and poetry all do these. Consider the aesthetic, what things look like or what language is used, the mechanical, the structure and plot, or the personal, the idiosyncratic choices of a person, their narrative and message. 

 

[Season 16, Episode 18]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses, Poetry and the Fantastic.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Amal] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Amal] I'm Amal.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Amal] And we're all fantastic.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, we are.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is the final episode in our eight part poetry master class with Amal. She's going to bring us around to a coda, I believe.

[Amal] Yes. So, throughout the series, we have talked about ways to approach poetry, to make it less scary. We talked about differences between poetry and prose. We've talked about strategies and approaches for writing poetry, appreciating poetry, structuring poetry, and some of the failure modes that can come from those things. But what I'd really like to talk to you… Talk about, rather, in this last episode is just how inseparable to me poetry and the genre in which I love writing, science fiction and fantasy, are. I want to talk about the fantastic more broadly, to incorporate multiple elements and facets of our genre. But I also just want to say that these things are not separate in my head. They are so often absolutely married to each other. I wanted to just kind of dive into the why's and wherefore's of that a little bit. So there is a quote by T. S. Eliot that I often refer to. The quote specifically is that discussing poetry, the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more elusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. So, I like to take that quote and break it, essentially. Do unto it, as T. S. Eliott says, the poet does in general. I like to say, to recall it as that poetry breaks or dislocates if necessary language into its meaning. I think about this a lot, because of the way that I was raised with poetry. I… So, my family is from Lebanon and Syria. I was born in Canada, but my parents were born in Lebanon. When… I lived in Lebanon for a little bit when I was little for two years when I was seven. That was where I first wrote poetry. I wrote my first poem at the age of seven when we were living in Beirut. When I did that, my parents were very moved and they told me that I was part of a sort of lineage of writing poetry, essentially. That my grandfather, my father's father, had been a celebrated poet and that poetry was part of my inheritance, essentially, and that they were very happy to see me writing poetry. I cannot stress enough how, like, the poem that I wrote when I was seven, was not a work of staggering genius.

[Laughter]

[Amal] But it was a poem, and it was recognizable as such. I absolutely still remember it. It was… It involved like a lot of playing with language, with unfamiliar bits of it, and it was also addressed to the moon. My grandfather's poetry was political, was revolutionary, was part of this kind of lineage of speaking truth to power and being a voice for the voiceless and stuff like that. My address to the moon was not that.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But it was, nevertheless, something that showed my parents that I wanted to use language in the ways that he did as something transformative, as something that made the world different than it was otherwise.

 

[Howard] My father had memorized a lot of poems, and would storytell with them. One of the ones that he told a lot, because us kids ask for it a lot, was The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. Which I love. I love it because my dad… I can hear my dad saying it. My dad, when he read the poem, relied heavily on the rhyme and meter, he leaned way into it as he read it. My freshman year in college, one of my professors on an outing recited The Cremation of Sam McGee and was much more… Conversational is the wrong word, but more natural dialogue-y with the way things flowed. I remember the first couple of stanzas thinking, "Wait. Did he… Are those the right words? No, I've heard this enough, that those are the right words." Then, the whole rest of the poem, as I listened, I think poetry itself became unlocked for me. Because I realized, "Oh. The meter and the rhyme aren't the point. The story isn't necessarily the point." It's sort of this whole thing, and the poem has a life outside of what Robert Service gave it. The poem has a life that is experienced differently depending on the listener and depending on the person who says it out loud. Okay, this was 17-year-old, or maybe I was 18 at that time… 18-year-old Howard having what at that time passed for an epiphany.

[Laughter]

[Howard] But I still love that poem, and I still like sometimes reading it and hearing the different voices in my head as I scan through it.

[Amal] Do you feel like one of them has like superseded the other in your head, or that your own reading voice has sort of introduced a different natural cadence into it?

[Howard] My voice dominates all of those at this point. Because my dad passed away when I was 20, and the reading I heard from Prof. Lyons was when I was 18. I'm now 53. So the voice that's in my head at this point is my own. But I cherish… This… I think this comes back to poetry as meme. I cherish this memetic series of events because there's a whole bunch of information compressed into that poem that Robert Service didn't put in there.

[Amal] Hah! That's absolutely true. This is the way that... I feel like a lot of us talk about novels in this way, too, that you read a different novel when you come to it at a different age, or that you might have one version of this novel in your head that gains or loses elements as you grow up, and then revisit it as a different person, essentially. To me, there's a lot of fantasy in that as well. There's a lot of… Even though this is obviously a very natural and observed progress of mortality, the idea of departure and return, moving through time in these ways, or, like the kind of time travel that feels inherent in [garbled] to something that you first experienced at a different age. All of that, to me, partakes of these relationships, of this kind of sense of the fantastic. There is this beautiful, beautiful essay by Sophia Samatar called On the 13 Words That Made Me a Writer. I like all of Samatar's work. I return to her work on a bimonthly basis, basically. I just reread her essays all the time, because I always… They always speak to me in a way that I feel like I need at a given moment. What she does in this essay is she talks about how, for her, fantasy resides in language. That when she was a child… I'll say like… So the 13 words in question are

 

There was a library, and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble.

 

These words made me a writer. When I was in middle school, my mother brought home a used paperback copy of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast…

 

And so on. So she draws these comparisons between like… So, this was a fantasy novel. So she tried to then go and find other fantasy novels that would make her feel the way that this made her feel. It became very hit or miss. She would get that feeling from some books, but not from others. She came to realize that the thing that catalyzed this very specific feeling in her of wonder and awe and marvel was more to do with the language that was being used than the plots or characters or tropes in a given story that might market it as fantasy. So she found herself finding that experience of fantasy in books that were not marketed or labeled as such. That that spirit of wonder and stuff like that she could find in lots of different places. I feel that way about fantasy, because it brings me back to this idea about what poetry does to language. So if poetry breaks language into meaning, I feel like fantasy breaks reality into truths. That what poetry does to language, fantasy does to reality. That the experience that we get from it as writers of genre fiction in so many different ways is that we are always figuring out ways to break and hack reality into a specific experience for our readers, right? And that poetry is doing that too, but at the level of language in a way that you can foreground or background as much as you like. But I also want to say that literature has been poetry for a lot longer than it has been not poetry. That we have… The novel is actually a very recent technology in terms of literature. Poetry is ancient. Similarly, fantasy is ancient. We have had domestic realism for a lot less time than we have had fantasy and the fantastic in our literature. I want to just give people this similarity because I want people who love reading science fiction and fantasy to look at poetry as as much theirs to play with, to read, to be moved and transformed by as the stunning books that they read when they were 12.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I have… You've given me a thought that I want to dive into, but first, let us pause for the book of the week, which is Monster Portrait.

[Amal] Yes. So, Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar, whom I adore. It's by Sophia Samatar and her brother, Del Samatar. Del Samatar is an artist. So the book, Monster Portrait, is a very slender book of fictionalized autobiography, where Sophia Samatar is responding to these illustrations, these images that Del has made with snapshots that involve interrogations of what is a monster, like, thinking about monsters and monstrosity, and when those things are valued and when they are not valued. Thinking of those in relation to race, to borders, to belonging. It's just an absolutely luminous… I know luminous is like a massive cliché in terms of talking about [garbled]

[chuckles]

[Amal] I review books for a living, I am too keenly aware of this, but genuinely, reading this book gives me an experience of light that I just don't know how to talk about otherwise. It's deeply beautiful. I just cannot recommend it enough. If you wanted to read a book that kind of could be a bridge to you between prose and poetry, I cannot recommend this one enough for doing exactly that thing.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that sounds amazing. So, that was Monster Portrait by Sophia Samatar and Del Samatar.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, here's the thing that was running through my head as you were talking. There's a thing that longtime listeners will have heard me say before that one of the things that drew me to puppetry is the same thing that drew me to SF and fantasy, which is that it takes reality and it tips it to the side, so that you can see the interconnective tissue. As you were talking, I was like, "Oh. Okay. That's what poetry does, too."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] But the other thing that went through my head as you were talking was about why a person picks a particular form. There's this other idea that I often talk about, usually when I'm trying to explain to people what voice means. It was in puppetry, we have these three ideas. There's the aesthetics, the mechanical, and the personal. The aesthetic is what something looks like. The mechanical is literally like what kind of puppet are you using. The personal is all of the idiosyncratic choices that you, as a person, make. The example that I use is that if you hand the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it will look like a different character. But what occurred to me as you were talking is that I can take that kind of model and think of it as the kind of thing that drives you as a writer. The story you were telling with Sophia that it was the language that called to her, it's like, "Oh, that she is drawn to aesthetic." Whereas I am… There are a lot of people who are drawn to the plot, the structural mechanics of a story. Then, other people are drawn to the kind of the personal story, the personal narrative, the message, so to speak, that's within it. That kind of knowing which thing drives you as a writer also tells you where your defaults are and where your weaknesses are.

[Amal] Yes. I completely agree with that. That's so helpful.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was like, "Oh. That is part of why…" Like, Pat Rothfuss talks about the fact that he needs to get the next word right before he can move on. I've always been like, "What's the point of him polishing words if you're not going to use them?"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, if I'm going to [garbled delete them?] later.

[Howard] How do I know if I'm going to use them if they're not polished?

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Wait. Yeah. This is exactly that thing.

[Howard] That's the dialogue.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah. So it strikes me as a… That, for listeners who are not naturally language driven, that one of the really arguably most powerful reasons to dive into this is because it gives you a different way to approach story. It gives you a different understanding of the ways we communicate. It basically tips your entire narrative form on its side to allow you to see the interconnected tissue.

[Amal] I think that is a beautiful, beautiful way of approaching that. I completely agree. I'm reminded… Gosh, who was saying this? Mmm… I'm not going to get this right. I think that Vonda Lee at some point was talking about… Possibly had an article on Tor.com or something that was about exactly this kind of thing, about how writing outside of your comfort zone being to learn… Actually, I'm not… I could be totally wrong, that it wasn't Vonda Lee, either. But mostly what I'm remembering is an article on figuring out where your facility is so that you can figure out in reverse, essentially, where your lack of facility is so that you can work on those things. I love that thought of approaching… Like, the thing that interconnected tissue and stuff. Because I think, too, of how many fantasy novels can… Like, are maybe not thought of as ones that are poetry forward and stuff, but, to me, absolutely are, because… I'm thinking of something like Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. Where, like it's written… It's not written in a way that is difficult to get into and stuff. It's very clear. But it's also very stylized. It's also very… And poetry is like a thematic plot-based concern. In the book, you need to know poetry in order to be able to read bureaucratic documents that end up on your desk as an ambassador and stuff like that. The crux of the novel, the climax of it, is the writing of a poem. Which is something that is unbelievably difficult to pull off. Like, this is where you absolutely do not want to miss the mark with a piece of rhyme that is not landing in a way that… Your whole plot depends on whether or not this is a good poem.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[Amal] And she absolutely nails it. Like, I think that the phrase "I am a spear in the hands of the Sun," is like the last line of this, and on the back of that line, they build a revolution and it's this whole enormous thing… Sorry, spoilers for a book that came out two years ago.

[Chuckles]

[Amal] But, hey, it's just absolutely wonderful, and poetry is part of the texture of that book. But I… Like, I don't know if Arkady would talk about herself as having written it poetically, or of [garbled]. But, nevertheless, there's this sensibility, I guess, to that style, to that aesthetic, that is truly wonderful to me.

[Mary Robinette] This has been fantastic. We are, I'm afraid, at the time which we need to wrap things up with our time with poetry. Do you…

[Howard] I would love… Dan, you remember that thing that I read from Robert Service at the very beginning to you? The…

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] That feels like closure. I'm just going to go.

[Mary Robinette] Okay. I have no idea what you're talking about. So you say that thing.

[Amal] Do you want to do it after the homework or before the homework?

[Howard] Have we done the homework yet?

[Amal, Mary Robinette] No.

[Howard] No. We did not do… Okay. Do the homework.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Thank you.

[Dan] Someone was looking up a poem instead of paying attention.

[Chuckles]

 

[Amal] So, as the… As sad as I am to leave things here, I… We have come to the homework part. Talking about novels and about prose and poetry, and to bring this all full-circle, the homework I want to leave you with is I want you to find a favorite line from a novel or a short story, one that moves you really, really deeply, one that you kind of keep in your head every now and then. I want you to take that line and use it as the epigraph for a poem. So, essentially, if you see a poem and there's like a single line in italics at the start, before the poem actually starts, that's what I mean. I want you to use that line from a novel or a short story, and I want you to write a poem following it, I want you to write a poem sparked by it. A kind of poetic tribute to whatever that line did to you.

 

[Howard] The reason I brought this up is that it feels like a poet's version of "you're out of excuses, now go write." It's from Robert Service.

 

Lone amid the café’s cheer,

Sad of heart am I to-night;

Dolefully I drink my beer,

But no single line I write.

There’s the wretched rent to pay,

Yet I glower at pen and ink:

Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,

It is later than you think!

 

[Mary Robinette] Oh, that's lovely. Also, so painful and so true. I'm… As we send folks away, I'm going to also share my father's favorite poem by Ogden Nash. Further Reflections on Parsley.

 

Parsley is gharsley.

 

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Dan, do you want to share a poem, too?

[Dan] That poem reminds me of the time that someone auditioned for our high school musical by singing Minimum-Wage by They Might Be Giants.

[Laughter]

[Dan] The only words in the song are minimum-wage. He just shouted it and left the room. It was great.

[Amal] Beautiful.

[Mary Robinette] That's the only thing you want to share before we wrap?

[Dan] Yes. I am going to share a poem with you. This is one of my all-time favorites. By Brian Turner, who was a medic in Afghanistan and wrote a lot of poetry, and then came home and he was, for a while, the poet laureate of the US. His most famous poem is called Here, Bullet.

 

If a body is what you want,

then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,

the aorta’s opened valves, the leap

thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,

that inexorable flight, that insane puncture

into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish

what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,

here is where I complete the word you bring

hissing through the air, here is where I moan

the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering

my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have

inside of me, each twist of the round

spun deeper, because here, Bullet,

[Whoof]

here is where the world ends, every time.

 

[Amal] Wow.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, with all of that, my dear listeners, you are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/09/01/14-35-what-you-leave-out/ 

 

Key Points: Worldbuilding an iceberg? Just build the tip of the iceberg, and make readers think the rest of it is there, too. Build what's needed for verisimilitude. Figure out where your scenes are set, then figure out what that looks like and how it works. What are you going to be using the most? What will my characters be directly interacting with? Give the reader information in ways that asks questions, instead of answers them. Use relationships to other events, rather than exact times. Leave it out, if it doesn't help the story. Think about what the book is, then do the research. Do you need to show the event happening or can you just tell the reader that the event happened and had an outcome? Sometimes, you don't want to go there. Postpone that decision until you need it! Be aware of the uncanny valley of worldbuilding -- far off, skip the details, it's okay, we got the broad strokes. Too close, too many details, and suddenly readers start asking questions. Don't fall into that valley! Watch out for the super-detailed realistic piece that makes everything else look fake. Focus on what you actually need to keep the story from falling apart. Avoid worldbuilding details that would ruin the story.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 35.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, What You Leave Out.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Pause]

[Howard] That probably wasn't what I was supposed to leave out, but go ahead.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] We all just sat there, going, "What is he? Oh!"

[Mary Robinette] And you are?

[Dan] I'm Dan, I guess.

[Howard] And I'm Howard. And unapologetic.

[Laughter]

 

[Brandon] All right. What you leave out.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled not amused]

[Brandon] So when I teach my students about this topic, one of the things I mention is when I was a newer writer, one of the things I got told frequently is that you want to, in worldbuilding, worldbuild a ton. But not put all of it in. Put enough of it in that the reader… You're indicating to the reader that it's like an iceberg, right? You can see the tip and you can see that there is so much more beneath. The more I became a published writer, the more I worked in it, the more I realized that that was… not a fantasy, but perhaps people in the business making it sound a little more grandiose than it is. Because most people I know do not worldbuild the entire iceberg and then show you the tip. What they do is they worldbuild the tip, and then they find a way to worldbuild a hollow iceberg that makes you think that there is the rest…

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Underneath there. The goal in worldbuilding is not to do everything, just to do as little as you can and still look like you've done everything.

[Howard] Two nights ago, I was watching the special features for the movie Deepwater Horizon, for that film. They built an 85% scale oil rig over a little 3 foot deep pond. The reason they did it was so that when the actors were outside up high, shooting scenes, the actors are reacting as if they are outside and up high. They could have done the whole thing green screen, but they didn't. They needed that level of verisimilitude. Then there was this point where the VFX guy said, "So, we didn't actually build the whole oil rig. We only built the front." You see this scene where the helicopter is coming in and the camera has panned around the oil rig and it is just… Like 25%, 20% of the oil rig. Then the VFX says, "This is what we had to build," and throws all the other stuff in. After hearing how much time they spent building 20% of the oil rig for verisimilitude, the peace that they needed, this iceberg thing totally makes sense. Build the piece that's required for verisimilitude. Drill all the way down on that. Then fix the rest in post.

[Chuckles]

 

[Brandon] So, how do we apply this to our worldbuilding? What do you guys do when you are worldbuilding? How do you give this indication that there's more underneath there? How do you decide what to leave out of your story? How do you decide what not to worldbuild?

[Dan] So, following along with this set building metaphor here, I remember reading an early interview with Gene Roddenberry when they were doing the original Star Trek series. He said that he wanted to have an engine room, and they weren't going to build him one, until he put that scene into the pilot episode. He's like, "Look, well, we have to have a scene here. I'm sorry, there's no way around it." So they gave him an engineering. What I do when I'm building my worlds and planning my books is I figure out, "Well, where are my scenes set? Where do I want those scenes to be set?" Am I going to be talking enough about main engineering, for example, that I need to figure out what it looks like and where it is and how it works, or is my story going to focus on some other thing? So they didn't build the entire, or even 20%, of the Starship Enterprise. They built a bridge and an engineering room and a transporter room, and that's kind of it. Maybe some hallways. Because that's where they knew their story was going to take place. So I try to figure out what am I focusing on, what am I going to be using the most, and that's what I focus on.

[Mary Robinette] I'm very much the same way. I really only worry about the things that my characters are going to be directly interacting with. I want to make sure that I understand enough of how they interact, of how it works, so that the interaction makes sense. But, like, when we move through our daily life, we interact with a lot of stuff that… There's a number of houses that you passed on the street and you have no idea what's in those houses. But they're still houses. You go to Disneyland. You don't actually know what it takes to make Disneyland work. It's just the front facing stuff. So one of the things that I do is that I think about the pieces that my character is going to have that direct interaction with, like you were talking about. One of the ones that I find works really well our past events. Referring to things… Usually these are things that I have no idea of what they actually are. But instead of saying, "Well, this happened in 1457." Like, I don't actually want to figure out how long ago a thing happened. I don't know. So I'll say, "Well, it happened during the… Right after the battle of the seven red armies." Everyone's like, "Oh, well, the battle of the seven red armies."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Clearly, she spent all of this time thinking about that. What that's done is it saved me from actually working out a timeline. Because I've… Now I can place the battle of the seven red armies anywhere I need to be.

[Dan] One of the things that that suggests to me is that you have given them the information in a way that asks more questions rather than answers them. That gives a gre… I mean, we know when it took place, but we know it based on a relation to an event rather than an exact number of years. In the audience's mind, it's not answering the question so much as it's saying, "Don't worry, I've got this. Also, here's something else to worry about."

 

[Brandon] Have you ever spent a lot of time in your worldbuilding before writing or during writing a story and then decided to leave that out of the story?

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely.

[Brandon] When, why, and what made you make that decision?

[Mary Robinette] In the Glamorous Histories, for Without a Summer, I spent a great deal of time figuring out how Parliament worked in relationship to glamour, and what laws were being passed and not passed, and got into the novel and realized that that entire plot structure was completely irrelevant. I like knew… I had spent all of this research on this one particular historical figure who never appears in the novel now. It was basically, it just didn't help the book. Chucked it. It was one of the things that made me realize that I really need to think about what the book is and then do the research. I will say that I approach my research now the same way that I… I mean, I approach my worldbuilding the same way that I approach my research, which is that all do like these broad strokes, but I only really drill down on the stuff that I actually need to.

[Brandon] I spent a lot of time in the Stormlight Archive before I was writing it, working on the writing systems. The glyphs that they were going to draw and things like this. I left that all out because once I actually wrote the book and I looked back at the stuff I'd done, I realized I'm not an artist.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] Beyond that, I'm not an expert in languages and… I just hired that out. So I took all the stuff I did… I didn't even give it to them. Because I'm like, "You know what, I'm going to use the text that I've written in the book." I'm going to give this to the artist and I'm going to say, "What would you imagine this to be?" Isaac came up with stuff that was waaay better than any of the stuff that I had come up with. It kind of taught me, also, that maybe I should spend my effort where I know I'm going to be using it in the story, and then I can, after the fact, I can hire some of these things out.

[Dan] Brandon, you and I just did this yesterday, actually, on the project we're collaborating on. The Apocalypse Guard. We've been wrestling with this book for months now, and yesterday made the decision that kind of the main thing we need to do to fix it is to axe one of the magic systems.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] It was something very cool that we considered foundational to the story, but now that we're looking at the book in its current form, it's kind of beside the point.

[Brandon] It's also the thing that is causing the biggest problem with the story, because where the story is spiraling out of control are all these scenes where I spent lengthy amounts of time talking about the worldbuilding and the history. Scenes that Dan cut out a lot of when he did his revision.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] But the effect of it's still there. It's leading to this big confusing ending where I have… Do what I do, tie all these worldbuilding elements together. But in ways that were cool for those worldbuilding elements and don't really work for the story.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Brandon] It's a point where we have to cut out… One of the things that is my signature is a magic system. Granted, we have multiples. So it's still going to be cool. But it's going to be a way better book if we just streamline.

[Howard] My approach here is often to ask where the line is between show versus tell. There are times in the story where it's absolutely required for the reader, because it's fun, because there's emotional content, whatever, to show an event happening. Then there are times when all the reader needs is to know that the event happened and there was an outcome. So entire scenes will vanish from the writing, because what I needed to do, with the story needed, was for somebody to say, "Battle was fought. So-and-so won." "Oh, really, that sounds terrible." And off we go with the core story.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop for our book of the week.

[Mary Robinette] All right. So our book of the week is Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder. I got to read this, an arc of it. It is fantastic. This is near future. It's an Internet of Things. A young woman discovers that her father has been murdered. She thinks. Everyone else thinks that it was a… Just an accident. Then people start coming after her. How do you disappear when everything is connected? So it's really, really cool. It feels like he has thought of everything. But the stuff that we're actually seeing is just the stuff that she interacts with directly. It's great worldbuilding, great characterization. I mean, it's a really good book. It also happens to illustrate some of these points.

[Brandon] Excellent. That was Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder.

 

[Brandon] So, we've talked about worldbuilding elements that we cut out. Are there ever things that you have decided even before you launch into the book, you're like, "I'm just not going to touch that. I'm not going to go that direction with the worldbuilding." Things that you just… Why have you done this?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, like in the Lady Astronaut books, I very carefully do not talk about what the rocket engine is that is driving this ship to Mars. I like really carefully do not talk about that. Because of the amount of research that I was going to have to do. But also, my character is not a rocket engineer. Right? She pilots things. She needs to know how to pilot things, and she does math. So, she needs to do those things. But I did not need to know how the rocket engine worked. And as soon as I worked on figuring that out, that was going to lock me into certain decisions. Like, if I decide that it is atomic oxygen, that locks me into one line of technology. If I decide that it is nuclear, that locks me into another line of technology. Because I don't know what subsequent books are going to need, I decided to not make that decision and to leave room for it to be any of those things, and just… I establish some trust with the reader early on, so that I can just… Like, just get in there and…

[Brandon] You know…

[Mary Robinette] It's like, they're going to Mars. Obviously, they've solved how they get there.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] I had a conversation with this… About this same topic with a writer that I know… That we were kind of brainstorming on some worldbuilding and things. The way I presented it as there's like an uncanny valley of worldbuilding where at a certain point, it's far off, and you're leaving out the right details from what we're doing so that nobody starts to question really how it works. Like, if you don't do enough, people are confused and you start to lose them. You do the right amount, and people are willing to take your word on it. They suspend their disbelief, they accept the worldbuilding, it feels really logical to them, you've got the couple of corner cases that they would assume. Then there's a stage where you start explaining it so much that the rational part of their brain kicks in and says, "Well, wait a minute. This and this and this and this," and you start to hit this sort of uncanny valley where suddenly you lose them. They aren't willing to suspend their disbelief anymore. That can be a really fine balance to walk.

[Mary Robinette] We have this problem in theater, with… All the time. Where you've got a set, and if you go very minimalist with it, you're asking the audience to be engaged. You go too minimalist with some shows, and everything falls apart. But if you've got like a set where everything looks really nice, and then there's this one piece that is hyper realistic, everything else in the story feels just awful. Beauty and the Beast, the animation… When they had… That was the first stuff of the computer animation…

[Dan] They introduced CG in the ballroom scene.

[Mary Robinette] The ballroom scene looks… It looks wrong, because it is more rendered than everything else. Then everything else starts to look false.

[Dan] I did a black box production of Assassins in college. It was all just super minimal sets, but we had a super realistic like rolltop desk, and it just… It looked terrible. Because it made the rest of the show looked terrible.

 

[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite pieces of set design that I ever did… This is a side tangent, but a good example. A friend of mine called me on a… On Monday and said, "We had a reading this weekend and are set designer did not show up with the set. I have just found out that she has skipped town with all of the money which she has spent on drugs. We open on Friday. Help me. I have $75."

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So I'm like, "Okay." We sat down and we talked about what are the things that have to be on stage or the show will fall apart. It was a tree, the moon, and a wall. That was basically it. So I bought some foamcore, and I got some paint, and I did this dry brush minimalist New Yorker style thing of a tree, a moon, and the wall. I think I gave him a chair, too. As a bonus.

[Dan] 'Cause you're a benevolent god.

[Howard] You had eight dollars left.

[Mary Robinette] I still had eight dollars. I had to get paid out of that $75, you know. So I… But we stripped it down to what you actually need or the show will fall apart. When the review came out, it raved about the minimalist design and delicate ethereal touches of the set. Meanwhile, in the program, I am listed as scene proctologist, because I pulled that set out of my ass.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] So, point being, just look at the worldbuilding details that you need to keep the show from falling apart.

[Dan] Well, it can also be helpful to look at the worldbuilding details that would ruin things. When I did my cyberpunk series, I specifically avoided artificial intelligence. There's algorithms, there's swarm intelligence, but there is no self-aware thing because that is a singularity that I was not prepared to deal with. So, that's not in the story, it's not a possible technology in that world.

 

[Brandon] This story of Mary Robinette's actually leads us really well into our homework. Which Howard is going to give us.

[Howard] Yup. I want you to take your worldbuilding slider and I want you to pull it all the way to zero for one of your chapters. Take a chapter that's got some worldbuilding exposition in it, that's got some cues about what's going on in your world that are deepening things, and pull all those out. Leave yourself with zero worldbuilding. Have a look at that chapter and see which elements of the story fail and which elements of the story still work. This is not so that you can tell yourself that you don't need to worldbuild. This is so you can tell yourself… What the…

[Dan] I need a tree and a moon and a wall…

[Howard] I need a tree and a moon and a wall, and I will give myself a chair.

[Mary Robinette] As a bonus, in the liner notes, I'm going to give you a copy of the first scene of Shades of Milk and Honey in which I have done this exercise. So I have stripped out everything that I identified as exposition. I have to say, that scene is a mess.

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